Kudos to SAL volunteers

Dear Editor, What a fantastic service we have at our home football games! The Sons of the American Legion provide transportation services for those needing assistance accessing Shanelec Field, the Home of the Ellsworth Bearcats!

I personally want to say thank you, as my father has utilized this service for the past several years. Thank you for your time and making this service available. Grandparents, community members and others can enjoy watching the Bearcats without having to navigate the hill.

The guys who provide this service are true gentlemen and a joy to interact with! Well done and Go Bearcats!

Best regards, Heather West Ellsworth

Lasting legacy of Coach Pep

The recent article on Coach Pep was excellent, however, it was missing the most important aspect of Coach’s impact on society and women/men over generations: Life lessons learned on the practice fields of Ellsworth High School have resonated over the years and are still contributing to positive outcomes today.

Not every one of the coach’s players became good men/women, but all knew the requirements required to be individuals of principle and character. As another mentor put it, more good than bad every day gets results. Coach Pep had a direct impact on thousands of young men and women athletes. They went on to have successful careers and families, utilizing the lessons learned on leadership from the playing fields of EHS.

Coach Pep stressed character — your character under duress determines the result. Character is the choices one makes to do what is right when no one is looking. Every individual must make choices daily that affect those around them. Making the choice that is correct may not be the easiest. Coach and his assistants, Jerry Marsh, Bill Parsons, Bill Finke and Dave Stonebraker, for me, brought out one’s character as a group of men/ boys suffering in the August heat during two-a-day football practice.

I can give only anecdotal examples of Coach’s impact, but several of his former players have similar experiences and results. I know there are more, but three of his players in the 1980s went on to be successful coaches and mentors of their own. Clay Manes in Ellsworth, Ken Stonebraker in Salina and Mitch Gebhardt at Southeast of Saline were/are all successful coaches. I am sure the lessons learned from Coach Pep passed to their players and continue the theme of creating good men and women for society.

I had decent success in my career, and I am boastful of the success of my subordinates as leaders. I retired from the Navy 14 years ago, but stay connected to several junior officers from my commands who are currently senior leaders. Several of them became commanding officers and four are currently on track to be commanding officers of our nation’s nuclear aircraft carriers. Each of these leaders knows Coach Pep’s lessons well on teamwork, character and accountability to peers.

Sacrifice to the team and the greater good was the primary lesson learned on the practice fields under Coach Pep. Those principles work for all careers and families. Sacrificing individual wants for the betterment of one’s family and organizations leads to societal success. Coach Pep’s contributions to the success of families and individuals are countless. Most beneficiaries do not know his impact directly because they experienced it indirectly from those he coached.

Bob Laubengayer Ellsworth

“Later”: An open letter to attorney general Kris Kobach

Mr. Kobach: Perhaps you’ve heard of us by now. We in Wilson are a small community that has just suffered, as many communities in Kansas have over the decades, the loss of our lifeblood and pride — our high school.

Unfortunately, we are neither unique among Kansans in our love of our community nor in the loss we feel about this recent setback. The winds of smalltown politics and school board voting have been blowing against us for the past few years, and we have defended our school as aggressively as we could against an outcome that proved inescapable, however illogical and unjust we feel it to have been. This letter is not intended to protest against this outcome, and our grievances outlined below are not intended to drive useless or gratuitous actions.

We are concerned about our children’s health. Over the course of the last few years, members of our community have sought asbestos and health and safety documentation from USD 112. Our request was embargoed. Instead of producing documents in a timely manner to the public, USD 112 only recently released a partial report of the current state of health and safety. More disturbing than this lack of transparency by local school district officials, however, has been the response we received from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. When USD 112 failed to provide documents, Les Vopat, long-time Wilson resident and business owner, volunteered to pick up the mantle and reach out to KDHE for information. Les sought to know what we all want to know: Is there asbestos in the school to which our kids were to be bussed? How much asbestos is there? After we received a decidedly ex-post-facto report from USD 112, we had more questions. Why did officials in USD 112 fail to inspect their asbestos problem for nearly 13 years when federal law requires inspection every three years? While vitally important to our residents, the KDHE Asbestos Chief seems unconcerned. We have waited months now for a response. In his latest communication to us in August, the KDHE dismissed Mr. Vopat’s concerns with a one word salutation. “Later.”

