CINS Co-President Resigns

Council of Intown Neighborhoods and Schools co-president Abby Martin resigned Friday afternoon after a post on a parent-run message board revealed a school redistricting plan sent by Martin to the district.

Martin sent a proposal to Superintendent Erroll B. Davis that recommended using the current Coan Middle School facility as the Grady cluster middle school to house six-through-eighth grades.

The proposal included using the current site as a ninth grade annex for Grady High School to relieve overcrowding.

, he proposed to close Coan Middle School and use the building as a grade six academy for Inman Middle School.

A spokesman for Atlanta Public Schools said Friday "no single suggestion or proposal" was the "driving factor" for Davis' plan.

"The proposal ventured by Abby Martin is not the same one that was incorporated into the superintendent’s proposed plan," APS spokesman Keith Bromery told Patch. "All of the superintendent’s proposals were crafted, shaped and vetted by the APS redistricting team."

Martin's proposal was sent anonymously to message-board administrator David Rein and was posted early Friday morning. The is centered around Atlanta Public Schools redistricting and was founded when the rezoning process began last year.

In an e-mail to Davis with the proposal, Martin said her plan came from an informal brainstorming conversation with Atlanta Public Schools board of education chairman Reuben McDaniel and a group of parents.

Martin is a Morningside resident with three children in the Grady cluster.

Read Martin’s e-mail and proposal in the pdf documents attached.

The following letter was sent by Martin to the CINS board on Friday afternoon:

CINS Board Members,

I hereby tender my resignation as a co-president of CINS effective immediately.

As a board, we decided that CINS would not take an official position on redistricting and have not done so.  We all agreed to advocate individually.  Many of our board members have done so quite effectively for their neighborhoods and community schools.  They have done so in many ways including the media and through the APS community input process.  I am proud to be associated with such exceptional community leaders whose interests are unique and perspectives are different.

As a parent, I submitted my personal input to APS with respect to the last round of option maps.  My email below speaks for itself about who, what, when, where and why of the idea I advanced.  I wanted and continue to want the best opportunity for a currently cohesive cluster of schools, neighborhoods and communities to move forward together in an improved partnership for the next ten years, providing a greater number of APS students with a more equitable access to a safe and quality education, provided by APS in a fiscally responsible way under the rules and guidelines I'd heard APS express in their planning meetings.  I did not and do not hold this solution out as representative of anyone other than me (one voice - one parent) - most assuredly not CINS, my neighborhood or my community.

The Grady Cluster of Schools is a high functioning model of what works and should be shared with as many children as possible.  This should first and foremost be about the children and a quality education.

In that vein, I will continue to advocate for all children in the Atlanta Public Schools and in the Grady Cluster specifically as I encourage all  parents of APS students to do.

Best regards,

Abby Martin

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Péralte Paul contributed to this report.