The Short List for July 24


  • July 24, 2015
  • /   Shannon Nickinson
  • /   studer-community-institute

Before you go to lunch, read the Short List for July 24.

Pensacola State faces penalties under performance funding

The Florida Board of Education approved performance funding metrics Thursday. Pensacola State College is one of five colleges that will have some of their funding withheld because of the way it fared on the measures.

The state will measure state colleges on four metrics — completion rates, retention rates, job placement and entry-level wages for graduates within one year of graduation.

In a newsletter sent to staff earlier this year, PSC President Ed Meadows said that PSC was hurt in the metrics by overall low wages in the region, our proximity to Alabama and a low graduation rate among low-income students made the metrics challenging.

Read more here. At a glance, here is how PSC scored on the metrics.

Pensacola Network links entrepreneurs, community for two years and counting

The Pensacola Network is celebrating two years and 2,000 connections on Friday evening, but the genesis of the networking events spans 22 years and began on a short drive down U.S. 98.

“I started the networking events over in Fort Walton Beach 22 years ago,” said Lloyd Reshard, who along with his wife Robin, runs the monthly events. “People from Pensacola would come over and ask, ‘Why don’t you start one here (Pensacola)?’”

When Lloyd and Robin were married eight years ago, he moved to Pensacola and the questions about networking events became more plentiful. Lloyd knew the interest for networking within the African-American business community was there, but unfortunately for him, the time never was.

“For me it was always too much of a challenge,” Lloyd said. “Then, when I retired three years ago, I had more time and I started to reach out to folks like Gulf Power to see if they were interested in helping.”

Read more here.

Pea Ridge Elementary wins statewide community involvement award

Pea Ridge Elementary School earned Florida’s 2015 Family and Community Involvement Award.

They won for the “Science Explorium,” their twist on a science fair that linked with the community in a collaborative STEM-based initiative involving teachers and students in grades K-5.

Teachers piqued student interest by introducing and exploring different inventors, past and present, using all kinds of resources, mostly Discovery Education. They assigned video clips, virtual labs and collaborative research assignments.

As a result of the hard work put into the project, Pea Ridge science scores rose 55 points from September to January.

Read more here.

Quint Studer told WEAR and the Pensacola News Journal that plans for the University of West Florida's Center For Entrepreneurship are "no longer feasible" at the Community Maritime Park. Mayor Ashton Hayward III announced Thursday by news release that the city would not approve three leases Studer and his wife, Rishy, negotiated with the Community Maritime Park Board as they were.

This morning, InWeekly's Rick Outzen is tracking the fallout from that announcement. Check out his blog here.

And to get in the back-to-school spirit, read more here about how Santa Rosa School District has, since 2008, used a partnership with the University of West Florida to study the effectiveness of reading instruction strategies to help elementary school teachers improve their skills and help their students consistently post some of the highest reading scores in the state.

 
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