120 at MVRHS to Go on to Post-Secondary Study

By BRIEN HEFLER

On Sunday, the class of 2004 at Martha's Vineyard Regional
High School will graduate. Said to be bright, hardworking and proactive,
the class of 189 will shed backpacks and combination locks for gowns and
mortarboards and enter the outside world, one that was hard to ignore
during their school years.

Some Transitions, New Faces as Farms Stand Ready for the Growing
Season

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By MARK ALAN LOVEWELL

Vineyard farmers are primed for the growing season. The soil is
properly watered and now it is time for some serious sunshine.

Graduating Class at Charter School, Four Strong, Is Confident,
Motivated

By C.K. WOLFSON

It took them six months to come to a consensus about the music to
choose, but on Saturday morning, dressed in white and blue, garlands in
their hair, they will stroll in to the sound of Dreams, by the
Cranberries, and when the ceremony concludes, walk out to the Beatles
singing, In My Life.

Mr. Barnes, along with an assortment of local builders, contractors
and heavy machinery, helped place a 1,000-pound, seven-and-a-half-foot
fossilized Triceratops skull atop a metal pedestal in the specially
renovated hallway of a Vineyard Haven home.

Bad news if you bought or built a new house on the Vineyard and figured you could cover some of your mortgage by renting it out for a chunk of summer: You weren't the only one with that idea. Now real estate agents say the market is glutted with houses for rent.

"There's a lot of houses out there to rent," said Deborah Hancock, a longtime real estate broker in Chilmark. "We have houses that have never been vacant that are still vacant . . . . It used to be that anything good was gone by January."

That's the cost of doing business for landscaper James Hayes now that gas prices have soared beyond $2.50 a gallon. Every five days, he swallows the steep price to keep his GMC 4X4 truck on the road. He charges it and reminds himself that as a small businessman, he can write it off at the end of the year.

Eight months after town health officials first detected a contaminated plume running beneath Edgartown Meadows subdivision, they are turning their attention to installing clean drinking water in the neighborhood instead of pinpointing the cause.

"This has dragged on for more than half a year. It's obviously more of a long-term problem," said Matthew Poole, Edgartown health agent.

"The most important thing is for people to have safe drinking water regardless of whether the source is septic systems or the golf club or something we haven't even considered," he added.

County Tries to Balance $4.4 Million Budget

By ALEXIS TONTI

Eliminating the water testing laboratory and turning down a $42,500
funding request by the Dukes County Regional Housing Authority -
these are some of the measures under consideration by the Dukes County
commissioners as they try to balance the $4.4 million total operating
budget for next year.

The county commissioners must consider the changes after an initial
draft budget came in with a shortfall of nearly $120,000.

Sgt. William L. Searle, state environmental police officer for the Vineyard, will retire from his post at the end of this month. Sergeant Searle, who is 54, is retiring for personal reasons, on June 30. He and
his wife, Linda, are selling their Island home and moving to Florida.

Prisoner's Story: Long Captivity Framed His War

By MANDY LOCKE

Six months after Lieut. Curtis Jones watched a one-hour Army
training film on how to handle imprisonment by the enemy, he fell into
German hands.

That March day in 1943 was a blur. Mr. Jones is still not quite sure
what went wrong, but he is not one to second-guess the events of his
life.