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City budget draft reflects reduced funding levels ———
Housing, pedestrian initiatives would receive less money than requested Lawrence Pedestrian and Bicycle Issues Task Force recommended. “While these funding levels are below amounts suggested by community advocates for these initiatives, I believe that they represent a starting point to further these imMarkus portant issues in balance with the city’s current financial capacity,” Markus wrote in a memo to city commissioners Friday. Affordable housing would also get $300,000 in 2018 under the preliminary plan, and that would grow to $350,000 from 2019 through 2021. The money would come from the issuance of general obligation debt.
By Nikki Wentling Twitter: @nikkiwentling
Richard Gwin/Journal-World Photo
KANSAS UNIVERSITY ENGLISH PROFESSOR JIM CAROTHERS, an expert on Faulkner and Hemingway as well as baseball literature, reflects on his 46-year teaching career at the university after retiring at the end of the most recent semester.
YOKNAPATAWPHA, BASEBALL AND
‘A GOOD LIFE’ Retiring English professor reflects on 46 years at KU
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By Sara Shepherd • Twitter: @saramarieshep
mong English professor Jim Carothers’ contributions over 46 years of teaching at Kansas University: Countless Jayhawks can spell Yoknapatawpha. Quizzing students until they could correctly spell the mythical
Mississippi county that is the setting for 14 of William Faulkner’s novels was part of Carothers’ curriculum for his Faulkner and Hemingway class. Carothers retired from KU at the conclusion of the spring semester. He jokes that he’s ready to leave
required meetings and paper-grading behind, he plans to continue sharing Yoknapatawpha County to future readers in a new way. Carothers, since 2011, is one of the Faulkner experts on the team creating the Digital Yoknapatawpha Project, an effort by scholars to build an encyclopedia of all the Yoknapatawpha novels’ characters and digitally map the invented county — inconsistencies between books included. He said the tool is hoped to be useful for scholars, teachers, students and independent readers of Faulkner alike. Please see CAROTHERS, page 2A
I read three Faulkner novels in five days, and it changed my life. I found a world there that was real.”
Chad Lawhorn clawhorn@ljworld.com
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New population estimates from the Census Bureau report that Lawrence’s 2015 population stands at 93,917 people. That’s an increase of 1,250 people since 2014. That’s a growth rate of 1.3 percent, which was one of the top annual growth rates for any major city in the state. Of the communities with a
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population of 50,000 and over, only Lenexa had a better one-year growth rate of 2.8 percent. But the more interesting totals are the longer-range ones. We’re at the halfway point of the decade, and thus far it has been a good one for Lawrence. Please see GROWTH, page 2A
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tongue in cheek, but that kind of thing that people would be concerned about… just little things that make peoples’ lives difficult that SCHOOLS can be done.” LEA representatives proposed an addition to the district’s teacher contract last week that would formalize a method for teachers to provide “protected” feedback about
Members of the Lawrence school district teachers union would like evaluations of building administrators to include more honest input from teachers. To ensure that, union representatives say teachers need guarantees they won’t be retaliated against for providing negative feedback. “Teachers are afraid to speak up because they don’t want to end up teachPlease see TEACHERS, page 5A ing in a broom closet,” said David Reber, lead negotiator for Lawrence Educa- l District expects tion Association. “And of enrollment increase course I say that a little bit next year. Page 3A
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Teachers want protection against giving feedback Twitter: @RochelleVerde
Lawrence population trending up don’t know if we need to buy a new SUV and start talking about soccer a whole lot more, but Lawrence is part of the Johnson County crowd in one way these days. Lawrence is once again seeing population growth that rivals the ever-growing Johnson County communities.
Please see BUDGET, page 2A
By Rochelle Valverde
— Retired KU English professor Jim Carothers
Town Talk
Lawrence’s affordable housing effort would receive $300,000 in 2017 and $450,000 would go toward bicycle and pedestrian improvements under city-drafted budget recommendations released Friday evening. Both initiatives are backed by groups that have been vying for funding in recent weeks, at the same time City Manager Tom Markus has warned the city is operating at a deficit and needs to cut spending. For affordable housing, the preliminary budget means getting $2.7 million less than what Justice Matters, a group of church congregations, requested through the city’s five-year capital improvement plan. The $450,000 for bicycle and pedestrian improvements is $550,000 less than what the
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U.S. Rep. Kevin Yoder told this year’s Baker University Class of 2016 that they give him optimism for the future during Sunday’s commencement ceremony. Page 3A
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