Joe Hultquist will be the featured guest speaker at the 2010 Annual Meeting of CAPPE (Citizens Against the Pellissippi Parkway Extension, Inc.). The meeting is scheduled for Monday, February 22, from 6:30-8:30pm in the Sharon Lawson Room at the Blount County Library.

"For several years we have designed our Annual Meeting as a community education event, featuring speakers who are knowledgeable about transportation issues relevant to our region," said Nina Gregg of CAPPE's Board of Directors. "We saw a need for education and civil discussion about transportation issues and decided to devote a portion of each year's Annual Meeting to fulfilling this need."

"This year we are pleased to welcome Joe Hultquist, Interim Executive Director of East Tennessee Quality Growth (ETQG) as our featured speaker," Gregg said.

Mr. Hultquist, who was born and raised in Blount County, will be speaking about the future of transit in the greater Knoxville area, including the upcoming Regional Corridor and Opportunity Area Study; options for transit between the airport and Knoxville; the role of independent advocacy groups; and ETQG's perspective on transit as a component of quality growth in the region.

Mr. Hultquist is currently serving as Interim Executive Director of East Tennessee Quality Growth, a new organization with representation from 16 counties of middle East Tennessee. ETQG's mission is to "create a vision for quality growth through dialogue, research, and education," and to "promote and facilitate implementation of this vision through regional cooperation and local action."

Previous speakers at CAPPE Annual Meetings have included Rees Shearer from RailSolution, Cindy McGinnis from Knox Area Transit (KAT), Jeff Welch from the Knoxville Regional Transportation Planning Organization (TPO) and Bill Dunlap from the Blount County Highway Department.

The public is invited to come hear Mr. Hultquist's presentation, which will begin at 7pm. Refreshments will be served at 6:30pm. CAPPE's annual business meeting will follow the speaker.

For more information, call Nina Gregg, CAPPE Communication Committee Chair at 977 7399.

Maryville Daily Times

Board OKs committee oversight of new school construction; advisory committee includes county mayor

Reader Our-town writes:

There are several options that are going around to help with the overcrowded high schools.

1. Make Lanier Elementary and Porter Elementary high schools again.

2. Make two shifts at the high schools so that some kids go on first shift
and some go on second.

3. Have five quarters to the year with the requirement that students attend four of them to make a year. Currently their are four quarters in the year. The extra quarter would come from Summer.

Does anyone have an opinion on these options?

PUBLIC MEETING:

March 13, 2008 at 6:30 p.m. in the gym at the Everett Recreation Center. Review of site plans for the new intermediate school on Sevierville Road.

Darwin Day, Events this week!

199 years ago today was the birth of Charles Darwin.
It is also 149 years ago that On The Origin Of Species was published. Read it at: Link...
Also in audio at Link...

Local Darwin Day events have been organized by the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. A schedule of events can be found here at the UT Evolutionary biology web site: Link...

A big evening event occurs tonight Feb. 12, 2008 at UTK. A lecture by Dr. Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education,
INTELLIGENT DESIGN, IS IT SCIENCE? IS IT VALID?
Tomorrow evening, Feb. 13, 2008 will be the film, WAR ON SCIENCE,INTELLIGENT DESIGN IN THE CLASS ROOM

Forrest Erickson

The John Sevier Area Residents group announce a Maryville City Meeting to discuss the impact of the new intermediate school on the Sevierville Road area. The details are as follows:

The City of Maryville has scheduled the next meeting, to be held at John Sevier School library on Tuesday evening, February 12, at 6 PM. Watch for an announcement in the newspaper. You are urged to attend, and to get the word out to folks whose neighborhoods were not represented in the first meeting last month, particularly residents along Everett High Road.

If you have questions, please reply to jsars.school@yahoo.com, which is monitored by Jennifer Franklin and Connie Miller, co-chairs of the former John Sevier 2020 group.

Knoxville News Sentinel: Pellissippi buys Hwy. 321 property for new Blount campus

The 39.5-acre property was purchased from James A. Bumgarner and Dorothy B. Petree for approximately $1.18 million. The land is located on Highway 321, with access from South Old Grey Ridge Road and Nelson Lane. The property fronts both sides of Highway 321, with about 3.5 acres on one side of the road and the remainder on the other side.

The Montessori Middle School, located on Louisville Road, will be opening in August 2008. There will be an informational meeting at the Blount County Library, today, Tuesday January 29, 6:00 - 8:00 PM. For more information visit www.discoveret.org/mms or call 985-8900.

So says the Tennessee Attorney General:

An opinion by Tennessee Attorney General Robert E. Cooper Jr. says that making developers pay for new schools would be a development tax and is not allowed under existing law.

"(S)uch a provision would conflict with both the spirit and the express language of the County Powers Relief Act," the opinion states.

