Columbus students marked present for first day even if they were not logged on

Columbus City Schools had not provided attendance records for how many students logged on for Wednesday’s remote first day of school as of 3 p.m. Thursday, despite a request by The Dispatch under the Ohio Public Records Act.

The district, which has some 47,000 students, had said Wednesday that attendance data would be behind by a day due to the virtual learning procedures the district implemented, but as another school day neared an end the data was still not available.

More:Columbus City Schools and Columbus Education Association reach conceptual agreement

Columbus City Schools clarified student attendance procedures Wednesday night, as some confused and unhappy parents posted on various social media platforms wondering why their students had been marked as present when they did not log into class on Wednesday.

Infinite Campus, the student information system the district uses, by default marks student present until someone (the substitute teachers) manually marks them as absent, said Columbus City Schools spokesperson Jacqueline Bryant.

"This is typical no matter the learning environment, online or in-person," Bryant wrote. "Many schools are still in the process of completing the manual attendance procedures for today, as synchronous check-ins were staggered throughout the day. We do not expect attendance reports to be completed until tomorrow."

Students who wanted to be marked present had to have attended a synchronous Zoom session. If they do not have access to a computer but are working on getting access, the parent must call the school's attendance line to get an excused absence.

"If a parent indicates to the school that their student is not participating in asynchronous learning, they will be marked with an unexcused absence if they do not have a legitimate excuse as provided by state law and/or the District’s policies," Bryant wrote.

Of Woodcrest Elementary School's 287 students, 28% logged on Monday for virtual learning (the first day of the strike), according to the district. Woodcrest is the district's only year-round school and their first day of school was July 27.

Woodcrest Principal Yolanda Cooper decided preemptively to have Monday be a virtual learning day since she knew the results of the CEA's vote Sunday on whether to strike vote wouldn't be known until late.

On Tuesday, 44% of Woodcrest students logged in, according to the district.

'Trying to pull one over'?

Jamie Martin, the mother of a Briggs High School sophomore, said her son was marked present Wednesday when he never logged on.

In the afternoon, she received an email from the high school saying more than 600 students logged on for the first day.

“There’s no way,” the 50-year-old West Side resident said.

Martin said she felt like the “board of education was trying to pull one over."

The email also said that students who attend school every day this week will be entered into a raffle for Kings Island tickets.

More:What we know about deal between Columbus Education Association, Columbus City Schools

Angiee Reene’s daughter, a third grader at John Burroughs Elementary, was still marked present for the first day of school as of 11:30 a.m. Thursday, even though she never logged on for school Wednesday.

“It’s weird,” the 27-year-old West Side resident said. “It was confusing. It was almost disheartening. It was falsifying information.”

She thinks the board and the union reaching a conceptual agreement early Thursday morning, hours after the first day of school with the attendance snafu, isn’t a coincidence.

“I’m glad this lit some kind of fire,” she said.

Data scandal

Some posts on social media questioning the district marking their students present when they hadn't logged on wondered whether Columbus City Schools possibly was having another data scandal on their hands.

The Dispatch reported in 2012 that 2.8 million absences were wiped from the district's attendance system over 5 1/2 years. Columbus school administrators were retroactively altering thousands of student-attendance records at the end of each school year.

The activity, The Dispatch reported, was a "top-down culture of data manipulation and employee intimidation" in which administrators were trained each year to game the state computer system by saying students had "withdrawn" from school and returned days or weeks later. The students never really left, but the changes knocked their scores out of the final tabulation.

mhenry@dispatch.com

@megankhenry

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Columbus students marked present for first day even if they were not logged on