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Clarke Schools’ Horrifying Achievement Gap
DEMOND MEANS HAS HIS WORK GUT OUT FOR HIM, AND MORE LOCAL NEWS
By Blake Aued news@flagpole.com
Clarke County School Superintendent Demond Means had
a chance to play college football, but he’s not big on sports
metaphors. Like any college football coach, though, he loves
systems—Urban Meyer’s spread, Paul Johnson’s triple
option, Mark Richt’s pro-style offense.
Three months into his new job, Means said it’s been
harder, the problems more deeply entrenched, than he
expected. The word “system” came up over and over again
at last week’s Board of Education work session. CCSD
doesn’t have one, according to Means. Under former super
intendent Phil Lanoue, principals were encouraged to be
creative. That’s like a team practicing flea-flickers when they
don’t know how to block or tackle. “Let’s get the basics first
before we talk about innovation,” he said.
Means’ talk came on the heels of some nausea-inducing
numbers released by the school
district. First, the good news: ff
CCSD’s graduation rate topped m
80 percent last year for the g
first time in memory. That’s up o
from 50-60 percent a decade
ago. Dig deeper, though, and
the picture gets ugly in a hurry.
CCSD is 54 percent black,
yet African-American students
accounted for 80 percent of
disciplinary incidents. Fewer
than 20 percent of black
third- through eighth-graders
were proficient in math or
language, compared to more
than 60 percent of white stu
dents. (Hispanics, who make
up 26 percent of the district’s
students, fared better than
African Americans but not as
well as whites.)
The differences are even
starker at certain schools. At
Barrow Elementary, which is
roughly evenly split between
black and white, 53 black stu
dents were suspended in 2016-
17 and just four whites. At
Chase Street Elementary, just
14 percent of black students were proficient in language,
compared to 92 percent of white students. Interestingly, at
a few elementary schools—Cleveland Road, Fowler Drive,
Gaines and Winterville—proficiency scores were awful
across the board. At none of the schools did students score
well regardless of demographic.
Means intentionally did not mention any of these num
bers during the work session Oct. 5. Instead, like Kirby
Smart in his first year, he’s trying to impose a new culture
first before drilling down into details. (I’ll use all the foot
ball analogies Means said he tries to avoid.) The school
board should be operating at a higher level, he told them.
Where Lanoue encouraged experimentation at the
school level in hopes of improving performance and closing
the achievement gap, Means, with his emphasis on equity,
wants to impose a structure or system from the top down
so that every student in every school receives an equally
high-quality education.
“If you live in Nellie B or Five Points, you should get
the same educational experience. Right now, that’s not the
case,” he said. “If you know how to navigate, we have a great
school district. Clarke County is awesome. What if you are
a family that doesn’t know how to navigate the system? As
we’ve talked about, we have a lot of them.”
A system does not mean a dictatorship. Means—who
also regularly emphasizes collaboration—coached the
school board on the collective impact model of manage
ment, where organizations work together to solve a
deep-seated social problem. Athens, he noted, is program
rich and systems poor, meaning that Athens has a lot of
talented people doing great work in the public sphere, but
they don’t always work together.
As an example of what the collective impact model looks
like on the ground level, Means envisioned “true commu
nity schools” that never close and offer services like health
care. “Whatever you need as a neighborhood is embedded
in that school,” he said.
Board vice chairwoman Sarah Ellis noted that schools
already offer services like vaccines and a dental van. But
they’re inconsistent, Means said, offered at some schools
but not others, here one year and gone the next, which
makes it hard for parents to know what to expect. “If it’s
not systemic, it’s hurting children,” he said.
Means mentioned several changes in how administra
tors will plan and budget. Freed from the restraints of
QBE (the state’s school funding formula) when it became a
charter district, CCSD can now distribute resources among
schools however it chooses, according to need rather than
by number of students. School-level Student Improvement
Plans will now be known as Student Growth Plans, and
they’ll cover two years, because one year isn’t enough time
to expect results. Plans for teaching the old-fashioned
three R’s, as well as guiding students’ emotional develop
ment, will be revised and standardized across schools, with
teacher input.
The board, too, needs additional training and reform,
Means said. “We have work to do, and it’s going to take a
change in the way we do our work,” he said.
