Mike Chapman figured the firestorm had passed. His vote, joining the 4-3 Cherokee School Board majority and denying public funding for Cherokee Charter Academy, was cast in June. A few weeks later Governor Nathan Deal and the state stepped in with money so the school could open anyway.
In early August, however, Chapman’s inbox was suddenly filled with another round of “hate mail,” as he described it, over his anti-charter school vote. Cherokee party politics, where Democrats generally are opposed to the charter concept while Republicans remain supportive, were in full play.
The discord now seems ready to spill into the November election, with the threat of wide-reaching consequences. A third extension of a 1 percent Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (SPLOST) for education is on the ballot, to pay for, among other things, bonds that voters earlier approved for capital improvements and new schools to match the county population boom.
The November vote could be payback for the June vote, said Kelly Marlow, a member of the activist group Cherokee Parents for Choice. Her group, and others, fought three years for a charter school in the county and were rebuked three times by the school board and Superintendent Dr. Frank Petruzielo.
“They wouldn’t give us the charter school, so I’m not giving them their SPLOST,” Marlow said.
Cherokee County has been one of the top-ranked school systems in the state based on various student test scores. Its public schools are standard bearers of community pride and boast, right up there with the slower pace of life as a distant northern Atlanta suburb and the blue green horizon line of the mountains just up the road.
Yet the unrest in Cherokee over the school board’s June vote won’t dissipate. The local Republican Party two weeks ago denounced Chapman and the three other Republican school board members who voted against the charter and asked them to reconsider their vote, or surrender their party membership. All four declined.
“It was that resolution, passed by the Republican Party, that got it all stirred up again,” Chapman said this week.
Conrad Quagliaroli, a long-time activist and member of the Cherokee Tea Party Patriots, said the uprising against the school board and school system, over the charter, and the way it manages its estimated $527 million 2011-2012 budget, approved by the school board last month, is long overdue.
“They’ve got 4,800 people on the payroll, and only about 2,500 are teachers,” Quagliaroli said. “I won’t support a SPLOST until they get that total number [of employees] down to 3,500. They need to cut the administrative staff. In my mind, the SPLOST is dead in the water.”
Supporters of the SPLOST said the anger is misplaced. They say the school system has managed finances as well as it could; for instance, it didn’t raise the millage rate this year as other metro Atlanta school systems have done. Cherokee increased the millage last year, however, and Petruzielo said it will happen again if the SPLOST does not pass in November.
Donnie Henriques, mayor of Woodstock and the chair of the 2011 Ed-SPLOST Renewal Committee, said voters knew the SPLOST would have to be passed “multiple” times when it was first proposed in 2000.
“It was passed because 40 percent of schools were overcrowded and we needed to upgrade the school system,” Henriques said. “Unfortunately, some of the people involved in the charter school fight have let this bleed over into the SPLOST. They’re two separate issues.
“In politics, once a vote is over you don’t hold a grudge and try to get back at another issue. All that will do is hurt the kids.”
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