#1 to Do Business, but No Mississippi Miracle

We sure do take pride in that #1 state to do business thing, don’t we, y’all? And if work was the ONLY thing Georgians did, then I think we’d be in a marvelous place. But the craziest thing is- there’s this whole world of living outside of our work lives, and in that space we experience birth (despite having a horrible maternal mortality rate), health issues (despite the best efforts of our Department of Public Health, we LOVE us some fried food and BBQs), and death just like anywhere else. In between, we are raising children to hopefully be contributing members of society, no matter how difficult we all are in our teenage years. Last time I asked the Budget Chairmen for money. This time Imma ask all of y’all under the Gold Dome for some improvement in education. I’ll use Atlanta Public Schools and our current conversation about facilities as my example, but I hope each of you legislators take the time to call your local Superintendents to discuss what I’m talking about here and ask them where they need your help.

Let me set the stage here in Atlanta, as I see it.

I think the APS Board has made poor decisions with managing funds over the years, a SLEW of changes in Superintendents who weren’t really ready for things after the cheating scandal, and the members rely almost entirely on using the Board of Education as a launching point for City Council seats. As a result, Atlanta has less long-term thinkers and largely people whose experiences managing budgets are more anecdotal than systematic. Or, people who carry water for Arthur Blank and the Community Foundation tax write-offs. More on that later.

Despite what the present board looks like, you might think I’m sad. Not so! I have hope for a future board based on the candidates I’ve seen in various forums across the city. In stark contrast to many on the current board who seem to have big hearts but no budget constraints, Royce Mann and Dr. Stephen Owens bring actual policy and advocacy chops to the table. Lord, what a breath of fresh air they are! Dr. Owens will be my pick for my School Board representation because we need a wonk. This man has worked on budgets from a policy standpoint for his career, and I’m ready to have someone who seems to know at least more than me sitting on that board. That statement isn’t one of arrogance; candidly, I’m shocked at the level of naivety demonstrated by some board members’ questions. There’s a TON I know I don’t know, but sheesh-I was honestly shocked at some of the questions I heard at the last Board of Education meeting. Additionally, I’m encouraged by what I hear from Royce Mann. He may be young, but his personal experience with a School Resource Officer at Grady/Midtown High has motivated him to provide the same grace to every student at APS. It isn’t just because he has a big heart, but because he had a school that recognized that he was a good student, but behaviorally wasn’t where he needed to be. He also has an Emory education and some job experience lobbying under the Gold Dome, which has provided him with the knowledge that his experience isn’t unique.

Now project that over an entire school district where, according to the last Board of Education presentation documents show that the highest levels of School Resource Officer calls are occurring at predominantly Black schools. H/T to Board Member Alfred “Shivy” Brooks for drawing attention to that. I’m going to expand a bit further as a hypothesis that I would encourage us all to chew the cud on for a bit. Are white kids better behaved? Or do we just tend to give them more institutionalized grace?

I see the hair on the back of your necks rising- just wait a doggone minute! No one is calling you racist.

Before all you good ‘ol boys get your hackles up, stay with me here. Y’all remember your uncles and grandfathers who didn’t much care for company but could repair cars with duct tape, fishing wire, and chewing gum? Or your aunts and grandmothers who had hobbies of china, crystal, and arranged all just-so on your homeplaces’ walls? Not a SPEC of dust, amirite? Today, we would have a tendency to recognize them as potentially neurodivergent. These are not reliable indicators, so please do not paint me into that corner, but we recognize that neurodivergence has been around for a lot longer than we give it credit. But please do- ask your attorney friends, friends in higher sciences, etc. if they’re neurodivergent in some manner. Look up Dr. Lamar Hardwick, a pastor in LaGrange, who has published a number of books on his adult autism diagnosis. We also tend to largely diagnose these things in areas where there are resources, strong advocacy, and the luxury of time: i.e., white and middle-class areas.

If you’re Black or brown in Atlanta/ America that doesn’t mean you do NOT have access to these, but those corresponding parents might not have the time in your day as I did in mine to sit in a three hour IEP meeting with APS with a Mother in Law who wrote IEPs in Hoover City and Jefferson Co., Alabama, and Cobb County schools for 38 years. I also come with a husband who has covered policies in the foster system across 15 Southern states. Our household packs more heat than most when we walk into a meeting, and as a result, FK gets that benefit.

