(Atlantic, Iowa) – The Atlantic School Board will hold a regularly scheduled session at the High School Media Center, beginning at 6:30-p.m., Wednesday (Jan. 8th). Action items on their agenda, include approving recommendations to hire: Heather Prall – Preschool Para; Gratt Reed – HS Girls Track Assistant Coach; and Amy Jessen – Nutrition Cook at Washington Elementary.

The School Board will also act on the purchase of a lawn mower, an SBRC application for At Risk/Dropout and Potential Dropout Prevention, in the amount of $568,285, and, the following agreements:

• Children’s Square and Heartland Therapeutic (Council Bluffs)
• Heartland Family Service (Omaha)
• Heartland School of Omaha.

The meeting can be viewed live through this YouTube link.

The next meeting of the Atlantic School Board is a Work Session January 22nd, in the Achievement Center Conference Room.

(Radio Iowa) – When the winter winds are howling, some Iowans take solace in dreaming of the coming warmth of spring and working in their green backyard gardens. Iowa State University Extension and Outreach is launching its free Home Gardening Webinar series this week. Alicia Herzog coordinates the master gardener program and says this year’s topics will include soil health, identifying edibles, and more. “Many of our master gardeners will use this webinar series for continuing education, but it’s also free and open to the public,” Herzog says, “so it’s a really great series for anyone who’s interested in gardening and horticulture and just wanting to have a better yard or lawn or grow better vegetables.” The first webinar is scheduled for Thursday night.

“This is a weekly series,” she says. “It goes for 10 weeks. It’s every Thursday, from January 9th through March 13th, and it’s at 6 PM from six to seven.” While there are a couple of online options, Herzog says the webinars will also be offered at many I-S-U extension offices throughout Iowa. “Some extension offices across the state will be offering live streaming in the office,” Herzog says. “So if people prefer to go in person, or maybe they don’t have internet at their house, or they just want to get out and socialize, they should call their extension office and double check with them, as not all extension offices will be offering it.”

There’s also the option of joining via computer using Zoom, or by going to the livestream on the extension’s Facebook page.

(Radio Iowa) – Iowa Travel Industry Partners is sending out its first scholarships to 21 tourism leaders in the state. The group’s executive director Chelsea Lerud says they are collaborating with the Iowa Tourism Office to encourage Iowa’s tourism professionals to attend regional and national industry conferences. “Getting them out to these national conferences to represent the state, to learn what other states are doing for programming, and bring those ideas back to the state, which will, in turn grow the offerings that we can here in Iowa,” she says. Lerud says the “Elevate Iowa” scholarships help with the cost of attending the conferences. “A lot of times the travel to these conferences is more expensive than the actual registration of the conference, so that can be a barrier for attendees,” Lerud says. “…The scholarship will support up to 60 percent of the individual’s cost to attend the conference. ”

Lerud says the scholarship recipients have several different conferences they plan to attend. “Two of our museum partners are attending the American Museum membership conference. So it’s the National Association for museums, and they’re just going to learn information about enhancing their museum membership programs,” she says. “Some are attending an event called the chief executive summit by sports E-T-A. Sports E-T-A is the National Sports Association, so destinations that host a lot of sporting events.” Others will attend the Upper Midwest Convention and Visitors Bureau conference. “That is a regional conference where Iowa falls eight states here in the Midwest. And that conference happens once a year just to learn best practices in kind of the Convention and Visitors Bureau, economic development, tourism, recruitment, space. And really collaboration with other destinations in the Midwest is really important at that conference,” she says.

Lerud says they want to keep getting out the word that Iowa is no longer just a flyover state. “We are a destination, and we want to make sure those visitors that are seeking destinations to go experience know that Iowa is an option for them. You know, in 2023 visitors spent over seven-point-three billion dollars in our state,” she says. The program gave out around half of its 40-thousand dollar allotment.

Here are some of the organizations which got money: Jewel Main Street, Discover Ames, Iowa Travel Industry Partners, Visit Quad Cities, Meet in Marshalltown, Villages of Van Buren, Cedar Rapids Tourism, Visit Quad Cities, Travel Dubuque, Waterloo Main Street, Driftless Area, Visit Fort Dodge, Explore Siouxland, Dubuque County Historical Society, Indian Creek Nature Center.

