Michael Thurmond sees himself as an emergency room doctor, someone who can save a bleeding patient and stabilize him for another day.
Thurmond, fresh off being Mr. Fixit for DeKalb County’s troubled school system, touts himself as the man who steered the state’s DFCS during the 1990s welfare reform and who served as Georgia’s labor commissioner during the Great Recession. Now he’s getting ready for his greatest act yet — trying to fix beleaguered DeKalb.
Thurmond, 63, will likely announce this week that he is running for DeKalb CEO. He says people are continually asking him to run for the job.
Of course, pols always say the public is clamoring for them. Former Sheriff Tom Brown said he’s asked him to run. Brown, a popular politician himself, said he would run if Thurmond doesn’t. Pulling DeKalb out of its tailspin is that important, he said. But, in reading between the lines, it seems Thurmond might be doing Brown a favor.
“You take it.”
“No, you take it.”
I mean, who really wants to be a human piñata? Ask Lee May, who’s leaving his stint as interim CEO with his hair on fire. Or Burrell Ellis, who’s in prison. Or Vernon Jones, who’s now politically dead.
Well, Michael Thurmond wants it. Connie Stokes, a former state senator and county commissioner, has put in her name, as has Calvin Sims, a retired MARTA employee who has run before.
But it is widely seen that the entry of the smooth and connected Thurmond, a lawyer, will lock down the field and prevent others from entering. He discounts that theory, saying the CEO position and the county’s reputation for dysfunction and unethical behavior are limiting the field.
“Listen, why aren’t there 12 people to run here? It’s the same reason as the school district. People don’t want to lose their careers here,” he said. “The CEO job has become almost undoable.”
Just last year, when Thurmond was still school superintendent, I asked him about rumors he wanted to run for CEO.
Thurmond laughed heartily, saying, “That is the last thing I would do, period, paragraph, close the book.”
OK, on second thought, open the book back up.
Sitting in an office at the high-end personal injury firm where he works, Thurmond said, “Listen to me. We cannot lose DeKalb.”
Part of wanting back in the game is he believes he can do what others couldn’t — end the divisiveness, heal the county. And he misses it.
In February 2013 Thurmond, a politician not an educator, was brought in to be DeKalb school superintendent. Two months earlier, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools put the district on probation, accusing it of board mismanagement, meddling and fiscal failings.
‘They had 9 potential candidates; 8 said no’
It wasn’t as if Thurmond was the best man for the job. “They had a list of nine potential candidates and eight of them said, ‘No,’” he said. “Someone had to fill the position.”
But the district has regained its accreditation, is on a firmer financial footing and sees less feuding. Thurmond has been credited with much of that success.
His tenure was rife with controversy, especially in the rejection of a “charter cluster” in the Druid Hills area, an effort to grant autonomy to seven schools, complete with a $40 million budget.
“I don’t hear much about the charter cluster because the district is progressing,” he told me the other day.
But he’s not hearing much about it because the majority of the board and Thurmond, in no uncertain terms, told supporters the effort was dead, dead, dead. Thurmond said carving out an independent cluster would have hurt the 100,000-student district as a whole. The supporters disbanded, knowing they were wasting their time.
Some complained that Thurmond in a private meeting brought up the term “Selma,” making it appear he was making it a black/white issue. (The charter cluster movement was often viewed as an effort by white residents to gain control. And the three white board members were on the losing side of the vote.)
He dismissed cluster members’ criticisms as a distortion of his words and “trying to put me in a racial box.”
‘It was enlightened self-interest’
Thurmond has been often viewed as a politician who can transcend racial and party lines. In his 1998 victory as labor commissioner, he became the first black candidate to win a statewide post without first being appointed to it.
The son of a sharecropper from the Athens area ran for the Legislature in the 1980s in a district that was 2-1 white. In the first two races, he campaigned heavily in the black districts and lost. The third time, he campaigned heavily in white neighborhoods. “I had to expand my comfort zone,” he said.
He won.
Looking back on his change in strategy, he said, “I wish I could say I had a great Martin Luther King moment. But I didn’t. I wanted to win. It was self-interest, enlightened self-interest.”
About the increasingly Balkanized county, Thurmond said such “enlightened self-interest” and “expanding comfort zones” are needed in tackling some problems.
Get ready to be uncomfortable.
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