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A8 • Wednesday, September 25, 2013 The Issaquah Press
A8
By Neil [email protected]
This summer, Rachel Cat-terall and Megan O’Brian achieved something none of their peers at Skyline High School can claim.
The two seniors won gold-medal honors in July at the Family, Career and Community Leaders of America’s National Leader-ship Conference in Nash-ville. Thousands of stu-dents attended the event, but a relatively small percentage did as well as Catterall and O’Brian.
Projects that qualify for nationals are scored with a rubric — a point-based system that looks at the quality of each compo-nent. The points are con-verted into a percentage, and students earn medals based on their scores.
“The majority of people at nationals get silver medals, which is 80-90 percent,” Catterall said. “Over 90 is gold, and we got 95, I think.”
Catterall and O’Brian spent the better part of the 2012-13 school year preparing the project that was eventually judged to be one of the best in the nation. They were part of the national No Kid Hun-
gry campaign, which seeks to end childhood hunger in the United States.
The project was much more than research; it re-quired hands-on activities. O’Brian and Catterall — who served as the president and vice president, respec-tively, of last year’s Skyline FCCLA chapter — had to raise money and awareness in their community.
Last October, they held a Wear Orange Day that got a big chunk of the student body involved. Shortly thereafter, they held a two-week food drive that netted hundreds of items for the Issaquah Food & Clothing Bank.
During the spring, the girls partnered with Pop-corn Palace to sell treats at the school. They made a $500 profit, which went directly to No Kid Hungry.
Their website, Sky-line for No Kid Hungry, chronicles the steps they took. They estimate their efforts reached 95 percent of Skyline’s students.
They also learned a lot in the process. The statis-tics they gathered were startling — 16 million American children live in homes without enough food, and 10.6 million don’t receive free or reduced-price lunches at
school even though they’re eligible.
“I learned a lot about childhood hunger itself,” Catterall said. “I didn’t re-ally realize how big of an issue it is in America.”
The girls were both in-volved in the school’s Teach-ing Academy as juniors, and their FCCLA project also relates to possible career prospects in teaching.
O’Brian said there are obvious examples of how meals can positively influ-ence a student’s academic performance, as well as their behavior and emo-tions at school.
“It’s pretty incredible
just what little changes can do,” she said.
Skyline’s FCCLA chapter is recruiting new members this year, the girls said, and because they have a new adviser, they’re expecting some changes. They also know FCCLA will be working with Au-tism Speaks on outreach efforts in the coming year.
“We’re planning on fo-cusing on that a little more this year,” Catterall said.
O’Brian said she is hop-ing to see more students join FCCLA and partici-
By Jane Garrison
My plants talk to me, and I always answer — sometimes in no uncertain terms. I was telling them the other day, “You guys have it made. You haven’t a clue what plants are dealing with in other parts of the country.”
This summer and last winter have been really conducive to plant growth here. We had a warmer than usual winter, extra heat this summer with higher than normal humid-ity, and a longer than nor-mal growing season. With a little extra water from the hose, it’s a jungle out there. Hot summer days started the first of June rather than July 5 this year, and as of this writing, the weather is continuing to delight.
I don’t have a real lawn, but we had to mow our weeds continually through-out the summer. My newly planted natives in the woods
are so inundated by growth I can’t even find them. To take advantage of all that grub, the deer are showing up in “herds,” a term usu-ally reserved for elk.
All that exuberance made me wonder if people ever get tired of it, if perhaps it is just too much. Do we fantasize about living or vacationing in places where plants struggle to stay alive, for example, in the desert, in the high
mountains, or perhaps the windswept sea coast? Some ecosystems keep their ap-pearances pruned nice and neat, all shaven and shorn. Windswept rocky or sandy beaches at the coast are like that. Alpine meadows in the Olympics and at Mount Rainier fit that de-scription. Eastern Washing-ton seems that way.
Maybe those landscapes make people think they are more in control of their en-vironment without having to do so much work. Maybe that’s why retired people move to Arizona. I know several couples who moved to the eastern Rockies in Wyoming and Montana. My sister fantasizes about moving to Ocean Shores. Our old friends from Edmonds just moved to Wenatchee, where they have a swimming pool surrounded by a rock and gravel yard. It must seem like a tremendous load lifted when landscapes can prune and weed them-selves automatically.
