In a note to alumnae yesterday, Agnes Scott College President Elizabeth Kiss announced that the college’s faculty had recently voted to discontinue the Masters of Arts in Teaching degree at the end of the 2010-2011 school year and “focus exclusively on our undergraduate minor in educational studies, established in 2008″.

In her letter, Kiss notes that while the program has been around since 1992, and the quality of the program remains “superb”, its viability has been influenced by the following factors:

Kiss closes by stating that Agnes Scott remains committed to educating future teachers, and is looking at future partnerships for undergraduates between colleges and continuing projects like the Fugees Academic Boot Camp for refugee children.

Photo courtesy of AJC

There’s lots of excitement surrounding the reopening of Macy’s (previously Davison’s) downtown this summer after an extensive $16 million renovation. The AJC has a great little write up on the transformation of the department store into an event facility with restaurants.  (You can also click here for a couple of renderings and “before” pictures of the space.)

Money quote from the article: “The best way to save a building is to use it.”

Dang straight.  Let’s keep providing incentives to do just that.

h/t: Next Stop…Decatur

Ben Brown, who is also working on the DecaturNext team, did this short interview with urbanist, straight-talker Andres Duany at the Congress for the New Urbanism in Atlanta yesterday.

As is often the case, Duany isn’t all that concerned about ideology and his thoughts on post-2008 city evolution will likely please both progressives and Libertarians alike.

As for Duany’s promotion of “bottom-up” transportation, Decatur’s already got one (Decatur’s Easy Living Pedicab) and is talking about another in the Strategic Plan round-tables (some sort of Decatur Transit System).

Feel free to use this post to make comments and ask questions about local issues not discussed here in the past week.

Comments close Monday.