Resnikoff, a longtime educator who led Doyle Park for more than 10 years, was an “inspiration to us all as we saw her in action,” said Patti Fitch, a first grade teacher at Doyle Park. “She loved Doyle Park School and was its advocate to the core.”

“I consider it an honor that she was my first principal in the district,” Fitch said.

For the full obituary written by Press Democrat reporter Robert Digitale, click here http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20091118/OBITS/911189911

Every ninth grader on campus will hear the two-day presentation today and Tuesday. Presenters are coming into physical education classes Monday and Tuesday.

9:04: About 45 students file into a classroom.

9:05: The presenter is Keith Woods, CEO of North Coast Builders Exchange. ‘This is a course today in you. A class in ‘you.’” “We are going to talk about money, we are going to talk about time.” “We care for a couple of reasons,” he said. “You are going to be the workers of the future. You are so close to being in the working world, you might not even think about it,” Woods said.

9:09: “Are you wanting to control your future or are you going to let your future control you?” said Robin Bartholow, program director for North Bay Builders Exchange. 9:10: “You don’t need to know now and don’t let anyone tell you you have to know,” Woods said of what students want to do for a career.

9:12: Topics today are factors influencing who they are, the Choices challenge, time management, money management. Tomorrow will be the time of my life, school decisions and career consequences, future impact, keys to success.

9:13: Factors influencing who I am include: abilities, friends, goals, reputation, year of birth, motivation, race, home life, family income, interests, education, culture, heredity. Woods gets a laugh when he asks whether students have control over their gender.

9:22: “For the most part you’ve got a say in you,” he said. “There are a lot of things you control and we want you to think about it.”

9:23: “It’s not the right answer, but I like your style,” Woods says to a student named Dylan Burr.

9:24 Students are going over what it means to have self-discipline: self-control, doing the right thing when no one is looking, saying yes when you want to say no or saying no when you would rather say yes.

9:26 Lily Avila and Alex volunteer for the Choices Challenge. Students are asked to make choices between studying for a final and attending a pro basketball game; between transferring to a specialty high school or taking a good-paying food server job.

9:33: “The point here is we all have decisions to make, we are presented with decisions that come up in our life daily. Are we going to think about the consequences of our decisions before or after?” Bartholow said.

9:34 This exercise is about the hours in the day and whether students have the time to do what they want to do and what they have to do. They are handed a purple sheets with two clocks on it – one for weekdays and one for weekends. They are marking their clocks with blocks of how they are spending their time.

9:41: “Stop for a moment and think about this there are 49 hours of you, even with two hours of homework a day,” Woods said of an average week. “It’s how you manage and use your time. The clock should be a reminder that you do the time.”

9:42: “Start to keep track of how you spend your time, it’s an eye opener to you,” Woods said. “What do you want to do with your coming week.”

9:43: “Remember balance,” Bartholow said. “There is a lot more time in the day than I think we realize.”

9:46 Students are doing an exercise on what happens to a one-month paycheck at minimum wage. Student volunteer Noemi Sanchez has to pay for: taxes, rent “come on up Mrs. Landlord,”; utilities; food and supplies (“Ajax to clean your bathroom because your mom’s not doing that anymore”). Sanchez just had to hand over her last dollar but she still has more bills to pay. A student shouts out “Look at that hobo!”

9:52: “All jobs are honorable, all jobs are good…but you have fewer options with a job where you make $9 an hour,” Bartholow said.

9:53: What else can she do for money? “She could recycle cans,” a kid yells out. “I could be the crazy old lady with a cart,” Sanchez said.

The free discussion will be from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. in the multi-purpose room of the Student Union.

Sociology professor Sheila Katz will head the discussion that will also include a discussion about recent developments in state and national policy.

“With the nation’s unemployment rate over 10 percent and California’s even higher, issues of poverty, hunger and homelessness need immediate attention,” Katz said in a statement.

“The current economic conditions are increasing the need for local service programs, at the same time as funding for these programs (is) decreasing,” she said.

Panel members include participants, volunteers and staff from organizations including the Committee on the Shelterless, the Redwood Empire Food Bank, Catholic Charities Family Support Center and the Salvation Army.

Admission is free.

The talk is a part of a week of activities to mark Homeless Awareness Week. For more information, go to 

http://www.sonoma.edu/pubs/newsrelease/archives/2009/11/students_work_t.html

To become a finalist, a semifinalist must have an outstanding academic record throughout high school, be endorsed and recommended by the high school principal and earn SAT scores that confirm the student’s earlier performance on the qualifying test.

Here the locals:

Cloverdale High School:

Frederick Westenberg

Casa Grande High School:

Anisa Li

Kristen Schwabe-Fry

Maria Carrillo High:

Stevie Chang

Madeline DiRado

Yanran Lu

Lauren Matevish

Montgomery High:

Kelly Cai

Benjamin Meeker

Camy Pearson

Christine Elizabeth Vivio

Santa Rosa High:

Kjellen Belcher

Colin Caskey

Peter Desauteis

Dante Dugan

George Mulcaire

Ursuline High:

Elizabeth Davison

Michelle Stone

Analy High:

Esther Vigil

Sonoma High:

David De Smet

Kevin McCarthy

The annual award is given to one alum and one member of the community who have showed “lasting and meaningful service to Cardinal Newman High School and the greater community,” and other qualities, according to school officials.

