DCSS Update December 2016 Edition

Purely
ACADEMIC
In a test of will, determination and academics, see how DCSS middle
school students answered the bell at the annual Academic Bowl

DCSS Update Pg. 2
Culture shifts more than just ‘academic’
J.D. Sumner
DCSS Public Information Office
When Albany Middle School students
hoisted this year’s Academic Bowl
trophy in victory last month, it was a
huge victory for their school.
And it wasn’t just because it was
the first time in 17 years that students
from AMS had won the competition, although
that is a heck of an accomplishment.
No, the win for the Indians was as
much symbolic as it was tangible. The
cup that Captain Preston Jones hoisted
on behalf of his teammates symbolized
what many within the Dougherty
County School System already knew
and what many outside of AMS are
rapidly learning; “The Middle” is a textbook
example of a school at the apex of
a culture shift.
Now often when school folks talk
about “changing the culture of a school,”
it immediately conjures up images of a
leadership change. The image of a stern
Morgan Freeman-esque principal figure
laying down the law in “Lean on Me.”
But, in “The Middle’s” case, the
change has been as much bottom up as
it has been top down.
Principal Eddie Johnson and Assistant
Angelica King have created an
environment where students have confidence.
They have a swagger about them
that, while may seem a touch arrogant
or boastful to some, is backed up by the
results of student-led groups like their
Academic Bowl team.
The culture there is pervasive and
has crept into facets of student life and
athletics in a way that makes people
want to be part of the school in a meaningful
way.
Earlier in the school year, district officials
told folks at the school that one
of their students had been chosen as a
REACH scholar. The gist of the program
is that middle-school students are
picked who are on track to be first-generation
college students and have a financial
need.
When the signing day came, the
Middle pulled out all the stops, inviting
the entire student body out into the gym
(including the pep band) to celebrate the
academic achievement of one of their
own.
That is the essence of a culture shift.
And that is what strong leaders in the
administration and classroom can do
when they’re able to reach students and
parents.
So kudos to the Albany Middle Academic
Bowl team and to the school in
general for changing the culture of “The
Middle.”
About the Cover
There’s a lot more than just a trophy at stake when it comes
to the annual Academic Bowl. There’s a lot of preparation that
goes into getting each team ready to perform.

