Imagine for a second:

Your family lives on the mainland where there are very few opportunities. If you can make it to the island, there will be job opportunities, but you would have to start from scratch to build a community: no roads, no water, no homes.

Would you go?

These are decisions that some living in Honduras make.

A booming tourist region, Hondurans are oftentimes able to find work in Roatan. But, they begin with nothing.

“People on the mainland hear there are jobs (in Roatan),” Mahomet-Seymour Spanish teacher Ellen Erickson said. “It’s a very impoverished country.”

“They are kind of like a squatters camp for a while until they can get their parcel of land.”

“(Land) is very cheap because there’s no electricity, no water,” Joey Gruner, a former Mahomet-Seymour soccer coach, said. “They just buy this little piece of land (20 feet by 30) that might be $50.”

Roatan is very forested and mountainous, also.

Joey and Angie Gruner, former employees of the Mahomet-Seymour School District, did not go to Honduras or Roatan for the same reasons.

When Joey visited Honduras in 1999 with a Youth for Christ mission team, he knew he wanted to return. By the spring of 2001, Joey and Angie moved to the island of Roatan with their two children to work with a new orphanage project.

After the orphanage project was completed within a couple months, the Gruners decided to stay a little longer to help in other areas.

They returned to the States in 2003, starting a non-profit organization by 2006. For over a decade, Mission Roatan has sought to raise money for needed resources in the developing Roatan communities.

The money raised has helped to fund community development projects and educational resources.

In 2017, a group of 250 families decided to establish a community, la Colonia Alden Webster, in Roatan. Without an adequate water source, the families, including children, have had to do what they can to get life’s most needed resource.

“They would just literally dig four or five feet down and water would seep up and they would get water from that,” Joey Gruner said.

These holes are where the townspeople would do laundry, get water to wash their dishes, and bathe. While they are not supposed to drink from the water, Joey said sometimes, people, especially children, do.

“Then that’s why they are sick all the time; it’s not meant to be drinking water,” Joey Gruner said.

The townspeople do have a drinking water source. They purchase 5-gallon buckets of drinking water, which, according to Joey, are pretty cheap and readily available, but oftentimes, they have to walk down the mountain and back up to bring it home.

But since 2017, the community and Mission Roatan have not just been sitting around hoping that a solution would come. They have been on the ground working to make their community a reality.

Mission Roatan teamed up with Enrique Valdez, who works with these developing communities to drill wells, to raise $20,000 to provide the infrastructure for a reliable healthy, clean, freshwater source.

Kicking off those fundraising efforts were teams of teachers and students in the Fisher and Mahomet-Seymour communities, among others, who wanted to get behind the project.

“In 2017, the high school students raised just over $4,000, probably in about six months,” Joey Gruner said.

Erickson said the opportunity to raise money for the project fit in nicely with the foreign language standards.

Jackie Risley, the AP Spanish teacher in 2017, took the reigns on the unit and raising money.

“I’ve been to Roatan several times. A piece of my heart is there,” Risley said.

“We have a community standard,” Erickson said. “We try to bring in pieces of the community into our classroom, but not just our local community, the global community. (We) look at issues of social justice.

“So that’s where the whole unit of water came from in that we were teaching about the issues of water scarcity throughout the world, and how these issues affect their whole countries how they impact other issues, for example immigration, how those are all interconnected.”

Risley thought, “we could do something.”

By 2018, Mission Roatan was able to raise $10,000 to get the project started.

But in a remote area, like Roatan, that didn’t just mean drilling a well. They had to get a drill truck from the mainland.

“That in itself was $10,000,” Joey Gruner said.

But the truck would have nowhere to drive without the development of roads, so part of the money went to building dirt roads to the village.

Then, the village had to get electricity so that the pumps on the well would work, and there were tacks and gutters that also needed to be put in.

Just as the group began to make headway, the project hit another bump. In Roatan, like many other developing countries, there are property disputes, both from other local villages and government entities.

“Enrique told us, he said, ‘I would not drill here right now because, it’s probably not very likely, but potentially, all these people could get kicked off this land,’” Joey Gruner said.

The pause in development gave the Mission Roatan team time to develop another plan to bring water to la Colonia Alden Webster.

Another Colonia located just on the other side of the crest of the mountain already had wells established. The leaders of the two villages were able to make an agreement to pipe water from the well to the developing village.

Joey Gruner hadn’t been updated on the progress of the water project recently, but Spanish students at Mahomet-Seymour High School talked to Valdez via video chat the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.

“We had the kids prepare questions,” Erickson said. “They were all prepared with their questions in Spanish.”

The conversation included news that Mission Roatan only needs $5,000 in funds to purchase two tanks for water storage and more piping to bring the water to la Colonia Alden Webster.

“So they are basically going to use gravity to pump the water into the tanks and then use gravity to help pull it down to the houses on the other side,” Erickson explained.

Once the money is raised, it may only take as little as two weeks to get the village freshwater.

The students, who have learned about the need for water throughout the world over the last couple months also looked at their own water usage.

“We also looked at innovations, what are some of the things that are being done to help people in these communities,” Erickson said.

“We (also) looked at how do we use water? What do we do in our daily lives? Do we wastewater? What does our own personal hydraulic footprint look like here in Mahomet? How much water do we use? What are some suggestions that we could look at, and could we reduce our hydraulic footprint? Not because it’s going to give water to people in Honduras, but it makes us more conscious and be a better global citizen.”

With this mindset, the Spanish students will take to the cafeteria next week to begin raising money in hopes to reach the $5,000 goal.

As Risley’s class did in 2017, Erickson’s students will take used water bottles with the necks cut off, to give to Mahomet-Seymour students. The students can then fill the bottles with change and bring them back as a donation.

The project is called “Change for Change.”

“It was kind of a fun, creative way to do it,” Risley said.

Making that personal connection is not only important as an educational tool, but it also brings meaning to the project.

Risley began visiting Roatan as a high school student, went back in college and is looking forward to one day being there with her children.

She said it’s more than getting on a plane to help people in poverty.

“There’s people that live in poverty very near to us,” she said.

“Being able to build relationships while we’re there, getting to know them and realizing that they are just like us: they love their families and they want to raise their children in a safe environment.

“I’ve been there, I know them, and I talked to them. They’re my friends.”

She said the trips she took solidified her decision to study Spanish.

Joey Gruner said being part of the la Colonia Alden Webster development has taught him two things.

“There’s people who need water all over the place,” he said. “And they’re all great, they’re all at the same level of need; people need water to survive.”

The difference, though, is knowing a people, not just a place.

“You feel connected to it,” he said.

“And you also know, I can’t save the world. I know I can make a difference here. It’s tangible.”

Joey Gruner said he didn’t ever dream of starting an organization like Mission Roatan.

“I was taking high school and college students down over multiple years, Jackie was a part of that multiple times.

“They got to know people. And honestly, the organization started with some of them saying they were friends with one or two teenage girls.”

Joey Gruner said that led to some of them asking if they could pay for their friends to go to school.

“Once you get that connection, you want to know what you can do,” he said.

The friendship between Enrique and Joey began the same way. Joey was helping out at a soccer camp in Honduras and Enrique asked how he could help.

Valdez and his family will be visiting East Central Illinois after the holidays.

Erickson hopes that students who talked with him via video chat might be able to also meet him face-to-face.

