City Work Session on CSD Facilities Master Plan Today at 6:45pm
Decatur Metro | August 19, 2013As noted on the agenda for tonight’s Decatur City Commission meeting, the Commission will hold a work session at 6:45p to discuss the City Schools of Decatur Facilities Master Plan.
Asst. City Manager Linda Harris describes the meeting as “an extension of the discussion of the request from the School Board for a bond referendum in November for the purpose of financing capital improvements.”
The commission needs to decide this month whether they will approve a bond referendum to expand Renfroe Middle and Decatur High School if they want to get it on the November ballot this year.
will they be streaming video of the meeting?
i tuned in too late to watch the work session, but am not disappointed because I still get to watch Mr. Keating of Mockingbird Lane rhapsodize about the importance of bathrooms—they seem to be his pet issue, regardless of the topic.
love it.
It is a delight.
did anything meaningful emerge out of the work session? next steps?
The Mayor introduced a closing resolution deferring the bond vote for a year and proposing a joint city/CSD committee to explore the less discussed economic “ripples” beyond hard costs — the Freakonomics, so to speak — that may accompany significant system growth. It passed 5-0.
Personally, I think it took some stones to do it and I support the path they’ve decided to take.
Agree—stones, and while I think we need to break ground sooner than later, I also feel a financial commitment of this magnitude deserves careful and prudent consideration.
1+
If it takes tying everybody to their chair for a while to keep knees from jerking, so be it.
Wow, that has been going on for decades, apparently.
Before he was focused on bathrooms, Dr Keating spent years speaking at Decatur BOE meetings imploring members to create a foreign language program beginning in elementary school. He didn’t get much traction . In fact, some rolled their eyes as over and over again he talked about hiring just one teacher per elementary school who would go from classroom to classroom through the day giving short daily language lessons.
Then in the early/mid 1990s, the State offered funding for pilot programs teaching foreign language . CSD was chosen for that funding. Thus began the system wide Spanish program. Not sure how it works now but at the start, each school had one teacher who went from room to room and taught 20 minute daily Spanish lessons.
By the way, 10 years ago (or more) Dr Keating and his school restroom cleanliness campaign was featured in a front page article in the WSJ.
i love freak flag flyers
especially when they’re smart and well-intentioned
here’s the WSJ article
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1025133912784551720,00.html
“And wherever the 61-year-old travels, he tells anyone who will listen that it’s time to transform grungy school restrooms into paragons of good citizenship and proper hygiene. If a school can’t do a simple thing like keep soap in a dispenser, he says, how can it hope to teach students self-respect or inspire them to greater academic achievement? “This is a national disaster and I think that we ought to do something about it,” says Dr. Keating, who launched his Project Clean campaign from this Atlanta suburb six years ago, using roughly $25,000 of his own money and a few tiny state and federal grants, all under $10,000.”
thanks for sharing the information about Dr. Keating
Thanks FTB. Dr. Keating served on the school board in the 80s, is an expert on penguins, and wrote a book that popularized the idea that the Decatur school system instituted a “Saturday School” calendar designed to discourage Jewish people from moving into the city. To many students, he is the “Penguin Man” and the “Restroom Guy”. His influence comes from the fact that he has stuck around over the years and continues to promote his ideas.
The Melrose Ave tree huggers should also be mentioned for their perseverance. They attended last night’s commission meeting in a sizable group and, based on the positive comments from individual commissioners at the end of the meeting, seem to have more influence than I thought they deserved. I disagree with their viewpoint but commend them for taking the time to present their ideas directly to the commission.
Woah. Thanks, Chris. I’ve read Saturday School several times and never made the connection that the author and our illustrious restroom champion were one and the same. Viva la variete!