Pg. 3
DCSS Update
DCSS Leadership Team
Dr. David C. Mosely
Superintendent
Mr. Jack Willis
Assistant Superintendent
for Support Services
Dr. Ufot Inyang
Associate Superintendent for
Academic Services
Mr. Kenneth Dyer
Associate Superintendent & Chief
Financial Officer
Dr. Kim Ezekiel
Director of Federal Programs
Mrs. Sonya Spillers &
Mr. J.D. Sumner
Public Information Office
Dougherty County
Board of Education
Ms. Velvet Riggins
Board Chair, District 3
Mr. Robert Youngblood
Vice Chair, District 1
Mr. Milton Griffin
District 2
Mrs. Melissa Strother
District 4
Reverend James Bush
District 5
Dr. Dean Phinazee
District 6
Mrs. Geraldine West Hudley
At-Large
About our District...
The Dougherty County School System is the local education agency for Albany
and Dougherty County in Southwestern Georgia. At the end of the 2015-2016 school
year, enrollment was 15,001 students with nearly 2,600 teachers and staff members.
Our Schools:
Albany High School
431-3300
801 W. Residence Ave.
Grades 9-12
Principal: Rodney Bullard
Dougherty Comprehensive
High School
431-3310
1800 Pearce Ave.
Grades 9-12
Principal: Dr. Jeffrey Ross
Monroe Comprehensive High
School
431-3316
900 Lippitt Dr.
Grades 9-12
Principal: Vinson Davis
Westover Comprehensive High
School
431-3320
2600 Partridge Lane
Grades 9-12
Principal: William Chunn
Albany Middle School
431-3325
1700 Cordell Rd.
Grades 6-8
Principal: Eddie Johnson
Merry Acres Middle School
431-3338
1601 Florence Dr.
Grades 6-8
Principal: Dr. Gail Griffin
Radium Springs Middle Magnet
School of the Arts
431-3346
2600 Radium Springs Rd.
Grades 6-8
Principal: Dr. Valerie Williams
Robert A. Cross Middle Magnet
School
431-3362
324 Lockett Station Rd.
Grades 6-8
Principal: Thelma Chunn
Southside Middle School
431-3351
1615 Newton Rd.
Grades 6-8
Principal: Dr. Frederick Polite
Alice Coachman Elementary
School
431-3488
1425 Oakridge Dr.
Grades K-5
Principal: Melissa Brubaker
International Studies Elementary
Charter School
431-3384
2237 Cutts Dr.
Grades K-5
Principal: Dr. Zeda George
Lake Park Elementary School
431-3370
605 Meadowlark Dr.
Grades K-5
Principal: Kenosha Coleman
Lamar Reese Magnet School of
the Arts
431-3495
1215 Lily Pond Rd.
Grades K-5
Principal: Dr. Angela Shumate
Lincoln Elementary Magnet
School
431-3373
518 W. Society Ave.
Grades K-5
Principal: Dr. Todd Deariso
Live Oak Elementary School
431-1209
4529 Gillionville Rd.
Grades K-5
Principal: Laytona Stephenson
Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary
School
438-3502
3125 Martin Luther King Jr. Dr.
Grades K-5
Principal: Vontressa Childs
Morningside Elementary
School
431-3387
120 Sunset Lane
Grades K-5
Principal: Christine Ford
Northside Elementary School
431-3390
901 14th Ave.
Grades K-5
Principal: Katina Allen
Radium Springs Elementary
School
431-3395
2400 Roxanna Rd.
Grades K-5
Principal: Bruce Bowles
Robert H. Harvey Elementary
School
431-3367
1305 E. Second Ave.
Grades K-5
Principal: Dr. John I. Davis
Sherwood Acres Elementary
School
431-3397
2201 Doncaster Way
Grades K-5
Principal: Yvette Simmons
Turner Elementary School
431-3406
2001 Leonard Ave.
Grades K-5
Principal: Dr. Deborah Jones
West Town Elementary School
431-3409
1113 University Ave.
Grades K-5
Principal: Steven Dudley

(TOP) Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., marches arm-in-arm with supporters in Selma, Ala. In his writings, Dr. King credited the success of
the Selma and Birmingham movements with lessons learned from his time in Albany. (BELOW) King and supporters listen to Albany
Police Chief Laurie Pritchett as reporters look on. (Credit: Spencer Quinn)
ALBANY & THE
KING
A look at how Dr. Martin Luther King impacted a
movement by Albany citizens who yearned
for equality
by Lee W. Formwalt,
Organization of American Historians,
for the New Georgia Encyclopedia
According to traditional
accounts, the
Albany Movement began
in fall 1961 and ended
in summer 1962. It was
the first mass movement
in the modern civil rights
era to have as its goal the
desegregation of an entire
community, and it resulted
in the jailing of more than
1,000 African Americans
in Albany and surrounding
rural counties. Martin
Luther King Jr. was drawn
into the movement in December
1961 when hundreds
of black protesters,
including himself, were
arrested in one week, but
eight months later King
left Albany admitting that
he had failed to accomplish
the movement’s goals.
When told as a chapter in
the history of the national
civil rights movement,
Albany was important
because of King’s involvement
and because of the
lessons he learned that
he would soon apply in
Birmingham, Alabama.
Out of Albany’s failure,
then, came Birmingham’s
success.
Recent historians,
however, have suggested
that extending the
narrative of the Albany
Movement chronologically
and geographically and
treating the movement
on its own terms—as a
local movement with deep
roots—rather than viewing
it as one brief failure in the
long saga of the national
civil rights movement, creates
a very different picture
of the freedom struggle in
the southwest corner of the
state.
Background
Although the struggle
for civil rights in Albany
can be said to have started
during Reconstruction,
when thousands of politically
active black men
elected fellow African
Americans to local and
state offices, the roots of
the modern movement

