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Amy Klarup was Eugene Weekly's special sections editor and education reporter.
Event producer Krysta Albert says she's gearing up for another year of celebrating all things Eugene, despite a lack of sufficient volunteers and wildfire smoke descending on the Festival of Eugene last year. The Festival of Eugene, created in response to the surprise cancellation of the Eugene Celebration in 2014, will take place Aug. 20-21 this year in Skinner Butte Park. Continue reading
Only a year ago, Kelly Middle School science teacher Dustin Dawson expressed his concern at a school board meeting that Eugene School District 4J wasn’t moving fast enough to adopt new science curriculum. At the time, some of 4J’s schools were using 20-year-old textbooks with outdated information written before Pluto was declassified as a planet and before the human genome was sequenced. Dawson was supplementing his classes with his own material. Continue reading
Thanks to a gun law in Texas, Eugene is now home to relationship author and blogger Duana Welch. She moved to Eugene last year after her home state of Texas passed a law allowing guns in classrooms. As a college instructor, Welch says she retired in protest, and she and her husband moved to Eugene in search of political ideals more closely matched to their own. Continue reading
It’s hard to imagine creatures more enigmatic than the gray whales that migrate along the Oregon coast each year. Ever since the ban on the commercial slaughter of gray whales took effect in the 1930s, the species has slowly recovered, and now thousands of these graceful marine mammals make the yearly journey up and down the West Coast, from Alaska to Baja California and back. Each summer, around 200 whales decide that Oregon is the place to be, and rather than go back to Alaska for the summer, they stop in Oregon and hang out until it’s time to return to Mexico. Continue reading
The state of Oregon landed a failing grade in valuing public education, according to the Network for Public Education's 50 state report card, released Feb. 2. The Network for Public Education, a national advocacy group in support of public education, rated each state based on six distinct criteria. Oregon received separate grades for each of the six categories, and then those grades were averaged together to come up with Oregon's D grade. Continue reading
Catherine and Cheryl Reinhart, owners of the wildly popular Sweet Life Patisserie, announced via Facebook today that they plan to open a second location at 19th and Agate near campus, where Eugene City Bakery once resided. The Reinharts write that they will share the spot with J-Tea, which is also opening a second location. "Sweet Life Petite" will ideally open in spring of this year, the owners say. Continue reading
Until last year, Eugene School District 4J did not have a policy in place to specifically protect transgender and gender non-conforming students. When 4J school psychologist Brianna Stiller was developing 4J’s gender policy, which the 4J School Board passed in the spring of 2015, district lawyers told her that since 4J already had anti-harassment policies in place, it didn’t need a gender policy. “I told them, ‘You’re missing the point,’” Stiller says. Continue reading
Math gets a bad rap, says Gina Graham, owner of Eugene tutoring service Math Is Magic! “We have in our nation a predisposition to think math is yucky,” she says. “I think that’s a problem.” Continue reading
Good news for Cafe Soriah fans: The famously tiny Mediterranean restaurant on 13th Avenue will expand into its neighboring space, allowing owner Ibrahim Hamide to accomodate more customers. Hamide says that his neighboring business for 22 years, a dress shop, shut down last summer, and Hamide's brother-in-law purchased the building in late August. "So now I have an extremely friendly landlord," Hamide jokes. Continue reading
A female dog euthanized in late December at 1st Avenue Shelter is the subject of some online uproar. City of Eugene Animal Services and 1st Avenue Shelter say the pregnant dog had a bite record and repeatedly demonstrated aggressive behavior, while advocacy group No Kill Lane County maintains that the dog could have been rehabilitated. Molly Monette, animal welfare supervisor with City of Eugene Animal Services, says a Eugene citizen picked up the stray boxer on Nov. 20. While in that person’s custody, the dog escaped from her enclosure. Continue reading