Tag Archives: consolidation

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

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 →

CUEE radio ad helps alienate Black Crow radio host

About
that CUEE radio ad,
Rob Harder wrote for Valdosta Today today,

“Morgan Freeman” CUEE Ad Fires Up Debate

A new radio ad from the Community Unification for Educational Excellence,
Inc (CUEE) has sparked a lot of controversy in the few days it has


been
running in local media.

…

The ad, voiced by an actor who sounds like Morgan Freeman but is
not, encourages Valdosta city residents to vote “Yes” on school
consolidation November 8th. The commercial claims that Valdosta schools
are “once again segregated” and ties the success of the vote to
Dr. Martin Luther King’s vision.



Callers to the Chris Beckham Show, which airs from 3PM to 6PM each weekday
on WVGA 105.9 FM, were overwhelming in their condemnation of the ad.

Yes, that’s what Chris Beckham told me when I talked to him today.
I’ll be on his radio show on WVGA 105.9, tomorrow, about 4PM.

You can hear the radio ad

in the Valdosta Today article.

The article contains this priceless quote by the real Morgan Freeman,

Continue reading →

Vote No for the Children helps Occupy Valdosta

Seen today on

Vote No! for the children. -jsq



Opportunity to March: Occupy Valdosta will be assembling at the Chamber of
Commerce this Friday. Please contact Bobbi Hancock bahancock@valdosta.edu
or Erin Hurley ephurley@valdosta.edu if you have questions. All of
us need to support one another, these college kids were crucial in the
efforts to get rid of the Biomass incinerator. Please help get the word
out and join up if you can. The Chamber needs to see that we are all
united! We’ll post times and places as soon as they are confirmed.

Videos of Candidates Forum by VLCoC last night



Videos of the Candidates Forum put on last night by the Valdosta-Lowndes County
Chamber of Commerce (VLCoC) are starting to appear in

this playlist.
The three Valdosta Mayoral candidates are there already (in order of appearance):

There’s one more candidate video to come.

Here are the videos so far:




Candidates Forum, Valdosta-Lowndes County Chamber of Commerce (VLCoC),

Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 11 October 2011.

Videos by John S. Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.

-jsq

Chamber opposes hidden taxes while proposing taxation without representation



Chairman Tom Gooding of the Valdosta-Lowndes County Chamber of Commerce
said that the Chamber was opposed to government adding hidden taxes,
and Roy Taylor can be heard going “Amen!”.
Yet both of them back the Chamber and CUEE’s school “unification” referendum,
which would

raise taxes for everyone in Valdosta and Lowndes County
plus making conditions more difficult for business.
None of the school consolidation proponents seem to see the irony.

Gooding’s talk about the Chamber’s Government Affairs Committee spelled
out the Chamber’s theory of local government, which is all about helping
business, and apparently not about anything else.
He didn’t say a word about government providing public benefits for the
common good.
Which is the tail and which is the dog?

Also, Gooding promised at least three times
(1
2
3)
that

Continue reading →

MLK Jr. radio ad for CUEE?

I haven’t heard it, but multiple people say they have:
a radio ad on Black Crow media

promoting Dr. Martin Luther King’s Dream with cuee’s mission.

Voiced by Morgan Freeman.
So we know CUEE is pouring money into their

local disaster capitalism.

This is not sitting well with opponents of consolidation.
Here’s JC Cunningham’s reaction:

I personally am not surprised by any tactics that Cuee uses in order to
win on Nov. 8th. In the last 5 minutes I have received 3 phone calls
and 6 emails. Each one asked me what was I going to do about it?
After the last call I began to get a little upset, because I did not
ask that person the same question. What are you going to do about
this?

Cuee and the Chamber will try and get away with

Continue reading →

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 →