Five years ago, The Grammar School held its first-ever Ski to End Hunger event, raising over $4,000 for the Putney Foodshelf. After a pandemic hiatus, the school brought the event back in early March, with high hopes to match or exceed their first tally.
On March 22, at their weekly All School Meeting, The Grammar School proudly presented a check for $7,630 to Hannah Pick, the Putney Foodshelf's executive director.
“We are so pleased to see the ski event return,” Pick said in a news release. “It's inspiring to watch students skiing with such dedication and purpose. The funds collected are enough to support our purchase of milk and yogurt for nearly a year. This is an economically challenging point in time, with inflation and the reduction of pandemic benefits, so we are seeing increasing numbers of people coming to the Foodshelf. We are committed to being a reliable resource for our community, and we can't thank TGS enough for their support.”
Social responsibility is a key part of The Grammar School's educational mission, and the school has a long history of supporting the Putney Foodshelf. For Ski to End Hunger, students in grades K–8 chose a distance to ski on the school's lower field, then gathered pledges from family and friends, with 100 percent of the funds going to the Putney Foodshelf.
Transitions • Brattleboro Savings & Loan recently promoted Michele Hackett to the position of vice president, culture officer, and Michael Levock to the role of assistant vice president, network engineering officer. Hackett has been with BS&L for almost 14 years and has worked as the bank's human resource manager...
On Friday, April 14, at 5 p.m., the Brattleboro Literary Festival's Literary Cocktail Hour will present Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Maraniss, author of Path Lit By Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe. Maraniss will be in conversation with Bob Parks, president of the board of the Brattleboro Literary Festival.
Boston-based artist Daniel Callahan, whose work is on view in the exhibition “En-MassQ” at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC), will give an artist talk and host a participatory MassQing workshop focused on his unique practice of “MassQing,” a ritual marking of the face with paint that aims to reveal the inner essence of his subjects and to find “connection and communion with all things.” Callahan's BMAC exhibit is on view through Thursday, June 11. The exhibit and related...
Putney Public Library, 55 Main Street, hosts Putney School art teacher Dan Folgar for a free class on creating diary comics on Wednesday, April 19, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Comics are a versatile medium for storytelling. The Vermont Humanities Council's “Vermont Reads” book selection for this year, The Most Costly Journey, is a nonfiction comics anthology of stories told by Latin American migrant farmworkers in Vermont accompanied by artists' illustrations. Vermont Reads brings communities together around stories, ideas, and...
Forbes columnist discusses learning disability disclosure PUTNEY - Landmark College will host a free public talk by author, journalist, and business consultant Denise Brodey on Wednesday, April 12, at 7 p.m. in the Brooks M. O'Brien Auditorium, located in the Lewis Academic Building. Brodey's talk, entitled “LD Disclosure: Pros, Cons, and Personal Stories,” addresses the weighty decision that students with learning differences (LD) - such as dyslexia, ADHD, or autism - must make about disclosing their LD when entering the...
A town-owned plot of land in Jamaica Village, which includes a popular stretch of sidewalk the length of a football field, will soon be preserved as a biodiverse pollinator meadow and a wildlife habitat, thanks to the efforts of a group of resident volunteers and the local Selectboard. Work on the two-plus acre parcel of land on Water Street will begin in May. According to a news release, residents interested in enhancing the property approached the Selectboard in June 2022...
The Saxtons River Art Guild (SRAG) announces a one day workshop given by Lynn Zimmerman on Saturday, April 15, at the United Church of Bellows Falls, 8 School Street, from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. The workshop theme is “Negative Painting in Watercolor.” This all-new workshop will feature ways of working to build paintings that preserve the beautiful luminosity of watercolor. Participants will experiment with some wet-on-wet techniques in ways that build intense color and bright lights, using paints fresh...
Our state legislators. We elect them, they disappear into rented Montpelier apartments, they get assigned to committees, they have meetings in the State House, they write - or help write - legislation, they send out newsletters. And meanwhile, the rest of us go about our daily lives and wonder: What exactly are they doing up there? Now that they are in the final weeks of the 2023 session, The Commons thought it would be interesting to see what Windham County...
Mud season has begun in Vermont, but soil isn't the only thing that's thawing. So, too, are the amphibians. As species wake from their winter sleep - and, in some cases, soften from a fully frozen state - wood frogs, peepers, a variety of salamanders and other critters begin moving toward ponds or vernal pools to breed. Often, their journey becomes dangerous as they cross roads in search of wetter climes. To guard against calamity, environmental groups around the state...
April baseball in Vermont is usually sloppy. Teams don't get a lot of opportunity to play outside, and working out inside is no substitute for taking ground balls off a dirt infield or catching fly balls on a windy day. The Bellows Falls Terriers tried to play a couple of scrimmages but, according to coach Bob Lockerby, both were cancelled. So their season opener on April 8 at Hadley Field against the Otter Valley Otters marked the first time BF...
Decatur Creek is Beth Eldridge, Doug Farrell, and Jack Henry. Each is a New Hampshire musician, singer-songwriter, and performer, and together, organizers say, they “write and play some of the most tasteful original music in the region, with sharp focus on songcraft and vocals.” Bill Wolston of Newport, N.H., plays keyboard and writes songs of love, loss, pride of place, and nature, influenced by John Prine, Stephen Sondheim, Lucinda Williams, and Gram Parsons.This will be a 3:00 matinee show on...
