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Dec 17
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BHS Yearbook Production Now A Popular Class
By Christi Boortz, Curriculum & Professional Development Department
Posted on December 16, 2015
Blind and visually impaired high school students were excited when a new class showed up on the FSDB course schedule for the fall semester, among the usual listings. Technically “Journalism 1,” the class focuses on Yearbook Production, and is taught by English and Language Arts instructor Melissa Fonda. The class has a strong literacy component integrating technology and the visual arts. Students learn writing and listening skills, as well as the aesthetics of photography and layout design. They use email to schedule interviews, fact check, and submit assignments via computer. Also, they use the Memory Book website to upload photos and create copy and layouts. Fonda has many good memories from participating in yearbook production as a student back in her early years—she “enjoyed the technical and creative aspects of making layouts and writing features,” Fonda received state of the art technology and equipment to implement the class, in the form of a giant Apple screen display unit with wireless keyboard and mouse, and two high quality Canon cameras. The class is composed of juniors and seniors, which is just fine by Fonda since “older students have had time to develop their writing skills, they know who people in the high school are, and they have a sense of the extracurricular activities that everyone is engaged in – more maturity overall.” Fonda is also pleased with the cross section of students who signed on, which includes athletes, musicians, artists, and Student Council members. Initially six students signed up, but three more added the class after they heard it was fun. Word travels fast in BHS!
Bryce Cothron plans to be a novelist in adulthood, so he especially enjoys writing snippets for the yearbook. He also expressed appreciation for learning about the various elements of photography, such as composition and positioning. He summed up, “It’s interesting to see how it all comes out. Good stuff.” Jonathan Moran asked himself, “Why not?” and showed up for class. He cites editing as one of his favorite activities. Ditto for student Aaliyah Gisondi, who loves being a copy editor. She admitted with a smile, “I get to tell anyone when they have made errors. It might sound funny but that makes me happy.” Gisondi also took the class so she could work with “Ms. Fonda,” one of her favorite BHS instructors. Roque Moran, brother to Johnathan, took the class partly because it fit his schedule and partly because he felt it would be interesting. The class has met his expectations. Among other things, he has learned “taking good pictures requires accuracy.” And he enthusiastically endorsed the instructor, saying “Ms. Fonda’s teaching is awesome.”
Emmitt Johnson enjoys writing and “running around the school to take photos of events.” He has learned, in terms of formatting, what to do and what not to do. Nick Thompson favors design and layout, but explained that he additionally does “odd jobs, like getting photo permissions.” Vanessa Coleman had a professional take on the “soft skills” she has been learning through the course, stressing that one should “always follow up and stay on task.” She shared her former problems with procrastination and explained “As soon as you get a task to do, you better get on it right away!” Quinn Delong took the course on the advice of Assistant Principal Charlie Crozier. Delong already had some accumulated knowledge from working with Fonda on the yearbook last year. He feels the course has added to his skill set in media, from technical aspects of layout to the softer skills of working in teams effectively, and sharing knowledge with his classmates. He has some advice to offer: “Do what you love, love what you do.” Apple Polonia is the editor of the club section in the yearbook, and through an email interview, shared that she is learning cooperation and interviewing skills. She highly recommends the class as a good learning experience for those who enjoy design and communication. She suggests that her peers should “try as many different things as possible, because knows that thing might turn into an interest and then maybe a passion.”
About FSDB
Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind (FSDB) is a fully accredited state public school and outreach center available tuition-free to eligible pre-K and K-12 deaf/hard of hearing and blind/visually impaired students. Comprehensive educational services at FSDB are individualized, specific to the unique communication and accessibility needs of each student for independence and lifelong success. FSDB gratefully accepts private donations to support vital programs that directly benefit students and are not paid by state general revenue funds. To visit the school or to learn more about eligibility for enrollment, contact 1-800-344-3732. For more information, visit www.fsdb.k12.fl.us.
