Conference change helps Hampshire off the field, too
If you haven't heard yet, Hampshire High School is thinking about leaving the Big Northern Conference to join its Community Unit District 300 peers in the Fox Valley Conference.
The move would give the Fox Valley Conference an even number of competitors and offer Hampshire athletes better competition, including District 300 "sister schools" Dundee-Crown and Jacobs.
My colleague John Radtke covered every sports-related angle of the potential move in a column earlier this month.
But I should mention that kids who aren't athletically inclined could also benefit if Hampshire joins the Fox Valley Conference.
Hampshire would be able to offer more academic clubs - such as debate - that are currently unsustainable because of a lack of competitive opportunities, Principal Chuck Bumbales said.
"It's simply because of the size of some of those buildings and the student body," Bumbales said. "It would provide us with more academic-oriented opportunities for our students that we don't have."
Those opportunities would also enable District 300 to create more parity between Jacobs and Dundee-Crown, on one hand, and Hampshire - which is less than half the size of the other District 300 high schools - on the other.
Bumbales and his team presented the idea to the District 300 school board this week. The board may vote on the proposal, which would have Hampshire join the conference in the summer of 2011, next month.
Sleepy Hollow celebrates roots: I didn't have the good fortune to grow up in a town named after a classic American short story.
My hometown, according to legend, got its name from a train depot on a line leading to Detroit, the closest big city.
The village of Sleepy Hollow celebrates its literary pedigree each year around Halloween, and this year is no exception.
Sleepy Hollow Elementary School is inviting residents to the school at 10 a.m. on Saturday to discuss the village's history and Will Moses' richly illustrated version of Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow."
If memory serves me well, Irving was the first American author to gain international recognition. Before Irving, America was regarded as something of a cultural backwater, sort of a redheaded stepchild of England.
Irving's reputation is well-deserved. Irving wrote elegantly descriptive language that evoked a bygone era and the untouched beauty of preindustrial America.
In "Rip van Winkle," Irving describes the Catskill Mountains: "When the weather is fair and settled, they are clothed in blue and purple, and print their bold outlines on the clear evening sky, but, sometimes, when the rest of the landscape is cloudless, they will gather a hood of gray vapors about their summits, which, in the last rays of the setting sun, will glow and light up like a crown of glory."
Residents of Sleepy Hollow should be proud to live in a place named in honor on one of our country's first literary eminences. On Saturday, they will have a chance to show their pride.
Happy Halloween.