Two Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches: What Georgia’s Next Governor Should Fix First

Now that the dust has settled with the Blue Wave/ Tsunami across the nation, I’d like to bring it back home with some hopes for our home state. There have been suggestions that this election is an over-correction and that the state will return to Republican control in two years. I haven’t personally found that to be true of Georgia’s past turnover, but it’s always helpful to plan for the worst while hoping for the best.

I think running scared is the only way to run any campaign and one is only promised an opportunity to govern while you occupy the seat. These recommendations are a longer-term view for eight years or so as they cannot all be achieved in one or even two sessions. 

• Appoint someone knowledgeable of Medicaid expansion to DHS and someone knowledgeable of child welfare to DFCS. She may not be ready for it now, but I’d love to see Allison Lomax in a leadership position within DFCS. While you’re at it, why not move us to the Virginia model of child welfare, where the legislature has oversight of DFCS?
• Reinstate the small school supplement allocation with meaningful reform of QBE and a poverty weight. Joe Frank Harris is on the transition team- ask him about QBE-he created it. Maybe Carolyn Bordeaux could break away from the Concord Coalition for a few weeks to rebuild the mess Kemp’s administration got us in the rainy day fund. Who knew Republicans didn’t know how to save?!?! The joke’s on us!
• Repeal Certificate of Need and subsidize rural community hospitals across our state, and specifically establish OB GYN residency programs with a focus on bilingual residents in partnership with HBCUs to improve reproductive health care in rural Georgia. Our maternal mortality rate is a solvable challenge. While abortion is healthcare, so is IVF and post-partum care. I was pro-choice before the heart beat bill passed and I’ve been wanting women’s healthcare to improve in rural Georgia since I lived there. CON is inherently anticompetitive, more options in more places are better for ALL Georgians. While we’re at it, let’s also reevaluate the tax exemption of some hospitals, ::cough cough:: looking at you Wellstar. 
• Plan for Governor Kemp’s Senate/Presidential run and have an independent panel with Republicans to look further into DFCS’s records. Unlike Senator Ossoff, Governor-Elect Bottoms can draw from her own experience as an adoptive mother as a means to address necessary system changes. More than likely, this could lead to developing a greater safety net across the state so that more families do not have to come into foster care.

Dear reader, allow me to explain.

Georgia’s been waiting for Medicaid expansion for some time. It was really dumb of Republicans to let it get to this point, but they did, so like the Heritage Foundation-originated ACA, Democrats are going to take the opportunity Republicans left for them and run with it. As anyone with any sense would do in politics. 

It’s said that politics is an art. Good artists imitate. Great artists steal and I don’t blame them at all. Democrats will be able to steal the thunder of Medicaid expansion and this one thing in the first session will provide a foundation for the farther reaching goals. 

The Republican answer to education is choice. Atlanta Public Schools has choice. This is the same school district that put Mesha Mainor on the map because of her vote for school vouchers. We can tell you alllllllll about how charter schools aren’t making the cut here. Choice doesn’t really seem to be making a sizeable impact in a system that is consolidating to support kids in the city with the lowest economic mobility in a state with no poverty weight, no meaningful QBE reform, and, as of late, no small school supplement as an add-on to the property value assessment cap Republicans foolishly passed. Maybe we should pick one, see how it goes, and go back to address the others. Georgia is one of six states in the nation that does not have a permanent poverty weight in its funding plan for schools. The small school supplement would enable smaller schools across our state to keep their doors open. Counties like Quitman and Taliaferro would benefit from that supplement. I volunteered every summer foa decade in Taliaferro County, whose county-seat of Crawfordville is the Governor-Elect’s ancestral home. I haven’t forgotten the kids there, and I hope Governor-Elect Bottoms hasn’t either.  I’m particularly interested in Governor-Elect Bottoms’s interest in her alma mater, Continental Colony Elementary, which is to be consolidated this year, along with F.L.Stanton, which is walking distance from her mamma’s home off Burbank Drive. I reside in between F.L. Stanton and the Governor-Elect’s mother, and our child, like Governor-Elect Bottoms, is 225 Certified. Once an Astro, always an Astro.

Rural hospitals serve a unique position in GOOA. Aside from providing healthcare to Georgians for whom a trip to Atlanta would require a full day, anyone who has grown up in a small rural town knows your ‘good’ jobs are the school, the hospital, or the prison. So when we see that about 50% of Georgia’s rural hospitals are operating at a loss, we need to be paying attention for the staff, not just the patients of those hospitals. I’m a prime example- I have type 1 (insulin-dependent) diabetes and chose to move to Atlanta because of the healthcare access, public transportation, and employment opportunities. Social Circle was a great place to grow up, but I’ve written about when my parents had to drive home because Walton County Hospital didn’t have my insulin at the time and how my father was life flighted to Old Georgia Baptist from Newton County. I may live on old Hunter Street now, but my heart will forever be found at the intersection of Mt. Paron Church Road and Social Circle Fair Play. I care about what happens there and the kids like me who want to make it out, if they can. 

I made decisions for my own health and the health of my family, but I have the affluence to do so. Many women in Georgia do not. Maternal mortality is a challenge Republicans have had the opportunity to deal with previously and ignored for the pursuit of the heartbeat bill. And the Democrats’ staged photo ops with the handmaids in the Capitol was great for political theater, but Georgians need all y’all (Republicans too) to get to work to stop the literal bleeding of our mothers in our maternity care deserts (93 out of 159 counties lack maternal care). This is the common ground of policy work that can meaningfully improve rankings in our state that aren’t sexy or controversial…and they were also not embraced by Planned Parenthood when I interviewed with them in 2019. 

