They were told to blend in, to do their best in the new high school.
He was 19, a junior. He liked to play basketball and copy answers on math tests. He made a B in the class, but an F in English and D in woodshop. That is, when he got to school on time.She was 17, another junior. She skipped American History a lot and failed most of her classes. But life management was a breeze. She made a B.
In the two months after Christmas break, the pair clearly aced their own course in modern economics: the sale of marijuana on the campus of Lakewood High School.
The two undercover sheriff's deputies bought $800 worth of marijuana from teenage dealers at the St. Petersburg school. Their investigation resulted in more than 70 charges against 23 students last week.
On Tuesday, the two deputies told reporters about the rigors of being undercover, beyond homework and pop quizzes and even Saturday morning detention. But they were identified only as Deputy Williams and Deputy Grissinger because they used their real first names during their secret assignment.
"I learned more about Theodore Roosevelt than I thought I ever would," said Grissinger, 25, who posed as the blond teenage boy who stood 5-foot-9 and weighed 180 pounds. He told other students that he was held back a grade because he was home-schooled on a farm.
"You have to act young and crazy at school," he said. "You've got to act mature and like a deputy sheriff when you get back here. And you got to go home and act like a real person - all in one day."
Williams is really 23. At 5-foot-5 and 110 pounds, she said she pulled her hair into a pony tail and wore baggy jeans to become a student at Lakewood High.
"You just act the way they did," she said. "We had to catch onto them, get into their routine."
She adjusted, for starters, to their music. "I had to go from country to 93.3," she said, referring to the radio station popular among teenagers.
The two deputies learned that "sack" was slang for a small bag of marijuana, usually costing $5. Do you ski? was a veiled request about their use of powdered cocaine.
On their first day of class in January, the deputies said they saw a drug transaction. Gaining access to dealers was easier than they thought it would be. Grissinger said he even bought marijuana in class, when a teacher was not looking.
To fit in, the two deputies drove cars to school, an instant plus among younger students. The two deputies said they would not acknowledge each other when passing in the halls, and each received notes in class from other students. There were offers to go out Friday nights, but Williams told the teenage boys that she was dating someone outside the school.
Grissinger said he was sometimes disruptive in class, and he once was sent to Saturday detention after he was excessively tardy to first period, which begins at 7:30 a.m.
Williams was absent 18 days from her fourth-period class, in which she was supposed to learn about the American Revolution and the Progressive Era. She was mostly quiet in class, said history teacher Joel Iles.
"She wasn't there very much," he said. "I had her during one of the other lunch periods. I just assumed she was out to lunch."
Only three adults in the school knew the deputies' true identities - the school resource officer, vice principal Esther Perry and principal Walter Hall.
After sixth period ended at 2 p.m., the two deputies went to the sheriff's narcotics bureau, where they briefed superiors and counted money given to them as an allowance for drugs. Grissinger would sit in his own cubicle, dipping Copenhagen and filling out reports, while Williams sat at a neighboring desk with her coffee mug.
At times, Lt. Gary Brown said he had to pep-talk the deputies in what obviously was a stressful assignment eights hours a day. The two were borrowed from the patrol division for the assignment at Lakewood and last year at Countryside High School.
"This is the only time an undercover deputy has to do a drug deal without a gun or 10 deputies outside as backup," said narcotics Capt. Tom Ward.
Besides their reports, the deputies had to worry about homework. Not that it did much good, according to their report cards.
Embarrassed, the two deputies admitted they failed most of their classes, even though they were told to do what they had to do as students. Despite jokes that the undercover operation ended last week because mid-term exams were approaching, the two deputies returned to Lakewood to help make the arrests.
"I think they were too surprised to say anything," Grissinger said of the students who saw him dressed as a deputy. "I think the most used word was wow."
Williams said a concerned teenage boy had tried to help her when he thought she was a student and saw her befriending drug users. After the arrests, she asked school administrators to pull him out of class so she could say that she hoped he would do the same thing for somebody really in need.
Emily Rollison, 17, shared a math class with Grissinger. A writer for the school paper, she even planned to quote him in a story about college placement.
"I never thought he could be an undercover cop. We would talk a lot," the senior said. "It makes me upset because I, like, confided in him about my personal life. I told him about problems with my boyfriend and my friends."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)