SUMTER COUNTY, Fla. – Sumter County School officials are hoping to regain the trust of the district, parents and students after a 50-plus page report revealed the district had created so-called “shell schools” to help with school grades.
State investigators claim the district, under Superintendent Richard Shirley, moved low-performing students out of schools so they wouldn’t impact the school grades.
According to the report, different schools had different names for the program, however the Office of the Inspector General opted to refer to all of the schools as the “SOAR Program” in the report for simplicity.
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Current Superintendent Logan Brown said he was a teacher in the SOAR Program at South Sumter Middle School from 2019-2021.
“The first time that I realized something was wrong is when I took them to the gym for class pictures and I gave them my kids’ names and they didn’t have anything for my kids,” Brown said.
Brown said when he began to realize something was off, he went to school-based leadership.
“At the end of the day they said ‘hey, it is what it is.,’” Brown said. “School-based leadership as well said hey this isn’t right, ultimately it is what it is, you know you just follow the lead of who’s in charge, but it was reported up the ladder absolutely.”
Friday’s report from the Florida Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General revealed that around 200 students were withdrawn from their zoned schools and enrolled in the Sumter Professional Center and Early Learning Academy, Sumter Virtual School or Sumter Virtual Instruction.
To read the a redacted report from the Office of Inspector General, see below:
Sumter County 50-plus page report by Jacob Langston on Scribd
The OIG’s office also found that the district failed to inform parents and students about the withdrawals.
“It’s hiding them basically,” Brown said. “It’s essentially hiding them. It’s saying hey, we don’t want this student to count against us. We don’t want to look bad based on this student’s performance and quite honestly it’s a slap in the face to our students and their families.”
According to the report, Wildwood Elementary School, where several students were withdrawn, achieved a ‘B’ grade during the 2016/2017 school year. This was up from a ‘D’ grade the year prior.
The OIG found that the school would have been given a ‘C’ grade had the students remained enrolled.
“Hiding our underperforming students to look better as a school or as a district is not the way to go about doing that,” Brown said. “We need to do right by our kids and the families and restore trust in our district.”
The report also said South Sumter Middle and Wildwood Middle High School would still have the same grade for the 2018/2019 school year with the inclusion of SOAR students but, said the school’s total number of points the schools earned would have dropped.
Assistant Superintendent Deborah Moffitt shared the following statement with News 6:
As a long term (37 years) employee of Sumter County, I am proud of my record. Through the course of my career, I have never been found to be anything but an effective dedicated employee. What is clear is that I was an employee that worked at the direction of the superintendent and the school board. I continue to be proud of the work I have done as a public servant and echo Mr. Shirley’s statement. Efforts to assist students who were struggling and needed additional help was always a transparent goal of Sumter schools. The timing of this report and the anonymous complaint that started it is suspicious as the records from this time frame are no longer available as was the districts retention policy. It seems clear that this “concerned citizen” was familiar enough with the inner workings of Sumter’s retention policy, as to come forward once they knew the retention time period elapsed, depriving both the DOE’s OIG and the public of the ability to look at the records that would have substantiated the fact that all matters were handled transparently, with parental consent to assist students achieve.
News 6 reached out to former Superintendent Richard Shirley for a comment, but we have not yet received a response.