At nearly 40 percent of Atlanta schools, too few people have volunteered to serve on the new local boards, as required at every school under the district's new "charter system" model.
That comes after DeKalb County schools rejected the charter system model, in part, because of concerns over staffing those local school boards.
Last year, 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. All Georgia school districts have had to pick one of three options for school oversight — charter system, strategic waivers or status quo. Charter systems and strategic waivers come with varying levels of freedom from state regulations on things such as student-teacher ratios and teacher pay. They also get varying levels of state accountability. Or school systems can choose to stick with the status quo.
Under Atlanta’s charter system model, each individual school will have a board. The district calls them local school governance teams, or “GO Teams.”
The local boards will set performance goals for their schools and approve school performance improvement plans. They will also have input into selecting principals, setting school budgets and staffing, and curriculum planning.
Atlanta pushed back the date of the local board elections to recruit more candidates and give people more time to participate in planning for their schools' futures, Superintendent Meria Carstarphen said Monday. Those elections, originally scheduled for January, will now be held starting March 8.
The district will run a city-wide advertising campaign including radio ads, billboards and yard signs to encourage candidates to run. Dozens of people have said they are interested in serving, said Angela Smith, the Atlanta Public Schools official overseeing the charter system transition.
“We have two months to change that interest into intent to run,” she said.
Each local school board will have nine voting members: Three parents, three school staff members, two community members and a “swing seat” drawn from any one of the three categories.
The school’s principal is a non-voting member. High school and middle school teams will have a student member; high school student members can vote on some items.
Most of the 26 schools without enough volunteers are elementary schools, though Crim High School is also on the list, according to a school board report. Of those 26 schools, a few are one person short of the number needed.
After The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a story regarding the lack of local board candidates earlier this week, Carstarphen said that suggesting that there weren’t enough people interested in serving on the new local school boards is unfair.
“I think it leads to impressions about our schools that are unfair…like we don’t have enough parents who are interested,” she said. “It’s important that we get the time we need to finish the process.”
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