ACCREDITATION: Clayton schools no longer alone in hot water

A west Georgia school district has five months to make improvements or face losing accreditation.

The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools voted last week to place the Haralson County schools on probation, SACS president and chief executive Mark A. Elgart said.

Haralson County, which has 4,000 students, is about 50 miles west of Atlanta on the Alabama border. Buchanan is the county seat.

SACS cited Haralson for problems similar to the issues that led to Clayton County Schools’ accreditation loss. On Sept. 1, Clayton, which has 50,000 students, became the nation’s first district to lose accreditation in nearly 40 years.

SACS investigators said they found governance problems by Haralson school board members, including micromanaging, not following their own policies and ethics violations.

Among the problems were board members interfering with employment decisions, telling coaches which students could play sports and moving classrooms without the authority of the board, according to an SACS report.

The board members’ actions were not only against board policy, but “sound judgment,” SACS wrote.

Haralson has until April to meet seven mandates, including training, following its own policies, amending hiring procedures and following the district’s chain of command.

Like Clayton, Haralson has struggled with governance issues for the past several years. The district was on warning status before SACS moved it to probation this week, Elgart said. SACS also placed Haralson on probation in April 2005.