Opinions

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the long-standing problems in the Jackson County Comprehensive High School football program and suggested that the real issue is a school culture that has never embraced football as being important to the school. [Full Story »] 

The old 4-W farm on Hwy. 129 South of Jefferson has once again been sold and the new owners, like the previous owners, are promising a new planned community for the massive property. [Full Story »] 

The Jackson County Comprehensive High School Panthers just finished its 31st year of football. It has been a three-decade record of inglorious frustration. [Full Story »] 

Most government officials aren’t good at much, but they are very good at one thing: Spending taxpayer money. [Full Story »] 

By the early 1990s, there was a lot of fatigue over discussions of school system merger in Jackson County. The years of complicated contracts and court involvement were over between the county’s three school systems. Each school system was now independent of each other and free to pursue their own destiny without courts or contracts.

Talks of school merger had begun in the 1950s, and had waxed and waned over the years. Literally hundreds of meetings had been held on the issue; numerous studies and assessments by both citizens and professionals had been done. At least a dozen citizens’ civic groups had been formed on the issue. And once, every voter in the county got a chance to vote on school system merger, but that effort was defeated in 1982. [Full Story »] 

As the new decade of the 1980s rolled around, Jackson County’s three school systems were locked in a scrum to see who could outmaneuver whom politically. [Full Story »] 

By the mid 1970s, local schools had quickly and non-violently adapted to integration of black and white students. But integration involved the federal court and that, in turn, entangled the relationship of Jackson County’s three school systems for many more years. [Full Story »] 

(This is Part 3 of a multi-part series on the history of the three school systems in Jackson County and how the school merger issue shaped those school systems.)

By the early 1960s, the three school systems in Jackson County were set into a firm structure. The Jackson County School System had contracts with both Jefferson and Commerce city school systems dating to 1952 under which the two city systems educated white county high school students and some elementary school students on the east (Commerce) side of the county and the central (Jefferson) area. And the county system provided bus transportation for those county students to attend the two city school systems.

For its part, the county system ran the white high school in Braselton and the black high school and black elementary school in Jefferson, in addition to five white elementary schools scattered throughout the county. [Full Story »] 

(This is Part 2 of a multi-part series on the history of the three school systems in Jackson County and how the school merger issue shaped those school systems.) [Full Story »]