COLUMBUS, Ohio – Columbus school officials say they are taking steps to fire four principals associated with the district’s data-scrubbing scandal.
Superintendent Dan Good made the announcement Tuesday, hours after state auditor David Yost released the results of his office’s 18-month investigation into the fudging of attendance records at the state’s largest school district.
“The swift action taken today by Dr. Good and the school board is exactly what the Columbus City School District needs and the students and taxpayers deserve,” Yost said.
Good says the principals of Linden-McKinley, Independence, Mifflin and Marion-Franklin high schools are being placed on unpaid leave and recommended for termination.
Good says the district has moved to address issues that the auditor has identified and says additional employees could be disciplined of as a result of the investigation.
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.
Yost says his investigators turned up “a top-down culture of data manipulation and employee intimidation” within the Columbus City Schools.
“This is a story of tears and sadness,” he said.
The auditors found what Yost calls a “troubling lack of documentation and records, inconsistently followed business rules, and unacceptably high data error rates” in the district’s records for the period of July 1, 2010 through June 30, 2011.
Among the methods used by district employees to falsify student attendance rates was withdrawing and re-enrolling poorly-performing students so their test scores would not be included in the district’s report card score. In one instance, 374 students were withdrawn and re-enrolled on the same day.
Yost’s investigators pointed their fingers at administrators Steve Tankovich and Michael Dodds as being the leaders behind this tactic.
Yost says his auditors found what they termed “zombie 12th graders,” students who had graduated but were then re-enrolled, though they appear to never have attended class.
A grade review found that more than 80 percent of the data did not have the documentation necessary to support changes, many of them from failing grades to passing.
The auditors will turn evidence from Marion-Franklin to the Columbus City Attorney, the Franklin County Prosecutor and the United States Attorney’s office for their consideration, Yost said.
The district could only provided adequate documentation for four of more than 10,000 erased absences, 87 percent of which were erased more than 30 days afterwards, Yost said.