The recent revelation about alleged grade manipulation at North Atlanta High School came as a surprise to the school system superintendent, who said the accusation played no role in his controversial decision several weeks ago to remove the school’s principal and administrative team.
Superintendent Erroll Davis told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Friday that he learned about the anonymous complaints alleging improper grade changes after he shook up North Atlanta High by removing the principal and reassigning several of his administrators.
Davis said internal affairs investigators work independently and that he only learned the nature of their investigation about a week ago when they sent him a request to hold all paperwork from the high school. At the time of his abrupt removal of the school’s administration three weeks ago — parents refer to it as “black Friday” — Davis said he only knew that various complaints had been filed, which is a common occurrence.
“I knew investigations were taking place. I knew I didn’t initiate anything. And I didn’t know what they were about,” he said. Atlanta Public Schools on Thursday confirmed the investigation after an Oct. 19 memo about it was leaked to the public.
Davis’ statement leaves parents wondering what was really behind the removal of principal Mark MyGrant, who’d recently retired but agreed to stay on through the transition of a new principal. That new principal, hired from Gwinnett County schools before MyGrant’s dismissal, starts Monday.
It’s been a rocky interim said Cynthia Briscoe Brown, whose son is a junior at North Atlanta High. There have been disruptions of the sort unseen since her daughter, now in college, was a freshman there, Brown said. “We’re having food fights again.”
Brown, the immediate past president of North Atlanta Parents for Public Schools, a decades old advocacy group, said she doesn’t believe widespread grade manipulation happened under MyGrant. She said she believes Davis when he says that the allegations played no role in his ouster of the school administration, but she said Davis still owes parents an explanation for his decision. She said she and other parents do not believe what Davis said about the school’s academic performance driving his abrupt removal of MyGrant and the others.
“We feel that there is still something there that he hasn’t told us,” Brown said. “We still have no adequate explanation. We really feel like our trust with the system has been completely betrayed, and we need to know what happened here in order for that trust to be restored.”
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