Oak Ridge Today

Tennessee again named economic development ‘State of the Year’

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Governor Bill Haslam

Bill Haslam

Tennessee first state to win award in back-to-back years

NASHVILLE—Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam announced Monday that Business Facilities, a leading national publication focused on site selection and economic development, has named Tennessee its 2014 State of the Year for a second consecutive year.

Tennessee becomes the first state in the award’s history to win back-to-back honors for economic development efforts and the first state to win the designation three times, winning in 2014, 2013, and 2009, a press release said.

“It is an honor to be the first state to receive this recognition two years in a row,” Haslam said. “We have a great story to tell in Tennessee. Businesses continue to make the decision to locate, expand and grow here, and we are grateful for those strong partnerships. We will continue doing all we can to make sure we offer an attractive business climate and skilled workforce to be the number one location in the Southeast for high quality jobs.” [Read more…]

Randy Boyd named state commissioner of economic, community development

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Photo courtesy UT Torchbearer

Photo courtesy UT Torchbearer

East Tennessee businessman Randy Body has been named commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development, Governor Bill Haslam announced Thursday.

Boyd, 55, is chairman of Radio Systems Corporation, which he started in 1991. Radio Systems is headquartered in Knoxville and has more than 650 associates worldwide with offices in seven countries, a press release said.

Radio Systems is the company that donated $100,000 donation to the PetSafe Dog Park at Big Turtle Park in Oak Ridge.

The press release said Boyd is a successful entrepreneur who served as a full-time, unpaid special adviser to the governor for higher education in 2013, focusing on the “Drive to 55” initiative to bring the percentage of Tennesseans with college degrees or certificates from 32 percent up to 55 percent by the year 2025. Boyd’s work resulted in the Tennessee Promise, a program that provides two years of community college or a college of applied technology free of tuition and fees to graduating Tennessee high school seniors. [Read more…]

Letter: Hope wants to be mayor, focus on schools, jobs, housing

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Chuck Hope

Chuck Hope

To my fellow City Council members,

I am asking you to consider me as a possible candidate for mayor, when we meet next Monday night. It would be a honor to become the next mayor of the City of Oak Ridge, I believe I have shown my ability to lead and find common ground on issues over the last three-plus years I have been on City Council.

Why do I want to be considered for mayor of our city? Oak Ridge is my home. I have grown up here, went through the school system here, started and maintained my business here, married my high school sweetheart, and raised my family all right here in Oak Ridge. I love my home town and care about what happens here. I care about my neighbors and the neighborhoods. I have watched multiple generations of families live their lives here, and look forward to seeing many more to come.

I want to see our city prosper and grow, and for us do that, we have to have good leadership from our civic leaders. As our civic leaders have done before us, I want to help our city continue to move forward. Over the last 55 years, our city has seen some remarkable things and has contributed many great things to the world. I want us to continue to build on these things and look forward to what we do next. [Read more…]

Letter: Eby a valuable resource to schools, community

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To the Editor:

Bob Eby has served as both a member and chairman of the Oak Ridge Board of Education. During most of his time on the Board, I was employed as superintendent of the Oak Ridge Schools, which gave me the opportunity to work closely with Bob on many school-related issues.

Bob was a tremendous help in responding to problems and decisions facing the Oak Ridge Schools at the time. His leadership and guidance were invaluable to the Board and certainly to me as superintendent of schools.

Bob has strong private-sector experience including excellent organizational skills which were, and continue to be, very helpful in analyzing and deciding issues facing the schools. [Read more…]

AC Chamber Council starts discussions on educational resources, workforce needs

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Randy Boyd

Randy Boyd

Submitted

CLINTON—Leaders from business, local, and post-secondary education across Anderson County gathered at the Hollingsworth Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership on Tuesday for an Anderson County Workforce Development Training Resources Luncheon hosted by the Anderson County Chamber of Commerce Education and Workforce Development Council. The council plans for this to be the first of a series of in-depth county-wide discussions about how to ensure that our educational resources are focused at meeting the businesses workforce needs in Anderson County.

