Malibu High School Principal Mark Kelly was concerned that the school’s newspaper knew about the alleged cheating, but he did not.
By Hans Laetz/Special to The Malibu Times
The latest edition of Malibu High School’s student newspaper was withheld from distribution for several days while administrators scrambled to investigate its allegations that cheating had occurred on recent Advanced Placement tests.
Principal Mark Kelly and Malibu High School Current newspaper advisor David Warshawski agreed to hold the press, but not censor the article, because they said the school needed to investigate the charge before news spread of the allegation.
“Whenever you have a possible irregularity on a College Board test, you are obligated to report that to ETS (the Educational Testing Service) and investigate it,” Kelly said in an interview.
“In this case, my concern was that the newspaper advisor knew about this charge and that I didn’t,” he said.
District superintendent John Deasy, Kelly and Warshawski met last Friday and agreed that the charge was so important that its publication would spoil any investigation into the report. A retired MHS assistant principal, Pat Cairns, was asked by Kelly to investigate the allegations, which had first surfaced as an ethics discussion in an English class that were picked up by a Current writer, Kelly said.
Cairns subsequently interviewed students and found that one senior may have committed a minor act of cheating, Kelly said. The principal said a student might have opened a test before a proctor had started the exam, which is a serious breach of exam protocol.
The AP tests can give a student college credit for mastering tough subjects, and some California school districts have ended AP credit courses because of the resultant cheating and other pressures. Students at some schools where widespread cheating has occurred have had to retake the stressful exams, teachers said.
Although the investigation continues, Kelly said, the newspaper was handed out to its readers Wednesday.
In a separate interview, the newspaper advisor said he was satisfied that both his student reporters and the district had acted properly. Warshawski said district administrators stressed that at no time they wanted to censor the student paper, but wanted it held until an investigation could be mounted.
Earlier this year, the newspaper angered some faculty members when students complained about one educator’s teaching methods in the school-published paper. Although some faculty wanted Warshawski to edit those charges out of the paper, the advisor refused and told his unhappy colleague to address those concerns in a letter to the editor.
The Current’s student editors printed the teacher’s letter.