A former principal and vice-principal at a Cambridge high school have been suspended after admitting to breaking the rules around EQAO standardized tests.
The Ontario College of Teachers claims that the two took part in a scheme to boost the overall test scores of their school, École secondaire catholique Père-René-de-Galinée on Maple Grove Road.
This week, former principal Carole Wilson and vice-principal Marc Lamoureux admitted to the college that they found ways to inflate the school’s EQAO test scores in 2010 and 2011.
According to an agreed statement of facts, Lamoureux told a group of Grade 10 students that they would not be allowed to write the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test, without consulting them or their parents, and “allowed the teachers to give back to the students their own EQAO assessments after the test period so that they could make corrections or finish their answers.”
Wilson admitted that she allowed some students to defer writing standardized tests.
In 2010, Fresias Maleka was a Grade 10 student at Père-René-de-Galinée. She says she was given a letter telling her she couldn’t write the literacy test.
Maleka claims that her vice-principal told her that the reason she couldn’t take the test was because she wouldn’t pass.
“The point of the test is to help see how they can improve the school system,” she said in an interview.
“By rigging it, no one is learning anything.”
Maleka, who is now in college, was moved to another school in another school board by her mother later that year.
In addition to a public reprimand, Lamoureux and Wilson have been suspended without pay and ordered to complete a course on professional ethics.
Neither of them replied to requests for comment from CTV News before this story was published.
