Commenters on the AJC Get Schooled blog largely condemned the rejection of the Druid Hills charter cluster last week by the DeKalb County school board, maintaining the plan had strong parent and teacher support at the seven affected schools and ought to have been approved. Here is a sampling of reader comments:
Broch: The DeKalb board and the administration circled the wagons. Top priority is maintaining the status quo, their jobs and their perquisites. Students are near or at the bottom of the priority list. Bureaucratic inertia at its finest.
Mary: The five courageous DeKalb County school board members who voted down the Druid Hills Charter Group tonight may have saved Georgia's public education as a true public educational system, through their brave and committed votes. Bravo for each of your votes, which gave testimony to your commitment to all students and to public education. Thank you for holding firm in your vision of what public education must be, and must become, in serving all students in Georgia equally. I salute you and I thank you.
DunwoodyMom: These new Board of Education members appointed by the governor were put in their positions with the idea that they would make better decisions for DeKalb students. So far, they get a big fat "F." I am still beyond angry at what transpired Monday night, and I don't even live in the Druid Hills cluster.
Erin: For those parents who spend countless hours volunteering, staying involved with their schools and helping their children succeed, you will be held back and told to accept mediocrity to stay in line with other school districts. Sad and disappointing. It's sad when you would love to support public schools, but can't if it is at the expense of your children.
First: The trick would have been to approve the cluster to see if the cluster experiment works and could be replicated in other parts of the county. Approval would have been an unpopular decision, and Thurmond's constituency in the DeKalb school apparatus would be fractured — clearly a political rejection. The sadness is that these white people will answer the rejection with something harsher for the whole county. Thurmond is naive. He should know that white folks do not take kindly to being told "no" about their children's education.
Howdy: Why does everyone always seem to look at the "racial" in any issue? It seems to me that the Druid Hills Charter Cluster offered a new approach that deserved a chance to succeed. If it worked, fine. If not, we could always return to where we are today. It just seems to me that the DeKalb school board is stuck in the same rut. It wants to control and is afraid that someone else's idea may prove to be better than this "let's keep doing the same thing and hope for a different outcome" mentality.
Zorro: I suppose it would have been OK to say "no" if one had a good reason, but that is absent here. DeKalb has no reason to deny this idea in the current situation. The district has no credible plan, no clue, no competence, just a sad mantra that they are great. Make no mistake, the crowd that started this is not going to stop, and they are going to make DeKalb very sorry they picked this fight. The board knows not who they are dealing with. If you saw "Mommie Dearest," the famous line is coming.
