September 2024

It’s easy to get bogged down with all that is negative. It seems as if everywhere we look we find nothing but complaints. Often, we get so focused on what’s wrong that we can’t see everything that is right. Positive school environments promote better student achievement and behavior, and in turn, promote better teaching and better teacher behavior. I’ve made one of my professional goals for the year to help cultivate a more positive environment in our schools. We need to be proud to be Corning Bobcats, and we have many reasons to be proud. As I prepared this article, I started listing the awesome attributes we, as Corning Bobcats, have to be proud. I want to share my top 10 with you.

The Clay County Farm Bureau Board presented a $500 check to the Clay County Emergency Task Force, a part of the Clay County Sheriff’s Department, to assist in the purchase of an underwater scanner. The scanner, AQUAEYE, uses sonar technology and artificial intelligence to identify human bodies underwater during search and rescue efforts.

Eureka! Welcome to Clayton County is a limited weekly column exploring the life of General Powell Clayton, the original namesake of our county, our early history, and why we are not called Clayton County today.

What on earth was ever meant by that? It seems that somewhere, somehow, someone equated the most miserable time of the year to dogs. Heck, my dogs don’t like it at all. They go outside to do their business, look around and head right back to the A/C. August doesn’t sit high on my list either. Down here in Southeast Texas, it is the time of high temps, high humidity, high populations of flies, and bad attitude from all those listed. It is also the time of the year when people in my neck of the woods start paying attention to the tropics, particularly the Gulf of Mexico. Just as we are getting out of the heat and the bugs, here come the hurricanes. Thankfully, we don’t get them every year. I had never experienced one of those monsters ‘til 2008. You folks up in Northeast Arkansas get a storm, and it is gone in a couple of hours. With something like Ike, who came ashore as Cat 2 with sustained winds of 110 mph, you have 12 hours or more sitting and listening to nonstop banshee like screaming of the wind, your whole house shaking, rain in sheets, and the potential of catastrophic flooding if you are situated in the wrong place. That doesn’t include the possibility of tornados that these storms can spawn. Anyway, I told Kerry, never again. If one comes our way, I plan on taking a long road trip elsewhere.