Karin Higgins, UC Davis
Eastern fox squirrel on UC Davis campus

When the squirrels aren’t being hunted for fun or falling to their death in flames caused by carelessly hung “power lines,” they just enjoy making sweet whoopee and raising families. And who can blame them, right?

Now word comes that the folks at UC Davis have had it up to here with the fertile squirrels on their campus and will be putting them on the pill next summer:

Officials said the university is being overrun with eastern fox squirrels, which aren’t natives of the Davis area…Faculty wildlife experts and their students plan to capture some of the squirrels next summer and give them hormone injections to try to limit offspring.

Hmmm, that tail sure looks familiar.

Some well-played investigative work by Kel Munger turns up different text on the English-language and Russian-language versions of an information card being passed out to ARC students urging them to vote No on the proposed recall of 9 ARC Student Association officers. The board passed a resolution in support of Proposition 8 on the November ballot, which inserts a hetero-only marriage definition into the California Constitution. Kel has some great posts up about the scandal.

My initial reaction was that a recall was a bit of an anti-democratic play from a group advocating for treating people with fairness, as no rule-breaking or misdeeds are alleged on the part of the officers as far as I know. But these officers are probably elected to terms of less than a year, and letting democracy do its thing and voting them out after their term would be pointless. Who would have ever thought that American River College would become a hotbed of democracy in action?

Great story about the Cristo Rey High School football team in today’s Bee. Go Saints!

KCRA, Fox40, SacBee.com and others are reporting that a junior at Mira Loma High School is on life support after shooting himself in a bathroom at the school. How terrible. Hopefully he will pull through.

Update: Unfortunately I am hearing that the young man passed away, but that isn’t being reported anywhere else.

Kudos to the Sac Bee for its newest salary database on all of the state’s teachers. “See how well your school district pays its teachers.” Not “See how much your kid’s teacher makes.” The tool allows you to look up district average salaries and other data, and compare salaries across districts in a region or across the state. A useful tool without any of the privacy issues. This should be the model for all of the Bee’s salary databases.

I do think it is interesting that the spin has been spun somewhat on this one… “Are teachers in your area making what they deserve?” That sentiment is absent from Melanie Sill’s editorial on the backlash to the State worker pay database. Back then it was all about doing a public service, giving us information about worker compensation because “state spending [is] under pressure.” Now, it’s all about making sure your kid’s teacher is getting a good paycheck? Maybe I’m splitting hairs, but I sense that the Bee is making some much needed course corrections here.

The Bee reports this morning that Kevin Johnson’s personal attorney conducted an internal investigation of the allegations brought against KJ by a Sac High student last spring, before notifying law enforcement or CPS. As a result the student recanted before the Sac PD conducted their investigation. According to Sgt. Matt Young, the Sac PD’s investigation was wrapped up in 8 days.

Maybe commenter Jean was right and this was the new angle the Bee was researching. It is unclear to me yet whether the sequence of events did not proceed according to legal SOP in this realm. The lawyer, Kevin Hiestand, claims he did tell the teacher, Erik Jones, to file reports with the police and CPS. Jones claims Hiestand told him the school would investigate first. The girl and her family still claim the story was made up. On the other hand we still have the decade old transcript of the confrontation call. All anybody can really do at this point is assume that the creepy guy in that 1996 phone call was guilty of crossing the same boundaries in 2007.

If you’re a parent of a child in the Sac City Unified School District you might have been recently working through the open enrollment program to enroll your child at one of the district’s fine schools outside your own home area. If that’s the case I hope you were able to get your timeline straight, because the District was not. From the Open Enrollment brochure (PDF):

Elementary, K-8 and middle schools will be notified of placement by the Open Enrollment staff during the week of April 18, 2008.

Continue reading “Sac City’s open enrollment calendar confuses” »

Tomorrow, the CIF will bring the best high school basketball teams from Northern California to Arco Arena for the NorCal championship games. Next weekend, the NorCal champs will face the SoCal winners in the finals. The Sac-Joaquin Section boasts several teams that have a shot at the state championship, so let’s get pumped and show some support! Woo!

In Division 1, Kennedy has the #2 raked girls team in NorCal. They will face #1 ranked Berkeley High in the semi-finals to see who will face the SoCal champion.

In Division 2 girls, #1 St. Francis will face #6 Archbishop Mitty.

The game of the year is definitely the Division 3 girls semi-final, with the only two undefeated teams in California vying for the NorCal title. #2 St. Mary’s of Stockton (GO RAMS!!!!!) will face #1 Sacred Heart Cathedral (SF).

The Division 3 boys match features a battle of the upsetting underdogs, with #7 Sacramento High battling #6 Sacred Heart Cathedral.

Best of luck to all of our local teams!

This photo provides an ironic
touchpoint to the article.

The Bee reported yesterday on a new rule at McClatchy High School banning students from wearing the color red. Problem is, the school’s colors are red and white.

Now I am not very educated when it comes to current gang problems, names of gangs, ways to identify bangers, which gangs are the coolest, etc. I’m sure that banning the color red is a great way to go, since I assume gangs usually wear solid color outfits to maximize their display of the gang-affiliated color. For example, gang members who are fans of the Yankees baseball club must have a tough time, since their team colors are blue and white. If their gang color is red, they are screwed. Likewise, a gang member itching to wear red is going to shy away from anything with something else on it like an M or a picture of a lion, right?

Continue reading ““McClatchy Red” banned at… McClatchy” »

How bad is this San Juan scheduling mix-up? Actually, that’s not a rhetorical question, I still have no idea how this actually happened. The CBS13 story is very vague:

Some principals told students they could come for a shorter day while other students were taking the exit exams but in essence they needed to be there the whole day for the state required classroom minutes to count.

And those shortened days off added up to 4 whole school days at Encina? Wow. I can imagine being pretty pissed if I were a San Juan parent right now. After all, as we all know, all the schools really have to do is babysit the kids for a predetermined amount of time. I kid the everybody…

But seriously, the exit exams are not a new thing, and neither is the “required minutes of instruction” thing. How could things get this bad? Could nobody remember what they did during exit testing last year? Anybody else got a question?