Harrington News - Panthers experience varied education; updates on opera house schedule

November

Panther Newsletter

A recently printed Panther News highlighted the Cowboy Buck and Elizabeth performance including details of their practice sessions at the school. The fifth and sixth grades took a field trip to the Eastern Washington University Challenge Course behind Roos Field on the campus. The third and fourth grades also went. “They have set up many hands-on activities that reinforce the themes of ’trust’ and ’teamwork’.” As one continues through the newsletter, it tells of the fifth and sixth-grade classes going to the Pre-K students to perform two Reader’s Theater books.

The first grade also took a field trip. They went to the Harrington Fire Station to learn about fire safety, but also were allowed to spray water from the truck. Taunya Sanford’s Kindergarten class accompanied them and learned from Fire Chief Scott McGowan and firemen Dusty Oestreich, Jordan Wagner and Brandon Larmer. Pre-schoolers with their teacher Carrie Halme are now learning about farm animals with familiar readings such as the “Three Little Pigs” and “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.” Their projects were learning where milk comes from and making butter from cream by taking turns shaking the jar. The Second Graders are busily involved in a math workshop and a reading workshop and learning all the building blocks for sentence structures.

Michael Cronrath, who teaches Social Studies, has the seventh-grade World Cultures students starting an in-depth look at North America; the eighth-grade geography class is concentrating on the continent of Europe and with new technology. Cronrath predicts that his class will learn 90% of the countries and their capitals in less than five minutes. The tenth-graders are beginning “an extended unit on the Revolutionary War. The Seniors are working on the 1960s in their Recent American History section of Current World History.” The ninth-grade class took a field trip to North Idaho to the edge of the National Forest where they met five SERE (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape) instructors from Fairchild Air Force Base. These instructors “customized the training to fit events and scenarios in the book, so students learned about how to treat injuries, how to signal for help, how to build shelters, how to forage for food and procure water, how to create small snares, how to navigate using different types of maps.” This was all a part of the introduction to reading the book “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding.

Dates to mark on the calendar for school events and dismissals included: November 4, Sunday, when the Harrington Homemakers served chili and homemade cinnamon rolls followed by Turkey Bingo at 1 p.m. Bingo cards were 50 cents each for a chance to win. Prizes included turkey, ham, rolls, pies and assorted prizes. November 9 at 10:15 in the gym, Michael Cronrath will present the annual Veterans Day Program, highlighting that this is the 100th year of the Armistice, which ended the fighting in World War I. The public is encouraged to attend this celebration of Harrington’s heroes. Learn of the men and women from Harrington who responded to our nation’s need and willingly served. School is canceled on Nov. 12, the legal holiday. There will be parent-teacher conferences on Nov. 19 and 20. Parents are encouraged to arrange a time with the appropriate teachers. School is closed November 22 and 23 for Thanksgiving. Announcements are out for the December 1 Hometown Bazaar. Santa will be at the Harrington Opera House from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. The Bazaar will open at noon in the Memorial Hall and close at 5 p.m. Homemade soup and rolls will be served from noon to 5 p.m. Entertainment throughout the day will include Christmas music on the keyboard, children’s piano performances, tap and jazz dance class and children’s crafts from 1-2 p.m. Individuals wanting to reserve a vendor space need to get their request in by phoning Carolyn Mattozzi at 509-215-0158 of the PTA or stopping in at the Post & Office to speak with Heather Slack. Spaces are about eight square feet for $20. At 5:15 p.m. there will be the annual tree lighting ceremony.

Harrington Opera

House Society

The Society is pleased to announce a return visit by Scott Kirby on Nov. 9, at 7 p.m. with his unique multi-media presentation of photographs, paintings and piano music. He “specializes in American and Pan-American musical genres, combining the worlds of classical, folk and popular music, performing musical styles, including classic Ragtime, Brazilian Tango, Blues, Traditional Jazz, Creole and Americana, as well as original compositions.” His appearance in November 2016 was marked with a large appreciative crowd and he responded well to their encore.

Coming this fall, Nov. 18, at 2 p.m. will be Mayumi Tsutakawa, an independent writer and editor, who will speak at the Harrington Opera House, sponsored by Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau. Tsutakawa’s presentation will be “The Pine and the Cherry: Japanese Americans in Washington.” Her topic will focus on the period following Executive Order No. 9066 by President Roosevelt which gave the military “broad powers to ban any citizen from a fifty-to-sixty-mile wide coastal area stretching from Washington state to California and extending inland into southern Arizona.” Japanese citizens could then be transported to assembly centers, comparable to concentration camps and called internment centers. According to one report, 120,000 Japanese Americans were forced from their homes across the West Coast.

Tsutakawa will speak at length of the injustices that were imposed on this group of citizens. She will address the poor quality buildings that were hastily built to meet with the urgency of the situation. She will discuss the role of widespread hysteria in the formulation of attitudes and laws. Finally, she will address the impact on the Japanese who, when they were allowed to return to their homes, most often found that they had lost everything. To make matters worse, they were not able to find jobs. It is true that some aliens who were Italian and many Germans suffered these same violations, but with the Japanese it was far more sweeping in the uprooting of entire communities and targeting citizens, as well as resident aliens. Tsutakawa’s father, George Tsutakawa, was a renowned sculptor, and it is anticipated that she will reveal a portion of her family’s history.