Category Archives: Community

Same old “unification” disinformation from the Chamber and CUEE

This is what
CUEE Referendum Supporters apparently support,


and why I call on them to stand up and say whether they are for or against it:
the same old disproved disinformation sent again yesterday by a
CUEE board member from
the Chamber’s own email address to Chamber members.
If you support CUEE, you support this disinformation campaign
instead of real research that shows consolidation would do nothing
to improve education, it would raise everyone’s taxes, and
it would not help attract industry.
Instead, it would seriously damage public education.

This is not a time to be silent.
Which side are you on?
CUEE and the Chamber’s propaganda campaign?
Or public education, and you will vote no?


CUEE Board Member “Jud Rackley, CPA”
emailed yesterday from chamber@valdostachamber.com, subject
“The Truth About School Taxes and Unification”, including:

I’ve heard several people say school unification will cause a significant tax increase.
Yet, no one seems to know why this would happen. It appears this rumor is based
on a document circulated by the Lowndes County Board of Education.



Dr. Troy Davis

spelled out why taxes would increase,
based on actual tax statements, plus information from the Lowndes County
Tax Assessors’ office and the actual budgets of the Valdosta and Lowndes
County School Systems.
See also former Valdosta


School Superintendent Sam Allen’s partial list
of massive layoffs, service cuts, and school closings
caused by reduced income because of less federal and state funding,
and increased costs due to bussing.


And the formal statements against consolidation approved overwhelmingly

by both school boards.
In addition to these statements by people with actual experience in school
administration, see also

the extensive statement against consolidation by the Valdosta City Council,
and

even the VDT turned against this consolidation effort.
If that’s not enough, David Mullis has compiled all the research
into a convenient

Grassroots Handbook Against School Consolidation.

Opposed to all this evidence, we have this undocumented letter

Continue reading →

Planning meetings, Occupy Valdosta @ VSU 27 October 2011



Yesterday’s Occupy Valdosta organizational session went faster than expected,
and resulted in adding some events to the upcoming list:



Here’s

Erin Hurley talking about two of those events:

Continue reading →

The missing Lowndes County public hearing for Comprehensive Plan Updates

Four local governments followed the rules, one appears to have left
citizens out of the process.

According to their letters of transmission to the

Department of Community Affairs (DCA)

Valdosta,

Hahira,
Remerton,
and

Lake Park
all held public hearings on the
Short Term Work Programs and Report of Accomplishment documents.

Here is
video
of the Valdosta Public Hearing.



The

Lowndes County resolution
does not say that a public hearing was held.
That’s because no public hearing was held, as you can see in the video below.

A public hearing was listed in the

agenda
of the 11 October 2011 Regular Session of the
Lowndes County Commission.

7. Public Hearing

a. REZ-2011-13, Fred’s Dept. Store, 4401 Bemiss Rd., 145c-90a, 2.0 ac.,
water/sewer, C-H(c) & C- G(c) to C-G

b. Greater Lowndes 2030 Comprehensive Plan Updates – Lowndes County Report of
Accomplishments (ROA) and Short Term Work Program (STWP)

However, citizens were not invited to speak for or against the document.
In fact, the document was not provided to the citizens for comment and an
open records request for the document has not been satisfied by the county.
Here is

video of items 7a and 7b.

The

County’s Resolution to Transmit says in part:

Continue reading →

The Comprehensive Plan updates Lowndes County refused to provide

LAKE has obtained the planning revision documents Lowndes County refused,
in violation of the law, to return in response to an open records request.
Here they are for all to see.



The Standards and Procedures for Local Comprehensive Planning,
established by the Georgia Planning Act of 1989, require updates
to the Short Term Work Projects (STWP) list and the Report of
Accomplishments (ROA) every 5 years.
Lowndes County and the cities in Lowndes County have submitted the
documents to the Georgia Department of Community Affairs
(DCA)

An open records request to Lowndes County for the documents was not satisfied.
However other government agencies were willing to abide by the

Georgia Open Records Law ocga 50-18-70.

The documents are available for review on the
Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange website for Valdosta, Lake Park, Remerton,
Hahira and Lowndes County.

I encourage you to read carefully what our elected officials see as the
future of our community.

-gretchen

Which side are they on? The deleted CUEE Referendum Supporters

The people who were on that

list of referendum supporters that CUEE deleted from its website:

Referendum Supporters


Mrs. Julia Ariall
John and Helen Bennett
Mr. James Bridges
The Honorable Tim [Golden? Carroll?]
Mr. Kevin Conrad
Mr. & Mrs. Joe Cordova
Mr. Ed Crane
Mr. Curtis Fowler
Mr. Jeff Hanson
Mr. Lee Henderson
Mr. Ryan Holmes
Mr. Jerry Jennett
Mr. Joe Johnson
Greg and Nancy Justice
Mr. Matthew Lawrence
Mr. Richard Lee
Mr. James McGahee
Mr. Dutton Miller
Mr. John Peeples
Mrs. Jennifer Powell
Mr. Donald (Butch) Williams
  • Were they put there without their permission?

  • Or did they change their minds?

Here’s the list.
Let’s hear from them.
Do they still support CUEE’s completely disproven bad case for
a bad “unification” referendum exercise in

disaster capitalism that would greatly damage the public schools,
and that has already cost the community huge amounts of time and effort?
Did they ever?
But more importantly, do they now?

Time to stand up and be counted.
There are two sides to this issue.
There’s the truth, and there’s a lie.

Which side are you on?

They say they have to guard us to educate their child.
Their children live in luxury, our children almost wild.
Which side are you on, which side are you on?



—
Florence Reese

And what about the Chamber board, which

apparently is no longer unanimous?

How about Chamber members?
Those signs out front of the Chamber: do they represent you?

Which side are you on?

-jsq

Imprisonment rates are higher in more unequal countries

Here’s yet another reason the 1% owning and controling everything is
bad for everyone.
Guess which country is the most unequal in income of big countries?
That’s right, the one with by far the most prisoners: the U.S.A.
Prisoners are shown on a log scale, so that’s not just a little bit higher,
it’s about three times higher than Canada or UK.


Why is the USA so high?
It’s not more crime, of the violent homicide and robbery variety.
It’s harsher sentencing, especially for drug-related crimes.
That’s one of many points Richard Wilkinson makes in this

TED Talk from July 2011,
in which he uses hard data to tie income inequality not only to imprisonment,
also to child conflict, drug abuse, infant mortality,
life expectancy, mental illness, obesity, high school dropouts,
teenage births, and social mobility.
The most socially mobile country? Denmark.
The least?
The USA.

I got his slides from

The Equality Trust.

Oh yes: we don’t need a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia
to make a few CCA executives and shareholders richer at the expense
of the rest of us.
Spend those tax dollars on rehabilitation and education instead.

-jsq

The local “unification” attack on public schools is part of a nationwide assault

The “unification” attack on the public schools in Valdosta and Lowndes
County, Georgia is part of a nationwide assault on public schools,
which has nothing to do with improving
public education, and everything to do with private profit and private schools: disaster capitalism right here at home.
And it’s not government causing our local disaster: it’s local business interests.
What should we do about that?

Jeff Bryant wrote for Campaign for America’s Future 13 October 2011,

Starving America’s Public Schools:
How Budget Cuts and Policy Mandates Are Hurting Our Nation’s Students



Critics of America’s public schools always seem to start from the
premise that the pre-kindergarten-through-12th-grade public education
system in this country is failing or in crisis.

This crisis mentality is in stark contrast to years of survey research
showing that Americans generally give high marks to their local


schools. Phi Delta Kappa International and Gallup surveys have found that
the populace holds their neighborhood schools in high regard; in fact,
this year’s survey found that “Americans, and parents in particular,
evaluate their community schools more positively than in any year since”
the survey started.

The first factor: New austerity budgets passed by state legislatures
are starting to have a huge influence on direct services to children,
youth, and families.

Well, we don’t have that problem in Valdosta City and Lowndes Schools.
For example,

graduation rates in Valdosta schools have been improving year over year,
and both school systems are solvent.



So what happened instead?
Why, they made up a crisis instead!

A local business group

convinced enough registered voters to sign a petition to get
a referendum on the November 8th ballot
to decide whether to abolish the Valdosta City School System,
which would force the Lowndes County School System to take it over,
and also

would result in massively raised taxes, which still wouldn’t
be enough, so services would have to be cut.
Voila! Forced budget crisis!
Fortunately, the two school systems have seen through it, and

Continue reading →

Atlanta police use 5 to 1 odds to arrest peaceful protesters in middle of night

CBS News wrote
26 October 2011

“Occupy Atlanta” camp cleared, dozens arrested,



With helicopters hovering overhead, police moved into a downtown Atlanta
park and arrested around 50 Occupy Wall Street protesters who had been
encamped there for about two weeks early Wednesday….

Organizers had instructed participants to be peaceful if arrests came,
and most were. Many gathered in the center of the park, locking arms,
and sang “We Shall Overcome,” until police led them out, one-by-one
to waiting buses. Some were dragged out while others left on foot,
handcuffed with plastic ties.

Police included SWAT teams in riot gear, dozens of officers on motorcycles
and several on horseback. By about 1:30 a.m. Wednesday the park was
mostly cleared of protesters….

Hundreds of others stood on Atlanta’s famous Peachtree Street, booing
police. They shouted “Shame!” and “Who do you protect? Who do you serve?”

And according to

Occupy Atlanta this morning:

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The Real Truth About School Consolidation by Supt. Smith to Lowndes County Schools

Received today. -jsq



Sent: Tue, October 25, 2011 7:55:07 AM

Subject: Letter to the Staff

Friends,

Attached is a copy a document that was sent to all Lowndes County
teachers and staff from Dr. Steve Smith.

Thanks,

Sam Allen

Samuel Allen, Superintendent Emeritus [Valdosta City Schools]

The letter is on the LAKE website.
Here are a few excerpts:

REAL TRUTH: Continuing all of the current programs the Valdosta City
School System and the Lowndes County School System have would


require a
millage rate of approximately 24 mills. Considering state law limits us
to 21 mills, some programs will be eliminated. The decision to eliminate
such programs will be recommended by the Lowndes County Superintendent,
subject to final approval by the Lowndes County Board of Education. There
will be winners and losers in consolidation and several current successful
programs will likely have to go.

Continue reading →

Being a part of this march was, in a word, liberating —Amber Smith

Amber Smith wrote for the
VSU Spectator 20 October 2011,



Occupy Valdosta exceeds participant’s expectations,

I don’t consider myself an extremely political person,
but I do believe
that people should stand up for what they believe in. The Valdosta
community has recently come together to do just that.

On Friday, I participated in the



Occupy Valdosta march
with over 100
students, teachers, and other members of the Valdosta community. I was
excited that I got to shed my title of Spectator reporter and


editor for a
day and actually fully take part in an event. The turnout was, in a word,
amazing. Honestly, I was trying not to get my hopes up too high for this.

The rest of her very interesting experiences and opinions are well worth
a read.
Here’s her conclusion:

Continue reading →