Video of the open forum Tuesday night at Lowndes High School
where the Lowndes County Board of Education thoroughly addressed
new evidence found by both them and CUEE.
Partly through the information they presented at
their previous forum of 4 October,
they provoked dialog with CUEE in the form of several email
messages from consolidation proponents distributed by the Chamber of Commerce.
At Tuesday's forum the Lowndes board and staff took CUEE's messages
as questions, looked up the answers (for example, how much did
taxes rise in places where there was school consolidation recently?)
and worked the result into their own computations.
The general answer is still that consolidation wouldn't improve
education and would raise property taxes to near the state-mandated
cap, yet that wouldn't be enough to preserve all the existing
school programs, and teachers and staff would also have to be
let go.
So the Lowndes Board and the Valdosta board
(several VBOE members plus Supt. Cason were present, and one repeated point was
that the two school boards and staff talk to each other all the time)
used CUEE's questions to improve the case
against consolidation while promoting community dialog.
They even managed to criticize specific named individuals
for specific messages
the blog of LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange
After apologizing for setting off a flash earlier,
I recommended the county video their own meetings,
so they wouldn't have to depend on amateurs.
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