Randy Boyd, Governor Bill Haslam’s special adviser on higher education, spoke about Tennessee’s “Drive to 55” initiative and the five main aspects to this statewide initiative: get students ready, get them into school, get them out of school, finish what we started with adult students, and tie education directly to workforce needs.

“There are nearly a million Tennesseans that have some college credit but no degree—that’s an untapped pool of people that we can get to complete a certificate or degree,” Boyd said. [Read more…]

Letter: Paine the right candidate for school board

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To the Editor:

We are writing this letter in support of Laurie Paine, who is running for the Oak Ridge Board of Education. We have two children who attended Oak Ridge schools and are now pursuing college educations. We feel Ms. Paine has many excellent qualities that she can offer to the community by serving on the Board of Education.

Among those qualities would be her educational and work background. Ms. Paine has experience in both accounting and project management. As a project manager for several companies, Ms. Paine has worked with large budgets. She was the senior project manager for one company. We know personally that Ms. Paine is familiar with the Oak Ridge Schools budget as she has done research and has attended BOE budget meetings in the past. The tools she has gained with her business experience will prove to be invaluable in the budget deliberation process and other financial decisions the BOE must vote on. If elected, Ms. Paine will see to it that ORS and the BOE have financial accountability and transparency.

Secondly, Ms. Paine cares about Oak Ridge children and wants to make them a priority. Ms. Paine states that currently 47 percent of Oak Ridge students come from financially disadvantaged families. She wants to ensure that these students and all Oak Ridge students are given equal opportunities in our school system. She will work to fairly allocate resources to benefit all students, and she especially wants to give hope and a voice to those children with limited financial resources. [Read more…]

Guest column: Technology in the classroom

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In 2012, the scientific community was shocked to see six Italian scientists arrested and placed on trial for the manslaughter of 309 people. How did they manage to kill 309 people? Easy: They failed to predict an earthquake.

As insane as it sounds, two years later these scientists are still stuck in an appeal process, and they are still facing a potential six years in prison. Now long off everyone’s radar, the questions this prosecution poses to Western civilization have faded from our memory.

At stake and at issue are the underlying ideologies of what our machines and the data they generate actually mean to us as human beings. Unfortunately, these ideologies remain in the background of our educational and technological decision-making. The lives and the minds of our students are rapidly becoming intertwined with their technologies and the haste we feel in harnessing this cultural phenomenon is driven by a competitive economic desire to “stay ahead” of the technological curve.

With the exception of perhaps a few hold-over “Luddites,” no one I know is against the use of technology in the classroom. On the flip side, however, I must say that in all my conversations about classroom technology, I have never—not even once—heard a citizen or educator discuss what the use of that technology actually means to a human being. [Read more…]

Letter: Wells would bring conservative values, ethics to school board

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To the Editor:

Aaron Wells is holding a fundraiser this Thursday night, September 25, between 6 and 8 p.m. at Razzleberry’s in Jackson Square. He is running for a non-partisan seat on the Oak Ridge Board of Education. Congressman Fleischmann and Lawrence Hahn will be attending the event, and Anne and I would love to see you there.

Aaron values the importance of inspiring, high quality teachers in education. He wants to help Oak Ridge schools maintain their superb reputation in the future, especially since his own child will be going through this school system. [Read more…]

PTA-PTO Council has City Council, school board candidate forums

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David Bradshaw

David Bradshaw

The Oak Ridge parent-teacher associations and parent-teacher organizations have scheduled two candidate forums, which will focus on questions related to education.

The Oak Ridge Board of Education candidate forum will be held on Wednesday, October 1. The City Council candidate forum will be held on Wednesday, October 8.

