August 8, 2011 Board Meeting - CRCT Update

At the board's August 8 meeting, Superintendent Erroll B. Davis, Jr. provided a status update on the steps that the district is taking in response to the CRCT report. 

 Initiate action against employees who have cheated or permitted the cheating of children:  

  • 19 employees implicated in the CRCT special investigation report resigned from the district after the report was issued.
  • 28 implicated employees resigned prior to the report’s release.
  • This is a total of 47 resignations., pending due process hearings.
  • 126 employees are on administrative leave
  •  We are working with the district attorney to determine when we can begin the hearings.
Put in place a long-term remediation program to address academic deficiencies of students who may have been impacted by a misrepresentation of their performance and lack of instructional support:
  • Now that we have the staff in place, we are in the process of identifying the students who continue to need academic assistance. 
  • I have met with representatives from the department of education, and they want to work with us to provide remediation in after-school programs where we do not already have them in place. 
  •  I will have more information about this at next month’s board meeting. It may involve a shifting of our Title I funds.
 
Require all APS employees to complete ethics training starting August 1 as a condition of their employment:
  • Online ethics training is now available to all employees.
  • All employees will be further exposed to ongoing training through the year.
  • For employees who serve as testing coordinators in schools, there will be an additional, deeper layer of training done by an external entity next spring.
  
Survey all employees – including and especially teachers, the leaders of our classrooms – to assess the culture in schools and district offices:
  • RPA is working on these surveys, which will be a part of the Effective Teacher in Every Classroom (ETEC) initiative.
  • The initial survey will be administered in September.

Move OIR from HR to Internal Audits, which reports directly to the board:

  • This has been completed.
  •  I have also eliminated a position in my office to augment this effort.

Require RPA to set trigger points that will result in automatic investigations of schools whose test scores increase by a larger-than-normal percentage:

  • This has been completed.
  • The trigger is any school that is 3 or more standard deviations from state school averages.

Final point: make customer service and student support a priority on the district’s balanced scorecard

  • This will be placed on the balanced scorecard.
  •  We will discuss in more detail at my team’s strategic planning retreat.