Reaching EVERYbody!
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Newsleader St. Joseph
Friday, Nov. 14, 2014 Volume 25, Issue 45 Est. 1989
Town Crier LEAF announces Homeless Student Fund
The District 742 Local Education and Activities Foundation announced it’s opened a Homeless Student Services Fund in response to the needs of homeless students in District 742. Donors who wish to contribute to the fund, which will provide needed school supplies, clothing, food and crisis housing assistance for District 742 homeless students, can make their tax-deductible contribution online at www. leaf742.org or send a check, made out to “LEAF” to the LEAF address of P.O. Box 1132, St. Cloud, MN 56302. For more information, visit thenewsleaders.com.
GREAT to hold auditions for Peter Pan
The Great River Educational Arts Theatre will hold open auditions for the musical adaptation of Peter Pan on Saturday and Sunday, Nov. 15 and 16 at GREAT Studios, 919 St. Germain St. W., downtown St. Cloud. There are 40 roles for a multicultural cast, ages 7 through adult; no experience necessary. For more information, visit thenewsleaders.com and click on Nov. 14 Criers.
Parkinson’s group hosts author Nov. 17
St. Cloud Area Parkinson’s Support group will host Susan Gangsei, author of “The Light in the Middle of the Tunnel” and “Stuck With It, Not In It,” during its monthly meeting from 1-2:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 17 at Independent Lifestyles, 215 N. Benton Drive, Sauk Rapids. November is National Caregivers Awareness Month. All meetings are free and open to the public. For more information, call 320-281-2040.
Blizzard blasts area, forces closings by Dennis Dalman editor@thenewsleaders.com
Central Minnesota was struck with a blizzard Nov. 10, forcing school closings across Minnesota, including in St. Joseph, where around one foot of snow fell. St. Cloud school district started two hours late Tuesday. Street crews in the area worked hard in the wee hours of Monday well through the daylight hours, as well as on Tuesday to clear roads. Every school in central Minnesota was closed Monday or had late-morning starts the next day, including the universities and the vocational school. Many other meetings and events were also canceled because travel was, at best, fraught with dangers. Massive amounts of blowing snow fell over much of the northern United States, and in central Minnesota it was the most snow received this early in the season since a blizzard that happened on Halloween day in 1991. It also topped the record for snow on Nov. 10, breaking the previous record, which was only two inches that fell on Nov. 10, 1996. The snow began falling at 2 a.m. Monday and Blizzard • page 3
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Culligan
photo by Logan Gruber
Eric Poissant, of St. Cloud, cleared snow while working for the city of St. Joseph Wednesday morning. Poissant said the city was being very efficient with taxpayer money. The crews had been out all morning Wednesday, and on Tuesday their day started at 2 a.m. Poissant and his family hope to move to St. Joseph soon.
Stock’s old history books release many memories by Dennis Dalman editor@thenewsleaders.com
Although Gilbert Stock has lived for 83 years midway between St. Joseph and Sartell, his heart has always been closest to St. Joseph. That is one reason he intends to donate a 100-year-old book to the St. Joseph Area Historical Society. The book is actually two big fat dark-brown leather books with goldembossed spines, Volumes I and II, of History of Stearns County, Minnesota by William Bell Mitchell. Published in 1915 by H.C. Cooper Jr. and Co. of Chicago, the 1,536-page work
includes many old photographs of buildings, as well as mostly studio-taken portraits of families and individuals. The books also contain hundreds of brief histories of many of the families who settled and lived in Stearns County at that time, including Gilbert Stock’s ancestors. The old books, in very good condition, have a long and somewhat mysterious history in the Stock family. One day, some years ago, Gilbert’s wife, Theresa, asked him to get a ladder and go up into the attic of the old farmhouse, just to see what could possibly be stored up there. Gilbert fetched the ladder, climbed it, opened the attic hatch door, peered
around, then reached onto a nearby board where he discovered the two old dust-covered books. He and Theresa figured Gilbert’s father, Joseph, had enjoyed perusing those history books, which he would store – when not reading them – in the attic to keep them out of the reach of his many young children, who might damage them. Later, the Stocks loaned the books to people they knew who wanted to read about their ancestors, then they lost track of the books until Gilbert did some “detective” work and traced them to a resident in Gilman, who Stock • page 4
Reading Corps tutors achieve great successes with students
Sabre dancers host Nov. 15 show
The Sartell Sabre Dance Team will host the annual invitational dance shows at 2 and 6 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 15 at Sartell High School. Tickets may be purchased at the door. Concessions, T-shirts and flowers will be available for purchase. The Nov. 15 show will feature the varsity dance teams from four area high schools: the Apollo Astronettes, the Cathedral Crusaderettes, the Rocori Rockettes and the Tech Tigerettes.
Postal Patron
by Dennis Dalman editor@thenewsleaders.com
contributed photo
Brayden Klinkner practices letter formation on a pretend cast on the arm of reading tutor Kara Rud. The cast was part of a demonstration from a visiting surgeon at the school who explained to the children how casts work to help heal broken bones.
Kara Rud loves working with pre-school children so much she changed her career goal from non-profit management to early-childhood education. Rud, who works with pre-schoolers at Kennedy Community School, is a volunteer reading tutor in the Minnesota Reading Corps program. The Reading Corps is part of AmeriCorps, founded in 1993, a kind of domestic version of the Peace Corps. Rud is one of 1,600 Reading Corps tutors at Minnesota’s 800 school and Head Start sites. At Kennedy, Rud works with the students of teacher Tracy Eiynck. Their goal is to get pre-K students to read at their grade levels by the time they are in third grade. There are Reading Corps tutors for grades pre-K through 3. There is also a math component for students in grades 4-8.
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Rud loves nothing more than to see that “light” go on in a child’s head when the learning starts to work. “When things start to click, I can just see it, whether it’s letter sounds or when we’re doing rhymes,” she said. “They get excited looks on their faces, and then they are so proud of themselves.” Rud tutors about half of the 16 children in the pre-K class. She works one-on-one with just one or two students at a time for five to 10 minutes. She also helps out with other tasks in the classroom. Einyck also serves as Rud’s coach. They sit down together and carefully review the data, what works and what does not. Through her daily interactions, not just her tutoring work, the students come to know, like and trust Rud, who knows how to make learning lots of fun through activities that teach letter names, sounds, rhyming, alliteration and other building blocks of learning how to read. She also sings Reading • page 3