With three children in high school, Charmeca Jenkins is watching the school accreditation drama in Clayton County with a worried eye.
Jenkins stuck it out when Clayton schools lost their accreditation in 2008 and then struggled to regain it. Now the threat looms again, as the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools warned last week that county schools’ accreditation could be in jeopardy because of infighting among school board members and other concerns.
“I thought they wouldn’t be that stupid twice,” Jenkins said.
Loss of accreditation is rare in the United States, but the consequences can be great. Clayton is still struggling to recover from losing its accreditation four years ago. That led thousands of parents to pull their children out of county schools and cost Clayton at least $20 million in state education dollars.
Jenkins, who lives in Ellenwood, wants to move out of the county but can’t afford to sell her home in the current market. Her son Jermah, a senior, fears that an accreditation loss would threaten his college dreams.
Jermah, who plays baritone tuba in the school band, wants to attend a historically black college and hopes to get a scholarship. Some schools and scholarship programs will not recognize diplomas from unaccredited schools.
“The only thing I have left is prayer,” Jenkins said.
In addition to the impact on students, the 2008 educational debacle heaped even more trouble on a county hit harder than most areas of metro Atlanta as the economy went into free fall.
The business community was rattled last week by the new warning from SACS. The Clayton County Chamber of Commerce is weighing in, vetting candidates for November’s school board elections with questionnaires.
“We understand how vitally important a strong school district is for our community and for economic development,” said Tim Hynes, the chamber’s chairman-elect.
In 2008, Clayton was the first school system in the nation to lose accreditation in nearly 40 years.
In the months after the system lost accreditation, more than 3,200 students fled the district. The county’s overall population, which reached almost 280,000 in the late 2000s, is down about 20,000 people, according to census estimates.
The economic climate isn’t much better. About 17 percent of the county’s residents live below the poverty line, the highest number among metro Atlanta’s core counties. Clayton’s unemployment rate remains stubbornly higher than its metro neighbors, too, rising from around 6 percent before the recession to about 11 percent now.
The housing crisis hit Clayton with a devastating punch. The median price for homes in parts of the county dipped below $30,000 in 2010, and RealtyTrac’s mortgage foreclosure data shows there have been about 460 filings a month in the past year, down only slightly from the height of the recession.
No one knows exactly how much of the decline can be blamed on the accreditation loss, though it’s widely acknowledged that a good school system can be a magnet for new businesses, jobs and home sales. And a bad one can turn them away.
Businesses that felt the pinch in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis are worried about a repeat. Karen Koschel, manager of a School Box education supply store near Morrow, said the loss of accreditation had a trickle-down effect that, along with the down economy, resulted in slower sales.
“It was a lot of extra stress and fear,” she said. “We definitely had teachers buying less — sticking to budgets and returning excess supplies.”
At Butch’s, a popular Jonesboro restaurant, co-owner Gail Glancy said her business has struggled to recover since 2008.
“We’ve just had so many jobs pulled out from here,” Glancy said. “And the school system isn’t helping a bit.”
Residents and those in business cling to signs of hope, like the sparkling new international terminal that opened this year at Atlanta’s booming airport and spawned new office space, warehouses and other signs of life in a previously sluggish area. And they brag that parts of the blockbuster “Hunger Games” movie sequel were filmed in Clayton.
Any hint of reversal raises concerns, said Hynes, who is also president of Clayton State University.
“We can’t control perception,” Hynes said. “I’m taking a wait-and-see approach.”
SACS has given the district until Jan. 15 to respond in writing to the concerns raised in last week’s letter. A satisfactory response could mean SACS takes no action. Otherwise, SACS could decide to send a review team to the school system to investigate further. An investigation that would end in Clayton losing its accreditation could take years.
Chanda White of Rex, who attends school board meetings, sees problems with one or two board members, but believes SACS may be overreacting.
“It’s quite unfair … to put our children’s future at a disadvantage,” White said.
Mark Elgart, the head of SACS, said last week he’d heard reports of divisiveness on the board and other problems and wrote the letter to outgoing Superintendent Ed Heatley as “a heads-up.”
Sid Chapman, president of the Clayton chapter of the Georgia Association of Educators, said he was shocked by SACS’ letter of concern, which referenced some school board members fighting among themselves and with school personnel.
Chapman, who is at every meeting, said the board doesn’t vote in lockstep all the time.
“Sometimes, from my observation of them with the outgoing superintendent, they’ve gone out of their way to not micromanage, almost to the point of not managing at all, which has been some of the criticism,” Chapman said.
But he said the situation is vastly different from 2008, when board members were out of control, going to schools to give principals orders, telling the superintendent what to do and “micromanaging and fighting to the point it had the community in disarray.”
“It’s not even in the same galaxy as it was before,” Chapman said.
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