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On the morning after spring break, four school buses leave the venerable bus barn on Third Street in Carbondale, but don’t return. The maintenance crew and a handful of drivers have spent the last week moving all the old tools and parts up to a new facility near El Jebel. In a few months, Roaring Fork School District hopes to have the old building torn down, the soil sampled and mitigated as needed, and a new teacher housing complex under construction on the site.

April 2, 1987: The Town of Basalt commended those who had rescued a man from his burning aircraft when it crashed in Holland Hills two weeks before.
“Let it be known to everyone that’s what saved my life,” Federal Express pilot Greg Dunham reportedly told Police Chief Larry Johnson when the idea of special recognition was proposed.

Roaring Fork School District Superintendent Rob Stein announced on March 24 that he had offered the job of principal at Roaring Fork High School to Brett Stringer, who currently serves as principal at the North Middle School Health Sciences and Technology Campus in Aurora, CO. Stringer accepted the position, Stein reported in an email to the district’s staff and obtained by The Sopris Sun, and will be starting the new job on July 1 if the selection is confirmed by the school board on April 12.

A little more than two weeks ago, Carbondale’s elected leaders and three closely-interrelated energy-efficiency consulting companies came up with a list of projects and programs on which to spend the $50,000 the town has set aside for energy programming in 2017.
The three consulting firms — mostly known by their acronyms; CLEER, CORE and GCE — have been working with the town for years to reduce Carbondale’s “carbon footprint” by helping local businesses, homeowners and the government itself to upgrade the structures around town by installing solar technology and energy-efficiency technology as a way of helping locals reduce their energy consumption.

Following Donald Trump’s unexpected presidential win in November, online activists around the country – including those in Carbondale, Basalt and Aspen – started communicating via social media and email on how to counter his agenda and prepare for the 2018 congressional elections.

The Sopris Sun is conducting a series of interviews with folks you may not have seen in the paper before – a sort of introduction to your neighbors. This week, we caught up with Heladio Sanchez, who runs things in the back warehouse at the Roaring Fork Co-Op.

March 24, 1977: Margaret Darien (neé Letey) announced her retirement after a teaching career spanning 50 years. “I’d like to teach a couple more years if I could,” she told the Valley Journal, but the school district – which didn’t even exist when she started teaching – had instituted a mandatory retirement age.

About 30 people from all around the Roaring Fork Valley made the trip to Ashcroft on March 18 and 19 for a public art project with an environmental slant. Organized by the Community Office of Resource Efficiency (CORE) as part of its brand new “High Five” approach, the project centered on the vision of California artist Sonja Hinrichsen.

Vail Mountain ended Roaring Fork’s two-game, season opening winning streak with a decisive 5-0 soccer win at home on March 18.
“They (Vail Mountain) were last year’s state tournament runners up,” said head coach Nick Forbes after the game.
Unfortunately, the Rams not only lost the game, they lost sophomore-starting defender Solana Teitler to a season-ending injury. Forbes said that going into a “defensive 50/50 tackle” she collided with the defender through the ball and fractured her femur above the knee. “Her first question was ‘did they score’,” Forbes told The Sopris Sun.

Roaring Fork School District no longer needs money or even, strictly speaking, approval from the Town of Carbondale to build a staff housing complex on Third Street, but that won’t stop RFSD from trying to live up to the “Community Partnership” name. The Carbondale Planning and Zoning Commission certainly found little to object to as the Roaring Fork School District voluntarily went through the standard approval process on March 16, while the sole public comment came down to questions more than objections.