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Shawnee Mission School District officials are proposing a new building to expand and improve services for early childhood education, currently offered in the Broadmoor Center and in some elementary schools. The discussion is still in the very early stages but was mentioned at the school board meeting on Monday as part of an update on the district’s budget. If approved, the building would likely go at the site of the former Katherine Carpenter Elementary, 9700 W. 96th St., in Overland Park, which is being demolished. Source: Johnson County Post

With little fanfare, the Shawnee Mission school board wrapped up a year-long study on donations by giving its final approval to a policy regulating when and how private money can be accepted to fund school staff positions. The board voted unanimously Monday to approve the policy and accept a few minor edits of the first draft that was introduced two weeks ago. Board members asked some clarifying questions but did not discuss the policy at length. Source: Johnson County Post

A piece of McPherson’s firefighting history has come home. The McPherson Fire Department has recovered its 1949 Seagrave Fire Engine, a truck that served the community from 1949 to 1975. After nearly 50 years away, the vintage vehicle was delivered back to town Tuesday morning, arriving just before noon and now housed behind Fire Station No. 2. Source: KSN-TV

Elected officials with Wichita and Sedgwick County want to speed up the process of getting $15.5 million in opioid settlement dollars into the community. The city and county decided in 2023 to pool their funds after they signed on to a national settlement agreement with opioid manufacturers and distributors for their role in the opioid crisis. But that money has largely been sitting untouched as the governments waited for guidance on how to spend it from a local needs assessment and strategic plan that were completed earlier this year. Source: Wichita Kansas Local News, Crime & More |

The city of Merriam is officially moving to a single trash hauler for all residents. The Merriam City Council on Monday voted 6-0 to approve a single waste hauler ordinance, which means all Merriam residents will be on a citywide contract with a single trash hauler. Source: Johnson County Post

Service providers and housing officials gathered Thursday to launch their first day of a their functional zero campaign, an effort to ensure that there are more people staying housed across the state than falling into homelessness. Planning bodies for each region, called continuums of care, participated in a homelessness summit in Topeka to mark Kansas becoming a Built for Zero state. The zero each region will be pursuing is functional zero, a milestone used to gauge how well a community is dealing with homelessness. Source: KLC Journal

A research study conducted by Downtown Wichita suggests that the number of housing units in the downtown area may need to double over the next five years to keep up with demand. Construction continues on Wichita State University's Biomedical Campus, which is expected to bring roughly 3,000 students and 200 staff members to the downtown area by spring 2027. Heather Schroeder, the executive director of Downtown Wichita, said the development serves as a strong selling point to attract developers to build in the area. Wu said that more retail stores, possibly even a grocery store, may be possible if the downtown population [...]

Development of northeast Garden City was discussed at the joint Finney County Commission, Garden City Commission and City of Holcomb meeting on Monday afternoon. Matt Allen, City Manager of Garden City, said the development of the city is generally to the north and northeast, and development in that direction was determined in the 1980s with a development plan of the city’s public infrastructure. Source: Garden City Telegram

Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of Commerce David Toland today announced the launch of the Blueprint to Build program, an innovative new Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funding round. This program provides rural Kansas communities a faster, more affordable way to construct state-of-the-art community centers. Blueprint to Build enables communities to select from three community center models that have already been designed, providing major savings and speeding up the process of building new facilities. Centers are designed for energy efficiency and are intended to be placed in walkable downtowns or near existing community spaces as a way to both reduce infrastructure costs [...]

A slow but steady population loss in rural Kansas has hit Moran as hard as anybody, Mayor Jerry Wallis noted Tuesday. It wasn’t that long ago that Moran boasted three filling stations, multiple restaurants, a golf course, doctor’s office, grain elevator, two taverns and the Klein Tools plant north of town. But one by one, most of those have closed up shop. Wallis was among a crowd of about 25 residents taking part in a community conversation that centered on more than a few blunt comments about the community’s future. But while the solution to reversing the population loss is easy [...]