COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Columbus city schools played "fast
and loose" with attendance data, grades and other records, the Ohio
auditor said Tuesday in releasing findings from an 18-month
investigation.
Auditor Dave Yost said his review into attendance
data scrubbing at the state’s largest school district showed a culture
of changing the numbers and a lack of oversight by its board of
education.
District employees have been accused of altering
attendance records for struggling students to improve performance
ratings, which can be used to determine government funding and employee
bonuses.
The auditor’s review covered the 2010-11 school year, and Yost said the district has since made some
changes in its protocol.
Shortly
after the report’s release, Columbus Superintendent Dan Good said at a
separate news conference that the district was moving to fire four
principals who he says were associated with the data tampering. They are
being placed on unpaid leave and recommended for termination.
Another
11 employees implicated in the data-changing scheme have already left
the schools on their own or in agreement with the district, Good said.
Others could still face discipline.
Good told reporters that the district has and will continue to address reporting issues that the auditor
has identified.
"I offer no excuses on behalf of the district," he said, adding that he wouldn’t let
"anything of this nature" happen again.
The record-keeping at the schools went beyond a paperwork problem, Yost said at a news conference.
Investigators
reviewed a sample of 200 letter grade changes in the district and found
that 83.5 percent did not have documentation to support the grade
shift.
Yost said certain grade-change evidence obtained from
Marion-Franklin High School would be forwarded to the city attorney, the
Franklin County prosecutor and the U.S. attorney’s office for their
consideration.
According to the report, teachers at the high
school told investigators that an assistant principal pressured them to
pass all students, explaining that the administrator’s constant comment
was to "D ’em up."
The high school’s principal was among those who
received a termination notice Tuesday. The notice said that an
assistant principal under her supervision, and acting under her
direction and knowledge, changed hundreds of grades from failing to
passing.
District spokesman Jeff Warner said in a telephone
interview that the assistant principal was no longer at Marion-Franklin
and that he could not comment further.
Of the district findings
overall, Yost said, "This represents really a failure to document and to
record the things that are most important to a child’s progress through
the educational system."
Other data indicated that 374 students
in the district were withdrawn and re-enrolled on the same day, the
report said. The office looked at 106 of those student files and found
that the district could provide documentation to support only two
withdrawals and no records to back the re-enrollments.
Asked about the motivations of district officials to change data, Yost told reporters that administrators
wanted to look good.
"They
wanted their performance measurements to look better than they did," he
said. "They wanted to avoid the consequences that come from not doing a
good job."
Yost said the district lacked a way to sufficiently
report its performance to the board of education that governs it. He
said that helped create a culture where administrators "felt free to
play fast and loose with the data, to take actions that were contrary to
Ohio law and contrary to the policies of the district itself."
Board President Gary Baker II told reporters the board has committed to reviewing its governance
structure and making changes.
Yost’s
review of Columbus was spun from a broader review he conducted last
year that identified more than 70 Ohio schools or districts that made
attendance reporting errors and a handful that scrubbed.
For the
Columbus investigation, he said, his staff interviewed more than 40
principals and assistant principals, 230 teachers, 20 secretaries and
other office personnel, and 25 current and former workers at the
district’s data center. His office has billed the district for more than
$115,000 for the hours it’s spent working on the audit.
___
Online:
Ohio auditor’s report: http://bit.ly/1nesTUJ

Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights
reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or
redistributed.