By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post

You might have seen a little orange buggy rolling up and done the sidewalk outside Ascencion Living Via Christi Village in Hays.

This pedal-powered Berg E-Gran Tour cart is the newest means Learning Cross Child Care Center has of connecting elderly residents at the Village with the child care center’s kids.

The child care center and preschool bought the buggy with a $5,000 grant from the Heartland Community Foundation.

Four people can ride in the buggy a one time — one staff person, one elderly resident and two children in the front. The staff person pedals, which helps energize a small motor in the back. The senior’s pedals have no resistance, so it is a very gentle workout.

Brett Schmidt, Learning Cross owner and director, said the kids and seniors alike have loved the buggy.

Tony Brummer, Village resident, said the rides are the highlight of his days. It also gives Brummer a chance to share stories with the kids. Brummer, a former farmer, has been caring for a large sunflower in the Village’s courtyard and has been using the short outings as a time to talk about the sunflower and gardening.

Schmidt said he hopes to integrate more learning opportunities in these times in the buggy by getting the elders to share stories or pictures with the children during their rides. They may also share prayer time on the buggy in the future.

“Once they are on the buggy, they are a captive audience — the kids are,” Schmidt said. “The residents are free to talk about whatever.”

The kids love the rides so much, the center uses the buggy rides as one of the rewards for good behavior.

Music and Memory

The organization also received a grant from Heartland Community Foundation to purchase a Music and Memory program about a year ago. The program is geared toward residents who suffer from Alzheimer’s disease or dementia. Each resident in the program receives an MP3 player programmed with music popular from the younger eras of their lives.

“It is kind of like a hardwire back to your memories,” Schmidt said. “So as you listen to a song, music is the last part of your brain that will go with those memories tied with it. You get a long way back to a memory. You get 10 to 15 minutes of kind of the person is back. You can have conversations with them.”

The program can help people with anxiety and depression. Some people experience fewer behavior issues when they engage with music and a as result their physicians can reduce their medication.

One of the residents was becoming very agitated and when she was introduced to the music, she became very calm, Schmidt said. The music makes her smile.

Grandfriends and Via buddies

Learning Cross, an Christian intergenerational child care center, has been at Via Christ Village for four years. Schmidt, a former kindergarten teacher, gleaned the idea for the child care and preschool from a similar program in Coffeyville. He said he could see the benefits to both children and their elders through the two groups interacting.

Every year, families with children at Learning Cross adopt elders at the Village as a “grandfriends.” The families share holiday gifts and drop-by visits throughout the year.

All the children at the child care center participate weekly in activities with both assisted living and long-term care residents. This includes church services and exercise.

“For the children, they learn empathetical responses, and learning sympathy and they are part of a larger community. They are part of a larger community they get to help with,” Schmidt said. “They get to go and do what we call ‘smile power.’ They go and smile and wave. They have created hug power, singing power — anytime they can get someone to smile — that is what their goal is.

“That has been awesome seeing that grow just out of the kids. That was not something out of my program that I developed.”

The residents often call the preschoolers their “grandkids” or their “Via buddies.”

“The residents, when you see the kids come up, you just see a magical moment. A new spark forms or a spark that was there comes back to life. …

“Some of them want the hugs, and some of them will just sit out and watch them, especially in the courtyard when we play out there. Windows open up and shades open up and they just sit in their rocking chairs and just listen to the kids play.”

Many older Americans today live far away from their families, and they fall victim to the three plagues of aging — boredom, loss of purpose and depression. However, Schmidt said he believes the presence of the children helps with all three of those issues.

“We give them a purpose. The grandfriends basically become grandparents again to these kids. They get to tell them stories. They get to play with them. They get to watch them. But also the depression piece, having that life — basically we are injecting life back into the building with the kids. We run down the hallways sometimes. There are always laughs. There are sometimes cries, but it is real life that we get to bring back. It is a magical, symbiotic relationship.”

Sandy Dinkel has worked at the Village for more than 20 years. She said the presence of the children has resulted in a calmer atmosphere that feels less institutional.

“It feels more home-like,” Dinkel, admissions director, said, “You have the kids going through. You’ve got more spiritual activities and the kids involved in the spiritual activities. That is a big, big thing.”

‘I am so blessed’

The “grandfriends” leave a lasting impression even when they are gone. One young girl became particularly attached to one of the Village resident. She often wanted to sit on the resident’s lap, but that resident recently passed away.

