Superintendent John Harper made the suggestion to terminate Rahbe to the board and the decision was reached after hearing testimony from the system's lead school psychologist, director of human resources and Rahbe herself.
David Freeman, the school system's lead psychologist, said it was brought to his attention in October 2010 by another school psychologist that there was suspicion over Rahbe's completion of "protocols" -- the test booklet used to score student responses. Information gathered from the protocol is put in a psychological report.
Freeman said the evaluations are just "one piece of the puzzle" that help determine whether a student qualifies for special education. According to state law, the evaluations themselves cannot be used exclusively to determine whether a student qualifies for special education.
He explained Rahbe was on medical leave at the time and the other school psychologists gathered Rahbe's protocols for a regular meeting. He provided examples of incorrect or falsely completed documents.
"In the psychological report I noticed there were some scores that were reported in particular on a test that I knew could not be done ... you cannot get that kind of score with this test, so that had alerted me of a scoring error or a typo that needed to be fixed," Freeman said.
He said this particular test had a score of 46, while the test was scored in increments of five.
Another example Freeman used was seeing a protocol that was not fully completed.
"You have to document clearly the students responses as well as their score so anybody else looking at this protocol can understand and interpret the performance of that child," he said.
Freeman said there was also a situation where Rahbe tested about six students in two days, a number he described as "a lot."
"I thought in my mind at the time that maybe some of those errors I was seeing was because maybe she was rushing or trying to catch up," Freeman said.
He said he gave Rahbe the opportunity to correct and complete the protocols, but upon his inspection, she had not done so by January.
"To my knowledge, those errors were not corrected," Freeman said.
He said this led to a peer review of all school psychologists, which included pulling five random protocols from the six school psychologists employed by the school system.
"In review of our files there were a couple of very minor issues, but when reviewing Ms. Rahbe's files, we found a large number of errors," Freeman said, adding all five of Rahbe's files contained significant errors.
He said examples of these errors include a false score on an IQ test, sections of protocols left completely blank and incorrectly or falsely documented the "ceiling" portion of certain tests -- an element Freeman said was essential in determining a student's test score.
"When you don't establish the ceiling, you don't know that the true score was actually achieved, that the student's performance was not measured correctly," Freeman said.
Rahbe became emotional during the hearing, saying she had not received so much as a write-up in the five years she served the school system. She said she was targeted by the school system due to personal illness.
"None of this came about until around October, and the only two things I can think of as to why [the school system] would want to get rid of me is one that I'm sick and that while I've been sick, based on issues they cannot identify, that could be possible mold I've been exposed to," Rahbe said. "I brought that to [the school system's] attention in October and, since then, all this other stuff has come along. In December I did ask for accommodations because even if mold isn't an issue of my illness, it can compromise people with lowered immune systems."
She also said that she was not given the opportunities necessary to review and correct the documents as was reported in the hearing.
"A lot of that information is not true," Rahbe said. "As far as documentation, I wasn't given the opportunity to look through the files as [witnesses] stated; I don't think an hour would give anyone time to look through several documents [witnesses] claimed were there, and for anyone to be able to give a legitimate explanation as to what had happened and to see if what [witnesses] are saying is true.
"I can understand a group of professionals who are looking at [the documents] saying what's wrong, I can understand why other people could look at it and say, 'Wow! OK, that could be a problem,' but not giving the person accused an opportunity to look through that information and give explanations or to at least understand 'what if I was doing these things,' and that's the whole thing -- so what if I was [incorrectly completing documents] -- I need to know because I am not aware."
Harper and Freeman said the school system will be contacting parents individually whose children were affected by the evaluations.