David and Diana Bilby started putting their heartfelt Christian faith into practice a few years back — reaching out, personally, to homeless people they met. They had nearly lost their east Vancouver home to foreclosure but managed to modify the mortgage and come out OK; after that, David Bilby said, he felt obliged to share his blessing with people less fortunate than he was.
Lovely idea, disastrous consequences: The homeless couple they faithfully housed took advantage of them. There was trouble with the law and David is convinced drug dealing went on under his roof. These days he slaps his forehead over the episode, which cost him money and, he realized, put his children at risk, too.
“Probably one of the most irresponsible things we’ve ever done,” he said.
But getting burned didn’t cure the Bilbys of compassion. They started hearing from the family resource specialists and counselors at local schools who’d caught wind of their efforts to extend real, practical help to the homeless.
These school officials urged the Bilbys to try again with some deserving students they believed in. Just get more cautious and formal this time, they said: Do your research. Protect yourselves. Build a program.
Last year, the Bilbys launched The Refuge as an arm of GoConnect, focused on finding “host families” willing and able to take in homeless high school students who are legal adults and on track to graduate. Eighteen- to 21-year-olds who are plodding towards graduation — truly motivated but tripped up by poverty, busted-up families and homelessness — aren’t that rare, David said. But they inhabit a gray zone, according to Carlson, where public assistance for needy children is no longer available, and neither are adult opportunities and resources. And these young adults don’t even have the advantage of a high school diploma yet.
“There’s not a lot of safety net for these older students,” said Chelsea Unger, family resource coordinator at Hudson’s Bay High School. “If not for The Refuge, I don’t know where they would go.”
The Bilbys themselves became The Refuge’s first host family.
A single tanker car carrying 25,000 gallons of asphalt product derailed and tipped onto its side Friday morning in a Vancouver rail yard, according to BNSF Railway.
None of the contents of the car spilled, and there were no injuries, said BNSF spokesman Gus Melonas. The derailment happened during a routine switching operation, he said, but the cause was not immediately known. The incident remains under investigation.
The derailment occurred in an area of the rail yard just north of West Fourth Plain Boulevard in Vancouver. The overturned car and maintenance crews were visible from the Fourth Plain overpass over the tracks.
“BNSF personnel responded within 10 minutes of the incident occurring,” Melonas said.
The load of asphalt was on its way from Canada to Portland’s Linnton district, Melonas said. Additional crews expected to have the car hoisted back on the tracks Friday afternoon. The load of asphalt would likely be transferred to trucks, he said.
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Twyla Barnes, a champion of public and early childhood education who led Educational Service District 112 as its superintendent for the past 20 years, has been named Clark County’s First Citizen for 2014 by the Community Foundation for Southwest Washington.
Barnes will be retired as of Tuesday. She’s noted for super-sized leadership despite wearing a size 7 1/2 shoe. “Big shoes to fill,” is what coworker Lori Simpson said in a Columbian story earlier this year.
ESD 112’s mission is to pursue educational equity across the 30 school districts in Southwest Washington through collaboration, program innovation and smart money management. It encompasses everything from Evergreen Public Schools, one of the largest districts in the state at 27,000 students, to Centerville, with 25 elementary students in a tiny brick building in rural Klickitat County.
Making sure that rural school districts, striving teachers and underserved students get what they need to succeed has been “the joy of my life,” she said after learning of her award Friday.
Evergreen superintendent John Deeder wrote in a nomination letter that area superintendents all “count on Twyla’s expertise” as they adapt to a constantly changing educational landscape.
Stories told by former captives during the Vietnam War are still valuable today, four decades after the war ended.
Jethro Abatayo and Logan Gibert, 14-year-old students at Pleasant Valley Middle School, found the stories so compelling they spent more than 600 hours researching, interviewing prisoners of war, writing and producing a documentary that placed first in the National History Day competition this month.
Abatayo and Gibert took first place in their division at the national competition with their 10-minute documentary, “Vietnam War Prisoners of War: Taking Responsibility When Deprived of All Rights.” The students also received the Captain Ken Coskey Naval History Prize.
More than a half-million students across the country participate in National History Day at the regional level. About 3,000 students, including three teams from Pleasant Valley Middle School, advanced to the national competition June 15-19 at the University of Maryland in College Park.
Pleasant Valley Middle School teacher Irene Soohoo has supported her students’ participation in the event for 25 years. Many have placed first at the state competition and several have placed at nationals, but Abatayo and Gibert’s win at the national competition is a first for Soohoo and for Battle Ground Public Schools.
Soohoo said the students worked after school every day and worked at home on weekends.
“These are top kids,” Soohoo said. “They’re workhorses.”
Being Muslim in America is a little like being American in America. Look beyond the unity of belief and identity and you’ll find a dazzling diversity of origins, ethnicities, accents and complexions.
“We have 15 or 20 nationalities and 15 or 20 different languages,” Khalid Khan, a board member and spokesman for the Islamic Society of Southwest Washington, said after a Friday afternoon prayer service at the society’s mosque in Hazel Dell. “This is a very multiracial and multicultural organization. We represent all countries, including the U.S.”
Khan is a native of India. The group’s prayer leader, imam Abdel Fattah, moved here a couple of years ago from Morocco. The youth group leader is from Georgia — the U.S. state, not the Asian nation. Others said they were born in Iraq and Syria and Texas. A couple of first-time visitors originally hailed from Germany and Turkey; the latter man was as blond-haired and blue-eyed as anybody you might spot on a Clark County street and assume his name must be Petersen or Peabody — not Abdul Kerim.
Whatever their names and wherever they’re from, Clark County Muslims will all strengthen their faith these next several weeks during Ramadan, a month of self-discipline and attention to virtue. Fasting is from sunrise to sunset daily, and is much more than abstention from food and drink; it is a mindful “submission to the creator” and a stricter observance of the moral code of Islam, Fattah said.
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