By HEIDI SANDERS
Reporter

A clerical error in 2012 has left 181 teachers in the Kent School District needing to reconfirm their status as highly qualified teachers, and 72 of those teachers, who teach Title 1 core subjects, have until school starts Aug. 31 to do so.

Highly qualified teachers have shown they are an expert in the subject matter they teach, either through testing, experience or other means, district spokesman Chris Loftis said.

“Our goal is for every teacher in the district to be highly qualified when people come in, and when we hire them we set them on a pathway to do that in the first couple of years to get to that status where they are recognized as such,” Loftis said.

He said the district keeps record of the teachers’ status as highly qualified and submits that information to the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction.

“Somewhere along the line in this, 181 teachers’ highly qualified status was misentered,” Loftis said. “Nobody knew that.”

The district discovered the error at the end of the school year, Loftis said.

“One of our teachers, one of the 181, was going to another school district to teach and needed the verification of her highly qualified status, and when that was researched at the state level it was found it was not there,” Loftis said. “Our HR (human resources) department did an internal audit and found 181 mistakes were made in a batch of those in 2012.”

Under federal law, educators who teach core classes, such as math, reading or writing, at Title 1 schools are required to have highly qualified status.

The district has 21 Title 1 schools, which have high poverty rates, and receive Title 1 federal funding to serve vulnerable student populations.

Loftis said the Title 1 core teachers will need to pass a content specific exam before school starts, but the remainder of the 181 teachers can work to obtain their highly qualified status again throughout the year.

The district reached out to OSPI seeking to remedy the situation when it learned of the error, Loftis said.

“OSPI’s initial response was there are some waivers you can get …,” he said. “There are a couple of times during the year where you can say, ‘We screwed this up. We need to fix this record,’ and that had already passed. Our response is ‘yeah, we know it has already passed but we didn’t know there was a problem.’ It is not like we missed the deadline. We didn’t even know we had a problem to apply for a deadline in the first place.”

The district learned on July 24 that the teachers would need to take the exam, Loftis said.

Nathan Olson, communication manager for OSPI, said taking the exam is the only option under federal law. State Superintendent Randy Dorn is trying to contact U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to see if there is something that can be done to help the teachers, he said.

“Unless federal government allows leeway on this issue, there is nothing we can do,” Olson said.

This is the first time there has been a situation like this in the state, Olson said.

Loftis said the district sent letters to the 181 affected teachers. He said some of the teachers are distraught by the prospect of taking the exam.

“You can imagine a teacher getting a letter saying, ‘You have been teaching math for the past 20 years. Because of a clerical mistake you have got to take a math test,’” Loftis said. “You are not all that happy. Rightfully so. We understand that but OSPI has given us no other choice.”

Loftis said the teachers may not have initially taken a test to obtain highly qualified status.

“Their experience may have supplemented their degree,” he said. “There are a lot of ways when you get that highly qualified rating. … Unfortunately, the state has only given us one pathway to fix this clerical error. That one pathway is problematic for folks.”

Loftis said the district plans to hold a seminar on Wednesday to help teachers prepare for the exams. Teachers who have recently taken the test will be on hand to give pointers to those preparing for the tests and walk them through practice exams.

“We are paying them for their time for their preparation,” Loftis said. “We are paying for the test itself. We are paying for travel. Bottom line is we made a mistake here and we are doing our best to come up with a plan of correction that is as good as it can be. That said, it is not perfect. The perfect thing would be that the mistake wasn’t made. We have apologized. We have got to move forward. “

Loftis said the tests are offered by agencies outside of the district at various locations and dates.

If a Title 1 core teacher does not pass the exam by the first day of school, Loftis said, the teacher still may be able to teach. He said the district would notify parents of students in the class of the situation and that the district was working to remedy the issue.

“The person can still be in the classroom but we run the risk of losing the federal funding associated with that classroom, so you either secure the money and push the teacher out or you secure the teacher and risk losing the funds,” Loftis said.

Lofits said no one in the district will be disciplined for the clerical error.

“No one who was involved in that in 2012 still works here,” he said. “It has been three years. People moved on.”