Visitation will be held on Tuesday, May 28, 10–11 a.m., at First Baptist Church, followed by a celebration of life, from 11 a.m.–noon. Interment will follow at Dayton National Cemetery. A full obituary will appear in the May 30 issue of the News.

The documentary was made in 2009 by two young women, both former victims of bullying, who have shown it to more than 30,000 children in 300 schools nationwide. The film is part of the Kind Campaign. a nonprofit created by the filmmakers.

The troop members, who are fifth-graders in Mills Lawn and the Antioch School, initially handed out surveys at recent “Girls Night Out” events to find if local young people saw girl bullying as a problem. About 90 percent of those who responded said yes.

The scouts said they have witnessed bullying among those they know.

“It affects girls’ self-esteem, the way they feel about themselves,” said fifth-grader Julia Hoff. “Getting bullied caused them to think bad thoughts about themselves and perhaps hurt themselves.”

The message to both children and adults at Friday night’s film is the same, according to troop co-leader Wendy Hoff.

“We have a choice, and every day we can choose to be kind,” she said.

The Yellow Springs Tree Committee decided to invest some of its donated funds to treat and try to save the arboretum’s ash from emerald ash borer damage. This effort constitutes something of an experiment in combating the borer, which has begun to attack trees in the village. Property owners who are considering treating their private ash trees could contact Tree Committee members to learn the results.

While the district will begin so-called project-based learning (PBL) next school year, Guest has been exploring similar methods for decades, squeezing in projects wherever she could. That’s one reason her retirement at the end of this school year is tinged with sadness.

“It’s bittersweet because [project-based learning] is the way I’ve always wanted to teach,” Guest said.

The Mills Lawn Elementary School first and second grade teacher of 12 years retires after 35 years in the Yellow Springs School District. Statewide changes to retirement benefits prompted her departure, she said.

Reflecting on her long local career, Guest said she always felt supported by the district in crafting new ways to reach students.

“Yellow Springs schools are wonderful because you have an opportunity to pursue the things you’re interested in with the kids,” Guest said. “As long as what you’re doing is still helping students to perform, you can approach things in the way you see is best for kids’ learning.”

Guest has sought to engage students with the natural world as much as possible, planting gardens right outside her window and bringing nature into the classroom. This year students harvested and cooked food from the school gardens, dissected owl pellets on a field trip, and watched a live Internet feed of a red-tailed hawk nest as part of a unit on the food chain (“What did the squirrel eat before it became dinner for the hawk?” Guest asked them).

Guest taught at nearly every grade level from K–8 during her time in the district. She enjoyed the playful and energetic middle schoolers, but in recent years has relished first and second graders. Teaching them is “like opening a present all year long,” Guest said, since it’s a mystery just how they will develop.

“They’re really blooming,” Guest said of the age group. “They’re discovering who they are and what they like, and I’m glad to be on the ground floor on their journey of self-discovery. It’s a privilege to be there when certain things get revealed about themselves.”

Mills Lawn was also a supportive and enriching environment, Guest said. She was consistently inspired by the talent and dedication of her colleagues. School-wide initiatives, which this year included modules on the 1940s and peacemaking, helped to nurture community in the school. And over the years a focus on art and artist residencies — from puppeteers and muralists to poets and musicians — engaged students.

Guest didn’t immediately know she would love teaching. After graduating from Blackburn College with an English degree, she taught high school in the Marshall Islands as part of the U.S. Peace Corps and also worked in adult education. It wasn’t until she began interviewing teachers as a reporter with the Yellow Springs News that she became attracted to public education. She went on to get a teaching certification through Antioch College and a master’s in reading and language arts at the University of Dayton.

It was her love of learning that drove Guest as a teacher, she said. When she interviewed for her first teaching position in Yellow Springs in the late 1970s, then Superintendent Ed McKinney asked her what her goal was as a teacher.

“On the spot I said I just want to be a better teacher,” Guest recalled. “I love to learn myself and teaching is always stimulating that way. Like other teachers I’m always trying to find a new and better way to teach something or address a child’s special needs.”

