The Georgia Board of Education along with Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue is poised to literally take over the Clayton County School District, eliminating local governance altogether.

For the Clayton County, Georgia, school district, things haven’t been going so well lately. The district recently lost its accreditation due to a “dysfunctional school board,” coupled with, it seems, a very determined school superintendent that resulted in serious infighting.

The intricate details of how the Clayton School District arrived at such a deplorable situation vary. What is certainly eyebrow raising is the action taken by Governor Perdue when, acting on a judge’s recommendation following a hearing that was triggered by citizens who filed legal complaints against the board members, he removed four Clayton school board members from office.

The legal mechanism that allowed Perdue to remove the board members from office is a little used tool under the state’s code of ethics. But it might be that Perdue and the state were quite eager to enter into a local concern. Perdue’s spokesman Bert Brantley said, “When local control fails, there has got to be a way for the state to step in and be more involved.”

There are new recommendations found in a 100-page report put together by a commission of business leaders with suggestions to fix failing school districts in Georgia. The proposed changes are very broad in scope, some would require legislation and even changes to the state constitution. But certainly the focus is on centralization of power and more oversight by the state — local communities would effectively lose control of their school districts.

The proposals from the commission include:

• Change state law to allow the state Board of Education to place troubled school districts in receivership. This would include schools not performing academically, struggling with accreditation problems, financial mismanagement or abuse of power.
• Mandate stricter qualifications for school board members, including criminal background checks and drug screens by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
• Implement a statewide code of ethics and conflict of interest guidelines for school board members.
• Prohibit school board members from being paid. Only reimburse for expenses.
• Prohibit employees of any public or private k-12 school system in Georgia from serving on a Board of Education.
• Legislate the size of school boards to be five to seven members.
• Change all school board elections to nonpartisan during the general election in November.
• Require school boards to have a strategic plan for timely performance reviews.
• Penalize members for not attending annual training.

While local taxpayers may be relieved to know they may no longer be paying seven people a $15,000 salary, a savings of $105,000 per year, and that conflicts of interest would be eliminated by not allowing teachers to serve on the board, the tradeoff with the state assuming total control and the loss of citizens’ voting privileges doesn’t seem to offset what are relatively small issues that could be addressed at a local level.

Using the crisis created by the Clayton County school board, the state and the governor of George seized the opportunity to grab control. This sets a precedent, and will be the impetus for serious legislative changes in the future. 

But perhaps this whole scenario is symptomatic of a rotten government educational system to begin with. And if the bad behavior of the board members and school officials is any indication of what’s being taught to the students by example and through indoctrination, the best thing that could happen is to close the place down completely. Surely the parents need to take responsibility for their children’s education, leaving the state, who has no authority to educate constitutionally anyway, to mind its own business.

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