Both forums will be held at the Oak Ridge High School Amphitheater from 6 to 7:30 p.m. In each case, there will be a candidate meet and greet at 5:30 pm, and visitors will also have a chance to directly 
speak with candidates from 7:30 to 8 p.m., a press release said.

For more information, contact moderator David Bradshaw at [email protected].

New Roane State building has health science labs, high-tech classrooms

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Goff Health Sciences and Technology Building

Roane State Community College officials will celebrate the new Goff Health Sciences and Technology Building during a Friday morning ribbon-cutting ceremony in Oak Ridge. Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam will be a featured guest.

 

This new $13.8 million building at Roane State Community College mixes high-tech amenities with new teaching techniques, and it eases overcrowding at the Oak Ridge campus. It adds space for health science classes and programs such as surgical technology, organic chemistry, and pharmacy technician students. It also incorporates environmentally friendly design features such as a reflective white roof, lights that adjust automatically, geothermal wells that help heat and cool the building, and rain gardens that capture storm water runoff.

The high-tech amenities include “smart dummies” that can be programmed with symptoms to train nursing students, full multimedia and wireless systems in classrooms, and more than 300 computers, including in five computer labs. There is a distance education classroom with microphones hanging from the ceiling, and an engaged learning, or “flip,” classroom, where students do homework before class and come prepared to collaborate and solve problems.

A new surgical technology program, co-sponsored with Walters State Community College, will be housed here. There is a new organic chemistry lab, and Roane State’s pharmacy technician program is moving to Oak Ridge from the college’s main campus in Harriman. There is also a “flex lab” that can be easily and quickly configured to suit the training needs of area industries. It has a high ceiling and bay door, plenty of power and conduits, and gas and ventilation.

The new three-story, 64,000-square-foot building—officially named the Goff Health Sciences and Technology Building—might be described as Melinda Hillman’s “baby.” Hillman, who is Roane State’s vice president of advancement and community relations, has spent thousands of hours during the past six years working on the project, from its inception in 2008 through the planning and fundraising stages to the end of construction. She will be among those celebrating during a Friday morning ribbon-cutting ceremony that will feature special guests, including Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam.

“It’s sort of ‘birthing a baby,’” said Hillman, who clearly has a passion for the project and hasn’t taken a vacation in a year. “I’ve worked on it so long.”

Hillman and Owen Driskill, Roane State’s director of marketing and public relations, recently led reporters on a tour of the brick-and-coated-metal building, the last expansion that the 40-acre Oak Ridge campus can accommodate. [Read more…]

Paine running for Oak Ridge school board

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Laurie Paine

Laurie Paine

Laurie Paine, who led the recent protests to restore bus transportation to students, has announced she is running for the Oak Ridge Board of Education.

Paine said she is running because she wants children to be the top priority in the community.

“I am the proud mother of three children currently in the Oak Ridge school system: Kaitlan, Tyler, and Tristan,” Paine said in a press release. “My daughter Alexis recently graduated from Oak Ridge High School and is now attending the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga.”

Paine said she has lived in Oak Ridge for 26 years and has witnessed many changes, “some good and some bad. It’s time for change again and that change needs to start at the top with the leadership on the Board of Education.”

In her campaign and as an elected representative, Paine said she will continue pursuing the following: [Read more…]

Fleischmann touts record, Appropriations seat; Wamp willing to work across aisle

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U.S. Representative Chuck Fleischmann

Chuck Fleischmann

They’ve battled over negative ads, political endorsements, special interest money, and the Affordable Care Act.

U.S. Representative Chuck Fleischmann, the two-term incumbent, touts his seat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee and, important to Oak Ridge, the Energy and Water Subcommittee.

Meanwhile, Weston Wamp, his challenger, has suggested a willingness to work across party lines to “move the country forward.”

The two men face off in a in two-man battle in the Republican primary on Thursday. It’s in part a rematch of the three-man GOP primary in Tennessee’s Third District in 2012, when Wamp and Scotty Mayfield lost to Fleischmann. [Read more…]