English students' grades changed
Principal: Changes in line with policy

By Bill Donovan
Staff Writer

GALLUP — Halley Wheeless knew someone had changed her student's grades for the first time on Feb. 12 when she was having parent-teacher conferences.

She was just planning to explain to one of her student's parents why she had failed their son in his ninth-grade English class for the fall semester when the parent told her that she had received a call from someone at the school who told her that her son had passed the course.

That was when she learned that the school's principal, Frank Chiapetti, had changed the grades of 41 of her students.

"Some went from an F to an A," Wheeless said. "Others received Cs and Bs."

She was amazed that something like this would be done to someone who has taught in the junior high for eight years and was a board certified teacher.

When she protested, however, she said she found out that there was little she could do.

"There is no state policy covering this," she said.

When she went to district officials, she also found little sympathy.

"Karen White (who was superintendent at the time) said that Chiapetti should apologize, not for changing the grades but for not informing me that he had done so," she said.

Chiapetti said Thursday he couldn't talk about the incident since it deals with a personnel matter but he stressed that whatever was done was in line with district policy.

While no one wanted to go on the record, it does appear that the grade changing caught the attention of a number of high-level officials within the district who held several meetings over it to determine what had happened and why.

All of these discussions seemed to center on the question of methodology and whether the students in Wheeless' English class were given an adequate chance at getting a good grade.

Wheeless said that the problem seemed to center around parent complaints dealing with her decision to teach a prose version of "The Odyssey" in the fall semester.

She said she teaches it to her English class every year, usually in the spring and it's standard reading for most ninth-grade English classes in the state and nationwide.

But this time was different and she found that the complaints resulted in her being forced to regive the final and being told not to include what was given as homework on the second test. As a result of that, nine of her 85 students received better grades for the semester.

Then she found out about the grade changing and she said she's still upset because this wasn't fair to those students who had done the work and received grades based on that work.

"This was a disservice to those who actually earned the As and Bs that they received," she said, adding that once she learned that some of her students received As that they did not deserve, she argued that all of her students should have had their grades increased to As.

School district officials stressed Thursday that the dispute is not about giving students grades that they don't deserve.

The district position is that all of the students in Wheeless' class received grades that they earned but a decision was made to allow each student to have the higher of the two grades they received on the two finals.

Wheeless disagreed with that, saying that the grades were based on a false test score.

Talking about the questions of changing student grades in general, Chiapetti said there have been a few special cases over the years where a grade has been changed to bring it in line with the one that the student should have received but didn't for one reason or another.

"We do not change grades to help out a student athlete or because of influential parents," Chiapetti said.

Esther Macias, who replaced White as superintendent, said she has been made aware of the dispute but was under the impression that this was resolved by the former superintendent with Chiapetti sending Wheeless a letter for apology for not telling her beforehand that he had changed the grades.

Although she is not a member of the local teacher's union, Wheeless has received support from Brian Bernard, president of the McKinley Federation of United School Employees.

"For an administrator to unilaterally change student grades without the appropriate input of the teacher or without notifying the teacher denotes a lack of academic responsibility, academic freedom, professionalism and confidence in one's teaching staff," he said in a statement released late Thursday. "Not to mention the effect this has on students."

He said that the decision of the administration to resolve the problem by directing the principal to write a letter of apology to the teacher is "ludicrous and unconscionable."

And if the state supports this kind of action, Bernard wonders why the district administration just doesn't do it all the time.

"Let's save time and money by cutting out the middleman," he wrote. "The administration can issue all student grades."

As for Wheeless, she has opted to go overseas next year and teach English in Turkey but said that she plans in a couple of years to return to the area to teach again.

She's leaving just after turning in her final grades for the spring semester and wondering if any of these grades will be changed.

"If they are changed, I won't know," she said.