A high school principal in Sukumo, Kochi Prefecture, was found to have faked school record reports on an acquaintance's son, who dropped out of the school last year, so the youth could take college entrance exams, the prefectural board of education said Wednesday.
Kiyoshi Shibata, 60, faked the reports in response to a request by the boy's father, a 54-year-old municipal elementary school principal in Nakamura in the same prefecture, according to the board. The son dropped out of Sukumo High School last March while a sophomore.
According to the board, the boy, after dropping out, passed the "daiken" college preadmission test. But since the colleges he wanted to take entrance examinations for needed school records, the father asked Shibata to write the reports in a manner enabling his son to take the exams.
Shibata wrote four documents as if he were one of the boy's teachers, and wrote that the boy was "expected to graduate," the board said. Shibata also boosted the boy's grades, it said.
The principal's actions surfaced after one of the two universities where the boy intended to take entrance tests found it strange that the record describes a dropout as being expected to graduate, and contacted the teacher who supposedly wrote the records.
The board is studying the incident to decide what measures it will take against Shibata and the elementary school principal.