(Anita, Iowa) – The CAM School Board held their regular monthly meeting Monday evening, in Anita. Shared CAM-Nodaway Valley Superintendent Paul Croghan told KJAN News the Board acted on approving some changes in personnel.

Mr. Croghan said the Board discussed the FY 22/23 School Calendar & Budget for the benefit of new Board member, and recent board members to review the process.

The CAM School Board approved an Education Services Contract with SWCC (Southwestern Community College), with regard to a pilot program taking place across the State for a building operations pathway program.

The program takes place by Zoom Monday and Wednesdays from 8- to 9-a.m., with hands-on experience Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. That might include aerating the football field, check roof-top HVAC units, and learn how contractors adjust to different aspects of building operations. In other business, the Board approved a Budget Guarantee for 2022-23.

And they approved a lease agreement for a CAM storefront on Main street, in Anita.

The Board’s final order of business was discussion with regard to district facilities.

(Radio Iowa) – On the fourth anniversary of the deadliest high school shooting in U-S history, Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley pushed for passage of his bipartisan bill called the EAGLES Act. Grassley, a Republican, says the bill would expand the role of the U-S Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center to identify and manage threats from teenagers before they result in more tragedies. Grassley says, “We would, by amending that assessment center, give it responsibility not only to do what the Secret Service already does there but to prevent school violence.”

Seventeen people were killed at a high school in Parkland, Florida, with 17 more injured. A 19-year-old former student was charged in the Valentine’s Day 2018 killings, which surpassed the Columbine High School massacre that killed 15, including the perpetrators, in Colorado in 1999. Under his bill, Grassley says trained professionals would be tasked with working to identify and manage threats at the high school level before they occur. “My bill would direct experts in child psychology to work closely with the Secret Service Threat Assessment Center to develop proven and evidence-based techniques to identify potential threats,” he says.

Passing the legislation is vital, Grassley says, in the fight to protect schools and to promote safe and healthy learning environments. The measure would establish a Safe School Initiative to expand research on school violence and how to prevent it. Grassley says, “The EAGLES Act will equip schools with needed resources to identify troubled youth and give them the intervention and treatment that they need, hopefully long before an intervention is needed by law enforcement.”

The Parkland, Florida shootings took place at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School where the school mascot is the eagle. Grassley named his bill after that mascot and says the measure has wide bipartisan support in the Senate while an identical bill was introduced in the House. Grassley says the bill is backed by more than 40 state attorneys general.

(Radio Iowa) – A legislative committee has approved emergency rules that will let Iowa school districts continue to use paraeducators hired to work with individual students as substitute teachers in any classroom. The action was necessary as the governor’s public health emergency proclamation which had allowed paraeducators to be subs during the pandemic expires at midnight. The committee is also proposing legislation directing schools to make a good faith effort to find substitute teachers and ending the policy after this school year is over. Representative Megan Jones, a Republican from Sioux Rapids, is the bill’s sponsor. “We don’t want enterprising folks thinking that we should put less qualified people into a classroom and use a para because we can pay them $12 an hour,” Jones says.

Jones also blasted the Board of Educational Examiners for holding a meeting yesterday (Monday) at 7:30 a.m. to reveal its solution to the problem, as that limited the public’s ability to review the regulations that already have been approved 24 hours later. “This process has been very ugly,” Jones said. “…It makes me sick to think of eliminating all of this public notice.”
The executive director of the Board of Educational Examiners says state officials do not know how many paraeducators are employed in Iowa schools. The board’s emergency rule requires schools to ask for waivers when paraeducators are taken away from their main jobs to substitute teach in another classroom. Emily Piper, of the Iowa Association of School Boards, says that’s important “We do share concerns about this being a permanent soluation,” Piper says. “We don’t think this is the answer, long-term, to our sub shortages.”

Melissa Peterson, a lobbyist for the Iowa State Education Association, says there are paraeducator shortages as well.  “These are folks who provide services to some of our most needy and vulnerable students,” Peterson says. Senator Rob Hogg, a Democrat from Cedar Rapids, blasted the governor for letting her public health emergency expire and creating this dilemma in schools that required this scramble to ensure paraeducators can continue to be assigned to substitute teach tomorrow (Wednesday). “This is the failure of the governor’s office to put us in this position. That has to be said today,” Hogg says. “This was totally foreseeable that something like this would happen.”

Hogg’s wife is the media secretary at a Cedar Rapids school, but she’s also a former paraeducator and Hogg says she’s often been assigned to lead a classroom as a substitute teacher over the past two years.

Sheriff’s officials in Union County report a man from Corning became impatient while waiting on a train, and decided to turn into a parking lot. Due to sun glare on his windshield, Lawrence W. Stedman didn’t see a large rock. His vehicle struck the rock and become “high centered” on the rock. There was no damage to the vehicle or rock. The accident happened at around 4-p.m.

Authorities say Monday evening, 38-year-old Alicia Ellen Lovell, of Creston, was driving a 2022 Toyota Camry southbound on Elm Street near Clark Street, in Creston, when according to Lovell, she fell asleep. When her car struck a curb, the woman over-corrected and accelerated into a stop light and power pole. There were no injuries or citations. Damage to the car was estimated at $7,500. The poles sustained an estimated $2,000 damage each.

(Radio Iowa) – An invasive moth that can eat away the leaves of trees has so far been held in check in Iowa. The D-N-R’s Tivon Feeley, monitors the gypsy moth — which is now known as the spongy month. “We’ve caught a few captures statewide this past year, but they are pretty low in number, and mainly in northeast Iowa. If we look back over the years, we’ve had to do some controls to kind of keep those populations at bay — and those have been very successful,” according to Feeley.

He is the D-N-R’s forest health program leader, and says there’s a concern about the population of spongy moths in Wisconsin and Illinois. “What we’re looking at here is how to keep those from spreading over and how to slow that spread down. And that’s what we work on. So we do trap and monitor where they are at,” he says.”We use a technique called mating disruption to prevent them from spreading as quickly. And that’s when you go out to the forest and spray the scent of the female — the pheromone out into the forest — and then they can’t find each other to mate.”

He says they can quickly impact trees. “The caterpillars defoliate trees — they prefer oaks — but there are over 300 species of trees that they will feed off of. The months lay their eggs –hence the name spongy, they look a little spongy — on just about everything from underneath your tire on your R-V, to your boats, you name it,” Feeley says. He says you can help prevent their spread by looking for their eggs if you are in other states. Feeley says they have traps set up to keep an eye on the spongy moth movement. He says they have some 18-hundred delta traps that look like green and orange triangles in nine northeast Iowa counties “It has the scent of the females inside, and when the moth flies by, the male moth gets stuck in there. And that helps us monitor their populations,” Feeley says.

He says Iowa doesn’t have any spongy moth treatments set for this year, but there is one across the river in Wisconsin.