That act prohibits Tennessee counties from enacting new infrastructure taxes or fees, other than an adequate facilities tax in which the county can charge developers up to $1 per square foot for new construction. If a county enacts that tax, it has to eliminate all of its other infrastructure taxes.

[..]

Rutherford County has tried multiple times to get around the County Powers Relief Act, first by asking the attorney general if the county could increase its existing $1,500 per home development tax, then by asking Hood to send a request to Cooper's office to consider whether developers could be required to pay for new schools.

UPDATE: More from the Tennessean.

UPDATE: TN AG Nov. 21st opinion here.

Congratulations to the Maryville High Rebels for an unprecedented fourth consecutive 4A State Championship.

According to the MDT, The Rebels have won 60 consecutive games, 99 of 100 and 113 of their last 115; they last lost during the regular season in September 2001.

Selected data from the Tennessee Department of Education 2007 Report Card:

(*2007 Graduation rates for Blount Co. system not available, 2006 figure used. Click post title to see table in wider view.)

Observations:

• The Blount Co. system spends the least per pupil, has the lowest percentage of local funding, and the lowest achievement.

• Alcoa spends the most per pupil and has the highest percentage of local funding, and has results in the middle.

• Alcoa has the highest percentage of minorities and Blount Co. has the lowest. All three systems are below the state average.

• Alcoa has the highest percentage of economically disadvanted and Maryville has the lowest.

• Hispanic students are outperforming in Maryville and Blount Co. schools and underperforming in Alcoa schools.

• Schools in the three Blount Co. systems outperform the state averages in most categories.

Your thoughts?

Last night the Maryville City School Board voted to accept Director Mike Dalton's recommendations for the schools. Here's the Daily Times story, which according to my wife who was at the meeting, accurately reflects what went down.

Link...

In short, they're expanding the high school, but there's no indication yet as to which expansion plan they'll use. Will they plow down houses up to Mountain View Avenue? Much of the drama of the evening centered on neighborhood opposition to school expansion. As a resident of the neighborhood (though not close enough to be directly affected) I think the school needs to consider removing some of the parking lot if necessary to make it fit within the current space. The elephant in the room has always been the football team - they won't split into two high schools for fear of breaking up the football dynasty. But I think cost is as much an issue as anything else. High schools are VERY expensive to build. The plan now calls for construction of a new high school after 2020.

The other major decision - and of more interest to me as a parent of a kindergartener and pre-schooler - is to construct a new intermediate school. Under the new system, the intermediate schools will include 4th, 5th and 6th graders. Supposedly, this was the result of a Fourth Grade Task Force decision. My wife, who has a background in education, thinks this is BS and that the decision is all about zoning (where would a new elementary school go?), money and property sites, and not about the educational needs of children. 4th graders are not mature enough to go from teacher to teacher the way middle and high school kids are. So will the 4th graders be completely separated from the 5th and 6th graders? Also, where will the zoning line lie between MIS and the new intermediate school? In five years they will begin planning for a new elementary school.

Anyway, these are the major issues decided. Fort Craig will take in the preschool program to relieve overcrowding at Foothills Elementary. Though I'm a Fort Craig parent I'm sympathetic to the charge that Fort Craig hasn't picked up its share of overcrowding.

Any other thoughts on the Maryville City Schools expansion plan? The school system is a point of pride for the City of Maryville. It's one of the best in the state, if not THE best. The reason is not wealth per se but parental involvement. But the system is at a crossroads of sort, as thousands of new people from the Knoxville area and elsewhere in the country move to Maryville.

According to the Maryville Daily Times Maryville Director of Schools Mike Dalton recommends that Maryville High School be expanded as opposed to building a new school.

Dalton sent the planners and architects back to the drawing board to come up with a way to minimize the impact on the neighborhood and traffic. He is also looking at the possibility of satellite facilities and separate "lower and upper" high schools.

Read the article for all the details.

It says that among the three options proposed (bigger school somewhere else, a second school, upgrading the existing school), an overwhelming majority of those polled chose the option of upgrading the existing school.

I guess this is all about protecting Maryville's championship football program?

There's a public input meeting tonight for residents in the Maryville High neighborhood to discuss future plans for the school. The meeting is at MHS, 7PM tonight (Monday the 17th).

As noted here by Amber Proffitt, there are also School Board meetings and forums tomorrow regarding this and other topics. Check Amber's post for the schedule and more details.

Depending on which plan is selected, the MHS expansion could have a huge impact on the neighborhood around the existing school. The Knoxville News Sentinel has an article about it in today's paper.

See this earlier BlountViews post for photos from around the neighborhood and some of the historic homes that could be affected.

The Maryville Daily Times has this news brief about the upcoming meetings.