ALBANY — After going over the tight guidelines the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement released in its “Procedure to Access to CRCT Answer Documents,” the Dougherty County Board of Education voted unanimously at Monday’s board meeting to send a delegation to Indianapolis to view student test forms.

The board also voted to send a strong letter to the GOSA and the Governor’s Office that it was not happy with the guidelines the state officials had approved for school systems that had schools flagged under the state’s first erasure analysis as “severe” or “moderate” concern. Dougherty had eight elementary schools on the “severe” list and six on the “moderate” list.

Chairman David Maschke had made a substitute motion to board member James Bush’s original motion.

“(I make a motion for) a stronger statement and endorsement of a full disclosure of the report,” he said. “(We’ll be) sending people to Indianapolis and sending a letter to GOSA and the Governor’s Office. We take the charges seriously and that we want to get to the bottom, but that they get fully transparent for the information they give us.”

Maschke particularly didn’t care for the two options the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement provided school systems with schools on “severe” and “moderate” concern lists. The first option only allowed school systems to look at a select sample of 150 documents between grades third and eighth during a two-hour period in GOSA’s Atlanta office. Dougherty County has about 12,000 students in first-to eighth-grade.

Test documents for first and second grade would not be released because some of the questions are being repeated in next month’s 2010 CRCT test. This request Superintendent Sally Whatley found unacceptable since 63 percent of DCSS flagged test sections are in those two grades. Whatley asked the board and it supported the school system’s desire to continue to press to get those grades released as well.

Maschke and Whatley also questioned the second option, in which school officials would have to travel to test vendor CTB-McGraw Hill’s secure warehouse in Indianapolis to view all of their students test sheets from third to eighth-grade during an eight-hour period.

“Frankly, I feel that when (GOSA released these findings) they were the investigators, judge and jury,” Maschke said. “This stuff was very accusatory. ... We got your documents, but you’re going to have to spend your money to go. I’m really surprised at this process. Neither one or two (options) are acceptable and that we’d like more control to go over the documents. It boggles the mind that they (couldn’t) have just sent the boxes to Atlanta.”

Whatley said after the meeting the delegation would be made up of at least two representatives from the Georgia Professional Standards Commission and DCSS board consultant Education Planners, as well as DCSS Test Coordinator Renee Bridges. However, Whatley said she hadn’t asked anyone to make the Indianapolis trip yet.

The board also voted 7-0 to give a $7,000 donation to the Albany-Dougherty Complete Count (2010 Census) Committee after it was determined the money would be spent for educational purposes.
“One of the main recipients is the school system, which is mostly in federal grants in the form of the Title I grant,” DCSS Executive Director of Operations and Business Services Robert Lloyd said.

The $7,000 was dispersed Friday after taking a phone poll of DCSS Finance Committee members Maschke, James Bush and Anita Williams-Brown.

“They were very, very appreciative and the speed in which it was handled,” Maschke said.

The board decided to table its “Superintendent Search: Public Forum.”

“We tabled it because the board was not ready to discuss the (public) forum,” Maschke said.