(Red Oak, Iowa) – The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office reports a man from Polk County was arrested following a pursuit that began just before 9-p.m., Monday, with an attempted traffic stop. Authorities say when Deputies initiated a traffic stop on a vehicle traveling at a high rate of speed in the 2200 block of Highway 34, the vehicle continued west into Red Oak before heading back east on Highway 34 at speeds of up to 140 mph.

The vehicle continued into Adams County before it stopped in the 1900 block of Highway 34. The suspect driver, 28-year-old Seth Hankins, of Des Moines, was arrested on charges that include: OWI/2nd offense; Driving while license is barred; and Eluding – Speed of 25 mph over/2nd offense. Hankins was being held in the Montgomery County Jail on a $10,000 bond.

Agencies assisting the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office during the incident, included:

• The Montgomery County Communications Center
• Red Oak Police
• Adams County Sheriff’s Office/Comm. Center
• Taylor County Sheriff’s Office
• Iowa State Patrol.

(Des Moines, Iowa) – The owners of a company that operates nursing homes in Iowa says a wrongful death lawsuit against an Iowa nursing home should be tossed out of court due to an arbitration agreement signed by the man’s family, according to a report in the Iowa Capital Dispatch. In February 2023, Marvin “Pete” Jacobs died at the Fonda Specialty Care nursing home where he had lived for six months with a tracheostomy tube that provided an airway for him to breathe. According to state records, Jacobs’ airway needed to be suctioned every eight hours, at minimum, to keep it clear of any fluids.

State inspection reports indicate that in the minutes leading up to Jacobs’ death, a nurse at Fonda Specialty Care, Becky Sue Manning, refused several staff requests to clear Jacobs’ airway so he could breathe, and that Jacobs suffocated as a result. Last March, Manning was criminally charged with felony wanton neglect of a health care facility resident. Recently, Manning and Pocahontas County prosecutors agreed to a deal that resulted in Manning entering an Alford plea to a reduced charge of misdemeanor wanton neglect that did not result in a serious injury. Manning is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 13.

In October, the Jacobs family sued Manning, Fonda Specialty Care, the home’s corporate owner, Care Initiatives of West Des Moines, and GrapeTree Medical Staffing for a variety of claims related to Jacobs’ death. The defendants in the case recently filed motions with the court to have any further proceedings in the case stayed, arguing that when Jacobs was admitted his son signed several documents, including one in which he waived the family’s right to sue for negligent care so that any such disputes could be settled through arbitration. The arbitration agreement, the defendants say, was not a prerequisite for admission. The family’s attorney has yet to file a response to those motions.

Care Initiatives operates 43 Iowa nursing homes as well as several assisted living centers and hospice locations that provide 2,800 elderly or disabled Iowans with care. When admitted, many of the residents sign arbitration agreements in which they forfeit their right to present any civil claims against the company to a judge or jury.

In 2016, the Obama administration approved a new rule proposed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that would have prohibited taxpayer-funded homes from having residents sign arbitration agreements. The American Health Care Association immediately sued CMS and a court blocked the agency’s enforcement of the new rule. The Obama administration appealed that ruling but shortly after President Donald Trump took office, that appeal was dropped and CMS proposed a new rule that expressly allows such agreements. In 2019, that rule was finalized, and it remains in place today.

Care Initiatives is currently facing at least 10 wrongful death lawsuits, including four against Northcrest Specialty Care in Waterloo. In each of the lawsuits, Care Initiatives has denied any wrongdoing and in several of the cases it has attempted to have the cases thrown out of court due to arbitration agreements.

The Iowa Department of Inspections, Appeals and Licensing fined Fonda Specialty Care $10,000 for Jacobs’ death, then reduced that penalty 35%, to $6,500, due to the lack of an appeal in the case. Manning entered into a settlement agreement with the Iowa Board of Nursing in which she agreed to indefinitely suspend her practice of nursing.

(Radio Iowa) – Governor Kim Reynolds has called for a statewide cell phone policy for Iowa schools and will unveil the details of her proposal next Tuesday. House Speaker Pat Grassley says lawmakers are most likely to establish a uniform, minimum standard focused on instructional time — when students are in class.  “To not overstep into the local control of it,” Grassley says, “but also make sure schools know we have an expectation of them having some level of policy.”

