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If It Wasn't for Bad Luck . . .

The California lottery is 10 years old now, and the state gaming Big Spin doctors are boasting that increased play is helping school districts more than ever, to the tune of a whopping $116 per student statewide last year. For the Santa Rosa City School District, that translated to about $1.8 million, which in an interesting coincidence is the same amount that the two parcel-tax measures on the ballot this month would have raised for the district each year.

But Superintendent Lew Alsobook isn't exactly celebrating the district's "luck" in the lottery. Just two years after it was instituted, in October 1985, then-governor George Deukmejian changed the ground rules, and directed that lottery money be counted as part of the state's general support for local school districts, essentially subtracting the lottery proceeds from other school moneys.

"We have no more money than if there had never been a lottery, except for those first two years," Alsobrook says. Now what do you suppose were the odds of that happening?

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Uniform Gift to Minors

Professor Harold Hill is still safe in River City, but the kids in Santa Rosa's Elsie Allen High School marching band will soon get fine new uniforms, even without his help. Instead, parent band boosters negotiated a deal with the school district for a $29,000 loan to buy 100 of the $350 uniforms. The boosters have already raised $6,000 on their own. The new uniforms will be dark blue and silver, with white trim, and will replace the costume currently used by the student musicians--black jeans and white T-shirts.

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Making Book

The shelves are bare in the newest library in Sonoma County. The new outpatient Cancer Center in north Santa Rosa, which opened its doors last month, has set aside space for a medical reference library that will offer free public access to printed materials, audio and video tapes, and on-line resources about cancer and related illnesses and issues. But none of those things are in place yet, as the fundraising campaign for the library is under way. Lending her support to that cause last week was petite mountaineer Vicki Boriack, who was one of 17 breast cancer survivors to scale Argentina's 23,000-foot Mt. Aconcagua in a special expedition last February. Detailing her medical history as well as her outdoor adventure in a slide show presentation to potential donors, the Santa Cruz woman praises the library plans as far better than resources she turned to after she was diagnosed, when cramming for her "Ph.D. in breast cancer."

Among the things she learned, Boriack says, was that the breast cancer rate in the Bay Area--one woman in every seven--is higher than the national average of one in eight, which in turn has tripled over the past 10 years. The Cancer Center also reports that the number of new cancer diagnoses in Sonoma County is climbing, from an average of 1,700 over the past five years to more than 2,100 this year. Once it is equipped, the library expects to see intensive use.

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