I’ve been asked by a former co-worker to apply for a job in Gainesville, Georgia. I’ve checked out the job description and the (very small) school and while the salary’s not great the upper-end (which is what I should get based on my experience) is ‘reasonable’ and more importantly the job sounds like something I’d enjoy. I know pretty much nothing of Gainesville, but I like it’s size (large town/small city) and its geography (about 30 minutes from the Georgia mountains [well, the beginnings of them] and an hour from downtown Atlanta]).
Does anybody know anything about the town itself? I’m interested in pretty much anything you can tell me, but particularly the bread’n’butter things such as affordable middle class housing, are the people friendly?, is it ultra-conservative/weirdly liberal, decent mom n pop restaurants, etc… (I can do online research of course but prefer firsthand “tell it like it is or at least like ya see it” accounts.)
*i.e. The workplace is small enough place to not have all the *@#*(#@ bureaucracy of bigger schools and be able to have some creative input, it offers the chance to teach some for credit courses [I haven’t done that in years and I miss it], lots of non-trads [my favorite students in general- teenagers become less cute [other than perhaps physically] with each passing year], no publish-or-perish environment [I don’t mind writing in the least but I *HATE* being required to publish x articles every y months when said articles are never going to be read by a damned person other than perhaps someone doing research to write articles that are never going to be read by another damned person in order to satisfy asinine tenure requirements], but large enough to have all the best databases (sorely missed where I work now), humanities courses, etc., and part of the University System of Georgia. Plus, Athens is an hour away if I ever need a huge library.
My wife works for a Character Education nonprofit in DC and part of her job is to go out and review schools’ character ed programs. She did this in Gainesville, and was very impressed by their very positive and successful environment.
She also said she was impressed with the aplomb the schools seemed to be handling a very large, very recent influx of hispanic students.
ETA: Crap, you’re talking college; I’m talking high school.
Still helps, thanks. I did notice they have an unusually high Spanish population (more Hispanics than blacks in fact, which is unusual for the south outside of the mountains, but becoming less so).
Yeah, there are lots of them there. I’ve wondered if that creates much of a smell. (I know for a while many were located in Chamblee and were moved due to the public outrage*, so I’ve wondered how big of an issue that would be.
I live about 15 miles from a city called Prattville that has a major paper mill. In spite of the distance there are nights I can smell the skunk like stench of the place from my house. I’d hate to live near something like that.
*That’s also when Chamblee got so many Asian immigrants it was nicknamed Chambodia.
I’m sure it’ll be conservative, in the typical suburban Atlanta way. Lake Lanier is right there, if you enjoy water (though it’s a couple of quarts low at the moment).
Gainesville has been a fast-growing area over the past couple of decades.
Odd detail: Gainesville seems to be in some sort of tornado alley. It’s had some bad ones over the years, the worst being the tornado of 1936.
Other than that, can’t tell you much, as I rarely make it up that way.