Teacher faces discipline over test help

She told her principal that she helped her first-graders prepare for the parallel math FCAT. The Seminole Elementary teacher is expected to be suspended for 10 days.

By KELLY RYAN

© St. Petersburg Times,
published June 21, 2001

A Seminole Elementary School teacher will be suspended for 10 days without pay amid accusations that she showed her students questions from a district exam the day before it was given.

Superintendent Howard Hinesley is recommending the suspension for Allison Blanchet, a Pinellas teacher since August 1991. If the School Board approves the punishment at its meeting Tuesday, Blanchet will lose $162.88 a day. An investigation found that on May 3, Blanchet used transparencies from a district exam called the parallel math FCAT as practice for her first-grade students.

The next day, she gave the same test to her students. She also wrote three problems on the chalkboard, which violates testing procedures, but it is not clear whether she also wrote the answers on the board.

After Blanchet started grading the tests, she told her principal that the students had seen the questions the day before.

Test results on the parallel FCAT are used to decide whether a student should be promoted to the next grade level or needs to attend summer school. After Blanchet explained what had happened to the test, her students were given another test to be used for promotion decisions.

Two messages left at Blanchet's home Wednesday were not returned. She signed an agreement with the district, accepting the recommended punishment and expressing remorse for her actions. She will serve her suspension Aug. 15-28.

Blanchet, 41, started as a substitute teacher in May 1982 and was hired as a full-time teacher at Tyrone Elementary in 1991, district officials said. She transferred to Seminole Elementary in 1998.

All of her evaluations have been marked "satisfactory" or "meets or exceeds expectations."

Last year, a teacher at Clearview Avenue Elementary was suspended for 73 days and agreed to give up a teaching job to be a paraprofessional after being accused of helping her students cheat on the parallel reading FCAT.

Helen Hoss, who had been teaching since 1987, instructed her students to write more on the test and wrote in answers for a student who was sick. Over the next two weeks, district investigators found, she wrote more answers on students' tests and tried to disguise her handwriting to match the students'.

District officials said Blanchet did not deserve as severe a punishment as Hoss because she came forward and admitted her mistake. Blanchet also had a series of "excellent" evaluations, said staff attorney Jackie Spoto.

"At least she knew enough to come forward," Spoto said. "To me, it acknowledges that a mistake was made and acceptance of consequences for it."

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