Tonight’s School Board Meeting will probably be the last one you’ll see on streaming video for a while – and you may not get to see much of that. The top-of-the-meeting “Consent Agenda” includes a measure to cease broadcasting the meetings. Assuming it passes, they may kill the feed immediately. The board’s not trying to hide from you – Federal requirements for disabled access mean text of the meeting must also run across the screen, and the board doesn’t want to take the money out of district operations to pay a service for the scroll. Multiple government entities have received form-style complaints from law firms specializing in ADA lawsuits on the issue – the County Commission retained a captioning service to keep its meetings on the tube to the tune of around $12,000 a year.
Looks like the bears are on the move again. Residents of Sun ‘N Lake are reporting a bear and her cubs were recently spotted in that community. They say she will leave you alone if you leave her alone, but anyone who goes for a walk or jog either early in the morning or after dark should be alert not to end up between her and her babies. Bear reports have come in from around Lake Placid and Sebring. Many complaints were about the animals rummaging thru garbage.
While we’re on the subject of pests, iIn case you thought it was just a recurring bad dream, reports are coming in that love bugs are back. They come twice a year, once in the spring and once in the autumn. Hard to tell yet how bad this fall is going to be – long-timers say the spring hatch was among the worst in decades. So far at least, athe bugs seen recently are smaller and there aren’t that many of them.
Some Highlands County School kids are getting a new set of wheels – no, not a new car. New school busses are in the fleet this week. Eight new 77 passenger busses are in the District’s fleet, inspected and prepared for use this week. A ninth will come later, financed by the county’s half-cent sales tax increase passed a few years ago for district capital improvements. Before the measure was passed, the district had gone seven years without a bus replacement, and word was the old ones were getting long in the tooth.