But the use of technology for these purposes is “impactful” and “brilliant,” according to Erickson.

“It’s pretty incredible that we can do that now,” she said. “They see his face and hear his voice. It’s not just us telling them.”

She hopes that experiences like this will encourage global citizenship down the road.

“You do bits and pieces to encourage them to go traveling,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be to Roatan, but just to travel anywhere and make a connection.”

Valdez talked to students about how it’s not about having $5,000, but using their own connections to find contributions.

“As our responsibility as global citizens that is our charge: to take care of and to recognize that there are those and other countries who do not have the same lifestyle that we do and to help them,” Erickson said.

Erickson herself took to Facebook to raise awareness about the need of la Colonia Alden Webster.

“I  thought, ‘Oh I’m just going to put this on Facebook.’ You never know, somebody might decide to give $5 or $10; every little bit helps.”

The biggest impact will be though, if, when Valdez comes to the area, the class can present a $5,000 check to him.

“We’ll see; it’s only three days,” Erickson said. “We’re a small school, and we’ll just see what happens.”

To give to Mission Roatan’s water project, you can donate online through PayPal or contact Erickson (eericson@ms.k12.il.us) or Gruner (gruner@missionroatan.org) with a check. PayPal will take a percentage of the donation, whereas 100-percent of any donations earmarked to the water project through Mission Roatan will go directly to this project.

The post Classic Plumbing PLUMBERS of the Month: Mission Roatan appeared first on Dani Tietz.

There’s something special about Barb Oehlschlaeger-Garvey.

Maybe it’s her soft demeanor that greets patrons at the Museum of the Grand Prairie. Maybe it’s the way she tears up as she tells the stories of local men and women who made their way toward the greater good for all. Or it could be her willingness to share chapters in American history that don’t make it into the books.

But as the workday of Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2023, ended, so did her 22-year employment tenure with the Champaign County Forest Preserve.

There is good news, though, Oehlschlaeger-Garvey has already submitted her volunteer application with the forest preserve, ensuring that at some point in the future, her presence will still be part of the Museum of the Grand Prairie, just as it was for the decade she spent writing grants and proposals while serving on the museum advisory committee in the 1990s.

To put Oehlschlaeger-Garvey’s time at the Museum of the Grand Prairie into perspective, it’s important to know that it opened 55 years ago, in 1968. At the time, she was still living in her hometown, Cincinnati. Garvey went on to study anthropology and art history at Indiana University before beginning her doctoral studies in art history at the University of Illinois.

In lending her time to the museum in the 1990s, while also working at the U of I, Oehlschlaeger-Garvey has been with the museum for more than half of its existence.

For Oehlschlaeger-Garvey, it was always meant to be.

She remembers building a museum of little trinkets and toy animals on her family’s table with her brother when she was 5 years old, selling tickets to her grandparents for five cents.

“I grew up in Cincinnati, and I had a real passion for Cincinnati history when I was a kid,” she said. “So I had to adapt to a new home (Champaign County) and find a new love of history here.”

In the Land of Lincoln, that is fairly easy.

“You walk down the streets that Abraham Lincoln walked down,” she said. “It’s not that hard to make it important.”

Her method of curation had to come a long way from those early days in Cincinnati, though.

When she joined the Champaign County Forest Preserve team in 2001, she was part of a movement to add a museum and education department, bridging the gap between the forest preserves and life in East Central Illinois.

“I think that’s been really, really helpful for presenting the natural and cultural history of Champaign County,” she said.

That movement went on to help inform some of the exhibits over the years.

As the Director of the Museum and Education Department, Garvey has helped develop permanent exhibits, such as “The Grand Prairie Story,” a look at how humans lived with the land from the time of the glaciers until now, and “Discovering Home,” a children’s exhibit focused on family and home in East Central Illinois.

Perhaps her favorite exhibits though, are the annual exhibits that pull a national topic into the local lens.

For example, there’s the “1968” exhibit of 2019. Garvey said that the museum group could have just focused on the history of the museum, and all it accomplished over its 50-year history. Instead, Garvey’s team decided to look at how 1968 was a “catalyst for later change,” highlighting the civil rights movement, the environment, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and the Vietnam War. Events throughout the year highlighted local leaders such as Candy Foster, Izona Burgess, and Stan West, who talked about how social subjects shaped life then, drawing similarities to what happens today.

The following year, the museum told the story of the women’s suffrage movement, telling the unknown stories of how advocates in Champaign County helped propel the national movement for equal rights and responsibilities as American citizens.

Women, such as Julia Burnham and Mary Busey, used their positions to start a hospital and library in Champaign and Urbana while Jane Patton owned her own property while raising her kids after being widowed.

Although the museum is closed for its winter update, they currently have a special exhibit looking at how disease has informed decisions and lifestyles in both the present and the past.

Bringing those stories to life for the Champaign County community at the Museum of the Grand Prairie serves a purpose in a world where information can appear to be polarized.

“I think the American Alliance of Museums has surveyed the public a bajillion times, and they always come up with the same answer,” she said. “Museums are one of the most trusted sources of news there is. I think there’s a reason for that, we tend to present a balanced, kind of middle-of-the-road discussion of things that have happened.”

Still, Oehlschlaeger-Garvey said, “there are voices who have been underrepresented forever. We should feel obligated to represent those underrepresented voices. But that doesn’t mean that all the good that we’ve done in the past is gone. It just means that it’s a bigger choir. We enjoy bringing in as many voices as we can.”

For Oehlschlaeger-Garvey that begins and ends with “humility.”

“I like telling other people’s stories because we’re all special,” she said. “We need to learn from other people. We should be so humbled by the things people have done so that we could be who we are.”

The multitude of perspectives begins with a variety of people on the mission-oriented storytelling team, though. Over the years, the museum staff grew to include a public programs manager, two education program specialists, a curator of collections and exhibits, and a registrar.

“Everybody sees things slightly differently, and so does our audience,” she said. “It helps to craft a voice for an exhibit that’s more universal. We (the Champaign County Forest Preserve team at large) work together on all kinds of projects. And it always makes a better product.”

Outside of special programs, it may be hard for visitors at the Museum of the Grand Prairie to see the people doing the work behind the scenes. It may be one of the things Oehlschlaeger-Garvey misses the most, though.

“It’s really evident that what they’re doing matters to them,” she said. “Not just for them, but for the greater community and for the children of the future.”

Yes, Oehlschlaeger-Garvey plans on continuing to be part of the Champaign County Forest Preserve as a volunteer in the future, but she also has some other things on her retirement docket.

She plans to spend time with her three daughters and grandchildren, who live nearby in Champaign County, east coast, and in Japan. She also plans to take trips, including one to France, just like she talked about doing with her late husband, John.

Then, “I have 1000 projects that I might do,” she said.

On that list are tasks like writing about her church’s history and unfinished tasks from her dissertation, a document she may not have touched in a while, but one her oldest daughter has not forgotten.

“She was 16 when I took this job, and after I finished my first exhibit, she said, ‘You know, mom, I didn’t know if I could be prouder of you than I was when you finished your PhD, but now I am prouder of you.’

“And then last week, when I was telling her about my goodbye party, and all the nice things people said, she said, ‘Mommy, you did it. You did everything you wanted to do.’”

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It’s a word used by every realtor throughout the Midwest. Every Chamber of Commerce member uses this word to describe their downtown. It’s a word used to describe the unique, the small, the revived, the picturesque.

