Top East Cobb 2020 stories: Cobb schools go virtual as board feuds

For several months after the Cobb County School District shut down in March due to COVID-19, the Cobb Board of Education conducted public meetings via Zoom.

It didn’t reduce some existing disagreements among school board members on a number of issues, and the feuding got worse, including over pandemic response.

Superintendent Chris Ragsdale announced in July that the school year would start online-only. It didn’t require a board vote.

But the decision set in motion many public conversations before and by the board and elsewhere during the fall semester, which gradually went to optional face-to-face learning before concluding in virtual format only due to rising COVID-19 community spread.

After the George Floyd death in May, the school board was among many elected bodies around the country in drafting an anti-racism resolution. The Cobb Board of Commissioners approved such a measure in June.

But after three attempts, the seven-member school board could not come to a unanimous approval on language in the resolution.

Black Democratic board members Charisse Davis, who represents the Walton and Wheeler clusters, and Jaha Howard of the Campbell and Osborne clusters, insisted on wording that the Cobb school district has had a history of “systemic racism.”

White Republicans David Banks and Randy Scamihorn objected, and said they wouldn’t support a resolution with that language.

As the year wore on, the racial and partisan divide on the board grew larger.

In an October East Cobb News candidate profile, Banks accused Davis and Howard of “trying to make race an issue where it has never been before.” He also said the Cobb school district’s biggest long-term challenge is avoiding the “white flight” of other metro Atlanta school districts.

Davis fired back, charging Banks of “spewing racist trash” and recounting Cobb’s history of segregated schools well into the 1960s.

Banks won a fourth term in November, and Scamihorn and chairman Brad Wheeler were also re-elected, preserving a 4-3 Republican school board majority for the next two years.

A few weeks later that same majority angered Davis and Howard by abolishing a newly formed committee to examine school naming policies.

The committee was to have considered such matters as an ongoing effort to rename Wheeler High School, named after a Confederate general (Davis signed that petition).

Howard, who began taking a knee during the Pledge of Allegiance when the board resumed in-person meetings in September, accused his Republican colleagues of “systemic racism.”

The four Republicans also voted to require a board majority for board members to place items on meeting agendas.

“What are you afraid of?” Davis asked her colleagues before the vote, which went 4-2.

Howard said the matter was no different than when the Republican majority voted in 2019 to prevent board members from offering comments during board meetings.

In December, the board bickered over a $12 million request from Ragsdale to purchase sanitizing products for elementary schools. The four Republicans voted in favor, but Davis and Howard said that was a lot of money to spend on a proof-of-concept basis and that there’s no evidence the new equipment is effective.

More Top East Cobb 2020 stories

• A Democratic election upheaval
• Small businesses struggle to survive
• Community response to COVID-19
• Cleaning up from Hurricane Zeta
• Vandals scrawl swastika, MAGA graffiti
• Petitions started to change Wheeler, Walton school names
• Tokyo Valentino sex shop opens

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