The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Dekalb school chief seeks trust
Superintendent trying to rebuild Dekalb district. Politics, race, money, perceptions pose challenges.
About two dozen parents gathered in a classroom at Dunwoody High School on a recent weeknight while a school official scribbled their complaints on poster-sized sheets.
Lousy teachers are being recycled from one school to another, a parent said. Children suffer retribution when parents complain to principals, another said. And that new attendance calendar with a shortened summer break? It was rammed through despite opposition from parents, many of them groused.
Later, the group of mostly moms, along with parents from other classrooms, headed to the auditorium, where DeKalb County schools Superintendent Cheryl Atkinson was waiting. She listened patiently as they took turns reading from the big sheets, then she rose to the microphone.
“I know we have some trust issues,” Atkinson admitted. “And we have to regain that.”
For more than a year now, Atkinson, 53, has been trying to rebuild Georgia’s third-largest school district. The word “trust” comes up all the time. And no wonder.
Prior Superintendent Crawford Lewis was indicted on fraud and conspiracy charges, and still awaits trial. The school board has divisions that reflect an electorate riven by disparities in wealth as well as geographic racial separation (blacks live mostly in the county’s southern half, whites in the northern part). DeKalb has one of the biggest immigrant populations in the South.
Also, property values have plunged, dragging down revenue and precipitating a bitter dispute over the budget last summer that was settled with reductions in the number of teachers, bus drivers, librarians and interpreters. And the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools is threatening to lower the school sys- tem’s accreditation level because of allegations of school board mismanagement.
It’s against that troubled backdrop that Atkinson must be judged.
Valarie Spradling, a parent at the Dunwoody forum, said she likes what she hears from Atkinson, but she’s heard it all before. Spradling lives in south DeKalb and sees an enduring inequality among schools.
One leader after another has talked about bringing schools in the south up to the level of the north, she said. “The same stuff I’ve been hearing for years hasn’t been done. Why am I supposed to believe you now? That’s why she has to prove herself.”
Asked about a northsouth divide, Atkinson said, “We do have differences in a county this size. And so to design an overall educational program ... that will meet all the needs is challenging.”
But the superintendent said she thinks there’s some “old excuses hanging around, and I refuse to believe that any of those really matter. I don’t see the county as a north and south, and I don’t want to. I don’t see the county as this race or that race. I see us as a whole — diverse, with lots of different expectations and needs, but with a common goal of student success for everybody.”
Atkinson lists her top accomplishments so far as aligning the county curriculum with a new “common core” rolling out across Georgia and most of the nation; marshaling administrators around initiatives and holding them accountable for the outcomes; and cutting $78 million from the budget.
State Sen. Fran Millar, R-Dunwoody, typically a critic of DeKalb school leaders and the largely Democratic school board, was skeptical about Atkinson’s qualifications for the job. Her last position was superintendent in Lorain, Ohio, a district near Cleveland that was all but broke and had about 8,000 students compared with DeKalb’s nearly 100,000.
Yet Millar gives Atkinson “at least a B” so far. “I’ve been very pleasantly surprised at her perseverance to do what she thinks is right,” he said. It’s too early to judge her work, he said, but he lauded her management style, saying she has a cooperative attitude. “She’s trying to do the right thing, and she’s trying to professionalize her office.”
However, Atkinson still has work to do with many parents, and the budget cuts, which contributed to classroom crowding, haven’t helped.
“People are so frustrated up here,” said Lynn Deutsch, a Dunwoody city councilwoman with a child in the school system. “There’s just a general sense that things aren’t going well. I think the class size thing has really hit home with people.”
Deutsch said Atkinson also has lost points for frequently calling school board meetings with just a day’s public notice.
“When she came in, she understood immediately that she needed to rebuild trust, yet way too often there are board meetings that are called at the last minute when the board is asked to vote on important issues before the community gets to vet them,” Deutsch said. “I think lots of involved par- ents feel this way.”
Atkinson said she has been beset by one surprise after another, some of which demanded an urgent response. She said she’s trying to get systems in place to anticipate issues and reduce the number of last-minute meetings.
She’s also grappling with the fallout from one of her biggest moves to date: reassigning more than 30 principals, with little or no parent input.
School board Chairman Eugene Walker said it was the largest reshuffling he’d seen. “I’m not aware of any other superintendent coming in and making this many changes so soon,” he said, adding that he got a lot of complaints from parents.
“It’s too early to tell whether this was a quality move or a harmful move,” Walker said. It’s also too soon to assess Atkinson, he said, in part because she was basically an emergency hire. SACS, the agency threatening to lower the system’s accreditation, had imposed a deadline to hire a superintendent after Lewis’ ouster. Walker said the school board only recently established goals for Atkinson.
Parents are withholding judgment, too. Cheryl Edwards tried to find out why her son’s principal at Stephenson High School was moved to an elementary school, but said she was “ignored, put off and finally cut off ” by administrators she called and emailed. As a result, she lost some faith in Atkinson.
Still, Edwards sees Atkinson as “a ray of hope” — someone willing to make “tough” calls and impose order on a school system in disarray.
“I think she’s going to hold people accountable,” Edwards said. “At least, it appears she is.”