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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 22, 2015)
143rd YEAR, No. 125 TUESDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2015 ONE DOLLAR Crab on! Commercial crab ¿shing opens Jan. 4 on North Coast The Daily Astorian Fresh Dungeness crab is back on the catch menu after ¿shery manag- ers determined the ¿shery is ready to open Jan. 4 along the entire Or- egon coast and Washington north to Destruction Island, as well as Grays Harbor and Willapa Bay. Fishery managers from Washing- ton to California approved the open- ing Monday after a monthlong delay. “Along with the state agencies, the Oregon commercial Dungeness crab industry has taken a very pro- active and precautionary approach to the opening of this crab season in the interest of public safety,” says Caren Braby, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife marine resources pro- gram manager. Photos by Joshua Bessex/The Daily Astorian See CRAB, Page 12A Trixie Bigby, an English development specialist at Lewis and Clark Elementary School, works with fifth-graders during a class Thursday. Students learn English by staying put Astoria teachers link language, content to keep English learners with their peers By EDWARD STRATTON The Daily Astorian F ifth-grader Veronica Valadez noticed something different, while she was sitting among a group of peers at Lewis and Clark Elementary School and working on her essay about Icelandic explorer Leif Eriksson. “It seems like this year, we work more in groups,” she said Thursday. “It feels like we’re working faster.” Valadez’s intuition is the hope of elementa- ry educators in Astoria School District, which formed the Co-teaching for Academic and Lan- guage Mastery coalition this year and embarked on a new “push-in” model of education. Instead of designated English Language Learner students being pulled out their classroom for special instruction like in previous years, lan- guage supports are pushed into their homeroom. “I think one of the biggest reasons the pullout (model) was ineffective is that what they were learning from me, I couldn’t tell if it was link- ing with what they were learning in their class- rooms,” said Trixie Bigby, an English language development specialist at Lewis and Clark. “I think that they weren’t able to take what they learned in here back into their classroom.” Bigby now visits each of the four classrooms with Lewis and Clark’s 34 designated English learners, providing teachers support as they in- corporate Guided Language Acquisition Design, an educational model used widely along the West Coast incorporating language supports into ex- isting curriculum. Another ¿ve classrooms have been designated to serve John Jacob Astor Ele- mentary School’s 42 designated English learners. Astoria Bridge turns 50 Pageantry, exhibits, planned for bridge bash Oscar Jimenez works on an introduction for his essay about Leif Eriksson during class. McAndrew Burns, the executive director of the Clatsop County His- torical Society, has a clever idea to mark the 50th anniversary of the As- toria Bridge next summer. He wants to recreate a ribbon-cut- ting dedication held on Aug. 27, 1966, that drew Oregon Gov. Mark O. Hat¿eld, Washington Gov. Daniel Evans, Miss Oregon and Miss Wash- ington, a delegation from Astoria’s sister city of Walldorf, Germany, the Astoria Clowns, and throngs of more than 30,000. So far, the Germans are coming. “It might seem strange to get ex- cited by the anniversary of a bridge,” Burns told the Astoria City Council Monday night. “But like so many things we enjoy and appreciate about our town, we sometimes forget how Teamwork Thursday morning, several teams of ¿fth-graders were spread around work tables in Megan Jacobi’s classroom. The walls and win- dows of their classroom were festooned with posters created by parent volunteers, depicting key vocabulary for the early explorers unit and sentence structures to provide students an im- mediate reference. Students wrote their essays separately on Google Chromebooks at the work See ENGLISH, Page 9A By DERRICK DePLEDGE The Daily Astorian Kim Llamas works on an essay about Leif Eriksson. See BRIDGE, Page 12A Polluted nuclear weapons site to be tourist spot By NICHOLAS K. GERANIOS Associated Press SPOKANE, Wash. — The nation’s most polluted nuclear weapons production site is now its newest nation- al park. Thousands of people are expected next year to tour the Hanford Nuclear Reser- vation, home of the world’s ¿rst full-sized nuclear re- actor, near Richland, about 200 miles east of Seattle in south-central Washington. They won’t be allowed anywhere near the nation’s largest collection of toxic ra- dioactive waste. “Everything is clean and perfectly safe,” said Colleen French, the U.S. Department of Energy’s program manager for the Hanford park. “Any radioactive materials are miles away.” The Manhattan Project National Historic Park, signed into existence in November, also includes sites at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Los Alamos, New Mexico. The Manhattan Project is the name for the U.S. effort to build an atomic bomb during World War II. At Hanford, the main at- tractions will be B Reactor — the world’s ¿rst full-sized re- actor — along with the ghost towns of Hanford and White Bluffs, which were evacuated by the government to make room for the Manhattan Proj- ect. The B Reactor was built in about one year and pro- duced plutonium for the Trinity test blast in New Mexico and for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, that led to the surren- der of the Japanese. Starting in 1943, more than 50,000 people from across the United States arrived at the top-secret Hanford site to perform work whose purpose few knew, French said. See HANFORD, Page 12A U.S. Department of Energy/AP The ruins of the old Hanford High School are shown near Richland, Wash. The towns of Hanford and White Bluffs were evacuated to make room for the Hanford Nuclear Reserva- tion, which made the plutonium for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, and the ruins of the high school and other buildings are now part of the nation’s newest national park, called the Manhattan Project National Historic Park.
