Gorgeous sky over NorthStar Park. Photo by Mari Schwartzer

Here’s what’s going on in your city during this pre-Valentine’s Day weekend:

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Saturday, 11 February 2012

Third Annual Poker Tournament (EVENT)

Davis Musical Theatre Company

6:30PM

$40

Let the betting begin. Davis Musical Theatre Company is cutting the cards and dealing an exciting evening of Texas Hold ‘Em poker action. Thousands of dollars in prizes are up for grabs throughout the night with a final round showdown on the DMTC stage for the evening’s highest roller. All donations for the evening’s game are tax deductible and proceeds benefit Davis Musical Theatre Company’s main stage and young people’s productions. Registration is required, visit the website for details.

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Friday, 10 February 2012

HeArtAbout [ARTS/EVENT]

See link for times and places!

Source

As reported by the Enterprise:

Friday’s ArtAbout is a special art and dessert walk celebrating Valentine’s Day. Participants are invited to discover the sweet spots of downtown Davis and view the romantic, heart-themed work of local artists.

Special valentine sweets, provided by downtown eateries at several venues, are first-come, first-served. And, many receptions include complimentary refreshments and opportunities to chat with featured artists. All events are free and open to the public.

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Saturday, 11 February 2012

Rocky Horror Picture Show (FILM)

UC Davis Giedt Hall Room 1001

7:30PM
$2-3
A cast of talented young performers will be acting out the movie as you watch it while encouraging public participation. Tickets are available at the door.

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Sunday, 12 February 2012

International House Open Mic Series (EVENT)

I-House, 10 College Park (Across Russell from Memorial Union)

7:00PM

Free admission, donations accepted

All ages are welcome at the premiere of an ongoing series of open-microphone informal cultural exchanges of music, spoken word and graphic art. International students and community members are invited to take advantage of the open microphone, and a featured performer will present a half-hour set each week.

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Sunday, 12 February 2012

Circa

Mondavi Center for the Arts

3PM

$25-49

Since 2006, Circa has taken its vision of re-imagining circus as a contemporary art form to 18 countries across five continents. Their work has been hailed as “a breathless barrage and banquet of circus pandemonium” (City News, Australia). Circa offers utterly new ways of experiencing the awe-inspiring world of circus, combining physically impossible skills with a poetic sensibility to amaze, astonish and move audiences.

Measure C, the mail-in ballot arriving in all registered Davis voters’ mailboxes this week, seeks to renew two other parcel taxes which account for $6.5 million dollars of the Davis Joint Unified School District budget.  To homeowners, this represents the continuation of $320 worth of annual taxes for each of the next five years, or $150 of continued taxes to those who lease (which should already be wrapped into their monthly rental payment).

But for Davis students, this renewal means the potential end or continuation of vital school resources such as librarians and libraries, music education, reading assistance, reduced class sizes, physical education classes that promote healthy living and seek to avoid childhood obesity, athletics programs, and even laboratory science classes.

As a late-twenties woman who doesn’t yet have school-age children, this list shocked me.  “Aren’t these basics for education?” I asked Barbara Archer, representative of the Yes for Our Students campaign, who met with me to clarify some of the details of this issue. “Without these programs, how can our students learn to ask questions and be inquisitive?” Ms. Archer explained that while it may not seem like it (to people like me), Davis schools are already working with very little, so if Measure C is not approved by voters the district will have no choice but to cut some of the programs students need.

While all of these potentially lost programs are necessities in education, as the wife of a neuroscientist and passionate educator, the potential loss of lab sciences really spoke to me.  ”Inquiry-based” or hands-on learning, especially in the sciences, is integral for students to not only absorb information and make connections between the topics in their classes, but is also essential for crafting enthusiastic students.

The prestigious Science magazine recently reported that less than 5% of tasks in college textbooks involve projects that the students must actually interpret or attempt to complete themselves.  Regardless of failure or success in hands-on projects, Science notes that students get bored and lose interest in learning when they’re only taught from illustrations and lectures. Students learn best when they conduct experiments and make discoveries, rather than simply reading about them. Davis students who lose lab science classes won’t get to learn about data interpretation, investigative methods, or learn for themselves how something works.  And they certainly won’t be prepared when they’re tested in fifth grade on science topics.

Now, science may not be my forte, but those early lab classes in elementary through high school taught me about the complexity of life, the importance of reading comprehension, and they helped me become a person who questions what I’m told by asking why and how. For my husband and his students, inquiry-based learning ignited a lifelong passion for scientific inquiry at a young age.