Campaigning and governing are two different skill sets. 

Georgians will now have the chance to compare which party is better at the latter for the first time in my lifetime. My bet is that Georgians remember that former Governors Sonny Perdue and Nathan Deal were once Democrats that switched parties. Governor Kemp was the first Republican Governor who was steeped in the party machine. I tend to think this is why the pendulum has swung in Georgia, more than Trump influence. 

Perhaps I stand alone, but for the last 20ish years I’ve heard how Republicans were going to improve things and what I see is a public education system for my kid that is subsidizing charter schools that don’t perform or even worse- private/home  schools that aren’t held to the same rules, no expansion of public transit or anything other than building more roads that are clogged with traffic, healthcare costs that are unsustainable, and children literally dying in the because of inaction of the state. Say what you will about Brandon Beach, but even he will tell you our transportation system needs to be improved.

Georgia Democrats are (by national standards) still pretty conservative. And for the last 20ish years, Georgia Republicans are (by national standards) less MAGA-y. We’re fiscally responsible, mind your own business, would prefer a hand-up versus a hand-out type of people. We have grit and pride, a good work ethic that has strong hospitality skills enough that we know how to tell you to go to hell in such a way that makes you think you might enjoy the trip. 

I think this last part is really critical for good politics. Roy Barnes was arrogant- it is rumored that he left the Governor’s office in such a disarray that Perdue’s team had to spend significant time cleaning things up. I think that’s poor form and a mark of a leader is one who leaves the space better than what they found it and takes care of their staff. This is a point Governor Kemp is well-known for and on which he and I would agree. As a person who has staffed a number of legislators’ offices, you’re only as good as the coat tails you ride on, and Kemp has always been known for taking good care of his people. I remember his unannounced presence at a particular Capitol staff funeral in Newton County. He and I may disagree on policy points-but we both believe you show up for the people who showed up for you.

There is a curse to this approach too though. 

Whatever your staff does can reflect poorly upon you and DFCS’s headlines are not good. 

• DFCS warned for months about abuse before 4-year-old’s death, friend says
• Nearly $1 million spent on single SUV by DFCS despite budget challenges
• Proposed Coweta DFCS complex ‘on hold’
• Federal court orders Georgia DFCS to stop erroneous, punitive, irrational charges
• Despite some providers closing, Ga. foster care spending up 159%

I haven’t written about DFCS lately because frankly it seems everyone else has already. Eric the Younger and I made our own recommendations to the Rising Cost of Foster Care Study Committee. My prediction came true that our former placement (the child in this publication I’ll refer to as my own even though it isn’t legally true) would wait an entire year before receiving the healthcare needed last December. As of a court hearing Monday, the DFCS caseworker assigned to the case somehow forgot that this has been an on-going issue for a year, and, per court order, has a 90 day follow up in 2027 to ensure this healthcare matter has been evaluated. According to the case worker, unnamed “leadership” has to sign off on it. 

Do tell.

Under the Perdue administration Fulton and Dekalb Counties were placed under the Kenny A. consent decree in 2005 because of a class action lawsuit, initiated in 2002. 

“Under the terms and conditions of the Kenny A. Consent Decree, the State is to achieve and sustain 31 outcomes, as well as maintain certain practice standards related to service planning, placement experience, healthcare, investigation of maltreatment allegations concerning children in foster care, court reviews and reporting. Some of these standards are new requirements for administrators and case managers, and others are existing agency policy and practice requirements receiving heightened attention. In addition, the consent decree stipulates various state and county infrastructure requirements. These stipulations pertain to automation, caseload sizes, training, supervision of private providers, foster parent licensing, and financing.“

Every six months, a report has been generated. If you would like to read those reports, you can find them here. You will notice that the website says these reports ended in June 2025. That is not accurate. The most recent news in this decree is that Georgia’s attempt to terminate it was punted back to federal court. Region 14, which encompasses Fulton and Dekalb Counties (and my region), held a recent discussion group for foster parents. 

So if the Governor-Elect would like to do both her state and party a solid, gather an independent panel of Republicans and Democrats who can dig through those DFCS records with a fine tooth comb. You don’t need a US Senate Committee hearing to do it. 

…Just a mamma who cares.

I can personally speak to two separate families who were reported to DFCS and the state did nothing. For one family, the children were only taken into the state’s custody because the parent was at Rice Street (Fulton County Jail) for a second time, and the person who called knew that the police can also take children into custody in absence of DFCS. The other family…that child comes by my house daily for two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to start his day. There’s a host of others that I know APS has called and reported to DFCS and it’s an open secret that Fulton County DFCS does not take children in for neglect. 

So when state legislators want to assert that Atlanta Public Schools aren’t doing their job by educating children, I will kindly remind them that APS is doing everything they can currently to close the gap left by DFCS. If we want to get better, y’all, we have to do better.

 “Every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does.”

― W. Edwards Deming

Let’s start now. 

Georgia has a habit of telling folks to wait their turn. A year for a medical procedure. A drive for the right insulin. A teenager who shows up at my house each day because two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are the only breakfast he’s guaranteed and a state division won’t do its job. None of that is a talking point. It’s my home, and it’s far from the only one.

Governor-Elect Bottoms knows my neighborhood because it was once hers too. She knows what a school means to a street and what’s lost when the doors close. So take the win, expand Medicaid, and then take the harder, less glamorous road: end CON, address maternal mortality, meaningfully reform QBE with a permanent poverty weight, and have an independent panel review DFCS records to find where a safety net needs to be.

Campaigning is over. Governing is where we find out who shows up for the people who showed up for them. 

Let’s get to work, y’all, Republicans too. Georgia is waiting for us to roll up our sleeves.