Bat Box Building.  Westchester Drive, Decatur GA (pic submitted by Jessie)

At the conclusion of Monday’s Decatur City Commission meeting, Mayor Floyd made mention of last week’s deadly night of tornadoes and the effect on dozens of small North Georgia towns, noting that in some places the entire downtown had been obliterated.

He closed by saying something along the lines of “Don’t be surprised if we come back to you soon with a plan to help out these folks.”

A great idea, which got me thinking “What COULD Decatur do to help out these communities?”

Other than just sending money, would we send teams of people to clean and/or rebuild?  Dedicate planning resources to help rebuild downtown areas?  (Is that even possible?)

What would you like to see happen?

UPDATE: Mary reports that Blaze has been there for about a year now, and only just put up signs!  Whoops!

Carl tweets and shows us in the pic above that this long vacant space, tucked into the vertical concrete on North McDonough has a new tenant, BlazeSports!

According to their website, the mission of the organization is…

…to advance the lives of children and adults with physical disabilities through sport, healthy lifestyles and the prevention of chronic health conditions.

Very cool!  Welcome to the neighborhood!

All sorts of interesting nuggets in the Superintendent’s letter to the school board!  Such as…

At this stage, the Career Academy is finished. I am very proud of this accomplishment. I know I came to CSD speaking about the need for more Career Technical offerings and education. I don’t know of any other time when CSD was a recipient for a grant totaling over three million dollars. The vision has once again become a reality. First with the Early Childhood Learning Center and now with the Career Technical Academy. By the way, Lt. Governor Cagle will be our graduation speaker this year. We are grateful for his foresight in the area of Career Tech Education and this grant opportunity.

You may recall that the Lieutenant Governor spoke at the High School last February about improving vocational education throughout the state.

Photo from last February’s visit courtesy of DHS teacher Chris Billingsley