At nearly 40 percent of Atlanta schools, too few people have volunteered to serve on the local school boards required under the district's new "charter system" model, according to a report the school board is set to consider today.
Most of those schools are elementary schools, though Crim High School is also on the list.
Atlanta became a "charter system" — which gives the district more freedom from some state laws and potentially a little more money in exchange for stricter state accountability — last year.
The district has pushed back the date of the local governance team elections “to give people more time to participate in the final stages of the cluster planning process leading up to the elections process,” district spokeswoman Jill Strickland said.
Each school’s board — the district calls them “GO Teams” — is initially supposed have nine voting members: Three parents, three school staff members, two “community members,” a swing seat and the school’s principal. High school teams will have a student member, who will not have full voting powers.
Last month, DeKalb County schools rejected the charter system model, in part because of concerns over staffing the local school boards.
"The issues of equal education access and the capacity of Local School Governance Teams," a required feature of charter systems, "to govern were at the top," district officials said in delaying the application.
"We could get more autonomy without the added requirement of governance" in a charter district, DeKalb spokesman Quinn Hudson told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last month.
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