BALTIMORE (WBFF) — An alarming discovery coming out of a Baltimore City High School caught up in a scandal. Project Baltimore has obtained student assessment data from Augusta Fells Savage in west Baltimore, showing just how far behind some students are in that school.

In June, Project Baltimore filed a public records request with City Schools, asking for iReady student assessment scores at Augusta Fells.

“He's stressed, and I am too. I told him I'm probably going to start crying. I don't know what to do for him,” said Tiffany France, a Baltimore City mother who spoke with Project Baltimore back in March, when her son attended Augusta Fells.

At the time, Augusta Fells was caught in scandal. Fox45 News had interviewed France, whose son passed just three classes in four years. With a 0.13 GPA, he ranked 62 of 120 in his class. In September, City Schools released the results of its own internal investigation, which confirmed Project Baltimore’s reporting that grades at the school were improperly changed and students were kept on the rolls even though they were not attending. We filed this request to see just how far behind students were at Augusta Fells. A few weeks ago, we got the results.

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“No, not at all. They don't surprise me. That's about what I would expect,” said a former City Schools teacher, when asked if the results were surprising.

The former teacher, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, taught eighth grade at another City School. She’s not from Maryland, but after graduating from college, she took a job teaching in Baltimore. And after seeing how the school system is run, and the level of education the students receive, she was overwhelmed.

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“I cried the whole way home my first day after working, because I was like, ‘Is this America, if this is what is happening in our schools?’. I mean, I remember, I just wanted to tell everyone, I was like, this is happening in America, and no one's really saying anything about it,” said the former teacher.

The former Baltimore City teacher told us she had 28 students in her eighth-grade class.

“I would say around half of them couldn't read to the point where they could fully understand what they were supposed to be doing,” said the teacher.

Schools use the iReady system to measure at which grade level a student is performing. In Baltimore City Schools, iReady assessments are given in math and reading. The scores we obtained were from tests taken by ninth, tenth and eleventh graders at Augusta Fells.

Much of the data is not provided. If fewer than 10 students test into any grade level, City Schools denotes that with an asterisk. The school system says that’s done to protect student privacy.

The data we received is from before the COVID shutdowns. During the 2018-2019 school year, 48 Augusta Fells juniors took the reading test, 11 tested at a third-grade reading level. In that same year, out of 54 tenth graders tested, 27 were reading at a third or fourth-grade level. We don’t know where the other half tested. City Schools won’t release the data. Fifty-five freshman took the reading test during the 2017-2018 school year, and well over half, at least 39, were reading at elementary school levels. It could be more, but again, we don’t know how many tested in first and second grade because City Schools won’t provide the data.

“I hear numbers like that, and I think, this is so unfair to students and it's so unfair to their families,” the former teacher told Project Baltimore. “Because as a parent, when you send your kid into school district, it's not crazy to want them, and to expect them, to come back and know how to read.”

City Schools declined an interview to discuss these scores, but we were told in a statement, “i-Ready data should not be used to represent student performance at Augusta Fells Savage during that period. Significant percentages of students at Augusta Fells Savage did not complete the assessment - City Schools expects an administration rate of 85 percent or higher to consider i-Ready results as representative of school performance," the statement goes on to say. "i-Ready scores do not provide a complete or final picture of student performance - City Schools and many other school districts use i-Ready to provide checkpoints on student progress during the school year and understand students' strengths and challenges. Data from the assessments are used to create individual teaching and learning strategies. We can then address learning gaps that may impede students from learning at their grade level."

“Our kids deserve so much more than this,” said the former teacher. “They don't know that they're at this level, really. They think it's normal because everybody's struggling with this stuff.”

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Project Baltimore asked the former teacher what she believes is the solution to the problem. Her answer echoed what we’ve heard from many other teachers. She said student behavior and discipline need to be addressed. She said oftentimes she couldn’t teach, because she was constantly dealing with fights, and other disruptive behavior that she said school administrators did not address.