Options on new Bibb system framework leaves many people puzzled

Two weeks of meetings on Bibb County’s new organizational structure have left many parents, teachers and residents scratching their heads.

The sessions, scheduled to explain the different options for the district and to solicit feedback, have instead left many people who attended confused.

“If they’re not frustrated like me, then they’re asking what is the purpose of this,” said Marie Harris, who attended one of the information sessions last month.

Bibb County, like other school systems across the state, must decide by June 30 whether to convert to a charter system, adopt an Investing in Education Excellence contract, or choose to be a status quo district.

Administrators have encouraged public input to help make that decision, but many parents haven’t felt informed enough to do so.

Part of the problem, Chief Academic Officer Bruce Giroux conceded at one of the meetings is, “We don’t know all the facts.”

The difficulty in reaching the decision also stems from a set of vague outlines from the state Department of Education that has brought little understanding about each option and left district administrators with no clear-cut answers.

Until school officials decide, they won’t know all the particulars of how an “IE2” or charter system would look in Bibb.

There’s also the added pressure of what a new framework for the county would mean for the district’s budget.

Out of Georgia’s 180 school districts, more than 100 of them are now in the decision-making process.

During their retreat last month, board members heard from Buster Evans, a former Forsyth County superintendent who was responsible for getting IE2 rolling in his district.

There was at least one takeaway from the retreat, as well as several of the community information sessions. The status quo option isn’t suitable for Bibb because it would lose the ability to seek state waivers, such as on class size.

“If there was no class size waivers, we would need 92 additional teachers at the elementary level,” Ron Collier, the system’s chief financial officer, said during the retreat. “And that would cost us about $6.6 million.”

Collier estimated that $720,360 would have to be spent hiring 10 additional teachers at the middle school level and another $1.3 million hiring 20 or more “early intervention program” teachers.

With an IE2 contract or under charter system, Collier said, “We would not incur that additional cost.”

A CLOSER LOOK AT IE2

Only four school districts in Georgia -- Gwinnett, Rabun, Cobb and Forsyth counties -- have been approved for IE2.

The demographics and needs of those particular districts vary greatly from Bibb county, which makes comparisons difficult.

The biggest difference between IE2 and charter is student achievement and governance, Evans said.

“You make more of a commitment to academic achievement improvement under IE2 than you do in charter,” he said. “You get flexibilities on both of them, but whether or not you meet your IE2 goals is going to be tied to student achievement, which everybody wants.

“Whether or not you comply with your charter contract is going to be based on governance distribution as well as maybe student achievement, but it’s more focused on distributing governance.”

IE2 schools are required to close a 3 percent gap each year between the baseline score on the College and Career Ready Performance Index and 100.

For high performing schools, school districts that are in the top 25 percent at the beginning of their IE2 contract, the 3 percent increase isn’t required as long as they remain within that group.

Schools that don’t measure up could convert to charter status, or the school’s operations could be taken over.

Steve Flynt, chief strategy and performance officer for Gwinnett County schools, said the initial questions they addressed in their community meetings related to the flexibility in IE2.

“Depending on where your school system is in wanting flexibility and in how you’re going to structure your governance, I think both areas -- either charter system or IE2 -- is a very workable avenue,” Flynt said. “But you really need to have that discussion with your board, your community, your stakeholders to see what works best there.”

Gwinnett was the first district to put IE2 into place and has a total of 14 waivers in its current contract, which includes flexibility such as class-size, expenditure controls and graduation requirements.

“Once you get through the governance question, then you can move on to some of the others. Because after that question’s answered, everything else can be done very similarly under both of those plans, whether it’s charter or IE2,” Flynt said.

THE CHARTER SYSTEM

While there are still requirements to hit academic targets, the focus with a charter system is on school-level governance. Another benefit is a financial boost, which could mean $80 to $90 per student (about $1.8 million for Bibb) in supplemental funding for the district.

The Dublin City School system is in its fourth year of operating as a charter system.

Superintendent Chuck Ledbetter, who also served on a Charter Advisory Committee, said he’s done a lot of site visits of charter systems across the state.

Out of the 28 active charter systems, “not a single one is exactly like another,” he said. “Throughout Georgia, there is no one size fits all. We try to make sure that our legislators and our public understand that.”

A concern for some Bibb County school board members, as well as the public, is whether the district could manage 41 separate local-governance teams, one for each school.

For Dublin, which has just six schools, “What we try to do is make sure that the decisions that can be made at the school level are made at the school level,” Ledbetter said.

Interviewing for a position at a school would be one example of a decision done by the school-level governance team.

“They have their questions that they use, they have rubrics that they score. And then they take the candidate they want to recommend and send that recommendation to my office, where I present that recommendation to the school board to vote on that recommendation,” he said.

At the board retreat in Perry, Wanda West voiced a concern about whether the school-level governance teams would undermine the board’s authority.

“If they are all as strong willed as this board, we’ve got a serious problem,” she said.

To contact writer David Schick, call 744-4382.

This story was originally published February 2, 2015 at 6:08 PM with the headline "Options on new Bibb system framework leaves many people puzzled."