It appears librarians are quite popular within the Hamilton Southeastern School District.  Kristen Distler, Fall Creek Junior High School’s Teacher Librarian, is the district’s teacher of the year for the upcoming school year.  For the school year just ended, no individual teacher received the award, with the school corporation citing all teachers as teachers of the year with the added stress of teaching during a pandemic.

The two previous teachers of the year, Maria Kussy & John Hochstetler, were both school librarians (also called media specialists).

The Hamilton Southeastern School Foundation established a fund to financially reward the HSE Schools Teacher of the year.  The fund was established by Superintendent Allen Bourff and is intended to be handed out to each teacher of the year moving forward.  Ms. Distler was awarded a $500 check.

Below, see the listing of Honor and Excellence awards.  Below that, view the video produced by HSE Schools about Kristen Distler.

It’s been discussed for months and now it is about to happen…116th Street will close at the Nickel Plate Trail beginning June 1 for what is expected to be a 60 day period.  During the construction, 116th Street will be closed from east of Municipal Drive to west of Maple Street. All local business and public parking access will remain open.

106th Street will serve as the detour (see map above).

Portions of the Nickel Plate Trail are now open, including the paved portion from 131^st Street to North Street, and from South Street to 106^th Street. The 116th Street tunnel will complete the trail connection through downtown Fishers, joining South Street and North Street, and establishing a full connection from 131^st Street to 106^th Street. While the tunnel is under construction, a pedestrian detour route will provide access through downtown between the north and south sections of the trail. View the pedestrian detour map here.

Health food lovers will have a new location to try starting in September.  Kurt Christian of the Indianapolis Business Journal writes that Clean Eatz will open a new restaurant at 8510 E. 96th Street.

For more, use this link to read the IBJ story.

Brittany RayburnThe local nonprofit group, Youth Mentoring Initiative (YMI), is welcoming a new executive director.  Brittany Rayburn is taking the helm after Alison Gatz left that post following four years of growing the organization.  Ms. Rayburn’s official start date is July 12.

“On behalf of the entire Board and staff, we are excited to welcome Brittany to the YMI team,” said YMI Board President Joe Eaton in a YMI news release. “With her non-profit experience and passion for service, the more than two hundred mentees we serve each school year will ultimately benefit. We hope to continue to grow and expand our outreach and services to help every student within the HSE School District who needs a mentor, so they know there is always a caring adult on their side.”

Rayburn, a Fishers resident, joins YMI with extensive experience in nonprofit work including fund development, relationship management, strategy, and staff leadership and development most recently with Hamilton County Community Foundation, an affiliate of Central Indiana Community Foundation.

“After serving this community for many years, I am looking forward to making sure YMI remains a critical resource for students in Hamilton Southeastern Schools, working with our generous donors and partners, and supporting the staff and mentors that impact lives every day,” said Rayburn.

YMI provides adult mentors to students in the Hamilton Southeastern School District.

Will this summer movie season see audiences returning to the big screen in the multiplexes this summer?  One big test will be a film being released over the Memorial holiday season, A Quiet Place Part II.  A sequel to the original 2018 film, this movie is most definitely made for a movie theater, not as much for a big screen at home.

So, is A Quiet Place Part II a good film and worth seeing?

Here is my review.

The Southeastern Swim Club and Hamilton Southeastern High School Athletic Department announced Wednesay that Christian Hanselmann has been hired as  the new Head Coach, pending school approval.  He will take over as head coach of the HSE High School boys and girls swim & dive teams.

Christian Hanselmann’s resume includes a degree from Brigham Young University in 2014 where he was a 2-year Letterman on the swim team and studied Biomechanics and Exercise Physiology. He also completed his Masters degree in Sports Psychology in 2015 at the University of Tennessee. Past coaching experience includes Eastern Michigan University, University of Tennessee, and most recently the Carmel Swim Club (Indiana).

Josh White joins the podcast talking about cars in films.  We have reviews of Quiet Place part 2, Cruella and more in this episode of the Grade A Movies Podcast, with Adam Aasen, Alec Toombs and Larry Lannan.

