Published in the Current
Cape Elizabeth Fire Chief Philip McGouldrick is warning town residents about home fire hazards, following a recent fire that could have destroyed a house on Woodland Road.
On Nov. 23, a Woodland Road resident put some ashes from his woodstove in a paper bag and put it on his back deck, McGouldrick said. Embers still alive in the ashes started a fire that caught the deck and the rear of the house aflame.
The resident was home and called the fire department before turning a garden hose on the fire, which helped keep damage down, McGouldrick said. But had the resident not been home, the house could have been ruined.
McGouldrick said ashes from a woodstove can stay alive even when they have been left alone for several days. “A hot coal in the middle of that ash will stay there for a long period of time,” he said.
Any ashes removed from a woodstove should be placed in a metal bucket and scattered outside the home, in a garden or planting area, he said.
When he does woodstove inspections, McGouldrick makes sure not only that the woodstove itself is safely installed, with enough distance between the stove and wooden framing of the house, but also that smoke detectors are working properly.
He said he also checks that the stove’s owner has tongs and a metal shovel and a metal bucket to properly maintain the stove.
This type of incident has happened before. McGouldrick remembers a “really bad fire down in the Oakhurst neighborhood” a number of years ago that resulted from woodstove ashes in a paper bag.
Ash disposal in dumpsters and trash cans also can cause fires, McGouldrick said.
He also warned parents to do fire drills with their children, citing recent national reports that children do not reliably respond to smoke alarms in the house, especially when they are awakened at night by the alerts.
McGouldrick also cautioned people to use care when using candles, making sure they are safely extinguished before leaving the home and also ensuring they are contained in something that will not ignite, if the candle burns low.
People should also take care that items can’t fall on top of candles accidentally, which could also cause a fire.
Thursday, December 5, 2002
Cape Education Foundation raises $20,000
Published in the Current
The Cape Elizabeth Education Foundation has made the first investment in its endowment, depositing $5,000 from a recent phone-a-thon fund-raising drive into a fund it hopes will eventually grow to over $1 million.
“This is our initial investment that establishes our permanence in the community,” said spokeswoman Susan Spagnola.
Interest earned by the endowment funds will be used to make grants in coming years.
The phone-a-thon, held Nov. 12, 13 and 14, reached over 500 Cape families and raised over $20,000, Spagnola said. Coupled with a mailed packet of information and request for contributions, the drive is expected to bring in around $30,000 in donations, she said.
“The response was excellent,” Spagnola said.
Over half of the respondents, she said, were receptive to the idea of a non-profit foundation that supports innovation and activities in the schools that are not funded within the normal school budget process.
Many people had questions about how the foundation works and were able to get them answered in the phone conversations, Spagnola said.
“People have a great deal of faith in us,” Spagnola said.
Some people expressed concern about high taxes that already support the schools, and others did not feel comfortable donating money in slow economic times.
“It is a hard time to be asking people for money,” Spagnola said.
The foundation expects to make a new round of grants this spring, in either May or June. The amount has not been finalized, but Spagnola said, “we hope to give away at least as much as we gave away this fall,” when grants totaled $15,000.
To meet that granting need, to cover its administrative costs and to begin planning for a capital campaign slated to begin next year, the foundation expects to spend $80,000. It needs to raise more money to get to that point, and is planning a series of community-based fund-raising activities for the spring.
One possibility for such an event, Spagnola said, could be a spelling bee in which local businesses raise teams and pay an admission fee to compete against each other. Such an event, Spagnola said, would involve the community and be in keeping with the foundation’s educational focus.
A series of committee meetings in January will set the stage for the next developments in the foundation’s projects, including setting up a detailed strategic plan for the foundation’s fund-raising efforts and encouraging teachers to apply for future grants.
The Cape Elizabeth Education Foundation has made the first investment in its endowment, depositing $5,000 from a recent phone-a-thon fund-raising drive into a fund it hopes will eventually grow to over $1 million.
“This is our initial investment that establishes our permanence in the community,” said spokeswoman Susan Spagnola.
Interest earned by the endowment funds will be used to make grants in coming years.
The phone-a-thon, held Nov. 12, 13 and 14, reached over 500 Cape families and raised over $20,000, Spagnola said. Coupled with a mailed packet of information and request for contributions, the drive is expected to bring in around $30,000 in donations, she said.
“The response was excellent,” Spagnola said.
Over half of the respondents, she said, were receptive to the idea of a non-profit foundation that supports innovation and activities in the schools that are not funded within the normal school budget process.
