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Category Archives: Fort Scott
Fort Scott American Legion Family October 2020 Activities
Saturday. October 3. Fort Scott American Legion Auxiliary Unit 25 hosts Breakfast on the Bricks at 8 am.
Monday. October 5. Fort Scott American Legion Post 25 meets at 7 pm in Memorial Hall.
Monday. October 5. Fort Scott Sons of the American Legion Squadron 25 meets at 7 pm in Memorial Hall.
Thursday. October 8. American Legion Auxiliary Unit 25 meets at 6 pm in Memorial Hall.
Thursday. October 8. American Legion Post 25 Color Guard meets at 7:30 pm in Memorial Hall.
Saturday. October 10. Fort Scott American Post 25 Color Guard hosts Breakfast on the Bricks at 8 am.
Saturday. October 24. American Legion Riders Chapter 25 meets at 10 am in Memorial Hall.
Friday. October 30. Fort Scott American Legion Family hosts a Halloween themed community dance at Memorial Hall from 7 – 10 pm. This event has been approved by the City but might be cancelled due to changes in COVID 19 guidelines.
The Fort Scott American Legion family welcomes all prospective members to attend our meetings:
General Eligibility Guidelines.
American Legion: Any honorably discharged Veteran who served one day of active duty since December 7, 1941 is eligible to join the American Legion. Any active duty military is also eligible to join the American Legion.
American Legion Auxiliary: Any immediate female family member of active duty military or an honorably discharged Veteran is eligible to join the American Legion Auxiliary.
Sons of the American Legion: Any male descendant of an honorably discharged Veteran is eligible to join the Sons of the American Legion.
For more information about eligibility to join the American Legion family, call Post 25 Carl Jowers at 620.215.1688.
FSHS After School Choir Enrollment Open
Students attending FSHS are invited to sing in the FSHS After School Choir, directed by MJ Harper.
Performers will further grow vocal abilities, musical knowledge, and choral repertoire. This ensemble will also
prepare students for district and state auditions and the spring musical. COVID guidelines will be observed.
Rehearsals will begin October 13th and will run 3:30-4:15PM Tuesdays and Thursdays at FSHS. Students
wishing to participate can enroll by scanning the QR Code on posters or by emailing
[email protected] , deadline October 9th.
Downtown Meet and Greet: All Things Downtown
The next meeting to converse on all things downtown is Oct. 6 at Sharky’s Pub and Grub, 16 N. National Avenue.
The Fort Scott Downtown Quarterly Meet and Greet was started on January 11, 2011, by the Chamber of Commerce.
“These informal, quarterly meetings are hosted by the Chamber for downtown business owners, representatives and community members to network and share ideas on events, promotions and anything related to downtown,” Fort Scott Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Lindsay Madison said.
Those who are downtown business owners or building owners are invited, along with anyone with an interest in downtown Fort Scott, Madison said.
The group meets the first Tuesday of each quarter in the year: January, April, July, October from 8:30 to 9:30 a.m., unless otherwise announced. The event is hosted by different downtown locations.
“The Oct. 6 meeting will be hosted by Sharky’s Pub and Grub for everyone to see their recent renovation,” Madison said.
Madison listed the following as on the agenda for the Oct. 6 meeting:
- “We are reviewing plans for the Halloween and Christmas Parades, decisions have not been made yet.
- The Holiday Open House will be held Thursday, November 12th from 5-8 pm where stores are open with drawings, refreshments, and great finds for holiday gifts and decor.
- The Chamber and CVB have designed a Mystery Mug Drawing Shopping Card where visitors pick up a discount card at the Chamber or other participating location and spend at least $5 in four locations and return the card for a monthly drawing for a Fort Scott mug with a mystery gift inside. We have always had a discount card for visiting groups, but are looking to more widely provide these discount cards to visitors to encourage shopping in our local businesses.
- New businessess downtown in the last quarter are Hound Nutrition, G-N-R Healthy Living, E3 Ranch Store.
- Downtown has been blessed to have a great amount of private investment injected over the last couple of years to preserve and renovate multiple historic properties. Yes, there are still opportunities for improvement, but significant progress is being made.”
FS Street Advisory Board Meets Oct. 1
The Street Advisory Board will meet on Thursday, October 1st, 2020 at 4:00 p.m. at the City Commission Meeting Room at 123 S. Main Street. This meeting is open to the public.
This meeting will be made available via the City’s you tube channel at City of Fort Scott.
St. Mary’s School Makes Changes for Pandemic
School started for St. Mary’s Catholic School on August 27.
But with the COVID 19 Pandemic, this year is not school as usual.
“We have moved our 3rd/4th grade combination classroom into our gym space, to ensure that there is at least six feet between all students,” Josh Regan, St. Mary’s Principal, said. “From the very beginning, one of our top priorities has been to make sure that there is adequate social distancing in every classroom.”
