Dougherty School Board delays vote on college and career academy

ALBANY — The Dougherty County school board on Monday heard an update from Seamless Education Associates Consultant Russ Moore on the status of the district’s college and career academy application.

The original intent was to place the item before the board Monday, but those plans were pushed back after the state charter commission pushed back an Aug. 1 deadline for receiving applications.

“We’re still tweaking the draft of the application and we think it’s best that we bring the application back to the board on its next scheduled meeting on Aug. 11,” Moore said. “Obviously the board will be seeing the final draft before then, but we want them all to have time to read over it closely.”

Moore said his attention is focused on three areas of the application — location of the facility, its governance board and what programs will be offered at the new charter school. In addition, Moore said he is concentrating on “cleaning up the language” on a $3.1 million grant application to the Technical College System of Georgia which will be used as seed money for the new school.”

Moore, however, cautioned that the board must approve the charter application before the grant application is filed sometime in September.

As far as the new charter’s location, school officials are talking about using part of Southside Middle School, which has easy access to Albany Technical College. Moore said the composition of the governance board, which was a factor in the 2012 failure of the first attempt to establish a charter school, would range from nine to 11 members.

“I want to assure people that the makeup of the new charter governance board will fairly and accurately represent the community,” DCSS Superintendent Butch Mosely said.

During the regular meeting the board tabled a proposed a new attendance policy would replace a dated attendance plan which allows a student up to 14 unexcused absences before the student faced grade-level retention. The new policy, which aims to bring the DCSS in line with similar policies set forth by both the Georgia Department of Education and the General Assembly, trims that number to five

Currently, both Georgia truancy laws and the College and Career Readiness Performance Index limit the number of unexcused absences to five for each student. Excused absences, which allow a student to miss class for illnesses or the death of close relative, are not counted against the student as long as the excuse is documented.

According the state education department, “Data indicate that missing more than five days of school each year, regardless of the cause, begins to impact student academic performance and starts shaping attitudes about school. Chronically truant students are not the only students negatively impacted by absences For students in the 6th grade through the 9th grade, student attendance is a better predictor of dropping out of school than test scores.”

Under Dougherty County’s proposed plan, students in grades K-8 will be required to attend 166 out of the 180 instructional days offered by the system. Students in grades 9-12 who miss more than three class hours per semester class or five class hours per year-long class will not receive credit for that subject.