Highland's 175 Jubilee Celebration

Peg Bellm

Rotary is an organization of business and professional persons united worldwide who provide humanitarian service, encourage high ethical standards in all vocations and help build good will and peace in the world.

"Doing good in the World is more than a motto.  It is our goal, our mission, and our reminder.  It expresses in the clearest terms why we have a Foundation, and it challenges us to reach as far as we can to do the most good possible with everything we have.  Our Foundation exisits to support the good that we can do through Rotary.  It expands our reach, increases our strength, and makes our service more powerful and more effective.  Because of our Foundation we can, very simple, do more of our Rotary work."

2004-2005

President Glenn Estess Sr. 

President, Maura Donnelly, opened the meeting leading the Pledge of Allegiance and followed in prayer by Adrian Rogier.

 ANNOUNCEMENTS

• Former Rotarian, Buzz Widmer has been diagnosed with cancer. Please continue to keep him and his family in your prayers.
• Also, Maura was unable to get an update on Alice Daiber, but please continue to keep both her and Len in your prayers.
• A thinking of you card was passed around for everyone to sign for both Buzz and Len and Alice.
• On 4/27 ,4/28, and 4/29, we will be hosting the GSE team from Sweden. We think we are taking then to the Cardinal game on Friday evening. We are planning a dinner for Saturday the 28th for the team and the host families and any Rotarians that would like to share in the experience.
• Fish race - March 25th - tickets must be in by March. 20th. You can turn in tickets at Rotary next week or at Regions Bank. Prior to today's meeting we had $900. The cost for this event is around $1900. Please keep selling! 
• Roland and Adrian attended the Upwards basketball games last weekend and the organization sent us a nice thank you.
• Business After Hours will be held on March 15 from 5-7 p.m. at Aviston Lumber. All Rotary members are invited.
• By-laws have been reviewed, revised and tentatively approved by the board dependent upon the acceptance by the club. We have linked the document to Highland Rotary's website and ask that everyone review them prior to March 20th when we will be voting on them at our weekly meeting. 
• The new bylaws that the Board has accepted subject to membership approval can be found by clicking HERE.

Dave Hagerman has submitted his application for membership. If anyone has any comments, please let the board know by next week.

Guests: 

Vicky Rankin (Guest of Jim Rankin, Jr.)

Make-ups: Tom Wehrle (Summit County, CO) and Brad Rench (O'Fallon)

Birthdays: 3/12 Tricia Blasdel, 3/13 Mark Frey, 3/16 Adrian Rogier, 3/16 Wilfred Holzinger

Anniversaries: 3/13 Peggy Sebastian  

Club Anniversaries: None

Please let these people know that they were missed: Cliff Couch, David Daiber, Len Daiber, Biddy Essenpreis, Dan Fieker, Jon Greve, Brett Gruender, Ray Hereford, Ronald Hesson, Lisa Hunsche, Linda Jakel, George Jones, Jack Klaus, Mark Korte, Terry Lammers, Mark Latham, Terry Leitschuh, Holli Martin, Glenn Meffert, Henry Metzger, Greg Miranda, Bob Nagel, Mark Reaka, Bill Schaefer, Eric Schmidt, Ron Schneider, Randy Schorfheide, Art Schutz, Peggy Sebastian, Gordon Smith, and Michael Sutton.

Reminder that 2011-2012 we will be tracking service hours again to see Rotarian's collective IMPACT.  This year's goal is 7500 hours, to date there are 1768 hours recorded. 

We are planning a Troxler Road Clean-Up day. Tenatively scheduled for 3/24 but Mark will let everyone know next week and pass around a sign-up sheet.

Members can go to the website and log your hours or email them to him directly: swconstruct@agtelco.com

There was $104 in the 50/50 with 50 cards left in the deck. The king of spades was pulled.

Happy Bucks:

Kevin Dewaele gave a happy buck for attending the P.E.T. (President Elect Training). There was a great turnout for the meeting and he was able to meet many upcoming leaders from our district.

Tom Wehrle gave a happy buck for returning safely from Colorado and skiing. He also shared a story of great service from his make-up meeting in Summit County, Colorado. A woman who is a teacher and has been very active in literacy programs had given $1,000 to a program to support literacy in Guatemala. She was recognized at the Rotary meeting for that contribution and the president also called up her husband at that time. Her husband then made an announcement that he was donating $100,000 in honor of his wife's work to the Summit County Foundation to support literacy programs.

Phil assigned Amy Stephan as honorary fine master. Amy fined anyone who hasn't been to a St. Louis Blues game this season OR offered to take our exchange student, Laura, to an event.

PROGRAM: State's Attorney, Thomas Gibbons

Thomas Gibbons is the Madison County State's Attorney. He is the chief law enforcement and legal counsel for Madison County. He also advises the County Board and County officials. He spent more than a decade as a prosecutor and has been the State's Attorney since 2010. His office has 60 employees, which includes 35 attorneys. His office handles 90,000 cases each year and works on community outreach.

When Gibbons took over as State's Attorney he quickly realized that there is a huge heroin problem in Madison County. He partnered with law enforcement officials and government officials to battle the problem. In Madison County there have been 56 deaths due to heroin overdoses in the past four years. That doesn't include the hundreds of overdoses that do not end in death.

Many people that are addicted to heroin actually start with using prescription drugs. Gibbons said that the DEA released a report showing that in 2011 doctors prescribed 270 million prescriptions for pain killers. The typical prescription is 30 pills and on average people only use 9 of them. This leads to leftover pills that kids are getting their hands on and using or distributing to others. Of the kids that are using prescription drugs, 70 percent of them get their drugs from family or friends.

Prescription pain killers are opiate drugs, as is heroin. Opiates change brain chemistry and the body craves more of it in larger doses. Prescription drugs act as a bridge into heroin use. Heroin is cheap and can be very addictive - even from the first use. In Madison County there have been two deaths from first time heroin users.

Gibbons is kicking off a new program called "Lock Your Meds." This is a two-step program directed at getting the community to take action and help reduce prescription drug abuse. Step one is to lock up your prescription medicine in a place where nobody else can get it. Step two is to throw out old medication that is expired or not being used. There are two ways to safely dispose of old medication. You can drop them in one of the drop boxes that will be provided throughout the county. You can also throw them in the trash, as long as they are mixed with something "gross" - such as coffee grounds. You should not flush medicine down the toilet. The pills get into the water system and are very expensive to remove.

UPCOMING PROGRAMS -  Jennifer Whitten