BCR's Daily Fishwrap Report for November 20, 2009

In today's headlines:

Healthy Start, Council Still Talking Demolition: Two Morehead Hill houses behind the Healthy Start Academy charter school off W. Chapel Hill St. may still be demolished by the school purportedly to build a new playground, though a consultant for the school agreed -- reluctantly -- to talk with the Planning department about alternatives the City has identified, along streets like Arnette and Shepherd. (Herald-Sun)

Super Search Close To Start -- Largely Behind Closed Doors: DPS' school board delayed its superintendent search firm pick until Dec. 1, hours before a kitchen-table conversation on priorities. But requests from teachers and an anti-Broad Foundation parents' group activist to hold public forums for superintendent candidates and to include parents as voting participants in the search got no traction. School board chair Minnie Forte-Brown cited top candidates' unwillingness to go through a public search while they hold a job elsewhere and state laws on who can vote on a hiring decision as the rationales. (Herald-Sun)

Employers, Schools on H1N1: DPS is seeing about a 1% bump in absenteeism this year, though inexplicably, the school system the Herald-Sun it's not tracking influenza-related illnesses. Er, 'kay. Meanwhile, the Paxton paper looks at preparations at a variety of private businesses, most of which say they're counting on employees to follow common-sense approaches to wellness to keep clean and stay home if ill. (Herald-Sun #1, #2)

Royal Oaks Sees Second Fire: The Royal Oaks apartment complex suffered its second fire in a month on Thu. morning, damaging ten units and causing a minor knee injury to a firefighter. The first fire was found to be arson; no word on the cause of this latest fire in the South Square-area complex. (Herald-Sun)

Oh Ho, The Wells Fargo (ATM) Wagon Is A-Coming Down The Street: Those creepy commercials showing the shadow of a stagecoach blotting out features on the landscape? Well, the Californicaton of Wachovia -- which we at BCR like to think of as San Francisco's revenge over the decimation of Bank of America's HQ  years ago -- show change is in fact on its way. New ATMs with high-tech functionality (like check summation without envelopes) are rolling out in a co-branded fashion. The Wachovia brand won't disappear in Durham and the rest of NC until sometime in 2011, the last part of the country to see the old name stick. (N&O)

East Durham Children's Initative Gearing Up: The effort, modeled on the Harlem Children's Zone, got an airing at the Religious Coalition for a Non-Violent Durham meeting this week. The effort is applying for federal funding but will move forward whether or not it gets it; the plan is to unify existing and new services for youth in impoverished NECD to provide cradle-to-college support for every child to break the cycle of poverty. (Herald-Sun)

Comments

[M]

I don't think it's realistic to expect a school system to track flu-related absences. On what basis will they decide which absences are due to flu and which are due to other illness?? School officials are not health care providers.

To diagnose flu it boils down to a judgement call for most health care providers anyway. This is because a) CDC recommends H1N1 testing only for patients who are so sick they're hospitalized, or for certain other specific scenarios, and b) "rapid flu tests" are terribly inaccurate for H1N1 [http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/diagnostic_testing_public_qa.htm].

So unless we expect school officials to make the judgement call that medical professionals are trained to make, don't hold their feet to the fire on this :)

Best schools can do is accept a parent's reported reason for their child missing school. That's got to have a large margin of error, though--if a parent reports their child is sick with "flu," it doesn't mean health care providers made the diagnosis. As a health care provider myself I can tell you that patients have any number of ideas about what "flu" means.

[Tar Heelz]

There are a variety of creative, no-cost approaches the Council could take to put serious pressure on Health Start Academy. Here are just some text change possibilities:

1) Text change to prohibit the construction of accessory uses following demolition of historically signficiant sites.

2) Text change to outlaw private playgrounds more than XXX feet from the primary educational structure.

3) Text change prohibit outdoor recreation uses, other than publicly available parks, etc., within this particular zone or overlay district.

4) Text change requiring a separate minor/major special use permit for the construction of private school playgrounds. (This might raise vesting issues.)

5) Text change to impose very high standards for private playgrounds constructed in certain historic neighborhoods.

Etc., etc., etc...

Sure the Academy could still choose to demolish the houses but they'd be stuck with less valuable, empty lots for a long, long time.