KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — A disturbance outside the Kansas City Zoo during a free admission day has resulted in charges against a 16-year-old boy.

The Jackson County prosecutor’s office said Tuesday the juvenile was charged March 19 with possession of a handgun, misdemeanor disorderly conduct and a probation violation. The boy’s name was not released. He remains in custody pending a juvenile court arraignment April 10.

Several fights broke out and shots were fired in the parking as visitors were preparing to leave the zoo. No injuries were reported, and the gunman remains at large.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — The Missouri Supreme Court has agreed to consider whether wrongful death lawsuits can go forward against a Chillicothe hospital.
The lawsuits allege that a nurse at Hedrick Medical Center intentionally killed several patients in 2002 by giving them overdoses of medications, and that hospital administrators concealed her actions.
The hospital, which is now part of Saint Luke’s Hospital System, contends the lawsuits should be rejected. It says the state’s three-year statute of limitations on wrongful death cases expired before the lawsuits were filed in 2010 and 2011.
Trial judges originally ruled for the northwest Missouri hospital. But an appeals court panel revived the cases last November. It ruled that because of the alleged concealment of the nurse’s actions, the statute of limitations did not begin to run until late

WASHINGTON (AP) — Wal-Mart is recalling 174,000 dolls because the toy can overheat and potentially burn consumers.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said Tuesday that the “My Sweet Love / My Sweet Baby Cuddle Care Baby Doll” has a circuit board in its chest that can overheat, causing the surface of the doll to get hot and burn someone.

Wal-Mart has received 12 reports of incidents, including two burns or blisters to the thumb.

Consumers should stop using the product, remove the batteries and return them to any Walmart store for a refund.

The electronic baby doll, made by Tak Ngai Electronic Toys Co. of China, was sold exclusively at Walmart stores from 2012 through 2014 for $20.

MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court seems divided over whether employers’ religious beliefs can free them from a part of the new health care law that requires that they provide coverage of birth control for employees at no extra charge.

The case argued Tuesday involves family-owned companies that provide health insurance to their employees, but object to covering certain methods of birth control that they say can work after conception, in violation of their religious beliefs.

The Obama administration and its supporters say a Supreme Court ruling in favor of the businesses also could undermine laws governing immunizations, Social Security taxes and minimum wages.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Jackson County will pay $1.4 million to five former county employees who complained of harassment and discrimination.
The County Legislature approved the settlement Monday. Details of the incidents that prompted the complaints were not released.
Attorney John Phillips told the Independence Examiner that the incidents go back to the 1990s but were only recently brought to the attention of senior county executives. All the employees worked in the assessment department.
He says the incidents were not physical. None of those involved in the conduct or who did not report it are no longer working for the county. All five employees agreed not to discuss the settlement and not to apply for any county jobs in the future.

NEW YORK (AP) — The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has condemned the parachute jump off 1 World Trade Center last fall by three skydiving enthusiasts as a “lawless and selfish act that clearly endangered the public.”

The agency said in a statement early Tuesday that one of the jumpers was a construction worker at the trade center site.

The Port Authority, which owns the site, says “the spirit of respect and reverence for this sacred site” was violated.

Four men were arrested Monday in connection with the “base jumping” on Sept. 30. The three daredevils and someone accused of being an accomplice on the ground were arraigned on charges of burglary, reckless endangerment and misdemeanor jumping from a structure.

Police Commissioner William Bratton says “being a thrill-seeker does not give immunity from the law.”

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill today sent a letter to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Gina McCarthy asking the agency to work with small independent manufactures to craft affordable, achievable heating rules for rural families as it implements its new emission standards for wood-burning stoves.

McCaskill’s letter came in response to the EPA’s recently proposed rule updating the 1988 standards for new wood stoves and heaters, which currently account for 13% of nationwide soot pollution. Several public and private voluntary programs, such as the Wood Stove Changeout and EPA’s own BurnWise program, have already successfully minimized fine particulate matter and other hazardous air pollutants from wood stoves and heaters.

McCaskill-who has worked to ensure Missouri families can heat their homes without breaking the bank-expressed concern that for the EPA’s programs to be successful, consumers must have access to newer wood stoves and heaters that are affordable.

