The Jackson High School Cluster: A Year in Review

Dear Atlanta Public School Board and Leadership:

As we near the end of the school year, we find ourselves reflecting on the progress made this year in the Jackson Cluster. We thought it would be especially important for you to understand what accomplishments have been made and what challenges remain in the schools you represent, and remind you that your decisions, your ability to work together and think creatively about things like the budget can have an immediate positive impact on 50,000 students.

For many families, this was the first year in new schools and a new cluster after redistricting. In our schools, we found some amazing teachers and leaders helping our children learn and grow. In our cluster, we found a rich and complex educational fabric of traditional public schools and public charter schools, where educators and parents had the opportunity to exchange ideas and educational approaches.

Unfortunately, we also found tragic levels of bureaucracy tying the hands of our principals and teachers, and we found that students were missing out on equal educational opportunities just because they attend a charter school or school with smaller student populations.

First, a few highlights:

• Jackson High School has great leadership, amazing parents, a great review by the International Baccalaureate, and the building is only a little behind schedule.
• Parkside Elementary looks forward to a new principal, thanks to a smooth transition led by steady hand of Dr. Haynes, a strong, supportive community, and great educators.
• D.H. Stanton, a school once on the verge of closure, has opened its doors to the community, and is about to launch a forward-thinking, dual-language immersion program.
• Our schools are working together with Saturday School programs shared with Whitefoord, Toomer, Burgess-Peterson, and Coan.
• The principal and staff at Dunbar after years of work have been able to gain the trust of their community and have truly engaged their families in the life of the school.
• Burgess-Peterson now has a strong Vice Principal and highly qualified art teacher.
• The principal at Toomer has assembled and retained a highly effective teaching staff for the 2013-14 school year. The staff and communities of East Lake and Kirkwood have successfully transition the combination of the two schools.
• We also have some amazing pre-k and kindergarten teachers. They are are critical for building long term parent engagement.

Thank you for finding and hiring an amazing cadre of principals. Thank you for approving and renewing charters for three charter schools that each uniquely contribute to the diverse educational fabric of our community. And thank you for investing SPLOST money in our communiity to support renovations to Maynard Jackson High School.

We expect to continue to see amazing things from our schools and our children, if your decisions do not undermine the integrity of their learning environment.

How could you undermine success? Simple, by thinking about adults and adult issues when you should ONLY be thinking strategically about getting resources to students and figuring out how to give authority and autonomy to principals and teachers to meet the needs of the communities they serve. And your actions should always be transparent.

I will start briefly, with the charter schools – Drew, ANCS, and Wesley. These three schools have some of the highest test scores of APS schools, and they serve 40 percent of the elementary schools students in the Jackson Cluster. However, each student receives, by some estimates, up to $10,000 per year less than a student at a traditional public school. If you continue to whittle away at their budgets by illegally making them pay for a pension liability, you will undermine the integrity of the schools, and just hurt thousands of students. You approved their charters, and welcomed them as APS schools because you know every child deserves access to the educational style that best fits him or her. In the Jackson Cluster, we celebrate and support our educational diversity. We celebrate when our children and our public schools succeed. At the same time we react in unison when a child's successful learning environment is threatened. We stand together in asking you to drop the APS appeal of the pension liability court case, and release the funds improperly withheld from these charter schools immediately.

The other major threat to the Jackson Cluster is lack of thoughtful support of schools with smaller student bodies. You demean them by calling them “under enrolled,” but, since your budgeting process only looks at the number of kids at a school, any school with fewer than 600 kids is “under enrolled,” and thus under resourced. More than 45 percent of the elementary school students in the Jackson Cluster attend a traditional public school with less than 600 students. All have part-time or shared counselors, social workers, art, music, or foreign language teachers. That means that more than 85 percent of the students in our cluster are shouldering that burden with extremely limited resources.

Some examples of how that affects the schools and the students include:

• King Middle lost an assistant principal in the middle of the year because it fell just below 500 students.
• Toomer gained students during the year, and has overcrowded classes because you only adjust classes at the beginning of the year.
• Dunbar shares a social worker with Jackson High.
• Coan Middle has a new principal, a temporary building, and no additional administrative support to ease the transition.
• Toomer was denied numerous requests for additional counseling to support students following the merger of East Lake and Toomer Elementary Schools.

How does this happen? You keep schools open because they support the community. At the same time you underfund them. You approve charters, only to take away their funding and keep them out of your vacant buildings. You give us great principals; but do not give them adequate resources and tie their hands in a way that keeps them from running the school effectively.

These stories are the same across the cluster and across the system, but you know that. You deal with the same problems year after year in the same way. We hope that the APS Board and staff have not become so comfortable with these problems that you have stopped looking for and fighting for creative solutions. We hope that you will go out of your way to be transparent in your actions, whether it is the sale or use of an APS property like the old North Fulton High School or Cook Elementary, or the future of our communities’ pre-k teachers.

We, the Board and members of SEACS and families in the Jackson Cluster ask you to follow through. We have community public schools in Atlanta — some large, some small, some traditional, and some charter. Each school should be given an equal opportunity to succeed, without being dictated to from a bloated or inflexible central office. Provide equal support to all students, looking across all of your $800 million in funding. Be creative, and provide greater autonomy to each school so that they can work in concert with the communities they serve to meet the unique needs of their students.

Sincerely,

Southeast Atlanta Communities for Schools (SEACS)

SEACS Board:

Richard Quartarone – President
Jennifer Haliki – Secretary
Andrea Knight – Treasurer

Carla Phillips – Jackson High
Jacquelyn Hutchinson – King Middle
Cynthia Hairston- Coan Middle
Angela Mora – Benteen Elementary
Beth Hogan – Burgess Peterson Academy
Feroza Syed – D.H. Stanton Elementary
Katie Howard – Parkside Elementary
Doug Wood  – Toomer Elementary
Toni Ingram – Whitefoord Elementary
Richard Gulson – Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School
Chad Hoffecker – Drew Charter School
Darryl Lesure – Wesley International Academy