Articles

LADDONIA — Roger Montague stood in the back of a small, red-brick church in the northeastern Missouri town of Laddonia on Sunday, wrestling with a button on his suit jacket that didn’t seem to want to fasten. He is understandably nervous; he has been waiting to say goodbye to his daughter, Sheri, for nearly six years.

“It feels right,” Montague says, his glasses quickly clouding over with tears. “It’s something we needed to do.”

JEFFERSON CITY — All along, the battle about how to change the way the state funds public schools was portrayed as a delicate balancing act between rural and urban interests.

In the end the votes for the new plan were largely along party lines. An analysis by The Associated Press shows that school districts with GOP representation, on the whole, fared better.

The big, yellow sign suspended above the doors of Grant Elementary School was almost impossible to miss. “Welcome Back, Mr. Miles. U.S. Army Reserves,” it read.

Eighteen months after his deployment to Fort Polk, La., Calvin Miles has returned to his family at Grant.

JEFFERSON CITY — When attorneys for several residents of a rural town along the Mississippi River filed a property damage lawsuit alleging contamination from a lead smelter, they cast a wide legal net that eventually included 11 defendants from across the nation.

One man, Marvin Kaiser, the chief financial officer of the nation’s leading lead producer, Doe Run Co., lived in St. Louis. And that’s where plaintiffs’ attorneys wanted to try their case.

Representatives of seven city agencies are asking for almost $1.8 million in Community Development Block Grant money for fiscal 2006, which begins Oct. 1.

Representatives presented the requests to the Community Development Commission on Wednesday. CDBG money is intended for the development and improvement of low- to moderate-income neighborhoods. Projects in large portions of central and northeast Columbia are eligible for the money.

For the players in the Diamond Council’s Memorial Day fast-pitch softball tournament, the weekend represented more than just the beginning of the summer; it marked the beginning of the season.

Twenty-six teams of enthusiastic teenage girls from all over the state gathered at Rainbow Fields in Cosmopolitan Park.

He had heard the good news for the first time about an hour before Sunday night’s game.

But it didn’t faze Brent Metheny either way.