Emails from a DeKalb County Board of Education member show his advocating Atlanta’s annexation of a portion of west DeKalb County, disenfranchising 3,000 students and shifting tax revenues to the city, annexation opponents said.
Board member Marshall Orson denied his advocacy, saying his emails were misunderstood.
Some DeKalb County residents in the affected area are calling for Orson’s resignation, saying he is not working in the best interests of the district.
“What he wrote (in the emails) should concern any parent in this district,” said DeKalb County resident Dawn Forman, an 18-year educator who now home-schools her 7-year-old son. “When he’s been confronted (about advocating for annexation) he’d always say he wasn’t orchestrating this.
In emails from his personal email account, Orson discusses the matter with Atlanta City Councilman Alex Wan and State Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver, D-Decatur.
“As we all have discussed at various times, a key to a successful annexation push will be to keep school attendance zones intact, particularly Fernbank and Briar Vista,” Orson wrote Oct. 31, 2014. “However, there are people in Clairmont Heights who are under the impression that Atlanta is not interested in annexing east of Clairmont.… Including CH is critical to the overall push and it is critical that the message on this point is consistent. Thoughts?”
In another email, from Oct. 17, 2014, Orson appears to be introducing Wan to Decatur City Commissioner Scott Drake, stressing cohesion after annexation as their districts would be adjacent each other.
Efforts to reach Orson for comment Thursday were not successful. He told an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter that he was not advocating annexation but was merely urging that proponents keep neighborhoods intact. Were they to take portions of DeKalb County into Atlanta, he said, he hoped they would take entire elementary school attendance zones or even the whole Druid Hills High School cluster.
“My goal was, if annexation were to ensue, we should try to find a way to keep the cluster together,” he said. “I am recognizing that if annexation were to occur – I’ve taken no position on annexation itself – I want there to be an orderly process.”
He said that an email might not have been the best way to communicate that sentiment. “This is one of those things where you say, in retrospect, I shouldn’t have sent it,” he said, adding that it was dashed off in haste on his cellphone.
Staci Melton an attorney who lives in the Druid Hills/Shamrock neighborhood in DeKalb County, said she asked Orson via email in the fall to resign.
“All I know is from the beginning of the Atlanta annexation, he was at every meeting, publicly pretty much advocating for it,” said Melton, who has two children attending DeKalb schools. “He is supposed to represent his constituents, and he was throwing the district under the bus.”
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