ROSES to the local Red Cross Disaster Action Teams, squads of volunteers who swoop in to help individuals and families put the pieces back together after a fire or other disaster.

Imagine a fire breaking out in your home. Firefighters, of course, are the first to respond. They do their dangerous and difficult job well, but even a relatively small blaze is likely to render your house or apartment uninhabitable for at least some period of time.

Where do you go? What do you wear if your clothes are damaged? What about food, medicine, bills, pets, important papers, all those things you take for granted until suddenly your life is upended? Every little daily task becomes dramatically more difficult.

That's where the Disaster Action Teams, or DATs, come in. The Orange County chapter of the American Red Cross has four DATs, which rotate weekly. They help victims of fires and other problems manage those myriad details -- food, shelter, clothing, communications and so on --until the people can get their lives stablized and back on track.

The DATs have had a busy season; we've had an unusually large number of residential fires in recent months. Thanks to the DATs, most of those displaced by those blazes have had a hand to help them get back on their feet.


ROSES to Cindi Rigsbee, a reading teacher at Gravelly Hill Middle School in Orange County, who has been named the 2007-08 Piedmont-Triad Central Region teacher of the year.

The Piedmont Triad Central Region is a large area that includes the metropolitan areas of Greensboro and Winston-Salem.

The regional honor puts Rigsbee in the running for the title of North Carolina teacher of the year. Teachers of the year from each of the state's nine regions compete for that honor.

Rigsbee was named the Orange County Schools teacher of the year in May. She has taught English, drama, language arts, reading and dance at schools in Guilford, Durham, Wake and Vance counties, and she joined the staff at Gravelly Hill in the fall of 2006.


ROSES to a quintet of seventh-grade students at Culbreth Middle School who got a jump-start on their social studies homework by organizing a benefit dance party to raise funds for charitable causes.

The girls -- Miriam Hughes, Hollan Wills, Katie Minogue, Kristen Lee and Laura Rojas -- are in Gretchen Bade's social studies class at Culbreth. The class has been talking about charitable organizations in the United States and throughout the world, and the girls decided to put what they'd learned in class into action.

They put together the dance party, invited their friends and solicited donations. The party raised $150, which will go to an organization they will learn about later in class.

The girls, it turns out, are old hands at this. They've already donated items to such groups as Toys for Tots, the Inter-Faith Council for Social Service and Ronald McDonald House.