(Red Oak, Iowa) – Police in Red Oak report a woman was arrested early this (Tuesday) morning on Arson and Criminal Mischief charges. 38-year-old Sara Sue Batten, of Red Oak, was arrested at around 12:15-a.m. in the 600 block of E. Reed Street. She was charged with Criminal Mischief in the 5th Degree (Simple Misdemeanor) and Felony 1st Degree Arson. Batten was being held in the Montgomery County Jail on a $25,000 bond.

Separately, Red Oak Police arrested 41-year-old Matthew Wayne Echternach, for Driving While Barred. He was arrested Monday night in the 200 block of E. Oak Street and was being held on a $2,000 bond.

CLIVE, Iowa — For the third time in three months a  person has won a large prize in the Lucky for Life game.  According to the Iowa Lottery, the winning ticket was purchased at the Kum & Go at 3105 Grand Prairie Parkway in Waukee. It matched the first five numbers but missed the Lucky Ball. The numbers were 9-12-22-36-45 and Lucky Ball 3.

The ticket comes with a $25,000 a year for life prize. It hasn’t been claimed yet, so check your tickets! If you’re the lucky winner the prize must be claimed at Iowa Lottery headquarters in Clive within 180 days.

In October a Des Moines man also won the second level prize of $25,000 a year for life and in November another Des Moines man won the top prize of $1,000 a day for life. Since the game started in 2016 there have been 23 Iowans who’ve won the top two prizes.

OMAHA, Neb. — A man from northwest Iowa who was attempting to open the cabin doors of a plane before takeoff was sentenced last week in federal court, for assaulting a flight attendant in Omaha. According to reports, 37-year-old Wesley Orban, of Ireton, will serve three years probation for assault in a special aircraft jurisdiction. Orban was aboard a plane that was about to depart from Eppley heading to LaGuardia Airport in New York in November 2023.

A passenger told authorities that Orban began yelling “God is real” and spoke of demons, then jumped from his seat and ran toward the front of the plane, according to court documents. Flight attendants heard Orban yelling, “open the doors” and he started pounding on the cabin doors, attempting to open them, according to court documents.

A flight attendant and four other passengers were able to subdue Orban, who then said, “I’m embarrassed, I don’t know why I did that,” court documents state. The flight was suspended and the airplane was returned to the gate, with Orban being taken into custody by the Omaha Airport Authority Police Department.

(Radio Iowa) – There’s a shortage of school bus drivers nationwide — and in Iowa. David Johnson, executive director of the Iowa Pupil Transportation Association, says it’s difficult to get younger people to consider the job because it requires working part-time — in the early morning and then after school. “That is the big struggle,” he says. “You really don’t have time to do a job in between.” Being a driver does require certain skills, according to Johnson.

“A teacher has 20 students in front of them. A bus driver has 50 students behind them and you can have a very calm route, you can have a very chaotic route. It kind of depends,” Johnson says. “Most of the people I talk to, once they get into it and do it, they love it.” Johnson, who used to manage school bus routes for the Van Meter School District, says drivers would often tell him they’d only drive for one more year — but then agree to drive for the next school year because they liked the work.

The average age of a school bus driver in the U-S is 57. Johnson says some older drivers did decide to retire once the pandemic put a stop to their daily routes — and that worsened the driver shortage.  “I think at the same time, right after COVID the feds put in more training you have to get a license and I think that hurt us as well,” Johnson says. “People are like: ‘I’m not going to go through all of this just to drive a bus for three hours a day.'” Johnson says there may be changes, though, in the federal rules that require entry level training for all those seeking a commercial drivers license, regardless of whether they intend to operate a semi or a school bus.

“There’s a lot of steps that school bus drivers have to go through,” he says. “They’re never going to drive a semi across the country, so they’re taking that stuff out and making it very school bus specific for people who want to get a school bus driver.” School bus drivers in Iowa must be a high school graduate, pass a criminal background check, meet medical requirements AND have a commercial drivers license. The chairman of the Iowa House Education Committee says he’s investigating whether it would be possible to create a transitional license for school bus drivers, a step that could help schools recruit new drivers as they complete C-D-L training.

National data indicates that when schools started this fall, there were about 12 percent fewer bus drivers than there were in 2019.

(Iowa News Service story) – A conflict between federal child labor regulations and those passed by the Iowa Legislature has increased the number of businesses fined for hiring children to do dangerous jobs. The U.S. Department of Labor recently imposed a $171,000 fine against an Iowa company for illegally employing school-age child under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Peter Hird – the secretary-treasurer of the Iowa Federation of Labor – said at the behest of several Iowa businesses, the state lowered the standards for hiring children, to help stem a post-pandemic labor shortage. “Some employers got fined,” said Hird. “They said they were following Iowa law, but the federal law supersedes the Iowa law, so they were getting fined by the federal Department of Labor. Plenty of people were warning the Legislature that that could happen before they passed those laws.”

Federal officials fined Qvest, a Sioux City Pork Processing contractor, for employing 11 children to perform dangerous overnight work cleaning equipment at its pork processing plant. Federal law forbids employing children under 18 in dangerous jobs in meat and poultry processing plants. Hird said Iowa employers pushed for a rollback in state regulations in 2023, as part of a national trend among certain businesses hiring child labor to fill in the gaps where it can’t find adult employees.

He said organized labor pushed back against the changes. “We also have human trafficking going on,” said Hird. “We’ve seen it in Iowa on construction sites, and now we’re seeing it in meat packing plants where kids are showing up to work with school backpacks, but some employers are saying they don’t know that they were kids.”

Hird said the Biden administration has prioritized going after businesses who employ children, but he said he is concerned that the incoming Trump administration might be inclined to side with businesses on the issue. “Obviously, we want employers who are or employing these kids to get caught if they’re doing illegal activity,” said Hird. “Typically, the last time around, the Trump administration’s Department of Labor wasn’t quite as vocal about child labor.”