TOLEDO, OH (WTOL) - In a statement Thursday, the TPS board of education acknowledged the disciplinary action taken by the Ohio Department of Education against 17 current and former TPS administrators and principals, but disputed that any wrongdoing occurred regarding data scrubbing.
The board said there "is no credible evidence that anyone at TPS improperly withdrew any students and no one at TPS inaccurately reported or caused others to inaccurately report student data to ODE."
The ODE on Thursday issued either suspensions or disciplinary letters to TPS employees that they determined had small roles in the district's practice of reporting data to the ODE.
The district asserts that it asked for clarification on its method of reporting attendance to the state but it never received direction.
ODE's action comes as result of a statewide investigation into some districts' practice of withdrawing habitually absent students from enrollment lists and then re-enrolling them to wipe them off the attendance data that was reported to the state.
The board of education stated the following in response to the disciplinary action by ODE:
- The consent agreements confirmed today are an attempt by dedicated educators to put this matter behind all of us so we can get on with the important job of making our students college and career ready.
- The practice at issue was put into place as early as the 2002-2003 school year, about how TPS schools accounted for students who were consistently absent.
- The state education department was aware as early as 2008 on how the district reported this student attendance data. TPS administrators repeatedly asked for clarification on this provision in the EMIS Manual - but never received direction or clarification from ODE.
- Without that guidance, TPS adopted a practice in good faith based on the statutory definitions of truancy.
- Finally, in 2011, ODE communicated to districts across the state that the practice was in error and then revised the EMIS manual to include directions regarding the procedures that were to be followed.
- The district immediately complied with these new directions and self-reported the previous practices.
- When the state department of education recalculated 2010-2011 attendance under the updated EMIS guidelines, TPS’s overall district-level rating did not change. In fact, many schools saw their scores increase.