We now understand this rude and disrespectful valediction to Mr.

Vopat to be taken literally.

Mr. Kobach, we are alleging dereliction of duty and inept program oversight by officials at KDHE. This poor oversight has only been matched in its ineptitude by the shoddy and unprofessional communication to which our small community has been subjected.

Wilson is a small town and working with limited resources to understand that pendulum swing in politics has worked against us with the recent school board. We cannot change that outcome.

However, our children need to be protected, but we need your help.

Kansas Attorney General, we seek a forensic audit of the accounting procedures at this facility and a full and transparent report of KDHE’s oversight over the asbestos program and associated health and safety programs intended to protect our children’s health.

Furthermore, we seek to understand if information that we requested was embargoed or otherwise intentionally withheld, we wish to understand what caused the delay in producing reports.

Finally Mr. Kobach, we invite you to visit us in Wilson. Take a tour of our modern, asbestosfree, ADA-compliant, but now closed high school. Our community invested in a high school that is accommodating to those with disabilities and open to all residents. We suspect you’ll ask yourself “What’s going on here?” That’s the question we ask today, but more importantly, if we must send our children elsewhere, can you help us ensure that our kids aren’t attending an unsafe school? We welcome your visit. Or as we say in Wilson ... Vitame Vas.

Les Vopat, Wilson School Future Committee Wilson

Concerns about Wilson mayor

Dear Editor: According to this newspaper, at a recent Wilson city council meeting, a supporter of Dan Taylor for mayor said, and I quote, “The loss of Mayor Peschka leaves a void that can be filled with the same goals and continued vision that Mayor Peschka and the council strove to obtain. Council member Dan Taylor is successfully filling the shoes of Mayor Peschka in his health crisis. For the city to continue to grow and move this vision forward, I am supporting a write-in campaign for Dan Taylor as mayor of Wilson.”

These statements may sound nice, but they are fantasy. The truth is Wilson is not growing and there is no vision.

Without serious change in thoughts and actions, Wilson’s future is continued decline. Dan Taylor is happy for people to think that Wilson is growing because it makes him look good and it’s easier to let the lie live on than to tell the truth and do the hard work to solve a challenging problem. To say that Wilson should keep similar mayoral leadership in place so it will “continue to grow” is bogus. Our town is depopulating while our mayor and city council tell us it is growing.

For the past few years, the mayor and city council have proven they can see messy yards that need cleaned up. What they can’t see are all the people who didn’t move to Wilson because they couldn’t find a house. Or the families with children who wanted to live and attend school here but couldn’t due to lack of housing. You’d think the city council would have a housing plan and would be working it hard. There is currently no plan to build new houses, to address vacant houses that exist all over Wilson, or to do anything at all related to housing.

Dan Taylor’s time on the city council has been marked by dishonesty and creation of measures to protect himself from having to answer uncomfortable questions.

Questions such as “Is it OK for council members to lie to the public?” He has used his voice to extinguish the voices of others by lying about them. He has demonstrated that he is more important than the people he was elected to serve, and will do most anything, including lie and cover-up, to ensure that people hear only what he wants them to hear.

Sometimes at the end of council meetings, the members congratulate each other on another short meeting. For this year, the average length of city council meetings has been only 66 minutes.

Most of that time is spent on mundane and administrative duties. The years keep slipping by and rarely is any of this time focused on housing. We need a mayor and council who are willing to think, work hard and put in the time, not just have short meetings. If Wilson doesn’t start doing more about housing soon, nothing else we do will matter.

Every year, Wilson is becoming more a town of fences and storage buildings. Houses that were once occupied full-time by families are now used as summer homes and empty most of the year.

Many other houses are empty all the time and gradually rotting away.

Someday in the not distant future, our school building might become storage for the wealthy and their lake toys.

Wilson is depopulating, losing population, dying.

Will Mayor Dan Taylor do something?

Sincerely, David Criswell Former Wilson Mayor and City Council Member