The Edgewood Independent School District submitted inaccurate information about how many students left the district in the 2021-22 school year to the Texas Education Agency — a mistake that occurred when the district transitioned to a new attendance software and suffered a previously unreported network outage that took systems offline for months.
In response, the state agency has ordered the district to enter a corrective action plan, which was unanimously approved during a board meeting Tuesday night.
As part of that plan to avoid future such errors, the data submitted to TEA moving forward has to be “pristine,” according to Deputy Superintendent Phillip Chavez, who presented the plan and next steps to the board.
If not, TEA could levy more severe sanctions against the district, which has a history of state scrutiny.
According to the plan, the TEA will informally monitor the board for continued compliance with all applicable statutes and regulations until the successful completion of the agreement, which is set to expire on March 15, 2025. The plan also warns that the district may be subject to a special investigation, corrective action or sanction for any additional violations.
Like in the case of previous agreements at other districts, the board waived its right to seek removal or modification of the plan and the right to judicial review.
The TEA confirmed the existence of the compliance review but didn’t comment further since it is an “ongoing matter.”
Chavez said the misreported data, which was for the 2021-22 school year but submitted a year later, resulted from several interrelated factors.
“That was the year that we switched from our previous student information system … which ended [in the] middle August of 2021,” he told the board. “Region 20 just shut it off, literally shut it off, and we weren’t able to get any files from them.”
Region 20 did not immediately return a call seeking comment Wednesday.
The district had been downloading files for several months at the time, but the situation put the district “in a rather disadvantageous mode,” according to Chavez, who said Edgewood was using an online platform to take attendance and spreadsheets to monitor the information.
But the district was also dealing with the fallout from a network outage, which rendered its computer systems “null and void” from early December 2021 until February 2022, he said. Chavez said during the meeting that the outage was the result of an “attack,” but a spokeswoman later said that was a “misuse of wording.”
“We had no information systems whatsoever,” Chavez told the board, adding that Office 365, which includes Excel, was inaccessible during that time.
Olga Moucoulis, the Chief of Staff and Communications for Edgewood, said that Dec. 2021 outage “stalled the collection of certain data discussed at the January 16th 2024 board meeting.”
“Some portions of this data may have been lost due to a lapse in backup consistency procedures,” she said in a statement.
But systems were brought back online and data gathering continued, she said, adding that proper backup consistency was addressed and systems for providing redundancies for adequate restoration have been implemented.
Data on the TEA website still shows that 183 students between seventh and 12th grade dropped out during that school year. While both entities confirmed that reporting was inaccurate that year, the district and TEA did not confirm whether it was under or over-reported.
Regardless of the precise numbers, the district has been facing declining enrollment for decades, falling below 8,000 students for the first time this year. In the 1987-88 school year, the district had nearly 15,500 students enrolled, according to data obtained by the San Antonio Report.
Last year, the board voted to close two schools in response to the declining enrollment and low campus space utilization.
Chavez said the district has already briefed principals and other staff on the situation and stressed the importance of adhering to leaver codes, which is the legal marker for reporting the circumstances of a student leaving the district.
The district will also provide the TEA with supporting documentation for all students leaving and how they were coded in January 2025, and in other years moving forward.
Different documentation could be required for different situations ranging from a student leaving the country to a student moving to a private school or dropping out, Chavez said.
He stressed to the board that staff will need to keep track of all the information for the sake of the TEA investigation and ensuring accuracy moving forward.
“If you have any other type [of student departures] … be sure that you have the documentation because we need all the documentation,” he warned.
