Rural Missouri classrooms were the first to use a promising new way to teach students how to read

Ashley Wood, a second-year kindergarten teacher in Phelps County, Missouri, is learning 
to teach her students reading with the new coaching model. (Photo via Missouri Independent)

Teachers in rural Missouri are helping students learn to read with a model that applies the science of reading to student learning, paired with teacher support and coaching. 

Through the Rural Schools Early Literacy Collaborative, literacy coaches from the national nonprofit TNTP "work directly with teachers in [select Missouri] schools, helping them implement structured reading instruction grounded in the science of reading," reports William Hehemann of the Missouri Independent.

Part of the effort includes coaches trained in reading sciences who regularly visit classrooms to observe teachers in action and model foundational lessons with students for practicing teachers. Hehemann explains, "Teachers receive feedback tied directly to classroom instruction. Coaching conversations are specific, practical and immediately applicable, accelerating growth in instructional practice."

The RSELC is working to improve reading proficiency across the state, where a majority of students are struggling. Hehemann reports, "According to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 27% of Missouri fourth-grade students scored at or above the proficient reading level . . . . Improving early literacy is critical because reading proficiency by the end of third grade is closely linked to long-term academic success."

Early data show that students taught with the coaching model have made significant strides in reading skills. "In Rolla Public Schools, more than 94% of first-grade students demonstrated year-long growth in reading after coaching support began," Hehemann writes. "In Dent-Phelps R-III School District, the share of first graders reading at grade level increased from 25.5% in the fall to 89.4% by the spring."

What began as an experiment in one rural Missouri county is "expanding across the state," Hehemann reports. "The coaching model is being implemented in 60 schools statewide. . . . Education leaders say the expansion reflects growing recognition that improving reading outcomes requires not only a strong curriculum but also sustained coaching and support for teachers."

Surrounded by crops sprayed with pesticides, Missouri's Bootheel residents report high rates of cancer

Small farming communities dot the Bootheel counties of Missouri, where agriculture is king, and residents live alongside crops regularly treated with pesticides. "The counties with the highest use of pesticides per square mile are all located in Missouri’s Bootheel," report Alex Cox, Adeleine Halsey, Kyla Pehr and Savvy Sleevar of Investigate Midwest. "Many of these counties have some of the state’s highest cancer rates, and their health care options are dwindling."

Dunklin County, Missouri, sits along the western border of the Bootheel and boasts the state's biggest cotton harvest. It also ranks among the state's "top 10 counties with the highest rates of colon cancer," Investigate Midwest reports.

Dunklin County resident Bobby Bibbs is a living example. "She discovered she had cancer in her colon in December 2023, which then metastasized to her liver, making it a stage four diagnosis," Cox writes. Bibbs told reporters, "There are so many (cases) where we are from. It’s got to be coming from somewhere.”

Like her neighbors, Bibbs lives surrounded by crops sprayed with pesticides. Cox writes, "Multiple scientific studies have explored a connection between pesticide use and cancer, pointing to a silent public health crisis hitting rural communities particularly hard."

For tightly-knit rural communities, a cancer diagnosis is shared along the grapevine, as are concerns that the area's only hospital closed in 2018. Investigate Midwest reports, "For cancer care, folks from Dunklin County often travel an hour to Jonesboro, Arkansas, or an hour-and-a-half to Cape Girardeau in Missouri."

Bootheel residents are often hemmed into farming to make a living. "As manufacturing jobs moved out of many places in the Bootheel, [towns] felt the economic sting," the article explains. "One industry that remains is agriculture."

While many area farmers see using agricultural chemicals as a way to protect their livelihoods, most are aware of the potential dangers. Jan McElwrath who has lived in Dunklin County most of her life, told Investigate Midwest, "We’re surrounded by agriculture. We recognize (chemicals) as a risk, but our economy here is very dependent on agriculture.”

California man turning old Kansas limestone mine into doomsday survival shelter

Californian Robert Vicino is preparing for the end of the world by making plans to turn a limestone cave in rural Kansas into a survival shelter. The cave is a former Army storage facility on the southeast edge of Atchison, about 50 miles northwest of Kansas City, Mo., reports Bill Draper for The Associated Press. The caverns, which are 100 to 150 feet below the surface, and have a constant temperature, were created by limestone mining operations that started in the late 1880s. (AP photo by Orlin Wagner)

Investor Coby Cullins bought the property for $510,000 and leased the 45-acre west cave to Vicino, who plans to call it Vivos Shelter and Resort, reports Draper. Cullins is marketing the 25-acre eastern cave to local businesses. Vicino's shelter will "have enough space for more than 1,000 RVs and up to about 5,000 people." The shelter, though, will be members only, and will require a steep fee to occupy. Vicino also owns other shelters, including one in Indiana, but won't say where "because he fears there would be anarchy in the event of a world-changing catastrophe." (Read more)

