Georgia Promise-eligible schools by district

Listed schools by district, 2026-27

The Governor’s Office of Student Achievement (GOSA) publishes the list of public schools in the lowest 25 percent that the Georgia Promise Scholarship’s attendance-zone rule is built on. GOSA groups the schools by district in alphabetical order; it does not rank them. We counted the schools under each district. The table shows every district with six or more listed schools, next to its count on the previous list. Every other district with a listed school is in the expandable list below the table.

Source: our count of GOSA’s 2025 Georgia Promise Scholarship Public School List for the 2026-27 academic year and the February 14, 2025 list used for 2025-26, matched by Georgia Department of Education school-system and school ID. We show counts only; open the official list for school names. County is where the district’s land lies, from federal NCES boundary files. A school count is not a count of families or children living in those zones; no public source counts those.

Districts with no listed school

68 of Georgia’s 180 school districts have no school on the 2026-27 list. They include some of the largest: the Forsyth, Cherokee, Columbia, Effingham, Fayette, Camden, Lowndes, Catoosa and Jackson county districts, and the city districts of Marietta, Buford and Decatur. Because the rule depends on the schools zoned to your home, a family living in one of these districts has no listed school to be zoned to on the current list (our reading of the rule).

• County and district can differ. Lowndes County’s district has no listed school, but the Valdosta City district, which serves the city of Valdosta, has 4. In Hall County, Hall County’s district has 13 and Gainesville City has 3, while Buford City has none.
• Accepted students stay eligible. GESA’s Family Handbook (FAQ 4) says a student who was accepted keeps eligibility even if the zoned school later drops off the list.
• The list is rebuilt every year, so a district with no listed school now may have one on the next list, and the reverse.

How to check your own address

1. Find out which elementary, middle and high schools are zoned to your home address. Your school district can tell you which schools serve your street.
2. Open the official 2026-27 list and look under your district’s name for each of those schools.
3. If any one of them is listed, your home meets the attendance-zone rule. In Odyssey’s words: “If you reside in the attendance zone of at least one school, you meet the attendance zone eligibility requirement. It is not based upon the public school the student attends.”
4. Check the other rules with the program’s own eligibility pre-screen, then apply at mygeorgiapromise.org during an application window. The program decides eligibility; we can’t.

Things that trip families up:

• Attending is not enough. Odyssey’s guidance says a student who attends a listed school while living outside its zone does not meet the requirement.
• School and place names repeat. Look under the right district. The “Sugar Hill Elementary” on the list belongs to Hall County’s district, not to the Gwinnett County city of Sugar Hill. Decatur County’s district is not City Schools of Decatur. Macon County’s district is not the city of Macon, which is served by Bibb County’s district.
• Some schools are never on the list. GOSA leaves out charter schools, online and virtual schools, alternative schools, magnet schools, schools that serve only pre-K through 2nd grade, residential treatment and Department of Juvenile Justice schools, the state schools for the blind and deaf, and schools missing a year of CCRPI scores.
• Schools on military posts aren’t included. The on-post schools at Fort Stewart and at Fort Benning in Columbus are federal Department of Defense schools, outside GOSA’s data.
• Make sure you have the current list. Its title says it is for the 2026-27 academic year. GESA’s program timeline says each December list “will apply to the following year”, so this is the list for the 2026 application windows, the last of which runs November 1–30, 2026.

How GOSA builds the list

Georgia law tells GOSA to list the public schools that performed in the lowest 25 percent of all public schools, based on school ratings for the two most recent school years, and to publish the list by December 1 each year. For the current list, GOSA averaged each school’s 2024 and 2025 CCRPI Single Scores; its calculation guide (updated November 26, 2025) puts the cut score at 67.5.

The list moves from year to year. The 2025-26 list had 512 schools in 104 districts. Comparing the two lists by school ID, 373 schools are on both, 133 are new and 139 dropped off (our count). Twenty districts with no listed school on the 2025-26 list have at least one now, and twelve districts that had listed schools now have none. The next list is due by December 1, 2026; until then, the counts on our pages are from the current list.

Four regional guides

Each regional page carries its own district table, local quirks and local options.

• Atlanta and DeKalb: 91 listed schools across four districts (DeKalb County 52, Atlanta Public Schools 31, Fulton County 8, City Schools of Decatur 0), and how to tell which district your address is in.
• South and East Metro Atlanta: 78 listed schools across Clayton, Henry, Newton, Griffin-Spalding, Rockdale and Douglas, where several counts changed sharply from last year’s list.
• Augusta: Richmond County’s 38 listed schools next to Columbia County’s none, plus notes for Fort Gordon families and for North Augusta, which is in South Carolina.
• Savannah and the Coast: The only reported county counts of Promise students we have found (about 800 in Chatham, about 200 in Liberty), and why Fort Stewart’s schools are not on the list.

Live somewhere else? The tables above cover every district with a listed school, and our tutoring works the same way anywhere in Georgia.

City, county and school district are different things

Promise eligibility and IEP questions both run through school districts, and district lines don’t always follow city or county lines.

