New Schools Georgia, Inc, (NSG), has filed a petition with the Georgia Charter Schools Commission, seeking authority to open an independent charter school to serve families in Albany and the surrounding area.

NSG is a statewide organization established by Allen Hughes, of Walton Press in Monroe, Ga., and Glenn Delk, an Atlanta attorney, to assist local communities in attracting high-quality school operators with proven track records, academically and financially, to open charter schools throughout Georgia.

NSG has begun the process of developing a board of directors for both the Collegiate Academy of Albany (CAA) as well as the statewide organization. To date, Glenn Singfield, the owner of Albany Fish Company and Artesian Contracting Co., and Stan Logue, the chief financial officer of Thrush Aircraft, have agreed to serve on the local board. Wendell Christian, a retired superintendent, Robert Thorpe, a retired high school principal, and Heather Robertson, an educational consultant, have joined the NSG board.

If approved by the Commission, CAA would open in August 2020, serving up to 376 students in Albany/Dougherty County in grades K-3, on a first-come, first-serve basis, with no admissions testing, growing a grade a year until the school hits a capacity of 1,450 students in grades K-12. If demand exceeds supply, enrollment at the tuition-free, public charter school would be through a lottery system

Charter schools are tuition-free, public schools.

Allen and Teresa Hughes, whose Hughes Family Foundation is leading the effort, lived in Albany until 1987 and returned to help out after recent tornadoes and Hurricane Michael damaged the area.

Allen Hughes said he wanted to help the community because he was inspired by his wife’s faith to give back to their hometown.

“We want to offer Albany-area families the same access to quality educational opportunities as other students have across our state,” Allen Hughes said. “CAA will offer Albany’s children the opportunity to receive a world-class education and prepare them to compete and succeed in the 21^st Century economy.”

The creation of CAA will also benefit the Dougherty school district since it will be solely funded by the state and not utilize local tax dollars. For each student who shifts from the district to the charter school, the district will retain the local per pupil expenditure -- $4,100 per student, Delk said.

“CAA will not only offer access to a world-class education for students who choose to attend but will also free up to $1.5 million the first year the charter opens so that the district will eventually have an extra $5.5 million annually,” Delk said.

The CAA board has chosen SABIS Educational Systems, Inc, a 133-year-old company educating 70,000 students in 20 countries on five continents to manage the new charter in Albany. http://www.sabis.net.

Chosen for their record of academic achievement and fiscal soundness, SABIS offers an integrated, comprehensive K-12 program which uses dynamic materials, proven methods and cutting-edge technology to deliver superior results such as closing the achievement gap with low-income, minority students in the U.S., as evidenced by the 22-year record of SABIS Springfield, Mass., where Hispanic and African-American students outperform the state average for white students on math and English exams.

“Together with the Hughes Foundation, we plan to deliver quality educational opportunities to Dougherty County’s families,” said Jose Afonso, SABIS’ director of development in the United States. “They will soon join the nearly 1,900 graduates from our class of 2018, in being accepted to over 500 colleges and universities throughout the world. These proud graduates are attending great U.S. universities, such as Georgia Tech, Kennesaw State, SCAD, Harvard and MIT, to name a few.”