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COPYRIGHT® 2012, EL PASO TIMES
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4 former principals say
they faced reprisals for not cheating
By Zahira Torres
EL PASO TIMES
Copyright, El Paso Times
Four former EPISD principals said they were intimidated, retaliated against and driven out of the district after they
refused to participate in a
cheating scheme devised by
their superintendent and top
administrators.
For months, the past principals of Jefferson, El Paso and
EPISD scheme reported to state, federal agencies
Austin high schools, who had
been forced from their jobs by
former Superintendent Lorenzo García’s regime, bit their
tongues and maintained a public silence on what they witnessed.
But that changed last week
when a school board member
blamed disgruntled former
employees for allegations of
wrongdoing at EPISD.
The comment angered former El Paso High Principal
John T. Roskosky enough to
make him break his silence by
sending an op-ed column to
the El Paso Times, published
in today’s paper. Three other
former principals agreed to
share their stories after learning that their colleague had
stepped forward.
The principals gave ac-
Plaza Classic Film Festival
counts of trying to stave off
district administrators who
wanted them to raise test
scores at the expense of providing a proper education to
all of their students and being
Please see EPISD 5A
TODAY AT
elpasotimes.com
•Read previous stories
on elpasotimes.com/episd
•Shapleigh calls for second town-hall meet. 1B
•Ex-principal, John T.
Roskosky, felt wrath of
EPISD administration 9B
Dealing with tragedy: Waley Liang
Event celebrates
5 years with
celebrities, films
By Doug Pullen
EL PASO TIMES
Armed with a $200,000 budget, a 44-footwide screen, a new 35mm film projection system, a restored $42 million movie palace and
a lot of desire, friends Eric Pearson and
Charles Horak improvised the script for what
is becoming one of the biggest annual cultural events in El Paso.
The El Paso Community Foundation’s
Plaza Classic Film Festival, which will return
Thursday through Aug. 12 in and around the
Plaza Theatre, started as a celebration of the
return of movies to the historic 1930 theater
after a 35-year absence. Guests such as Al Pacino, Tippi Hedren and Eva Marie Saint and
films such as “North by Northwest,” “The
Birds,” “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” “To Kill
a Mockingbird,” “An American in Paris” and
“The Sting” will be among this year’s attractions.
It’s a year-round operation now.
But Pearson, president of the Community
Foundation, and Horak, an architect and coowner of Horak Construction, pulled the first
one together — five years ago — in six
months.
“It was kind of a one-off event that, frankly,
got out of hand and got enormous really fast,”
said Horak, the festival’s artistic director.
It got much bigger much faster than either
of them expected over those first 11 days in
August 2008. Then called The Movies Return, the festival drew nearly 30,000 people
to classics such as “Casablanca,” “Giant,”
“The Wizard of Oz” and “Rear Window.”
“We were literally moving so fast and
working so hard and had our heads buried so
deep into the details to figure out how to
make this happen,” Horak said. “There really
wasn’t the time to think beyond that first festival.”
Bolstered by the success of the first one,
they brought it back a second time in 2009,
changing the name to the Plaza Classic Film
Festival. More than 135,000 people attended
Please see Festival 8A
TODAY AT
elpasotimes.com
•Poll: Do you plan to go to this year’s
Plaza Classic Film Festival?
MARK LAMBIE / EL PASO TIMES
Ailen and Tony Liang, above left, pray with Jyshi Hur, pastor
of the Chinese Baptist Church, and his wife, Connie Hur, in
the Liangs’ restaurant, Bobo China. Left: Waley Liang poses
for a photo in Utah during his trip with the Geology Club.
A
missing
peace
Family copes with
loss of beloved son
“Each of us has his own
rhythm of suffering.”
— Roland Barthes
By Diana Washington Valdez
EL PASO TIMES
The drowning of 21-year-old
UTEP student Waley Wenyu
Liang in the Colorado River has
pierced his family in a way that
only death can.
Since then, Liang’s parents, sister and brother remain torn by
raw emotions, lost in anger and
despair.
“My son used to greet me at the
Inside | Business » 1E | Classified » 1D | Crossword » 13D, 6F | Deaths » 4-5B
door every night when I got home
from work,” said his mother,
Ailen Liang. “He would help me
carry the things from the car into
the house.
