The Atlanta Public Schools board has less than two months to salvage the district’s accreditation, with members still at odds over a policy that caused last year’s leadership coup and the board’s subsequent meltdown.
How members deal with it represents one last, crucial hurdle. The board otherwise has made significant progress since January, when Georgia’s primary accrediting agency put it on probation for poor governance and infighting among members.
Members agreed last week to overhaul an ethics panel that polices the board’s behavior. Effective Aug. 22, it will turn to outside agencies, including the Atlanta Bar Association, to recommend panelists instead of having board members appoint them. The agreement also included additional ethics training for the board.
Two weeks ago, state school board members unanimously agreed to let APS board members continue in their work, despite a state law that threatened their jobs. Weeks before that, the board coalesced behind new leadership and a new superintendent.
Its recent track record has encouraged those who watch the board closest. There is no guarantee of the outcome.
“The way they come out of this will help lay the groundwork of how they can work together in the future,” said APS parent Julie Salisbury, who helped start an advocacy group, Step Up or Step Down, following the sanctioning by the accrediting agency, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. “We are increasingly optimistic with every meeting we attend.”
The board’s problems stemmed from a series of 5-4 votes, beginning last summer, over how some members felt others were handling allegations of widespread cheating on student achievement tests. A state investigation into cheating on state tests last month implicated educators in 44 APS schools.
Members gave themselves the power to use a simple majority, rather than a two-thirds vote, to replace board leaders midterm. According to the board’s governing charter, those leaders would normally serve uninterrupted two-year terms.
The policy change set off an almost comically tragic chain reaction, as the board’s bickering reached as far as the state Attorney General’s Office. One faction of the board also sued the other, although a Fulton County judge forced them to settle the matter.
Still, the acrimony drew the attention of SACS. The agency saw a group almost at impasse because of a breakdown in trust among board members.
When SACS handed down its sanction in January, it gave the board six mandates for improvement. The mandates touched on various aspects of governance and leadership — policy-making, consensus-building, communication — generally meant to push the board to work cohesively.
“Boards get in trouble when they focus on management and not management oversight,” attorney Glenn Brock, who is helping the board with its accreditation work, said last week.
Revisiting the policy, however, still causes uneasiness. Policy experts last week suggested changes that would require a two-thirds vote to remove board leaders midterm, as well as a two-thirds vote to change the policy in the future.
“That doesn’t actually accomplish what we want it to do,” said board member Courtney English, who voted last year in favor of the coup. He does not support those changes. “We’re talking about stability. I understand that,” he said. “I think it definitely should rise above being a simple majority. But this just means I need to find one more vote.”
A preliminary vote on these latest changes to the policy could come as soon as Monday. If it passes, a second vote would be needed to make the changes final, likely by mid-September.
The original deadline for improvement set by SACS was Sept. 30. A spokeswoman for AdvancED, SACS’ parent company, confirmed to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week that it will send a review team to the district Sept. 26-27. The team will recommend whether the agency should restore full accreditation or continue any sanctions.
Its report likely won’t be released publicly until the end of October.
“The board has made substantial progress ... and is now in the process of developing its final report on resolution of the SACS [mandates], as well as preparing for the SACS site visit in late September,” said longtime member Brenda Muhammad, who the board elected as chairwoman in June to replace Khaatim Sherrer El, who resigned from the board July 11. Members are confident, she said, the agency “will clearly see that the board has taken this matter very seriously and worked hard over the past half a year to resolve the governance issues.”
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