• Atlanta Public Schools is the City of Atlanta’s district. By land area, about 93.5% of it lies in Fulton County and 6.5% in DeKalb County. Fulton County Schools serves the rest of Fulton County.
• Some cities run their own districts inside a county district’s territory, including City Schools of Decatur (DeKalb), Marietta City (Cobb), Gainesville City (Hall) and Valdosta City (Lowndes).
• Some districts cross county lines. By land area, Buford City is 78.7% in Gwinnett and 21.3% in Hall; Social Circle City is 84.1% in Walton and 15.9% in Newton.
• Consolidated governments such as Augusta-Richmond County, Columbus-Muscogee, Macon-Bibb and Athens-Clarke are one city-county government, and their school districts carry the county name: Richmond, Muscogee, Bibb and Clarke.

District land shares are from the NCES School District Geographic Relationship Files (GRF25). Confirm any address with the district.

Online only, anywhere in Georgia

We don’t have a Georgia office, a tutoring center or in-person sessions, and we don’t list a Georgia street address. Special Ed Resource is an online tutoring company with 40+ teachers certified in special education. Every session is live and one-to-one by video, so a family in Valdosta, Dalton or Brunswick uses the same format as a family in Atlanta.

What a family needs:

• a computer with a webcam and a reliable internet connection;
• a quiet spot where your child can see the screen and keep materials close;
• for younger children, an adult nearby at the start of sessions.

Statewide, 91.0% of Georgia households have a broadband subscription (Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2020–2024), but it varies: among the 27 larger counties we compared, it is lowest in Dougherty County, at 82.3%. If your internet is patchy, tell us in the consultation so we can talk it through honestly.

We tutor reading and dyslexia, math, ADHD and executive function and academic skills for autistic learners. Our work is academic only: we don’t provide therapy, speech services, evaluations or diagnosis. We work with children from age 3½, but Georgia Promise starts at kindergarten, so tutoring for a preschooler is paid privately. We confirm a teacher and a schedule with you before anything starts; we don’t promise a time slot before checking. Prefer to talk first? Call (844) 773-3822.

Paying with Georgia Promise

Special Ed Resource is an approved provider in the Georgia Promise Scholarship Odyssey Marketplace. Families apply for the scholarship through the program’s own site and spend it only in the Odyssey Marketplace. We are not the Georgia Education Savings Authority (GESA), Odyssey or the State of Georgia.

Promise-funded tutoring must be in a core subject and, in the program regulations’ words, must be “provided by an educator certified by the Georgia Professional Standards Commission.” Each Marketplace tutoring offering names its certified tutor, so in the consultation we explain which teacher would lead Promise-funded sessions and which times could work.

For the 2026-27 school year the scholarship is up to $6,500, paid in four quarterly payments of $1,625, and GESA may withhold up to 5% for administration. Families approved in the August or November 2026 window receive only the second half of the year’s payments. Promise is a general scholarship: there is no extra amount or priority for a student with an IEP, and the only special-education rule is that students may stay in the program until age 21. Read more in Georgia Promise eligibility and the school list, paying for tutoring with Georgia Promise and our provider page.

Court status: In August 2026, families filed a lawsuit in DeKalb County Superior Court (Sands v. Green) challenging the rule that students must first attend public school, according to the families’ lawyers and news reports. As of October 2, 2026, we have found no report of a ruling, and the program is operating for the 2026-27 school year. More on the court case.

Where to get help across Georgia

• Parent to Parent of Georgia: Georgia’s Parent Training and Information Center, with free statewide help for families of children with disabilities.
• Georgia Parent Mentor Partnership: the Georgia Department of Education’s list of parent mentors by county and school system is the quickest way to find someone who knows your district.
• Questions about your Promise application: the program’s support line, listed on mygeorgiapromise.org as the Odyssey Support Team, is 470-470-7057.

These are separate organizations, not partners of ours. For IEP rights and timelines, see our Georgia IEP help page.

Sources

• GOSA: 2025 Georgia Promise Scholarship Public School List for the 2026-27 academic year (as posted on mygeorgiapromise.org)
• GOSA: Georgia Promise Scholarship Public School List, February 14, 2025 (2025-26)
• GOSA: 2025 Promise Scholarship Public School List FAQs (updated December 22, 2025)
• GOSA: Promise Act Public School List Calculation Guide (updated November 26, 2025)
• Georgia Promise Scholarship Program Timeline
• Odyssey: Who is eligible to apply for the Georgia Promise Scholarship? (updated April 30, 2026)
• Odyssey: help article on attendance zones (updated February 20, 2026)
• GESA: Georgia Promise Scholarship Family Handbook (version as of January 8, 2026, posted August 12, 2026), page 6 and FAQ 4
• SB 233 (2024), Georgia Promise Scholarship Act, O.C.G.A. § 20-2B-29
• National Center for Education Statistics: School District Geographic Relationship Files (GRF25)
• U.S. Census Bureau: American Community Survey 2020–2024 5-year estimates, table B28002

Local figures and links checked October 2, 2026.