Michael Thurmond
Education: Bachelor’s degree in philosophy and religion from Paine College; juris doctorate from the University of South Carolina’s School of Law. He also completed the Political Executives program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Career: An attorney and author, in 1986 he became the first African-American elected to the Georgia General Assembly from Clarke County since Reconstruction. In 1997, he became a distinguished lecturer at the University of Georgia’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government. He was elected Georgia Labor Commissioner in 1998 and served three terms in that office.
Family, personal life, etc.: Thurmond and his wife Zola have a daughter, Mikaya. He is a member of the Ebenezer Baptist Church West of Athens. One of Thurmond’s books, “Freedom: Georgia’s Antislavery Heritage, 1733-1865” was awarded the Georgia Historical Society’s Lilla Hawes Award and the Georgia Center for the Book listed Freedom as one of The 25 Books All Georgians Should Read. He has served on the Board of Curators of the Georgia Historical Society.
Cheryl Atkinson
Education: Ph.D. from Virginia Polytechnic & State University and undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Career: Before term as DeKalb superintendent, she was superintendent of the Lorain City Schools in Ohio. Before that, deputy superintendent of the Kansas City, Mo., schools; a regional and then associate superintendent in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district; associate superintendent of Charleston County schools; staff development director and then executive director curriculum services of Rockdale County schools in Georgia; a principal at schools in Orlando and Hampton, Va.; an assistant principal in Suffolk, Va.; and nearly a decade teaching in Virginia, Kansas, South Carolina and North Carolina, interrupted by a year as curriculum coordinator at the University of Kansas
Family, personal life, etc.: Her husband Terrence is a retired construction manager. She has three grown sons, the youngest a graduate of Stephenson High School in DeKalb, and a grown stepson. Her hometown is Dayton. Atkinson discovered in a graduate school lecture that she had symptoms of dyslexia and realized that she’d learned to cope with help from her grandmother, a teacher, who drilled her as a child during summer visits.
Cheryl Atkinson is out and former Georgia labor commissioner Michael Thurmond is in as leader of the DeKalb County School District, the third largest in the state.
After first failing to muster a majority, the DeKalb school board tried a second time Friday and by a 5-4 vote approved a separation agreement that pays Atkinson $114,583 to leave. Then, they voted 7-2 to approve an employment agreement with Michael Thurmond, a former Georgia lawmaker who went on to become state labor commissioner.
Thurmond will be paid the same $275,000 salary Atkinson got, and will receive three months’ pay if the DeKalb board replaces him before his year-long contract expires.
He said he had no interest in holding the position long-term. Thurmond said the search for a permanent superintendent would begin immediately and he would leave as soon as one is found.
The transition at the top of a system that educates almost 100,000 students comes at a perilous moment. An accrediting agency has threatened to strip DeKalb’s accreditation, alleging a multitude of governance sins by the school board.
The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools accused the board of nepotism and financial mismanagement, among other things, and placed the system on accreditation probation in December. That triggered a provision in state law allowing removal of the school board. The board goes before the Georgia Board of Education for a hearing on the matter on Feb. 21.
If the state board recommend it, Gov. Nathan Deal would have authority to remove all nine DeKalb board members. Neither Deal nor the state board chairwoman had comments about that.
Atkinson’s separation document and official statements describe the break as a mutual agreement, but she wasn’t around to comment. She’s been absent since her father died Jan. 23.
Marcia Coward, president of the DeKalb County Council of PTAs, said the transition comes at an unfortunate time of distress for the school system. She said she spoke with Atkinson a few weeks ago and believes the board pushed her out.
“I don’t think she wanted to leave,” Coward said.
Thurmond, 60, was a Democratic member of the Georgia House of Representatives from 1987 until 1992, when he and school board chairman Eugene Walker, then a Democrat in the state Senate, ran competing campaigns for a U.S. House of Representatives seat in DeKalb. Neither won.
Thurmond’s lack of educational experience and his ties to Walker disturbed some parents. Despite their adversarial run for the same seat, Walker and Thurmond worked together on legislative matters, such as reapportionment.
“I’m beyond angry,” said Paula Caldarella of Dunwoody. “His only qualification seems to be that he’s friends with a couple of board members. It’s almost as if these people are arrogant enough to think they can do whatever they want to.”
Don McChesney, who lost re-election to the school board last year, suspected the board’s chairman played a role in Thurmond’s selection. Walker and Thurmond go back decades, he said.
“All signs would point to Gene. They’re friends,” McChesney said.
Walker, who voted to hire Thurmond, acknowledged their prior working relationship, but said he recommended four people and Thurmond wasn’t one of them.
Marshall Orson, who unseated McChesney to become one of the three new board members this year, said he’s the one who brought up Thurmond’s name. No one else had considered him, Orson said.
Orson had seen Thurmond speaking publicly and in small groups over the years, and was impressed.
“He just had a way about him that drew people in,” Orson said. He said Thurmond’s lack of an educational leadership background seemed an asset, given the withering criticism of the public these days for so-called “educrats.”
Thurmond said he wasn’t hired because he was somebody’s friend. Rather, he was brought to DeKalb to help turn it around. After regaining full accreditation, he said, his biggest challenge is unifying a divided county.
He said after the vote that he looked forward to being a “bridge” between disparate groups in DeKalb. He said he was interested in the job because it was a challenge and because he believes in the importance of public education. Former colleagues on both sides of the partisan aisle praised Thurmond’s demeanor and leadership skills.
Sen. Jeff Mullis, R-Chickamauga, chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, described Thurmond as “a man of high character.”
“I’m confident he [can] do anything he commits himself to doing,” Mullis said. “He would make an excellent superintendent.”
Thurmond, a lawyer, has leadership experience beyond labor commissioner. Before that role, in the early 1990s, he directed a state agency that was a magnet for depressing news — what was then called the Department of Family and Children Services.
Georgia’s last Democrat governor, Roy Barnes, knows Thurmond well from their time at the Capitol. Barnes, now a lawyer in private practice, said he thought Thurmond would bring bracing, and necessary, change as interim superintendent.
“For an interim to kind of stir things up, I think Michael Thurmond would be a great choice,” Barnes said.
The son of a Georgia sharecropper who couldn’t read or write, Thurmond said public education is “critical to the future of this county and this state and this nation.
“I think we have to work harder to bridge the geographic, racial and political divides,” he said. He said being a bridge builder is “part of who I am.”
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