State briefs
Project to begin ERIE, Pa. (AP) – A summer construction project at Presque Isle State Park will provide better access and storage for lake-dredged sand, a state official said.
From June to August, contractors are scheduled to begin breaking the pier’s old concrete and replacing it with a 1-foot concrete cap reinforced with steel bars. A 100-foot-long section of the pier also will be strengthened so it’s strong enough to hold equipment used to unload sand from a barge.
The sand is then to be carried by a conveyer to a stockpiling site. Having a stockpile of sand allows the park to replenish the beach and prepare for swimming season, which traditionally opens Memorial Day weekend.
The project will cost $177,000, said Gene Comoss, chief engineer for the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.
Contributions continue
JOHNSTOWN, Pa. (AP) – The United Way of Laurel Highlands is still contributing to the financially troubled Johnstown YWCA, but not without some strings attached.
Nikki Yorchak, executive director of the United Way of Laurel Highlands, said the group’s financial committee wants to review the YWCA’s finances every month before releasing that month’s allocation. The United Way requested such oversight in allocating $24,000 for the year to the YWCA.
Yorchak told The Tribune-Democrat of Johnstown that her group wants to be let in on the recovery plan.
Debi Balog, the YWCA’s acting board president, said the organization’s future remains unclear. Nearly all board members have resigned since the YWCA’s financial problems became known in February when leaders said they couldn’t pay the gas bill.
District praised
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) – Several administrators in the Harrisburg School District said the prospect for improving the schools led them to abandon more lucrative jobs elsewhere.
“There’s a wonderful energy here that’s contagious,” said Gale Tapper, who took a pay cut of $8,000 a year to leave the East Windsor schools in New Jersey.
Another administrator, Mavis Kelley, is working for about half the money she made at the Milton Hershey School.
The administrators said they liked the challenge of turning around a school system that in 2000 had the highest failure rates on the state assessment among all of Pennsylvania’s 501 school districts.
The capital city’s school system is small enough that change is possible, the administrators said. Yet it is large enough that a dramatic turnaround will be noticed by school officials all over, they said.
Grant received
SUNBURY, Pa. (AP) – The city is getting a $67,000 grant from the state to make a riverfront development plan.
Sunbury, which is on the Susquehanna River, has proposed installing a fish passageway at a dam and a new ampitheater.
Mayor David L. Persing said the designs in the master plan funded by the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources will include walking paths linking the two projects and other ideas to develop both sides of the flood wall.
Few attend seminar
YORK, Pa. (AP) – Only two people showed up at a church’s grief seminar to help people get over the murder-suicide at Red Lion Area Junior High School, and the church’s pastor saw that as a good sign.
The Rev. Jon Bausman said attendance at Sunday’s seminar at St. Paul’s Chapel United Methodist Church in York Township may have been poor because members of the congregation are progressing as they should through their grief.
Thirteen children who attend the church are enrolled at the school where 14-year-old James R. Sheets fatally shot Eugene Segro in the cafeteria, then shot himself, on April 24.
Answers sought
READING, Pa. (AP) – Berks County officials have had trouble finding answers about the death of a man whose body was found in December in the trunk of his car, so they expect to consult nationally known forensic scientists.
Jason M. Huckabee, 29, was reported missing to Spring Township police on Oct. 23. His car was found Dec. 10 in Wyomissing. Police said they could tell the car had been parked there since before a Dec. 5 snowstorm because of the way snow was piled on it.
Dr. Nicholas Bybel, the Berks County coroner, said a national forensic science association might be called upon to provide more information.
Plan scaled back
EASTON, Pa. (AP) – Northampton County officials are considering something less ambitious than their current $31 million prison expansion plan after judges said such an expansion is larger than needed.
County Public Works Director Ed Boscola said the modular design should be fairly simple to make smaller. Boscola said the county had been planning a six-story prison with cell blocks “in pancake fashion”; he said the smaller prison design was simply a matter of building fewer stories.
But County Council prison liaison Anne McHale said since the county had been planning to keep female inmates at the top of the building, she is concerned that Boscola’s idea might not be enough to accommodate female inmates. She said she thinks configuration changes will have to be made to the inside of the addition.
Movie attracts crowd
WEATHERLY, Pa. (AP) – More than 140 people packed an auditorium in Eckley for a screening of “The Molly Maguires,” a 1970 movie about Irish-American miners rebelling against coal companies.
“People were sitting alongside of the steps,” said Bill Strassner, an educator from the state museum. “We never expected this amount of people.”
Not only did the movie take place in Pennsylvania, but much of it was filmed on location in Eckley, accounting for a lot of the local interest. Local resident Emily Rebarchak, now 73, had a small part in the film and attended Sunday’s screening.
“It was very exciting,” she recalled. “We ate what the stars ate. Everybody was really friendly. We had pictures taken and autographs signed. It was really very interesting.”
AP-ES-05-19-03 0149EDT