Herald Englewood
November 9, 2012
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A Colorado Community Media Publication
ourenglewoodnews.com
Arapahoe County, Colorado • Volume 92, Issue 39
Kagan will return to state House Incumbent retains seat in redrawn district By Deborah Grigsby
dgrigsby@ourcoloradonews.com Redrawn borders made the race for Colorado House District 3 a nail-biter, with incumbent Democrat Daniel Kagan narrowly defeating Republican Brian Watson by a margin of less than 1,600
votes. Unofficial results the morning of Nov. 7 show Kagan garnering 50 percent of the vote, 16,883 votes to Watson’s 15,323. Watson got about 45 percent of the vote, with the remainder going to LiberKagan tarian David Jurist. Formerly a district where Democrats were the majority of voters, redrawn boundaries created an
almost even split between Democrats, Republicans and independents. “My take-away from this election is that the people of House District 3 don’t want extremism or ideology to dominate,” said Kagan. `They want commonsense, practical, bipartisan solutions to the problems we face.” Kagan and Watson endured one of the state’s more nasty and expensive mud fights, lobbing a series of unflattering campaign mailers and robo-calls. “I think this was a hard-fought, spir-
ited race and Brian Watson did a great job of getting his message out, but in the end, voters decided that my record of constructive solutions has been good,” Kagan said. The district is made up of Englewood, a strip of northern Littleton, Cherry Hills Village, Sheridan and Greenwood Village. A Yale-educated lawyer, Kagan served as a delegate to the 2008 Democratic National Convention and as an attorney for the Hillary Clinton campaign in ColoraKagan continues on Page 10
Charter school proposed Proponents schedule two public meetings By Tom Munds
tmunds@ourcoloradonews.com
Dr. Donald Frei stands in Swedish Medical Center with equipment used in a procedure to treat a stroke where a blood clot blocks the blood supply to the brain. Swedish is one of a handful of hospitals in Colorado with the equipment and specialists to perform the procedure. Photo by Tom Munds
Swedish has new stroke treatment Hospital among 20 doing pilot study By Tom Munds
tmunds@ourcoloradonews.com In past years, clot-busting medication was the primary treatment for an ischemic stroke, where a clot cuts off blood supply to part of the brain. But Swedish Medical Center is using new technology that, in many cases, can reach and remove the clot. “Our center treats 20 to 30 stroke patients a month,” said Dr. Donald Frei, the neurointerventional radiologist at Swed-
ish. “We are one of 20 hospitals doing a pilot program study on an improved catheter system that is inserted in the blocked artery. The innovation is the separator that is inserted into the catheter and through the clot. Then the separator then grabs the clot, drawing it back into the catheter, where suction removes it from the artery.” The device is called the Penumbra MAX System Reperfusion Catheter, and Frei said the device is important because, in stroke treatment, time is everything. “The saying in stroke treatment is that time is brain,” he said. “That is because cutting off blood supply to any part of the brain means 30,000 brain cells die every second.”
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Swedish is the only hospital in the Rocky Mountain area using the new technology. Frei said there are 800,000 strokes a year in the U.S., and 15 percent are the type where a clot blocks a major artery to the brain. He said the device could be used to help treat about 120,000 patients a year. For many years, the best available treatment for blocked arteries in the brain used so-called “clot buster” medication to break up the blockage. It saved many lives and helped many stroke victims recover, even though there were potentially serious side effects. More recently, treatment also could involve the use of catheters attached to suction to try to draw the clot out of the artery. The catheter treatment was an advance in stroke treatment that wasn’t available 15 to 20 years ago. The MAX system improves on the catheter technology, Frei said. Area residents are fortunate because Swedish Medical Center is one of only two or three comprehensive stroke treatment centers in Colorado where there is the equipment and the specialists to proTreatment continues on Page 10
Two meetings are scheduled for proponents to talk about their proposal to start a charter school in Englewood. The Colorado League of Charter Schools states that charter schools are tuition-free public schools, operated by an independent group of parents, teachers and/or community members. The statement says that because charter schools are independent, they have more flexibility to be innovative. The first meeting will be held at 6 p.m. Nov. 13 at the Maddox building, 700 W. Mansfield Ave. There will be a second meeting at the same time and place on Nov. 27. The tentative plans for both meeting are for the charter school proponents to outline their proposal and answer questions. The Englewood School Board will decide whether or not to accept the charter school application. The board will review the proposal, and the approval of the application is tentatively scheduled to be on the agenda of the first board meeting in December. “A group came forward about a year ago, held off and presented their proposal for a charter school on Oct. 1,” said Karen Brofft, Englewood schools assistant superintendent. “Their plan calls for a core-knowledge school that will open for kindergartners through fifth-graders. Their goal is to grow and eventually be a kindergarten through eighth-grade school.” She said the proposal does not include information about where the school will be located. Charter schools were first authorized under the 1993 Colorado Charter School Act. A charter school operates under a contract from the school district or the Colorado Charter School Institute. There were about 170 charter schools in Colorado operating in the 2011-12 school year. Charter schools receive 100 percent of the state pupil funding for each student enrolled in the program.