LETTER: Female athletics
To the editor:
On May 3, 11 Democrats and three Republicans voted to sustain Democrat Gov. Kelly’s veto of SB 55 that would allow men identifying as women to participate in female athletics.
On May 14, the Leavenworth Times printed the results of a track and field event that included teams from Leavenworth, Lansing, DeSoto, Basehor, Shawnee Heights and Turner.
The Times compared the results of equivalent male and female events. For example: 100-meter dash – M-10.78 seconds, F-12.47 seconds; 200-meter dash – M-21.6 seconds, F-24.96 seconds; 400-meter dash – M-51.19 seconds, F-56.75 seconds; high jump – M-6 feet, 2 inches, F-5 feet; long jump – M-24 feet, F-16 feet, 7 inches; pole vault – M-11 feet, F-10 feet, 6 inches; shot put, M-53 feet, 10 inches, F-36 feet, 7 inches; javelin – M-154 feet, 3 inches, F-125 feet, 10 inches; 1,600-meter run, M-4 minutes, 27.72 seconds, F-5 minutes, 37.69 seconds.
When Shawnee Heights Unified School District 450 first considered using the Quantum Learning professional development system for teachers years ago, Laura Hurla asked the school board to think back to their years as students and remember who their favorite teachers were.
Hurla, now an instructional coach at Berryton Elementary, asked the board to go a little further than just those teachers names and to think about what it was that made those teachers their favorite. Most likely, those teachers were doing these strategies that we re including in Quantum Learning, Hurla said.
Now, after a year of shifting learning strategies to accommodate COVID-19 while following the concepts set out in the teacher training program, Berryton is the first school in the U.S. to achieve the program s Quantum Learning School designation.
Jack Arnold had been just some geeky track kid his freshman year when track coach Brad Nicks challenged him with YOGOWYPI.
Or in other words, the phrase You only get out what you put in, but in an acronym that has just enough vowels to work as a word, too. He was just a motivating individual, and he saw potential in me and told me that I had it, where other people might not have cared as much for some geeky track kid, Arnold said. But him telling me I had that potential really motivated me to use every bit of that potential that I had and always work at getting better.
Silver Lake Jr./Sr. High has its next principal.
The Silver Lake Board of Education on Wednesday evening approved the hiring of Ryan Luke, the current principal at St. Marys Jr./Sr. High, to be the district s next secondary principal.
Current principal Brad Womack said the district was recommending Luke because he brings forward thinking vision of education that will allow Silver Lake students to continue to be highly successful both in and out of the classroom, as well as in their post-secondary endeavors.
Luke, who is in his 20th year as an educator and his sixth as an administrator, said he was thankful for the opportunity to interview, and that he was excited to begin in the district.
Elly Keyes hadn t thought very highly of a pen-and-ink drawing she’d made of the Kansas Statehouse during her sophomore year at Shawnee Heights High School, but then her teacher Avery Ayers-Berry encouraged her to enter it in as many competitions as she could.
About a year and a half after she first drew it, Keyes’ painting is now hanging in the U.S. Capitol.
“I didn’t like it at first,” said Keyes, who is now a junior. “It looked rough, since it was a pencil drawing at first. But the more I added, the better it started looking as I added more ink. It was fun to do all of the little details on the (Kansas) Capitol and the surrounding places.