After more than 100 Island high schoolers called in sick on Wednesday — including 10 football players, 10 members of the boys’ soccer team and the cheerleading coach — Saturday’s football game and the season’s final two soccer matches were canceled, beginning a cascade of sports suspensions and other precautions as cases of suspected H1N1 flu spread quickly among Vineyard youths.
Longtime YMCA executive Jill Robie will relocate from Orono, Me., to become interim executive director of the Martha’s Vineyard Y beginning Monday, Nov. 2.
Ms. Robie will take over from Margaret (Peg) Regan, the retired regional high school principal who has been acting in the role since August. Construction of the 38,000-square-foot center in Oak Bluffs began in May; the first phase of the complex is expected to be completed in May 2010.
In the small town where he lived, there is no memorial to Matthew Shepard. The fence post where he, an openly gay man of 21, hung dying for some 18 hours, tied up after being pistol-whipped, has been torn down. The bar from which he was lured to his murder is gone.
He carries in his fingertips the rhythms of the world, from the Caribbean calypso that cries out from his old beat-up steel drum, to the Cuban guaguanco (wa-wan-kó) that comes from his congas, to the Brazilian sambas he lays down in layers. The samba he teaches in parts — one, for instance, he taps out to the phrase, “I like pizza, all kinds of pizza” — to groups of elderly Parkinson’s patients, to preschoolers, to prisoners and to people with cerebral palsy.
The Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School celebrated the addition of four newly-built classrooms at a potluck ribbon-cutting ceremony on Tuesday evening in West Tisbury.
Board president Laura Sargent Hall used hedge clippers to slash the blue ribbon, and school girls collected the gold bows for souvenirs, after some singing and bagpipe music greeted the latest extension to the post-and-beam school that began 14 years ago with nothing but the main hallway connecting some classroom trailers.
Events and Secret Service agents conspired to keep President Obama largely distant from Islanders this week, though a few found themselves up close, or at least close enough to snap their own photos.
“It was a very close encounter,” said former year-round resident Tom Murro, who was visiting this week from his New Jersey home when he found himself shaking hands with Mr. Obama on Monday.
