Georgia Pundit

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The Atlanta school board couldn’t agree Monday on whether to reduce class sizes and canceled a scheduled vote on a budget that’s still $61 million short of being balanced just 10 days before they must give it initial approval.

Atlanta Board of Education Chairman Reuben McDaniel proposed keeping class sizes at current levels, which in some cases are larger than Georgia guidelines. But board members Nancy Meister and Cecily Harsch-Kinnane said the school district should explore spending money to shrink classes, especially in schools where they’re especially oversized.

Superintendent Erroll Davis told the board it wasn’t practical to spend some $20 million to get class sizes in line with state standards. State law says that class sizes shouldn’t exceed 32 students in public high schools (fewer in lower grade levels), but the state Board of Education has waived those requirements over the last few years as school districts struggled with financial difficulties.

“I think the max (class size limit) is there for a reason. I would like to challenge the administration about how we could do that next year,” Meister said. “How can you get us there? Is there a way?”

via Atlanta school board debates smaller class sizes | www.myajc.com.

AUSTIN (May 20, 2013)–A combination of weather events has Central Texas peach farmers expecting a meager crop once again this season, after several years of little yield because of the weather.

About 90 percent of the Gillespie County peach crop was wiped out by a warmer-than-normal winter, two late freezes and a hailstorm that pummeled the few peaches that remained on the trees.

About 40 percent of the state’s peaches come from Gillespie County where average yield has dropped from about 200 bushels per acre in good seasons to about a third of that in more recent years.

via Central Texas Peach Crop Takes A Beating | KWTX.com.

FREDERICKSBURG — It’s peach season, but Austinites likely won’t be seeing any Fredericksburg peaches in grocery stores any time soon after a combination of freezing weather and hailstorms decimated more than 90 percent of the crop in Gillespie County.

“The damage is pretty widespread,” said Jamey Vogel, owner of Vogel Orchard in Stonewall and president of the Hill Country Fruit Council.

The loss of most of this year’s crop is just the latest setback in what has been a tough decade for Hill Country peach farmers. Smaller growers have disappeared, and others have been forced to grow additional crops to survive.

Farmers around Stonewall and Fredericksburg point to a series of weather events that decimated the 2013 peach crop, along with other fruit crops such as plums and apricots. The area experienced a warmer than normal winter, but peaches need a certain number of hours below 45 degrees to produce a healthy crop. Then, two frosts hit late in the season — one in March and the other in April — that wiped out most of the crop.

via Trifecta of drought, late freeze, hail decimate Hill Country… | www.mystatesman.com.

Suburbs are becoming home to more and more of our nation’s poor.

A Brookings Institution study released Monday finds nowhere is that trend more evident than in metro Atlanta.

As a whole, researchers found an average increase in poverty of 64% in the nation’s largest 100 metro areas.

In Atlanta, the figure is close to 159%, making it the the largest increase of any US city.

via Atlanta Suburbs See Alarming Rise in Poverty, Study Finds | WABE 90.1 FM.