Kirk with Raymond Bell

WELCH—Lovendia Lea Kirk, 64, of Welch, Okla., passed away Mon., May 24, 2010, with her family at her side at Hillcrest Medical Center in Tulsa after a sudden illness.

She was born Jan. 14, 1946, in Marion, Ohio. Her parents were Marion and Mable (Bridges) McKenzie. She moved to Arizona with her family when she was in the second grade. She was a graduate of Coolidge (Ariz.) High School. She married Danny Kirk in Coolidge, Ariz., Jan. 12, 1962. In January 1966, the couple moved to California, where Lovendia attended college and worked as a Dietitian Assistant. She was also an active member of the Moose Lodge of California. Danny preceded her in death, Dec. 9, 1982.

She later became the loving companion of Raymond Bell, and the couple relocated to this area in 1997. They made their home in Seneca, Mo., until Raymond’s passing, Feb. 7, 2002. Soon after, she moved to Welch to be close to her family.

Lovendia had a love for people. She took a job in housekeeping at Craig General Hospital in Vinita, where she always wore a smile and enjoyed visiting.

She was also preceded in death by her parents; one son, Danny Lee Kirk; and three brothers.

She is survived by two daughters: Barbara (and husband Jim Pace) of Welch and Cheri (and husband George Borders) of Des Arc, Mo.; five grandchildren: Cabrina Pace of Welch; Kimberly and Anthony Kirk of Mexico, Mo.; Nichole Kirk of Cape Girardeau, Mo.; and Curtis Chapman of Modesto, Calif.; her first great-grandchild (on the way); two step-grandchildren: Scott Borders of Patterson, Mo.; and Sherry Borders of Modesto, Calif.; two step-great-grandchildren; and a host of friends.

A memorial service will be held at 10:00 a.m., Thur., May 27, 2010, at Gateway Church in Welch with Pastor Pat Hankins officiating. Interment will be at Welch Cemetery.

Arrangements entrusted to Jim Thomas, Thomas Funeral Home, Welch, Okla.

WELCH—The Welch Public Schools board of education will convene a special meeting tomorrow night, and the largest item of business is the board’s vote to approve regular and temporary personnel as recommended by Superintendent, Clark McKeon. Stan Eller, Welch vocational agriculture instructor, is on the list of those recommended for approval (see agenda attachment [PDF]).

Eller’s department drew administration scrutiny following a review by Guy Shoulders, Northeast District Program Specialist with the Agricultural Education Division of the Oklahoma Department of Career & Technology Education (ODCTE), in which certain areas of the program were noted as needing improvement. Eller supporters attended the last school board meeting en masse in support of the long-time Welch teacher, and some who spoke in public participation stated that he was placed on a program of improvement which was impossible to attain. After a lengthy executive session, in which Eller participated, the board returned to open session, making no comment and taking no action on Eller’s employment, though Eller had emerged from the executive session to tell his supporters that termination had been taken off the table and that he would be recommended for rehire at the next board meeting (as previously reported in this space).

As a public service and because many various disparate accounts of the issues at hand have been reported, WelchOK.com submitted a request to Welch Public Schools under the Oklahoma Open Records Act asking for any and all reviews of the Vocational Education Department in the last five years. The school has complied with that request, and we provide the following documents for your review. Please note, personnel records are confidential and were not requested (items in any teacher’s personnel file can only be released if said teacher were to release them voluntarily). Below is the formal review and the safety checklist performed by Shoulders.

Welch Ag Dept. Formal Review by Guy Shoulders, ODCTE, 12/16/2009 [PDF]

Welch Ag Dept. Safety Checklist by Guy Shoulders, ODCTE, 12/16/2009 [PDF]

Other Resources

Welch School Board Special Meeting Agenda 5/25/2010

Oklahoma Criteria for Effective Teaching and Administrative Performance (70 O.S. § 6-101.10 and 6-101.11)

From the Redneck Diva:

Technology is a wonderful thing. I am personally involved in a very deep, meaningful relationship with all of my electronic devices. It might even be safe to say I love them.

