Union Institute & University (UI&U), a nonprofit, private university offering degree programs designed for the busy adult, will host an open house from 2-4 p. m., Saturday, June 18, at the Brattleboro Academic Center located at the Vermont Agricultural and Education Center (VABEC), 3 University Way.
The open house will provide prospective students with program highlights as presented by a student, alumni, and faculty panel. Optional break-out groups will be led by faculty who will present information on a variety of concentrations including arts, writing and literature; education (teacher licensure track available), environmental studies & sustainability; and global studies.
Academic advisors will be available for transcript evaluation, if requested, and a financial advisor from VSAC will have information on financial aid options for Vermonters.
In UI&U's B.A. program, students design their studies through lenses focusing on their own interests. With a low-residency program in place - one weekend a month at the Brattleboro Academic Center - students who are currently working full-time and dealing with other commitments have the opportunity to finish their next degree without giving up the face-to-face interaction with faculty and staff. Union also offers the B.A. degree program in Montpelier and completely online.
I study and train in violence. More specifically, I am a budoka, a student of budo, traditional Okinawan and Japanese martial arts. Budo is in part an aesthetic practice, in part a spiritual practice, and it serves as a limited realm in which the pursuit of perfection is possible.
The Brattleboro Recreation & Parks Department will offer the following programs in June. To register, or to learn more about the offerings, call the Recreation & Parks Office at 802-254-5808, weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon or 1 to 5 p.m. • Yoga and pilates: Instructor Cindy Gray offers...
Is college a sucker's game? Billionaire venture capitalist, hedge fund manager, and vocal Libertarian Peter Thiel thinks so. The co-founder of PayPal - who was among the first to spot the end of the Internet bubble in 2000 and the end of the housing bubble in 2007 - thinks that higher education will be the next overvalued economic sector to collapse. It's a legitimate question to ask, now that four years of tuition, room, and board can cost $200,000. Even...
Joyce Marcel's column in the June 1 issue, “We fought the bear and the bear won,” illustrates a connection between co-existence with wildlife and solid waste management. Marcel twice refers to taking meat scraps, bones, and carcasses “to the dump.” In the Windham Solid Waste Management District (WSWMD), this kind of garbage is trucked to a landfill in Moretown, over 100 miles north of Brattleboro. This begs the question: Why is organic waste being stored outdoors, enticing bears, while awaiting...
The Arts Council of Windham County (ACWC) recently announced the winners of the Fine Art Raffle that benefited Brooks House fire victims. According to ACWC President Greg Worden, raffle tickets to win art created by three local artists were sold during the month of May, and the raffle “netted hundreds of dollars which will be given to the United Way's campaign to help victims of the Brooks House Fire.” The winner of a colorful, hand-stitched 30x30-inch art quilt by Jan...
Obituaries Editor's note: The Commons will publish brief biographical information for citizens of Windham County and others, on request, as community news, free of charge. • Eileen “Mamie” Callahan Baker, 59, of Dummerston. Died June 9 at her home. Wife of David Baker. Mother of Jennifer Nickerson. Stepmother of Timothy Baker of Aberdeen, Scotland. Sister of Pat, Tim, Daniel, Terry and Jennifer. Born in Brattleboro, the daughter of Bill and Margie Callahan, she attended St. Michael's School and graduated from...
Brattleboro Memorial Hospital is offering another of its free series throughout the year of multi-session tobacco cessation programs. This six-week class of Vermont Quit Network starts on Tuesday, June 21, and goes to July 26. It will be held in the Tyler Conference Room on the first floor of the main hospital. Class times are 5:15 to 6:15 p.m. For more information about the BMH class, or to register, call 802-251-8456. The weekly program offers group support as well as...
What do you get when you combine yoga, music, art, local foods, Deepak Chopra, and the Green Mountains of Vermont? You get Wanderlust, what organizers call “an epic four-day yoga throwdown” that brings together the world's top yoga instructors, with a healthy dollop of post-yoga fun, at Stratton Mountain Resort on June 23-26. This is the first time that this festival - which has been already been presented this year in Miami, San Francisico, Phoenix, Dallas, Atlanta, and New York...
“I bet a lot of you thought that with 14 graduates, this graduation ceremony couldn't take long,” said assistant director Eric Rhomberg about two hours into the Compass School's ninth graduation ceremony on June 4. More than 200 teachers, graduates, family, and friends all had a part in celebrating the graduates. School Director Dr. Rick Gordon offered opening remarks about identity forming experiences, stating how important it is that a school provides the opportunities for every child, regardless of background...
The second-seeded Brattleboro Colonels faced the top-seeded and undefeated BFA-St. Albans Comets for the Division I softball title at Veterans Memorial Park in Poultney on Friday night, and came away with a dramatic 2-1 win in nine innings to capture their second straight state title. Friday's game was everything a championship game should be - the top two teams in the state going toe-to-toe with everything at stake and little margin for error. Fittingly, this game was the only extra...
Two figures move as one across the steaming asphalt of a medical building parking lot under a hot January sun. This is the kind of day that brings hordes of winter refugees west to follow the televised New Year's Day Rose Parade in Pasadena, Calif. One of the figures is a frail old woman collapsed in a transporter wheelchair - a conveyance with four small wheels, made for transferring from place to place those whose self-propelling days are history. The...
Several current House districts in Windham County could be reconfigured in a proposed redistricting map under consideration by the Apportionment Board. Last Thursday, the board voted 4-3 to recommend a new map of legislative districts for House representatives that creates 138 new single-member districts. There are currently 44 single-member districts. Redistricting is a once-a-decade ritual that often leads to political fights in the Legislature. Though members of the board from the minority parties have insisted that the redistricting changes are...