Corrected version and Comment Editor isn’t working for me, sorry:
Dr. Keating’s book about CSD’s unique history of having Saturday School is fascinating and important documentation. And while I know everyone tires of hearing Dr. Keating talk about bathrooms at School Board meetings and elsewhere, have you used the girls or boys bathrooms in the middle school or high school lately? Every once in a while, I do. I have to say that they are not up to speed. Better than they were 5 years ago but still a place I would avoid if I were a student there right now. I completely agree with Dr. Keating’s pleas that any new renovations come with bathrooom upgrades. Students shouldn’t feel uncomfortable using bathrooms at school. It’s kind of surprising in an era where FAVE-ers have iPads and our curriculuum is International Baccalaureate, that we have sub-standard bathrooms. Having a global focus doesn’t mean we have to have Third World bathroom facilities!
Thread hijack continuing… Clean bathrooms at school are a good thing. Many kids will refuse to use school bathrooms if they are dirty and holding all day can cause UTIs and other problems. I had no idea until one of my own kids started having this kind of problem. So I say, good for Dr. Keating!
Just wanted to say Juval at College Heights keeps everything sparkling like a firefly. He is a sweet, wonderful young man and the second generation in his family to work for CSD.
For whatever reason, it’s the bathrooms at RMS and DHS that seem sub-par, not those in the other schools. Probably because they are mostly in old sections of the schools that haven’t been renovated in years.
I am sure it’s harder at the middle school and high school level as kids don’t use the bathroom as a class with a teacher to check it. Actually, both Dr. Keating and Rodney Thomas and the clean bathroom campaign at 4/5 Academy (when it was housed at Glennwood) were mentioned in a book I read researching my child’s health issue — it was extremely weird to read a book where a school that I’d had a child attend was mentioned.
Wow. Another reason to like and admire Dr. Keating, Mr. Thomas, and Dr. Lee. Not sure how to get a similar campaign going for teens–maybe it could count towards community service? Be a high school internship? Factor into a student’s “weighted” GPA? Come with iTunes credit?
Did not know that Dr. Keating was a major force behind our wonderful K-12 Spanish program. It’s one of the programs that makes CSD stand out from other good public school systems in the area. It contributed nicely into the rationale for CSD having an International Baccalaureate program. Thank goodness we didn’t eliminate it when it was slated for major trimming several years ago. Given Dr. Keating’s historical and educational experience and insights, I’m developing a growing respect for his thinking. Maybe we should listen a bit more closely about having suitable bathrooms…..
My point was more that Tom’s idea was ahead of its time and, in my opinion, not taken seriously enough by the CSD administration at the time. As far as I know no CSD administration has ever really acknowledged his vision and his long time effort to bring foreign language instruction into our elementary schools.
Most current CSD parents don’t even know Dr Keating and his history in Decatur and with the BOE. That is a shame. I totally agree that we should listen more closely to his ideas about school restrooms.
Some things never change. I would be shocked if I ever heard CSD (or most government administrations, for that matter) ever say “You know, you guys were right….” Dr. Keating will have to write another book about CSD…..
To further hijack this thread that is focusing on one particular person: – serious question here, not intended to provoke: Why do we think the idea was “ahead of its time” or “right?” Was it because the idea was first proposed to CSD but later enabled by GA?
What are the some of the main benefits or compelling reasons for Spanish to be compulsory for ALL students K-12? What were the reasons given then and what would they be today?
This is NOT my areas of expertise. My main reason for loving this program is that the younger and more plastic the brain, the better it picks up a foreign language. Waiting to start a foreign language until a child is in middle or high school is not strategic or efficient. Spanish is a good language to select because it is a good basis for learning any romance language because of its fairly regular grammar and pronunciation. Plus it’s a useful language in the U.S. these days. Ideally, families would have a choice of language—Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Arabic, etc. But it’s not practical to support that many languages K-12.
I’m sure Dr. Keating could present a more evidence-based rationale.
The City Commission approved a resolution to form a Blue Ribbon Committee to review the existing master plan and perform further research re: the best way to accommodate student growth.
There’s a desire to more fully engage the community with the goal of building consensus around a unified plan that would be voted on in a November 2014 referendum.