For new Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent Meria Carstarphen, expectations are high and time is short.
Carstarphen officially started work as the district's new leader Monday. She faces a host of challenges including raising graduation rates that hover at 59 percent, repairing the image of a school system still tainted by the stigma of a test-cheating scandal and getting the district's often inefficient bureaucracy to work better for schools. School starts in one month, and some Atlanta parents, residents and staff are impatient to see evidence of change under a new administration.
Former APS superintendent Erroll Davis steadied the district in the aftermath of perhaps the nation's biggest test-cheating scandal. Now many say it's up to Carstarphen to lead the Atlanta schools forward. She's been asked to improve everything from test scores and special education services to school meals and bus routes. And she faces intense scrutiny throughout the district and the region.
Carstarphen says she’s already begun making changes to how the district operates.
Among the differences Carstarphen says parents and students will see by the time school starts Aug. 4 is an emphasis on attendance. The district will be pushing out the message that attendance for students and staff from Day 1 is essential, she said.
“It’s one of those common-sense approaches to how to we improve the experience in school,” she said. “We need people to turn up on the first day of school and be ready and excited.”
Carstarphen, who previously worked as superintendent of the Austin, Texas, school district, has actually been working for the Atlanta school district since shortly after she was hired in April. She formed a "transition team" whose work was funded with about $260,000 in private donations.
Atlanta has about 20 new principals this year, many of them selected with Carstarphen's input. Carstarphen says she's already changed the principal selection process to include more staff input and plans to tweak it more with the goal of recruiting top principals as early as the fall. She has started to examine where the district should move away from an earlier high school redesign that split Atlanta high schools into individual academies. Last fall, the APS board voted to ditch the idea of independent theme-based schools on a single campus at Washington High School. This year, the three theme-based academies at Therrell will be united under a single principal.
And Carstarphen has begun reorganizing APS' central office to make the district's expensive bureaucracy more functional and do a better job of supporting schools. She says she plans to create a "sea change" in the district's culture to put children first.
“I do think people understand that,” she said. “And if they aren’t up to making that transition they really don’t have a place on the APS team anymore.”
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