But what about those other kids across APS?

Here’s an open secret no one seems to want/ know how to talk about unless you’re in Exceptional Education circles: we’re already educating those children, we just haven’t diagnosed them yet. And, in the City of Atlanta/ state of Georgia, because we have no poverty weight for funding schools like other states across our nation, we in Georgia incarcerate rather than rehabilitate, and children find themselves adjudicated more than finding jobs to use their skills.

And then y’all went and cut the dang small school supplement. *shakes head*

So you’re expecting school districts across our fine state to walk backward, upside down, AND with a hand tied behind their back. Ok. May I suggest you manage a 50 kid classroom, all jacked up on sugar approaching Halloween? No? Then let’s all agree that smaller schools aren’t about educating children better and more about retaining our teachers whose mental healthcare and bourbon budgets we do not fund.

And we assume we’ll be getting our next workforce for all these businesses we’re attracting from where, exactly? Mississippi is looking pretty good. Their literacy rates have topped ours, AS A STATE, and they’ve been climbing for the past decade.

It’s funny; often in years past, when discussing policy, we have been able to rely upon the ability to say “at least we’re not Mississippi”. But now my friends, because we have cut so much and because Governor Kemp and Senator Robertson have tried to undo all those Nathan Deal Criminal Justice Reforms that really were trying to get us back on track, we’re looking UP to Mississippi.

Here’s how I see FK’s school being caught in the middle, sadly.

Douglass High School is being asked to consolidate despite the success the 9th grade academy has brought because we have been successful at:

We have become the facilities sacrificial lamb- not that closing the 9th grade academy will be the silver bullet of budget issues- no. In fact, for APS’s $1.8B budget, closing the 9th grade academy will provide less than a 1% impact on the overall budget. But it IS a building that CAN close because we have been put in that place by parents who don’t have the bandwidth to be engaged, some small group of alumni that have dominated the PTSA and seemed to be more focused on social gatherings than innovation and reinvestment, and held together by a principal who is actively trying to simultaneously scale & clean up while the district gives him less and less all while expecting more. We’re easier to pick off because after years of disinvestment in this area by the City of Atlanta, the only long-term thing that remains standing and is intact IS Douglass and its legacy of a caring community that shapes children rather than writing them off.

Meanwhile, ~~GENIUS~~ Mayor Andre “I got a shitty idea” Dickens’ idea is to extend the Tax Allocation Districts in our city because starving our schools of tax money as the city grows is SUCH A WISE IDEA. I wrote about that previously here. Dear God, can someone PLEASE run for Mayor and have him take Dickens’s new Chief of Staff (Courtney English, whose own missteps while on the Board of Education I outline in the previous piece) with him?? Again- at every turn- state and local, legislators are starving the budget for education and we’re seeing those results. All while building more prisons in rural Georgia- who knew that would be our next big crop?

It’s the best advertisement for young families to move to Mississippi I’ve ever seen.

But Mayor Dickens will tell you he’s making Atlanta “the best place to raise a family”. Sure- as long as you’re of upper-middle-class income enough to send your kids to private schools.

Honestly, I hope the MS legislature is at least contributing to campaign funds, because over here, our Mayor and Gold Dome can’t seem to find their way out of a paper bag right now. I hope we can also recognize that the two entities I’m referencing here are supposed to be from different parties. See the above-linked Lewis Black commentary.

But the only color that matters in Georgia is green, amirite or amirite? We don’t care about kids- unborn children maybe, but we seem to not be able to do anything about that icky maternal mortality rate, sadly. And as for children? Well for children we’re happy to provide no safety net or thinking beyond a five-year threshold. Gub’ment likes the idea of kids, not their reality. Otherwise, we’d actually focus on turning them into productive taxpayers in the future. You know, because the bureaucracy is always expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. God bless Oscar Wilde and the wit that comes from being persecuted and Irish.

