Two arrests were made Feb. 24 in connection with the Feb. 13 robbery of a man walking down 44th Avenue in front of MTHS.

Parents of MTHS students were alerted to the robbery a week later via email due to the close proximity of the school to the scene of the crime. The email indicated that four men had attacked a lone 18-year-old at around 6:30 p.m., beating him and stealing his cell phone. Other details included that in addition to punching the victim, who was not an MTHS student, one suspect threatened to use a machete on him if he did not comply with the robbery.

The crime could not be reported immediately, as the victim was no longer in possession of a cell phone, but two teenaged suspects were identified and arrested 11 days later. The suspects are from Everett and aged 16 and 17, with the 16-year-old accused of being the machete wielder. Police are actively searching for a third suspect but have not provided any further details to the public.

There was another armed robbery the two days later within four blocks of MTHS, though students were not formally informed by school administrators in this case.

An Asian market was robbed at gunpoint by a suspect described by the victim as a black male in his 20s or 30s, who wielded a black air pistol later found near the scene of the crime. No arrests have been made in this case, and the two robberies are not believed to be related. Persons with relevant information are encouraged to contact the Mountlake Terrace Police Department.

Expanding film through education, the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) offers youth under 18 the opportunity to submit their films to the festival for a reduced rate. The program is titled FutureWave.

Senior Nick Terry’s film, “Senior Prom,” has been accepted into the festival through the FutureWave program. Guidelines to the program state that entered films must be no loner than 10 minutes, yet they made an exception to the rule for Terry’s 80-plus minute film.

SIFF is one of the largest, longest, and most prestigious film festivals in the world.

In 2009 13 youth films debuted in the festival, selected from more than 100 submissions.

SIFF’s mission is to create experiences that bring people together to discover extraordinary films from around the world. It is through the art of cinema that they foster a community that is more informed, aware and alive.

The festival will run from May 20 to June 13 at many locations throughout the Seattle area.

Other questions concerning the SIFF FutureWave program, or if you want more information about when to catch Terry’s film, check the Hawkeye’s Web site for information as it becomes available.

Times of economic downturn are when charitable giving may have the most impact, but it is also likely to be more difficult. It can also be difficult to see the tangible impact of monetary donations.

According to the American Red Cross, a blood donation is required every two seconds of every day. That is 38,000 per day and roughly 14 million for a year. One out of every 10 people admitted to a hospital require a blood transfusion. Money donations provide many valuable resources to hospitals, but they cannot provide blood. Blood donations have an extremely high value due to their necessity in many cases.

There are 12 pints of blood circulating the human body. The human body can sustain small cuts and replenish its supply of blood in time after clotting over the wound. Problems arise when blood is lost too quickly and the heart cannot produce enough blood to meet with the demand for it. That is when blood transfusions become necessary. If patients do not get the blood they need, they will die, regardless of the quality of medical care.

The qualifications for giving blood are very inclusive to facilitate a wide variety of donors. Donors must to be 110 pounds and at least sixteen years of age.

Some other precautionary details can make a donor intelligible to give blood. Donors cannot have their blood drawn if they have received a tattoo within a year, or if they are sick at the time of donation.

The donor’s iron level is checked, and female donors are asked if they are pregnant. Other questions related to sexual activity are asked confidentially to ensure that the blood has not been contaminated in any way. Blood centers take all blood types, and will inform the donor of their blood type for free a few weeks after it has been taken.

There are some medical side effects to getting blood drawn, though none are extremely serious. Patients may feel queasiness or fatigue for a short amount of time. Drinking large quantities of water and eating a large breakfast can mitigate these effects.

The blood drive at MTHS this year surpassed expectations for donations. All 80 spaces on the sign up list were quickly filled, along with a waiting list. At least 80 pints of blood were given, which means that on Friday, Mountlake Terrace students combined to give enough blood to save 240 lives, not counting the possible pints collected later by donors on the waiting list.

There are several opportunities available for students who were unable to give blood Friday but would still like to. The Puget Sound Blood Center has a large facility for blood donation and there are numerous blood centers in the area for quick donation.

The increased economic difficulties can make rising medical costs a much more substantial burden on many families, a burden that could be significantly lessened with more charitable blood given of the type seen at Mountlake Terrace High School last week.