For most of the last 30 years or so, Janet Chandler has been serving as President of the Hamilton Southeastern Education Association, but that is about to change.  Abby Taylor will soon begin her tenure as president of the local group representing teachers in the HSE School District.

I spoke with both Abby Taylor and Janet Chandler in this podcast.  We talked about the challenges local teachers faced this past school year with a pandemic, changes in class start times for different grade levels in the coming school year, diversity & inclusion in school curriculum and much more.

This is a very tough period for journalism.  I made my living as a reporter for nearly 10 years (1970s & early 80s) and have written this volunteer local news blog for more than 9 years.  I am very concerned about the state of the news business now.  Here are just a few reasons why.

First, Alden Global Capital appears to be the new owner of the Chicago Tribune, one of the premier newspapers in one of America’s largest metropolitan areas.  Alden is a hedge fund.

The experience so far of hedge funds buying newspapers illustrates that staff will be cut savagely, maximizing the profit margins with little or no regard to how it impacts news coverage.  Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with news organizations making a profit, but the hedge fund history of an insatiable desire for higher and higher profit margins has the newspaper Guild in Chicago plenty worried.

If Alden does what other hedge funds have done in the past, look for massive layoffs of journalists at the Tribune.  I would hope that doesn’t happen, but I’m not optimistic.

It should be noted that the Tribune Company owns newspapers in other eastern U.S. markets, including Baltimore, Orlando and many more.

The second item of note deals with CNN and Chris Cuomo.  As you may know, his brother Andrew happens to be the governor of New York.  Whenever I saw Chris interviewing brother Andrew on his prime time CNN talk show, I cringed.  Why is CNN allowing a prime-time host to interview his own brother?  I saw that as a bad look for CNN.

Now, we know it was much worse than that.  It has come to light that Andrew Cuomo received advice on how to handle sexual harassment allegations from his brother Chris.  That crossed an even brighter line on what a news person should not do.

Chris Cuomo went on his program and apologized, but the stain remains.  Why did CNN ever get itself into this situation?  A clear policy keeping Chris out of brother Andrew’s political affairs would likely have prevented this from the start.

Back in Chicago, African-American Mayor Lori Lightfoot is now commemorating her first two years in office.  As a result, media outlets have been asking for interviews with the mayor.  She announced just days ago she will only grant interviews to reporters of color.  Needless to say, this has created a firestorm of controversy.

Lightfoot says this is a way of highlighting how few non-white reporters have been assigned to cover Chicago City Hall.  The mayor makes a valid point, and this is a problem in newsrooms throughout the nation.

However, news outlets must be able to independently decide which reporters are assigned to any particular beat.  This is a simple exercise of press freedoms that is part of our American traditions and our constitution.

Both the mayor and the news directors & editors all have a point.  I hope they all find a way to solve this.

Here in Fishers, there is plenty of news to cover.  We may be getting a new City Hall because the old one is literally falling apart.  Our local school board is preparing to transition from one superintendent that is retiring to a new one taking the helm on July 1.

I try to provide straightforward reporting on meetings and issues I cover.  On occasion, I will write commentary but only when I feel it is absolutely necessary and no one else is writing about a particular issue.

LarryInFishers.com is about 9 ½ years old.  I tried to quit once, but the pandemic brought me back.  Don’t ask me why, but I am still at this computer keyboard pounding out stories.

The state of local news is bad, very bad.  That’s why the plight of the Tribune Company with all its newspapers is important to us all.  Local newspapers are either folding or drastically cutting-back on reporting staff nation-wide.  This is why I continue blogging, covering the stories that do not always receive coverage from other news outlets.

We all must be vigilant about a free media that can report to you, independently, what is happening in any local community.  I look at the numbers of people reading this blog and listening to my podcasts and I know there is a hunger for local news.  Let’s find a way to deliver that product profitably.

Director Luke Holland tragically died before he could finish a film project he began in 2008, a documentary about the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, Final Account.  Other filmmakers finished the project.  Is the finished product worth seeing?  Here is my review.