Custer County

All You Need is … Inclusion

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WALKING UP TO THE FRONT DOOR of the Starpoint-staffed home in Salida, I immediately reflect on my own life with the disabled population. My dad has managed a group home for disabled adults since I was 7 years old. Living in Salida I’ve savored my small, always positive, interactions with Starpoint consumers. So, I jumped …

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Places: The Silver Cliff Museum

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By Doris Dembowsky There’s nothing like a museum for allowing parents and grandparents to reminisce. Walking from room to room, you’ll hear them saying, “I remember when ….” Those reminiscences wrap adults in warm family stories. As for historically challenged youth, they’re wide-eyed, looking at life as it was before TV and computers. The Silver …

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At What Cost?

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By Hal Walter I’ve followed with keen interest a case in which parents sued Colorado’s Douglas County School District to pay tuition after pulling their autistic son from the public system and placing him in a $70,000-per-year private school for special-needs kids. The parents claimed the district did not provide adequate education for their child, …

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Rights

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By Hal Walter

Last year when my son Harrison was suspended from school for taking swings at teachers, he asked if I’d ever been suspended. I answered truthfully that I had been, once, then I told him why.

I was serving out the senior year of what I viewed then as my school sentence at Moffat County High in Craig, Colorado. I also worked at the local community newspaper, the Northwest Colorado Daily Press. As part of my duties there I wrote a school news column called “MoCo Highlights.”

As I recall, someone in the school faculty had suggested I write about the new audio-visual equipment in the library. However, when I interviewed the librarians I found an even better story – they had some great new equipment but had received no training on how to use it; thus, it was collecting dust.

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Only a Loose Wire Apart

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By Hal Walter

When I first moved here in 1991, we had no snail mail delivery. I circulated a petition to get that started, and had one person refuse to sign, because her weekly visits to the post office were the only time she had a chance to visit with other people.

Phone service was by landline and often it went out for days at a time. Cell phones were unheard of, and dial-up Internet was still a few years off.

We didn’t have TV, though the previous owners had installed an aerial antenna that was better at attracting lightning strikes than it was network reception. Movies were rented on VHS tape from a small but busy business in Westcliffe.

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There’s More to School Than Academics

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By Hal Walter

It was the third such phone call from the school in seven school days; when I stopped the car about a mile from my house because I had forgotten something I really needed to bring to town, I sat there in the middle of the deserted dirt road slamming my fists on the steering wheel and cursing.

My son Harrison had just been suspended from school for the fourth time. Once he was sent home for being disruptive to the class. The following three times he’d actually struck out at teachers.

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Twenty Years of Preserving this Place Called Home

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By Hal Walter

Poet and conservationist Gary Snyder once said: “Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.”

For 20 years now, San Isabel Land Protection Trust has been helping people protect places they call home, and in turn helping provide a home for nature in a time of increasing strain on land resources in Southern Colorado. Over these two decades the population of Colorado has exploded, and the ripple effects of runaway growth and development on the Front Range and I-70 corridor have been felt in all corners of the state, including here in Custer, Fremont, Huerfano, and Pueblo Counties, where San Isabel serves to protect land and water resources.

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