Former EPISD administrators allegedly pressured into signing documents

Testimony Tuesday in the trial of five former El Paso ISD administrators accused of taking part in a cheating scheme centered around statements the district tried to get employees speaking with the FBI to sign.

Prosecutors allege the scheme was meant to artificially inflate federal accountability scores for EPISD schools.

Former Jefferson Assistant Principal Maribel Guillen and former campus director Vanessa Foreman testified then superintendent Lorenzo Garcia and associate superintendent James Anderson pressured them to sign “guiding” documents, stating nothing illegal was going on at the district.

Both refused to do so. Anderson is one of the current defendants.

“I didn’t want to sign it because it was not accurate,” Guillen said of the statement.

Foreman, who already pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the government and is scheduled to be sentenced in July, later testified about the statement she was asked to sign. “I felt very uncomfortable about it. It had more to do with the district than to do with us,” Foreman said.

When she refused to sign it, Foreman said EPISD’s attorney at the time turned off a tape recorder in the room.

“That made me very uncomfortable,” Foreman said. “James Anderson kept calling us and telling us we needed to sign it, we needed to sign it. It was a lot. I ended up giving them a different statement.”

Foreman also testified about being allegedly pressured by Garcia and Anderson to write a letter about the firing of Jefferson principal Dr. Steven Lane. Lane testified Monday about the methods used to keep Limited English Proficiency students out of the 10th grade so they could avoid accountability testing.

“They were specifically asking me to give them a letter about (Lane) being counter-productive,” Foreman said. “I didn’t do it because I didn’t feel it was appropriate. That was odd. I had never done that before.”

Foreman later described what happened when she questioned a report she ran showing about 100 students at Austin High School who were graduating despite missing credits and attendance issues.

“The class size was about 300,” Foreman confirmed. “It looked like about a third of them were missing credits.”

Foreman said she reported it to Anderson, who told her to speak with Austin principal John Tanner, who is a defendant in the case.

“Dr. Tanner called me and was really upset,” Foreman said. “He started cussing at me and asking me what I was doing.”

Foreman said when she started looking for documentation to support the students had completed the courses, it was incomplete. She said every time she showed up at the campus, more documents would appear, but some were duplicates signed by different teachers.

Foreman later confirmed that nothing happened to those students and they received their diplomas from Austin High School.

In addition to Anderson and Tanner, former Austin assistant principal Mark Tegmeyer are also charged with conspiracy to defraud the U.S. Government. Former Austin assistant principal Diane Thomas is charged with retaliating against a witness or a victim. Former Austin assistant principal Nancy Love is charged with retaliating against a witness or victim and false declaration before a grand jury.

The administrators allegedly engaged in schemes designed to discourage at-risk students from registering in schools, to under-represent at-risk student populations within the schools and fraudulently award class credits to students to falsely increase graduation rates of schools, change attendance records of students and manipulate students grade levels to avoid state accountability tests.