Police are investigating after a vehicle crashed into a pole and a water meter early Tuesday morning.
According to Sgt. Brett Kelley with the St. Joseph Police Department, around 3:12 a.m., a truck hit a KCP&L pole on 19th and Messanie and also caused a water meter to shift and a residential water line to break. Kelley said one resident in the area reported they had no water.
Kelley said all occupants of the truck fled the scene.
A volunteer center at Missouri Western State University aims to connect Griffons with ways to give back to the community.
GriffsGiveBack has been in the idea stage for many years but finally came to life last fall when Brent Rosenauer went to the right person with the idea.
“I started the conversation with Vice President of Student Affairs Shana Meyer about the idea of starting a center where people could come together and find ways to give back to the community,” Rosenauer said. “That day that I met with her, she gave me all the resources I could possibly need, a bunch of people who were interested in helping, an office to host all these ideas out of, a website and all the equipment I needed.”
Brent Rosenauer is Director of GriffsGiveBack. A kickoff campus cleanup event was held in February and over 50 volunteers showed up to help. Rosenauer said community response to the volunteer center has been supportive so far with many wondering why something similar has not existed before now.
“Any non-profits or any people who need help or have a way that a bunch of volunteers from the university can make an impact, they come to me, they come to the center, then we give that idea, that project out to people who are interested in helping,” Rosenauer said. “The amazing thing at Missouri Western is that there are already so many people and so many organizations making an impact, it’s just a matter of how effectively they are doing what they do. GriffsGiveBack is just making it easier for people to make that impact and making the connection between student organizations and non-profit in the community a littler bit simpler.”
Rosenauer said GriffsGiveBack also works to help students find how they can give back in their own way.
“If you’re super passionate about the idea of helping animals or being involved in pet shelters, we’ll find you the resources to make that impact on your own terms,” Rosenauer said. “Just come to GriffsGiveBack with your own skills, your own passion and we’ll find something for you.”
Rosenauer said some upcoming projects include the Great Campus Cleanup Spring Edition and they’re currently looking for anyone with knowledge of how recycling works or is part of a recycling organization to help them with setting up a sustainable recycling system at Missouri Western.
For more information about GriffsGiveBack, click here.
Storm season is underway and this week during Severe Weather Awareness Week everyone is encouraged to refresh their emergency plans.
A statewide tornado drill took place at 10 a.m. Tuesday. Buchanan County Emergency Management Director Bill Brinton said the main thing people should do during Severe Weather Awareness Week is make sure they have a plan or go over their home or business emergency plan.
“When the sirens go off it’s not necessarily a time to go outside and look for the tornado, it’s about going to somewhere in your house,” Brinton said. “It’s about whether you’re going to be safe, it’s whether it would be a basement away from the windows or if you don’t have a basement, go into a closet and possibly cover yourself up with a blanket or something which would protect you the minute your house is hit by a tornado.”
Brinton said the annual storm spotter class put on by the National Weather Service will be held next week.
“Our focus is not necessarily about turning people into storm spotters,” Brinton said. “It’s more about educating people about seeing what could possibly happen, understand what the weather conditions are, be able to identify the different cloud formations and how not to become a victim of a tornado.”
Brinton said the class is free and open to anyone. It takes place at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, March 14, at the Missouri Theater in St. Joseph. For more information contact Bill Brinton (816) 271-1574.
For more on severe weather preparedness click here: Storm Aware.
The Rolling Hills Library and St. Joseph Public Library will celebrate National Library Week with a redesigning contest.
National Library Week 2017 is April 9th through the 15th. St. Joseph Public Library Community Services and Promotions Coordinator Crystal Stuck said the contest is a combined effort between the two library systems. 
“All the books… in the public domain, sometimes when you order those books now they come with very generic, sometimes very boring book covers,” Stuck said. “So we thought this would be a fun way to do an in-house contest to come up with some really creative ways to market some of our in-house public domain titles.”
Participants can submit their cover designs until March 22nd. Each library branch will have a winner that moves on to the overall final contest. There will be a public choice award and a staff pick award, both of which will be announced at a reception on April 12th.
