Official school reports upset lawmakers

Some school administrators need an old fashion "butt kickin' and takin' of names," one legislative leader said Wednesday.

Rep. Dave Ure, R-Kamas, co-chair of the Administrative Rules Committee, was upset over state school officials' new rule allowing "inaccurate" information to be included in State Office of Education reports and statistics.

No inaccurate or misleading information should be included in such reports, the legislators said.

Deputy state superintendent Pat Ogden said the rule is a "last ditch effort" to force collection of such data, which in turn may be required to get federal No-Child-Left-Behind funds for the state and local districts.

The reports are also used by the state in classifying whether a school is "failing or succeeding" in educating children. And lawmakers don't want such critical public classifications skewed either in favor or against schools because of inaccurate information, they said.

Ogden said some school administrators in the past have not submitted needed data to the state office on time. And since important reports containing information on all Utah schools must still be compiled and published, those final reports may contain incomplete and thus inaccurate information because of some tardy reporting.

But the whole report must be published anyway, which is why the new rule says "inaccurate" information must be fed into master reports, he explained.

"This just sounds stupid to me," said Senate Majority Leader Michael Waddoups, R-Taylorsville, "To say that you'll include (in reports) inaccurate data? I can't stomach that."

Ogden tried to explain that some reports, which could contain incomplete information, are used in grading whether a school "fails" in its education goal. And after much thought, he said, state school bosses decided that it would be much worse to "fail" a school because a secretary or principal or district administrator failed to properly or timely file required reports than to just say the reports may be "inaccurate" because of missing information.

Publicly declaring a school as failing when other indicators show it is "succeeding" could lead to lost state or federal funds, parents pulling their kids out of the school and poor teacher morale, said Ogden.