Kansas City school worker fired for faking attendance data says bosses made her do it
A former Kansas City Public Schools secretary who was among seven employees accused of falsifying student attendance data says she and her co-workers were only scapegoats following orders — from the superintendent on down.
“I gave them exactly what they said they needed,” said LaQuyn Collier, who was a secretary at Central Middle School until December. “And you terminate me for giving you exactly what I was directed to do.”
Emails obtained by The Star show the extent of top administrators’ insistence that attendance numbers improve enough to raise the district’s overall performance score with the state.
In 2014, they asked secretaries to gather at the district’s central office, where they “reviewed several attendance recording issues.”
“I need you to get all the secretaries together and get this done on Monday,” Luis M. Cordoba, then the executive director of the office of student support, wrote to Samuel Johnson, a district truancy and dropout specialist, on Aug. 2, 2014. “This is priority and a directive from the sup. No exceptions.....this will be our primary focus.”
Then-Superintendent Stephen Green had given specific orders that revisions in attendance records should raise the district’s score with the state by 5.5 points.
“Let’s complete the full 5.5,” Green said in an email to his cabinet that same day. “Failure is not an option.”
In November, Kansas City Public Schools officials revealed that while Green was superintendent, from 2013 to 2015, employees had inflated attendance numbers so the district would score better on Missouri’s Annual Performance Review and regain state accreditation.
The district said that internal and external investigations found that seven employees had changed attendance records. Three no longer worked for the district. The other four were initially put on administrative leave. In the end, two were fired, including Collier.
Now she and another employee implicated in the scandal have retained an attorney to try to reclaim their jobs and their reputations.
Green’s contract provided up to $100,000 in bonuses for improved performance scores. But, Collier’s lawyer points out, his clients would receive no perks for changing attendance numbers. The district stopped the practice of bonus incentives when current Superintendent Mark Bedell replaced Green in 2016.
Under state attendance guidelines, 90% of a district’s students should attend school 90% of the time.
Collier said she and other secretaries were given lists of students whose attendance was “at 85% or higher,” just shy of the required 90%. She said they were told to raise the attendance to 90% by changing certain attendance codes in the district’s database.
“They only cared about the students close to 90. This was not about fixing errors,” she said. “If that was the case, why did they only give us students who were almost to 90?”
District officials declined to comment in detail on the accusations.
“We have wanted to be very open and transparent,” said Kelly Wachel, a district spokeswoman. “We understand that the public deserves that from us.” But, district officials said, details about the case “will be at the heart of potential litigation, and we want to let that play out and we don’t want to do that in the newspaper.”
”While we are very much constrained in the amount of information we can provide … I am worried about the lack of constraints of some of your sources,” she added.
‘Laser focus on this project’
When Green took over in 2013, the district was unaccredited and on the brink of state takeover. When he left in 2015, the district had received provisional accreditation.
According to Collier and the emails The Star obtained, a big push to change attendance numbers came during the 2014 summer break.
“It was district-wide,” she said. She said nearly every attendance secretary in the district had been ordered by district administrators to manipulate attendance data.
Each year, districts submit attendance data to the state by June 30. The state then allows them time to review and fix errors in coding that could change overall results.
On July 28, 2014, Anthony Lewis, then director of elementary education, wrote to the district’s principals requesting that secretaries and attendance monitors begin “looking at all attendance data from previous school years one last time and correct any errors you find.”
The same email also said that “Beginning May 28, 2014 the attendance monitors from each of the high schools gathered in the IT&C (the central office’s Information Technology & Communications) classroom to address attendance reconciliation efforts for the 2013-2014 academic year. During these days the monitors reviewed several attendance recording issues.”
Johnson sent an email Aug. 3, 2014, to several members of the superintendent’s cabinet: “Team, I need this email to go out to all principals. We need all secretaries to laser focus on this project all day Monday. The goal is to get a 1.5% increase in attendance by end of business Monday 8/4/2014.”
An email from Green the day before questioned whether those in his cabinet had been able to revise attendance records to raise the district’s performance score with the state by 5.5 points.
“Did we get the revisions on attendance submitted? For the 5.5 points?” Green wrote in an email to Cordoba and Vickie Murillo, then the chief academic and accountability officer for the district.
