DeKalb County School District Superintendent Devon Horton sat in front of a principal, a teacher, a bookkeeper, two parents, two students and two community members at Stoneview Elementary in Lithonia and asked them a few simple questions.
“What’s great about Stoneview?” he asked. Then later, “What can we do to better support you?”
Horton and his team visited 88 DeKalb schools to have this same conversation last year.
In her 21 years of teaching, Stoneview’s LaSheta Reynolds hasn’t ever sat down with a superintendent and had a conversation like that. She thought it was a good idea.
“You can’t run a school district if you don’t know the community you serve,” she said, touching on a fear that prevailed when Horton took the job around this time last year.
Horton came from a small district outside of Chicago with no high schools to lead Georgia’s third-largest school system. July 1 marked his first anniversary in DeKalb. While some people were eager for a fresh perspective (Horton is a self-described “disruptor”), others thought the learning curve would be too steep.
In his first year on the job, Horton has been busy: He restructured the district office, started a teacher residency program to train people who are new to the profession, began efforts to place one-on-one mentors at high-needs schools, opened academic skill centers to provide tutoring, hired dozens of people and began tackling entrenched operational issues like the over-budget and overdue transition to a new computer system for finances and human resources. There’s a lot going on.
“It’s not as complex as it appears,” Horton said in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution about his work so far. “There are some really brilliant, talented individuals in the community and the district, and I just think there’s been a need for some system-building.”
The DeKalb County Board of Education, which hired him and supervises him, so far seems pleased. In April, they voted to extend his contract to 2027, and they frequently thank and praise him for his work.
As the school system’s ninth leader since 2010, the board hoped Horton would bring stability to DeKalb. Horton, who moved to the area with his family, has said he has no plans to leave.
“It’s a great place to be because you have a community that’s supportive, that will roll their sleeves up and get in the trenches with you,” he said. “I would love to be here as long as the board and the community will have me.”
Horton’s biggest critic is, perhaps, board member Joyce Morley, who opposed his hiring and disagrees with much of the work he’s done so far.
Morley has admonished Horton for hiring too many people to the district office too fast, for hiring people he worked with in previous jobs and for committing too much money and time to academic efforts without knowing whether they’ll succeed.
“You got two more years added to your contract, you don’t need to rush,” she told him at a recent board meeting. “You can slow the train down. This is crazy.”
Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com
Horton’s speedy start comes as DeKalb attempts to tackle a number of challenges. In 2022-2023, 45% of DeKalb third graders were not reading on grade level, which is below the state average. About 34% of all Georgia third graders were reading below grade level. The district has struggled to hire enough teachers and faced declining enrollment in recent years.
Glenda Barner is the Parent Teacher Student Association president at Stephenson High School in Stone Mountain, where her children, grandchildren and now niece and nephew have attended. She said some of those moves at the district level have allowed their principal to be more available to parents, and teachers more available to students.
“For me, having children all the way to grandchildren (at Stephenson), I see the change and I do believe the change is good,” she said. “I believe if everybody allows Dr. Horton the time, they will be able to see.”
DeKalb has more than 91,000 students and a fiscal year budget of about $2 billion. As he enters his second year at the helm of a large organization, Horton expects to begin seeing improvements in academics and students’ social and emotional health, he said. But to get where he wants the district to be — with no schools in DeKalb counted among the lowest performers in the state — he said it’ll be more like three to five years.
Credit: Photo provided by DeKalb County School District
Credit: Photo provided by DeKalb County School District
And things aren’t going to be slowing down any time soon. As part of the system-building efforts, DeKalb is gearing up to begin what Horton is calling a “reimagining” — in other words, student assignment planning. It’s a process that will likely take more than a year, and involve examining student attendance boundaries, special education programs and planned new schools to see if those efforts are meeting the district’s needs. Horton has said he expects the process to be “brutal”; one board member said she anticipates that people will “hate” district leaders for it.
Horton also plans to provide high schoolers with more resources to prepare them for life after graduation. This year, some schools hosted half-cap ceremonies for sophomores on track to graduate on time, to encourage them to keep going. Next year, some schools will let students take the SAT or ACT during the school day for free. And the district is hiring more advisers to help ensure every student has a postsecondary push plan — or everything they need to enroll in college, be employed somewhere, enlist in the military or begin entrepreneurship.
And he plans to keep asking schools what they need.
“We got into 88 schools this year, and you best believe we’re coming to get into the rest!” Horton said in June. DeKalb has more than 100 schools.
The 2024-2025 school year starts Aug. 5.
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