RECORD SOUTH WHIDBEY
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2012 | Vol. 88, No. 10 | WWW.SOUTHWHIDBEYRECORD.COM | 75¢
INSIDE: Falcons whup ATM, Sports, A10
School board hears pitch for adult ed classes
Now this is ice cream
Organizers of new program hope to use district facilities BY BEN WATANABE South Whidbey Record
Patricia Duff / The Record
Chris Johnston works at the machine that helps him to fill cardboard pints at Whidbey Island Ice Cream’s plant near Useless Bay.
Couple scoop up the chance to keep a Whidbey business going BY PATRICIA DUFF South Whidbey Record
DOUBLE BLUFF — Down a country lane on a sunny, cold February morning near Useless Bay, a gorgeous gleaming ice cream machine is churning away. Florence Hecker has her plastic bouffant cap on and bounces from task to task in the small Whidbey Island Ice Cream plant she runs with her co-owner husband Ron Hecker. Her son-in-law, Chris Johnston, whom she calls a “jack-of-all-trades plant manager,” is busy filling bright, white cardboard pints out of a machine that oozes an impossibly thick stream of “Now This Is Chocolate.” The enticingly named ice cream is just one of 45 flavors the company produces using all natural ingredients, including the 18 percent butter fat cream it gets from Lochmead Farms in Junction City, Ore. The colorful names of each flavor are not the only thing that has proved enticing since the Heckers bought the business about two years ago. People just can’t seem to get enough of the sweet, creamy concoction. The Heckers said they never would
Patricia Duff / The Record
Pints of Whidbey Island Ice Cream’s “Now This Is Chocolate” are lined up before being packed into boxes for delivery. have imagined themselves the owners of an expanding company years ago when the previous owners, their friends Mike
Rudd and Mary Stoll, asked them to help out at a few farmers markets. Things changed rather quickly though, when by 2009 both Rudd and Stoll had died from unrelated illnesses. The Heckers just dove in head-first. “Our business has increased by 50 percent in the past year,” Ron Hecker said. “We have found that our customers on Whidbey Island buy almost as much of our ice cream as is sold on the mainland,” he added. “I’m just thrilled with the support which we get on the island.” That points to an impressive amount of ice cream being consumed locally, considering the large number of retailers to which the company distributes the product off-island. From Bellingham to Tacoma, Whidbey Island Ice Cream is distributed to about 60 purveyors including grocery stores, restaurants, confectioners, cafes and hotels. Whole Foods and the Metropolitan Markets of Seattle carry it, and Seattle’s Renaissance Hotel even carries it exclusively on its room service menu. SEE ICE CREAM, A15
LANGLEY — Life-long learning may come to South Whidbey this year. A group of South End residents is planning to launch a community education program, using local schools as a place to hold classes. The idea is still in the early discussion phase, and the South Whidbey School Board got a briefing on the potential benefits of the program by organizer Duncan Ferguson at its recent board meeting. The plan is to use the school district’s facilities to house continued education classes for adults. “There was a lot of good, quality education going on all around us, but it appeared to happen in silos,” Ferguson told the school board. “The consensus was that if the school district could take it under its wing, that would be a good thing.” “It’s a credible place to lodge such an educational endeavor,” he added. Ideally, the program would be financially independent from the school district and could run itself. District officials said the proposed program seems worthy, but would need to pay its own way. “Essentially it pays rent,” said District Superintendent Jo Moccia. “Should it not work out, it can be discontinued.” Moccia also said that just because the district won’t create the adult learning system on its own doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea. District revenues have declined with its student population, and state and federal funding have fallen off, she said, and the money just isn’t there. “I’ve seen it work very effectively,” Moccia said. “As much as we would want to do it, we can’t.” Ferguson presented a financial plan for the program to the board, and outlined the potential sources of revenue and expenses for the next three academic years, until 2015. An initial cost of $100 per course, which would last five weeks, was estimated to raise $30,000. Instructors would be paid $500 per course, a part-time coordinator would have a $15,000 salary and a part-time director would get a $30,000 salary. That’s the outline for the first year, with graduated increases for 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 for the coordinator and overall instructor salaries. The large amount of money had some board members concerned until one of their own cleared the air. SEE CLASSES, A15