“If the costs of new stoves are unnecessarily increased, consumers will not choose to replace their older, dirtier models with newer, cleaner options,” McCaskill wrote in the letter. “That is why I am concerned that EPA’s current proposal would negatively impact small independent manufacturers who do not have the financial resources to quickly redesign their products or manufacturing processes. If emission standards are unattainable for the sector at large or implemented too quickly for manufacturers to adjust, I fear the net benefits of these proposed rules will not materialize. Therefore I strongly encourage you to work with manufacturers to craft a rule that is achievable, affordable, and benefits the millions of Americans who use wood stoves and heaters as a primary or supplementary source of heat.”

McCaskill is also a co-sponsor of the Reliable Home Heating Act, which would help protect the roughly 212,000 Missouri families who rely on propane for heating from propane price spikes and shortages like those this winter across the Midwest.

(AP) – A St. Louis area man convicted of kidnapping, raping and strangling a 17-year-old girl in 1989 could become the fifth person executed in Missouri in five months.

Jeffrey Ferguson was scheduled to die at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday at the state prison in Bonne Terre. The execution would be about 25 years after Kelli Hall was abducted from a St. Charles gas station. Her frozen body was found 13 days later, on Feb. 22, 1989, on a St. Louis County farm.

Gov. Jay Nixon is weighing a clemency request, and court appeals are pending.

Missouri switched to a one-drug execution method last year. All five inmates put to death since November were killed by pentobarbital. The state obtains the drug from a compounding pharmacy it refuses to name.

By Mike Shields
KHI News Service

TOPEKA — In the state that has proudly called itself the nation’s breadbasket, the problems of poverty — including hunger, homelessness and mental illness — reach farther into classrooms than many Kansans might expect or care to believe.

In hundreds of public schools across the state, there are students that each Friday — or before holidays — are sent home with “backpacks” or “kits” of donated food put together by volunteers to be sure the children will have something to eat until they return to class the next school day.

That happens in Johnson County in suburban Shawnee Mission, which many would consider a rich school district, but also at schools as varied as Lincoln Elementary in Sumner County, the top wheat-producing area in a top wheat-producing state, and in Natoma, a burg of only 329 people in Osborne County. At least 175 students get the backpacks in Newton, the hometown of the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, which will spend considerable time this legislative session studying the issue of state school spending, including the arcane financing formula for “at-risk weighting” that helps districts with disproportionately high numbers of students from low-income homes.

The food initiatives often are loosely organized with the schools by private charities or civic groups such as the PTA or Rotary.

The biggest “backpack” distribution programs are run by the state’s major food charities, which keep close counts of the number of children they help.

For example, Harvesters, which serves people in 26 counties in northeast Kansas and northwest Missouri, currently has 19,580 schoolchildren on its food kit lists. The Kansas Food Bank, which is based in Wichita and serves people in 86 of the state’s 105 counties, has almost 7,000 students on its backpack list, including about 1,300 in Wichita.

‘Hunger is in every county’

Brian Walker, president of the Kansas Food Bank, said his organization’s program was quietly launched about nine years ago without trying to “sell it” to the schools “because we didn’t want to overpromise and not be able to deliver.”

It has since grown steadily every year, he said, mostly as other schools learn of the program and contact the food bank.

“We know hunger is in every county, in every community,” said Ellen Feldhausen, a spokesperson for Harvesters. “The percentages vary from county to county.”

Feeding America, an anti-hunger group, has developed an interactive online map that shows the numbers, county by county, across Kansas and the U.S. of how many people are considered “food insecure” because they are poor.

The map was built using data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

According to Feeding America, more than 433,000 Kansans, or about 16 percent of the state’s population, live in households that are “food insecure.” More than half of the 433,000 are in households that earn so little — less than 130 percent of federal poverty guidelines — that they could qualify for the federal food stamp program.

