RIVERA H.S.-GRADE CHANGING SCANDAL NOT FIRST ONE

By Juan Montoya
First of all, a hat-off congrats to Channel 4's Mary Avila for her report on the alleged grade-changing scandal at Rivera High School.
On its face, the story is this: Grades were changed (no one knows by who) for a sophomore student's French class from 81 to 96 that resulted in that student being placed over another as the top student in Rivera H.S. for 2013.
It just happened that the student whose grades were changed was the niece of Rivera Principal Hector Hernandez. The parents of the student who was kicked off the top student recognition (one Juan Antonio Villanueva) cried foul and complained of favoritism. The French teacher (one Blanca Arizmendi) reportedly then filed a grievance with the Brownsville Independent School District alleging the grade tampering and forgery claiming the signature on the form where the grades were changed grades were not her handwriting.
One of Avila's sources alleged that "one of the clerks...said it was the assistant principal in charge of grades most likely directed by the principal" who made the grade changes.
That change in that French class kicked Villanueva off the top spot and the principal's niece over him.
So far, the BISD has refused to hand over the details of the grievance to media reps. Instead, they have asked the Texas Attorney General for an opinion on what they can release, which could take weeks or months.
But, as is usually the case, there is another version also making the rounds. This one says that Arizmendi erred in notating the grade for the girl as an 81 because she had another student with the same last name and transposed the 81 to her instead of to the other student. The second version says that when she noticed she had made the mistake, she was embarrassed and had to make the change. The version continues that to hide her embarrassment, she then claimed that someone else had forged her signature on the grade change form.
We have learned that the principal's niece and Hernandez himself have acquired legal representation to fight the teacher's claims. We have also learned that Hernandez will be transferred from Rivera soon. There are even some reports that BISD workers were seen removing entire file cabinets from the school.
Where will this end? How about the local courts?
This is not BISD's first rodeo with scandals involving alleged grade changing.
In March 2012, Pace High School Principal Rose Longoria and her assistant Carla Gonzalez came under scrutiny after numerous witnesses said they were in the the room where the test answer booklets were kept and were seen hanging something on the answer sheets.

After a few days of trying to get a clear answer from the BISD about the incident, the district finally made a public comment.
It said it had inserted a "letter of concern" in Longoria's files as a result of their investigation and was forced to release a copy of the statements made of the incident by some 14 witnesses.
According to the rules of the Texas Education Agency only the testing coordinator at the school is allowed to have access to the exams to insure the integrity of the testing process. District spokesmen and the women vehemently denied that the two administrators were changing the grades on the 11th-grade exit exams but rather that they were correcting erroneous demographic information contained in the exams.
The district assured the media that what some reported as changing grades was actually an innocent move by Longoria and Gonzalez to correct the students' information on the face of the exam.
According to the dictionary, demographics relates to "the statistical data of a population, especially those showing average age, income, education, etc."
Could it be that Longoria caught a general error in the tests where students got their age, income, ethnicity, grade level, etc., wrong on the exams?
Curiously, of all the high schools in Brownsville, only Pace passed the state's 11th grade exit exams.