Grady is a step closer to becoming a charter school after the board voted 8-1 to send a letter of intent to the Georgia Department of Education. This vote follows the board’s October meeting, at which an advisory committee to APS Superintendent Meria Carstarphen recommended that the district pursue a “Charter System” status.

In 2008, Georgia passed a law requiring all school systems in Georgia to choose one of three operating models: the “Investing in Educational Excellence System” (IE2), the “Charter System,” or the “Status Quo System.” Each school must inform the Department of Education of its choice by June 30.

In an IE2 system, the school system enters into a contract with the state, which grants the district waivers from certain parts of Title 20, which is the part of Georgia law dealing with education. The state sets academic progress targets that schools must meet, and if schools don’t meet their targets then the district may lose governance over them. Gwinnett County chose this model in 2009. Cobb County voted to adopt this system in September.

In a charter system, the school system enters into a five-year contract, or a charter, with the state, which grants it flexibility to vary from essentially all of Title 20 as well as state rules and guidelines.  The district must submit an application that outlines how it will use this flexibility and how it will set up a local school governance team for each school to help make decisions. Both Fulton County and City Schools of Decatur chose this system, and DeKalb County is leaning towards choosing it.

In a status quo system, the school system does not have flexibility to vary from any parts of Title 20 or state rules and guidelines.

APS is currently operating under three waivers from Title 20: class size, expenditure control and the 65 percent rule. The class size waiver allows schools to exceed the state maximum for class sizes; the expenditure control waiver allows schools to choose where they spend money they receive from the state (instead of being required to spend it in specific areas); and the waiver from the 65 percent rule allows schools to spend less than 65 percent of their budgets on direct instruction.

Matt Westmoreland, the District 3 representative on the APS Board of Education, wrote via email that if APS were to operate without those waivers, the district would have to make up around $40 million per year in the budget. 

Westmoreland said there are several reasons APS has delayed exploring the three options until now. These reasons include operating under an interim superintendent, the selection of a new superintendent and a high turnover on the school board. During her first week on the job in March, however, Superintendent Carstarphen announced that a committee would begin studying the three options and would release a detailed proposal for the charter system.

“The advisory committee—made up of parents, principals, community members and administrators—studied all three options over a seven-week period,” Westmoreland wrote. “At the end of that process, they recommended we move forward with becoming a charter system because it allowed for flexibility and shared governance, which they believe best aligns with the needs of all students across our diverse system.”

He also wrote Superintendent Carstarphen shared this belief and made the same recommendation to the board.

If the charter system is implemented, there will be many changes throughout the district, which may include new customized standards for academics, longer school days and a longer school year. Because APS is choosing to take a cluster-driven approach, Westmoreland, along with Grady principal Timothy Guiney, thinks that this charter system will allow the cluster schools to collaborate and engage more with each other.

“I think it will be good,” Guiney said. “I think that one of the reasons that APS and the community and all of the stakeholders felt like the charter with a cluster emphasis is a positive system because it allows for some different flexibility and some different ways to go about educating students in each of the different clusters.”

Becoming a charter system also means that the control and decision-making is pushed down to the school level, where the principals and the local school governance teams might have a better sense of what their students need to thrive.

“I think it will help us as a cluster to have a better planning process,” Guiney said. “It will help us build upon our strengths and help us work together a little more seamlessly.”

Now that the APS Board of Education has voted to send a letter of intent to the state, the next step will be to start developing an application and submit it to the state for approval. If approved, all of the APS schools would be operating under a charter system no later than the 2016-2017 school year.