It looks to be another spirited meeting at the Avon Park city council tonight. Council will look at appointing a representative to the Tourist Development Council. Vice Mayor Jim Barnard abruptly resigned after a tiff with the TDC’s consultant.
Council also will look at what citizens pay for protection by the Highlands County Sheriff’s office in the Cityof Charm. Those numbers are to include both what the city pays and what residents pay in county taxes.
In other action, the council is slated to get a cost analysis on the planned Nucor steel manufacturing facility.
Highlands County Sheriff Paul Blackman has taken to Facebook to clarify information about their traffic enforcement. He maintains some published information and allegations are “flat-out wrong.”
The sheriff pointed out that nearly half the traffic enforcement in Highlands County is done by his deputies.
He notes that deputies do significant traffic details, writing more than 2,800 citations last year. Blackman said the decoy cars that are parked, generally are near some of the most dangerous intersections in the county.
Blackman said his traffic enforcement comes on top of his 75 uniformed officers patrolling some 1,100 square miles of area. They answer around 90,000 calls for service every year.
A number of traffic accidents kept law enforcement and first responders busy over the weekend.
One person was killed and a driver was injured yesterday when a van and another vehicle collided at the intersection of Highway 27 and Dal Hall Blvd in Lake Placid, No names or other details are yet available on that one.
A Sebring man was injured Friday in a two-vehicle crash at the intersection of Highway 27 and Valerie Boulevard. 23-year-old Reginaldo Reyes Canseco was taken to Tampa General.
A motorist was flown to Lakeland Regional Saturday afternoon when their truck rolled over on the Sebring Parkway. Yet another accident with injury was reported on Highway 27 at Cloverleaf.
Earlier this year, Governor Ron Desantis pulling back common core mandates in Florida, officials of the Highlands County School Board said Until a developed plan is provided from the Florida Department of Education, the School Board of Highlands County would stay the course and continue to teach the Florida Standards with our adopted curriculum and instructional materials.
At this time, students continue to be assessed on the Florida Standards Assessment following the adopted testing calendar.
Now, an international assessment has confirmed what people have been protesting for years. It maintains students are being dumbed down.
Since Common Core Standards were imposed on the states, reading scores for United States fourth-graders have declined, both for the average score and in comparison with their peers in other nations. Those scores of the lowest-performing students declined the most.
According to the results of a Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, an assessment given to fourth-graders in schools around the world every five years, the U.S. overall average reading score was lower than the averages for 12 education systems.