Nassau and Jackson counties

I was in a hurry when I posted about the news article this morning about some more counties passing or considering anti-evolution resolutions, so I couldn’t do any research concerning the counties mentioned in the story. Now that I have a little bit of time, let’s see what we can dig up.

The story mentioned:

The boards in St. Johns and Baker counties have unanimously passed resolutions urging the Florida Department of Education to back down from those new standards on evolution. The matter comes up tonight in Clay County, and Nassau and Putnam counties have similar resolutions pending.

We already know about St. Johns, Baker and Clay. So, the new ones are Nassau and Putnam.

Here is Putnam’s agenda and meeting minutes page. I don’t see anything about the resolution there, do you? We need to keep an eye on that page for the next agenda to be posted. If someone has some time to make some phone calls, please do. Contact information here.

Nassau County does have the resolution up for approval. Here is the agenda for their Jan. 24 meeting. On page four it says:

Request adoption of Resolution #1238 asking the State Board of Education to direct the Florida Department of Education to revise the new Sunshine State Standards for Science such that evolution is not presented at the exclusion of other theories of origin of life.

The meeting is at 6:30 p.m. at the School Board District Office, 1201 Atlantic Avenue, Fernandina Beach, Florida 32034. (904) 491-9900. Here is contact information for the school board members. Can anyone attend the meeting?

If you paid attention to the title of this post, you will notice that it says Jackson County too. Let me tell you a short story about that. For the past week I’ve been methodically visiting and searching every single north Florida school board web site looking for agendas and meeting minutes in order to ferret out as many resolutions as I could. I had visited the Jackson County website and marked it off as “nothing found.” There were agendas and meeting minutes, but no mention of a resolution that I could find.

However, today I discovered the following news blurb in the Jackson County Floridan:

In other business at the school board’s meeting on Tuesday:

A resolution opposing the proposed new Science Sunshine State Standards will be sent to the State Board of Education. The board is against teaching evolution as a fact and not as a theory.

Odd how that blurb is waaaaaay at the bottom of the news story, don’t you think? And how did I miss that resolution when I had visited the Jackson County site? So, I head back to the county site and, lo and behold, there is an agenda for a Jan. 15 meeting that includes the following:

6. CONTRACTS/RESOLUTIONS/AGREEMENTS
E. Approval of Resolution Regarding The Proposed New Science Sunshine State Standards

This had me scratching my head. Had I somehow skipped right over that? Just for the heck of it, I took a peek at the web page’s source code because I wondered when the page had been posted and sometimes that information can be found in the source code. Sure enough, there was this:

[o:DocumentProperties][o:Author]Vivian Ford[/o:Author] [o:LastAuthor]Vivian Ford[/o:LastAuthor][o:Revision]2[/o:Revision] [o:TotalTime]514[/o:TotalTime] [o:LastPrinted]2008-01-15T17:17:00Z[/o:LastPrinted] [o:Created]2008-01-16T22:32:00Z[/o:Created] [o:LastSaved]2008-01-16T22:32:00Z[/o:LastSaved]

Do you see the dates there? Remember, the meeting was on the 15th. I’m not sure what to make of that. Maybe there is an innocent explanation for the incongruity. I dunno.

On a side note, the Orlando Sentinel School Zone education blog is looking for your comments about the anti-evolution resolutions. Feel free to stop by.

Are we having fun yet?