For school teachers, as in many other professions, there’s no substitute for hands-on experience.  But there are ways that experience can be shared, as new teachers in California are learning.

The North Coast Beginning Teacherprogram has been in place for seven years now, reports regional director Corrine Muelrath, and is now part of California’s teacher credentialing process.

There are 560 new teachers currently in the mentoring program, Muelrath adds, a higher-than-usual number that reflects some of the uncertainties that school districts face in preparing their budgets without a state budget in place.

The area served by the North Coast Beginning Teacher program are shown in color on this map.

In most any museum, the items on display are just a small slice of their large and varied collection. And the Sonoma County Museum is no exception.

By acquainting himself with the breadth and variety of the total museum collection, Curator Eric Stanley  is then able to find ideas and items to draw from it to flesh out thematic displays. One recent instance of this, he recalls, was an exhibit based around the concept of Botany.

Another collection within the larger multitude of historic items that fascinate Stanley are the relics remaining from Santa Rosa's Chinatown. Now vanished and virtually unknown to all but the oldest area residents (or students of local history), it was a vibrant part of the core community less that 100 years ago.

The Sonoma County Museum is celebrating its own history with a  25th Birthday Party on Saturday afternoon. See a full schedule of upcoming museum activities here, including their rare, late September warehouse sale.

Eric Stanley

The federal health care bill, passed earlier this year, will also boost the fiscal well-begin of community clinics in Sonoma County, as well as the patients they serve.

Mary Szecsey, Executive Director of the five West County Health Centers,  explains that the local clinics, and many of their counterparts across the county, have helped pioneer and refine the concept known as a “medical home” for patients.

This approach, developed in considerable part out of necessity, has proven to be both efficacious and cost-effective, Szecsey adds, which is why it is being more widely adopted.

Liberal Sonoma County was once a hotbed of anti-communist fervor, as well as home to a series of utopian communities, all of which is on display at the Sonoma County Museum.

When taking a longer historical view, Eric Stanley, exhibitions and collections curator for the Sonoma County Museum, says the term “communism” should be understood to be used much more generally than in contemporary political discourse.

The exhibit, Red Sonoma: Communism and Radical Politics in Sonoma County, is housed in a single small room at the side of the main exhibit area, and continues through September 26. 

It was developed as a companion show to the museums’ current main show of contemporary art from Cuba. Stanley says public reaction to it has been mostly, but not entirely, positive.