“We’re going to have the winning submissions turned into posters and we’ll hang those up in our libraries,” Stuck said. “Also the winning submissions will be used on some bookmarks in-house, so we’re going to promote their winning submission in that way. There’s also a $50 gift card for the grand prize and $25 gift card for the staff pick winner.”
Submission forms and a list of books in public domain available for the redesign contest are available at both library branches.
For more information, contact Crystal Stuck at the St. Joseph Public Library at (816) 236-2136 or Holly Hutchinson at the Rolling Hills Library at (816) 232-5479.
(Update) – Three juveniles were detained after an early Friday morning hit and run.
According to Sgt. Steve McClintick with the St. Joseph Police Department, around 2:15 a.m., two trucks collided at the intersection of King Hill Avenue and Alabama Street. Capt. Jeff Wilson said one truck had five juveniles inside. three boys and two girls all of them fled the scene. Wilson said officers located all five kids being picked up by two other people in a car on the lot of Hosea Elementary School. Officers took two of the girls and one boy to juvenile detention.
McClintick said the incident is still under investigation and it was unclear yet who was at fault for the initial crash.
None of the juveniles were injured. The driver of the other truck reported rib injuries but refused medical treatment at the scene.
The Cat in the Hat, who also happens to be a Central High School student, stopped by Humboldt Elementary School Thursday morning.
Annaka Kellogg is a Senior at CHS and part of the National Honors Society. She said she got involved when she found out the event included reading and wearing a costume.
“David Jordan, one of the people that helped arrange this is one of my business teachers so he asked if I’d be interested and then was asking if I knew anybody who would dress up and I was like, uh, me,” Kellogg said. “Once he told me what it was for, which is the NEA’s Reading Across America… my parents always read to me, especially Dr. Seuss books and so I think that reading’s very important because not only does it help in school but also opens your mind to get to explore different things and I think it’s really important to teach kids from a young age the fun in reading.”
The Cat in the Hat visited classrooms at Humboldt while other National Honors Society students from CHS read to first-graders. A similar reading event took place at Edison Elementary School Thursday afternoon.
J. Eric Simmons is the local St. Joseph National Education Association Vice President and Central High School Teacher. Simmons said NEA puts on the Read Across America program in all 50 states and wanted to bring it to students in St. Joseph.
“Our local St. Joseph NEA Chapter decided to put this together as a pilot for two of our elementary schools this year for the first-graders and then popping in to the kindergarten rooms just to have them see the Cat in the Hat,” Simmons said. “Next year, hopefully we can move this into something bigger and continue to expand and reach more of our St. Joseph School District students.”
Simmons said the purpose of the program is to help students become lifelong learners.
“These high school students have already told me that they loved doing this and participating in this event. I hope they continue to want to come back and help us with this more,” Simmons said. “It’s a good thing for them to also solidify how important it truly is for them as a high school student to read. By coming down to the elementary school and showing them, the students here, why they read, why do our high school students read, why is it important for them to read. It solidifies within themselves why they fell in love with reading in the first place.”
The beginning of the Read Across America program kicked off on March 2nd, coinciding with the birthday of Dr. Seuss.
Project Graduation organizers are looking for volunteers to make the event a success this year.
Angela Reynolds is the Project Coordinator for the Drug Free Communities Group. Reynolds said the all-night lock-in event on May 14th at the East Hills Mall for graduating seniors in the St. Joseph School District area offers games, prizes, food and a safe place for seniors to celebrate.
“It’s always important to try to encourage the kids to celebrate substance free,” Reynolds said. “If we know we can save one person from drinking and driving and getting in an accident and having a serious injury or a fatality I think it’s worth anybody’s time.”
Reynolds said they’re encouraging parents of graduating seniors to volunteer and they are also looking for donations to help fund the event.
The next planning meeting for Project Graduation takes place at 6 p.m. on March 8th at the Youth Alliance office at 5223 Mitchell Avenue.
For more information, contact St. Joseph Youth Alliance at (816) 232-0050.
The second annual Entrepreneurship Week at Missouri Western State University will include presentations of two new awards.
Nominations are being accepted now through March 10th for the Emerging Entrepreneur and Entrepreneur of the Year Awards.