These are the places where people listen to bird songs instead of trains passing. Where you’re sure to see your friends at the grocery store. Most likely where you would feel like you could leave your car unlocked all night. Where there might be a crop growing within walking distance.

Quaint always makes me feel welcome and safe.

But then I saw the perspective of quaint in a different light yesterday. As I scrolled past updates on Ukraine and the upcoming State of the Union Address, a Black mother wrote that she would love to move her children to a “quaint” part of the Midwest, a place where the kids could run and play and just be kids, but she knows that moving to them to that “quaint” space might also take away much of their childhood.

I grew up believing that racism was something of those southern white boys, the ones with the confederate flags. I couldn’t be a racist because I did not agree with the institution of slavery and I was a Yankee, and we weren’t part of that (right?).

Of course, this is a generalization. But I do believe it sums up the belief of many in the quaint small towns of the Midwest. We are not racist because when we see a person of color, we don’t believe that they are less than white people. Many of us would, in fact, say that we “don’t see color.”

Part of my question, then, is where do our children come up with the racist things they say and do? For me, it’s not only how do they believe that one race (gender/religion/class)  is less or deserves less than another, but how do they get the gumption to attack people within that community?

When news broke that a racially-charged video made by two 14-year-old students at Paxton Buckley Loda that included the words “Kill all the Blacks. Kill all the Blacks. Get back in your cage, monkey,” (source Iroquios County Times Republic) was being investigated, I once again asked myself these questions. I have not seen the video, but it was enough for the PBL School District to release a statement:

“It goes without saying that the contents of the video (are) offensive and unacceptable,” Cliff McClure’s statement said. “PBL Unit 10 is a community where all are welcome, and the safety of our students and staff are of paramount importance (source PBL Facebook Page).”

A mother pulled her children from the school district, citing years of anxiety and low self-esteem as they have felt like “nobody cares” about them because of the color of their skin (source WCIA).

And now, the Paxton Police Department is asking the Ford County’s prosecutor to criminally charge the boys who made the video with committing a hate crime, a Class 4 felony; harassment by electronic communication, a Class B misdemeanor; and disorderly conduct, a Class C misdemeanor.

This incident is not one that has been brushed under the rug as has been the case in so many rural communities before. The Superintendent did not say that they were looking into the video or allegations; he did not call this “unfortunate” or look the other way. He said that the video was not appropriate and held those who made it accountable.

His actions, in this instance, match his words. He said this is not acceptable and went through the proper channels to ensure that the boys and their fellow students know that it was not something that will be tolerated.

McClure has one more year at the helm before retiring in 2023. Seeing as BIPOC parents have told news outlets stories about the mistreatment their children have experienced in the quaint-Paxton town, I’m certain this is not the first time he’s encountered a situation where a student or a group of students felt threatened or unseen because of the color of their skin.

I’m not sure what course of action he’s taken in the past, but there is more work to be done. That is exemplified by the fact that it is 2022 and these blatant and public displays of racism are a part of many school districts’ stories.  Racism isn’t just a divide or a difference of opinion: it is ignorance; it is self-serving; it is evil.

Ensuring that racism is not a part of children’s lives, and making sure that they can live in “quaint” towns without their mothers’ fear that they will feel unseen or different is up to the adults within any given community.

It’s not just slapping a child on the hand when they paint their faces black; it’s not just saying that a social media video was a joke; it’s not just singing that Jesus loves all the children. Saying we “don’t see color” only ignores another’s identity, their culture, their history and it diminishes the unique differences and experiences racial groups face. This saying just gives white people permission to not see or understand the issues people within the BIPOC community face.

White adults in these quaint towns need to come to terms with their historical viewpoint. They need to realize that there are different perspectives to take into account.

We have to educate these children on more than the Black persons’ plight through slavery. To only teach slavery suggests that there is only one dimension to the history in this country, as slaves.  It ignores the tapestry and wholeness of a person and what they contribute to a society, how they impact it.  Black people have love and joy and grace abounds. Black people have accounted for the success of their own freedom, and for the freedoms that many other communities in America enjoy. At every turn of the foundation this country was built on, you can find Black people doing something significant.

If we don’t start teaching students how to celebrate the accomplishments and contributions of Black humans, we will continue to raise children who think that the color of someone’s skin makes them into someone they are not.  If we don’t raise the stakes on these displays from “jokes” to hate crimes, then our children cannot understand the gravity and hurt that these types of actions inflict. And if we continue to think that we, those who live in “quaint” Midwest towns aren’t part of the problem because the problem is somewhere else, then we will continue to raise children who are just as ignorant as I once was.

The post Commentary: Racist social media video once again shows there is work to be done in rural town appeared first on Dani Tietz.

Maybe LaShunda Glover, Susie Jackson and Maggie Kinnamon and John and Mindy Spencer were destined to be in Mahomet for this moment.

Their stories span decades, but their message is succinct: they want their children and the children of their friends to feel like they belong in the community they choose to live.

Being a Mahomet resident has always been layered with an ache for John. The south Chicago native moved to the rural town of 3,751 in 1995. He purchased a home with his girlfriend, a black woman, on Prairieview Road.

“We lived in the mobile trailer park, and we didn’t necessarily have many issues in the trailer park,” John said. “I believe that a lot of that was because I was around.”

But the same didn’t hold true for his partner when she went to work at a local store.

“She received a lot of negative feedback for simply just being there,” John said. “There were little snippet remarks for simply being in Mahomet or working at the Jamboree.”

The couple talked a lot about the impact those words had on her.

“We weren’t moving, though,” he said. “We had bought that place together. We settled in there for a bit.”

Fast forward to 2013. At that time, John was living in Champaign with his daughter, who is biracial.

Their experience in the Champaign Unit 4 school system produced an experience where his daughter felt the effects of racism, but when John was considering a move to Mahomet, he had multiple conversations with her about what that might look like.

Mindy remembers the first time John’s daughter visited the Mahomet-Seymour school district. As a junior high student, she came to watch an elementary school performance at Lincoln Trail.

“It was a medley of slave songs,” Mindy said.

Mindy saw something that she’d witnessed many times at school performances and didn’t think twice about a group of predominantly white children repeating songs and dances in a unit they learned about different cultures.

At this performance, an adult narrator used the voice of a little black girl who was a slave to tell a story from the slave’s point of view.

“At first it didn’t even dawn on me,” Mindy said. “But then I looked over and saw her face, and I was like, oh, this is what she is going to experience when she and John move here.”

From ninth grade to her senior year of high school, John’s daughter struggled with being in a predominantly white school where she felt like she was different than everyone else because of the color of her skin.

But as she entered the school district, John quickly learned that he couldn’t always protect his daughter.

“Not a single year went by where I did not hear my daughter tell me there were kids saying the n-word openly in the hallways and that there were kids saying the n-word at football games and in various school activities,” John said.

During her senior year, a teacher used the n-word openly during a class discussion.

“Not just reading it in a book, but outwardly said it,” John said.

His daughter confronted the teacher after class to learn that the teacher thought it wasn’t a big deal.

John reached out to the principal but ended up talking to the assistant principal. For the most part, that’s where the discussion about his daughter’s experience stopped.

“My number one concern was my daughter,” he said.

