School Board Candidates

Tuesday was the deadline for school board candidates to file to run for office in the April 6 election. Here are the candidates from several area school districts. When we hear back from the Francis Howell, Fort Zumwalt and Warren County school district’s we’ll post their candidate information too.

Orchard Farm School District (two seats)

- Jane (Henning) Baum

- Donald Joe Bushdieker

- Carrie (Mitchell) Doza

St. Charles School District (two seats)

- Donna Towers

- Mike Thorne

Wentzville School District (two seats)

- Patricia Hacker

- Joe McDonald

- Paul Werner

- Peg Scholl

- Dale Schaper

- Michelle Caracci

Wright City (two seats)

- Austin Jones

- Mary Groeper

Restaurant on a Riverboat to dock in St. Charles

St. Charles City Council Tuesday unanimously approved a lease agreement with the owner of the Lt. Robert E. Lee, a riverboat that will operate as a floating restaurant in downtown St. Charles.
The four story boat will moor at the city-owned docks just south of Frontier Park.

Adoption Day

bringing home kitty

 

Chris and I decided to adopt a kitten.

We had hoped to get an abandoned kitty my uncle Gary found near his house, but sadly, the little white and orange furball died before we could get him.

We went looking on Saturday to see what kitties needed a home. The St. Charles Animal Shelter had a whole room full of cats- tiny new ones and older grumpy ones. My sister Shannon took a liking to a black, calm cat named Jim, but Chris and I decided to keep looking.

We went to the St. Charles Humane Society in St. Charles. I did a story in the journal earlier this year about how the Humane Society is running out of funds at a time when people are surrendering their pets more often.

They don’t have a lot of space for new kittens but we found a little 3 month old named Nova. She came over and sat on my lap.

I went to pick her up Tuesday night. She mewed the whole way home, but seemed to like the space in the guest bedroom (I guess I’ll have to call it the kitty’s room now).

This morning, however, I had red eyes and a sniffly nose. Let’s hope it’s not allergies, but I suspect it will be. What to do?

But more importantly, what to name kitty?

Her stats:

Born on April 1, 2009. Long haired. At the moment, sneezy because she has a cold. Enjoys looking out the window. I suspect she will be a big fan of the Harry Potter movies.

Suggestions welcome.

St. Charles School District offers pre-K readiness classes

Program designed to teach children foundational skills

BBC’s 100 books

I have loved to read books since I was pretty little. And when I was old enough to start making lists, I have loved to do that too. So here’s a combination of both of my favorites: A list of 100 books compiled by the BBC. My friend Mallary Tenore had it on her blog along with a check mark next to all of the books that she’s read.

I decided to pilfer it and repost it on my blog below: I’ve read those with an X next to them. (46 total)

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen X
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien X
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte X
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling X
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X
6. The Bible (Parts, but not the whole thing.)
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell X
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens X
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott X
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier X
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien X
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger X
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger X (wonderful book, an beautiful love story)
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald (Started it, couldn’t get through it)
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame x
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy X
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens x
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis X
34. Emma – Jane Austen x
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen x
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis X
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden X
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne X
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell X
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown x
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving X (another great one)
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery X
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood X
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding X
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel X
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen x
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens X
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon x
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck X
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold X
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas x
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding x
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville X
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens X
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker X
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett X (One of my favorite books!)
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens X
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White X
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Alborn x
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare X
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl X
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo X

Orchard Farm School District celebrates 50 years

On Feb. 14, 1959, fifteen school districts from around the Orchard Farm area voted to combine and form the Reorganized School District of St. Charles County.  Saturday marks the 50th anniversary of Orchard Farm School District and they have scheduled several events to celebrate during the upcoming year. 

The events scheduled include: a community anniversary festival for patrons from 1 to 100 featuring games, rides, a tractor show and a car show on September 18-19, 2009; an employee reunion variety show and dinner on November 21, 2009; a Board recognition program for all current and former Board members on February 19, 2010; and an alumni reunion basketball tournament and dance in March of 2010.

Crafters interested in participating in the community anniversary festival please contact Stephanie Knobbe at stephaniestephk@sol.com and/or 636-899-1249 or Mary Johnsen at mrjohnsen@sbcglobal.net and/or 314-566-1275. Patrons who have memorabilia that could be displayed as a part of the celebrations should contact the district offices at 636-250-5000. For more information about the 50^th anniversary celebrations please visit the district webpage at www.ofsd.k12.mo.us.

If you or someone you know remembers the school district’s reorganization please call me- I’d like to talk to you.

Kalen Ponche – schools reporter (636) 946-6111 ext 240

an apple a day

The St. Charles County Journals are starting a new column called “An Apple a Day” which will run on page A3 every other Wednesday. The first one is about the Foundation Grants that were awarded to 10 teachers or pairs of teachers Thursday Jan. 15.

