ATLANTA – School districts across Georgia are preparing to reopen their classrooms to full-time in-person learning this fall with the help of more than $4 billion in federal funding.
The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that President Joe Biden signed in March includes $122 billion in economic relief to help public schools shut down by the coronavirus pandemic reopen safely.
Local school superintendents from metro Atlanta made a commitment Monday to fully reopen their classrooms when school starts in August during a news conference with U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga.
“This has been a really, really tough time for parents who have had to deal with partial school closures, for educators who have had to adapt to the realities of this pandemic, most of all for your people who over this past year didn’t get the kind of experiences because of the public health crisis that we wanted to make sure we could offer them,” Ossoff said.
Ossoff said the legislation gives local school systems broad discretion over how they plan to use the stimulus money.
Clayton County School Superintendent Morcease Beasley, who hosted the news conference, said parents made it clear they wanted their children to get back into their classrooms as soon as possible.
“These funds we’re receiving today are going to allow us to provide opportunities for our students not only to learn content they may have missed over this pandemic but to ensure that they have social experiences that will add value to their lives,” he said.
The federal funds are going to school districts around the state primarily based on their student populations. Here is a breakdown of the top-10 recipients:
A criminal justice expert says fallout from the deaths of Black men at the hands of white police officers last year has resulted in a reduced police presence on city streets. This protest outside the Georgia Capitol took place last June. (Photo by Beau Evans)
ATLANTA – The double-barreled ugliness that was 2020 in America is reverberating in 2021 in a crime wave that has hit cities across the country, including Atlanta.
In Georgia, the rise in violent crime sparked by the coronavirus pandemic and the nationwide protests following the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis is being felt primarily in the metro region.
But the increase in crime is raising alarms at the Georgia Capitol to the point that a committee in the state House of Representatives has begun holding hearings to try to identify the causes of what’s happening and how the state might help fix it.
“Atlanta has been the engine that runs Georgia,” Rep. Darlene Taylor, R-Thomasville, said late last month during the House Public Safety and Homeland Security Committee’s initial hearing. “We cannot let this deteriorate.”
“We have a crime wave in Atlanta, a battle that we’re losing,” added House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge, who tasked the committee to look into the issue. “The only way we’re going to win it is to work together.”
The statistics are grim. Homicides in metro Atlanta are up by 60% so far this year over 2020.
Statewide, there were 125,873 “crimes against persons” – including death investigations, assaults and robberies – during the first 10 months of the current fiscal year, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI). That’s slightly higher than the 125,680 such crimes reported during all of fiscal 2020.
The increase in the broad category of assaults, robberies, kidnapping and human trafficking was particularly dramatic, 19,746 through the first 10 months of fiscal 2021 compared to 15,809 for all of the last fiscal year.
Dean Dabney, chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Georgia State University, said COVID-19 is partly to blame for the crime wave.
While domestic violence didn’t rise significantly during the pandemic, according to national research, street crimes did, Dabney said.
“It was people on the streets, gangs, drugs, those kinds of dynamics,” he said.
Dabney said that trend was particularly pronounced in Georgia. As one of the first states to reopen its economy, Georgia drew people from other states anxious to escape mandatory lockdowns, he said.
He suggested the shutdown of courts during the pandemic also has contributed to higher crime by delaying prosecutions, which left accused criminals on the streets.
But Dabney said the fallout from the deaths last year of Floyd and Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta has played a larger role in the crime wave than COVID-19 because of the impact the protests have had on police officers.
“There’s been a slight drop in community willingness to engage with police,” he said. “But more of it is due to police not feeling comfortable with the rules of engagement.”
Several members of the House committee said much the same thing during the panel’s first hearing.
“There’s been a tidal wave that’s touched down on law enforcement,” said committee Chairman J Collins, R-Villa Rica. “Law enforcement [officers] are scared to do their jobs.”
While the General Assembly is in the business of passing laws, Ralston said new legislation is not going to fix the problem.
