Bibb County school district, advocates weigh in on legislation

The Georgia legislative session ended April 4 with several education-related bills making it to the governor’s desk.
Gov. Brian Kemp has 40 days, until May 14, to sign bills that make it through the General Assembly following the end of the legislative session.

Here are three things that happened in the Georgia legislature that will impact local schools.

State wants more local charter schools, district not so keen
The Local Charter School Authorization and Support Act gives stronger incentives and deterrents for school districts considering charter school applications.

The state department of education will offer $250,000 grants to school districts that approve new charter schools. The grants are designated for costs associated with approving the charter school like labor or professional development.

“There’s a cost involved with this, the policy enacted in this bill is to help defray some of that cost,” said Kyle Wingfield, president of the Georgia Policy Foundation. The act “removes a common excuse smaller districts might have for not taking charter schools seriously.”

A school district that rejects two or more charter schools that are later approved by the state charter school commission is subject to having any strategic waivers from the state stripped for up to three years.

School districts with more than 60,000 students can reject up to three charter schools in similar fashion before having their waivers or charter system status revoked.

Macon has three charter schools, the Academy for Classical Education, Foothills Education Charter High School and Cirrus Academy. The Bibb County school board rejected a proposal last August over discrepancies in the application.

Bibb County Schools Superintendent Dan Sims said the bill may force the school district to approve charter schools that are not in line with the needs of the community. The incentive grant is not the sole reason for Bibb County Schools to approve a charter school, he added.

“To me, it stands a chance of disintegrating the trust for school boards and communities to make decisions that are good for their community,” Sims said.

Bonnie Holliday, president of the Georgia Charter Schools Association, said the bill tries to put more onus on local districts to approve charter schools. She said nationally, 90% of charter schools are locally authorized, compared to 50% in the Peach State.

The bill isn’t meant to force districts to approve bad petitions, Holliday said, but tries to address the trend of high-quality charter school applications being passed along to the state.

“Ideally all charter schools are locally approved, where they have district resources available to them, better access to transportation and school nutrition funds. A local partnership benefits everyone, most of all the kids,” Holliday said.

State requires attendance teams for districts with chronic absenteeism
The state legislature took steps to resolve chronic absenteeism, which is defined as a student missing 10% or more of the school year, and updated the state’s compulsory attendance law.

The bill — filed by Sen. John F. Kennedy, R-Macon — requires districts with 10% or more of its student population considered chronically absent or two or more schools with a 15% chronically absent mark to hire an attendance review team to come up with individual plans for getting chronically absent kids back in the classroom.

In the Bibb County School District, 24% of students were chronically absent last school year, according to Sims’ state of the district address in January.

Sims has noted the hiring of an absenteeism consultant as one of his budgetary priorities for the upcoming fiscal year, a hire that is still being scrutinized by the board. He said the legislation will “strengthen” what plans and strategies are already in place.

“My only concern is that we don’t want accountability to shift so much on schools that we forget it is fundamentally the responsibility of a parent or guardian to get their child prepared to either catch a bus or get them to school,”
he said.

Cell phones banned in classrooms, up to districts to decide how
The “Distraction-Free Education Act” made it through the General Assembly. It bans personal electronic devices — cell phones — for kids in elementary and middle schools during school hours.

In Bibb County public schools, students are already not allowed to use their devices during the school day — from the first bell to the last bell of the day.

Sims said he supports the ban, especially given the district’s policy, because of the number of distractions teachers face in the classroom.

Sims said in light of the state ban, the district may make adjustments but will look to employ the ban such that students who violate it will be “held accountable.”

Michael O’ Sullivan, executive director of the Georgia education advocacy group GeorgiaCAN, said the potential ban comes when many schools and states have already raised the alarm on cell phones and have sought to “return classrooms a place of learning.”

He said the ban on cell phones also limits overreactions in case of an emergency, forcing students to follow a teacher’s instructions and prevent false alarms from causing chaos.

“People in general have forgotten how life was 10-15 years ago, when if you needed to get in touch with a kid, you contact the school and the legislation requires there’s a process in place for getting in touch with a parent,” O’Sullivan said.