District of Columbia Schools: School Year 1996-97 Enrollment Count
Vulnerable to Errors (Testimony, 11/20/97, GAO/T-HEHS-98-53).
GAO discussed its report on the enrollment count process that the
District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) used in school year 1996-97,
focusing on whether the process appeared sufficient to produce an
accurate count.
GAO noted that: (1) even though DCPS changed parts of its enrollment
process in school year 1996-97 to address prior criticisms, the process
remained flawed; (2) some of the changes increased complexity and work
effort but did little to improve the count's credibility; (3) errors,
including multiple enrollment records for a single student, remained in
the Student Information System (SIS), but DCPS had only limited
mechanisms for correcting these errors; (4) DCPS' practice of allowing
principals to enroll unlimited out-of-boundary students increased the
possibility of multiple enrollment records for one student; (5) DCPS'
official enrollment count included categories of students usually
excluded from enrollment counts in other districts when the counts are
used for funding purposes; (6) problems also persisted in the critical
area of residency verification; (7) the pupil accounting system failed
to adequately track students; (8) other school districts report that
they use several approaches to control errors and to improve the
accuracy of their enrollment counts; (9) the District of Columbia School
Reform Act of 1995 imposed enrollment count reporting and audit
requirements, but the official enrollment count report released for
school year 1996-97 did not provide all of the information required by
the act; and (10) because the enrollment count will become the basis for
funding DCPS, GAO has made several recommendations for improving the
DCPS enrollment count.
--------------------------- Indexing Terms -----------------------------
REPORTNUM: T-HEHS-98-53
TITLE: District of Columbia Schools: School Year 1996-97
Enrollment Count Vulnerable to Errors
DATE: 11/20/97
SUBJECT: Management information systems
School management and organization
Public schools
Students
School districts
Attendance records
Data collection
Data integrity
Reporting requirements
IDENTIFIER: District of Columbia
DC Public Schools Student Information System
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Cover
================================================================ COVER
Before the Council of the District of Columbia, Committee on
Education, Libraries, and Recreation
For Release on Delivery
Expected at 11:00 a.m.
Thursday, November 20, 1997
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA PUBLIC
SCHOOLS - SCHOOL YEAR 1996-97
ENROLLMENT COUNT VULNERABLE TO
ERRORS
Statement of Cornelia M. Blanchette, Associate Director
Education and Employment Issues
Health, Education, and Human Services Division
GAO/T-HEHS-98-53
GAO/HEHS-98-53T
(104913)
Abbreviations
=============================================================== ABBREV
DCPS - District of Columbia Public Schools'
SIS - Student Information System
MIS - Management Information Services
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA PUBLIC
SCHOOLS: SCHOOL YEAR 1996-97
ENROLLMENT COUNT VULNERABLE TO
ERRORS
============================================================ Chapter 0
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee:
I am pleased to be here today to assist the Committee in its
oversight of the District of Columbia Public Schools' (DCPS)
enrollment count. An accurate count of the number of enrolled
students is the cornerstone of a school district's financial needs
assessment. Although in the past DCPS has not received funds on the
basis of the number of students enrolled, new budget initiatives will
soon directly link DCPS' funding to school enrollment. Consequently,
a valid enrollment count process and an accurate count are critical
for DCPS' district- and school-level planning, staffing, funding, and
resource allocation.
Today I will discuss our recent report\1 on the enrollment count
process that DCPS used in school year 1996-97. Our report was
prepared at the request of the House Committee on Government Reform
and Oversight's Subcommittee on the District of Columbia. The
Subcommittee's request was in response to criticisms raised over the
past several years about the accuracy of DCPS' enrollment count.
Specifically, the Subcommittee asked us to examine DCPS' enrollment
count process to determine whether the process appeared sufficient to
produce an accurate count.
The information I am presenting today is based on interviews with and
documents obtained from DCPS administrative staff, city officials,
officials in other urban school districts and their state departments
of education, officials in the U.S. Department of Education, and
education experts. We also visited 15 DCPS elementary and secondary
schools, randomly selected by school level and city quadrant. During
our school visits, we interviewed principals, school administrative
staff, and teachers and reviewed selected documents. It is important
to note that we have done no work involving DCPS' enrollment count
process since issuing our report and therefore can report nothing
about the process DCPS used for its school year 1997-98 enrollment
count. Our comments today pertain only to the process that was used
for the school year 1996-97 count.
In summary, even though DCPS changed parts of its enrollment process
in school year 1996-97 to address prior criticisms, the process
remained flawed. Some of the changes, such as the use of an
enrollment card to verify attendance, increased complexity and work
effort but did little to improve the count's credibility. Errors,
including multiple enrollment records for a single student, remained
in the Student Information System (SIS), but DCPS had only limited
mechanisms for correcting these errors. For example, although
Management Information Services personnel maintained SIS, they had no
authority to correct errors. Furthermore, DCPS' practice of allowing
principals to enroll unlimited out-of-boundary students increased the
possibility of multiple enrollment records for one student.
