Photo finish: Americans edged out for gold in Rio.
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THE IOLA REGISTER Locally owned since 1867
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Tuesday, August 16, 2016
One-room schoolhouse tales recalled Teachers recall pie suppers, wood stoves, outhouses By RICK DANLEY The Iola Register
J
ust as we recently lost the last of the living World War I vets, time will remove, perhaps in the turn of another generation, the last of the women who taught in a one-room schoolhouse. But for an hour last Thursday, three of the most charming such specimens from this neck of the Midwest stood before an audience of more than 50 and, with sturdy voices, relayed their memories of life in a country school. At 17 years old, fresh out of junior college at Fort Scott, Bonita Holeman was in need of a job. One day she received word that the teacher at the Pleasant Ridge School, in Bourbon County, had just left her post. And so, without delay, Holeman straddled her horse and rode the 5 or 6 miles down the road to apply. “Well,” Holeman said, looking back nearly 75 years, “I got it. And, once there, I was cook, janitor, nurse, and teacher of all grades.” The great variety of duties that awaited a teacher at
Mary Louise Wilson, center, speaks about her experiences as a one-room schoolhouse instructor Thursday at a Iola Public Library program on the history of the schools. Listening are fellow instructors Prudence Fronk, left, and Bonita Holeman. REGISTER/RICK DANLEY a one-room schoolhouse was a key feature of Thursday’s panel discussion at the Iola library. “You had to sweep the floor, wash the boards, carry in your coal, and then, in winter, build your fire,” Holeman recalled. “And of course we only had one bucket of water and one dipper. For everybody.” “Once a week I tried to go around and check their hands to make sure they had washed them well and that there was no impetigo going around,” remembered Mary Louise
Study: Pregnancy, use of acetominophen questioned By MELISSA HEALY Los Angeles Times
Acetaminophen, long the mainstay of a pregnant woman’s pain-relief arsenal, has been linked to behavioral problems in children born to mothers who used it during pregnancy. Research published Monday by the journal JAMA See STUDY | Page A3
Wilson, who, around the same time, began her teaching career at the Limestone School, also in Bourbon County, about 3 miles north of Bronson. “But the thing I still think about are the hot lunches,” said Wilson. “That was quite a job, especially for someone right out of high school, fixing lunches for all those children. I’ll tell you, I didn’t think when I started to teach school that I would be holding a book in my left hand and stirring a spoon with my right.”
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Teachers: Schedule change benefits student athletes By JASON TIDD The Iola Register
Editor note: This is the second half of a story written by summer intern Jason Tidd about how Iola High School has changed its class schedule format for the upcoming 2016-17 school year.
Research published Monday found that a woman’s use of acetaminophen at 18 and 32 weeks may link to behavioral problems later in the child’s life. FOTOLIA/TNS
Wilson had only one rule when it came to food — “They had to at least taste it” — but plenty of rules when it came to her classroom. She would start every year with a list. “I would tell them that, in later life, they will have rules too, and that it will be necessary to obey them.” A few of Wilson’s classroom basics: No whispering. No chewing gum. No leaving the school grounds without permission. Also, a student must use special hand signals if she wanted to leave her desk.
“Hold up one finger — that let you go sharpen your pencil,” recalled Wilson. “Hold up two and you could go to the restroom outdoors.” (At one point in the program, a woman in the audience was so moved by the memory of her school outhouses that she had to chime in: “Our school had two outhouses. One for boys and one for girls. And they were fancy — they were two-holers!”) But rules weren’t a casual luxury in a one-room schoolhouse, where there were often dozens of kids packed into a class, sometimes ranging in age from 6 to 20. They were necessary. Playing hooky was the most common infraction in those years. Wilson recalled a couple of boys who hid out in the pasture for a day instead of attending lessons. Every now and then she’d see them pop up on a distant haystack, then jump down again and scamper off. “They were having a playful day. Well, when they came back to school, I told them: ‘You’ve been playing, so now you have to make up the time that you were playing and we were working.’ Oh, they cried — they said, ‘Oh, no, ma’am! Why, we didn’t think you’d do that! We thought you’d spank us and you couldn’t hit hard enough for it to hurt!’” But teachers weren’t only there to mete out punishment. Occasionally, especially
Student-athletes were hurt the most by the old block scheduling system at Iola High School because of athletic absences, music instructor Matt Kleopfer
contended. (The format has changed back this school year to a traditional hourly schedule.) In block scheduling, four classes met every other day for 87-minute periods. “A lot of the kids in high school have some pretty severe attendance issues, whether it be tardies or athletic absences,” Kleopfer said of the block scheduling. “You might go a whole week without seeing a kid if See SCHEDULE | Page A6
Brownback says election wasn’t rejection of his policies By JIM MCLEAN Kansas Health Institute
The results of the recent primary election haven’t pushed Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback off his talking points. In a rare informal conversation with Statehouse reporters late last week, Brownback was asked whether he interpreted the primary results as a rejection of his policies, his controversial income tax cuts in particular. “I consider them (the results) to be a frustration with the budget, with K-12 (education) funding because those are the things I’m hearing the most about,” Brownback said, conceding that media coverage has led many Kansans to believe that his tax cuts are responsible for the state’s chronic budget problems. “There’s been very little coverage of positive sides of business growth in the state,”
he said, noting that smallbusiness growth had been particularly robust on the Kansas side of the line in the Kansas City metropolitan area. Asked why Kansas was still among the bottom 10 states in job growth, Brownback pointed to the low unemployment rate. “We’re at a 3.8 percent unemployment rate,” he said. “We’ve got jobs that we can’t (fill). We need people.” The governor continues to insist that the individual and business income tax cuts he pushed through the 2012 Legislature are not responsible for revenue shortfalls that have forced cuts in Medicaid, higher education, highways and children’s programs. Downturns in mainstays of the Kansas economy — agriculture, oil and gas, and the aircraft industry — are responsible for the deep and sustained plunge in revenue
Quote of the day Vol. 118, No. 203
In a rare, informal conversation with Statehouse reporters late last week, Brownback said the results of the recent primary election aren’t causing him to reconsider his positions on tax cuts, school finance or Medicaid expansion. KHI/JIM MCLEAN collections, he said. “We had contraction in the Kansas economy, and I think everybody’s been frustrated by that. I certainly have been,”
Brownback said. Tom Cox begs to differ. A moderate Republican, Cox beat conservative Rep. Brett Hildabrand, from Shawnee, in
“To find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth.” — Pearl S. Buck, author 75 Cents
the Republican primary. In a post-election interview with the Topeka Capital-Journal, Cox said voters he talked with while campaigning doorto-door wanted to send a message to Brownback. “It was 100 percent a repudiation of his policies and specifically, the No. 1 was actually tax, not education,” Cox said. Several conservative lawmakers who helped Brownback pass those tax cuts won’t be back. Some retired rather than face the voters. But others, like Hildabrand, were defeated by challengers who pledged to stop the bleeding and restore stability to the state budget. Many primary winners also support expanding KanCare, the state’s privatized Medicaid program. Kansas hospitals and other provider organizations have See POLICIES | Page A6
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