VOL. 8 NO. 25
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Kincannon to Slovenia; shakes up school board
School board member Indya Kincannon will resign her position in August to travel with her husband, Ben Barton, to Slovenia where he will teach law at the University of Ljubljana as a Fulbright Scholar. Barton has taught at the University of Tennessee College of Law since 2001. He teaches torts, evidence, advocacy clinic, comparative law, and images of the law. Kincannon, in her third term, has represented District 2 on the school board since 2004. She served as board chair in 2008-10. Their two children, Dahlia and Georgia, will go along for the family adventure. Kincannon said she expects to teach English or Spanish there. Knox County Commission will appoint a replacement. – S. Clark
Interns visit Happy Holler Learning to play pinball machines wasn’t exactly what their parents expected when they signed up their kid for a summer internship with Shopper-News. But last week we took them to Happy Holler. Read about our visit to the Time Warp Tea Room, the Mabry-Hazen House and the Old Gray Cemetery, inside on A-8 and A-9.
Lamar’s rally U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander left no doubt that he will do whatever it takes to win re-election, even reversing his 1,000-mile walk across the state. That would be interesting because Alexander has aged a bit since that 1978 race for governor.
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Read Sandra Clark on A-4
A new egg in town Nothing beats a hot breakfast − except a hot breakfast cooked by someone else. So when I heard there was a new breakfast joint in Bearden, I felt compelled to investigate.
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Read Wendy Smith on A-3
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June 25, 2014
By Wendy Smith President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. John Stewart thinks Hubert Humphrey should receive some recognition for the role he played in the passage of the landmark legislation. Stewart should know. As Humphrey’s legislative director, he wasn’t just a close observer of the process − he was the Senate assistant majority whip’s hands and feet. Stewart and his wife, Nancy, lived in Washington, D.C., for nearly two decades before moving to West Knoxville in 1979. He was working on a Ph.D. in political science at the University of Chicago when he was chosen to participate in the Congressional Fellowship in 1960. He spent the first half of the yearlong program working with Democratic Rep. Richard Bolling and the second half working for Humphrey, a longtime Democratic senator from Minnesota. “He was a nice person. That didn’t always come across on TV,” Stewart says. “He loved people, and he was funny. But he couldn’t tell a joke. He’d always screw it up.” Staffs were small in those days, so Stewart was given “a real job” − following the Senate Appropriations Committee for Humphrey. At the end of the year, he was asked to run the Congressional Fellowship Program. Nancy Stewart eventually found
Nancy Stewart, left, and John Stewart, right, introduce Sen. Hubert Humphrey to a visiting African student in 1962. Photos submitted Hubert Humphrey was vice president when he met Michael Stewart, accompanied by his father, John Stewart, in 1966. Michael is currently a member of the Tennessee General Assembly, representing East Nashville.
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The money trail to Strawberry Plains By Betty Bean Why did the state buy a decrepit block building at the edge of nowhere – near the Strawberry Plains I-40 exit – for a Pellissippi State Community College branch campus? How did Pellissippi State attract Knox County Schools to build a new magnet school in the basement of the former Philips Electronics building at a time when it was closing down community vocational schools, like the agricultural education program at Halls? And how did a local investors group double its money on the property? Turns out that reporter Walter F. Roche Jr. of the Tennessean covered this part of the story nearly two years ago, with a long, detailed account of how a group of investors led by Sam Furrow bought low and sold high after enlisting the help of Gov. Bill Haslam’s chief of staff when the deal to unload the 220,000-square-foot building wasn’t moving fast enough. Read his article and supporting documents at: http://archive.tennessean.com/article/20121216/ NEWS0201/312160067/Tennes see-pays-millions-fi xer-upper/. “The state bought the building by tapping $87 million that it had previously budgeted for TennCare, the state’s Medicaid program for the poor. But that money was able to be shifted for other uses when the federal government boosted its share of Medicaid funding for Tennessee as part of the stimulus package. In addition to $8.5 million in state funds, $1.5 million was contributed by the Pellissippi State Foundation toward the purchase,” Roche reported.
Get Ready For 4th Of July!
THE MONEY TRAIL The Shopper-News requested title information for the property at 7201 Strawberry Plains Pike from Register of Deeds. Here’s what we got: 3/7/79 – Carl Armstrong to Philips Electronics – $300,000 5/24/79 – Hal Sherrod to Philips Electronics – $10,000 6/28/07 – Philips North America to Furrow Realty Fund – $5 million 3/9/12 – Furrow Realty Fund to State of Tennessee – $10 million
The bulk of the foundation money came from PetSafe founder and CEO Randy Boyd and his wife, Jenny, who donated $1 million toward the purchase of the Strawberry Plains campus. Last month, the building was named for the Boyds, who have given large sums of money Don Lawson to support public education. Roche reported that the building required some $16 million in repairs. Pellissippi started classes in September 2012, a few months after Knox County Schools Superintendent James McIntyre put a career and technical school in his strategic plan. During that time, CTE director Don Lawson pitched the idea to Pellissippi State President Anthony Wise one day over lunch. Wise was enthusiastic, since Pellissippi was using about 20 percent of the building. A year later, the school board voted to shift nearly $4 million in funding for renovations at Pond
Gap Elementary School to the new CTE magnet. Knox County program: Don Lawson cut his teeth on vocational education when he was a senior at Doyle High School in 1978 and took an agriculture class from then firstyear teacher Mike Blankenship. Lawson has been struggling to preserve CTE since becoming its supervisor. Although the state funds CTE at a rate of nearly 250 percent of regular academic classes (due mostly to the cost of equipping classrooms with state-of-the-industry tools and machinery and keeping classes small enough for teachers to closely supervise students), class enrollments are capped at 20 per CTE class, making the numbers difficult for principals to work with when they are trying to stretch their resources to accommodate their student populations. Lawson said his program has been cut by nearly $2 million in salaries in recent years and will have five fewer positions this fall, although Knox County Schools reports that 9,598 students enrolled
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Blankenship keeps job Mike Blankenship, whose Ag Ed vocational program was eliminated at Halls High School, has landed a teaching position at the new career magnet academy, the county’s newest high school, Blankenship located on the Pellissippi State campus at Strawberry Plains. And following a plea to the school board by two rising seniors, Blankenship will be able to teach a half-day at the North Knox Vocational Center. That means the juniors who lack one class and all seniors will be able to complete their program. It means James Dunn, president of the Future Farmers of America chapter, can compete for a college scholarship. But the arrangement is good for one year only. Senior Ryan Cox called the compromise “better than nothing.” It resolves his problem but won’t help younger students.
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