GEARY COUNTY – Law enforcement authorities in Geary County are investigating an alleged case of arson.
The Geary County Sheriff’s Department and Geary County Rural Fire Department responded to the Milford Lake area near the Fish Hatchery Sunday night for a report of a burning vehicle.
Deputies found a 2008 Dodge Charger owned by Korey Wainwright, Fort Riley, fully engulfed in flames, according to Sheriff’s Department Detective Lieutenant Brian L. Hornaday.
Investigators have determined that it was an act of arson.
No one was injured.
Authorities say that they are seeking the public’s help with information related to this case.
Contact the Geary County Sheriff’s Department at 238-2261 or Crime Stoppers at 785-762-TIPS.
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Republican Gov. Sam Brownback and top legislators have approved $4.2 million in emergency aid for 25 public school districts after trimming back their requests.
Brownback and eight top lawmakers reviewed the requests Monday under a school funding law enacted earlier this year. They approved a previous round of aid in August.
The districts sought $6.5 million for greater student numbers, unexpected drops in property tax revenues or other reasons. Brownback and legislative leaders approved 66 percent of their requests.
The Wichita district sought $980,000 for additional teachers and classroom aides for an influx of refugee children. The amount was reduced to $367,000 because of uncertainty about refugee numbers.
The meeting came three days after the Kansas Supreme Court heard arguments over whether the funding law complies with the state constitution.
MANHATTAN – Law enforcement authorities in Riley County are investigating an altercation involving a police officer.
Kiontaria Brown, 22, Fort Riley, was being escorted out of an establishment, in the 600 Block of North 12th Street, she was not welcomed in when just after 1.a.m. on Sunday.
She pushed and scratched a uniformed police officer after grabbing his neck in a rude, angry and violent manner, according to a media release from Riley County police.
Brown was arrested for battery of a law enforcement officer.
The officer received minor injuries in the form of lacerations, according to police.
Brown was transported to the Riley County Jail and was given a bond of $5,000.
Photo by Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences This rendering depicts the Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences’ new campus, which is scheduled to open in 2017 in Joplin, Mo.
The Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences is nearing a milestone in its march toward opening Missouri’s first new medical school in four decades, with a fundraising campaign for its Joplin campus now entering the home stretch.
The Joplin-area committee running the campaign has commitments for more than 80 percent of the $30 million it pledged for the medical school, and the leader of the campaign says it’s on track to complete the task by the end of the year.
“The reception has been very good,” says Rudy Farber, chairman of Community Bank & Trust, which is based in Neosho, Mo. “People have been very open. They really do understand the importance of this branch of (the university).”
The funds will cover the operating expenses of the Joplin campus for its first three years. The school is scheduled to open in 2017 with a class of 150 students.
Farber says some of the money also will help renovate the medical school facility, which previously served as a temporary hospital for St. John’s Regional Medical Center (now known as Mercy) after it was destroyed by the 2011 Joplin tornado. Mercy is donating the building and the surrounding land to the university.
The Joplin campus, however, is about much more than bricks and mortar for the university, which is based in Kansas City and this year adopted the shortened acronym of KCU. Starting a program from scratch, university officials say, will allow for implementation of a 21st century osteopathic medical school curriculum.
Moreover, they say, its presence in southwest Missouri will make it easier to recruit home-grown talent in a region that – like many other rural areas around the country – suffers from a lack of primary care physicians. KCU’s region includes southeast Kansas, along with portions of Oklahoma and Arkansas.
“This is going to be a unique model in Middle America to address the health and medical needs of the region,” says KCU President Dr. Marc Hahn. “We think that with our track record of producing primary care physicians, and physicians that choose to practice in rural parts of the region, this model will translate very well to Joplin.”
New ideas
On the curriculum side, the Joplin campus gives KCU the opportunity to put into practice some of the ideas included in the 2013 report of the Blue Ribbon Commission for the Advancement of Osteopathic Medical Education. Hahn co-chaired the commission, and one of its recommendations was the establishment of an educational “pathway” dictated less by the rigid system in place for the past century and more by a continuum in which students advance based on their mastery of skills.
