CHICAGO (CN) - Charter school officials falsely accused one of the nation's top high school basketball players of cheating on a math test and gave him a zero, rendering him ineligible to play in the state tournament, Jonathon Mills and his mother claim in Cook County Court.
Mills, who attends North Lawndale College Preparatory High School, is nationally ranked as one of the top 50 high school players in the country and is a ranked player in every scouting service in the country.
He allegedly had a 2.0 GPA in February 2009, before he took the final exam in trigonometry/algebra. He needs to maintain a 2.0 in order to play in the state basketball championship.
He says he scored a 96 on the exam, but school officials later accused him of cheating. Principal Robert Karpinski changed his grade to a zero, thereby reducing his GPA to 1.8.
Karpinski, math department head Nicole Howard and another principal, Lacel Palmer Pratt, spread the word that Mills had cheated "without any substantive evidence or basis to believe that such a disclosure was true."
Mills and his mother, Flora White, claim the false allegation damaged Mills' reputation and put his college basket scholarships in jeopardy.
They are represented by Oliver Spurlock.
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