Cheating probe: Atlanta principal's demotion called retaliation

Jimmye Hawkins probably couldn’t have taken charge of Atlanta’s Scott Elementary School under more awkward circumstances. Her predecessor was among the 12 principals suddenly reassigned amid a cheating investigation that cast a shadow across the city’s school system. Her new boss was friends with the old principal, and hardly welcomed Hawkins’ arrival.

On top of everything else, Hawkins is a middle-aged white woman, brought in from a mostly white Northside school. Scott Elementary sits across town on Hollywood Road. All but 10 or so of the more than 400 students are black.

A week after Hawkins moved to Scott, administrators told her and other interim principals to bring parents to a Board of Education meeting. Parents from other schools begged the board to reinstate their principals. A parent from Scott, though, proclaimed, “It took a Caucasian from Buckhead to come in and clean up our school.”

Hawkins’ boss, Tamara Cotman, turned around sharply, apparently displeased by the deviation from the script. “Who’s that parent?” she demanded of Hawkins. “Who’s that parent?”

“I knew then,” Hawkins said recently, “I was in deep crap.”

Thus began the journey of perhaps the unlikeliest martyr in a scandal that calls into question a decade’s worth of academic achievement in the Atlanta Public Schools. Hawkins endured continual criticism from Cotman, she says, and was among the principals Cotman ordered to write “Go to hell” notes to state investigators. After a lawyer for the school district questioned Hawkins about the matter, Cotman removed her from Scott.

By mid-February, Hawkins had been interrogated, demoted, accused of being a whistle-blower, described in court papers as a confidential informant (“CI 11-022”) and, finally, reinstated as interim principal. What happened to her, state investigators say, is a prime example of a pattern of retaliation and retribution against employees who report wrongdoing in Atlanta’s school system.

The district has since reassigned Cotman, who oversaw about two dozen schools. In an e-mail Friday, Cotman’s lawyer, George Lawson, said: “Ms. Cotman did not retaliate against Ms. Hawkins and had no reason to do so. ... Ms. Cotman did everything in her power and provided Ms. Hawkins with all necessary resources to assist and help Ms. Hawkins in her new position.”

Cotman has declined several requests for an interview. On Friday, however, she appeared on Channel 2 Action News and described the “Go to hell” notes as an exercise to reduce tension. She did not address her demotion of Hawkins.

Lawson said Hawkins “had problems in the position from day one.” He said Cotman did not know Hawkins had been questioned by the district’s lawyer when she demoted her.

A district spokesman declined to comment.

Hawkins, an educator for 35 years, seems uncomfortable with the attention attracted by her role in the cheating investigation. She thrived by avoiding trouble and was reluctant to become a symbol of what a troubled school system could do to dissident employees.

“I don’t think she wants to be the face of this,” said Hawkins’ lawyer, George Shingler, “the leader of ‘doing right’ in the Atlanta Public Schools.”

‘Taking heat’

Hawkins spent the past 3½ years as an instructional specialist at W.T. Jackson Elementary. She was preparing to start a new school year there last August when the district reassigned a dozen principals from schools with the highest numbers of suspicious erasures on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test in 2009. On the Friday before classes began, the district told her to report to Scott Elementary on Monday as interim principal.

All but a handful of Scott’s students are poor enough to qualify for a free or reduced-price lunch, and the school had a weak academic history. But test scores had soared under the now-reassigned principal, Roxianne Smith.

In 2008, Smith’s second year, almost 79 percent of Scott’s students passed the CRCT — a 15-point increase. Scores held steady in 2009. But a state analysis found a suspicious number of wrong-to-right erasures in two-thirds of Scott’s classes that year. In 2010, with state officials closely watching schools suspected of cheating, just 61 percent passed.

Hawkins set out to improve student attendance and to sharpen teaching.

Barely a month into the school year, Hawkins said in an interview, Cotman called her into her office and “raked me over the coals.”

