More women than ever are going to college, and they are graduating in record numbers, too. Expect in certain subject areas, such as math and the hard sciences. A local group believes that the way to change that is to start early.

Expanding Your Horizons is not a job fair, but local board member Julie Silk says it does give the girls who participate a close-up look at some career possibilities they might not previously have considered.

The online registration form for the Sonoma County Expanding Your Horizons workshop at Sonoma State on March 20, is available here.

It may take a lifetime to see the results, but students replanting a native oak forest near Glen Ellen are taking the long view.

   Bouverie Preserve 

   Sonoma Valley High School

Foreclosure sales of homes where the loans are in default still represent a loss for the banks making the sales. Yet local agencies that work with overextended homeowners say few lenders seem willing to work toward other outcomes.

When people come to the foreclosure prevention program, says Linda Hedstrom at California Human Development, they sometimes have unrealistic hopes. But the keeping the house is often not possible, so damage control becomes the fallback objective.

One secondary effect of the foreclosure wave has been a considerable number of former homeowners who must return to the ranks of renters. But Hedstrom observes the rental market in Sonoma County currently is much tighter than the for sale housing market.

The wave of home foreclosures that swept California in 2008 and 2009 has not gone away. In some ways, it may be getting worse.

Last year, says Brian O’Callahan, who directs the three-person Foreclosure Prevention program for Catholic Charities in Santa Rosa, his agency was contacted by roughly 3500 people seeking help with home loans gone bad. Out of that number, about 600 met the criteria for his HUD-funded program (first mortgages only, primary residence of the borrower). And only a quarter of those 600 were able to get significant assistance. For many of the rest, the best they could offer was sympathy and someone to listen.