An Apple A Day will feature stories about interesting things going on in the classroom. Have a suggestion? Let me know!

P.E. time, credits

For the second board meeting in a row, a board member has raised concerns about the amount of physical activity students are getting in school.

This month, Board President Linda Schulte suggested the board consider raising the number of required physical education credits at the high school level and increasing the amount of time middle school students at Jefferson Middle School spend in P.E.  You can read more about that in my story which ran Sunday.

 A group of teachers at Jefferson Middle school who are working on the schedule for next year have come up with several options that would encompass a move to daily P.E. But the minutes that would go towards giving students more P.E. time would have to come from somewhere, such as specialty courses, like foreign language or leadership class, or from core courses.

That has led some the board to put the brakes on a change until administrators and the board can more fully examine the ramifications of such a move.  School board members themselves decided to push off a decision until next month. 

At the school board meeting Schulte expressed frustration at the slow pace that the board sometimes moves by pushing issues off into study by a committee.

What do you think should happen?

Working with the people who are still flooded

I’m working now on a story about some of the people who are still dealing with the aftermath of the flooding that happened over the summer throughout the St. Louis area.

There are still people who are not yet back in their homes although it’s been about six months since the waters receded.  Some of their homes were damaged so much that the owners can’t move in until they  raise their home to a level that is above the height of the 100-year-flood, or one with a 1 percent likelihood of happening in a given year.

The other option they have is to raze the home and start over. Depending on their circumstances, people who live along the Mississippi are choosing to walk away from their properties or, in one case, to live in a trailer next to their damaged house as they save money to have it raised and completely rebuilt.

These have to be made less immediately than the ones that people had to make when the flood water rose within inches of the tops of levees. At that point they  could abandon their homes and belongings and seek shelter or stick it out, moving boxes out of the basement and praying that the levee would hold.

People in the city of West Alton who decided to wait it out were fine. The levee held up and the water came down. Further west along the Mississippi River, homes that were in lower areas or right along the river had water pouring into their basements, garages and in some cases halfway up the walls.

Many of those residents are still making tough decisions about whether to rebuild or move. When you look out at the Mississippi River, it’s hard to imagine how it was inside these people’s homes not very long ago. Right now it’s frozen solid and beautiful.

I’ll post my story when it’s done- here are links to some of the stories and a video I did this summer:

Floodwaters prompt residents to prepare for flooding

http://suburbanjournals.stltoday.com/articles/2008/06/16/news/sj2tn20080614-0615stc-flood00.ii1.txt

Portage de Sioux prepares for rising waters

http://suburbanjournals.stltoday.com/articles/2008/06/17/news/sj2tn20080617-0618stc-flood0.ii1.txt

Rising Floodwaters: Mississippi pushes farther into St. Charles County

http://suburbanjournals.stltoday.com/articles/2008/06/25/news/sj2tn20080624-0625stc-flood0.ii1.txt

Residents, National Guard shore up West Alton, Portage des Sioux levees

http://suburbanjournals.stltoday.com/articles/2008/06/29/news/sj2tn20080628-0629stc-flood0.ii1.txt

River’s crest brings relief, waiting game

http://suburbanjournals.stltoday.com/articles/2008/07/02/news/sj2tn20080701-0702stc-flood0.ii1.txt 

Park still closed due to flood damage

http://suburbanjournals.stltoday.com/articles/2009/01/13/stcharles/news/1114stc-close0.txt

Foundation awards 10 grants

Members of the St. Charles School District Foundation awarded teachers with $5,445 in grants for their classrooms today. Lower interest rates have affected the amount of money the Foundation’s endowment has generated, which in turn affected how much they could give out. 

Another interesting thing to note are the number of projects that involve technology. For example, Susan Hoernschemeyer (Lewis and Clark Career Center) received a $764 grant for an overhead document camera.

At Monroe Elementary School, Janet Stahlschmidt now has $437 to spend on flip cameras for global awareness. Second grade teacher Kathy Barnett received a check for $494 to spend on MP3 player stations and podcasts.

Annette Stamm (Jefferson Middle) was awarded $317 to buy books to help instill a love of science in the students she works with.  Mary Lou Montgomery, also of Jefferson Middle, was out sick today so her colleague Becka Rich received a check for $459.89 on her behalf. The money will go to buy renewable energy kits for students.

The other winners were:

Amy Brandes and Anne Bosenbecker, of Null Elementary, $415 to start an after school Spanish Club.

Jenna Tate and Carol Ahlemeyer, Lincoln Elementary, $368 for sensory integration tools for a kindergarten class.

Rachel Martin, Coverdell Elementary, $700 for discovery bags.

Kevin Dill, St. Charles High School, $928 for a 3-Dimensional scale model project.

Ruth Fannon, Juvenile Justice Center, $559 for a Wii game system.