BOSTON (WHDH) - Officials with the Boston Public Schools are apologizing over an error that wrongly calculated student GPA’s and impacted which students were told they were eligible to go to some of the city’s exam schools.
Speaking with 7NEWS, parents voiced frustration on Tuesday.
“It’s unfortunate,” one parent said. “That’s misleading. It’s unfair.”
“They’re a mess,” another parent said. “That really is not okay. Our kids deserve an equal opportunity for the best education possible and the exam schools provide that. If they don’t notify us in time, or they tell us we’ve passed and haven’t passed, that’s a problem.”
Boston Latin, Boston Latin Academy and the O’Bryant School of Math and Science are elite exam schools many parents hope their children can make the grade to attend.
Boston school officials this week, though, sent out an email telling parents that mistakes had been made in recent notifications about calculations for some students’ grade point averages.
Boston Public Schools Superintendent Mary Skipper later spoke at a Boston School Committee meeting Wednesday.
“We recognize that this mistake impacts not just the students most directly affected, but it also impacts the trust our families have in BPS,” she said. “I’m committed to rebuilding that trust and addressing challenges transparently.”
Skipper said, out of roughly 1,700 students, 26 were wrongly told they were eligible to apply to the exams schools. Skipper said 41 students were mistakenly told they were not eligible.
“Although we work with an external auditor to ensure the accuracy of our calculations, neither the external auditor nor our BPS’ Office of Data and Accountability caught the error before eligibility notices went out,” officials said.
Skipper said accurate eligibility notices will be sent out by the end of the week.
Still, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu acknowledged the mistake makes a tense time for many parents even more tough.
“We still know that it is extremely disruptive for families and we’ve been reaching out one by one to each of these families just to make sure that we are clear and just so apologetic about the mistakes that happened with this,” she said. “We have to be precise about all of our processes at every step along the way.”
Officials said exam school invitations are still scheduled to go out early next month as planned.
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