“But he’s not there anymore,”
she said grasping her chest. “I feel
this pain in here that doesn’t go
away.”
The loss has been profound.
His parents say no one sits at
the table anymore to talk about
the day’s activities as the family
once did. In fact, no one sits at the
dinner table at all.
Please see Son 9A
Continued from 1A
EPISD
El Paso Times
Sunday, July 29, 2012
elpasotimes.com
Principals speak out
Continued from 1A
reprimanded or forced to retire for not following the
cheating scheme that was
meant to make it appear as if
the district were meeting federal accountability standards.
One principal said he shared
information about the cheating scheme two years ago with
school board member Isela
Castañon-Williams, now the
board president, only to be ignored.
Steven Lane, the former
principal of Jefferson High
School, said he reported unethical and illegal practices to
the Texas Education Agency
and the U.S. Department of
Education in spring 2010 to no
avail. He said his last recourse
was to seek help from Castañon-Williams, whose district includes Jefferson in
South-Central El Paso.
Castañon-Williams denied
the conversation took place.
“I started calling TEA and
got no response,” Lane, 57,
said. “I called the Department
of Education and they wished
me to have a good day. When
I didn’t know where else to go,
that’s when I told CastañonWilliams. That was my last
hope.”
Scheming for scores
García pleaded guilty last
month to two counts of conspiracy to commit mail fraud,
including scheming with six
unnamed district employees
to game the federal accountability system by forcing some
students to drop out of school,
keeping other students from
enrolling, stripping some foreign students of their credits
and sending false data to state
and federal education agencies.
Roskosky, a 67-year-old Air
Force veteran, said he learned
through his interviews with
the FBI that he and four other
principals were on a target list
to be fired because they “were
not playing ball.” He confirmed the other names after
the El Paso Times cited principals that might have been on
the list.
They were Bowie High’s former Principal Lionel Rubio,
former Austin High Principal
Angelo Pokluda and two former Jefferson principals, Sam
Villarreal and Lane.
“I think he (García) thought
we probably weren’t going to
do things as easily as a young
principal,” said Villarreal, who
spent three decades as an educator. He added that he retired
in January 2009, denying García the satisfaction of firing
him.
“Think about it. If he hires
you to be his principal of a
high school, who do you owe
your loyalty to? It’s very simple. You owe it to him.”
The FBI could not be
reached for comment
Federal accountability standards under the No Child Left
Behind Act require that a certain number of 10th-graders in
the state pass the English and
math parts of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and
Skills test. Schools also must
graduate a set number of students to meet federal standards. Schools that consistently fail to meet federal accountability standards have to remove staff and risk being
closed.
Federal performance standards for testing and graduation are also based on the
achievement of several student subgroups. A campus can
fail to meet standards if children who are not proficient in
English and special education
students do not make the
grade.
Under García, administrators began identifying lowperforming students they believed would keep campuses
from meeting such requirements and prevented them
from taking the test as sophomores, according the federal
government’s charging document.
They changed some students’ grades from passing to
failing, and then changed them
back to passing. They told other students they would not allow them to enroll because
they would hurt the school’s
accountability ratings.
But schools could not simply
fail students to keep them
from taking the tests because
federal standards also are tied
to graduation rates.
“Their plan was create a
vacuum in the 10th grade. Fail
everybody or pass everybody.
You get everyone out and just
create this small group,” Vil-
“I called the Department
of Education and they
wished me to have a good
day. When I didn’t know
where else to go, that’s
when I told CastañonWilliams. That was my last
hope.”
Steven Lane
“Their plan was create a
vacuum in the 10th grade.
Fail everybody or pass
everybody. You get everyone out and just create
this small group.”
Sam Villarreal
Former principal,
Jefferson High School
Former principal,
Jefferson High School
“I’ll go as far as to say we
didn’t fit the mold of what
they wanted at those campuses. And, quite honestly,
I’m not quite so sure that the
people that fit the mold that
they put at those campuses
have been as successful.”
Angelo Pokluda
Former principal,
Austin High School
“I will tell you there were
many, many times when I
nodded
and agreed
and everything was
fine, and
when they left, I directed
my curriculum assistant
principal to carry on just
the way we had been carrying on.”
John T. Roskosky
Former principal,
El Paso School
larreal, 60, said. “That’s what
they were doing, playing with
numbers but unfortunately
those numbers were real students.”
