Richmond Public Schools
RPS intends to meet a Feb. 1 deadline for seniors’ transcripts to be amended.
Richmond School Board members listened with consternation Monday night as administrators discussed widespread student transcript and credit-hour irregularities identified in a recent Virginia Department of Education audit and outlined steps to address them.
The 455-page VDOE report covers issues at Richmond's five "comprehensive" high schools — Thomas Jefferson, George Wythe, Huguenot, Armstrong and John Marshall — dating back to 2015, and school officials said Monday that RPS intends to meet a Feb. 1 deadline for seniors’ transcripts to be amended before first semester report cards and class rank take effect. The remainder of student transcripts and course credits will be adjusted by an April 1 deadline, Superintendent Jason Kamras said.
After the Thanksgiving holiday, there will be two after-school meetings with families, students and the public:
Tuesday, Dec. 4, at 5 p.m. at Thomas Jefferson High School
Thursday, Dec. 6, at 7 p.m. at Huguenot High School.
Additionally, Kamras said there will be a meeting at every high school during the day, but he wanted to extend the option to families who wanted to attend public information sessions, too. The RPS website, he said, will also have a new page specifically dedicated to updates, and an email has been set up to take questions and concerns: transcripts@rvaschools.net
“A lot of this is really the breakdown of process, ownership and I’d say a culture of trying to figure out what students need to move to the next level but not asking, ‘Can our students do more?’ ” Chief Academic Officer Tracy Epp said. “That’s a leadership question, but a lot of this is process checks.”
“The state ... found a number of irregularities that I reported to this body earlier this year,” Kamras said at the board meeting. “In response, we requested a waiver to hold harmless some of our students affected by the irregularities — that was denied and we’re now beginning the process to make all necessary corrections.”
The superintendent added, “As far as we can tell right now, there’s not a single high school senior who is in jeopardy of losing a credit — because of these issues — they need for graduation. I also want to be clear there are seniors who may not be eligible for graduation for other reasons.”
In a letter to James Lane requesting the waivers, the state superintendent for public instruction, Kamras said that rescinding invalid credits would mean that 1,220 students, including 304 seniors, would lose more than 1,700 credit hours.
The VDOE's report explained the waiver denial by stating, "While this practice would not be a detriment for the students for whom the requests are made, it would affect students whose transcripts are accurate and reflect bona fide credits earned. Class rank and GPAs are two of the ways these students are negatively impacted by a 'hold harmless' approach for their classmates. The final key consideration in the review was the failure to remove unearned credits would result in RPS transcripts continuing to be flawed and class ranks and GPAs continuing to be inaccurate through the 2021-22 school year. "
Kamras said there were four key errors dating back to 2015 noted in the state’s audit, which looked at a large, representative sample of students within the school system:
- Courses were miscoded as two credit hours instead of one.
- Credits were given for duplicate courses.
- There were “locally approved” courses — courses a school division or School Board can approve for credit — that had no documentation “that this body or any other went through the local approval process,” Kamras said.
- Credits were awarded for courses taken in middle school, “but for a variety of reasons weren’t eligible for high school credits,” he said.
Kamras said that his administration, under Epp’s leadership, is beginning the process of looking “at every single transcript” to make sure irregularities are amended as quickly as possible.
Epp said the administration has met with VDOE to “map out next steps,” which will include a team of individuals from the state conducting training for school-based teams as they begin reviewing transcripts and making corrections.
“This is a rather laborious and extensive process and it’s a necessary process — we absolutely have to get this right, and we will get it right,” Epp said. “And though this is a difficult exercise we now have to undergo, ultimately it’s the right thing to do to make sure our transcripts are 100 percent correct and we don’t have to worry about this issue moving forward.”
Kamras noted that because of the gravity of the outcomes for students — particularly graduating seniors — and the extensiveness of the process, the school system may have to re-prioritize and adjust resources to meet the immediacy of the timeline to amend credits.
School Board members seemed to be largely taken aback by the depth of the problem weighing on students and the administration of Kamras, who will have been with the school system for a year in February.
“[Do we know if] in the past there were people who knew there were problems? [Were there] folks who didn’t whistleblow?” 4th District representative Jonathan Young asked Epp about the irregularities, “I’m trying to get a handle on — yes, I don’t want to diminish the value of [VDOE] training — but that culture piece too.”
Kamras answered directly: “I don’t know.” But, he added, the past is not his priority moving forward.
“It’s important to me and this administration, that when something is being done that isn’t right, that folks raise their hand and let us know,” Kamras said. “There will never be retaliation for that, as long as I’m superintendent.”
Representative Linda Owen honed in further on the pervasiveness of the widespread credit and transcript errors — and how they flew under the radar for at least three years.
