"School Violence Records Poorly Managed and Improperly Deleted; Student Records 'Copy-Pasted'"

An audit has confirmed instances of poor management and improper deletion of school violence records at some schools.

The Board of Audit and Inspection (BAI) released the results of its regular audit of the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education today (July 20).

The BAI has demanded that the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education establish measures to manage school violence counseling results and ensure thorough record-keeping practices.

According to the Enforcement Decree of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, teachers are required to actively intervene in school violence situations, verify facts through counseling, and ensure that all processes related to their duties are produced and managed as official records.

However, the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education failed to establish specific methods for recording and storing school violence counseling details, leaving the responsibility entirely to teachers.

As a result, a sample inspection of 155 school violence cases involving middle and high school students, reviewed by the Gangnam-Seocho and Gangseo-Yangcheon Offices of Education—which handled the highest number of school violence deliberations between March 2023 and November 2025—revealed that 143 cases (92.2%) were not submitted to the school violence committee because the schools had not kept the records.

In particular, among those 143 cases, there were 2 instances where some claims made by victims were not recognized due to a lack of objective evidence, as the counseling records were unavailable despite requests from the committee.

Furthermore, although the manual requires school violence committees to record and store meeting minutes, including individual committee members' discussions, the basis for measures taken, and the final consensus process, all 11 district offices of education under the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education only recorded the final results without documenting individual evaluation scores, grounds for decisions, or the consensus process. This made it difficult to verify how the measures were decided upon through discussion.

Some schools, misunderstanding the regulations, deleted records after a deliberation process even though they were not eligible for deletion, as the retention period (two years from the date of graduation) had not yet passed.

There were also cases where records were deleted after deliberations were held despite a lack of a quorum for the committee.

The BAI plans to conduct a comprehensive inspection of school violence committee decision-making practices through an audit of school violence response conditions in the second half of this year, and to develop improvement measures for issues such as the compromise of fairness in committee decisions.

Additionally, there were cases where the "detailed special remarks" section of student records was poorly written.

The BAI inspected the status of student record entries at 239 high schools in Seoul from 2021 to 2024 and confirmed that 803 teachers had entered identical content in the detailed special remarks for 51 or more students.

There were cases where a single text was used repeatedly throughout the year, where the same teacher recycled the previous year's text for a different year, and where a single text was used for both 1st and 3rd-grade students, despite their educational content being completely different.

In particular, 18 of these teachers wrote identical "comprehensive opinions" for more than 70% of the students in their classes, and some wrote the same comprehensive opinions for an entire class in a single day.

The BAI pointed out that the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education's checks on duplicate entries in student records were insufficient.

Furthermore, the BAI explained that despite the government's teacher reduction plan, the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education hindered the efficiency of budget operations by hiring more new and fixed-term teachers than the projected vacancies.

When establishing recruitment plans for new elementary school teachers, the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education excessively hired new personnel by increasing the number of projected vacancies without justification, resulting in a surplus of hundreds of teachers.

The BAI also noted that some elementary schools hired 496 fixed-term teachers outside of the authorized quota, while secondary schools hired 1,616. Because of this and other factors, 681.3 billion won more was spent on labor costs than the budget allocated by the Ministry of Education, which ultimately forced a reduction in funds for purchasing teaching equipment and materials.

(Photo: Provided by the Board of Audit and Inspection, Yonhap News)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.