There is something really strange about a school district that can say it has nationally ranked magnet schools and a superintendent who was fired because of a criminal charge. That’s the truth about the DeKalb County School District, which has 138 schools in the eastern part of the Atlanta metropolitan area and educates more than 102,000 students. The district has never quite fit into a single, clean story.
The district’s main office is on Mountain Industrial Boulevard, close to Stone Mountain, in unincorporated DeKalb County. The address isn’t the flashiest, which makes sense in a way. DCSD has always been in a good balance—it’s not quite the center of attention, but it’s also never really out of it either.
What is often forgotten is how academically strong some parts of this district really are. U.S. News and World Report ranked the DeKalb School of the Arts No. 75 in the country and No. 2 in Georgia. In 2018, it was given a gold designation. Also, Chamblee Charter High School won gold. The Academy of Engineering and Medicine at Arabia Mountain High School won silver. These are not participation ribbons; these are schools competing with schools from all over the country. Henderson Mill Elementary made history when it became Georgia’s first STEAM-certified school. This is the kind of important event that doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it should.
But the district’s story of accreditation is a different one, and it’s not as happy. In December 2012, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools put DCSD on probation and told them they were about to lose their full accreditation. It was an important moment, the kind that shakes up both property values and parent group chats. It took years of hard work in an institution to get back out. By 2016, full accreditation was back. As of 2017, a five-year extension had been agreed upon. The CCRPI score, which is only used in Georgia, went up from 66 to 70 during the same time period. Between 2013 and 2017, the rate of graduates went up by 14%. There was real, measurable progress, even if it was slow.
When you think about what the district has been through, you can’t help but think of August 2013. A man with a gun who was 20 years old went into Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy and locked himself in the front office. He shot at the police. He got angry, but Antoinette Tuff, the school’s bookkeeper, calmed him down. They did this carefully and without any deaths. Obama called to tell her how great she was. That moment made me think about what schools really ask of the people who work there, even when they don’t expect that kind of duty.
The stress in the workplace that came up in 2018 pointed to the same deeper truth. Almost 400 bus drivers called in sick because they were unhappy with their low pay and few benefits. In a state where people have the right to work, that was against the law, and at least seven drivers lost their jobs because of it. It was a quiet echo of the teacher strikes going on across the country at the same time, but it got much less attention from the media and had a bigger impact on the people who were involved right away.
There has always been a question mark over leadership. Crawford Lewis, who used to be the superintendent, was charged with racketeering, theft, and bribery in 2012 because of a construction scandal. Then, in October 2025, the board voted to accept the resignation of superintendent Devon Horton after an indictment tied to alleged kickbacks from contract dealings at a different Illinois district entirely. Two chief executives. Two guilty pleas. The school district can’t let this happen over and over again.
The DeKalb County School District is a big, complicated public institution that has to do a lot of things at once. It has to produce great students, deal with political upheaval, settle boundary disputes with Atlanta, and make sure that all 6,000 teachers and thousands of staff members are working toward the same goal. It doesn’t always work. Some people think that the students and teachers in those 138 schools deserve more praise than what they get from the news.
