Surprised. That’s how parent Andrea Shelton described her reaction this week after learning North Atlanta High was in such academic turmoil it warranted massive changes in leadership.
Shelton’s perception of North Atlanta didn’t line up with the picture of an underperforming school painted by Superintendent Erroll Davis at a community meeting Tuesday. “My view is this school needs to be a lot more than it is presently,” Davis told parents that night. “Performance data for this school says it has to improve and improve quickly.”
A sampling of data reviewed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows the school located in Buckhead, one of Atlanta’s most affluent communities, has a mixed academic performance.
About 62 percent of its students graduated in 2011, 10 percentage points above the district’s average of about 52 percent. The highest graduation rate was at Carver Early College, where 97 percent of students earned a diploma.
Davis highlighted North Atlanta’s rate in his comments Tuesday night, when he noted that four out of 10 students won’t graduate from the school.
Under the state’s old accountability system, which was ditched this year, North Atlanta High for years failed to meet annual academic goals. Only three other schools in the district had a worse track record of meeting benchmarks than North Atlanta, according to state data.
But the school is among the district’s best in other subjects. State data from 2011 shows North Atlanta’s SAT score of 1,439 was the second-highest in the district, just behind Grady High’s of 1,455. Passing rates on the End of Course exam in math 2 were the fourth-highest in the district.
Six of North Atlanta High’s key leaders were removed last week — two retired, four reassigned to other schools. A new principal, Howard (Gene) Taylor, starts Oct. 29 and will be allowed to build his own leadership team. But Shelton and other parents are upset about the changes and say Davis didn’t give a complete picture of the school, which seemed to make progress in the last 10 years.
“I visited the school when my son was in elementary school, and I wouldn’t consider sending him there,” Shelton said. “Now we have a school that is safe, it’s a stimulating learning environment, a school that the community is sending its kids to. That was unheard of.”
Atlanta school board chairman Reuben McDaniel said these aggressive changes aren’t unique to North Atlanta High. At Jackson High, the district hired a new principal at the school and has started an International Baccalaureate program. A new principal was also hired at Douglass High, said district officials. That school also failed for years to meet state academic requirements.
McDaniel said parents can expect more changes throughout the Atlanta Public Schools district as new data is used to measure how much students are learning at every school. “This feels drastic at the moment, but this is not an isolated incident,” McDaniel said. “I think you will see over the next six to eight months some serious overhaul of various schools.”
The decision to reassign North Atlanta’s staff because of performance concerns is also troubling to parents at other schools. Margaret McBride, a parent at BEST Academy High, said one of North Atlanta’s former administrators was transferred to BEST.
“This is what they are doing, bringing people that no other school wanted? I am horrified they would do this,” McBride said. “If she couldn’t perform at North Atlanta, why would they bring her to BEST?”
Superintendent Davis said Wednesday he believes there is a difference between individual performance and team performance. Those reassigned from North Atlanta may be excellent individually but are not excelling with the team, he said.
The district will review how it handled the ouster of the leadership team, Davis said.
“We accomplished an objective,” he said. “I have had some responses I’m not happy with. We’ll do a ‘lessons learned’ and see if we could have accomplished the objective without some of the upset.”
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