Background & Context

Historically, school facility planning and community planning have been siloed from one another. Rejecting the harmful outcomes of this approach, our work considered the impact of school facility planning on communities and vice versa. APS planning documents (e.g. district, cluster, and school plans) highlighted the interconnectedness of school and community success. These documents also emphasized the equitable distribution of resources; the integration of trauma-sensitive, social-emotional learning in the classroom; and the creation of health clinics and wraparound services within individual schools. With the understanding that student performance is significantly impacted by life outside of school, we aimed to center community needs in our analysis and recommendations. Taken together, the history of Atlanta Public Schools and the larger city context should be considered in the development of facilities plans to sufficiently meet both school and community needs.

History of (In)equity in Atlanta Public Schools, 1869 – 1916

In 1869, the Atlanta City Council established the Atlanta Public School system. Three years later, the Atlanta Public School system established three grammar schools and two high schools that were “free and open to only the city’s white residents” (Eternally Forgotten Atlanta Public Schools – Pt 1., 2017).

One of the primary concerns among black citizens at the time was the “alleviation of the inequitable distribution of educational facilities for white and black children;” when the schools began operating, there were no public schools for black students though “the school-aged population in Atlanta was almost equally divided between black and white children” (Plank, 1987 pg. 590-591).

As a result, Black members of the Republican Party fought and persuaded the City Council to establish two schools for Black students. In contrast to the newly constructed white schools, however, the black schools were formed in old, rented buildings and church basements. Additionally, black students did not have the opportunity to receive secondary education as the city did not provide non-white high schools. Despite protests by black citizens for more equitable distribution of public resources, the City Council and the Board of Education failed to provide black students with the resources and spaces that they deserved. From the very beginning, black families and students faced major structural obstacles to equitable access to public school resources.

As the number of black voters surpassed that of white voters, the political system—the City Council, Board of Education, and voting process—adjusted to represent the white minority. The institutionalization of the Democratic white primary limited the participation of voters of candidates to white voters and thereby, eliminated the need for black votes and ignored outright, the black majority (Plank, 1987, pg. 591). This meant that key pieces of legislation – that oftentimes affected white and black schools–were decided by candidates selected by white voters. This practice permeated all white governmental decision-making bodies and reduced the participation and power of black citizens. During the period of 1892 – 1916, only three petitions for additional educational space were submitted by black citizens; none were approved, all were rejected. (Plank 1987, pg. 593).

Efforts to Demand Equal Representation and Teacher Pay, 1942 – 1954

In the early 1940s, two federal court cases had a large impact on the Atlanta Public Schools system. The first suit, filed in 1943, sought the equalization of white and black teachers’ salaries. Though white administrators on the Board of Education and City Council worked to block these reforms, considerable increases in salary were achieved during the time the case was working its way up the court system. The second suit demanded the elimination of the white primary. This suit arose after a similar court case in Texas, Smith vs. Arkwright, declared Texas’ Democratic white primary unconstitutional. This legal precedent had an “immediate and far-reaching [effect]: in the 51 days following the decision, the Negro Voter’s League registered 18,000 new black voters” (Martin 1978, p. 50; Suber 1975, p. 58). The positive impact of these two suits “marked the inauguration of a new era in Atlanta school politics and city politics more generally” (Plank, 1987, pg. 596). By restoring their political power, structural improvements in Atlanta’s black schools became more quickly and effectively implemented.

In 1944, Board of Education proposed a bond issue in which 15% of revenues would be allocated toward improvements in black schools. Though this allocation was “three times as large as previous measures”, the Urban League asked for double the percentage, from 15% to 30%. The Urban League also demanded the equalization of the quality and quantity of facilities between black and white schools by identifying four main objectives:

“(1) The construction of two new high schools for black students, including one vocational high school;
(2) The construction of four new elementary schools;
(3) The addition of 81 new classrooms to existing schools; and
(4) The provision of auditoriums, gymnasiums, cafeterias, libraries, and adequate sanitary facilities for all black schools.”
Source: Atlanta Board of Education, Minutes, March 13, 1945

With the increase of black political power over the course of future elections, the Board of Education accepted the demands and passed the bond issue, securing future revenues for the provision of additional school facilities for black students. With this success, the Board effectively followed up on the promise of funding improvements in black school facilities.

