(Radio Iowa) – The State Board of Education has approved plans by the University of Northern Iowa to offer an online accelerated elementary education and special education teacher program. U-N-I’s Director of Education Preparation, Benjamin Forsyth says courses in this program will be offered in eight-week, eight-credit terms. “The way we had to do this to be able to accelerate was to bundle courses that typically aren’t taught simultaneously,” he says. You will need an Associate of Arts (AA) or Associate of Science Degree and must be employed as a paraeducator or teachers’ aide within a K through sixth-grade school setting to get into the program. Forsyth says surveys on the interest in such a program show it is high.

“Just one example, on Facebook, if you and I say hey we’re doing something, you got about three shares, we’re up to almost 200 shares on this,” Forsyth says. Iowa and other states have been struggling with teacher shortages, and it’s hoped this will help. “We’re expecting a lot of people to apply, but then a portion of those not to actually meet requirements. And because chapter 79 is the way it is we really can’t take anyone that doesn’t have an A-A or A-S. We really can’t take a paraeducator that’s teaching preschool because they’ve got to have these field experiences,” he says. Forsyth says they will slowly get the program rolling.

“We want to take as many as we can but we’re not expecting to go that large on this first round,” Forsyth says, “we know that we don’t have the resources to go beyond about 30 or 60. We know that we’re going to have to work out some bugs on the first round but we want to see this happen.” Those who complete the accelerated program will have a Bachelor of Arts in Elementary Education and a minor in Special Education with teaching endorsements for a K-6 elementary teacher and K-8 instructional strategist.

The State Board of Education approved the plan at their meeting on Thursday.

(Red Oak , Iowa) – A traffic stop Thursday night in Red Oak, resulted in the arrest of a man wanted for Forgery. Red Oak Police say 30-year-old Aaron Garfield Nelson, of Red Oak, was taken into custody on a Red Oak Police warrant for four felony counts of Forgery. Nelson was being held in the Montgomery County Jail on a $20,000 cash-only bond.

(Radio Iowa) – Iowa’s largest water utility has begun operating its nitrate removal facility, as nitrate levels have spiked in the rivers that are the source of drinking water to 600-thousand customers. Ted Corrigan is general manager and C-E-O of the Des Moines Water Works.  “It isn’t as easy as just flipping a switch, but we’ve tested everything fairly recently and we can put the whole process into action pretty quickly, within a couple of hours or so.” Corrigan says spring rains washed nitrates off land upstream.

“It’s not uncommon at all for us to see high nitrogen concentrations in both the Des Moines and Raccoon River when we have a wet spring following a dry fall or a even dry year, like we had last year,” so it’s not really a surprise, but we are seeing nutrients that are coming off the landscape after basically having been stored there during the dry conditions of the last couple of years.” Employees are monitoring the processed water that is pumped to customers in the Des Moines area and Corrigan says it is safe to drink.

“Customers shouldn’t notice any difference in the treated drinking water,” Corrigan says. “It meets all the federal drinking water standards.” It costs about 10-thousand dollars per day to operate the nitrate removal equipment. “The length of time that we’ll have to run the facility is very dependent on how much flow we see in the river and the temperature,” Corrigan says. Corrigan expects the operation to run for several weeks. The last time the nitrate removal facility at the Des Moines Water Works was running was in 2017 and what was removed was diluted and returned to the river.

“We’re no longer able to do that and not because of the nitrate, but because of the chloride that’s in the waste stream. We don’t want to put that back in the river,” Corrigan says, “so now we actually have a pumping station that sends that waste stream to the wastewater treatment plant and they run it through their process.” Due to nitrate runoff, Corrigan says tests on Tuesday started to show the utility’s river water source had nitrate levels close to the federal cutoff for safe drinking water, so the nitrate removal facility began operations.

“We literally need millions — 10 million, 15 million acres of cover crops in the state. We need thousands of saturated buffers. We need hundreds of wetlands across the state,” Corrigan says, “and those practices are being implemented across the state, but not at a scale to see a measurable difference in water quality.” On Monday night in GRINNELL, there was a catastrophic failure in a large water pipe and nine-thousand customers of Grinnell’s water utility were advised to boil water before drinking it. The pipe rupture was repaired, the water tower refilled and tests of water in eh system showed no bacterial contamination, so Grinnell officials lifted the boil order on Thursday.

(Atlantic, Iowa) – District Court Judge Amy Zacharias, Thursday, approved a request from attorneys for Alison Dorsey, to continue her 1st Degree Murder and Child Endangerment trial until Dec. 5, 2022, at 9:30-a.m. The trial – which will held in Council Bluffs – was set to take place June 20th. A pre-trial conference in her case will now be held 8-a.m. November 29, 2022.

Her Cass County trial in the fall of 2021 ended in a mistrial due to a deadlocked jury. Dorsey was, and will be, on trial for the death of an infant while in her care in October 2019.