Highlanders in the News: Week of June 6

Every week, our Highlanders are using their education to do extraordinary things. Here, we’ll highlight some notable mentions from local, regional, national and international news media. Whether our students, alumni, faculty and staff are featured as subject matter experts in high-profile stories or simply helping make the world a better place, we’ll feature their stories.

Preservation acts

Bellefonte is a small, historic town of roughly 6,200 residents, situated about 10 minutes from Pennsylvania State University.

For the past several years, the president of Bellefonte’s Chamber of Commerce has been Tamara Schuster, M.A. ’95, who moved to that region from Carroll County about 15 years ago.

In addition to her position and overseeing the Victorian bed and breakfast she runs with her husband, she’s been an active player in the move to preserve and revitalize the town’s historic charm.

Schuster is the subject of an extended interview that was posted June 1 on the website statecollege.com.

In the chat, she discusses her efforts, talks about changes coming to the town and details the backstory of how she arrived in Pennsylvania, as well as the origin of the name of her business, “Our Fair Lady.”

“I love living in Bellefonte. There’s so much history here, and we want to preserve it,” she says.

“It’s a big team effort, and it’s people who love Bellefonte, and we want to see Bellefonte continue to grow,” Schuster explains. “It’s just been this very steady pace of things increasing, and more people coming in and getting excited. And it’s really taking off now.”

Down in the dumps

It’s been said that artists have the ability to draw beauty from the mundane, and the latest exhibit by photographer Bill Ratcliffe ’06, M.F.A. ’09, may be a textbook example of that notion.

Ratcliffe’s multimedia exhibition, “End of the Line,” offers views of landfills, trash disposal sites to which almost everyone contributes something, but few actually visit or examine very closely. With “End of the Line,” Ratcliffe’s photography surveys those storage spaces for modern waste and some of the things that wind up there.

A June 6 story on the New River Valley News website touts the exhibit, held at the Blacksburg Museum and Cultural Foundation in the Alexander Black House main galleries, and notes Ratcliffe’s upcoming artist’s talk, to be held there on Saturday, June 18 at 11 a.m.

In the piece, Ratcliffe, who earned both his B.F.A. and M.F.A. in photography at Radford University, said landfills “represent the idea of a magical place… where things can be sent and forgotten. With examination, these places may help us to heal from our obsession to consume at all costs.”

Admission to the artist’s talk is free, and more information is available at blacksburgmuseum.org.

Principal achievements

The Roanoke County School Board recently announced 13 administrative appointments for the upcoming academic year, and Highlanders account for roughly one-quarter of them.

Those promotions and others in the school system will take effect for the 2022-2023 school year, and were announced in The Salem Times Register in a story on June 1.