The Richardson ISD is performing its first-ever redistricting exercise, having just adopted single member districts in 2019. Monday night, at the meeting of the RISD Board of Trustees, the three maps that the district is considering were shown to the public for feedback.
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| From 2019 11 21 Kom Ombo and Edfu |
Today's photo-of-the-day is from Edfu, Egypt. It shows a dress shop.
The City Council of Richardson held three secret meetings to set their Council Goals for the 2021-2023 term. I say secret because there were no videos. There were no minutes. The only way for you to know what was said, and by whom, was if one of the three members of the public who managed to find their way upstairs to the chamber of secrets told you what happened. Your faithful correspondent was one of them. You can read about that part of the story using the links at the bottom of this post.
Today's photo-of-the-day is from the exhibit "Van Gogh and the Olive Groves" at the Dallas Museum of Art. It includes a series of paintings made between June and December, 1889, while Van Gogh was a patient at the asylum of Saint-Rémy. The man was clearly on a roll in the last year of his life. One Van Gogh painting (not in this exhibit) sold at auction in 2017 for $81 million dollars. Going by that, this one small room in the DMA contains perhaps a billion dollars worth of art. The exhibit has a letter from Van Gogh to his brother on display in which Van Gogh said he was working on a series of of paintings of olive groves with a hope of selling them for "ornamentation for bourgeoisie homes." That's some decoration!
Click for a bonus photo.
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| Rotten Tomatoes |
The trustees of the Richardson ISD school board held a three hour training session Tuesday night on team-building. You might think this was well-timed, given recent events, but it's been on the board calendar all year. Texas State law requires team-building training every year. This week was RISD's turn. The trainer was Kay Douglas from the Texas Association of School Boards (TASB). She was excellent. She is knowledgeable, experienced, and generous with sharing her learned wisdom.
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| Rotten Tomatoes |
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| Rotten Tomatoes |
After the jump, more random thoughts.
There's a gaping divide in politics today, and nowhere is it on show more than in schools across the country. Richardson ISD is no exception, where the school board president abruptly resigned, in part no doubt because of public invective hurled at her and in part perhaps because of a split on the school board on how to deal with a pandemic.