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Officials set to approve purchase of trash carts By Chad Lawhorn clawhorn@ljworld.com
used to hire staff, to provide mini-grants for community projects and to expand the number of phone lines and counselors answering the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline — 800-273-8255 — at Headquarters Counseling. The grant also will be used to provide Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training, or ASIST, which is used by the Kansas National Guard. It helps people know how to identify the warning signs and how to get people connected with the supports they need. “It’s a very interactive course that’s been shown to
Get ready to close the lid on Lawrence’s great trash cart debate. After months of hand-wringing, city commissioners at their meeting today will be asked to approve the $885,490 purchase of 21,000 wheeled plastic trash carts that will be distributed to essentially every singlefamily household in the city. The purchase is part of a plan to require households to use the carts rather than traditional trash cans or bags. If approved, the carts likely would be distributed in October. “I’m confident this is going to create a better trash system than what we have Dever now,” said City Commissioner Mike Dever. City leaders are projecting the city’s workers’ compensation claims will drop significantly with the new system because sanitation workers won’t be required routinely to lift heavy trash cans and bags. Instead, hydraulic lifts that currently are on all city trash trucks will be used to dump the carts. The city had about $700,000 worth of workers’ compensation claims in the Solid Waste Division in the last two years. “It is one of the more accident-prone positions in the entire city,” Dever said. “We can’t just keep ignoring that there are ways that will make the lifting much easier.” The idea of mandated carts, however, has not been universally loved. Some residents have complained they won’t have enough
Please see SUICIDE, page 2A
Please see TRASH, page 2A
Nick Krug/Journal-World Photo
LAWRENCE RESIDENT SARAH WALLACE adds a fresh coat of paint to her front-porch railing Monday on New York Street.
Agency gets suicide prevention grant Headquarters receives federal annual award of $480,000 By Karrey Britt kbritt@ljworld.com
Lawrence-based Headquarters Counseling Center recently received a federal three-year, $480,000 annual grant to help reduce suicide attempts and deaths among Kansans age 24 and younger. The grant will be used to expand prevention activities across the state and to set up a resource center and website.
“The bottom line is we want more people to know what to do when somebody is at risk of suicide,” said Headquarters director Marcia Epstein. “This grant will save lives.” Every day, at least one Kansan dies by suicide. It is the second-leading cause of death among Kansans between the ages of 15 and 24, while nationally suicide ranks third in that group. According to the Kansas Department of Health
and Environment, 234 suicide deaths occurred in that age range between 2007 and 2010; six of them were Epstein in Douglas County. Epstein, who also serves as co-chairwoman of the Suicide Prevention Subcommittee of the Governor’s Mental Health Services Planning Council, said the state has had no resources — funding or staff — dedicated to suicide prevention until now. She said the grant will be
Review team at KU in place to consider alarming student behavior By Andy Hyland ahyland@ljworld.com
Say you’re teaching a class at Kansas University and you’re worried about a particular student. Maybe a passage in a paper seems particularly dark or talks about suicide. Maybe someone notices a social media post that looks like a threat. Maybe a student unleashes a loud, verbal attack after receiving a failing grade. Where to call?
Definitely 864-4060, says Frank DeSalvo, associate vice provost for student affairs. That will alert KU’s Student Conduct Review Team, DeSalvo a group of seven people who consider cases where students are exhibiting behavior that others may find alarming.
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ter, is another team member. He said that while many universities — such as Arizona State, where he worked before coming to KU — had these teams in place, many more formed after the Virginia Tech shooting. “I think Virginia Tech probably opened the eyes to a lot of different campuses,” Shoemaker said. A similar team at the University of Colorado considered the case of James Holmes, who now faces 24 counts of first-degree
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The group was formed in April 2008, about a year after a campus shooting at Virginia Tech University that left 33 people dead. DeSalvo, a member of the team, said the university wanted to pull together experts from a variety of areas of campus to get a sense about why certain behaviors might be occurring and the psychology behind them. Andrew Shoemaker, associate director for KU’s Academic Achievement and Access Cen-
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murder and 116 counts of attempted murder after a shooting July 20 in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater. In that instance, according to the ABC affiliate in Denver, the team took no further action after Holmes began the process of dropping out of school around the same time as the review. At KU, DeSalvo said, responses can vary depending on what the team finds. Upon receiving a call that someone is worried
Bond issue resurfaces
Please see CRISIS, page 2A
Vol.154/No.227 24 pages
The Lawrence school board has again turned its attention to a proposed bond issue that it hopes to put before voters next spring. Page 3A
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