“The little girl we told her she is not going to be here anymore. She is in heaven with God. She said, ‘I am so blessed that I got to be with her when she was here.’

“That is what we want to teach is the positive. She was able to affect this lady’s life that much. She was a happy grandfriend that just loved everybody. She didn’t care what was going on. All your worries, everything melted away, when she gave you a hug. That is what we are trying to develop, letting them give back. That girl will remember that for the rest of her life.”

Schmidt said the partnership is wonderful. The children can play in the courtyard and in the a adjoining playground when the weather is nice, and they have many long corridors to walk in when the weather is inclement. Schmidt said they once tracked the children’s activity and found they walked a mile a day even when they were indoors.

The children have play-based learning and preschool. They learn phonics, and most can read before they begin kindergarten. Social/emotional learning is a foundation of the program, Schmidt said.

“We try to get the kids to express their emotions, identify their emotions,” he said. “It is the key to get to high-order thinking, so when they go into school — kindergarten, first grade, second grader, they are learning how to learn from us not what to learn. No matter the environment they are in, we are hoping they will be successful in any classroom.”

The program had seven children when it started. It will have 24 children in the fall and has a wait list until 2022.

“I would say this has been a God journey,” Schmidt said. “It started out so small. I can’t still believe the success we’ve had.”

By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post

The Sternberg Museum has opened its backroom to show the public the transformation of fossils from the field to something that can enter the museum’s collection.

A big part of this has been the opening of the newly renovated Dane G. Hansen Paleontology Center. In addition to new state-of-the-art equipment, the lab has windows through which museum visitors can see scientists working on fossils.

Christina Byrd, collections manager, is using the space to offer fossil identification at noon each Friday in July.

As there was no line waiting for Byrd’s services, I took my own “fossils” in for identification. I have been hunting crinoids with my dad in the gravel pits on my grandfather’s farm every since I can remember, so I dug into my box of rocks and fished out three promising specimens.

Two of my “fossils” weren’t fossils, Byrd said. They were just interesting rocks.

The one fossil was a mold of the inside of a clam. Byrd said although the shell of the clam was gone, sediment had likely deposited inside of the clam to form the mold.

Although I had not marked the fossil, based on the box I found it in, I think this came from the area below the Tuttle Creek Dam. Many fossils were found there after flooding washed away topsoil and rock in 1993.

Byrd said she enjoys the opportunity to interact with visitors thanks to new lab space.

“I think being able to interact with the scientist who is actually doing the work is so important,” she said. “I get stuck downstairs so often that I love the opportunity to come up and talk to everybody about the stuff I get to do everyday.”

The day I visited, she was working on a mosasaur skull. Mosasaurs were large aquatic reptiles that lived during the Cretaceous period from 100 million to 66 million years ago. They inhabited the inland see that covered Kansas at that time.

Byrd’s specimen on Friday was found in Gove County. Of the museum’s 21,000 catalog fossils, 14,000 of them were found in Kansas.

If you visit the lab, you can see the stages fossils move through as they are being prepared.

The fossil is first removed from the surrounding material and placed in a burlap and plaster cast for shipping. Once at the museum, the paleontologist has to remove the surrounding material.

My little clam fossil was pretty clean, probably because it was forcefully ripped out of the rock by a torrent of water. Not so for Byrd’s fossil. Her mosasaur skull was encased in a matrix.

The material surrounding the mosasaur skull was fairly soft, so Byrd was using dental tools to painstakingly clean the fossil. To add to the challenge, plant material had tried to grow into fossil.

Dinosaur fossils found in other areas of the U.S. can be located in much harder material. This can require pneumatic tools.

How long it takes to clean a fossil depends on its size and the material in which it was found. Some fossils can take years to prepare, Byrd said.

All of the paleontologists’ work is done under a microscope, but a monitor is mounted outside of the lab so visitors can see what the scientists are seeing.

“Because we do everything under a microscope, it is sometimes hard to see when someone is at the window because we are so focused. However, I can hear when they are interacting with that monitor,” Byrd said. “Because I hear a mom say, ‘Hey sweetie, see what she is working on there. You can actually see it up close there.’

“If I have the windows open I can say, ‘Hey, do you have any questions? Would you like to learn anymore about what is in here?’ Or kids will point and say, ‘What’s this?’ Having this larger window and broader space, people can see what is in here.”

