About 30 leave APS in cheating scandal

Interim APS Superintendent Erroll B. Davis said Thursday night that about 30 employees implicated in the CRCT cheating scandal have left the school system.

Because of resignations and retirements, "we're in the 130s to 140s, not 178," Davis said in response to a question at a town hall meeting at He said that the administrators and teachers remaining will receive their due process rights, but vowed that none will be teaching students. 

Here is a summary of Davis' remarks in response to questions from the audience at the town hall meeting.

• He met with Fulton District Attorney Paul Howard for more than an hour Thursday, discussing Howard's criminal investigation into the cheating scandal. He declined to give details on the possibility of indictments, but said that he and Howard discussed their separate processes in regard to the educators named. He said one topic discussed is "should the administrative process be used as a discovery process for criminal procedures?" He made his remarks in response to a question from John Sherman of the Fulton County Taxpayers' Foundation.
• It's a shame that the cheating scandal is overshadowing real progress made by APS students on exams, Davis said. He pointed out that students showed significant gains in 2010, the year after widespread cheating was found, and when the exams were administered under the watch of state monitors. For example, he said that only 47 percent of fourth graders met state reading requirements in 2000, but now more than 80 percent do.
• Davis told senior Arsidez Leon, who asked whether negative national publicity about APS would hurt students' college acceptances, "I'm not concerned that this will have any effect on high school seniors at all." 
• He said that the cheating scandal was confined to middle schools and elementary schools and that seniors applying to colleges would be judged by colleges on their ACT and SAT performance and their school records. He did say a permanent loss of high school accreditation could hurt seniors' futures.
• About the Atlanta School Board's efforts to meet six conditions imposed by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools to retain accreditation, including improved cooperation among board members, he said "I am very optimistic about the board's relationship with SACS. The board has new leadership and is working very well together."
• Davis said that he had spoken with Mark Elgart, president and CEO of AdvancED, SACS' parent organization. While Elgart "is not going to comment in advance," Davis said, "he is very pleased with the progress of the board."
• The superintendent said that he is so optimistic about the board's gains that he is tempted to ask SACS to re-evaluate the accreditation situation before its September deadline. Dissension among board members led to the accreditation probation decision. "I am very optimistic that when they visit in September they will see a very different board, functioning very differently."
• In response to a question from a parent about "how are we going to pay for this disaster?" Davis said that "I never use lack of money as an excuse." Apparently agreeing with the parent's assertion that the district is "top heavy" with administrative personnel, Davis said that his priority will be in spending on teaching. "The first dollar should go to to the classroom."
• Earlier, he commented that under the previous admnistration, funds had gone to redecorating offices. A parent pointed out that the APS may have to continue paying administrators and teachers involved in the cheating scandal. "We will find the funds," Davis said. "We have $500 million to work with. We need to spend it wisely and make sure that we don't waste any of it."
• Praised longtime l teacher and north Buckhead resident Lisa Kepler for forthrightly saying at the microphone, "I am a teacher." Davis said that teachers he had spoken to had often undervalued their profession by saying "I'm just a teacher."
• In response to Kepler's question about how the schools would treat sixth grade students hurt by the cheating scandal by receiving inflated exam scores, Davis said the school system had not yet begun an evaluation process to determine if any students needed remedial assistance.