On Fridays, Principal Jeanna Chandler’s staff at Wellborn Elementary School hauls out the Rubbermaid totes. Usually there are two, one reserved for car-riding students, another for those who take the bus.

If you want a fair-minded view of the fastest-growing population in Alabama, don’t look to Russellville or Albertville or Fort Payne. Look at Oxford.

With a noteworthy 5-0 vote, the Anniston City Council this week decided to invigorate one of the city’s low-income neighborhoods.

Anniston’s poverty rate is 29.5 percent; 5.57 percent of Annistonians — 1,213 people — live in public housing. Spin that any way you wish and it’s still awful, a clear indication of Anniston’s health a decade removed from the Great Recession and 20 years after the closure of Fort McClellan. 

Montgomery's new mayor regularly makes comments that any Anniston mayoral candidate could borrow for their campaign, comments that sound as if Montgomery’s mayor was discussing the Model City, not Alabama’s capital city.

Anniston has lived alongside Oxford for more than a century, and never have the neighbors been closer in population size than they are today.

It comes as no surprise that administrators spent so much time Wednesday at a student town hall meeting fielding questions about a proposed new on-campus dining hall and accompanying “mandatory commuter meal plan.”

Anniston chews up mayors, turning what should be an attractive political gig into a four-year marathon of frustration, much of it self-induced. Why? And why does anyone want the job?

Ben Little, Anniston’s most polarizing politician, the man so often considered by his critics as tinder that ignites City Hall disharmony, may run for mayor next summer. 

I never met T.J. Summers. Never shook his hand. Never debated politics with him over coffee. Never heard his telling of a life lived remarkably, a life of immigration and war and patriotism and family and Saks, his adopted home.

Back in the day, Anniston had its chance to envelope Oxford. Not kill it but absorb it in a bloodless electoral conquest, the massive (by Calhoun County standards) over the meek. Except, Oxford wasn’t meek.

These arguments about Anniston City Schools aren’t new. But they’ve blossomed this fall because a shadowy nonprofit — Forward 4 All — is pursuing a radical deannexation of east Anniston, Golden Springs and McClellan, and Alabama Sen. Del Marsh, R-Anniston, is listening to the overtures.

Forward 4 All sought Sen. Del Marsh’s help in deannexing Anniston's Ward 4 and annexing it into Oxford and leaving Anniston with the reputational fallout. Now they want more.

Everything about the recent arrests of 11 young men on charges of second-degree rape and one on second-degree sodomy in Jacksonville is awful. It is a dirty, trashy pit of accusations and alleged crimes and questionable behaviors.

Allowing for a little time travel, what would these two black preachers of Anniston have to talk about? How to bring about change, for one.