Missouri town of 35 gives OK to medical marijuana

One tiny Missouri town has passed a resolution legalizing medical marijuana. Cliff Village, with a population of around 35, saw its voters approve physician-prescribed use and growth of the drug earlier this month. But supporters say the ordinance primarily seeks to show support for legalization on a broader scale, with state law prohibiting medical marijuana use and federal law enforcement agencies raiding medical marijuana establishments even in states where its use is legalized. “It’s not Kansas City, (but) it still shows that people on the community level usually want this,” said Allen St. Pierre of the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws. (Encarta map)

“This is symbolism, pure and simple,” said Mayor Joe Blundell, who says that marijuana has helped ease pain he suffers following a train accident which left him in a wheelchair. “I would like to be the brave one who grows the first plant, but they’ve built a lot of cages for the people who stick their necks out.” He says that his high profile has led him to quit smoking pot, he said that his use was not recreational: “I’m not just stoning myself out. It allowed me to function.” But "skeptics say research is slim to support its medicinal benefits and call it a ruse for the partying crowd," writes Scott Canon in The Kansas City Star. (Read more)

St. Louis paper notes Ky. and Okla. use databases to track purchases of key meth ingredients

Pharmacies have been the first line of defense when it comes to stopping the production of methamphetamine, with many states passing laws regulating the purchase of a key ingredient, the cold medicine pseudoephedrine. In many states, purchases and buyers are logged at pharmacies, but a lack of oversight of such logs has meant they often provide little help to law enforcement.

In Kentucky and Oklahoma, however, pharmacies and police have turned those logs into online databases that have prevented illegal sales as well as led to meth lab busts. Such systems offer a model for Illinois and Missouri, which led the nation in meth busts with 1,189 — twice as many as any other state — last year, reports Christine Byers of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

In Laurel County, Kentucky, police have been using MethCheck software for the past two years. (P-D photo by J.B. Forbes shows Detective Brian Lewis talking with pharmacists in the county about possible illegal purchases of pseudoephedrine.) "In the first year of using the program, the number of labs the squad seized more than quadrupled," Byers writes. "Using federal and state money, Kentucky plans to spend about $500,000 to link its 1,290 pharmacies statewide in June." The linking of pharmacies is the key, because it means meth producers can't just go from store to store, buying pseudoephedrine and signing logs that remain isolated. A similar system already is in place in Oklahoma, where officials said the database linking the state's 1,485 pharmacies has helped reduce the number of confirmed meth labs by 92 percent since 2005. "You're basically putting the 'Welcome' mat out for meth cooks to come to your state if you don't have a database," Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics spokesman Mark Woodward told Byers.

In Missouri, lawmakers have passed bills to create a system modeled after Oklahoma's, but the necessary funding won't be available until next year. In the meantime, some counties are pursuing grants to establish their own databases now. Oregon, however, has taken an alternative approach by making pseudoephedrine a prescription drug, a move the state said makes expensive databases unnecessary. (Read more) As we noted last week, meth cooks can find other ways of securing key ingredients, such as stealing from farms.

Flood forces Missouri paper's staff to higher ground; it freeezes bound volumes for preservation

As storms soaked the Midwest this week, floods caused major damage, especially in Missouri, where 47 counties have been declared disaster areas. In southwestern Missouri, the town of Monnett experienced historic flooding, and the staff of its local newspaper, The Monett Times, was caught in some of the worst of it. (Times photo: A firefighter guides production manager Charlotte Brady across a flooded street. Below, another view of the flooding.)

Thursday morning, members of the 4,000-circulation evening paper's staff had to be rescued by firefighters, according to the paper's staff report. The staff had started putting up the floodgates and sandbags by 7 a.m. to stop the rising waters of nearby Kelly Creek, but by 9 a.m., firefighters began preparing for a rescue effort as waters were waist-high in the street outside the newspaper office.

The water started to recede after 11 a.m., and managing editor Murray Bishoff navigated his way into the building. Inside, water had reached a height of five-and-a-half inches, but with with water still on the floor — and near the high-voltage press equipment — The Times could not print for the first time in its history. Instead, The Times published its Thursday edition online by 9:30 p.m. Included in that coverage was Bishoff's report on the flood.