“I think people don’t want to believe the statistics,” Feldhausen said. “Yet if you speak with teachers … it’s not a surprise to them. They see children coming to school hungry. They see children in the lunchroom hoarding food because they want to take it home for a little brother or sister. There are a number of heartbreaking behaviors they observe. It’s a very common situation in the schools. But when you’re just talking with people generally, I think that figure is really surprising to them.”
Free lunch

For the 2014 school year, according to a report from the Kansas State Department of Education, slightly more than 40 percent of Kansas school students will get free lunches because their families had annual earnings less than 130 percent of federal poverty guidelines, which is $30,615 for a family of four.
Only three of the state’s 286 school districts reported free-lunch percentages in the single digits: Fort Leavenworth, the Blue Valley district in Johnson County and the Andover district, which serves one of the wealthier Wichita suburbs.

Wichita’s USD 259, the state’s largest district, also had the highest percentage of students eligible for free lunch: 68.57 percent.

Southeast Kansas, long known as the state’s poorest region, also has districts with relatively high percentages of students lunching for free. But the high rate of subsidized meals is by no means limited to certain counties or regions of the state.

For example, more than 64 percent of students in the tiny Deerfield district in Kearny County qualified for free lunch.

The Satanta district, which has a relatively strong tax base because it sits atop part of the Hugoton Gas Field and so by some Statehouse reckonings is considered a “rich” district, has 55 percent of its students eligible for free lunch because of their families’ low earnings.

“We’re a farming community, and we have three of the largest feedlots in a five-state region in our county,” said school Superintendent Ardith Dunn, a lifelong resident of Haskell County. “Our labor is basically Hispanic and so those are the children that populate our schools. A lot of our children are from low-income families with parents working in manual-labor type situations.”

Telling legislators

Earlier this month, superintendents from six of the state’s largest school districts appeared together before a joint meeting of the House and Senate education committees as legislators began their recent crash courses on school finance.

Each cited poverty as a major concern for their schools.

Wichita Superintendent John Allison said many poor students in his district will change schools within the district two or three times over the course of the year as their parents chase after affordable housing.

“When we see a free-month-rent promotion” at some apartment complex, he said, “we know we’re going to see changes, because the parents are at that point financially.”
Jim Hinson, Shawnee Mission’s superintendent, said he was relatively new to the district but had been surprised after he arrived to find that “we have school nurses who are the primary health care providers” for many poor students.

“Right now, I can’t hire enough social workers” because of “what’s going on or not going on in homes,” he said. “One of our kindergarteners watched her mother commit suicide in front of her.”

Garden City Superintendent Rick Atha told the lawmakers that when he was forced to close schools earlier this year because of the polar blast blizzards, he had calls from parents complaining.

“I got calls to have school tomorrow,” he said, “because they know their kids would get breakfast and lunch.”

Topeka Superintendent Julie Ford told the lawmakers about the hundreds of homeless students in her district and the growing problem of mental illness.

“We can’t just keep doing these little tactical changes like we’ve been doing the last 10 to 15 years … and we need to have a serious discussion about mental health,” she said.

No one can say for sure how many Kansas students, or their parents, are coping with mental illness or substance abuse. The state education department doesn’t track those numbers. But Ford isn’t the only school official who says that problem is growing.

‘Dire straits’

Rosanne Haberman oversees the Topeka school district’s counselors and its programs for homeless students.

As of March 13, she said, she knew of 516 homeless students in the district, though the number fluctuates over the course of the year. Federal law requires every district to have a “homeless liaison” and to report the number of homeless students, so that is part of Haberman’s job.

The count of homeless kids enrolled in USD 501 schools has ranged as high as 699 over the past four years. The district gets about $60,000 a year in federal grant dollars to help them.

Haberman said she uses the money to buy the children school supplies, textbooks, eyeglasses and, in fewer instances, shoes.

Another grant, not specifically intended for homeless problems, has helped the district staff a special, after-school classroom at the Topeka Rescue Mission, a homeless shelter.

Haberman said when that grant “dies and goes away, we’ll really be in dire straits because we’ll have trouble supporting our lead teacher at the Rescue Mission and our tutors we’re paying now will go away.”
Jeannie Jackson, a married mother of two school-age children, has been living at the Rescue Mission with her family for several weeks. Her son and daughter use the classroom there.
“Oh gosh. It’s hard for them, really hard,” Jackson said. “They have friends that don’t even know they’re here (at the shelter) because they’re so scared they’re going to be made fun of.

