Rory Smith, who is running for governor.

BY ABBY FOX

Rory Smith, political newcomer, 48-year-old successful businessman, East Greenwich resident of 15 years, and father of three, last Wednesday filed a Notice of Organization with the Rhode Island Board of Elections, making official his desire to run in the 2010 race for Rhode Island governor.

“Everyone’s worried about jobs and the economy; that’s the number-one issue,” Smith said in a brief interview last week after his announcement. “I’ve personally helped small and mid-sized businesses grow and be successful and we need to give business owners a chance in this state. That’s what I want to see happen: putting Rhode Islanders back to work and make Rhode Island a business-friendly state.”

BY ABBY FOX

Elderly people who are being abused either financially or physically now have a local place for assistance and care.

St. Elizabeth Home, the East Greenwich branch of the Saint Elizabeth Community for seniors, announced Tuesday morning the launching of a “safe haven” where older people who need a refuge from abuse can stay for as long as 30 days. (Elderly they define as someone 60 years or older.)

BY ABBY FOX

Last Wednesday, school and town officials were slapped with $140,596.87 worth of change order requests from Fleet Construction Company and Geisser Engineering Corporation, and invoices from John P. Caito Corporation, for the school athletic fields project.

“I think it surprised everybody,” Town Manager Bill Sequino said. On the other hand, “It seems to be par for the course for this project. What’s disappointing is some of the work [from change orders] has already been done,” Sequino added, effectively trapping the town’s hands. “So you’re essentially asking council to approve change orders for work that has already been done.”

Photo: Abby Fox
Emma Bisonette, Laura Murphy and  Grace Turchetta making words.

BY ABBY FOX

It’s kind of like scrabble, but it doesn’t take nearly as long to play; there are fewer letters to make words with; and you can play against yourself.
The game, Bananagrams, is being tried out in fourth-grade classrooms at Hanaford Elementary School, to help kids with their word power and problem-solving skills.
And it’s fun, the students all said.
“It’s the hottest game in the United States right now,” said teacher Ric Saborio, who introduced Bananagrams, because his wife’s friend knows the man who invented it, Abe Nathanson, a local Rhode Islander, who donated several games to the school.

BY ABBY FOX

When you lose your job as a production manager at a printing company and your brother doesn’t want to work in the mortgage business anymore, what do you do? The answer for Lucia and Tom Asprinio was to start a chocolate business.

Last year, this brother-and-sister-team was inspired to put the chocolate-peanut-pretzel-raisin chunks their mother made for them growing up in East Greenwich, into a product for sale. A year ago, Lucia said, she would say: “Sell it? We don’t have time to sell it!” Then, she said, they had the time.

Reinhard Straub in front of one of his paintings at his Carolina studio.

 By JON GIBBS

CAROLINA–Some people get to crawl up close to the Great Abyss and come back to tell of it. The ones who can best describe what they saw there: the shades and nuance of darkness, the textures and the feeling of terror, dread and horror – all mixed up with Truth, we call artists. The very best of those artists leave just enough out of their vision to allow us to get involved with it and make our own interpretation.  
 Meet Reinhard Straub. He is a fifty-nine-year-old bundle of talents, experiences and occupations that would ordinarily be parceled out to a committee of people, not one sole individual. Put another way: If he were a literal, not a figurative, ball of yarn, it would take a quartet of cats all of their combined lifetimes to unravel him. He is a fascinating mix of therapist, musician and artist. And while the term “Renaissance Man” gets tossed around a lot, most of the time it is applied to people who do a lot of things but do none of them particularly well. Straub, however, does the things he does very well. It just has not been an easy, or particularly direct, route in getting the recognition he has begun to receive. And that recognition is about to be doled out with a grand opening at his studio in Carolina on Oct. 4 and following that, at the HopArts studio tour on Oct. 17 and 18.

BY ABBY FOX

Students and parents anxious to start playing on the new turf field at the high school are going to have to wait some more, now that officials have decided to test the field again in order to truly know if the sub-base underneath is up-to-par.

Town Manager Bill Sequino called a meeting last week and on Friday he and others met with GZA, the firm that reported back on the first tests several weeks ago. “We had them clarify the results from the testing,” said Jean Ann Guliano, chair of the school committee. School Superintendent Victor Mercurio attended the meeting, as well as Project Manager Ernie DiSaia.

Photo: Abby Fox
Eldredge Elementary School teacher Renée Hadfield is partnering with fellow teacher Kara Ratigan on a grant from the East Greenwich Education Foundation to teach on the theme of Past, Present and Future.

BY ABBY FOX

Studying the “Past, Present and Future” as a year-long theme may seem like a huge topic for fourth-graders to handle, but their teachers at Eldredge Elementary School say they’re up to the challenge.
Kara Ratigan and Renée Hadfield received a $2,369.98 grant from the East Greenwich Education Foundation to incorporate interviewing elders at Greenwich Bay Manor; learning about Native Americans at George B. Parker Woodland Wildlife Refuge in Coventry; and studying every region of the country’s way of producing energy, all in one school year.
“It puts everything together,” Ratigan said, whereas in past years, they’ve been able to do one or more of these projects, but not all of them at once. “Without the funding, there’s no way we could have paid for all of it.”
In fourth grade, the students are required to study state history and “land and water” in the sciences and Ratigan and Hadfield now have exciting ways to bring those topics to the children: through one-on-one interviews with older people, on what life was like for them when they were fourth-graders, and later, by making what’s called a “spiral book” that reveals what they’ve learned in their social studies and science curriculum, through writing and art work. “It makes the curriculum meaningful for the kids,” Ratigan said.
Then toward the end of the year, students will pair up with the younger generation, second-graders at Frenchtown Elementary School, “to teach them what we’ve learned,” they said, and to read aloud the children’s books they’ve written.
This is the second-year the two have team-taught together. “We bounce things off one another,” Hadfield said. “And then we build from that,” Ratigan said. 

Dancast Update

When it comes to the weather, we will remain tranquility base today and tomorrow—no problem here, Houston.  We await the ever-so-slow progress of a storm system over the upper Midwest and its trailing cold front.  Thanks to tenacious high pressure just off the coast, any rain will likely hold off until late Tuesday night into Wednesday.  South to southwesterly winds on the back side of said high pressure will also siphon warm air our way—expect highs in the mid 70s today and tomorrow, with lows in the 50s to around 60.

Photos: Abby Fox
Lucia and Tom Asprinio started a candy business last year, when their jobs dried up in the recession. They make a chocolate, pretzel, peanut, raisin combination from their mother’s recipe file.