Category Archives: Planning

CHIP Grant: Twice Ashley Paulk Broke the Tie @ LCC 27 September 2011

Twice Tuesday Ashley Paulk broke a tie to vote for assistance state-funded assistance for poor people for affordable housing. Joyce Evans made the motion, Crawford Powell said nothing, Richard Raines was absent, and Paulk seconded and broke the tie for.

Tuesday the Lowndes County Commission considered a routine acceptance of a Community HOME Investment Program (CHIP) grant. The previous morning at the work session, Commissioner Raines had (according to the VDT) said he was against it. (This is the same Richard Raines who thought NOAA Weather Radios were “wasteful spending” back in March.) However, Raines was not at the regular session Tuesday; presumably he was on one of his many sales trips. Twice, Commissioner Evans made a motion related to CHIP, and Commissioner Powell did nothing. Twice, Chairman Paulk exercised his privilege in such a case and broke the tie, seconding and voting for the CHIP grant.

The first CHIP vote was 9.a. Resolution of Intent to Submit a 2012 CHIP Grant Application and Commitment Letter

Here’s Part 1 of 2: Continue reading →

Steve Prigohzy, guru of Chattanooga-Hamilton Co. school consolidation

We’ve seen that Steve Prigohzy’s magnet school, CSAS, was started in 1986. Chattanooga school consolidation with Hamilton County, Tennessee was in 1995. And look who was waiting to tell them what to do: Chattanooga, 1995: City Referendum on Consolidating Schools, and No Legislative Interference, by Smart City Memphis, 1 January 2011, quoting Education Week 2 August 1995,
A month after the election, the board voted to ask the Public Education Foundation to help frame the new system. The move was partly on the advice of educators in Knoxville, who faced a raft of problems after consolidating rapidly with Knox County eight years ago.

The foundation, one of the wealthiest local education foundations in the country, has worked closely with educators in both the city and county. Its president, Steven H. Prigohzy, is a dynamo with a clear vision of where he’d like to take education in the new system.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a county

Continue reading →

Sports teams won’t change (Tom Gooding) my sports team changed (Ronnie Mathis) @ CUEE 27 Sep 2011

CUEE and the Chamber hardly need opponents for school consolidation. All they need is for people to listen to what they say to contradict each other. Here’s a good example.

First, Tom Gooding said sports teams won’t change (until there’s a newly elected Lowndes County school board, which of course can do whatever it wants to; read the fine print as he speaks).

Then Ronnie Mathis said he’d been through “unification” elsewhere, and his sports team changed from Vikings to Bobcats. Oops!

Maybe this is why CUEE won’t post videos of its own meetings. But LAKE has, so you can watch this for yourself.

Here’s Part 1 of 2: Continue reading →

Steve Prigohzy’s magnet school

CUEE’s paid expert from Chattanooga, Steve Prigohzy, started and ran a magnet school in Chattanooga, much like the one in Troup County that is still causing extra costs and consternation eighteen years after unification. Prigohzy’s school also used prison labor to avoid spending on local labor.

After reading Barbara Stratton’s piece about Steve Prigohzy screening a movie about magnet schools, I wondered, who is this Steve Prigohzy, anyway? CUEE never showed us his resume, as near as I can tell, and they’re a private organization, so they don’t have to. But his tracks are all over the Internet.

Cynthia M. Gettys and Anne Wheelock wrote for The New Alternative Schools in September 1994, (Volume 52, Number 1, Pages 12-15) Launching Paideia in Chattanooga,

With the board’s approval and support from the Lyndhurst Foundation, a committee outlined the necessary steps to develop a Paideia school for Chattanooga students. First, the group hired Steve Prigohzy as the school’s planner, promoter, and educational leader. Prigohzy looked for teachers who were lifelong learners themselves. “I would ask teachers to talk to me about a book they were reading that I shouldn’t miss. I wanted people who were acting out their curiosity about the world,” he said. Prigohzy also sought teachers whose appreciation for discourse would sustain the school as a community of learners. Limited public confidence, especially in the city’s middle schools, influenced the planning.
They must have liked him, because he was hired as its principal, according Jessica Penot and Amy Petulla in Haunted Chattanooga, Continue reading →

Questions for CUEE —Etta Mims

Received today.
Updated 5PM 28 Sep 2011: Added preface and other changes to the document by Etta Mims. -jsq
I am attaching an 8 page document I compiled this week to show that CUEE and the Vote Yes supporters are not answering the questions being asked of them. They are dancing around the topics but these supporters are spending alot of money to put our children and the employees of both schools in danger of 4-5 years minimum of changes that will be detrimental to all concerned.

