12th grade blues

For nearly all of us out there in America, a high school diploma requires graduation from 12th grade.

Twelve grades seems like an arbitrary number.

Into the 1940s, all it took were 11 grades of hassle to earn the tassel. Then Georgia decided to transition.

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Surrency versus State

When Georgia wanted to overhaul its public schools in the 1950s, it unveiled the Minimum Foundation Program.

The program worked for both state and school systems. School systems got much needed money to upgrade and in exchange, the state got systems to agree to its conditions. Conditions were for equalization of white and black facilities, certain acreage and location of schools and if impartial surveys indicated that a school was small and losing population, there was a good chance Georgia would decree it be closed and consolidate with another.

In some cases, this led to a battle. Rural schools, especially high schools, were occasionally hesitant to lose their status. Systems like Washington County and Elbert County/Elberton city were late to start building programs because of wars over small high schools.

Others readily accepted Georgia’s offer of money and agreed to consolidate, but ultimately did not.

Ten years later, Georgia was not happy with the stragglers.

GIA track champions

As you are probably aware, the Georgia High School Association (GHSA) recognizes sports champions of the Georgia Interscholastic Association (GIA), the high school organization for black schools that existed from 1948-70.

The GHSA voted in 2002 to give this recognition to the GIA, a few months after a three-part series by J.C. Clemons and Derrick Mahone in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the league.

Mahone and Clemons listed all the known GIA champions at that time. It was not much of a list as there were not too many resources about the league that had been saved.

A winning night for Screven County

The Screven County Lady Gamecocks won a basketball game December 27. Screven defeated Portal, 39-23. It was a dominating win for Screven, which was credited by MaxPreps as having a 21-5 halftime advantage.

More importantly for the Lady Gamecocks, it was their first win. Their first win in a long time – February 13, 2013, to be exact. In between these victories were 97 straight losses.

When supporting integration could get educators fired

The 1950s were a time of upheaval in Georgia.

At the beginning of the decade, community schools were widespread, though there was little money and little to offer students beyond the school being local. Consolidations came to improve standards and with them, plenty of protests about the schools leaving the communities.

By the middle of the decade, many of these debates had subsided, with only a few major ones – Tennille’s objection of losing their high school to Sandersville and Oglethorpe versus Montezuma, for example – still on the table.

But there were other crises.

In 1954, Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, was decided. Effectively considered the end of separate but equal racial policies, the battle was just beginning.