John Phillips told the Oconee County Board of Education on Monday that Oconee County Schools is out of compliance with requirements for use of federal relief funds and called on the Board to investigate.
On Tuesday morning, Phillips filed a complaint with the Georgia Department of Education, which administers the federal funds, also asking for an investigation to “determine if there has been fraud, waste, and abuse” at Oconee County Schools.
Oconee County Board of Commissioners Chair John Daniell told his colleagues last week that Oconee County has had few problems involving annexation.
Daniell said he nonetheless recommended that the Board ask the Georgia General Assembly in its session that officially started Monday to reform its dispute resolution procedures for annexation.
The Board responded with a unanimous vote to ask the legislature to pass legislation that balances “the oftentimes conflicting interests among counties, cities, incorporated and unincorporated citizens, and developers seeking different land uses through annexation.”
Oconee County’s three state legislators will face a tough choice if a bill seeking to make all school board elections in the state nonpartisan comes before them when they return to Atlanta for the General Assembly session that starts on Monday.
Kathy Hurley, chair of the Oconee County Republic Party, said the local party would like to keep Oconee County school board elections partisan, saying that in the current political environment “there is no such thing as a nonpartisan election.”
The 10-county Northeast Health District added 4,077 new cases of COVID-19 in the first five days of 2022, and four confirmed deaths from the disease.
The average number of added cases per day in those first five days was 815.4, compared with 663.4 in the seven days ending on Dec. 31.
The Georgia Department of Public Health did not release its usual Daily Status Report on either Thursday or Friday, citing unspecified problems with its Electronic Laboratory Reporting system.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation on Wednesday closed the file of a complaint against Oconee County Schools in August of last year for a religious display at Oconee County Middle School.
Phillip L. Hartley, attorney for Oconee County Schools, informed the Foundation on Tuesday that the display in question was part of a larger display by student groups.
Hartley said Oconee County Schools had not identified the Fellowship of Christian Athletes as the student group sponsoring the display “and that has now been corrected.”
The Georgia Department of Transportation is planning meetings both with local officials and with the public this spring to discuss interchange improvements along SR 316 in Oconee County.
Details of these meetings, which remain incomplete, were first announced by SueAnne Decker, District preconstruction engineer with the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) at a MACORTS Technical Coordinating Committee meeting on Oct. 27.
Attorneys at the Freedom From Religion Foundation are weighing how to respond to a lack of response from Oconee County Schools to a request that it remove a religious display at Oconee County Middle School.
The national foundation based in Madison, Wisc., wrote to Oconee County Schools Superintendent Jason Branch in August and again in late October asking him to reply and to indicate what he did “to remedy this constitutional violation.”