Many people had questions about how the foundation works and were able to get them answered in the phone conversations, Spagnola said.
“People have a great deal of faith in us,” Spagnola said.
Some people expressed concern about high taxes that already support the schools, and others did not feel comfortable donating money in slow economic times.
“It is a hard time to be asking people for money,” Spagnola said.
The foundation expects to make a new round of grants this spring, in either May or June. The amount has not been finalized, but Spagnola said, “we hope to give away at least as much as we gave away this fall,” when grants totaled $15,000.
To meet that granting need, to cover its administrative costs and to begin planning for a capital campaign slated to begin next year, the foundation expects to spend $80,000. It needs to raise more money to get to that point, and is planning a series of community-based fund-raising activities for the spring.
One possibility for such an event, Spagnola said, could be a spelling bee in which local businesses raise teams and pay an admission fee to compete against each other. Such an event, Spagnola said, would involve the community and be in keeping with the foundation’s educational focus.
A series of committee meetings in January will set the stage for the next developments in the foundation’s projects, including setting up a detailed strategic plan for the foundation’s fund-raising efforts and encouraging teachers to apply for future grants.
Home on the range in Scarborough
Published in the Current
Hidden away on Ross Road is a medium-size farm behind a big business. Started in 1992 with a few dozen animals, Bayley Hill Elk and Deer Farm now has 1,200 head of Rocky Mountain elk and red deer serving several different markets.
Owned by Fred and Kathleen Bayley, the farm is open to visitors through Christmas Eve, and when families buy a tree at Bayley’s Campground on Pine Point Road, they get a free bag of apples to feed the elk and deer on the farm just down the road.
Many families come back year after year, Farm Manager Nick Richardson said. “It’s become a tradition.”
Behind the scenes, the farm is a serious business.
One big market it serves, according to Richardson, is producing velvet, or new growth antlers for an arthritis supplement the farm sells as nearby as Lois’s Natural Marketplace on Route 1 and as far afield as China. “China is starting to look at buying a lot,” Richardson said.
The horn is harvested every 60 days, Richardson said, and is dried and sent to Canada for further freeze-drying – shrinking fresh antlers to about one third their original weight – before being made into pills. The pills can sell for as much as $150 per pound, Richardson said, and the farm’s best producer of antlers, a bull elk, has put out over 30 pounds of fresh antler per year.
The farm used to ship more to the Far East, where velvet antler is used in traditional Chinese medicine. That market has slumped recently, allowing
Richardson to grow out the antlers on many bulls to see if they would do well for a second market, which is trophy animals.
Ranchers in Texas, Ohio and Florida buy live bull elk and deer to take to their land for hunters to stalk, paying big fees for the privilege. The ranches will pay up to $5,000 for a bull, Richardson said, and Bayley Hill will sell about 110 animals to ranchers this year.
And though the animals are fenced in on private land, the hunt isn’t necessarily easy. “In Texas a ranch can be 100,000 acres,” Richardson said.
Closer to home, the animals’ meat sells well. The farm deals with a restaurant supply company in Boston that serves high-end hotels and restaurants throughout New England. The farm sells “several tons” of fresh venison and elk meat each year, slaughtered and processed in Guilford.
“We ship all over New England,” Richardson said.
Making matches
The fourth segment of the business is the most complex and also the most profitable. Bayley Hill provides breeding stock for other deer and elk farms.
Bayley Hill, Richardson said, is one of the top breeding farms in the U.S., and the top bull can bring in as much as $400 per straw – the unit in which bull semen is sold – with hundreds of straws possible per year.
“The beauty of it is that you don’t actually have to bring the animals here,” Richardson said. Rather than shipping animals, breeders send cases of straws around instead. It’s cheaper and easier, especially with the international fears of spreading hoof-and-mouth disease.
Now there are restrictions on animals entering and leaving countries, for fear the disease would be transported along with them, unbeknownst to the owners.
In 1997, Bayley Hill inseminated 240 females, and this year will inseminate 1,000 females, with the goal of improving the farm’s stock.
There is a general rule: “Fast-growing animals that produce huge horns are valuable animals,” Richardson said. But other attributes also up the value of an animal or a line of offspring.
Lean meat is what the meat buyers want, and large antlers are good for the velvet antler market. The largest bull, which would provide the most meat, does not necessarily produce the biggest antlers, Richardson said, meaning lines have to be separated by their intended use.
