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It was at La Conner High School where one of the foremost archaeologists in North America started to dig what would become her life’s work. A transfer student in the late 1990s from Victoria, B.C., the future Dr. Kisha Supernant recalled, “as a sophomore, I took the world history class with Mr. (Vince) Sellen that really helped solidify my interest in archaeology.” Today, she is the director of the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology and an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta. Super...
As a La Conner High student in the late 1990s, she was shy and introspective, a teen apt to shun the limelight save once when called upon to sing a solo in a campus stage play. These days, Kisha Supernant – now Dr. Kisha Supernant – has become one of the most widely recognized leaders in her field, the subject of numerous TV, radio and print media interviews in the U.S. and Canada this summer alone. Supernant, an archaeologist, has worked with indigenous communities to locate human...
Idled by the COVID-19 pandemic a year ago, the two-time defending state 2B champion La Conner High School volleyball team couldn’t wait to get back in the gym this fall. And when that time came last week, the Lady Braves got back to business by making short work of 2A foe Sehome and NW2B rival Darrington with twin straight-sets victories to open the 2021 net campaign. Ellie Marble delivered 20 kills and Emma Keller fueled the attack with 30 assists to lead a 25-11, 25-6, 25-20 rout of Sehome last Tuesday at Landy James Gym. Marble added 15 k...
Donald R. Kruse passed away at his home with his son by his side on August 27, 2021 after an 18-month battle with Leukemia. He was the owner of Skagit Sun, a berry farm in La Conner, Washington. Don Kruse was born in Jefferson City, Missouri on July 12, 1948, the youngest of three children born to Eleanor (Stratton) Kruse and Raymond Kruse. He finished high school in Jefferson City. During his formative years, Don’s family lived in the city but also had a farm where they spent much of their t...
Having turned the page on the Labor Day holiday, La Conner High sports teams are poised to get down to business this week with the return of their regular fall sports schedules. The La Conner High volleyball team, which won State 2B crowns in 2018 and 2019 and did not lose a single set during last spring’s modified season, opened their current schedule with a non-conference home match opposite 2A Sehome Tuesday night. “Filling a non-league schedule with larger schools will help our girls to improve and play at a higher level,” La Conner head vo...
La Conner teachers welcome students back to class today, a return to full-time in-person instruction for the first time since March 2020. But planning for the Sept. 1 back to school date has been weeks in the making, including a series of summer budget workshops and hearings capped by passage in late July of a balanced $14 million general fund budget for the 2021-22 fiscal year. The school district anticipates $14,070,000 in revenues and expenditures of $14,022,000 during the ’21-’w22 year. The budget was approved during a July 26 hybrid sch...
The countdown is on for the start of school, meaning numbers are now much on the minds of La Conner students, teachers and administrators. That’s especially the case as the La Conner School District begins developing a new math curriculum during the 2021-22 academic year, Superintendent Will Nelson told board members at their nearly two-hour hybrid meeting Aug. 23. His confirmation of the district’s emphasis on math squared nicely with the school panel’s emerging road map for short-term and long-range district goals. “I’d love to see a focus on...
There was a time, in the late 1980s, when famed actor Danny DeVito and a production crew scouted La Conner as a setting for the dark comedy film “War of the Roses,” an eventual Golden Globe nominee for Best Motion Picture. Alas, the Hollywood suits chose Coupeville – often a high school sports rival of La Conner – for the film shoot. But fast forward more than three decades to last weekend and the sweltering San Joaquin Valley city of McFarland, California, which did land a mov...
Calling the La Conner High School girls’ soccer team a work in progress is a compliment Lady Braves players and head coach Christian Warman accept with pride. That’s because the retooled roster has taken a blue-collar, hard-working approach to preseason workouts. And the result, according to Warman, is steady progress made leading up to the team’s Sept. 16 conference opener at Coupeville. “Preseason practices have been going fantastic,” Warman told the Weekly News Tuesday. “Our captains worked very hard in the off-season to keep this team t...
Jacques Brunisholz once completed a demanding 500-mile hike on the famed Pacific Crest Trail. Years before he trekked across much of the globe, including a stop in Afghanistan nearly a half century ago. But given his passion for public service it likely was harder for him to step away from the La Conner Town Council last week. Still, the retired La Conner High School foreign language and art teacher hardly broke stride in choosing to resign his long-held council seat, a tenure begun about 2008, during the town’s famed flap over the status of a...
Decisions, decisions. Perhaps none of late have been so scrutinized as whether to be vaccinated against COVID-19. In some cases, as for the state’s health care workers and emergency responders, it is less a choice than a mandate in the attempt to curb spread of the deadly virus, which has claimed nearly 630,000 American lives in a year and a half, 300 times more than the number of U.S. military members lost in two decades fighting in Afghanistan. This month has brought two major developments on the vaccine front. On Aug. 9, Gov. Jay Inslee p...
Rachel Cram has focused on local history this year, developing an in-depth anecdotal history and virtual tour of landmark La Conner downtown buildings. The La Conner High senior is also eyeing the future – her future. Cram, a 5’6” guard, has signed a letter of intent to attend and play basketball next year at Carroll College, a National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) school in Helena, Montana that boasts a strong women’s hoops tradition. The Fighting Saints won Front...
It seems like yesterday that the surprising La Conner High football team was securing an NW2B title with a season-ending four-game winning streak after three straight single victory years. And, in a way, it was yesterday as the upstart Braves and their league foes shifted traditional fall schedules to spring in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet much has changed in just four months. First-year La Conner head coach Jeff Scoma stepped down in June to lead the 3A Stanwood High grid program and has been replaced at the Braves helm by defensive...