can be traced to the early-twentieth-century
Jim
Crow era, when fewer than
thirty African Americans
were registered to vote in
Albany. In the immediate
wake of World War
I (1917-18), returning
black veteran C. W. King
founded a local branch of
the National Association
for the Advancement of
Colored People in Albany.
Although dormant
within years, it was revitalized
in the 1940s. The
perennial desire to gain
more control over their
own lives led some middle-class
blacks to organize
voter registration drives
in the 1940s and 1950s.
Others petitioned local
governments to make
improvements in the infrastructure
of African American
neighborhoods. C.
W. King’s son, C. B. King,
went to law school and
used his talents on behalf
of African Americans in
the segregated courtrooms
of southwest Georgia.
The Movement,
1961-1962
In 1961 Albany witnessed
the intersection of
some of these local efforts
with those of three young
Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC)
workers—Charles Sherrod,
Cordell Reagon, and
Charles Jones—who had
come to the Albany area to
conduct a voter registration
drive.
Slater King
and the Albany
Movement
The SNCC workers encouraged
students and others
in Albany to challenge
the establishment and its
Video:
Click
segregation policies. From
the start they faced opposition
from whites as well as
conservative African Americans.
Divisions in the black
community would continue
to plague civil rights efforts
throughout 1961 and 1962.
Yet at important moments,
Albany’s African Americans
rose above the divisions.
They did so in mid-November
1961, when the major
black improvement organizations
in town formed
the Albany Movement and
selected as their president
William G. Anderson, a
young black physician.
Mass meetings were called,
protestors marched, and
by mid-December more
than 500 demonstrators
had been jailed. The leaders
decided to call in Martin
Luther King Jr. to keep
on the image below to watch a video
of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech at
Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Albany
the momentum going and
to secure greater national
publicity for the cause. In
December King spoke at a
mass meeting, marched the
next day, and was arrested
and jailed.
In Albany, King witnessed
the power of song
to inspire and empower the
crowds attending the mass
meetings. Out of Albany
emerged the SNCC Freedom
Singers, including Albany
native Bernice Johnson
Reagon, who brought this
rich musical tradition, borrowed
from the rural Baptist
churches, to other communities
around the nation.
Convinced that city officials
had agreed to certain
concessions, King accepted
bail only to discover that
the white leadership refused
to consider any of
the movement’s demands.
King returned to Albany
the following summer for
sentencing on the convictions
relating to the December
marches. Although he
and fellow civil rights leader
Ralph Abernathy chose jail
over paying a fine, a white
attorney anonymously paid
their fines, and they were
released against their will.
King decided to stay
and carry on his effort to
desegregate the city. He
brought in his Southern
Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC) staff
to coordinate the campaign.
He had a formidable
opponent in Albany police
chief Laurie Pritchett.
Pritchett ostensibly practiced
the nonviolence that
King preached, ordering his
officers to avoid brutality, at
least when the TV cameras
and news reporters were
present. Prepared for the
waves of marchers King
encouraged, Pritchett had
them arrested and sent off
to jails in the surrounding
counties, including Baker,
Mitchell, and Lee.
In the end King ran
out of willing marchers
before Pritchett ran out of
jail space. Once again King
got himself arrested, and
once again he was let go. By
early August it was clear that
King had proved ineffective
in bringing about change in
Albany, but he had learned
the important lessons that
he and the SCLC would
carry to Birmingham.
After Effects
From King’s perspective
the Albany Movement was a
failure, but African Americans
in Albany disagreed.
King’s failure did not
mean that the movement
failed. SNCC field sec-