Females are bred not for size but for mothering skills and quality of milk. A small female may be the one with the most successful offspring, Richardson said, because it’s a better mother than a larger female.
“Each successive generation gets better,” Richardson said.
Ease of birthing is also a factor. Unlike cows, which cannot give birth without human assistance, deer and elk still have unassisted births most of the time. That’s an attribute Richardson and his counterparts at farms around the world want to keep.
Smart animals
Richardson has been doing this sort of work for 20 years, first in New Zealand and then in Britain, where he managed the largest deer farm in the country for five years before coming to Bayley Hill in 1997.
Elk and deer, he said, are intelligent animals that are also very strong. They are kept in fields with six-foot-high fencing around them, but Richardson said some animals could jump even that if they wanted to. Instead, they stay and get 20 to 30 pounds of food a day, which they rapidly turn into meat. At 17 months, the elk can get close to 600 pounds. They eat hay and brewers grain, a byproduct of the Budweiser brewery in Merrimack, N.H.
The animals do have to be handled with caution, because of their size and their wildness, despite living on a farm. “We’re very very careful, but it’s still a high-risk business to be in,” Richardson said.
In the barn, where they are taken for shipping or harvesting of antlers, there is a sophisticated system of hydraulic-powered chutes to keep them moving along properly and under control.
Despite the danger, the animals do play a lot, running around their fields and romping with other animals.
“I truly do believe they have a sense of humor,” Richardson said.
Hidden away on Ross Road is a medium-size farm behind a big business. Started in 1992 with a few dozen animals, Bayley Hill Elk and Deer Farm now has 1,200 head of Rocky Mountain elk and red deer serving several different markets.
Owned by Fred and Kathleen Bayley, the farm is open to visitors through Christmas Eve, and when families buy a tree at Bayley’s Campground on Pine Point Road, they get a free bag of apples to feed the elk and deer on the farm just down the road.
Many families come back year after year, Farm Manager Nick Richardson said. “It’s become a tradition.”
Behind the scenes, the farm is a serious business.
One big market it serves, according to Richardson, is producing velvet, or new growth antlers for an arthritis supplement the farm sells as nearby as Lois’s Natural Marketplace on Route 1 and as far afield as China. “China is starting to look at buying a lot,” Richardson said.
The horn is harvested every 60 days, Richardson said, and is dried and sent to Canada for further freeze-drying – shrinking fresh antlers to about one third their original weight – before being made into pills. The pills can sell for as much as $150 per pound, Richardson said, and the farm’s best producer of antlers, a bull elk, has put out over 30 pounds of fresh antler per year.
The farm used to ship more to the Far East, where velvet antler is used in traditional Chinese medicine. That market has slumped recently, allowing
Richardson to grow out the antlers on many bulls to see if they would do well for a second market, which is trophy animals.
Ranchers in Texas, Ohio and Florida buy live bull elk and deer to take to their land for hunters to stalk, paying big fees for the privilege. The ranches will pay up to $5,000 for a bull, Richardson said, and Bayley Hill will sell about 110 animals to ranchers this year.
And though the animals are fenced in on private land, the hunt isn’t necessarily easy. “In Texas a ranch can be 100,000 acres,” Richardson said.
Closer to home, the animals’ meat sells well. The farm deals with a restaurant supply company in Boston that serves high-end hotels and restaurants throughout New England. The farm sells “several tons” of fresh venison and elk meat each year, slaughtered and processed in Guilford.
“We ship all over New England,” Richardson said.
Making matches
The fourth segment of the business is the most complex and also the most profitable. Bayley Hill provides breeding stock for other deer and elk farms.
Bayley Hill, Richardson said, is one of the top breeding farms in the U.S., and the top bull can bring in as much as $400 per straw – the unit in which bull semen is sold – with hundreds of straws possible per year.
“The beauty of it is that you don’t actually have to bring the animals here,” Richardson said. Rather than shipping animals, breeders send cases of straws around instead. It’s cheaper and easier, especially with the international fears of spreading hoof-and-mouth disease.
Now there are restrictions on animals entering and leaving countries, for fear the disease would be transported along with them, unbeknownst to the owners.
In 1997, Bayley Hill inseminated 240 females, and this year will inseminate 1,000 females, with the goal of improving the farm’s stock.
There is a general rule: “Fast-growing animals that produce huge horns are valuable animals,” Richardson said. But other attributes also up the value of an animal or a line of offspring.