Brian Joy and Chris Nostrand were born and bred in Bellows Falls. They have been friends since they were 3. And, they say, because they know what it's like to constantly hear the lament that “there's nothing to do here,” they founded Cider Magazine last fall. Joy and Nostrand recently moved their operation to The Waypoint Center at 17 Depot St. on the Island. The move is one sign of how much their monthly music and arts publication has grown...
As the Vermont economy continues to slowly recover from the current recession, there is still one big elephant in the living room: the housing market. With apartment prices still high, it's difficult to find affordable living situations in the Brattleboro area. The solution for many is to share an apartment, or find a homeowner open to sharing his living space with other tenants. But while sharing a living space makes economic sense, the human equation may not always add up.
On our sparsely populated three-mile stretch of rural dirt road, the bright cobra light hovering on top of a 30-foot pole is a glaring illustration of “incongruous.” Every first-time guest arriving at my house after dark asks the same question: “What's up with that street light?” “It depends on whom you ask,” I reply. Road rumors are rampant because, outside of a newsroom, why should anyone bother with facts? Some people claim the town installed the light when a security-conscious...
A group of activists last week began an effort to raise public awareness about the area within a 10-mile radius of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon - the plant's official Emergency Planning Zone - in the lead-up to two politically charged events later this month. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission will hold a public hearing in Brattleboro on June 22 on its recent safety assessment of the plant. The next day, the U.S. District Court in Brattleboro...
Here in Vermont, we struggle to meet the needs of our citizens, to make ends meet, and to invest in our future. We started the year with a $176 million budget shortfall, and we had to make difficult choices to balance our budget. In the coming years, we will have to make more hard choices, as revenues are not expected to return to pre-recession levels for several years. Meanwhile, elected officials in Washington are proposing deep cuts to federal spending.
The Windham Orchestra hoped that its concert on Sunday would be a memorable one. It was, but not in a way they planned. The orchestra was to perform on the lawn of the Brattleboro Retreat, but rainy weather forced the concert to relocate to the Latchis Theatre. The first half of the performance, a premiere of Windham Loops, by Derrik Jordan, went off without a hitch. After an intermission, everyone reassembled for the the second half of the concert, Beethoven's...
At least in theory, the Windham Central Supervisory Union (WCSU) - composed of elementary school boards in Townshend, Brookline, Newfane, Windham, and Jamaica, and Leland & Gray Union High School - could smoothly implement Act 153, the latest legislation that directs disparate union school boards to merge into a single-board K-12 school district. But given the ideological competition between local control and cost control, the process all but guarantees a bumpy road, even as school committee members and administrators take...
I read with interest Alice Muise's story about the baby goose [“Make way for gosling,” The Commons, June 8]. In 1955, a long time ago, I was working for the Jamaica School District as school bus driver. This meant traveling dirt roads to pick up and drop off students. On one trip, as I was driving back to town in the empty bus, I noticed something moving in the ditch, so I stopped. When I got out, I found a...
The Neighborhood Market, a community CSA providing local, organically grown produce from Windham County farms, is about to begin its second season of operation. The farms participating in this years' Market are Circle Mountain Farm, Youth Agriculture Project, Amazing Planet! Farm, Wild Carrot Farm, New Leaf CSA, Guerrilla Grown, and the Community Farm at SIT. The Neighborhood Market is at three locations this year – the Westgate Housing Community, on the lawn of Samuel Elliot Apartments on Elliot Street, and...
In a town marked by its dedication to artistic expression, one organization is working to ensure that the opportunity to create art is available to all Brattleboro residents. Brattleboro musician Jackson Emmer, with the support of the Brattleboro Boys and Girls Club, Westgate Housing Community, and the Vermont Jazz Center, is looking for backers for his new Free is Art program, which intends to provide free artistic and musical training to underprivileged area residents. Emmer, who is originally from Palo...
Dover Elementary School students have 36 new laptops and printers to use at school and at home, thanks to a project that aims to increase digital literacy within rural communities and encourage broadband use. “This is the world they're growing up in, and the most responsible thing we can do is to prepare them,” said Eric Bird, lead trainer for the Dover Elementary project. Bird works with Digital Wish, in Manchester Center, which has given the school computers for students...
Craig Divis of Bellows Falls Union High School has been awarded a Distinguished Fulbright Award in Teaching grant to conduct research in South Africa, the United States Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. Divis will be working with teachers and students in South Africa to learn more about how apartheid is taught in schools and its place in the curriculum, specifically the violent and non-violent anti-apartheid movements. He says he wants to see if there...
They don't own a full-sized tractor. Or a barn, or a farm, for that matter. But that has not stopped Caitlin Burlett, Jesse Kayan, and Max Madalinski from digging in and rooting their lives firmly in farming. This summer, the three twenty-something farmers will offer shares in Wild Carrot Farm, their Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm in Brookline. The trio are leasing five acres from Norman and Laura Solomon, owners of Windmill Hill Alpaca Farm and Artisanry. Burlett, Kayan, and...
Climate change has come to Vermont. From local volunteers, officials, and members of organizations like the Windham Regional Commission (WRC), to our elected representatives in state government, Vermonters are addressing the strange weather patterns that are becoming the rule, not the exception, all over the state. Exhibit A: Lake Champlain, which remains above flood stage and continues to cause damage to homes and property along the shoreline in Chittenden County, as well as in New York state and Canada. In...