As Hamilton County and the nation pull further and further away from the grimmest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s good to begin seeing progress on other fronts: The county’s 27-voting-member regional health council held its first meeting in 30 months Monday, Brainerd High School Principal Crystal Sorrells reconstructed how the school’s leadership helped students improve graduation and attendance rates to get off Tennessee’s “priority schools” worst-performance list, and a Chattanooga youth violence panel formed and met this week.
This is not small stuff!
And somehow all that news nudged its way onto the pages of the Chattanooga Times Free Press as our business reporters were covering a visit from U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Santa Clara, California — in Chattanooga by invitation of Mayor Tim Kelly, who hopes to win some big bucks for the city to become one of the nation’s planned 20 new innovation hubs.
This would be enormous stuff.
Khanna is a high-powered Silicon Valley congressman who helped shepherd the July-passed Chips and Science Act signed in August by President Joe Biden to channel more than $52 billion into researching semiconductors and other scientific research — all with the primary aim of countering China’s near monopoly on computer chips and other important manufacturing and technology components.