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STATE STUDY
Charter schools on decline in Kansas By Peter Hancock phancock@ljworld.com
Richard Gwin/Journal-World Photo
A FROG HIDES IN AN OKRA PLANT early Thursday as temperatures in Lawrence soared into the 90s with rain. This week is expected to be drier and cooler with highs in the 80s.
Crew to investigate K-10 safety issue Area resident says patch of highway especially dangerous after heavy rain By Ben Unglesbee bunglesbee@ljworld.com
Richard Gwin/Journal-World Photo
DAN STRIMPLE, a co-owner of Cutter’s Smokehouse at 218 E. 20th in Eudora, has seen cars hydroplaning in heavy rain on Kansas Highway 10 near the Eudora exit.
The tire tracks look fresh, the grass still flattened. They run to the right from the highway shoulder, then start to curve left as the driver skidded through grass and dug into soil. If Dan Strimple’s hunch is right, they’re the all-too-regular consequence of heavy rain, in this case on Thursday night, along a patch of Kansas Highway 10 in Eudora.
Kansas has never been known as a hotbed of charter schools. But new figures from the Kansas State Department of Education show that the number of charter schools — quasi-independent schools that receive public funding but are usually managed by outside boards or private companies — is rapidly declining in Kansas, with only 11 still operating this year. That’s down from 15 last year and 33 as recently as 2010. Jessica Noble, who coordinates charter and virtual school programs for the state, provided those numbers to the State Board of Education last week. She said the main reason for the SCHOOLS decline is that school districts are choosing to convert the charter schools back into regular schools. That was the case in the Humboldt school district in Allen County, where the district’s elementary school was converted to a charter school a few years ago, mainly so it could obtain grant funds to buy computers and equipment to provide technology-enhanced education. This year, the school district converted it back to a regular elementary school.
Strimple says there have been plenty of other tracks like these during the past two years. Altogether, he said, he has seen 15 or 20 vehicles in the ditch near this strip of the highway. After seeing so many tracks and marooned cars following heavy rains, Strimple knew something wasn’t In search of grant money right. “I thought, ‘Uh oh. We “The state of Kansas had gotten some mongot a problem,’� he said. ey from the federal government, and they Strimple started to notice were giving out some grants,� said Humboldt regular appearances of skid Elementary Principal Kay Bolt. “We were one Please see SAFETY, page 2A
Please see CHARTER, page 2A
Local scientist a witness to Voyager 1’s historic journey By Ben Unglesbee bunglesbee@ljworld.com
A year ago, at a 35th anniversary celebration of Voyager 1’s 1977 launch, Tom Armstrong was listening to some of the engineers and launch crew that worked to lob Voyager into space. They were talking about a moment shortly after launch when things could have gone very differently for the mission. With fuel on Voyager’s booster running low, they said there was
about a two-second window to get the craft out of Earth’s orbit. One second more, and it might have missed its flight path. And the trajectory of Armstrong’s life might well have changed with Voyager’s. That’s because so much of Armstrong’s life has been tied to the space probe. He has watched space exploration history as it unfolded, from Voyager’s design to the data analysis that led to September’s announcement that Voyager had ventured past the heliosphere and is
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now traveling, at 38,000 miles per hour, through interstellar space. Armstrong, a professor of physics at Kansas University from 1968 to 2003, helped design one of the key scientific instruments on the Voyager. Currently Armstrong, along with fellow scientist Jerry Manweiler, co-owns the Lawrencebased company Fundamental Technologies LLC. The company analyzes reams of
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Humans have never had communication with anything that they could prove was outside or beyond the solar system. Now we’re there. Our generation is the first generation of humans for which this has even been thinkable.� — Tom Armstrong, who helped design a key instrument on Voyager 1
Prepare for the worst
Vol.155/No.266 24 pages
Lawrence-Douglas County Health Services sponsors an eight-hour citizen preparedness class that provides emergency planning tips and information on the different types of natural disasters. Page 3A
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