EDISON — Richard King had spent years leading church mission trips around the globe, but when he read about school conditions in this poor, isolated part of Southwest Georgia, he said, “God just got a hold of my heart.”
So there the Stone Mountain pastor was last week on a hot dusty morning, pads on his knees and tar on his hands, helping to replace a rotted roof at Calhoun County High School. The building has seen few repairs since it was built 50 years ago.
King, discipleship pastor at Mountain Park First Baptist Church in Stone Mountain, led more than 70 members here to lend a hand to a largely forgotten part of rural Georgia, a place he knows few people in his part of metro Atlanta have ever seen, or even heard of.
» PHOTOS: Volunteers spruce up Calhoun schools
“If I thought about it, yes, I knew this existed in Georgia,” said King, who has taken about 30 mission trips over the years to places like Mali and Serbia. “But until I saw it, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
King and church members, a few local folks and the staff of one of the poorest school districts in Georgia spent Memorial Day weekend and last week trying to breathe new life into the system's three schools. They scraped and hammered and cleaned and sanded and painted. They tore out rotting wood, put in new walls and replaced light fixtures, 40-year-old toilets and ancient ceiling tiles with an inch of dust on top of them. In a school media center, they organized boxes of books collected and donated by students from Camp Creek and Mountain Park elementary schools.
“The people of Mountain Park Baptist Church are a godsend,” said Alvin Williams, chairman of the Calhoun County School Board, who was wiping down walls at the middle school with students. “This is what America should be about, just people helping each other.”
King got the idea for the southwest Georgia mission trip after reading about the plight of Calhoun County last June in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The story told of the stark differences between the state's largest school district — Gwinnett County — and rural systems like Calhoun, which can offer students only the basics and doesn't have the money to upgrade its schools.
“Reading that paper that day, God got me by the throat and told me to do something,” he said.
‘Like stepping back a little bit in time’
Calhoun is a district of about 600 students in a no-stoplight town 80 miles south of Columbus. Vast fields of peanuts, cotton, wheat and corn spread across much of the county, and small churches dot the rural landscape. Of the county’s population of slightly less than 6,700, about one-fifth reside in the local state prison. The non-incarcerated population is about half of what it was a century ago.
Members of the mission said it was like revisiting Georgia of the 1950s.
The public high school is a half-century old and attached to the middle school. Much of the school, from science labs to lockers, is original. More than 90 percent of the system’s population is African-American. Across the highway from the high school/middle school is a charter school, where a majority of the students are white.
Comparing property tax structures shows the striking difference between Calhoun and Gwinnett. One mill in Calhoun County — $1 per $1,000 in assessed taxable value — brings in $115,000 worth of property taxes for the district. In Gwinnett, one mill equals about $23 million.
While the economy has picked up in parts of Georgia, Calhoun County continues to struggle. The county suffered a blow in February when its hospital closed. The Georgia Department of Labor estimated the unemployment rate at 10.7 percent in April.
Calhoun Superintendent Danny Ellis has spent much of his tenure trying to figure out how to keep the tiny system afloat. He furloughed teachers, cut bus routes, left instructional coach jobs unfilled. He has fewer overall teachers in his high school than some Gwinnett schools have teaching one subject, like English.
“It makes you realize that not very far from home, things are very different,” said Celina Garrett, who was scraping paint from a men’s room floor in the Calhoun County high school. “Having sent three kids through Gwinnett County schools, they got what I expected them to get. I don’t think I ever once stopped to think there were kids that weren’t getting what my kids got.”
Marvin Wyatt, a district maintenance manager for Gwinnett schools who has been doing mission trips with King for more than 20 years, said it’s easy to get caught up in the notion that it’s people in other countries who need help.
“Actually, you’ve got the same situation here,” said Wyatt, a Dublin native. “This is old-time Georgia. We don’t want to admit it, but there are two Georgias. When we came down here, it was like stepping back a little bit in time.”
Sleeping on cots and air mattresses
King made several scouting trips to Calhoun to see how his church could help. Ellis, the Calhoun superintendent, said the group donated pencils, copy paper and other supplies at the start of the school year. Mountain Park First Baptist bought 71 pairs of tennis shoes for needy children for Christmas. The church also bused the Calhoun teaching staff up to Gwinnett County to shadow teachers and build relationships with local educators. A few days before Memorial Day, mission members began arriving in Calhoun County to work on the schools.
They slept on air mattresses and cots in classrooms and showered in the locker rooms, after they cleaned them. The county doesn’t have hotels to accommodate the missionaries, Ellis said. The group ate its meals — prepared by staffers and community volunteers — at the school as well.
Ellis said some of the repairs the missionaries made might not have gotten done for four or five years because the system simply doesn’t have the money.
But to some locals, it was just as important that somebody showed they cared about their tiny school system.
“It’s a wonderful thing,” said Roosevelt Carter, who works at a local tire shop and has a daughter at Calhoun High. “You’ve got somebody who wants to come down and help, and it makes you want to help them, too. When you have somebody outside who is concerned, it makes you want to help your own community.”
His wife, Carol, who works at the school, said, “I am not surprised people do great things, I’m surprised we were chosen. It was like a miracle.”
Doug Cox, executive pastor at Mountain Park First Baptist, said, “There are so many churches in the Atlanta area that could be doing what we’re doing, but they are not just because somebody hasn’t put the idea in their head.”
King said his group’s work won’t be the end of their involvement in Calhoun County. He’d like to set up a children’s Christmas party later this year, and maybe a day camp. He wants to find a way to help the students dream big, to aspire to technical school, or college, the way kids do in Gwinnett County.
“A lot of the kids here just do not have a vision for anything beyond Calhoun County, and I hate that,” he said.
“I have a relationship with some of these folks. You understand their heart and the situation they find themselves in. They are good folks and I want to come back down here and do it again.”
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