Category Archives: Politics

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

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
Visit our Facebook Site!
229.333.5277
229.300.0922 (c)
229.333.5312 (f)
chull@sgrc.us
www.sgrc.us/transportation

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

Calderón contra la Guerra de las Drogas?

Juan Carlos Hidalgo wrote for Cato 20 September 2011, Calderón Hints at Drug Legalization Again,
Mexican President Felipe Calderón seems to be experiencing a dramatic change of mind regarding his war against drug cartels. Soon after a drug gang set fire to a casino in Monterrey a few weeks ago killing 52 people, Calderón told the media that ”If [the Americans] are determined and resigned to consuming drugs, they should look for market alternatives that annul the stratospheric profits of the criminals, or establish clear points of access that are not the border with Mexico.” Many people interpreted that as a veiled reference to drug legalization.
The referenced story by Julian Miglierini 1 September 2011 for BBC News also said the Mexican president went farther: Monterrey attack: Game-changer in Mexico’s drugs war?
Hours after it took place, the president described it “as an abhorrent act of terror and savagery” and later said the authors were “true terrorists”.
When you think about the billions or trillions the U.S. and other countries spend against terrorists who cause less damage than the Mexican drug cartels, he could be indicating that priorities are misdirected.

The Cato article says Calderón has now gone further: Continue reading →

Cobb EMC loses special election by huge margin

Cobb EMC lost a court-ordered special election yesterday by 2561 to 1113, according to Take Back Cobb EMC’s facebook page. That was the vote against mail-in voting, because the insurgents believe mail-in voting helps incumbent directors win re-election. It’s Cobb EMC’s incumbent directors who want to build a coal plant in Ben Hill County, about 70 miles north of here.

MJDOnline explained the issues 14 September 2011, Don McKee: Decision day comes Saturday for Cobb EMC members

There are two questions in the form of proposed bylaw amendments to be decided by members Saturday: (1) whether to allow mail-in voting for directors, and (2) whether to prohibit payment of retirement benefits to directors.

Reform groups Cobb EMC Owners Association, Take Back Cobb EMC and Cobb EMC Watch strongly oppose allowing mail-in voting until new directors are elected. They argue that mail-in voting would give an overwhelming advantage to incumbent directors with unlimited EMC member funds at their disposal in campaigning for re-election versus the very limited funds available to challengers.

“The historical evidence of mail-in voting shows that it favors the incumbents over challengers,” Cobb EMC Watch says. “It gives the corporation tremendous leverage to manipulate and influence the voting process. The corporation can use its much greater financial resources to back its slate of candidates.”

One would guess the second item on the ballot passed: Continue reading →