A Cat Saved from a Tree and Iowa City School District Seeks to Deal with Deficiencies: Iowa City Daily Links, Jan. 17

The nice part of a later Winter is there's only a few more months left of this stuff

On to the links!

From this Site

Speaking of snow, the city of Iowa City is hoping that all of this newly arrived cold and snowy weather will help .

A man with a previous arrest selling drugs in Illinois was arrested in Iowa City on Sunday, for allegedly .

We have polls up about the top and of 2011. Gives us some comments with what you think would be some great names.

Speaking of cats, is up for adoption. He's one of those awesome cats that will lumber around your house and rub against your legs on cold days like this one.

In Parent Talk this week, we ask what is to be done .

From Other Sites

The stranded Iowa City cat was successfully rescued from a tree with the help of the community. And the crowd rejoiced!

The new moped laws went into effect his month.

This is the first day of work for a new batch of teachers hired to alleviate class size concerns, writes Jill Kasparie of SourceMedia Group News.

Jordyn Reiland of the Daily Iowan writes that among the many things recommended by the Synesi audit of the Iowa City School District, improving school lunch will be one of the big challenges.

Alesha Crews of the Iowa City Pres-Citizen writes that a different audit, this one by Dell Computers, enumerates on multiple technological challenges that the Iowa City School District faces.

Rana Moustafa of the Daily Iowan was on the scene as University of Iowa law students catalogued items from the Red Avocado and Defunct Books so they can be saved once the building is torn down.

Emily Schettler of the Iowa City Press-Citizen writes that students from West High School are still pushing for legislation requiring motorcyclists under 18 to wear helmets by law. Strangely enough, they're getting the full legislative experience by running up against a special interest group.

Work crews will be starting work on rebuilding historic Sutliff Bridge today.

Daily Links Excerpt(s) of the Day

(1) However, Diane Duncan-Goldsmith, the current district food-service director, said with five production kitchens and only two kitchens in the actual schools, food-service staff can only do the best with what they have.

"The system is what it is until there is some major infrastructure change," she said.

Coralville Central Elementary Principal Barb Mueller-Jenkins said she agreed, noting that the lack of a kitchen in her school makes it difficult for food-service employees to serve children efficiently.

"It's tough to see that many children and there's no kitchen," she said. "I want to have my kids have food in their stomachs and the proper nutrition."

(2) Dude said he felt the two biggest IT challenges the district has to face are the lack of bandwidth throughout the district and the number of elementary schools that are not included in the district’s fiber optic network. He said data storage is also an immediate issue the district will need to address.

“We just do not have enough bandwidth through the Internet right now and there are a lot of issues when kids try to do bandwidth-intensive things, like streaming videos for their classes or doing research online,” Dude said. “They need to be on our fiber optic network, or something similar to that, so they can communicate and have all the same systems and capabilities that all the other schools have.”