![](\"http:\/\/farm7.static.flickr.com\/6172\/6214096731_9643e75001_m.jpg\")
<\/a>\nshowed it to us all, and could answer questions,\nall demonstrating that school consolidation would not improve education,\nwould increase expenses and taxes, and far from bringing in more industry\nwould probably drive some away by reducing the quality of education.\n\nTuesday evening, going beyond\n\nthe research it had already published,<\/a>\n\n \nJerome Tucker, on fire as a cheerleader, spelled out his life-long\n\n\ninvolvement\n\n \nFred Wetherington (my school board member) related how the consolidation\nidea started at the Chamber when he was there and how it seemed like a good\nidea at the time, but when he looked at the actual research, it became\nclear that consolidation would not improve education, would not reduce\nexpenses, and would not bring in more industry, so now he opposes it.\n \nMost of the Valdosta School Board and its superintendent were there.\nI didn’t see any of the CUEE board, although CUEE supporter Roy Taylor\nstood up and asked a question.\nUnlike CUEE’s selection from written questions,\nLCBOE let people come to the microphone and ask their own\nquestions.\nPlenty of FVCS and other anti-consolidation people were in there,\nand some asked questions.\n \nWhere was CUEE?\nWhy can’t they hold their own in an open discussion?\nMaybe because they don’t do their homework and the school boards do?\n \nThose are a few highlights.\nVideos will follow.\n \n-jsq\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unlike consolidation proponents, the Lowndes County Board of Education did its homework, showed it to us all, and could answer questions, all demonstrating that school consolidation would not improve education, would increase expenses and taxes, and far from bringing in more industry would probably drive some away by reducing the quality of education. Tuesday evening, […]","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":[97,40,1376,14,15,49,3305,2,1105,3458,21,22,1106],"tags":[1636,8829,300,8704,8869,8701,3708,793,8815,7,1620,2877,383,1635,6,8816],"class_list":["post-1443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-community","category-cuee","category-economy","category-education","category-elections","category-fvcs","category-government","category-lcboe","category-lcboe-4-october-2011","category-planning","category-politics","category-vboe","tag-consolidation","tag-cuee","tag-development","tag-economy","tag-fvcs","tag-georgia","tag-homework","tag-industry","tag-lcboe","tag-lowndes-county","tag-lowndes-county-board-of-education","tag-school","tag-taxes","tag-unification","tag-valdosta","tag-vboe"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-nh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1443","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=1443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1443\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"http:\/\/farm7.static.flickr.com\/6112\/6214591822_83f4221c05_m.jpg\")
<\/a>\nDr. Troy Davis took CUEE’s own figures for how much more consolidation would\nrequire to be spent per each Valdosta City school student,\nand demonstrated that not only would that\n\nrequire raising taxes for both\nValdosta and Lowndes County residents<\/a> to near the state-capped maximum\nof 21 mils, but even then there is no way enough tax revenue would be\ngenerated to pay for all the things CUEE proposes to do after consolidation,\nand probably not even enough taxes to continue employing all the teachers\ncurrently employed by the two school systems.\nOh, plus consolidation would lose state and federal grant money by\nincreasing the composite school system size, so the local taxpayers\nwould have to make up that slack, too.\n![](\"http:\/\/farm7.static.flickr.com\/6094\/6214660642_e969dea820_m.jpg\")
<\/a>\nin every facet of local industry plus his involvement in both school systems,\nincluding in\n\nCommunity Partners in Education (CPIE)<\/a> since its inception\n(remember\nCUEE’s Walter Hobgood didn’t even know<\/a> what CPIE was).\nThen Jerome stated from his personal experience:\n\nFolks, the truth is,\nI have never, never, been asked whether I’ve got one system or two.\nNever!\nI have never asked anyone whether they have one system or two.\n<\/blockquote>\n