“Going through it, there’s so many things besides the transcripts — the course descriptions, course offerings — it just boggles the mind,” Owen said. “I promise you we will all support what you need from us, because this is huge. I still haven’t made it to the last page of the last appendix … it’s just so much, and they’re just so in the details about every single solitary thing and that’s not to say we shouldn’t do it but I’m just in awe looking at climbing this El Capitan in such a short amount of time.”
Epp said she and the leadership have been “working on this quite extensively, and our school counselor teams will be working on this,” too.
“Infrastructure-wise, in terms of fixing the current transcripts and doing the current work, there’s no other way to do that except line by line, student by student,” Epp said. “That’s a pretty aggressive timeline and means our counselors will have to balance multiple responsibilities. I do believe we’re implementing the right process steps.”
Epp noted that historically, there has only been one person assigned for K-12 counselors, and the workload increases in high school, when counselors are tasked with also helping students plan post-secondary options.
“We did add a position at the central office level as sort of a coordinator for counselors,” Epp said, noting the position was posted and still open to applicants at this time.
Other School Board members, such as 7th District representative Cheryl Burke, expressed concerns about staff workloads, but also about the potential cut to course offerings as a result of the audit.
“We have absolutely no intention to reduce the number of wonderful offerings we have, but we do want to make sure if the offerings require board approval — that we have that approval,” Kamras said.
Epp also noted that a lot of course offerings would need to be simplified out of necessity.
“So what we now have is our course catalog has grown to a pretty large, complicated set of courses not all actively offered,” she said. “Some are duplicates, or very similar but have a different name — do we need to offer both? … It’s less about reducing options, and more about simplifying and clarifying.”
Second District representative Scott Barlow noted that the transcript and course offering irregularities are not isolated from other recently discovered issues such as the SOL testing problems at Carver Elementary School identified last spring.
“[We’re] still figuring out where some of the issues are buried, where some of these skeletons are buried,” Barlow noted. “Mostly I’m thankful that our students don’t appear to have been penalized for these administrative oversights.”
At the career and technical school in particular, Epp explained that some course offerings are two credit hours, but some are only one; the audit indicated that most technical school credits were awarded as double when they should have only been one credit hour.
“The short of it is there are some [Career and Technical Education] courses that are legitimately two credits, and some that are one, and they were being conflated,” Epp said, adding, “Just because you have a course credit you took at [Richmond Technical Center], that does not mean you will necessarily lose a credit.”
When asked if and when affected students would be notified, Kamras said no students have been notified by the school system.
“No students have been notified yet at all as to where they stand; we still have to do the work to identify the transcripts,” Kamras said. “The VDOE report is indicative of a large, comprehensive sampling — but still just a sampling.”
He and Epp reiterated that until the administration does a student-by-student, line-by-line review, RPS won’t be able to say exactly how a student is or isn’t affected, “but at this time we do not believe this will impact [senior] graduations.”
“The important part of that is as we do the transcript-by-transcript review that we will identify other issues,” Kamras said. “There could possibly be something else when we go through every single transcript line-by-line — we don’t anticipate anything significant, but if there’s anything we’ve learned from this process, it’s that this is a tangled web.”
Moving forward, the timeline is swift: Epp said by Nov. 30 — the end of next week — RPS will have a finalized process for determining which courses the administration will recommend as eligible for board-approved "local" courses.
Retroactive board approval for the courses will be ready by the Dec. 10 so the board can consider them at the first meeting in January 2019, which Kamras said is on track with the VDOE timeline.
One complication is that for the board to retroactively approve a local course, the school system needs corresponding course materials such as syllabi, which may not be available — especially if a teacher or administrator has left RPS since 2015.
Kamras said to this end, the administration will be leaning on the help of engaged parents and other school system stakeholders who may still have such materials or other historical precedent/context for the administration to take into consideration.
“We’ve had a number of families — some in the audience tonight — that can be helpful giving us context, historical resources,” Kamras said. “This gives you a flavor of the laborious nature of the process before us.”
Several board members expressed concerns about amending transcripts before the second semester begins, while also addressing the areas outlined in the VDOE’s Memorandum of Understanding with RPS concerning accreditation.
“To the state’s credit, they have already articulated willingness to change timelines on other items before us [like the corrective action plan] to accommodate that,” Kamras said. He also said the administration is “more than happy to follow the will of the board, so we can do it concurrently with the monthly [corrective action plan] update.”
“I can tell you we’ll be working on it every day, so we’re happy to provide updates as requested,” Kamras said.
For representative Young, the biggest reassurance was that of accountability moving forward.
“I really do think that was one of the problems of the past, you know that thing, ‘when everybody’s responsible, nobody’s responsible,’ ” he said.
