Angela Jennings worked nearly a decade for the DeKalb County School District, until she was forced from her job as an elementary school principal during an investigation into cheating.
She then taught in Abu Dhabi, and when her contract expired she hopped a flight home. She arrived Tuesday evening, just a couple of hours after a judge signed an indictment against her, her lawyer said.
The former principal at Rock Chapel Elementary School was among three former administrators charged with multiple felony counts. It is DeKalb’s miniature version of the test-cheating scandal that engulfed neighboring Atlanta Public Schools, where, two weeks ago, 35 educators, including former Superintendent Beverly Hall, were indicted in a racketeering case.
The grand jury approved charges that say Jennings plus former principal Agnes Flanagan and former assistant principal Derrick Wooten independently committed fraud and other felonies.
Decatur attorney Stephen Roberts, who started representing Jennings during the criminal investigation, said the DeKalb case is nothing like Atlanta’s, which may be the biggest cheating scandal in U.S. history.
“If the Atlanta cheating scandal is a Tsunami,” he said, “this would be a glass of spilled water.”
Roberts, a former DeKalb prosecutor, said it is “not very hard” to get an indictment. Getting a conviction is another matter, he said, adding that he is surprised prosecutors believe they can make a case against his client. He said Jennings has always cooperated with investigators, meeting with them in April 2011. “I left with the impression that they were fishing for stuff to charge her with,” he said.
Attempts to reach Flanagan, Wooten and Jennings herself on Wednesday were unsuccessful. Their phones numbers were either unlisted or disconnected. Attorneys for Flanagan and Wooten didn’t return phone and email messages seeking comment Tuesday and Wednesday. Also, there were no responses to calls to about three dozen phone numbers listed for people who appeared to be their relatives.
The alleged motive of the trio: boosting the perceived performance of their respective schools.
DeKalb District Attorney Robert James said the careers of other administrators had been derailed when their schools failed to meet performance standards.
“It’s very difficult to climb the ladder if your school is failing,” James said.
Flanagan, a 23-year DeKalb school employee and former principal of Cedar Grove Middle School, is accused of ordering two teachers to change students’ answers on the 2009 Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests, or CRCT.
The high-stakes tests largely determined whether schools were labeled as failing under federal benchmarks known as “Adequate Yearly Progress,” or AYP. According to DeKalb officials, an analysis of student tests determined that 482 students at Cedar Grove had a higher than average number of wrong-to-right erasures, a red flag for cheating.
Cedar Grove met the AYP standards that year, as it had the year before and did the next year.
The indictment says Wooten, a former Stoneview Elementary assistant principal, ordered six teachers to mark truants as present during the 2010-11 school year.
Attendance is a secondary measure of school performance. The school met AYP standards for attendance that year and the year before, but failed on test scores both years.
Jennings is accused of removing students temporarily from electronic enrollment records, so their 2010 CRCT tests wouldn’t count against the school’s average scores. Her lawyer, Roberts, said it was Jennings’ job to check attendance records but that he didn’t think she even knew how to operate the computers.
“She certainly denies making any computer changes that would in any way go to the integrity of the tests,” Roberts said.
Rock Chapel Elementary met AYP the year she allegedly fudged enrollment, as it did the years before and after.
Flanagan left the district in January 2012. She was referred for possible discipline to the Public Standards Commission, which licenses Georgia educators. She appealed potential sanctions and is negotiating a possible settlement with the Georgia attorney general’s office. Wooten had been with the DeKalb district four years when he left in May 2012. The PSC suspended him one year, until Aug. 7. Jennings worked nearly eight years for DeKalb, until she left in 2010 when her contract was not renewed, her lawyer said. She too was suspended by the PSC, but her suspension ended last April.
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