The commission suggested a system in which highly qualified students can finish in five years. That’s in contrast to traditional medical schools, which take four years before residencies and fellowships. Why use a calendar to assess when it’s time to move on, Hahn asks.
The skill set required of rural doctors is different than that of their urban counterparts, says Dr. Bruce D. Dubin, executive vice president for academic affairs and dean of the medical school on the Kansas City campus. Duties might range from being on call for the Friday football game to providing late-night, armchair psychiatric services in the aisle of the local Wal-Mart – or even serving as an emergency stand-in when the local veterinarian is on vacation.
“So the competencies and the need for that kind of training is much more intense, much more procedural, and it needs to be broader,” Dubin says. “That’s part of the innovation that we are looking at bringing down to the Joplin campus: training that real great Marcus Welby-type doc, who can kind of do it all.”
KCU officials are addressing the second part of the equation – reversing the migration of doctors from rural communities – in a way not all that different from sports coaches scouring the landscape for blue-chip recruits.
By talking with mayors, superintendents and other leaders from small towns in the region, the university is recruiting high-achieving teens who have the makings of future doctors.
The idea is that local recruits are much more likely to stay close to home once they hang out their shingle. The conversation goes something like this, according to Dubin: “Jane, you are entering high school. Tell you what: I’ve got a seat for you in the medical school. It is yours right now. You are going to be a doctor. It’s yours to lose or yours to keep.”
Shortage of primary care doctors
Brian Smith knows just how a message like the one Dubin articulated would resonate with students and what it would mean for the area if they established their practices close to home. Smith is superintendent of the school district in Galena, just across the state line from Joplin, and a former member of the board of Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas, which serves patients based on their ability to pay.
Galena is in Cherokee County, which along with many of its Kansas neighbors ranks near the bottom of the county health rankings published annually for each state by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. Smith says having more primary care physicians in the area could encourage more residents to seek preventive care rather than waiting until they are very sick to see a doctor.
Meanwhile, he says, having a medical school next door in Joplin could attract area students, especially kids from lower-income households who might be first-generation college students.
Those students typically don’t want to stray too far from home for college, Smith says. Student who now head off to places like the University of Kansas or the University of Missouri-Kansas City for medical school – “They don’t come back,” Smith says.
Overarching mission
Founded in the late 1800s in Kirksville, Mo., osteopathic medicine focuses on wellness, health promotion and disease prevention. As such, osteopaths often specialize in primary care, with an emphasis on serving rural or underserved communities.
A quarter of KCU’s graduates practice in rural or underserved parts of Kansas. In Missouri, 22 percent of its graduates work in rural areas and nearly a third practice in underserved areas. Missouri and Kansas have a dearth of primary care physicians, as measured by the federal Health Resources and Services Administration. Population centers with one primary care physician for every 3,500 residents or more are designated as a “health professional shortage area,” or HPSA. The thousands of HPSAs across the country are short by more than 8,000 doctors, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, with the current workforce covering only about 60 percent of the need. Combined,
Missouri and Kansas are short 429 primary care physicians, based on the data, and Missouri’s 38.6 percent of need makes it the fourth-worst in the country. Kansas’ percentage is nearly double that of Missouri. Progress on the Joplin campus comes eight months after plans for it were first announced.
A national search for a dean of the campus is under way. Farber says donors have responded to the message that a medical school in Joplin will boost the health and well-being of area residents, provide an important educational opportunity for area students and serve as an economic engine with the potential to add $100 million to the local economy annually once it’s fully operational. It’s also a long-term investment, Farber says, noting KCU’s impending 100-year anniversary next year.
“I fully expect that this school will continue on,” he says, “and 100 years from now we will still have a campus in Joplin.”
MERIDIAN, Miss. (AP) — A Mississippi official says a weekend cave-in of a restaurant parking lot that swallowed 12 cars was not the result of a sinkhole.
Meridian Public Safety Director Buck Roberts tells The Meridian Star the collapse was not a sinkhole but didn’t provide any further details.
