Denaya Todd’s heart sank when she learned where her son would attend first grade.
“Oh, no,” she thought. “Not Thomasville.”
For years, Thomasville Heights Elementary School has been one of Atlanta’s worst schools. It ranks near the bottom of all Georgia schools under the state’s rating system.
Just a quarter of fifth graders pass all their core classes and state tests. About 90 percent are on welfare or food stamps. Many walk to school from the apartment complex across the street where parents say gunfire is all too common.
She’s proposed hiring charter-school groups to run Thomasville and four other schools.
Her plan tests the theory that outside groups can do a better job of educating black, low-income students than their local school district.
If it works, Atlanta will have succeeded in turning around high-poverty schools that have struggled for years — a task at which dozens of other districts have failed. Carstarphen will have delivered on her promise that under her leadership Atlanta, home of one of the nation’s largest school cheating scandals, would actually educate all of its students.
“I was hired 18 months ago for this very purpose,” she told parents earlier this month.
But her plan is risky. Few districts nationally have tried similar plans, and their results have been mixed at best. And the groups Carstarphen would hire have little experience turning around schools as poor and troubled as Atlanta's.
Still, if Carstarphen doesn’t do this to Thomasville now, the state might do it later.
If voters approve Gov. Nathan Deal’s Opportunity School district plan this fall, Thomasville would be among about two dozen Atlanta schools up for potential state takeover the following year. The state could close them, turn them into charter schools or run them itself.
As districts nationally face takeovers under similar plans, Atlanta is one of the few to attempt drastic steps to get ahead of the bulldozer and cling to some measure of local control.
“Right now we have a choice. If the state takes a school, they could close it, end of story,” Carstarphen said.
In Thomasville’s gray concrete bunker of a building down the road from the federal penitentiary, Denaya Todd said her son has been doing the same lessons for months. Last year, he was in the accelerated program in his Fulton County kindergarten class.
“Something has to be done,” Todd said.
Related Atlanta Public Schools news:
- Atlanta turns to charter school groups to rescue sinking schools
- APS proposes school closures, charter school management
- Sickout? Half of teachers absent at APS school up for new management
- National, local foundations with charter school ties fund APS work
- Which Georgia schools are in danger of state takeover?
- Atlanta schools hope big changes will avert state takeovers
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