Another interesting note, if you go to the Vote Yes page, and

Continue reading →

CUEE demolishes its own case

CUEE still doesn’t have a plan for improving education. When asked for any concrete examples of education improving because of school consolidation, not one person could come up with one: not CUEE, not the Chamber, not their invited experts. Their invited experts established that consolidation in Troup County not only didn’t save money, it required a bond issue. And it took four or five years of the hardest work they’d ever done, even though they couldn’t give any evidence that it improved education. It was like that on almost every point: the Chamber and CUEE either couldn’t answer the simplest questions, or even more frequently demolished their own case.

The last question asked to give an example of any company that had declined to come in because of multiple school systems. Not only could nobody give an example, but someone, I believe it was Walter Hobgood, stood up at the podium and said when he was working for a large company he had never encountered a case where they looked at the number of school systems.

Early on Chamber Chair Tom Gooding went on at great length about Continue reading →

Local leadership nets $1.5 billion solar project

That’s 400 MW of solar power in twenty 20 MW PV plants, just across the state line in Gadsden County, Florida. Plus ongoing jobs, expanded education, private sources of investment, and customers for the electricity.

According to SolarServer quoting a National Solar press release yesterday, National Solar Power chooses Gadsden County, Florida for 400 MW PV project

The company estimates that the 400 MW project will create 400 jobs during the five-year construction phase and up to 120 permanent operations jobs.
And that’s not all. According to Solar Energy News today, Plan to build $1.5bn solar farm in Florida, Continue reading →

Detracking Troup County, according to Terry Jenkins

In Troup County, school “unification” was all about race and desegregation, according to the speaker our local Chamber is bringing in Tuesday evening.

Dr. Terry Jenkins, co-authored an interesting paper in 1997, Detracking Troup County: Providing an Exemplary Curriculum for All Students.

As series of decisions, not unrelated to race, made by the “white fathers” of the city of LaGrange, led the citizens of the city to vote their school system out of existence and to become a part of the county system.
The quotes around “white fathers” are in the paper.

Hm, back when I first encountered CUEE, they were speaking to SCLC in Valdosta late last year, Rusty Griffin among them, and the theme was desegregation. They did not receive a warm welcome. Funny how CUEE changed its tune to “unification” after that.

But the local “white fathers” are still insisting on making decisions for all of us.

-jsq

Corrected T-SPLOST Southern Region Cost Changes

Received this morning. Many thanks to Corey Hull and SGRC for sending this correction. -jsq
John,

I reviewed your question, and that project had an error in it, I am attaching a new spreadsheet, that is slightly revised. It includes the TIA funding with inflation so that it matches the other project sheets that we have handed out at the public meetings

I am sorry about the confusion this has caused.

Sincerely,
Corey

Corey Hull, AICP
MPO Coordinator
Valdosta-Lowndes MPO

This corrects the earlier post.

The corrected spreadsheet he sent is on the LAKE website in Excel spreadsheet and HTML versions.

In the HTML version, I have added three columns. Name is taken from the Unconstrained Project Listing. Difference and Diff% were computed from the Original total Cost Estimate and the Updated Total Cost Estimate.

The project descriptions may be found in the unconstrained and constrained project lists. More later.

-jsq

T-SPLOST Southern Region Cost Changes

Update 6:30 PM 26 September 2011: Please see the corrected version received from Corey Hull today. -jsq

Received yesterday from Corey Hull, with this cover sheet message, responding to my request in the T-SPLOST public meeting Monday.

John,

In the attached spreadsheet you will find the each project associated with four columns: the original estimate, the updated estimate, the TIA funding (any difference from the TIA and updated cost estimate is a secondary funding source i.e. federal, state, or local), and whether that project is currently included in the constrained list.

GDOT provided the updated costs estimates (based on current GDOT bids) and in some cases those estimates were further revised by GDOT and the local governments where appropriate. All project scopes remained the same with the exception of RC11-000049 and RC11-000042 (highlighted in yellow), these project termini were changed significantly.

I hope this answers your questions, let me know if you have any more.

Corey

Corey Hull, AICP
MPO Coordinator
Valdosta-Lowndes MPO
327 W. Savannah Ave.
Valdosta, GA 31601
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229.333.5277
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The spreadsheet he sent is on the LAKE website in Excel spreadsheet and HTML versions. If you want to know what the projects are, you need to look at the unconstrained and constrained project lists. More later.

-jsq