Sunset Elementary Promotes Literacy at Synergy Event

by Justin Gibson | Apr 10, 2019 | Community, Vicksburg

Parents and vendors circle the Sunset Lake cafeteria at the community Synergy event.

By Travis Smola

“March as they say, is reading month. But we really want our kids to be thinking about literacy every single day,” Sunset Lake Elementary Principal Amie McCaw told a group of parents during a community Synergy Event in early March.

The event was a slight spin on the school’s traditional family night, with an extra focus on literacy. This year, the Vicksburg Community Schools Foundation’s “Big Read Machine” bus was on display at the event. The bus will travel around the community over the summer to deliver books to children. McCaw said they are looking into ways to have the bus provide free Wi-Fi too. The idea is to combat the educational “summer slump” in reading proficiency that happens over summer break.

Derek Wheaton, a former principal and now a prominent education consultant, was a key speaker at the event. He dove more into why summer reading such an important issue. “If a child reads over the summer months, it’s a gain of one month of reading proficiency,” Wheaton said. “If they don’t read over the summer, it’s a loss of two to three months.”

Wheaton said studies have shown that a student who reads just 20 minutes a day will be exposed to up to 1.8 million words in a year. It has a major effect, as the student is much more likely to score in the 90th percentile. On the opposite end of the spectrum, a student who only reads one minute a day is only exposed to 8,000 words a year and more likely to score in the 10th percentile.

“Research studies for 25 years tell us the amount of reading that students do matters,” Wheaton said. He encouraged parents in attendance to help encourage reading by setting an example in reading more themselves. He said it was important for parents to read to children.

In order to encourage more reading in the home, he suggested making some tradeoffs with children., perhaps encouraging a child to read a specific length of time before the child is allowed time to do another enjoyable activity.

Wheaton has primarily advised schools directly in the past, but he hopes he can do more events like this in the future to connect directly with the parents.

The Vicksburg District Library was also on hand to promote literacy. In addition to its regular reading programs, this year the library is expanding its summer reading program slightly into a “Summer Adventure” program that packs in other educational opportunities. “Children have a chance to come in and do crafts or come in and socialize with board game nights or other ways to get out of that summer slump,” said Adrianne Schinkai, the library’s head of Circulation and Reference Services.

This year, volunteer parents and the school worked together to bring in multiple sponsors like Jaspare’s Pizza and Family Fare to fund and hand out prizes at the event. The event also brought the opportunity for community organizations like Generous Hands to promote their extensive work in the schools. Generous Hands helps provide food for approximately 300 children in the district on weekends.

“These children have free and reduced food at school, and they don’t always have a lot of food on the weekends,” Generous Hand’s Executive Director Sheri Louis said. Generous Hands also provides vouchers to help families get essential items like milk, bread, eggs and produce. They handed out information to families on how they could use their services at the event.

This year was the first time Sunset has involved all these local organizations in a Parent’s Night. McCaw was pleased with how it turned out. “We really had a great response when we reached out to our community,” she said.

Doug Stafinski to Go on Talons Out Honor Flight

by Justin Gibson | Apr 10, 2019 | Community, Vicksburg

By Sue Moore

There were few honors for Vietnam veterans after that war ended.

Talons Out Honor flights, first organized in 2005 to take dwindling numbers of WWII veterans to Washington D.C. to see the new memorial in their honor, is now correcting this by honoring the many who came home from Vietnam without recognition.

One of the first from Vicksburg to be accepted for this honor is Doug Stafinski, who served in the U.S. Army’s Military Police in Vietnam. He’s scheduled to make the one-day all-expense-paid trip to Washington on April 20. The 1982 Vietnam memorial and those honoring veterans of WWII and the Korean War are near the Lincoln Memorial

Stafinski’s job was to guard the perimeter of a huge Army base at Long Bien. He lived in a small shelter, a “hooch,” and pulled 12-hour shifts at night with the 557th Military Police company. “We were concerned about incoming mortars and rocket attacks. These sent us to bunkers with sand bags below ground, armed only with M-16 rifles. It wasn’t about being overrun by Viet Cong infantry, just the nightly shelling. Our security guard unit was filled with military personal who had been shot up out in the field and recovered. They were sent to our company after recovery to fill out their tour of duty. They had plenty of stories to tell.” Stafinski said.

“Towards the end of my enlistment, we were given a choice. If we wanted to extend our two-year commitment with an extra five weeks in a war zone, we could check out of the military immediately upon returning to the U.S. I took that offer and counted every day until we were flown out in May 1970,” Stafinski said. “I landed at Fort Dix, New Jersey and two hours later, was processed out. I called home and nobody answered so I boarded a plane for Detroit and still nobody answered at home.

