From DecaturMom…

In an effort to address the child care and education needs of the immediate community, the First Christian Church of Decatur is planning to offer an after school and school vacation program for children ages Pre-K through 5th grade starting in the Fall of 2010.

This is a grass roots effort that developed out of needs expressed by concerned parents in our community entering the CSD system with limited options for after school care and child care coverage during planned City of Decatur school vacation days.

After working with city inspectors, we were approved to use the facility at First Christian Church previously rented by the Georgia Center for Children. The facility, with a few modifications, can accommodate between 50 and 60 children between the hours of 3:00 pm to 6:30 pm, Monday through Friday. Transportation will be provided from City of Decatur schools to the facility.

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Beth writes in…

Clairemont Elementary School Meet and Greet for our new Principal, Erin Wheeler, on Tuesday, May 25 from 4:30 to 5:30 pm.

While many in Decatur pine for a historic theater, Duluth is knocking down theirs. From the AJC…

Duluth will knock down the oldest section of its prized Red Clay Theatre on Wednesday.

Almost a month after razing about 80 feet of the theater at Ga. 120 and Main Street, the city will demolish the 1908 portion of the city-owned brick building. Despite efforts to salvage the section, officials said there were too many structural issues at too high a cost to repair.

According to the article, another portion of the theater was knocked down last month in order “to widen GA 120 and increase the historic district’s visibility from Buford Highway.”

Perhaps this is all just to make way for that Continental Divide Ice Cream Parlor.

Don Calder writes…

Well, folks, we’ve moved from start to finish in fairly short order. As many of you know by now, Dr Edwards announced her final decision last Friday in parallel letters to Clairemont and ECLC families. Trailer(s) will be added to the ECLC — not Clairemont — to accommodate the 60 pre-K kids who were displaced from DHS and Oakhurst.

This, of course, is comforting to some and disappointing to others. There were very strong arguments for and against additional kids and trailer(s) at Clairemont, and they had the potential to be divisive and damaging. I am not aware of matters degenerating into any sort of neighbor-vs-neighbor, Thunderdome sort of thing. Great, huh? It appeared everyone simply wanted CSD to make a fully-informed and timely decision, based on a fair and open review of all the options.

As I wrote in my last post, Dr Edwards deserves much credit and praise for reconsidering her initial decision. She single-handedly tamped down a lot of the community’s frustration by speaking openly, sincerely and candidly of factors under (re)consideration…Many weighty decisions are in the offing, including reconfiguring attendance zones when Glennwood is repurposed as a K-3 school, choosing and effecting plans to relieve K-3 overcrowding in the long-term, and forming an advisory committee to review if, when and how Westchester should be redeployed as a school.

Thanks again for your ongoing support of an open, respectful and constructive dialogue with CSD.