The primary of an inventive West Harlem government funded school killed herself the day after her understudies took the state Common Core exams — which were later hurled out in light of the fact that she duped, The Post has learned.
Jeanene Worrell-Breeden, 49, of Teachers College Community School, bounced before a B train in the 135th Street station on St. Nicholas Avenue on April 17, police said.
Jeanene Worrell-Breeden
She was hauled out from under the train and taken to Harlem Hospital, where she passed on eight days after the fact. The city Medical Examiner’s Office ruled it a suicide.
The jump took a swing at 9:20 a.m., under 24 hours after her 47 third-graders wrapped up three days sweating over the high-stakes English exam — the first ever given at the juvenile school.
It was likewise that day an informant reported the conning to DOE authorities.
Folks were stunned and disheartened to learn Worrell-Breeden kicked the bucket yet were given no subtle elements at the time. It was supposed she was slaughtered in an auto collision.
Folks were in for another stun in June. Administrator Gale Reeves let them know in a meeting that all the third-grade English exams had been “red-hailed” and “nullified.”
“The youngsters didn’t do anything incorrectly, and the instructors didn’t do anything incorrectly,” Diane Tinsley, a mother of one of the third-graders, cited Reeves saying. Reeves declined to clarify.
In a June 22 letter to families, Reeves composed, “The respectability of the appraisal was traded off because of activities outside your tyke’s control.”
Folks became baffled. Nobody from the city Department of Education or the state Education Department, which controls the exams, addressed inquiries. They requested assistance from government officials, including Assemblyman Keith Wright, whose staff additionally hit a divider.
On Friday, the DOE faulted the dead primary.
“Primary Worrell-Breeden was the subject of assertions of testing shamefulness,” representative Devora Kaye said. “An examination substantiated these claims, and we shut the examination tailing her lamentable passing.”
Kaye would not say how Worrell-Breeden purportedly messed with the tests.
‘The youngsters didn’t do anything incorrectly, and the instructors didn’t do anything incorrectly’
– an understudy’s mom
Asked whether Worrell-Breeden was recounted the April 17 affirmations against her, DOE authorities did not reply.
The DOE refuted each of the 47 English exams. Third-graders took the state math exams April 22 to 24. Those scores will be discharged this mid year, yet Tinsley said the administrator guaranteed folks that every one of the children would be elevated to the fourth grade.
The extreme Common Core exams have raised nervousness. In 2014, just 34.5 percent of city understudies breezed through the math tests, and 29.4 percent finished English tests.
“Quite a few people are getting wiped out and leaving the framework as a result of the weight the high-stakes tests are putting on them,” a veteran instructor said.
Be that as it may, Worrell-Breeden appeared to be “casual,” Tinsley said.
“She was consoling us folks,” Tinsley said. “Her entire state of mind was that they’re going to easily finish this test, and that she had set them up to pro any test.”
Every morning of the three-section exam — given April 14 to 16 — Worrell-Breeden served the children breakfast and held a get up and go rally.
“She had them circled the exercise center cheering to dispose of their apprehension,” Tinsley said.
A family companion depicted Worrell-Breeden as a determined pioneer battling with individual setbacks.
“Her grandma kicked the bucket a year ago. Her spouse moved out a year ago. He had a youngster with another lady. She was under a considerable measure of weight at home,” the companion said.
“She was the first essential at that school so she was attempting to make . . . a decent impression. “Possibly all that weight, included to what was going at home, got to her.”
Worrell-Breeden, who made $135,000 a year, was the establishing vital of the school, which the DOE opened in 2011 in association with Columbia University’s Teachers College. It guaranteed access to Columbia offices, understudy assistants and scientists. While wanting to develop, it served just pre-K to review 3 last school year.
Worrell-Breeden landed the position regardless of an outrage at her previous school, PS 18 in The Bronx. In 2009, the exceptional chief of examination for city schools discovered she had checked in for extra minutes pay while working out with a fitness coach three times each week in the school rec center.
Her time card “vanished” after specialists went to the school. The test discovered she modified her time card and pressured subordinates to say she had offered them several OT hours first — as obliged — before taking them herself.
In a six-month period she gathered more than $9,500 in OT pay, records say.
A mediator released charges of a coverup. She was docked two weeks’ pays.
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