On a fundamental level this preseason is no different for the La Conner High School volleyball team than any other during the 29-year tenure of hall of fame head coach Suzanne Marble. In other ways, however, it is a far different vibe now than last August. The team, which captured the 2018 and 2019 state 2B net crowns, is looking forward to a full fall season after having been limited to a short spring campaign due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “This year more than ever has been the season we have all looked forward to the most,” Marble told the...
A time came when Lorraine Loomis figured there was a better way to earn a living than toiling at double shifts as a fish processor. She was right. There was a better way. It just wasn’t easier. If anything, becoming a long tenured “salmon warrior” was much harder – but a career that Loomis embraced and now provides a legacy destined to have an impact for generations to come, due to her diligence and perseverance. The longtime director of the Swinomish Tribal Community Fisheries progr...
New La Conner School Superintendent Will Nelson cannot stress enough the value of doing one’s homework. That goes for him as well as the nearly 600 students he and school district staff will greet this fall as La Conner transitions from on-line and hybrid instructional models employed last year in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. School board members chose Nelson this past spring following a rigorous selection process to succeed Rich Stewart as the district’s lead administrator. Nelson had been director of equity and student success at Arl...
Every four years, Maggie Wilder finds herself weeping during the Olympics. “I’m moved by the glory of it and that I never won anything,” she said. “I always wonder what that would feel like.” Knowing that qualifying for the high hurdles was out of the question, Wilder suggested to her sister Georgia Johnson that they enter pies in the Skagit County Fair. “I wanted to win something in a friendly competitive way,” said Wilder, “and what could be friendlier than the fair?” When the judging was o...
An abnormally dry summer here didn’t stop the Pacific Northwest Rain from descending on the Valley of the Sun. The Rain, an area girls’ travel team, took top honors in their high school age division of the recent 2021 Summer Sizzle basketball tournament in Phoenix. Five La Conner High players – Juna Swanson, Rachel Cram, Sarah Cook, Ellie Marble and Josie Harper – were members of the tourney title winners, coached by former Mount Vernon High standout Tyler Amaya, who played col...
After sustaining heavy graduation losses from its NW2B football title team, La Conner High School will likely sport a youthful lineup this fall. It only made sense, then, that the school district would tap someone with past success developing young talent to succeed championship coach Jeff Scoma at the Braves helm when the season kicks off in a few weeks. Charlie Edwards, a longtime local youth sports coach and member of the Braves staff this past spring, has been promoted to fill the head coaching vacancy created when Scoma left La Conner in...
The Blue Heron Canoe Family camped at the former Maple Avenue ballfield in La Conner last week, a stop on their Healing Waters 2021 journey to Lummi Island. The Willapa Spirit canoe accompanied it. Swinomish tribal member Eric Day joined the journey in La Conner to help skipper the second canoe. The Snohomish tribe crew and supporters totaled 65 people, Karen Condos, director of Natives United Journey, told the Weekly News Thursday. Vehicles arrived at the ballfield site late Wednesday morning...
The two-time defending state champion La Conner High School volleyball team is already laying the foundation for a post-COVID fall net campaign. La Conner players did so by sweeping a traditional cornerstone event – the Burlington-Edison Invitational Summer Tournament – in late July. The Lady Braves, limited to a shortened, primarily NW2B spring schedule because of pandemic restrictions, made the most of their opportunity to match up at Burlington opposite teams from larger enrollment schools. La Conner defeated Nooksack Valley,...
La Conner High will remain the home of the Braves. The school district’s board of trustees on Monday formally approved a unanimous Swinomish Tribal Senate resolution supporting retention of the Braves name for La Conner athletic and academic teams. Board president Susie Deyo joined members Amanda Bourgeois, John Agen and Lynette Cram in approving the Senate measure. Board member J.J. Wilbur, who also serves on the Swinomish Senate, abstained. The joint tribal-school district action is in accordance with state legislation passed earlier this y...
An American youth softball team playing in the Dominican Republic last week had an Edge against its competition. Make that two Edges. Twin sisters Alissa and Kelsey Edge were selected to play seven games in the Caribbean for a national team assembled through the American Based Sports Abroad organization. The Edge sisters are products of the Marysville-Pilchuck High School softball program, but their dad, Bernie Edge, is a La Conner alum who played baseball for the Braves. “It’s been a lot of fun watching them develop and play,” he told the W...
C.J. Woods represents the latest branch off a decades old Friday Harbor basketball coaching tree dating to the late Dean Turnbull, for whom the gymnasium at the island school is named. Woods is now looking forward to setting down roots in La Conner as the new Braves head hoops coach. The Friday Harbor and University of Idaho alum was chosen to succeed Todd Hinderman, an award-winning science teacher at La Conner Schools who guided the Braves to a State 2B sweet sixteen berth in 2019 and whose up...
On Friday, November 13, 2020, Marilyn Alice Frey, loving wife, mother, grandmother, sister and friend, passed away peacefully of natural causes at age 87. She was a resident of Serenity Assisted Living in Bellevue, Washington Marilyn was born on April 30, 1933, on San Juan Island to Roy and Mary Gresli. After graduating from Friday Harbor High School, Marilyn attended Western Washington State College (now WWU) in Bellingham, Washington, where she met her future husband, Stanley Frey. Married on...
