David Yoshihara, superintendent of the Tamalpais Union High School District for the past three years, abruptly resigned from his post this week, effective June 30. The unexpected announcement, delivered Thursday evening via email in a terse, two-paragraph statement, offered no explanation for the resignation other than it was accepted Thursday by the board of trustees at a meeting in closed session at the district office in Larkspur.

In late 2014, 41 years after she endured what was then called a “groping” by comedian Bill Cosby at a tennis tournament in Pebble Beach, Helen Hayes picked up a copy of a Bay Area newspaper in her San Anselmo home. An article had caught her eye that described a recent bit by comedian Hannibal Buress in which he referred to Cosby as a “rapist.”.

With a target on potential new federal money, Marin’s lawmakers and county officials are teaming up with local leaders and activists to lobby the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for $11.7 million to dredge the San Rafael Canal. San Rafael Public Works Director Bill Guerin and Nadine Urciuoli, CEO of the newly formed San Rafael Channel Association, will travel next week to Washington, D.C. to meet with Corps of Engineers officials about including the dredging in the Corps’ 2018 work plan, to be announced May 22.

As soon as she turned 16 three weeks ago, Tamalpais High School sophomore Avery Schoen took her first opportunity to pre-register to vote. But her activism didn’t stop there. This week, she agreed to help out in a campaign to alert her classmates that they can do the same — by text. Tam High on Friday joined two other Marin high schools — Novato and Terra Linda — in signing up for a new Text2Vote smartphone app that allows for mobile voter pre-registration.

San Rafael civic leaders say the city’s plan to “freshen up” the downtown area by removing concrete “bunker” seating and replacing the large liquidambar trees is ill-advised and not necessary. “The downtown streets are the living room of our city,” said Linda Jackson, program director for the Aging Action Initiative, at last week’s Design Review Board meeting.

After many months of uncertainty, College of Marin officials this week said they are ready to consider pathways to reopen research options at the Bolinas Marine Lab, a rare and coveted field station site along the Bolinas Lagoon in West Marin. “We want to clean it up and make it functional as it can be, within the confines of the law, ” said COM trustee Wanden Treanor, after Tuesday’s first board study session on the topic.

Despite criticism they were allowing right-wing anti-public-school forces’ “infiltration” of the Ross Valley, the board of the Ross Valley Charter School this week accepted a $325,000 grant from the Bentonville, Arkansas-based Walton Family Foundation. The move comes as the charter school, housed in eight classrooms inside Ross Valley School District’s White Hill Middle School in Fairfax, announced it has accepted the district’s final space offer of the same eight classrooms for next year.

If world peace could be achieved with a 3-D printer and a ton of plastic, then Jaden Ramos is working on it, hand by hand. In mid-February, Ramos, 15, of Greenbrae, a sophomore at Redwood High School in Larkspur, finished work on a 3-D prosthetic of a forearm and hand for a Romanian man who had lost his own in a work accident.

Marin’s already inflated housing market climbed even more in 2017, with the median price of all homes at $980,000, an 8.9 percent jump from the 2016 median of $900,000, a real estate data tracking firm said. Irvine-based CoreLogic statistics show that sales volume in Marin was also up 2.1 percent in 2017, with 3,386 homes sold during the year, compared with 3,315 sold a year earlier.

The first Tamalpais Union High School District teacher to go public on allegations of sexual harassment by male students said young boys need to learn new ways of behaving toward girls and women or risk repeating the mistakes of the current generation. “We’re making them when we decide the adult woman’s voice does not matter, and that whatever the man says — no matter how old — that that’s the truth,” she said.

“It’s time my story is told,” Rieder, a math teacher at the Mill Valley high school for 15 years, said during the public comment portion of the Feb. 6 Tamalpais Union High School District board of trustees’ meeting at Redwood High School in Larkspur. “It’s time I say #MeToo.”. Rieder, who said she had been nervous about speaking up before now due to fears of retaliation, said the similar testimony at the previous board meeting Jan. 23 by Redwood High School math teacher Jessica Crabtree convinced her it was time to come forward.

A standing-room-only crowd of more than 300 Marin residents packed a town hall Saturday, all intent on finding ways to “step up their game” on wildfire preparedness in the wake of October’s deadly fires in Sonoma and Napa counties. “Last year’s fires were the deadliest and most destructive in state history,” said state Assemblyman Marc Levine, who convened the town hall at College of Marin’s Kentfield campus.

A war of words at increasingly embattled Ross Valley schools has ratcheted up a few notches this month. At issue is the amount of space to be allotted next year to the charter school, which occupies eight classrooms inside the district’s White Hill Middle School in Fairfax. The charter school is asking for an additional classroom — or a total of nine — for 2018-19.

A major proposed mixed-use project along Third Street in San Rafael got both praise and slams this week in its first public run-through before the city’s Design Review Board. The project, at 999 Third St. at the former site of a Pacific Gas and Electric Co. building, includes two new lab and office buildings from pharmaceutical company BioMarin and a 53-unit senior housing and activities building for Whistlestop, a nonprofit serving older adults.

A federal civil rights office has launched an investigation into Dominican University of California in San Rafael on allegations of age and disability discrimination, the agency said. The Office of Civil Rights, part of the federal Department of Education, opened an investigation Aug. 18 into a claim brought by Allison Bordessa of Novato, a spokesman based in the agency’s Washington, D.C. office confirmed.

A new idea involving the underbelly of the Highway 101 freeway overpass was added this week to speculation about where to move the Bettini Transit Center in downtown San Rafael. Bill Guerin, San Rafael public works director, said the freeway underpass site was mentioned briefly in passing, but that no further action on the idea has been taken and all options are still on the table.