Fulton County Students Head Back to Class
Thousands of metro Atlanta students returned to class last week. But Monday was the first day of school for other metro districts, like Fulton County. WABE’s Martha Dalton accompanied Fulton Superintendent Robert Avossa as he visited schools Monday morning to see what the first day of school is like for him.
Hear the broadcast version of this story.
As he walks through the halls of Mimosa Elementary School in Roswell, Dr. Avossa greets teachers, parents, and students and pops into classrooms. He also checks in with new principal Ariane Holcomb, who walks with him.
“Any facilities challenges?” he asks her.
“We had an air conditioning issue,” Holcomb says. “Actually, we wrote it up Saturday and somebody was out here in two hours. Oh, my Gosh; it was fantastic.”
Avossa visited a total of seven schools, including Roswell High School, which is under construction.
But renovations aren’t the only thing going on at Roswell. Avossa credits Roswell Principal Jerome Huff and other school leaders for boosting the school’s graduation rate from 68% four years ago to 86% last year.
Huff says the school’s counselors and other staff members just didn’t let kids fall through the cracks.
“We get counselors involved, we get social workers involved, sometimes we get outside agencies involved, to remove all the barriers,” Huff says.
Leadership, Avossa says, is critical to a school’s success. And it’s clear he’s also happy with the leaders at his next stop, Centennial High School.
The school boasts a new Learning Commons, not to be confused with a library or a media center. There are books, but there are also laptops hooked up to flat screens and individual technology centers.
English teacher Scott Kent says there’s more to come.
“We’ll have 3-D printers in here,” he says, gesturing to an unused room. “We’ll have digitizers so students can work with digital artwork. Again, shared monitors, all kinds of opportunities for the students to use advanced materials they wouldn’t normally be able to use in the traditional classroom setting.”
School leadership turned the dream of a Learning Commons into a reality through a Request for Flexibility, or RFF, made possible by Fulton’s charter district status.
Avossa and about 25 other administrators will spent the day visiting schools. They’ll hold a four-hour debrief at the end of each day this week. They’ll discuss what needs to be done differently and make changes for next year.
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