As many as 50 Berkeley High School students face suspension, expulsion or community service after administrators say they were found selling changes to classmates’ attendance records.
School officials say a recent investigation found several students hacked into attendance data after obtaining an administrative password which they used to clear tardies and absences from the records.
“(School administrators) found some things that didn’t look right,” Berkeley Unified School District Spokesperson Mark Coplan said. “Somebody else had gone in and actually taken out absences, whereas teachers usually just enter them in to the system.”
Coplan said the inconsistencies were found in December after administrators analyzed data from PowerSchool, the school’s attendance database.
In a letter sent to the school community Wednesday, Principal Pasquale Scuderi said the students were both selling the changes and doing them as favors for friends.
Thirty-two students have been suspended for three to five day periods and others are in the expulsion process or will be required to do community service, according to Coplan.
“We have emphasized and reiterated a deep and genuine hope that they use this incident as a window for deep and earnest reflection on how they see themselves through these actions in relation to the values of honesty and integrity,” Scuderi said in the letter.
Increasing attendance has been a major goal for the high school this year. Toward that end, the administration increased the number of attendance clerks at the school from one to three and hired a dean of attendance. According to Scuderi’s letter, this focus has increased daily average attendance by 1.55 percent in the last several months compared to the same period last year.
“We still have a long way to go, and our current attendance average is nothing to boast about, but it is a nice start,” Scuderi said in the letter. “Our collective focus on attendance is paying off — more BHS students are going to class.”
Coplan said the attendance fraud may have gone unnoticed entirely had it not been for the new staff, which he said allowed for increased attendance analysis.
“We have to keep in context the fact that given the size of our school it was roughly 1 percent of our student population who made these poor decisions,” Scuderi said in the letter. “Nevertheless it still is a vastly unacceptable number of kids who made regrettable decisions.”
A Berkeley High School freshman who requested to remain anonymous out of fear of creating problems for himself on campus said he heard the students had been changing both their own attendance records and their friends’ records.
“Maybe their motives were understandable, but I don’t think they were necessarily right,” he said.
Coplan said the students probably targeted absences and tardies instead of grades because they could not access the grade system. He said absences generally do not have a large impact on grades.
“There’s not a huge amount of value in erasing absences — you would think grades would be where the real money was,” Coplan said.
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I found this action very interesting as I had volunteered for a very very short time at Berkeley High School. One day while I was tutoring my student she set her cell phone on her desk. I told her it would be so totally rude if she would be so bold as tonanswer it while I was working with her.
She informed me her boyfriend would be calling and she had to leave.
I am a retired teacher with 35 years of teaching under my belt.
I pointed the situation to the classroom teacher and she asked the girl, ” oh family stuff?”
The girl affirmed the Teacher’s concern but never asked for an early dismissal note or called the attendance office to verify what the student was saying.
Come on people – let us take this a little more seriously – if that student was hit by a car while she
Had walked out of school without anyone verifying the reason for her departure – who is responsible?
Please do not tarnish the hacker name. This is NOT hacking because:
1) They probably guessed/stole the password
2) This required no skill
3) People that do malicious things like this are called crackers, not hackers
If you want to see what real hacking is, take a look at the various hackathons and events in Soda
Does that help you get laid?
No, but making fun of the Daily Cal’s lack of research does.
Sorry idk what I was thinking when i wrote this.
LOL NICE ONE