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Aug 07
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Mike Fonda: A life fighting sexual violence
January 28, 2015 by The Hudsonian Student Newspaper – Andrea Currie, News Editor
Mike Fonda, a retired Cohoes Police officer who specialized in sexual assault crimes, now does counseling at Hudson Valley once a week.
“This is a perfect retirement job for a guy like me,” said Mike Fonda, a retired Detective Sergeant from the Cohoes Police Department, who works as a Prevention Educator for the Sexual Assault and Crime Victims Assistance Program (SACVAP) at Samaritan Hospital in Troy. Fonda’s work takes him all over the Capital Region: he teaches personal safety and self-esteem at K-12 schools; he conducts the Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) program at seven YMCAs; he offers the MVP program to sports teams at local colleges; he conducts the MVP program with inmates at Rensselaer County Jail; and on Wednesday afternoons from 12 – 4 p.m., he offers in-person counseling at the Hudson Valley Health Services office in room 146 of Fitzgibbons Hall.
When Fonda started working at the Cohoes Police Department, he was assigned the traditional role for incoming officers: juvenile officer. “You deal with everything from stolen bikes to the sex crimes,” he said. When a new person joined the department, Fonda asked to keep the job, and when he was promoted to sergeant, he requested to keep working on sex crimes. He said that he thought he had the right demeanor for the job. “I had other police officers come up to me and say, ‘you know, you’re relaxed, you’re fun, people feel safe with you, … they trust you. So I just stayed with it.’”
In 2007, Fonda was hired by the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services to track down the records of sex offenders who moved in from out of state. There is no central repository for these files, so he had to speak with other police officers, agencies across the country, and, often, call sex offenders and interview them about their convictions. Fonda said that offenders often lied to him during these interviews. “I let them blame the victim. But in that victim-blaming is the truth,” he said, “I’ve learned to give people enough rope to hang themselves.”
Fonda briefly worked with SACVAP before joining the state and had stayed in contact with them. In early 2011, they told him they had a prevention educator position open. He jumped at the chance. “Sometimes money isn’t—you know. It’s okay, but I feel like I need to be doing something,” Fonda said. His state job was a good job and paid well. “But you’re basically in an office working with a fax machine, a telephone, and your computer.” He said the prevention educator position was a perfect fit for him, since he has a master’s degree in Community Psychology, has taken many counseling courses, and with his law enforcement background, can talk about the subject from experience. “I know there’s a lot of people out there wondering, did I do something wrong? Who’ll believe me? … Well, I would, ’cause I know. I’ve seen that, the cases with the state police and the Cub Scout leaders and the Kiwanis clubs,” said Fonda.
He said that his favorite part of his job is going out into schools and providing information. He said that he focuses on victim-blaming and why people shouldn’t blame themselves for being assaulted. “I’m hoping to see some lights go on with people saying, Okay, so it wasn’t just me,” said Fonda. Fonda said that the MVP program gives him an opportunity to address men. “These issues, they seem like they’re women’s issues, because you might say, women get raped,” he said, “But it’s men who rape women. And it’s not every guy who rapes a woman.” He says that the MVP program challenges men to speak out and condemn sexual assault. He speaks about men who’ve been sexually assaulted as well and reassures them that they did nothing wrong.
Fonda said that over the time he’s been doing this work, he has observed a change in public attitudes towards sexual assault and rape. “To me, it feels like it’s finally getting the attention it deserves,” he said, “It feels like we’re on a bubble, that all this stuff is about to burst and people are going to know about it, they’re going to understand it, and they’re not going to look at it the same way as … saying, I’m broken, or, it’s the victim’s fault, or … how can you accuse these celebrities of doing that?” Fonda said that sexual assault is never about sex: “It’s about the power. It’s about having that power to do what they want.”
Fonda said that he is proud of SACVAP. “It’s just phenomenal work. It’s not sexy, it’s not glamorous, people don’t want to talk about it, but every day, we’re there, 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” he said, referring to the agency’s sexual assault hotline. SACVAP offers in-person services at Samaritan Hospital at 2215 Burdett Ave. in Troy, including short-term counseling; therapy free of charge; and legal advocates for survivors.
