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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2007 > June > 01 > Entry
City Day board forced out
By Scott Elliott
Staff Writer
City Day Community School’s governing board will be fired Friday for failing to remove its superintendent, a lawyer for the charter school’s sponsor said.
Superintendent Roseda Goff is responsible for a lack of institutional control that resulted in mishandling of state exams, said Phyllis Brown, an attorney for Education Resource Consultants of Ohio.
Reached Thursday at the school, Goff declined comment. An attorney who advised the board at a meeting Tuesday said then that City Day could appeal any such sponsor sanction in court.
In early May, Brown said, a City Day employee was caught taking notes while reviewing an Ohio Achievement Test that students were to take later in the week. ERCO reported the incident to the state education department.
This was the second testing irregularity incident for the school. In February, a Dayton Daily News examination found City Day students practiced on 44 questions were identical or nearly the same as questions that later appeared on the actual state exam in the days leading up to the March 2006 administration of the Ohio Achievement Tests. Taken together, Brown said, ERCO felt the testing problems were too serious to ignore.
“It was enough for ERCO to feel the exams, under that administration, could not be effectively administered,” Brown said.
City Day students last year made stunning gains when test scores were released. At some grades, scores jumped into the top 5 percent in the state, up from the bottom 5 percent the prior year. The gains helped the school, with about 170 students, jump from “academic emergency” to “continuous improvement” — two steps up from the bottom of the state’s five-step rating scale.
As a result, ERCO this year required training in test administration for all City Day staff and sent monitors to proctor the test. Brown said one of the proctors walked into a testing room and surprised a City Day staff member who was scribbling on paper while the students worked. The proctor found the staff member was actually taking notes on a different state exam that students were to take later in the week.
“That test should not even have been opened yet,” Brown said.
In a separate incident, the proctors stopped a City Day staff member from erasing student marks that were mistakenly put in the wrong column, Brown said. The staff member had intended to recopy the marks into the correct column, a violation of state rules.
On May 21, ERCO sent the City Day governing board a letter, ordering it to fire Goff in the wake of these and other managerial problems, promising to either close the school or fire the board if it failed to take action.
Letters will sent out no later than today to the current board, telling its members, “they are no longer board members,” Brown said.
The new board will choose a new superintendent, she said. To apply for the board, send a resume to ERCO at 11260 Chester Road, Suite 230, Cincinnati, Ohio, 45346.
Permalink | | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, City Day Investigation