“I spent the night in the airport and called home once again to say I would be on a flight coming in to Kalamazoo that day. My brother David answered only to tell me that my parents, Frank and Thelma, were waiting for me in Oakland, California where they kept checking every incoming plane for my arrival. They never went anywhere outside of Vicksburg but had been told all returning veterans, dead or alive, from Vietnam were processed out of this facility.”

Stafinski’s route to serving his country began with his graduation from Vicksburg High School in 1964 and a business administration degree from Michigan State University in 1968. “I was drafted before the lottery came into existence,” he said. “I reported for duty in October 1968 at Fort Knox in Kentucky where they decided to make me a military policeman. My drill sergeant at Ft. Gordon, Georgia, correctly informed us that all of his recruits go to Vietnam. When we arrived at our first stop in Hawaii, the officer in charge emphasized not to even consider leaving the airport.”

He left the military as a Specialist 4th class and came back to Vicksburg when the jobs were few and far between, he said. “All my family had worked at Upjohn and I had worked there and at Burroughs in the summer. My dad was getting madder and madder that I didn’t have a real job after one year out so I decided to take the Civil Service exam.

“I did well enough on it to become a clerk or a mail carrier with the Kalamazoo Post Office. I decided on the mail carrier which was a day job so I could continue in fast pitch softball for 30 years, church slow pitch softball and Kalamazoo City League baseball playing for Norm Snyder, the manager from Vicksburg.”

This eventually led to becoming postmaster in Vicksburg in 1984 for 14 years. After 34 years with the post office, Stafinski retired in 2003. His community service encompasses 30 years as a member of the Lions Club, serving as president two times. For the last 19 years he has been the general chairman of the club’s big Summer Festival, popularly known as the B&B (for beer and bratwurst). This event has raised huge dollars for nonprofits in Vicksburg while honoring the legacy of Otto Kaak, who started the event 46 years ago.

Stafinski’s Talons Out flight is wholly paid for by donations from the greater Kalamazoo community.

It’s A Fine Life – My Hometown

by Justin Gibson | Apr 10, 2019 | Community, Vicksburg

By Kathleen Oswalt-Forsythe

It’s a fine life. It’s true. No, it isn’t exactly Mayberry, but living in Vicksburg, Michigan is mighty fine. We are surrounded by rich farmland, small lakes, and carefully tended hardwoods. We grumble about the winter weather, but we love hunkering down for a snowstorm which closes schools, brings neighbors together, and encourages family dinners.

No, it’s not perfect, but with the blessed arrival of warmer weather, life in our village is close to it.

Dear Spring is here, and she’s always worth the wait. She unpacks her unique fragrances, early flowers, and blissfully longer days. She calls to us, inviting us to shed our warm coats and our thick sweaters. We enter her sweet season, squinting and yawning from our winter hibernation. The red-winged blackbirds trill in my yard, and I watch for the bluebirds’ return to the boxes in our neighborhood. Soon my neighbor’s children will chirp happily, riding their bikes, running in their yard, and learning to work it out as all children must do. Twenty-five years ago, those were the cheerful voices of our children. Kickball, soccer, and tag games flattened our grassy yard, while the sandbox and playsets occupied the shady corners.

My four brothers and I grew up on our family farm, with the daily “you kids need to get outside” directive from our mother. Once outside, we played enthusiastically, exploring the fields and woods without much – if any – supervision. We spent our summers finding frogs in the reeds of the ditches, collecting fireflies in the June grass, and building straw forts in the old hay barn. Exhausted by day’s end, we slumped drowsily in old lawn chairs on the screen porch, listening to Ernie Harwell.

Freedom. Innocence. Simplicity.

We attended Fulton Elementary School, which still stands, abandoned and neglected. The same swing sets and concrete tiles stand vigil, alone and aging in the wild grass. I imagine the echoes of my friends’ laughter in the old hallways, the swish of the jump rope at recess, and the savory smell of Mrs. Harrison’s school lunch as it seeped under classroom doorways. Here I made my first friends, learned the playground rules, and raced through the math workbooks to re-enter the world of Laura Ingalls Wilder or Anna Sewell’s National Velvet.

How can it be that fifty years have passed?

Each changing season reminds me of this fast-forward of time and nudges me to slow my pace, to put away my technology, and to reconnect with the people I care about. I am determined to take a break this spring and to be thankful for simple things – the crocus’s stretch towards the sun, the warming of the sweet earth, the swans’ parades on Sunset Lake.

And to appreciate the most important things: family, friends, and our little hometown.

It’s a Fine Life.

You can follow Kathy at her blog: http://www.itsafinelife.com

Editor’s Note: Kathy Forsythe teaches 10th and 11th grade English at Vicksburg High School. She was the grand prize winner of the Tournament of Writers contest conducted last year by Friends of the Schoolcraft Library. She plans to write three first-person columns for the South County News. They will run from April through June. We will evaluate our readers’ response to her work in a survey we plan to conduct. The survey will appear in our June funding appeal envelope.