“I’m not sure we need new laws,” he said. “We need a new commitment to enforce the laws we have. … We’re not apprehending people for committing crimes, and those we do we’re not bringing to justice.”
Instead of legislation, the state is dedicating money and personnel to fighting the crime wave. Gov. Brian Kemp has committed up to $5 million of the Governor’s Emergency Fund to support state efforts to bring crime in Atlanta under control.
“The state has some assets that can be of help, the state patrol, GBI, the Department of Natural Resources and others,” Ralston said. “I want to see a unified effort to deal with a serious problem.”
But the brunt of combating Atlanta’s crime wave falls on the city. Rodney Bryant, Atlanta’s new police chief, announced a plan June 7 to restructure the Atlanta Police Department (APD) by creating a new domestic violence team, centralizing its investigative unit and expanding its gun assault unit.
“The state can only do so much,” Kemp said. “I’m glad the APD is stepping up. We’ve needed that kind of leadership in the city.”
Dabney said the police presence needs to increase if Atlanta and other cities are to come to grips with the crime wave.
“Crime rates dropped precipitously over the last decade due in part to a proactive policy … as opposed to waiting for 911 calls and going there in a reactive manner,” he said. “That came to a screeching halt last summer.”
But in the current atmosphere, Dabney said police have to be careful in how they step up their presence.
“You can’t just go back to the old way of aggressive policing. The community does not like that,” he said. “You need to revisit the tenets of community policing. … You have to do reform and you have to do proactive.”
Democrats on the House committee say they hope Republicans won’t use the hearing to win votes by stirring up fears of crime.
“If it’s political theater, I’m not interested,” said Rep. Scott Holcomb, D-Atlanta. “I’m interested in solutions.”
Collins said the committee’s mission is serious.
“There’s going to be politics in this,” he said. “[But] this committee wants to dig down and look at the facts.”
The Appalachian Regional Port near Chatsworth opened in 2017. Photo credit: Georgia Ports Authority
ATLANTA – Georgia’s next inland port will be built with the help of a $2 million federal grant.
The funding will build road and other infrastructure improvements necessary for the planned 104-acre Northeast Georgia Inland Port near Gainesville.
The $5.8 million facility will provide a direct rail link to the Port of Savannah via Norfolk Southern. The grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (EDA) is expected to create nearly 700 jobs and generate $185 million in private investment.
“It is exciting to see this funding in place,” said Griff Lynch, executive director of the Georgia Ports Authority (GPA). “Improvements to adjacent roadways will further increase the public safety, economic development and job creation opportunities of the planned inland port.”
The GPA’s inland ports are designed to boost the role freight rail plays in moving cargo to and from the ports of Savannah and Brunswick. When completed in 2023, the Northeast Georgia Inland Port will offset 600 roundtrip highway miles by truck for every container moved by rail.
The GPA opened its first inland port in 2017 near Chatsworth in Northwest Georgia. A third privately run inland port in Cordele opened in 2013.
The new inland port will serve the manufacturing and logistics corridor along interstates 85 and 985.
“President Biden is committed to helping communities grow their critical industries,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said. “This EDA investment in Hall County will facilitate the expansion of the region’s research and development sector while improving the Georgia Ports Authority inland ports, creating new economic opportunities and jobs for local citizens.”
Truist Park in Cobb County will not be hosting this year’s All-Star Game.
ATLANTA – A federal judge Thursday denied a bid to force Major League Baseball (MLB) to reverse its decision to pull this year’s All-Star Game out of Georgia in protest of a state law putting new restrictions on voting.
Washington, D.C.-based Job Creators Network, an advocacy group for small businesses backed by The Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, sued MLB and its players union late last month seeking either the return of the game to Truist Park in Cobb County or the payment of $100 million in damages, an estimate of the game’s potential economic impact.
MLB announced it was moving next month’s All-Star Game to Denver shortly after the Republican-controlled General Assembly passed and Gov. Brian Kemp signed a bill that tightens voter ID requirements in Georgia, limits locations for ballot drop boxes and prohibits non-poll workers from handing out food and drinks within 150 feet of voters standing in line.
