MOLINE ACRES • Emails from Riverview Gardens school administrators in the final weeks of the last school year depict a central office driven to count and recount student attendance numbers to reach full accreditation status on the district’s annual state report card.
Records contained in the emails, obtained through a public records request by the Post-Dispatch, show that the district’s overall attendance rate for the school year was 78.8 percent on May 30, four days after the last day of school. But after administrators told principals and secretaries to “clean up†attendance records multiple times, the district recorded an 81.5 percent attendance rate with the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Accreditation has been a high-stakes game for Riverview Gardens, which was taken over by the state in 2007 amid financial corruption and mismanagement by district leaders as well as poor academic performance. Because Riverview Gardens had been unaccredited , Missouri’s transfer law required the district to pay millions of dollars for hundreds of its students to attend schools in accredited districts if they so desired.
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One way for Riverview Gardens to regain full accreditation was by setting a laser focus on attendance, which also helps determine how much state money a district receives.
The district earned the full 10 points possible for attendance on this year’s annual performance report, which was issued in November by the state. Those attendance points helped the district earn an overall 70.7 percent of all points possible on its annual report card, which was just within the fully accredited range.
If the attendance rate had remained at 78.8 percent, the district would have earned just 6 of 10 possible points for attendance, meaning the district would have received a 67.9 percent on its annual report card, which falls within the provisionally accredited range.
The district’s jump in attendance after the last day of school seemed suspicious to at least two administrators, considering the district’s attendance rate steadily fell from the beginning of the school year to the end.
According to district emails, on Sept. 6, 85.2 percent of students were recorded as attending class 90 percent of the time. Students must attend school 90 percent of the time to be counted in a district’s overall attendance rate. One month later, the rate fell to 83.4 percent. It slid to 81.2 percent at the start of December and to 79.9 percent by early April.
“You can never explain that. That’s unexplainable,†said Westview Middle School Principal Danielle DeLoatch. “That should generate an audit immediately.â€
DeLoatch and Gibson Elementary Assistant Principal Amanda Bell-Greenough claimed in separate lawsuits in October that they were mistreated by the district after they objected to what they believe was the district’s doctoring of attendance records. They alleged the district did so by recording as present students who were late or absent.
Superintendent Scott Spurgeon said in a recent interview that the district committed no attendance fraud and that the attendance cleanups were done to ensure data was accurate. He said this has been a district practice since before he was hired as superintendent in 2013. Spurgeon added that all of the district’s 15 attendance secretaries signed documents saying they’ve never done anything fraudulent with attendance data, nor have they been asked to do so.
“It’s disturbing to me, really disturbing to me, that this has come out the way it has,†Spurgeon said of allegations that the district doctored attendance records. “Because in the final analysis, all it does is hurt children because we have spent countless hours and years working to turn this district around. We’re moving in the right direction and now we have to deal with an allegation that we’ve done something inappropriate or improper in, quote, fixing the data, and that is absolutely not true.â€
The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education informally reviewed Riverview Gardens’ attendance data after hearing of the allegations, but didn’t find anything to investigate further, said Sarah Potter, department spokeswoman. Districts self-report attendance data to the department.
Riverview Gardens’ Special Administrative Board asked its law firm, Tueth Keeney, to investigate the allegations, said board Chairman Lynn Beckwith in an email. When asked whether it was a conflict of interest for a law firm to investigate allegations against its own district, Beckwith said in an email: “Our legal firm has investigated other situations for the district and I’ve always found them to be impartial and above reproach.â€
‘We need every point’
The Post-Dispatch obtained more than 250 pages of emails through a request under Missouri’s Sunshine Law, including messages sent and received by Spurgeon, district Systems Administrator Tina Adams-Turnipseed and district Director of Assessment Sherri Sampson.
On May 9, Spurgeon told principals in an email that the district “must exceed†last year’s attendance rate — 84.2 percent, according to state records — and told them to reach out to the family of every student who was on the brink of a 90 percent attendance rate. The same day, Adams-Turnipseed told staff to “pull out all stops and offer incentives†to get students to come to school.
