KANSAS CITY, KAN. ? The Wyandotte County district attorney began taking deposition-style testimony Thursday from people involved in the Piper High School plagiarism controversy.

Dist. Atty. Nick Tomasic issued subpoenas last week for members of the Piper school board, district administrators and Christine Pelton, the teacher involved in the case.

Pelton, a biology teacher in the eastern Kansas school district, resigned in December after the board overruled her decision to give zeros to 28 sophomores she accused of plagiarizing a botany project from the Internet.

Tomasic said Pelton would be the first to testify, followed by board members and administrators today.

He said he was investigating whether the board violated the Kansas Open Meetings Act Dec. 11 by discussing plagiarism accusations in private and then directing a change in the grading system without a public vote on the matter.

“So far we’re questioning whether or not they were proper in going into executive session if they were talking about grading procedures,” Tomasic said.

A public body in Kansas can reach a consensus in secret but cannot act on it without a public vote.

“We don’t know what happened. All we know is they met, they adjourned and the next morning action was taken,” Tomasic said.

He said the board and his office could reach a consent settlement, in which the board would agree it violated the law and then agree not to do it again.

If the case goes to court and a violation is found, he said, each board member could be fined up to $500.

Another option, depending on what Tomasic discovers in testimony, could be to file a motion to have the members removed from the board, Tomasic said.

Tomasic said his investigation would take at least a week.

Pelton, a Kansas University graduate, said she suspected plagiarism because some students’ reports contained identical material. She then ran the papers through a computer program that detects whether a paragraph or page is plagiarized from sources on the Internet.

Pelton said she thought the 28 sophomores shouldn’t get any credit for their work, and therefore should flunk her biology class.

But after several parents complained, the board ordered her to give the students partial credit and to decrease the project’s value from 50 percent of the final course grade to 30 percent.

Pelton resigned the next day.