More than 200 businesses on the Treasure Coast and in Okeechobee County have been cited for selling alcohol to underage people, according to state records from January 2004 to August 2009. Some of those businesses were repeatedly cited.

“It’s a widespread problem,” Indian River County Sheriff Deryl Loar said.

A Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers review of five years of citations from the state Division of Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco show some stores stores have been cited three times. (more…)

TREASURE COAST — The number of Treasure Coast medical equipment suppliers for Blue Cross/Blue Shield patients will dwindle to three starting Nov. 1.

The cutbacks follow a competitive bidding process by regional suppliers who provide products from diabetes testing strips to oxygen machines statewide to remain in the Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Florida network.

Liberty Medical Supply and Physician’s Choice Respiratory Services, Inc., both in Port St. Lucie, and Rotech Oxygen & Medical Equipment in Stuart remain as the lone Treasure Coast suppliers after the bidding, according to a Blue Cross/Blue Shield list sent to Oxygen Plus in Vero Beach.
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Alex Barton with his mother, Melissa Barton

A mother whose autistic son was voted out of kindergarten in St. Lucie County last year is planning a press conference this afternoon to announce the filing of a federal lawsuit against the school district, several school officials and the local teacher’s union.

The complaint submitted in federal court alleges 5-year-old Alex Barton suffered irreparable damage when his teacher Wendy Portillo “orchestrated a ‘Survivor-style’ vote” asking the boy’s classmates whether or not he should be allowed to return to the class after he’d been repeatedly disruptive. The class voted him out 14-2.

Alex has since been diagnosed with a form of autism called Asperger’s syndrome.

Wendy Portillo answers questions during an administrative hearing.

The school board initially suspended Portillo one year and stripped her tenure, but in June they restored her tenue and said she will be allowed to return to the classroom in November.

St. Lucie County Schools spokeswoman Janice Karst this afternoon said the district does not comment on active livitgation.

Barton this morning declined to discuss the specifics of the lawsuit, reserving comment for the press conference scheduled for 3:30 p.m. at her attorney Paul Sopp’s office in West Palm Beach.

She did say that her son now attends a private school in Palm Beach County through a scholarship.

“He’s doing so well,” she said. “His teacher’s a sweetheart.”

Sopp said that that while Barton is seeking monetary damages from the suit, a victory in the case would help other students.

“What we’re trying to do is ensure that no one in the St. Lucie County school district is denied education based upon their disability,” Sopp said.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

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Though the summer brought tough budget cuts to Treasure Coast schools, a push into the digital age and environmental consciousness will be top priorities for the school year that begins today as thousands of students head back to classrooms.

St. Lucie County school officials closed Port St. Lucie Elementary and Southbend K-8 School, both in Port St. Lucie, at the end of the last school year and eliminated middle school and junior varsity sports districtwide.

Martin County also made cuts in sports and tightened individual school budgets for expenses like field trips and school supplies, but the fact that two schools this year became Title I schools also brought extra federal money to the district.

Martin Schools Superintendent Nancy Kline on Friday said this year will be the first for the Martin Virtual School, which will provide online instruction to students at all grade levels.

“It’s particularly helpful for students who will have to take extended absences from school, though virtual schools in general are becoming more and more popular,” Kline said.

Some students in St. Lucie County will get a taste of the high-tech at two new charter schools — The Nau Charter School and Renaissance Charter School, both in Port St. Lucie.
Renaissance Principal Eric Lewis said teachers at the new school spent the last few weeks reviewing curriculum and learning how to navigate around high-tech classrooms inside the $10 million building, which will include five laptop computers in each classroom.

“We used to think of the average classroom supplies in terms of papers and pencils, or glue and glitter, but now there are so many other tools at our disposal,” Lewis said.

And though the St. Lucie County school officials made significant cuts to the district’s after-school programs, some administrators still found ways for expansion.

Leaders at Village Green Elementary, for example, responded to news that their after-school environmental program would be cut with plans to integrate the program into their day-to-day curriculum. They unveiled plans for the school’s Global Environmental Studies Center magnet in June, a plan St. Lucie Schools Superintendent Michael Lannon said will actually save the district money.

“What they’ve been able to do is remarkable,” Lannon said.

