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 Members of the Wapakoneta Middle School Student Council pose for photo outside the classroom earlier this year. To date, the group has raised nearly $2,300 in which they have donated to various local and area organizations throughout the 2009-2010 school year. Photo provided By KRISTA HAYES
Staff Writer
With the end of the school year nearing, Wapakoneta Middle School Student Council members are hoping to end their term on a positive note.
During the school year, the school government raised nearly $2,300 for various local and area organizations.
“Each year, we try and raise as much money as we can for various clubs and organizations that we vote on and decide to help support at the beginning of the school year,” Wapakoneta Middle School Student Council President Neal Maxson said.
Elected a Student Council representative of his homeroom, Maxson, a seventh-grade student, said this is his second year serving on the council. This year as president, his main responsibility is to set forth an agenda and preside over the group’s monthly meetings which are held the first and third Thursday of each month.
“I joined the Student Council because I was looking for a new activity to do and thought it’d be challenging experience,” Maxson said. “Politics have always been one of the things to stick out in my head and when I grow up, I want to be a lawyer.
“Overall, as president I think I have done a pretty good job,” he said. “Being president is a lot harder than what I thought it would be since I have to make the agendas, run the meetings, and keep the advisers in the loop. I have the whole weight of the council on my shoulders, and at times it can get frustrating, but I would recommend it to all the kids coming to the middle school next year because it’s a fun activity to be involved in.”
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Friday, 18 September 2009 |
By KAREN CAMPBELL
Assistant Managing Editor
At least one area of Auglaize County is to receive some grant assistance from the federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program.
“We OK’d one project in the county,” said Auglaize County Administrator Joe Lenhart, who serves as the county’s representative on a regional committee to determine how funding would be split.
He said an abandoned house south of Buckland is planned to be torn down and removed, and the ground around it cleared with the $20,000 allocated to Auglaize County.
Only certain areas of the county were eligible to use the funding and they had to be in low- to moderate- income areas.
“I talked with the mayors and we originally had one or two more suggested, but they fell through,” Lenhart said of how this particular location was chosen.
The region, which included Auglaize, Shelby and Miami counties, and the cities of Troy, Piqua and Sidney, received more than $1.1 million through the federal program, but Shelby and Auglaize, which had less need, approved the more urban areas to receive more of the funding to help their projects go further.
“We didn’t have as much of a need, so we both decided to do one project, at about $20,000 each,” Lenhart said.
The Auglaize County project has been submitted for approval and is ready to proceed once the Ohio Historical Society gives its blessing.
“We’ve put our specs together, but we probably won’t do it until next spring,” Lenhart.
Funding came from the state’s Department of Development under Title III of the Housing and Economic Recovery Act passed in 2008.
The regional group received grant funding in June, but first began meeting in February to discuss how they might want to divvy up the dollars. Lenhart said they gave up one of their projects to give Miami County more to work with as they tore down houses and built homes with Habitat for Humanity.
“We’re looking at one project with the money we got, but if we have enough left over, we could do another,” Lenhart said.
He said there were no homes in the county condemned by the Health Department that would qualify.
“We sat around and discussed our needs,” Lenhart said of the regional group. “When we got done our wish list was about $2 million. We started dwindling it down to see how the money could best be divided and used.”
He said originally this funding was expected to be the first round of the program, but a second round now is to be a much more competitive process with a majority of funds going to bigger areas in more need.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 21 September 2009 )
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