Archive - Jun 2010
June 24th
VERGENNES — Vergennes is falling into step with arts organizers in nearby towns who, in the last few years, have set up regular arts walks in Middlebury and Bristol.
The public is invited this Saturday to view a variety of art at four stops in the Little City: the Vergennes Opera House, Bixby Memorial Library, Studio V, and Creative Space. The last two are both relatively new galleries in town, said opera house Executive Director Jackson Evans, and the ramble is a way to showcase some of the work on display there.
MIDDLEBURY — At its annual awards banquet on Monday, the Middlebury Lions Club formally pledged $25,000 to the Middlebury Volunteer Ambulance Association (MVAA), which is raising money to pay for its new headquarters just north of Porter Medical Center.
Outgoing Lions Club President Dave Nourse presented the first of five annual $5,000 checks to Mickey and Carol Heinecken, who are spearheading the MVAA fund-raising effort.
BRISTOL — Concerns about the excessive use of executive sessions sparked a brief discussion about Vermont’s Open Meeting law on Monday night, when two Bristol residents pushed the town’s selectboard to limit the use of closed meetings in town affairs.
New Haven’s planning commission is asking good questions and hedging bets on an uncertain energy future by asking the developers of a proposed 40-acre, 178-panel solar installation — which would be one of the state’s largest — to provide guarantees of its good intentions.
ADDISON COUNTY — Springtime in teacher Jan Davis’ classroom comes with a bang. Her third-grade students at the Monkton Central School year after year count down the days to “Hatch Day,” when their incubated chicken eggs will crack open to reveal tiny chicks.
Hatch Day is the culmination of an embryology unit meant to teach students about the development of cells and eggs.
“It really is a favorite unit of both the kids as well as the other students in the school, because they know chicks are coming,” Davis said. “There’s a real excitement in the air.”
ADDISON COUNTY — The high school softball season ended in heartbreaking fashion for the four local teams: All suffered losses in winnable playoff games, Otter Valley, Middlebury and Mount Abraham in Division II and Vergennes in D-III.
Yet each had much to be proud of: OV, MUHS and Mount Abe earned top-four seeds in D-II, and VUHS doubled its regular-season win total from the year before and produced its best season in more than a decade.
A year ago, The New York Times reported on the growing number of idealistic college students who spend summers working on organic farms.
The article described a few different members of my generation. An English major from Kenyon College declared that, after his summer farming, he was finally comfortable with not having been born in the ’60s.
MIDDLEBURY — Middlebury College last week received a grant of $137,000 to do thermal energy retrofits on three campus buildings.
The Vermont Clean Energy Development Fund announced the recipients of $1.7 million in grants on June 16. The college was among 14 public-serving institutions — defined as hospitals, colleges, universities and government buildings — in the state to receive a grant. The money comes from federal economic stimulus funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and was allocated to the institutions to encourage renewable energy and efficiency.
