Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe has called the troops back to Jefferson City to try to save the Chiefs and Royals. Legislators will return to Jefferson City in short order and try to hammer out some legislation that diverts your money to keeping the Chiefs and Royals in Missouri. I’m torn on these efforts. I tend to not believe the “pull” factors that you will read in the coming days about the impact of sports franchises on communities.
One look at the area around the Truman Sports Complex would tell me that the sports franchises have very little impact on their immediate surroundings, but that’s me applying old fashioned common sense and I failed college economics more than once. So, believe what you will.
Kehoe has not been helped by the local politicians or Jackson County residents. Frank White has all but pushed the Royals into Kansas and Jackson Countians, by vote and actions, have done everything but load the moving truck for the Chiefs. It is going to be an interesting summer. I’m predicting Royals to Clay County riverfront and Chiefs to Wyandotte County. Don’t bet the house on it.
Platte County R-3 threw out a post on their Facebook page last week that has perplexed me. It read:
Exciting news! Platte County R-3 was awarded a Meta Community Action Grant! Our PCHS ELA 4 students partnered with Dr. Khalandi, Director of College and Career Readiness, to tackle a big question: How do we expose K-5 students to different career pathways? Using design thinking, students pitched creative, student-led solutions like Career Play, Career Month, and Career Quest to our elementary principals. This summer, some of these student-led concepts will be piloted, with grant funds supporting project supplies.
What in the world does that mean? That is violent education meeting speak and only lacks “collaborative,” “synergy” and a few more buzz words that are rarely used anywhere but schools and corporate zoom meetings. Just gobbledygook. They did not say how much of the Meta (Facebook) money they got.
But really, what was your career path thought as a third grader? I was worried about which lunch box I was taking to school, and I suppose we’ve progressed to third graders sitting on the bus worried if they’re going to be a nuclear engineer or diesel mechanic at this point.
It is clear that I am just not a deep enough thinker to understand all this new education progress and I’ll just have to survive my remaining years in this darkness of thought.
I guess it makes sense that these grants that Meta Data Centers dole out will make us feel better when their data centers cause electric brown outs and higher rates in our future. I suppose I’m just ungrateful and cynical.
Speaking of Data Centers, take a gander at the new Google site across from the Facebook site on Highway 169, just north of Interstate 435. It is a massive site of hundreds of acres, and they are rolling along. The landscape of this area is completely changing and I’m skeptical that building mega data centers in our region is as good for us as the politicians, economic developers and these data companies are telling us. But again, maybe I’m just ungrateful and cynical about data giants building huge complexes to store data. I’m sure it will all be fine. Don’t worry.
(Guy Speckman can be reached trying to figure out exactly where his Facebook photos are being stored at the new data center)
