
GNV4ALL held its first live general body meeting since before the COVID pandemic at Howard Bishop Middle School on Wednesday night.
Guest speaker Diyonne McGraw, a newly elected School Board of Alachua County (SBAC) member on a first-time all-female board, spoke on her top priorities.
McGraw shared her vision for when she joins the school board after recapturing her District 2 seat in the August Primary. Gov. Ron DeSantis removed her last year because McGraw lived a few hundred feet outside the district she represented.
Her main focuses were the achievement gap, discipline and social, emotional support, and salaries.
“Staring with the board, we need to work together,” McGraw said at the meeting. “The community is tired of having a board that cannot work together. Our job is to provide a strategic plan with clear goals and objectives and promote equity and inclusion while leading with compassion.”
The meeting provided an update for GNV4ALL’s transformative Family Learning Center project, scheduled to open in June 2023.
After a year and a half of negotiations, the school board unanimously approved the lease granting GNV4ALL the right to use a building on the campus of Metcalfe Elementary School for the learning center.
“I can’t begin to thank enough the school board for their efforts in supporting our project,” James Lawrence, the GNV4ALL executive director, said at the meeting. “It’s not every day they vote unanimously for anything, so getting that was a huge deal for us. We still work closely with the board and other partners.”
The city of Gainesville awarded a $350,000 grant to the learning center. There are also over 200 donors who have donated sums of money ranging from $5 to $80,000.
Once the speakers finished, community members broke into teams to discuss forging systemic change in criminal justice, health and transportation, education, fatherhood, and family support.
The headline reads McGraw shares vision. Okay what is her vision? I only read what she saw as the problems.
No vision here! Just the same spewing of what she thinks people want to hear as hot button issues! This is the second article in which she shares her “vision” and never addresses her remedy to the current problems face by ACPS students and teachers! Oh, there will be working together, now that there is only one non-activist on the board. Can’t wait to see if they bring their “highly qualified” Superintendent back to the stage. Non-partisan school board is a very lousy joke!