I haven’t always been this way, though. I was very technology-resistant for a long time. I was the teenager who obnoxiously declared to my high school boyfriend that I would never own a CD, that cassettes were going to be around forever, and those little discs he played Guns N’ Roses on were a passing fad. In my defense, though, it was 1989 and I was 16, so you really can’t hold it against me.

The first time I had really worked on a computer was in my gifted class as a seventh grader. They were Commodore 64s. They didn’t have a mouse. We wrote code as classroom assignments. It was so beyond my hormone-laden comprehension at the time that I didn’t really enjoy working on them. Apparently I wasn’t “gifted” in that department. Or maybe I was too busy thinking about boys to concentrate on computer code.

We were actually one of the first families at our little school to get a home computer, and my father was so excited about the fact it was an “IBM clone,” whatever that meant. I’m sure that meant it was cheaper than an IBM; a knock-off, so to speak. I’m surprised we didn’t buy it from a guy’s trunk on the shady side of town. [Editor's note: her whole town was shady.] What Sis and I remember most about that first computer was that you had to load approximately seven floppy disks (and I mean actual floppy floppy disks) to boot it. It was an old-school, DOS-using, mouse-less, one-color-on-the-screen (green) monstrosity—and the printer was a daisy wheel dot matrix. We were in high cotton, folks.

Fast-forward to the beginning of the digital information age. Fast-forward to Windows. Fast-forward to the mouse. In 1999, I had a three-year-old daughter and a one-year-old son. I was a stay-at-home mom who spent the majority of every day watching Blue’s Clues. For some reason, my sister got it in her head that I needed to learn how to use a computer. I wasn’t sure why she thought that since a computer wasn’t needed to turn on Nickelodeon, change a diaper, or wash a load of laundry, but insist she did. She hauled a gigantic computer over to my house one day and set it up for me. I looked at it blankly and said, “I don’t have a clue what to do with this thing. You know that, right?” She laughed and said, “Mmmhmm. Now…here’s the mouse.” I squealed and jumped on a dining room chair until she explained she was talking about the computer mouse. That first time using the mouse was…interesting. I couldn’t control it: the dang thing kept making the cursor disappear, and it was way too fast for my brain, which was at the time running at toddler-speed. And the windows? I think one time after the whole dang thing locked up and I had to call my sister, she found 15 windows open. I didn’t know you had to close them.

Shortly after that I started hearing about this fancy thing called “Internet” and the “World Wide Web” and it intrigued me enough to ask my mother-in-law if she would consider helping us buy a computer “for the kids”—because, you know, all preschoolers need a computer. Well, they do now. Back then they did not. She didn’t know that, though. She bought us a Gateway desktop with like a Pentium ¼ processor. This thing was a behemoth with a monitor the size of Guam; not the screen, the actual housing. I got us hooked up to the World Wide Web the day after it arrived. I insisted on calling it the “World Wide Web”, not “the Internet” or “the Web”. No, I would nonchalantly say, “Well, you know today when I was surfing the World Wide Web…,” and boy, wasn’t I just full of awesome. I’d get up to get a drink in the middle of the night and check my email or see who was online on ICQ. (Does anyone remember ICQ? No? Just me? [Editor's note: Me!]) I think it’s safe to say I was addicted to the Internet.

One day my three-year-old proudly announced to a living room full of family, “I loooooove cheese. Cheese -dot-com!” This came directly after her daddy and I had spent the larger part of one evening typing random words followed by “.com” just to see what kind of websites we’d find. Strangely enough, there was hammer.com, clouds.com, cows.com, and yes, cheese.com.

Because I really hold very little back when it comes to my online presence, I have been recognized in public, and it thrills me to hear someone tentatively ask, “Are you Redneck Diva?” People have called my mother to ask how one of the kids is feeling after I’ve posted, updated, or tweeted that I’ve got a sick kid at home for the day. A woman once asked my sister in the checkout line at Walmart why she was buying cat food because I hadn’t mentioned anything on my blog about her having a cat. My mother was convinced for years that someone was going to kidnap me, hack me into pieces, and bury my dismembered body in 55-gallon drums in their backyard. She’s settled down a little now that, after six years blogging, I still have all my body parts. She even admits to reading the blog every now and then, but she’s much more open to reading here at WelchOK.com because it’s a “news site” and not just bloggy silliness [Editor's note: We knew your mom was good people.]. And y’all know how serious and business-like I am here at the Diva Dish.