DETAILS BY COUNTY
St. Lucie
Charters: Two new charter schools, The Nau Charter and Renaissance Charter, open today.
Sports: Budget cuts mean no junior varsity or middle school athletics unless the schools are able to pay for them.
Transportation: Transportation hotline is 772-340-4849. The phones will be manned from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays, with bilingual staff available. Transportation to magnet schools will be more limited this year, with fewer stops.
Supplies: Supply lists for individual schools, open house schedules and sports release forms are available online.
For more information, visit www.stlucie.k12.fl.us

Martin
Funding: Though school officials had to make cuts, the naming of two schools as Title I schools brought extra funding to the district.
Virtual School: Students for the first time will be able to receive instruction online through the Martin Virtual School. Eligible students had until August 12 to enroll.
Academics: Academically advanced middle school students in Martin this year will have more opportunities to take high school courses like Geometry, Integrated Science and Algebra. The 8th grade academic intervention program, which last school year helped 148 students in danger of failing pass through to the 9th grade, will be expanded to also target 6th and 7th graders.
Transportation: For transportation questions, call: 772-219-1287
For more information, visit www.sbmc.org.

Just days away from the new semester, school administrators in Martin and Indian River counties say that last year’s unprecedented flood of students qualifying for free and reduced-cost lunches will likely expand even further in coming months.

In St. Lucie County, the situation is about the same as last year, with no improvement expected.

More formal statistics won’t be available for a couple of weeks – after parents complete all of the paperwork – but early indicators show a massive spike in eligible candidates for the federally funded National School Lunch Program in the two Treasure Coast counties. (more…)

STUART — It was “bizarre” for Martin County Sheriff Robert Crowder to repeatedly pat the short, spiky haircut of Detective Jennifer Heard, her lawyer said, and he expects Heard’s sexual harassment complaint to lead to a federal discrimination suit.

“We fully expect to file a lawsuit and just litigate the matter,” said Justus Reid, a lawyer representing Heard. “The overall theme will be gender discrimination and, in effect, sexual harassment that went on in the department.”

Heard filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in May alleging the sexual harassment against her began shortly after she was hired in September 1996 and continued for the next 12 years in the form of sexual advances, catcalls and a suggestive nickname. She also accused Crowder of belittling her by patting her on the head.
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Theresa Caputo of Stuart, in black, hugs another woman Wednesday at the scene of a memorial that was built along Cove Road near Stuart. Caputo, a mother of three, said her children all knew and grew up with those killed. (DEBORAH SILVER/Treasure Coast Newspapers)

A few teenagers in board shorts and T-shirts lifted their sunglasses just long enough to wipe away their tears and hug one another in the grass along Cove Road Wednesday afternoon as they stood above a swelling memorial site.

Amid her tears, a mother bent down, reached through the letters, flowers and mementos and clutched a golf ball in her hand.

Angela Coady said she knew one of her son Nick’s friends had put it there intending for it to stay, but when she saw it she decided she had to take it with her.

“The last time I saw him he was going to play golf. He was happy as a lark,” she said. “The next time I saw him, he was dead.”

Nick Coady, 18, and his friends — Christopher Harold Briglio, 18, and Connor William Graver, 16, — were all killed early Tuesday when the Jeep Grand Cherokee that Coady was driving slammed into the back of a John Deere truck and overturned.

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If there was fun to be had, Nick Coady, Chris Briglio and Connor Graver were likely involved.

They were the ones to call if you wanted to know where the party was or if you were looking for something to do, even on an otherwise boring summer night in Martin County. Once they got everyone to play musical chairs. Often, they were together.

Christopher Briglio

Connor Graver

Nicholas Coady

“Those guys, you couldn’t help but have fun around them. They always lived life to the fullest,” said James Young, 18, a classmate at South Fork High School in Stuart.

So there was laughter mixed in with the tears Tuesday as their former classmates and friends at South Fork gathered near the spot along Cove Road, south of Stuart, where the three lost their lives in what authorities are calling an alcohol-related crash.

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Nick, 18, of Stuart, Chris, 18, of Tequesta, and Connor, 16, of Hobe Sound, died at about 2 a.m. Tuesday after the SUV they were in slammed head-on into a John Deere front-end loader at a construction site at Cove Road and U.S. 1, said Lt. Chris Cribbs of the Florida Highway Patrol.

Chris and Connor, who friends say were “inseparable,” died at the scene. Neither were wearing seat belts, according to the police report. Nick, the driver, died later at St. Mary’s Medical Center in West Palm Beach. He was wearing a seat belt.

Investigators also suspect Nick was speeding. The speed limit on Cove Road is 35 mph.

The driver of the John Deere, Pedro Perez-Espinosa, 25, of Okeechobee wasn’t hurt.

