School board member, Columbus residents on bus trip to tour Camelot campus

Camelot Education, the private, for-profit company based in Austin, Texas, and recommended by Muscogee County School District Superintendent David Lewis to run three alternative education programs for $6.4 million annually, is bringing 18 folks from Columbus on chartered bus to Pensacola, Fla., today to visit one of its 43 campuses in six states.

The Ledger-Enquirer is along for ride.

The bus left the Muscogee County Public Education Center at 7 a.m., 11 hours before the Muscogee County School Board is scheduled to meet there at 6 p.m. for its monthly meeting. On the agenda is District 8 representative’s Frank Myers suggestion to reconsider the April 10 vote. That’s when the board voted 5-3 to table the controversial recommendation for three months and form a citizens advisory committee to investigate the issue. A month later, such a committee hasn’t been established, and the board and community seem just as divided.

District 7 representative Cathy Williams is the only member of the nine-person school board on this trip to visit Camelot Academy in Pensacola. She also was the only board member to visit the three programs in Chicago that Camelot made available to the board last week.

The board appears to have two swing votes who will decide this issue: Kia Chambers, the board’s lone countywide representatives, who made the April 10 motion to table the recommendation; and Mark Cantrell, the District 6 representative who was absent from the April 10 meeting.

The Ledger-Enquirer texted Chambers and Cantrell this morning, but neither has responded.

This story was originally published May 15, 2017 at 11:25 AM with the headline "School board member, Columbus residents on bus trip to tour Camelot campus."