Atrophy, Sci-Fi/Action-Adventure Film at Vicksburg’s PAC

by Justin Gibson | Apr 10, 2019 | Community, Vicksburg

By Linda Lane

A sci-fi action-adventure film, “Atrophy” will premiere locally on Saturday, April 27, at 7 p.m. at the Vicksburg High School’s Performing Arts Center. The film was produced by Troy Smith, Vicksburg High film teacher, and Jason Slingerland, a Western Michigan University graduate. It boasts a cast and crew mostly from Kalamazoo and others from Grand Rapids and Detroit.

Cost for the tickets are $10 for adults and $5 for students and seniors and can be purchased at the door or online at: http://www.vicksburgcommunityschools.org/pac.

The movie’s plot centers on a young father, Matt, who is mysteriously transported into a wasteland world, and the challenges he faces to find a portal to return home. Matt discovers he has a bounty on his head as a “newcomer” and must survive assassins, armies and a seven-foot killing robot before he loses memories of his previous life. If he fails, he will be trapped forever as others have been. There is a suggested rating of PG-13 for violence.

Atrophy was written and directed by Slingerland and produced, filmed and edited by Smith. The film premiered at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts Unreeled Film series in the fall of 2017 and also was shown at the GenCon Film Festival in Indianapolis in August, 2018. The two partners have also worked together on short films, a web series and two feature films.

When people write an independent movie script, they typically steer away from difficult scenes such as filming in a desert or expensive props such as a seven-foot robot.

Not Slingerland. Instead he called Smith with a proposition.

“Let’s write a movie that’s beyond what we think we can do and do it anyways. Let’s make a blockbuster for under $10,000,” Slingerland said to Smith. “We were daring in writing something that we knew was going to be hard to do, like trying to film the desert scenes in Michigan. But we did it anyway, and we managed to pull it off.”

“There are very few things that we cut out of the script because we could not do it. The only example I can think of was a desert motorcycle, which we did end up cutting.” Robert Couch, the production designer and one of the executive producers, built the robot out of spare parts with platform shoes for the movie.

“We wrote things without typical constraints, like ‘let’s have a car buried in the sand.’ And then we used movie magic to make it work in the movie,” Slingerland said. There’s a scene in the movie which looks like a car really is buried in the sand. “We had an old Chrysler Reliant car, so we took the door and attached it to a box and buried it. We managed to make it look like the car was buried. But the interior shots of the car were actually filmed in a driveway in Portage,” he said. They also took advantage of access to a pilot, Slingerland’s dad, who took Smith up in his airplane and allowed them to get aerial shots of the Lake Michigan shoreline, with Smith holding the camera outside the plane’s window.

A typical action-adventure film takes a full-time crew three to five months to shoot, and one to two years to edit. The group started filming in June of 2010 and finished filming in the fall of that year. But the film took almost seven years to complete, including adding the special effects, sound effects and sound mixing. And while big-screen budgets can range from $250,000-$5 million, they made their movie for $9,000 – under their goal. In fact, the film had less crew in filming and producing it than many YouTube videos.

The most expensive prop in the movie was a donkey, which they rented for four hours in a scene with a carpetbagger to lend authenticity to a scene. They managed to film the desert scenes by getting permission from a sand mining company in Grand Haven. Other scenes were filmed in a rock quarry in Rockford, in some private woods in Vicksburg, the house of one of the executive producers, and in the television studio in VHS.

“My favorite location was filming in the USS Silversides, a WWII submarine located in Muskegon,” Smith said. “One happy accident with the sub was that it worked really well as a transition from an outside shot in the desert sand. It had a circular entrance the cast entered to the inside space of the round submarine,” Slingerland said.

A DVD of Atrophy can be ordered online for $20 at: atrophythemovie.com, which includes their first full-length feature movie, Coffee Shop Kings. That came out in 2008.

Bird Feeders are a Big Fundraiser for Cub Scouts

by Justin Gibson | Apr 10, 2019 | Community, Vicksburg

By Bob Ball

Vicksburg’s Cub Scout Pack 251 netted $1,620 through an on-line auction of brightly painted scout-built bird feeders. Half the proceeds will go to support pack activities. The other half will be distributed among the scouts who built the feeders. Those distributions can be used for summer camp.

The pack for years held an annual Cake Bake sale. But interest began to wane, said Wolf Den leader Valerie Tassell. “It was ending up that the pack parents were just buying their own cake back or buying another scout’s cake.”

A change was needed. “Last year we decided that while we liked the auction, we needed to have something that would last and that the scouts could build and paint, so we started the For the Birds Birdhouse auction.”

This year, photos of the 60 completed bird feeders were posted on a dedicated Facebook page. Interested buyers could post bids in the page’s comment section. Buyers included family members and friends and community members, Tassell said, not just parents.

And next year? “We are debating duck houses vs bat houses.”