McDonough's Latest Community News

Normally, kids aren’t encouraged to draw or paint on the walls of the local train station.

But the MARTA train system is proudly displaying the eye-popping colors and brushwork of patchwork murals created by students from six metro Atlanta elementary schools.  

Students created artwork on the theme “My Destination: Where I Can Go on MARTA” as part of an arts education program developed Creating Pride, a local nonprofit arts and education organization, and MARTA to encourage student creativity while learning more about the transit system.

MARTA riders traveling through one of six stations will be able to glimpse the lively and colorful works created by students from Morningside Elementary School, Carter G. Woodson Elementary, College Park Elementary, Renfroe Middle School, Sequoyah Middle School, and North Springs Charter School of Arts and Sciences.

Each school developed one “Patchwork Painting” that combin

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For years, the Chattahoochee Nature Center has connected people with their environment. Now the nature center's new state-of-the-art Discovery Center is extending the connection to the river that sustains all of metropolitan Atlanta — the Chattahoochee itself.

The highly anticipated $9.7 million Discovery Center and Pavilion opened in June  after five years of fund-raising and campaigning by the who’s who of local leaders.

“It’s been a long time coming, but we’re finally here,” campaign chair Christopher Sawyer said.

The result is a place where visitors can learn about the profound relationship between humans and the river.

The Discovery Center sits perched on a hillside overlooking the pavilion, a pond, garden terraces and an eagle aviary on the 127-acre Chattahoochee Nature Center campus.

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They say learning never ends and at just $50 per month for unlimited workshops at the new LearnShop in Atlanta, it doesn’t have to. The only question left is: What do you want to know?

In a recession, all things financial tend to get put on hold, including schooling. But what if learning new skills were still accessible, even during the economic downturn? That's the anti-recession rationale behind the LearnShop Learn Store, says founder Rishan Tesfamichael, a registered architect and real estate licensee. 

Like thousands of others, Tesfamichael suffered the shocking blow of unemployment in January 2009, despite her hefty résumé. Instead of wallowing in her misfortune, she decided to turn her own tide.

“I decided this was the last time I would hang my financial stability on a job, and I would lift others wit

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When the International Community School needed furniture moved this year, principal Laurent Ditmann rolled up his sleeves and helped.

Public money covers about 80 percent of the budget for the International Community School’s two campuses in DeKalb County, says Ditmann. “For everything else, we fundraise, just like a private school.”

Administrators at Georgia’s independent charter schools have got to be willing to sweat and get creative to make ends meet. While Georgia’s charter schools are performing well academically, many struggling financially. More than 40 percent of start-up charter schools in Georgia operated in the red during the 2006-2007 school year, according to an analysis by Georgia State University researcher Cynthia S. Searcy.

Publicly funded charter schools get less per-pupil and are smaller and less able to take advantage of economics of scale. Searc

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When Atlanta was hit with massive flooding last fall, it wasn’t just the creeks, roads and homes that were disastrously affected. Several schools, including Clarkdale Elementary School in Cobb County, also were irrevocably drowned in the flood waters.

Now, the Cobb County Board of Education is ready to do something about its overly soaked school building.
Nearly six months since the damaging flood, a recent vote approving the rebuild of Clarkdale Elementary gives proponents of the measure something to smile about. The Board agreed to relocate the school from its current location to a site adjacent to Cooper Middle School, between Ewing Road and Flint Hill Road in Austell.

At a public forum on Feb. 2, district officials offered up three solutions for the displacement of Clarkdale students, including absorption into other schools, rebuilding at the same site and rebuilding next to Cooper. The move next to Cooper was the most heavily favored

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