As she leaves, Guest is optimistic about the move toward project-based learning. She saw the benefits in her own classroom this year when she piloted a PBL project. Students focused on solving a real world problem — helping other students understand the food chain — and used inquiry and collaboration as well as learned content in the process of creating a book. In her retirement, Guest, who lives in the village, plans to spend more time hiking, canoeing and gardening, pursuing a photography hobby and visiting her granddaughter on the West Coast.

But for the next month Guest is trying to work in as many projects as she can. This week her students are decorating houses on paper according to their unique imagination, learning “how do you recognize what your dream is for your life?” Guest said. They’ll read Miss Rumphius about an old woman who makes the world a more beautiful place while challenging her students to do the same.

And, for the last time, Guest will read Megan McDonald’s Insects Are My Life while encouraging her students to find their own passions. Then, as she has done for years, she’ll write down on the inside cover what this year’s students love — stuffed animals, water slides, dolphins, Nana’s house.

“[The book] helps kids understand and appreciate that we’re all unique and all have our own special interests,” Guest said. Most books and materials Guest plans to leave for the next first-grade teacher. But she’ll take McDonald’s book with her and looks forward to one day reading it to her grandchild and sharing with her the loves of so many children that were once her students.

The district was returned to fiscal health after the community approved a major levy in the fall, providing an annual $915,000 boost to district coffers. And the forecast was enough to pursuade the board at Thursday’s meeting to approve a renewal of the permanent improvement levy at its current level, rather than ask for increased funds. The levy is expected to be on the ballot in November.

“We’re recommending that we renew at the current level and spend it wisely,” Weller said of the district’s commitment to no more new taxes for the foreseeable future. However, one of the district’s emergency levies that brings in $1.06 million annually is scheduled to expire in 2015, and will need to be considered for renewal or replacement at that time.

The current five-year forecast assumes the renewal of this year’s permanent improvement levy, which brings in $145,000 annually for capital improvements and fixed-cost purchases. The money is needed this year to restore the roof over the Mills Lawn annex, estimated to cost $90,000. Other capital needs include a new handicapped accessible bus to replace the one that had to be retired this spring. (The district is currently borrowing a bus from the Greene County Career Center.)

Whereas over the past three years, the budget shows the schools spending an average of $550,000 over revenues each year, even after major budget cuts, the current forecast shows a cash bounty. In 2013 the district expects to spend about $200,000 less than it will bring in, and be about $450,000 under revenues for the following two years.

While the district’s cash reserves have covered the past deficit spending, the cash was being depleted. Now the forecast shows the reserves bulking up again to about $2.6 million by 2016.

In other school board business:

• The district is piloting a math intervention and credit recovery program this summer to provide additional instruction for eighth- and ninth-grade students who are struggling with the pre-algebra and algebra skills necessary to graduate from high school. The program is a hybrid learning environment involving one of the district’s math teachers and several online learning providers such as Apex, Khan Academy and TeacherTube.

Concurrently, the district is offering its first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) this summer, Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative. Students may register for the course offered in collaboration with Antioch University Midwest for one-semester elective credit.

Both summer programs cost $150 per student.

• The board approved the hiring of McKinney physical education teacher Angela Bussey, who will replace Sarah Lowe; two-year contracts with McKinney/YSHS secretary Debra Kimbler; special ed instructional aide Candace Greenwood; Mills Lawn school nurse Michele Brown; bus driver George Fenimore; and volunteer softball coach Waring Worsham.

• The district honored retiring teachers Ellen Guest, Sarah Lowe, Mary Anne Christopher and Cheryl Ayrsman for their service to the schools.

• The board approved a $200,000 contract with the Greene County Educational Service Center for the 2013–14 school year. The center, located across the parking lot from the high school, provides services such as speech therapy, counseling and psychological support.

• For future planning, the school board rescheduled its August meeting to Thursday, Aug. 1, at 7 p.m.

Rosengarten’s large, expressive oil paintings will fill the walls of the exhibit, “Constructions of Space: Tess Little and Jennifer Rosengarten,” in which Little, a sculptor, will exhibit her work on the floor space. The exhibit runs through June 15.