I recently became a contributor to a collaborative blog with five other Oklahoma housewives, and because we’re insanely busy with all of our soap opera-watching and bon bon-eating, we can’t always get together in person for brainstorming and scheduling meetings, so we are all on Skype. This morning I was in a Skype chat with them while I brushed my teeth. I also switched the laundry from washer to dryer while typing one-handed on my iPod Touch in the chat. I felt positively professional standing there in my ratty paint-splattered shorts, minty foam around my mouth, discussing upcoming events and important topics (No, not All My Children vs. Days of Our Lives) while providing clean clothes for my family. Well, I felt as professional as one can feel with Colgate dripping out the side of her mouth.

I sleep with my iPod and cell phone on the nightstand and yes, I have been known to check Facebook at 3 a.m. occasionally, but not often. I mean, eating bon bons all day just wears me out, so I sleep pretty well. When the weather gets stormy and it looks like we’ll be visiting the cellar, the laptop is one of the first things to go to the fraidy hole. My cell phone is usually in my hand at all times or at least in my purse. I tweet in Walmart, the doctor’s office, while shoe shopping, and while on the treadmill, but those treadmill ones are usually nonsense because of the lightheadedness that usually occurs while walking on it.

Today I’m a little less obsessed, with technology, but not much. While I haven’t been in a public chat room in years, now there are blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and Skype. I am so connected to everyone around me I might as well claim them as tax deductions. I know who drinks coffee in the morning, who hates Mondays, and who can’t spell worth a darn. In return, though, everyone on my friends list knows if I take a nap in the afternoon, if my kids are driving me crazy, and what I fixed for dinner. Is it too much information? Oh probably. Ask my mother what she thinks.

Diva

Kristin Hoover is the Redneck Diva. A local blogger and stay-at-home mom, Kristin has won Okie Blog Awards for her humorous take on the rural life of a natural-born diva who married a redneck and produced three offspring. Visit her blogs at http://www.theredneckdiva.com and http://therhok.com.

Board members & superintendent talk before board meeting

WELCH—The Welch Public Schools Board of Education’s regular meeting last night was full to overflowing, with approximately 115 persons having signed the guest register. One believes most were in attendance as a show of support for vocational agriculture teacher Stan Eller, whose program has lately been the subject of scrutiny. Board members laid their first agenda item, an executive session to discuss personnel—including Eller, on the table so that public participation could be allowed first. Five or six individuals spoke in support of Eller and his program. Eller was given the opportunity to speak, at which time he thanked the crowd for showing up in support and said that he had a prepared statement that he intended to share with board members in executive session.

The crowd awaits the board's return from executive session

The board’s executive session took approximately 2 hours and 15 minutes, though Eller’s review was not the only item of discussion on the executive session agenda. When Eller emerged from executive session, he again thanked his supporters and told the remaining crowd that termination had been taken off the table as an option and that he would be recommended for rehire at a later board meeting, which WelchOK.com has confirmed via a source close to the board.

After the executive session, the board made no comment in regards to Eller’s review, other than to report it had been discussed in executive session.

In other business, the board conducted routine business according to the posted agenda (including purchase of a 2010 F-250 pickup) and, in new business, accepted the resignation of kindergarten teacher Crystal Gleaves, effective at the end of the school year.

VINITA—Craig County voters yesterday narrowly passed a 3/4-cent sales tax extension to fund a proposed multi-million-dollar facility on the county fairgrounds in Vinita and promoted as a community center. When the polls closed, the precincts that vote at the Welch Civic Auditorium had defeated the measure, with 96 in favor and 98 opposed. Bluejacket voters defeated the measure by a significant margin. Overall, though, county voters approved the measure by a vote of 667-626, giving tax-extension proponents a 41-vote victory, which works out to 51.5% passage.