To be fair, there have, indeed, been some concerns about Measure C that I find legitimate, but in the end, the plain truth is that without this renewal, students will be punished and made to sacrifice inappropriately.  No matter how you look at it, our students need and deserve more than a “bare bones” education. Without these programs, we can’t expect our youth to become lifelong learners with a passion for inquiry, to make our community proud, to compete for the best jobs someday, and to keep up the high standards of education for which Davis is so well-known.  Let’s remember that our school system is an important factor in keeping housing prices steady, and in luring and keeping strong families in the community.

There’s more at stake than first meets the eye in this vote, so when your ballot arrives in your mailbox, take your time, and consider what it really means for each and every Davisite. It may seem like just a tax renewal to support local schools, but the alternative may hit our community hard in many more ways than we can predict.

Strange Theft Remains a Mystery For Both Occupiers and UC Davis Officials

Arbitrator’s Report and Ruling on DACHA

The City Makes Its Case for the Parks Tax Renewal

Ground Zero is Coping with the Dry Winter. Are You?

Rabies Concerns: Deputies Seek Dog Who Bit Man in South Davis

Know of anything else newsworthy?  Leave us a comment to share!

by warren jones

***

when i look

at

variations

in wood grain

and

patterns

in rusted metal

i see the history

of man

and woman

and all creatures come to life

questions of the ryeness

of almost anything

and then wheatness

of buck

stop the clock

i am glancing

at

and that’s when i

check to see if i am still sane

that’s what we do

in life’s crazy

moments

we run simple tests

to make sure

we are still

listening to ourselves

still drumming

on the concert bandstand

more than this though

there is freedom

in tactile expression

and

freedom

in the bit player’s

voice

Even in the winter, the Farmers Market never disappoints. Photo by Mari Schwartzer.

HELLACAPPELLA 2012 [MUSIC/PERFORMANCE]

Saturday February 4th, 7:30-10:30pm

Come join the lovely ladies of The Spokes, UC Davis’ only all-female a cappella group, as they bring together eight other NorCal a cappella groups for the 8th annual HELLACAPPELLA concert. This year, a portion of the proceeds will be donated to the American Cancer Society.  HELLACAPPELLA will be held at the UC Davis Arc Pavillion this Saturday. Tickets are available at the door at 7pm or look online for advanced tickets.

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Family Circus Arts Workshop  [KIDS/FAMILY]

Sunday February 5th, 10am- 12pm

The Mondavi Center is putting on a free family arts workshop this Sunday. UC Davis’ Institute for Exploration in Theatre, Dance and Performance give families the opportunity to indulge their wish of running away with the circus. Develop some of the skills and confidence of circus performers. There will be two 90 minute sessions that cater to parents and children alike! The event will be held in the Vanderhoef Studio Theater. Given a maximum of 50 participants per each of the two sessions, reservations are recommended by emailing ucdavisdance@gmail.com.

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Co-op Circles: people getting together [COMMUNITY BUILDING/CRAFTS]

Sunday February 5th, 4pm- 6pm

Are you working on finsihing knitting that scarf before winter is over? Good News, the ground hog saw his shadow so you have six more weeks to knit away! The Co-op invites knitters of all levels to participate in their biweekly knitting and crafting circle. The circle is held in the Conference Room, is free of charge, and all are encouraged to join.

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Workshop: Build a Wild Home [NATURE/FAMILY]

Sunday February 5th, 1pm- 5pm

Join in this free event to help provide habitats for animals in the UC Davis arboretum and throughout the campus. Participate in making homes for owls, bats and bees! Take advantage of the lovely weather and spend some time out of your house making a house for the other critters who call Davis home. This event is free and children are welcome as long as parents are there to supervise.

The winning entry in the Deck the House Contest. Courtesy of Patch.com

Davisites Kristy and Jim Powell decorated their home for the holidays and entered it in Patch.com‘s national Deck the House contest.  But this was no simple feat to win.  The winning home and community had to impress thousands of online voters to eventually beat out over 850 other communities’ entrants.

Through an intense social media vote campaign, support from the Davis Enterprise, and even an old-fashioned flyering downtown, the “level of support for the Powell family in the Deck the House contest [was] unbelievable,” according to Patch.

An exciting testament to the closeness of Davis residents, the local commitment to education, and the usefulness of a well-connected social media web, this is a concrete example of how hardwork (in so many ways) can literally pay off for our community.  And don’t worry, the Powells also won a $500 personal prize to help with that surely hefty December power bill.

Patch and the Powell family presents $100K. Courtesy of Patch.com

This past Friday, the Powell family joined Patch officials during halftime at Davis High School’s basketball game to hand over the $100,000 prize to Superintendent Winfred Roberson.

