Fireworks At The School Board or Just a Fizzle of Smoke?

Seems there may have been some raised blood pressures at the School Board Meeting last night, 12 June.

It seems some are chaffing under the strong leadership of Dr. Webb and have reached out to some School Board Members to bring down their wrath on the Superintendent.

There can be no question about Dr. Webb having turned the school system upside down, but that seems to have been exactly what he was hired to do. Has his methods been easy or smooth no, but neither has been the task. Some have been removed from comfortable positions, some removed unfairly, some have been challenged to greater performance, some have been replaced by those far less competent.

When you have a school system with as many inherited problems as this one a shake up is required, just as with the county as a whole. Too much was let slide over the years with the emphasis on the "painted
facade" while the foundations continued to deteriorate.

The only surprise in this, to me, is that it took so long to catch on to the total sham created by the former Superintendent, now there seems to be a rush to condemn by some who were instrumental in creating the problem by their in-action with the former superintendent.  

Meth Labs In Minor Hill But No News Is Good News?????

Authorities in Giles County are investigating after finding two meth sites, including one near a school.

Add to that the timing. In 21 days, law enforcement believes a lot of the money for meth cleanup will be gone, so there is a question about who will then get the bill. And one site is so dangerous no one even knows how much it will cost to clean up.

Walter Chavez is now under arrest for allegedly cooking a lot of meth in his rented garage apartment across the street from Minor Hill Elementary School.

"Luckily school was out," said Giles County Sheriff's Deputy Scott Nations. "We are pretty sure this has been going on for a while. He had a child that attended that school, and obviously their safety wasn't his first concern."

Just a few miles away, off a secluded rural road, another renter named Gerald Melton was arrested on a probation violation for cooking meth. But for the first time in this county a meth cook was storing his meth in a well.

"I interviewed the guy, and he said the bottles were gathering up around the house. So he bagged them up and either by himself or with somebody he thought that putting them in the well was a good idea. And it's not," Nations said.

Officials had to carefully remove the bottles from the well one by one without breaking any, using a giant claw similar to what you might use to grab stuffed animals at a carnival.

Nations ended up pulling 20 bottles of meth out of the well, and the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation is now testing the water to see if any of the chemicals have seeped into other wells in the area.

The cleanup from this one site could cost several thousand of dollars.

And, soon, no one knows exactly where that cleanup money is going to come from. Federal grants expire July 1. The belief is that there is enough money left for cleanup, just not as much.

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 Question is why this hasn't been a big news story here?