THE FRIDAY
CANADIAN COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER AWARD 2012
TRI-CITY NEWS MOSSOM CREEK HATCHERY PROJECT
CANADIAN COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER AWARD 2012
AUG. 29, 2014 www.tricitynews.com
INSIDE
Letters/11 Things-to-do Guide/29 Tri-City Spotlight/32 Sports/43
In the latest instalment of our year-long series on the project to rebuild Mossom Creek Hatchery, which was destroyed by a fire last December, The Tri-City News looks at a major contribution by Lafarge Canada, which is supplying concrete and workers to build the foundation: see page 3
SUBMITTED PHOTO
Coquitlam’s Thomas Schelesny can now add “Emmy winner” to his resume after earning a visual effects award for his work on the wildly popular Game of Thrones.
Coquitlam animator wins Emmy for Thrones Animator is a Centennial grad By Sarah Payne THe TrI-CITy NewS
Coquitlam’s Thomas Schelesny has done a lot in his 20-year career, starting out as an animator and slowly working his way up to the well-known visual effects pro he is today. H e h a s wo r ke d on productions for the small screen (The X Files, Doctor Who and American Gothic, among others) and the big screen (Men in Black 2, The Matrix Revolutions, Enchanted and many more), not to mention
racking up credits as a writer and director. But it was the moment on Aug. 16, sitting in a Los Angeles theatre, when his name was announced as the winner of an Emmy award that has Schelesny living in a surreal blur. “The whole things is crazy,” he said while at work at the Vancouverbased Scanline VFX. “I feel like I was shot out of a cannon.” Schelesny was part of the team that won a Creative Arts Emmy for Outstanding Special and Visual Effects for the Game of Thrones season four finale, called “The Children.” see STORYTELLING, page 15
JANIS WARREN/THE TRI-CITY NEWS
TRI-CITY TEACHERS RALLY FOR SUPPORT
About 75 teachers from Coquitlam River and Aspenwood elementary schools donned bright signs at a rally Wednesday morning in Coquitlam — one of three protests this week organized by the Coquitlam Teachers’ Association. For more on the protests, see page 13. For more on the schools dispute, see page 9.
SD43 teacher quits after warnings about touching Kevin Buffell also accessed inappropriate websites at school By Gary McKenna THe TrI-CITy NewS
A School District 43 instructor who had been warned multiple times
not to touch students has agreed to resign and sign an undertaking prohibiting him from teaching in the future. Kevin James Buffell was suspended with pay last January after he was observed by a school principal with a female student in his Grade 2/3 class sitting on his lap in a darkened room while
watching a movie. According to a consent resolution agreement written by the B.C. Commissioner for Teacher Regulation Bruce Preston, Buffell had been warned as early as September 2013 to manage his interactions with students in order to limit contact with the children. He
was again warned later that fall by a district investigator and told to “not get physical or have contact with children, and that he should not have children sitting on his lap.” “During the district investigation, Buffell admitted that in spite of the warnings he had previously received, he often
allowed girls in his class to sit in his lap, that he sometimes picked them up and that he also hugged them,” Preston wrote in the agreement. The document also stated that Buffell had been accessing inappropriate websites during class time. see ‘HIGHLY’, page 7