Dispute keeps Wake County students out of math competition

Some of Wake County’s brightest students will miss out on a prestigious math competition because of a dispute between school officials and event organizers over the posting of the organization’s copyrighted material.

Organizers of the Math Olympiads for Elementary and Middle Schools, also called MOEMS, want the Wake County school system to pay about $5,000 in damages because a teacher posted past tests online, material that the non-profit group says is copyrighted. Wake school officials have refused to pay the fine and are severing the district’s ties with the competition, saying they’ll look for alternative academic opportunities for students.

“We don’t feel that an infringement occurred, so we’re not willing to meet their terms,” Wake schools spokesman Michael Yarbrough said. “We’re looking at other options.”

But Nicholas Restivo, executive director of the New York-based group that runs the program, said the posting of the material hurt the integrity of the program and that he doesn’t intend to let the matter rest.

“I’m a former principal and director of math in several New York area school systems,” Restivo said. “I know what teachers need to hear from their supervisors. If they’re not letting teachers know the copyright laws, that’s a very serious problem.”

Parents who had hoped their children would participate in the Math Olympiads are in the middle.

“It’s another example of the school system letting the children down,” said Anne Farmer, a parent at Mills Park Elementary School in Cary. “The kids are the ones who are suffering. They’re not the ones who made the mistake, and we’re punishing them.”

The Olympiads are problem-solving contests for teams of up to 35 students in grades four through eight. Organizers say the contests stimulate enthusiasm and a love for math.

Last year, nearly 150,000 students from 6,000 teams worldwide participated in the Olympiads. Teams from North Forest Pines Elementary School in Raleigh; Farmington Woods, Green Hope, Mills Park and Weatherstone elementary schools in Cary and West Cary Middle School received awards last year. Several other Wake schools participated.

The competition’s website says the material provided to schools is copyrighted and that “under no circumstances may the actual contests or the individual problems and/or solutions be published in any form, including the Internet.”

Restivo said his group recently learned that a Wake elementary school teacher had put past tests online. Yarbrough, the Wake spokesman, said the teacher thought she had permission to post material from 2008 but took it down after hearing from Math Olympiads’ attorney.

Wake school officials dispute that a violation occurred, citing the fair use doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material.

Yarbrough said the problems were posted for students at the year-round school to use so they could continue to study while they were tracked out of class. He said the Math Olympiads procedures that accompanied the problems stated that copies could be distributed.

While Restivo said they let teachers make copies, he pointed to four places on the group’s website that state that the material can’t be posted online. He said posting the test questions hurts the ability of the group to sell books containing past tests and compromises the integrity of the contests.

“Anything they post is a big deal for me because those old tests are sold by us,” Restivo said.

Restivo said he still intends to collect damages from Wake, including pursuing legal action if North Carolina’s largest school system doesn’t pay.

When situations like this have occurred, Restivo said, school districts have paid between $3,000 and $10,000 in damages. He said $5,000 would be a “drop in the bucket” for a district the size of Wake, which has a $1 billion budget and whose 155,000 students make it the 16th-largest in the nation.

Some parents say Wake’s refusal to settle shows how the district is not meeting the needs of academically gifted children.

“It’s becoming more and more in the parents’ realm to have to enrich their children,” said Sonia Fitzpatrick, a parent at Mills Park Elementary. “It shouldn’t be like that. It should be equal resources.”

This story was originally published October 2, 2015 at 6:13 PM with the headline "Dispute keeps Wake County students out of math competition."