Sharon dollar green interview

An Interview with Sharon Danks, Founder of Green Schoolyards America

Sharon Danks, the author of 

In a Green Technology interview, she describes the benefits that transforming these public resources can bring to students, teachers and communities.

I was wondering if you can tell me what green schoolyards are, exactly?

Green schoolyards are rich outdoor environments that strengthen local ecological systems, provide hands-on learning resources, and foster a wide range of play and social opportunities while enhancing health and well-being. These re-imagined schoolyards look and feel more like parks, and are often open to the local community after hours. Green schoolyards have comfortable microclimates that include deciduous shade trees, varied topography, edible and native plant gardens, nature play areas, outdoor classroom spaces, sport pitches, play structures, and elements that have been designed and built by the students at the school. Land use in a green schoolyard is very diverse and balanced: Green schoolyards provide an “ecosystem of opportunities” that the children, the school, and the community can use to make the most of this shared public space.

Lately, we have also been using the term “living schoolyards” to describe traditional school grounds that have been renovated in this way. This newer term highlights the natural features and ecology that is central to this idea.

Well-designed living schoolyards model the ecologically-rich cities we envision for the future, at a smaller scale, and teach the next generation how to live in an environmentally responsible way. They are places where urbanization and nature coexist and natural systems are prominent and visible, for everyone to enjoy. When implemented comprehensively and citywide, living schoolyard programs have the potential to become effective components of urban ecological infrastructure, helping their cities address many of the key environmental issues we are now facing, such as climate c

By John Mauk

In northern Michigan, we have bears, cherries, waves of tourists, and a vibrant literary community. If you walk or swim in any direction for very long, you’ll collide with a poet—a genuine and serious poet who studies hard and commits to the craft—and that person will know several fiction writers who hang around various memoirists who cavort with playwrights or songwriters. It’s an ecology of practitioners. Given our abundantly long winters and slow-motion springs, we have time to workshop, revise, confer, publish, and grind ahead no matter what.

With so many writers chopping at manuscripts, a formal organization was bound to develop. Michigan Writers has been a steady force in the region for decades. It hosts workshops, supports scholarships, distributes news among members, and publishes The Dunes Review, a longstanding and beloved print journal. For many members, an annual highlight has been the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press chapbook contest, which began in As in other contests, the process involves a round of volunteer readers across genres, then an outside final judge for each category: poetry, CNF, and fiction. Past outside judges include widely hailed writers such as Fleda Brown, Diane Seuss, Andy Mozina, Patricia Clark, Stephen Dunn, Thomas Lynch, Patricia Ann McNair, and Stephanie Mills. In , Thisbe Nissen, the outside judge in fiction, selected Sharon Bippus’s ThisBlue Earth. In her estimation, the stories resound with “wondrous turns of phrase” and “plainspoken truth.”

While the announcement came in June, Sharon Bippus is still sailing along, carried by the muster of affirmation. As most—perhaps all—writers know, drafting and revising can become terrifically lonely. Even with a community around us, the work can turn our writing spaces into self-loathing echo chambers. We long for any response, some howl in the distance that acknowledges our effort. Winning a chapbook contest is often a first formal acknowledgem

American woman convicted of two murders

Sharon Kinne (born Sharon Elizabeth Hall; November 30, – January 21, ), also known as Jeanette Pugliese, La Pistolera in Mexico, and Diedra Glabus (later Diedra Ell) in Canada, was an American murderer and prison escapee who was convicted in Mexico for one murder and is suspected of two others in the United States, one for which she was acquitted at trial. Kinne was the subject of the longest outstanding arrest warrant for murder in the history of Kansas City, Missouri, and one of the longest outstanding felony warrants in U.S. history. In January , it was announced that Kinne had been living in the small Canadian town of Taber, Alberta, from approximately until her death in

On March 19, , Sharon's husband, James Kinne, was found shot in the head. Sharon claimed that their two-year-old daughter, who had often been allowed to play with James' guns, had accidentally shot him, and police were initially unable to disprove her story. Then, on May 27, the body of year-old Patricia Jones, a local file clerk, was found by Sharon and a boyfriend in a secluded area. Investigators found that