The agency also has opportunities for volunteers. Winter 2015 Volunteer Training starts Feb. 3. Volunteers must be at least 18 years old and be willing to sign up for at least three hotline shifts monthly, commit to at least six months with the agency, attend monthly in-service meetings, and complete at least 10 hours of community education.
Interested parties should contact Jamie Seastrand by phone at 518-271-3140 or via email at jamie.seastrand@sphp.com.
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Jun 18
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Jihadi Jane
Personal Liberty, Posted on June 17, 2015 by John Myers
Actress Jane Fonda is still raking in money despite the fact she has been ridden hard and put away wet. The 77-year-old is now featured in the Netflix comedy “Grace and Frankie” — the very same Hanoi Jane who was making the lives worse for Americans fighting for their life in the jungles of Vietnam 45 years ago.
Last Saturday, Fonda was not far from my neck of the woods. She spoke in Vancouver, Canada, at a Greenpeace Canada rally, Toast the Coast. It was launched to demonstrate against oil sands development, tanker traffic and future Arctic oil drilling.
Fonda said: “I feel totally committed with every ounce of my being to stopping Big Oil from doing what they’re doing — both drilling in the Arctic and piping tar sand oil across the land into this coast, which is so pristine.”
I cannot figure out Fonda’s economic platform. But it seems to highlight North American energy insecurity, future gas lines and sky-high oil prices that will be dictated by the Middle East oil producers, like Saudi Arabia, which quietly finance the world’s worst jihadists. It is only logical because shutting down Arctic exploration and stopping the transportation of Canadian oil along the West Coast would be dangerous geopolitically for the United States and would throw the county further toward energy instability while creating a massive recession for energy workers.
In her 1995 book “My Life So Far,” Fonda complained about ex-husbands Ted Turner and Roger Vadim. She wrote that Vadim dominated her and made her have threesomes with him and other women. All this suffering, and today she is down to her last $120 million. I doubt Fonda has ever been worth much less than $5 million and has lived only in mansions and driven only gas-guzzlers. I’ll bet she doesn’t have the least understanding what Americans need in a job.
Fonda never had to worry whether her famous actor father was going to make enough money to keep the family going. I am certain that as she marches toward age 80 while continuing her social protests, she has zero understanding of how critical North American oil is to the United States as a nation and to the people who need those jobs.
Green Jane is still the one and same Hanoi Jane who made radio broadcasts to discourage drafted American GI’s, who were already hurting and fighting in a war just to stay alive. Yet she was a willing, attractive and, some may even say, convincing actress in her peacenik patronage of North Vietnam, including having her picture taken manning an anti-aircraft battery whose sole purpose was to shoot down American flyers.
Mr. Conservative stated:
What Jane Fonda did was traitorous. In fact, it’s a shame that she that she got away with committing treason because it made some of her fellow travelers on the Left realize that there is no price to be paid for encouraging people to hate their own country.
Unfortunately for Fonda, there are still a lot of Americans who love their country and they haven’t forgotten or forgiven her for betraying it.
So, periodically, Fonda gives insincere apologies for her despicable actions.
Here’s the latest one that she gave to Oprah Winfrey.
“I made one unforgivable mistake when I was in North Vietnam, and I will go to my grave with this. I don’t know if I was set up or not,” she said. “I was an adult. I take responsibility for my actions. And I was laughing and clapping, and there were pictures taken.”
She was “laughing and clapping” while Americans were dying. She was “laughing and clapping” while Americans were rotting away in POW camps. She was “laughing and clapping” with her new pals who she knew were torturing American soldiers.
Given the fight Fonda now has against North American oil discovery and transportation, she has once again aided and abetted the enemy: Islamic oil producers.
