At 8 a.m. Tuesday, the conference room at the Greene County administrative building was unusually full.
The Greene County Development Authority (GCDA) was holding its monthly meeting but also in attendance were two members of the Board of Education, the Lake Oconee Academy CEO and three members of the Board of Governors, the Mayor and Vice Mayor of the city of Greensboro and a regional project manager from the Georgia Department of Economic Development.
After a review of development projects in the county, the meeting quickly got around to last month’s vote by the GCDA to get the BOE and the LOA Board together to talk about 25 acres of land in the county industrial park. It is next to the Athens Tech campus and across Highway 44 from Carson Middle School in downtown Greensboro.
GCDA Vice Chairman and President of Reynolds Lake Oconee Rabun Neal said the GCDA is interested in how the school system’s “potential use of the land there would help economic development in Greene County.”
This was not that meeting. It is still being planned. But something strange happened in the room with members of the two school boards that are in a fight over LOA’s lawsuit against the BOE over funding. When Neal asked for comments about the land offer, communication, if a little awkward, took place.
“This is the first time in my recollection we’ve ever had, all of us, an opportunity to come to the table to plan and talk,” said BOE Vice Chairman Steve Kilgore. “We seem to all have our own individual pathways. I just think it’s overdue.”
“We need to sit down and have a conversation,” said LOA Board Vice Chairman Michael Tompkins. “We believe in the need of a good education for all of our kids in Greene County. We’ve got some work to do. Let’s get together and see if we can make something happen.”
Everyone in the room who spoke acknowledged the importance of a good school system as a way of drawing new business and industry to the county.
The Board of Education is about to start construction on a $30 million school building for grades kindergarten through grade 5. It’s on Meadow Crest Road behind Home Depot, nowhere near the long-time school complex at Greene County High School. It’s even further away from the current Greene County Primary School in Union Point. All the kids there will move to the new building in 2023, and the fate of that building has not been announced.
GCDA board member Dee Lindsey is also the Greene County Commissioner representing the people of Union Point.
“They have a great interest in keeping their school in some form or fashion,” Lindsey told the group.
After years of decline, he said, Union Point is starting to show industrial growth. Like the rest of the county, it needs affordable housing but he also worries that transferring all the students to the new school and closing Union Point will hurt the city’s progress.
“There’s been a lot of public talk, not by the Board of Education, about having three elementary schools in the county, two elementary schools in the county and what is best for the future of Greene County. About the future growth in the county a lot of people tend to think the growth is going to be down the (Highway) 44 corridor. We at the development authority have had a lot of discussions about how we can promote growth in some of the locations in the county that have seen a decline in population,” Lindsey said.
BOE board member Perry Lee had a different idea. Combine LOA and the other Greene County schools.
“One elementary school, one middle school and one high school,” he said. “The hard work is that both boards need to work together with community involvement to make it happen over the next seven years. We have two years on this charter and we anticipate a five-year charter in the next term. The quality of the educational environment in the schools is growing and as the schools’ performances are closer together, at the end of that seven-year period we can merge together into a form that both boards agree on. That means the community working together so that we have the No. 1 educational system in the state of Georgia.”
“That would be a long time, maybe 10 years,” LOA Vice Chair Tompkins told the Lake Oconee News after the meeting. “Given the number of students in the county, 2,600, from a practical matter. I believe that if we embrace what we’re doing at LOA, say that’s the formula for success, 10 years could become three to five years. The truth of the matter is that we are obviously doing something right.”
According to the school data collection website SchoolDigger.com, results from the 2021 Georgia Milestones tests ranked LOA as 96 th out of 410 high schools in Georgia. GCHS ranked 371 st . Until that gap is narrowed, it appears the location of school buildings and talk of merging the system into one will have to wait.
No decisions were made Tuesday, and it remains to be seen if the three boards get together to discuss the GCDA’s land plan. But the meeting shows that the GCDA is joining the list of groups trying to get LOA and BOE to settle the lawsuit and, as many say, get back to the business of educating kids.