Bowie model
The scheme was referred to
as the Bowie model, after the
South Side school that was the
epicenter of a broader cheating scheme, according to Lane.
He said under the Bowie
model, campuses were expected to automatically place students in ninth grade regardless
of how many credits they had
earned and at the end of the
year try to jump them to 11th
grade to avoid the sophomore
test that counts toward federal accountability.
The Bowie model, he said,
sought to keep students from
enrolling despite state and federal laws that say they are
guaranteed a free public education until they are 21 years
old. Another effort sought to
get those children who were
already enrolled to drop out
and seek a GED or take online
classes through a diploma mill.
The scheme, according to
several of the principals, was
carried out through the district’s Priority Schools Division, which was run by thenAssociate Superintendent Damon Murphy. The division,
which was later led by James
Anderson, had several directors — including Priscilla Terrazas and Vanessa Foreman —
who oversaw struggling campuses.
Roskosky said he was fighting off efforts by Terrazas to
single out students with limited English skills. He said his
resistance landed him written
reprimands from Murphy, and
at one point García told him
that he might have the rights
and privileges of a principal
but he was to listen to Terrazas’ orders.
Roskosky spoke of a room at
El Paso High that had a board
with the names of every student with limited English
skills. He said he and his staff
had to protect those students
from Terrazas and other directors from central office to
guard against practices such as
reclassification.
“I will tell you there were
many, many times when I nodded and agreed and everything
was fine, and when they left I
directed my curriculum assistant principal to carry on just
the way we had been carrying
on,” Roskosky said. “We were
going to educate these
damned kids.”
Lane described having to
meet secretly with parents
early in the morning or in the
evening to enroll their children at Jefferson High, away
from the watch of Terrazas
and Foreman.
Lane said the priority
schools directors pressured
some teachers who taught
children with limited English
skills to score the students’
writing samples artificially
high in an effort to keep them
out of the limited English proficient subgroup and place
them into the general testing
pool.
Because the general testing
group is larger, there was a
smaller chance that the performance of a few students
with limited English skills
would affect accountability
ratings.
Murphy, in an October 2011
interview with the El Paso
Times, insisted that no laws
were broken and administrators had done nothing wrong.
Murphy is now the superintendent of the Canutillo Independent School District.
“I’ll tell you what did happen
at Bowie, what did happen at
Austin and what did happen at
El Paso High is that we had
lackadaisical principals,” Murphy said in the interview.
Pokluda said principals do
not earn their positions by being lackadaisical.
“A lot of things could run
through my mind about why
Murphy would say something
like that,” Pokluda said. “I’ll go
as far as to say we didn’t fit the
mold of what they wanted at
those campuses. And, quite
honestly, I’m not quite so sure
that the people that fit the
mold that they put at those
campuses have been as successful.”
He said success should be
based on overall student
achievement, not just test
scores.
“You can set a school up to
where it can generate outstanding test results, but have
you really serviced the kids
and the community when you
do that?” Pokluda asked.
Minimesters
Lane said the worst part of
the Bowie model was the system of mini-semesters — or
minimesters — that were created to help students catch up
and graduate with their classmates.
“They got high-school credit for no work or high-school
credit because they spent two
hours talking to a teacher,” he
said. “There was no written
exam. There was no evaluation. It was just nonsense. It
was just make-believe credits
because they wanted to artificially raise the graduation
rates by doing these silly minimesters.”
Lane said he told his staff he
did not believe in granting students credit for work they had
not earned. His refusal to implement minimesters drew the
ire of administrators and
prompted a meeting between
some of Lane’s staffers and
García’s then-chief of staff,
Terri Jordan; James Anderson,
the assistant superintendent
for high schools; and Jose Mariano Silva, an assistant superintendent of math and science.
“They sent everybody out
there to try to force us to do
minimesters, and I had a room
full of witnesses,” he said.
Jordan did not respond to an
email requesting an interview
Saturday. The district has consistently refused to make top
administrators available for
interviews about the cheating
scandal, citing ongoing criminal investigations.
Lane and Roskosky said they
never witnessed Bowie High
Principal Jesus Chavez fighting against the scheme.
