For a first-time teacher, teaching kids barely out of Pampers can be a lot like herding cats — only with fewer hairballs. Maja Petras found herself in the role of cat-herder, er, primary school teacher earlier this month. Petras, made a pre-kindergarten class at the Villages Elementary School her proving ground for auditioning her solo […]

College graduation is at once an exciting time of accomplishment and a nervy realization that it’s time to navigate the world independently as an adult. Not that everyone is ready to launch. Some 20 percent of college graduates with learning differences and attention issues stumble immediately after graduation in making successful transitions to full independence and to rewarding careers. This reality undergirds Beacon College’s pioneering pilot program, the First Career Community.

They might not give the Hell’s Angels a scare still a gang of Beacon College bikers (OK, bicycles) delivered a scary good performance for charity earlier this month in The Villages Regional Hospital Auxiliary Foundation’s 4th annual Hearts for Our Hospital Big Bike Challenge.

Darryl E. Owens, who serves as director of communications at Beacon College, has been elected to the board of directors of Community Health Centers. CHC directors appointed Owens to the board at their April 26 meeting. Launched in 1972, Community Health Centers is a private, non-profit organization that provides compassionate healthcare services to more than 66,000 under-served children and adults each year local communities that are insured, uninsured, and under-insured.

Beacon College representatives Sheryl Nichols and Darryl E. Owens and human services student Lilly Slomowitz visited Rimes Early Learning & Literacy Center Thursday as part of the college’s effort to support strengthening attendance numbers at the Lake County Schools venue. Students who missed fewer than three days this month were treated to an after-school pizza […]

Every day, one in six Central Floridians wonders whether food will grace his or her dining table that day. In Lake County, some 45,120 Lake County residents wonder just how they’ll curb their too often rumbling bellies. That troubled Simon Vaz. He knew he couldn’t solve the dilemma alone. Yet, by dishing up hearty helpings of chicken noodle soup, Vaz reckoned he could help bring awareness to the hunger that ails too many neighbors of Beacon College in Leesburg, Fla.