Regan knows the school is fortunate to be small enough to be able to social distance, and that not all schools have this ability, he said.
Regan is thankful for the cooperation of staff and the community in setting the school up for the start of school.
“I want to commend our 3rd/4th grade classroom teacher, Amber Russell, for her hard work in creating a classroom space in just a couple of weeks,” Regan said. “She really went above and beyond in making that space not only conducive to learning but also inviting and comfortable for kids.”
“We also want to thank Matt Ida and Brian McGowan at Extrusions Inc. for their generous help in constructing temporary walls for that classroom,” Regan said.
The administration and staff want to maximize time the students can be without a facemask, one of the ways they are following government guidelines to stop the spread of the disease, he said.
” We want to maximize the time that kids can be kids, without the restriction of a facemask that we feel strips away part of our God-given human connection with others since we cannot see concealed faces,” Regan said. “Communication is damaged and relationships are much more difficult to build when we cannot tell whether a child is frustrated, sad, happy, or somewhere in between based on their expression!!”
“So much communication is nonverbal, especially in how a teacher reads the emotions of students and how kids interact with each other,” he said. ” Our kids wear masks as mandated, but we have worked hard to maximize time outside where they can remove masks safely and laugh, talk, and enjoy the time with their friends! ”
Students bring beach towels to school each week to spread out on the school’s lawn to eat lunch.
” About a month before school we also started asking school families, parishioners, and community members to allow us to borrow any picnic tables that we could get our hands on,” he said. “A couple of our families even anonymously bought and donated outdoor tables.”
“Our teachers frequently take classes outside and use the tables to distance kids with masks off,” Regan said.
In addition, the school has all its’ physical education classes outside.
“It has worked out great for us, mostly because God has blessed us with beautiful weather so far this year,” Regan said.
USD 234 Early Release Day on Wednesday, October 7, 2020
There will be an early release day for students on Wednesday,
October 7, 2020. Students will be dismissed at the following times:
Fort Scott High School and Eugene Ware School – 1:01 p.m.
Fort Scott Middle School – 1:11 p.m.
Winfield Scott School – 1:06 p.m.
Fort Scott Preschool Center and New Generation Preschool – 11:05 a.m.
There will be no afternoon preschool sessions and no after-school child care.
Quarterly Downtown Meet and Greet Oct. 6
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Doughnuts For Dictionaries: Deadline Oct. 2
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Podcast of Fort Scott Losing Mercy Hospital Begins Sept. 29
A new audio file will be available for Fort Scottians to download to a computer or mobile device about the demise of Mercy Hospital in 2018.
It will be a series, which can be subscribed to, entitled “Where It Hurts.” The first season is “No Mercy.”
The author of the series is Sarah Jane Tribble, a Kaiser Health News Senior Correspondent.
Tribble returned several times to Fort Scott following Mercy’s closure, to interview residents.
She spent more than a year recording the lives of people and how they changed.
“Their stories are full of grit and hope. Along the way, Tribble finds that the notion that every community needs a hospital deserves questioning,” according to the press release.
“The reporting for this project began just weeks before the hospital closed in December 2018 and ended with a final trip in December 2019,” Tribble said. “Throughout, I was reminded of the resilience and strength of people in southeastern Kansas.”
Each episode spends time with people in town, Tribble said in an email interview. “In one, I take the listener to a (Fort Scott) Chamber Coffee, in another, we travel to the cancer treatment center. I truly believe every person in this podcast is worth meeting and spending time with.”
Tribble asked “uncomfortable questions of (Fort Scott) town leaders and the Catholic nuns who once ran Mercy to find out why the hospital, like so many others in rural America, fell upon hard times and ultimately shut down,” according to the release.
Tribble in the first segment on Sept. 29, interviews Pat and Ralph Wheeler, Dave Martin, Roxine Poznich, Krista Postai, and Reta Baker.
Mercy’s Importance To Fort Scott
The loss to the community was not just health care but Mercy Hospital was one of its largest employers and had some of its best-paying jobs according to a Kaiser Family Foundation press release, New Podcast “No Mercy” Features Fort Scott.
“Mercy Hospital served as a mainstay of the town for 132 years and was a constant presence until faltering finances forced its doors to close in December 2018,” according to the press release. “The town felt abandoned.”
To subscribe to the podcast, click below: http://whereithurts.show
The new podcast is a collaboration between Kaiser Health News and St. Louis Public Radio.
When KHN Editor-in-Chief Elisabeth Rosenthal read Tribble’s stories of Fort Scott, she knew it should be a podcast, according to the press release .
St. Louis Public Radio General Manager Tim Eby said in the press release “The powerful stories from ‘Where It Hurts’ will help listeners, no matter where they are, understand the health care challenges facing our nation. These are stories that bring context and humanity and need to be heard by audiences.”
