Councilman Ken Dishman, City of Sandy Springs
As a design thinking exercise, students in Mrs. Couvillion’s eighth grade Grammar/Composition classes were prompted to develop a proposal to solve community issues within the City of Sandy Springs – the sixth largest city in the State of Georgia, comprised of approximately 100,000 residents.
Student citizen leaders researched what they found to be specific city-wide issues and developed succinct proposals for these problems. Once determining who might be contacted, the students crafted emails posing questions to various city government officials.
City of Sandy Springs Councilman Ken Dishman, who has received worldwide acclaim for being a pioneer in leveraging the public-private partnership model for the provision of government services, responded to one student’s email, asking if he could visit the School and the English classes to discuss the issues and potential solutions. Mr. Dishman answered various questions from project cost to community relevance for the new City Center of Sandy Springs.
Councilman Dishman will take the students’ concerns, ideas, and suggestions back to the City. Whether or not their solutions are actually realized and come to fruition, the students learned that they, too, can make an impact. By empathizing, asking questions, thinking critically and seeking solutions – the MV Mind was demonstrated throughout their discovery process.
