A Waverly staple for the past 60 years is back in full swing this weekend.

The annual Waverly Old Fashioned Picnic begins Thursday and will run through Saturday. Activities on the main stage include the Miss Waverly pageant on Thursday evening, The Devon Clemons Band Friday night, and White Lightning Saturday night, all of which start at 7PM.

Stu Good says some new and returning activities are at this year’s picnic: “We are bringing back a couple of things we did in the past. We are bringing back a dunk tank this year. That hasn’t been there for the last several years. We’re bringing back the teen dance this year. It hasn’t been there since before Covid. Obviously Covid kind of wrinkle on a lot of different things that we had in the past. We are trying to bring a lot of that back now that we are getting acclimated again without the Covid issues. One thing that’s different is we won’t have a standard carnival this year. We’re bringing in a company called 25/8 Extreme out of Arthur, Illinois. Instead of your normal Ferris wheels and merry-go-rounds and so on, we’re going to have 25/8 to bring a zipline, a rock wall, and a bunch of different obstacle courses, 3-in-1 sports games, and we’ll have bounce houses for the smaller kids and so on. It’s a little different on the carnival side, which people aren’t quite used to yet. Hopefully it’s going to turn out good. We’ll see how it plays out.”

Other activities include craft, artisan, and food vendors daily; the American Legion Fish Fry on Friday; and washers, 3-on-3 basketball, and cornhole tournaments all taking place on Saturday.

For more information or a look at the complete schedule, visit the Waverly Old Fashioned Picnic’s Facebook page.

A grant gifted to the Pike County Sheriff’s Department will aim to help the fight of drug abuse within the county.

The department announced today that they were awarded a grant worth over $16,000 by Norfolk Southern Corporation, which will go towards equipping the department’s new canine vehicle. 

The grant is a part of Norfolk Southern’s Safety First Grant Program and the Thriving Communities Grant Program – two community programs that look to advance safety organizations and help to promote economic opportunity and support communities. 

Pike County Sheriff David Greenwood said in a press release that an immediate impact on fighting illegal drugs in the county will be made from the funding, and the department is thankful for the railway company for helping them in their mission.

The Scott County Health Department has received a grant to fund social programs for after school and summer programs for youth in the county.

The Department announced on Monday it was awarded the Teen REACH Grant from the Illinois Department of Human Services for children ages 6-17 to put in place programs for the Winchester and Bluffs school districts.

The programs will offer a safe place for students to engage in academic, social, and personal development skills during non-school hours. The program will operate pending location approval from each district offering services that may include academic assistance and tutoring, life skills education, recreation, and positive adult mentorship among others.

Scott County Health Department Community Health Educator Wendy Smith says that the need for after school programming was identified in a recent Community Needs Assessment Survey: “One of the top health needs that was identified in the last community health study that was done a few years ago was a need for after school and child care. There is a lot of kiddos who are not in any kind of sports or extracurricular activities. With Scott County kind of being away from everything and not a lot of people work in Scott County, there is this gap in [time] of when people are getting done with work and when the kids get out of school. There is a lot of kids that just go home alone and are completely unsupervised, which can lead to its own problems with regards to impacting their mental health, their physical health, and community health overall.”

The health department is currently seeking to hire a program director and part-time contractual positions to staff the program. To apply, contact Marsha Faulkner at mfaulkner@scottchd.com.

For additional program information or questions, contact Smith at wsmith@scottchd.com or call 217-742-8203 during business hours 8:30AM-4PM on Monday or Wednesday through Friday. You may also inquire at the health department at 335 West Cherry Street in Winchester.

The rights to a Cass County solar project has officially changed hands.

Savion, a solar and energy project and development company from Kansas City, Missouri announced on Thursday that the have sold the 150-megawatt Cass County Solar Project near Beardstown to Ameren-Missouri. The project is expected to utilize up to 330,000 solar modules across approximately 1,700 acres near a levee of the Illinois River, with approximately 600 acres outside the project fence to be vegetated and returned to farming use.

Approval of the project was given by the Cass County Zoning Board in 2020, with construction beginning last June. The completion of the construction phase is set for the end of this year. Savion officials report that around 250 local union jobs were created during the construction phase.

Once built, the 150 megawatts of energy is expected to be pumped into the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) power grid. Based on the average annual use of Ameren-Missouri customers, a project of this size is expected to produce enough energy to power approximately 27,500 homes annually.

The 30-year project is expected to create between $100-150 million in capital investment resulting in approximately $15-20 million in generated tax revenue for Cass County over the life of the project.

Ben Cox assisted with portions of this report.

An exchange student at Illinois College is pushing to pursue his goal of becoming a U.S. politician.

Oliver Hagen, from Flensburg, Germany, is a double major in Political Science and History at IC. After 10th grade, Hagen decided to take an apprenticeship, a common practice in Germany, at a bank. But after eight years, Hagen decided to pursue his dream goal of working in politics in the U.S.

The 27-year-old lays out his plans to get into the U.S. political system.

“So first I learned that I need an American degree, and I want to have one,” Hagen said. “When I finish in Germany, then I will look for grad schools in the U.S. in a few months or years, maybe I need to collect some money, I don’t know. And then I will look for further options, maybe a bigger school in a bigger city nearby a spot where it is possible to work, or where I can have a foot in the door, or somewhere I do know people who knows people.

Hagen took classes this past semester at Illinois College and will take another semester of classes in the fall before returning home to complete his schooling in Germany. Once finished, Hagen plans to come back to the U.S. and find work in politics.

Hagen is attempting to start up a club at Illinois College called the College Republicans of IC. If you have any interest in joining the club, please contact Hagen at 217-607-1530 or by email at hagen.oliver@ic.edu.

The Winchester School District is looking to exercise the next step in a possible new school renovation project.

The district is working to create a survey with the help of consultants and focus groups consisting of parents, staff, landowners and other member of the community. This survey would collect more information on how much support the decision to build a new school would have. Previous forums have shown the community consensus leaning toward building a new school rather than making renovations to the existing school.

Winchester Superintendent Kevin Blankenship lays out the process of the surveys.

“We’re going to collect their input and develop a survey. We hope to roll that survey out here shortly in the first weeks of June. We’re going to open that up, we plan on sending it out to everyone in the Winchester school community, and were going to ask everybody to go in, fill out that survey so that our consultants can collect the information, do a data analysis for the board and then ultimately tell the board ‘Hey, here is what your community has said about the project as it stands now.’ And that will kinda give us more direction on weather or not we need to consider putting it on the ballot in November.”

Blankenship acknowledged some of the hurdles in the process such as a near doubling in the tax rate and the decreasing population in Scott County over the past few years.

Talks of Winchester and Bluffs consolidating schools were also noted, but there was little community traction to back the idea.