Artist Leads Students On Adventure Of The Imagination

One is a raven. One is a man with a huge eye for a head. The last is a deer.

Five students from East Valley School District’s alternative high school worked on the raven one morning last week. Led by Joe Pachak, an artist from Utah, Amber Fortier, April Fortier, Brian Hawks, Katie Nauroth and Jenny Kay patted and smoothed on a coat of reddish concrete, the color of rust. Next came a bucket of black concrete, to coat the under surfaces. Brandon DeRuwe videotaped their work. The young artists would use different colors to finish the other figures.

Other students involved in the project have been Chris Willis and Nick Blessing.

The designs came from rock paintings the students studied at Long Lake. The sculptures are based on skeletons of rebar - steel rods - that the students bent into shape and welded together.

Pachak, an artist and archaeologist from southern Utah, came to East Valley via the Internation Studies Department at Eastern Washington University. He worked with the students for about two weeks.

“Some of them have been quite creative. They came up with all sorts of names for the eyeball man: the Allseeing Eye, Jeanne Dixon…” Pachak said.

The sculptures look strangely at home in the shop room at East Valley High School. But that’s not where they’ll end up.

After being wrapped for a week to cure, they’ll go on display in the high school library. This spring, plans are for other students from the extension school to landscape a site for the sculptures on North Pines, outside the district’s curriculum building.

Sweet spell of V-I-C-T-O-R-Y

Daniel Lueck, eighth-grader at Gethsemane Lutheran School won this year’s Valley Spelling Bee last week.

His winning word was “heresy.” Lueck wins a $100 U.S. Savings Bond and a trophy.

Here are the other 15 finalists, in the order they were eliminated and the word they missed:

Jim Bowles, sixth-grader at St. Mary’s School, mitochondria.

Catherine Catlin, ninth-grader at Evergreen Junior High, perspicuity.

Leah Scarcello, seventh-grader at Spokane Christian Academy, indiscriminately.

Tara Sammons, ninth-grader at Valley Adventist School, apocryphal.

Katie Delderfield, eighth-grader at Centennial Middle School, forfeiture.

Ryan Mauer, seventh-grader at Grace Christian School, liturgy.

Sean Gamble, seventh-grader at St. John Vianney School, imperceptible.

Kjersti Gemar, ninth-grader at Greenacres Junior High, imminence.

Cole Cramer, seventh-grader at Mountain View Middle School, legitimacy.

James Simons, eighth-grader at East Valley Middle School, impeccable.

John La, ninth-grader at North Pines Junior High, dromedary.

Katrina Swenson, eighth-grader at St. Paschal’s School, elocution.

Matt Schroeder, eighth-grader at Bowdish Junior High, enmity.

Jason Duba, eighth-grader at Horizon Junior High, infallibility.

Silas Hilliard, seventh-grader, Valley Home Scholar, heresy.

Each finalist receives a $50 savings bond.

Good ideas grant

Twenty-nine fifth graders at Broadway Elementary taught by Colleen Weber and student teacher Jerry White will dig into the past this spring.

White, an archaeologist, is enrolled in Whitworth College’s masters in teaching program. With a $600 grant from Washington Water Power and the generosity of the neighboring Gethsemane Lutheran Church, Weber’s class will study archaeology for about a month.

First, students will visit another dig. Then, using church property, White will create a site for the students to dig, complete with arrowheads and other artifacts.

, DataTimes