THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 30, 1995 TAG: 9507300084
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: ROANOKE LENGTH: Medium: 59 lines
Future Miss Virginia contestants may have to provide documentation for their grades and honors, as pageant officials attempt to avoid taking away a winner's crown again, they said.
On Tuesday, Amber Medlin became the second Miss Virginia crowned this month after officials took Andrea Ballengee's crown away for falsifying her fact sheet.
``Obviously there was a hole, and it had not come up before,'' pageant board member Ralph Smith said.
Before, ``we just accepted the fact sheet more or less, without asking for details,'' board member Elizabeth Bowles said.
To repair the hole, the pageant's Executive Director Margaret Baker said she and the board will look into several possibilities.
The pageant may ``require that every fact sheet has transcripts of grades attached to it,'' Baker said.
Also, she said, contestants who claim to be members of national honor societies may need documentation.
And the requirement that contestants list their grade-point averages on the fact sheet probably will be discontinued because the question is ambiguous, she said.
On her contestant's fact sheet, Ballengee had listed academic and athletic honors that she had not achieved. During the pageant itself, she also said she'd been accepted into law school when, in fact, she had been placed on a waiting list.
Board member Steve Musselwhite said the issue has brought an awareness to the entire pageant community - statewide and nationally.
``It's forcing everyone to live up to a higher standard,'' Musselwhite said.
Smith said the attention the issue has drawn shows just how seriously the public takes Miss Virginia and the pageant.
``We put (Miss Virginia) on a pedestal,'' Smith said. ``Naturally, we want as credible a person as we can get.''
The pageant board has had to deal with criticism for not taking Ballengee's crown away after the first questions were raised about her fact sheet. The pageant's initial support of Ballengee was questioned in newspaper editorials, letters to the editor in papers across the state and other public forums.
Musselwhite said he understands those criticisms.
``Based on the information given at that time, we made the right decision,'' Musselwhite said. ``What the public doesn't understand is that we weren't presented with all the facts.''
Baker said the pageant was satisfied with Ballengee's claims that the first four mistakes were misunderstandings and were not intentional.
``The whole thing is, after we made the first decision, other things came to light that we could not ignore,'' Baker said.
KEYWORDS: BEAUTY PAGEANTS MISS VIRGINIS PAGEANT by CNB