WEDNESDAY, JUNE 8, 2011
Volume 10 Issue 178
Santa Monica Daily Press
KOBE SILENT ON NEW COACH SEE PAGE 12
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THE THOUGHTFUL MOVE ISSUE
Officials: Avoid 405 at all costs DAISY NGUYEN Associated Press
LOS ANGELES Only in Los Angeles could a weekend freeway closure be compared to the end of the world. Authorities will close Interstate 405 to do road work in July, and they took the step Monday of issuing a dire warning a full month ahead of time because of the potential traffic nightmare it could cause on one of the nation’s busiest freeways. “This doesn’t need to be a car-mageddon,” county Supervisor Zev Yaroslovsky SEE 405 PAGE 10
Young Collegians setting the course BY ASHLEY ARCHIBALD Daily Press Staff Writer
FOURTH STREET Monday night, in front of an audience of family, friends, faculty and administrators, 15 high school seniors walked across a stage at the Doubletree Hotel to mark the end of a grueling academic career. “I’m excited,” said Bryan Hurtz, a graduating senior. “It’s been a long four years.” These and the rest of SMMUSD seniors will get their accolades on June 21, when they leave high school for the wider world beyond. Many of those students will walk having always known they would be going on to get degrees in higher education. The young men and women at the Doubletree did not. All 15 students that attended the special ceremony, as well as one that could not be there, represent the first graduating class of the Young Collegians program, a collaboration between Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District and Santa Monica College. The program takes students having difficulty in their freshman year of high school, usually with a C average, and supports them through a rigorous academic program that exposes them to college-level courses during SEE GRADS PAGE 8
Brandon Wise brandonw@smdp.com
LOOKING COOL: People try on handmade eyewear on Tuesday afternoon at TOMS Shoes’ ‘One-for-One’ event on Main Street.
Shoe company debuts eyewear for a cause BY ASHLEY ARCHIBALD Daily Press Staff Writer
MAIN STREET TOMS Shoes, a Santa Monica-based company that provides footwear to underprivileged children in foreign countries, announced Tuesday that it will expand both its product line and charity to fight another global health problem — blindness. The company’s founder and Chief Shoe Giver Blake Mycoskie unveiled the newest product, a line of designer eyewear that TOMS will use to further the “one-for-one” model it established with its shoes. For every pair purchased, a person with vision problems will receive care that they could not afford before. “In 2007, when we’d sold 10,000 pairs of shoes, we realized that the one-for-one model was working,” Mycoskie said. “We also saw that there were many more needs
that were not being met.” It didn’t hurt that TOMS shoes became popular with the young, hipster set. Four years and 1 million pairs of shoes later, Mycoskie and his band debuted three styles of designer sunglasses, with the tagline “Every Stripe Tells a Story” for the pattern built into each pair. The sunglasses, which are made in Italy, sport three hand-painted stripes, two blue sandwiching one white. The first blue line represents the purchaser that provides a critical eye service to the recipient, depicted in the second blue line. The white line signifies TOMS, which connected the two. Mycoskie decided to venture into the realm of eyeglasses in 2007 after delivering the company’s shoes to a rural village in Nepal. He and his fellow volunteers noticed how many people in the village had vision problems, or were completely blind.
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“Vision seemed to be the next most obvious choice,” he said. Mycoskie announced his intention to expand into other kinds of products at the South By Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas, but left the direction a mystery. People questioned the business decision, saying that it was “risky” to change course when the shoes were not only doing well commercially, but providing such a valuable service to the needy. “I thought the big risk would be to not do something else,” Mycoskie said. Six months ago, after coming up with the design for the glasses, TOMS approached the Berkeley, Calif.-based nonprofit Seva Foundation. The Seva Foundation combats vision problems in developing countries. In the SEE TOMS PAGE 9
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