Comments on: great entertainment, if it wasn’t personal

By: Jennifer Lubke

Jennifer Lubke — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:50:14 +0000

Sorry, but Dr. McIntyre is a public figure and a school official, which makes his family’s choice of neighborhood and “attached” school a very public and political act that deserves scrutiny. There is just no getting around it.

Thank you for acknowledging that relocating to desirable school attendance zones is not always a financially feasible option for families. The fact that it is MORE feasible for some families than it is for others underscores an old truism of US public education: We already function, in large part, within a system of school choice. That system is called “the suburbs.”

By: nobody

nobody — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:25:54 +0000

I promise my family is not culturally bland and (gasp horror) we live in Farragut..
That being said let’s wait and see what the man does and doesn’t do before we vilify him

By: Barry

Barry — Thu, 08 May 2008 18:53:09 +0000

He bought a house in a neighborhood that was zoned for Blue Grass – what’s wrong with that? He didn’t have special dispensation to choose the school, he just chose a house in a neighborhood that was attached to the school.

Every family is free to move to another house in a neighborhood served by whatever school you prefer. While obviously not usually very feasible, nonetheless anyone can move anywhere they like to coincide with the zonings.

I think the news story is a total non-story, and really nobody’s business where his kids are going to school. It’s only going to have an effect if people make a big deal out of it. And that’s not his problem, it’s theirs.

By: cathy

cathy — Thu, 08 May 2008 18:39:29 +0000

I live in West Knox County. I do not have the faith in some of the inner city schools that I would like to have. Like it or not, his presence in a school does have an effect on that school. He just moved Blue Grass down a notch on the new school wait list. Every parent in Knox County Schools was told that we can’t pick the school our children go to when we were rezoned last year. All of the high schoolers in West Knox got scooted East while the downtown students were scooted West in the great financial busing of 2007. Will he smile happily when his children are sent out of their neighborhood to attend Cedar Bluff? Why would you feel the need to apologize for any of Knox County’s schools?

By: Barry

Barry — Thu, 08 May 2008 18:11:55 +0000

Really? Culturally bland. I’m sorry, we folks that live in West Knox County will try to excite things up for you.

And I’m sorry, I don’t think using his kids as test cases to prove his dedication to rebuilding a school system is something I want from a superintendent. And for you to advocate he pick a school for his kids to go based on his occupation and what “message” it sends to parents sounds like a very bad parenting decision. Find the best school possible you can for your kids, then work to make every other school in Knox County live up to that example.

I’m tired of having to apologize for our good schools because they don’t live down to the standards of the crappy ones.