Schools

Nsight, parent company of Nsight Telservices and Cellcom, is offering scholarships to area seniors who are planning to enroll in a full-time undergraduate course of study at an accredited two- or four-year college, university or technical school.

Cellcom will award 16 scholarships of $750 each to graduating high school seniors across its service area. Applicants must reside within a Wisconsin or Michigan county where Cellcom operates. Interested students can visit www.cellcom.com/events for more information.

Similarly, Nsight Telservices will award six $1,200 scholarships to graduating high school seniors in Niagara, Florence, Pulaski, Oconto, Oconto Falls, Two Rivers, Shawano or Door County. Interested students can visit www.nsighttel.com/the-nsight-difference for more information.

The 56th annual University of Wisconsin-Extension Cow College program three-part series starts Jan. 9 in Clintonville.

The first session on Jan. 9 from 1-3 p.m. features Dr. Kent Weigel and Dr. Victor Cabrera, both UW-Extension specialists from the Dairy Science Department at UW-Madison. Weigel will discuss what has been learned about using DNA analysis as a tool to improve health and productivity of commercial dairy herds. Cabrera will then discuss the economics of cross-breeding low producing dairy cows and heifers with less genetic potential to beef bulls with superior carcass traits as an option for increasing dairy farm income.

The second session on Jan. 16 also begins at 1 p.m. featuring Dr. Randy Shaver and Dr. John Goeser, both with the Dairy Science Department at UW-Madison. They will review lab results from the 2017 forage and grain harvest with feeding strategies for dairy producers to consider in the coming months.

The third grade class at Sacred Heart Catholic School, instructed by Jamie Gegare, recently held a pajama drive in support of Scholastic’s Pajama Program.

The annual Scholastic Book Clubs Great Bedtime Story Pajama Drive is a national nonprofit organization that provides new pajamas and storybooks to at-risk children. The Pajama Program supports children living in shelters, group homes, and foster care, and those who attend Title I schools, Head Start programs and other organizations that support at-risk youth.

For every pair of pajamas the class donated, Scholastic donates a book. Those items are then donated together to families in need.

For information about the drive and Pajama Program, go to scholastic.com/pjdrive.

A local club has donated archery equipment to Wittenberg-Birnamwood High School for its individual and lifetime leisure sports classes.

Nick Mechelke, who teaches the two elective courses to juniors and seniors, recently approached the Witt-Birn chapter of Wisconsin Deerhunters Inc. to see if the group could help give the students a better experience by providing 3-D targets.

The club purchased and donated all of the equipment for the school’s archery curriculum, which included bows, arrows and targets. The equipment arrived on Friday.

It is the first time the organization has donated to a specific physical education program.

Although the chapter has donated equipment and block targets to the high school before, this was the first time it donated to a specific program.

Member Denny Brahmer said the club ordered six 3-D targets, costing approximately $2,500, from Rhinehart Targets.

Small, sparsely populated school districts across the state have received $18.5 million in sparsity aid, including four in Shawano County, according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.

Marion School District will receive $150,337, while Tigerton School District will receive $70,276, according to a DPI press release. Bowler School District will get $123,946 from the state, while Gresham gets $92,515.

Unlike most categorical aids, which are targeted to a specific program or service, sparsity aid may be used for general school operations.

For the 2017-18 school year, 144 districts in the state qualified for sparsity aid based on membership of 745 or fewer students and density of less than 10 pupils per square mile of the district’s geographic area. Aid was paid on the third Monday in September.

There was plenty of milk to be had Wednesday when a couple of four-legged visitors joined Wisconsin’s Alice in Dairyland at Bonduel High School.

Several Bonduel students got the chance to milk a cow by hand, a practice not done as much by Wisconsin farmers since technology has produced automated milking machines. But it gave the student body a chance to see how milk was collected in the days of yesteryear.

Crystal Siemers-Peterman is the 70th person to hold the Alice in Dairyland crown. She talked to the students about the state’s agriculture industry, focusing mainly on dairy. Siemers-Peterman gave the students a chance to test their trivia skills, and a few others attempted to moo like the cows that were brought in for milking.

The Dead Dog Cafe might sound like the last place anyone would want to go, but when the words “Comedy Hour” are attached, it’s a different story.

The College of Menominee Nation is performing “The Dead Dog Cafe Comedy Hour” next week, three individual episodes from a popular radio show penned by Cherokee author Thomas King. The show will be performed at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Menominee Indian High School, N501 State Highway 47-55, Keshena, while the other show takes place at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Norbert Hill Center, N7210 Seminary Road, Oneida.

Besides the community shows, CMN is also performing two shows for MIHS students.

Ryan Winn, CMN theater professor and director of the show, said he knows King professionally and was interested in doing a live action staging of the show that was popular on Canadian radio for four years. Winn contacted King by email to see how amenable he would be to his work, set for a radio studio, gracing a theatrical stage.

Interns from the Sustainable Development Institute of the College of Menominee Nation recently made presentations at the 2017 First American Land Grant Institution’s conference in Washington, D.C.

CMN students Georgie (Dolly) Potts, Adam Schulz and Allison Bailey delivered information about the research projects in which they participated throughout the last growing season.

Research by the students is funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Potts and Schulz are conducting agricultural research to determine if different soil amendments impact the growth and yield of Bear Island Flint Corn, a traditional crop. The soil amendments chosen for the project were selected from archaeological work done by Dr. David Overstreet. Soil samples taken from the ancient Menominee garden beds show amendments of river muck, bio-char, pottery fragments, fish and other plant species.

Jonathon Kent didn’t think his life would go the way it has the past year.

Almost exactly one year ago, the Shawano Community High School choir director became paralyzed from the waist down.

“We had just driven to Milwaukee and back,” he recalled.

It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving when he started shaking violently and went to the emergency room. They did tests on Kent, 61, and Sunday he went back home, but returned to the ER on Monday when his legs began to go numb. The tests showed a staph infection and, the next day, he underwent surgery.

In 1992, he’d had a similar bout but was OK after six weeks of IV therapy. This time, it hit the exact same spot.

“I was in tremendous amounts of pain,” Kent said.

Shawano Community High School is this year’s recipient of a $500 science and technology grant from the ExxonMobil Educational Alliance program through local fuel retailer Auto Prep Center, 220 N. Main St., Shawano.

Only Exxon retailers that maintain favorable rankings in their store operations are eligible to apply for the grant. During the past 14 years, Auto Prep has been able to award nearly $7,000 in grants to local schools.

“Our schools work hard to make learning interesting and fun,” said Pat Trinko of Auto Prep. “We are proud to be a part of this program and to assist in that pursuit.”

The ExxonMobil Educational Alliance program was designed to provide Exxon retailers with an opportunity to invest in the future of their communities through educational grants to neighborhood schools. Local retailers like Auto Prep are allowed to work directly with educators to identify schools and programs most in need of support.