Emergency crews were called to the IHOP restaurant in the city of Meridian and discovered a section of the parking lot, about 35 feet wide and 400 feet long, had collapsed. Cars, trucks and sport utility vehicles dropped into the void that appeared to be about 15 feet deep.
Kansas City, Kan. (AP) — Police are investigating after a man in his early 40s was found shot to death in Kansas City, Kansas.
The Kansas City Star reports that police were called to an apartment complex around 4:45 a.m. Sunday. Police found the victim dead inside the building.
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Wichita students who aren’t up to date on required immunizations will be excluded from school next week.
The Wichita Eagle reports that beginning Nov. 16, students in the Wichita school district will be pulled out of class and told they are not allowed to return to school until their immunizations are up to date.
Wichita Public Schools Health Services Coordinator Kimber Kasitz says 2,000 students were not in compliance with vaccine requests as of Friday.
Officials say school nurses have been notifying parents about the requirements through letters, phone calls, emails and parent-teacher conferences.
Kansas schools will allow an unvaccinated child to attend class if the child’s health is threatened by receiving a vaccine or if one is opposed to vaccinations because of religious beliefs.
SHAWNEE COUNTY- A Kansas woman was injured in an accident just before 6p.m. on Sunday in Shawnee County.
The Kansas Highway Patrol reported a 2010 Kia Forte driven by Shyra Latisha Graham, 21, Olathe, was eastbound on Interstate 70 three miles west of Topeka.
The vehicle drifted off the roadway and struck a KDOT sign.
A passenger in the vehicle Porshae Monique Summers, 20, Olathe, jumped from the vehicle before it came to a compete stop.
Summers was transported to St. Francis Medical Center.
Graham was not injured.
Both were properly restrained at the time of the collision, according to the KHP.
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — The bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Wichita is preparing to make the case that an Army chaplain from Kansas who died in a North Korean prisoner of war camp deserves to be granted sainthood.
The Wichita Eagle reports that Bishop Carl Kemme is addressing the leadership of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints in Rome on Monday. It is the most significant moment yet in the push to have the Rev. Emil Kapaun declared a saint.
The Congregation for the Causes of Saints evaluates evidence in sainthood investigations and makes recommendations to the pope.
Kapaun is a U.S. Army chaplain and priest who grew up on a Marion County farm. Fellow prisoners of war said Kapaun was a source of inspiration and faith during their captivity.
MARION COUNTY- A Kansas teen died in an accident just before 9a.m. on Sunday in Marion County.
The Kansas Highway Patrol reported a 2009 Mitsubishi Galant driven by Sally N. Rowell, 19, El Dorado, was southbound on U.S. 56 five miles south of Herington.
The vehicle went left of center and collided with a northbound International semi driven by Tommy M. Tibbets, 45, El Dorado.
Rowell was pronounced dead at the scene and transported to Zeiner Funeral Home.
Tibbets was transported to Herington Municipal Hospital.
Both drivers were properly restrained at the time of the accident, according to the KHP.
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Property taxes are expected to increase this year for patrons of most Kansas school districts.
The Topeka Capital-Journa reports that the projected increases come as the Kansas Supreme Court considers whether public schools are underfunded.
Homeowners in most of the state’s districts saw their bills for supporting schools shrink last school year after an influx of court-ordered aid to schools. The average drop in property taxes among 286 school districts was 2 mills. This year, preliminary data from the Kansas State Department of Education indicates the average rate is expected to rise by 1.8 mills.
Some superintendents say a controversial change in the state’s financing of K-12 education is the reason. Other school leaders in western Kansas say the oil and gas industry is a key factor.
OVERLAND PARK, Kan. (AP) — One person has been arrested in a suburban Kansas City crash that killed a 16-month-old girl and injured two others.
Police identified the victim Sunday in a news release as Addilynn R. Poole. Police provided no details on what led up to Saturday’s three-vehicle crash in Overland Park, saying the investigation is ongoing. The release said one person was arrested and was being held pending charges.
An 8-year-old and 20-year-old were taken to a hospital with injuries. Both were in the same vehicle with Addilynn.
GEARY COUNTY – Law enforcement authorities in Geary County are investigating an alleged case of arson.
