Kudos for St. Cloud Main Street

We’re sorry to see St. Cloud Main Street cut the Friday Night Live! Series and the Saturday farmers market, but we support its efforts to regroup in these tough economic times. Recruiting or keeping business and volunteer support of any program nowadays and getting patrons to attend events is difficult.

The Live! series began in 2001, and has had a good run with its car shows, beach parties and barbecues. These days, it’s all about consolidation of events at best and cancellation at worst.

Creating one large event next fall incorporating most of the prior activities sounds like a workable solution and allows St. Cloud Main Street volunteers and supporters to still be involved. In these hard times many residents have their attention focused elsewhere and just may not have the means to help out as they may have had in the past, and that’s understandable.

We like the idea of St. Cloud Main Street reestablishing its Junior Main Street program. Intended to help enhance downtown, the program would be run by high school volunteers on a mini-board of directors who would earn community service hours toward their graduation.

Kudos to teachers, district

Kudos to Osceola County School District administrators and district teachers’ union for signing on to get a share of the $700 million available in Florida for the federal Race to the Top grant competition.

The School District and teachers have less than 90 days now to complete a detailed plan on how the money would be used. Our share could be as much as $7 million over four years.

The president of the Osceola Classroom Teachers Association picked 21 teachers to serve on seven committees to provide input for the district’s proposal.

As association president Kathy Donato said, this is a true collaboration where the teachers will have some say in decide how to help our students compete in the global world.

We can’t disagree with Superintendent Michael Grego’s goal for the money to go toward staff development and recruitment and to help student achievement at struggling schools. We also like Donato’s suggestion to implement a mentoring program for first-year teachers and those new to the district to help them for the first three to five years of their careers.