By Victor Skinner
EAGnews.org
    
PATERSON, N.J. – About a dozen seniors at one Paterson, New Jersey high school are scrambling to complete a required biology class after a school counselor told them it wasn’t necessary to graduate.
    
“Unfortunately, there was no follow-up by the school to enroll these students in the course until our newly appointed Director of High Schools discovered the error early March,” Paterson Superintendent Donnie Evans wrote to board members in an email, according to NorthJersey.com.
    
School board member Manuel Martinez told the news site “obviously, someone dropped the ball,” and students will “have two months to cram in a year’s worth of material.”
    
The impacted students, about 20 percent of the senior class of 2013 at PANTHER Academy, contend a school counselor told them as freshmen that they aren’t required to take a biology class to graduate this year, but learned last month they may not graduate in June unless they complete the class.
    
Evans told board members he took “appropriate personnel action” against the employee, as well as the employee’s supervisors.
    
The local teachers union, the Paterson Education Association, contends the counselor isn’t at fault, and has been unfairly punished. PEA president Peter Tirri told NorthJersey.com the counselor never misled students.
    
“Moreover, Tirri said interim administrators at PANTHER have made changes in the past few months that undermined the guidance counselor’s ability to do her job, including moving her out of her office and into a hallway space set off by partitions,” the news site reports.
    
“Her records are all over the place and now she doesn’t have a place to hold confidential meetings with the kids,” Tirri told NorthJersey.com.
    
Judging by the dozens of students she allegedly left in the dark, that might not be a bad thing.