There was a meeting on Tuesday for the public to review and comment on the preliminary designs for the portion of the four-mile downtown Greenway that runs between Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and Gate City Boulevard.
The Downtown Greenway is becoming the project that will never end. After 16 years of planning, according to the city the design for this part of the Greenway is about 50 percent complete.
Maybe by 2033 the designs will be 100 percent complete and by 2049 the construction will be completed. But that is assuming that the Greenway doesn’t hit any roadblocks and construction continues at its current pace.
The Greenway, for all its hoopla, is no more than an extra wide sidewalk. How long does it take the city to design and build a four-mile long extra wide sidewalk? The answer is, we don’t know, but we do know that it takes more than 16 years.
There are a multitude of efforts by well-intentioned people to provide schools, teachers and students with school supplies because the schools can’t afford school supplies, and that got me thinking
If the $9 billion spent on public education by the State of North Carolina and the $200 million by Guilford County is not enough money to provide adequate school supplies for the schools, imagine what the school administrators must be going through.
Everyone in education says that students, teachers and classrooms come first, so certainly the Department of Public Instruction has put all of its money for supplies into the classrooms. And yet it still isn’t enough, which means the poor administrators must be buying their own pens, pencils, pads and copy paper. And when you consider all the reports have to be printed in triplicate, or maybe even quintuplicate, imagine how much paper they go through. They probably are making their own Post-it Notes with scrap paper and old toothpaste. (It’s surprisingly sticky.)
No doubt the administrators either have to buy their own computers or are using computers that still have green screens and use the big floppy disks from the 1980s.
I am starting a drive to collect office supplies for school administrators – the Administrative School Supplies (ASS) drive.
So once you have paid your taxes, given money for school supplies for students, teachers and schools, I ask that you reach into your pocket one more time and write a check to ASS to help the poor school administrators.
Who knows if they even have office chairs and desks, since every possible dime is going to the classroom.
And it does make me wonder if the big-wigs from Raleigh, who frequent the school administrative offices across the state to make sure every form is filled out and box checked, have to hitchhike from Raleigh. Certainly if they don’t have money for school supplies for classrooms they don’t have money for cars for big-wig administrators to drive around the state to make sure their forms are being filled out properly.
If we have any money left over in the ASS fund, after we provide office supplies for all the administrators in the state, then we’ll buy bus tickets for them, so they don’t have to hitchhike.
I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I got lost going to Guilford Technical Community College in Jamestown on Tuesday.
I knew the roads out there had changed, but I didn’t realize how much they had changed until I found myself driving past Ragsdale High School. I suppose I wasn’t really lost because I knew where I was, what I didn’t know was how I had gotten there.
Emma Carper of Brown Summit, who just turned 10, got some well deserved recognition from the Guilford County Board of Commissioners at the Thursday, August 17 meeting. After seeing a sign at the Guilford County Animal Shelter saying that donations of food, pet toys and other items were needed, Carper decided to forgo receiving presents for her birthday and instead asked her friends to bring pet food and other donations for the shelter. She also made a video her mother posted on Facebook asking for donations, and so far she’s collected over 1,500 pounds of pet food and other needed items.