DCSS Update 6
retary Charles Sherrod
remarked, “Now I can’t help
how Dr. King might have
felt, . . . but as far as we were
concerned, things moved
on. We didn’t skip one
beat.” In fact, black voter
registration efforts were so
successful that, two months
after King left Albany, African
American businessman
Thomas Chatmon secured
enough votes in the election
for a city commission seat to
force a run-off election. The
following spring the city
commission removed all the
segregation statutes from its
books.
King had visited the
county jail to check on an
injured white demonstrator,
William Hansen. Hansen’s
jaw had been broken in a
beating he received when
he was put in a cell with
other white prisoners who
objected to the civil rights
protests.
From Albany, SNCC
workers and others led
protest actions in nearby
Americus and Moultrie, and
African Americans in other
southwest Georgia towns
and counties were inspired
to challenge their local
white power structures. The
civil rights movement went
through several stages in the
Albany area. Once the segregation
laws were challenged
and overturned, movement
leaders turned to school
integration in the late 1960s
and 1970s. When court-ordered
integration required
many school boards in
and around Albany to bus
students, white parents established
private academies,
many of which still flourish
in the region.
Recent
Developments
In the 1980s civil rights
efforts shifted to politics and
the attempt to end at-large
voting in city and county
elections. By the 1990s,
however, civil rights leaders
had refocused on education
and practices like tracking
or grouping students by “academic
ability,” an informal
means of segregating white
students from black. Meanwhile,
community leaders in
Albany began in the 1990s
to address the issues of race
that had previously been
swept under the carpet. The
city’s and county’s political
leaders agreed to allocate
$750,000 to renovate the
Old Mt. Zion Church,
where King had rallied the
masses in 1961-62, into
the Albany Civil Rights
Institute, which opened
in 1998. And supporting
all of these efforts was the
Albany Herald, which in
the early 1960s campaigned
vigorously against King and
the black struggle to destroy
segregation.
At the start of the
twenty-first century, Albany
was different in many ways
from what it had been only
four decades before. Diversity
is now the watchword
of the political and business
establishment. And yet, in
other ways, Albany remains
divided. Its school system
is majority black because
of massive white flight
to neighboring suburban
counties. Black per capita
income stubbornly trails
that of whites, and the jails
contain disproportionately
high numbers of young
African American males.
Despite the success of the
Albany Movement, the legacy
of American apartheid
continues to mark this Black
Belt community.
DCSS forms new partnership with Albany Civil Rights Institute
by J.D. Sumner,
DCSS Public Information Office
The Dougherty County
School System has
forged a new partnership
with the Albany Civil
Rights Institute in hopes
that a broader coalition
between the two organizations
will further enrich
students to the historical
events that happened right
here in Albany.
The partnership was
spurred by Mr. Frank Wilson,
the executive director
of the museum, and Mr.
Jesse Jackson, the DCSS
Social Studies coordinator,
following a meeting the
two had in late 2016.
The partnership will
start with regular visits
by DCSS Faculty to the
ACRI facility, with plans
to branch out into student
volunteer opportunities,
faculty research opportunities
and more.
“It’s unthinkable that
we have people in our
community who don’t
know the impact that
our town had on the civil
rights movement and the
freedom struggle,” Jackson
said. “It’s unforgivable
that we might have teachers
that don’t understand
its significance so we are
working together to increase
awareness.”
The teacher tours are
planned to start in the
Spring.
The Albany Civil
Rights Institute is open
Tuesday - Saturday, from
10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
The Freedom Singers
give free performances on
the second Saturday of
each month at the center.

7
DCSS Update

Members of the Albany Middle School Academic Bowl team pose for a photo after winning their trophy. (Credit: The Albany Herald)
DCSS student vye for a chance to hoist the...
Bowl
by Terry Lewis,
Reprinted with permission from
The Albany Herald
ALBANY — Albany
Middle School roared back
from its only loss of the
Dougherty County Middle
School Academic Bowl
competition Thursday to
win its first bowl title in 17
years and break Robert Cross
Middle School’s three-year
winning streak.
AMS breezed through
the first two rounds before
falling to RCMS, forcing
a showdown round for the
Christine Blaylock Memorial
Trophy, which Albany
Middle then won handily,
130-85
Following Albany Middle
and Robert Cross in the
final standings were Radium
Springs and Merry Acres
middle schools. Southside
Middle School also competed
in the event.
The top four schools
now advance to the regional
Academic Bowl competition,
which will be held Jan. 7 at
Georgia Southwestern State
University in Americus.
“Our kids worked hard
and they had a point to
prove,” AMS team coach
Jasamine Dixon said. “The
worked hard then came
here, where we saw and
conquered. I am exhilarated.
We knew that it was going to
be hard, but even after losing
that round to Robert Cross,
we knew we had the win
under our belts.”
AMS Principal Eddie
Johnson agreed that his team
had a point to prove.
“This is a very sweet
win,” Johnson said. “Everybody
expected that Robert
Cross would win because
they had smart kids. Well,
we’ve got some smart kids,
too. We’ve been making a
hard push in our academic
areas, and this win exemplifies
that effort and hard
work.”
The moderator, timer
and scorekeeper for the event
were volunteers from The
Albany Herald.

