Archive - Mar 2012
March 22nd
CHITTENDEN — Racing in spring-like conditions on March 16, 17 and 18, six local athletes — all members of Ripton’s Frost Mountain Nordic Ski Club — helped their Vermont team win the Eastern High School Championships against the rest of the New England states and New York.
Competing for Vermont were Bristol’s Alia Johnson, Ripton’s Britta Clark and Lydia Allen, Middlebury’s Dominique Powers, and Cornwall’s Mac Groves and Will Conlon.
MIDDLEBURY — The owners of Ferrisburgh-based Vermont Livestock (VL) are seeking permission to expand their operation with a new, 11,442-square-foot slaughterhouse and meat-processing facility in Middlebury’s industrial park.
If endorsed by local, state and federal authorities, the new facility could be under construction by May and might be ready to handle animals by this October, according to Carl Cushing, owner/operator of VL.
ADDISON COUNTY — After a banner maple syrup spring in 2011, county sugarmakers this week were facing an early end to this year’s season.
Tim Hescock of Vermont Trade Winds Farm in Shoreham said this year he tapped his 2,200 trees earlier than usual and began boiling 19 days early. As of last Friday his season was over.
On Tuesday, Hescock said the prolonged high temperatures this week likely would end any chance of more sap flowing in Addison County maples.
LINCOLN — Fifth-grader Jesus Rosa-Ivey Jr. opened the hearts and minds of his fifth- and sixth-grade classmates at Lincoln Community School this year. He inspired his teachers to think beyond the boundaries of conventional education and consider new levels of intelligence.
He was also a student with severe cerebral palsy, who couldn’t walk or speak.
When Rosa-Ivey entered the fifth grade at LCS last fall, his teacher Alice Leeds dedicated a unit of study in her fifth- and sixth-grade class to disability rights and awareness in the United States.
WEYBRIDGE — Students at the Patricia A. Hannaford Career Center in Middlebury have been hard at work on a new maple sugaring operation for the past year, and this spring it finally began to show results.
With a design by the architecture class, and building by the construction class, a sugarhouse has grown up just below the school’s 330-tree sugarbush in Weybridge since September 2010. This winter, the Forestry and Natural Resources class spent hours installing taps, setting up state-of-the-art equipment and boiling sap.
BRISTOL — An organization looking to start a clinic in Bristol and two other Vermont health care organizations that were not granted aid to create Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC) last year might get an injection of funds from an unexpected donor — a health insurance company that violated state law.
ORWELL — Early Wednesday morning, school boards in the Addison Rutland Supervisory Union (ARSU) and representatives of the district’s teachers’ union reached a tentative contract agreement, averting a threatened teachers’ strike that day.
Orwell Village School board chair Glen Cousineau, who said both sides agreed to keep details of the agreement private until it is ratified, was relieved by the breakthrough.
