Will DeKalb school board oppose Gov. Deal’s takeover plan?
DeKalb County’s school board could go on record Monday opposing Gov. Nathan Deal’s plan potentially giving state control to schools deemed as failing.
The district announced a called meeting for Monday. The only agenda item is approval of a statement regarding Deal’s Opportunity School District, which, if voters in November approve a constitutional amendment authorizing it, could take schools from several districts across the state into one reform district.
Under Deal’s plan, the DeKalb district could lose 26 schools considered failing. The state list includes 27, but two schools have since been combined.
Several Georgia districts — among them Bibb, Cherokee, Clayton, Fayette, Henry, Jasper, Newton, Richmond, Rockdale, Savannah-Chatham and Troup — have approved resolutions opposing the plan. Deal said last week that some of the state's school board members have allowed failure to fester in some districts for generations, with mostly poor and minority children as victims. He added that they would not have sent their own children to failing schools.
The DeKalb meeting agenda did not say which way the statement would lean. Superintendent Steve Green has said he's seen takeover plans backfire, and has instituted a plan to address failing schools in-house.
“We believe the answer to boosting performance lies in a most obvious place — the classroom,” Green said last month in a written commentary. “We see no single, magic answer, just a laser focus on raising the quality of instruction and learning.”
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