Good news is heating up

Talk about it

It’s been a hellish week – with scorching temperatures soaring out the roof, the state legislature continuing to play cat and mouse over the budget bill, Wednesday’s big Internet/telephone outage that sidelined many local businesses and individuals, and seemingly record numbers of criminals filling up the docket of the Carlton County court schedule all week.

To be sure, summer is in full swing in every sense of the word.

But despite any misgivings we may have over all of the negative things happening this week, we need go no further than the Pine Journal inbox to discover how many truly positive things are going on around the area at the same time.

The Barnum Fire Department invested in a new thermal imaging camera that will assist firefighters in seeking out stranded victims in the midst of a burning building and very possibly saving lives because of it.

The Cloquet Rotary Club sponsored six local young people for the Rotary Youth Leadership Awards (RYLA) Camp held on the University of Minnesota Crookston campus. Camp RYLA’s mission is to provide outstanding high school students with a variety of educational and recreational activities which provide numerous opportunities for leadership and team building.

Carlton County has decided to throw its hat in the ring with the Northeast Minnesota Toward Zero Deaths initiative, a statewide collaborative initiative using education, enforcement, engineering, and emergency services to reduce traffic deaths and severe injuries, with a goal of 350 or fewer deaths by the end of 2014, as well as 850 or fewer serious injuries by the same year.

South Terrace Elementary School in Carlton received a grant for $4,675 from the Northland Foundation in support of the district’s efforts to improve early literacy among struggling students.

Just Kids Dental Care announced it is expanding its school-based preventive dental care program to include most of Carlton County, including the communities of Moose Lake, Cromwell-Wright, Wrenshall and Carlton, in addition to Cloquet, which has been seeing great strides made through this valuable program since 2009.

The Suhonen family of rural Wright was selected as Carlton County’s Farm Family of the Year for 2011 for its exemplary efforts to keep family farming a viable pursuit in today’s world.

The list goes on and on. And though this sort of news doesn’t always make front page headlines, as people and programs continue to make good news around our county, the bad news doesn’t seem all that bad after all.

Wendy Johnson

Tags: opinion, editorials