Accreditation announcement coming for DeKalb | www.myajc.com

People in DeKalb County are anxiously awaiting an announcement Tuesday about the accreditation of their schools.

The political and financial turmoil that roiled Georgia’s third-largest school system in prior years are a thing of the past according to some hopeful observers, who believe the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools will finally erase the stain that has soiled DeKalb’s name for more than a year.

Mark Elgart, the president and chief executive officer of SACS parent company AdvancED, will meet with the county school board at 10 a.m. to reveal the findings of a review conducted last month, a year after his agency placed the district on probation. The drop in accreditation, and a SACS threat to strip accreditation altogether if school leaders failed to reform the system, plunged the district into crisis. The superintendent walked out, the governor intervened and the state supreme court got involved.

Now, officials and observers say the district of 99,000 students has stabilized and deserves to come off probation.

“I’m extremely optimistic,” said Ernest Brown, one of two parents SACS interviewed in 2012 during its investigation of the district. (Most of those interviewed by SACS were school officials.) The school district has dug out of its budget deficit, he said, and Gov. Nathan Deal’s intervention — he replaced two-thirds of the nine school board members — neutralized a major concern about school board meddling.

SACS accused the former school board members of infighting, influencing personnel decisions and otherwise throwing their weight around inappropriately.

“The reason we went on probation was not because of what was going on in the classroom but because of what was going on on the school board,” said Brown. “There’s a 180-degree difference.”

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