Sara Leaming

The Mead School District will hold a groundbreaking ceremony today for the new Mead Middle School, about a half-mile east of U.S. Highway 2 on Day-Mt. Spokane Road. The groundbreaking will take place at 1 p.m.

The families of Barialay Momand and Faisal Asef are calling it a miracle. After carbon monoxide poisoning left both men in a coma, Momand, 20, and Asef, 18, are awake. It's too early to determine whether either suffered brain damage, as is likely, hospital officials said.

A chairlift tower at Silver Mountain Resort sustained "major structural damage" overnight Wednesday, resort officials confirmed. The damage to a Chair 5 lift tower just below Kellogg Peak was discovered Thursday before the mountain opened, said Stephen Lane, marketing director for the Silver Valley resort.

Chris Moreau may teach at Willard Elementary School, but her name soon will be well-known in all 35 of Spokane's elementary schools. The longtime music teacher recently published her first children's novel, "The Professor's Telescope," and Spokane Public Schools officials purchased enough copies for every elementary school library. The book is also in the process of being presented to the school board for approval so it can be used in the classroom.

OLYMPIA – Gov. Chris Gregoire said Thursday that she'll recommend "significant" spending on educational reforms over the next two years, but said she plans to do it without increasing taxes. "I'm not into taxes," she told reporters. "I'm looking at what we have now and why we can't fund better … and use some of our new increased revenue that we have and invest it."

Cooper Elementary School and Shaw Middle School have been named Washington State's Title I Distinguished Schools, Spokane Public Schools officials said. Title I is part of the federal No Child Left Behind Law, and designed to give disadvantaged children equitable access to a high-quality education, officials said.

Two Spokane high school students were identified recently as outstanding students by the College Board's National Hispanic Recognition Program. Matthew Rivera, a senior at Rogers High School, and AJ Garcia, a senior at Lewis and Clark, are among 3,300 students identified as the highest scoring Hispanic students out of 124,000 who took the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test or National Merit Qualifying Test.

Nearly half of Washington's high school juniors face the possibility of no diploma in 2008 after two failed attempts at passing the WASL, now a requirement for graduation. Results from retakes of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning administered in August show 55.5 percent of the state's high school students meeting standard in reading, math and writing on the high-stakes test.

Rayann Huston is deaf, but she can do everything her hearing peers can do, with a little assistance. The Linwood Elementary School third-grader depends on an interpreter each day to explain math lessons, learn the words to music and communicate with her teacher.

The latest data for on-time graduation rates show Spokane Public Schools performing well below the statewide average, with Central Valley School District performing perfectly. But superintendents at both districts question the validity of the numbers reported each year by the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction.

After parental complaints last year, the process of keeping Spokane students' personal information out of the hands of military recruiters has changed. Last year, high school students "opting out" of lists provided to military recruiters found they were also going to be left out of the yearbook, honor rolls, sports rosters, programs for graduation and the like.