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Nicholas Coady
Christopher Briglio
Connor Graver

Construction crews were widening the road and installing drainage or sewage pipe at that intersection when the SUV, traveling eastbound, approached, Cribbs said. The loader had just dumped some dirt by the roadside and was backing off the road when the SUV struck. It hit the loader’s bucket, flipping the SUV, according to the police report. The crash destroyed the SUV.

There wasn’t much light in the area, he said, but crews said the front-end loader itself was well lit.

The crash closed Cove Road for hours as emergency workers cleared the wreckage.

A woman who answered the door at Nick’s house Tuesday said he was an “angel,” but said the family didn’t want to discuss the crash.

Chris’ grandmother, Helen Nekola, said the Briglios’ family members were gathering in Tequesta to mourn.

“He was a wonderful boy,” Nekola said by phone from Bethpage, N.Y. “We’re just trying to get around this.”

Classmates, who gathered at the site after the wreckage had been cleared, built a makeshift memorial for the trio. They left flowers, a football, a polo shirt and letters. They scrawled messages across a large poster as they might have a yearbook, covering it with signatures by mid-afternoon. And they talked about their friends. (more…)

Asked in a questionnaire by Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers for TCPalm.com’s “Ask the Candidates” page whether they had been convicted of a felony, both candidates on the ballot for state Senate District 28 seat wrote “no.”

The answer from one of the candidates isn’t accurate, according to a Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers investigation.

According to court records and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Eastern Pennsylvania, Democrat Bill Ramos, a mortgage broker from Jensen Beach, pleaded guilty to a single count of embezzlement of postal funds — accepting a three-year probation and repaying the missing money — in 1989. That charge is a felony.

Ramos said Thursday he didn’t consider pleading “no contest” the same as a conviction.

“I answered specifically as it was asked,” Ramos said. “It just said have you ever been convicted of, and I answered no. I plead no contest.”

The court documents show Ramos pleaded guilty.

Assistant State Attorney John Cannizzaro, of Florida’s 19th Judicial Circuit in Fort Pierce, said judges advise defendants before they enter a guilty plea that the action is the same as being convicted at a jury trial.

“There is no difference,” he said. (more…)

MARTIN COUNTY — A $4 million federal grant announced Tuesday should mean restored oyster beds, cleaner water and about 100 jobs in Martin County.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration has allocated $4,024,969 to the Martin County Commission. At their meeting Tuesday, commissioners are scheduled to award a contract to build about 200 acres of oyster bed reefs in the St. Lucie River between the Roosevelt and Evans Crary bridges and in the Northwest Fork of the Loxahatchee River near Tequesta.

The money for the project comes from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, part President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package. More than 800 applications for grants were made and 50 approved. Of the four projects funded in Florida, Martin County’s was the largest.

To qualify for the stimulus money, said Kathy FitzPatrick, a Martin County coastal engineer, the project had to be “shovel-ready.”

FitzPatrick said bids from contractors are expected Wednesday.

“If the commissioners award the bid on July 7,” she, “we’ll be out on July 7, 8 or 9 doing surveys on the St. Lucie and Loxahatchee rivers to see exactly where to put the oyster beds.”

Work could be completed in about a year.

FitzPatrick said “seven or eight” sites in the St. Lucie have already been permitted for beds. Patch reefs 30 feet in diameter and made of old oyster shells will be placed in the water near Martin Memorial Medical Center and Rio.

Closer to the Crary bridge, smaller reefs made of oyster shells in mesh bags will be placed in the water both as oyster habitat and to protect shorelines from erosion by boat wakes. Several landowners have signed on for mangrove plantings along their shorelines, FitzPatrick said.

County officials have identified 106 jobs that will be involved in the project, “everybody from marine contractors, barge operators, quarrymen for the huge amount of shells we’ll need, to nurserymen, scientists and ecologists,” FitzPatrick said. “There will be a lot of people employed by this over the course of the year, and almost all of them local.”

Oysters once thrived in the St. Lucie River, said Vincent Encomio, an oyster research specialist at the Stuart-based Florida Oceanographic Society.

“But over the years the St. Lucie has lost about 75 percent of its living oyster bed acreage,” Encomio said. “Creating more habitat for oysters will improve the habitat for all the other organisms that depend on the reefs to live.”

Oysters filter water at a rate of 40 gallons per oyster per day. With about 600,000 oysters per acre of reef, that’s 24 million gallons of water a day.

FitzPatrick said the bivalves will be able “to filter the entire volume of the river every month. That improvement to the water quality is very substantial.”

By Tyler Treadway