(UPDATED 10-a.m.) SOLON, Iowa (AP) — Authorities say two people were killed and one injured in an eastern Iowa collision. The crash occurred around 8:30 p.m. Thursday on Iowa Highway 1, just south of Solon in Johnson County. The Iowa State Patrol says a southbound 2013 Dodge Caravan driven by 30-year old Tori Saben Smith, of Mediapolis,  crossed the center line and struck an oncoming 2017 Kia driven by 50-year old Kirk Flom, of Solon.

Smith and Flom died at the scene. A passenger in one of the vehicles, 20-year old Jose Gamez Avila, of Wapello, was injured and was flown to University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics. Authorities say Smith and Flom were wearing their seat belts, but Avila was not.

(Radio Iowa) — A state board has completed its plan for greatly expanding options for Iowa children who need mental health care services. Department of Human Services Director Jerry Foxhoven says he’s optimistic lawmakers and the governor will implement the board’s proposals. “We looked at what is doable quickly and what is most important quickly, so we know we need crisis services,” Foxhoven says. “We know that we need, like, an 800 hotline. We know that we need universal screenings — so some of those steps we require almost immediately.”

The plan calls for mental health screening of Iowa children under the age of 18, so parents and professionals can perhaps intervene earlier — before there’s a crisis. Peggy Huppert, the leader of a mental health advocacy group, says she’s encouraged by the recommendations, but she cautions that lawmakers will have to find money somewhere to make the entire plan a reality. Foxhoven says he’s optimistic lawmakers will make it a priority.  “There’s been such a commitment from the governor and from both sides of the aisle that it’s worth putting money into it,” Foxhoven says.

There’s no estimate, yet, of exactly how much money is needed to implement the plan.

(Reporting for Radio Iowa by Iowa Public Radio’s Katarina Sostaric)

(Radio Iowa) — Leaders of Iowa Wesleyan University in Mount Pleasant say the school will remain open this spring and recruiting for new students will continue. Thursday’s announcement followed word from administrators earlier this month that the school might close because of financial troubles. Annette Scieszinski, chair of the Iowa Wesleyan Board of Trustees, says alumni and residents of Mount Pleasant rallied around the school. “We are so grateful for the support of the community,” Scieszinski said. School officials on Thursday also announced the formation of a “New Directions Team” to address needs beyond this academic year. “I think Iowa Wesleyan University will stand as a leader in higher ed for the prospects that we see and the open-mindedness that we exercise in going forward in a changed environment,” Scieszinski said.

A couple weeks ago, University President Steven Titus said the school needed to find $2.1 million to have a spring semester. Students and faculty were among those who helped raise the money to keep the 176-year-old school in business. “I think it speaks of the commitment of this community,” Titus said. “I also think it illustrates how important institutions like this are to rural communities.” Prior to Thursday’s announcement, Kristi Ray of the Mount Pleasant Area Chamber of Commerce said the loss of Iowa Wesleyan would devastate the local economy. “We’re going to see houses on the markets, you’re going to see sales tax revenue decrease, and we’re going to see students in our public schools that have to leave because their parents were administrators here,” Ray speculated.

Iowa Wesleyan administrators said they’re open to institutional changes, including a potential merger with another school. They say long-term solutions will depend on more donor support and new partnerships with other organizations.

(Reporting for Radio IA by Theresa Rose, KILJ, Mount Pleasant & Kate Payne, Iowa Public Radio)

(Radio Iowa) — Attorney General Tom Miller says the budget for the Iowa Department of Justice has reached a “perilous” point. Miller says there’s not enough money to cover the costs of working with county attorneys on criminal cases, working to uphold criminal convictions that are appealed AND representing the state when it’s sued in civil court. “Pretty vital functions of our office and state government,” Miller says. The situation, Miller says, has been caused by a series of budget cuts over a long period of time. “Earlier this year we really had a crisis or a semi-crisis in representing the state in civil litigation. A whole sort of ‘perfect storm’ came at us,” Miller says. “I was extremely concerned and we worked through that, at least temporarily, but we’re just teetering on what the citizens of Iowa want us to do and expect us to do.”

Miller says “to avert total disaster” over the past two years, lawmakers gave him authority to use payments from legal settlements paid to the state by companies accused of bilking Iowa consumers. Miller says that fund can’t be tapped forever. He’s asking the governor and legislators for a half-a-million dollar boost for the current state budgeting year and a one million dollar increase in his agency’s budget for the following fiscal year.

