HUTCHINSON, Kan. (AP) — The Kansas Department of Agriculture is accepting applications from farmers who want to be part of the state’s industrial hemp research program, which state lawmakers created last April.

One of the farmers eager to get on board is PJ Sneed, who is building infrastructure, clearing land and establishing a cover crop on his land in western Reno County.

“I’m very excited; for me, it’s been a long time coming,” Sneed said. “It has for a lot of people, especially the grassroots movement. We’ve all been waiting for this moment.”

Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer signed legislation last April to allow industrial hemp production only for research purposes, with a goal of encouraging the resurgence of hemp as a production crop and to promote economic development. The 2018 federal farm bill also legalized hemp farming.

The agriculture department has spent the last year gathering public input and establishing regulations for the program. Applications are due to the department by March 1.

Before the federal farm bill was approved, Kansas could only establish a research program for hemp growing but the state is now open to establishing commercial growing if the legislature approves.

“So nothing is changing yet. The law that passed last spring and the regulations that go with it are what’s on the books,” agriculture department spokeswoman Heather Lansdowne said.

Lansdowne said the earliest the state could have additional laws to allow industrial hemp would likely be 2020.

Sneed agreed and predicted a large increase in hemp growers in the new future.

“I think in year two you’ll see a huge boom after people see what it is and how it’s grown,” he said. “In 2020 I think you’ll start to see more banks open up for commercial loans and things like that.”

The application process will include background checks and more.

The Hemp Biz Conference and the Planted Association of Kansas, of which Sneed is a member, will host a symposium on hemp growing in Hutchinson on Feb. 23. He said it’s designed to help farmers network and find markets but the focus this year will be on rules and regulations and the application process.

The Kansas Senate expected to pass a resolution Thursday decrying the New York law as harmful to both “unborn children” and women. Twenty-seven of the 40 senators are sponsors, all but one of the chamber’s Republicans. GOP leaders were so eager to send the message that they dispensed with committee hearings and set a vote three days after the measure was introduced.Abortion opponents across the nation have criticized the New York law as allowing abortions up to the moment of birth, with one resolution introduced in South Dakota calling it “barbaric.” The law permits women to end their pregnancies after 24 weeks for health reasons, when the state’s previous law said a woman’s life had to be at risk.But in Kansas, the public condemnation also highlights abortion opponents’ anxiety over what the future holds in their state. The Kansas Supreme Court is considering whether the state constitution protects abortion rights in a lawsuit that threatens to upend nearly a decade’s worth of restrictions and stymie new ones. The court hasn’t ruled — thwarting work on a response.

“Why are we sending this message to New York? Because we want to our let our Kansas Supreme Court know that we would find this abortion mentality in our state as totally unacceptable,” state Sen. Mary Pilcher-Cook, a conservative Kansas City-area Republican, told her colleagues during debate on the resolution.

The New York law was designed to codify protections for a woman’s right to obtain an abortion granted by the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and other court rulings a time when abortion-rights backers fear a more conservative high court might strike down Roe. It replaces a 1970 state law legalizing abortion.

Opposition from “people who are anti-choice” isn’t surprising, said New York state Sen. Liz Krueger, a Manhattan Democrat and a longtime supporter of the legislation.

“Lies and attacks are not going to intimidate New York from standing up for women’s rights,” said Mike Murphy, a spokesman for New York Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, a Yonkers Democrat.

In Kansas, Democratic senators are likely to send their own statement to counter their state’s formal resolution, which would be sent to New York’s governor and all its legislators. Sen. David Haley, a Kansas City Democrat, told his colleagues during their debate that New York “really doesn’t care” that Kansas legislators oppose the law.

Criticism of other states’ laws can spill over into formal action. A handful of liberal states have restricted travel by government employees to states with laws viewed as discriminatory against LGBTQ individuals. Kansas is on a list of nine states targeted by California.

In Missouri, a resolution introduced this week in the state Senate urges GOP Gov. Mike Parson to boycott New York and other states with similar abortion laws and prevent state workers from traveling there except in emergencies.

“Many, many of my constituents have reached out to me and said, ‘What can we do about this?’ Well you know, sorry, there’s not a whole lot we can do about it,” said the resolution’s sponsor, Sen. Paul Wieland, a conservative St. Louis-area Republican.

Kansas Senate President Susan Wagle, a conservative Wichita Republican, said New Yorkers’ celebration of their new law “just made a lot of people cringe.”

“We believe in Kansas in a culture of life, and most people in America believe in protecting life,” Wagle said during the debate on her state’s resolution.

In other red states, officials have condemned the New York law as they’ve pursued new abortion restrictions.

Supporters in Arkansas of a proposed “trigger law” to ban most abortions if Roe is overturned mentioned New York’s policy. In Iowa, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds mentioned it as an impetus behind a proposed state constitutional amendment meant to overturn an Iowa Supreme Court decision last year protecting abortion rights.

In Kansas, legislators have adopted the approach of the anti-abortion group Kansans for Life in seeking incremental expected to survive federal court challenges. The group is pursuing legislation this year to require providers to tell women using medication to terminate their pregnancies that the process still can be reversed after the first of two pills.

But work on any legislation is clouded by the case before the Kansas Supreme Court, which heard arguments from attorneys nearly two years ago.

Abortion opponents haven’t introduced a proposed constitutional change yet, arguing that they need to see how the court actually rules. And Mary Kay Culp, executive director of Kansans for Life, said abortion opponents also could have an easier time building support for an amendment after a ruling than before it.

