Senate Republicans and Democrats hit another impasse over spending in their struggle to end a partial government shutdown and avoid hitting the federal debt limit

in just four days. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have taken charge in trying to end the crises. However, they failed to break the stalemate in talks on Sunday.

On Sunday Missouri 6th District Congressman Sam Graves wrote on his Facebook page “Deadline after deadline missed. Red flags ignored. And the result? These are not glitches. The extent of the problems is pretty enormous.”

There is no end in sight to the government shutdown.

Several southwest Missouri school districts say the federal shutdown could cause construction delays for safe rooms because the paperwork behind the projects must be completed by workers who are currently furloughed.
For the Neosho School District, that means more than $10 million worth of safe room plans are up in the air. Avilla, Webb City, McDonald County and Joplin also have safe room plans awaiting approval from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, The Joplin Globe ( http://bit.ly/1cIgrcw) reported.
“It certainly concerns me,” said Tim Crawley, operations manager for the Neosho School District.
Interest in safe rooms increased sharply after a May 22, 2011 tornado wiped out a large swath of Joplin and killed 161 people.

Several local schools were either damaged or destroyed.
Neosho’s safe room plans include a $6 million, two-story, 18-classroom addition at the high school, a $2 million practice gymnasium and stage at one elementary school and a $1 million classroom addition at another.
“We’re expecting to be approved right around Thanksgiving time,” Crawley said. “If it’s not approved by the first week of December _ at the latest _ the construction schedule will be thrown off.”

Webb City is moving forward with the construction of two safe rooms, but others planned for the school district likely will delayed if the shutdown continues.
Avilla is working on a 5,000-square foot safe room project designed as a cafeteria that includes a new kitchen and a small commons area connecting the existing gym to the cafeteria.
Architect Brad Erwin, of Paragon Architects in Springfield, said design documents for that project and some in the McDonald County School District were completed in September and approved by the State Emergency Management Agency, which then sent them to FEMA in Washington.
“With FEMA people being out of the office, they can’t do the technical review,” Erwin said, “and then the people up the chain from there _ financial compliance, etc. _ aren’t working either. All those projects will have a delay in getting released.”
Once FEMA approves designs, districts can move on to the bid process, which takes six to eight weeks to complete, Erwin said.

An 18-year-old man who was found unresponsive in a University of Missouri residence hall has been pronounced dead, but officials say there is no indication of foul play.

The man was a guest of one of the room’s residents. University police were sent to the room at 9:07 a.m. Sunday for a medical emergency and found the young man unconscious and not breathing.

Weimer says investigators are interviewing the man’s friends and others in the area to determine what happened. A medical examiner will release an official cause of death at a later date.

Entities affiliated with the Roman Catholic church have contributed more than $300,000 toward a Missouri ballot initiative that would authorize state tax credits benefiting private schools.
A committee entitled Missourians for Children’s Education was established this past week to finance the campaign for the ballot initiative, according to records at the state Ethics Commission. It was launched with a $300,000 contribution from the Archdiocese of St. Louis and more than $11,000 from the Missouri Catholic Conference.
The church’s financial backing is being paired with an effort to mobilize members to help gather the thousands of petitions needed to qualify the proposed constitutional amendment for the November 2014 ballot, said George Kerry, the legislative consultant to Archbishop Robert Carlson.
“The cost of education, the tuition, has become a real obstacle for parents in order to continue the enrollment of their children in Catholic schools today,” Kerry said. He added: “We believe this would very much help to stabilize enrollment _ and hopefully to grow enrollment _ within the Catholic and private schools.”
The Archdiocese of St. Louis has 148 schools with about 49,000 students enrolled in grades K-12 in the city of St. Louis and 10 eastern Missouri counties, Kerry said.
The ballot initiative, which was approved for circulation last month, would allow a 50 percent tax credit for businesses and individuals who donate to nonprofit organizations that benefit schools. The groups could offer scholarships for children to attend parochial and private schools or provide financial aid for programs in public school districts.
The measure would allow up to $90 million of state tax credits to be claimed annually, an amount that would be adjusted yearly to keep pace with inflation. Half of those tax credits would be allotted for donations to organizations that benefit public school districts, 40 percent would be reserved for contributions benefiting private and parochial schools and 10 percent would go to support special education programs in either public or private schools.
Supporters of school-choice measures have failed repeatedly to get similar proposals through the Missouri Legislature. Among the bills that failed this year was a less expansive proposal to create a tax-credit-scholarship program only for students in unaccredited public school districts.
Gov. Jay Nixon signed a bill this year that authorizes scholarships for special-needs children to get services at private facilities or other public schools. But it’s to be financed through grants or donations, not subsidized with state tax credits.
The Missouri National Education Association, which represents teachers, generally has opposed efforts to use state money or tax credits to help students attend private schools.
Association lobbyist Otto Fajen said there was no organized opposition yet to the newly proposed ballot initiative. But that may be coming.
“Public investment of whatever form for education should primarily flow to public schools, because those are the schools that are accountable for standards imposed by the state,” Fajen said.
Missouri provides more than $3 billion annually in basic aid to public school districts. But that’s roughly $600 million short of what’s called for under a 2005 school funding law.

Sunday update

Shoppers in many states have found themselves unable to use their food stamp debit cards on Saturday, after a routine check by vendor Xerox Corp. resulted in a system failure. Shoppers from Maine to Oklahoma had to abandon baskets of groceries because they couldn’t access their benefits.

Ohio’s cash and food assistance card payment systems went down at 11 a.m., said Benjamin Johnson, a spokesman for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. Ohio’s cash system has been fixed, however its electronic benefits transfer card system is still down. All states that use Xerox systems are affected by the outage.

Xerox spokeswoman Karen Arena confirmed via email Saturday afternoon that some EBT systems are experiencing temporary connectivity issues. She said technical staff is addressing the issue and expects the system to be restored soon.

The site was created through a collaborative effort of libraries, museums, and historical societies in Kansas and Missouri. The Historical Society images include

photographs, maps, journals, and government documents from the territorial Kansas and Civil War periods. Civil War on the Western Border will be maintained by the Kansas City Public Library.

Visit the site at civilwaronthewesternborder.org.

The Historical Society’s 1,600 images, plus many more dated 1854 – 1865, are available onKansas Memory, the Historical Society’s online digital archives. Visit kansasmemory.org.

The Kansas Historical Society is a state agency that operates the Kansas Museum of History, State Archives, Kansas Capitol Tour Center, and 16 state historic sites. For more information, visit kshs.org

Missouri Department of education say it’s in the best interest of students transferring from unaccredited to accredited school districts to do so at the beginning of the school year. They have released updated guidelines.

In Kansas City because of a pending court case, there are no transfers. The Kansas City district is seeking to regain accreditation.