Trione, a longtime philanthropist in all corners  of Sonoma County, initiated and sponsored the Cardinal Newman and Ursuline ensemble and pep band.

Molinaro, a 1972 graduate of Cardinal Newman, is a longtime sponsor of the annual Alumni Golf Tournament, funds from which student scholarships are drawn. Molinaro is also a longtime supporter of the Redwood Empire Food Bank.

 Trione and Molinaro will be recognized during a private President’s Reception on Dec. 2 and again at the Cardinal Newman Legacy Gala on March 20.

Russell, who studies under Lisa Piehl in Santa Rosa High’s FFA program and ag department, works at Petaluma Farms.

The national FFA convention is the nation’s largest annual youth gathering — some 50,000 students who participate in FFA all over the country, according to the organization.

In other FFA news, check out Saturday’s Press Democrat for a story on Petaluma High’s second place finish in the dairy cattle evaluation competition. That team is headed to Scotland next June for an international competition. Read the story here http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20091113/ARTICLES/911139958/1350?Title=Petaluma-FFA-champs-will-head-to-international-competition

“We are just trying to highlight all the stuff at Piner,” she said. “We want them to come to our school.”

Students toured Piner’s geospatial tech classrooms, culinary facilities, heard about the early college magnet program and other things specific to the Fulton Road campus, Correia said. They then ate a lunch prepared by students in Piner’s culinary program and attended the school’s twice-yearly academic rally where students with top grades are honored by the student body.

Students also got to talk to members of Prospector athletic teams.

 “We want to get these kids here,” Correia said. “We really want to pull them here because they are local.”

 The photos posted here were taken by leadership students Andrew Jones, Brandon Larson and Asa Rimal.

To see Piner’s web site, go to www.pinerhigh.com

The discussions were prompted in part by one employee’s request not to be named.

There were questions of whether using the names would re-victimize this person or put people in further danger. There was talk of whether using the names changes what is important in the story: Are school employees safe doing their job? What is going on with a student that would make him/her behave this way?

Are the names attached to these incidents important in the telling of those stories or the examination of those questions?

It was argued that the students who attacked these professionals know their names, so to print it in a newspaper story doesn’t put them in further danger.

The descriptions of what they went through are laid out in public documents. Court proceedings were held to determine that a real threat existed. These cases were not made in secret and we did not learn the information by way of a leak or via a promise of confidentiality.

At the community level, if you read the story and know the people affected, doesn’t that make it more real to you? Might that inspire a greater interest in what it takes to be a teacher or assistant principal or campus supervisor today? The staffers did nothing to deserve what they got, but maybe they deserve a larger conversation about school safety and maybe that conversation happens because you know them.

On a human level, there was consideration for how these staffers feel, having been beaten by students and then having that story told publicly. After all, we are not running the names of the students because they are minors.

Therein lies a secondary discussion.

We know their names because they are listed in the petition for a restraining order. But school officials, bound by confidentiality laws, won’t discuss the students and law enforcement and juvenile hall won’t either. So we don’t know if these students were arrested, charged or expelled.

Without knowing what charges, if any, these students are facing, it was decided not to override this newspaper’s traditional policy not to run the names of minors involved in criminal complaints unless the crime in question was particularly heinous or the juvenile was to be tried as an adult.

In the end, the decision to run the names of the school employees came down to a simple statement: It’s what we do. It’s what a newspaper does – we report the news, create an historical record and put in as much information as we can to create a complete picture.

That said, it’s not easy when you report abuse. That is why I asked the question: Is this necessary? I know some of these teachers and staffers and I work with them. Most of them were not happy I came calling on this one. There was worry that one incident would paint an incomplete picture of their campus, give people a negative and false impression.

But to me, the story is bigger than a single staffer’s name or a single campus or a single incident. After all, these assaults occurred at four different schools throughout the city. The focus shouldn’t be a staffer’s name or where they work, but what is going on that incites the kind of violence these four students showed.

And whether or not school staffers are safe doing their jobs.

A middle school in North Carolina, struggling with unsuccessful fundraisers, thought selling grades might bring in a little more money than hawking wrapping paper and candy.

“Last year they did chocolates, and it didn’t generate anything,” Rosewood Middle School Principal Susie Shepherd told the Raleigh News Observer.

In the quickly aborted scheme, a student who brought in $20 got 20 extra points – 10 points on two tests of the student’s choosing.

For the full story, click here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/education/story/185460.html

“Gareth Hill, M.S.W., Ph.D. speaks on Masculine and Feminine Patterns in Alchemy, Saturday Nov. 14,  10 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Cooperage on the Sonoma State campus. This seminar is an integrative exploration of the parallels between a model of the Self based on the archetypal patterns of Masculine and Feminine, and the alchemical model of psychological development as developed by C. G. Jung.

“Hill is a certified Jungian analyst member of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, where he is on the teaching faculty and serves as Chair of the Admissions Committee. He is the author of Masculine and Feminine: The Natural Flow of Opposites in the Psyche, and is a former dean at the Sanville Institute, where he is currently on the faculty. He maintains a private practice in Berkeley.

“$20 Admission. Additional $20 fee for 3 hours CE for psychologists(APA), and therapists and social workers (BBS). Cash or check only. Registration at the door the morning of the event. Doors open at 9:30 a.m. Free parking in Lots J and D. For more information see www.sonoma.edu/psychology/depth/“