ADW ATLANTA DAILY WORLD
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Volume 85 Issue 38
Sailor is Recruiter of the Year Page 3
Jay-Z on the Cover of TIME Page 5
Take a Look at Living Well Pages 7-10
What’s Happening Around Town? Page 15
April 25 - May 1, 2013
atlanta schools Work to help Kids Left Behind AP Photo/David Goldman
Burgess-Peterson Academy principal Robin Robbins, center, meets with students during Atlanta Public School's after-school remediation program in Atlanta.
By Christina a. Cassidy Associated Press Long after the school day ends, nearly half the students enrolled at Burgess-Peterson Academy in Atlanta spend an extra four hours in class looking to hone their math and reading skills by using such items as a deck of cards for subtraction problems and staplers and crayons to practice taking measurements. While this Atlanta public school wasn't ensnared in a massive cheating scandal that led to criminal charges against the district's former superintendent and 34 other educators, it's a sign of the intensive work being done across the district to remediate children affected by allegations of forged test scores, as well as those who have simply fallen behind. ``It is clear that students were deprived of services that they should have received if their test scores had been adequately and appropriately recorded,'' Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent Erroll Davis said in a recent interview. ``We certainly have a larger than average percentage of people not performing at the appropriate levels, and those are the students we are trying to get into our remediation programs and those for which we are designing programs on an ongoing basis.'' With state standardized tests beginning in Atlanta on Tuesday, teachers are anxious to find out how their students are progressing. One recently told Burgess-Peterson Principal Robin Robbins he feared three of his students may not pass. She reassured him, telling him to focus on how much progress they had already made in his class. ``The wider the gap, the harder it is,'' Robbins said. ``So that's why we really spend a lot of time working with students early on. Kindergarten, first grade, if you see the gaps, then you need to attack them then. If not, they are going to grow larger and larger, and before you know it, the graduation rate is the way that it is.'' At Burgess-Peterson, specialized teachers are brought in to drill students on math and reading concepts, with students Page 2
Georgia Democrats Predict a Return to Political Power By Maynard EatOn S.E. Region News Is Georgia about to become a blue state again? Perhaps. A group of past and present Democratic Party power brokers pontificated at the Atlanta Press Club this week about how the party’s fortunes were on the rise and predicted that a Democrat could win statewide by 2014 or 2016. “We’re close, we know that,” said the Georgia Democratic Party Chairman Mike Berlon. “It’s not a question of if, it’s when. I think we are on the right track.” A panel discussion included House Minority Leader Rep. Stacey Abrams, Georgia State political professor Stephon Anthony, Chairman Berlon, Rep. Scott Holcomb and Better Georgia CEO Bryan Long. “There are two reasons we’re on the rise,” said Abrams, an attorney and astute debater, who is the first woman to lead either party in Georgia’s Legislature. “Demography is moving in our favor, and we’ve actually had electoral successes that indicate that. We’ve hit the lowest ebb that
we are going to hit as Democrats. The reapportionment map that drew us so low was unable to destroy us. “Every election from here on will be about gaining seats; it will be about gaining seats in the House and gaining seats in the Senate, making us competitive in state-wide races,” she continued. “That trajectory is a bit long. It’s a 2014, 2016, 2018 trajectory, but it’s coming.” She noted that there is nothing on the Republican side that can create a drag for Democrats because GOP members are squabbling internally, particularly on the national and state level. “As long as we have a cogent strategy and are willing to work at it, we can take advantage of it,” she said. For the past several years, the palpable public perception of the Democratic Party has been almost laughable given the Republican political domination in the Legislature and state-wide elections. Page 2
STACEY ABRAMS
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