On Wednesday, Judge Marissa Hutabarat of Orleans Parish Civil District Court agreed that John F. Kennedy High School grads of 2019 and 2020 had enough in common that they could sue as a legal class, allowing them to seek damages as a group from the now-defunct charter network, New Beginnings Schools Foundation and its insurers.
Former students, and the parents who entrusted New Beginnings with their children’s education, still remember being hit with a bombshell five years ago.
In June of 2019, less than a month after Kennedy High School seniors walked across the stage, nearly half of the class learned they had not been eligible to graduate.
The fallout was immense, as the academic duties that the school had neglected stacked up, one after another.
The school had failed to properly track students’ credits or ensure they took the proper classes. School administrators misused a credit-recovery system, so students thought they had earned credits that ended up being no good.
Dozens of students spent the next few months sitting in class or working online to make up credits, instead of what they thought would be a carefree summer after senior year. Some had to re-enroll and repeat their senior year.
There was also an information vacuum in the weeks after graduation. While students awaited official diplomas, parents begged for information. Students wanted to fill and show off the empty diploma covers they symbolically received on the stage. College-bound grads also needed to send official documents to waiting registrars.
In the end, they simply had to wait. Board members of the charter group New Beginnings Schools Foundation, which ran Kennedy, said they couldn’t help while transcript reviews were underway.
That same summer, attorney Suzette Bagneris sued New Beginnings, the Orleans Parish School Board, Board of Elementary and Secondary and the Louisiana Department of Education on behalf of parent Darnette Daniels and her daughter, Tayler McClendon. The other agencies were later dismissed and only New Beginnings and its insurers remain.
McClendon was a junior who’d been taking extra classes at night and on weekends in hopes of graduating a year early, in 2019. Even as she put on her cap and gown on the day of commencement, she believed that she had graduated.
When Tayler found out she hadn’t graduated, she fell into a deep depression, her mother said. Then she had to return for her senior year, after thinking she’d successfully graduated early. Her plans to go to cosmetology school were put on hold.
“At that point she lost her drive for everything,” her mother said. For a few years, life was just hard for her typically over-achieving daughter.
In coming months, other students joined the suit. In her filings, Bagneris attempted to get the entire school of nearly 700 students eligible for damages, but on Wednesday, Hutabarat narrowed that field to the 2019 and 2020 seniors, many of whom testified in hearings on the matter, some in person and some via videoconference.
“She made it a point to hear most of the witnesses live so she could personally access their credibility which I thought was outstanding,” Bagneris said. “It’s been a very hard-fought case and I think they felt heard and seen.”
But it’s been a long road, Bagneris said, rattling off the names of students who successfully went to college and others who struggled to get their records straight.
The setback hit hard then and its echoes are still felt today, Bagneris said.
“The battle has not really ended for some of these kids,” she said, noting she spoke this week with a student, Jessica Young, who was struggling to obtain her transcript to attend school this fall.
An immense fallout
The trouble at Kennedy began to emerge in the spring of 2019, months before graduation, when a whistleblower, Runnell King, alerted The Lens to suspicious grade changes at the school.
King, the network’s director of data, assessment and accountability, noticed that several students’ grades had been changed from F’s to D’s and D’s to C’s. The changes had occurred in the class of a teacher who had to resign mid-year to care for her husband.
After King did some digging, he – and the teacher who had resigned – noticed the changes were made manually. That meant that the students’ final grades were overridden, not calculated from the combined scores on assignments and tests. The teacher said they did not match the grades she had entered.
Testimony in the hearings held over the last year revealed administrators were alerted to problems as early as the 2015-16 school year, when the school changed data systems and transcript information failed to transfer. The class of 2019 would have been freshmen that year.
In early 2019, King alerted administrators and was fired. Nothing else happened until he alerted The Lens, which published a story outlining the problems.
In response, CEO Michelle Blouin-Williams denied that anyone had manually changed grades. Then, in a flurry of action in the final month of the school year, the network hired a consultant TenSquare to act as CEO, its contractors uncovered key discrepancies.
But the level of the damage was unknown at the time.
The total number of ineligible students wasn’t available until a full month after graduation, in June, when the state Department of Education completed its audit. Of the 155 students in the 2019 graduation program, 70 lacked one or more graduation requirements.
After the state audit, NOLA Public School district officials ordered reviews and asked the state inspector general to look into a possible criminal investigation in the matter.
In the end, New Beginnings gave up its charter at Kennedy, after all of its highest officials had resigned. One year later, the entire New Beginnings charter board voted to dissolve, passing its remaining two schools to KIPP New Orleans and InspireNOLA.
The Orleans Parish school district overhauled its reviews of charter school transcripts and record keeping, vowing to do an audit of every single high school student enrolled in a New Orleans charter school.
A lot of fingers were pointed by officials at all levels.
The impact hit hardest on students, who lost scholarships and had their class ranks miscalculated. A forensic psychiatrist found they suffered “serious emotional distress.”
Dwayne Crenshaw, who said he and a friend had been jockeying for valedictorian since they were freshmen, fell into fourth in class rank. He questioned the school’s GPA calculations, and whether the class ranks were accurate. “I feel like I was robbed,” he said at the time.
Finally, students have a glimpse of justice, because of Hutabarat’s ruling this week, which allows the students to sue as a group for emotional and financial damage caused by the charter group’s management failures.
Darnette Daniels, Bagneris’ first plaintiff, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of her daughter Tayler, testified at the hearings held earlier this year.
Instead of taking the blame for laying young lives to ruin, the opposition’s lawyers seemed focused on unnecessarily digging into the lives of plaintiffs. “They were pulling up pictures of my wedding, other pictures and stuff like that,” said Daniels, who found it ironic, given how little scrutiny was given to people fudging gradebooks in 2019. “If you’d put that much time into investigating these people we wouldn’t be here today.”
Daniels hopes her daughter can reignite dreams with the help of a settlement, which she hopes to use to pay for cosmetology school.“She’s going to pay to go to school and get her license and open her shop,” Daniels said.
The case is still moving forward, toward a jury trial, to determine whether the Kennedy students will receive damages from their former educators.
Bagneris is hopeful that upcoming hearings in the case will go smoothly for Tayler and her other clients. She was also moved by watching her young clients feel the satisfaction of testifying. “They really felt the judge heard them,” she said.