Lez Zeppelin, the all female Led Zeppelin tribute band, will rock the Latchis Theatre on Friday, April 21, at 8 p.m. Founded in 2004 by guitarist Steph Paynes, the band has garnered critical acclaim as one of the most exciting live acts around. “Lez Zeppelin stays true to the spirit of the original,” organizers say, “delivering the legendary rock band's blistering arrangements and monstrous sound note-for-note.” The Guardian called them “the best tribute band in the world.” Chuck Klosterman of...
Next Stage Arts announces the lineup for the third summer of its outdoor, cultural performance series, running from May through October throughout Windham County. The series will include more than 20 performances ranging from a diverse group of musical styles, dance, and puppetry that will take place in fields, farms, and parks throughout the area. “The Bandwagon Summer Series is an opportunity to cultivate friendships, experience new music, and bask in Vermont's outdoor beauty,” Keith Marks, executive director of Next...
The Flat Iron Cooperative at 51 The Square has just created a new program to help provide food, coffee, and a welcoming space to members of the community who might need a little help. The new Table 7 fund will accept contributions that will fund food and drink for customers who might not be able to pay. They can come into the coffeehouse and ask for “Table 7.” They can then order what they want, and as long as funds...
After a nightmarish week for Groundworks Collaborative, friends, clients, and co-workers came together on April 7 for a candlelight vigil to honor the memory of Leah Rosin-Pritchard as the agency announced a three-week pause in operations to allow staff “time and space for our healing to begin.” The community was shocked by the April 3 death of Rosin-Pritchard, shelter coordinator at Morningside House, at the hands of a shelter resident who has since been arraigned on charges of first-degree murder.
Kathy Bullock, Ph.D., professor emerita of music from Berea College, will lead a daylong workshop at Guilford Community Church Saturday, April 15 “to teach new choral music by Black composers, to honor their work, and to share the history of appropriation of Black music,” according to a media release. The workshop is part of the international Black Lives Matter Commissioning Project (BLMCP) in affiliation with the Vermont Conference of the United Church of Christ's Racial Justice Task Force. Catalyzed by...
Regarding your story on the loss of utilities in the recent storm, I noted a similar problem on May 27, 2022 and I wrote to the Public Service Department and our legislators about it. “Today, southern Vermont suffered what seems to have been about an 18-hour internet outage for Consolidated Communications customers,” I wrote. “There was apparently no public information disbursed about this outage; the recorded message at Consolidated said the same thing all day: that a technical difficulty was...
As members of the Vermont Antiquarian Booksellers Association, we have dedicated at least a portion of our lives to the care and maintenance of used and rare books. Our shops preserve books and make them available to new readers. So it's no surprise that we were horrified to learn of the proposal by the administration of our state's public university to eliminate physical books from the institutions they lead. To paraphrase Cicero, a library without books is like a body...
The workers in Windham County who deliver public and human services are much-loved unsung heroes of our towns. On April 3, a tragic death occurred at Morningside House, the shelter run by Groundworks Collaborative. Groundworks is one of the recipients of a few thousand dollars each year from the Town of Brattleboro. Our human services workers - at Groundworks and beyond - show up every day to provide the tough work of providing care in a fraying and violent society.
Regenerative farmers like to say, “It's not the cow, it's the how,” when people tell them animal agriculture is overheating the planet. I'm not clever enough to think up a saying like to defend wood heat, but the same concept applies: If we do it dumb, it's bad. If we do it smart, it isn't. So in response to Rick Cowan, here are a couple of thoughts about the Affordable Heat Act. One: I sure was glad my mom had...
The U.S. spends $1.73 trillion a year for national defense, but we cannot protect our children from being shot in school. The recent carnage at the Covenant School in Nashville - the 13th school shooting this year - proves again that all children are vulnerable to this madness. Twenty years ago, the gun industry began to aggressively market assault-style weapons, particularly the AR-15, which became a cash cow. Today, one of every four guns made in the U.S. is an...
I left Brattleboro's Representative Town Meeting on March 25 perturbed. A lot of good was voted for. Not much restraint was in evidence. I was also unsettled because I think a lot of District 1 (now District 7) residents would not agree with all the spending that was approved, but I failed to articulate my concerns. We representatives wrestled for a good while with Article 23, about how large a human services budget to recommend for FY25 (i.e., for July...
Until this year, I'd never spent even a month away from my mother. Now I had flown across the seven seas to an adventure I could never have imagined. It would have been sufficient to experience a new family, a new school, new friends. But I never imagined that I would have an experience of Ramadan here in Brattleboro that would be so memorable. Ramadan is a month of blessings for Muslims and a time during which we try as...
Years ago my wife and I came to an unscientific conclusion: that, past the age of 27, one's basic personality rarely changes. And later, more specifically, we included attitudes: about race, gender, color, nationality, or religion. We still think that is true: who we are as a person, including our attitudes about different others, is quite fixed before we're 30. So, every time we read about “sensitivity” or “implicit bias” training (or have undergone such training ourselves), we wonder whether...
Most weekdays, you will find Rani Arbo at Wesleyan University's Center for the Arts, where she serves as campus and community engagement manager. But on Saturday, April 15, you will find her fronting a concert with daisy mayhem, her acclaimed folk/roots quartet. Originally from New York City, Arbo, 55, shares her Middletown, Connecticut home with her bandmate and husband, percussionist Scott Kessel. Their son, Quinn, 19, who shared a touring life with his parents, is now off at college. The...