School district announces plan to resolve grading issues at Brookland-Cayce after audit

The Lexington 2 school district has announced a plan to correct problems that caused Brookland-Cayce High School to have its accreditation downgraded earlier this year.

The Cayce-West Columbia school district announced Monday it has submitted a proposed “corrective action plan” to the S.C. Department of Education for review, after an audit identified grading issues that may have allowed some students to graduate without completing all the required courses.

In May, The State broke the story that Brookland-Cayce and its sister school, Airport High, were having two years’ worth of graduating seniors’ transcripts audited after the education department identified “alarming” grading issues at Brookland-Cayce.

The school’s accreditation was downgraded by the department because of the audit’s findings, including that students had misused the credit recovery courses that allowed them to make up failed courses earlier in the year. Students were found to have been awarded credits they had not earned and took courses they should not have been able to based on their grades.

The district’s new superintendent, Brenda Hafner, said she is confident Brookland-Cayce can get its full accreditation restored after the Department of Education completes its next review after the 2022-23 school year. An education department spokesperson confirmed the department has reviewed the plan and said Brookland-Cayce is on course to have its accreditation restored from “accredited/advised” to a full “all clear” if the plan is followed.

To address the department’s concerns, state officials “conducted intensive training this past week for all middle and high school counselors, as well as registrars, building administrators, and district staff,” the district said. Administrators are also revising their policies on when students will be allowed to take recovery courses and outline expectations for students’ “seat time” to address attendance issues.

“Lexington Two is launching a new process for annual transcript monitoring for high school students to closely track and address any potential problems,” the district said.

In its statement, Lexington 2 said the district’s school board had not been informed about the audit between the district’s receipt of a letter from the education department requesting transcripts last November and May, when the former superintendent resigned.

Former superintendent Nicholas Wade resigned suddenly in May and was replaced on a temporary basis by Barry Bolen, who had previously served in the same job from 2000 to 2008. After district hired Hafner as the permanent superintendent in July, Bolen was named the principal at Brookland-Cayce for the 2022-23 school year.

“Because the board had not received any information about the pending audit, the board immediately asked Mr. Bolen to follow up with SCDOE regarding the November 21 letter,” the school district statement reads.

The day he left the district, Wade wrote to the education department encouraging state officials to continue to review the situation in the district, saying he worried the school board would “dismiss” the audit’s finding.

Documents released by the school district show the school board agreed to pay $250,000 for Wade to leave the district after only a year on the job as superintendent, and that Wade agreed to cooperate in “any litigation arising from events occurring during his tenure as superintendent.”