“I was concerned about her finishing her senior year because if you are not emotionally engaged because everything about the culture is keeping you from being engaged and focused; you don’t feel like you belong, you’re being isolated, you don’t have a voice and nobody is interested in listening to your feelings.

John believes that these issues, racism, and bullying, never make it to the public eye because the board never sees them.

While John and his daughter were fighting for a voice at the school level, Mindy approached Mahomet-Seymour Superintendent Lindsey Hall right as she stepped into the role in 2017.

“I was in her office week one telling her what happened,” Mindy said.

At that time, Mindy began the conversation with Dr. Hall about the possibility of racial bias, diversity, equity and inclusion training.

A few months later in Oct., Mindy and Mahomet resident Jen Tee approached the Mahomet-Seymour Music Boosters and the Mahomet-Seymour School board, respectively, to address a racial slur that was uttered by a Mahomet-Seymour parent during Central’s Marching band performance at the Eastern Illinois University’s Marching Band competition. No action was taken.

“The reputation has been chipped away because they are not addressing the issues,” John said. “They are, in my opinion, embarrassing themselves when it comes to these board meetings. I don’t care how they feel. I do care about creating an environment for these children, for all these children where they feel safe.

While the Spencers have been happy with Hall’s initiative to address issues as they arise,, they also feel that training the staff and students as a whole is critical.

Susie Jackson, who moved from Ann Arbor with her husband, a black man, and two biracial children three years ago, said that being part of the Mahomet community has been a wake-up call.

Coming from a very diverse environment where children were taught to embrace differences between people and cultures, Susie said that part of what she’s seeing as the district approaches discussions on race is that people don’t know how to have the conversation.

Growing up, Susie got the same message that she believes Mahomet kids are getting now.

“My parents never said to be racist, but we stayed away from certain areas of the town that we lived near,” Susie said. “I went to a Catholic school because the public school was, you know, not good, even though that’s where you had more diversity.”

“Without talking to these kids about it, that’s what they are learning from looking around; they’re assuming things from their environment.”

Susie said that families may be teaching their children that race doesn’t matter or may not even be talking about it at home because talking about race, to them, is racist. But she also believes that produces two additional problems.

Susie’s son, KJ, had a friend over to stay the night a few years ago. The boy used the n-word in front of KJ. KJ told the boy that the Jacksons don’t use that work, and the boy asked why KJ would care, “he wasn’t black.”

The next day they Jacksons talked to the boy’s mother, who was mortified to learn that her son even knew what that word was.

“Where do you think he learned that word?” Susie said. “He learned it from school.”

KJ reports to his mother that racial slurs are used among students at Mahomet-Seymour Junior High School consistently. He also heard racial jokes or students share racist videos almost daily.

“It’s in the culture of the school, and it’s accepted,” Susie said. “Nobody’s stopping it and nobody is talking about it, so it has fertile ground.”

Maggie’s oldest son, Kyle, experienced hearing the same talk when he was a student at the junior high school. Although Maggie raised her children to be culturally aware and sensitive, Kyle came home in junior high repeating some of the racist jokes he’d heard at lunch.

At that time, Kyle didn’t know what to say or do, except repeat what he’d heard.

“I think kids are uncomfortable with it and don’t know what to say, so they just don’t say anything,” Susie said. “That’s why it has to be taught bit-by-bit, otherwise it just going to keep going on.”

Susie, a social worker, said that while comments about race did exist in the school her children attended in Michigan, the staff knew how to talk about it so that the children could process how those comments or actions affected other people and so that they knew how to stand up when they heard hurtful words.

When the kids came to Mahomet-Seymour, it was a culture shock.

“It was almost every day that they would come home, and they were upset and scared and hurt and worried.

“When Kaden went to sixth grade, he was actually in tears because he said that the kids were making fun of (a teacher’s) accent. He couldn’t believe it.

“I felt like I was doing them a disservice by letting them be in this environment where they’re learning that racism is okay. I mean that’s what they’re learning when nobody says anything and everybody laughs.”

The Jackson’s spend a lot of time talking about the kids’ thoughts and feelings.

“Kaden went through a stage where he didn’t want to have his name attached to anything,” Susie said. “He didn’t want me to tell the school when he told me stuff. He was afraid.

“Riley has said, ‘I wish my skin wasn’t a color; I wish I could just blend in. They don’t want to be different.

“We keep talking to them, so they’re coming back around to being more like where they were. They feel, I think, a little bit more empowered to stand up.”

Maggie said that she is proud of her children who have stood up for others when racial slurs are spoken at school. Her daughter, Kara, was in a class with a substitute when a boy calling a girl the n-word.

Kara approached the teacher, asking her to step in. When it kept happening, Kara warned the boy that she would smack him if he didn’t stop. The boy ended up being smacked.

Kara went to the principal to tell him what happened, knowing that she would get in trouble. She did get a detention, and the boy was also reprimanded.

“We keep putting the weight on the kids to figure out how to get the support, and it is not on the kids, it is on all of us,” Mindy said. “It is on the schools, it is on the administrators, it’s on the board to make this better for all of our children.”

As a teacher in Urbana for 20 years, Maggie said that the administration and board decision to make racial equality part of the school improvement plan five years ago has been beneficial to everyone in the district.

“I have learned so much,” Maggie said. “I truly believe that this is an essential part of what we are asking for because if the teachers don’t learn to embrace what we’re talking about, then they aren’t going to teach that with authenticity.”

Maggie said that not everyone in the Urbana district was keen on having racial equity be part of their vision. Staff was asked to go back into their childhood to examine when they were first made aware of race.

But the internal work the staff has done has led to teachers being able to have conversations with their students when the color of their skin comes up.

Maggie said that one teacher had to address the class when a student said that brown skin looked like poop.

“She did not stray away from the conversation,” Maggie said. “She leaned into it. She wasn’t like, ‘Oh, let’s move on to the next thing.’ She was like, “Why do you say that? Why do you feel that way?’ And then they had a whole broad conversation with the entire class contributing and the kids were speaking authentically from them themselves, and she wasn’t shaming them, of course, she was just guiding the conversation.”

But, the conversation may not have happened without the training District 116  provided.

“Until the adults in the school feel like they are competent to have these critical conversations, then they’re not going to have them, and things are just going to keep getting brushed aside,” Maggie said.

Part of the curriculum needs to be in social skills, Susie said. It’s actually part of the state’s educational mandate.

“It ties into how we treat each other, what’s our society’s way of handling our emotions and communicating our dislikes or our uncomfortableness,” she said.

Developing that common language will help students and teachers be equipped with the tools to handle difficult situations.

The ongoing ramifications of allowing racial jokes, racial slurs, and racially insensitive conversations to continue to happen only hurt one group, the children.

“The children who are the children of color are going to be the ones that are left with this feeling of nobody cares enough,” Maggie said.

When John’s daughter entered the Mahomet-Seymour School District, she was placed in honors courses. But over time, her focus drifted away from her studies to “her eating this negative idea” about who the world wanted her to be, according to John.

“Whether it was they wanted her to sit there so they could touch her hair, whether it was she was supposed to be the Ebonics Queen, whether it was that you know she was supposed to be the person who could validate whether they could say these nasty things or not about people, it was painful. It was horrible.”

As eighth-grade students in 2019, LaShunda’s children, Teri and Janae Hall, had a similar experience.

