In what McDuffie County Superintendent of Schools Mark Petersen called a "significant paradigm shift of how we educate at-risk students," members of the system's Board of Education voted Thursday night to close their alternative school and subcontract the educational service to a private company.
After spending several hours in discussion during their morning planning session, the McDuffie County Board of Education wasted no time in the regular meeting that evening approving unanimously to close CrossRoads Learning Center and replace it with an Ombudsman program through Educational Services of America.
According to their website, ESA's Ombudsman service offers personalized, computer-assisted learning for middle and high school students who benefit from an alternative learning environment due to a variety of issues including truancy, credit or academic skill deficiencies, social and family challenges or learning/behavioral disorders.
"It provides a path for them to do something besides flip burgers for the rest of their lives," Dr. Petersen said during Thursday morning's planning meeting.
Ombudsman operates existing programs in eight other Georgia school districts: Bulloch, Coffee, Effingham, Jefferson Davis, Liberty, Douglas and Toombs counties and Vidalia City.
McDuffie became the 10th district to recently sign up for the program to begin in the next school year, joining Appling, Camden, Pierce, Tattnall, Ware, Walker and Cobb counties and Marietta and Cartersville city districts.
"It is a turn-key program. They take care of everything - facility, building, staff, computers and everything," Dr. Petersen said.
The only thing not covered in the costs of the program will be the transportation. During a press conference following the board meeting, Dr. Petersen said "there's a financial piece that's a by-product of the decision.
"It will save the local tax payers a tremendously large amount of money," he said, adding that he was not ready to quote numbers, but they were "very large." He did say it currently takes $400,000 of local funds and $280,000 of state funds to run CRLC annually.
Dr. Petersen said it was not the school board's desire to see employees lose their jobs, so most of the small CRLC staff and faculty "will be absorbed somewhere else into the school system."
Nine of the faculty members attended the regular meeting, but did not make any public input. One lady, who wished to remain anonymous, said she "just wanted to find out what was going on."
"The faculty did not know because I had no authority to go and talk to them without the board's vote of approval," Dr. Petersen said. "So, I will meet with them on Monday or Tuesday."
The board had to move on a short notice because Thursday was the deadline to join the program and have it open the first day of school. Dr. Petersen also said a decision had to be made after CrossRoads Principal Steve Strouble announced his intent last month to retire at the end of the school year.
"The issue we had was Mr. Strouble was retiring, and there was going to be a change no matter what we did. So we had to make a decision," he said.
During the planning meeting, board chair Virginia Bradshaw said she, Dr. Petersen, board member Jerry Randolph and Thomson High School Principal Rudy Falana made two visits last week to Ombudsman Learning Centers in Statesboro, where they have operated for three years.
"On the surface, it seems to be a very good program," Mr. Falana said.
Although they are typically located within the school district they serve, Ombudsman learning centers are away from the other school campuses to minimize social distractions and allow students to focus on their studies. Mrs. Bradshaw said the ones in Statesboro were in store fronts of shopping centers.
"But they were locked up so no one could just walk into them," she said. "I liked that idea and felt it was safe."
Offering a Tier 2 diploma, the Ombudsman program is fully accredited by the Commission on International and Trans-Regional Accreditation (CITA), an international alliance of premier accrediting organizations including the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools, the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, the National Council for Private School Accreditation and the Council on Occupational Education. According to their website, the success rate is 85 percent.
The vote had to be made so quickly, that Dr. Petersen said future plans of the CRLC building, which is the old Pine Street Elementary School, are yet to be determined.