Annette Weeks is the Director for the Center of Entrepreneurship at Missouri Western’s Craig School of Business. Weeks said the Emerging Entrepreneur Award will recognize a regional entrepreneur who’s been in business five years or less and the Entrepreneur of the Year Award will recognize a more established entrepreneur who has grown a business.
“We’re looking for one that has community impact, as well as involved with the community, that’s grown a business, that’s creating jobs for our communities and is (a) role model and interacting with other entrepreneurs as well,” Weeks said. “It’s a time to highlight a business that you admire and want to give acknowledgement towards.”
Entrepreneurship Week will include workshops and events March 27-31. Weeks said workshops include “How to Write a Business Plan,” QuickBooks, creating a social media marketing plan for a business, what legal concerns businesses should know about and more.
“I love bringing entrepreneurs together and helping educate them,” Weeks said. “Also through the week we’re bringing in high schoolers and having a MECA Challenge where we have a group coming in from Kansas City to lead a competition for our regional high schoolers, so there’s a little bit of something for everyone.”
Steve Craig will be leading a session for students in entrepreneurship and David Bradley will be speaking at the Capstone Business Luncheon on Friday, March 31. Registration is required for the luncheon. All of the week’s other sessions are free and open to students and the public.
For more information, click here.
St. Joseph Mayor Bill Falkner gave a State of the City address at Friday morning’s St. Joe Rising event.
Mayor Falkner spoke at the Chamber of Commerce breakfast on the theme of “Building for Success.”
“You may have noticed the hard hats on your table. As I was thinking about this speech I started thinking about all the positive things that went on last year and are still going on right now,” Falkner said. “I believe everyone can agree there is a lot of building going on around town, not only in structures but also in the many different partnerships. I really feel that St. Joseph is building toward success.”
Mayor Falkner said not all the news from downtown last year was good news as historic buildings were lost to fires which impacted nearby businesses and residents.
“That’s why it’s so important we keep the momentum going to make the vacant buildings that we have a wanted commodity.”
Falkner listed recent highlights around St. Joseph including the sales tax for the levee project approved by voters in August. He also listed multiple renovations and new things going on downtown including the German American building and the parking garage and retail facility.
“There are so many positive things going on in our community,” Falkner said. “Do we have issues? Yeah, we have issues. But, as a city, we work through those issues together, we bring in the people that we need to bring in and we address those issues, we don’t back away. There have been some very difficult issues and it would have been real easy to just push it on down the road and not address it, but this group, this community, come together and we make it work.”
Also during his speech, Mayor Falkner announced his decision to seek re-election next year.
Running shoes will help fund more running area for dogs at a small non-profit animal shelter outside of Hiawatha, Kansas.
Ruth Shaver is the Brown County Humane Society President. According to Shaver, they moved into their current building, a former veterinary clinic, in 2015. The shelter takes in stray and unwanted animals in the Brown County area and, as space allows, in Nemaha and Doniphan counties.
Shaver said they run entirely on donations. They use Facebook and Petfinder to post information about adoptable pets and have gotten pets adopted to homes in Colorado and Canada.
The shelter is collecting any kind of gently worn used shoes for a shoe drive through a fundraising company. Shaver said they will earn a certain amount per pound through the company and the shoes eventually end up in the hands of micro entrepreneurs from other countries.
“Your average families, maybe some Haitian families, they buy the shoes and then they clean them up and they re-sell them and that is how they make a living for their family, how they feed their family,” Shaver said. “So it not only helps us raise some money for some projects at the shelter but it also helps people in those 25 countries support their families and put food on the table and it keeps the shoes out of the landfills as well.”
Shaver said the shoe drive will help raise funds for three more large play areas for the dogs at the shelter so they can get out of their kennels more often.
“They can run and play and socialize,” Shaver said. “With adding three more, pretty much, twice a day, all the dogs should be able to go in the play yard. I’m just so passionate about letting them be a normal dog for a couple hours a day.”
The Humane Society is collecting shoes until May 1st.
For more information, contact the Brown County Humane Society at (785) 742-1976 or visit their Facebook page.