In separate Literature classes, the girls read the 1960 novel “To Kill A Mockingbird.” The story written by Harper Lee follows Scout, Jem and Atticus Finch as during three years of the Great Depression when a black man, Tom Robinson, is accused of raping a young white woman. Tired of waiting for white people to help him regain his freedom, innocent Tom Robinson is shot while trying to escape prison.

The girls’ teachers read the book aloud in class. Janae and Teri also listened to the book at home. That’s when LaShunda heard the n-word being read over and over. According to the teacher LaShunda talked to, the n-word is used 29 times in the text of To Kill A Mockingbird.

Although the teenage girls felt uncomfortable as their teachers and peers read the text aloud, without instructional context or discussion around what they were reading, they didn’t know how to approach the teachers or tell their mother.

As the only black student in each classroom, the girls saw other students’ eyes point toward them each time the word was uttered.

LaShunda did what all mothers in that circumstance would do, she began to advocate for her children and the children within the community.

At student-led conferences, LaShunda approached the teachers, handing them “Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America by Jennifer Harvey. One of the teachers, who accepted the book, told the mother that she was concerned that because the issue was being brought forth that To Kill A Mockingbird may not be able to be in the schools anymore because the district “doesn’t like controversial things.”

“I felt at that moment that they just thought it was controversial,” LaShunda said.

LaShunda asked to know more about the unit. She involved the school’s principal, asking questions and to see a lesson plan. The district ELA curriculum shows that students are supposed to learn about “empathy, social, political, and world issues, how to remove barriers, promote change, and be change agents, and how to see things from multiple perspectives or points of view. Students will also explore world, social, society, or community issues and write an argumentative research paper to explain the issue and encourage or bring about change.”

According to the girls, those discussions did not happen. Instead, the lessons focused on the events within the book and grammar correction.

Students were asked to wrap up the unit with a “Tea for Tom”, a student in-class gathering where children dressed up like a character from the book and made a dessert to share.

LaShunda said that the unit focused on developing sympathy instead of empathy. She also offered suggestions on teaching students about rewriting the end of the story through petitioning the governor, writing to the judge, or connecting Tom’s situation with current events that focus on equalities in the judicial system.

The girls did not want to participate in the tea after being through the unit, but they also did not want to be the only ones left out. The girls were given the choice to participate in the tea or to do another assignment on their own.

“I don’t want my child to be alienated,” LaShunda said. “Why would she want to alienate herself? But it makes it hard for me, as a parent, and it makes it doubly hard for a child who has an authority figure to tell her you either have to isolate yourself for the rest of the class, or you do something that makes you uncomfortable.”

Janae and Teri said that they feel like they have to deal with stereotypes often. When a balloon popped in a classroom, a boy asked if that is what it sounded like in the neighborhood they lived in in Chicago.

“Was that what it sounded like at night,” he asked.

“I got so mad I went off on him,” Teri said.

She believes that giving children the opportunity to learn about diversity in public schools is the right place to begin when moving toward racial equality.

“Kids’ brains aren’t fully developed so they can have a change of mind,” she said. “If he knows that what he said was wrong. It’s like that towards Black people, Asian people, Hispanic people, and gay people.

“It’s harder to change an adult’s mind because they’re very different and set in what they know.”

Although the parents have tried to go through the appropriate channels in order to provide a safe environment for their children, they have felt like there’s a lot of rhetoric with little action.

Maggie and Susie finally decided to approach the board of education in Nov., asking the district to educate all children, especially white children, to address racism directly in the school system.

“Our experiences as a bi-racial family regarding race continually impact our feelings of safety, my children’s developing racial identities and have caused us to question whether this community has a place for us,” Susie said. “I could share the countless things we have experienced, but it would be too heartbreaking and take too long.”

Hall asked the women and LaShunda, who was present at the board meeting, to meet with her privately. The women advocated for teachers training and a community committee to begin the process.

Being so close to the holidays, Hall suggested that the process begin in Jan. 2020. When Susie asked about the committee in Jan., she was told that one would be started in the spring.

Jackson said that the committee keeps getting pushed further and further down the road.

The parents believed that when a Mahomet-Seymour alumni group banded together to ask more from the school district they grew up in, change would happen.

The alumni asked the board of education to guide changes in diversity through policies and curriculum.

“While we value the public education we received and lessons we learned, we cannot ignore the curriculum gaps and harmful pedagogical practices which also accompanied our education at Mahomet Seymour,” the alumni wrote.

“Our K-12 education did not prepare us to recognize, acknowledge, or engage with the current and historical social injustices in our society, nor were we prepared to enter a diverse, global workforce. Additionally, various lesson plans, assignments, and the framing of historical events and timelines of our nation have further contributed, likely unintentionally but with a negative impact nonetheless, to the social injustices of our society.

“While it is true that Mahomet and the surrounding communities have historically been, and continue to be, predominately white, there is no excuse for the District to not engage students in meaningful, developmentally appropriate education about power, race, and privilege.”

Maggie thought that the alumni petition, signed by over 600 alumni, and the policy put forward were spot on.

“It came from people who graduated from the school district not too long ago,” Maggie said. “ They were not prepared to go out into the world outside of Mahomet after they graduated. They did not feel prepared to engage in communities that were diverse and workforces or colleges that were diverse.”

With a few changes to the alumni’s policy proposal, Hall put forth that she believed the district should adopt the policy. Prior to the discussion, board members Jeremy Henrichs and Lori Larson gave statements that centered around the Declaration of Independence’s promise of “all men are created equal” and Jesus saying “love your neighbor as yourself” in the Book of Matthew.

Board member Meghan Hennesy put forth a motion that the board of education should develop a community committee that would focus on diversity to help the board through future plans.

“I thought it was an amazing idea to have this community involvement and get everyone involved from the board level, and really figure out some solutions,” Mindy said.

The board of education voted the measure down 4-3 with Merle Giles, Lori Larson, Max McComb, and Jeremy Henrichs in opposition.

“It was totally deflating that nothing happened.”

“They’re not listening to the people in the schools. They were not listening to everyone because if they weren’t listening to everyone, they would have responded differently, and they would have been more open to community-based solutions,”.”

John said that part of the problem is that the board never hears about the bullying and incidents that happen within the district.

“I would love it if every single racial incident, every single bullying incident, every single incident where somebody is affected or assaulted because of their gender goes straight to the board,” he said. “If they are not seeing these issues, it’s because the administration in the schools is muffling it.”

“There are people hurting,” Maggie said. “There are people telling you, their stories and they’re telling you that they’re hurting.”

Susie whose face looked desolate on the board of education video as she watched the discussion said that the vote was devastating.

“It was a complete blow to the gut like I just didn’t think that we were that far behind. I mean, I thought that we have made some progress,” she said.

Susie knows that there are teachers within the district who want to be trained so that they can make the environment better for all students.

“I’ve had teachers call me, I have friends that work in the district,” Susie said. “They are dying to participate, to grow, to learn, to share the information that they have. Literally, if the board and the superintendent are the barrier, they’re preventing the staff who know what they’re doing and want to learn and want to work. They’re preventing them from doing the work.

“We have smart teachers, so they could handle this. They could get this together. This is not something that would be hard to do. It just needs to be allowed.”

She liked the idea of a board-led community committee to address diversity issues because she said that lack of diversity in any community is a community issue.

