Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 25, 1995 TAG: 9507250098
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SHANNON D. HARRINGTON AND DAN CASEY STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
After scrutinizing Amber Medlin's fact sheet like the credentials of a Supreme Court nominee, Miss Virginia Pageant officials say they will name her as successor to Andrea Ballengee at 6 p.m. at the Hotel Roanoke and Conference Center.
"She's somebody who will make everyone proud," said pageant spokesman Bud Oakey.
Medlin, who entered the pageant as Miss Virginia Beach, was runner-up to Ballengee.
Pageant officials say they have checked everything on her fact sheet - and they mean everything.
A stack of papers about two inches high on pageant executive director Margaret Baker's desk Monday included documentation of essentially all of Medlin's claims - from membership in the Alpha Epsilon Rho honor society to whether or not she really had been crowned "Neptune Princess."
"The board asked that [Medlin's] fact sheet be fully investigated so that there are no chances of having future problems," Baker said.
But even if the board had not asked Baker to do this, she said, she would have had to do it anyway.
"If I sent a fact sheet into Atlantic City [headquarters of the Miss America Pageant] that was wrong, I would really be in trouble," she said.
But the board did find one discrepancy.
One member of the pageant's board of directors said the board was in a quandary over whether they should crown Medlin because her college grade-point average was a smidgen lower than she claimed on the fact sheet she submitted.
Medlin listed her grade-point average as 3.0.
"We don't know what to do," the board member said Monday. "Would it be fair to take it from Andrea and give it to [Medlin] if her fact sheet isn't exactly right, also?"
But Oakey and Baker said the board wasn't really in a quandary over the issue. "It was just part of the investigation process," Oakey said.
The pageant requested an opinion from two schools Medlin attended - Radford University, where she graduated, and Norfolk State University - on whether her stated grade-point average was misleading.
Paul Harris, Radford's vice president for student affairs, wrote that the fact sheet's question about the contestant's G.P.A. may be confusing because it is "sandwiched" between two other questions about the contestant's major. "This positioning would lead you to believe that your request was for the G.P.A. for the major."
His conclusion was that Medlin's claim of a 3.0 was not an embellishment. Pageant officials would not disclose what her actual G.P.A. was, saying that it varied depending on how it was calculated.
Whether the grade point average question is on the fact sheet next year has yet to be determined, Baker said.
"There is a good possibility we might drop the G.P.A [question]," she said.
Ballengee's crown was taken away Thursday, two weeks after a caller to The Roanoke Times raised questions about a claim on her fact sheet.
Ballengee said she was a member of the college honor society Phi Beta Kappa when she was not; said she graduated from Virginia Tech magna cum laude when she had not; and claimed to have won the "most outstanding female athlete" award in high school - when it went to another student.
The board backed her at first, with members saying they thought the inaccuracies were unintentional. But last week they voted to strip her of the crown after discovering that she had not been accepted to the University of Miami law school, as she had claimed during the pageant.
At least one of the contestants interviewed last week suggested that the inflating of resumes is a common practice among pageant contestants, and perhaps none of them could be held up to a standard of strict truth.
"You could check any contestant's application. Everyone fluffs up their resume. Every contestant does it," said Leigh Krause, Miss Central Shenandoah Valley 1995. "It's like, if you're a farmer, are you going to put down `farmer' or `agricultural technician'?''
But Ballengee's resume "was a little more exaggerated or inflated" than others, Krause said.
by CNB