Background on the candidates
District 3
Michael A. Erwin, 44, the incumbent, was appointed by Gov. Nathan Deal. An assistant professor at Georgia Gwinnett College and a Navy veteran, he graduated from North Carolina Central University and has a Ph.D. in biological sciences from the University of South Carolina. He is married with two children.
Atticus LeBlanc, 34, owns real estate and construction businesses. He has an architecture and urban studies degree from Yale University. He is married with three young boys and a baby on the way.
District 4
Karen Carter, 51, an incumbent, was appointed by Gov. Nathan Deal. She chairs the business and social sciences department at Georgia Perimeter College’s Clarkston campus and previously chaired the paralegal studies program at Atlanta Technical College. A lawyer, she has a law degree from Ohio State University and graduated from Denison University in Granville, Ohio.
Jim McMahan, 48, an incumbent, is a mortgage broker. He attended Georgia State University and Wofford College. He is married with two school-age daughters.
District 5
Thad Mayfield, 58, the incumbent, was appointed by Gov. Nathan Deal. He works in business development and management. He graduated from Tougaloo College and has an MBA from Mercer University. He is a single grandfather with two children.
Vickie B. Turner, 59, is headmaster of The Augustine Preparatory Academy of Atlanta. She graduated from Bowling Green State University and has a Master of Education degree from Troy State University. She is a married grandmother, with three adult children.
A proposal to peel off a group of DeKalb County public schools into an independent “charter cluster” has emerged as a wedge issue in the July 22 runoff election for school board.
There are plenty of other concerns, from accreditation to a low graduation rate. But the race for three school board seats could boil down to one hot-button issue: Each race features a candidate who supports the charter proposal and another who doesn’t.
“The charter vote is the line for a lot of people,” said Michelle Penkava, a mother of two who lives in the Tucker area and has closely followed the election. “For people who understand it and are aware of it, it’s a big deal.”
Last year, a group of residents in and around the affluent Druid Hills neighborhood coalesced around a new law allowing schools to peel away from their districts’ central offices while still receiving taxpayer dollars. The proponents of the Druid Hills Charter Cluster contend the DeKalb administration is wasteful and they could produce better outcomes with the same money.
The school board scrapped the petition in a 5-4 vote in November, after the administration said it would drain money from the district, harming the remaining children. The petition has been renewed, though, and the pending election could shift the balance in its favor.
Tucker is outside the Druid Hills cluster area. But Penkava, who chairs the Tucker Parent Council, has noted broad frustration over the quality of education in her area, and sympathy for the proposal. There’s been a lot of talk in Tucker, Dunwoody and other parts of north DeKalb of copying Druid Hills if the cluster succeeds. In a new twist, the Brookhaven City Council recently moved to establish a charter school overseen by city leaders.
The cluster idea has been less popular in south DeKalb, said Zepora Roberts, a former school board member there. Poverty endures in that part of the county, and some there fear wealthier neighbors to the north want to pull from the district, leaving the poor kids on their own, she said. “The low graduation rates — people are concerned about that more than anything,” she said. “We can’t do anything about that by breaking up.”
There are other concerns in this election. In 2012, The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools threatened to strip DeKalb’s accreditation over poor governance. The district got off probation after Gov. Nathan Deal intervened the next year, replacing six elected school board members with his own appointees.
The organization has yet to restore DeKalb to full accreditation, though, and has warned of the importance of this election. Two of the governor’s appointees opted not to run, and only one of the other four won outright in the May primary. Two of the remaining three lack the full advantage of incumbency because they were shuffled into districts they did not originally represent when the Georgia General Assembly shrank the board by two members, effective January 2015.
Because of the redistricting, one of the governor’s appointees, Karen Carter, is now battling elected incumbent Jim McMahan on his own turf in northeast DeKalb. McMahan voted for the cluster while Carter voted against it. Another appointee, Thad Mayfield, was moved into a district in southeast DeKalb and faces a challenge from private school headmaster Vicki Turner. Mayfield voted for the cluster, but at a recent election forum Turner said she would have “fear and trepidation” that the model would create an “elite” system that gives a quality education to only some students.
A third appointee, Michael Erwin, is defending his seat against businessman Atticus LeBlanc, who has made an issue of Erwin’s vote against the charter cluster.
The posturing over charter clusters has taken on racial overtones for some, including parent Katrina Edmondson. She watched a June election forum attended by all six candidates, and was troubled by the references to a “north” and a “south” DeKalb, given the distribution of color and money in the county.
“Charters are the big hot button because, from what I heard, this is a racial issue,” said Edmondson, who is black. “It’s about the elites. Did you not hear the code words? … The division bothers me.”
Penkava, the mother from Tucker, attended the same forum at DeKalb Medical Center. People in her area are nervous about handing over control to independent charter groups, she said. But they are also sympathetic to innovation that could improve student outcomes. Fewer than six in 10 black students graduate from DeKalb schools within four years.
The next school board will have another big decision: selecting the district’s next leader. Superintendent Michael Thurmond’s contract expires in June, and he has said he does not want an extension. Despite the effect these decisions could have on the county’s future, the election has been a blip on most residents’ radar.
About a fifth of DeKalb’s voters turned out in May. The seven school board races drew 61,530 voters — in a school district with 100,000 students.
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