Wednesday, January 14, 2004

Clayton schools: lessons for Fayette

By J. FRANK LYNCH

NEWS ITEM: Twelve months later, Clayton County finally hires a superintendent.

Exactly one year ago yesterday, Dan Colwell was abruptly fired as superintendent of the Clayton County School System. An illegal action, Clayton’s misfit Board of Education “righted” themselves within the week and then fired him again, as legally as they could.

His office door in Jonesboro padlocked, Colwell took the hint and swore off education. The former head of Georgia’s sixth-largest school system now sells real estate here in Fayette County, where he has lived for several years. Though a career educator in Clayton until his dismissal, Colwell and his wife sent their children to Fayette County schools, which he now promotes to prospective home buyers, one would assume.

No dummies, the Colwells.

His firing was like pouring gasoline on a smoldering pile of leaves, igniting a series of events that have left the community to our east a decaying shell of its former self, with the lowest property values and, after the city of Atlanta, the worst-performing schools in metro Atlanta.

NEWS ITEM: Tyrone Town Council passes ordinance prohibiting operation of “massage parlors,” limits liquor sales to restaurants.

“Clayton school chief likes a challenge,” read the unintentionally sarcastic headline over a story in the Big Metro Daily on Barbara Pulliam, 55, who hails from a small district in suburban Illinois but has experience in the war zone known as Chicago Public Schools.

Calling the dismal condition of Clayton’s schools “a challenge” is laughable, of course, but the state of public education just across the Flint River isn’t funny. Though the threat of losing accreditation is mostly lifted with the hiring of Pulliam, Clayton still has a long way to go:

• SAT scores took another nosedive in 2003, falling to 897, 87 points below the state average, which is the lowest in the nation;

• 14 percent of Clayton 11th graders failed last year to pass the state’s High School Writing Test required for graduation;

• Nearly 60 percent of Clayton’s students qualify for free or reduced lunch;

• Clayton’s graduation rate of 60.3 percent is 3 points below the state average;

• At roughly 80 percent, the number of “Highly Qualified Teachers” in Clayton classrooms is the lowest among any school district in Metro Atlanta;

• Based on the most recent measures of student performance, every school in Clayton County will fail Adequate Yearly Progress this year.

NEWS ITEM: Clayton Chamber of Commerce CEO quits, saying a community overrun with apartments, mini-marts and cheap starter homes shows no economic promise.

Clayton’s schools were already in sharp decline before the whole Colwell incident sent them into a tailspin, mirroring a dramatic and unprecedented shift in demographics starting in the early 1990s that anybody should have seen coming, but which Clayton leadership ignored.

Of course I’m talking about “white flight,” a couple of innocent words that turn ugly when applied to the phenomenon of pulling up and moving out of neighborhoods in which you invest your all just to avoid being the last “white” family on the street.

Many of you are familiar with this concept because you’ve been there, done that: Southwest Atlanta in the 1960s; South DeKalb in the 1970s; South Fulton in the 1980s; and now, Clayton in the last decade.

The 1990 Census showed Clayton County had 182,000 people, 72 percent of them white. By 2000, when Clayton’s population had expanded to 236,000 total, the share of white residents had fallen to 37.9 percent.

At 51.6 percent, blacks were the new majority in 2000.

But it wasn’t just new African-American families moving in that so dramatically shifted the face of Clayton County in the 1990s: Whites moved out by the tens of thousands, from 131,792 in 1990 to just 89,741 in 2000.

Two years later, in 2002, the Census estimated the number of whites had fallen another 20,000 people, to 67,942, or 28 percent. The black population, meanwhile, had grown almost as many by 2002, to 146,614, or roughly 61 percent.

In two years.

NEWS ITEM: First Baptist Church of Jonesboro noted by the Southern Baptist Convention for having the “fastest-growing African-American membership in the nation.”

Just 14 years ago, the racial breakdown in Clayton County was dead-on the state average.

Today, it is the most segregated of Georgia’s largest counties, with a larger share of black residents than DeKalb or Fulton counties and even the city of Atlanta.

Until the current school board took office in January of last year, Clayton had no majority-blacked elected boards or councils. Riverdale elected a black mayor in November, the first for any Clayton municipality.

Yet, as a percent of the total population, only tiny Hancock County in the “Black Belt” of central Georgia shows a larger share of African-Americans than Clayton, based on Census estimates.

To think such a dramatic change would not impact the schools would be foolish, of course. Just since 2000, white enrollment has fallen another 12 percent in Clayton, to about 14 percent of the total. Every school in the county is at least majority black, some nearly all black.

But to place the blame for the collapse of a once-proud school system on a rapid change in the makeup of its student enrollment is too easy an out. The Clayton County story is far more complicated than that.

Consider: All the while Clayton County’s schools have been sliding further off the charts of acceptability, new homes have gone up at a record-pace on any tract of land still available. It’s like “build-out” in Peachtree City, except Clayton knows not the meaning of the word “greenspace.”

Who is buying these homes? Who is enrolling their children in these schools?

Perhaps the answer can be found in the types of commercial businesses that have sprung up in recent years along Ga. Highway 85 in Riverdale, Tara Boulevard in Jonesboro and Old Dixie Highway in Forest Park: Title pawn outfits, furniture rental rip-offs, extended stay motels and Asian “spas” fronting for prostitution.

When there are competing storefronts on opposite corners of the street declaring “Checks Cashed” in bright pink neon, it means this: Your population is barely getting by.

And a population barely getting by will get excited about a three-bedroom, two-bath home on a quarter acre for $100,000. They will not be concerned whether or not the neighborhood school improved its test scores last year.

The delicate relationship between a community’s schools and its overall economic well-being can be summed up this way: A community declines only when its schools start to decline, and schools decline only when a community allows them to decline.

If you own a home in Fayette County and you don’t care about the welfare of Fayette County’s schools, do your neighbors a favor and sell to someone who does.

NEWS FLASH: Since 2000, black enrollment growth in Fayette County schools has outpaced white enrollment growth by more than 500 percent.

NEXT WEEK: The rest of that story.