Ghost students: Failure and apparent fraud at one Baltimore high school

Hotair ^ | April 23,2021 | JOHN SEXTON

[Hojczyk]

Last month a Baltimore TV station aired a report about a local high school that was doing an extraordinarily bad job for students. The report focused on one student (his name was withheld) at Augusta Fells high school who had been absent from class about half the year and had only passed three classes in four years. And yet this student had been promoted through the grades year after year. The most shocking part of the story was that the student’s 0.13 GPA placed him solidly in the middle of his class.

In Maryland, schools receive funding per student. The more students enrolled, the more money the school gets. City Schools receives nearly $16,000 per student, every year. So, the question is, did North Avenue get taxpayer money to educate 21 students who were on the rolls of Augusta Fells, but were not actually attending the school? That would come out to $331,653 of taxpayer money to educate students who weren’t there

[Flick Lives]

Make that “Healthy Holly”

[the OlLine Rebel]

Please note it’s a specialty school, for “visual arts”.

Pretty bad they can’t even pass there.

(I’m local, and have been seeing this every night on local news.)

[Viking2002]

I was about as bad. I spent half my senior year on suspension. All I needed was English to graduate, and my English teacher gave me a D on a final term paper that was about three lines long and written in the previous class. Legend has it that they took an informal poll in the staff lounge and voted to pass me so they wouldn’t have to put up with me another year. LOL My sisters said they were still talking about us ten years later. We were Animal House on steroids.

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

That show absolutely hauled rear. If I had the time, I would sign up for HBO Max and go into a coma watching that show again.

[rockrr]

I was suspended for skipping class and smoking on campus. So when I returned I sought the teacher out and decked him. I wasn’t arrested but they expelled me and filed criminal trespass charges against me. I finished high school in an adjoining district.

[MinorityRepublican]

Season 5 of The Wire. AS long as the kid shows up one day in September and one day in October, then the school gets full funding for that kid the rest of the school year. The vice principle hires a couple of guys in van to round up kids on the list to make sure they each get their “September day”. All the truant kids are in on the scam too.

Oh yeah. Wow.

[Viking2002]

Heh. The final straw for me and my buddy was, we knew a bunch of high school girls at a school about 20 minutes from there. We pulled the ultimate Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and called the principal's office, pretending we were the father of one of them. That got us a free invite into the girls' locker room. To this day, there's a few pics out there (from a Polaroid Instamatic - how's that for carbon dating?), us leaning on the door of the emergency exit, cigarettes hanging out of our mouths, and half-nekkid girls in the background. Unfortunately, one of them decided to narc on us, and it turned out that the school principal was the brother of one of our gym teachers. A glitch in our hungover, on-the-fly Grand Plan. (We were in mid beer buzz, and pulled this idea out of our, um, hats on a second-by-second basis.) We headed back to a buddy's house who was a bass player in a band scheduled to play a school dance there that weekend, and he got a call on the phone. When he hung up, he just looked at us and said, "That was the school. They know it was you." Ruh-roh. When I walked into the house at the end of the day, my dad was sitting there with my mom, and he just looked up from the paper and said, "So, how was your day? I hear you had a little adventure." Well, no supper for me. The next morning after PA announcements completed, we sighed in relief that we didn't hear our names. Then the PA suddenly came back on and told us to report to the principal's office. LOL The coolest part of it all was that as we were walking The Green Mile, other kids were hanging out the classroom doors, cheering us. Nobody had ever had the balls to do what we did, and almost got away with it. We were celebrities. The principal about popped a vein in his forehead, but the vice-principal thought it was a hoot. He grilled us on all the vivid details, and said if it weren't for county school regs, he'd have let us walk out, but we had to be 'disciplined' and we got chucked back into detention hall for another month.

Now you see why they deliberately graduated me. I was generally harmless, but man, we kicked up a lot of dust. I mean, c'mon man, John Bonham just died, Led Zep broke up....

[Freedom56v2]

children of the ghost voters?

[alexander_busek]

I was about as bad. I spent half my senior year on suspension. All I needed was English to graduate, and my English teacher gave me a D on a final term paper that was about three lines long and written in the previous class. Legend has it that they took an informal poll in the staff lounge and voted to pass me so they wouldn’t have to put up with me another year. LOL My sisters said they were still talking about us ten years later. We were Animal House on steroids.

This might be straying rather far a-field of the topic at hand, but: When, how, and why did you then subsequently return to the "straight and narrow?"

When did you "get your act together," and what notable event (or chain of events) motivated you to do so?

And where are you today?

I realize that might be rather private information, so I hope that you'll forgive me for being so inquisitive. Please feel free to "anonymize" your answer and avoid specifics.

Regards,

[wetgundog]

Student was busy doing co-op at a vaccine manufacturing plant.

[MissEdie]

Since Covid, school districts in SC are allowed to count students for funding as long as they remain on the roster of the school. There are students who have not attended school since March 2020 still on the rolls- and the districts are still getting the funding for them. Traditionally, the law stipulates if a student misses more than 10 consecutive days they are to be dropped from the attendance rolls.

[ronnie raygun]

Teachers helping the rat cause and staying home getting paid and screaming they don’t want to go back to work because of covid. Why give blacks and people of color an education? when it comes time after being pushed thru school they will get a job because of affirmative action, inequality, critical racism and not their mental abilities or experience

[Adder]

The most shocking part of the story was that the student’s 0.13 GPA placed him solidly in the middle of his class.

Thats just effin sad.

AND thats just at one school in one city...dumble-run, it goes without saying but I did anyway.

Then they grow up and have ballots made for them.

[Vehmgericht]

A 0.15 GPA will get you into Harvard.

[TigersEye]

That is a surprise to me. Even so I can’t imagine paying Ivy League level tuitions to get a teaching certificate to teach English in K-12.

[mewzilla]

Update....

Baltimore City Schools: A Failing Grade Won’t Stop Students From Moving Up