Imagine a school system where teacher input is used to improve teaching techniques. Where administrative decisions are made by volunteers who are motivated not by money and power, but by the welfare of the students. Where teachers no longer feel that their opinions will be met with anger or worse, not even heard at all.
That kind of situation is what proponents of the Druid Hills Charter Cluster envision for the Druid Hills area. The charter cluster can provide necessary improvements over the current administrative control by the DeKalb Board of Education.
The biggest advantage to becoming a charter cluster is that the Druid Hills area will have more autonomy in deciding how things are run. Instead of relying on a central office to dictate policies, the governing board, along with the schools’ staff members, will determine how the schools are run. The governing board will have the power to decide everything from curriculum to staff hiring to cafeteria menus. And that’s a good thing.
In a school system as large as DeKalb County’s, it is nearly impossible for central office personnel to see the direct effects of the policies they implement. The charter cluster will have a much smaller student body, and a lot fewer schools. It will be much easier to tailor policies to fit the student body, and much easier to see if those policies are working. In addition, increased teacher input will ensure new policies are effectively implemented.
Increased teacher input will also eliminate the “culture of fear” that SACS cited as one reason for putting DeKalb schools on probation. SACS said that in DeKalb, many employees were afraid to speak out for fear of losing their jobs. Because the charter gives control over hiring to individual schools and a local governing board, teachers will no longer need to fear their jobs are on the line when they offer suggestions or criticism.
In fact, because the charter is locally run, teacher input will be not only welcome but necessary in developing policies tailored to benefit students. These alone are strong arguments for the formation of the cluster.
Teachers and staff in the Druid Hills area are fed up with what they perceive as a long and storied history of being ignored. Many teachers throughout Druid Hills are threatening to leave the county if the school board denies the petition. If the board has any interest in providing students with the best education possible, they should approve the petition and give great teachers hope and incentive to continue teaching.
Some argue that the cluster is bad for DeKalb as a whole, contending the cluster will divert funds away from the rest of the county, or that its formation will allow the cluster to limit its student body and increase divisiveness within the county. These claims are untrue.
If Druid Hills and its feeder schools become a charter cluster, nothing in the rest of DeKalb County will change. The cluster will receive 97 percent of the combined funding that its members would have been entitled to if the area remained non-charter. Per-pupil funding in the rest of the county won’t be affected.
The attendance zones won’t change, either. All students already attending schools in the cluster are entitled to spots in those schools, including regional transfer students participating in programs such as special education.
Some also complain that the number of waivers the cluster is applying for seems excessive. What must be understood, however, is that the charter must have waivers to do anything different from the county. If the petition organizers thought the cluster might ever have an interest in acting differently from the county in a certain way, they had to apply for a waiver.
Just because those waivers exist doesn’t necessarily mean the charter will immediately throw out county policy once they are approved. In fact, for the first few months, things are likely to stay very much the same as the cluster gets organized. As the charter finds its footing, however, it will be able to phase out county policies it finds unnecessary or unhelpful.
The formation of the Druid Hills Charter Cluster can only benefit the students and staff within its walls and has no foreseeable consequences for those outside. If the board really has students’ best interests at heart, it will approve the charter petition.
