The Race for City Hall

ATLANTA HAS A NEW MAYOR. WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Andre Dickens has won the Race for City Hall. The two-term councilman, Georgia Tech grad and Adamsville native will ascend to the highest office in Atlanta, a job he’s wanted since he was a teenager, after winning a whopping 64% of the vote last Tuesday.

That’s considered a landslide in a city where we’re used to mayoral elections being decided by less than 1,000 votes. How did he pull it off ? We’ve got you covered with an in-depth analysis of how Dickens won his runoff after finishing a distant second behind Felicia Moore in the general election.

Dickens now has about a month to prepare for taking office, a transition that began first thing Wednesday morning, after the mayor-elect got about two hours of sleep. He spent an hour meeting with Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, and had calls with Gov. Brian Kemp, House Speaker David Ralston, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan and police chief Rodney Bryant. He said he had a list of about 20 people to work through, including leaders of the Buckhead cityhood movement.

Dickens is expected to convene a transition team, and said he will take time to “sit down and really pick a good chief of staff and chief operating officer,” he told reporters Wednesday, his voice a little hoarse after the big night.

On Friday, he had a phone call with President Joe Biden, saying in a tweet: “We have work to do here in Atlanta, and I look forward to working with you and your administration to help move Atlanta forward.”

For the first time this year, the incoming mayor will have access to $100,000 in city funds before he takes office, to start paying staff and plan an inauguration ceremony.

Shortly after his victory,

Dickens outlined his Day One priorities to reporters:

Reopen City Hall to the public.

Go over 100-day crime plan with the police chief and ramp up community

policing strategy.

Set up a team to be prepared for federal infrastructure dollars coming to the city.

Work with leaders at the state Capitol to keep Buckhead a part of Atlanta.

He’ll have a lot on his plate — we’ll leave you with this quote from “Hamilton” (sorry): “Winning was easy

... governing’s harder.”

Felicia Moore thanked her supporters in an email on Friday: “I am so proud of how you fought this fight alongside me: you fought it with empathy and kindness and generosity — and of course, with enormous passion and grit . ... I will do everything I can to move forward with the administration because we have serious challenges to face and we can only face them together.”

Dickens said in an interview the morning after his victory that he planned to meet with Moore and was open to finding a place for her in his administration, but specifics haven’t been worked out yet.

Moore also asked for contributions to help retire the campaign’s remaining debt of $10,000.

Come January, Atlanta

will also have a new City Council president. Doug Shipman, the former Woodruff Arts Center CEO, defeated Councilwoman Natalyn Archibong 54-46% in last week’s runoff.

We talked to Shipman after his victory about what he hopes to accomplish and how he is preparing to hold elected office for the first time.

“I will spend probably more time outside of City Hall than inside of it,” Shipman said.

Meanwhile, the City Council

itself will see a significant amount of turnover, with six new members and two former councilors making a return to City Hall.

The council will be, on average, younger than the current one, and has a number of historic “firsts”:

It will be the first time the council has three openly LGBTQ members, with Alex Wan, Liliana Bakhtiari and Keisha Waites.

With Bakhtiari and Amir Farokhi, the council will become the first and only legislative body in the country with two Iranian Americans, Farokhi said on Twitter.

And Bakhtiari, who identifies as non-binary and uses “she” and “they” pronouns, will be the first queer Muslim elected official in the state and the first non-binary elected official to serve the city, LGBTQ Nation reported.

The election may be over, but we’re going to keep bringing you City Hall insights throughout the transition and as the new administration begins. Please send us any tips, thoughts or feedback at wilborn.nobles@ajc.com and jdcapelouto@ajc.com.

With the deadly Oxford, Mich., high school shooting that killed four students last week still raw, a new government study details how increasingly malicious American school environments can be.

Analyzing Education Department data, a Government Accountability Office report found a huge jump in K-12 public school “hostile behaviors.” The most alarming statistic: Physical attacks with a weapon nearly doubled early in the Trump administration.

In a two-year period, from the school years of 2015-16 to 201718, attacks with weapons jumped 97%, according to the most recent data available. At the same time, hate crimes increased 81% and sexual assaults rose 17%.

The report offers no reason for the dramatic growth in attacks with weapons and hate crimes, but “schools are microcosms of their communities,” said Jacqueline Nowicki, the GAO’S director of education, workforce and income security issues.

The numbers probably fall short of actual occurrences because “hostile behaviors ... are generally underreported” by victims, the report said.

Another problem is that reporting by victim advocates also declined for political reasons. Hostile-behavior complaints to the department dropped 9% in the 201819 school year and 15% the next year. That sounds like a good thing, until the report explains: “Civil rights experts ... said that in recent years, they became reluctant to file complaints on students’ behalf because they lost confidence in OCR’S ability to address civil rights violations in schools.”

OCR is the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which enforces school-related civil rights laws, including those prohibiting a range of hostile behaviors. The loss of confidence

stems from the Trump administration’s decision to dump the Obama administration’s school civil rights policies.

The Trump administration withdrew policies to “avoid, and remedy discriminatory discipline” in schools, “ensure that transgender students enjoy a supportive and nondiscriminatory school environment” and fight “sexual harassment of students, including sexual violence.” Trump officials claimed the discipline policies were “not required or contemplated” by law, the transgender policies were rescinded to “more completely consider the legal issues involved,” and the sexual harassment guidance “led to the deprivation of rights for many students.”

At the time, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights criticized the Trump administration moves, saying its policies demonstrated that it did “not care that schools are discriminating against children of color” through disproportionate punishments and sent transgender students “a clear message” that the law was not “on their side.”

AJC’S Wilborn P. Nobles III (left) and J.D. Capelouto.

NICK HAGEN/THE NEW YORK TIMES Law enforcement officials patrol outside Oxford High School in Michigan last week after four students were killed on campus, allegedly by a fellow student.