News

SANTA CRUZ COUNTY—For years, the annual “Nutcracker, Clara's Dream” was a winter holiday staple put on by the Santa Cruz Ballet Theater. With their own take of Tchaivovsky’s ballet, that was typically staged at the Santa Cruz Civic, Cabrillo College’s Crocker Theater and the...

WATSONVILLE—A group of residents from Watsonville's senior neighborhoods gathered at the Pajaro Village Club House last week to hear a presentation on pesticide use, and on an upcoming pilot project to notify residents on nearby applications. Hosted by the Center for Farmworkers Families, Safe Ag...

WATSONVILLE—Veterans of Foreign Wars Freedom Post 1716, which was facing closure this month after the organization could not elect leadership, was given a last-minute reprieve Wednesday at a make-or-break meeting. The VFW, which was launched in 1929 to serve the local population of World War...

SANTA CRUZ—Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s deputies on Thursday responded to a call for an “individual in crisis,” and during a traffic stop on the 1200 block of Soquel Avenue discovered what appeared to be a pipe bomb in the person’s car, according to Sheriff’s...

More than 200 people gathered Monday for the Third Annual Harvey Milk Day/Progress Flag Raising event at the Pajaro Valley Unified School District Office. The event took place on Harvey Milk Day. Milk was a prominent gay rights activist who was assassinated on May 22,...

SANTA CRUZ COUNTY—School districts throughout Santa Cruz County have passed out some 80,000 rapid-result Covid-19 test kits to families, as kids return to in-person instruction from winter break and officials try to prevent a surge via school campuses. As of Tuesday, officials have reported a...

Thanks to the efforts of a group of local students and artist Jaime Sanchez, a new colorful mural has been added to an outdoor wall of the Family Center in Ramsay Park. The 65-by-15-foot work, titled "The Bigger Picture,” stems from the Teen Artes program...

Laughter filled the building as quip after quip, Supervisor Zach Friend sat through the stories, comic strips and one-liners “roasters” threw at him as part of Aptos/Capitola Rotary’s annual dinner Friday.

WATSONVILLE—Watsonville High School’s new principal is Maria Clara Fernandez, who graduated from that school in 2001, Pajaro Valley Unified School District announced Tuesday. Fernandez worked with Pajaro Valley students from 2000-11 in the After School program, in Migrant Education and as an elementary teacher. She...

The Pajaro Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees on Wednesday rejected a pair of staff recommendations to cut roughly 100 teacher and school employee positions, a move district officials said will cause greater financial peril in the future. Opponents of the cuts disagreed, saying...