Franklin Co. BOE Selects IE Squared Plan
By MJ Kneiser, WLHR Radio, Lavonia
When students start class in the fall of 2015 in Franklin County, there will be a new flexibility program in place.
At their meeting earlier this month, the Franklin County School Board voted to go with the IE2 school plan.
About two years ago, the State Board of Education ordered all school systems in Georgia to choose between becoming a charter school system, an IE squared system, or stay a regular historical school system. The deadline to choose a plan is June, 2015.
Franklin County School Superintendent Dr. Ruth Odell said the timing was right for the Board to make a decision.
“We have been mulling over this flexibility option,” she said. “It was just time for us to bear down on the plans and what we had to choose from and make a decision that best fit us.”
Under the IE2 system, the school board will have more flexibility in its decision making, but without the layers of governance required by the charter school system, according to O’Dell.
“This was better for us than the charter mainly because we didn’t see that our system would benefit from another whole level of governance,” she said. “We’re small and that would have required us to have governing boards for each school. And that would have required another whole layer to go through for suggestions and input.”
Dr. O’Dell said there are already school councils and parent input sessions in place and she said another layer of decision making is not needed.
She said staying as a regular school system as they are now was also not an option because it would not help move the school system forward.
“We need to be a system that moves forward,” she said. “We don’t need to be isolated school systems again after we’ve worked so hard to work together. We don’t want to be status quo or indicate to the public in anyway that we don’t need to move forward and think that we are just doing things great.”
Franklin County has been working on their SACS accreditation all year and O’Dell said going with the IE squared system will be in place when the SACS decision comes down in the spring.
“We have been working all year on our Southern Accreditation Plans,” she said. “In March we will have our evaluation visit from SACS and having this in place will be a help.”
O’Dell said it will also help with their application for a Striving to Read grant to improve student reading skills and do some different things to improve literacy.
O’Dell said the new IE 2 system should be completely in place by the fall of 2015.
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