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Update: Justin Scally says he's leaving Louisville Metro Animal Services in better shape than when he took over the struggling agency in August 2011.

Speaking to reporters Monday, Scally pointed to improvements at the city department's Manslick Road shelter, increases in the city's live release rate, decreases in the euthanasia rate and upgrades and standardization to the department's procedures as signs of success.

For most of the past two decades, African-American history and issues were the focus of a regular series of free Saturday classes in Louisville. The driving force of the Saturday Academy was J. Blaine Hudson, the longtime University of Louisville professor who died in January.

Louisville’s Air Pollution Control District is moving forward with plans to place an air monitor near the Watterson Expressway. The monitor will measure concentrations of nitrogen dioxide, or “NOx.”

The Air Pollution Control District has chosen a site for the monitor; it’s at 1517 Durrett Lane, right next to I-264, and slightly west of Poplar Level Road. Now, the district is just waiting for the Environmental Protection Agency to approve the location.

Oprah Winfrey once explained this way her outlook on life after rising from a difficult childhood to a status of wealth and influence:

"Though I am grateful for the blessings of wealth, it hasn't changed who I am," she said in her magazine. "My feet are still on the ground. I'm just wearing better shoes."

Which brings the (maybe not obvious) question: What do those shoes look like?

Overall suspensions are down in Jefferson County Public Schools this academic year, but the district is still struggling with one major at-risk student group.

Louisville will install the first of a dozen markers this week to note significant civil rights events and celebrate the 50th anniversary of the passage of the city’s Public Accommodations Ordinance. 

The idea was started by the late University of Louisville professor Blaine Hudson in 2011. The inaugural sign installed on Tuesday at 3:30 on Fourth and Guthrie streets will note local demonstrations and acts that led to the ordinance, which outlawed discriminatory practices in the city.

Each week, members of the WFPL News team spotlight interesting stories we've read and enjoyed, for your weekend reading pleasure:

A trio of Kentuckians who favor the legalization of hemp says a trip to Washington D.C. to meet with lawmakers and executive branch officials was beneficial.

Jefferson County Public Schools is set to be the subject of a what observers are calling a "Herculean" state audit to review Kentucky's largest school district.

It's unclear what the JCPS audit will turn up, but most agree a review of the city's $1 billion budget with over 100,000 students is long overdue. Some school board members object to the examination by saying JCPS has been probed enough, but critics argue paying $125,000 to learn more about the district's finances and administration is important.

The review will focus on contracts, travel expenses and ethics policies, and especially the financial and administrative operations of the central office.

"This is the result of properly focused policy makers organically having conversations about how important public education is," Audit Adam Edelen has said.

The Bard’s Town Theatre continues its season of notable newer work with Jonathan Marc Sherman’s 2007 “Things We Want,” a satisfying dark comedy about three emotionally-stunted adult brothers still living in their childhood home while attempting to figure out how to overcome their various fragilities before they kill themselves or each other. That sounds heavier than the play actually is—tonally, it’s a gallows humor-charged fight between the id and the super-ego with flashes of brilliance that resists taking its characters seriously enough to let them fall apart in any kind of realistic disintegration.