This past spring, a key Republican lawmaker threatened to cut Miller’s budget by 10 percent — because Miller is joining lawsuits challenging Trump Administration policies. Miller, a Democrat, was just reelected to a 10th term in office. Republicans did not nominate a candidate for attorney general in 2018.

Here is the latest Iowa news from The Associated Press at 3:40 a.m. CST

MOUNT PLEASANT, Iowa (AP) — A private school in southeast Iowa that was on the verge of closure says it has secured new funding that will keep its doors open. The board of Iowa Wesleyan University in Mount Pleasant voted Thursday to continue operations after securing funding from alumni and the community, as well as collaboration with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development.

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds has ordered flags on state property flown at half-staff to honor a fallen sailor from Traer in the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. U.S. and state flags are to be lowered from sunrise to sunset Friday to coincide with a burial Mass in Traer for William Kvidera. Kvidera was a 22-year-old carpenter’s mate 3rd class assigned to the USS Oklahoma when it was torpedoed on Dec. 7, 1941. His remains were recently identified.

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Banking giant Wells Fargo has informed employees that it will lay off 400 workers in the Des Moines area. Local bank spokesman Steve Carlson told the Des Moines Register that the company notified employees in the home lending department on Thursday. The layoffs go into effect early next year. Wells Fargo employs more than 15,500 people in Iowa, including about 14,000 in metropolitan Des Moines.

JOHNSTON, Iowa (AP) — Dozens of students were sent to hospitals after a building with high levels of carbon monoxide was evacuated at the Iowa Law Enforcement Academy in suburban Des Moines. An overnight security officer detected a strong odor a little before 6 a.m., academy director Judy Bradshaw said. Nearly 60 students with elevated blood levels of carbon monoxide were sent to hospitals, and Bradshaw said other students who’d been exposed but displayed no symptoms were taken to hospitals as a precaution.

Officials with the Iowa Dept. of Natural Resources said Thursday, that a plugged manhole at the Smithfield Foods plant in Denison, sent some rinse water to the Boyer River early Thursday morning.

Smithfield crews noticed the discharge around 3:30 a.m., about 15 to 30 minutes after they think it started. An unknown amount of final rinse water flowed across the property, then entered a storm sewer that flows into the river.

In less than two hours, a construction crew built a small dam, stopping the flow into the river. Another crew began vacuuming up the rinse water. DNR staff were on site before 8 a.m., checking on the cleanup and the river. DNR will continue to monitor cleanup efforts and consider appropriate enforcement action.

(Radio Iowa) — The executive director of a group which provides school safety training says districts are overlooking a key area where student deaths could be prevented. Michael Dorn of Safe Havens International says accidents in parking lots are the biggest danger to students.  “In 1998 to 2013 we had 525 people hit and killed in the parking lots, 487 died from violence — this is nationally — of those, 62 died in active shooter events,” Dorn says.

Dorn made a presentation at the Iowa Association of School Boards annual convention. He says the parking lot deaths often involved one individual at a time, so they don’t get the headlines that other things do. “When you look at the data on it, we are focusing a great deal of our time, energy, money on some of the rarest — to be clear most catastrophic types of events that we can’t ignore — but even within the category of violence, nine of ten people, more than nine out of ten who are murdered, it doesn’t look like the events we see on the national news,” Dorn says. “Or if you Google school violence on the internet or social media you are going to get the rare but catastrophic, but you are going to miss most of what causes fatalities.”

Dorn says suicides accounted for 129 deaths in the same five-year time period.  “Twice as many people died from suicide than at the hands of an active shooter,” Dorn says. “And suicide prevention efforts lower the risk for both. One of our more effective approaches. If you step back and look at the data what we see is a lot of schools are now very seriously out of whack with their risk profile. And we are doing a lot of things that sound good — that are very popular — but they are not tested.”

Dorn says the images of school shootings push schools to take some kind of action. “What has happened in this country in the last few years is there’s been a bit of a motive reaction to things. And we’re rolling out products and we’re rolling out training programs but people are taking the time to test them with simulation to see how they actually work and they are not doing as well as we might thin, And they can make things much more dangerous as we see.”

