What was billed as a meet-and-greet turned into something of a debate. The Cobb school board candidates vying for the Post 6 seat met at Mt. Bethel Elementary School Tuesday night, and offered differing views on how they would tackle challenging issues facing the Cobb County School District.
Organized by the Mt. Bethel PTA, the forum, which took place in the school’s media center, drew a couple dozen citizens. They asked some occasionally pointed questions after the candidates made their opening statements.
Scott Sweeney, a two-term Republican incumbent, said he wants to continue the progress he said the district has made in the eight years he’s served.
His challenger, Democrat Charisse Davis, is a first-time candidate, mom, former teacher and librarian who said voices like hers are needed on the seven-member Cobb school board.
Davis, a proponent of more Pre-K offerings in Cobb schools, said she was prompted to run because she’s heard from parents that the school district, over the last eight years, “is becoming less competitive for some people.”
She said after a school board meeting she talked to one mother who withdrew her child’s enrollment from the district out of frustration. Davis also thinks the board and district could be more transparent.
“They feel like no one is listening to them,” said Davis, whose children attend Teasley Elementary School and Campbell Middle School. She works at the Wolf Creek Branch of the Atlanta-Fulton Library System.
Post 6 includes mostly the Walton and Wheeler clusters. Sweeney, whose sons now attend Walton and Dickerson Middle School, took issue with Davis’ contention, and said Cobb is considered one of the best public school districts in the state and the country.
Sweeney also said transparency isn’t an issue: each Cobb school board meeting is televised and available on a live stream, and discussions conducted in executive session are voted in public meetings.
He also touted the tens of millions of dollars in capital improvements the district has invested during his time in office, including rebuilds of Walton, Wheeler, East Cobb Middle School and Brumby Elementary School, and future improvements scheduled at other Post 6 schools.
Davis noted that the Cobb school board could become all-male in January, since Susan Thayer, the only female currently serving, is not running for re-election. In another East Cobb race, Post 4 incumbent David Chastain is being opposed by Cynthia Parr.
“Representation matters,” Davis said.
“Well, I’m a dad,” said Sweeney, a financial executive with InPrime Legal Services of East Cobb. “The fact that I’m a male doesn’t disqualify me.”
(The Fulton County Board of Education, which also has seven members, is all-female.)
Candidate websites:
The candidates had different views on the school walkouts that took place at several Cobb schools earlier this year, including at some East Cobb high schools, in response to school shootings.
Davis said the Cobb school district, which didn’t endorse the walkouts and threatened punitive action for unexcused absences, missed a “teaching moment” that took place in other metro school systems.
Students who walked out were typically given a one-day in-school suspension, and later some of them lashed out during the public comment session at a school board meeting.
” ‘Please help us to be safe,’ that’s all they were saying,” Davis said in support of the suspended students.
Sweeney said while he supported students’ free expression rights, sometimes those actions have consequences, and that the school district shouldn’t get involved in political debates.
“The school district isn’t the place for that,” he said.
Both candidates said they oppose arming teachers. Sweeney said Cobb has one of the best-staffed and trained school police forces in the state, with armed officers at every high school and middle school and some elementary schools.
Davis said she thought the district could do better than to be mostly reactive: “What are we doing to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again?”
As for making academic success a more variable thing, Davis said she wants Cobb to create a career and college academy similar to what’s been done in other metro school districts. The pressures some students feel, even at good schools, to live up mainly to test scores can be overwhelming, and make them feel left out.
While schools in East Cobb are among the best in the state, she asked if “we are meeting the needs of all our students?” Test scores alone, she said, is “not what makes a great school. A family feeling is better than any rating.”
Sweeney said he supports the reduction of what he called “the burden of standardized testing.”
Cobb is among those districts in Georgia that has applied to the state for create alternatives to some currently required tests, including the Milestones, which are released during the summer.
Here’s more on the Cobb Metrics program, which was announced earlier this week.
The candidates are scheduled for at least one more forum before the Nov. 6 elections, at an event next Monday in Vinings at the Cochise Club (3795 Cochise Drive), that starts at 6:30 p.m.
(East Cobb News photos by Wendy Parker)
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