This n' that - catchin' up

Want to try something different in a music venue? Check out the Garth Newel Music Center near Warm Springs, about 75 miles from Roanoke and just north of The Homestead Resort. The annual Blues and Jazz Festival held outdoors there yesterday was absolutely the most bucolic and wonderful setting there could be for an outdoor festival. The music was great too; especially The Waybacks. Most of the time the music offered there is classical in the chamber music ilk, so the blues and jazz was a nice change of pace. Check it out sometime. Outgoing director Jacob Yarrow is on to bigger and perhaps better things at the University of Iowa in about a month, but he gets kudos for creating the blues and jazz festival.

School scandal: Roanoke City Schools have been battling for the past few years to make a comeback: closing schools, shuffling attendance zones, changing superintendents, trying to convince doubters that an overage academy would work. The first-ever graduation last week of students from Forest Park Academy - some are in their 20's - featured smiles, hugs and tears from students, teachers and staffers. Less than a dozen dropped out and more than 100 did or will graduate by the end of the summer. Others wait to get in. Seems like a winner, does the overage academy in its first year, on the site of a closed elementary school that became a political issue when David Bowers ran for mayor last spring. (The recent raises for Central Admin. staffers while teachers got nothing was just a minor PR disaster)

The sorry saga at William Fleming over who didn't take Standards of Learning exams threw a bit of a cloud over last week's commencement ceremony, in large part because Fleming's Principal and four other school administrators were uninvited to their own school's graduation. Reportedly they helped certain students avoid having to take SOL tests that could have brought down the school's overall score and left it unaccredited ... that unfortunately became the focus of media coverage, leaving somewhat of a pall over other graduates and the event itself.

If there is blame then those at fault should be punished. But then changes need to be made: put systems in place that don't allow a school staff to exempt kids from SOL's without someone from Central Administration okaying that - and perhaps look again at the No Child Left Behind mandates which threaten schools that don't meet Standards of Learning benchmarks, with a loss of funding.

As School Board chair David Carson has said, it is bass ackwards - the schools that need more help (more teachers, tutors, remedial programs etc.) we're going to take funding away from ... huh? Here's hoping the powers that be learn from this unseemly situation and don't repeat it in the future.