“If the community is not involved, it’s only going to be half hearted,” Susie said.

“Getting the community in on the ground level, and having them work together to say, what are the problems, what are the things that we could address, how can the community come together and work with the board and work with the administration to help to really get that change, moving; you have to get the members of that committee in on the ground level.”

The parents said that they are not going to give up, though. They know that there is so much to lose for their children and for other children in the community.

“We keep trying to enact change,” Mindy said. “And we keep trying to help the kids.

“I will still keep reaching out to Dr. Hall,, and we will keep talking to the school board.”

LaShunda and Susie would like to see a group started for children of color in the Mahomet-Seymour community.

“It is really hard to be a person of color in this community and to be alone and to figure out how to handle these things,” Susie said.

“I hope that at some point, if Mahomet gets far enough down the road to where they ever even acknowledge this, they will consider what can we do to help our children of color to get support from each other?”

Incoming freshmen Janae and Teri are scared to go back to school this fall.

Over the summer Janae has lost a few friends because of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Teri said that knowing that the news and conversations are racially charged, she feels like she will be the center of jokes and conversation as students gather back together.

Knowing that her children’s grades slid in all grades after the To Kill A Mockingbird unit, LaShunda is considering not sending her girls to Mahomet-Seymour in the fall.

“I’m afraid that when they go back, it’s still going to drop,” LaShunda said. “Or it’s going to get worse.”

She worries, though, that not knowing the situation her children went through last fall, other school districts may look at their last semester grades and judge them, instead of looking at the A’s and B’s in the years prior.

Whether or not the girls go back to school, LaShunda said there is still work to do at home and in the community.

“I just have to love them,” she said. “And hopefully strengthen them.

“When they go to bed, they don’t feel secure. They’re afraid. They’re like, ‘Mommy, what if somebody does this and that?

“My children are still hurting from this.”

LaShunda also knows that this is a moment when something can be changed for her children and the children to come after them, too.

“I know that something has to happen,” she said. “I want them to be able to say, ‘I made this happen.’ I want them to know that they can do anything. So I’m still hopeful.”

The post Glover: “I want them to know that they can do anything, So I’m still hopeful” appeared first on Dani Tietz.

It’s in his blood.

The seventh generation steward of Spence Farm in Livingston County can take a seed and produce heirloom and native crops on the 160-acre farm.

It’s a process he learned from his ancestors, who purchased the land nearly 200 years ago, and one that he is passing on to his grandchildren.

On the side of producing vegetables, mixed grains, wheat, rye, different varieties of corn sorghum, flours and corn meals, Travis is also planting the seed of opportunity for 60 other Central Illinois small farms through marketing and distribution services that deliver fresh produce, dairy and meat to almost 50 restaurants in Chicago and Central Illinois.

“Last year we delivered about 120 tons of product,” Travis said.

The thriving dining economy was something that was expected to continue in 2020. But, prior to March, Travis saw that the spread of COVID-19 would likely take hold of the United States in the same way as it had in China, Italy and Spain.

The tried-and-true model of providing products to restaurants would have to shift, and it would need to be done quickly.

In a matter of days, Travis and the 60 farms he works with, went from providing food to 30 restaurants in Chicago to three. He immediately offered a solution that would benefit both restaurant owners and the public: produce deliveries to supplement grocery shopping during the stay-at-home orders.

“Many of our farmers at the very beginning said, ‘Oh, we’re going to scale back; you’re not going to be able to sell it to the restaurants so we should scale back and not plant as much or get rid of some livestock,’” Travis recalled. “And I turned around and I said ‘No, please. Just keep planting, plant as much as you need. We will find the place to make this happen.

“We were able to pivot quickly enough to offer (the product) to local families here in Central Illinois and in Chicago,” Travis said. “It exploded.”

The demand came with the help of restaurant owners like The Wheelhouse’s Ryan and Abbie Rogiers. The farm-to-table restaurant has a long-standing relationship with Travis. Much of their product comes from the farms he serves.

The Rogiers took a week off after Pritzker announced that restaurants would have to close to figure out a plan that would work for their schedules, budget and customers.

When they came back, a weekly produce menu was distributed to the public via Facebook. Customers had access to everything that chefs had access to. The orders that were placed on Sunday were delivered to the restaurant from the back of Travis’ truck by mid-week.

“(The customers) could make choices and have control over what they wanted to feed themselves and their families,” Travis said.

The St. Joseph community was not the only town served, though. Travis continued his weekly trips up I-57 to Chicago in order to deliver to a few restaurant owners and customers there. He also delivered to Peoria and several other small communities.

At the height of the pandemic, the local farmers with the help of some Chicago distributors were serving about 700 families a week.

“I’m thrilled, beyond words to be able to offer all of our farm’s products to local families,” Travis said. “The quality of what we’re offering is, I think, exceptional.”

For Travis, though, selling a product isn’t all that goes into consideration as he grows the distribution business.

First and foremost, “I’m trying to protect the emotional, physical and mental capacity of our farmers,” he said.

There are also time and packaging limitations on the Spence Farm operation.

Restaurant owners like the Rogiers help to sort and package the goods their customers order. Travis said restaurant owners in Chicago have also done the same.

“By consolidating all those orders by all in bulk, do the packaging for all the individuals and take care of the sales invoice, that will allow us to come back and do what we do best: taking care of our farmers and our customers, our restaurants and our bulk buyers,” Travis said. “That will eliminate at least 40 hours a week for me.”

Organic farmers like Thomas Harrison from Crooked Row Farm in Champaign said that having an innovative thinker like Travis was reassuring in a time when nothing seemed real.

Moving from part-time work on the farm to a full-time schedule, Harrison had planned to scale up in 2020.

“I still need to feed myself and my family and my friends; that’s that’s important to me,” Harrison said. “So I’m going to continue to do what I planned to do. I wasn’t really too worried about not selling anything.”

Instead, Harrison chose to work beside Travis.

“How do we learn more about this and adapt and move on,” Harrison said. “Yeah, it was frightening at first; this can affect everybody. And not just certain people in life. This is a pandemic, it’s widespread. And this, this could hit home. But we just need to learn about it at this point in time and then move forward. We’ll learn and adapt.”

Part of the learning and adapting process included going with Travis to Chicago and helping him deliver food.

“It is the most surreal thing to have this experience in which we pull into an alley behind a restaurant and have down the block and around halfway the other side of the block people lined up,” Travis said. “And many of those people are celebrity chefs who are in a food line to get product from us out of the truck space six feet apart.”

Going to the Illinois’ epicenter for COVID-19, Travis and Harrison knew they were taking a risk.

“We talked briefly about the fear aspect in the risk ask aspect,” Travis said.

“For me, at the very beginning, there was conscious thought in, ‘Do we take this risk? Do we do this?’ ‘And what does that mean?’

We have families, we have responsibilities. But that fear went away very quickly, with more knowledge about how to keep ourselves safe with the purpose of serving people.”

The men wore masks, used hand sanitizer often and changed their gloves between every stop in Chicago.

“People were super comfortable with it,” Travis said.

“Part of it is in the messaging. Part of it is in creating the community through email. Here’s what we need. What do you need? How can we make this comfortable for you? How can we give you some sense of control back in this? How can we make you feel like, what you’re doing is being responsible toward us and we’re being responsible toward you?