“They don’t have a lot of space where they can run and play and be kids. They don’t have their own room. All our money goes toward housing. We spend money on clothing here and there, once in a while, and they’re lucky for that. We had to go to donations to get clothing and hygiene, and that’s not very happy for a kid.

“I was in foster homes, I was uprooted from my family at a young age,” she said, “so that kind of prepared me for this. But I don’t think anyone can be really prepared for this. It’s just something that happens tragically in life … it can happen to anybody, anytime.”

Jackson said the family finally lost its home and most belongings after the cleaning service she had worked for five years shut down because of tax problems. She didn’t graduate from high school and is struggling to find new work.

‘Doubling up’

The problem of homelessness isn’t unique to the Topeka district. The Olathe school district reported 427 homeless students last school year, an almost 500 percent increase there since 2006-2007.
According to education department reports to the federal government, there were 9,330 homeless students statewide last school year, a 161 percent increase over the 3,569 reported in 2006-2007, which was the school year right before the Great Recession hit. Nationally, the number of homeless students only increased 72 percent over that same period.

The tallies includes various categories of homelessness: Children who are “doubling up” in the homes of friends or relatives, those living in homeless shelters, those living on their own or “unaccompanied,” those living in motels or hotels, and those who are “unsheltered,” which means they might be living beneath a bridge or in a tent in someone’s backyard. The great majority falls in the “doubling up” category.

These problems apparently aren’t lost on many who are familiar with their local schools.

“We recognize that poverty contributes in large part to the achievement gap,” said Tammy Bartels, president of the Kansas PTA, which has about 18,000 members. “Students in poverty tend not to eat as well or get as much medical care. So it is difficult to sit down to read if you have an untreated toothache or if you’re hungry.”

Bartels said a lot of local PTA chapters have started food backpack programs. And the group recently approved a resolution stating that PTAs should support schools in helping homeless students.

“Unfortunately, I think a lot of the resources these kids need has been a victim of the school finance situation,” Bartels said. “They don’t have access to school counselors that could help them identify outside resources. They don’t have access to after-school programs that would help further these kids’ educations. I don’t think schools have the financial ability to support these students as much as they could, not through any fault of the schools. It’s very easy to cut things outside the classroom, such as school nurses who could help identify some of these issues.”

‘Band-Aid sitution’

Bartels lives in Tonganoxie, which is in Leavenworth County, and graduated from high school there in 1989.

She said when she was in high school there were two counselors. There still are two, she said, but enrollment in the district has gone up about 100 students per year in the interval.

“The number they are expected to serve has nearly doubled in the last 25 years,” she said.

The situation is similar in many other Kansas school districts.

Dunn, the Satanta superintendent, said her schools are about 45 minutes from the nearest community mental health center in Garden City. When a serious issue comes up, the district is pretty much on its own to deal with it.

“When we have a problem, whether it’s a mental health issue or a drug issue in the home or even an alcohol problem, we just don’t have resources for that,” she said. “When we have truancy issues, we don’t have other options like a charter school or a detention facility where the kids are still being educated. We don’t have those kinds of resources. It is us. And when we don’t have a counselor and there’s just a principal in administration, that’s it.”

Dunn said the district has a part-time school nurse that it pays the local hospital to provide. It once had two counselors but now has one part-time counselor for all grades.

And school professionals say the problems they encounter now in classrooms are more complex.

“Most of the time we’re in a Band-Aid situation,” said Haberman, head of the counseling department at USD 501. “We try to get the student back to class, try to teach them how to survive the world they’re in, work with parents to get them to recognize the kinds of issues they’re dealing with, promote seeing someone in the community.

“There is a lot of stress in our society, a lot of bullying going on,” she said. “You have a lot of families working two or three jobs and a lot of children at home by themselves for long periods of time…How do we handle this? We need to figure it out, because it’s a growing problem and it’s pretty worrisome.”

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Missouri House members have approved legislation that would create an incentive for business to relocate to the state.

The measure would offer businesses a tax credit worth up to 20 percent of their eligible expenses for coming into Missouri. The incentive program would be capped at $10 million annually.

The House had delayed a vote on the bill because of concern that it would apply more broadly. Changes were made, and the bill was approved 136-17 on Monday. It now moves to the state Senate.