Around the district:
Check out the latest news and
information from our schools
Shriners donate $600 to AMS
‘Lake Park Leaders’ donate
books to pediatric patients
Phoebe Pediatrics received a special delivery from
4th and 5th graders at Lake Park Elementary.
The students, who are Lake Park Leaders, purchased
the books and donated them to the patients.
They sat down with Mandy Fagiano to learn what it
means to be a Child Life Specialist during their visit.
Pictured with the students are Angie Barber, Director
of Phoebe Network of Trust, and Lake Park’s school
counselor, Patrice Mitchell.
Al Rakim Shrine Temple #142 presented a check for $600 to the
Albany Middle School Athletic Department. The financial support
will help the coaches to make sure they have necessary equipment
for all students who participate. Past Potentate James
Laster, Past Potentate Derwin Canty and Noble Dennis Turner
were on hand to present the donation to the staff. Albany Middle
School truly appreciates the partnership and support from this
generous group of Shriners led by Noble Kyle Walters, the current
Illustrious Potentate.
Westover hosts college fair; 13 universities attend
On Wednesday, Nov.
30, 2016 Westover High
School hosted its’ first
college fair. The college
fair was held in the gymnasium.
There were about
13 colleges represented including
Piedmont, Albany
State University, FAMU,
Valdosta State University,
SCAD out of Savannah,
Ga., just to name a few.
Students had the
opportunity to speak with
representatives from the
different colleges present.
Students had the chance
to ask questions about
their programs, application
process, and enrollment
requirements.
The college fair also
gave students an opportunity
to ask questions that
they can’t get answered
over the internet. While
attending the college
fair students also got a
chance to apply to college.
There was an area in
the gym with computers
where students could
actually apply to college.
The month of November
is usually set aside for
Georgia Apply to College
month.
Westover High
School plan to make
this an annual event for
students. Mr. William
Chunn, Principal and
Mrs. Yolanda Skinner,
Director of Guidance.

ISECS students end year by
ringing bell for Salvation Army
Students from International Studies Elementary
Charter School’s United Nations Club rang the bells for
the Salvation Army’s kettle drive on Saturday at Sam’s
Club. Students sang and used percussion instruments to
help attract attention and donations.
ISECS is part of the International Baccalaureate
(IB) program, which promotes student action and the
IB Learner Profile encourages children to develop into
caring individuals.
Radium Springs Middle
Students volunteer for SA
Radium Springs Middle Magnet School of the Arts
Future Business Leaders of America served as Kettle
Bell Ringers for the Salvation Army. The students were
greeted with smiles and many donations from customers
while completing this volunteer activity.
The FBLA students participating in this community
service project were Kyleah James, Ni’carleon Jones, and
Deqavioun Davis. Ms. Gloria Clemons serves as the
FBLA advisor.

Storm Delay Reminder
School starts back January 17
We in the Dougherty County School System were blessed that our schools survived
the wrath of the January 2 storm with only minor damage and power outages.
The same can’t be said for hundreds, if not thousands, of our students,
families and staff.
Thanks to the hard work and dedication of work crews from the Dougherty
County Emergency Management agency, the City of Albany and surrounding
communities and cities, most of the damage has been cleared and our community
is well on the way to recovery.
The Dougherty County School System would like to thank all the men and women
who worked so tirelessly during our extended break to try and bring a sense
of normalcy back to Albany while keeping all of us safe.