On the other hand, I don’t think I want to
COMMUNITYSection
B WednesdaySeptember 25, 2013
THE ISSAQUAH PRESSTHE ISSAQUAH PRESSTHE ISSAQUAH PRESS
King Salmon greets children during the 1981 Salmon Days Parade on Front Street near the old Village Theatre.
2001.020.001
OPENING THE ARCHIVES
AN ONGOING LOOK AT MEMORABLE IMAGES FROM
ISSAQUAH’S PAST
The Issaquah History Museums take requests regarding what peo-ple would like to see in the Digital Collection. Roughly quarterly, volunteers have a data-entry day and prep a bunch of records for upload. If there is a particular name, place or item you’d like to see more images of on the web-site, email Erica Maniez at [email protected]. If you have a photo or subject you would like to see in this feature, email [email protected].
Master gardener’s cornerWith Jane Garrison
Automatic landscapes
GET GARDENINGTalk with master gardeners at plant clinics from 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays at the Issaquah Farmers Market until October, and this month at Squak Mt. Greenhouses & Nursery.
By Christina [email protected]
When rare thunder-storms pounded the area in early September, Issaquah resident Justin Shaw was not staring out the windows of his Talus home, marvel-ing at the lightning strikes.
He was staring at a computer screen, track-ing the storms’ paths and experiencing the extreme weather virtually with the more than 1,100 follow-ers of his Seattle-weather themed Twitter account.
“It was almost more fun to be on Twitter talking about the storms than ac-tually watching them,” he said. “It’s like this big party with all of these weather nerds uniting together.”
A self-professed weather geek, and proud of it, Shaw created the Seattle Weath-er Blog, and its accom-panying Twitter account, as an outlet for one of his greatest interests.
It is just a hobby, though, since Shaw currently works in marketing for a downtown Seattle law firm. Whenever he has lunch or a break, he’s looking up weather statistics with the National Weather Service, or tracking a storm with online radars.
He combs through the data, often looking for
something interesting to say about today’s weather and how it relates to the past, like the time he noted that Seattle was on tap for the warmest Aug. 16 since the day in 1977 when Elvis Presley died.
“There’s kind of this rush of excitement that I get when I’m doing it,” Shaw said. “I like finding a cool stat that no one really knows about yet.”
During severe storms, Shaw’s Twitter followers share with him the weather they’re seeing in their respective areas. He’ll often tweet about the weather he sees from his Talus town-house, which is always a bit more extreme than in other places, he said.
“We definitely get a lot more rain because we’re kind of on top of a hill,” he said. “If it’s really hot in Seattle, it will be hotter up here. If it’s really cold there, it will be colder here.”
As his Twitter account
ON THE WEBJoin Justin Shaw as he follows the Pacific Northwest’s extreme weather on Twitter at www.twitter.com/KSeattleWeather or on his blog at www.seattleweath-erblog.com.
Tweeting up a storm
See LANDSCAPES, Page B3
Issaquah resident shares his passion
for weather
BY CHRISTINA CORRALES-TOY
Justin Shaw displays his Weather Blog Twitter page, with more than 1,100 followers, on the laptop computer in his Issaquah home.
Help set up Habitat garage sale
Volunteers needed to help with Habitat for Hu-manity Benefit Garage Sale set-up Sept. 25 and 26, any time from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.
All abilities are needed but especially volunteers that can lift 50 pounds or more to help load and
transport furniture dona-tions. Also needed are trucks and drivers.
Those interested in help-ing can email [email protected], go to habitat-garagesale.org or call Faith Church at 392-0123.
The sale will be Sept. 27 and 28 at the church at 3924 Issaquah-Pine Lake Road S.E.
See WEATHER, Page B3
Skyline duo earns top marks at national leadership conference
BY NEIL PIERSON
Rachel Catterall (left) and Megan O’Brian, Skyline High School seniors earned gold medals from July’s national conference of the Family, Career and Community Leaders of America.
BY PATTY HERMAN
Duncan Mulholland (above), of Issaquah, leads the Clydesdale Ranger out of the Draft Horse Barn on Sept. 12 at the State Fair in Puyallup. Mulholland is a volunteer and spends his time harnessing, groom-ing and driving the hitch team of six Clydesdales (left) belonging to Alan and Shelly Manning, including Ranger.
A BREED APART
See LEADERS, Page B3
BY SYMONE LITTLEFIELD
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The Issaquah Press Wednesday, September 25, 2013 • B7
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