Monthly Archives: April 2016

A Memorial Service will be held in Oklahoma. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Shriners Hospitals for Children. For online condolences habingfamilyfuneralhome.com. 

 Vigil, Sunday, April 10, 2016, 3:00 P.M., at Habing Family Funeral Home. Funeral Mass, Monday, April 11, 2016, at 11:00 A.M., at St. Mary’s Catholic Church, Gilroy. Entombment will follow at St. Mary’s Cemetery, Gilroy Condolences at www.HabingFamilyFuneralHome.com. The family would appreciate donations to the American Diabetes Society, American Cancer Society or the SPCA.

 Her rosary will be Wednesday, April 6, 7:00 P.M., at Grunnagle-Ament-Nelson Funeral Home (visitation hours, 1:00 to 8:00 P.M.) and her funeral will be Thursday, April 7, 11:00 A.M., at St. Benedict Church. For full obituary, visit www.grunnagle.com.

If the one-lane traffic limit last summer on Hecker Pass was frustrating, expect it to be doubled this summer. While the Highway 152 construction continues, Highway 129 will also see slowdowns for the next nine months.

Four out of every five people you see in Gilroy work somewhere else. Even the majority of the City Council—including the mayor and vice mayor—commute to San Jose or further for work.

Waving blue pom-poms and screaming like their favorite team just scored the winning point, students at South Valley Middle School on Tuesday celebrated the school’s placement at the top of the leaderboard in a Bay Area math competition.Called LearnStorm, the initiative from Mountain View-based Khan Academy, is a nine-week math challenge open to all students in grades 3-12 that uses gaming concepts and a point reward system to encourage students as they gain greater math proficiency.At a special assembly on Tuesday, representatives from the academy along with Gilroy Unified School District superintendent, Deborah Flores; GUSD Board of Education member James Pace and school principal Anisha Munshi celebrated the school’s achievement in the math competition rankings, receiving a trophy for placing No. 1 on the Mastery Total Points leaderboard.“It is an amazing program,” said Valerie Kelly, South Valley Middle School math teacher and math department chair. During the assembly, Kelly presented top-scoring students with a certificates for their hard work.“The competition keeps them on task,” said Kelly, highlighting the point structure and the competition’s use of videos and diagrams to keep students engaged.All of the school’s math classes—more than 800 students—participated in the 9-week competition, which will culminate at a grand ceremony at Levis Stadium on April 5, where select schools in the Bay Area will be recognized.Flores said the competition, which started on January 29, and is made available to schools for free, rewards perseverance and reinforces skills taught in the classroom.“I love the way the program is set up,” she said, adding that her own son participated in a trial run of the competition last year at Gilroy High School. “It helps kids work through their math problems to figure out the answer.”Flores also appreciated the timeliness of the competition as a statewide math test is coming up in mid-April and the extra math preparation may help improve student scores.“I am hopeful that it will benefit individual performance in those assessments,” she said.Started as a pilot program at select schools in the region last year, the Khan Academy’s LearnStorm challenge is now available in counties throughout the greater Bay Area, from Napa to Santa Cruz.In the Bay Area, 1,000 schools participated in the competition this year, according to the Khan Academy.In addition to South Valley Middle School, Gilroy schools that participated include Gilroy High School, which placed second in Mastery below South Valley Middle School, Christopher High, El Roble Elementary, Glen View Elementary and GECA (Dr. TJ Owens Gilroy Early College Academy).To keep up with the latest school rankings, go to: learnstorm2016.org.

 Celebration of Life Sunday, April 17, 2016, at 1:00 P.M. to 3:00 P.M., at the Grange of Morgan Hill, 40 East 4th Street, Morgan Hill, CA. Condolences at www.habingfamilyfuneralhome.com.