Current Washington state high school juniors will be affected by a change in the College Academic Distribution Requirements (CADR), which refers to the particular types and amount of credits required to enter a Washington state college. Beginning next year, students must take one credit of math during their senior year. Students must also take two credits of laboratory science. These standards are set by the Washington Higher Education Control Board (HEC) and specifically impact science and the amount of math required of students who will be seniors in 2012 and beyond. The current minimum requirements consist of four credits of English, three credits of mathematics, two credits of world language, three credits of social science, one credit of art, and two credits of science. This credit requirement may be completed by taking Algebra 2 if the student has not taken it yet, a math-based quantitative course such as statistics, applied math, a relevant career and technical course, or an algebra based science course.

Some colleges have also revised their requirements slightly in accordance with the new policy, with Western Washington University specifying that the algebra-based science course must be chemistry or physics, and both the University of Washington and Western Washington University specifying that half of the art credit may be in an academic elective.

“The senior-year math requirement does not mean a fourth credit of math is required, nor does it require a higher level of math. The intent of this requirement is for seniors to take meaningful math,” states the HEC in its Minimum College Admission Standards for Students and Parents document.

Since the intent is for seniors to take meaningful math, students who have completed pre-calculus or higher their during junior year are exempt from the revised math requirement. Most juniors who have been planning their classes based on the previous CADR will likely be facing four years of math, as well as slight revisions to any electives they have planned for their senior year. The CADR differs from high school graduation requirements, which are determined by local school boards. Students who wish to know more about the CADR revisions can visit the HEC Web site for a full overview of the revised policy.

Beginning Jan. 1 Community Transit’s paper bus transfer distribution system was eliminated, and replaced with the One Regional Card for All (ORCA) card.

ORCA cards serve two purposes in the world of community transit; firstly, as a means to pay initial bus fare, and secondly as an electronic bus transfer that will last up to two hours after riders purchase their bus pass. The ORCA card costs extra for the bus transfer aspect of the card, along with however much more your wish to put on it to pay for bus fare with. This new system mimics other single-pass programs found in large cities such as San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, and Washington D.C.

The card is currently free, but beginning Feb.1 they will cost five dollars. They will last for three to five years.

In the past riders have been able to pay their fare upon entering the bus, received a paper bus transfer, and been allowed to transfer as many times as they wished within the next few hours depending on when they purchased their original fare.

“I bought an ORCA card like a week ago,” said sophomore Community Transit rider Laura Karnoski. Karnoski uses Community Transit daily and finds fault with the new regulations enforced alongside the ORCA card.

ORCA cards eliminate the need to carry change, but also cut down the time allotment riders used to have to transfer with significantly.

Karnoski used to have to transfer three times a day to get to school but lately her father has been driving her to school, “partly because we cannot afford the ridiculously high cost of bus passes, and unbelievably, because it’s just cheaper to buy gas,” she said.

“[The ORCA card] discourages users from taking the bus, especially people to have to take the bus, the same people who take the bus because they can’t afford a car,” Karnoski said, “This is no battle for inflation.”

Sophomore Hunter Goncalves got her ORCA card at Westlake Center in August when they first came out. Goncalves lives out of district and takes community transit every day, to and from school, transferring one time each way. “I do like [the ORCA card] though. It’s handy and it’s cute,” Goncalves said. “It’s easier because you just swipe the card. It makes me feel cosmopolitan.”

Although Goncalves prefers the ORCA card to paper bus passes she pointed out that riders used to be able to purchase a month long bus pass that would give them unlimited rides all month long, but bus passes are no longer available.

“It’s obvious [community transit] needs money. But instead of raising their fare to $1.25, they should hold car washes or cookie dough fundraisers,” Goncalves said.

Two men from Mountlake Terrace are now threatening to sue the city after their request for a business license to open a medical marijuana dispensary was rejected.

Todd Madison and Aaron Panagos have both been using marijuana in the place of painkillers, which they claim never worked for them, for years. After running a business out of their homes for almost a year now, the two decided to open up a public for-profit dispensary.

In September, they applied for a business license to open a Botanical Urban Dispensary Service (BUDS) in Mountlake Terrace. But in early October, Madison received a letter from the city, denying the business license request. A later appeal to the rejection was also denied. Now the two men are threatening to sue the city if they are not allowed to open their medical dispensary.

