Visible Men Academy in Manatee County moves on from founder’s exit
Louis Parker didn’t have much in common with his classmates at Phillips Academy Andover in 1969.
The child of an uneducated facilities manager, Parker showed up at the nation’s most elite boarding school having grown up on a diet of government cheese and powdered milk.
His dad couldn’t read. His buddy Jeb, meanwhile, lived in the same dormitory and would become Florida’s governor, while Jeb’s father and brother would both go on become president of the United States.
Parker had gotten a scholarship to Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, and it was a gift that dramatically altered his life’s trajectory, opening doors unimaginable to him as a poor child growing up in Pittsburgh. Those doors would lead to the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and then the heights of corporate America.
Sarasota County Commissioners consider one tenth of a mill increase for mental health district | Sarasota yourobserver.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from yourobserver.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Sarasota County leaders this year are hoping to resurrect a public referendum that would create a mental health special taxing district to help address treatment gaps throughout the county.
Commissioners first began discussing a potential special taxing district to support mental health organizations in 2019 after Commissioner Mike Moran brought forth the idea.
They were poised to add the issue to the November 2020 ballot but decided against it when financial uncertainties over COVID-19 arose in April.
“You’d be asking existing programs to take a hit while instituting new programs and I don’t think that’s a great position to be in,” Commissioner Nancy Detert said at the time. “If we delay it a year, I think people would understand.”
Laura Kingsley should be somewhere in the Polynesian Islands right now.
Two years ago, the Sarasota County School District chief academic officer and assistant superintendent had been planning the iconic cruise she and her husband would take to celebrate her retirement, originally planned for the summer of 2020.
The around-the-world trip would be a fitting end to a four-decade career in education, and Kingsley had assembled a three-inch thick binder of research on all the places she would visit.
But in November of 2019, former Superintendent Todd Bowden resigned, district leadership was in turmoil, and, in March, COVID-19 shut schools down for months. Kingsley knew she could not leave in the midst of such chaos, so she pushed it back a year.