The departing Atlanta school board relinquished control in its last meeting Wednesday, handing the system over to a new board that will be responsible for the city’s educational recovery.
Tarnished by a cheating scandal, the outgoing school board members left plenty of work for their successors: hiring a new superintendent, raising academic achievement and evaluating how to make sweeping changes.
The old board went quietly Wednesday, with no last-minute moves involving the superintendent search or policies.
Newly elected members take office next month, filling six of the nine positions. The three incumbents who survived this year’s election are Courtney English, Byron Amos and Nancy Meister.
“From the ashes of a fire, like the cheating scandal, it puts you on a path for everything to be reimagined,” said small business owner Leslie Grant, one of the incoming board members. “I’m excited about the opportunity to re-look at everything.”
The past four years were marked not just by allegations of widespread cheating — a state investigation found that 185 Atlanta Public Schools educators were involved in changing students’ standardized test scores — but also by conflicts over redistricting and board infighting that attracted the scrutiny of the district’s accrediting body, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.
While the fallout from the cheating scandal is still playing out in court, school board members said they see the upcoming term as a turning point for APS.
“We’ll have a renewed sense of urgency. The new board is going to want to aggressively tackle the issues facing our kids,” English said. “The first thing we have to do is figure out what direction is north.”
In other words, the board will have to rally around a collective vision and list of priorities.
Besides finding a superintendent to replace Erroll Davis, who plans to retire, most board members have said they want to decentralize authority away from the central office, reconsider how to spend a $595 million annual budget, and decide on how to balance traditional and charter schools.
“They’re going to have to work together and compromise,” said Emmett Johnson, who decided not to seek re-election to the board after 16 years in office. “If you cater to the whims of adults, you’re doing a disservice to the children.”
The new board will be starting on an optimistic note after the system showed improvement this month in graduation rates and testing. Graduation rates rose from 51 percent to 59 percent last school year, and Atlanta students outperformed their peers in other urban school districts over the past decade, according to National Assessment of Educational Progress scores released Wednesday.
“We can build on recent successes, even though we’re not where we want to be yet,” said Matt Westmoreland, a high school history teacher elected to the board in November. “New people bring new ideas, fresh perspectives and energy.”
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