“Then at the end of the day, we take the gloves off, somebody feeds us, and we go home. It’s an intense day but it is a good day.”

When Travis gets home from Chicago on Wednesdays, he does not open his computer. Instead, he regroups for the Thursday trip to St. Joseph.

Alongside offering the farm box to their customers, the Rogiers also jumped on the wagon with meal kits to be prepared at home once a week. Ryan shows home chefs how to prepare their food on a weekly video while Abbie provides comical insights and thoughts.

The process from the farm to the table is deliberate. Travis works with restaurant owners each year to get an idea of their seasonal menus so that he can provide planting feedback to the farmers.

“There’s so much education that goes on behind-the-scenes with us trying to help farmers understand what it takes to be profitable, what it takes to be productive, what it takes to be safe and provide a product called food that we all consume.

“It’s important that they learn how to be efficient, and have the highest quality crops,” Travis said.

Harrison added, “It’s a synergy. If our plants or animals are healthy and we consume those, then we’re healthy, and we stand a better chance at fighting disease and virus. If the plants and animals are healthy, they can defend themselves from these things as well.”

An added benefit is that buying produce from local farmers also stimulates the local economy.

“I’m not saying that this system is for everybody or that it replaces the grocery store; but what I’m saying is it gives people the choice,” Travis said. “It gives the opportunity for each of us to support local economies and local farms in a way that maybe we haven’t stepped up to in the past.”

For Harrison, the slower pace of Illinois during the stay-at-home order helped him reconnect with what is really important to him.

“This also gives us an opportunity to grow as people and just kind of slow down and get back to the things that are important to us: our food, our family and our friends. In that aspect, this pandemic has allowed us to reach and connect with our communities on another level than we have previously.”

Travis said that in recent years he has had to turn down a demand from restaurants for produce, meat and dairy products because while the demand is there, local farmers don’t have the capacity to do everything for everyone.

He has taken the Spence Farm model to help others, like Harrison, to start their own organic farm in hopes that more local farms will be established in Illinois and throughout the country.

“Then we don’t have to be big, we just have to be great,” Travis said. “I want more of these pods around the country, around the world, to create opportunities for local farms, local communities to rebuild and regenerate that whole economy.

“We can take back our autonomy by having this local economic development again.”

Abbie said that the changes the pandemic is bringing to small businesses could be a good thing, too. Aside from moving from dine-in to curbside to outdoor dining, the Rogiers have also been in the process of setting up a local farm-to-table delivery system.

“That’s my favorite part of this whole thing,” Abbie said. “It’s like forced innovation; you have to change some choice like you can’t just keep going.

“That’s the good thing about being a small farm or small restaurant is that we have the ability to adapt and recreate things.”

Travis agrees.

“It’s a remarkable time,” he said.

“It’s an opportunist opportunistic time.”

He also thinks it’s an intentional time.

“We’ve all had to practice social distancing, I would hope that we will be able to practice intentional compassion,” he said. “That would go a really really long way throughout society and throughout the world. And it doesn’t take that much.

“Practicing intentional compassion is really trying to take care of each other. Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes progress.

“So, we should practice more.”

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Whether the turkey is brining in the refrigerator or still on the grocery list for the upcoming week, a feast is about to be prepared.

As families across the nation sit down to dine on the year’s finest, few think about where the food that will be before them came from. Some, though, know exactly where their food was grown, harvested, or processed.

“If you know your farmer and you learn to trust your farmer, I think that’s going to go a long way in ensuring your health long-term,” David Bane, owner of Bane Family Meats, said.

Locally grown and sourced products are nothing new.

David, who grew up on a family farm near Bloomington, Ill., said it was all that he knew until he was an adult.

“We always had great quality food and it spoiled me,” he said.

Once David left the family farm to study veterinarian medicine, he realized that not all food was produced and processed the same way.

He became concerned with the industrialization of agriculture and the use of chemicals, antibiotics and pesticides.

“We never did that on the farm that I grew up on,” he said.

“But I kind of tolerated it because I knew that was the direction agriculture was trending towards: industrialization.”

For a decade, Bane practiced at the University of Illinois’ College of Veterinary Medicine then took a job in the pharmaceutical industry. While raising five children and supplying his family with food, Bane continued to question what he provided for his loved ones to put into their bodies.

“I was really concerned about the quality of food that you could buy in the grocery store,” he said. “And I thought, ‘I can do this a whole lot better,’ so I started doing just that.”

While they raised livestock together, David began by teaching his children the principles that he learned on his family farm all those years ago.

The children were involved with 4-H; each wanted to raise a different species of animal. The diverse livestock gave the Banes what they needed to provide sustenance to their meals. Soon, family, friends and neighbors started asking about their products.

“We would give them some for gifts and we started selling,” David said. “It just kind of grew like that into a business.”

Bane Family Meats has now been serving East Central Illinois for more than 20 years.

David left his job in pharma in the early 2000s to expand on what his children had started.

“I was on the road with my job in corporate America, probably 60- to 70 percent of the time,” he said. “And when my kids were growing up. For me, that was not the direction I wanted to go.”

A surge in local like-minded farming practices gave him a network to grow with.

“There was a growing sense I think in the community at large that we needed better quality food for our families,” he said.

At the time, the restaurant industry caught on, too.

Bane was able to provide antibiotic-free, GMO-free chicken to a restaurant in Urbana.

“Then the business kind of exploded,” he said.

That is until the drought of 2012 hit. The associated costs forced Bane to raise his prices by about 40 percent, which was too steep for the restaurant.

“I didn’t want to raise livestock at a loss,” he said. “So I said this is what I’m going to have to have for us to continue to be able to do business.’”

The restaurant couldn’t meet their bottom line with increasing costs, and had to pull away from the agreement.

While David has and does work with a few businesses, Bane Family Meats’ primarily focuses on the needs of families. They hand-deliver their products to customers, ensuring that each customer gets the freshest meat.

“Customers can buy individual packages of meat: one chicken or one turkey, or they can buy in bulk; they can buy a half of a cow or a quarter of a pig. Or they can also buy a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture).”

CSAs usually provide seasonal vegetables, but Bane Family Farms became a meat CSA about three or four years ago.

The program allows the customer to purchase  5-, 10- or 20-pounds of meat per month on a 6- to 12-month basis. Based on customer feedback, David then customizes the order and delivers it.

“It’s been a great relationship and the people really enjoy the products and then, you know, enjoy me coming and telling them about the farm,” he said.

David said that the relationship he has built with his customers over the years is what is most important.

“They want the best foods available for their families and that’s what I try to provide,” he said. “I’m not about quantity, and more about quality.”

Quality is what David believes is the best medicine.

“Processed food is killing people,” he said. “Just look at the incidents of chronic inflammatory diseases, and there’s an epidemic, obesity, all those things.

“There’s got to be a better way. And this is one of them.”

David said that Bane Family Farms has nothing to hide, either.

“People could come out anytime and see the livestock and see what we do,” he said.

Maybe even more important than customers to David are the animals.

“I’m always aware of what the day is going to bring in terms of stresses on the livestock,” he said.

It’s not just making sure that they have their food and water, but that the temperatures are not too hot or too cold and that they have the proper protection from the elements and predators.

David said it is the most difficult during the summer months.

“When we have a week straight of 90-plus degree temperatures in the daytime and then at night, it will not cool down very much, it’ll be in the low 80s, it doesn’t allow the animals to recover very much from that heat stress and that’s just really devastating on them.”

