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Greetings!
This is the August 20th edition of a weekly report to the LINC Commission. Our board is deeply interested in our work and wanted to learn about -- and share with others -- the great things LINC is helping to accomplish.
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Van Horn community garden feeds 33 families
Site Council members at Van Horn Caring Communities have harvested their first plants of the gardening season including tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, cabbage, collards, and broccoli.
 Members of the community and Site Council met every Sunday night to work in the garden on the grounds of Glenwood United Methodist Church.
This is the fifth year the Van Horn site has grown and harvested a community garden, and the first year the garden has been hosted by the church, which also hosts the Van Horn Food Pantry.
Site council chair Lisa Temple-Young spearheaded the initiative to make the Van Horn Garden a reality by working with Kansas City Community Gardens and other gardening groups.
Van Horn is one of many community gardens LINC supports through the initiative of its Caring Communities sites.
The garden yielded enough vegetables to send home small baskets and containers of produce to eight neighborhood families who worked on the garden through the summer. Produce also supported 25 families in the community through a partnership with the Van Horn Food Pantry.
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Site coordinators get advance training
Many LINC site coordinators spent Wednesday, Aug. 18, getting trained to support program quality improvements for the upcoming school year.
The training focused on curriculum planning, special needs children and program quality.
The training took place at Penn Valley Community College and was provided by the Francis Child Development Institute.
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LINC financial audit begins
Field work began on the 2009-10 LINC financial audit this week.
Auditors from BKD are in the LINC main offices starting work on the annual independent audit.
When the audit is complete it will be presented to the LINC Finance and Audit Committee and later to the full LINC Commission at a regular meeting.
Visit the LINC website for previous audits and other financial information.
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Staff get training on Survival Skills for Women
Two LINC staff members went to Columbus, OH, for training and certification on the new Survival Skills for Women curriculum.
LINC staff receiving the training were LINC Deputy Director Candace Cheatem and the new LINC Educare Coordinator Dorothea Kelley.
LINC will offer the 10-week Survival Skills for Women program to unlicensed child care providers and parents in our community.
LINC has made extensive use of the Survival Skills curriculum in programming for youth.
Educare providers previously were able to take the program through trainers contracted by LINC. Now LINC staff can offer the training directly to childcare providers and parents in our partner school districts.
More information about Survival Skills is available at www.ssed.org.
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Topping Elementary gets off to a solid start
The LINC Caring Communities Before and After School program at Topping Elementary got off to a good start.
As of Thursday, 48 children were enrolled.
This is the first time LINC has operated an out-of-school time program in the North Kansas City, Mo. School District.
Sheila Marshall is the LINC site coordinator. Dana Miller is the Topping principal.
Topping is one of five new schools in North Kansas City where LINC will have a site coordinator. The others are Chouteau, Davidson, Maplewood and West Englewood. These four schools are served by two site coordinators, Jerome Williams and Adrian Wilson.
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Quality Matters panel
Two LINC site coordinators participated in a community panel about Quality Matters,a United Way of Greater Kansas City initiative to improve out-of-school-time programs.
On the panel were Christina Esteban (Nowlin Middle School, Independence) and Janet Miles (Martin City K-8, Grandview), who represented two out of three LINC sites that participated in the Quality Matters process. The third was Northeast Elementary (Kansas City, Mo.), which is now closed.
The presentations set the stage for an expansion from 24 to 50 local out-of-school sites using the Youth Program Quality Intervention (YPQI) process developed by the David P. Weikart Center for Youth Program Quality in Ypsilanti, MI.
An initial report on the first year's experience showed that the YPQI process increases quality at a comparatively low cost.
The 24 initial sites were from across the region and included multi-site afterschool programs, including community-based and faith-based, serving over 3,000 children and youth in the five-county area.
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LINC supervisors get new assignments
LINC Caring Communities supervisors received new assignments this year. The changes reflected a growing presence in the North Kansas City School District, fewer schools in the Kansas City, Mo. School District and the retirement of Bill Rogers.
Pam Ealy now supervises the LINC Caring Communities sites in North Kansas City. Kelly Dodd has been reassigned to the Independence and Fort Osage sites. Candace Cheatem is the interim supervisor for Grandview sites.
Other LINC Caring Communities supervisors supporting the Kansas City, Mo. School District will have fewer sites, but student enrollment is expected to be higher at those sites because of the large number of schools the district closed.
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Noble Night Out Against Crime
Over 60 neighbors and guests participated in the Aug. 7 Community Crime Awareness Program sponsored by the Noble Neighborhood Association. Dona Stephenson, site coordinator at Southeast Caring Communities, helped organize the event, which was held at Noble Park in Kansas City.
Elected officials, representatives from city departments, and religious leaders were on hand to encourage neighbors to work with each other and authorities to prevent and report crime.
Long-time Noble resident Rosemary Lane wrote a poem for the event:
CRIME
Creates danger in the home, school and neighborhood.
Resists the police, preachers and those who teach good.
Interrupts the unity along the way.
Moves around to be harmful any time night or day.
Efforts are being made to prove that crime does not pay.
Entertainment was provided by the Missouri Steppers and CPR Family. Local stores provided food for a community dinner.
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Contact Information
Brent Schondelmeyer, Director of Communications
phone: (816) 410-8350
email: bschonde@kclinc.org
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