Incoming Senate Education Committee chairman Lynn Evans, a Republican from Aurelia, says there are concerns about the impact cell phone use is having on academic achievement. “There was a Rutgers-New Brunswick study that was published in the Journal of Education Psychology that found similar results,” Evans says, “that cell phones and other electronic devices have a negative effect on the individual’s test scores as well as the learning environment in the classroom itself.” But Evans, who is a retired superintendent, says he doesn’t want to interfere with Iowa schools that have taken the initiative to establish policies for the use of cell phones, tablets and other electronic devices during school hours.

“Even school districts that are adjacent to each other and share a border, their cultures are different. The needs of their students are different,” Evans says, “so that’s why I’d like to allow some flexibility for each board to address it in a manner that works best for their school.” House Education Committee chairman Skyler Wheeler of Hull says he’s open to reviewing what the governor may propose, but his local superintendents are telling him they want to retain the ability to adopt policies that best fit their own school districts.

“My kind of inkling is schools are starting to create policies and we just kind of let the schools operate that way. Like I said, I’ll be open to whatever the governor has that she wants put forward, but I think you have a lot of different factors going on here,” Wheeler says. “Different schools obviously serve different communities and different people and parents are probably going to think one way over here and maybe differently over there and they may have different input, as well as the teachers and the students.”

House Democratic Leader Jennifer Konfrst also suggests there is a limit to how far the legislature should go in setting a statewide policy on cell phone use in schools. “We want to make sure that we’re not putting more work on teachers, that this just doesn’t become one more thing we’re asking educators to do,” Konfrst says. “Let’s let school districts decide what’s best for implementing the policies in their own districts.” Senate Democratic Leader Janice Weiner says there is wide agreement something should be done to curb cell phone use in schools, but it’s too early to say the governor’s proposal will become law.

“Will it be sort of a basic floor that says: ‘You have to do at least this much and anything else you want to do is fine.’ I would imagine that we would probably be fine with that,” Weiner said. “Or would it be more prescriptive?” Senate Majority Leader Jack Whitver says Senate Republicans are happy to work with the governor on the issue, but haven’t come to consensus yet on what cell phone restrictions the legislature should adopt for Iowa schools.

The 2025 legislative session begins Monday. On Tuesday, Governor Reynolds will deliver the annual Condition of the State address and will reveal her 2025 legislative agenda.

(Adair, Iowa) – (This is an update to our previous social media posts) – Emergency crews were called at around 6:30-p.m. Monday, westbound Interstate 80 near mile marker 76, just south of Adair on a report of a semi on fire.

When firefighters arrived on scene they found a semi engulfed in large flames. According to the Adair Police Department said the driver was able to safely escape the semi. The fire is believed to have started in the engine or cab area before spreading to the trailer, according to police. (Still frame images are from an Iowa DOT traffic cam video of the accident scene)

The fire and emergency response led to the Interstate being closed for several hours. The westbound lanes were finally re-opened at around 10-p.m.

(Radio Iowa) – Three people died and three were injured in an early morning fire today (Monday) in Davenport. The Davenport Fire Department report says they were called at 3:15 a-m to a two-story single family home. Two people were reportedly trapped in the basement and the report says firefighters had to battle heavy fire and smoke to get them out. One of those rescued said there were more people on the second floor.

Firefighters rescued one man from the second floor who was unconscious and three people were found dead from burns. The rescued man was flown to the University of Iowa Hospitals burn unit in critical condition. Another person was taken to the hospital, no condition was available.

No names have been released and the Davenport Fire Marshal is trying to determine the cause of the fire.

(Radio Iowa/CORRECTION BY THE UIHC) – A statewide network of over 20 clinics that had operated under the name “Mission Cancer plus Blood” is now part of University of Iowa Health Care. Nineteen doctors and over 200 clinicians worked at Mission’s network of clinics around the state when the deal was announced in October and the acquisition was completed December 31st.

The dean of the University of Iowa’s College of Medicine says adding Mission’s clinics to the U-I Health Care system is a turning point in the fight against cancer in Iowa. For the past two years, Iowa has been one of just two states with rising rates of cancer.

(Photo provided by UIHC)

Here’s the list of cities/community hospitals that operate clinics that are now part of U-I Health Care: Albia, Atlantic, Carroll, Centerville, Chariton, Corning, Corydon, Fort Dodge, Grinnell, Knoxville, Leon, Newton, Oskaloosa, Osceola, Pella, Webster City and Winterset.