Bureau County Fair Pageant Winners

While the actual fair doesn’t start for another two weeks, royalty presiding over the Bureau County Fair have been crowned.

17 year old Hannah Sheley of Geneseo won Sunday night’s pageant for Miss Bureau County Fair Queen.  19 year old Tina Maupin of Princeton was runner-up while.  Fair queens can be from Bureau, La Salle, Henry, Stark, Lee, Whiteside, Marshall or Putnam Counties.

The winner of Junior Miss Bureau County is Hailey Schultz.  Alexis Marquez was crowned Little Miss Bureau County.  Both of them live in Bureau County.

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Weather Observer Needed For Putnam County

If you enjoy keeping track of the weather, the National Weather Service has a volunteer opportunity for you.

The office in the Quad Cities is looking for a volunteer weather observer to file reports from Putnam County.  Observers will file daily precipitation and temperature reports in the morning.  The weather service provides the equipment needed.

If interested, call the weather service in the Quad Cities.

Still No Pay For Regional Superintendent

How much would you have to love a job to work for free?  It’s a situation facing regional office of education superintendents statewide.

La Salle County’s Superintendent Jim Carlson says as of next week, he’ll have missed three pay periods since taking over the position July 1^st.  Governor Pat Quinn cut out funding for ROE’s in the budget.

Carlson says there’s a tension between fulfilling his commitment as an elected official and not having money to pay his own bills.  He has thought about taking out loans to pay for his personal expenses.

Carlson says his assistant Chris Dvorak has also gone without pay since July.  Other office staff has been getting paid because their salary comes from grants and county funds.

Carlson says his office has reserves but he’s not sure enough to know that he can legally pay for his Dvorak’s salary with reserves.  He does know that the state has broken the law already since state code says regional superintendents are supposed to be paid monthly.

Brush Fire Suspect Sent To Jail

A misdemeanor charge could quickly grow like the recent brush fires on the I & M Canal in Ottawa.

Kenneth Johnson of Ottawa was arrested Sunday for criminal damage to property.  Police say a witness was able to snap Johnson around the canal when fires broke out.

Firefighters say they’ve put out around a dozen brush fires on the canal in recent weeks.  No one has been injured in the fires.

Johnson meanwhile was taken to the county jail.  His bond was set at 15 hundred dollars.

Central States Tournament affected by weather

You won’t find any baseball Monday night in Peru.  The stormy weather means games in the Central States Tournament have been postponed.

Games have been scheduled for 2:30pm, 5pm, and 7:30pm Tuesday.

Stormy weather floods streets and causes severe weather warnings

What started off as a cloudy but quiet Monday turned stormy by late afternoon.  The first storm system to make its way through La Salle County left streets in La Salle and Peru flooded until the storm sewers could catch up.

Lightening also left people in La Salle, Spring Valley and a few other towns with out power for a while.  Lightening was also being blamed for a house fire in Marseilles.

Another round of storms prompted a tornado warning in Marshall County and severe thunderstorm warnings for Bureau and Putnam Counties.  A severe thunderstorm watch was eventually issued for much of the area until 12am Tuesday.

 

IVCC Professors have research results published

If you’re the parent of daughter, how does she feel about math and science?  A few professors at Illinois Valley Community College spent several years working on two research projects involving local junior high-aged girls.  Results from both have been published.

Professor Sue Caley Opsal says one project focused on parental involvement and if it helped girls develop an interest in engineering and hands-on skills.  It did and she hopes parents continue the conversation at home.

For the second project, Opsal wondered if today’s girls are more confident than girls in previous generations.  Apparently they’re not. They noticed that the boys dominated the projects and in anonymous surveys, the girls showed much less confidence.

Opsal says they still have many unanswered questions and would like to see more research.

Learn more about the projects by listening to an interview available at the AM 1220 WLPO news page.

Rash Of Brush Fires Ruled Suspicious In Ottawa

Sometimes you see something happening you know isn’t right.  A person along the I and M Canal in Ottawa Sunday became suspicious after noticing a man seeming to start grass fires along the way.

He snapped a picture with his phone and soon police officers had the man they think is responsible for a number of fires along the canal since last Thursday.

Kenneth Johnson of Ottawa faces a misdemeanor criminal damage to property charge.  That charge could be made more serious as an investigation continues.