On June 30, 2006, I
received the following email from the Education Department regarding
Richmond's ongoing violations
of the state truancy law:
Mr. Butcher,
Dr. Emblidge asked that I update you on the steps that have been taken
since your inquiry about truancy in Richmond.
On June 22, Dr. Emblidge requested that the Department of Education
review the data cited on your Web site, including truancy data
published by Richmond on its Web site but not reported to the
department, and your conclusions regarding the scheduling of truancy
conferences. The department subsequently notified Richmond Public
Schools that it would be conducting this review. In addition, the
department will be requesting a report from Richmond on its efforts to
reduce truancy as specified in the Truancy Reduction and Prevention
Program (TRAPP), which was implemented last year.
When divisions submit required data to the department, the division
superintendents are required to certify in writing that the data being
submitted are accurate. Examples of these submissions, which you
referenced, include data for the following charts and tables that are
found on the department Web site:
* Table 8: Number of Days Taught, Average Daily Membership, Average
Daily Attendance and Percent Attendance
* No. of Students with Whom a Conference Was Scheduled After the
Student Had Accumulated Six Absences During The School Year
* Dropout Statistics
As in other instances, should the DOE have reason to question the
accuracy of submitted data, the DOE follows up with the division.
[link to the data added] |
The State gets an "A" on courtesy
(short term, at least; see below) and an
"F" on content:
-
The Department has notified RPS that
it "will be" reviewing the data;
-
The Department "will be" requesting
a report from Richmond regarding its truancy activities with the
State's $675,000;
-
Division superintendents are
required to certify data they submit to the State; and
-
If the Department has reason to
question the accuracy of the data submitted, they follow up with the
local school division
-
According to the email, the only "step"
the Department has taken is to tell Richmond it will be taking "steps." That one
(baby) step was not a request
for information. Neither did it include an analysis of the published data
(about a ten minute job).
The Department took eight days and all they managed to do was tell RPS
they will be "conducting [their] review".
-
The Department "will be requesting" a
report on Richmond's efforts to reduce truancy using
the
State's $675,000 (i.e., the Truancy Reduction and Prevention
Program, "TRAPP"). Notice, please, the State hasn't requested a report;
they "will be requesting" it. Never mind that
the Plan
already calls for quarterly reports. And never mind that the
Appropriations Act requires that "the
Department and the City of Richmond shall provide a project status report
that includes an assessment of the results of the program to the Chairmen
of the House Appropriations and Senate Finance Committees by December 1,
2005."
-
The remainder of the email discusses the
process by which local school divisions report information to the State
and it tells us that the Department "follows up with the [local school]
division" if it has a reason to question the data. Why do you
suppose half of this email discusses data quality? At this point in the
process, the Department has not even analyzed
the data in its possession,
or the
data on the RPS Web site; it has not demanded any data from
Richmond; it only has told Richmond that it will be "reviewing" the data I
copied from these two sources. Why is the Department talking about an
unidentified (and apparently hypothetical) data problem,
rather than asking about truancy and Richmond's
violations of state law? Do you smell another coverup such as
this one or
this one?
It Gets (Much) Worse
Following that email, the Education
Department fell silent until September, 2006, when I heard elsewhere about a July,
2006
meeting between the Richmond Superintendent, the President of the State
Board of Education, and the
new State Superintendent on the truancy issue.
I sent a Freedom of Information Act request on 9/12/06 for:
-
All non-identical
copies and draft copies of the presentation for Dr. Emblidge and Dr.
Cannaday and other Department of Education staff on July 19, 2006
regarding accuracy of truancy data, efforts underway to increase
accuracy, and efforts to reduce truancy;
-
All records presented
to Dr. Emblidge, Dr. Cannaday, or Dept. of Education staff in
preparation for, in connection with, or as follow up to the July 19
presentation; and
-
All public records
identified in, referred to in, or relied upon to prepare that
presentation.
After an exchange of clarifying emails,
the Education Department told me they had no records, adding:
"Richmond
collected the hard copies of the presentation at the end of the
July 19 meeting because the information had not been presented
to the school board." |
Hiding from the Public
What a wonderful way to do public
business: Hold a secret meeting; watch a presentation; keep no records of
your own and give back the
hard copy of the presentation so your press officer can honestly say: "I do not have a copy of
it."
Continuing Richmond Violations
It gets better: The Richmond School Board
had a copy of the presentation, of course, and they produced it to my FOIA
request. You
can review it
here. In short, the presentation says that the percentage of
conferences went from 7% in 2005 to 73% in 2006. The presentation does
not say what the denominator is in that calculation (we don't know
conferences as a percentage of what). Let's infer that
the numbers respond to the statute and are the percentage of kids with six
truancies for whom the conferences were scheduled. Presuming that
much, the Richmond Superintendent admitted to the State Superintendent and
the President of the State Board that she again failed to comply with the
plain requirement of §
22.1-258 in 27% of the cases: After the sixth absence the Superintendent
is required to hold the conference within fifteen days in every
case.
The presentation is silent about the
further question: How many of the required proceedings did the
Superintendent initiate in cases of the seventh truancy
(Note slide 18, which might be helpful on this subject but is blank)?
For certain, however, there is no evidence that the state is acting to
compel Richmond to initiate those proceedings.
Lying Down with Dogs . . .
A further trifle: A document becomes a
"public record" when it is
"in the possession of a public body or its officers, employees or agents in
the transaction of public business." Code §
2.2-3701. Thus, the copies of the Richmond presentation became "public records" when the
President and Superintendent reviewed them in the course of deciding to
continue ignoring their responsibility to enforce the truancy law. Code §
42.1-86.1 makes it unlawful for a state agency to "sell or give away
public records" or to "destroy or discard a
public record" except in accordance with a records retention and disposition
schedule approved by the Librarian of Virginia. In any event, a signed
"Certificate of Records Disposal"
must be approved by the agency's
designated records officer and on file in the agency before records can be
destroyed. In this case, the Superintendent and the President gave
away a public record, certainly without the execution and filing of a
Certificate of Records Disposal.
So there it is:
-
The Richmond Superintendent admitted
that, despite considerable improvement, she continues to grossly violate
§
22.1-258;
-
The State Superintendent and the
President of the State Board held a private meeting on the subject,
destroyed a public record in violation of State law, and decided to
continue to ignore their duty to enforce the State
truancy law
as to Richmond.
I think the word for all this is
"malfeasance."
Note added on January 2, 2012:
In January, 2011, the Board of Education
proposed a
truancy regulation to implement Code
§
22.1-258. The Governor
approved the proposed regulation on December 29. So I got to do
some holiday reading.Unfortunately,
it's a truly awful job. So I filed
comments.
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