The former head of human resources for Atlanta Public Schools testified that former Superintendent Beverly Hall ordered the destruction of drafts of an internal investigative report into suspicions of cheating on a 2008 make-up standardized test.
Millicent Few testified on Day 52 of the trial that she was assured it was legal to destroy the documents because they were drafts and not final.
She also testified that Hall wanted language removed from a report on an investigation by outside investigator Penn Payne. According to Few, Payne had written in a draft that it was “highly likely” there was cheating at Deerwood Academy and Hall insisted that was not true.
Not only did the district try to mislead the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement but the media as well, by providing falsified logs that did not include notations of missing files, Few said.
“We decided not to put those cases on the list because we did not know if those were actual cheating cases,” Few testified.
Few entered a plea agreement last year with prosecutors in exchange for her testimony. Investigators charged her with making a false statement and racketeering but she pleaded guilty last February to a lesser charge, malfeasance of office, to avoid a possible 20-year prison sentence a racketeering conviction could bring. Instead, Few was sentenced to 12 months probation, fined $800 and ordered to perform 250 hours of community service as her punishment for the misdemeanor plea.
Earlier Thursday, prosecutors in the Atlanta Public Schools cheating trial said they expect to finish their case against 12 former educators accused of cheating on standardized tests as early as Feb. 10 but no later than Feb. 12.
“By the end of next week we should be down to our last three or four witnesses,” said Senior Assistant District Attorney Fani Willis.
That news, however, was greeted with a deluge of arguments from defense attorneys about what they have told prosecutors about witnesses they plan to call, including phone numbers and addresses for those people.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Jerry Baxter told defense lawyers if they had not given prosecutors the required information by next Friday, Feb. 6, those defense witnesses could not testify. Baxter also threatened to bring in defense witnesses to find out if lawyers for the 12 on trial had told them not to cooperate with prosecutors or investigators for the District Attorney’s Office.
Baxter said he will ask “those people about why they are refusing to communicate and specifically whether the lawyers for the defendants told them not to talk to the state.”
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