It’s the end of lunch at Media Academy in Oakland, and students are heading back to class. One of them is Ronald Johnson. He’s a good student and he’s involved in lots of extracurricular activities.
“I’m in leadership, head of sound crew, I’m editor-in-chief at the newspaper,” he said. He’s also a second-year senior who was supposed to graduate last year.
Johnson gets help from Javarte Bamino, a college counselor with the independent program TRIO College Prep. “Ronald had to repeat his senior year because his freshman-year grades weren’t in the system,” Bamino said. “And we couldn’t find any of his information from his freshman year, so he just went from the ninth- to 10th-grade year, so he missed 65 credits.”
That’s right. Johnson’s freshman year was just lost — like it never happened. And because there is no record of him ever having attending his freshman year, his college applications we considered incomplete.
Johnson said he was shocked to hear about the hole in his transcript. “It’s just out of the blue,” he said.
He said his guidance counselor told him, “You have this long, and if you don’t get this stuff done, make up those credits, then you won’t graduate.” There was virtually no way for him to make up all those credits in time, so he was forced to say goodbye to his classmates as they went off to college.
“I mean, I was mad,” he said. “I didn’t get to go to college with my friends. I missed out on graduating with a lot of my friends I was growing up with and you went to school with for three years.”
Johnson said Bamino started an investigation to find the missing ninth-grade year: “Javarte basically kind of went to bat for me when my actual college counselor for the school wasn’t able to pull my transcripts, and she called on several occasions, trying to get them to fax it over. He actually took it upon himself to go down there and pull something. Talk to the people himself, in person, and basically tried to find out as much information as possible that he could to help me.”
Bamino looked in the main Oakland school district database.
“I just searched for his name and I couldn’t find anything, so I was like, ‘Do you have anything for the ninth-grade year from any school from anywhere?’” he said. “And I was like, ‘OK, it may be somewhere.’ So I am just assuming it’s in a box somewhere. If it’s not online, it’s in a box somewhere.”
Bamino tried to convince the school district to do a thorough search of Johnson’s school records, but he came up against a brick wall: a disorganized and often unresponsive bureaucracy. He said as more schools are consolidated, shut down or split up, more and more students are losing their records.
“I don’t want to say often, but I’ve seen it enough for it to be too much,” Bamino said. “Mainly I see it from students who went to schools that used to be charter schools that closed down, and then they get their transcripts and they’re missing. And they are like, ‘Yeah it’s at my school,’ and then the school no longer exists, and then the paperwork is lost in the system somewhere, or it’s just lost.”
Despite the trouble he’s had to go through, Ronald Johnson is still able to keep a positive perspective.
“I’m just happy that I am able to come back and make things correct,” he said. “I’m basically having another senior year, so it’s kind of like having two senior years.”
He’s set to graduate this year, and Bamino said the fact that Johnson’s made it this far, and with good spirits, is remarkable. “I’ve seen that he is a resilient young man who can deal with things like these barriers and whatever obstacles in his way. He won’t fold easily. So I think that was the other good thing — that he didn’t fold.”
Johnson said that he won’t let his negative experience in the public education system block his path to college.
“I have a lot of options open to me so, but I’m probably going to end up going to school for journalism and minor in communications or something,” he said. “But I don’t really know.”
The school system responds
By Holly Kernan
News Director, “Crosscurrents” on KALW
The Oakland Unified School District has big budget problems. It’s $80 million in debt, and that has a lot of consequences. Oakland is grappling with a host of issues in the schools, including how to keep kids from dropping out. The school district acknowledges that the it has suffered recently from mismanagement and that Ronald Johnson appears to have fallen through the cracks of a system under stress.
But Troy Flint, a spokesman for the Oakland Unified School District, said Johnson’s case is an anomaly.
“I am not aware of any widespread problem related to losing records and having students repeat a year,” Flint said. “It is a large organization and it is a bureaucratic one, so there are instances where records are not identified immediately, or in an especially timely fashion, and we’re certainly working to correct that by digitizing our records and making them more accessible. But I am not aware of widespread problems particularly that would involve credit loss for students.”
And Flint said records are kept at schools, not at the district. He said he believes it’s been that way since 1991.
“So in regard to a ninth-grade year, that would be a matter in which the school site — the administrators of that particular school site — would be responsible for, whoever is the custodian of records at that institution.”
I called Ronald Johnson’s middle school, Far West, and left a couple of messages, but my calls we unreturned. I asked Flint if he thought the bureaucracy was unresponsive to a 17-year-old.
“Certainly there are instances where we don’t provide service or show consideration to the fullest extent,” Flint said. “I don’t think that characterizes the organization, but no doubt there are those cases. And that is something we are working to correct with a greater emphasis on service. But it’s a process. You don’t turn a battleship right away, and that’s essentially what we are dealing with right now.”
Flint promised to look into the issue to find out what happened. So we spoke again after Flint had located Ronald Johnson’s complete school transcript.
Holly Kernan, KALW Radio: So what happened?
Troy Flint, Oakland Unified School District: It’s an unusual situation. It’s somewhat complicated, but to sum it up, it appears that Ronald was taking courses that he believed were counting toward his high school graduation, but in fact were not. They were actually courses at the middle school or junior high level, depending on the terminology you want to use. And so while he was in what he felt was the ninth grade, he was not receiving credit for these courses, because they weren’t applicable to the high school level.
Kernan: So let me see if I am understanding. He did all of the work, but it was the wrong work, and in essence he did two years of eighth grade. Is that right?
Flint: Uh yes, essentially he was repeating. He wasn’t taking classes that were counting toward his high school graduation.
Kernan: So how exactly does that happen? I mean, so here’s a kid who thinks he’s in ninth grade. He’s graduated from eighth grade, he’s taking the courses that he is being told to take, and yet essentially he’s just repeating a year?
Flint: Well, clearly there was some sort of communications failure, a breakdown here. I am assuming that he did not receive proper advising from his counselors at the school. The persons who were in those roles at the time are no longer with the schools. There has been a wholesale transition and change of the administration because of unsatisfactory issues like this. So we don’t have first-hand testimony, but just based on re-creating what happened, it does appear that he was not served well by the administration there at the time.
Kernan: So my big concern here, Troy, is that you were easily able to access his records and figure out what happened. It’s too late to help Mr. Johnson now, but it does seem like the system in general was really unconcerned with this young man’s plight primarily because he didn’t have a high-powered advocate who could get the attention of people with the power to resolve the issue.
Flint: I can’t speak to the motives of the people involved, but it does seem that Ronald is somebody who fell through the cracks, which is unacceptable. And I believe that it was because of instances like this that we have transformed the administration at the school in question. And hopefully his story will focus people and show them the consequences of not being thorough when they are really dealing with the lives of children.
Postscript:
Ronald Johnson is finishing up his second senior year, and he’ll graduate this June. He’s been accepted to Chico State, where he’ll start in the fall. He plans to study journalism, and hopes to blow the whistle on more stories like his own.
One young man had every intention of graduating and going on to college — until he ended up in a bureaucratic mess
[ Listen to the radio version of this story at crosscurrentsradio.org | Read the school district’s response ]
This report originally aired May 6, 2009, on the daily news program “Crosscurrents” on KALW-FM public radio in San Francisco. Mical Asefaw is a student in KALW’s reporting program at Mills College.