Lean meat is what the meat buyers want, and large antlers are good for the velvet antler market. The largest bull, which would provide the most meat, does not necessarily produce the biggest antlers, Richardson said, meaning lines have to be separated by their intended use.
Females are bred not for size but for mothering skills and quality of milk. A small female may be the one with the most successful offspring, Richardson said, because it’s a better mother than a larger female.
“Each successive generation gets better,” Richardson said.
Ease of birthing is also a factor. Unlike cows, which cannot give birth without human assistance, deer and elk still have unassisted births most of the time. That’s an attribute Richardson and his counterparts at farms around the world want to keep.
Smart animals
Richardson has been doing this sort of work for 20 years, first in New Zealand and then in Britain, where he managed the largest deer farm in the country for five years before coming to Bayley Hill in 1997.
Elk and deer, he said, are intelligent animals that are also very strong. They are kept in fields with six-foot-high fencing around them, but Richardson said some animals could jump even that if they wanted to. Instead, they stay and get 20 to 30 pounds of food a day, which they rapidly turn into meat. At 17 months, the elk can get close to 600 pounds. They eat hay and brewers grain, a byproduct of the Budweiser brewery in Merrimack, N.H.
The animals do have to be handled with caution, because of their size and their wildness, despite living on a farm. “We’re very very careful, but it’s still a high-risk business to be in,” Richardson said.
In the barn, where they are taken for shipping or harvesting of antlers, there is a sophisticated system of hydraulic-powered chutes to keep them moving along properly and under control.
Despite the danger, the animals do play a lot, running around their fields and romping with other animals.
“I truly do believe they have a sense of humor,” Richardson said.
Rabid skunks in Cape
Published in the Current
One skunk has tested positive for rabies and a second, believed to be rabid, remains on the loose in Cape following two encounters with pet dogs on Fowler Road and Patricia Drive.
Three dogs have been quarantined, due to concern about contact they may have had with rabid skunks. On Fowler Road, a skunk tried to enter a wire kennel sheltering two dogs. The homeowner put down the skunk himself, and the animal was later found to be rabid.
On Patricia Drive, a skunk was seen circling a dog, but did not successfully spray the dog, which is unusual, Leeman said.
Most skunks don’t miss, unless they’re sick. A vet who examined the dog, Leeman said, did not find any puncture wounds or saliva indicating direct contact between the animals, but the dog was quarantined as a precaution.
That skunk ran under a shed and could not be captured, Leeman said. “What I worry about is it’s still out there.”
Like the raccoon outbreak of rabies in Cape earlier in the year, this year’s skunks are aggressive rather than shy, Leeman said. He said he has been picking up a lot of dead raccoons lately, leading him to believe the outbreak is reaching its lethal phase in raccoons and will subside soon.
He also has not seen any foxes believed to be rabid, after three gray foxes were found this summer. One was not tested, but the two that were tested both were positive for rabies. One of them had bitten a two-year-old girl at an Old Ocean House Road daycare center, resulting in rabies vaccinations for about a dozen people, children and staff.
One skunk has tested positive for rabies and a second, believed to be rabid, remains on the loose in Cape following two encounters with pet dogs on Fowler Road and Patricia Drive.
Three dogs have been quarantined, due to concern about contact they may have had with rabid skunks. On Fowler Road, a skunk tried to enter a wire kennel sheltering two dogs. The homeowner put down the skunk himself, and the animal was later found to be rabid.
On Patricia Drive, a skunk was seen circling a dog, but did not successfully spray the dog, which is unusual, Leeman said.
Most skunks don’t miss, unless they’re sick. A vet who examined the dog, Leeman said, did not find any puncture wounds or saliva indicating direct contact between the animals, but the dog was quarantined as a precaution.
That skunk ran under a shed and could not be captured, Leeman said. “What I worry about is it’s still out there.”
Like the raccoon outbreak of rabies in Cape earlier in the year, this year’s skunks are aggressive rather than shy, Leeman said. He said he has been picking up a lot of dead raccoons lately, leading him to believe the outbreak is reaching its lethal phase in raccoons and will subside soon.
He also has not seen any foxes believed to be rabid, after three gray foxes were found this summer. One was not tested, but the two that were tested both were positive for rabies. One of them had bitten a two-year-old girl at an Old Ocean House Road daycare center, resulting in rabies vaccinations for about a dozen people, children and staff.
Cape looks out of state for other “world class” schools
Published in the Current
Cape Elizabeth has joined forces with two school districts, one in Missouri and one in Pennsylvania, and is looking for as many as four more “like-minded” districts to form a national consortium of schools seeking to be “world-class.”
