April 30, 2007

By MEGAN JAMES

MIDDLEBURY — Middlebury College students Htar Htar, Zohra, Bilal, Mahmoud and Chinyere gathered last Thursday to talk to a small audience about their childhoods. From four very different countries one thing tied them together: all five grew up in war zones.

The panel discussion was part of a week-long symposium on Sex and War, sponsored by the college’s Women and Gender Studies Department, that intended to highlight how women and men experience and participate in war differently.

Junior Htar Htar Yu grew up in an armed conflict area in southern Burma, where a civil war has raged for the past 13 years. Her parents were a soldier and a nurse in the Tavoyan United Front, a militia formed by what she called a “sub-Burmese” ethnic group to which her family belongs.

April 30, 2007

By MEGAN JAMES

BRANDON — The Brandon Fire Department hasn’t operated out of its original firehouse on Franklin Street near the town hall for almost 10 years now. But in the building’s second story, where the Dunmore Hose Company held its meetings since the building was constructed in 1888, relics of another time remain untouched.

On a dusty round table is a roll of tickertape tangled up in a contraption that once controlled the horn on top of the building. Various combinations of horn signals were assigned to each street in town, so firemen knew where to go when they heard the alarm. The horn was taken down in the 1970s, but the last number it called is still punched into the tape.

Scanning a finger down the list of street numbers on an old chart recently, longtime Brandon firefighter Gene Pagano looked at the tape and said, “13. It must have been on Grove Street.”

April 26, 2007

By JOHN FLOWERS

MIDDLEBURY — Local members of the Vermont House on Monday sharply criticized a Senate-passed legislation calling for annual caps on school budget increases.

The measure — devised by Gov. James Douglas — calls for public school budget increases to be limited to 4 percent in the first year, and at 3.5 percent during ensuring years, unless a “super majority” of at least 60 percent of the local electorate decides to override the cap.

Douglas has touted the cap as a means of limiting education-related property tax increases during an era in Vermont’s history when school populations are declining.

The Vermont Senate on April 17 voted 15-15 — with Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie breaking the tie — to endorse a series of amendments (including Douglas’s spending cap) to H.526, the so-called “act relating to education quality and cost control.”

April 26, 2007

By HARRIETTE BRAINARD

MIDDLEBURY — The annual cost of attending Middlebury College will hit $46,910, a 5.25 percent increase over the prior year, for the 2007-08 academic year. The increase includes a 5 percent bump in the comprehensive fee and a 50 percent jump in the student activities fee set by the Student Government Association (SGA).

College officials this week said the increase reflects the commitment their institution has made to increasing faculty size and student aid as outlined in the strategic plan approved last May.

“With the federal government taking less of a role in providing scholarships to college students all of us who are involved in educating students are trying to reduce the loan component for the sake of the student,” said Vice President for Communications Mike McKenna.