The Worthington City School District includes the city of Worthington, Village of Riverlea, and neighboring portions of Perry Township, Sharon Township, and the City of Columbus, Ohio. There are approximately 60,000 people residing in the area with 13,837 in Worthington proper as of 2013.[citation needed] Since July 1, 2015, Trent Bowers is the Superintendent of Worthington Schools.The student enrollment for the Worthington School District was 9,925 for the 2015–2016 school year.According to the district quality profile, 93% of Worthington graduates attend 2- or 4-year institutions of higher learning following graduation. The class of 2015 was offered more than $27 million in scholarship money. More than 75% of high school students participate in extracurricular activities, including 29 varsity sports, 40 clubs, music and performance activities.A five member Board of Education is elected to lead the Worthington School District. Current BOE members include Board President, Jennifer Best, Nicolette Hudson, Amy Lloyd, Sam Shim, and Charlie Wilson.
For many patrons, libraries are synonymous with books and reading. However, people don’t always take advantage of reader’s advisory services offered by libraries. Rather than approaching librarians for suggestions of what to read, most people instead turn to their personal networks or express a preference for more passive approaches to recommendations. As a halfway point between in-person reader’s advisory interactions and algorithmic recommendations, Worthington Libraries staff leveraged the NoveList and Polaris APIs to create custom book recommendation kiosks. Recommendation Stations, as we call them, allow people to scan a book barcode, browse read-alikes, check local availability and print shelf locations, all in the guise of an interactive fortune teller.
Current models of landscape response to Holocene climate change in midcontinent North America largely reconcile Earth orbital and atmospheric climate forcing with pollen-based forest histories on the east and eolian chronologies in Great Plains grasslands on the west. However, thousands of sand dunes spread across 12,000 km(2) in eastern upper Michigan (EUM), more than 500 km east of the present forest-prairie ecotone, present a challenge to such models. We use 65 optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) ages on quartz sand deposited in silt caps (n = 8) and dunes (n = 57) to document eolian activity in EUM. Dune building was widespread ca. 10-8 ka, indicating a sharp, sustained decline in forest cover during that period. This decline was roughly coincident with hydrologic closure of the upper Great Lakes, but temporally inconsistent with most pollen-based models that imply canopy closure throughout the Holocene. Early Holocene forest openings are rarely recognized in pollen sums from EUM because faint signatures of non-arboreal pollen are largely obscured by abundant and highly mobile pine pollen. Early Holocene spikes in nonarboreal pollen are recorded in cores from small ponds, but suggest only a modest extent of forest openings. OSL dating of dune emplacement provides a direct, spatially explicit archive of greatly diminished forest cover during a very dry climate in eastern midcontinent North America ca. 10-8 ka.