Madison and Panagos’ business license request has crossed into some unprecedented territory- Although Initivatve 692, which was passed in 1998, legalized medical marijuana in the state of Washington and gave physicians the right to recommend medical marijuana to their patients, federal laws make the sale or possession of marijuana as a whole illegal.

These two contradicting laws make a decision much more difficult to justify.

Stated in a letter addressed to Madison, “the sale of marijuana through a medical marijuana dispensary is not allowed as an outright permitted use or as a conditional use in any land-use zone within the City of Mountlake Terrace.” Under another city ordinance, the possession of marijuana is prohibited. The selling of this drug also violates the Washington State Uniformed Controlled Substances Act.

But in 1998, voters passed Initiative 692, known as the Washington State Medical Marijuana Act. This law allows physicians to provide a 60-day supply of marijuana to patients with conditions including glaucoma, AIDS, cancer, chronic pain and nausea. The Washington Administrative Code also specified that patients can possess a supply of 24 ounces of marijuana, or allows the patient to grow up to 15 plants. None of these laws “authorize or provide for a storefront dispensary delivery system for medical marijuana.”

“The two letters were the only action that has been taken,” Scott Hugill said, the Assistant City Manager, who was the head of this matter.

Madison and Panagos’ threat to sue is still up in the air.

Upon returning from winter break MTHS cafeteria lunch-goers found a drastic change had taken place in the school lunch lines. Previously plastic bagged milk, of the chocolate and white variety, had been replaced with the cardboard carton version students may remember using five years to the prior in Nov. 2002.

The district originally switched from cartons to bags in 2002 to help reduce the volume of solid waste going into landfills.

“Although they were recyclable in the past, wax milk cartons are currently not accepted for recycling,” Edmonds School District Resource Conservation Specialist Pandora Touart saidc.

“At that time [Nov. 2002], the cost difference between milk cartons and pouches was not significant and the district was able to save money [by making the switch],” Edmonds School District Food Service Director Barbara Lloyd said. This switch saved money because the size of dumpsters in use could be reduced along with the number of times per week the dumpsters were emptied because not as much waste was being produced.

The decision to switch back to milk cartons was a district wide decision and was implemented in all schools on Jan. 4.

The main reason for this recent switch back to carton milk was to save money. Over the past few years, the cost of the pouches has escalated and the price difference between the pouches and the cartons has become significant. The use of cartons will save the district $128,000.00 annually.

“In maintaining a balanced budget, we constantly have to perform a cost/benefit analysis on the decisions and actions we take. At this time, it is too expensive for use to offer the pouches anymore,” said Lloyd.

“It’s heartbreaking to go back to a container that is not recyclable,” Assistant Superintendent Marla Miller said.

The Edmonds School District has recently reevaluated their Internet filtering levels for teachers in the district. Beginning Oct. 12, 2009 online communities, chat, instant messaging, games and newsgroup sites were unblocked on staff profiles.

Before new sites were unblocked however, teachers were required by the district to watch a six-minute informative video that reviewed the appropriate use of the sites that were opened to them.

“With today’s advances in technology, our filtering system can now differentiate between staff and students. This means we have the ability to [create] a new Staff level for filtering, thus allowing all teaching staff access to these important resources from their schools while maintaining the stronger filtering levels for students,” said Kim Mathey, ESD Libraries and Instructional Technology Manager, in an e-mail to district employees.

This censorship reevaluation can be traced back to budget cuts earlier in the year that eliminated the Library and Information Systems Coordinator position, whose job entailed dealing with requests for unblocking sites.

Since the position was eradicated, requests for unblocking sites (stemming mainly from teachers) had piled up and response time had been elongated. The new separate staff filtering level has cut the number of requests by half.

Despite these changes, every filtering level in the district will continue to have pornography, dating profiles, spyware, hacking sites, proxies and gambling sites blocked from their profiles. Filtering at the student level will be reviewed in late fall 2010.

English teacher Ryan Niman has been instrumental in monitoring district filtering levels since he first became involved with the cause in Jan. 2005. At this time the district made the decision to block chat, IM, malicious code, and blogs from all school profiles. “Why block a blog, anybody can sign up for a website and post whatever they want on it,” said Niman.

