Othello Easter Egg Hunt draws large crowd, plans for bigger event next year
GABRIEL DAVIS | Hagadone News Network | UPDATED 9 months, 2 weeks AGO
Children race to fill their Easter egg baskets during the egg hunt event Saturday afternoon at Othello’s Lions Park.
COURTESY PHOTO/OTHELLO HOLIDAY COMMITTEE
Saturday’s Easter Egg Hunt at Lions Park in Othello included prizes for the young egg hunters, ranging from about 40 easter baskets to bikes donated by local organizations, such as one donated by the Cow Path Bakery, pictured.
Children begin hunting for eggs at Lions Park during Saturday’s Othello Egg Hunt. Othello Holiday Committee Manager Tania Morelos said the event was over in less than a minute.
Hundreds of children line up at different sections of Othello’s Lions Park for the city’s first-ever Easter Egg Hunt Saturday afternoon.
Gabriel Davis is a resident of Othello who enjoys the connections with his sources. Davis is a graduate of Northwest Nazarene University where he studied English and creative writing. During his free time, he enjoys reading, TV, movies and games – anything with a good story, though he has a preference for science fiction and crime. He covers the communities on the south end of Grant County and in Adams County. | April 5, 2024 1:35 AM
OTHELLO — The Othello Holiday Committee put on Othello’s first Easter Egg Hunt event in Lions Park on Saturday afternoon, drawing in a large attendance according to Committee Manager Tania Morelos.
“It was a great turnout. There were a lot of people. We had 6000 eggs,” Morelos said. “6000 eggs sounded like a lot, until it wasn't. So we just realized we need a lot more. When we were filling them we just thought it was a crazy amount of eggs, but it was over in less than a minute, for sure.”
Morelos said the committee is considering how to make the event last longer. Simply adding more eggs may help, but Morelos said the hunt still might end fairly quickly.
“If we do that, we're going to need a lot more help and support from the community, because we didn't make a single penny off of this event,” she said. “The money that we did put into it came from our Christmas fund. We were trying to be pretty frugal and pick and choose what we want to spend money on because we dipped into our Christmas event and that's our bigger event, so we don't want to take too much away from that.”
Morelos said the committee didn’t ask for much funding since the egg hunt was utilizing funds for A Christmas Miracle on Main Street. She said the committee will likely request more funding for next year’s event.
Despite some of the challenges of organizing an event for the first year, Morelos said the feedback was positive and community members have an interest in attending the event again.
“Basically a great turnout, more than we expected,” she said. “It was difficult to estimate how many eggs we needed. Obviously, this was our first trial, and now we know. There's probably going to be some changes next year.”
Safety is an issue the committee is looking at, Morelos said.
“There were some crowd control issues, especially in the toddler section. It was really important for us that parents would not enter the hunt areas, just because we felt like it was a safety issue, especially for the younger kids,” she said. “That was a little difficult to enforce, so that's the area that we're gonna meet about and hash out and see how we can do things differently next time because people chose not to follow the rules, so it was a little concerning.”
The committee said in a statement they will be looking to recruit a much larger number of adult volunteers to help organize the event and to better enforce the rules.
“Other than that, like the first through sixth grade areas, everything went perfectly smooth,” Morelos said. “We were kind of talking about maybe not having a toddler section next year. We really don't want to do that, but we need to figure something out.”
The committee will be looking to expand the event to include more activities, Morelos said.
“We're hoping to add more next year, hopefully, maybe some bounce houses or face painting, just making it more of a longer activity day because people spend so much time preparing to come to this event just for one minute (hunting) and it’s over. There were lots of prize winners. They all were very happy. That went very smoothly. We had prizes from a bunch of businesses from the community; we ended up with over 40 Easter baskets, and then each section had a grand prize and it was a bike.”
The bikes were donated by The Cow Path Bakery, Lineage Logistics, Columbia Physical Therapy and Simplot.
“This was our trial and error year. We wanted to see if we would even have a good response. Clearly, we did,” Morelos said. “We'll make it more organized next year … We were even thinking that if we add those activities, we could probably do the egg hunt by age groups at different times so it's not so chaotic.”
Morelos said this was the first year the committee expanded beyond its focus on A Christmas Miracle on Main Street. Aside from planning how to expand the Easter egg hunt, Morelos said the committee is also interested in looking at even more events in the future.
Gabriel Davis may be reached at gdavis@columbiabasinherald.com.
Saturday’s Easter Egg Hunt at Lions Park in Othello included prizes for the young egg hunters, ranging from about 40 easter baskets to bikes donated by local organizations, such as one donated by the Cow Path Bakery, pictured.
Children begin hunting for eggs at Lions Park during Saturday’s Othello Egg Hunt. Othello Holiday Committee Manager Tania Morelos said the event was over in less than a minute.
Hundreds of children line up at different sections of Othello’s Lions Park for the city’s first-ever Easter Egg Hunt Saturday afternoon.MORE STORIES
ARTICLES BY GABRIEL DAVIS
Work-based learning lets students build their own futures
MOSES LAKE — Work-based learning provides education opportunities for the workforce to receive hands-on training and technical education and prepare themselves to enter various industries. Educators and workforce development professionals from Eastern Washington discussed some the training they offer and the benefits of their programs. Next Generation Zone, an affiliate of WorkSource based in Spokane, provides job training opportunities for youth and young adults ages 16 to 24. Program Coordinator Kate Martin said there are multiple benefits to the program. “One of them is a paid work experience, and that’s where we reach out to area employers who are willing to take a young person and train them,” she said. “This is a short-term learning experience, so it’s typically about 240 hours; sometimes it could be longer or shorter. We’re the actual employer; we cover all of their wages, taxes, the L&I, and the employer just agrees to give them the experience and train them in whatever field it is that they’re wanting to go into.”
Serving schools: ESD superintendents reflect on operations, priorities
MOSES LAKE — Educational service districts are government-mandated agencies put in place to provide services to school districts across the state. ESD Superintendents discussed what they do and their priorities in operating their districts. ESD 105, led by Superintendent Kevin Chase, serves four counties, including Kittitas, Yakima and portions of Klickitat and Grant counties and provides support for 25 school districts – including Royal School District and Wahluke School District – and more than 66,000 students. “We help them collaborate with each other as well or collaborate with other partners,” Chase said. “(It’s) a lot of advocacy work, either regionally or across the state, or even federally, working on different issues that impact our education. And we provide very specialized services in certain situations in order to meet the needs of our students in our region and of our school districts.”
Columbia Basin Project making headway through Odessa Groundwater program
CASHMERE — The Columbia Basin Project is making gradual progress toward completion with particularly significant accomplishments for the Odessa Groundwater Replacement Program in the last six months or so, according to Columbia Basin Development League Executive Director Sara Higgins. “When we’re dealing with a project of this size, advancement is kind of like watching paint dry, but yes, there have been (developments),” she said. “There are a lot of exciting things happening right now.” There are more than 300 miles of main canals, about 2,000 miles of lateral canals and 3,500 miles of drains and wasteways in the irrigation project, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation website. The CBDL advocates for the operation of those waterways and for the project to continue “build-out.”