GREENE COUNTY
Two of the big issues in the 2020 lawsuit that Lake Oconee Academy filed against the Greene County Board of Education were not resolved with the settlement reached in January.
The number of LOA students that the BOE will pay for and what the BOE withholds in administrative fees were set aside to reach a deal on the 29-month-old lawsuit. Temporary solutions were put in place, but they will end when the charter expires in June 2024.
This summer’s negotiations between LOA and the BOE for an extension of LOA’s charter were expected to be more contentious than the lawsuit.
But it now appears that the Georgia legislature will resolve them next week in favor of the state’s charter schools, including LOA.
House Bill 318 was approved by the Georgia House this month on a bipartisan 147-17 vote. It is expected to be approved by the Georgia Senate before the legislature’s final session this Wednesday and signed by Gov. Brian Kemp.
LOA’s charter allows the Board of Education to withhold up to three percent of its funding to LOA as an administrative fee. The current draft of HB 318 requires school districts to itemize their administrative fees and return to the charter school any money not used at the end of the school year.
For Fiscal Year 2023, the Greene County BOE budget indicates an administrative fee of $413,419.14 in expenses relating to LOA.
LOA Board of Governors Chairman Michael Tompkins told the Lake Oconee News that, over the first six years of the current charter, administrative charges have totaled more than $2 million. He just wants to know what it was spent on.
“It’s my hot-button issue,” he said. “We shouldn’t need a law to tell us that. They should want to tell us that.”
This week, a spokesperson for the Greene County School District told the Lake Oconee News that they do not have those records.
“The legislature has heard one side of the story,” new BOE Chairman Perry Lee told the Lake Oconee News. “If we have to spend a lot of time administratively to figure out and go through the complex process, that costs a lot of time and effort to prove that they don’t need any more money and that we do more than 3 percent. That’s a waste of time and effort that can go to other places. That’s not an easy process to do.”
The other major item of disagreement between Greene County educators is the number of students enrolled at LOA that the BOE should fund. The current charter allows LOA to accept as many as 1,051 students before the charter expires in June 2024.
The issue was whether or not the charter requires the BOE to fund all of the students enrolled or, as the BOE argued during the lawsuit negotiations, only the annual enrollment limits included in LOA’s application for the charter renewal in 2016. The limits were not included in the signed charter itself.
The current draft of HB 318 allows school systems to agree to annual enrollment limits in a charter but requires school boards to fund that number of students. However, the charter school is allowed to exceed those limits by up to two percent and the school district must fund the additional students also.
“Whatever the state passes, we will do,” Lee said. “(The state) gives us money, but it only covers about 26 percent of school board’s expenses. That money plus a lot more is given to LOA so they can run their budget. If the amount that we give LOA goes up, we’re going to have to raise the millage to pay for that.”
This year, LOA has had an enrollment of about 1,081 students. The lawsuit settlement agreed to by both sides requires the BOE to only fund 1,051 students since that was the established maximum in the current charter.
LOA CEO Otho Tucker has said a proposed new charter approved by the Greene County Board of Education must be delivered to the state by this Fall.
The charter renewal comes at a time when Greene County continues to grow with new housing developments planned for or under construction in three areas south of I-20, and the county is building a new school for pre-K to Grade 5 children. Yet a chasm exists between the test scores at LOA, where about 40 percent of the county’s children are educated, and test scores at Greene County’s other schools.
Despite an increase in the quality of teachers and administrators in the district in recent years, new programs targeting both children and parents, the establishment of a College and Career Academy, and some test scores showing promise, a solution to the education disparity in Greene County remains.