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• Valley's fallen heroes

  Valley's fallen heroes

  Service members with central San Joaquin Valley ties who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan:

  2012

  Army Pfc. Alejandro Jose "AJ" Pardo, 21, Granite Hills High graduate, Porterville

• One more for checklist

  One more for checklist

  Let's add to Tate Hill's "Checklist for a prosperous city" (commentary Feb. 28) by including a strategy that focuses on youth who aren't stellar students and young men of color falling victim to Fresno Unified School District's harsh discipline policies. How are we to have a prosperous community if youth are not graduating high school and instead led down the "school to prison pipeline"?

  Fresno Unified School District's trustees must adopt and implement a restorative discipline model allowing students to take responsibility for their actions and continuing with their education, instead of pushing them out with unnecessary suspensions and expulsions.

  According to Children Now, during the 2010-2011 school year, Fresno Unified suspended one in every five K-12th-grade students -- that's 14,600 suspensions! Sadly, during that same school year, only 73% of students graduated from high school on time.

• Vice President of Finance

  Vice President of Finance

  Mari Wylie, Vice President of Finance, oversees finance functions for the Fresno Bee, Sierra Star, Vida en el Valle and the San Luis Obispo Tribune. Mari re-joined the McClatchy Company in May 2012, following 18 years with Gannett Co. Inc, where she served as Controller for the Visalia Times-Delta, Tulare Advance-Register and Salinas Californian. Earlier in her career, she held positions at the Fresno Bee, Clovis Independent and McClatchy Printing Co. She graduated from California State University, Fresno with a Bachelor of Science degree in accounting.

• Edison graduates host Maruko descendant

  Edison graduates host Maruko descendant

  A group of Edison High School graduates, who regularly meet for breakfast and to reminisce, are hosting a special guest Feb. 4 -- Kenji Maruko, son of longtime Fresno bicycle shop owner Sanichi Uye Maruko.

• More continuation schools

  More continuation schools

  My father's favorite line is: "I agree with 98% of what people say. It's the last 2% that's the problem." I agree with the Children Now report that the Fresno Unified School District needs to address the expulsion policy and improve graduation rates, especially for students who live in a cycle of poverty or neglect (story March 8). But expelling students, then changing the expulsion to a suspension and transferring the students from one high school to another is not addressing the student's needs.

  Students who are expelled for drugs, gangs or fights, and students who are not on schedule to graduate need intervention, counseling and guidance to help them break the drop-out cycle and become productive members of society.

  Fresno Unified is providing this service but it needs to double, if not triple, the staff and attendance at continuation schools such as DeWolf. As a comparison, Clovis Unified has a student population of 39,000 and their continuation school, Gateway, has 380 students. Fresno Unified has