Douglas Woman Won't Be Charged For Having Cheating Party at Her House

The Atlanta elementary school teacher, accused of having a CRT "cheating party" at her Douglas County home will not be prosecuted, according to a report in the AJC.

Special investigators granted immunity to the Douglas woman, Bernadine Macon, and four other Gideons Elementary fifth grade teachers in exchange for their testimony.

Therefore they can't be prosecuted, Douglas County District Attorney David McDade said, according to the Ajc report.

“So our focus is on the administrators or supervisors of those teachers,” he said.

The governor’s office report, released last week after months of investigation into the Atlanta Public School cheating scandal, says Macon had a weekend test “changing party” in 2009 at her house in Douglas County.

J. Tom Morgan, a former district attorney, said he has never seen an executive agency issue a report like the one released to the public in the APS case that names individuals and accuses them of crimes without having first been approved by a grand jury, according to the AJC.

“It puts the DAs in an awkward position,” he said, noting the local prosecutors did not oversee the investigation and must now deal with immunity agreements granted to witnesses that they did not approve.

Morgan, who represented APS, said he was not speaking on behalf of the system.

When former Gov. Sonny Perdue launched the probe last August, he stressed that teachers who cheated but were honest with investigators should not be criminally prosecuted, according to the AJC report.

Gov. Nathan Deal restated that directive after he took office, the report says.

McDade said Friday that he expects it will take prosecutors a considerable amount of time to reach decisions. He noted that the GBI’s investigative file in the case amasses 120 volumes.

The was just one of numerous accusations in the report from Deal’s office. School officials across the Atlanta Public School system changed answers on the CRCT tests and went to great lengths to cover up their trail and silence any whistle blowers, according to the report.

Cheating was “an open secret” at Gideons Elementary, the report says.

The testing coordinator handed out answer-key transparencies to place over answer sheets so the job would go faster, according to the AJC report.

When investigators began questioning educators, now-retired principal Armstead Salters obstructed their efforts by telling teachers not to cooperate, the report said.

“If anyone asks you anything about this just tell them you don’t know,” the report quotes Salters as saying.

He told teachers to “just stick to the story and it will all go away.”

Salters eventually confessed to knowing cheating was occurring, the report said.

Macon also admitted to investigators that she and others changed CRCT answers at her home in Douglas County.