Murillo wrote back to Green: “I talked with Luis earlier and he said, We are at 4pts … 76.5 percent. He instructed his team to keep going. He said, we will continue chipping away.”
Green’s response: “Let’s complete the full 5.5. Failure is not an option.”
Collier said she did as she was told the first year she was asked. But she became suspicious the second year because “that is when they gave me the list of all the students,” from all across the district,” she said. “These weren’t just my kids. I didn’t know these kids.”
And, she said, she did not have access to the attendance records for these students. But district leaders gave her and co-workers access when they were called to the district office.
She says she was paid for 15 hours of overtime, but decided to stop participating in changing attendance again, even though administrators called her asking her to do so. She saved a recording of a conversation with an administrator asking her to help with attendance.
“It all came from the top,” Collier said. She believed her “job depended on” her doing what she was told.
She said she tried to get a meeting with Green. “It was like trying to get a meeting with Donald Trump. It ain’t happening,” she said. As far as reporting to someone else, she said, “Who the hell you gonna tell? They are all affiliated.”
The fallout
KCPS officials say they learned about the falsified data from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) in January 2019 from a former employee who came forward.
Over the next few months, the district conducted an internal investigation and then hired a law firm to do a separate investigation.
In November, officials announced their findings, blaming the seven employees.
The inflated attendance figures helped the district acquire $192,730 in state funding it had not earned. Missouri districts get state money for every day a student is in school. The district has since repaid the state.
Many of the administrators who worked for the district during the time of the data tampering have since left.
Green left in 2015 to be superintendent of the Dekalb County School District near Atlanta. In November, the DeKalb County Board of Education approved a separation agreement with Green, effective immediately.
Cordoba was the district’s chief officer for the division of student support services when he retired in December. The Star attempted to contact Cordoba and Green, but neither could be reached for comment.
Murillo left KCPS in 2017 for a job as superintendent in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Last year she told local media there that she didn’t know anything about falsification of attendance data in Kansas City.
When The Star contacted her in Iowa, she said she did not recall the 2014 email exchange. She said she was responsible for academic improvement in Kansas City and did not submit attendance information. “I was not that close to it,” Murillo said.
District officials have declined to share details about how the attendance records were faked, nor would they say how the employees involved were identified and whether they were ultimately fired, retired or forced to resign.
But they did say recently that their investigation revealed some employees were asked to do wrong and chose not to and that “there were tools in place” for employees to report if they believed they were being asked to do something that they shouldn’t do.
Collier said she believes she was targeted because she told investigators last year she had information that showed how high up the problem went.
“Initially she was told she was not in any trouble,” said Gerald Gray, the attorney representing Collier and another employee who was implicated. “But as time goes on she is asked to resign, and when she refuses she is terminated.”
Gray reiterated Collier’s claims. “Both of my clients were given directives from their supervisors that not only do they have no choice to do this, but they have no benefit for doing it because neither of my clients had any interests with DESE or the state.
“A lot of district employees involved had no knowledge that what they were being directed to do was wrong, and to select a couple of people who chose to stand up and to speak up for others as the fall guys is wrong, making it look like these people are the ones violating policy when it is a common practice for the district.”
Gray said he believes that the terminations “had nothing to do with what they had done but because they were willing to provide information about their knowledge of the attendance debacle.”
But he said his clients are not looking for other district employees to be punished. “My clients would like to be returned to their positions in the school district. Both have families with young children.”
District officials say they stand by the disciplinary actions they took and said they may not be done with the matter.
“The district fully understands that there can be continued work involved with this and we are committed to seeing the work through,” Wachel said.
“We did an investigation for a long time and we are comfortable with the decision that we made. We are confident because we were so measured and took our time.”
Ray Weikal, another district spokesman, said, KCPS “has forensic evidence” from its investigations. “We are confident that our investigation was thorough and we know exactly what happened and how it happened.” District officials declined to say what evidence they had.
Now, Wachel said, the district has a new person overseeing attendance and has taken steps to make sure this type of meddling never happens again.
“This whole thing has changed KCPS culture and climate and how we do things,” she said. “Our commitment is to do the right thing.”