Dorn says school districts could benefit more by spending money training personnel on student supervision techniques. “We can reduce our risk of death in tornadoes, active shooter, sudden cardiac arrest, anaphylactic shock, the risk of abduction, sexual abuse of children by children, accidents on the playground,” Dorn explains. “So, taking the time to teach people how to supervise. Taking the time to teach people how to look at our traffic flow in the morning.”

He says schools need to create drills that provide real experiences and teach school personnel the best way to react to situations to keep kids safe.  “We go to a staff member, give them a scenario and they have to react as they would in a real event. That does a lot of things. It reinforces the empowerment of the individual employed to take lifesaving action. It lets them practice, it really makes them confront the reality that they have to be prepared and they have to learn what’s in those plans,” Dorn says. “And when you do that, you won’t get that type of complacency and boredom. Because every time we do a drill, those teachers, those custodians are saying ‘next month it could be me’.”

He talked to school board members about how they can conduct simulations that he says work.  “We get tremendous affect with it and it dramatically improves the speed and reliability of decision making under stress. And very easy to do, not expensive, they don’t have to buy anything. And any school in Iowa can do this,” Dorn says.

Dorn’s bio says he is a former police officer who became a safety specialist and has traveled around the world helping organizations improve their safety.

(DES MOINES) – Gov. Kim Reynolds ordered all flags in Iowa to fly at half-staff from sunrise to sunset on Friday, November 16, 2018, to honor a fallen U.S. sailor. Navy Carpenter’s Mate 3rd Class William L. Kvidera, of Traer, was killed in action on December 7, 1941, when the USS Oklahoma was attacked by Japanese aircraft at Pearl Harbor. The 22-year-old was accounted for on July 3, 2018. Kvidera’s remains were returned to his family for burial in Traer with full military honors.

William Kvidera

A Mass of Christian Burial for Kvidera will be held 1-p.m. Friday, Nov. 16th, at the St. Paul Catholic Church, in Traer. Flags will be at half-staff on the State Capitol Building and on flag displays in the Capitol Complex. Flags will also be half-staff on all public buildings, grounds and facilities throughout the state.

Individuals, businesses, schools, municipalities, counties and other government subdivisions are encouraged to fly the flag at half-staff for the same length of time as a sign of respect.

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Banking giant Wells Fargo has informed employees that it will lay off 400 workers in the Des Moines area. Local bank spokesman Steve Carlson told the Des Moines Register that the company notified employees in the home lending department on Thursday. The layoffs go into effect early next year. The layoffs announced Thursday were among 1,000 positions cut companywide.

Wells Fargo employs more than 15,500 people in Iowa, including about 14,000 in metropolitan Des Moines. The San Francisco-based bank announced in September it planned to reduce its national workforce by more than 26,000 jobs. The bank has faced several investigations in recent years over practices including the opening of accounts without customers’ consent, charging clients for unnecessary insurance policies, and imposing unfair fees tied to mortgage rates.

Montgomery County conducted its first post-election audit Thursday under a new law designed to monitor and protect election processes.  Auditor Stephanie Burke said Thursday, “The audit was a perfect match to the result recorded on the election tabulator.”

Iowa law now requires that after each general election, the Secretary of State will choose, at random, one precinct in each Iowa county to be audited. County auditors must then supervise a hand count of the ballots from that precinct and compare the results from the presidential or gubernatorial election, depending on the year, to the voting machine count from election night.

In Montgomery County, the Secretary of State chose the Absentee precinct. The process for auditing the absentee precinct is a little different than auditing all other precincts. During the absentee audit, the same machine is used and at least 50% of the ballots must be ran through the machine during the audit. 800 ballots were counted. The machine count and hand count matched perfectly.

“That’s what we like to see,” said County Auditor Stephanie Burke. “the hand count shows that our machines are accurately counting the ballots.” Burke said that the new law is in response to concerns about computer hackers altering election results. “Since our voting machines, as well as our programming and tabulating computers, aren’t hooked up to the internet, hacking the vote is highly unlikely, but not totally impossible,” she said. “Being able to rely on paper ballots should give us confidence in the integrity of our voting system.”

Four precinct election officials, representing the two major political parties, conducted the count under the supervision of Elections Clerk, Beth Peterson, and Auditor Stephanie Burke. As required in the law, the Auditor’s Office notified the county chairs of both of the two major political parties. The process was witnessed by a representative of the Montgomery County Democrats.

Questions about the post-election audit and other election matters may be directed to the Montgomery County Auditor’s office at 712-623-5127.