ATLANTA (AP) — The Latest on the NCAA task force’s report on the feasibility of allowing athletes to profit from their names and images (all times local):

1:30 p.m.

The NCAA Board of Governors has taken the first step toward allowing athletes to cash in on their fame. The board voted unanimously on Tuesday to clear the way for the amateur athletes to “benefit from the use of their name, image and likeness.”

The vote came during a meeting at Emory University in Atlanta.

In a news release, board chair Michael V. Drake said the board realized that it “must embrace change to provide the best possible experience for college athletes.”

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2:30 a.m.

A key NCAA task force is expected to provide an update on whether it would be feasible to allow athletes to profit from their names, images and likenesses while still preserving amateurism rules for the nation’s largest governing body for college athletics.

Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith and Big East Conference Commissioner Val Ackerman are leading the working group, which will present a progress report to the NCAA Board of Governors at Emory University in Atlanta this week.

It is an important early step in a process that could take months or even years to work its way through the NCAA various layers.

NCAA rules have long barred players from hiring agents and the association has steadfastly refused to allow players to be paid by their schools, with some exceptions. A California law set to take effect in 2023 would prevent athletes from losing their scholarships or being kicked off their teams for signing endorsement deals. Other states could put laws in place earlier than that.

The NCAA says it represents some 450,000 athletes nationwide.

By CELIA LLOPIS-JEPSEN
Kansas News Service

TOPEKA — The road to democracy is paved in donuts.

At least that’s the case if you dropped by Washburn University’s Memorial Union for lunch on a recent afternoon, followed the “free donuts” sign and blaring rock music down to the lower level, where there were not just boxes of glazed temptation, but smiling faces holding out electronic tablets.

Are you registered to vote, they wondered. If not, it takes just a few minutes.

For most of the curious students dropping by on National Voter Registration Day, the answer was “yes.” As of the 2018 midterm elections, three in four students at Washburn were registered voters. Significantly fewer joined the voter rolls in time for the 2014 midterms.

But the most dramatic difference came at the ballot box: 46% of Washburn students voted in 2018, up 17 percentage points from four years earlier.

Nationwide and in Kansas, new research from the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education and the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) reveals just how much the 2018 midterms energized young people.

Overall, voter turnout doubled at the 1,000 colleges tracked. The University of Kansas, Kansas State University, Emporia State University and Johnson County Community College saw jumps in turnout of more than 20 percentage points.

That could affect turnout in 2020 and beyond, because campaigns will be eager for the new voters’ support.

“The biggest predictor of whether people vote or not is whether somebody reaches out to you,” said CIRCLE director Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, whose organization and the institute are both housed at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. “The biggest predictor of whether somebody reaches out to you is whether you voted before.”

That feedback loop means young people often get ignored until they’ve cast their first ballot.

The college surge

Anita Austin has returned repeatedly to her former college since last year, coaxing Washburn students to talk voter registration over pizza or sweets. Her message? Government responds to people who vote.

“We always complain about government meeting the needs of a select few,” said Austin, program director at Loud Light, a small (full-time staff of two) but active Topeka nonprofit group created in 2015 that coordinates registration drives ac

ross the state. “But those are also the folks who are very engaged in the government process.”

Washburn nursing student Jacqueline Solis got similar messages from her grandparents, who encouraged her to register. She voted last year and plans to again next year.

“Even if it’s just one vote,” Solis said, “I think it can make a big change.”

All 17 Kansas colleges that let Tufts researchers calculate voter turnout on their campuses saw higher numbers in 2018 than the 2014 midterms.

Austin thinks old-fashioned shoe leather and modern-day electronics combined to help boost numbers on Election Day in 2018. Volunteers, often students and armed with tablets, put in long hours chatting up passersby in bustling student unions.

At the same time, ksvotes.org had come online. The nongovernmental site spearheaded by Loud Light and former Google vice president and former Democratic secretary of state candidate Brian McClendon made it easier for people to register online.

In a couple months’ span, we registered almost 3,000 students,” Austin recalled.

