At a meeting on Thursday, Oct. 25, the Mingus Union High SchoolDistrict Governing Board voted unanimously to put Superintendent Penny Hargrove on a 10-day administrative leave, due to dissatisfaction with the way she handled the school’s AZMerit testing procedures and the resulting drop in Mingus’ Arizona Department of Education grade from a B to a D.
Mingus’ AZMerit testing last spring led to problems reportedly due to technological issues in administering the tests. The school district chose to condense its testing schedule from the three-week long period it usually has used to four days. On both of the first two days of testing, the school’s internet connection was overloaded, leading to crashes that canceled the scores.
The Proficiency and Growth categories, which rely on AZMerit testing, account for 50 percent of the school’s grade in Arizona Department of Education evaluations.Technical problems on the testing procedure effectively doomed the school’s chances of a good grade, according to school administrators.
Members of the MUHSD board took issue less with the technological issues than with the response by school administrators to those issues.
“The state tells me no effort was made by Mingus, on the day it crashed, to communicate the computer failures,” board member James Ledbetter said at the meeting.
Ledbetter said he endeavored to find out if other schools in the state had had similar problems, and took issue with Hargrove for not having made those inquiries herself.
“I’m concerned that I, as a board member, have to reach out to the state to get these definitive answers. I don’t get them here. I have to figure out what the heck went on by looking outside of here. That’s problematic,” Ledbetter said.
“I used to do test coordination here, and if there was a problem like that, I would be all over it,” MUHSD Governing Board President Anita Glazar said. “If I had to drive down to Phoenix and say, ‘Look, we’re not going to take the hit on this. This is something that happened outside of our control.’ And you push and fight really hard.”
“There’s a little bit of a feeling of, ‘Well, I don’t know. We’ll do better next year.” And it just doesn’t feel right to me,” Glazar said.
Mingus Union High School Principal Genie Gee defended the administration’s efforts to fix the problems after last year and ensure they don’t happen again. The school has since refurbished its internet connection in the hopes of preventingerrors from happening again in the coming year’s tests.
“I’m hoping there’s just enough of a change to be able to change that frame of mind and hit the reset button on this,” Gee said. “Our IT department absolutely knows that this cannot fail.”
However, testing the system to handle AZMerit testing has not gone well so far, with the system failing two of three tests.
Ledbetter called for an outside consultant to be hired to determine how the school could be prepared for AZMerit testing in the spring.
“Let’s be clear, the school got a D. This is a leadership failure,” Ledbetter said. “And we can’t let that happen again. We let our school down. We let our community down. These kids are far higher performing than D’s. And I got to say, as one board member, I am overwhelmingly frustrated that I’m having to get answers outside of the school and I don’t trust the answers I’m getting inside of the school.”
Hargrove’s fate remains uncertain. The board intends to remain in contact with Hargrove during her time on administrative leave, as the MUHSD Governing Board intends to examine more closely what happened.
Hargrove was instructed not to comment publicly. Hargrove could be disciplined, however, under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and subsequent Arizona free speech laws, the board has absolutely no legal authority whatsoever to legally prohibit Hargrove from ever speaking to any member of the public.
Jon Hecht can be reached at 634-8551, or email jhecht@larsonnewspapers.com
