Columbus schools administrator who changed data gets jail time

Michael Dodds, a former top-level administrator who oversaw several Columbus City Schools buildings, will report to jail today to start serving a 14 day sentence for his role in manipulating student data to make the district look better.

Dodds pleaded no contest in June and was convicted on three felony charges: attempted tampering with government records and two counts of unauthorized use of property. Today, Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Kimberly Cocroft sentenced Dodds to a jail term of one day less than that received by Stephen B. Tankovich, the former district administrator who masterminded the data purging, received for his role.

The sentence was part of a deal Dodds struck with prosecutors as they prepared to take him to trial for his role in the district’s data manipulation.

Dodd’s attorney, Bradley Barbin, told the judge that former Superintendent Gene T. Harris and the school board singled out Tankovich and Dodds as the culprits in the data changing scheme to protect themselves.

“This isn’t something Mr. Dodds created,” Barbin said. "It was something he was told to do."

Barbin turned in a statement signed by 30 former students who said Dodds had helped them and Dodd’s sister told the judge that he is a caring person who helped an ill neighbor.

But Cocroft told Dodds that he “should have dug a little deeper into what was being asked of you.” And she said he is in court because he was in a position of trust that involved children and some of those children were cheated out of opportunities.

“In your efforts to do good, there were some children who were left by the wayside,” the judge said.

Because of the tampering, some educators got bonuses they did not earn, and some parents missed out on private-school vouchers because their children's schools appeared to be doing too well to make them eligible.

Dodds is the fourth district official to be convicted of a crime in the district’s data scandal, along with Tankovich, Harris and former Marion Franklin High School Assistant Principal Stanley K. Pyle.

The Dispatch reported in 2012 that Dodds, a former high-school principal whom Harris promoted in 2009 to be an executive director over 26 principals, deleted almost 70,000 absences dating to 2006-07. Dodds’ deletions started when he was principal of Independence High School, a building that topped the list of deleted absences while he was there.

Students and others were set to testify that on days that Dodds withdrew them, they actually were in school -- they had used their lunch accounts or had other proof that they remained enrolled and were physically there.

In the employment hearings of two Columbus principals whose involvement cost them their jobs, others testified that Dodds regularly came into schools, sat down at a computer and changed student data.

Dodds was far from the only official deleting records. Almost 1,700 employees changed at least one record, the data showed. It was later learned that deleting absences was a computer byproduct of withdrawing students from the district to kick their poor proficiency test scores out of the system. The withdrawals made the district and some schools look better on their state report cards.

Another tale of public schools failing, pursuing the almighty dollar and subsequently wasting it, and so-called educators becoming criminals will surprise nobody here, but several comments nevertheless:

1) Like the Atlanta test-cheating network, it was assumed/believed that nobody would be prosecuted for this which makes a result all the more refreshing.

2) Government schools are a bad idea with worse implementation with political 'reforms' to government schools even worse than that. Politicians blackmail schools with funding restrictions if certain testing or attendance thresholds are not met. The schools moan about such requirements and, when they realize nobody's listening, take it upon themselves to fiddle the numbers. A case of absolute power corrupting in both the school and the State House.

3) The mania for attendance figures mean that disruptive students who have no business in any sort of school short of a young offenders' facility are kept in school to the detriment of those few who actively wish to learn. Teachers become prison guards and the cycle perpetuates itself.

4) If you wonder why a dusting of snow is just cause for an entire district to cancel school, look again at the attendance requirements. A dip below a certain threshold (say 75% or 60%) is marked as a 'non-attendance day' even if the schools are physically open and the cash allocated for that day is not received. Nervous bean-counting administrators/superintendents are more than happy to cancel classes.

As usual, the entire process is a charter for corruption and 7/8 of this iceberg is still unseen.

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