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The new Superintendent of Troup County Schools, Dr. Rachel Hazel, served as the guest speaker for the LaGrange-Troup County Chamber of Commerce Early Bird Breakfast on Tuesday morning.

The event served as another opportunity for the new superintendent to introduce herself and, now that she has three months under her belt, say how things are going for TCSS.

Dr. Hazel f was formerly the Deputy Superintendent of Volusia County Schools in DeLand, Florida. She holds a doctorate from the University of Central Florida in Executive Leadership, a master’s degree in Educational Leadership from Stetson University, and a Bachelor of Science in Exceptional Student Education, focusing on mental handicaps, from the University of Central Florida.

Though she has spent 27 years in Florida, Hazel is a native of Coweta County and attended school there until the seventh grade and later graduated from Pike County High School.

Hazel began her career with Volusia County Public Schools in 1996 as a front desk receptionist at the school level. She’s been a teacher, assistant principal, and principal and worked in district-level administration. Hazel was hired as Troup’s new superintendent in May after a nationwide search with over 30 candidates.

During her speech, Hazel spoke about where the school system is at the moment, how they plan to improve things and concluded with why they do what they do.

TCSS currently has about 12,280-plus students with about 1,800 total employees, 1,030 of which are certified staff members. All of those certified staff have a bachelor’s degree. 48% hold a Master’s degree, 29% hold a specialist degree and 4% hold a doctoral degree. 

“That’s the number of people that have gone above and beyond in their education. So it’s a very qualified staff,” Hazel said.

Last year, TCSS served almost 800,000 breakfasts, 1.3 million lunches, and 85,000 suppers, not including the summer meals program.

“This year, all breakfast and lunch are at no charge to students, and many of our supper programs are as well. So we’re very proud of the work that they do,” Hazel said.

“Our transportation department transports 8236 students a day to and from school. That’s over 169 routes and over a million miles on the road,” she said.

Hazel briefly spoke about the school system’s Georgia Milestones Assessment System (GMAS) scores, which recently went public. Hazel touted TCSS’s graduation rate at 85.8%, which beat the state average of 85.4%.

Hazel explained that while TCSS lags behind the state in many GMAS proficiency categories, they have also closed the gap in nearly every category.

“When a student gets a score, they get one of four scores: they either get a basic score, which means they don’t know the content and they’re pretty far behind, or they get a developing score, which means they’re right there, but not proficient yet … proficient, which means they’re reading their grade level to moving ahead and they’re right where they need to be. And then there is advanced, so we just need to keep pushing them forward,” Hazel said.

Hazel explained that a student who doesn’t test as proficient in reading doesn’t mean they can’t read. It just means they are not reading at grade level.

“We are very, very close to the state average on those scores. When you average in all of our schools, some schools are further along than others. We’re very close. We’re within four percentage points for all of the areas that are tested, which are 26 areas, particularly we were looking at elementary reading scores, and we were pretty close,” Hazel said.

“If you add in those students who were developing, who are close. They’re right there. They just need a little push. If we were able to move those students into the category of proficient, our numbers would be in the 70 to 80%, which would put us well above any other district in our surrounding area,” Hazel said.