Cheryl Atkinson has spent the past 30 years climbing the education ranks, going from teacher to principal to superintendent and, along the way, establishing a reputation for turning around struggling schools.
That has made her a candidate to head school systems in Cleveland and Atlanta, and now she’s the leading candidate to take over DeKalb schools, Georgia’s third-largest school system.
As the daughter and granddaughter of teachers, Atkinson says that, for her, education is a calling.
“I remember, as a child, I was having difficulty reading,” she said. “So much so that they told my mother that I probably wouldn’t finish high school. But my mother, as well as some dedicated teachers, really took the time to help me learn to read, and I succeeded. My teachers said that I wasn’t going to be one who’ll slip through the (academic) cracks, and I never forgot it.”
Atkinson, 52, was born in Dayton, Ohio, and raised in Charlotte, N.C. She said that she thought about becoming an accountant while at the University of North Carolina. But, after a summer internship crunching numbers, she knew that she wanted to be a teacher.
“I’m good at math, but I wasn’t passionate about it, not like teaching children,” she said.
Atkinson started her career in the Carolinas, then taught in Virginia before moving up the administrative ranks. Starting in 2000, she served as a director of staff development for about two years in the Atlanta area, in Rockdale County, before getting on the superintendent track in 2002 in Charleston, S.C. She served in five different jobs at four districts across the East Coast, including the massive Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C., district with its 127,000 students, where she was both a regional and then deputy superintendent.
The DeKalb Board of Education is expected to vote soon, possibly as soon as Aug. 29, on naming her its next superintendent, a $275,000-a-year post.
“In her career, she has taken on challenged districts and turned them around,” said DeKalb school chair Tom Bowen. “She is the best candidate to help move our schools forward.”
“We are confident that, once DeKalb residents get an opportunity to hear directly from her, our parents and community members will be impressed with her creative approaches to increasing academic performance,” said Bowen.
But the nine-member DeKalb Board of Education isn’t unanimously convinced that Atkinson is the right person to lead its district of about 96,000 students.
On the day she was named as the sole nominee for the job, two DeKalb board members sent out scathing letters on the Internet decrying the choice. Atkinson helms an academically troubled Ohio district, they pointed out. And it’s tiny compared to DeKalb. The Lorain City School district, in the Cleveland area, has 7,600 students and a $170 million budget. DeKalb dwarfs Lorain with its 100,000 students and a $775 million budget. Dissenting board members questioned whether Atkinson was up to making the leap to running a big-city district.
DeKalb parent Allyson Stone, who has one child in school, echoed that sentiment.
“How do you go from being the boss of a school district with just one high school to ours, which has two dozen?” Stone asked? “That’s a big leap.”
But Atkinson counters that she’s served in high-ranking jobs at districts as large or larger than DeKalb’s.
“I was the person responsible for everything from academics to budget to on-campus law enforcement,” she said, in reference to her time in Charlotte.
But she also keeps her focus on the students and not school bureaucracy.
As a teacher, she said, she was always looking out to make sure that she and her fellow teachers had the support that they needed from the district, so much so, that her principals encouraged her to go into administration.
“I didn’t want to leave the classroom, but my principals kept telling me that I was a natural [in administration],” she said. “I made the change because I felt I could make a bigger impact on students lives.”
DeKalb has a number of challenges, including 22 schools that failed to make “adequate yearly progress” in the standards set by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, and the parents of more than 1,300 students have asked that the district transfer their kids to better schools.
Atkinson said that she has faced similar challenges in her career, the latest in Lorain, which has made some soon-to-be announced academic gains.
“Turning around a school isn’t an overnight thing,” she said. “But we’ve been told that we’re moving up a tier in the school ratings and that’s a huge accomplishment.”
She added that her other accomplishments include getting tough concessions from the local teachers union, the Lorain Education Association, that amount to about $2 million in taxpayer savings and helping to reduce the school’s deficit from about $10 million to $8 million.
But she said that her focus is always the students.
Atkinson is married and has three sons. She said that learned to play golf so she could spend more time with her husband and children.
And although she’s not eager to keep moving them from state to state, they understand her dedication to education, which was evident from early on, she said.
“I feel like it’s a calling,” she said. “I want to help as many children as I possibly can.”
About the Author
