The Johnson County Board of Commissioners have called to convene a special meeting on Thursday, May 11 to consider and appoint the interim successor for the office of State Representative for District 3.
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The Robinette Company officials recently announced that the company would invest $10.3 million to construct a new 100,000-square-foot facility in Piney Flats.
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Tennessee Hills Distillery officials announced Monday that the company will invest $21.3 million to expand in Northeast Tennessee by adding a Bristol location to serve as the company’s new headquarters. The company’s newest investment joins its existing operations in Jonesborough and Johnson City.
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Advanced Call Center Technologies (ACT) announced Monday it will establish new operations in Bristol and Kingsport, creating 650 new jobs in Sullivan County. ACT’s expansion in the region will create 350 new jobs at its Kingsport facility and 300 jobs in Bristol, according to a press release by the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development (TNECD).
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Tri-City Extrusion, Inc. (TCE) officials recently announced that the company will invest $30.8 million to expand its manufacturing operations in Northeast Tennessee.
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The firing of Matthew Hawn, a high school teacher in Sullivan County, Tennessee, recently made national news and seemed to confirm fears that newly-enacted state bans on critical race theory (CRT) would have a chilling effect on teacher speech. Hawn, a 16-year veteran tenured teacher and baseball coach, had assigned students in his contemporary issues class Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay, “The First White President,” and a spoken word poem from Kyla Jenée Lacey called “White Privilege.” One headline declared, “A Tennessee teacher taught a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay and a poem about white privilege. He was fired for it.” A Georgetown professor tweeted, “This really seems extreme and a harbinger of what is to come.”
But contrary to news coverage and social media chatter, Hawn wasn’t fired for violating the state’s newly passed CRT ban. Really, he was dismissed for failing to adhere to the Tennessee “Teacher Code of Ethics,” a seldom-invoked but sensible state requirement for teachers to provide students access to varying points of view on controversial topics. Not only did Hawn fail to follow this code when he assigned the contentious poem and Coates’ essay from The Atlantic, which contains claims such as, “With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness,” he also later asserted that “there is no credible source for a differing point of view.” (Hawn recently denied making such a claim, though he declined to explain why the district attributed this statement to him.)
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A Sullivan County-based nonprofit that accepted taxpayer money went against state policies and hired a convicted felon and another person who was a registered sex offender, according a report Tennessee Comptrollers released last week.
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Tennessee officials report they have charged residents of Lincoln, Shelby, and Sullivan counties with TennCare fraud.
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A Sullivan County parent who made headlines when he complained about local elementary school officials passing out flyers about condoms said publicity from this story provoked someone to threaten his family.
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Personnel at one elementary school in Sullivan County sent kids home with a flyer that advertised free dental and vision care and, among other things, birth control pills and condoms.
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The Sullivan County Board of Education voted 4-2 Tuesday to adopt a controversial social studies textbook that critics say promotes God and Allah as the same, WJHL said. The adoption for the seventh-grade book doesn’t mandate its use, WJHL said. It only makes it eligible for the district’s purchase. The station quoted one parent, Richard Penkoski, who said, “It’s denigrating Christianity and favoring Islam and anybody who reads that book will get that themselves. That’s why I am against this.” The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) called on Muslims to attend the Sullivan County Board of Education meeting to oppose “Islamophobic opposition from at least one board member,” The Tennessee Star reported Tuesday. CAIR provided the email addresses for school board members and instructions for signing up for the public comment portion of the meeting. Board Chairman Michael Hughes, Vice Chairman Randall Jones, Matthew Spivey, and Randall Gilmore (pictured above, left-to-right) voted for adoption, the Kingsport Times-News said. Jane Thomas and Paul Robinson voted no. Board member Mark Ireson was absent. The book by McGraw-Hill, called “World,” was the overwhelming choice of teachers on the textbook committee, the Times-News said. It could be formally chosen following a public comment session on April 15…
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One Sullivan County School Board member is opposing the body’s planned adoption tonight of a social studies textbook that says the God of Christianity is the same as Islam’s Allah, while CAIR is calling on Muslims to pack the board room. Jane Thomas told the Kingsport Times-News that the seventh-grade “My World” book is full of “incorrect statements” also present in the earlier version and will confuse students. The book equates Allah with God. “We (Christians and Muslims) do not worship the same god. Allah is not God,” Thomas said. “It presents Allah as the same god as Almighty God.” She said the Islamic holy book, the Koran, should not be presented on the same level as the Holy Bible, the Christian word of God with a New Testament including words of Jesus Christ. She also decried the inclusion of the Five Pillars of Islam in the text. Board member Matthew Spivey said, “We can’t promote any one religion over another,” according to the Times-News. An earlier version of the book also drew opposition. Meanwhile, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) called on Muslims to attend the Sullivan County Board of Education meeting to oppose “Islamophobic opposition from at least one board member.”…
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Tennessee Comptrollers have called out officials in yet another county for doing a lousy job keeping tabs on evidence they seize from other people — this time in Sullivan County. According to Comptrollers, deputies with the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office kept this property a lot longer than they should have. “When reviewing the evidence logs, auditors were assured that all seized cash had been deposited into the official bank account used for evidence. However, during a review of the evidence room with the officers on duty, we observed that cash totaling $42,141 was being maintained in a safe. This cash related to approximately 66 cases dating as far back as 2005,” auditors wrote. “Evidence logs for many of these cases indicated that these seized funds had been deposited in a prior year. Since evidence logs were not adequately updated and maintained, we were unable to determine if the office properly accounted for all evidence and seized property. All seized cash in the safe was deposited subsequent to June 30, 2018.” Auditors also called out the county’s evidence custodian for not always issuing property receipts. “From our review, only two property receipts were issued by the evidence custodian for the entire…
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The former director of the Sullivan County Emergency Communications District stole district funds totaling nearly $17,000, according to an audit Tennessee Comptrollers released this week. This month a Sullivan County Grand Jury indicted that man, Isaac Lowry, on one count of theft over $10,000, according to a press release from Comptrollers. The communications district provides enhanced 911 emergency telephone service for the Sullivan County area. The district’s board of directors asked members of the Comptroller’s Office to investigate, according to the press release. “Investigators determined that Lowry stole district funds totaling at least $16,856 when he redeemed a whole life insurance policy which had been paid using district funds,” Comptrollers wrote. “In August 2017, the board passed a motion to have Lowry either surrender the policy or compensate the district for the value of (the) policy. Instead, Lowry told investigators he redeemed the insurance policy for its cash value and placed the proceeds in an investment for himself.” Those weren’t the only irregularities Comptrollers reported. Vacation and sick leave balances for three current employees and the former director were improperly inflated, Comptrollers wrote. “As of October 2017, these balances were inflated by a total of 2,272 hours, or 284 days,…
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The United States Constitution does, of course, contain guidelines as to how a territory may enter the Union as a full-fledged state on an equal footing with all previously-existing states. The last time that any new states were added to the United States was in the year 1959 when Alaska became the nation’s 49th state and Hawaii became the country’s 50th state. Specifically, the U.S. Constitution’s Article IV, Section 3, Clause 1 — which requires only a simple majority vote — reads: “New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.” There has been recent chatter about admitting Puerto Rico into the Union as the nation’s 51st state. As the Constitution was not written until 1787 — and, once written, did not take effect until the following year — the procedure outlined within the still-in-force Articles of Confederation would have remained applicable to admission of news states up to…
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