Niman successfully worked last spring to unblock blogs, and has been working with Mathey to give teachers access to override the filter entirely. “I was promised last spring that would happen, and I’m kind of disappointed it hasn’t yet,” Niman said.

Among more educational uses, Jessica Walton had used this reduced censorship to access her Farmville from school.

“Of course I only [play Farmville] on my lunch break. I don’t play it on my free period, because that is when I do work for my classes,” Senior Experience, Chef 1 and Child Psychology teacher, Jessica Walton said.

Walton regularly competes with Kimberly Nelson on this Facebook sponsored game; both teachers are on level thirty-three, with Nelson about two thousand points ahead of Walton. “I’m coming in sick tomorrow, so I will have time to get ahead of her then,” Walton said.

Walton has also used access to Facebook to connect on a more personal level with her students. “I think it has increased my ability to relate with students who have Farmville. Be it if it is just how any chickens they have,” Walton said.

For the first time in many Terrace students’ memories of the school, there has been active maintenance on the roof above the gym. Construction on a new gym roof began over Winter Break, becoming less and less subtle as students came back to school. Numerous detrimental and inconvenient leaks have spurred this replacement, including, but not limited to: the interruption of homecoming coronation ceremonies, basketball games, and overall quality of the school’s aesthetic.

The roof was originally planned to take a month to complete, but this far it has been difficult to pin a completion date. Due in part to rainy weather, uncharacteristic of the season, there have been time extensions, and it is expected to take longer than projected for the project to be completed.

If all goes according to plan, it should take about another month to complete.

It may be surprising to some that the school is able to pay for this renovation, as the budget this year has been decreased so substantially.

“The money to pay for this project comes from the district’s capital projects fund,” Principal Greg Schwab said.

“This is a separate fund from the district’s operating budget. So in terms of an effect on our budget as a school, we won’t be negatively impacted. I believe the total cost for this work is $130,000. We will have more work done on our roof in the future as the entire school’s roof needs to be replaced,” Schwab said.

At a recent basketball game was forced to forfeit by because a rival team refused to play on the wet courts.

“We’ll continue to try and hold events in the gym as long as the leaks do not pose a safety hazard. We have cancelled some basketball games but it is hard to predict in advance if we will need to cancel future events as it really depends on the weather,” Schwab said.

Last weeks’ womens’ basketball game against Meadowdale was moved to Friday, and the Shorecrest game was rescheduled for Jan. 30.

“It’s frustrating that we couldn’t play in our gym. We were all in our mindset for playing and then we had to reschedule,” said varsity women basketball player Teryn Bouche.  

Administration has taken this leaky roof problem seriously, and acted to fix the leak. However, the effects of water damage can be seen on the particleboard ceilings within hallways, classrooms, and other workspaces, and have caused many distractions in the school’s visual disposition.

The elements are beginning to show their wear and tear on Terrace, and it is likely that more reconstructive maintenance will be scheduled soon, for other parts of the building.

“So long as it is dry outside, it will be dry inside,” said Schwab.

Beginning Friday Jan. 20, Washington state registered voters will receive their mail-in ballots for the Feb. 9 elections.

The School Programs and Operations Levy has been re-added to Snohomish County’s ballot by the Edmonds School District, reinstating an old tax nearing it’s expiration date.. Other districts in state went further than ESD to add additional funding issues to their ballots.

This tax is not new, nor does it add on to pre-existing taxes; it will simply replace an old levy that expires in 2010, and the public will be paying on average the same as they currently do, Edmonds School District Superintendent Nick Brossoit said.

The state has projected it will receive even less funding for the next school year, and the public is growing concerned about where educational resources will come from Brossoit said.

“In the current economy, there are understandably concerns about fiscal matters,” Brossoit said.

“State funding issues will get sorted out in this legislative session, and then we will thoughtfully go through the open process we use to build our operational budget for next year,” Brossoit said.

The levy makes up 20 percent of the district’s General Fund, which funds additional teachers to keep class sizes smaller, new textbooks, student transportation, special-needs services, athletics, music and drama.

It does not however supply new busses or the money needed to rebuild buildings that money comes from different district funds.

“All is considerably better if our General Fund budget has a revenue foundation that includes the replacement of the local programs and operations levy,” Brossoit said.

Information on this replacement tax has been made available electronically on the district Web site as well as in the form of hand outs at school board meetings.