The organizers of the Druid Hills Charter Cluster will officially present their petition to the DeKalb County School District on Friday, initiating a lengthy review process:
Interim Superintendent Michael Thurmond will have 60 days to assess the proposal and make any requests for changes.
The proposal, with any revisions, then goes to the school board, along with Thurmond’s recommendation. The nine-member board gets 30 days to consider it before voting.
If the board approves it, the petition then goes to the Georgia Department of Education for final review. The process does not allow for appeal if the DeKalb board denies the petition.
The Druid Hills Charter Cluster would be governed by a self-appointing body, unlike the county school board, whose members are typically elected.
The authors of the petition named seven initial board members: Matthew S. Lewis, Theresa Johnson-Bennett, Scott L. Bonder, Frederick “Fred” L. Daniels, Jr., Kathleen Boyle Mathers, David G. Roberts, and Robert B. Thorpe.
When each member’s term expires, the governing board will select a successor from a pool of nominees. The nominees will have been identified by appointees of school leadership teams at each of the seven schools in the cluster.
The school leadership teams will comprise members elected by parents or staff at each school plus others appointed by those elected members.
Parents, teachers and administrators at seven DeKalb County schools veritably shouted that they want more local control when they voted overwhelmingly to establish the first charter school “cluster” in Georgia.
But the more than 1,100 people who trooped to Druid Hills High School to cast their ballot this week represent a fraction of those who would be affected.
Taxpayers without children got no say. And of those eligible, less than a quarter turned up.
Proponents of the vote say they are still proud of the turnout, which they calculate at around 23 percent.
“I have not heard anyone who had anything to say about the turnout, except that it was dramatically higher than anyone expected,” said Matthew Lewis, a leader of the petitioning group and a member of the governing board that will be established if the county school board and state approve it.
Others, though, said the turnout seemed suppressed, and noted that whites appeared to outnumber blacks by a wide margin. The vote organizers have so far provided only the total vote, with no breakdown by race, geography or status (parent or teacher).
“The people voting don’t match the racial diversity of the schools,” said David Schutten, as he stood on the steps outside the polling place Tuesday evening. Schutten, who is president of the Organization of DeKalb Educators, the leading advocacy group for the district’s teachers, said he saw a “handful” of blacks enter the polling place in the gym and guessed that nine-in-10 voters were white. “The lack of diversity is troubling.”
The measure passed with 92 percent of the 1,130 votes counted.
The cluster petition would create a governing board with authority over hiring, firing, pay, curriculum and other major decisions within a cluster of seven schools: Druid Hills High and the six schools that feed it — Druid Hills Middle and Avondale, Briar Vista, Fernbank, Laurel Ridge and McLendon elementary schools.
The petitioners are the first to test a state law that allows groups of schools to break away from school district bureaucracies. The Druid Hills Charter Cluster could become a model for other big Georgia districts. Every district in Georgia is facing a July 2015 deadline to either decentralize authority from the central office or lose popular waivers from state requirements, such as caps on class sizes.
DeKalb officials have three months to consider the proposal. If the school board rejects it, there is no appeal to the state. If the board approves it, the state must still sign off.
On Tuesday, parents got one vote per student attending or eligible to attend one of the cluster schools. The most recent official enrollment count, in the spring, showed nearly half the students in the cluster were black and about a quarter were white.
Andre Merrill would have voted against the petition, but said it caught him by surprise and he missed it. The financial analyst would have gotten a vote for his daughter, since they live near Avondale Elementary. She attends a special school — Robert Shaw Traditional Theme School. It’s near their neighborhood but was not included in the charter cluster.
No one from the petition group visited his daughter’s school to announce the pending vote, Merrill said. “You really have to be in the circle to know what’s going on.”
Merrill, who is black, said he opposes the charter proposal because it seems to him that mostly white parents are pushing it and he doesn’t feel they worked hard enough to involve parents like him. He noted that a lot of the communication about the petition happened online, and said many parents he knows, especially immigrants, do not have Internet access.
“If they’re making decisions for our community,” he said, “shouldn’t they hear our voice?”
James Prigatano, a petition organizer, said the group did work to reach parents. They held informational events in or near schools, visited apartment complexes and stood in carpool lanes.
A lot of parents from Avondale Estates, which is largely white, apparently got the message, he said. Not so many from Avondale Elementary, which was 90 percent black last spring, may have, though.
“We had a ton of turnout from people from the Avondale community, but unfortunately hardly anybody from the actual Avondale Elementary showed up,” he said. “Obviously that’s a concern.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution calculated Tuesday’s turnout at 20 percent — less than the percentage calculated by the petitioners. The 3 percentage point difference likely resulted from different enrollment figures provided by the school district at different points in time. Enrollment typically grows each day at the beginning of the school year as parents register their children, and the student count provided to the AJC Wednesday contained about 500 more students than the number used by the petitioners to calculate turnout.
It may be an imperfect comparison, but the turnout in the local school board race last year at precincts mostly within the cluster was higher than both numbers, about 26 percent.
Lewis, the lead organizer and potential governing board member, said that wasn’t a very big difference, though, especially since these were volunteer parents with little funding while an official election campaign is driven by candidates with backing from donors.
“A large and interested group of parents and teachers voted — by any measure and in excess of every prediction made to us by those who follow these things,” he said.
Lewis said cluster supporters have a vested interest in ensuring high quality at all the schools within it. If any one school fails to reach its performance goals, he said, the entire cluster could lose its charter.
About the Author
