It’s not on VSU’s facebook page, either.
The VDT doesn’t have it listed in its Community Calendar.
Even Jane Osborn doesn’t have it in her Community Calendar.
Well, I hear that it’s elevenish to threeish. I hope somebody told the students.
-jsq
Lynnell Hancock wrote for Smithsonian Magazine September 2011, Why Are Finland’s Schools Successful? Here’s a clue:
So what do they do? Drill the weak students on test questions? Nope: Continue reading“Children from wealthy families with lots of education can be taught by stupid teachers,” Louhivuori said, smiling. “We try to catch the weak students. It’s deep in our thinking.”
Campbell Robertson wrote for the New York Times 13 August 2011, Bishops Criticize Tough Alabama Immigration Law
Continue readingCULLMAN, Ala. —On a sofa in the hallway of his office here, Mitchell Williams, the pastor of First United Methodist Church, announced that he was going to break the law. He is not the only church leader making such a declaration these days.
Josh Anderson for the New York TimesSince June, when Gov. Robert Bentley, a Republican, signed an immigration enforcement law called the toughest in the country by critics and supporters alike, the opposition has been vocal and unceasing.
Thousands of protesters have marched. Anxious farmers
Leonard Pitts Jr. wrote for the Miami Herald 30 July 2011, NAACP’s paradigm shift on ending the Drug War
Conservative as in:Here’s why this matters. Or, more to the point, why it matters more than if such a statement came from Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. The NAACP is not just the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization. It is also its most conservative.
…denoting a propensity toward caution and a distrust of the bold, the risky, the new. And that’s the NAACP all over.How monumental? Continue reading
…there has always been something determinedly middle class and cautious about the NAACP. This is the group whose then-leader, Roy Wilkins, famously detested Martin Luther King for his street theatrics.
For that group, then, to demand an end to the Drug War represents a monumental sea change.
Interesting how the headline writer watered that down: NAACP called Continue readingIf you grew up at the same time that I did, you’ll remember the “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign that became popular in the mid-1980s and early 1990s.
It manifested itself in many ways, from the posters and talks in class to the “very special episodes” of shows such as “Blossom” and “The Facts of Life,” where a character encounters a kid from the wrong side of the tracks who is pressuring him or her to try drugs. Inevitably, good prevailed and the druggie turned out to be from a broken family and needed only a good face-to-face with Nancy Reagan, the driving force behind the campaign, to overcome his addiction. (She appeared on “Diff’rent Strokes,” and considering the real-life histories of Gary Coleman, Todd Bridges and Dana Plato, she probably should have stuck around for a five-episode story arc.)
“Just Say No” was part of the larger war on drugs the Nixon administration declared in 1971. For grown-ups, that war symbolized a lot more than sappy primetime television. Especially for black adults. For them, it meant stricter laws for those found buying, selling and distributing illegal drugs.
To that end, the NAACP took an interesting step at its national convention last month. It approved a resolution to end the war on drugs because of its devastating effect on the black community.
Georgia Tech Professor Ellen Dunham-Jones spole January 2010 at TEDxAtlanta, Retrofitting suburbia
Here’s the video: Continue readingIn the last 50 years, we’ve been building the suburbs with a lot of unintended consequences. And I’m going to talk about some of those consequences and just present a whole bunch of really interesting projects that I think give us tremendous reasons to be really optimistic that the big design and development project of the next 50 years is going to be retrofitting suburbia. So whether it’s redeveloping dying malls or re-inhabiting dead big-box stores or reconstructing wetlands out of parking lots, I think the fact is, the growing number of empty and under-performing, especially, retail sites throughout suburbia gives us actually a tremendous opportunity to take our least-sustainable landscapes right now and convert them into more sustainable places. And in the process, what that allows us to do is to redirect a lot more of our growth back into existing communities that could use a boost, and have the infrastructure in place, instead of continuing to tear down trees and to tear up the green space out at the edges.
Why do you have to take the one politician that actually works for us?
Well, some farmers in Tifton didn’t take kindly to
the main idea Kingston was pushing yesterday.
Said a farmer:
I have tried working with probationers and I’ll just say that it was a very inconsistent supply of workers.Hm, the VDT previously was of a similar opinion, an opinion that got quoted in the AJC. Maybe the VDT didn’t know Kingston was pushing HB 87, even though they sat down with him yesterday morning?
We don’t need an ALEC-organized private prison law like HB 87 to profit private prison company CCA, and we don’t need a CC private prison in Lowndes County. Spend those tax dollars on rehabilitation and education instead.
-jsq
Now that’s privatization of justice! Looks a lot like no justice at all. Makes you wonder how many other people are in prison who shouldn’t be.A northeastern Pennsylvania judge was ordered Thursday to spend nearly three decades in prison for his role in a massive bribery scandal that prompted the state’s high court to toss thousands of juvenile convictions and left lasting scars on the children who appeared in his courtroom and their hapless families.
Former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. was sentenced to 28 years in federal prison for taking a $1 million bribe from the builder of a pair of juvenile detention centers in a case that became known as “kids for cash.”
We don’t need a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia. Spend that tax money on rehabilitation and education.
-jsq
PS: Had to go to the Guardian for the picture, though.
“Are you willing to put your children’s education at stake because somebody has promised you something they can’t deliver? I for one am not willing.”
Here’s the video:
Your children’s education at stake —Sam Allen, FVCS, 7 July 2011
No school consolidation,
Press Conference, Friends of Valdosta City Schools (FVCS),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 7 July 2011.
Videos by John S. Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.
-jsq
Here’s the video: Continue readingWe cannot duck this issue. I couldn’t duck it any more. I couldn’t sleep, if I wasn’t out advocating getting rid of the War on Drugs. You can’t get to end the War on Drugs that the whole bureaucratic institution of the United States of America has declared, unless you end prohibtion. They couldn’t do it with alcohol, and you can’t do it with drugs.
—Alice Huffman, President, California NAACP