All of the surrounding sediment materials cleaned from the fossils is saved. A specific researcher is using the material around the fossils to evaluate in what type of environment the animals lived.

“Once you have taken it all off, you have lost a specific detail of this bone’s history,” Byrd said. “It’s another clue. When you think about life, you have to think in the whole view. You can’t think in terms of just one animal. You have to think in the ecological view — the animals, the plants. What are the sediments telling us?

“Especially in the Western Interior Seaway since it was covered in water, the sediments can tell you a lot about what changes happened through time within those sediments. Did it get more course? Did it get finer? That can tell us different things about how water is moving throughout this area through that broad span of time that water covered the U.S.”

Microscopic creatures can be found in the sediment that also give clues to environment, such as temperature and salinity.

The original prep lab is now the histology lab. Scientists cut very thin slices of bone and grind them down to be viewed under a microscope.

Looking at the bone at the minute structural level can also gives clues about how the animals grew and what they ate. When reptiles experience a trauma, that can have arrested growth, which shows up in their bones.

Bone growth can also give researchers clues to the environment in which the animals lived, including water temperature and if the animal was warm- or cold-blooded.

One FSHU graduate student has been recently using histology to study the growth patterns of the Sternberg’s plesiosaur.

“You have all of these clues that confirm what scientists have been thinking of,” Byrd said. “It is just more evidence to support the case and give us a more solid understanding.

“We are taught to always question, but once you get enough information, we can say, ‘How much do we trust the current evidence? Test it again, see if we get the same results.’ If we continue to get the same results, then ‘OK that’s it.’ ”

You don’t have to have a fossil to visit the lab during the fossil ID ID time. You can just show up with questions. The event is free with admission.

If you have a question about a fossil and can’t make it on Fridays, check with the front desk or call the museum.

By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post

Theater goers will be able to enter the enchanting under sea world of Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” this weekend.

The Hays Community Theatre will present the story of a mermaid who falls in love with a human prince at 7 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday at Beach/Schmidt Performing Arts Center.

Tickets are still available for all three shows and can be purchased through the HCT website or at the door if tickets are still available. Tickets are $25 for adults and $15 for children.

Cody Kreutzer, a recent FHSU graduate in theater, is making his directorial debut with HCT with “The Little Mermaid.”

Kreutzer directed at FHSU, but nothing on the scale of the 50-member cast of the “The Little Mermaid.”

Organizing a large all-volunteer cast and using rehearsal time wisely has been a challenge, he said.

Trying to costume a cast of sea creatures has also been a challenge, but he said he has had a wonderful costume and set design team who is bringing both the underwater and terrestrial worlds to life.

“We had to come up with a ship for all of the sailors and the big sea numbers and having something on stage during under the sea so its not just on stage. … It’s been difficult, but I think what we finally have and decided on is good.”

For those not familiar with the cartoon classic, “The Little Mermaid” is the story of Ariel (Erin Muirhead), King Triton’s (David Koshiol) youngest daughter, who wishes to pursue the human Prince Eric (Ryan Will) in the world above.

She bargains with the evil sea witch, Ursula (Haileigh Jacobs), to trade her tail for legs. But the bargain is not what it seems, and Ariel needs the help of her colorful friends, Flounder the fish (Addy Brull), Scuttle the seagull (Micheal Hernandez) and Sebastian the crab (Travis Grizzell) to restore order under the sea, according to the HCT website.

Muirhead, 19, a Hays High School grad and student at K-State, loved the Disney movie when she was a child.

“I think the biggest challenge for me is to take a character people know and make it my own,” she said.

She said she could relate to Ariel as a character who is forced to make difficult decisions and is trying to follow her dreams.

“I think everyone has had to make those decisions to follow their passion, and I hope I am doing that as well,” she said.

Muirhead went to high school with her leading man, Ryan Will.

“He is a close friend of mine. I think he is doing a great job, and it is great to work with him,” she said.

Will, 19, is a sophomore at FHSU majoring in psychology. This is his first HCT production, but he is no stranger to the stage. He played Quasimodo in the HHS production of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”  among pother productions. He also played Pepper in “Mama Mia” and Antonio in “The Marriage of Figaro” at FHSU.

Will said “The Little Mermaid” has been much more challenging than he anticipated from both musical and acting perspectives.