UPDATE, April 15: Bishoff reports to us that 120 bound volumes of his newspaper (30 years' worth) were damaged by the flood, and he is freezing them to prevent development of mold pending restoration. "The Missouri State Historical Society directed us to get them frozen immediately, so yesterday and today we wrapped them in plastic and hauled them off to the local production plant for International Dehydrated Foods, who will deep freeze them for us to stop the mold," he wrote. "The Northeast Document Conservation Center tells me that if you get a filing cabinet soaked, freeze your files in two-inch sections, divided by wax paper so you can pull two inches out at a time and thaw them bit by bit, rather than everything at once. For my bound volumes, a disaster recovery provider should be contacted next. They further advised me that vacuum freeze drying will cause the least amount of distortion. Two firms, Munters Corp., based in Chicago (800-686-8377), and BMS Catastrophe, based in Fort Worth (800-433-2940), specialize in that process."

Biodiesel plants pose threat of water pollution

Biodiesel plants, touted as a largely non-polluting source of renewable energy, are causing water pollution in Iowa, Missouri, Alabama and probably other states, reports The New York Times.

"The discharges, which can be hazardous to birds and fish, have many people scratching their heads over the seeming incongruity of pollution from an industry that sells products with the promise of blue skies and clear streams," Brenda Goodman writes. But a Missouri official "said she was warned a year ago by colleagues in other states that biodiesel producers were dumping glycerin, the main byproduct of biodiesel production, contaminated with methanol, another waste product that is classified as hazardous. . . . In January, a grand jury indicted a Missouri businessman in the discharge, which killed at least 25,000 fish and wiped out the population of fat pocketbook mussels, an endangered species. "

An engineer for the National Biodiesel Board told Goodman that some producers of the fuel have had problems complying with environmental rules, "but says those violations have been infrequent in an industry that nearly doubled in size in one year, to 160 plants in the United States at the end of 2007 from 90 plants at the end of 2006," Goodman writes.

Citing climate change and costs, feds suspend loans for rural electric cooperatives' coal-fired plants

Concerns over climate change, and the prospect of limits on greenhouse gases, recently prompted major banks to add to stricter emissions standards to any financing for coal-fired power plants. Now those same worries are complicating public financing for rural electric cooperatives, which get 80 percent of their power from coal.

"The federal government is suspending a major loan program for coal-fired power plants in rural communities, saying the uncertainties of climate change and rising construction costs make the loans too risky," reports Matthew Brown of The Associated Press.

Since 2001, $1.3 billion in loans had been issued for new plant construction, but "none will be issued this year and likely none in 2009, James Newby, assistant administrator for the Rural Utilities Service, a branch of the Department of Agriculture, said Tuesday," Brown writes. Projects in Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky and Missouri had been seeking a total of $1.3 billion in loans at the time of the suspension. (Read more) We reported on cancellation of the Missouri plant yesterday.

UPDATE, March 13: Steven Mufson of The Washington Post catches up, and expands, on the story. To read his report, click here.

Rural co-op cancels coal-fired power plant in Mo.

Yet another coal-fired power plant, this one planned for western Missouri and serving the great majority of the state's rural electric customers, has been scratched because of "rising costs and an uncertain regulatory climate," The Associated Press reports.

"A member of the board of Associated Electric Cooperative Inc. says it has voted to delay the project indefinitely," AP reports. "Growing concern over global warming has led to speculation that the federal government will soon regulate greenhouse gases." Several other electric utilities have canceled or postponed plants for the same reason. (Read more)
The large rural utility serves 850,000 customers of six regional and 51 local electric cooperatives in Missouri, northeast Oklahoma and southeast Iowa. It wanted to build a 780-megawatt plant near Norborne, a town of 779 about an hour east of Kansas City. (Encarta map) Its Web site says it is the only Missouri utility with wind power on its system.

Missouri Press Association plans ad campaign to combat newspaper circulation declines

With the struggles of major newspapers much in the news, the Missouri Press Association wants to address the issues that are behind declines in circulation and readership. In February's Bulletin, the MPA's publication, the organization announced it would be working with Strategists LLC to "develop a message on the value of newspapers to reach and influence your existing and potential subscribers and readers."

MPA wants input from newspapers in the early stages of this process, as it seeks to combat negative perceptions of newspapers. "The perception that we represent an outdated, maturing industry that's tied to old technology is wrong and it has hurt us . . . We are the source of the vast majority of news and information in our communities," the MPA writes in the Bulletin. "It's important for us to tell the story." (Read more)

MPA Executive Director Doug Crews told us the association plans to hold a March 13 meeting to discuss the initial ideas and visions for the campaign. If you have ideas for him, feel free to contact him. Go here for full contact information for the MPA.

Missouri starts trying to expand rural broadband

Missouri is organizing an effort to get broadband, or high-speed Internet service, into rural areas, and like some other states is using Kentucky as an example.

"The task force is examining a model created by the state of Kentucky," which uses a public-private partnership called ConnectKentucky, reports Rajah Maples of KQHA-TV in Hannibal (and Quincy, Ill.), citing state Sen. Wes Shoemyer. "He says that state has increased its high-speed Internet coverage by at least 40 percent in a just a matter of years." Shoemeyer is a member of the Rural High-Speed Internet Task Force created by Gov. Matt Blunt. "For rural Missouri that this is something that's critical," he told Maples.