And while President Barack Obama may insist that Saudi Arabia is one of America’s closest allies, he and his fervent liberal and ultra-rich followers should pay attention to the fact that high-ranking members in the Saudi government carried out 9/11 with Saudi agents. But 14 years later, Saudi Arabia still dictates the price of world crude oil.
With oil prices just over half of what they fetched a year ago, domestic oil discovery, production and transportation industries are in a depression. Poor families up and down the west coast are trying desperately to hang on to jobs in an industry that was expected to be a major power source to the United States for the next several decades.
It seems Jihadi Jane neither understands how her actions are viewed by the enemy (major Muslim oil exporters, some of whose core members want to see the destruction of the United States) nor how these anti-jobs protests impact hundreds of thousands of North American families.
That North American oil can be competitively and safely produced doesn’t seem to be a thought that runs through Fonda’s head. Nor does she seem to understand that people’s biggest problems aren’t orgies and drug parties with former husbands but rather just keeping food on the table for the kids and a furnace going.
Fonda will never admit she doesn’t understand the working class — just as another pro-feminist, anti-Vietnam war female contemporary will never make that admission: Hillary Clinton, who is making her second bid for the U.S. presidency.
While Fonda was spending her time on the west coast Friday protesting oil, Clinton was launching her campaign across the country on New York City’s Roosevelt Island. She spoke to the audience about how she knew of tough times because her parents went through the Great Depression. Fonda knows how hard it was just to stay alive during the Dust Bowl because her father gave an outstanding performance in the much acclaimed 1940 movie “The Grapes of Wrath.”
Over the years, my dad told me how at 12 he was driving a wagon team with a team of eight horses across the prairie, sometimes to be caught up in a winter blizzard or deterred by a lame horse. His stories made me shiver. But despite the fact he had done it, I didn’t have the slightest clue as to how such an endeavor would even begin.
Fonda seems to believe that playing a starring role in the movie “The China Syndrome” makes her an expert on energy policy. Another aged hippie, Clinton, told us that same day that she understands tough times for the working class because her parents went through the Depression. I guarantee neither have faced tough times nor were worried where their next meal was coming from.
Clinton may do far more damage to the country if elected president, but both women make promises that they have no intention of keeping. The winner for tease of the month is Fonda for what she told The Vancouver Sun:
If I have to tie myself to some rig or if I have to lie down in front of a truck, I’ll do it. I’ve lived a good life. I’m willing to do that.
I, too, am willing for her to do the right thing rather than flying around the world in Gulfstream private jets, protesting the very crude oil that keeps her aloft. And as far as I am concerned, it wouldn’t do any great harm to America for Fonda to take Clinton down with her.
Yours in good times and bad,
–John Myers
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Jun 02
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Bridget Fonda and Danny Elfman Buy Full-On Fixer Next Door
By Mark David @YourMamaTweets
BUYERS: Bridget Fonda and Danny Elfman
LOCATION: Los Angeles, Calif.
PRICE: $3.6 million
SIZE: 4,443 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: Prolific and in-demand film and television composer Danny Elfman and (presumably) retired actress Bridget Fonda have shelled out $3.6 million, according to both real estate yenta Yolanda Yakketyyak and property records, for a meticulously maintained if comically outdated time capsule of a residence in the historic, guard-gated Fremont Place enclave that’s centrally situated between Hancock Park and Koreatown.
Miz Fonda, born into an illustrious and much-lauded family of actors — she’s Oscar winter Henry Fonda’s granddaughter, two-time Oscar winner Jane Fonda’s niece and twice Oscar-nominated Peter Fonda’s daughter — hasn’t appeared on the small or silver screen since 2002 but before that had a long and admirable career that earned her both Golden Globe and Emmy wins. Mister Elfman, the frontman for the 1980s new wave band Oingo Boingo, has composed theme music and scores for a slew of successful television programs and films including “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” “The Simpsons,” “Desperate Housewives,” “Beetlejuice,” “Dick Tracy” and, more recently, “Milk,” “American Hustle,” “Silver Linings Playbook” and “Fifty Shades of Grey.” He currently has about half a dozen projects in some phase of production including the Tim Burton directed “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” and “Alice Through the Looking Glass” starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, both scheduled to be released next year. Anyways….
