When Bibb County joined the Strategic Waiver School System initiative nearly a decade ago, district leaders hoped it would provide the flexibility needed to boost achievement in one of Georgia’s most chronically underperforming school systems.
Strategic Waivers School Systems enter into multi-year performance contracts with the State Board of Education to gain greater flexibility from state laws and regulations to increase student achievement. This can come in many forms, with two key areas being teacher certification and salary.
An analysis of five years of state data reveals that Bibb County’s teacher retention rates have steadily declined since 2021, ranging from 83% to 75% by 2025. This is significantly lower than the state average of 90% and trails all but one nearby district.
In core academic areas like Math, Science, and Special Education, turnover is especially severe, with fewer than 70% of teachers staying from one year to the next.
This exodus has largely gone unnoticed by the public, but its impact is clearly felt in classrooms. Math and English proficiency levels in the county lag behind the state average, with only 3.7% of students achieving distinguished marks in Math, in comparison to the 20.6% state average, according to the GoDE teacher pipeline.
“Impoverished areas suffer from both material and cultural deprivation. Families often don’t have the ability to engage with the school due to work hours or sometimes don’t have as strong of an interest in their child’s education,” said Laura Simon, who is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Mercer University. “Children in impoverished areas tend to attend the same schools as their parents. In this way, success and achievement in education areas can become cyclical.”
Figure 1: Teacher Retention by District, (Middle Georgia). https://georgiainsights.gadoe.org/Dashboards/Pages/EducatorPipeline-Leaders.aspx
The System Was Designed to Be Flexible. But at What Cost?
Under Georgia’s SWSS framework, school districts can bypass certain state rules in exchange for meeting improvement goals. For Bibb County, this entailed relaxed hiring requirements and the ability to implement alternative programs. But critics argue that this “flexibility” often comes at the expense of stability.
“Strategic waivers often signal underperformance,” Simon said. “We can infer that schools with strategic waivers are underperforming schools and generally will cause more stress.”
Simon’s analysis echoes a broader concern: that waivers intended to empower schools are instead enabling a revolving door of inexperienced teachers, high turnover, and lowered accountability standards.
“Teachers [in Bibb] put in a lot of hours and get very little support. This comes from both the institutions and the parents of students. Teaching has become a sort of ‘passion career,’” Simon said.
A County Falling Behind
A review of the Georgia Department of Education’s 2021–2025 data shows Bibb County slipping behind nearly every neighboring district regarding teacher retention. In 2025, Houston County retained 89% of its educators. Peach County held onto 87%. Twiggs County is an anomaly in this sense. Long considered one of Georgia’s most challenged school systems, Twiggs’ retention rate falls way behind any other district.
Bibb’s decline wasn’t limited to certain grade levels. Across nearly every subject, the county posted below-average retention. In 2025:
- Science retention dropped to 67.92%
- Special Education retention fell to 68.96%
- Math retention slipped to 72.41%
The data also shows that Bibb’s retention of early career teachers is increasingly reliant on those with induction certification—a designation for educators still completing standard professional training. Strategic Waivers provide school districts with flexibility in certain areas, including certification requirements. This enables them to hire teachers with shorter pathways to full certification, like an Induction certificate. By 2025, 14.5% of Bibb County teachers held induction certificates, compared to a state average of 13.47%.
“Districts with strategic waivers can’t hold on to experienced staff due to the way that schools are funded in the United States, which means that schools in impoverished areas often struggle to amass enough funding to improve,” Simon said. “So they recruit teachers with less training. That worsens educational outcomes, which in turn increases turnover. It’s a loop.”
Figure 2: Teacher Retention by Subject (Bibb County). https://georgiainsights.gadoe.org/Dashboards/Pages/EducatorPipeline-Leaders.aspx
The presence of average and high-achieving districts surrounding Bibb County can also result in a lack of fully qualified professionals for Bibb.
“[Houston] creates a big pull factor for already qualified teachers in underperforming counties, like Bibb, as they can offer a better work experience as well as a better salary,” Simon said.
Visualizing the Problem
A heatmap of teacher retention (Figure 1 and Figure 2 above) shows Bibb County as one of the weakest in the region, trailed only by Twiggs, as well as illustrating how retention plummeted in critical subjects. Bar charts (Figure 3) show how reliance on induction-certified teachers spiked.
One image compares Bibb and Houston Counties from 2021 to 2025. While Houston consistently maintains retention above 85%, Bibb’s rate nosedives, marking a divergence that mirrors broader economic disparities between the two counties.
Similarly, Figure 3 shows the poor retention of Bibb in numbers. The data shows that consistently, the number of teachers retained in Bibb diminishes notably. Highlighting how, as well as struggling to retain qualified teachers, Bibb also has issues in maintaining a foundation of potential qualified teachers to build upon.
Figure 3: Bibb County employment statistics by Induction Status. https://georgiainsights.gadoe.org/Dashboards/Pages/EducatorPipeline-Leaders.aspx
A System in Need of Scrutiny
“Schools are struggling, and that’s frustrating,” said Laura Bell, a former Bibb educator. “When you’re the one in the trenches and the people above you do not know what to do, it’s frustrating.”
As Bibb continues to grapple with low test scores and enrollment declines,Superintendent Dan Sims is expected to ask for a strategic waiver renewal upon the current waivers’ expiration in June 2025. In the meantime, however, the county prepares for a virtual recruitment event on May 6.
