Success Stories
Louise Watley
The Georgia GOAL Scholarship Program encourages parents and other family members of scholarship recipients to become involved in Georgia’s school choice movement. It is often the case that the most effective school choice advocates in a community are parents or relatives of children who have been provided with a scholarship to attend a private K-12 school. Such was the case with Louise Watley.
As a longtime resident of Carver Homes, one of Atlanta’s oldest low-income public housing communities, Louise considered it a blessing that her grandchild was provided with a privately-funded scholarship to attend an Atlanta private school. Relieved that her granddaughter would be able to secure a quality education, Louise went to work to help other parents realize their goals for the education of their children. In 1997, she gathered more than 100 parents and their children for a breakfast at the Carver Homes community to discuss the possibility of creating a charter school. Upon learning that under Georgia law, only existing public schools could convert to a charter school, Louise worked tirelessly at the Georgia State Capitol to amend Georgia law so that parents, teachers, and community leaders could, with the permission of their local school boards, create new community-based charter schools.
In March of 1998, Louise Watley and three other resident presidents from Atlanta public housing communities visited Washington, DC to attend a debate in the U.S. Senate over then-Senator Paul Coverdell’s school choice legislation, the A+ Accounts for Public and Private Schools Act. A copy of the letter that Louise personally delivered to Senator Coverdell, and from which he read during the course of the floor debate, is available here.
The Lambert Family
The Georgia GOAL Scholarship Program understands that many educators support the idea that low-income parents should have the ability to move their children from inadequate public schools to better private schools. Due to her experiences with the education of her children, this is especially the case with Marie Lambert, a teacher at Our Lady of Mercy Catholic School in south Atlanta.
During the 1990s, Marie’s daughters, Stacey and Dominique, received privately- funded scholarships to attend two of Atlanta’s best private schools. As a result of this financial assistance, both girls graduated from high school and attended college in Georgia. In addition to the scholarship aid, Marie had to make a significant financial investment in her children’s education, a philosophy shared by the Georgia GOAL Scholarship Program. Reflecting on the days her daughters were in private schools, Marie explained that “I’m very thrifty, and I’d rather they not have all the Tommy Hilfigers and all that.” Instead, Marie always worked “a job and a half” to put money into their education.