USA softball, Kmart, school start times and other Columbus news you may have missed
Missed the big stories last week? Don’t worry. We’ve got you covered.
International softball returns to Columbus
More than two decades after Team USA Softball won Olympic gold in Columbus, they return to our city for an international tournament.
The USA Softball International Softball Cup, starting Monday, July 1, is a warm-up before the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.
The games will be played at the renovated South Commons Complex. The city ($3 million) and private donors through the Columbus Sports Council ($2.2 million) funded renovations focused on two fields and a stadium built after the 1996 Olympics. Of that money raised, $4.8 million has been spent so far.
Read more about Columbus’ Olympic history here.
Read more about the South Commons renovations here.
Former Macon Road Kmart site gets new tenant
The old Kmart site on Macon Road will soon be a Roses Discount Store.
Bitsy Dedwylder, MidTown Business Association coordinator, said the store is scheduled to open by the end of the year.
It will occupy almost half of the remaining space in the building, which is now partially occupied by a new AutoZone store.
Read more about Roses here.
School start times this year are unchanged
Start and end times for the 2019-2020 school year will remain the same in Muscogee County.
After a discussion in May, the board voted last week to drop the action item that was Superintendent David Lewis’ revised proposal.
Lewis agreed to pull the proposal at the request of Board chairwoman Pat Hugley Green. She told the L-E she hopes the district will put out another survey at the beginning of the school year.
Lewis told the L-E he’d come back with another proposal because “the long-term benefit of the proposal outweighs the expediency.”
The proposed change would have extended the elementary school schedule by 15 minutes in the afternoon. It also would have made the middle school day 10 minutes longer, starting 5 minutes earlier and ending 5 minutes later. The high school day would have remained the same amount of time but would have shifted the start and end times 5 minutes later.
Read more about last week’s meeting here.
Columbus’ cleanest school is…
Downtown Elementary Magnet Academy is the cleanest school in the Muscogee County School District for the second straight year, according to the district’s annual ratings.
Want to know where your child’s school ranks?
Read more here.
This story was originally published July 1, 2019 at 10:41 AM.