While the consultants for the facilities plan did not make it over to Douglass for our community meeting, I did. I, along with other parents and alumni, we prepared statements in case we were to be given an opportunity to speak. Instead, we did exactly what we did in picking our principal- an exercise that had a gallery walk and put questions off until the end, which were then cut off because “we all wanted to get home”. I find this approach, like many things in Atlanta politics, is performative. It is the performance of a public meeting that then skews the results in favor of the narrative that is presented. I’m grateful we have Principal Jennings as a principal, but if I wanted another, we were never presented with that option. And like that experience, the facilities discussion was the same- we were never presented with another option other than consolidation. In fact, Forestella Taylor informed us all at the beginning of the meeting that Douglass’s STEAM Academy “was never meant to be permanent”.

So I sat and listened to what we were being fed.

We learned that before we arrived (without any meeting signage, or any preceding publicity other than a buried flyer in the Astro Advocate, our weekly school newsletter), the Douglass High School faculty had already engaged in a presentation. So you can imagine my surprise when Douglass’s Family Engagement Director/Title One Coordinator/Parent Teacher Liaison provided a litany of reasons she was in favor of the consolidation. This was surprising to me both because presumably she had engaged in the faculty meeting before to have her voice heard, and, as an alumni of the school, she also sat, engaged, and presented on behalf of the alumni, another totally different table from the group I was in, but then provided the list of reasons she was in favor to the group I was sitting in. I watched as a fellow parent took down her dictation.

I guess we all like to have our thumbs on the scale where we can, don’t we? Is this fair? Will anyone even read these responses? Who knows? It was clear that we were there only to respond to the plan at hand, and, if need be, others would counterbalance our responses.

Yesterday, as a result of a conversation with a member of the Community Task Force (from another cluster) I learned there was a meeting tonight. I looked on the Facilities portion of APS’s website. Here’s the information shared about the meeting:

Earlier this morning, I sent a message to the “Let’s Talk” option on the Facilities portion of APS’s website.

Here’s a screenshot of that message.

Here is the reply I received.

I don’t think APS is trying to block public comment, but let’s say it isn’t making it as easy and as forthright as they make it seem. Tell the public you don’t want to show up to the meeting without saying the words. This is consistent with what I’ve found for previous meetings as well.

What was pointed out in the Douglass specific Community meeting that will be an ongoing challenge for Douglass is that teachers and faculty are divided between the campuses, making it difficult for them to teach effectively and for course offerings for kids. I am very familiar with this challenge as our family has lived it. But this isn’t a challenge of facilities- this is a challenge of budget. Consolidating facilities will not give Douglass a greater portion of the budget. And, if campuses are consolidated, and behavior challenges exacerbate, then parents who can will opt out of APS entirely, which compounds its challenges. Alternatively, if parents have the option, they’ll move to Midtown or Buckhead.

Because when asked when will our programs be equitable with North Atlanta or Midtown, Forestella Taylor pulled no punches (that’s why I love her). ‘Maybe in ten years’.

That community meeting was the greatest advertisement for moving to North Atlanta or Midtown clusters I’ve ever seen.

Prior to this, on September 27th, before attending the Frederick Douglass Alumni Picnic, I attended the Go Team Summit for APS, where GO Team members came together from all over the district to learn how we can better support our schools. It’s made up largely of parents, but also school officials and guardians or grandmothers. A note on the Alumni picnic for those (like me) who don’t/didn’t know. It is a THING, almost exclusively an event that highlights Black joy and solidarity in our city that celebrates the shared experience of Douglass High School. It’s a joyous event that brings people together, and it’s like tailgating on The Grove in Oxford. I was elated to have the opportunity to attend and take great pride in my child being 225 Certified. There was little to no discussion of the upcoming public meeting, and the Alumni Facebook page (the only centralized place for dissemination of information that I know of) did not feature anything about the upcoming meeting until maybe the day before- and it was only because one of the PTSA members who is also an alumna posted it.

At the Go Team Summit, I was presented with data that highlighted the fact that Douglass’s greatest areas of opportunity are College & Career Readiness, School Climate, and % of students earning HS credit in AP, IB, or Dual Enrollment (see below). Douglass doesn’t offer IB. We are no longer STEAM certified, and AP certification is an issue of professional development/ hiring enough credentialed teachers to provide those options. None of those are facilities issues- those are all budget issues that, unless I want to become an AP certified teacher and give more of my time away to APS, I cannot resolve those challenges.

