Tennis Court Lights at the Branches, Cheating in School and goodbye Flip-Flops

• Lighting the tennis courts at the Branches comes to the ZBA on July 2nd.

Today's Dunwoody Crier (the legal organ of the City of Dunwoody) on pages 22 & 23 contain the legal notices for upcoming meetings and proposed zoning changes coming in front of the Dunwoody Zoning Board of Appeals and the Dunwoody Planning Commission. I quickly reviewed them and saw that the Branches Club would like to add lights to a tennis court and the notice shows that this will be heard by the Dunwoody Board of Zoning Appeals on July 2 at 7 pm at City Hall. On the surface that sounds straight forward but I understand that this is a long standing issue in the community that I heard was even the subject of a prior lawsuit.

Also on the ZBA agenda for July are a few hold over items from the previous meeting, including the Goddered School playground issue in the Dunwoody Village which is mentioned in a letter to the editor in the Crier, but there are also a number of other new items to be heard involving the corner of Ashford Dunwoody & Hammond. (Ravinia expansion?)

I was hoping to find these same legal notices on the City of Dunwoody or the Dunwoody Crier websites so that I could do a copy and paste of the text in order to list all of the items but unfortunately they are nowhere to be found on-line. Since I believe that these public notices need to be available via the web (sooner rather than later, though I do believe that the city will post the agenda and background information about 15 days in advance on a calendar announcement on the Dunwoody website), I will be asking if this information dissemination can be improved. The City Manager, Mr. Warren Hutmacher stated on Monday that the RSS feeds (currently under utilized) could be used for this purpose and I would like to see that happen when rezoning or variance applications are accepted and placed onto the appropriate meeting calendar. As soon as the City schedules a zoning issue, informs the applicant of the hearing date; the residents should also be notified by some basic online notification system or voluntary mailing list subscription.

• Senator Dan Weber proposes criminal sanctions for cheating in school.

The CRCT testing scandal has officials considering whether to make it a crime to tamper with standardized test scores. Head of Georgia's Senate Education committee Dan Weber wants educators to know just how serious it is to mess with them.

"If you cheat and change answers... there should be criminal sanctions for that," said Senator Weber(R-Dunwoody), "These people, they're professionals. They're put in a position of trust and these families and our state rely on them to do the right thing or else the kids are cheated."

According to the AJC the DeKalb County principal found at the center of this controversy resigned quickly. (I wonder if he gets to keep his credentials to teach elsewhere and shouldn't he have been retained, investigated & then fired.)

• Death of the flip-flop in the DeKalb County School System - new system wide dress code.

Of course the Charter schools in Dunwoody set their own dress code and the 4 / 5 Dunwoody Elementary will also have a dress code based on the catch phrase of "Plain is Perfect, and Spirit Wear is Super!"