Tag Archives: Chamber of Commerce

Marching to Occupy Valdosta 14 October 2011

Will someone pick up that sign? As you can see in the playlist, why yes, someone did!

More than 100 people (estimates ranged from 110 to 150) went Marching to Occupy Valdosta.


Tony Daniels and Freddie Richardson carry the Occupy Valdosta banner

They marched more than three miles from Drexel Park to Bank of America, where they noted BoA got bailed out and we got left out and recommended withdrawing your money. Then to MLK Park, where many people spoke on a variety of subjects ranging from stand together, to make the Industrial Authority be accounted, to vote No on School Consolidation on November 8th, to if MLK was alive he would be here today, to marching for rights for a lifetime, to no private prison, to tax the rich, and and of course come back here (MLK Park) tomorrow (Sat 15 Oct) at 11AM! Then to the VDT (where the Assistant Managing Editor was surprised by a cheer) and the Chamber (where the President didn’t care for a thesaurus lesson); more on all those stops later.


Marching to Occupy Valdosta, 14 October 2011:
Drexel Park, Bank of America, MLK Park, VDT, Chamber of Commerce.
Videos by Gretchen Quarterman and John S. Quarterman
for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.

Videos are still uploading, so check back later. I’ll also blog more about specific events along the way.

-jsq

The Grassroots Handbook Against School Consolidation

Received yesterday, The Grassroots Handbook Against School Consolidation: The Truth About Unification/Consolidation of the Valdosta/Lowndes School Systems By David E. Mullis, J.D., LL.M., October 12, 2011. It’s a 43 page exhaustive compendium of all the statements against consolidation by both school boards, the Valdosta City Council, etc., together with detailed debunking of every argument CUEE has made.

I think this passage on page 3 sums it up:

In other words, we can offer a great education, provide incentives for students to perform, make modifications to education to help students succeed, and provide technical help, but if the child is homeless, left home alone for long periods of time, living in a high crime area, living in a home with substance abuse, or just downright defiant, there is only so much the school can accomplish in helping these students succeed. Good parental, home and community environments are critical to the success of underprivileged children.

Therefore, CUEE and the Chamber of Commerce’s efforts are focused on the wrong methods of improving our school statistics. Unification will not accomplish any of their stated goals, but will create an enormous financial burden on the community and its families during this time of recession and high unemployment. The business community and volunteer organizations should instead focus on providing educational awareness and success clinics in low income areas. They should organize efforts to reduce poverty by bringing in industry with good wages and sponsoring basic community literacy and vocational training and tutoring. They should focus on programs to promote the value of education. They should organize drug awareness and rehabilitation programs in low income areas. They should focus their efforts in decreasing poverty. They should focus on encouraging community diversity. If they will do this, the educational problems will take care of themselves in good systems like Valdosta and Lowndes.

However, CUEE and the Chamber have insisted on pushing forward with their unification agenda despite the certain negative effect it will have on the community and the education of our children. They deny there will be any negative effect, but they have no personal accountability if they are wrong. They ignore all relevant studies and dismiss the results as being misleading. Then they state their own misleading and false assertions and claim them to be FACTS.

Indeed, what qualifies the Chamber of CUEE to talk about education? Judging by their track record, nothing does.

This Handbook is a great resource, and I applaud David Mullis for producing it.

-jsq

To the people of Valdosta and South Georgia —Occupy Valdosta

Posted today in Occupy Valdosta’s facebook page:
To the people of Valdosta and South Georgia

We, the local citizens occupying Valdosta, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; to nonviolently occupy public space; to create an open process to address the problems we face, and to generate solutions accessible to everyone.

Our issues are varied, yet related.

We seek

Continue reading →

What qualifies you to come talk about education? —Kent Bishop @ VLCoC 11 October 2011

The first question Kent Bishop asked at the Chamber’s Candidates Forum, where he got eight minutes to speak for school consolidation while each of the candidates for Valdosta Mayor only got five, still hung in my mind at the end:
What qualifies you to come talk about education?
Like so many CUEE speakers, he isn’t an educator and he hadn’t done his homework.
You know, what I hear is that, from the other side, is that our taxes would go up because of consolidation. The facts just don’t point to that. Generally what you’d see is some blending of the costs. And if we do that and average it out, we’re gonna find the two millage rates will come out somewhere in the middle. It makes total sense.
Well, maybe it makes total sense if you like just making stuff up. Or you can see, hear, and read the extensive research by the Lowndes County Board of Education that demonstrates if consolidation passes taxes will go up and public school services will go down.

