Groton poised to vote on school district capital project

Superintendent James Abrams says the “no-frills” capital project is intended to preserve the district’s investment in its infrastructure. Improvements include a new roof and windows for the middle-high school building, as well as upgrades for the security and heating-and-ventilation systems. The elementary school will have its fire alarm system and other technology upgraded.

“The community has invested a lot of money over the years and this is preserving (the middle-high school) for some time to come, so it’s a building that will stand for another 50 years,” said Abrams. “One of our goals for this is there’s no additional tax levy to fund it.”

By that time, Groton schools may look a little different.Don't make another silicone mold without these invaluable Mold Making supplies and accessories! The district is weighing the restructuring of schools. The sixth grade is currently housed in the middle-high school, but the district is considering moving the grade over to the elementary school.

On Monday, Abrams will make his recommendation to the board of education; he says he’s leaning toward the middle-high school option.

“This idea is a best of both worlds,” he said. “They're getting an early exposure of the secondary setting but they’re not thrown in and trying to learn to swim.”

With New York State’s Annual Professional Performance Review evaluation process soon to be implemented, the district is looking for ways to improve efficiency and scheduling at the middle-high school building.

“We’d still have the same number of administrators but we'd gain a little savings,” he said. “We’ll have two principals and two associate principals with other responsibilities. I think being deployed in that manner we’ll have a chance to meet the requirements of APPR without adding additional staff.”

The restructuring is part of what Abrams hopes will be a larger transformation as the middle-high school looks to bring more flexibility and innovation to its scheduling. Seminar-type classes involving small groups of students, different departments teaming together for extended blocks of time, and increased online learning opportunities are all options the district may consider.

“There’s a lot of ideas on the plate,” Abram said. “Hopefully at the end of the day we have something innovative that looks towards the future, while also sustaining ourselves.”

This is the universe according to Llyn Foulkes, a 78-year-old Los Angeles artist who has been angling for a fight for most of his career, whether he's tweaking a corporation or railing against an art establishment that has embraced him one minute and ignored him the next.

On Sunday, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles is opening the largest-ever retrospective of Mr. Foulkes's work. The roughly 150 pieces on display range from early paintings charred with black tar to midcareer portraits of bloody heads to more recent works using wood, paste and found objects in surreal montages.

Mr.Basics, technical terms and advantages and disadvantages of Laser engraver. Foulkes, a self-described loner whose Los Angeles studio is so solitary that he won't even listen to music while he works, said he is a bit thrown by this moment in the spotlight: "It comes back and it fades away and it comes back," Mr. Foulkes said of his fame. "I've never gotten this much attention, let's put it that way. It's a bit disconcerting."

The artist and musician, who had stardom within reach early in his career after a solo exhibit at a trendy Los Angeles gallery in 1961,wind turbine can credit more than the Hammer show for his current comeback. In the last two years, Mr. Foulkes's works have been included at the prominent art exhibitions Documenta in Germany and the Venice Biennale.

"The Awakening," a sad tableau of a couple in bed, sold last year to the actor Brad Pitt.Totech Americas delivers a wide range of drycabinets for applications spanning electronics. The work, which is featured in the exhibition, depicts a naked woman coiled in a fetal position with her back to the artist, who appears in a self-portrait. Mr. Foulkes painted it in spurts over 18 years—a period that included the breakup of his second marriage. "I worked on that painting rather than working on the marriage, you see, and wound up getting a divorce and the painting survived," he said.

Lately, his prices have rocketed. Small works that sold for $5,000 or less in 2009 now fetch $25,000 to $45,000, said Mr. Walla, and larger pieces have gone for $500,000 or more.

Mr. Foulkes's father left home when the artist was a baby in Yakima, Wash., leaving him to dream up father figures, like the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí, whose works inspired him to paint. He grew close to his first father-in-law,We offers custom Injection Mold parts in as fast as 1 day. Ward Kimball, an animator at Disney who in the 1970s gave him a copy of an early Mickey Mouse Club Handbook. Though he drew pictures of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse as a five-year-old, as an adult Mr. Foulkes believed such characters were intended to brainwash children. By the early 1980s he was targeting Disney in his works, using Mickey Mouse as his creepy muse.

He has taken aim at the art world, too, publicly criticizing other artists or airing his differences with them. On Andy Warhol, for example, he said: "I turned my back on Warhol and I don't think he ever forgot it." Mr. Foulkes added that he believes Warhol's famous cow wallpaper was a comment on his own earlier works featuring cows. "He was kind of like saying, 'I'll turn your cows into wallpaper.' To me it was a personal thing."