The Struggle for Integration, 1954 – 1973

The unanimous decision in the Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, to declare segregation in public schools unconstitutional, met strong resistance from white citizens and decision makers in the City of Atlanta and other large cities. Immediately following the ruling, the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP submitted a petition to the Atlanta School Board demanding “immediate desegregation of the city’s public schools” (Ecke 1972, p. 324). Other groups submitted similar petitions with no response from city officials. NAACP filed a suit in federal court seeking the Board of Education’s fulfillment of the court ruling. The subsequent trial was quick to require “a prompt and reasonable start toward desegregation” by the Atlanta Board of Education (Huie 1967, pp. 39-40). As a result of the court ruling, the Board of Education was required to implement desegregation within 18 months. After months of “extended deliberation and extraordinarily careful preparation”, the Atlanta public school system was “peacefully desegregated in September 1961” (Huie 1967, pp. 192, 289-92; Martin 1978, pp. 152-53; Jenkins 1974, p. 112).

However, this integration represented 9 black students as only 9 out of 130 black student applicants were approved to integrate into four white high schools. In September 1961, Time Magazine described this initial integration effort as the “smoothest token school integration ever seen in the Deep South.” Even so, white families and their students began to leave the city and move into the suburbs with the goal of never having to face integrated schools. Soon, the schools that had been predominantly white in the 1950s – 1960s had become majority black in the mid-1960s. According to Alton Hornsby in his publication “Black Public Education in Atlanta, Georgia, 1954 – 1973,” by the 1970s, the federal district court, the Atlanta Public School System, and community leaders believed that racially integrated schools in Atlanta were no longer possible because there “simply were not enough whites” left “to go around.”

The newly constructed black schools that were created from the bond issue of 1944 became underutilized as black students integrated into white schools and white students left the city center to create their own schools in the suburbs. Formerly black high schools, no longer being utilized as a result of integration and white flight, were either closed or repurposed into black middle schools. As a result, the schools that were constructed as a means to improve black school facilities and prevent racial integration became surplus buildings, some of which are owned by the Atlanta Public School system today. In addition, the construction of highways to support the suburbanization of white families and white flight stripped vital funding from the maintenance and upkeep of school buildings and facilities for black students in the city. These funding practices thereby caused school closures in response to that degradation.

Redistricting, 2012 – 2014

Redistricting and school closures in Atlanta Public Schools is cited as the result of the underutilization of school facilities and the inefficiency that comes with it: “traditional schools serve 47,000 yet [APS has] seats for 60,000 students. Heating, cooling and lighting 13,000 empty seats consumes resources which could be put to better use elsewhere.” The geography of the problem as framed by the Superintendent and Board of Education in 2012 is as follows: “data show that the majority of empty seats are in the southern part of our district, while the northern section of the district is experiencing overcrowding” (Superintendent’s Final Redistricting and Closure Recommendations, March 2012).

The final recommendation for redistricting as cited in the final APS report was “to eliminate approximately 5,500 out of 13,000 seat excess and generate substantial savings.” With these savings, the district can more readily provide services that offer more direct support to students in the form of “counselors, assistant principals, special education resources, and paraprofessionals” (Superintendent’s Final Redistricting and Closure Recommendations, March 2012).

The redistricting process redrew the lines of high school districts resulting in 10 elementary school closures all located in the predominantly African American southern region of Atlanta. The closures resulted in significant changes for local families and students. As a result of new district lines, a number of schools closed, causing students who had attended their neighborhood school to leave their communities to attend a school farther away.

Conscious of how this process of redistricting led to inequitable outcomes for families and students, the School Superintendent Maria Carstarphen and the Board of Education have made a deliberate effort to approach the district’s current facilities master planning process in a way that prioritizes equity in the Atlanta Public School system.

Atlanta Public Schools follows a cluster model. According to the 2019-2020 APS Cluster Model & Map of Schools, the school district “is organized into nine high school clusters that consist of a high school fed by middle and elementary schools. The cluster model ensures continuity for students from kindergarten through grade twelve” (Atlanta Public Schools, 2019).