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NEWTOWN, Pa. - A Pennsylvania community College has received a $100,000 grant from the Windgate Foundation, an Arkansas-based private grant-making institution.
Bucks County Community College will use the two-year grant to fund its Windgate Fine Woodworking Legacy Residency.
“There is a long tradition of fine woodworking in Bucks County and southeastern Pennsylvania,” says Associate Professor Chriss Todd, who is in her fourth year teaching under the Windgate Legacy Residency. “Windgate’s generous support of our program allows us to continue to offer a high quality woodworking education to those in the area.”
Todd says the program is more vital than ever, as she believes there has been a national decline of interest in the trades among young people.
Combatting coronavirus in Bucks County proved to be a costly fight over the last year.
Some $109 million in federal CARES Act money has helped fund that battle as officials dispersed money on several fronts to address the diverse public health, economic and other needs caused by the pandemic.
The expenditures show the wide-reaching impacts of the virus that first appeared in Bucks in early March 2020.
According to the Bucks County Commissioner s office, the entirety of the county s CARES Act allotment was distributed as follows:
32 percent for county staff substantially dedicated to addressing COVID-19 and overtime expenses;
27 percent for economic stabilization activities (Bucks Back to Work grants, PPE);
Democrats passed an unapologetically progressive stimulus bill through the Senate this weekend, one that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has called “the most significant piece of legislation to benefit working families in the modern history of this country.”
This bill would not be on the brink of becoming law if Democrats did not have a governing trifecta in the White House, the Senate, and the House. And that trifecta in turn would not have been possible were it not for the defection into the Democratic column of a particular, and perhaps surprising, demographic: suburban whites with college degrees.
These voters, once a reliably Republican constituency, switched in large numbers in 2018, handing Democrats decisive House seats in places like California’s Orange County. In 2020, they helped elevate Joe Biden to the White House by turning out for him in places like Pennsylvania’s Montgomery County.
Bucks County will be opening two new COVID-19 vaccine sites next week, a move it anticipates will nearly double the current vaccination rate and cut into the current appointment backlog.
The two new sites at the St. Luke’s hospital in Quakertown Borough and the Neshaminy Mall in Bensalem are expected to open on March 16, Bucks County Commissioners Vice Chairman Bob Harvie confirmed Tuesday.
The commissioners are set to vote on the agreements for the new vaccine locations at their meeting Wednesday. Last month, Bensalem Mayor Joseph DiGirolamo announced the mall would host one of the county s vaccine clinics, but county officials would not confirm the news at the time.