Rotary Club of Farragut welcomes the community to a spring concert fundraiser featuring School of Rock Knoxville from 6 to 8 p.m., Saturday, May 4, in Farragut Community Center, 239 Jamestowne Blvd. The event, which benefits Knox County’s Ridgedale Alternative School, also will feature Smith’s Endzone BBQ and West Knoxville’s Smiley Swirl food trucks and beverages offered by Water Into Wine bistro & lounge. A general admission ticket is $25 at the door. “We really are excited about our partnership (with RCF),” Ridgedale principal Rebecca Bitner said. “I can’t say enough about the quality of your members.” Rotary Club of Farragut, which has adopted Ridgedale School as a Partner in Education School, learned more about the school during a recent Wednesday club meeting in Farragut Community Center. Ridgedale serves students who have had from 10 to 180 days’ school suspension with “an intensive learning environment,” its principal said. Also, the staff has trauma infrared training to help students with such risk factors as abuse, neglect, household deficiencies or family mental illness, domestic violence or divorce. Since Ridgedale, located at 4600 Ridgedale Road off Western Ave., is not considered a “base school,” Bitner said the school does not receive the same funding or budget as other Knox County schools. Club members followed the RCF meeting by observing World Rotary Day Saturday, March 23, when about 70 members worked at the school to help improve school grounds.
Read MoreKNOXVILLE — Roughly 17 years after throwing his last pitch as a reliable four-year arm on the Tennessee Vols Baseball team from 2004 through 2007, this former All-state pitcher at Farragut High School — staff ace on the Admirals 2003 Class AAA state championship team — is making a quite different kind of pitch as vice president for affordable housing with DGA Residential Development Group in Knoxville. “I’ve been doing work with housing development since 2010; doing it for a long time,” Cobb said during his roughly four-minute address during Mayors’ Leadership Summit on Homelessness” held recently in The Foundry in downtown Knoxville. Praising the “collaboration that the city and county both had … we leveraged $2.5 million to break ground on 280 units here in the city at the end of last year,” he added about new, more affordable housing. “Those funds were instrumental.” Cobb said he recently received information “that opened my eyes to some things about what you were just speaking on — the eviction process.” Beyond downtown Knoxville, “we were releasing up a property out in the county that we’re really proud of,” Cobb said, adding that he learned, “‘Hey, there’s a lot of people out here … that have this need or are living in cars and what-not that have been (evicted) for some reason or another.’
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