Lawmakers acted after then-President Donald Trump claimed massive voter fraud in Georgia robbed him of carrying the state last November, charges that were subsequently dismissed by state election officials and in the courts.
Republicans defended the new law as a way to restore public trust in elections. Democrats charged it amounts to voter suppression.
A lawyer representing Job Creators Network argued Thursday that MLB’s decision to move the All-Star Game is punishing Georgia in an effort to intimidate the legislature into repealing the new law.
Transferring the economic benefits of the game from Georgia to Colorado would violate the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause by inflicting harm on Georgia businesses while benefiting those in Colorado, Howard Kleinhendler said during a hearing in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
“If you’re going to harm someone, you have to have a valid reason,” Kleinhendler said. “You can’t say ‘yes’ to Colorado and ‘no’ to Georgia because you don’t like an election law. That’s not a legitimate reason.”
But Judge Valerie Caproni, who sharply questioned Kleinhendler’s assertions throughout the hearing, ruled that Job Creators Network had no legal standing to bring the suit because it failed to demonstrate it has suffered harm from MLB’s decision.
The group spent significant resources taking its case to the public, including leasing a billboard on New York’s Times Square and taking out an ad in The New York Times.
But Caproni maintained such public relations spending is part of the group’s core mission.
The judge also declared that MLB has the legal right to take a stand on public policy. She sympathized with baseball players and coaches chosen for the All-Star Game wanting to avoid facing media questions about the issue.
“That’s a policy debate that maybe MLB doesn’t want to have,” Caproni said.
Jeffrey Kessler, a lawyer representing the players union, said his client shouldn’t even have been brought into the lawsuit because it didn’t have a say over MLB’s decision to move the game.
“We don’t belong here,” he said. “[Job Creators Network] admits we don’t have the power. We didn’t make the decision.”
Caproni also faulted Job Creators Network for waiting until the end of May to file the lawsuit, after the decision to let Denver host the game had been made.
The judge set a pre-trial conference for the case early next month.
ATLANTA – First-time unemployment claims in Georgia dropped significantly last week, echoing a national trend that has held for six weeks running.
Jobless Georgians filed 22,240 initial claims last week, down 2,382 from the previous week, the state Department of Labor reported Thursday.
The drop in claims came as the labor department was preparing to reimpose eligibility requirements for unemployment benefits the agency waived during the coronavirus pandemic.
Starting June 27, claimants must actively look for a job during each week they continue receiving benefits. They also must register with EmployGeorgia, the labor department’s reemployment system, which will ask them either to create a searchable resume or upload one to the site and submit three work-search contacts for each week they request benefits.
“States across the nation are reinstating work-search mandates as emergency rules are lifted and businesses reopen to the public,” Georgia Commissioner of Labor Mark Butler said Thursday.
“We adjusted many of our regulations during the pandemic to make receiving benefits easier during the crisis, and now those modifications are no longer necessary.”
Since COVID-19 first hit Georgia in March of last year, the state has paid out more than $22 billion in state and federal unemployment benefits while processing nearly 4.9 million claims, more than during the decade prior to the pandemic.
With cases of the virus and resulting hospitalizations down across Georgia, the worst of the pandemic’s impact on the state’s economy appears to be in the past.
“We are not seeing the number of layoffs and temporary shutdowns we experienced last year,” Butler said. “But we will continue to monitor the job market and make any changes needed to help get Georgians back into the workplace.”
The resumption of work-search mandates will coincide with a cutoff of the $300 weekly supplemental unemployment checks jobless Georgians have been receiving.
Gov. Brian Kemp has ordered an end to those federal checks following complaints from businesses that they can’t find enough out-of-work Georgians willing to return to the workforce.
Critics of the order say the problem is not an unwillingness to work. Instead, they say many of the available jobs pay so little that the unemployed don’t want to take them.
More than 238,000 jobs are listed on EmployGeorgia. Claimants receive access to job listings, job search assistance, career counseling, skills testing, job fair information, job training and special accommodations for veterans and people with disabilities to transition back into the workplace.
