Digital Media Center
Bryant-Denny Stadium, Gate 61
920 Paul Bryant Drive
Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0370
(800) 654-4262

© 2024 Alabama Public Radio
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Sentance named new Alabama education superintendent, Drought continues in Alabama

The Alabama Board of Education has named the state’s new superintendent.  APR Student Reporter Jalen Drummond has the details…

Michael Sentance of Massachusetts will be the Alabama Public School’s top official.  Sentance won the position by a narrow margin with five votes after board members voted on candidates for several rounds. 

Sentance worked for the U.S. Department of Education, serving as the secretary's representative for the New England States. He most recently served as senior education adviser to the governor of Massachusetts.

Govenor Robert Bentley says Sentance can help make positive changes in Alabama’s Schools.

He replaces former superintendent Tommy Bice.  He retired back in March after four years on the job.

The latest national report on the drought shows that the worst conditions in Alabama continue to be in the state's northeast corner.

Numbers from the U.S. Drought Monitor released today show extreme drought continues in most of Jackson County, along with portions of Madison and DeKalb counties.

The report shows that areas of severe drought persist in several Alabama counties along the Mississippi line, and also several counties along the Georgia line.

The U.S. Drought Monitor is produced through a partnership between the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the federal government.

It will look like the stars are falling on Alabama tonight and tomorrow morning. The annual Perseid* meteor shower will hit its peak in the pre-dawn hours tonight.

Bill Cooke is the head of NASA’s meteoroid environment office in Huntsville. He says you’ll need to get out of populated areas in order to see the meteors properly…

“From midnight to dawn under a clear dark sky, so you don’t want to be in the middle of a city and you want to have a nice dark sky. You need to lie flat on your back and look straight up, no telescopes no binoculars, just your eye.”

Cooke says during the peak hours star gazers can see between eighty and a hundred meteors per hour.  However, Jupiter’s gravity as pulled some of the meteors closer to Earth, so those numbers could possible double in some locations.

News from Alabama Public Radio is a public service in association with the University of Alabama. We depend on your help to keep our programming on the air and online. Please consider supporting the news you rely on with a donation today. Every contribution, no matter the size, propels our vital coverage. Thank you.