The facility will be built with money raised from bonds sold now and repaid after the new county courthouse debt is retired. County voters previously approved a 1-cent sales tax increase to fund the new courthouse and sheriff’s office/jail; 1/4-cent continues in perpetuity to provide courthouse maintenance, while 3/4-cent was set to expire in 2023. Passage of yesterday’s measure extends the 3/4-cent portion of the sales tax to 2040. Supporters of the fairgrounds facility were unable to propose a new tax because Craig County is maxed out on bonds, requiring the extension of this tax to 2040.

From Your Flummoxed Publisher & Executive Editor:

Tomorrow, Craig County voters are being asked to determine the fate of a 17-year extension of the 3/4-cent county sales tax to fund a “community center” at the county fairgrounds. I hope turnout is massive, and I hope this ill-advised effort goes down hard. In flames. And explodes.

I first learned of this little project back in March, when Jeane and I attended our first Craig County Republican Party meeting. After a speech from Lt. Gov. candidate, John Wright, meeting attendees were subjected to a presentation by those proposing the “community center” project. The presentation lacked some very basic information, such as a precise total cost of the building and precise length of tax extension. After the spiel, a motion was made that the party go on record as supporting the project. The motion nearly died for lack of a second before county Republican party chairman, Jay Franklin, called on his wife to second the motion, which she did. Without debate or any explanation of who was eligible to vote, the motion was put to a vote and received a handful of “ayes” and no “noes.” Allowing the presentation is one thing, but I was appalled and amazed that the county Republican party would go on record as supporting a massive tax increase. It was my last Craig County Republican Party meeting.

To start, my default position on tax increases is “no.” Not just no, but heck no. We already pay too much in taxes. The government irresponsibly wastes the money it taxes from its citizens. Higher taxes stymie the economy. Bureaucrats and politicians ignore necessities (roads, bridges, etc.), while pursuing nonsensical and petty projects (case in point, Tulsa has a dandy new ballpark but you’ll need a new chassis for your car after driving there on their roads). In the case of sales taxes, they hit poorer, working-class families harder than others (This should not be confused with the Fair Tax, which I wholeheartedly support, so long as the income tax is repealed with it). In general, taxes need to be as low as humanly possible. That said, I do recognize that taxation is a necessary evil. However, there has to be some determination of what taxes are wise and which are not.

I wasn’t a resident of Craig County when the vote for the courthouse occurred, but in general, I tend to believe that it was probably time for a new county government facility. In the case of the county courthouse, I’ll grant that it was needed. I can get behind a project that really is a necessity for the orderly transaction of county business and law enforcement. But then, we have this atrocious “community center” project. It’s a very different animal.

I’m from Welch. We have a civic auditorium. Many years ago, the LIONS Club saw a need and worked hard to build a community gathering place. They have since maintained that facility, lately adding a natural gas generator so that it can be used for housing during emergency situations. In short, Welchkins don’t need a community center because we have one. Now, if Vinita needs a community center, I recommend the LIONs Club or some other group of community-minded citizens get to work and build one, but don’t come to your rural neighbors with your hands out asking us to help build and pay for it. Until 2040.

Further, the plan to build the “community center” is just downright bad planning. To fund this disaster, we’re being asked to extend a tax that’s not even set to expire until 2023. And the extension goes until 2040. And these people are bringing this to us with straight faces? The only thing crazier than this is all those credit cards Discover gives kids in college so they can be paying for tacos for 20 years. If the tax extension passes, they sell the bonds now, get the funding now, and build the facility now. Without paying a dime for it. And they won’t pay a dime until 2024. Seriously? Is it really good economics to borrow $2.8 million that we won’t even begin paying on for 14 years? Can you fathom what kind of interest $2.8 million accrues over 14 years? And it won’t be fully paid off until 2040.

And why are we extending the courthouse sales tax instead of a voting on a new tax? Because, as a county, we’re maxed out. We can’t vote  a new tax; we can only extend an existing tax. Sometimes, you just have to stop spending money and get caught up before you buy a luxury item, which this “community center” certainly is.

