A Magnet School for Thomasville, Georgia
I hear my hometown, Thomasville, Georgia, is getting a magnet school. When one hears the term "magnet school," I think there is the tendency to equate the term with success. Some magnet schools are successful, and many are not so successful.
In my hit-and-miss research of Georgia magnet schools, there was one school that stood out for me. It stood out because it was a small school in a community with a mean average income well below the state average, a heavily black student population (like Thomasville), and a record of outstanding performance for all of its students. That school is Augusta, Georgia's Johnson Magnet.
Now, I don't know if our school administration in Thomasville has the talent or the desire to extract this kind of performance from all of its students but it does have an example in Johnson Magnet that says it can be done.
That said, I would be negligent to not mention two points:
1) Richmond County, the home county of Johnson Magnet, seems to at least at the high school level have a record of academic performance, unlike the Thomasville School System, that does not appear to run heavily across racial lines.
2) The Richmond County school system has at least one school comprised of an all black population, East Augusta Middle School, and that school like Thomasville's virtually all black Harper Elementary has a history of dismal performance in comparison to its more diverse counterpart Jerger Elementary.
To sum all of this up, a magnet school if administered properly can be a wonderful addition for our high achieving students. The flip-side, I'm not sure our resources are best used by focusing on our high achievers, afterall these students are already excelling.
But then, no one asked me or any of the other parents that I know for our opinion.
posted by YouthPlay Staff @ 12:39 PM
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