Instead of 9 Board Members, We Will Have 15

Feb. 23, 2013...  The AJC is reporting that Monday at 11 a.m., Gov. Nathan Deal will hold a press conference announcing his decision regarding the suspension of the DeKalb County School Board.  It was recommended that he suspend the 6 members who were serving at the time the district accreditation slipped to the Probation status.  The next step is loss of accreditation if they do not comply with a long list of improvements, mostly aimed at governance issues and financial instability.

The members expected to be out of work with full pay are:  Dr. Eugene Walker (a super district that spans the west side of the county, not the south as is the common misconception), Dr. Pamela Speaks (the super district representative for the east side of the county), Nancy Jester (the northern district of Dunwoody), Sarah Copelin-Woods (the southwest portion of the county that pays the least in property taxes and has seen a large number of school closings in the past five years), Jesse Cunninham (the southeast portion of the county that includes M.L. King High School) and Ms. Donna Edler (the Stone Mountain, middle section that appears to be getting squeezed by the larger districts surrounding hers).

If Gov. Deal adds 6 appointees, will this be what the BOE in DeKalb will look like?

The remaining board members were just elected in July 2012 but did not have their terms begin until January 2013 which was an odd twist in the school system voting debacle.  Most people who are paying attention to school issues are parents and the summer is when the kids are on vacation, so most adults try to focus their attention away from school matters and toward summertime vacations and other forms of developing interests for their children like summer camps and swimming lessons.  Moving the school board elections to the dead of Summer was an attempt, some say, for the special interest groups, like the Fernbank community, to have a stronger hold on the outcomes in their districts as they have been organized and strategic in their planning for quite some time.  They have been criticized for using questionable methods for bullying other groups out of their way, using personal attacks on anyone who criticizes them and using their clout and political connections (donations) to get laws rewritten and districts redrawn to give them the largest advantage possible.

The Fernbank community is frequently given credit on the online school blogs for putting Walker into office when he promised to save their school from closure.  Believed to have jumped from a school district marked for elimination to one that is now gaining a brand new school and swiping enough students from surrounding areas to sustain it in the future, they have made many enemies and a few friends, depending upon where you live.  Fernbank has been led by newly elected and not recommended for suspension Marshall Orson.  Many say he has extreme influence over neighboring district board member Jim McMahan, the new vice chairman who some say may have alliances with former board member Paul Womack.

Sounds like Mr. Orson is trying to repeat the power scenario that Dr. Walker and his neighbors Cunningham and Copelin-Woods are getting ousted over, doesn't it?  Another similarity is that Walker, Orson and former board member H. Paul Womack are all Duke University graduates.  Duke is in North Carolina, where Dr. Cheryl Atkinson has lived and worked.  Atkinson was the former Superintendent who recently abandoned her job amid possibly felony charges for her improper firing practices that were being challenged in court.  Walker and Womack brought Atkinson in.  Did they have this planned from the beginning?  Do they also have a role to play in the construction scandal that will soon be tried in DeKalb with another previous Superintendent Crawford Lewis?  Lewis is being tried on corruption charges, racketeering and running a criminal enterprise in the school system.

You can't run an "enterprise" all by yourself.  GTCO-ATL wonders just how far up the food chain does this conspiracy against the DeKalb taxpayers go?  And, by leaving Orson, McMahan and long-time Dekalb "palace" employee Melvin Johnson in place, just how much change will any of this state BOE decision really make?

Are we fooling ourselves to keep getting our hopes up that real change will happen here?  Or do we continue to allow the "masters of distraction" and their top notch legal team throw our children right out of the bus and into the real world without an education and with terrible adult role models for what it means to be a success.

At the state hearing, Michael Thurmond pleaded with the state BOE to save the DeKalb BOE because if they are replaced he will essentially be left with 15 board members, 6 elected, 3 serving and 6 appointed.  Well,  at least we know he can do the math right.  That's a step in a better direction already.  Maybe there is still some hope.