In the Shadow of the American Chernobyl: Roane County (TN)

Guest: Geoff Alexander of the Trade Movies podcast.

Our first cross-pod episode. Geoff — aka "the woker" — asked us to look at Roane County, TN, where he grew up, with a focus on the "technical path" that segmented kids toward trades as early as 13. In exchange he had us watch Peter Greenaway's The Falls, which turns out to be a spookily good analogue for what it feels like to reconstruct a district from budget documents.

We roam across the 1983 Perkins Act and the vocational-ed → CTE rebrand, McNamara's Project 100,000, the Kingston Fossil Plant coal-ash disaster ("the American Chernobyl"), Y-12 / Oak Ridge and the ORNL "traveling science fair," Tennessee's BEP-to-TISA shift, the new $50K teacher-salary floor as an unfunded mandate, why Roane County has to carry Oak Ridge Schools' debt on its books, the 2019 (and 2024) push to consolidate five county high schools, and TN Amendment 3 (2022) — the 13th-Amendment loophole that puts prison labor in the school-painting rotation.

WORKS MENTIONED

- The Falls (Peter Greenaway, 1980)

- The Saragossa Manuscript (Wojciech Has, 1965)

- Jared Sullivan, Valley So Low (Knopf, 2024)

- Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip (2014)

- Cormac McCarthy, Child of God / Suttree

- The Moynihan Report (1965)

- Kingston coal-ash spill

ROANE COUNTY SCHOOLS — DATA SOURCES

- District website

- Board meetings (BoardBook)

- 2024 Long-Range Facilities Planning Session