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Thursday, December 27, 2018 • Vol. 134, No. 26 • Oregon, WI • ConnectOregonWI.com • $1.25
Stories of the Year 2018
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Gerlach Wholesale Flooring Oregon School District
Learning the lesson of giving Students continue Christmas tradition SCOTT DE LARUELLE Unified Newspaper Group
happen – individuals from an Engineers Without Borders chapter in Minneapolis will conduct an assessment for an entire solar electrical system soon after the UW-Madison group leaves. In summer 2017, the “Partners in Light” conducted an assessment for the solar electricity system on the orphanage in Ebenezer. While
Seventh- and eighth-graders can be an excitable bunch. So for many Oregon Middle School students, when the calendar rolls around to December, that means something they’ve eagerly looked forward to all year – raising donations to buy Christmas gifts for their fellow students in need. In the past few weeks, students gathered more than $5,400 in donations from local residents and businesses, and with the money, they took part in a shopping spree and wrapped dozens of gifts to go under trees for 25 families and more than 40 kids throughout the Oregon area. OMS student council adviser Kevin Gasner, who has been heading up the project for the past eight years, said it all started from his own family tradition of going to Madison’s West Towne Mall to be “Secret Santas” for families in need. “My parents were both teachers and raised me that we try to help people this time of year,” he told the Observer last week. “So every year, we’d go down and took a name or two off the tree and went shopping for them. I wanted to see if it was something we could do here.” A group of student council members loved the idea, but Gasner was stumped on how to raise money and asked if they should consider a fundraiser of some sort. “They just looked at me and said, ‘Well, let’s just ask people for it,” he said. “So that’s exactly what they did, and the first year we raised around $2,000, just
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Rendering courtesy of Bray Architects
RenA rendering show the outside of the planned new K-6 elementary school in Fitchburg that’s planned to open in time for the 2020-21 school year. Electors approved the district’s land purchase earlier this month.
Preparing for growth New school, hotel, youth center plans signal new trend purchase deals capped a busy year for school officials, who convened a growth task force and coordinated a public information campaign for the district’s fourth referendum since 2012. Oregon’s main commercial areas were another target of this growth and the plans for more. The downtown got a new look with the addition of the Jefferson Crossing, which opened to residents in July after more than a year of construction. All 61 units in the three-story building were rented almost immediately. Less than a mile away, at 110 N. Oak St., construction started in October on a new Oregon Youth Center, funded almost entirely by donations. The Oregon
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Stories of 2018 1. Building referendum passes for Fitchburg school 2. New hotel ready to open 3 (tie). Youth Center goes from zero to under construction 3 (tie). Village president won’t run again, Carpenter says she will 4. Oregon boys soccer wins state title 5. Library suffers setback but fundraising starts 6. Downtown apartments open, fill immediately 7. Perry Parkway connects OHS to Janesville Street 8. Food pantry grows within new building 9 (tie). Random drug searches made permanent 9 (tie). Flooding ruins Rotary bike trail
Oregon native prepares for return trip to Haiti EMILIE HEIDEMANN Unified Newspaper Group
Oregon native Ryan McGuine, engineer and University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate, will travel with five peers and two professional mentors to Haiti from Jan. 11-15 – a sequel to a trip the group took in summer 2017. The group calls themselves “Zanmi-Limye” – Haitian for
“Partners in Light” – and they will travel to Ebenezer, Haiti, to assess a solar electric lighting system for a local orphanage. While there, they will put together a manual of the system to help community members understand how it works, how to repair it and who to call during an emergency. “There are some people that are electrically inclined in the community that can fix a lot,” he said.
Ebenezer, a community connected to a nearby, government-funded electrical grid, experiences occasional rolling blackouts, something McGuine and his colleagues are trying to correct. He said the advantage of working with solar energy is it’s “scalable” – other groups can come along and install more batteries and solar panels as more electrical needs come up. And that’s exactly what will
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Oregon is about to experience a growth spurt. From the opening of Jefferson Crossing apartment building to construction of a new hotel and youth center, there was plenty of action in 2018. Many of the most notable events of the year were actually planning for the future, however. The most far-reaching of those was the successful Oregon School District referendum effort voters approved Nov. 6, totaling $47 million. The result will be a new elementary school in the northern part of the district and the purchase of land for an eventual new middle school off the U.S. Hwy. 14/ County Hwy. MM interchange – with the construction of the middle school saved for a separate vote in a few years. That effort and the resulting land