The cheating scandal at Louisville’s Male High School may have taken yet another interesting turn.

Early in July the Kentucky Department of Education released a “Kentucky Assessment Allegation Report” on the Male situation. The report indicated among many other things that staff members at Male were threatened with being “Overstaffed” if they didn’t comply. Overstaffing would mean the teachers would lose their highly desirable jobs at this competitive magnet high school. Overstaffed teachers in Jefferson County schools are put in a district-wide teacher hiring pool and can wind up almost anywhere in the system.

So, it looks like “overstaffing” was being used as a threat to force teacher compliance at Male.

Furthermore, a Courier-Journal education blog reported that the former Male High principal – who currently faces possible disciplinary action from the Kentucky Educational Professional Standards Board – did announce a number of teaching staff positions were “overstaffed.” Those teachers would be losing their teaching positions at the end of the 2013-14 school term.

Putting the Courier-Journal’s blog and the Assessment Allegation Report together, a question arises: “Was that former overstaffing declaration at Male a legitimate assessment of the school’s staffing needs or an attack against teachers who didn’t go along?”

New information now makes that question even more interesting.

A July 29, 2014 WDRB news release says that seven of the nine school staff members the former principal had declared as “overstaffed” in fact are still needed and will be back at Male in the coming school year! In addition, an eighth staff member apparently could also have returned but decided to stay with a new school assignment, instead.

So, in the vast majority of the overstaffing cases at Male, it looks like the teachers were not truly overages at all.

Hmmmm.