The speaker went on about ongoing white flight, without ever mentioning that consolidation would cause bright flight to head out of the county to Lanier and elsewhere.

He did come right out and admit something I’ve been saying: Continue reading →

Neighborhoods matter more than schools?

Where you live makes more difference to your education than where you go to school, says a news study, backed up by an older study.

Maureen Downey blogged for AJC 5 October 2011, Forget school vouchers. The route to improving education may be housing vouchers.

School voucher proponents argue that kids need a way out of failing schools, but research increasingly suggests that it would be more effective to provide them a way out of failing neighborhoods.

Should we consider giving poor families in low-performing school zones housing vouchers that they could use to relocate in the zone of a school performing above the area median?

I’d say that’s a bad solution to the problem the study identifies, and we already know better solutions. But first, from the abstract of the the study Continue reading →

It is important to give our children wings and roots. —Barbara Stratton

Received today on CUEE radio ad helps alienate Black Crow radio host. -jsq
CUEE can attribute the source of this ad to another committee all they want to. I know that I personally overheard Rusty Griffin telling Myrna Ballard about the ad last Thursday night at the CUEE Education Task Force meeting which I attended as a concerned citizen. Rusty was very excited about the ad & said he expected it to greatly enhance their campaign to unify the black community for consolidation. I told Sam Allen what I heard, but neither of us knew what would be in the ad until it aired Tuesday. Rusty said he had to get a final OK so I was hoping that person would be smarter, but evidently not. Another thing I noticed at the meeting where everyone but me was part of the task force only two people out of the fifteen were from the black community. How does that represent the diversity they preach?

I personally appreciate all the times over the past months

Continue reading →

Why Employers Support School Unification —Greg Justice

Received today from the Chamber. -jsq
Why Employers Support School Unification
By Greg Justice
Director of Manufacturing
Regal Marine Industries, Inc.

Look it up, states that rank among the highest in terms of quality of life and economic growth rank among the highest in terms of quality of education. Is this because these states have higher levels of education, or did they become attractive places to live because they have a focused approach to improving the quality of education? And does the same reasoning hold true for different nations?

It would seem we’re about to find out. In one generation, the U.S. has fallen from No. 1 to No. 9 in the number of people graduating with college degrees. We’re mediocre in education when compared to the other 34 industrialized nations. A 2009 study from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shows the U.S. ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science, and 25th in math – all lagging behind other leading industrialized countries.

It is hard to relate these statistics to our local schools,

And I thought business people liked hard work! Continue reading →

Occupy Valdosta Flyers

Already more people have signed up to march Friday than showed up at the Chamber’s event last night. Here are some flyers. There’s an Occupy Valdosta organizational meeting tonight; more in the blog after that. The traditional media are starting to flock around, as well.

-jsq

Candidates Forum by Chamber of Commerce

Today from 5 to 7 PM at the Rainwater Conference Center is the 2011 Meet the Candidates Forum organized by the Valdosta-Lowndes County Chamber of Commerce.
The Chamber’s Meet the Candidates Reception provides an opportunity for Chamber members to meet and hear from candidates running in the Nov. 8 general election. All Chamber members and guests are invited to attend this event at the Rainwater Conference Center. There is no cost to Chamber members to attend.
Here’s the link to RSVP or if you need directions.

Here’s a list of who qualifed to run. As you can see, most local incumbents are running unopposed. Maybe they’ll show up anyway, and there are at least a few contested positions (Valdosta Mayor and Council At Large, Hahira Council 3, Dasher Post 3, and Lake Park Council At Large. This being an odd year, there are no county-wide posts up for election, but the municipal elections affect everyone around here, even people like me who do not live in any of the cities. Whether at this event or elsewhere, you may want to ask the candidates their platforms and positions on local issues.

Usually there’s also an AAUW Lowndes County Political Forum; I don’t know what’s up with that this year. Usually it’s immediately after the Chamber thing, and the AAUW Forum is open to all.

-jsq

School consolidation as disaster capitalism

School consolidation would set up an artificial fiscal disaster that could force the “unified” public school system to turn to private foundations for funding, at the price of control of public education by private entities. This is disaster capitalism, or the shock doctrine, right here in Valdosta and Lowndes County.

What’s the Shock Doctrine? It’s been around for a long time, but Naomi Klein researched it for her book of the same name. It’s

“the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock”
She was writing mostly about wars, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters. Locally here we haven’t had any of those. But we may be about to create a disaster, a shock, at the ballot box in November, if voters fall for the school “unification” snake oil.

What’s the next step after CUEE has accidentally revealed that Continue reading →