A gallery talk on the exhibit will take place Thursday, May 23, at 6:15 p.m. and Rosengarten will offer a workshop on drawing on May 18, 3–6 p.m.

While Rosengarten has exhibited her work in many Dayton, Cincinnati and Santa Fe galleries, she has worked for the past year and a half to get ready for this event.

“It’s the most significant show I’ve had,” she said in an interview last week.

Rosengarten describes her work as “on the fence between abstraction and representation,” and lists as her influences Cezanne, Matisse and Joan Mitchell, among others. Her paintings are clearly inspired by the natural world, such as the image of a golden maple in October, or white dahlias in her garden on a summer evening when the doves begin cooing, her favorite time of day.

But the finished work is far from just representation. She takes the spark of that image into her studio, where it mixes with memories, photos and emotion to become its own creation.

“People think I paint from life, and it starts that way, but then becomes a dialogue with the painting itself,” she said. “The color, the lines, the shapes take on their own life.”

For instance, the painting that began with the white dahlias ended up with deep blues as well, in what Rosengarten sees as the tension between light and darkness that animates any good painting.

Rosengarten sometimes worries that her paintings are too “pretty,” and she aims for something different, incorporating beauty but going beyond beauty as well.

“To me, there has to be an element of coming through something, because to me that’s what beauty is,” she said. “The level of emotion has to do with that contrast between light and dark.” And many of her works have to do with endings, such as how it feels to be in the garden at the end of summer, or at the end of a day.

And after many years of painting, Rosengarten finally realized that perhaps there’s a reason her works are so large.

“If there’s one reason I paint, it’s that I’m always trying to create a space for me to be in, a space where I want to be,” she said. “It needs to have a lot of life force, the energy of living things.”

Rosengarten moved to Yellow Springs with her husband, Chad Runyon, and their son, Jack, 12 years ago. The two grew up in the Dayton area, and Yellow Springs figured into Rosengarten’s career as an artist, as her Wright State University teachers Ernie Koerlin, Deborah Chlebek and Diane Fitch were all artists who lived in the village. She then spent several years in the area preparing her portfolio for graduate school, and won a full scholarship to Boston University, where she received an MFA. Also at Boston, she won the art school’s $15,000 annual award, which allowed her to travel to Europe to see the great paintings she’d always wanted to see. She then lived in Rhode Island for several years, working as a waitress, teaching at Providence College and painting in her free time. Then Rosengarten re-connected with Runyon, whom she had known growing up, and the two lived in Taos, N.M., Portland, Maine and Rhode Island, until deciding they wanted to be closer to their families.

“We thought the only place we could live in Ohio would be Yellow Springs,” she said.

Rosengarten has taught part time at University of Dayton for the past 11 years, although she recently gave up that job. She’ll miss the students, she said, but looks forward to having more time to paint. Her art is selling well, especially to corporate clients who can make use of her large canvases, and she recently sold work to Premier Health Partners and to the Dayton developer Richard Danis. Galleries sometimes say her work is too large to exhibit, although she has displayed work at the Meadowlark restaurant in Dayton.

Over several decades as a painter, Rosengarten’s work has evolved. It’s hard to believe, looking at her current work bursting with life and color, but her early work focused on interiors, and she used darker colors.

“I guess I was hiding,” she says of earlier work. “I finally came out of my room, into life.”

Her work, as well as becoming more inspired by the natural world, has also become “looser in mark and lighter in palette,” she said. And she has grown out of her earlier need to make big artistic statements, she said.

“I think it’s enough to be in the day, and talk about what that was,” she said. “The day can be dense with emotions. I’m letting go of the pretense of what I should be doing as an artist to experience things as fully as I can.”

The Dayton Visual Arts Center is located at 118 North Jefferson St., Dayton. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Lois Miller, with a grade point average of 4.098, was named valedictorian, and Hunter Lawson, with a grade point average of 3.952, was named salutatorian.

Taylor Ford, Hunter Lawson and Regina Brecha are National Merit Commended students. They placed in the top 5 percent of more than 1.5 million students who entered the 2012 competition by taking the 2010 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test.

