Tuesday Aug. 7,
2012
50 cents
Daily Corinthian Vol. 116, No. 189
Partly sunny Today
Tonight
94
69
• Corinth, Mississippi • 16 pages • 1 section
Franks appointed to arena board BY JEBB JOHNSTON jjohnston@dailycorinthian.com
In a split vote, the Alcorn County Board of Supervisors on Monday agreed with the Corinth Board of Aldermen’s appointment of Joe Franks to the Crossroads Arena Board of Directors. The action will result in the removal from the board of Bill Strickland, who, in the 1990s,
led the effort to secure a multipurpose facility and has served as board chairman. The seat up for consideration is jointly appointed by the two boards. The city board voted 5-0 to appoint Franks a couple of weeks ago and supervisors voted 3-1 to appoint Franks, with Dal Nelms voting “no” and Gary Ross abstaining.
“Bill Strickland has been a consistent pillar of support for the arena since its inception, and I believe he would continue his unwavering commitment to the facility and its board of directors,” said Nelms. “I’m sure Mr. Franks will do an excellent job, and I look forward to working with him.” Franks, who runs an office
supply business, said he is looking forward to working with the arena board and staff and hopes to help them build community interest in the facility. For about 12 years he worked on the entertainment lineups for the Slugburger and Hog Wild festivals as part of the Main Street Corinth board. The term on the arena board
is five years. Supervisors had one other appointment on the agenda for the Tombigbee River Valley Water Mangement District Board of Directors. The board appointed Joe Duncan to complete the term of Don Rinehart, who resigned. The term runs through July 2015. Duncan has served on the Hatchie River Drainage District.
‘America’s Teacher’ helps, Supervisors agree motivates local educators to raise tipping fees BY JEBB JOHNSTON
BY BOBBY J. SMITH
jjohnston@dailycorinthian.com
bjsmith@dailycorinthian.com
Distinguished educator, speaker and author Ron Clark danced, hopped and wildly gestured the way to a successful future for education at Crossroads Arena on Monday. The animated Clark discussed his journey to become “America’s Teacher,” from his first classroom in a hard-luck North Carolina school district to working with inner-city kids in Harlem to the founding of the Ron Clark Academy, where Clark and his award-winning faculty use innovative and creative methods of instruction to teach middle school kids from all walks of life. Clark spoke about the difficulties he encountered when trying to introduce more fun and creative methods of teaching during his time at the struggling school in North Carolina. To bring the lesson to life and capture the attention of his students, he proposed dressing up as a character from the reading Photo by Kim Jobe/Corinth School District
Please see CLARK | 2
Ron Clark talks teaching after taking the table.
County supervisors agreed Monday to increase tipping fees at the solid waste transfer station in an effort to stop losing money in the operation. The increase, effective Sept. 1, will affect haulers of waste such as the City of Corinth and Waste Management that bring truckloads to the transfer station. The tipping fee will rise from $38 per ton to $47 per ton for in-county loads and $50 per ton for those from out of the county. Supervisors said they are only trying to get the numbers at a break-even point. “We have been losing money for a number of years now, and this looks like the fairest way to do it,” said Board President Lowell Hinton. The move to raise fees came about as the board reviewed finances in preparation for completing a fiscal 2013 budget. In other business, Magnolia Regional Health Center CEO Rick Napper presented
a quarterly report with news that the emergency room is on track for a record year of about 35,000 visits compared to a normal year of about 30,000. Despite the emergency increase, the hospital has seen a decrease in adjusted patient days to 50,504. “That’s approximately down by 700 in-patient admissions,” said Napper. “We had an extremely low flu season for admission to the hospital — the flu was not as bad as it has been in the past years. That volume almost directly correlates to the number of flu cases.” For the seven months of the fiscal year through April, the hospital had income of $1.038 million. The hospital has recruited two physicians — a neurologist who begins work next month and a pulmonologist who begins work in July 2013. Current hospital construction is scheduled for completion in December, but Napper said it will likely be about a month longer.