Up next, how will the $100K be divvied up?  The jury is still out on how the funds will be spent by the school system, so we’re dying to know — what do you think the school district should do with the $100,000? How should they spend it?  Leave us a comment here to join the conversation!

7:00- A brief overview of the night’s agenda: the School Board will consider whether to move to district-based, one-trustee-per-district elections (based on concerns raised related to the California Voting Rights Act, which discourages at-large election systems because they can more easily disenfranchise minority groups); the Board will hear a presentation about the District’s plan for improving test scores of English language learners; the Board will hear a request to cap enrollment at Da Vinci Junior High, housed on the Emerson campus, at 300; some stuff will happen related to graduation requirements and ceremonies; a budget update; and then some public hearings that I doubt anything will happen at.  Meeting begins, and both the consent calendar and the agenda are approved unanimously.

7:20- The trustee-area elections that the Board is considering moving to are the only type of election immune to legal liability under the California Voting Rights Act.  In the case of Sanchez v. City of Modesto, the city settled with the plaintiffs (which would’ve alleged that the at-large election system stymied the ability of protected classes to elect a candidate of their choice) for $3 million, in addition to spending $1.7 million on its own attorneys–so the financial incentive to make the shift is clear.  Whether DJUSD would be vulnerable to a legal challenge, though, would depend on whether there are racially polarized election results, which is unclear; this can be determined using various statistical regression techniques.

7:30- The District’s legal counsel, who is presenting the item, is recommending the District conduct a liability analysis–costing $10,000 to $30,000, prompting pained looks from the Board members.  Richard Harris voices his skepticism of the District’s legal vulnerability because no member of a protected class has run but then lost in school board elections, and Gina Daleiden says that though she thinks there may be good reasons to move to district elections, she doesn’t think that the threat of a lawsuit is a strong concern given this record.  Legal counsel clarifies that he knows of no allegations or impending lawsuits against DJUSD in this area, but notes that many districts are transitioning away from at-large elections.  Susan Lovenburg notes that 3 of the 5 school districts in Yolo County have done so.

7:50- Maps revealing the racial composition of DJUSD voters show that racial and ethnic groups are much more heavily represented in some parts of DJUSD than others; however, without evidence that these groups are significantly divergent in their voting patterns than the District at large, this is legally inconsequential.  Tim Taylor moves to keep an at-large election system, and Daleiden, Allen, and Taylor agree; Lovenburg votes no, saying that she thinks the situation merits a legally valid assessment rather than the “anecdotal evidence” relied upon currently.  Taylor’s motion carries 4-1.

8:30- Essentially–like almost three quarters of California school districts–we are currently not meeting our No Child Left Behind-designated guidelines for improvement of English learners’ standardized test scores.  We’re supposed to reach 100% proficiency in all subjects across all groups within two years, so this isn’t exactly surprising, especially considering the years of budget cuts California schools have had to endure as NCLB raised its benchmarks.  Lots of discussion that tends towards the less interesting side of things.  Board unanimously votes to submit the District’s action plan for meeting NCLB goals as it is currently written.  Next is a followup to a presentation at the last meeting (which I missed due to illness) about enrollment at Emerson Junior High and Da Vinci Junior High, which share a campus.

8:40- A little background: Emerson Junior High has been severely underenrolled for many years, and when Da Vinci added its junior high program two years ago, it was placed on the Emerson campus to help solve this problem.  In contrast to the main Emerson program, however, Da Vinci JH cannot offer places to all who want to attend.  Staff has recommended that Da Vinci JH be allowed to increase enrollment by 100 students (from the current 180) over the next two years, while capping enrollment at 300, thus preserving the conventional “neighborhood school” program offered by Emerson while giving more students who want to attend Da Vinci a chance to do so.

9:00- About 50% (more or less) of current Da Vinci JH students are within Emerson attendance boundaries, and around 50% on the waitlist are also within Emerson attendance boundaries, drawing questions from the Board about the impact of Da Vinci expansion on the Emerson staff.  However, the expansion is highly unlikely to shift any more than 1.5 full-time jobs to Da Vinci from Emerson; and if necessary, displaced Emerson staff would have first dibs on any open positions in the District (including at Da Vinci).

9:30- Public comment on the proposal, including: 1 Emerson alumna and mother of two Emerson students worried about declining enrollment at Emerson; two Da Vinci JH students, one speaking against the change because of the rise in grade sizes and another more positive about the change but worried about the potential culture change that could result; another Emerson parent, worried about potential damage to Emerson’s core program because of declining enrollment; Troy Reeves, Da Vinci JH’s Vice Principal and lead English teacher, speaking about how she thinks more students deserve a chance to experience the Da Vinci program, and how she and the entire staff are dedicated to preserving the school’s culture while expanding the program; Emerson Principal Alicia Cummings, speaking about the dedication of her staff and how they have worked to formulate a vision for Emerson’s future; and others.