On May 25, Adams-Turnipseed ordered staff to attend a three-day, mandatory, “no excuses no exceptions†end-of-year attendance cleanup from May 31 to June 2. The last day of school was May 26.
Adams-Turnipseed described the cleanup as a gathering of all school secretaries in the high school computer lab, and going through each school’s attendance “with a fine tooth comb.â€
Adams-Turnipseed wrote that she had spoken with Spurgeon and he was aware they would be doing the cleanup “as we always do.†She added that Spurgeon had asked her to look specifically at Glasgow, Koch and Danforth elementary schools and Westview Middle because their numbers had dropped.
On June 20, Sampson sent principals a list of students who had attendance percentages between 88 and 89.9 percent, telling them to check their records because “we need every point for full accreditation, so every students [sic] attendance matters!!â€
When a principal questioned how they were supposed to “clean up†attendance records, Adams-Turnipseed told her to look at each student’s attendance history and “correct anything that looks wrong.â€
In the interview, Spurgeon gave two reasons why staff cleaned up attendance records after the last day of school: First, they made sure student suspension records matched their attendance records. Second, complete online course attendance data isn’t available until after the last day of school and until students finish the coursework.
But Spurgeon could not explain how or why records of students who weren’t suspended were being checked. He also could not give examples of how secretaries would know, just by looking at an attendance record, whether it was correct. He said he did not attend the cleanup days.
Other school districts
Spurgeon said that Riverview Gardens’ attendance record practices are not unusual.
“We are no different than any other district in the state of Missouri. Data corrections go on in every school district in the state of Missouri,†he said. “You can’t fault a school district for doing the right thing and that’s what we’re doing.â€
But several area school districts, including ºüÀêÊÓƵ Public Schools, Ritenour, Hazelwood, Mehlville, Jennings, Normandy, Parkway, Ferguson-Florissant and Rockwood, said they rarely correct attendance records after the end of the school year.
“We don’t have to change data at the end of the year because our data is accurate,†said Charlotte Ijei, Parkway School District’s director of pupil personnel and diversity. “Our records are accurate because we have someone where that’s that person’s job.â€
Officials at those districts said they review attendance for errors weekly if not daily, so there’s no need to revise anything at the end of the school year except for unusual and rare circumstances, such as taking out a student who they later learned had left the district.
“Generally the expectation is that data is being corrected all along,†Ritenour Superintendent Chris Kilbride said. “If you can reconcile it as close to the attendance date as possible, that’s what we prefer to do.â€
Still, school districts are allowed to change or appeal attendance numbers after they submit them to the state in June.
Diane Cox, Riverview Gardens’ former federal programs director, was a principal for 18 years and an educator for more than four decades, including time at ºüÀêÊÓƵ Public Schools while that district lacked full accreditation. She said she never worked in a school that changed attendance records the way she was told Riverview Gardens staff did. She said she resigned last school year because she had concerns about attendance.
“Having been a building principal for a number of years and knowing how important attendance is in determining how much money we get from the state, how much we get in points in attendance, that is something we treated with importance every single day and we always made sure we had a high degree of accuracy,†Cox said. “I don’t think there is a legitimate reason to change anything in attendance. I cannot think of it.â€
Ensuring accuracy
Anytime states place an accountability measure on schools, such as attendance, experts say there’s a risk that the measure can be manipulated.
“Truly it is not known to what extent this happens,†said Diane Schanzenbach, a professor at Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy.
, Schanzenbach outlined several safeguards states can use to help ensure accuracy of attendance. Those could include algorithms that search for anomalies such as high numbers of edited data entries, late data entry or excess deviation from baseline attendance data. States could also do surprise in-person checks of attendance data logs or require that attendance data be centrally managed.
Phyllis Johnson, editorial director for FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University, says states could require that attendance data be reported to the state monthly, rather than all at once, as it is in Missouri.
It was through a surprise check in 2013 that the state education department found that the former .
In the same year, the department found after the district self-reported it. The state auditor confirmed in 2011 after a school staffer reported it.