Dougherty County School System facing discipline, graduation issues

ALBANY — Dougherty County School Superintendent Butch Mosely has never been known for pulling punches during his frequent public speaking engagements, and he held true to form Tuesday at the Dougherty Rotary Club’s weekly luncheon.

“I feel blessed to have this opportunity (of being DCSS superintendent). This job is the challenge of my life,” Mosely, who has served as superintendent in six different school systems in Georgia, said. ” I wanted to do this. Sometimes when you have a competitive nature — and I was a coach — there are challenges you want to see if you are up to to see if you can pull it off.

“By and large that’s what keeps me going.”

Mosely became the district’s interim superintendent on January 2012 and was named permanent superintendent a year later. He inherited a system reeling from a test cheating scandal and one that was under financial supervision by the Georgia Department of Education.

The DCSS has recovered from the cheating fiasco and is on the verge of getting state’s boot off its neck in regard to finances. However, Mosely’s biggest challenges — discipline in the classroom and the county’s abysmal dropout rate — still loom large.

“In my thinking, along with my staff, our real challenge is discipline of the children,” Mosely said. “How do we keep them behaving and put them in an atmosphere where they value learning? That’s hard to do because so many of them have negative influences at home. We have children in some of our poverty-ridden areas that the only way a child knows how to survive is to be tough and, sometimes, even be mean and fight. Where fighting is the only way to resolve and issue, there’s no such thing as talking through a problem.

“They bring that culture to school. That group … I’d say 15 percent of our school population falls into that category. They are difficult to deal with and their parents are just as difficult as the child.”

Mosely said that over the past two years discipline problems in the county’s four public high school have fallen dramatically, and issues among the five middle schools have lessened. But discipline is still a major issue in the system’s 14 elementary schools.

“The difficult part is dealing with unreasonable parents that just won’t accept and face the fact that little Johnny has done something wrong. They think we are picking on them,” Mosely said. “I know growing up the rule at my house was that the teacher was right 100 percent of the time. We knew if we had a problem at school then we were going to have a problem at home — so we’d have two problems.”

The superintendent added that discipline and graduation rates are joined at the hip. Students with discipline problems are at greater risk of dropping out.

“The system as a whole is functioning at about the 65 percent level, which is unacceptable. We want to be at 90 percent,” Mosely said. “Graduation rates are in the 60s, we want 90 percent. We want a 90 percent graduation rate and 90 percent academic achievement. We have developed a five year plan, we call it our roadmap. We had a three percent gain last year and expect a five percent gain this year this is how it’s going to be done. That can be done here in Dougherty County.

“I promise you it can be done of we put the right people in the right spots. Everybody has their road map to know where they need to be. We know we have to do a better job in reading and math. We lost 185 young folks last year in the ninth grade. That’s 185 kids under 16 that are on the street.

“This is our greatest challenge.”