Series Begins On September 29 With Weekly Episodes
The series employing a narrative storytelling approach, debuts Sept. 29, with episodes to be released weekly through Nov. 10.
They will be available on major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and NPR One.
About the author, Sarah Jane Tribble
Tribble was born and grew up in Parsons, Kansas. Her parents still live on the 10-acre farm she was raised on.
“My love of journalism began when I joined the high school newspaper staff,” she said. ” I went away to college, took a job at the Wichita Eagle, and then followed a journalism career path that took me from coast-to-coast.”
She first heard of Fort Scott Mercy Hospital closing from her mom in one of their frequent conversations, Tribble said.
Doing the background for the story, Tribble was alarmed by the health statistics.
“As someone who grew up in the region, I was initially surprised and alarmed to learn of some of the poor health statistics in the area,” Tribble said in the email interview. “The data shows there are higher rates of diabetes and obesity as well as higher rates of smoking and childhood poverty than other areas of the state. It all adds up to people dying younger.”
New Grocery Store In Downtown Fort Scott Is Coming
A new grocery store in downtown Fort Scott is on the horizon.
This project is a result of the Strengthening People and Revitalizing Kansas (SPARK) program.
The SPARK Taskforce is charged with leading Kansas forward in recovery from the far-reaching effects of COVID-19, according to the website https://covid.ks.gov/spark-recovery-office/
The Kansas SPARK Committee approved the final pieces of the Bourbon County Spark Plan on Sept. 25.
This Kress Building repurposing addresses access to food, which was one of the issues identified for the SPARK program.
” BAJA Investments, LLC submitted an application which will result in the rehabilitation of the Kress Building located at 17 S Main Street in downtown Fort Scott, into a grocery store,” Bill Michaud, the developer of the project and owner of BAJA Investments, LLC, said.
Featured at the future store will be locally produced co-op food and salad bar/deli, he said.
Additionally, a new resource center to support the needs of the community through COVID-19 pandemic recovery will be located in the rehabilitated Kress Building.
“Prior to the grocery store opening, a collaboration of local community resource agencies will open the BWERC (pronounced B-WORK) which is an acronym for the Bourbon County Workforce and Entrepreneurship Resouce Center,” said Michaud. “This is an exciting collaboration between Kansas Works, (a division of Network Kansas that supports Workforce Development), the SBDC at Pitt State (Small Business Development Center), Fort Scott Community College, and the Fort Scott Area Chamber of Commerce including the E-Community program — all that together with being coordinated and supported by Bourbon County Economic Development.”
Any inquiries regarding the B-WERC facility services may be directed to Bourbon County Economic Development Director, Jody Hoener at 620.215.5725 or by email at [email protected]
Food Co-op, Deli Meat/Cheese and Salad Bar
“The idea of a downtown grocery store certainly wasn’t an original idea,” Michaud said. “I think there has been discussion of this since the Dollar General moved out of downtown many years ago. I think it’s one of those things that people didn’t realize how convenient it was to have until it was gone.”
“The many issues that have arisen out of the COVID pandemic pushed this need to the forefront and access to healthy food was a stated point of emphasis under the SPARK program,” he said.
“One feature we are planning is the food co-op for locally grown produce and other food products,” he said. “We are going to provide a local outlet for as many ‘produced in Bourbon County’ products as possible.”
“We hope to become a resource to connect local producers with the market of consumers and restaurants who are looking for fresh, locally grown products,” Michaud said.
“Secondly we are offering to partner with CHC/SEK so that they may expand the food delivery service that they offer to the homebound, elderly and other underserved populations in Crawford County, into Fort Scott,” he said. “The new store will provide storage for donated food items for delivery and supplement the needs of the clientele by making additional food items available.”
The pandemic has caused some nationwide unemployment, which leads to increased food insecurities, some driven by lack of transportation, Michaud noted.
“So adding to the food supply downtown and in northwest Fort Scott will help address that need for residents of that part of town,” he said. “In recent years, the increased downtown housing development has further increased the need for a downtown grocery store.”
“That increase in residential housing, the lack of food supply to residents west of 69 highway and the great opportunity for partnerships to support local produce and other small businesses make this an investment in our community and in our downtown … a project I thought was worth pursuing,” Michaud said.
FS Commission Special Meeting Agenda For Sept. 28
SPECIAL MEETING AGENDA
FORT SCOTT CITY COMMISSION
CITY HALL COMMISSION ROOM
123 S MAIN STREET
SEPTEMBER 28, 2
I. ROLL CALL:
K. ALLEN P. ALLEN NICHOLS WATTS MITCHELL
II. CONSIDERATION:
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Consideration of applicant for Kansas Moderate Housing Grant
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Consideration to submit KDOT grant for fuel pedestal system at the Fort Scott Municipal Airport
III. MOTION FOR ADJOURNMENT: ROLL CALL