"Shoemyer says the committee's first step is mapping out areas that don't have broadband Internet access. Then, the committee will submit those maps to the governor's office and lawmakers later next month." (Read more)

Potentially harmful levels of weedkiller atrazine showing up in streams in Missouri and Indiana

"Atrazine, the second most widely used weedkiller in the country, is showing up in some streams and rivers at levels high enough to potentially harm amphibians, fish and aquatic ecosystems, according to the findings of an extensive Environmental Protection Agency database that has not been made public," reports Juliet Eilperin in The Washington Post.

"The analysis -- conducted by the chemical's manufacturer, Syngenta Crop Protection -- suggests that atrazine has entered streams and rivers in the Midwest at a rate that could harm those ecosystems, several scientific experts said. In two Missouri watersheds, the level of atrazine spiked to reach a 'level of concern' in both 2004 and 2005, according to the EPA, and an Indiana watershed exceeded the threshold in 2005."

The watersheds were not named, but those in Missouri are in the northeast part of the state. Sygenta toxicology chief Tim Pastoor said those two monitoring sites were prone to excessive runoff for various reasons, including vegetation clearance by a farmer. "Syngenta sales agents and local corn growers are trying to reform the practices of the farmer," Eilperin reports. EPA won't release the analysis because Sygenta claims some of the data are proprietary. The Post got the records from from the Natural Resources News Service, a Washington-based nonprofit group focused on environmental issues. (Read more)

GateHouse Media purchases 14 dailies, three non-dailies from Morris Publishing Group

A deal between two community newspaper chains will make 17 newspapers in eight states change hands. GateHouse Media Inc. announced late Tuesday its purchase of 14 dailies, three non-dailies and a commercial printing operation from Morris Publishing Group. The sale totals $115 million, reports Editor & Publisher.

The 14 daily newspapers, mainly in the rural Midwest, range in size from the 4,700-circulation York (Neb.) News-Times to the 21,000-circulation of The Grand Island (Neb.) Independent. Here is the complete list of the dailies and their circulations:

• Dodge City (Kan.) Daily Globe, 9,700
• The Newton Kansan, 7,647
• The Morning Sun, Pittsburg, Kan., 10,312
• Hillsdale (Mich.) Daily News, 7,285
• The Holland (Mich.) Sentinel, 18,345
• Hannibal (Mo.) Courier-Post, 8,171
• The Examiner, Independence, Mo., 14,022
• The Grand Island (Neb.) Independent, 21,204
• York (Neb.) News-Times, 4,695
• The Daily Ardmoreite, Oklahoma, 9,753
• The Shawnee (Okla.) News-Star, 8,830
• Yankton (S.D.) Daily Press & Dakotan, 7,855
• The Oak Ridger in Tennessee, 7,554
• News Chief in Winter Haven, Fla., 9,817

The deal also includes three non-dailies:

• La Estrella (Spanish counterpart of Dodge City Daily Globe)
• The Girard (Kan.) City Press, 1,300
• Vermillion (S.D.) Plain Talk, 1,630

Morris Publishing CEO William S. Morris IV said the sale is "in line with our strategic plan to focus on our larger markets and will enable us to pay down our existing bank debt." Before the sale, the Augusta, Ga.-based Morris Publishing owned and operated 27 daily newspapers, while the Fairport, N.Y.-based GateHouse, one of the nation's largest community newspaper chains, owned and operated 86 dailies. "This is an excellent acquisition opportunity for GateHouse," GateHouse CEO Mike Reed said in a statement. "These are strong local media franchises in small markets, many of which are near existing GateHouse properties and offer compelling synergy opportunities." (Read more)

Missouri dedicates its first wind-energy farm

In northwest Missouri, the Bluegrass Ridge Wind Farm (in a photo by Richard Oswald for the Daily Yonder) became a reality thanks to the cooperation of local landowners, reports Brownfield Network.

The push to create this wind farm, the state's first, began with Tom Carnahan, the son of former Missouri Sen. Jean Carnahan and the late Gov. Mel Carnahan. But he told Brownfield's Julie Harker that nothing could have happened without local support. "Getting the landowners in the community, their support and involvement is key," Carnahan said. "It doesn't matter how good your wind is, if a community doesn't want a wind farm there, there's not gonna be one."

The farm's 27 turbines sit on 8,000 acres. The energy they create will be purchased by Associated Electric Cooperative. John Deere Wind Energy and Carnahan’s Wind Capital Group worked together to build the farm, which was dedicated this week. Two other Missouri wind farms are being developed. (Read more)