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| Whoops! Image source: ANN News |
Last week it was revealed that teachers at an elementary school in Himeji City, Hyogo Prefecture, gave 117 students participation certificates for a contest, despite never having submitted the students’ works due to having accidentally lost them.
According to the Himeji City Board of Education, last September, teachers at Aoiyama Elementary School collected a total of 263 compositions from the school’s 4th, 5th and 6th with the intention of entering them into a journal contest. However, before the compositions were sent out 117 of then went missing. School officials suspect that the compositions were thrown out due to having been stored near the paper trash bin of the school’s copy room.
Teachers at the Himeji elementary school never informed students or parents about the accident. Instead, teachers made the 117 students think that their compositions had been submitted and put on display by giving them extra participation certificates that the group organizing the contest had sent them.
The Himeji City Board of Education has stated that the school principal decided to do this in order to keep school morale up. Furthermore, they indicated that they would be providing guidance to the principal and taking measures to ensure this sort of incident does not occur again.
