Atlanta dropping small-schools concept

Wednesday, March 18

Thursday, March 19

It was an educational experiment that seemed to be working: divide big high school campuses into smaller, more intimate schools so teachers could get to know their students.

Now, to the dismay of some students and parents, Atlanta Public Schools is ending the experiment — consolidating small schools across the district, even some of the more successful ones.

Less than four years ago, then-Superintendent Erroll Davis let the public in on a secret: The Early College Academy, one of the “new schools” at Carver High, had some of the best numbers in the district. The school in a low-income area south of Turner Field posted a 100 percent graduation rate, and students were showing big gains on state tests, though not top scores.

"That is the highest-performing school we have right now," Davis said at a public forum in 2011. "I don't know that everybody knows that. We haven't publicized it."

Early College shared a campus with three other, lower-performing theme schools. Students had to test into it, and they took classes at nearby colleges, which was novel in 2005 when Davis’ predecessor, Beverly Hall, led the initiative that established Early College.

By 2012, though, Davis had determined that small schools weren’t outperforming traditional programs enough to justify the extra expense, such as multiple principals at each campus. The district estimated it could save $700,000 per campus with consolidations.

That work began last year, with D.M. Therrell and Booker T. Washington high schools.

On Thursday, Carlton Jenkins, the district’s chief academic officer, waded into an agitated crowd in the Carver High library to explain what was coming. Too many kids were ill-served by the small-school model and it was time to “right size” the school. “We’ve looked at the small school results,” he told them. “It’s mixed.”

On April 13, the school board is scheduled to vote to downsize Carver from the current four schools to two, doubling the size of Early College and establishing a "comprehensive" school for the other half of the student body. Officials will hold public meetings soon to discuss consolidations at other schools.

Jenkins said more students will have access to the higher performing Early College.

Parents and students fear the results of the disruption.

“If something’s not broke you don’t fix it, right?” said Carl Alexander Williams, who said his daughter is in the School of Technology at Carver. “Why not let it exist as it is?

Raven McQueen, a junior at Early College, put Jenkins on the spot, demanding to know why APS was leaping to this new model so quickly. Why not wait and see how it works at Therrell and Washington, she asked.

“Great question,” Jenkins responded. But he didn’t have an answer. “I’m going to have to think more on that.”

McQueen, 16, fears losing a personal connection with her teachers. She moved to Carver from a big high school in Cobb County where she felt like “just a face — just one of some 2,000 kids. But here,” she said, “my principal knows every student’s name.”