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NOVEMBER 2020 • VOL. 14 — NO. 11
Buckhead Reporter WORTH KNOWING
A PATH400 worker’s trail to a second chance P19
Perimeter Business
Shop local for the holidays ►
PAGES 7-10
Exploring ‘tiny parks’
APS in-person delay divides local parents BY JOHN RUCH
COMMENTARY
Giving thanks in a time of crisis P16
AROUND TOWN
PHIL MOSIER
Christie Jo Mayo shows off her farming-themed “tiny park” along the PATH400 multiuse trail on Oct. 17. Mayo was one of more than 40 participants in the “Big PATH, Tiny Parks” event, which celebrated green space and recycling. See story and more photos, p. 30. ►
Time for Perimeter cities to plan together? P20
City, MARTA team on Lindbergh-Armour master plan
BY JOHN RUCH
The city and MARTA are teaming on
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a master plan that will attempt to tie together partial or long-stalled developments in the Lindbergh/Morosgo and Armour neighborhoods. MARTA’s unfinished vision for transit-oriented development at Lindbergh
Center Station lies at the core of the Lindbergh-Armour Master Plan, and a bevy of new multiuse trails -- including a future Atlanta BeltLine segment -are prodding a closer look. The process is just gearing up with an intent to submit a plan to the City Council in June or See CITY on page 22
Atlanta Public Schools’ decision to delay a return to face-to-face instruction until sometime in January is dividing parents, especially in Buckhead, which has become a hotbed of back-to-the-classroom advocacy. Disagreements in interpretations of pandemic science and APS’s equity policy are pushing parents, teachers and staff into separate camps with Facebook groups. A group going by “Let Atlanta Parents Choose” appears to have been influential in Superintendent Lisa Herring’s early decision to start a face-to-face return in late October; another group called “We Demand Safety APS” appears to have helped pressure her switch to the delay. The pro-return forces are regrouping under the name Committee for APS Progress, intended to be a formal nonprofit organization. Laura Roxburgh LaHiff is a Buckhead mother with an eighth-grader at Sutton Middle and twin fourth-graders at Morris Brandon Elementary. She’s with the We Demand Safety APS group and welcomed the delay as a matter of health equity. “We are inconvenienced. We are not endangered,” she said of the virtual learning, adding that many others in the district without Buckhead’s privileges and options might not fare so well. “We’re all facing this situation together so we also have to keep an eye out for our friends, our neighbors… people that we don’t know with a view of kindness and compassion.” Shannon Schlottmann, whose son is a kindergartner at Morris Brandon, is in the Committee for APS Progress camp. She says virtual learning isn’t as good as in-person and is unfair to the students. See APS on page 27
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