Dougherty School System has full plate at start of 2015-16 school year

ALBANY — As the Dougherty County School System prepares for the first day of school on Aug. 5, the district has a full plate of opportunities and potential problems laid out on the table. How the DCSS tackles these opportunities will determine if they become problems.

Here is what the system is looking at heading into the 2015-16 school year — implementation of the district’s 1-to-1 Technology Initiative, preparing to convert the system into a charter school system, establishing a college and career academy, conversion of the former Curriculum Department into a Department of Academic Services, and getting results back from the state’s new Georgia Milestones student assessments.

And that’s just for starters.

“There is no doubt that we have a lot on our plate right now.” DCSS Superintendent Butch Mosely said. “The system has the opportunity to make tremendous strides right now because basically everything is new and wide open. But sometimes with people who aren’t experienced with this there is also the possibility that things can go south in a hurry. I am confident we have the people in place who can pull it off.”

Let’s take a look at what the DCSS has before it this upcoming school year:

The 1-to-1 Technology Initiative

Outside of building new schools or renovating existing buildings, the $14 million outlay is the school system’s largest single non-capital project expense. The DCSS already has 6,500 computer tablets awaiting distribution, which is approximately half of what the system needs to reach its goal of putting a device in the hands of each of nearly 15,000 students hands by December.

In a change of plans, the DCSS school board recently approved purchasing 7,000 Dell educational laptops instead of tablets for students in grades 6-12. The good news in the system also cut a deal to get the laptops at around $40 less per device. That will save the district around $280,000 from the original plan.

The trick now is making the program work.

“I understand we’re spending a lot of money, and I don’t want my legacy to be the failure of this program,” Mosely said. “But we are going to have to make this change and the sooner the better. We have the people to make it work.”

The College and Career Academy

On Aug. 10, the BOE will vote on approval of a charter application to be submitted to the state.

Educational Consultant Russ Moore said attention is currently 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.

The district’s conversion to a Charter School system

The move to a charter system will allow local school governance teams (LSGTs) to have a say in school-level strategic and Title I planning, budget recommendations, input into aspects of curriculum and instruction, establish and monitor school improvement goals and have input in the selection of a principal when a vacancy occurs.

“The governance teams will have a direct impact on their community schools,” Mosely said. “The school board will still have the final say, but the LSGTs will be a major factor in their individual schools.”

Initial LSGTs will consist of nine people in the county’s 14 elementary schools — two teachers, two non-certified employees, two community partners, two parents and the school principal. There will be 11 members at the middle and high school levels. The extra two people will be two students who are elected members of the school’s student government association.

The terms of the LSGTs will be two years following the initial terms with each member being limited to two consecutive two-year terms.

All members of the LSGTs must be approved by the school board. The district has two major challenges — finding 181 different people to serve on the LSGTs and having the structure in place for the 2016-17 school year.

Establishing a Department of Academic Services

With the dissolution of the DCSS Curriculum Department, what emerged from the ashes was the newly created Division of Academic Services, which will have five departments under its umbrella — Curriculum and Instruction, Testing and Evaluation, Special Education, Teacher and Leadership Development, and CTAE (career, technical, agricultural education).

Ufot Inyang, the DCSS’s associate superintendent of academic services, said the restructuring was necessary to prepare for the future and to move the district forward.

“The reorganization within the department has been ongoing for a while. It is not something that just happened,” Inyang said. “Indeed, I can say that since my assumption of office about two and a half years ago, we have been engaged in restructuring given district priorities, challenges, needs, direction and constraints. Given the fact that I had responsibility and oversight for not only Curriculum and Instruction, but for the entire academic services division, we had to rename it the Division of Academic Services.”

Georgia Milestones assessments

This is not only a Dougherty County problem, but resonates through every school district in the state.

In June, the State Department of Education announced that CTB/McGraw-Hill will provide $4.5 million in services at no cost to the Georgia Department of Education, following content errors and disruptions during 2015 Georgia Milestones testing, Those services include safeguards to ensure future administrations of the test take place with no similar issues.

That funding includes $2.64 million to create and implement end-of-course assessments serving the new traditional/discrete math course options — meaning those tests will be developed at no expense to Georgia taxpayers. CTB/McGraw-Hill will also provide:

• Up to $120,000 for an in-state program manager to serve as a point of contact for the GaDOE for one year, helping to coordinate, organize and prioritize tasks requiring GaDOE review and input

• Up to $60,000 toward an independent analysis of the problems that took place in 2015-16

• Mote than $1.6 million in additional services

The bottom line is the 2015 test results were to be used as a baseline for the state’s 181 school districts. The numbers are still not available and might not be until November.