Superintendent Dorsey,

As a follow up to the question that you asked me at the BOE meeting last week, I wanted to make sure you knew why we characterize OACS as a FREE Public School.

Oakland Academy (OACS) will be a FREE Public School because…
1. OACS will be FREE from tuition or enrollment fees for residents of Gilmer County.
2. All school aged residents will be FREE to attend if space is available. This is not a school for one part of the county. All students will be welcome! It is your freedom of choice!
3. OACS will be FREE from many of the rules that make teaching and learning difficult and were written into the Georgia’s state education laws. Charter schools don’t have to follow most of the rules that just don’t make sense, like requiring children to sit in a chair for a set period of time.
4. OACS will be FREE from outside influence from the local Board of Education and State Department of Education so long as we meet our obligations in our charter contract.
5. OACS will be FREE to explore new ways of teaching and learning and FREE to listen to good ideas and act on them.
We all know that anything you get has a cost associated with it. No tax payments are free to the citizens, and that money must come from somewhere and hopefully will go somewhere and be used wisely.
OACS is proposing a new and more efficient way of operating a school that would be under the greater umbrella of the BOE but where the individual school manages all tax dollars for those students and is responsible for their higher performance. Since the BOE would no longer be providing teachers, services, real estate, or other overhead to those students than there should be little tension in not receiving money for those students. The 3% BOE take-out on the local funds will cover more than enough for the over-sight functions that you will want to do. OACS will be fully responsible for serving the needs of those students and will, like most charter schools, deliver better performance than the Gilmer Schools are able to deliver based on the given constraints that you operate under.
OACS is only free because in a technical sense public education is free. When I moved to Gilmer County my children’s enrollment was not tied to any other fee. But if you own property then the taxes aren’t free. Also, there is a cost associated with bad schools that communities will pay for in other social costs, mostly born by the state and local governments. So free is a moving target, isn’t it?
The charter application process is by nature going to challenge you and the board to think beyond dollars. We all know that based on the budget constraints that were in place when you arrived in Gilmer County that this will be difficult to do. But as leaders you can do it if you realize that holding onto an old way of operating schools can not deliver better performance. You need new ideas to do that. We have hand delivered those new ideas on a silver platter at no up-front cost to you or the citizens of Gilmer County. All you have to do is go out on the limb of progress and decide that better schools in Gilmer County is your most important task, and this is an opportunity to get them.
If you try to limit the development of new ideas it will only contribute to your own lack of success. Fostering and cultivating new ideas and helping them grow is the essence of being a leader, and you all have an opportunity to do that now.
Regards,

Isaac Lassiter
Chair
Founding Board
Oakland Academy Charter School
[email protected]
(706) 250-2602