Elaine Ott, the park district’s new general manager, seems up to the challenges that confront her. A seasoned executive with a strong background in finance, she appears to be both hard-headed and good-hearted, a person who has the moxie to handle Vashon politics as well as the skill and personal warmth to rebuild a beleaguered agency.
During the storms that have engulfed the Vashon Park District in recent months, one person has remained a rock.
Today’s students live in a world of global communication and trade where information is just a mouse click away. What will the world be like when our current kindergarteners graduate? For young people to be successful, they need to be both visionary and grounded and to possess skills that will enable them to be flexible and dynamic, able to adapt to the changes that will surely come their way. And we, as teachers and administrators, parents and community members, need a vision for the future of our schools that builds on our strengths, reflects the values of our community and sets priorities that will help our young people succeed.
Going out on “choucroute” was awful. We knew we had the base word down, but was it one “t” or two? We agonized, guessed wrong, and left the stage shaking our heads.
A few weeks ago, when a photograph of Kevin Pottinger taking in the enormously high tide washing over his street on Quartermaster Harbor ran on the front page of The Beachcomber, he emailed us with an observation. Based on the responses he got to his 15 minutes of Beachcomber fame, the newspaper’s circulation is robust.
Every so often, we use this column to review our letters to the editor policy. It’s a chance to remind people who have forgotten how it works, to introduce the concept to those new to letter-writing and to re-enforce what’s printed at the top of this page every week.
Dark days are short. Birds sit mute in their nests. Sunset is a perfunctory dot fading behind the crisp white crests of the Olympic Mountains, framed by twilight-black sky.
I have been sponsoring and organizing a Martin Luther King, Jr., commemoration on the island for 23 years, always held on Jan. 15, his birthday. We’ve had some wonderful guest speakers and local musicians involved over the years, as well as many of our local clergy. It’s been one of my missions in life to keep the memory of Dr. King alive.
It’s time for the commissioners who run the Vashon Park District to comport themselves professionally and honorably. To use words thoughtfully. To show they get it.
This is an advisory to dog owners, hunters and those who manage the deer hunt in Island Center Forest.
With the start of a new year, The Beachcomber would like to suggest a community-wide resolution that we hope many of us could embrace — a commitment to engage in thoughtful and respectful discourse.
As another year draws to a close, we at The Beachcomber would like to thank the many people who supported the newspaper in 2012. Putting out a weekly paper for a place as lively and engaged as Vashon is both difficult and rewarding, and we couldn’t have done it alone over the past 12 months.
Five months ago, an editorial about the mass shooting in Aurora, Colo., appeared on these pages. We noted the madness of a legal system that allowed a young man to purchase 6,000 rounds of ammunition by mail order, that the United States is first in the world, followed by Yemen, in our per capita ownership of guns and, most noteworthy, the seeming lack of a collective sense of outrage over this sorry state of affairs.
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