Grand Jury Makes Suggestions To Prevent Newburgh Grade Tampering

NEWBURGH, NY — A grand jury investigated problems with attendance policies and online courses in the Newburgh Enlarged City School District. The investigation began in 2017, after a former teacher and varsity athletics coach at the Newburgh Free Academy made a complaint to the state Education Department and the Orange County District Attorney's Office about the manipulation of the academy's student-athletes' attendance records and chronic student absenteeism.

District Attorney David M. Hoovler announced Thursday the findings and recommendations of the grand jury.

"The primary mission of our schools is to provide students with an education to help them lead fulfilling and successful lives," Hoovler said. "I hope that the Newburgh Enlarged School District will carefully consider the grand jury's recommendations so that working together we can provide students with the education that they deserve."

The grand jury was empaneled Jan. 10 and, over the course of six weeks, it heard testimony from 15 witnesses and considered 31 exhibits, including tens of thousands of entries of data from Infinite Campus, Inc., the company that manages the district's student attendance software and APEX Online Learning, which produces the online courses the district uses for "credit recovery." The grand jury also examined hundreds of pages of attendance records.

SEE ALSO: New Rochelle Says Online Grades Were Altered Improperly

What the grand jury found were numerous instances of chronic absenteeism, particularly among some student-athletes, and issues with how attendance policies were administered in general.

One witness said, between 2015 and 2017, hundreds of students participated in athletics while ineligible under the district's attendance policies.

Evidence seen by the grand jury demonstrated that in some cases "unexcused" absences for some Newburgh Free Academy students were changed to "excused" tardies up to 215 days after the actual absence.

The use of the APEX Online Learning system, which was designed as a way to have students make up for failed courses through computer learning, also came under fire.

There was evidence that teachers would regularly override or change the test results of students taking the computer courses.

One APEX teacher at the academy had 99 grade overrides, one had 275 and another had 325 between 2016 and 2018.

The grand jury saw proof that more than 100 APEX students were marked as completing their respective courses in under two hours and then remarkably received a passing grade of a 70 or above.

When a district employee witness was asked to explain how a student could complete four scored 10-question quizzes in only 18 minutes with a final grade of 98 out of 100, the witness said that was "insane" and noted that the questions couldn't even be read in 18 minutes, let alone answered correctly.

Among the recommendations from the grand jury were the hiring of an independent attendance monitor, one who would not be an employee of the district, and the adoption of a uniform attendance policy to be approved by the school board on a yearly, or more frequent, basis.

The grand jury also recommended that, if the district continues to run the APEX Online Learning program at its campuses, an independent monitor be hired to oversee the administration of the program and run it according to APEX's best practices.

That would include disabling certain settings, such as question randomization and feedback, which serve primarily as a tool for cheating. Also it was recommended to cap the number of grade overrides for a given student and quiz resets, both of which undermine the purpose of having the student earn the grade on his or her own.

Disabling the manual input of a final score was also recommended. The final score should be an APEX generated score based on grading options contained within the software and not subjected to manual override or input, the grand jury said.

The New Rochelle School District stopped using APEX last year after it found that more than 200 grades were changed affecting 32 students at the high school, according to an independent investigation into the school's Credit Recovery Program.

New Rochelle's investigation found 21 students who received diplomas the previous June would not have received passing grades in their APEX online courses without the numerical grade changes made by the coordinator.

The complete Orange County grand jury report can be found here.

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