‘Human error' at school district will cause hundreds of Jacksonville kids to change schools

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — School district mistakes will cause nearly 400 Duval County students to transfer to other schools next year.

The kids were supposed to be reassigned last school year, after attending failing schools -- but that didn’t happen.

The Duval County school board discussed the slew of errors during a workshop Tuesday morning.

The mistakes were outlined in a PowerPoint presentation that school board members received in an email eight minutes before the meeting started.

School board member Scott Shine, who was not at the meeting, forwarded that PowerPoint to Action News Jax.

The presentation shows that Duval County Public Schools explains the multiple inaccuracies the district passed on to the state were the result of “human error.”

Last school year, DCPS chose to close and convert Richard Lewis Brown, Smart Pope Livingston, Hyde Grove and Oak Hill elementary schools because of their poor performance.

R.L. Brown Elementary became a gifted and academically talented magnet school.

S.P. Livingston Elementary and Hyde Grove Elementary became arts and technology early learning centers.

Oak Hill Elementary became an autism lab school.

In what’s known as a turnaround option plan, the students of those schools were given the option of being reassigned to “C” or higher schools.

The district supplied the Florida Department of Education with lists of those students.

DCPS has now found that those lists were full of “incomplete information and inaccuracies,” according to the PowerPoint presentation given to school board members.

“Apparently, somebody didn’t do their job correctly,” said Michelle Ellington, whose daughter attends R.L. Brown Elementary. “There should have been somebody to overlook it, like proofread it and make sure the proper information was given out.”

The PowerPoint presentation shows 900 students were left off the lists completely, 197 student records were duplicated and 378 students were not reassigned to a school of “C” or higher.

Parents of those 378 students will get letters saying their children have the option to change schools.
Roosevelt Jones said his daughters love going to R.L. Brown Elementary now that the once-failing school has been converted to a magnet.

“There’s going to be human error in anything that we’re involved in,” Jones said.

The “human error” also meant the district was not monitoring the academic progress of hundreds of students that it committed to keeping tabs on.

Out of the students from those four schools who have been monitored, 39 percent remain non-proficient in reading and 35 percent remain non-proficient in math.

Action News Jax asked DCPS who was responsible for the errors and what went wrong. We are still waiting on a response from spokesperson Laureen Ricks.

School Board President Paula Wright did not return Action News Jax’s multiple emails and phone calls about this story.

Cox Media Group