Longtime Walton High School principal Judy McNeill is retiring.
In making several principal-level appointments Thursday evening, the Cobb Board of Education accepted her retirement, effective Aug. 1, the first day of the 2018-19 school year.
Her successor was not immediately named. McNeill’s name was not included on a list of more than 200 retiring Cobb County School District employees who were honored at a luncheon last week.
McNeill has been at Walton nearly 30 years, and has overseen a school that’s generally been regarded as one of the best in the state of Georgia.
In what turned out to be her last year at Walton, McNeill oversaw the move to a new campus building and had to handle gun-control protests that included a walkout in February.
The Cobb district did not endorse the walkouts, and permitted principals to determine how their schools might honor victims of a Florida school shooting that sparked the planned demonstration.
In an interview with East Cobb News, McNeill said students had organized a memorial observation before classes that day, and discouraged students from following through with a walkout.
After some student protest leaders announced they had more than 2,000 signatures to walk out, only around 200 or so Walton students participated.
School board member Scott Sweeney, who represents the Walton attendance zone, said at the end of Thursday’s meeting that McNeill was “an absolute joy to work with. . . . We wish her the very best in her retirement.”
The school board also appointed David Nelson, principal at Daniell Middle School, as the new principal at Pine Mountain Middle School, and Faith Harmeyer, an assistant principal at Mt. Bethel Elementary School, as the new principal of Nicholson Elementary School.
Those appointments are effective June 1.
The school board formally adopted a fiscal year 2019 budget of $1.2 billion Thursday that includes a 1.1-percent raise for all district employees, a 1.1-percent bonus for many employees and STEP increases for eligible employees.
The budget, which goes into effect July 1, does not include a millage rate increase. Connie Jackson of the Cobb County Association of Educators had asked the school board to raise the millage rate from 18.9 mills to the limit of 20 mills for higher increases.
But Sweeney and David Chastain, who represents Post 4 in Northeast Cobb, opposed raising the millage rate any higher.
The vote was 6-1, with school board member David Morgan of South Cobb opposing. During a work session on Thursday afternoon, he pleaded for a raise in the millage rate, showing charts illustrating how Cobb’s starting teacher salary average of $42,364 is 9th out of 12 districts in metro Atlanta.
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