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Salt Lake City School District managers are scrambling to correct an error that resulted in mistaken magnet-school acceptance letters being mailed to students.
The snafu leaves roughly 700 students in limbo after applying for the district's Extended Learning Program, an honors curriculum for gifted students.
Students previously accepted to the program could be bumped when more accurate scores are calculated, district spokesman Jason Olsen said.
"The only thing we know right now is that on some of these letters, the wrong score was associated with the student," Olsen said. "We're trying to figure out why that happened."
Olsen said the district was made aware of the error after parents began questioning the low scores of their children on a cognitive-ability test. He said it's unclear how many students were falsely accepted or rejected for the Extended Learning Program, because the cognitive test is one of several factors applied to a student's application.
"We don't know exactly how many students will be impacted," he said.
Of the 700 students who applied, roughly 150 will qualify for magnet programs at West High School, Clayton Middle School and Hillside Middle School, Olsen said. Other students with high enough scores are able to participate in community Extended Learning Programs based at their neighborhood school.
Katherine Kennedy, a member of the district's school board, said the district has experienced a number of glitches with this year's cognitive exam after switching to a new online testing system. That transition delayed the release of test scores, she said, and resulted in scores being assigned to the wrong students when data were transferred between computer programs at the district.
"We want the public to know that we are concerned about this," she said. "We recognize this was a big deal for many people, but we're trying to proactively solve it."
Parents were contacted Wednesday by the district and told to disregard the test results they had received earlier.
Kennedy said the district has tried to keep parents as informed as possible on the delay. But she added that families have been placed in a difficult position by the error, which postpones their decisions about where to enroll their kids.
"I'm one of those parents," she said. "I have a sixth-grader myself who is in that situation."
Olsen said the district hopes to correct the error and mail new test scores by early next week.
Jordan School District operates a similar program with its Advanced Learning Placement for Students, or ALPS. Spokeswoman Sandra Riesgraf said the district may have issues with individual student test scores from time to time, but she was not aware of any mass system failure.
"We just haven't had a problem like that," she said.