{"id":1314,"date":"2011-11-04T09:16:43","date_gmt":"2011-11-04T13:16:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/11\/why-the-chamber-supports-unification-tom-gooding-chairman-vlcoc.html"},"modified":"2011-11-04T09:16:43","modified_gmt":"2011-11-04T13:16:43","slug":"why-the-chamber-supports-unification-tom-gooding-chairman-vlcoc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/11\/why-the-chamber-supports-unification-tom-gooding-chairman-vlcoc.html","title":{"rendered":"Why the Chamber Supports Unification —Tom Gooding, Chairman, VLCoC"},"content":{"rendered":"My opinion is appended. -jsq\n
\n\n<\/a>\nDate: Wed, 2 Nov 2011 11:17:00 -0400 (EDT)\n
\nFrom: Tom Gooding <chamber@valdostachamber.com>\n
\nSubject: Why the Chamber Supports Unification\n
\n
\nDear Chamber Members:\n

\nSome ask why the Chamber supports school system unification, instead\nof focusing\non poverty. The answer is very simple: The Chamber’s mission is to\nbuild a strong\nand healthy community, resulting in job opportunities for our citizens,\nwhich addresses poverty. Improving public education is the single most\nimportant thing we can do to build a strong community, grow jobs, and\nreduce poverty.\n

\nValdosta’s business community consistently ranks\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n

\n“lack of an educated,\nqualified\nworkforce” at or near the top of their biggest challenges in growing\ntheir businesses.\nOur community has a large high school drop-out rate, affecting the quality\nof our workforce. Residents without a high school diploma have limited\njob prospects and little disposable income to spend in our businesses.\nLack of education leads to\npoverty. It is a vicious circle.\n

\nWe have two separate school systems whose educational outcomes are merely\naverage in one of the lowest ranked states in the country. The Chamber\nbelieves that “being average” hurts our community. We must combine our\nresources and our efforts and\nwork together – as a community – to transform two average school systems\ninto one\ngreat public school system.\n

\nWorking separately-even with extraordinary effort by our educators-our\nschool systems have experienced limited success. We believe that\nunification will provide the platform upon which our community can\ntransform public education – and help us grow jobs, reduce poverty and\nincrease our quality of life.\n

\nSincerely,\n
\nTom Gooding\n
\nChairman of the Board\n
\nValdosta-Lowndes County Chamber of Commerce\n<\/blockquote>\nI’m not going to bother to refute this one point by point,\nbecause there are no points in it that actually argue for\nschool consolidation, except the magical thinking that somehow\n“unification” will solve all problems, despite\n\nall the evidence amassed that it won’t.<\/a>\n

\n-jsq\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"My opinion is appended. -jsq Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2011 11:17:00 -0400 (EDT) From: Tom Gooding <chamber@valdostachamber.com> Subject: Why the Chamber Supports Unification Dear Chamber Members: Some ask why the Chamber supports school system unification, instead of focusing on poverty. The answer is very simple: The Chamber’s mission is to build a strong and healthy […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97,40,1376,14,15,49,21,22,332],"tags":[424,2153,8717,1636,8829,8704,8705,847,3500,3501,839,2877,1520,1635,1040,8765],"class_list":["post-1314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-community","category-cuee","category-economy","category-education","category-elections","category-planning","category-politics","category-vlcoc","tag-business","tag-children","tag-community","tag-consolidation","tag-cuee","tag-economy","tag-education","tag-jobs","tag-magic","tag-platform","tag-poverty","tag-school","tag-tom-gooding","tag-unification","tag-valdosta-lowndes-county-chamber-of-commerce","tag-vlcoc"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-lc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}