Online school meeting
draws no one from Albany
Georgia Connections Academy, the online, tuition-free, public education option at we featured last week in The Albany Journal , has received about 5,500 inquiries and about 800 applications, its principal said.
In our article last week, we reported that the academy held a recent information session in Albany. No one attended.
It might be because few people knew about it. Indeed, Dougherty County School System’s go-to person for information, R.D. Harter, said he wasn’t aware of the academy of the opportunity at a local hotel to learn about it.
“Unfortunately, no families attended the session in Albany – we were very surprised by this. However we saw great turnout in other cities – Columbus, 26 attendees; Peachtree City, 25; Douglasville, 38; Atlanta, 22,” said the school’s principal, Heather Robinson.
Robinson would not breakdown the hometowns of the academy’s applicants. The new Atlanta area-based school – an option for all students from kindergarten to 12th graders — is enrolling students for the 2011-12 school year. The program is funded with the same money that pays for traditional public education. In other words, if a student leaves Dougherty County for GACA, Dougherty County would lose that funding to the academy. The state average expenditure per pupil in 2009-10 was $8,759, a per-student amount calculated on by dividing a system’s total expenditure budget by the number of full-time-equivalent students.
Robinson says the amount of taxpayer funds allocated for Georgia Connections Academy is $5,800 per student.
Phoebe counting down
to centennial from 100
Phoebe will begin its 100-day countdown to the hospital’s 100th anniversary with a celebration on Thursday.
The event starts at 1:30 p.m. at the flagpole in front of the main hospital and then at 2 p.m., the event will move to the Jefferson Street parking lot, where the original Phoebe hospital building stood. Phoebe employees will unveil a marker and welcome a special, undisclosed guest.
Nights@dtown featuring
local performing artists
“Deck the Arts” is the theme of the April 29 Nights@dtown, which will be held atop the parking deck at Jackson Street and Broad Avenue.
The event is for ages 21 and up.
Featuring live music, live art, food and drinks, Nights@dtown is held the last Friday of each month.
Musicians performing on April 29 are: Travis Goodson, Robert Lawson, Phillip Phillips and The Hamptons. Artists who will performing will be Durrell Smith, visual; Sean Mulkey, Cameron Malphus, graffiti; Heather Ashberry, visual; and Jazzmine Phoenix. Spoken word artists on tap are Reginald Sweet and Dustin “Sandman” Parham.
Also on the card are the Bany Boys roller skating group, jewelry maker Melanie Dunbar; photographer Darrell Jenkins, and food vendor Café 230.
Fair Housing forum
set for Katrina victims
It has been almost six years since the nation witnessed the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, the natural disaster that severely impacted the people and the land of the Gulf Coast. Because of the magnitude of the hurricane and the scale of the evacuation, the events of August 2005 remain fresh, and the full transition to a new city is still in progress for some evacuees.
To gain an assessment of the experience of Hurricane Katrina evacuees in the Albany-Dougherty area, the State of Georgia Civil Rights Department – Georgia Commission on Equal Opportunity will present a free Fair Housing Forum for Hurricane Katrina Evacuees and community members on Thursday at 7 p.m. at the Albany Civil Rights Institute (ACRI), 326 Whitney Ave.
For more information, contact ACRI Executive Director Lee W. Formwalt at 432-1698 or lee@acrmm.org.
ACRI’s regularly scheduled monthly Community Night, set for April 28, will feature Hank Klibanoff, Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of “The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation.”
Klibanoff will discuss his book on reporting the civil rights movement as well as his current work on reviving cold cases of civil rights activists’ murders.
A book signing will follow the ACRI presentation, which begins at 7:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public. Hilton Garden Inn Albany and Sam’s Club are the sponsors of ACRI Monthly Community Nights.
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