Category Archives: LCBOE 2011-11-01

Video meetings like Lowndes Board of Education? —John S. Quarterman @ LCC 7 November 2011

After apologizing for setting off a flash earlier, I recommended the county video their own meetings, so they wouldn’t have to depend on amateurs.
Lowndes County Board of Education had an open forum about school consolidation. and they had their own person videoing the whole thing, and it ended up on the web in a day or two, which means that everyone in the county could see what was going on….
Chairman Paulk:
We get enough of that for free.

jsq:

I’ll send you a bill!
The Chairman nodded, so I’ll take that for approval of billing by LAKE.

Here’s the video: Continue reading

Financial Issues of Consolidation @ LCBOE 1 November 2011

Video of the open forum Tuesday night at Lowndes High School where the Lowndes County Board of Education thoroughly addressed new evidence found by both them and CUEE. Partly through the information they presented at their previous forum of 4 October, they provoked dialog with CUEE in the form of several email messages from consolidation proponents distributed by the Chamber of Commerce. At Tuesday’s forum the Lowndes board and staff took CUEE’s messages as questions, looked up the answers (for example, how much did taxes rise in places where there was school consolidation recently?) and worked the result into their own computations. The general answer is still that consolidation wouldn’t improve education and would raise property taxes to near the state-mandated cap, yet that wouldn’t be enough to preserve all the existing school programs, and teachers and staff would also have to be let go.

So the Lowndes Board and the Valdosta board (several VBOE members plus Supt. Cason were present, and one repeated point was that the two school boards and staff talk to each other all the time) used CUEE’s questions to improve the case against consolidation while promoting community dialog. They even managed to criticize specific named individuals for specific messages Continue reading

An Open Forum on Financial Issues Concerning Consolidation —LCBOE 1 November 2011

Last chance for an open forum about school consolidation issues.

Lowndes County Board of Education will hold a An Open Forum on Financial Issues Concerning Consolidation:

6PM, 1 November 2011
Lowndes High Cafeteria
1606 Norman Drive
Valdosta, GA
All about the previous LCBOE Forum of 4 October 2011.

-jsq