The following students were awarded the Diploma with Honors in acknow­ledgement of their superior academic achievement and commitment to excellence: Angela Allen, Regina Brecha, Lucy Callahan, Taylor Ford, Maya Hardman, Philip Kaiser-Parlette, Hunter Lawson, Lois Miller, Ali Solomon and Paloma Wiggins.

The Award of Merit was given to the following students in acknowledgement of their superior academic achievement and commitment to excellence and attendance: Angela Allen, Lucy Callahan, Maya Hardman, Megan Hiner, Philip Kaiser-Parlette, Katie Kruk, Hunter Lawson, Chauncey Longshaw and Lois Miller.

Current active members of the National Honor Society are: Lois Miller, Hunter Lawson, Lucy Callahan, Philip Kaiser-Parlette, Maya Hardman, Regina Brecha, Megan Hiner and Charlie Fenimore. New inductees are: Lillian Rudolf, Paloma Wiggins, Angela Allen, Taylor Ford, Ali Solomon, Erin Grote, Kirsten Denman, Zoey McKinley, Christina Brewer and Rachel Meyer.

2012–13 Foreign Exchange Students were Fernando (Boris) Calle-Fernandez, Yuka Iguchi, Pedro Cussioli, Lotte Mulder and Elisa Wilk.

Perfect Attendance awards were presented to junior Taylor Beck and senior Keturah Fulton.

The Community Blood Center recognized Taylor Ford, Keturah Fulton, Lois Miller, Ali Solomon, Casandra Wessendorf and Paloma Wiggins as “red cord graduates” for registering to donate blood three or more times during their high school career.

Rachel Meyer received the Bausch and Lomb Honorary Science Award. Recipients of this award receive a scholarship of $7,500 per year if they attend the University of Rochester.

Zoey McKinley received the Rensselaer Medal Award for outstanding academic achievement in mathematics and science.

Philip Kaiser-Parlette received the Eric Smith CodeDog Scholarship for $300.

Paloma Wiggins received the Delta Sigma Theta (Wilberforce) Scholarship for $500.

Maya Hardman and Paloma Wiggins received the Greene County Youth Activity Fund scholarship for $500 each, given by the Greene County Sheriff’s Department.

Maya Hardman received the Simply Women Scholarship (Paloma Wiggins Foundation).

Tyler Kimball received the Howard Kahoe/Dud Scott Scholarship for $500.

Angela Allen received the Martha Dell Cadow and Warren Dell Scholarship for $500.

Hunter Lawson, Lucy Callahan and Ali Solomon received Yellow Springs Theater Arts awards of $200.

Rachel Meyer and Erin Grote received Mary Jane Bachtell Awards for Creative Writing in the amounts of $400 and $200, respectively.

Yellow Springs Arts Council Student Art Awards were given to Dora Perini ($300), Accomplished Series; Romy Farrar ($250), Accomplished Series; and Lillian Rudolf ($200), Excellence in Individual Works.

Lois Miller received the YSHS Metro Buckeye Scholarship, awarded to an athlete based on sports participation, GPA, community service and academic and athletic achievement.

Maryah Martin received the John Gudgel Scholarship for $750.

Niki Worsham received the Yellow Springs Education Association Scholarship for $800.

Sierra Butler received the John McConville Memorial Scholarship for $1,000.

Angela Allen received the James A. McKee Scholarship for $1,000.

Taylor Ford and Paloma Wiggins received Bulldog Scholarships of $1,000 each.

Regina Brecha, Erin Grote and Naomi Guth each received $350 awards from the Shirley Mullins Endowment Fund

From the Shirley Mullins Endowment, Taylor Beck, Kennedy Harshaw and Oluka Okia each received $100 awards from the Summer Private Lesson Fund; Christina Brewer and the YS Quartet Music (Gabe Day, Henry Potts-Rubin, Meredith Rowe and Josh Seitz) received Music Purchase Awards; and Blaze Wright received a Targeted Scholarship of $150.

