When Memorial Hospital opened its new inpatient pavilion late in 2020, the second floor of the facility was built with the ability to add more rooms in the future. As it turns out, the future is now. Memorial Health’s Board of Trustees approved a measure Thursday night to allow 12 additional rooms to be added to the three-story tower, to bring the facility total to 48. The new 77,000-square-foot tower currently has 36 patient rooms available, 24 on the third floor and 12 on the second. During the $50-million construction process space for 12 additional rooms was left unfinished, with…
Author: Chad Williamson
If he were a little younger, Cole Swindell might have built an online following as a springboard to country music superstardom, posting videos so his talent could speak for itself. As it stands, the 38-year-old Swindell had to take the old-fashioned path by building relationships, learning the entire business from the bottom up. When the Georgia native takes the stage at the All Ohio Balloon Fest on Thursday, Aug. 12, it will be the result of a chance encounter at a frat house. Since that night, Swindell has gone on to become a Grammy-nominated, multi-platinum selling artist with nine No.…
Farmland around the Marysville School District that used to pump out corn will likely be responsible for pushing a new crop of students in the Marysville School District over the next 10 years. With seven multi-family housing projects underway and another five planned for single-family units, the Journal-Tribune article about a nearly 700-home development eying the city’s west side has district officials ready to take a fresh look at available capacity in the schools. Superintendent Diane Allen told the board of education Thursday night that a space study completed a few years ago will need updated. “We feel that survey…
Masks will be optional when students make their August return to class in the Marysville School District and they will need every unrestricted breath as educators will be pushing students to make up lost ground. Superintendent Diane Allen made her recommendations for the return to school at Thursday night’s Marysville School Board meeting. Officials also heard a presentation that showed student performance last year was behind the previous year, particularly for marginalized groups. Allen recommended that masks would be optional next year but an emphasis on social distancing will remain in place. This means that teachers will attempt to keep…
North Lewisburg Village Council approved temporary budget figures for 2022, but will zero in on more specific numbers later in the year. Village administrator Andy Yoder said revenue appears to be holding steady and he expects that trend to continue through the end of the year. He said income tax dollars flowing into the village have not dipped compared to previous years. He also noted that he believes regular expenses for 2022 will be similar to past year, with the exception of salary figures, where raises were built in for employees. A pair of line items are expected to take…
I realized the other day that at some point I picked my daughter up and held her for the last time. I lifted her off the ground as a child and then it never happened again. I don’t have the faintest recollection of when that might have been. Sometime in elementary school I would imagine. But that moment did not register in my memory and now it’s lost forever. That thought makes my heart feel as though it’s melting onto the floor of my stomach. It’s funny how significant final events in our lives can be washed away with a…
Teachers get $1,000, other staff $500, for efforts during pandemic Over the last year and a half, Marysville teachers and staff faced an unprecedented task, so in return the district will offer them an equally unique show of appreciation. The Marysville Board of Education Thursday night, extended the contract with the local teachers union by two years. Included in that was a one-time bonus of $1,000 for all teachers and $500 for all other staff members employed in 2020-21. The district employs 369 teachers and 237 classified employees, meaning the bonuses will cost the district just under $490,000. District officials…
Cause of city’s online outage was local, not global New information has come to light about the cause of a website and email outage that impacted that City of Marysville on June 8. As it turns out the issue had nothing to do with a global outage and was rather an unfortunately timed billing mistake. In the scramble to restore online services, city officials incorrectly blamed contracted web developer CivicPlus and global cloud service provider Fastly for the outage. “It was a bizarre group of circumstances, in one morning,” said Marysville IT Director Aaron Story. According to the Associated Press,…
Marysville City Council approved on third reading, a raise for its own members and Marysville Law Director Tim Aslaner during Monday night’s meeting. After discussing the raises at length in previous meetings, council voted 6-1 on each measure, with different council members casting the dissenting votes. Aaron Carpenter voted against the raise for city council members while Henk Berbee voted against raise for the law director. The city law director’s salary has been on a schedule of a $2,000 annual increase for many years, except for a bump in 2018. In 2014 the salary was $98,000 increasing to $104,000 by…
The older I get, the more I wonder if I’m destined to walk the streets of this bustling city with tinfoil wrapped around my head. In the information age, I was fully prepared to give up some privacy for convenience. I know darn well that if I search once for pontoon boats on my computer that I’m going to get months of online boat advertisements shoved in my Facebook. I can accept that if I click on a video of a shark eating a kayak, I will be offered other videos of sharks eating weird things. I get it. That’s…
The Village of North Lewisburg will not be donating money to the area’s annual Fourth of July Fireworks show in 2021. Tuesday night village council voted 3-1 against making the annual $1,000 donation to the North Lewisburg Fireman’s Association fireworks show after learning that the display will take place outside of the village this year. The organization acts as a support arm of the Northeast Champaign County Fire Department, which serves the village and surrounding areas. “I’m not sure you are comfortable to send money out of town,” mayor Cheryl Hollingsworth said prior to discussion on the topic. Since taking…
A local nursing home administrator, nominated for a top statewide award just four months ago, has been removed from her position. Heather Adcock, hired as administrator of Memorial Gables in late in 2017, was removed from her position Tuesday for apparent mismanagement. Memorial representatives would not comment on the termination, but documents in Adcock’s personnel file paint a picture of operational problems at the facility. Because Memorial is a county hospital, its staff members are considered public employees and as such their personnel files are considered public records. “We need to go in a different direction from a management and…
The leadership within the Marysville School District will look very different in the fall. Superintendent Diane Allen announced recently that planned administrative shifts will see a variety of members of the existing administrative team take on new job duties, including five changes among building principals. “We considered the openings within the district as an opportunity to realign and redesign services in order to best serve students, staff and the community,” Allen said. Perhaps the most visible change to parents will be the move of Ken Chaffin from Early College High School (ECHS) Principal to Director of Leadership and Collaboration. Current…
The Roaring 20s was an interesting period of U.S. and European history, but I wonder how many people truly know the origins of the era. The simplest snapshot of the period would be the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel The Great Gatsby, turned into a stylized movie in 2013. The book, movie and decade itself was marked by indulgence, excess and energy. Highlighting this idea was the face of the Roaring 20s – the Flapper. Flappers were young women who threw off the constraints of decorum to smoke, drink and dance with the boys, often in their signature tasseled skirts and…
Marysville district residents want return to normal Area residents told the Marysville Board of Education exactly what they thought of the district’s mask policy Thursday night. Seven members of the public spoke at the board meeting, expressing concerns about education, anxiety, extra-curriculars and graduation. Board members also indicated receiving more than 30 emails about COVID restrictions, a few voicing support, but most in opposition to the district’s protocols. The district took no action on relaxing mask mandates through the end of the year. Becky Mash, a 1990 graduate of MHS, said Ohio Governor Mike DeWine is breaking the law by…