Decatur’s city commission recently approved a one-year moratorium on all annexations, a condition requested by City Schools of Decatur’s school board.
Decatur’s school board remains in negotiations with DeKalb County’s school board over a proposed DeKalb bill stating that boundaries of a school district can’t be extended by a city annexation unless approved in a separate referendum.
The impact on Decatur would be separate boundaries for the school district and the city after any future city annexation.
“We want every child in the city of Decatur going to Decatur schools,” Decatur Board Chair Lewis Jones told the AJC. “We don’t want a system of old Decatur and new Decatur, where new Decatur kids can’t attend our schools.”
The bill was originally packaged as Senate Bill 53 during the 2019 legislative session, passed by both the House and Senate but subsequently vetoed by Governor Brian Kemp.
SB 53 was intended to protect DeKalb County’s school district from losing students after Atlanta’s 2018 annexation of Emory University’s 744 acres. After Kemp’s veto then-DeKalb Superintendent Stephen Green vowed to keep “fighting,” adding that, “Senate Bill 53 is coming back. This is encroachment, this is infringement on DeKalb County and the DeKalb County school district and it must stop. It must end.”
Believing that some form of SB 53 will return to the legislature in 2021, Decatur’s school board is hoping the 12-month window gives the district enough time to work out a compromise with DeKalb’s school board.
The proposal offered by CSD is that it would allocate all school taxes from any future annexation to DeKalb’s school board. Decatur would keep only the amount needed to educate those new students assimilated from the annexed properties. That amount is determined by multiplying the number of annexed students by average cost of educating one student.
The DCSB, according to Jones, would get the leftover money plus 100 percent of any commercial annexation and most of any residential annexation.
“We think it’s a good and fair proposal,” Jones said. “We hope we can both agree [within] 12 months. But so far we don’t have an agreement in principal.”
In truth the city has no plans for annexation in the foreseeable future, according to City Manager Andrea Arnold. One trigger for annexation is the potential municipalization of the entire county, for which there was serious discussion as recently as 2015 but has since dissipated.
Decatur also wants to clean up its “partial parcels,” or property that’s partly in DeKalb, partly in Decatur. The city annexed 12 partial parcels in Dec. 2016, and Arnold said there are roughly a dozen more, but those could wait until the moratorium expires.
