Dr. Joseph A. Buck, III, President of the Savannah-Chatham Board of Public Education, Receives the 2012 Benjamin Elijah Mays Lifetime Achievement Award from the National School Boards Association
Atlanta (October 8, 2012) – Georgia’s Savannah-Chatham Board of Public Education President Dr. Joseph A. Buck, III has been honored with the 2012 Benjamin Elijah Mays Lifetime Achievement Award. The National School Boards Association’s (NSBA) Council of Urban Boards of Education (CUBE) gives the award each year.
Buck, a member of the Savannah-Chatham Board of Public Education since 2006, received the award on Saturday, October 6 at the 2012 CUBE Annual Conference in Atlanta. CUBE honored Buck for his efforts to improve student achievement and management in the school district as well as his efforts to increase community engagement in the district’s public schools.
“The Benjamin Elijah Mays Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes Dr. Buck’s strong focus on improving public schools in the Savannah-Chatham school district,” said Minnie Forte-Brown, Vice Chair of the CUBE Steering Committee. “We were impressed with Dr. Buck’s leadership and his commitment to equity, opportunity, and access for all the students in his community.”
The Benjamin Elijah Mays Lifetime Achievement Award is given to individuals who demonstrate a long-standing commitment to the educational needs of urban schoolchildren through school board service. Benjamin Elijah Mays, whom the award honors, was a teacher, minister, author, and civil rights activist who served as president of Morehouse College and the Atlanta school board from 1970 to 1981.
Buck spent nearly 40 years as an administrator at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, most recently as Vice President of Student Affairs. During that time, he also built partnerships between the university, the school system, and key businesses. Two local programs that he has helped implement include Leadership Savannah and Leadership Georgia, which help local professionals gain leadership skills. Buck recruited many teachers and administrators to these programs and used his positions on the groups’ boards of trustees to build partnerships between schools and the business community.
When Buck became Savannah-Chatham’s school board president, the school district was on probation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools and was facing declining enrollments and mistrust from the community. Working with a new superintendent, Buck helped expand a school choice system and bring back students to neighborhood public schools.
Buck has supported charter schools in his school district, and helped build a new charter facility using the education special purpose local option sales tax. He also is a member of Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal’s education advisory group, which meets quarterly to discuss issues facing schools in the state.
The Savannah-Chatham school district, which is located on the southeast coast of Georgia, employs over 4,600 full time employees, of which more than 2,800 are full-time classroom teachers.
CUBE represents more than 100 urban school districts in 35 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The districts that comprise CUBE educate nearly 7.5 million students in more than 12,000 schools, with a collective budget of about $99 billion. CUBE helps urban school boards work together to improve student achievement and find solutions to challenges that they face.
For more information about and CUBE and the Benjamin Elijah Mays Lifetime Achievement Award, please visit www.nsba.org/cube.
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Founded in 1940, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) is a not-for-profit organization representing state associations of school boards and their more than 90,000 local school board members throughout the U.S. Working with and through our state associations, NSBA advocates for equity and excellence in public education through school board leadership. www.nsba.org