Paloma Wiggins received the L. Shelbert Smith Memorial Scholarship for $2,000.

The Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Yellow Springs Lodge #279 awarded $1,000 each to Acala Cresci, Keturah Fulton, Maya Hardman and Maryah Martin, and presented $100 book awards to Regina Brecha, Lucy Callahan, Taylor Ford and Ali Solomon.

Regina Brecha received the $3,600 Foos Scholarship administered by the Yellow Springs Lions Club.

The Greene County Career Center gave the following awards:

Angela Allen: Distinguished Student Award for Medical/Legal Office Technologies; Sinclair Community College Tech Prep Scholarship for $3,000; DeWine Memorial Scholarship for $20,000; and 2nd place, Advanced Interview, Business Professionals of America Regional Competitive Events.

Megan Hiner: Sinclair Community College Tech Prep Scholarship for $3,000.

Tyler Kimball: Sinclair Community College Tech Prep Scholarship for $3,000; Silver rating, Culinary Team, Family, Career and Community Leaders of America Regional Competitive Events.

Kathryn Kruk: Sinclair Community College Tech Prep Scholarship for $3,000.

Chauncey Longshaw: Presidents’ Award for Educational Excellence; 2nd Place, Management Team, Miami Valley Tech Prep Showcase Competition; 3rd place, Small Business Management, Business Professionals of America State Competitive Events.

Cory Thompson: Sinclair Community College Tech Prep Scholarship for $3,000.

The process has many faces, but the food bank effort is one example of project-based learning, or PBL, which Yellow Springs schools have begun to use as a foundation for the district-wide curriculum. PBL is experiential, it’s student driven and therefore often unpredictable. It can have real world application, and according to senior Paloma Wiggins, a participant in the food bank project, project-based learning motivates her to do better work.

To stimulate discussion in the wider community about the purpose of project-based learning, the district has invited a speaker from the Gary and Jerri-Ann Jacobs High Tech High school in San Diego to share ideas about building a curriculum based in PBL. Laura McBain, director of external relations for High Tech High, will join school leaders in an evening of dialogue on Monday, May 20, from 7 to 9 p.m. in the multi-purpose room at Antioch University Midwest.

High Tech High was conceived in the late 1990s by a group of civic and business leaders looking for a labor force of diverse young people qualified for the high tech world of work, according to the school’s website. They wanted students who were passionate about learning and possessed the skills needed for both work and citizenship. According to McBain in an interview this week, project-based learning was chosen as a key component of the curriculum for its ability to put students’ ideas first and allow them to generate excitement about their learning process.

The roots of PBL were developed over a century ago by philosophers such as John Dewey, but the methods never infiltrated the traditional public school model of teacher as the content expert telling students exactly how to get to all the “right answers.” But when teachers trade direct instruction for a more fluid role as coach and mentor, students begin to take ownership of their process and as a result become more engaged and excited about learning. According to McBain, if PBL is done right, the adults should end up learning alongside the students.

When YSHS English teacher Elizabeth Lutz and art teacher Elizabeth Simon conceived of a project involving the foodbank, for instance, they had no idea where the students would take it. According to Simon in a recent interview, she and Lutz presented the concept of using their writing and graphic art skills to benefit the nonprofit in some way, but the students themselves created the whole idea for a public ad campaign and proceeded to design it the way they thought would be most effective. The teachers participated in the discussions, offered a historic look at design strategies of professional advertisers, and talked about the use of concepts such as rhetoric, irony and metaphor, as well as design elements of contrast, alignment and proximity. But it was the students who critiqued each other as they revised their work to make it better. And ultimately, it was the foodbank, an entity completely independent of the school, toward which the students may have felt the most accountable. The students also used hunger concepts from the Mathile Institute and partnered with local graphic artists DJ and Justin Galvin for feedback on their work.

Yellow Springs teachers have essentially been practicing project-based learning for decades. Their interdisciplinary, experiential units have included a Humanities House at the high school in the 1990s, a hands-on unit about Egypt at Mills Lawn, a science and art unit on the Rain Forest at McKinney, and more recently projects under the theme of water, hunger and other subjects. But according to Simon, what makes the current drive to root learning in experiential, applied environments different is the commitment to manage group work and partner with an outside element that holds the students accountable — “it’s more high stakes for them, and for me as well,” she said.

