TOLEDO, OH (Toledo News Now) - After several months, a statewide probe conducted by the Ohio Department of Education into school attendance tampering has come to an end.
State Auditor David Yost found evidence of attendance scrubbing in eight schools from the Toledo Public Schools district. In the summer, TPS brought forward its own practices to the attention of the department when it thought it may have been against the rules.
The following schools were examined during the attendance scrubbing probe:
-Rogers High School
-Scott High School
-Start High School
-Byrnedale Middle School
-Leverette Elementary School
-East Broadway Elementary School
-McTigue Elementary School
-Samuel M. Jones at Gunckel Park Elementary School
-Fulton/Kobacker at Robinson School
Yost determined most of the evidence was found due to a lack of documentation. The district had been retroactively dropping chronically truant students from their attendance records at the end of the year and would be later re-enrolled. The auditor said a lack of documentation accounted for a portion of these findings.
District officials said they are still hunting themselves.
"Our people now are trying to backtrack and review what our auditors have done. They are going to continue the search to try to establish firmly what kind of documentation we have on students that auditors weren't able to find," explained superintendent Dr. Jerome Pecko.
Yost made some recommendations to the Ohio Department of Education to keep these practices from resurfacing. Among the suggestions are basing attendance funding in the state to a time period of a year, instead of basing it on count days.
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