Arkansas Blog

What cowards! ACORN just may have let a Fox in the henhouse.

The race in zone 3 is beginning to look like a struggle between Hillcrest and the Heights, with Hillcrest supporting Roddy and the Heights supporting Fox, if yard signs mean anything. I want to go on record as saying I supported Carol Roddy even before I saw a yard on Cantrell with signs for Fox and for Asa.

Zone 3 is a struggle between a person who is willing to ask the hard questions and do the research needed before blindly accepting Brook's pronouncements from on high (Roddy) and a well meaning person who is afraid to buck authority (Fox.)
Zone 6 is about true representation of the students who attend district schools from that zone. Armstrong is a civilized, gentlemanly candidate who does not try to rule by intimidation and threats such as Rose. For the ADG to suggest that TR would be a good candiate for any office, let alone a number of offices, is mind blowing.
Zone 7 is a struggle again about true representation for the students in that zone. When the paper wrote that all the candidates were nice I chocked on my ceral. What is nice about Brock calling teachers horses behinds at a meeting. Curry is an outstanding representative or her community who has been actively involved in the public schools as a volunteer for years. How interesting that that same quality is valued in their endorsement of MF in Zone 3, but not DC in Zone 7. And by the way, when is someone going to ask Brock if it is true that he removed his girls from public schools for several years when the districts were desegregated? If it is true, I'd love to hear his reason(s) why. Maybe that is a question that can be asked at the candidate forum this Wednesday night, Sept. 6th, in the LRSD Board Room at 6:30 that has been widely (?) publicized.

I'm with Pavel on Roddy.

I have seen more Roddy signs going up on the outskirts of the Heights, north of Cantrell...good sign.

Testing, censorship, testing...

For me, ACORN demonstrated its incoherence on the local level after Donna Massey voted to put the jail tax on the ballot just before her group decided to oppose it.

I agree with Yonwood. When I read the DG's endorsements yesterday, I was nearly sick to my stomach. I guess that it is ok with them when board members stand up and yell at the audience, all of whom were not teachers, to shut up. There were also in attendance, many community members from Broadmoor and UALR. It is ok to publicly call teachers horse's behinds. It is just fine to publicly utter curse words while in the board seats at a board meeting. Apparently, it is perfectly acceptable to refer to a teacher in a derogatory manner while being broadcast on local tv to the entire city. That single moment at that board meeting illustrates how little respect the endorsed board members have for the teachers of the LRSD. Rose even went so far to say that the teachers would regret not endorsing him. They would do well to remember that many of those teachers are also patrons and taxpayers of the district.
There has been a rift between the teachers and the board for entirely too long. No real change will happen until the two parties begin to work together toward the end goal of higher student achievement. As long as the board sits on their thrones and treats teachers as lowly peasants in their kingdom, there will continue to be problems in the district.
Tony Rose and Tom Brock have already proven that they aren't willing to work with teachers through their actions and behavior. Everyone wants to make nicey-nice when it becomes election time, but teachers are not forgetting the past three years. It is time for new leadership on the board and it is way past time for Brooks to go. The candidates that ACORN has endorsed will help bring about a change when they are elected. I can hardly wait!

The Democrat Gazette's editorial endorsing Rose was also a bit misleading. The editorial suggested that Rose was on the mathematics faculty at UALR. Suffice to say, he is not. The department's webpage lists him as the department's "office administrator."

http://www.ualr.edu/mathdept/about_us.html

Working in the math department's office no more makes him a mathematician than being a janitor in the physics department makes one a physicist.

Always glad to see ACORN's endorsements so I know who not to vote for.

As a teacher in a LRSD school and a former member of the CTA, I can say I'd be cautious (to put it mildly) about voting for anyone endorsed by the self-serving leadership of Katherine Knight and crew.