Daybreak Wednesday 8/26/20

A PLEASURE TO SEE YOU, UPPER VALLEY!

Today, a touch of what lies ahead. Yesterday's front has moved through, dragging much cooler air behind it. It'll be mostly sunny and breezy, though there will be clouds around. Winds from the northwest, and temps rising at best to the high 60s or 70. Down into the 40s overnight. Definitely a taste of fall.And in the meantime...

Mink the bear found dead in Lebanon. After wildlife experts tracking her remotely noticed that she hadn't moved for several days, deputy Hanover fire chief Michael Hinsley—"who had kept a close and cordial watch on Mink’s movements in town," as the VN's John Gregg writes—found her body near the Mascoma River. Firefighters carried her out of the woods, and Hinsley took her to Ben Kilham's in Lyme. She had a broken foreleg, and both Hinsley and state bear expert Andrew Timmins believe she may have been hit by a car. They're still on the lookout for her three cubs from this year's litter.The map. In case you want to remember what it took for Mink to make it back from the Canadian border to home last year. Northern Stage plans live, in-theater fall production. Susan Apel reports on her Artful blog that the company is "finalizing paperwork" with Actors Equity to mount a production of It’s Fine, I’m Fine, the one-woman show written and performed by Stephanie Everett and a favorite at New Works Now in 2018. Northern Stage plans to upgrade its HVAC system and take other precautionary measures—including, the NYT reports in a story on its live-theater effort and two others in New England, a limit of 44 people in the 240-seat space.Thetford Center bell falls silent. In a listserv post Monday (no link), selectboard chair Nick Clark announced that the rope attached to the bell in the Timothy Frost United Methodist Church—which volunteers had been ringing every evening at 7—has broken. "There is no safe way to get to the bell without having a contractor reinforce the platform above the clock, and building some proper steps," he reports. Writes Daybreak reader NS: "It was a wonderful local shout-out to all who could hear it, a 'we are still here.' Thank you to whoever rang the bell for its message." (And thanks, NS!)ECFiber lands $1.2 mil to extend broadband to mobile homes. The money comes from the state, using nearly $4 million of Federal CARES Act dollars to expand high-speed internet around the state. In ECFiber's case, it will go to build fiber to the home in 13 mobile home parks in Randolph, Royalton, Bethel, Braintree, Sharon, and Woodstock. ECFiber's grant was the second-largest; $2 million is going to VTel. Ledyard Charter School lands million-dollar USDA loan to buy and renovate Shoetorium building. The alternative high school has operated in the space on the Lebanon Mall—once used by Lebanon College—for the past five years. “It’s kind of a thrill to think this little school is going to own its own building,” Mike Harris, chairman of Ledyard’s board of trustees and a former Leb school superintendent, tells the VN's Tim Camerato. Renovations are due to start Monday, and will take about a year.Debate over race and policing lands in 3rd-grade classroom in Springfield. It arose in the spring, when Jeremy Desjardins' son was in an online class that read a book about how two families deal with the police killing of a Black man. Desjardins, a police officer, objected both to the way police were portrayed in the book and to its abrupt introduction. "This conversation is very important and should be had," he told the school board last week, but "this probably wasn’t a good first book to start those conversations." The board now wants a new policy on introducing controversial subjects in the classroom.New bus service between Leb and Claremont to start up... sometime. Southwestern Community Services, which runs transit services in Sullivan County, hopes to have three trips a day between the two cities by the end of the year. "Just the medical needs alone, getting to and from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital, the bus could be incredibly helpful,” COO Beth Daniels tells the Eagle Times. “But also for the employers on either side of Sullivan County and Grafton County." Specific routes aren't settled yet.Thayer researchers find that in the right circumstances, biofuels can mitigate climate change impact. The study, by profs Lee Lynd and Mark Laser and colleagues at Colorado State, found that accounting for all of the carbon flows in biofuel systems and comparing them to those of grassland and forest restoration, some biofuels strategies can net carbon benefit—despite concern about carbon losses from planting grasses rather than, say, carbon-sequestering trees. Lynd is involved in Enchi, a biofuels startup.Now there's a name for them: microschools. That's the word Lisa Bozogan, who runs the River Valley Club's FitKids program, uses for the new K-3 FitKids Academy in RVC's yoga studio. It's part of a trend toward "supervised learning spaces," writes the Concord Monitor's Eileen O'Grady, that are popping up to serve NH (and VT) parents struggling to juggle hybrid schooling. The Boys and Girls Clubs of Central NH are creating one at the Steeplegate Mall in Concord. Primary-care practices dropping out of OneCare VT. That's because, in a bid to encourage cost savings, the organization at the center of Vermont's all-payer health-care reform model is dropping its set monthly payment for patients and introducing a range; the more the system saves, the higher the payment. The 13 practices dropping out, however, argue that in the middle of a pandemic, “The concept of putting independent primary care at more risk is antithetical to any hope for a more efficient and cost-effective health system.”UVM study finds anti-bias training has only small effect. Looking at police stops in seven towns and by the state police from 2015 to 2019, researchers, led by economics prof Stephanie Seguino, found that Black and Latino drivers were more likely to be stopped, searched, and arrested than white drivers, but less likely to be found with contraband like drugs or weapons. "The idea in terms of bias-free policing," Seguino tells WCAX, "is that anything that happens to you should be based on your behavior." Okay, it's a little far afield, but if you're a kayaker in search of something other than the tried-and-true spots... Catherine Frank and Margaret Holden are 77 and 82 now, and they've been kayaking Lake Champlain for the last 17 years. During that time they've learned a thing or two and they literally wrote the book. Seven Days editor Candace Page gets their recommendations, not just for around Burlington, but to the south and up to the north. Me, I've got my eyes on the waters off Larrabees Point in Shoreham.Or maybe you're rich as Croesus, in which case you could follow Richard Gere's advice in reverse. He's got a road-trip itinerary in Architectural Digest that starts at the Bedford Post Inn in Bedford, NY—which he, ahem, co-owns—and winds up at Barnard's Twin Farms. But why not start at Twin Farms, then take Gere's route and head to the Castle Hill Inn in Newport, RI, thence to one of the 18 chalets at Winvian Farm in CT, and then to his inn? Or you could just bag all that and follow Daniel Boulud's itinerary through Upstate and the Berkshires. But only if kayaking Lake Champlain doesn't do it for you.

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A moment of silence today for Mink. At least, as Michael Hinsley points out in John Gregg's

VN

article, she leaves behind several generations of offspring with their own cubs. Treat them right, people.

Music tomorrow. See you then.

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