15 years ago
• With expenses outpacing contributions, the decision of the First Baptist Church in Brattleboro to sell a valuable one-of-a-kind, 9-foot-tall Tiffany stained-glass window caught the national press attention and triggered an outpouring of donations and community concern.
The 88-member church's finances have been ravaged by declining membership.
• Recent repairs to the 100-year-old Rockingham Free Public Library have improved the environment for employees and patrons, but an architect has warned that, without an additional $1.9 million in repairs, the building will continue to deteriorate.
With a number of patrons and staff reporting respiratory reactions in the library, Bellows Falls Village Trustees contracted with an environmental consulting firm to investigate the cause of this poor air quality.
A resulting evaluation revealed the worst problem to be mold and asbestos in the basement rooms, and the town addressed the problem both there and in the youth bathrooms.
10 years ago
• A digital grid of blue lines punctuated by purple dots shone on a projector screen at the head of a training room in Entergy corporate headquarters on Old Ferry Road in Brattleboro.
One by one, over three hours on Dec. 29, green dots appeared inside the grid, which represented the 368 fuel assemblies that power the reactor at the company's Vermont Yankee nuclear plant in Vernon.
The green dots illustrated the addition of control rods made of boron-containing metal that slow the nuclear reaction.
As VY operators in the plant's control room inserted control rods, the reactor's power level slowly decreased. After 42 years, at 12:12 p.m., VY disconnected from the New England power grid.
And then, at 1:04 p.m., the reactor shut down for the final time.
• Libraries have always been important to Emily Zervas, the newly appointed director of the Putney Public Library, who took up her duties in the first week of January.
Zervas served Rockingham Free Public Library as interim co-director during the period following the library board's controversial firing and eventual reinstatement of the library director. As co-director, Zervas helped guide the move into the newly renovated library. She led brainstorming sessions with the staff, developing new policies and procedures, through which she discovered that she enjoys long-term planning.
Frankie Knibb, one of PPL's trustees, said many factors influenced their selection of Zervas. "She is a very poised young woman with strong experience," Knibb said. "She is really a part of the community and has been using the library for a number of years."
• Art recently became more accessible to producers and patrons in downtown Brattleboro with the opening of Brattleboro Printmakers, founded by Leigh Niland and James Primrose.
Now that the studio is complete, the relatively low cost for entry has already brought in 15 members, and Primrose says he expects more.
Primrose says early supporters include Jonas Fricke of Putney, "who has done a lot of artwork here for The Future Collective. He was our first member."
5 years ago
• School Superintendent Lyle Holiday loves education.
Politics? Not her happy place.
"It was a very hard decision," said Lyle Holiday of her recent decision to retire from the role of superintendent after three years serving the Windham Southeast Supervisory Union (WSESU). She leaves her job on June 30.
"I want to be right up front: I love my job and I love the people that I work with - the teachers, the administrators, and the staff - that has really been the thing that's made it hard to decide what to do," she said.
Holiday started her career in the district almost 40 years ago as a student teacher. In the decades that followed, she has served as a classroom teacher, as the supervisory union's curriculum coordinator, and most recently, as the superintendent.
• In Ricky Davidson's new office, the sun-faded corkboard over his desk shows the shapes of the previous tenant's papers: a heart-shape document here, a few small squares in the corner.
Davidson sits comfortably in his office chair - almost as if he moved in months ago. But it has been only three weeks since he left as executive director of the Boys & Girls Club of Brattleboro to become the high school's new student assistance program counselor (SAPC), where he serves as the go-to person on substance issues and prevention in the high school.
"I really see myself as trying to make [school] as successful as possible for as many kids as possible," he said.
This News item was submitted to The Commons.