Digital listing details indicate the Prairie-style residence sits on a flat, 0.37-acre mid-block lot and was originally built in 1916 with a low-profile hip roof and remarkably deep eaves. The two-story abode currently measures 4,443 square feet with four bedrooms and five bathrooms, per online marketing materials, with additional storage space above the detached two-car garage located behind iron gates at the tail end of a long driveway that passes under a porte cochère as it runs along the side of the house.
From a modern-day stand point the interior spaces are — let’s be honest, children — utterly preposterous, and no doubt the entire property will likely be radically altered and updated for future use so the grim decorative details are somewhat moot. Nonetheless, listing photographs show there are heavily and unfortunately textured plaster ceilings and wall treatments, miles of floral wallpaper and floor tiles of an unknown material throughout the main floor living spaces that appear to this property gossip in listing photos a bit too much like linoleum.
At some point, possibly in the 1960s or 1970s, the interiors were revamped and opened up into a spacious, open-plan living/entertaining space that extends from the front of the house clear through to the back and includes an imposing and arguably salvageable stone fireplace. (The stone detailing around the windows the flank the fireplace, of course, would need be removed.) Toward the back of the space there’s a built-in wet bar with mirror backed shelves and an impossibly ugly carved wood canopy. Integrated cabinetry next to the bar houses an upright piano painted the exact same shade of ecru as the walls and multipaned sliding glass doors open to the backyard where there’s a flagstone terrace surrounded swimming pool and a built-in barbecue station.
A low-tiled peninsula divides the main living/entertaining space from an informal dining space that links to a clean but practically archaic center island kitchen. The most bizarre and decoratively egregious feature in the entire house might be located in the step-down formal dining room that overlooks the frond yard and where the white paneled walls are set off by a brick lined niche fitted with three beer kegs. That’s right, children, there are three beer kegs sticking out of the wall in the dining room. Quite frankly, unless this was a frat house we’re not sure what would be better, if those kegs were purely decorative or if they had actual functioning taps.
We confess we have no inside information on what plans the Fonda-Elfmans might have for the property but it seems unlikely they’ll occupy the house as their primary residence even after an extensive and expensive renovation since they have long lived in a larger, neighboring property of just over three-quarters of an acre with a much more grand and probably far more updated 1920s Italian Renaissance villa that Miz Fonda purchased, according to various online resources, in late 2000 for $2.125 million.
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Jun 01
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Forensic exam shows Texas woman committed suicide in Cherokee County by burning herself
Updated: May 29, 2015, By Jordan Aubey, Reporter
News release by Chero
kee County Sheriff’s Office—
The Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office and Kansas Bureau of Investigation have been investigating the death of 35 year-old Shannon Fonda since her body was discovered near Scammon on March 23rd, 2015.
After identifying Ms. Fonda, investigators made contact with her family in Texas, and learned it was not uncommon for her to leave home without notice for periods of time.
During the course of the investigation, detectives conducted numerous interviews documenting Ms. Fonda’s departure from Midland, Texas on March 14, 2015. Based upon those interviews, surveillance video from several establishments Ms. Fonda stopped at along the way and financial records, authorities know that Ms. Fonda was traveling alone and ran out of money leaving her stranded in Cherokee County.
An autopsy on Ms. Fonda was conducted in Kansas City and it was noted that while she had non-life threatening cuts, which were consistent with self-inflicted injuries, her death was caused by severe burns to 90 % of her body.
Crime Scene Investigators collected numerous items at the scene and DNA testing along with other forensic examinations were conducted. All testing, including DNA analysis on the gas can at the scene, showed Ms. Fonda was the only one who handled the gas can.
As a result of the investigation, Ms. Fonda’s death is being ruled a suicide.