Warren Easton honor student Maya Peterson could not wear her glistening silver prom dress to prom last week. She was barred from her senior-class picnic.
She must also sit out from her graduation ceremony this week, though she has earned all of the credits necessary to receive a diploma. Her name will not be called. “She will get her diploma but not walk,” said her mom, Quinntina Peterson.
The situation calls into question an increasingly common school practice: schools that withhold graduation ceremonies from students as a form of punishment.
“Graduation is a rite of passage and a family milestone; it’s not just a celebration of that child; we don’t know what obstacles that family and child overcame to watch that child walk,” said longtime community activist Ashana Bigard, of Amplify Justice, who led a press conference about the matter on Monday morning.
The punishment stems from a cheating allegation aimed at Maya, 17, a student with a 3.6 GPA who is secretary of the National Honor Society, serves on the Student Council and is a standout on the school’s basketball and flag-football teams. She plans to attend Louisiana State University at Eunice.
Ironically, Maya has also become an expert in the importance of graduation. As an active member of Daughters Beyond Incarceration, Maya served as a policy ambassador, traveling to Washington, D.C. to speak to the state’s Congressional delegation and working with a state legislator to craft a 2025 bill that allows parents who are serving prison time to view their child’s graduation through Zoom. A citation for her work on the issue is posted on the walls of the school.
Maya believed that law was necessary because she, like Bigard, views graduation as a community ceremony. “Graduation is not just for you,” she said. “It’s for your family. It’s a culmination of your work for your whole 12 years.”
Though the situation is confusing, the basic facts are this: Maya is somehow charged with cheating on a civics test through her telephone. But she had earned a straight A in civics going into the civics portion of that year’s LEAP test. And her phone was collected by proctors before the test and returned at the end of the day after everyone had taken the exam.
The allegations start at that point, as the students sat in the cafeteria waiting for parents to pick them up.
It’s unclear how school officials explain the matter. When a caller identified as a reporter asked to speak to either principal or deputy principal, the phone line went dead at Easton’s office at around 2:30 p.m. on Friday; about a dozen attempts to call back between 2:30 and 3:30 p.m. went unanswered. On Monday, a spokeswoman called to ask if The Lens had been calling Easton on Friday. The school issued a long statement defending its decision but refused to provide evidence to support their charges.
That day, after a long day of testing, students were sitting in the school cafeteria, reunited with their phones. So they were all scrolling through their devices. Maya was sitting with a friend, who showed her a social-media screenshot of what seemed to be the LEAP civics exam that had been posted by a male classmate.
Because social-media stories are often posted and then deleted within minutes, Maya went to see the young man’s post on her own phone and took a screenshot of it. Other students around them heard them talking about it and went to the post as well. They saw Maya take a screenshot of it. Or that’s how Maya and other students described the situation to a reporter.
Maya didn’t post the screenshot or text it to anyone, she said, but her friend did text the young man about it, telling him to take down the post.
Students across town also posted on their social-media stories about the breach that day. Easton began deal with it the next day.
The following day, school administrators told Maya they needed to check through the photos on her cell phone. They found the screenshot, which is evidently what they were looking for.
At first, school officials issued her a two-day suspension and attempted to expel her but were unsuccessful. The school presented no evidence, not even a copy of the screenshot, said well-known student advocate Dr. Ashonta Wyatt, who successfully defended Maya at the expulsion hearing and is aghast at the decision to bar her from graduation, which she considers “counter-intuitive to our role as educators.” The school-hearing officer said the matter did not merit explusion had downgraded the matter to “a conference” after hearing the arguments from the school and the student.
Tanya Barrow-Jackson, Easton’s assistant principal, said in the hearing that the school is facing a $100,000 fine “because of the incident,” Wyatt said. It was unclear if any other students were punished for the image of the LEAP test that was posted. “This is the only student that I know that has penalized for this.”
Wyatt emphasized that the hearing officer, who represents NOLA Public Schools, said, “Let’s get this straight right now, this is not an expulsion hearing. There is no proof to support that.”
After the expulsion hearing failed, school officials barred her from all senior-week activities, including graduation.
That infuriates Bigard, who notes that Louisiana state law instructs schools to instead use restorative practices with students whenever possible. The result also seems wrong to Dominque Jones, the head of Daughters Beyond Incarceration, who has worked with Maya for years. “They are claiming that she cheated on the LEAP test, but they have no proof or no eyewitness to back up their story,” Jones said.
Some local charter-management organizations try to avoid yanking students from “life experiences” like graduation. But a spokeswoman for NOLA Public Schools said that the matter was a school-based decision and that the district “did not intend to intercede.” The student was given her due process through the district’s hearing, the spokeswoman said.
“I believe that’s a cop-out,” Wyatt said. “It’s an abdication of their actual responsiblity. The hearing officer works for NOLA Public Schools. He said there was no evidence; we can not entertain this as an expulsion. So how can the district say, ‘We put our hands up. It’s a schools decision.'”
At this point, Warren Easton should apologize for focusing on Maya as the root of this matter, Wyatt said. “It’s very easy to apologize to say, we’ve jumped the gun. She’s already missed every senior activity. Why do you need to take graduation? There’s no answer to it.”
This story has been updated with information about the $100,000 fine mentioned in the hearing.
