For not wanting to deal with this group of

(pick one of the following)

A) Educators
B) Businessmen
C) Clowns

I don't know if McIntyre ultimately supports charter schools or not, but putting an inner city charter school in Crestwood Hills is not the sort of garbage even a populace as apathetic as ours is will buy.

Currently, diversity is the name of the game. Good luck to you if you are a parent of a child with any sort of gift or needs. Most schools I've seen have a transfer policy for a limited number of students to enter every year, but have fun matching your child to the right school.

Neither Lindsay nor McIntyre have been do-nothings, in fact, if one was to look only at either's highlights, one might come to the conclusion that all is great. And it can be if you make the right decisions. My concern is that one wrong decision can really screw up a kid. If one gets the right teachers, joins the right extra curricular activities, has the right coaches and is held accountable while still being allowed to be a kid, public school works.

What I worry about is the drugs and violence and crime and hunger and disease and the sloth created by both too much wealth and not enough money for economic sustenance. Charter schools can't fix these problems and contrary to the anti-tax crowd it will take money. One bad decision, either on a parent's or child's part puts that child in harms way. That's what being a parent in Knox County Schools is like. That's why we worry. That's why we're broke. The tuition to public schools if one wants one's child to be able to participate runs 2000 to 5000 dollars a year, depending on the level of participation one chooses. Plus, you get to get condescending lectures from members of the local media telling you that on top of your full time job, your volunteer work at the school, your independent time you spend working with your child at improving their skills and your actual showing up at events to watch and support your child in his or her efforts, you should be writing press releases because the media is, you know, busy and actually digging in to what's going on takes time. No shit.

Many of the parents could and should do a better job. And every time she writes on education, I thank God for Tamara Shepard because she's actually taken the time to ask the questions and research the answers to the problems I haven't faced yet. The same goes for Cathy McCaughan, Glostik, Stick and a host of others. The media, particularly those in charge of decision making have to be accountable. Giving a free ride to public officials while overplaying semantic issues does not do a community justice. We need information on what's being done right, as well as what's being done wrong. We need someone on the inside calling down to sports and saying, "Hey Jesse! How come you quit reporting on the junior golfers but kept publishing the senior scores? If these volunteer coaches and underpaid First Tee employees can teach them golf, we can teach them to read newspapers." That's what real reporters and real editors do. That's how you build your market and protect your profession.That's how you help our schools. Hold your people accountable and make sure there is something in the paper that kids don't want to miss. Even if this is an industry-wide problem, the solution has to start somewhere.

But I digress. I think McIntyre wants the right charter school, and by that I think he wants one that conforms to his way of doing things. He wants the funding as well. One needn't look past middle schools to see the management problems downtown. Middle school parents have begun to get worn down and overwhelmed with the finances of child rearing. Between tuition, glasses, braces, extracurricular activities a middle class budget gets stretched pretty quickly. In other words, the middle school years can be overwhelming , but then they're gone, in the blink of an eye. Both the board and administration recognize this and as a result cut middle school programs at will. At Bearden Middle, Spanish was an experimental pilot program. Seriously? Really? To compete on an international basis, our kids should be working on fluency by middle school from a choice of at least two languages. I think what McIntyre is doing is developing a market to force this community to accept whatever changes he mandates. And I think he is doing it at the middle school level.

And I think you guys are helping him regardless or your intent.

The L&N STEM Academy is more like a magnet than a charter. There is no criteria or test for admission.