In addition, DCPS' official enrollment count included categories of
students usually excluded from enrollment counts in other districts
when the counts are used for funding purposes. For example, DCPS
included in its enrollment count students identified as
tuition-paying nonresidents of the District of Columbia and students
above and below the mandatory age for public education in the
District of Columbia, including Head Start participants,\2
prekindergarten students (age 4), preschool students (age 0 to 3),
and some senior high and special education students aged 20 and
older.\3 In contrast, the three states that we visited reported that
they exclude from enrollment counts used for funding purposes any
student who is above or below mandatory school age or who is fully
funded from other sources. Furthermore, even though the District of
Columbia Auditor has suggested that students unable to document their
residency be excluded from the official enrollment count, whether
they pay tuition or not, DCPS included these students in its
enrollment count for school year 1996-97.
Problems also persisted in the critical area of residency
verification. In school year 1996-97, schools did not always verify
student residency as required by DCPS' own procedures. Proofs of
residency, when actually obtained, often fell short of DCPS'
standards. Moreover, Central Office staff did not consistently track
failures to verify residency. Finally, school staff and parents
rarely suffered sanctions for failure to comply with the residency
verification requirements.
In addition, the pupil accounting system failed to adequately track
students. SIS allowed more than one school to count a single student
when the student transferred from one school to another.
Furthermore, schools did not always follow attendance rules, and SIS
lacked the capability to track implementation of the rules. Finally,
some attendance rules, if implemented, could have allowed counting of
nonattending students.
Other school districts report that they use several approaches to
control errors, such as the ones we identified, and to improve the
accuracy of their enrollment counts. These include using centralized
enrollment and pupil accounting centers and a variety of automated
SIS edits and procedures designed to prevent or disallow pupil
accounting errors before they occur.
Finally, the District of Columbia School Reform Act of 1995 imposed
enrollment count reporting and audit requirements. The act requires
the enrollment count process to produce an enrollment count that
includes the number of special needs and nonresident students by
grade level and the amount of tuition assessed and collected. The
official enrollment count report released for school year 1996-97 did
not provide this information. The act also requires the District of
Columbia Financial Responsibility and Management Assistance Authority
(Authority) to provide for an independent audit of the enrollment
count. The Authority decided, however, that the inadequacies that
led to the restructuring of the public school system would make
auditing the school year 1996-97 count counterproductive. In short,
the Reform Act's audit requirement was not met.
Because the enrollment count will become the basis for funding DCPS,
we recommended in our report that the Congress consider directing
DCPS to report separately in its annual reporting of the enrollment
count those students
-- fully funded from other sources, such as Head Start participants
or tuition-paying nonresidents;
-- above and below the mandatory age for compulsory public
education, such as those in prekindergarten or those aged 20 and
above; and
-- for whom District residency cannot be confirmed.
We also recommended that the DCPS Chief Executive Officer/
Superintendent do the following:
-- Clarify, document, and enforce the responsibilities and
sanctions for employees involved in the enrollment count
process.
-- Clarify, document, and enforce the residency verification
requirements for students and their parents.
-- Institute internal controls in the student information database,
including database management practices and automatic procedures
and edits to control database errors.
-- Comply with the reporting requirements of the District of
Columbia School Reform Act of 1995.
We further recommended that the District of Columbia Financial
Responsibility and Management Assistance Authority comply with the
auditing requirements of the District of Columbia School Reform Act
of 1995.
In commenting on a draft of our report, DCPS' Chief Executive
Officer/ Superintendent stated that DCPS concurred with our major
findings and recommendations and would correct the identified
weaknesses. He also acknowledged that the enrollment numbers for
school year 1996-97 are subject to question for the reasons we
cited--especially because the enrollment count credibility hinged
almost entirely on the written verification provided by local
administrators. He said that no substantial checks and balances, no
aggressive central monitoring, and few routine reports were in place.
In addition, he said that virtually no administrative sanctions were
applied, indicating that the submitted reports were hardly reviewed.
The Authority shared DCPS' view that many findings and
recommendations in our report will help to correct what it
characterized as a flawed student enrollment count process. Its
comments did, however, express concerns about certain aspects of our
report. The Authority was concerned that we did not discuss the
effects of the Authority's overhaul of DCPS in November 1996.\4 It
also commented that our report did not note that the flawed student
count was one of the issues prompting the Authority to change the
governance structure and management of DCPS. In the report, we
explained that we did not review the Authority's overhaul of DCPS or
the events and concerns leading to the overhaul.
Other comments on our report by the Authority and the U.S.
Department of Education dealt with technical suggestions. The
complete comments of DCPS' Chief Executive Office/Superintendent, the
Authority, and the Department of Education, along with our responses
to the comments, are included in our report.
--------------------
\1 District of Columbia Public Schools: Student Enrollment Count
Remains Vulnerable to Errors (GAO/HEHS-97-161, Aug. 21, 1997).
\2 Head Start has its own funding source.
\3 The District of Columbia School Reform Act of 1995 requires
separate reporting of some of these groups but does not require that
they be included in aggregate counts.
\4 For many years, DCPS had been governed by an elected Board of
Education. In November 1996, the specially appointed Authority
declared a state of emergency in DCPS and transferred DCPS
management--until June 30, 2000--to the Authority's agents, a
nine-member specially appointed Emergency Transitional Education
Board of Trustees. The Authority also replaced DCPS' superintendent
with a Chief Executive Officer/ Superintendent.
-------------------------------------------------------- Chapter 0:0.1
Mr. Chairman, this concludes my prepared statement. I would be
pleased to respond to any questions you or members of the Committee
may have.
*** End of document. ***