Educator wants to establish charter school in Kyle (and other things I learned about road projects, zoning issues and the city attorney’s wretched use of metaphors at tonight’s city council meeting)

Since its founders held an organizational meeting last month, I’m assuming most of those in the educational community were already aware of this, but I didn’t know until tonight, when Jewel Cournoyer spoke before the Kyle City Council, that she and her co-partner, Natasha MacNevin, want to open a tuition-free charter school serving grades K-3 somewhere in Kyle in August 2016.

It’s going to be called A.I.M. Charter School and the letters stand for Advocating for the Individual Mind. You can learn a little bit more about the school as well as about Ms Cournoyer and Ms MacNevin here.

She told me she is looking for a location that will house the at least 200 students she hopes to have enrolled by her opening date and the possibilities she told me include partnering with a church or finding a usable retail space.

She also said she needs to expand her two-person faculty to at least 12 "highly motivated" educators who will be dedicated to a system that features a year-around 10-hour school day with no public transportation to and from the school.

I also learned when construction will actually begin on the five road projects created by the $36 million bond proposal approved in May 2013 and how much the projects could cost homeowners. The Goforth Road project is scheduled to begin first, sometime in June, followed by Bunton in August, Marketplace in October (even though where that road will eventually go is still anyone’s guess), Lehman in March of next year and Burleson in October of 2016. Yes, that’s right. The North Burleson project will begin (not complete) construction, a full 3½ years after voters approved work on it. Why is it taking so long? I don’t have all the answers. Remember I’m new in town. But I couldn’t help but notice that the "preliminary engineering" on the five projects, something that should have been outside the scope of the bonds and should have been completed even before the bonds were proposed, is now scheduled to be finished on the fifth project late next month. So there’s that.

As for where Marketplace will intersect Burleson, tonight the council agreed on a contract that calls for the road alignment to deviate from what you see here on the city’s web site, which, as any bond attorney will tell you, is patently illegal, because, from what I gather the citizens voted for these alignments. Instead, tonight’s agreement would have Marketplace make a sharp left hand veer much more to the north. Negotiations with the property owner are underway (let me amend that, they will be underway as soon as the property owner returns from a cruise) to make the alignment featured on the map a reality, but we’ll just have to wait a couple of weeks to see how that goes.

So I guess now is as good a time as any to mention City Attorney Ken Johnson’s use of metaphors (to give him the benefit of the doubt I must tell you he said he was a little "off" tonight due to the fact he was trying to quit smoking). At one point, referring to the contract the council approved he publicly demeaned a significant (albeit non-voting) segment of the population by saying "It has undergone more changes than a teenage girl in a closet." Then later he said the contract had been "created more times than Frankenstein." I hate to break it to you, Mr. Johnson, but it was Dr. Frankenstein who did the creating. So there’s that.

And the costs of the road bonds to taxpayers? City Finance Director Perwez Moheet said the maximum should be 16 cents per $100 valuation. That means if you own a home valued at $100,000, your property tax will increase approximately $160 a year to pay the interest on these bonds he said will probably be issued all at one time.

And finally, dear Ms. Debra Britt, who came before the Planning and Zoning Commission last week to beg them not to isolate 280 homes in the Southlake Ranch subdivision, lost her zoning battle on first reading with the council tonight. But the truth of the matter is, she and two compatriots she brought along with her, wussed out. Instead of centering their argument on the public safety issue, and to a lesser extent the convenience issue, of extending Onyx Lake Drive to Goforth, they took on the type of zoning, a battle they could not possibly win with a pro-developer council. Now she must make sure the site plan for the development does whatever it can to protect the subdivision and a representative of the development said it would do just that. But then someone at the city one time told Ms. Britt they would look into her request for the Onyx Lake Drive extension and we’ve seen how far that one has gone. So there’s that.