Baltimore City Public Schools Settles Lawsuit Over Allegations of Inflated Attendance and Grades, Commits to Randomized Audits

Baltimore City Public Schools has settled a lawsuit filed by a parent, Jovani Patterson, who accused the school district of inflating student attendance and grades for financial gain. While the school system denies these allegations, the settlement includes funding randomized audits focused on student grade changes over a three-year period. Three schools will be audited each year, and up to 300 grades will be reviewed, as reported by

WMAR-2 News

.

Despite the agreement, recent figures detailed by

Fox Baltimore

, stemming from the same lawsuit, suggest a troubling pattern where students missing significant amounts of school—sometimes more than a third of the year—were still promoted; this audit, in 2019, indeed propelled Patterson’s lawsuit. Carl Stokes, a former city council member, and charter school operator, expressed concern, saying, “It’s a huge problem because it says that the kids are coming out of class, out of a semester, out of a particular grade, or even out of school entirely, undereducated.”

Notably, one alarming statistic from Augusta Fells Savage High School showed that of 194 promoted students, 70 had missed 60 or more school days during the 2022/23 school year, while Mergenthaler (Mervo) High School reported 173 promoted students with such absences, according to

Fox Baltimore

. Similar trends persisted at elementary and middle school levels, with high percentages of promoted students also missing comparable time from school.

While declining an interview, the school district sent a statement asserting their efforts to improve student attendance and refusal to give up on students with imperfect attendance. Although critics like Stokes may deride credit recovery programs as bogus—programs designed to help students quickly make up for missed coursework.

Maryland’s latest Comprehensive Assessment scores indicate that Baltimore City students’ proficiency rates in math and English Language Arts are at a statewide low, a mere 10.2 and 27.7 percent, respectively, only adding to concerns over the actual preparedness of students being advanced despite inadequate classroom attendance and potentially inflated academic achievements, the full settlement from Patterson’s lawsuit, which may shed light on efforts to confront these issues, is available for review online.

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