GAINESVILLE – When the Gainesville City School Board of Education met Monday evening Superintendent Dr. Jeremy Williams said he wanted to add something to his recent list of legislative priorities, submitted in draft form to the Board at the November 6th work session.
Each year the Gainesville BOE formulates a list of items it hopes to see accomplished by the Georgia General Assembly and submits the list to local legislators as they prepare for the convening of the General Assembly in January.
“It (the new priority being added to the list) is one that we believe is going to actually gain a good bit of traction in the General Assembly this year…and what I want to really stress here is the fact that we know students can’t come to learn unless they’re ready to learn,” Williams said.
The priority reads as follows: “We stress the need for the General Assembly to increase the awareness, advocacy, and allies of public schools by encouraging state agencies, non-profits, and communities to provide holistic services to students and families through collaborative efforts.”
“Our community in particular is primed for this,” Williams said with emphasis. “We have the resources, we have the people, most importantly, we have the need. If we can’t do it here in Gainesville, why should anybody else be able to do it?”
This new priority rose out of a recent meeting according to Williams. “We’ve recently met with Leigh Colburn of the Synergy Project. She is a former administrator out of Marietta City (Schools) and they had the ‘Student Success Center’.”
“And the Student Success Center provides wrap-around services for students where kids can come in at different times for tutoring services, parents come in and there’s a food pantry and social work is there…different community projects just come together in one location.”
Williams defined the wrap-around services he hopes to see made available as, “social work services, maybe mental illness; it’s different things that we know that keep a child from being ready to learn.”
He added, “We have many kids that have many barriers and we’d like to take down as many of those as we can.”
“We feel that with the needs we have with our students and the struggles we see, we also see how strong the partnerships are with United Way…and Boys and Girls Club and…other entities as well, that we can pull those together to really get on the same page at the same time…will be an opportunity for our district to make a difference in the lives of kids, not just now but in the future.”
To read the proposed letter containing the list of legislative priorities requested by the Gainesville City School Board of Education for the 2018 Georgia General Assembly click here.