At a two-day meeting in Portland in November, Superintendent Tom Forcella, curriculum coordinator Sarah Simmonds and School Board Chairman Marie Prager met with superintendents and assistant superintendents from Clayton, Mo., and the Palisades School District, north of Philadelphia, Pa.
“We did a lot of sharing about our districts,” Forcella said. And while the districts knew they were similar in some ways, they discovered other ways that surprised them. Beyond being districts that are well known in their own states for being strong educationally, all three districts are now teaching physics first in their high school science curriculum, something that is becoming more common but is still the exception, rather than the rule, for U.S. high schools.
Several school districts have contacted the American Associa- tion of School Administrators, seeking to join the Cape-Clayton-Palisades group, and the group’s next meeting in March will include a discussion of which schools to include.
Districts they are looking at will include those who “really have a commitment to being world-class,” Forcella said. Like Cape, he said, those districts would look not only at standardized test scores, but also at the quality of citizens and students in the district.
The school districts will be working on developing “professional learning communities,” Forcella said, and focus on quality instruction and student achievement.
Forcella said there is real value in talking to districts outside the state that are working toward similar goals. Instead of talking about state-mandated programs, Forcella said, school officials talk about actual educational issues they are facing.
“The conversations are different,” Forcella said, than those he has with superintendents from other Maine school districts.
He said the schools have real opportunities to learn from each other. The Missouri and Pennsylvania officials expressed interest in observing the lesson-study project at Pond Cove School, but they didn’t know about it before last week’s meeting, meaning they will have to wait until a future visit.
Forcella and the Missouri officials will observe a “walkthrough” program at the Pennsylvania schools in March. There, a team of people, including someone from the local university and teachers and administrators from other district schools, will visit a school and spend an entire day talking to students about their experiences and issues. At the end of the day, the visitors meet with the faculty to discuss what they have learned.
Forcella said that is a good way to get a sense of how things are going in a school without taking a lot of time to do so. He expects future consortium meetings to include people from the districts who have similar jobs, such as all the principals.
“We think alike,” Forcella said of the school officials in the group.
Cape Elizabeth has joined forces with two school districts, one in Missouri and one in Pennsylvania, and is looking for as many as four more “like-minded” districts to form a national consortium of schools seeking to be “world-class.”
At a two-day meeting in Portland in November, Superintendent Tom Forcella, curriculum coordinator Sarah Simmonds and School Board Chairman Marie Prager met with superintendents and assistant superintendents from Clayton, Mo., and the Palisades School District, north of Philadelphia, Pa.
“We did a lot of sharing about our districts,” Forcella said. And while the districts knew they were similar in some ways, they discovered other ways that surprised them. Beyond being districts that are well known in their own states for being strong educationally, all three districts are now teaching physics first in their high school science curriculum, something that is becoming more common but is still the exception, rather than the rule, for U.S. high schools.
Several school districts have contacted the American Associa- tion of School Administrators, seeking to join the Cape-Clayton-Palisades group, and the group’s next meeting in March will include a discussion of which schools to include.
Districts they are looking at will include those who “really have a commitment to being world-class,” Forcella said. Like Cape, he said, those districts would look not only at standardized test scores, but also at the quality of citizens and students in the district.
The school districts will be working on developing “professional learning communities,” Forcella said, and focus on quality instruction and student achievement.
Forcella said there is real value in talking to districts outside the state that are working toward similar goals. Instead of talking about state-mandated programs, Forcella said, school officials talk about actual educational issues they are facing.
“The conversations are different,” Forcella said, than those he has with superintendents from other Maine school districts.
He said the schools have real opportunities to learn from each other. The Missouri and Pennsylvania officials expressed interest in observing the lesson-study project at Pond Cove School, but they didn’t know about it before last week’s meeting, meaning they will have to wait until a future visit.
Forcella and the Missouri officials will observe a “walkthrough” program at the Pennsylvania schools in March. There, a team of people, including someone from the local university and teachers and administrators from other district schools, will visit a school and spend an entire day talking to students about their experiences and issues. At the end of the day, the visitors meet with the faculty to discuss what they have learned.
Forcella said that is a good way to get a sense of how things are going in a school without taking a lot of time to do so. He expects future consortium meetings to include people from the districts who have similar jobs, such as all the principals.
“We think alike,” Forcella said of the school officials in the group.
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