News that some big-city school districts were cooking their No Child Left Behind data came as no surprise to Lawrence Supt. Randy Weseman.

“It’s been my fear from the start that this would turn into a game of manipulation, of moving things around to make things look better than they are,” Weseman said. “To me, it defeats the whole purpose.”

The Associated Press on Monday reported some school districts had padded their No Child Left Behind test scores by lumping students into racial subgroups.

According to No Child Left Behind rules, racial subgroups with fewer than 30 students can be dropped from the total.

Some schools, AP reported, have used the loophole to skew results.

“We don’t do that,” Weseman said. “We want the data to tell us what we need to know to fulfill our mission, and that’s to make sure all students reach their maximum potential.”

He admitted the district’s black students lag behind their white counterparts.

“That’s a huge issue for us,” he said. “Why would I want to manipulate the data to show it wasn’t? That makes no sense to me.”

Racial groups and subgroups – black, Hispanic, Asian, American Indian, white and multiethnic – are part of the district’s data-gathering processes, said assessment specialist Terry McEwen.

So, too, are gender and age.

When a group or subgroup has fewer than 30 students at a school, McEwen said, it’s not included in that school’s assessment data.

But the results are not dropped from the districtwide totals, McEwen said. “They’re added back in,” he said. “We’re not hiding anything.”

McEwen said the rules were designed to ensure students’ privacy. “If you had just a handful of kids in a subgroup and if their scores were part of their school’s assessment, it would be pretty obvious how they did,” he said.

The No Child Left Behind data for Lawrence schools is posted on the district’s Web site at www.usd497.org.