Building a newspaper is a little bit like putting together a jigsaw puzzle without having the picture on the box to guide you — you have to make all the pieces fit in the proper slots, even when you don’t know what the final result is going to look like until it’s done. Unlike a jigsaw, however, sometimes you just can’t cram all the stories into the paper — at least, not into the print edition.

If you read Justin Davis’ fine article on Grant School District’s enrollment (and funding) drain in our print edition, you didn’t get the whole story — we had to lop several paragraphs off the end to make it fit in print.

This is where our website comes in handy: You can read the full-length version of Justin’s story online here, including comments by Grant School District Superintendent Louis Dix and Grant County Education Service District Superintendent Robert Waltenburg.

Of course, even that doesn’t capture the full measure of what’s going on at Grant School District. As you may have noticed in our story on the Grant School Board election, four of the five seats up for a vote are being contested, and several of the candidates mentioned problems in the district in their candidate profiles. 

Justin will be doing a follow-up story to try and get at the question of why so many local families have pulled their kids out of Grant School District — and what can be done to rectify the situation.

Last week’s paper also featured stories by Neil Nisperos on the aftermath of the April 17 fire in downtown John Day and the arrest of a man at the fire scene who said he was just trying to help, as well as my update on the October arrest of a Forest Service burn boss after a prescribed burn he was supervising jumped the lines and scorched 20 acres of private land.

Coming up this week, look for stories on the relocated Squeeze-In Restaurant (already available online), wolf numbers in Grant County, a local artist and more.

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— Bennett Hall, Editor