The final tribunal for a former Atlanta educator accused of cheating concluded Wednesday, bringing to a close nearly three years of efforts to fire school system employees allegedly involved in the scandal.
Three retired school employees acting as a jury didn’t make a decision after eight hours of testimony in the case of Juanessa Booker, a former testing coordinator at Scott Elementary in western Atlanta. They’ll soon return for deliberations.
Booker is the last of 185 educators named in a June 2011 state cheating investigation whose employment with Atlanta Public Schools hasn’t been resolved. All but about 24 of those implicated resigned, retired or were fired.
Charge letters from Superintendent Erroll Davis seeking Booker’s dismissal allege she failed to prevent cheating at the school, which had 68 percent of its classrooms flagged for suspiciously high numbers of wrong answers erased and corrected on the 2009 Criterion-Referenced Competency Test, according to the state investigation.
Booker, testifying for herself Wednesday, denied participating or knowing about cheating. She’s seeking reinstatement and back pay for the two years she’s been suspended.
“I did not erase any student answer documents,” Booker said during the hearing in the Atlanta Public School’s board room. “I did not cheat, nor did I tell anyone to cheat, nor did anyone tell me to cheat, nor did anyone tell me they saw someone else cheat.”
But Associate Superintendent Steve Smith said he’s lost confidence in her ability to carry out her duties, which included securing testing.
“Dr. Booker is not … the type of role model we’d want in front of our students, unfortunately,” Smith said. “It would appear that at some point those materials were not in her possession or were not monitored as closely and properly as they should have been.”
The process to terminate Booker’s employment started in May 2012, when Davis wrote a letter informing Booker her contract wouldn’t be renewed for the 2012-2013 school year.
Since then, tribunal hearings have started and stopped several times until finally finishing Wednesday. Booker’s attorney, George Lawson, said lengthy negotiations didn’t result in an acceptable settlement offer from Atlanta Public Schools.
Lawson argued that the case against Booker was built on circumstantial evidence because no witnesses said they saw her cheat.
“Every testing coordinator who had high numbers of flagged classrooms in their school was not necessarily involved with cheating,” Lawson said in his closing. “We’re making this young lady a scapegoat for something she had no control of.”
Dominique Martinez, an attorney for the school system, responded that Booker failed to take responsibility for actions that occurred on her watch.
“She messed up. Cheating would not have occurred on such a systemic level unless she had messed up,” Martinez said. “Either she knowingly participated in cheating, or she turned a blind eye to it. Either way, she willfully neglected her duties.”
After the tribunal decides on Booker’s job status, other cheating cases outside of Atlanta Public Schools jurisdiction will continue.
Thirteen former educators, including Superintendent Beverly Hall, face criminal charges in a trial scheduled to begin this fall. Also, dozens of appeals are pending from educators whose certifications have been recommended for suspension or revocation by the Georgia Professional Standards Commission.
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