The new school superintendent in DeKalb County wants people to trust her administration with nearly a half billion more dollars.
Superintendent Cheryl Atkinson announced Tuesday that she will create a 12-member panel to watch her administration spend the money on school construction. The move comes three weeks before voters decide whether to approve a sales tax delivering $475 million over five years.
"A lot of people have accountability questions," spokesman Walter Woods said. The panel will ask a straightforward question, he said: "Are we putting this money where it's supposed to go?"
Atkinson became superintendent last month, succeeding an interim leader who managed the system after scandal engulfed the administration of former Superintendent Crawford Lewis. Lewis and former Chief Operating Officer Patricia Reid were indicted last year on charges of racketeering, theft and bribery related to construction deals. Their cases have not gone to trial.
Lewis and Reid presided over the 2007 Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax, or SPLOST. That penny per dollar tax has produced $402 million so far, and funded the reconstruction of one high school and the renovation of a half dozen others. More work is planned with the $64 million the tax should generate before it expires next year.
If voters on Nov. 8 renew the tax for a fourth time, officials say it could pay for the replacement of seven elementary schools, a middle school a high school. Since 1997, the tax has generated $1.2 billion to build, or fund major work on, more than 40 schools.
This isn't the first sales tax oversight panel. Cobb schools have had one for years, and DeKalb had one on at least the most recent phase of the tax. Atkinson will appoint a half dozen members of the panel, and they in turn will appoint the other six.
That won't convince Rick Callihan of Dunwoody. The board member of the Dunwoody Homeowners Association said such panels were ignored in the past.
"I'd like to have the superintendent spend a little time on the job before I hand over half a billion dollars to pretty much the same entity that misspent it last time," he said.
But Ernest Brown of Lithonia served on a panel that oversaw the current tax, and said the construction programs were well-managed. "If you go back and look at what was promised and what was delivered," he said, "you would see that DeKalb did a good job." He said DeKalb's aging schools need five times more work than the tax would cover.
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