The Vineyard Haven harbor’s two pump out boats carried between 12,000 and 15,000 gallons of raw sewage from holding tanks on boats to the town’s sewer system during this past boating season, according to harbor master John (Jay) M. Wilbur 3rd.

And as the demand for pump outs increases every year, the town harbor department is beginning to have trouble coping, Mr. Wilbur said.

Statistics may not always be reliable, but the writing on the wall seemed pretty legible: many teenagers are having a hard time on the Island. This year’s Island-wide youth survey showed a spike in the number of students who said they attempted suicide in the last year and Martha’s Vineyard Hospital records showed a spike in the number of teens admitted for attempting suicide this year.

Women are failing their driver's license road tests at nearly twice the rate as men on the Vineyard, according to Registry of Motor Vehicles (RMV) data from January to September 2007.

While 24 per cent of males failed their road test on the Vineyard so far this year, 43 per cent of females failed. That difference of 19 percentage points is the biggest gender discrepancy of all 38 test locations in Massachusetts - mostly RMVs -for which 2007 data is available.

Buddhism is on the rise in Brazil, and West Tisbury journalist Perry Garfinkel has some ideas on why.

He’s the author of the 2006 national bestseller Buddha or Bust: In Search of Truth, Meaning, Happiness, and the Man Who Found Them All. When the Portuguese edition of the book was released in June, Mr. Garfinkel traveled to Brazil, where the national census shows the percentage of Roman Catholics there has dropped from about 90 to 70 per cent since 1980.

With extreme regret and "hoping she'll change her mind," the regional high school committee accepted principal Margaret (Peg) Regan's resignation on Monday night and made some decisions on how to proceed with the search process for a new principal for Martha's Vineyard Regional High School.

The Edgartown School can rest easy for the moment.

Numbers released by the state Department of Education last week show that the school passed its annual yearly progress (AYP) requirement on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) test in both English language arts and mathematics. This means that the state will not be stepping in to take corrective action.

Now it’s the West Tisbury School and the Oak Bluffs School that must focus on bringing up their test scores next year. The two schools did not meet their AYP in English this year.