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In the wake of an alleged cheating episode, a charter school that is overseen by the Lennox school district has tightened some of its internal rules on testing, officials say.

Animo Leadership Charter School, which is in Inglewood but will soon move to a new facility in Lennox, was disqualified from receiving an Academic Performance Index score earlier this month because officials believe that a teacher might have altered students’ answers on a science test. That teacher is no longer with the school, officials say.

Beginning this school year, teachers at Animo Leadership supervising students taking the California Standards Tests will be assigned to a class where they are not responsible for the student performance. For instance, a teacher of 11th-graders might be assigned to administer tests to a group of ninth-graders, officials said.

Also, the classrooms in which tests are being taken will be subject to random pop-in visits from administrators – a practice known as auditing.

“We are continuing to tighten what we already felt was a tight ship,” said Cristina de Jesus, chief academic officer for Green Dot Public Schools.

Animo Leadership is part of the Green Dot Public Schools brand, a well-regarded group of a dozen public charter schools in greater Los Angeles. All told, the cluster of schools posted big gains on test scores this year, and only Animo Leadership had its scores revoked.

Green Dot officials have been quick to point out that what happened is not comparable to cheating scandals that have sullied the reputation of other schools in recent times.

“There are thousands of schools across the country – about 95,000 – and hundreds of thousands of teachers,” said Douglas Weston, Green Dot’s director of communications and development. “You are going to have some who cheat. Some people are not going to uphold the standards.

“In some cases this has happened from the top down. You have to differentiate that from” what happened at Animo, he said.

Officials say they took swift action when they learned of the irregularities. It came to their attention after students informed a teacher that the answers on their tests appeared to have been altered. That teacher, they say, immediately informed administrators at the school, who in turn informed officials with the Lennox school district, the California Department of Education and the Los Angeles Unified School District.

In fact, in California, the only schools liable to be caught cheating are self-policers. This is because severe budget cuts in 2009 prompted the state Department of Education to end the practice of analyzing erasures and making drop-in visits, according to California Watch, a nonprofit investigative news website.

Citing concerns over confidentiality laws, officials said they cannot name the teacher in question. They also couldn’t say whether the teacher who came to administrators with the news of alleged cheating was the same teacher who is accused.

The officials say they have long mandated that testing materials be placed under lock and key. Teachers are supposed to pick up the materials from the locked cabinet at the beginning of the testing period, and then return them afterward, meaning the materials should be gone for only two hours at a time.

“We have a clear protocol and have always had a clear protocol,” de Jesus said. “In this particular instance, we had a teacher who basically was able to get ahold of answer documents. This investigation is still in progress, so this is all alleged.”

Animo Leadership currently enrolls 625 students in grades nine through 12. Since its 2000 inception, the school has been located in a building owned by Hertz Rent-a-Car at 1155 W. Arbor Vitae St. in Inglewood, directly under the flight path of Los Angeles International Airport. In January, the school will move to a brand-new facility three miles southeast at 11044 S. Freeman Ave. in unincorporated Lennox.

Named multiple times in recent years to U.S. News & World Report’s list of the 100 best high schools in the country, Animo Leadership draws most of its students from the K-8 Lennox School District. It was Green Dot’s first school, as well as the South Bay’s first charter school.

Green Dot Public Schools took over Los Angeles Unified School District’s failing Locke High in 2008, and its crusading founder Steve Barr was profiled in the New Yorker a year later.

While Animo Leadership’s score has officially been disqualified, administrators there have calculated its API to be 796 – a 52-point leap over last year. The score is four points shy of the state-set target of 800 for all schools, but comfortably above the 742 average for high schools statewide. The average one-year gain for the franchise’s “founding five” schools – which also include Animo Inglewood, Oscar de la Hoya Animo, Animo South LA and Animo Venice – is 30 points. The founding five’s average API score is 766.

In addition to having its API score revoked, Animo Leadership will be ineligible from receiving awards for two years.

Although charter schools generally enjoy more local control than most public schools, they usually must ask local school boards to renew their charters every five years. Animo Leadership is accountable to the Lennox school board, whose superintendent, Fred Navarro, makes recommendations.

Navarro confirmed that the school came to him right away with the bad news and said he is satisfied with the way the incident has been handled.

“They were very aggressive in their investigation,” he said. “Unfortunately, because of the missteps of one teacher, the whole school suffers.”

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