Sunday Solutions — Aug. 27, 2023
It’s been a week where we all needed to step back and take a hard look around. Today’s lineup includes looks at student mental health services and a detailed dive to see where taxpayer money landed when Spaceport Camden project crashed. And, don’t forget to take the quiz!
College gaps strains community’s safety net
It’s common for reporters to pick up story ideas from every day conversations, especially when the same themes recur over time. The Current’s Audrey Gibbs had heard various stories at different times and places from area college students about scarce mental health resources and ineffective help. She also heard that community resources were being strained as more students from Savannah College of Art and Design flooded their systems. So she decided to start reporting to understand the real picture. Over the next few weeks, Gibbs interviewed dozens of students and looked at the data and standards for mental health services at peer colleges which showed SCAD’s ratio of counselors to students far larger than other arts colleges and area state universities. That gap underscored many of the student complaints about long wait times for help and referrals. She also talked to community resources that are working with SCAD students to help them. Here’s the full story, along with a list of area services if you know someone who may need help.
Comprehending missing link in literacy laws
The newly legislated Georgia Council on Literacy met earlier this month to start its long trek toward better reading scores among Georgia students. The Current’s Craig Nelson wrote about the challenges and the discussion as the council worked to get its bearings. A story this month from the national education news site Chalkbeat pulls together the popular and widespread efforts across various states to improve reading by implementing more training with phonics, using letter sounds to determine a word. Experts say the simple approach leaves out a fundamental piece: background knowledge. Research shows that students better comprehend what they read if they have some understanding of the topic they’re reading about. Yet, state laws leave out that component, and with more challenges to overall curricula that may make the literacy goals a bit harder. Here’s the breakdown of how “science of reading” works and more pieces that may be needed.
Are you on the leaderboard?
The news quiz is getting more competitive, so we made this week’s quiz even harder by weighing certain questions more than others. Are you up for the challenge?
Last week’s leaderboard featured our first perfect scores in leaderboard history. Check them out:
- First Place: TD Mike and mwgerard (Tied, 5/5)
- Second Place: Tribe, Jack, Mark, Charlie, Anon1, Vicki, Murem S., Suz, Best Guess, John (Tied, 4/5)
- Third Place: Lee, Ben, Kathryn, KCS, Grumpy (Tied, 3/5)
Here’s the link to this week’s quiz.
Catching up on the news
- Where did the Spaceport Camden money flow? The Current’s data reporter Maggie Lee has been tracking the payments to experts, lawyers, marketing firms and lobbyists for the defunct project. Camden County has released 500 invoices from the multiyear effort to build a launch pad in the county. Those only represent about 1/3 of the total spent in the $12 million effort. Some are still being held for redaction or “security” reasons. We’ll continue to follow and update.
- Former Savannah car salesman misses his Jan. 6 hearing in Washington, D.C.: Dominic Box, who publicly posted video of his trek to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was instead in a Jacksonville jail charged with DUI. Here’s the story from our news partner, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
- Covid death counts remain high: Stateline reminds us that the pandemic may be over, but covid’s threat is most certainly not. A look at the Centers for Disease Control’s national stats shows national numbers for hospitalizations and emergency care rose last week even though 3 states and other governmental entities don’t report any data on covid. In Georgia, emergency room visits for covid are up 38.6% over the previous week — and most of the state’s 159 do not have emergency rooms.
Your second cup: Where did they come from? Where did they go?
It’s clear the pandemic’s upheaval wasn’t just a health matter – it affected us to our roots for generations to come. Population shift data for the first year of the pandemic is now available and it shows the rural South gained lots of new residents. The Daily Yonder, a nonprofit news site dedicated to rural policy, tracked the moves — often overlooked because the states’ overall growth appeared stagnant because of the deaths that overrode the in-migration numbers. However, there’s another reason for that, too: People were leaving the metro areas and moving into less populated ones within the same state. Here’s a breakdown of the wheres.
Note: This week we say good-bye to summer staffer Audrey Gibbs as she heads to her new job as music writer for the Nashville Tennesseean. We send good wishes with the person who can neatly pack an entire apartment, furniture and all, in her car.
Students say SCAD mental health services fall short
Some experts believe that mood disorders are more prevalent among creatives. Students at Savannah College of Art and Design say the resources may not meet their needs.
With passion, Georgia’s literacy council goes to work
Literacy rates among K-12 students, if not reversed, imperil the vision of Georgia as a top business hub, Scott Johnson, the literacy council’s chairman, warned in remarks to the council in Statesboro.
The science that’s missing from ‘science of reading’ laws
Much less attention is paid to another critical component of reading: background knowledge. A significant body of research suggests students are better able to comprehend what they read when they start with some understanding of the topic they’re reading about.
Who benefitted from doomed Spaceport Camden?
At least 30 lawyers and a million dollars on wooing the public and governments.
Georgia Jan. 6 defendant arrested in Florida on DUI charge
Box’s lawyer said he could not attend the Washington hearing because he was in the Jacksonville jail, following a separate incident where a sheriff’s deputy found him unconscious in his car in the parking lot of a barbecue restaurant.
Death counts remain high in some states even as Covid fatalities wane
Nationally, death counts for the first six months of 2023 are about 7.7% higher than they were for the same period in 2019, before the pandemic, the analysis found. That’s just a bit above the 6.7% increase to be expected anyway; counts routinely inch up annually with the United States’ aging population.
Thousands moved to rural South during pandemic’s first year. Where did they come from?
While overall growth rate was small, Southerners left the cities for rural communities.
DNR Board names Walter Rabon commissioner
Walter Rabon, whose 30-year career in the DNR includes a 2017 suspension for drunk driving, is the department’s new commissioner
Growing Georgia citrus farms pass winter’s tough test
The freeze was a big test for Georgia’s burgeoning citrus industry, which is taking root thanks to the combined forces of climate change, crop science and disease in Florida. There were very few citrus trees in Georgia a decade ago. Now, there are more than 500,000 trees across nearly 4,000 acres. Those farmers worried this freeze could hurt their […]
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