Cotman told Hawkins she had been overheard speaking disparagingly of parents and referring to students as “those kids.” Hawkins denied saying anything of the sort. Nevertheless, Hawkins said, Cotman told her she had tired of “taking heat” for installing a white principal at Scott and needed only “probable cause” to remove her. “She said she could not have a person in that school who did not love the kids.”

Another topic, however, soon dominated Cotman’s conversations with principals, Hawkins said: the state’s cheating investigation.

In meetings and on conference calls, Hawkins said, Cotman spoke of the “foolishness” of the investigation and the “lawlessness” of state agents. Once, Hawkins said, Cotman gave the principals instructions for dealing with investigators: “Don’t give them any information they don’t ask for.”

“It always made me uncomfortable,” Hawkins said.

Hawkins’ uneasiness swelled in November when, she said, Cotman opened a principals’ meeting with a rant about the state investigators. Hawkins said Cotman handed out paper and told each principal to write to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which was assisting the inquiry. The assigned theme: “Go to hell.”

“Expressing an opinion is one thing,” Hawkins said recently, “but when she tells us to write a note [with that message], she crosses the line. I’m sitting there thinking, ‘What if the GBI finds out about this?’”

Fear of retaliation

Three weeks later, Superintendent Beverly Hall’s office received an anonymous letter complaining about Cotman’s “Go to hell” meeting. Hawkins said she did not write it.

She next heard about the matter in January, when she got an e-mail from Veleter Mazyck, the district’s general counsel. Labeled “privileged and confidential,” the message notified Hawkins that she was to be interviewed by a lawyer for the school district who was investigating the complaint. When the lawyer, Halima Horton, came to the school, Hawkins said, she asked whether Cotman might have intended the “Go to hell” notes to be merely an exercise.

“Is it possible,” Hawkins said Horton asked, “that all the principals were very stressed and she asked them to write letters to whoever they were angry at?”

“It wasn’t ‘whoever we were angry at,’” Hawkins said. “It was, ‘Write a “Go to hell” letter to the GBI.’”

Horton did not respond to a request for an interview.

Hawkins questioned whether her statements to Horton would be held in confidence. She was especially worried, she said, because Mazyck’s e-mail also went to a principal who was friends with Cotman. Late on Jan. 27, Hawkins e-mailed Mazyck to say she feared retaliation for what she told Horton.

At 10:52 a.m. Jan. 28, Mazyck replied: “In light of your concerns, and as a matter of practice, steps have been taken to ensure that you will not be retaliated against.”

At 12:30 p.m. Jan. 28, Cotman arrived, unannounced, at Hawkins’ office.

A demotion

Cotman told Hawkins she had come to conduct a “walk-through” inspection of the school. Shortly, Hawkins said, Cotman gave her a list of “concerns,” detailed in a memo as “ranging from student work posted with December dates to student artifacts posted with no commentary and rubrics.”

Good school leaders, Hawkins said Cotman told her, place lagging teachers on probation or rip up their bulletin-board displays to get their attention. Twice in the memo, Cotman told Hawkins to walk through the school “to ‘inspect’ what you ‘expect.’”

Over the next few days, Cotman sent members of her staff to observe Hawkins. Cotman returned for another inspection on a day when many teachers were away at a conference, replaced by substitutes.

On Feb. 11, Hawkins received a telephone call summoning her to Cotman’s office. “I knew,” she said recently, “what it was about.”

Cotman told her she had “lots of concerns” about the teachers’ performances and the principal’s leadership, Hawkins said. Hawkins was immediately demoted, told to have her office cleared out and her keys to the school surrendered by 5 p.m., in less than four hours.

Back at Scott, Hawkins crammed her books, files and other belongings into her Toyota Matrix hatchback. Teachers met her in the parking lot, hugging and crying before she drove away.

Hawkins left a voice mail for Mazyck, the district’s general counsel, and met friends at Six Feet Under, a restaurant near downtown. She didn’t know that Channel 2 Action News was airing a story previewing an Atlanta Journal-Constitution article about Cotman and the “Go to hell” notes. Amid the restaurant’s Friday evening clamor, Hawkins didn’t hear her cell phone ring when Mazyck returned her call.