What We’re Reading: Monday, June 16th
Welcome to What We’re Reading, a weekly rundown of the articles that caught our eye related to investing in our community or the things that make Athens great.
Job Fairs: ABH reported on two job fairs happening soon. The first is a job fair for military veterans hosted by the Georgia National Guard and the Georgia Department of Corrections. This one is June 26th from 10:00am-2:00pm at the U.S. Army Reserve Center at Ft. Gordon near Augusta. The second job fair is hosted by the Georgia Department of Juvenile Justice and occurs at two times. The first time is at the Hilton Garden Inn in downtown Atlanta on Tuesday, June 17th from 1:00pm-3:00pm. The second time for is scheduled for Saturday, June 21st from 10:00am-3:00pm at the Dublin Mall.
ABH provides this recap of the Hot Corner Celebration and Soul Food Festival from last weekend. The Hot Corner, the corner of Washington and Hull streets, was an early center of African-American business in Athens. The corner was the site of the dental offices of Ida May Hiram, the first African-American woman to pass the Georgia Dental Board Exams, and is still where you can find the Historic Morton Theatre. You can check out more about the theatre here and be on the lookout for The Soul of Athens: A History of the Morton Theatre.
The ABH also reported that statewide data on 2014 CRCT scores was released last week. School-level data is scheduled to be out by July 10th, but you can find the statewide data here. While there are a lot of great things going on in all classrooms across Athens-Clarke County that this data may not capture, it will be important to understand where our students stand with regards to our state’s learning standards.
Sprawl, sprawl, sprawl. AJC reports on the rebound in housing prices that is helping metro Atlanta extend further north into counties like Barrow, Bartow, Cherokee, Forsyth, Hall and Jackson. 2011 American Community Survey Data showed Georgia had the highest percentage of commuters with commutes 60 minutes or longer in the South.
The New York Times reports that the former axiom “all politics is local” is turning into “all politics is national” across the South. United States Senate races in Virginia and Mississippi are seeing voters who increasingly view local politics through a national lens created by cable news. Even if politics does go national, we have some pretty exciting things going on in our slice of heaven in Athens- or as the New York Times might call it: our slice of the Chick-Fil-A belt.
Got anything else we should be reading? Reach out to us here: