School Board Meeting Tonight.. . .

[R0cketer]

I guess nutshelling it to me is, you should make the schools the best you can, without being a big school that becomes impersonal (come on people they are not gonna be much bigger than they were back when the schools and communities were big). I realize that not everybody is gonna go to college, not everybody is gonna be alpha dogs (or dawgs *lol*) but you need to make the system available and easily available for the optimum opportunities.

If the small schools are so great, and they may be good, where are all these super eductated people at, why aren't they using all this top notch education they got, and coming into the area to help improve it? More often then not, those great educated people get out of Dodge and don't come back. They may have find memories of their school days and ball games, but they go to better places, where their kids get better opportunities. Lets look at it simply this way, and I'll go sports since that seems to be something that makes everybody around here moist due to. Think of all these great, world class athletes we have had here, how many of them got noticed? How many got to go to school with their abilities? You know why not many of them do, because if you are a coach or a scout or whatever, do you go see the 1 kid in a game who might help you, or do you go to where there may be 10 kids that can help you. We talk about these great PV teams, the great Clintwood teams, Appy teams, etc, when Clintwood got the most attention, when they won multiple state titles in a short time, they had multiple players who got attention from D1 schools, but when you have the numbers and such we have had lately, the great kid from Appy who might be a legitimate college player or prospect will not get the chance unless they happen to play Gate City or bigger schools where someone happens upon them. I mean there is only a certain amount of days that they have to scout people, do you go for the 1 possible (who might not play that day, may have a bad game, etc) or do you go where there are a bunch of kids that might be targets?

Lord love the communities and the schools we got, but change is inevitable, you either learn to accept it and adapt or you get left behind. This area has been so resistant to change, and you see whats happening.

I would love for the ones who are so against consolidation to not just worry about their schools for one minute but put 1/2 the energy they put into stirring things up, hunting for every loophole, asking what 'is' means, trying to turn everything into an us against them mentality. Thats fine to have on Friday night but the other 6 1/2 days of the week it need to be an us versus the world mentality and by us I mean this area. Look around, everybody is right, this area has been the ugly step sister for how long? Va ends at Roanoke, we all know that. You tell people where you are from and they have no clue most of the time. You know why, same reason this area was able to raped for years of all its money, because they can keep tossing some people here pennies and they are happy as long as they get something.

[MikMo]

"Barry Nelson is officially nuts."


If you'd ever had him for a class, you'd have already known that.