That summer, then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach also lost a landmark federal trial, ensuring the state couldn’t demand to see passports, birth certificates or similar paperwork from registrants. The judge said what was then the strictest voter registration rule in the country was unconstitutional and illegal. (Kansas is appealing the case.)

Nationally, a Tufts survey found concerns about a range of issues fueled young voter turnout: the environment, gun violence, opinions about President Donald Trump and more. Plus, as the 2018 election approached, tightly contested and sometimes polarized races for Kansas governor and the state’s congressional seats may have driven up interest among young voters.

But even with the 2018 surge, college student turnout was around 40%, compared to 50% of the general population.

‘Interest begets interest’

Half of Emporia State’s students cast ballots — the highest among Kansas public universities that work with Tufts.

The university worked hard to get to that level of participation, economics professor Rob Catlett said.

Fifteen years ago, he said, the political parties in Kansas estimated fewer than 1 in 10 Emporia students had registered to vote. (Back then, Tufts didn’t calculate such figures for schools, so Catlett didn’t have hard numbers.) He challenged his students to change that, and by the time the 2004 election approached, they were delivering boxes upon boxes of registration forms to the county clerk.

“A dramatic change,” he recalled, but one that faculty and students had to work to maintain as each college class graduated and new students arrived.

As of last year, 80 percent of Emporia State students had signed up to vote, but no one’s declaring victory.

“We’ve got challenges,” Catlett said. “We need to convert more of those registered voters into actual voters.”

His students are optimistic, and say voting has become part of the campus culture.

“Interest begets interest,” said Jonathan Norris, a senior who registered on campus last year. “When you have students taking more and more of a role … there’s kind of an implicit social pressure for other people to become involved.”

That spirit caught up Miranda Veesart, a sophomore and libertarian who said she felt unmotivated to vote before arriving at college.

“I didn’t really see the point … just because, you know, probably never going to see a libertarian representing me,” she said. Now she’s encouraging her friends to vote in the Nov. 5 elections. “We all hold a stake in who is representing us.”

What to expect in 2020

Washburn student Jessica Galvin has voted before and plans to again. She suspects some young people struggle to see how elections affect them, since many issues on the minds of older voters don’t apply to them yet.

“A lot of us don’t get jobs till we’re older,” Galvin said. “A lot of us don’t have to worry about taxes and stuff like that — Medicare, social security. It’s just something we think of as an adult thing.”

With Trump up for re-election, that could drive young voters back to the polls in 2020.

“I need to vote for someone I think is going to beat Donald Trump,” said Caleb Soliday, a Washburn political science major who is gay. Soliday worries about Trump’s stances on everything from LGBTQ issues to higher education. “I’m so frankly scared that within one tweet (by Trump), I can have my rights taken away.”

Washburn political science professor Bob Beatty said the concern that new voters will check out again is fueling the tug-of-war among Democrats over whether to nominate former Vice President Joe Biden or someone more likely to fire up younger generations with progressive messages or better representation for women and people of color.

Voters sent a record number of women and people of color to Congress in 2018, though both groups remain significantly underrepresented there. Kansans elected their third female governor and first Native American congresswoman.

Young voters aren’t a monolith, but they’re more likely to vote Democrat. That means Democratic candidates will hope to draw them back to the polls in droves in 2020, but Beatty argued strong turnout is far from a given.

“Campaigns will rue the day that they take (young voters) for granted,” he said. “To be honest, you can sort of take older voters for granted. Those over-50 voters, boy, I mean, they show up.”

And for those concerned too many young people still don’t vote, Kawashima-Ginsberg sees high school as “the most neglected opportunity” to teach the importance. About 1 in 5 18- and 19-year-olds voted in 2018, her research shows, and those still in high school or not in school at all are less likely to vote than those at college.

“A lot of efforts are going into college,” she said. “Not all young people go to college.”

Most people under the age of 30 in the U.S. right now don’t have college degrees.

Some Kansas schools help students register to vote. In Johnson County, for example, the local election office takes its voting machines to schools for student body elections, teaches students to run them, and registers voters all at once.

