Two months into the job as interim DeKalb County school superintendent, Michael Thurmond continues to deliver the same broad message of optimism: DeKalb’s schools will get on track, but it won’t be overnight, and it won’t be easy.
Thurmond is navigating a narrow strait, seeking to appease parents shouting “off with their heads” about central office holdovers from previous administrations, and to impose stability on a district that has lurched from one crisis and one lawsuit to the next.
The most current crisis is also the potentially most damaging. The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, citing financial mismanagement, school board dysfunction and nepotism, placed the 99,000-student district on probation in December and threatened to strip its accreditation. In response, Gov. Nathan Deal ousted six board members and replaced them from an applicant pool culled from more than 400 names.
In his first months, Thurmond has crisscrossed the county, speaking to neighborhood groups. He has spent a lot of time in north DeKalb areas discussing secession.
While the drive from his Stone Mountain home to north DeKalb is a matter of a few miles, Thurmond said the politics make it seem as if 2,000 miles separate them because of historic political divides.
“We have to recognize that some of the dysfunction we have seen in the school board is really dysfunction in the county,” he said. Schools will not thrive unless communities find common ground, he said.
While people keep hearkening back to the greatness of DeKalb schools 30 years ago, Thurmond said the homogeneous middle-class system that existed three decades ago is gone.
“That population today has 71 percent of its students qualifying for free and reduced lunches,” he said. “Not that those children can’t learn and can’t be successful, because I qualified for free and reduced lunch. I was the grandson and great-grandson of Georgia sharecroppers who could not read and write.”
Another challenge today is that 20 percent of DeKalb’s students are English language learners or have parents who speak English as a second language in the home or not at all, Thurmond said. “We have not engaged or understood the great opportunity that presents,” he said. “One mistake we did make is, we fired all the interpreters.”
Asked about the stubborn racial divide in DeKalb, Thurmond recalled that he graduated from Clarke Central High in Athens 42 years ago — in the first year that the black and white schools consolidated. He spent 11 years in segregated schools and was 18 before he spoke to a white peer in school, he said.
A historian by avocation, Thurmond said African-Americans were denied any access to education for 250 years and then faced “separate but equal” schools for the next 150. It’s only been four decades that blacks and whites have learned side by side in Georgia, he said.
“You cannot undo 400 years of history in 40 years. It doesn’t bother me when I meet people who may not have evolved on the race issue. The nation is still addressing the vestiges of a history that we luckily have put behind us,” Thurmond said.
In a question-and-answer session at a recent joint meeting of the DeKalb Chamber of Commerce and Leadership DeKalb, Thurmond outlined what has become his canon of leadership: 1. Open lines of communication. 2. Transparency. 3. Listening. “In order to govern anyone, you have to be willing to listen,” he said.
Thurmond told the packed house that DeKalb’s property digest fell from $25 billion to $18.9 billion between 2008 and 2012, a drop of more than 24 percent. And the state cuts continue.
“We will do a better job of using the resources we have. We have lost our way,” said Thurmond, adding that DeKalb schools became caught up in “politics and adult messes.”
While DeKalb needs money, Thurmond said that’s not his greatest challenge “Money is tight, but money is never really the primary challenge; it’s the lack of will, lack of ideas, lack of innovation. (The annual school budget of) $750 million is still a lot of money.”
Thurmond has a 12-month contract but has not ruled out staying longer if asked. When he does leave the interim post, Thurmond said, he intends to turn over to a new school superintendent a functioning and achieving district.
“He or she won’t walk into the situation that I walked into. People deserve better than that.”
