BLAINE — A high-school principal was placed on paid administrative leave after authorities accused him of tipping off a School Board member that her daughter was targeted by a pot-smuggling investigation, the school superintendent of this U.S.-Canadian border town said yesterday.

Blaine High Principal Daniel Newell was charged Monday in Whatcom County District Court with two misdemeanors: rendering criminal assistance and obstructing a law-enforcement officer. Each carries a maximum penalty of a year in jail and a $5,000 fine. He faces arraignment Feb. 4.

"We do not presume guilt or innocence at this point, but we do have Mr. Newell on paid administrative leave," Mary Lynne Derrington, superintendent of Blaine schools, said yesterday.

She said school officials did not know about the charges until Monday afternoon. School Board members met Monday evening but issued no statement.

Newell has not returned repeated calls for comment.

Newell, principal since 1990, is accused of making an anonymous call in December 2003 to the mother of a 16-year-old girl, telling her that her daughter could be arrested in a probe of pot smuggling on a Point Roberts-to-Blaine school bus that passes through British Columbia each day.

The mother, no longer on the board, defended Newell in an interview with the Bellingham Herald, saying she recognized his voice and that his warning saved her daughter from prosecution and got the girl to clean up her act.

"The whole situation gave her life back," the mother said.

According to an affidavit prosecutors filed with the charges, Newell acknowledged making the call, saying he was "just trying to help a School Board member."

According to the affidavit, the girl told investigators she had carried 20 to 25 pounds of marijuana on the bus almost daily and for each delivery received $1,000 to $2,000 that she split with a Point Roberts man named James Jarosz.

The affidavit filed by Deputy Prosecutor Peter Dworkin cited information from the Sheriff's Office, police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The three agencies involved in the October 2003 investigation had notified school officials that the girl might be involved.

The probe led to the June arrest of Jarosz, who was accused of providing marijuana to "numerous students." Prosecutors allege the kids then smuggled the drug on the school bus from Point Roberts, a spit of land dangling south of the British Columbia mainland, to Blaine.

Jarosz's trial on drug-delivery charges is pending in Whatcom County Superior Court.