In this world, there are some people who have grand ideas for things they’d like, especially if they can be built with other people’s money. This is one such example. The Craig County Community Improvement Association (CCCIA) has dreamed this dream and has apparently tried to raise the funds to make it a reality for six years. Unable to raise the funds, they try the typical last resort of bad ideas, put it to a vote and let everyone pay for it. They argue that that the facility is sorely needed. Yet, in six year’s time, they have been able to secure a altogether embarrassing sum of $200,000. Here’s a tip: if it were all that great an idea and so very needed, people would be lining up to help fund it.

One other consideration: What if we, as a county, have some genuine need that arises. As noted above, we’re maxed out on bonds, so we can’t pass a new bond issue. I guess we’ll just have to extend the “community center” tax. Then we can be paying for actual needs starting in 2040. Sounds like government at its finest. The people who dreamed this up should go hide out of embarrassment. And the county commissioners who are supporting it, why don’t you all either focus on your jobs or move to Tulsa or Washington, where they could certainly use your prowess for spending other people’s money for pipe-dream projects while ignoring basic infrastructure.

The reality is that this “community center” is an abysmal idea that has been badly promoted and poorly executed, the result of which is now to toss it onto the voters’ plate, where they hope we’ll gobble it down because our eyes are too big for our stomachs. It’s a whole lot easier just not to put it in our mouths than it will be to stomach it later. Go vote, and vote no. If you think the “community center” is needed and a good idea, then—by all means, make your contribution to CCCIA—and built the thing privately. But, please, don’t expect us to pay for this disaster—starting 14 years from now. Gag!

Ed.

PS I also meant to mention that this is a special election, called only for the purposes of ramming this thing through. Are we supposed to believe that this “community center” is so urgent that it couldn’t possibly wait to be added to the November ballot (or earlier primary ballots)? Here’s an idea: The CCCIA ought to pay for the cost of this special election (anywhere from $5,000-$7,000 according to my recent call to the election board) out of that $200,000 they have raised over the past six years. Further, I’m also told that the $200,000 amount isn’t exactly precise, so I’ll be investigating.

Camry Hankins (L) & Kelsie Smith (R) were elected FCCLA district officers

AFTON, Okla.—Two Welch Family, Career & Community Leaders of America (FCCLA) members have been elected to district office. District elections were held May 4, 2010, at the Northeast CareerTech campus in Afton. Kelsie Smith, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Kevin Smith, was elected Northeast District IV Vice President and Camry Hankins, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Patrick Hankins, was elected Northeast District IV Public Relations Officer. Hankins and Smith, both juniors, will serve their terms during their senior year of school.

Family, Career and Community Leaders of America (formerly Future Homemakers of America) is a nonprofit national Career and Technical Student Organization for young men and women in Family and Consumer Sciences education in public and private schools through grade 12. FCCLA is unique among youth organizations because its programs are planned and run by members. It is the only career and technical in-school student organization with the family as its central focus. Participation in national programs and chapter activities helps members become strong leaders in families, careers, and communities. Involvement in FCCLA offers members the opportunity to expand their leadership potential and develop skills for life—planning, goal setting, problem solving, decision making, and interpersonal communication—necessary in the home and workplace.

WELCH—We recently received a request from the school’s physical education department requesting help in rounding up used baseball and softball mitts for the youngsters in PE. We decided to take the opportunity to have a little contest. It was pretty straight-forward: for each used ball mitt you donated, you would receive one entry into a drawing for a $50 Wal-Mart gift card. Everyone had about two weeks to get their mitts to us. We announced the contest on the site and via Twitter and Facebook. And we waited. And waited. And waited.

All told, we received a total of zero ball mitts. It was a massive, phenomenal, epic bust.

So, we’re asking for your help. Please use the comments section here on WelchOK.com (not on Facebook) to tell us why we failed. Do people just not have mitts they can part with? Was the amount of the gift card not enough to motivate you? Would you prefer cash? Fill in the blanks for us and help us do things better next time. Thanks!