“So many people tried to
stand up and got squashed, and
Chavez was doing all this crap
with enthusiasm, and at the last
minute he flips, and now he’s
the star prosecution witness,”
Lane said. “I don’t know where
people go with that.”
Chavez spoke out publicly
for the first time earlier this
month in an interview with the
El Paso Times. He said the
problems at Bowie were mostly caused by others, and said
he was cooperating with the
FBI.
In his op-ed column for the
Times,
Roskosky
said,
“shamefully, many of us knew
exactly what was going on at
Bowie but did not speak out
for fear of what would happen
to our careers.”
“The reason that we knew
was because Jesus Chavez
used to actually make the
statement that he told his kids
the INS (Immigration and
Naturalization Service ) was
coming to check on them,”
Roskosky said in an interview.
“He’d laugh about how he was
doing things with students.
Shamefully, many of us knew
what was going on at Bowie.
How they were treating their
students and we did not speak
up.
“I’m one of those who is
ashamed about it,” Roskosky
said. “I didn’t know who to go
to. Who are you going to go to?
Are you going to go to García
and complain to him — the instigator of the plan? Am I going to go to Murphy and complain to him?”
Chavez, who was reassigned
to a position at central office in
April, said the remarks from
the two principals were untrue. The Bowie principal filed
a grievance against the district
after Jordan, now the interim
superintendent, publicly announced his reassignment as
the Times prepared a story
documenting potential fraud
at Bowie.
“That is just totally erroneous,” he said about remarks
from Roskosky. “That couldn’t
be further from the truth.”
Chavez said the principals
corroborated what he’s been
saying all along — that the
cheating was a scheme
hatched by García and carried
out throughout the district.
But Chavez said he continues
to fight misconceptions about
his role in the scheme.
“When I get to Bowie, I’m
gung-ho about making things
happen,” said Chavez, who
was named principal in 2008.
“I’m gung-ho about getting the
school in shape. If he misinterpreted that as me being gungho or enthusiastic about doing
wrong things, that couldn’t be
farther from the truth.”
Intimidation and
retaliation
The principals all gave accounts of the fear and intimidation tactics doled out under
García’s regime.
Roskosky said he eventually
retired in June 2009 because of
pressure from García, Murphy
and Terrazas.
That is why, he said, he was
so angered by school board
Trustee Russell Wiggs’ comments last week in an El Paso
Times story that revealed two
internal audits into alleged
cheating at Chapin and El Paso High.
Wiggs, whose district includes Chapin, told the Times
that he did not believe the internal audit would find wrongdoing at Chapin. He dismissed
a former Chapin counselor’s
allegations as rumblings from
a disgruntled ex-employee.
“I always find it curious that
the people who report these
(allegations) are always former employees,” Wiggs said.
“I always find that real curious.”
The comment led Roskosky
to write an unsolicited op-ed
column for the El Paso Times
describing the wrongdoing
5A
that he witnessed. He said that
most people are afraid to
speak up and that he and other principals who did speak
out were “constantly beat
down, beat down and beat
down” until they just disappeared.
Roskosky said principals
never understood why the
school board gave García sole
power to hire and fire employees all the way up to associate
superintendents.
“That’s unheard of,” he said.
“Nobody has that much power. That’s what a school board
is for, but then he had it, which
automatically caused especially principals a lot of grief because all of a sudden we had
no recourse with the school
board. If he didn’t like us,
we’re history. It was that plain
and simple.”
Wiggs said he did not intend
for his statement to appear as
if he was saying all former employees were disgruntled.
“I apologize if he took it that
way,” Wiggs said. “That’s not
what the intent was. If he
would like me to apologize directly to him, I will, but it was
definitely not meant to be a
broad stroke over all employees that have left the district,
whether they retired or went
to other employment or whatever.”
Villarreal said García conducted “power visits” to look
at Jefferson’s numbers and test
scores for special education
students and children with
limited English skills, curriculum plans and attendance
records.
Pokluda, 58, was demoted to
an assistant principal at Coronado High School in 2008 after
Austin High’s consistent failure to meet federal accountability standards reached the
point where the campus faced
possible closure. But Pokluda
said it was his resistance to
bring the campus up to par by
cheating that led to his reassignment.
Pokluda said Murphy and
other administrators wanted
him to find ways to reclassify
sophomores by identifying
those who didn’t pass classes
such as algebra and English
Please see EPISD 12A