In a stunning announcement made during Tuesday night’s board meeting, City Schools Decatur Superintendent Phyllis Edwards announced her resignation from the job she’s held nearly 12 years. Edwards will remain at least through the end of the school year, and may stay as long as through December. Eventually, however, she’ll move back to Palm Coast, Fla., where she worked for 21 years as a teacher and assistant superintendent before coming to Decatur.
Chairman Garrett Goebel said the board will partner with an executive search firm or the Georgia School Board Association to initiate a national search for Edwards’ replacement.
Edwards arrived in 2003 when CSD enrollment was around 2500, nearly an all-time low, with 25 percent of all fourth graders leaving the system entirely, usually going to private schools. Edwards subsequently closed two schools and spearheaded a controversial re-organization of the school system into three (now five) K-3 schools and a 4/5 Academy.
She now leaves behind a flourishing and highly-regarded system, with CSD enrollment at an all-time high of 4336. But that enrollment’s projected to increase to 7,300 by 2019-20 even without annexation. CSD is figuring it will need over $100 million of renovation and new construction during the next five years, this in a city that was mostly built out by the 1960s.
Decatur Mayor Jim Baskett recently called CSD’s building needs “a crisis [that] affects everybody in the city.”
“It’s definitely a critical time,” she said in an interview with the AJC after the meeting. “But every year I’ve been here has been critical. I’ve been here a long time, and now it’s time to leave and move on. I figure I’ll keep working in some capacity, but I’m not sure what.”
Edwards, who turns 64 in May, isn’t calling this a retirement. She also said that health, neither hers, her husband Stephen Edwards nor their two adult children, is not an issue.
Edwards is only the system’s ninth superintendent since 1900.
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