Finally, the cavalry is coming – coming to make a first truly strong effort to fix Hamilton County’s most broken schools.
This long-awaited help will, if approved by the school board and not torpedoed by politics, has the promise to be better than a cavalry. It has the promise of a coming together of the Tennessee Department of Education, the Hamilton County Department of Education, Chattanooga 2.0 and an outside adviser known as Empower Schools to develop what would be, in essence, a separate school district of our five lowest-performing schools within the Hamilton County school district.
Tennessee Commissioner of Education Candice McQueen and Hamilton County Interim Superintendent Kirk Kelly like to call this fix “a partnership” and “shared governance.”
It’s a bit more than that.
On one hand, it’s a step below the dreaded state “takeover” of those five failing iZone schools – Brainerd High, Dalewood Middle, Orchard Knob Elementary, Orchard Knob Middle and Woodmore Elementary. If a contract for this partnership for some reason doesn’t gel, then the state will take schools from Hamilton County’s control and place them in the state’s Achievement School District.