Meanwhile, abortion opponents acknowledged that it’s helpful to keep abortion issues visible by highlighting opposition to the New York law. Haley said the resolution creates a test vote on abortion issues to help GOP leaders in lobbying for other measures.

“There are other shoes to drop,” Haley said. “By no means at all do I think the discussion regarding abortion is done.”

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By STEPHAN BISAHA

Simplistic crisis plans and missing mandatory training by some Kansas schools led the Kansas Board of Education on Tuesday to reinforce its suicide prevention requirements.

Suicide rates in the United States have been going up for years, but the rates have risen faster in Kansas. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Kansas suicide rate increased by 45 percent from 1999 to 2016.

The youth suicide rate in Kansas more than doubled from 2005 to 2015. That led to the creation of the Youth Suicide Prevention Task Force and its recommendation of a state coordinator focusing on the issue.

“More needs to be done because the problem is right in our face,” said Scott Rothschild, a spokesman for the Kansas Association of School Boards.

Then-Gov. Sam Brownback signed the Jason Flatt Act in 2016. The law required mandatory suicide prevention training for all school employees and detailed crisis plans.

Wichita Public Schools officials said they have noticed an uptick in reporting from their staff regarding suicide concerns since the law passed. Advocates say the law has helped bring more awareness to the issue.

“Before 2016, you would not have seen mental health fairs in the schools,” said Steve Arkins, founder of the suicide prevention foundation Speak Up, located in the Kansas City area. “You would not have seen student councils and clubs develop to try to promote mental wellness in their schools.”

But the act has received some pushback in Kansas. A failed bill in the Kansas Statehouse last year would have removed the need to provide the one-hour annual training to all employees. Some districts have said it’s a waste of resources to train workers who have little-to-no contact with students, such as janitors and plumbers.

Wichita Public Schools trains all its employees in suicide prevention, but district officials question the need to provide training to all workers.

“It’s a great thing to provide that training, but we do question the need to train, for example, seasonal employees,” said Terri Moses, the director of safety services at Wichita Public Schools. “It is a drain on resources and logistically it’s a difficult thing to do.”

A Kansas State Department of Education survey of school districts found more than a third of districts were not providing suicide prevention training to their mental health workers.

The state board adopted the council’s recommendations Tuesday to determine how to better monitor the mandatory training.

The board also approved more flexibility in implementing the training. Schools will now be able to provide specialized training for different personnel, though the one-hour of training for all staff is still required. That would require a change to state law.

KSDE officials say the new law will prevent the annual training from becoming just another hour in a long list of mandated training that employees doze through.

“You get these critical truly life-and-death type discussions that we need to have and they get regulated to a checklist,” said Myron Melton, an education program consultant with KSDE.

The mental health advisory council also took issue with the crisis plans at schools. The state board requires that the plans include guidelines for identifying students with thoughts of suicide, intervention and dealing with the aftermath of suicide.

But most districts had little more in their plans than who workers should contact in the school for all matters related to suicide. KSDE will provide crisis templates to schools and assist in updating their current plans.

“We just want to make sure they have suicide protocols so that it’s clear what they are to do if something happens,” said Kathy Busch, the chair of the Kansas State Board of Education.

Stephan Bisaha reports on education for the Kansas News Service. Follow him on @SteveBisaha.

ST. CHARLES, Mo. (AP) — A Missouri mother who did nothing to protect her infant from fatal abuse at the hands of her boyfriend has been sentenced to 21 years in prison.

22-year-old Megan Hendricks, of Wentzville, was sentenced Friday. She had pleaded guilty in August to a felony count of child abuse resulting in death in the killing of her 9-week-old son.

The boyfriend, 22-year-old Robert Burnette, was sentenced last week to 26 years in prison for beating the infant to death. Authorities say Burnette stuck his fingers down the infant’s throat to get him to stop crying, threw him onto a bed and violently shook him.

The infant died in November 2016 after weeks in the hospital for treatment of brain bleeding, liver contusions and broken bones.

Police say Hendricks saw the abuse but didn’t call for help, then later lied to doctors and police, saying she didn’t know how the baby was injured.

COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) — The University of Missouri has re-established its Graduate School as an academic and administrative unit.

The Columbia Missourian reports former Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin closed the Graduate School in 2014 and created the Office of Graduate Students to replace it. That decision left several graduate and interdisciplinary programs without an academic home.

Shortly after he arrived in August 2017, Chancellor Alexander Cartwright said he would reconsider the Graduate School’s status.

On Thursday, Provost Latha Ramchand announced the new Graduate School will continue the work of the Office of Graduate Students. It also will be the academic home for several interdisciplinary and graduate programs.

The Graduate School will provide resources that the office, which was solely an administrative unit, couldn’t. It also will advocate for graduate programs and student needs.

CAMDENTON, Mo. (AP) — The parents of two suburban Kansas City victims of a Lake of the Ozarks boat crash have filed a lawsuit.

The suit was filed in Camden County, Missouri, Circuit Court on behalf of the families of 23-year-old Joseph LeMark, of Overland Park, Kansas, and 21-year-old Hailey Hochandel, of Olathe, Kansas.

They were killed in May along with 24-year-old Daniel Lewis, who was driving the boat when it slammed into a rock bluff in the dark. Two others were injured, including the boat’s owner, 22-year-old Hayden Frazier.

The suit alleges that Lewis was intoxicated and operated the craft in a negligent and careless manner. It says Frazier was negligent in allowing him to do so.

The suit seeks an unspecified amount in damages.

Ashley Lamb a 22-year-old senior at Kansas State University was also injured in the crash.