Shirley Ferris made a plea for her job at the school board meeting at Courthouse Square last week. Not for herself. But for a position she’s held for years.
The popular counselor is about to step down after four decades in education. Due to a budget crisis Superintendent Terry Lindquist is working hard to resolve, her position — as it stands right now — will disappear when she retires in June.
On the ferry ride home after helping my father to die, the first thing I did was buy a Beachcomber.
Imagine my surprise when I saw a piece on Booth Gardner’s Death with Dignity campaign; how apropos. I had, a few days before, witnessed firsthand how to die with dignity intact, and I had helped to make it possible.
It’s easy, it seems, for adults — especially those of a progressive stripe who are in despair about the state of the world — to rob youth of what they need most: A sense of hope and optimism about what lies ahead. It’s refreshing to see we haven’t completely succeeded.
It didn’t start out being a story. It was a family first — a Vashon family. There were four boys, Vashon High School graduates. But it was the war that turned it into a story.
April brought amazing events to Seattle: a conference called Healing Our Planet Earth, the Seeds of Compassion events with the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu and a talk on Vashon by Joanna Macy. I participated in each of these, looking for inspiration about restoring Creation.
The Vashon PTSA hosted its seventh annual auction, “Memories of Tomorrow,” on May 3 at K2 Commons.
We read and hear about tragedies caused by earthquakes, hurricanes, cyclones, tornados and wildfires almost daily. Tens of thousands have died, hundreds of thousands have been injured and millions are homeless worldwide.
Given the United States’ extensive international influence, every American citizen should be politically and socially aware.
“What is Death with Dignity? Does it have something to do with death row?,” a friend of mine asked me when I told her the topic of my eighth-grade forum paper.
t As prices for all food rises, organic and local food will start to seem like a bargain.
In these strange days that we live in, when public schools are increasingly reliant on private support to balance their books, the Vashon Island School District has had a couple weeks of good news.
Pictures, lately, have consumed my life. Pictures everywhere, in every corner of my office, in huge envelopes in my car, piled high on the desktop, splayed as tiny icons across my computer screen, in albums stacked next to the front door — literally thousands of pictures, and the imperative to look at every shot, to divine a connection between decades of photo-taking and the phenomenon that has been my parents’ relationship for what will be 60 married years on June 14 of this year.
