One piece of great news was receiving an Outride Bicycle grant from Specialized. Thanks to Carlene Foldenauer, the Safe Routes to School Coordinator for the coastside (whom I knew when she & I were STRS coordinators for CUSD & LHPUSD respectively). She guided us through the whole process, we built a great team led by Greg Virgallito, and we are expecting up to 30 Specialized hardtail mountain bikes sometime in the upcoming school year.

Please check out the slideshow which accompanied the grant proposal. (One could choose a 3 minute video or a power point, so I embedded 8 clips totaling more than 3 minutes – but still quite short – into two of the only seven slides.) Please take the time to watch them, including Mauricio’s beautiful statement and Greg’s amazing bike stunts. There are also a couple cool maps of bike routes on campus and around the area: Riding for Focus.

Another big event was the retiring of Wayne Johnson and Anne Ingraham. It’s gonna take a lot to fill their shoes (but I hope to try in the case of Annie). There was a nice retirement party at the Harley Farms barn…

Certainly, I could elaborate on the actual school year of teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic. Lots to say about Zooming and Google Classrooms (email me if you’re interested). But one huge and tragic event was the death by accidental drug overdose of Sequoyah Klingele. He was in both my Geography and World History classes, and even though he was eventually taken out of Schoolwise (our SIS), I kept him in my Google Classrooms. His death has had a profound impact on La Honda, but it was particularly tragic because his older half-brother, Dakota Foureyes (whom I also had as a student years ago), also overdosed several months earlier. He went my the nickname “Kodak” and you can see his carving work on this piece of wood from the bench at the bus stop which I salvaged from a junk heap to become the frame of my largest assemblage artworks. May they both rest in peace…

Hopefully, I’ll have more posts in the future about the 2021-22 school year and how great it’s gonna be…