In partnership with Oakland High School and Tacoma Public Schools, Classics professor Bill Barry has led a team of Puget Sound students to teach elementary Latin to high school students.
Programs
Math Circles is a partnership with the Tacoma Urban League targeted to 4th to 6th grade girls and facilitated by Puget Sound math professor David Scott. The program focuses on building young girls confidence in math and to work on positive self-esteem through leadership and service learning projects.
One of our newer initiatives, this program joins members of the university’s faculty with members of the Pierce County Medical Society with the intent of sharing the university’s wisdom on a variety of social, cultural, scientific, and political issues with the physicians that primarily serve the Pierce County area. The society believes that these types of programs will help caregivers and medical professionals appreciate the broader set of concerns that their patients must confront.
The Lifelong Learner Program is not meant to provide professional training or continuing education for society members, but to offer health care providers more general and current information to inform them as citizens and medical professionals. It also provides a unique opportunity for the university’s faculty to share their expertise and research findings with a targeted audience of professionals. Presentations on a wide range of topics are planned for the program, including bioethics, economic development and fair trade issues, and anti-terrorism and wiretapping.
Under the tutelage of professor Janet Marcavage, Puget Sound students provide instruction on print making to community members attending this annual festival in Tacoma.
The experience of theater enriches both the campus environment and the quality of life in the South Sound. The university’s Department of Theatre Arts actively engages with the local performing arts community to develop programs and opportunities in "community theater." Through its efforts the department helps to support a vibrant and innovative cultural environment for our area.
A partnership with Northwest Playwrights Alliance, Broadway Center for the Performing Arts, and playwright C. Rosalind Bell realized the production of Bell’s The New Orleans Monologues, which brought to life the imagined voices of those who suffered the ravages of Hurricane Katrina in vastly different ways. The play premiered on campus in the fall of 2007, and made it’s way to the Festival of Northwest Plays in February 2008.
Northwest Playwrights Alliance, Broadway Center for the Performing Arts, and the Department of Theatre Arts also co-produce the annual Double Shot Festival. This event offers more than a dozen new works over a 48-hour period with Puget Sound students, faculty, and alumni working with actors, writers, directors, and musicians from the region.
It seems every new building going up in Tacoma these days is a condo. Part of that may be related to the fine work Cascade Land Conservancy is doing on open space preservation in Pierce County. With the population set to double in our region over the next century, we need to start getting creative about urban development while protecting our natural areas and respecting the rights of property owners.
Transfer of Development Rights is a market-based mechanism that promotes responsible growth, bearing in mind that developers, property owners, and conservationists are all stakeholders in this complex issue. The theory is that the landowner sells the right to develop the land--not the land itself--for a fair and equitable price. Developers then pay for the right to a bonus in a different area, one that can accommodate additional growth. That bonus may be extra height on a planned or existing building or higher density that wouldn’t normally be allowed.
Economics professor Garrett Milam and two student research assistants are currently testing market mechanisms that would be most successful in Pierce County and the extended region. The program is also collaborating with the Washington Department of Community, Trade, and Economic Development on an advisory committee for the 2009 legislative session.
