First to lose accreditation?

CNN just put up one of its BREAKING NEWS banners alerting the public that the school district in Clayton County, Georgia has become the nation’s first (in forty years!) to lose its accreditation.

My question isn’t whether that news warrants the BREAKING treatment, but whether it’s true - not that the Georgia district did or did not lose its accredited status, but whether it is actually the first to lose it.

The Saint Louis public school district was stripped of its accreditation by the Missouri State Board of Education on March 22, 2007. That decision was upheld by the Circuit Court of Cole County on January 23, 2008.

Unless the definition of accreditation is at issue here, which I doubt, that sort of strips away the whole five-alarm BREAKING aspect of the CNN story. Somebody call an editor.

Update: Ah. Someone did call an editor (emphasis mine):

A Georgia county’s school district has become the third district in the nation in 40 years to lose its accreditation.

Better. Though someone at CNN should feel kind of foolish for the earlier banner treatment of the story. If not for the falsely-assumed historic nature of the story, it would probably never have been published at CNN at all.

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