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As discussed at Pine Tree ISD School Board Meeting on July 12, 2010…
No decisions were made tonight as to the issue of Pirate Stadium. Pretty good crowd went home with nothing decided. There is a big push to reopen the stadium for this football season. It seems they will decide at a meeting next Tuesday whether to do the repairs to the pressbox only. Any other repairs to anything dealing with the 5 major functions of the stadium, seating, parking, ingress/egress, restrooms, or water fountains would kick in mandatory ADA repairs costing over $4 million. There is a feeling on the board that too much money is being spent to hold all the football games at other area stadiums. Also discussed was trying to identify sites for a new stadium for their consulting firm so that a better picture of what can be done come next bond election. It was mentioned that any other site than the current location will cost several million in construction.Several million for dirt work on property already owned by the district. This is going to be an ugly issue for some time because the issue has been ignored for so long(dating back to excavation for a stadium behind the current high school field house when the new high school was built).
Robert Bailey
Source for the unemployment figures: a spreadsheet taken yesterday from the Bureau of Labor Statistics website. Republican period: January 1995-December 2006. Democrat period: January 2007-June 2010. Click here for chart.
In one of the most outrageous displays of arrogance by Washington in recent memory – which is saying a lot, of course – the House Democrats have inserted specific language on top of $10 Billion in funding for education included in a War Supplemental bill targeted directly and solely at Texas – language that demands the money be spent in certain ways.
According to the Houston Chronicle, “The proposal would allow the federal government to give money directly to school districts, provided Perry certifies that the federal support will not replace the state money. Perry must also agree not to proportionally cut education funding more than any other item in the next budget. While the measure includes $10 billion in education funding nationally, Texas is the only state that must make such a certification before receiving the federal funding.” Continue reading…
In perhaps the President Obama’s most stealth campaign to date, the federal government has been slowly tightening its grip on the education sector to little fanfare. Rather than working through the democratic legislative process, this Administration has circumvented Congress to enact an ill-conceived education agenda that will weaken accountability, reduce transparency and minimize choice while only adding to the national deficit.
Continue reading…
American education needs to be fixed, but national standards and testing are not the way to do it. The problems that need fixing are too deeply ingrained in the power and incentive structure of the public education system, and the renewed focus on national standards threatens to distract from the fundamental issues. Besides, federal control over education has been growing since the 1960s as both standards and achievement have deteriorated. Heritage Foundation education policy experts Lindsey Burke and Jennifer Marshall explain why centralized standard-setting will likely result in the standardization of mediocrity, not excellence. Continue reading…
About 47 percent of U.S. households will pay no federal income taxes for 2009. Either their incomes were too low or they qualified for enough credits, deductions and exemptions to eliminate their liability. That is according to projections by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research organization.
In recent years, credits for low- and middle-income families have grown so much that a family of four making as much as $50,000 will owe no federal income tax for 2009, as long as there are two children younger than 17, according to a separate analysis by the consulting firm Deloitte Tax LLP:
Continue reading article from NCPA…
What is the right of Initiative? It is the right of citizens to propose state laws or constitutional amendments which after they have collected enough signatures, the proposed legislation is placed on the geneal election ballot for the approval (or rejection) by the Texas voters.
What is the right of Referendum? It is the right of citizens to repeal laws passed by the state legislature that the citizens feel are harmful. They do this in the same way as the initiative, collecting signatures and having the proposition placed on the general election ballot for approval or rejection by Texas voters. The legislature passed law cannot go into effect until the paople have voted.
Please note that this is not endorsed by We The People-Longview. It is for you to decide. If you would like to learn more, please visit their website for more information: Initiative For Texas.
President Obama’s proposed overhaul of No Child Left Behind is long overdue. Over the past decade the regime’s rigid metrics and penalties transformed schools into testing factories. Unfortunately, the White House proposal — which replaces NCLB’s legal sticks with new legal carrots — won’t come close to fixing America’s schools, says Philip K. Howard, chair of legal reform organization Common Good.
According to Howard:
- A 2004 study of the rules in one New York City school by Common Good found that the daily decisions made by teachers and principals are dictated by thousands of regulations.
- Over 60 steps and legal considerations are required to suspend a disruptive student.
- Manuals of 200 pages describe the “rights” of students.
Continue Reading article from NCPA.
“Don’t Mess with Texas” is a popular slogan in our most prosperous state. By a 10-to-5 margin, the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) just told liberals to stop “messing” with social studies textbooks. Continue Reading article from Eagle Forum.
Millions of Americans have been forced to rely on unemployment payments for extended periods as the nation struggles through its longest period of high joblessness in a generation. Critics are taking aim, saying that the Depression-era program created as a temporary bridge for laid-off workers is turning into an expensive entitlement.
- About 11.4 million out-of-work people now collect unemployment compensation, at a cost of $10 billion a month.
- Half of them have been receiving payments for more than six months, the usual insurance limit.
- But under multiple extensions enacted by the federal government in response to the downturn, workers can collect the payments for as long as 99 weeks in states with the highest unemployment rates — the longest period since the program’s inception.
Continue reading article.
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