Civil War Kids Day activities scheduled Saturday BY BOBBY J. SMITH bjsmith@dailycorinthian.com
To mark the end of summer and the beginning of a new school year, the Corinth Battlefield Unit of Shiloh National Military Park will host a Civil War Kids Day on Saturday. “We are excited to host the Civil War Kids Day on Saturday morning,” said Supervisory Park Ranger Ashley Berry. “We
have several activities planned that are both educational and fun.” Kids will participate in several hands-on activities that will introduce them to various functions of a Civil War-era army and will have the opportunity to earn five of the park’s new Civil War to Civil Rights Trading Cards. “We’ll be doing activities
that correspond with the three branches of the army — infantry, cavalry and artillery — and we’ll have a demonstration to show how to load and fire a musket,” explained Park Ranger Rachel Winters. “It’s going to be fun and a good way to earn a Junior Ranger Badge. The activities will begin at 9 a.m. and end at noon. Children of ages five to 12 are invited to par-
ticipate in the Kids Day activities at the Corinth Civil War Interpretive Center. Activities will be conducted inside and outside the building. Children should bring water, snacks and sunscreen, and wear comfortable clothing for outside activities. Winters said the Corinth Battlefield Unit hopes to present the Kids Day activities at least once every year, depending on
how successful it is. Parents are encouraged to register their children in advance by calling the Interpretive Center at 287-9273. Also on Saturday, the band Lost Cause: A Confederate String Band will play their authentic renditions of Civil Warera music at the Interpretive Center auditorium beginning at 2 p.m.
Chinese drywall turns dream home into nightmare BY BOBBY J. SMITH bjsmith@dailycorinthian.com
(Editor’s Note: The following is being reprinted after some of the story was left out in Sunday’s edition.) It’s early on a rainy and dreary day. Emily, a 40-year-old mother of three, is sitting in her car, looking across the driveway at the four-year-old home she bought last April. She thought it would be her dream home, but her experience has been more like a nightmare. In the yard sits a large metal container. It looks like a shipping container that would be used on a boat. The container holds the recently stripped out interior of her home, the toxic Chinese drywall that cost Emily and her family so much — even their health. “I thought I bought my dream home,” said Emily. “I had pictures of the front of my house plastered everywhere, at work, on my fridge. It was my
first house as a single woman. I thought I did everything right. I brought in a home inspector, I asked all the right questions. How did this happen to me?” Emily bought the house from its previous owner in August of 2011. She works hard every day in the medical field, and after saving for a year and a half, she wanted to do everything right. So, she called in a home inspector. After spending over two hours in the house, the home inspector told Emily it was perfect. He couldn’t find anything wrong with it, he said. A second home inspection would also get the thumbs up. Soon the air conditioning went out. She called one of the big air conditioning companies in town and workers said her AC was low on freon. They had to refill her air conditioning system with Freon four times from August to the following March.
“Finally that company called me and said the EPA would not allow them to continue putting Freon in my unit without doing a leak test,” Emily remembered. “It was high dollar already. I had only been in the house six months — how can it already be a money pit?” Emily enlisted Jeff Crabb, of Crabb’s Heating & Air, to do the leak test. “He wasn’t in the house but a couple of minutes and he detected it,” Emily said. “It was Chinese drywall. The gases from it corroded the copper in my unit. That’s why the Freon was leaking out.” Chinese drywall is defective drywall imported from Chinese manufacturers beginning in the first years of the 21st century. Lab tests have identified emissions of several sulfurous gasses — carbon disulfide, carbonyl sulfide and hydrogen sulfide — coming from the drywall.
Index Stocks........7 Classified......14 Comics...... 11 Wisdom...... 10
Weather........5 Obituaries........ 3 Opinion........4 Sports........8
Submitted photo
The copper evaporator coil to Emily’s air conditioner is only two years old. It should look like copper. Instead it looks burnt, with a black, ashy substance covering the coils.
On this day in history 150 years ago At Blackburn, England, a public meeting called for the immediate recognition of the Confederate States of America because “it was impossible for the North to vanquish the South.”