“At this point, I am excited to perform. I hope we can provide the community with an escape for a night or two,” he said. “I really think this is going to showcase a lot of people and the time and effort we put into it. I think it is going to be a good one.”

His favorite music from the performance is “If only,” a quartet during which Prince Eric weighs his options for the future.

Will had never seen Disney’s movie version of “The Little Mermaid” until just last weekend. He said he much preferred the stage version, which includes much more music.

Kretuzer said his favorite scene in the musical is a number in which Prince Eric teaches Ariel to dance, a sequence that is not in the movie.

“It is the first moment we see they could fall in love,” he said. “Just talking about it gives me chills. It is so beautiful. ‘Part of Your World’ is my favorite Disney song written, so when Erin (Ariel), sings ‘Part of Your World’ every night, I love it. It is so good.”

Kreutzer said he is proud of his cast.

“They are all working so hard,” he said. “We have rehearsals three hours a night, five nights a week. They are just excited to do it and excited to be here and excited for people to see it.”

Although many people might think “The Little Mermaid” is a production just for kids, Kreutzer said older audience members will enjoy the production as well. HCT not only has grand sets and costumes, but the production has humor adults will appreciate too, he said.

Kruetzer said he and the cast have had fun putting the show together.

“Part of it is for ourselves to make us feel good, but we also want people to see it because we want to bring them joy,” he said. “We want them to get as much joy out of seeing this as we have had putting it on.”

Cast list

By CRISTINA JANNEY

Hays Post

Kansas Department for Children and Families Secretary Laura Howard and Kansas Department of Health and Environment Secretary Dr. Lee Norman Monday announced at the Hays DCF office a new partnership that will locate KDHE employees in DCF offices.

KDHE is moving processing of Medicaid applications from a private contractor back under state control. It will take a year to completely make the transition. Eventually 350 once private employees will be employed by KDHE.

Thirty KDHE employees who will determine eligibility for Medicaid will now be located in 17 DCF offices across the state. One of these employees will be in the Hays DCF office. The Hays and Wichita offices will be the first to receive the KDHE employees as of this week.

Howard and Norman said in a press release that the move will foster collaboration around the KanCare application process for the elderly and people with disabilities. It is also designed to improve efficiencies and expand the reach of both agencies.

“This is just one way we want to bring a high-touch approach back for Kansas citizens,” Howard said during the press conference.

Norman said, “We’re pulling a bunch of these services back into the state to provide more customer service.”

Norman said in the press conference most Medicaid applications are being processed in the 45 days required by federal law. However, he said he hopes the changes will improve approval times beyond the federal standards.

“I’ve always believed that our DCF offices can be an important connection point for Kansans who need services,” Howard said in the news release. “This new partnership is a first step in providing a more efficient experience for those who need assistance with the complicated KanCare application process.”

“As an agency, we are continually looking for opportunities to collaborate and improve the stakeholder experience,” Norman said in a news release. “By co-locating, we are making good use of existing state office space and extending our reach across the state.”

Elderly and disabled KanCare applications are among the most complex. Under the new partnership, KDHE employees will initially spend most of their time processing home and community-based service applications.

“These complicated cases take a special approach,” Norman said. “You wouldn’t go to a family physician, necessarily, to have a brain tumor removed. You would go to someone who is highly specialized in that area. The population that Sec. Howard spelled out is a group that needs a specialist in that area. There is a fairly lengthy training process involved in that.”

The KDHE employees also will be available to work with DCF staff on complicated cases. Once the full transition is complete in mid-2020, it is expected that KDHE staff will be able to meet face to face with Kansans who need help navigating the KanCare application process.

 “I believe this collaboration with DCF will result in positive outcomes for Kansans,” Norman said in the news release.

Norman said during the press conference Monday KDHE is also working to update technology to make the KanCare application process more efficient. He said the system is still requesting information through fax, and most people no longer use fax machines.

Other offices that will have KDHE employees include:

• Kansas City and Overland Park in August
• Emporia, Great Bend and Newton in September
• Manhattan and Pittsburg in October
• Atchison, Chanute and Salina in November
• Dodge City, Garden City, Hutchinson and Liberal in December
•  Independence in Jan. 2020

 As more KDHE staff are hired, the agencies plan to expand to other DCF offices that have available space.

“I’ve heard first hand from our workers how excited they are to have KDHE staff in the same office,” Howard said in the news release. “We know this is an important step in helping Kansans connect with services that are vital to their well-being.”