That may prove most difficult of all, though. The board
voted in August to bar its members from serving consecu
tive terms as president or vice president—the rationale
being that each member should have an opportunity to
gain leadership experience—and to strip the president of
the power to appoint committees, appointing them by con
sensus instead.
The changes were made on the advice of a consultant
hired by former interim superintendent Jack Parrish, but
proved controversial, as some African Americans viewed
them as a slap at Charles Worthy, who’s been board presi
dent for the past 12 years. Board member Linda Davis—
who, along with Worthy, was one of only two to vote
against the “B policy,” or board policy, changes—is pushing
her colleagues to reconsider at the Oct. 12 meeting. That
didn’t sit well with some of them, like Greg Davis, who are
ready to move on. John Knox even pointed to the board’s
ethics policy, which requires board members to present a
united front and support board decisions after a vote is
taken.
“I think this has ceased to be a policy discussion and has
become a political discussion, and I don’t like that because
it distracts from the work,” Ellis said. “I don’t think there’s
room for politics in education. It’s about the children.”
AADM: Move Confederate Monument
to Oconee Hill Cemetery
After a well-attended meeting at the library last week,
a group that’s been discussing what to do with Athens’
Confederate memorial in the wake of the violent white-
supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA has reached a con
sensus: Move it to Oconee Hill Cemetery. Whether that’s
possible remains to be seen.
About a dozen members of the Athens Anti-
Discrimination movement came to the Athens-Clarke
County Commission meeting Oct. 2 to lobby for moving
the Broad Street memorial. “The
obelisk honors the dead for dying,
therefore a more suitable place
would be the cemetery where they
rest, not on a park in a middle of
the street making a statement not
shared by the majority of citizens,”
co-founder Knowa Johnson said.
While some people view the
monument as a rather innocu
ous tribute to the Confederate
dead, University of Georgia his
tory professor Scott Nelson tied
it to the Lost Cause and the Ku
Klux Klan. The monument was
finished in 1872; four years earlier,
Athens politicians Benjamin Hill
and Howell Cobb gave a series
of speeches attacking African
Americans’ newly won right to
vote. Those speeches led to the
formation of the KKK in Georgia
to intimidate African Americans
and their white allies. The lan
guage on the monument—spear
headed by Cobb’s sister, Laura
Cobb Rutherford—is similar to
Cobb and Hill’s talk of “blood” and
“angels,” and it served as a rally
ing point for all three iterations
of the KKK, according to Nelson. Rutherford’s daughter,
Mildred “Miss Millie” Rutherford, would go on to become
a prominent educator, running the Lucy Cobb Institute (at
what’s now UGA’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government)
and perhaps Georgia’s foremost defender of the Lost Cause
mythology. As Russell Edwards later pointed out, the
median where the monument now sits—it’s been moved at
least twice before—is called Rutherford Park, and the Klan
burned crosses there as late as the 1950s.
Longtime civil rights leader Charlie Maddox urged cau
tion, though. “I marched on one side of that monument [in
the 1960s] and the Klan marched on the other side, and
that statue didn’t bother us,” he said.
While the historical record regarding the monument’s
relationship to white supremacy is becoming more and
more clear, Johnson also made a public safety argument in
favor of moving it—truck drivers often swing wide to avoid
it, endangering other drivers and pedestrians. There’s a
preservation argument, too: Road vibrations have damaged
it over the years, requiring repairs in 2014.
Those could be exceptions to a state law prohibiting the
alteration or removal of a monument on state property,
such as Highway 78, aka Broad Street. County Attorney
Bill Berryman is already looking into the issue, according
to Commissioner Melissa Link. And Commissioner Harry
Sims said he will ask Athens’ state legislators to enact
“whatever type of legislation we might need to remove the
Confederate monument.” ©
Georgia Bulldog staffers on their way to Knoxville, TN were the first to use Athens-Ben Epps Airport’s new $4.4 million commercial terminal,
which opened Sept. 29. While Ben Epps still lacks a commercial airline, and there’s no news to report on that front, the terminal will be
used by charter planes and a flight school until such time as Athens lands a new airline, according to interim airport director David Fluck.
FLAGPOLE.COM | OCTOBER 11, 2017
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