10:00- Lovenburg says that she does not feel she can support the motion to increase Da Vinci’s enrollment because she feels it’s a little too soon to expand so dramatically, and is concerned about the impact on Emerson’s program; however, all other trustees vote to approve the motion, and it passes 4-1.  The room, perhaps at 2/3 capacity earlier (much higher than the usual), pretty much empties out.

The presentation begins about graduation requirements and policies, which mostly consists of adjusting written guidelines to match current procedures, and streamlining the policies with current law.

10:10- Revisions are accepted unanimously, and we begin a budget update presentation that I will likely be quite zoned out for the duration of.

10:20- Key words: “This is the largest fiscal challenge that DJUSD has ever faced.”

10:30- I think some stuff happened..?  Anyway I think we’re pretty much done here.  Meeting concludes (+/- 10 minutes)!

Meet city’s new bike coordinator on Feb. 10

Mis-Communiqué-ted: Occupiers Leave the Cross Cultural Center

UC spent $100,000 on consultant after pepper-spraying

Dan Wolk with a Huge Early Monetary Advantage

DDBA launches dining, shopping promotion

Scrutinizing the “O” in the DBO Process — Two of the Operators Have Questionable Past

With that, I leave it to Zac to kick off our first of many fun pre-weekend reports…

We might be feeling the effects of this dry winter down the road, but that is no reason not to enjoy the warm and sunny upcoming weekend. Let’s savor these sunny dry weekends while we can, folks!  Take the opportunity to visit the Farmers Market in Central Park on Saturday morning, or enjoy a pleasant stroll through the UC Davis Arboretum. In the evenings, the Mondavi Center and several other local venues have  exciting shows for you to enjoy while avoiding the cold. Check out some of the wonderful weekend diversions going on this weekend in your community.

Friday, 27 January 2012

Royal Philharmonic Orchestra [MUSIC]

Longtime music director of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, Charles Dutoit brings Britain’s heralded Royal Philharmonic Orchestra with a French and Russian program featuring Jean-Yves Thibaudet playing Saint-Saëns final piano concerto.

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Saturday, 28 January 2012

Alfredo Rodriguez Trio [MUSIC]

A young pianist of astonishing virtuosity and imagination, Cuban-born Alfredo Rodriguez calls up images of legendary jazz pianists like Keith Jarrett, Thelonious Monk, Art Tatum, Bill Evans and his compatriot Chucho Valdés. Schooled in the rigorous classical conservatories of Havana, Rodriguez’s riveting artistry is informed as much by Bach and Stravinsky as by his Cuban and jazz roots. Discovered at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2006 by Quincy Jones, Rodríguez’s star has risen rapidly under the tutelage of the famed producer.

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Sunday, 29 January 2012

Alexander String Quartet [MUSIC]

Following on the heels of its exploration of Beethoven’s complete string quartets, Mondavi Center mainstays the Alexander String Quartet celebrates its 30th anniversary with a focus on Czech composer Antonin Dvorák. A fixture in the major music capitals of four continents, the Quartet has secured its place among the world’s premier ensembles while maintaining a major artistic presence in its home base of San Francisco.

Renowned musicologist, author and composer Robert Greenberg provides commentary throughout the concert.

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Saturday, 28 January 2012

Davis IDOL – Final Performance [MUSIC/PERFORMANCE]

The annual DAVIS IDOL competition is back and better than ever. Mark your calendars for three nights of amazing entertainment: January 20, 21, and 28. Singing to karaoke-style pop songs, high school contestants will try to become this year’s 2012 DAVIS HIGH IDOL.

This event is sponsored by the Davis Senior High Advanced Treble Choir. The competition will take place on the Davis Senior High campus in the Brunelle Performing Arts Theatre (IPAB). Thirteen contestants will perform each night (Jan. 20 and 21). The top five contestants from these two preliminary nights will then advance to the final performing night (Jan. 28), and one of these final 10 lucky contestants will be chosen as the new DAVIS HIGH IDOL. Finalists and winner will be selected by three musically trained judges.

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Saturday, 28 January 12pm – 5pm

Rominger West Winery [WINE] [MUSIC]

Last Saturday Celebration

Come celebrate the end of the month with live music from the Putah Creek Crawdads, delicious wine, and more! Free * Music