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Omitting about 175 white students now attending Riverview lowered the district's white enrollment in kindergarten through sixth grade by about 1 percentage point.
Jackie Rosswurm, the district's human resources chief, said there wasn't much discussion on whether Riverview students should be included in the district totals until other errors surfaced last month. Rosswurm said that after she asked for clarification, officials with the federal Office for Civil Rights told her the charter school students should have been included.
In February, the school district fixed several errors in the ethnicity data it originally provided to Riverview, making the minority enrollment targets set for the school by OCR easier to reach. Riverview's target white enrollment moved to nearly 64 percent. The district originally calculated 59 percent as the maximum number of white students allowed to enroll at Riverview.
The original data undercounted the district's white enrollment by about 600 students. In addition to omitting Riverview students from the district totals, a data clerk mistakenly counted a number of white students in the Pacific Islander category when manually compiling a report for the charter school. Several mistakes in the Pacific Islander category accounted for more than two-thirds of the errors.
Another data entry error was made when some Hispanic students were counted in the black American Indian category, according to Elaine Morgan, the district's data services director.
Morgan said the errors were honest mistakes -- an employee shifted some numbers into the wrong column of a spreadsheet.
"It was not intentional," she said. "It was just a keying error."
Morgan said the employee was not punished.
Morgan said she did not review the clerk's work before it was sent to Riverview, as she should have. A formal protocol for requesting data has since been established to prevent future errors and ensure data is double-checked.
All staff are now required to submit written requests for data to Morgan, so she can oversee all information that comes out of the office. Morgan said district staff no longer will be allowed to directly approach clerks with information requests, which can cause confusion and overwhelm employees.
The request for the Riverview data was made directly to a data clerk, without going through Morgan.
The district's transition this year to a new, Web-based student information management system also will prevent future errors by eliminating the need to compile some reports manually, Morgan said.
The district's current system isn't centralized and stores information on servers at individual schools, Morgan said. She said it's easy to generate an ethnicity report at the school level, but the system isn't capable of generating a district-wide ethnicity report.
Superintendent Valerie Truesdale said the errors have not affected the confidence she has in the district's data department. She said the protocols put in place will assure employees have enough time to thoroughly prepare requests and check them twice.
"They deal will thousands of points of data from attendance to testing to dropouts to zoning -- if established protocols had been followed, quality may not have been compromised," she said.
Truesdale said she has accepted full responsibility for the errors and apologized to representatives of the Riverview board.
"In an organization as large and complex as this school system ... things happen," she said. "We have to expect the unexpected and build in safeguards."
