GAINESVILLE - Last week, the Florida Board of Education approved a plan that would consolidate the two public schools in Jefferson County, Fla. and convert them to a charter school.

As the board voted, Bill Brumfield, the newly elected school board chairman, breathed a sigh of relief.

Bill Brumfield, a school board member and former superintendent in Jefferson County, addresses the Florida Board of Education.

"Thank God," he said.

Thursday's vote ended months-long saga to win approval for a plan to turn around the struggling North Florida district.

And it sent one of the state's most impoverished and persistently struggling rural school systems down an uncharted course.

State board members remarked that Jefferson is preparing to launch a miniature version of the great experiment in New Orleans, in which the school district handed the operation of nearly all its public schools over to charter school providers in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

New Orleans "is a model, potentially, that can offer some hope" about what can happen when charter schools work with a district to raise student achievement, board member Rebecca Fishman Lipsey said, "especially where there's high levels of poverty."

Right now, four charter school operators may be candidates for the job. They include a network associated with one of Florida's largest management companies, the organization that revitalized public schools in a small Central Florida town, and a mom-and-pop Palm Beach County charter school founded by a Jefferson County native.

Over the next two weeks, the district will court these organizations, and try to find one that's up to the task.

"We're turning over to a charter school to save the district, for the children's sake," Brumfield told the state board, which rejected three earlier, state-mandated turnaround plans, deciding the district couldn't get the job done on its own.

Brumfield said parents, many of whom he'd taught over four decades as an educator, were ready for a big change.

"They all want this. They want something new," he said. "They see Governor's Charter [Academy] over in Tallahassee, and they want something like that, but in their community."

Decades of struggle

Jefferson County's school system is an outlier in many ways. (more…)