Hundreds came, singing with such enthusiasm the music could be felt as much as it could be heard.
They came Tuesday evening in support of the 11 former Atlanta educators who may go to prison for cheating on standardized tests. On Monday 10 of those convicted will learn how much they will be punished.
At the “prayer vigil,” the hundreds who walked through the front door of the First Iconium Baptist Church in East Atlanta were given fliers with the phone numbers of Judge Jerry Baxter and Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard. Please call and ask them to show mercy when the former teachers, principals and administrators are sentenced, they were asked.
“I don’t know about you, but it was the handcuffs,” Atlanta City Councilman C.T. Martin said, conjuring up the sound of the metal cuffs being shut around the wrists of the just-convicted educators after a jury announced its verdict. Six men and six women convicted 11 of the 12 on trial and acquitted one, retired special education teacher Dessa Curb.
Shock has been one response to images of handcuffed teachers being taken to jail. Another has been outrage at the cheating and the damage to children who were promoted because of inflated test scores even though they could not do the work.
“I’m watching these ‘civil activists’ planning the prayer vigil for the educators,” Abby Martin, a parent of two children at Grady High School, said in a message to a reporter before Tuesday night’s event. “Sickening. Don’t forget to ask that group if they’ve held a prayer vigil for the victims of the crime … the cheated children. I didn’t see them praying during the cheating investigation. And ask these same clergy, would they exempt convicted felons from punishment if the crime had been armed robbery? Isn’t stealing stealing?”
Speakers and supporters at the vigil were outraged that teachers could go to prison while those who criminally profited from the financial crisis years ago are free. What about them, asked Denise Freeman, who ran unsuccessfully for the Atlanta Board of Education last year.
“I don’t understand,” Freeman said.
The two men and eight women have been in jail since Wednesday. They could be sentenced Monday to as much as 20 years in prison for violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act as well as some lesser felonies.
Former Dunbar Elementary School first-grade teacher Shani Robinson, one of the 11 convicted, was sitting in a wheelchair beside the front row of pews; her blood pressure was dangerously high. Baxter allowed her to stay home, not go to jail with the others, because she is pregnant, expecting a son any day. She will be sentenced in August.
Robinson swayed, clapped and sang just four rows in front of Curb, who was with her two sisters. Curb stood most of the time, singing, her hands in the air and stepping side to side to the beat of the music.
No hymnals were needed as about 600 enthusiastically belted out “Every Praise.”
Attorney Annette Greene, who represents Robinson, said supporters respect the jury’s verdict but “healing in this difficult case can only begin with a show of mercy for these imprisoned educators.”
Much of the cheating was in schools in low-income areas where students struggled to just read and perform basic math. The scheme was to prompt students as they took the 2009 Criterion-Referenced Competency Test or to correct the wrong answers later so the district would see an increase in scores and meet federal benchmarks. The alleged leader of the conspiracy, former Superintendent Beverly Hall, was indicted along with the 11 convicted, but she did not go to trial; she died of breast cancer last month.
“I think an injustice was done,” said Herbert Young while waiting for the event to begin. “I don’t think it was a criminal act if anything was done.”
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