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Parent alleges district redacted gifted evaluation, says hearing order not followed
Summary
At the March 24 Wyoming Area School Board meeting, parent Amanda Pacho accused the district of redacting her son’s qualifying gifted scores, commissioning a second evaluator who never met the child, and failing to comply with a Feb. 25 hearing officer order to provide differentiated work.
Amanda Pacho of Exeter told the Wyoming Area School Board on March 24 that her son Luke was properly identified as gifted but that the district “redacted the qualifying scores and replaced her work.” She said the evaluator who originally found Luke gifted has 29 years of experience and served as an expert witness in court, and that the district later hired a second evaluator who she said never met her son and excluded the qualifying scores used in the first assessment.
Pacho said the second evaluator “made her determination based on directions from administration” and told the family on the record that she is paid to perform such work with taxpayer funds. She added that the second evaluator said the General Ability Index (GAI) had not been used in Wyoming Area since 2020, yet the GAI appeared in Luke’s evaluation and was used, Pacho said, to disqualify him.
Pacho said a hearing officer ordered the district on Feb. 25 to provide differentiated work for Luke at his demonstrated level, which his teacher described under oath as fourth- to fifth-grade work. “Yet since that order, nothing has been done. No differentiation, no compliance, no communication,” she said, adding that the family’s written communications to the superintendent and board have been ignored.
Pacho framed her remarks as a request that the board honor its oath to follow the law and to ensure the district stops “hiding data, rewrite[ing] evaluations, and ignor[ing] legal orders.” She asked the board to act to secure the gifted identification and the differentiated instruction she said the court ordered.
The board did not issue an immediate response on the record in this public comment segment, and no board action or motion was recorded in the transcript at the time of Pacho’s remarks.
What this matter is and next steps: Pacho described an administrative dispute involving evaluations and an administrative hearing that produced a hearing officer order. The transcript does not contain the district’s account of the evaluations, the texts of the evaluations, the second evaluator’s report, or any subsequent written district response. The hearing officer’s order and compliance status beyond Pacho’s statement were not provided in the transcript and are therefore not independently confirmed here.
