Glenwood, Mena, & Hope

I started yesterday morning early, leaving the house at about 6:15. I drove up to Glenwood and had breakfast at Susie's and gained some "knowledge" sitting around the round table there.

From there I headed to Mena for a meeting with Representative Abernathy and some school superintendents from his District (most were from mine also but not all of them). The subject of our conversation was transportation cost for the school districts. As you can imagine the increased cost of fuel has dramatically impacted the school districts budgeting of their transportation costs. Under the current school funding matrix (it was called formula when I was last in the legislature) the districts receive $286 per pupil for transportation costs. For maybe a third of the districts that is plenty of money, in fact they make money. For the middle third it is almost a break even propostion and for the bottom third they are spending a lot more on transportation than they receive. Most of the districts in the bottom third are small rural districts who wind up covering a lot of square miles in the course of picking up students.

Representative Abernathy hopes to get transportation included in the definition of "adequacy" and provide some high cost funding for those schools that need help. Next Wednesday's meeting of the Joint Adequacy Committee should give us some indication of where that will be going.

It is hard to get from Mena to Hope. The best way is just to come back to Nashville and start over. I was in Hope by noon for a meeting hosted by Sammie Cox & Bradley Hardin giving us an update on the Turk Power Plant project. It sounds as if the permitting is coming along and they hope to have the process completed by October 31st.

Today looks like it will be pretty calm. I have a project working with a state agency to help one of our local businesses. I hope to get some closure on it this week - hopefully today.