The Yellow Springs school board is expected to approve an $85,000 grant from the Yellow Springs Schools Capital and Endowment Fund this year for continued professional development training from High Tech High and the Dayton Regional STEM School. And this past year teachers received some introductory training from the STEM school and have already begun implementing a range of project-based education.

McKinney math and science teacher Jack Hatert, for instance, has couched almost all of this year’s lessons in projects, he said at a recent school board meeting. His students Jorie Sieck and Cameron Haught participated in group projects on ecology in a bottle, water cycle firecrackers, air and ocean currents, and other lessons involving problem solving, presentations, and critiques. Throughout the year, Sieck said during the meeting, she learned how to see the strengths of her group members and divide the work based on “what people can do well,” she said. Though he never saw himself as a leader per se, Haught said he learned how to take on a leadership role when needed and to “demand top quality work” from his teammates.

According to Brian Boyd, who was the founding principal of the Dayton STEM school and is now the hub director in charge of sharing what the school has learned with other districts in the region, transitioning to a project-based model isn’t going to happen overnight. It will be an evolutionary process of trial and error, as well as some amount of risk taking on the part of both teachers and students to allow the version of PBL that Yellow Springs wants to unfold. But Boyd believes in PBL because it establishes a need to know, it develops soft skills like collaboration and communication, and he has seen the work that students can produce when they’re leading the charge.

“I’ve seen students produce really meaningful work that they’re proud of and that demonstrates the content we want them to learn,” he said this week. “They see that they’re capable of doing that work.”

McBain travels to different school districts around the country also sharing what High Tech High has discovered about learning, and she tells the story of a high school student in Iowa who developed an idea for an environmentally sound “green” golf ball. He focused months designing, revising, getting critiqued and revising again, wanting to get the product exactly right. One night while the student was again engrossed in tweaking his golf ball, McBain explained, his father reminded him that he had an economics test the next day. The student replied that he had already figured out he only needed a C to pass, and that he still had time to keep working on the green ball.

This is all part of the intentional process of producing good work, McBain said. If students are engaged they will produce work that has value to the community, whether it’s artwork to beautify the school environment (as at High Tech High) or research that helps communicate cancer prevention (as with a project the STEM school worked on with the Greene County Combined Health District). Ultimately, project-based learning is an effective way of raising youth who care about their communities and have the skills to make them better.

“It’s how we create people who come back and contribute to the community,” McBain said, adding that the effect is not limited to students’ home community. “It’s about contributing to the global work place… by graduating kids who think well, communicate well and have the entrepreneurial skills to maneuver within a rapidly changing job market.”

Village Council will continue to discuss additional changes to the code next month before voting to approve the entire zoning code revision sometime over the summer.

Several contentious items arose during the discussion, which was attended by about 35 villagers. Council members did not always agree on the right tack to take, and several items came down to a split vote. The first was minimum square footage for primary structures in Residence A, B and C districts.

Council voted 3–2 to eliminate minimum footprint, with members Judith Hempfling, Lori Askeland and Rick Walkey voting for the motion and Karen Wintrow and Gerry Simms voting against it. Wintrow preferred to maintain the existing code’s minimum building size of 500 square feet in R-B and 900 square feet in R-C, which she said was already smaller than the old code allowed but was necessary to preserve the integrity of the lower density R-A neighborhoods.

“It’s offensive to have a large lot with a 300 square-foot house on it — it’s a waste of land and resources, and I don’t understand it,” she said.

Other Council members did not believe the move would have a negative impact on the R-A neighborhoods and saw it as a way to help residents who are trying to save energy by building smaller homes.

Council continued to discuss changes to the code’s residential chapter, voting 3–2 to add flexibility by making offices and professional spaces a conditionally permitted use in residential districts. Hempfling supported the motion to allow greater land-use flexibility and continue the uses that are currently permitted. Wintrow preferred to prohibit offices in R-A and R-B with conditional use in R-C in order to encourage a more consistent, safer neighborhood environment with less traffic in the residential areas.

