Clayton superintendent tries to keep schools on restoration track

Clayton superintendent tries to keep schools on restoration track
By Jeffry Scott

It’s hard to pinpoint the low point, there were so many. But Aug. 28, 2008, fits as well as any.

That was the day Gov. Sonny Perdue finally ousted the last four Clayton County School Board members who had performed their duties so badly that three days later Clayton schools would became the first school system in the nation in the last four decades to lose its accreditation.

Their names might be forgotten – Michelle Strong, Lois Baines-Hunter, Yolonda Everett, and Sandra Scott – but their wreckage lives in infamy.

It's why every morning Superintendent Dr. Edmond T. Heatley, a retired Marine Corps drill instructor, rises about 4:30, goes through his daily workout and makes it to his office at the Clayton County School board by 6:30: To get an early start on the long march back.

“The reputation is what people believe about us, but the character is what we are," said Heatley one afternoon last week looking, at 47, muscled and fit beneath a natty suit as he sat in his office in Jonesboro.

Heatley speaks like that, adorning his sentences with phrases -- “You lead from the front;” “Anything that is wrong, you put at my feet. I own it.” -- that make it easy to imagine Heatley's earlier life as a Marine Master Sgt. who once whipped raw recruits into shape with bluster and top of the lungs oratory at Camp Pendleton in San Diego.

He did that for three and a half years before retiring from active duty in 1996 and pursing graduate degrees in education.

“For the first part of my life, I fought for my country,” said Heatley, who earned a Bronze Star in combat in the first Gulf War. “The rest of my life I’m fighting for children.”

It won’t be an easy fight, under any circumstances, for the educator who previously was superintendent of the Chino Valley Unified School in Chino, Calif., a system with 36 schools and 33,500 students (Clayton has 37 schools and 50,000 students).

Clayton schools regained accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Council (SACS) two months before Heatley was hired last July.The accreditation, however, is provisional. The system remains on probation for two years and must submit to SACS inspections every six months which, so far, it has passed.

As with school systems across the state and metro Atlanta, Clayton must slash its school spending next year because of declining revenues and state cutbacks in education funds. Clayton is attempting to do that without damaging student performance or impeding the road to recovery and unqualified accreditation.

Heatley has recommended spending cuts that will remove $85 million from the budget by July 2012. Without the cuts, which include reducing his salary ($250,000) and those of the school board, plus 80 more measures, he said next year Clayton schools will run a $40.8 million budget deficit.

Academic experts said it’s significant he doesn’t plan to cut teachers or close schools.

“What you want to do is make the cuts as far away from the classroom as you can,” said Mark Elgart, president and CEO of the accreditation agency SACS. “And he’s done that.”

Heatley put it another way, “We’re not going to use the economy as an excuse not to do the right thing.”

He's encountered little resistance from the new nine-member school board, which will receive his detailed budget on April 26. How well he and the board settle on a budget will be a key indicator of progress made, said Brad Bryant, who was special liaison to Gov. Perdue’s office in resolving the accreditation crisis.

“If they work together well as a group it may mean they can begin to raise student performance as well,” Bryant said.

Heatley said there’s already at least one sign of academic improvement under him. Clayton County eighth-graders scored higher this year on state writing assessment tests than they did last year, with a pass rate of 77 percent, which still trails the state average of 79 percent.

Parents, board members and political leaders, after what they’ve been through over the past few years, mostly are taking the attitude of so far, so good.

“He’s a strong superintendent and he says what he thinks, and that’s what we need,” said Cyd Cox, president of the Clayton County Council of PTAs. “And when he makes a mistake, he admits it, instead of saying ‘I never said that.’”

State Representative Mike Glanton, who authored a 2008 bill in the state Legislature requiring the Clayton School board to abide by tougher ethics restrictions, said he was immediately impressed that Heatley, unlike previous superintendents, bought a house in Clayton and enrolled two of his children in the school system.

“It shows he’s invested, he’s a part of the community,” said Glanton. “I’m not happy; I’m elated.”

If others had trepidation about the board hiring an outsider unfamiliar with Clayton County Schools, Clayton County, or, for that matter, Georgia, Heatley had a few doubts himself.

He’d been watching and reading the news and, when he quietly slipped into town unannounced to get a look at his next job and home, he half expected to “see buildings burning and a lot of people running around with their heads on fire."

Instead, when he talked to people at gas stations and restaurants and told them he was thinking of moving to Clayton, he received mixed reviews, with many telling him he’d picked a wonderful place to live.

“After I did my homework I realized this was a diamond in the rough,” he said.

Board vice chairperson Ophelia Burroughs said the thing that most impressed her during board interviews, and she taught in Clayton schools for 23 years, was Heatley was “aware of some of the latest techniques in teaching that we didn’t even know about.”

SACS head Mark Elgart has been impressed by the system’s progress and the board’s decision to take SACS advice and bring in an experienced superintendent from outside.

“This school system has had a problem with its culture for the last 10-15 years,” Elgart said. “They needed a complete change of culture and they needed someone with experience in urban life settings, and he fits that description.”

However, John Trotter, head of the Metro Association of Classroom Educators, wasn't impressed with Heatley or, for that matter, Elgart and SACS.

“It’s all window dressing,” he said. “There’s all kinds of miscreant behavior going on [in the Clayton school system], but you just never hear about it. The discipline is shot to hell and back, and the new board is not doing its job.”

Yet classroom discipline has been addressed by Heatley. He's had discussions with a juvenile judge about a program in which students who are habitually truant, or with habitual behavior problems, will attend on Saturdays – with their parents.

"[It will] allow students to catch up on their schoolwork [and] the parents will have the opportunity to go through parenting classes," said Heatley, sounding a bit like the old Marine drill instructor.