Lawyers for a student bullied at Corona del Mar High School because she was perceived to be a lesbian have reached a settlement with the Newport-Mesa Unified School District in which the district will pay $60,000 of taxpayers’ money to train school employees and students how to recognize and combat homophobia and sexism on campus.

While such monetary sanctions against homophobia are commendable, they are not enough.

California law allows school officials to take disciplinary action against students for making ‘threats of harm,’ whether in person or on the Internet. Corona del Mar High School should have expelled the perpetrators (football team players who threatened to rape and murder their peer after she played a lesbian character in a school play) so that all students could attend class without fear of harm to themselves or their peers. And if the school couldn’t provide for the victim’s safety, it should have paid for her to attend a private school.

The Orange County District Attorney’s Office should charge all such young thugs under the California Penal Code. If the boys in this case were minors at the time they made the threats, the District Attorney can still charge them as adults, or let the Juvenile Court impose a restitution order and appropriate sanctions. Further, it’s time to amend the Penal Code so that mandated child abuse reporters must always report “threats of harm to a child” to police.

This would send a message that homophobia will simply not be tolerated in schools. A training course, especially one paid for by taxpayers and delivered to an administration that continues to deny wrongdoing such as Corona del Mar’s, is simply not enough.

It’s a relief that the San Diego Police Department and the District Attorney have a suspect in the death and sexual assault of Dane Williams, the Orange County resident whose body was found in City Heights in January 2008. But it’s more than unfortunate that we learned for the first time on Tuesday that someone sexually assaulted Williams.

Media reports of Williams’ death did not mention the accompanying sexual assault. Yet police had to have been aware of it, at least after criminologists examined Williams’ body. Had we known that there was a male-to-male sexual assault involved, our community would have been alerted to the fact that there was a rapist at large.

Police should have informed this community of the nature of the crime.

We need to ask them why they didn’t, as failing to do so may have put other young men in danger. After all, there is a string of unsolved murders of young men throughout the country, almost all involving college-aged males, last seen by friends drunk, and leaving parties or bars, as Williams was the night he died.

Indeed, according to media reports, investigators now fear there may have been other victims. They have released a photo of the suspect, Philong Huynh, 39, in the hope that any additional victims who have not reported a crime ? or anybody with information about either case ? will contact police.

Police arrested Huynh two weeks ago after identifying him as a suspect in another sex crime that occurred in June of this year. Huynh had also been arrested in San Diego in 2003 in connection with a kidnapping and sexual assault in Arizona. But before he was extradited, the case was dismissed. In all the cases, the young men had been drugged before being assaulted.

Huynh recently plead not guilty in court. He is being held on $500,000 bail.

There is a $20,000 Crimestoppers reward in the Williams case. Please call 619-531-2293 if you have any information.