Regarding the business districts, though Hempfling proposed to make electric and plumbing supplies service as well as repair shops a conditionally permitted use in the Central and General business districts downtown and by Dollar General, the rest of Council preferred to keep those uses to Industrial-1 districts at MillWorks and the Vernay property on Dayton Street. The current downtown uses, including A/C Service, will be grandfathered in.

For the Industrial-1 district Hempfling proposed adding as a conditional live/work use to allow artists and others to live and work in a studio-like space. Though MillWorks owners said they have had requests for such a land use, they didn’t think that family dwellings were a good fit for the kind of light industry and production activities that take place in I-1 districts. Council also did not have a working definition for “live/work” land use, and agreed to table the motion for a later time.

On other zoning items, Council members found easy consensus. The Community Resources board requested that the Village consider a mixed commerce district specific to the Center for Business and Education to facilitate the gradual division of the property as it is sold to the businesses and commercial entities it was designed to host. Council agreed to withdraw the current zoning of planned unit development (PUD) for the commerce park and establish mixed commerce solely for the CBE.

Antioch College proposed several zoning changes that Council agreed to. The college proposed adding to the Education 1 zone (where both the college and Antioch University are located) permitted uses including general retail catering to the needs of the campus (such as a bookstore or coffee shop) less than 10,000 square feet in size. After some discussion about not wanting additional retail areas to compete with the downtown, but also wanting to give the college the flexibility it needs to be successful, Council agreed to approve small-scale retail as a conditional use in E-1. Also at the college’s request, the Village added as permitted uses in E-1 an interpretive center, as well as offices for executive, administrative, real estate, accounting and similar professional activities. Finally the college asked that the property directly west of the campus and north of Vernay be rezoned from Industrial 1 to Residence C. The college had concerns that a sexually oriented business could be located there and would conflict with surrounding land uses.

Two Cliff Street residents requested that instead of including their properties at the northern edge of the Central Business District that they be zoned R-C, like the adjacent properties. The neighbors had recently built their homes with passive solar elements that require the setbacks of R-C to guarantee adequate sun exposure to heat their homes. Council voted yes on the measure.

Council also agreed to several changes on the Glass farm off King Street. First Council agreed to a request by several neighbors to maintain and formally recognize the conservation easement on the eastern third of the Glass farm. That portion of the property can be used as part of the negotiated green space required for the development of a PUD on the remaining portion of the property, according to word from the Village solicitor. Council also agreed to switch the “underlying” zone of the Glass farm from Residence A to Residence B. Though the property is currently undeveloped, Council hoped that the initial zoning would establish the intent for the property and encourage future developers to choose the higher density of the R-B district. R-B is consistent with the adjacent districts directly south and north of the property.

Manieri shares her personal journey in the form of original songs and theatrical verse that she began creating 13 years ago. She said that the art weaves together her real experiences, her dreamscape and imagination, and that it is an offering of “deep heart to all who are on their healing journey to reclaim their wholeness and embodied wisdom.”

The “Dance of Liberation” is choreographed by Marybeth Wolf and performed by Yellow Springs women. It is rooted in the Southern Italian ancient rhythmic healing traditions, known today as the Tarantella. It has been used in Italy and the Mediterranean for centuries to cure people, especially women, suffering a form of mental depression known as “tarantismo,” attributed to the mythical bite of the tarantula. The malady’s effects are thought to include depression and hysteria resulting from sexual abuse and societal oppression. When a woman was identified as being bitten, they would call in the musicians to play for her while she shook and erotically rolled around on the ground. They would keep playing until the woman was healed through this entrancing rhythm.

Manieri has been invited to begin her apprenticeship this summer with the woman who teaches these ancient healing rhythms today, internationally-renowned singer, percussionist and teacher Alessandra Belloni. The performance is a fundraiser for Manieri’s pilgrimage to Italy to bring back home these healing rhythms of her ancestors.

A donation of $20 is suggested.