At this point, it becomes a time value of money issue for me. While I believe in and support public education as a whole, I have to sacrifice my time earning money to support my local school. Could I potentially just pay for a private school and have enough time then to earn more? Please note I haven’t even considered whether a private education is BETTER than APS- this is just a time/value comparison.

I’m willing to bet this is a large part of why Atlantans opt out of APS, sadly.

As a person who is passionate about serving my community and school, the community meeting left me feeling heartbroken and hopeless. Frankly, I can now see why parents who are working shift jobs and juggling multiple children don’t show up. Why would they want to when the school employees (and school leaders, might I add) feed a narrative to us that we’re all supposed to swallow whole. I can’t imagine what this would feel like if English was my second language.

So I went to the APS Board of Education Meeting on October 6th.

My overall takeaways were:

1. Many of the board members have no feeling of constraint regarding the budget and frankly don’t seem to act as if they were aware of this upcoming cliff. It’s not like they are in Congress and can just print money. They’re all gonna run for GA-5 at some point, so they are just practicing. It left me feeling like many of them were really foolish. At one point, the Superintendent actually said something to the effect of, ‘you saw this cliff coming, right?’

2. There was some discussion of Foundations and Partners closing the gaps. I appreciated Board member Tolton Pace’s asking if “partners” were aware- like, ‘have y’all asked my old boss yet or nah’? And it seemed APS had not. Board Member Pace was appointed as a Senior Program Officer at the Blank Family Foundation in 2023.

3. I appreciated Board Member Brooks pointing out that the schools with the highest number of disciplinary calls/ School Resource Officer visits were all predominantly Black schools (see above). And the Super and others pointed to how there needed to be more granular data to understand what’s behind this. Do tell, APS, do tell. And I hope other school districts across our state are able to look into their School Resource Officer calls as well. Maybe we’re looking at issues that can be resolved with some trauma-informed approaches and IEPs, perhaps? I dunno, seems cheaper than building more prisons and backlogging more Georgia courts.

4. In the budget discussion, there was a mention of “reevaluation” of behavioral specialists as a budget item. No shade to Lisa Bracken, here, the CFO of APS. I’m a big fan of hers- particularly how she very nicely tells Board Members “no”, professionally. I WISH I still had that level of diplomacy. We have to have all options on the table, and no one should walk away from this mess entirely happy or entirely mad. We’ve all got to give a little. Bracken is trying very hard to hold Board members by the hand as she dutifully explains pluses and minuses and how budgets are supposed to work. Her calming voice is what is going to get us through this chaos.

Numbers 3 & 4 strikes me as significant because the Douglass 9th grade academy was created to address behaviors and they have largely decreased across the district, AND Douglass has 4 behavioral specialists- one for each grade. The suggestion of eliminating any one of those along with consolidation leads me to think we will see an uptick in School Resource Officer calls and presumably higher costs associated with disciplinary follow ups-more adjudications. This is neither helpful for improving student outcomes nor is it saving money. I also worry about eliminating behavioral specialists in terms of Exceptional Education. Without advocates who are knowledgeable about IEPs, I could see this cut leading to exacerbating challenges for APS as a whole. I just know it from the Douglass angle, but none of these challenges are unique to Douglass.

And candidly, think we all know they aren’t unique to Atlanta.

I also don’t think consolidating Douglass’s 9th grade academy is going to improve these numbers. I don’t think extending those TADs is going to make Atlanta a great place to raise a child, and I don’t think any of this is improving education in our state-certainly not exceptional education. We may do business well here, but if we want all of our children to be educated, at this point we better send them to Mississippi.

I think we know what we need to do, whether we want to point fingers at one another or not, and no matter which team we play for. Cutting school budgets and hoping challenges go away because legislating is as hard as “parking iz hard” (thank you, James Salzer) at Pete Hackney is like closing down Central State and then expecting wards of the state to be taken care of in their communities without adding to homelessness. I hope we have learned from our mistakes and recognize that cutting budgets or shutting things down doesn’t make problems disappear.

If we want to get to the real work, I hope you’ll turn to the school psychologists and behavioral specialists who will tell you what’s going on. I hope you give them all a generous raise, because they’re doing the Lord’s work.

Published by Scarlet Hawk