Administrators violated class size rule, state says

Two former leaders of a Miramar elementary school have been disciplined after the state said they created a fake class to comply with a law restricting how many students a teacher can have in a classroom.

The state says that Catrice Duhart, the former principal of Annabel C. Perry Elementary PreK -8, and Christopher Gentles, the former assistant principal at the school, removed the names of some students from a large class and created, on paper, a second class, making it appear as though both classes were small enough to meet state requirements.

The two will be on probation for the next three years and won’t be able to file class size reports to the state or federal government unless approved by another school administrator, according to discipline recently approved by the state Education Practices Commission.

The two also received letters of reprimand from the school district for the incident, which happened during the 2016-17 school year, district spokeswoman Nadine Drew said. Both were moved to different schools last summer. Duhart is now principal at North Andrews Gardens Elementary in Oakland Park, while Gentles became assistant principal at Castle Hill Elementary in Lauderdhill.

A state report says the two “instructed school staff to create a non-existent class,” and “submitted fraudulent class

rosters” to make their school appear as if it was complying with the state’s Class Size Amendment, approved by state voters in 2002 to become part of the state’s constitution.

The Class Size Amendment limits the size of classes in grades kindergarten to 3 to 18 students, while grades 4 to 8 can be no larger than 22 students. High schools are limited to 25 students for most nonelective classes. The district can be fined if schools exceed that cap.

Neither Duhart nor Gentles could be reached for comment Monday. But Lisa Maxwell, who represents them through the Broward Principals and Assistant Principals Association, said they made “coding errors,” and there was no attempt to turn in false data.

Maxwell said they made mistakes in the way they documented students who were pulled out of regular classrooms and into special classes, such as ones for disabled students or those with limited English skills.

She said in some cases, the state allows a student being pulled out to be assigned to the new teacher, which makes it easier to comply with class size. In other cases, the student must be counted with the main teacher’s class. Maxwell said she didn’t have the specifics of what happened in this case. “It was a reporting issue, and people should know that the outcome doesn’t benefit them in any way,” Maxwell said. “They were attempting to report correctly. They didn’t report correctly, but when they discovered the error, it was corrected.”

A state report detailing class sizes for the 2016-17 school year shows that Annabel C. Perry was well below the state requirements for average class sizes. Drew said the district did not have to pay any fines for submitting incorrect data. Maxwell said the error involved a “nominal number of kids.”