Exchange-student problems bring shake-up

Troublesome situations that six foreign exchange students encountered at Oklahoma City's Bayard Rustin Living Learning Center should never have happened and steps have been taken to make sure they don't happen again, said the regional director of the exchange organization that placed the students there.

ASSE International Student Exchange Programs has replaced its local representative and will never again send a student to Bayard Rustin, said Terri Joski, ASSE's regional director.

Concerning ASSE's former local representative, Joski said: "Clearly, his judgment was not very good.”

Criminal background checks by The Oklahoman revealed that two host parents used by the organization for Bayard Rustin students had felony criminal convictions.

Those felony records should have been uncovered during a criminal background check required by the U.S. State Department, Joski said.

ASSE paid an outside company to perform the background checks, but for some yet to be explained reason, those checks did not reveal the felony convictions, she said.

"If we had gotten results like that back, we cannot place a student in a home with a convicted felon,” she said.

Individuals with minor criminal infractions in their distant past can sometimes serve as host parents, but the exchange student and the student's natural family must approve, Joski said.

It is unclear whether name changes and aliases were a factor in the organization's failure to discover the criminal backgrounds of Lauret Hooks and Toshav L. Storrs.

Court records show both have gone by other names in the past. Hooks has used at least seven other names, including Jean Miller and Lovin' Spoonful Hooks, records show.

Storrs used to be known as Tony Lamonte Greene. He changed his first name to Toshav when he converted to Judaism in 1990 and took the last name Storrs when he and Phillip Storrs united their lives in a gay commitment ceremony in New York in 1995. The couple since has split and Toshov Storrs now lives with another gay partner and his partner's elderly mother.

Joski said ASSE was not told that Storrs was living with a gay partner when it placed students in his home.

The organ