The Hills?boro High School Oracle survives and our readers living in the Hillsboro, Lehigh and Durham zip codes will find it in this week?s edition of the Free Press in the center of Section A.
So what?s the big deal?
When we learned that USD 410 cut about $3,000 from its budget for the Hillsboro High School newspaper, I decided there had to be a way to keep it going. As an Oracle staff member way back when, I know it makes a difference when kids have the experience of publishing a newspaper. You learn about meeting deadlines, having to make decisions about what is important and what isn?t and writing skills for life.
So to reduce the cost, I thought it would make sense to print the Oracle as the center four pages of one of the Free Press sections and then cut the web on the press when we had enough papers printed with the extra pages to mail or deliver to Hillsboro, Lehigh and Durham addresses.
Since the school gets a couple of hundred for the students and faculty, we could then have them remove the Oracle from the center section from 200 copies of the Free Press and bring the rest of the newspaper back. We would then use those newspapers to deliver to the zip codes who don?t receive the Oracle.
I thought we could find a few sponsors who might help us cover the cost. I pitched the idea first to Lyle Ediger at Midway Motors. Without hesitation, he said they would sponsor the project in its entirety.
The Oracle lives, and it?s brought to you by the private sector.
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Other activities at Kansas schools may be at risk in the future. The Kansas State Board of Education for VE2 journalism is going to end in 2012, which includes yearbooks and student newspapers.
From what I have read about the subject, it would affect the smaller schools much more than the bigger schools. We are going to keep an eye on this new development.
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Nancy has started a special promotion at her store involving a big puzzle, but it took several weeks this summer to put a 1,500-piece puzzle together for it. I wasn?t much help, but at one point I was determined to find one particular piece. After days of looking, I never found it.
When the puzzle was finally finished, the piece was still missing. Then last week when I was vacuuming (don?t tell anybody), the machine sucked up the piece before I could stop and get it.
I fished through the bag and found the missing piece. Prior to that, I thought I was just not good at finding puzzle pieces.
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It was so windy in western Kansas that a chicken laid the same egg eight times.
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I sat at the Trojan football game Friday night with Dick Koontz, who used to play quarterback for HHS 40-plus years ago.
He?s always thinking about how the game is played and was wondering how much character it builds when a quarterback doesn?t call his own plays.
He also has a theory about punting that makes perfect sense to me. It would apply mostly to the professional game. Since these punters can kick a ball about as high as they can for distance, which is in the 40-50 yard range, why not kick a line drive 80 yards and aim for out-of-bounds. Such a kick would never be returned.
