Having been there before, Atlanta’s education leaders know a thing or two about recovering from problems similar to those facing DeKalb County’s school system.
Like DeKalb, schools in Atlanta were put on probation by their accrediting agency because of infighting on the school board.
After an arduous, two-year process, the Atlanta school system returned to full accreditation last November and has some tips for DeKalb’s incoming school board members if they hope to do the same.
Atlanta’s first step was to make its board members understand the gravity of the situation and stop bickering among themselves, said Superintendent Erroll Davis. Loss of accreditation would make it harder for graduates to get into college and could diminish grant funding.
“If we can get everybody focusing on educating kids, then we’ll make a lot of progress,” said Davis, who was hired in July 2011, six months after the Atlanta school district’s probation started. “The most important thing was for individual board members to decide that they wanted to emerge from this. Once they decided that, they did it.”
One early action taken by the Atlanta Board of Education was to start working overtime. The board agreed to meet every Monday evening — and some weekends — to address concerns raised by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools until they were resolved.
“It allowed us to get the work done. It allowed us as a board to coalesce around the importance of the system as opposed to individual board member issues,” said Atlanta school board Chairman Reuben McDaniel. “From a tactical perspective, I would recommend it.”
But gathering at least once a week, instead of just once or twice a month for regularly scheduled meetings, wouldn’t have made much of a difference if the board hadn’t learned to get along. Atlanta Public Schools relied on consultants to provide training for working as a group instead of dividing into political factions, McDaniel said.
Mark Elgart, CEO of AdvancED, which oversees SACS, said school systems need stable managers at the top to provide direction.
Both school districts hired interim superintendents — Davis in Atlanta and Michael Thurmond in DeKalb — with extensive leadership experience. Davis had been chancellor of the University System of Georgia and the chairman of the board for Alliant Energy Corporation; Thurmond was the state’s labor commissioner.
“I’m becoming more convinced that getting somebody with a strong leadership background is more important than getting an educator who wants to be superintendent,” Elgart said.
Pressure from students, parents and accreditors motivated school board members to get over their personal differences, said Atlanta board member Cecily Harsch-Kinnane. The board heard from students that its dysfunction could harm their future.
“We had gotten distracted with infighting and once we shifted our focus back to our work, it changed the dynamics of the board,” she said.
One key difference between the Atlanta and DeKalb situations is that six of DeKalb’s nine board members were removed and replaced by Gov. Nathan Deal, while Atlanta’s board was left intact.
The three months lost while the DeKalb school board faced removal gives it less time to meet SACS demands for emerging from probation, Elgart said. DeKalb has until the end of the year to meet goals set by SACS to restore the district’s emphasis on student education.
But the changes on DeKalb’s board could work to its advantage because the new board members are less likely to bicker, Davis said.
Atlanta’s board was able to overcome its differences by setting ground rules for how members would treat each other, make decisions and carry out plans, said Alexis Kirijan, chief strategy and development officer for Atlanta Public Schools.
“The board knew what was at stake,” Kirijan said. “When they realized the position they had put the district in, they fully committed to doing the work.”
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