Sign up for our eNewsletterBy Jeff Clemetson | Editor
On June 29, construction workers raised and installed the final beam for the frame of Alvarado Hospital’s emergency room expansion.
To celebrate the milestone, construction workers and hospital staff gathered for a ceremony that included speeches, food and the signing of the last beam. In a tradition of ironworkers, the final beam was strapped with an American flag and a small pine tree.
By Doug Curlee | Editor at Large
“Scary! It was very scary to see flames that close to my house.”
Brenda Wise recalls the afternoon of May 22 more clearly than she wants to. The flames of what was named the “Rock Fire” were only a few hundred feet from her house at the end of Big Rock Road in Santee.
By Jeff Clemetson | Editor
There was a moment when Tracy Dahlkamp doubted that she could pull off bringing back the Lake Murray Fireworks and MusicFest. She wasn’t sure that people cared enough to bring back the annual July 4 event.
“When we started this project, I was concerned because I wasn’t sure that the community wanted it and my husband said to me, ‘You know what, if people give you money, that will tell you they want it,’” she said. “And we got a lot of money. We got a lot of support.”
By Mario Koran | Voice of San Diego
On a recent evening, a group of PTA parents from Gage Elementary huddled together in the back of a Del Cerro bistro to brainstorm ideas for how to handle a school district that they say can’t or won’t answer basic questions about their children’s school.
At the table sat an exceptionally well-resourced group of parents. Lisa Deaton is a scientist for a pharmaceutical company. Megan Nuñez is a special education attorney. Jeff Bennett is a member of the National Guard who also serves on the District Advisory Council, an advisory board that makes recommendations for how the district should spend money to support students.
By Della Elliott
The inmate journals tell the story best about renewed hope and aspirations that a new program offering Grossmont College classes at Las Colinas jail have brought to the women, the first ever to enroll in college at the facility.
Haydee described the epiphany of lessons learned in a counseling course on College and Career Success, one of three classes offered to inmates at the Las Colinas Detention and Re-entry Facility in Santee. Pathways to Success Academy is a joint pilot program of the college and the jail that provides nine college credits, tutoring and financial aid information to inmates who succeed in the five-month regimen of instruction, homework and tests.
By Frank Sabatini Jr.
A visit to Tak Grill potentially sends you on a culinary odyssey through several countries beginning with Iran, where Hossein Ebrahimi ran a similar eatery before emigrating to the U.S. several years ago.
His native recipes for minty shirazi salad and succulent meat kebabs are supplemented by dishes common to Turkey, Lebanon and Greece — chicken shawarma, stuffed grape leaves, lamb-beef gyros and falafel.
By Doug Curlee | Editor at Large
Who would ever think someone would pay money for a necklace composed of a .50 caliber cartridge? An increasingly growing number of people will, apparently.
That’s why Grantville-based Bullets2Bandages is now a fast-growing enterprise offering all kinds of military-oriented gifts and useful items that were once heavy military ammo.
By Cynthia Robertson
By Doug Curlee | Editor at Large
The on-again, off-again saga of Fourth of July fireworks at Lake Murray are apparently back on again, but there are “ifs” involved.
The fireworks went away in 2012, after a 2011 lawsuit against them was filed by an environmental group upset about setting off fireworks over water — especially over water that is to become drinking water.
By Doug Curlee | Editor at Large
The April 12 meeting of the Navajo Community planning board has been hearing this plan, in one form or another, longer than anyone currently on that board can remember.
It’s the plan that would build homes — in this case, 24 of them — in what is generally considered a gully along the east edge of College Avenue from Interstate 8 west.