FAIRMONT — Lined up at the entrance to the West Fairmont Middle School gymnasium, cheerleaders shook their blue and red pom poms to welcome Opera, a Chocolate Labrador Retriever.

Trained as a therapy dog, Opera elicited roars of approval Wednesday from the packed gym of sixth through eighth graders.

“We’re excited to work with Opera and see the interaction and how the relationship with a special therapy dog and our students will help our students succeed in the classroom,” Gina DeLorenzo, Mari

FAIRMONT — Friends of 5th Street, a nonprofit, won the Fifth Street Gym at auction last Thursday, March 21. The building was sold for $88,000. Joe R. Pyle Complete Auction & Realty Service performed the Auction.

“We are told that the buyer is very much interested in maintaining the support of youth sports through the purchase of that property,” Marion County School Superintendent Donna Heston said.

The auction was part of the Board’s continuing efforts to tighten the school system’s belt acros

FAIRMONT — Marion County Schools will cut 40 positions this semester for next school year, in response to dwindling student enrollment and expiring federal funds.

School Superintendent Donna Heston revealed the information during an informational presentation on staff reductions Thursday at the Board of Education offices. The school system lost 141 students between September and March 13. At the same time, expiring federal COVID pandemic funding and mandatory increases in the form of raises and

FAIRMONT — Marion County Schools is more or less on budget, Treasurer Scott Reider reported to the school board at Monday’s Board of Education meeting.

The agenda for Monday’s meeting included an informational briefing on where the budget was at this point of the year. For the most part, Reider correctly anticipated where budgetary needs would fall.

“If there was one thing I might have missed, it was telling them maybe the extra time we have to give the aides because they are six hour employee

WHITE HALL — Jo recalls the time an ambulance picked her up from her home close to the top of a hill that Timrod Drive lays on in White Hall.

An illness caused an emergency severe enough to where an ambulance became necessary. Jo is a pseudonym, she requested her name be withheld to protect her privacy.

However, what made Jo nervous was that her ambulance pickup coincided with the end of the school day at White Hall Elementary.

“We got down the hill, I’m facing, looking up at the hill and yea

“I find how languages developed very interesting,” she said. “The linguistic process, it’s so cool. English, it’s a lingua franca now and that’s partly because of the internet and stuff. But it came from, a lot of words came from other languages like French or German or other languages, and that’s why we have some weird spelling.”

Weird spelling will be familiar to survivors from the spelling bee. Next year, students will have their chance for revenge by dissecting how languages like English an

FAIRMONT — Although weather might have broken above freezing after the weekend’s snowstorms, for the roughly 700 students at East Fairmont Middle School nothing much has changed.

Class is still held in a building with a broken heating system, with staff forced to use electric heaters and hallway fans doing their best to keep the temperature barely above 60 degrees.

Meanwhile, at the Marion County Courthouse, Hranec Mechanical Corp. and the Marion County Board of Education tussled over the proc