schools

Again, Corrine Brown has embarrassed her constituents and her state. We should all be embarrassed that a woman of her ilk represents US to the rest of the country and the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2gIsUCDDfI

Good evening, folks.  As I wrap up my campaign finances for the Superintendent primary, I was struck by an irony that would be quite funny if it did not involve our children's safety.  I could have entitled it, "A Funny Thing Happened to me on the way to the Election," but since it is not funny and it involved the second most spoken mantra by the Clay County School district, "Safety is our Number One Priority" (right behind "Clay County has Good Schools,"), I will stick with the mantra.

As you know with TS Fay approaching Tuesday morning, Duval County Schools announced at daybreak that after-school activities were cancelled, and that they would soon announce if school would be cancelled.  That decision was made before school ended, to include both Wednesday and Thursday.  In the meantime, the silence from Clay County School District was both deafening and defining, as they refused to communicate any information to the parents. Tuesday Evening, after only the second day of school, the district had also scheduled Open House at the high schools.  Parents flooded the phonelines, wanting information, so much so that we finally received an automated (and sounding particularly perturbed) call from a principal that stated the the open house was still on and school was still on and their number one priority is our children's safety.

Hi folks,

Tomorrow starts early voting.  The Republican nominees for Clay's Superintendent of Schools had the headline article in Sunday's T-U Metro section today and will be interviewed tomorrow at the downtown office for a video to be put on their website soon.  Understandably, the Sheriff's race has received the lion's share of the attention.  If, however, anyone has any questions about my stand on the school issues and would like to talk about my programs to raise the bar, I would be glad to answer them, and I am sure my opponent Mr. Wortham would do the same if you would contact him.  I can answer questions directly on this blog or you can go to my website: Thurman4Super.com, see and read the progams for yourself and email me if you would rather have them answered privately.

Hi, I am Pat Thurman, candidate for Superintendent of Schools for Clay County.  I am running a grass roots, word of mouth campaign, with the encouragement and prayers of family, friends, and the teachers of Clay County.  As a retired naval officer, graduate of Annapolis, and a Master's Degree in Strategic Studies, I have taught NJROTC locally at Middleburg High School for the last five years.  I was a classroom and cockpit instructor pilot, worked on billion dollar programs in the Pentagon, and ran the travel detachment for the Chief of Naval Operations on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

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High School                  2007-2008 Grade    2006-2007 Grade

Clay -                                 B                       B

Fleming Island -                    A                       B

Speaking of a plethora of comments, it would seem that a couple of people spent some time rambling through their minds to come up with some fairly inane subjects for blogs.

Looked more like an effort to get the 5+2 discussions off the front page but then I'm just a suspicious and pessimistic type of guy. Just an observation.

But one did catch my eye for all of that. I found the School Impact Fee blog somewhat interesting (I know, slow day in the news) so I read some of the report in the attached link.

The comment that I found interesting is the one that said the impact fee may have to be raised to $9100 from $7400. One of the factors in this is population growth.

What do you think? Good idea or another major hit to our schools? Can we actually make up this reduction through other taxes?

http://www.news4jax.com/news/15620395/detail.html

I've GOT to get on this kind of commitee. They only meet once every 20 years.

 Mike Heemer

This morning's Florida Times-Union contains an editorial about a survey. If you want to know more about the survey itself, check that out. But the findings, well, they were fairly interesting ...

- Quality of life is declining, say 43 percent of those surveyed, a 7 percent increase over those who responded that way last year. Also, 37 percent of those surveyed expect Florida to become a worse place to live in the next year compared to 24 percent who think it will get better.

I'm with the 43 percent, and think there's a probable decline ahead. Some of that decline, however, can be mitigated by some common sense (instead of developer-, special interest- and lobbyist-driven manipulations) in managing growth. It is a statewide problem, not just Clay County's, but Clay County is where we can force our government to change its approach.