Five months since CPS removed Dr. Michael Beyer, the principal of Ogden International School, from his position, he’s still getting paid but can’t return to work.
CPS officials never explained why, having had the OIG’s report since June, they’d only moved to fire Beyer in November. But this wasn’t the first time he’d gotten in trouble with the district.
In the information vacuum, speculation and conspiracy theories proliferated: maybe the mayor’s office wanted to tank the success of the Ogden/Jenner merger by pressuring CPS to remove Beyer, thereby making it less likely that a rich and poor school would merge in the future? Maybe CPS wanted to clean house of any principals who raised red flags for any reason in the wake of the sexual abuse scandal uncovered by the Tribune in the summer of 2018? Maybe CPS CEO Janice Jackson was cracking down and following the OIG’s recommendations to improve her chances of staying in her job under a new mayor? Maybe CPS was finally heeding complaints from parents who’d been unhappy with Beyer’s leadership? Maybe this is just how slowly district bureaucracy works?
But after the Cook County judge got involved, CPS scheduled three dates for Beyer’s pre-suspension hearing and allowed him to bring witnesses, including parents who’d unenrolled children for family travel to testify that he’d never instructed them to do so. On the first day of the hearing (November 15), CPS’s hearing officer admitted that there were no written rules for the proceedings. Beyer’s lawyers reported this to the circuit court judge. After the second day of the hearing (December 6)—at which Beyer presented more witnesses in his defense—the parties went back before the county judge. CPS finally agreed to provide Beyer’s legal team with the unredacted OIG report and subsequently cancelled the third day of the pre-suspension hearing.
On January 31 the CPS hearing officer didn’t allow Beyer’s lawyers to call any witnesses to defend him on either the record falsification or the data breach charges. A week later CPS decided to suspend Beyer without pay. If not for the Cook County judge’s injunction on all of their pre-suspension hearing decisions, he would have been. The judge is expected to rule on whether the suspension can go into effect at the end of April. Planning for Beyer’s termination hearing is still ongoing.
To receive the highest rating for attendance, the SQRP requires an elementary school to have a minimum rate of 96 percent average daily attendance. The next rung down in the attendance rating is 95 percent. If all the Ogden students who had been unenrolled or marked as transferred had been marked as absent, the school’s SQRP rating would have fallen by 0.23 percent, 0.13 percent, and 0.26 percent in each of the three school years, according to Beyer’s calculations. This would not have brought Ogden’s attendance rate below the 95 percent threshold in any of the three years. “So why would we cheat?” Beyer said.
