Students watch as board drags a district down

Kyanda Daniels, a junior, ran for miles with the Jonesboro High School track team the other day. When she was done, she stood above the stadium, gasping for air, and wondering what on Earth she was striving for.

“We’re in school for nothing, basically,” said Daniels, 17. “When I get out my homework, I think to myself, ‘Man, why am I doing this?’ What college is going to accept us? Who would give us a scholarship?”

Anxiety has engulfed students across Clayton County, a predominantly black area south of Atlanta, ever since they learned their school district could become the first in the nation since the 1960s to lose its accreditation.

Last month, the Southern Assn. of Colleges and Schools recommended that the district’s accreditation be revoked Sept. 1 because of ethical violations by its board. The national accreditation commission will vote Saturday.

For the county’s nearly 53,000 public school students, loss of accreditation would mean they would not be eligible for state scholarships or be accepted at many universities. They also would have difficulty transferring to other high schools.

Such a devastating scenario would also have symbolic significance for this once mostly white, rural county, where Margaret Mitchell set her 1936 novel, “Gone With The Wind,” and where large numbers of blacks have settled as Atlanta has grown in recent years. The population is now 62% African American.

For many, the accreditation problem puts an embarrassing spin on the county’s transition from white to black.

“It makes me mad,” said Garrett Anderson, 36, a forklift operator who came to Jonesboro High the other afternoon to pick up his 14-year-old son, Garrius, after weight training. “How can nine adults rob so many kids of their dreams?” According to the report, Clayton County Public Schools’ nine-member school board is so “dysfunctional” that it has had difficulty recruiting a superintendent, teachers and bus drivers. It accuses board members of nepotism, conflicts of interest, micromanagement, lax fiscal responsibility and failure to audit school attendance.

One board member, who was ousted this month, is not a legal resident of the county. Another spent more than $500 in taxpayer money at a hotel less than half an hour from her home. Another pushed for a football coach to be fired after he refused to provide her with highlight tapes of her son.

The board, the report said, is inappropriately influenced by “detrimental” outside influences: Four board members are linked to a local for-profit teacher’s union called the Metro Assn. of Classroom Educators, which regularly pickets Clayton schools calling for the resignation of principals.

The report cited the case of a board member, who heads the union, steering the board to cancel a successful program in mid-contract because the union did not endorse it. The cancellation, which cost taxpayers more than $1 million, deprived schools of a key academic curriculum.

The school district has the opportunity to “show cause” that it has improved before Sept. 1, but Mike Elgart, president and chief executive of the accreditation association, said that the school system did not seem to be able to repair itself.

Elgart said students’ education was already being compromised. “Ultimately, the students could suffer either way -- from the consequences of accreditation being removed or from the inaction of the district in addressing concerns,” he said.

While many parents blame the board, some have castigated each other for not electing qualified candidates or monitoring the steady decline of the school system. The district had the lowest SAT scores in metro Atlanta in 2007. Its interim superintendent is a former middle school principal who was fired in 1996 after showing teachers vocabulary words from a national test before students took the exam.

This is the second time in five years that the Southern Assn. of Colleges and Schools has investigated Clayton schools. In 2003, the district was placed on probation and told it risked losing its accreditation if it did not address ethics violations. Voters replaced most of the board members, and the probation was lifted, but some say inexperienced candidates affiliated with the same unions were elected in their place.

“It’s all just so embarrassing,” said Jo Lynn McEwen, 54, owner of a Jonesboro gift shop that sells figurines of Mammy, the house slave in “Gone With The Wind,” as well as “The Robert E. Lee Family Cooking and Housekeeping Book.” “One can only hope people quit voting for color and start voting for character.”

With organizations as diverse as the Georgia Assn. of Realtors, the Clayton County Chamber of Commerce and the Georgia NAACP calling on board members to resign, Gov. Sonny Perdue has appointed two experts to help the school district meet the Sept 1. deadline. He is also pushing legislation that would give residents the power to vote to oust board members if their district loses accreditation.

Some parents across the county already are trying to sell their homes. But with property values plummeting -- the median price of a house in Clayton is $119,000, about $8,000 less than it was in June 2007 -- many are pondering whether to send their children to live with relatives in other counties, teach them at home or send them to private schools.

In the last decade, voters have elected the county’s first black district attorney, solicitor general, magistrate, county commissioners and sheriff, but not without problems.

In 2004, the new black sheriff, Victor Hill, fired 27 supervisors, deputies and officers -- most of them white -- on his first day. In 2006, a black Democrat running for district attorney distributed fliers superimposing his opponent’s face on a Confederate flag.

With the public schools in jeopardy, many hope voters will pay closer attention in July when members of the board are up for reelection.

In the meantime, about 40 students from each of the county’s eight high schools -- all members of the newly formed Clayton Students’ Coalition -- met March 6 to discuss what they could do to save their futures.

Under ordinary circumstances, Joshua Penny, 16, a junior at Jonesboro High School with a 4.0 grade-point average, would be researching a history paper on the differences between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. As chairman of the coalition, however, he put his studies aside to outline the various problems with the school board, and brainstorm with fellow students.

“Basically,” he said with a sigh, “we have to make sure our board doesn’t act like a bunch of children.”

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jenny.jarvie@latimes.com