“We have one last shot with our high school kids,” Republican-appointed Johnson County Election Commissioner Ronnie Metsker said, to “teach them the importance of civic engagement and voting.”

Celia Llopis-Jepsen reports on consumer health and education for the Kansas News Service. You can follow her on Twitter @Celia_LJ or email her at [email protected]. The Kansas News Service is a collaboration of KCUR, Kansas Public Radio, KMUW and High Plains Public Radio focused on the health and well-being of Kansans, their communities and civic life.

Salina Post

SALINA — When Salina Public Library security contacted police about a man believed to have stolen a DVD from the library, they had no idea they were about to recover nearly $2,400 worth of property.

Just before 9:30a.m. Monday, police were sent to the library, 301 West Elm Street after security personnel observed a man they had on surveillance video taking a DVD on Sept. 18, according to Salina Police Captain Paul Forrester.

The officers made contact with Isaiah Wilson, 19, of Salina, who agreed to go to his residence and retrieve the DVD.  Additionally, Wilson voluntarily told police that he also had numerous other library items including 35 graphic novels, 12 hardback books, 13 paperback books, 64 DVD sets with one or two discs each and 12 DVD sets with two or three discs each

Total value of the items taken was just under $2,400, according to Forrester.

Wilson was able to take the items without setting off alarms by peeling the security strips off the items before putting the items in his backpack and walking out of the library, Forrester said.

Police arrested Wilson on suspicion of felony theft, according to Forrester.

MANHATTAN, Kan. (AP) — An Oklahoma football fan died after suffering an apparent heart attack at Saturday’s game against Kansas State.

David Adams, director of Riley County emergency services, said paramedics were called to the stadium for a patient experiencing chest pain, and the fan collapsed after they arrived. He was treated at the scene and taken to a Manhattan hospital across the street from the stadium, where he was pronounced dead.

The man was seated with friends and family at Bill Snyder Family Stadium when he collapsed.

The man’s name has not been released.

MIAMI COUNTY— Law enforcement authorities are investigating a case of alleged animal cruelty involving two dogs.

Just after 4 p.m. Saturday, police responded to storage business in the 23,000 block of  West 255^th Street in Hillside, according to Miami County Sheriff’s Captain Mat Kelly.

At the scene, the woman who called the sheriff’s department told deputies she heard barking coming from the storage unit. Deputies heard it too, eventually were able to enter the unit and located two dogs in two separate kennels.

With assistance from Paola police, the animals were transported to a local veterinarian clinic in critical condition, according to Kelly. They believe the dogs had been in the unit for up to a month with minimal care.

The sheriff’s department has contacted the individual who rented the storage unit and they are cooperating with the investigation, according to Kelly.  The sheriff’s department is working with the Miami County attorney about possible criminal charges in the case.

One dog is doing well and fully recovered. The other dog is progressing, according to Kelly and they hope it continues to get better over the next few days.

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. (AP) — Authorities say a horticulturalist was slain outside his Kansas office, and a man in a vehicle that was linked to the original homicide scene killed himself hours later in Missouri as deputies attempted to stop him.

Overland Park, Kansas, police says 59-year-old David Flick was shot Monday morning outside an office center, where his consulting firm was located.

The Clay County, Missouri, Sheriff’s Department says that deputies later heard a single gunshot while attempting to stop a sport utility vehicle in Kearney. The SUV in which 60-year-old Scott MacDonald died by suicide matched a vehicle description released by Overland Park police in Flick’s death.

Investigators say MacDonald may have been connected to Flick’s death, but did not say how. No motive was released.

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OVERLAND PARK, Kan. (AP) — Police say they are investigating a fatal shooting near an office center in Overland Park.

Overland Park Police Department spokesman John Lacy says police responded to the shooting at Deer Creek Office Center at about 8:45 a.m. Monday.

The victim was in his 60s and worked in one of the businesses in the office park. He has not been identified publicly.

Police were investigating the death as a homicide

No suspect information has been released.