[FOXBALTIMORE] Baltimore City Schools CEO Dr. Sonja Santelises apologized Tuesday night for failures at Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts."I want to take this opportunity to apologize to those students and families who may be affected," she said at a school board meeting.
Our Project Baltimore report revealed that a student there passed just three classes in four years and has a 0.13 GPA.
The school CEO has yet to sit down with us to answer to what’s happening at Augusta Fells and within the school system, but she did speak on radio Wednesday.
Fox45 has sent repeated requests to city schools to speak with us about our Project Baltimore investigation.
Wednesday morning Dr. Santelises was asked directly about it on WBAL NewsRadio by hosts C4 and Bryan Nehman.
She told them the student was not officially a senior.
"While the student had been there, the fact that they, that he had only passed three classes meant that he was officially a freshman. That’s the first piece that I think is important," she said.
She then spoke to the student's GPA and class rank.
"I think one of the things about that that is important to know is that if you are a ninth grader, depending on when you pull the GPA, you might not have had any GPA as of yet for a ninth grader. It’s just read as zero if you have not actually completed a full series of classes. Depending on when the GPA was pulled then your GPA would show as zero only because you had not finished the quarter or had not finished the semester. So it’s possible that a lot of those students did not actually have a zero, but that he was being compared against ninth graders who had not yet had a full kind of report card reporting."
The student with a point .13 GPA was ranked 62 out of 120 students, showing that of those several did have GPAs on record.
"For us to accept what we just heard as an answer for why multiple students may be well over 16 years old and have passed three classes is unacceptable Bryan. It’s unacceptable," host C4 said.
"It is unacceptable and I guess it’s trying to explain away a little bit about what happened, but it’s hard to explain away how a kid goes that long and his school without a firm answer or idea from mom where he was," Nehman said.
Dr. Santelises explanation does brings up even more questions.
Fox45 and Project Baltimore are committed to finding answers and holding those in charge accountable.