It was the first day of school in Atlanta Tuesday, a time of rallies and well wishes for the year that lies ahead, but no students got the kind of pep talk that the incoming sixth-graders at the new John Lewis Invictus Academy heard.
The Atlanta congressman and civil rights legend for whom the school was named showed up to share his hard-won advice with the pre-teens: Faith can deliver success.
“Maybe one of you will be president of the United States,” the 77-year-old told the boys and girls in the auditorium. “If you believe it, you can do it.”
School opened across the city Tuesday and in Decatur and Cherokee County. Buford, Marietta and Coweta and Forsyth counties start later this week, followed by most of the rest of metro Atlanta on Monday.
The schools will be striving to cultivate a desire to learn while trying to tame the wilder instincts of youth. They'll also be hoping to see improvements over their recently released scores on last spring's standardized state tests, the Georgia Milestones. Low-performing schools that fail to improve will feel the prod of the Georgia Board of Education, under a new mandate from Georgia lawmakers that describes a new state intervention process. It could lead to loss of control over schools and even removal of school board members.
Schools like the new one named after Lewis, a Democrat who has represented Georgia’s fifth congressional district for three decades, might need more faith than others will to succeed. The area it serves in southwest Atlanta is among the poorest in the city, and ample research has tied faltering school performance to poverty.
Indeed, the school, also named after the Victorian era poem, "Invictus," about strength and courage against adversity, is replacing one of the poorest-performing schools in Atlanta. The incoming sixth-graders would have attended Harper-Archer Middle School, where all students qualified for government-subsidized school meals in 2016, and two out of three failed the state standardized math tests.
Credit: Bob Andres
Credit: Bob Andres
Harper-Archer will serve only the remaining seventh- and eighth-grade students this year, and eighth-graders the next. Then, it will close, which is fine by parents like Amanda Bradley, who came to the Lewis Academy Tuesday to hear the congressman speak and to watch her child start middle school.
“A lot of schools around the neighborhood, they’re going down,” Bradley said, adding that she would not have allowed her daughter to attend Harper-Archer. “They were just pushing them through. I don’t think it was a good school.”
She has high hopes for the Lewis Academy because she knows the principal, who was just promoted from the elementary school her daughter attended. Usher-Collier Heights Elementary showed gains on the state tests under Gregory Parks' leadership and scored well on the state's "climate" rating, which includes survey results from parents and tries to measure the invisible factor of school culture. Superintendent Meria Carstarphen and the school board wanted to wipe away the old middle school culture for this attendance area and start anew.
Credit: Bob Andres
Credit: Bob Andres
After Lewis and and the herd of reporters, handlers and district leaders had left the building, Parks read the names of each of his new students, and assigned them to their teachers.He peppered his roll call with insights delivered in a soft voice. "It's important to be respectful," he said at one point. "I choose to be respectful." Later, he said some believe they can win an argument by raising their voice. "I disagree."
Afterward, he explained that he believes success or failure grows from a state of mind. “I think it’s important to use the power of words to encourage people,” he said, adding that flowers are important, too. He’ll have them planted around the school — Lewis had told the children he likes to plant flowers — because he thinks the effort behind such attention to detail will register with his students, and with his staff. He said he believes his students will score better on the state tests than the sixth-grade students at Harper-Archer did last year, and said that belief will push him to do what it takes to make it happen.
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