Word: dayton
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Nurse home visitor Tammy Ballard has had some memorable experiences in close to a decade of helping new mothers raising their children in poverty in Dayton, Ohio. Once, she arrived at a new client's home to find a TV news crew waiting outside; apparently, someone fleeing gunfire had sought shelter there. Another time, she knocked on a door only to hear shrieking in response, but no one would let her in. Later she learned it was the family's parrots, which had been trained to squawk at visitors. (Read "The Year in Medicine 2008: From...
This is not the FFRF's first foray into Dayton. In 2002, it was a plaintiff in a court case that ultimately banned Bible classes in Dayton's public schools. "For us, this billboard was really symbolic," Gaylor admits. "We didn't really expect Dayton to be a fertile recruiting ground for us. It's just our statement that they should not suppress knowledge by teaching religion in schools. Their belief is holding them back...
Locals, however, say the whole billboard contretemps is more amusing than controversial. "The billboard right next to it says 'My friend's got mental illness,' " jokes Tom Davis, the public-information director at Bryan College, who has lived in Dayton for 17 years...
...overwhelmingly Christian and conservative small town less than an hour's drive north of Chattanooga, Dayton landed the Scopes trial in 1925 after the American Civil Liberties Union announced a search for a teacher willing to challenge a state law prohibiting the teaching of evolution. Town leaders, eager to boost the local economy with the media attention a trial would bring, came up with a 24-year-old science teacher named John Thomas Scopes, who was willing to teach Darwinist theory instead of creationism...
While Gaylor insists that Dayton locals have gotten more and more backward over the years, Davis says that's not so. "We have a public school system that's accredited by the state," he says with a smirk. "Our kids seem to score appropriately on state tests. We even have some people with college degrees. So the H.L. Mencken attitude is tiresome. It's as ignorant as we're proposed...