We have a very important resolution on the November ballot that is key to our Strategic Plan for the Greene County School System (GCSS)’s traditional schools.
The resolution renews the 1% sales tax (called ESPLOST) that supports qualifying school projects, and the resolution gives the GCSS authority to issue debt to fund a new elementary school. In support of this resolution, I’d like to make the following points.
First, do not confuse approval of this resolution with the issues associated with the GCSS and LOA charter school leadership. We have two school systems—one that is in good shape and one that, academically, is not where we want it to be. It is important to this county that BOTH systems are doing well. It is NOT an “either/or” situation—it is a “win/win” solution that is important. As shown below, the new elementary school is key to getting to this “win/win”. Hopefully, by the time this letter is published, we will have settled the litigation issue with LOA—and we can get on with assuring that the other “win” stays as a “win”.
Why a new elementary school? First, our case is fully laid out in a paper we put together that can be accessed with this link—“https://tinyurl.com/stateofgcssaddress” Please read it. It describes the journey we started about five years ago with an aggressive Strategic Plan that emphasized the importance of doing a much better job of ensuring that our 3rd graders had mastered basic reading and writing, and our 5th graders mastered basic mathematics—something research tells us is fundamentally important for a successful school system.
We took some bold steps including closing a school, consolidating two separate K-8 systems, and creating a Primary School at Union Point with all the K-3 students. This gave us savings of about $1.5 million that we redeployed back into the system, allowed us to concentrate our best resources on the task at hand, and made easier the task of executing the many initiatives we undertook.
Three years later, there is substantive evidence these bold steps are working. Our 3rd graders this past spring were the only 3rd graders in the region to improve on GA Milestone test results from the last pre-COVID year of 2019 and they substantially closed the gap with our benchmarks—LOA and the state average.
However, we still aren’t hitting our benchmarks, and we have barriers that would hinder these 3rd graders matriculating upstream.
So, why a new elementary school? Our vision is to have a PK-5 elementary school similar to that enjoyed by other successful school systems such as LOA and Oconee County.
Research shows us the importance of a seamless and transition-free structure at the early learning phase. Unfortunately, when we started, we had no building large enough to house all the PK-5 students—so we had to leave the PK kids behind in Greensboro, we had to bus K-3 students up to Union Point, and we had to move the 4th/5th graders into the Middle School (which it turns out are not good ages to mix).
This is NOT a structure sustainable in the longer term. The new elementary school gets us to our ideal structure of a single PK-5 school with no unnecessary transitions or barriers to successful matriculation downstream (e.g., 4th/5th graders at the Middle School)—and is key to our getting to an academic “win”.
The bad news is that this is not the best time to be building anything because of inflation—and the investment presently stands at $39.5 million. The good news is that we have saved enough along with available state money to fund 40-plus% of the cost upfront—with debt service for the balance that can easily be funded by ESPLOST (65% of which is borne by tourists)—with NO INCREASE in property taxes. It would be the first new school facility for the traditional school system in over 2 decades. We hope you VOTE FOR THE “WIN/ WIN”!
Some side issues: First, some have questioned why we combined the renewal of the popular ESPLOST with the more controversial debt issue.
The answer is simple—we need to know if we have an ESPLOST that can fund the debt—a failure to approve ESPLOST would make the decision to go ahead with the elementary school a very difficult one.
Second- some have proposed that we go the opposite way with a series of “community” schools. The answer here is that we are a small school system with 2,600 students between LOA and the traditional school system.
Breaking into even smaller schools would lead to an uneconomical system—with the risk of many classes being ineligible for state aid.
And academic performance would take a backward step—after all, one of the primary reasons our performance has improved so much is the benefits we gained by consolidating the two K-8 systems we had in the traditional system.
Mike Lynch Chairman, Green County Board of Education