Using different strategies he’s learned over the years, David is attentive to the animals.

For the chickens, he’ll freeze gallons of water overnight so that during the day the chickens can stand on them.

Being in tune with the animals like that makes it hard for the Bane family to get away.

“One thing that’s a downside of what I do is that I’m so particular about the comfort of the animals that I never ever want to leave here,” he said.

“That means limited vacations and, you know, you’re just pretty much tied down because it’s hard to hire people to come in and take care of the animals that have that same sense of the rhythm.”

The operation does not solely rely on David, though. His children, who live within driving distance, and his wife, Susan, who is a full-time occupational therapist, continue to get in on the fun.

David’s brother also houses the majority of the cattle on his grounds, while David keeps a few cows on his property.

As families, including the Banes prepare to gather around the table for the holidays, David is busy delivering Bane Family Meats turkeys to customers throughout Champaign County and the surrounding areas.

When he first started providing turkeys, David said that families wanted 20-pound birds; now, the demand is for 13- to 14-pounds.

He also said that in the beginning, customers were interested in purchasing meat without bones, and now, having been educated on the benefits of broths, they want the bones, too.

This time of year, business picks up for Bane Family Meats as customers are looking for a special turkey or ham to share with their family and friends. David said that come the new year, the demand will die down a bit before picking back up for the spring, summer, and fall months.

Coming into the new year, the Banes are looking to expand on what they offer on their 14-acre farm, located at 1062 County Road 2125 E, Sidney, Ill.

In years past, Susan has had groups of students come to the farm to learn more about organic sustainable agriculture, the woods and to do crafts. The Banes hope to expand on those offerings as they provide an indoor space below the virgin timber.

Susan is also looking forward to instructing yoga and Zumba.

Groups of students will come to the farm to learn more about organic sustainable agriculture, the woods and to do crafts. A certified yoga and Zumba instructor, Susan also plans to host classes underneath the canopy of the five acres of virgin timber.

To learn more about Bane Family Meats, visit their website at banefamilymeats.com or their Facebook page.

The post Gobblin’ Up Something Good with Bane Family Meats appeared first on Dani Tietz.

What came first, the chicken or the egg?

Well, in the case of Coopers Backyard Farms, owned and operated by Andy Wilsey-Cooper and Randy Cooper, a dozen chickens came first.

Over two years of their operation, the egg layers have been the catalyst for a change in lifestyle for the Coopers.

“I rarely have to go to the store,” Andy said.

Coopers Backyard Farm, which includes a lush garden with beans, peas, squash, cabbages, carrots, zucchini, tomatoes, asparagus, berries, garlic and potatoes, egg layers and chickens and turkey for meat, has also grown to include bees, a fruit orchard and grape vines.

Randy also has his sights set on bringing in pigs, sheep and breeding the chickens instead of purchasing chicks each year.

“Everything is reliant on each other for its growth,” Andy said.

Andy said she became more aware of what she was putting in her body and it became of the utmost importance when her daughter and sister were diagnosed with cancer.

“I started looking into all the nutrition,” she said. “I got a hold of Suzanne Somers’ book. And boy, she hit the nail on the head. She talked about, you know, how we’re under environmental attack. And we really are.”

The Coopers are careful not to use chemicals on their plants and they don’t feed their chickens hormones or fillers. Andy spends her evenings tending to the garden, pulling weeds, giving the plants Epsom salt baths or spraying them with tea tree oil.

“If you go to the store to buy organic, it’s only 35-percent less, and that’s not good enough for me,” Andy said.

“In the summer (the chickens) eat the bugs and keep my garden really healthy.”

During the fall and winter months, the chickens eat non-GMO without antibiotics or hormones feed or barley from Triptych Brewing.

And although some of the chickens are Easter-eggers, the best part about them is that they follow Andy and Randy all over the farm. The Coopers have become part of their brood, and the chickens watch over them.

Andy knew that she was part of the team when she tripped and fell in the yard.

“Red (a rooster) freaked out and he ran over to me,” Andy recalls. “He was so upset.”

Having healthy food isn’t all that concerns the Coopers, though. They also want their animals to have healthy lives, too.

Andy said she is always taken when she watches documentaries on how food, particularly meat, is produced. The standard may be for chickens to have a little light every day, but they may also be on confinement with nowhere to move on large farms.

Cooper’s chickens have moved from a small coop Randy built to a barn where they can come outside when their owners are home and have wood and beams to climb on inside the barn.

They get new bedding about every 10 days and take baths in the dirt. The Coopers even leave the radio on for them during the day, mostly to scare away predators, but also to keep the chickens company.

The dark orange egg yolk is packed with protein and can be left on the counter unwashed for use over a month’s time.

“That’s just how they were supposed to be,” Andy said. “Back in the old days, they didn’t have refrigerators, so they just ate the chicken eggs as they came and let them know until they needed them.”

The Coopers keep their egg layers separated from the chickens and turkeys used for meat, although those birds also get a steady diet of pasture and bugs.

The growth of the farm has been trial and error, though. The Coopers rely on the expertise of others, mostly through YouTube videos, to troubleshoot the issues they come across.

Currently, the Coopers are learning about how to take care of bees. With a couple hives near the orchard on their property, the plan is to plant red clover nearby so the bees have an organic food source to create their honey.

Andy not only believes in the nutritional value of honey, but also its medicinal qualities.

“I had surgery and one of my wounds was healing and we were getting ready to go on this big trip to Mexico,” she said. “

“I went to the doctor and he’s like, ‘No, you’re not gonna be able to go in the ocean.’ I decided I’ve got to get this healed. So I got online did some research. I found that in burn centers, they use Manuka honey from Australia, really high grade, and they slather it on the skin to prevent, you know, infections.

“So three days later, my wound started closing up.  I went back to the doctors two weeks later and it healed up, and I had no scars.”

The farm is not a solo operation, though. While the Coopers do the majority of the day-to-day work, they enjoy when their children and grandchildren visit, helping to gather eggs or harvest beans or potatoes.

Andy said the kids run and the dogs play while the adults will sit in the garden to talk.

The Coopers hope that at some point, they may be able to open their land to children for a camp so that they, too can learn about organic farming and taking care of food products.

Until then, the Coopers offer products for consumption.

Every now and then, Andy will post about farm-fresh eggs for sale at 109 N Main St., in St Joseph. The eggs sit in a wooden box near the entrance and can be paid for by the honor system.

The Coopers also sell their chicken meat and will sell their turkey meat in a few weeks. The price may be more than a customer might pay at a grocery store, but the Coopers are just recouping expenses incurred from raising the chickens, not making money.

Fresh fruits and vegetables will be canned throughout the fall months. Andy said that the produce grown last year was enough to sustain the family.

To learn more about the Coopers Backyard Farm follow them on Facebook.

The post Someone to Know Near SJO: Coopers Backyard Farms appeared first on Dani Tietz.

Ryan was a football star and Abbie was someone he adored.

But he didn’t tell her for a very long time, so that’s where the song is going to end and the story will begin.

Maybe it’s not good to tell the end of a story at the beginning of the story, but Abbie Layden and Ryan Rogiers do end up together.

Married, in fact.

But, it took them more than 25 years to get to that point.

When Abbie and Ryan met, they were 10 and 11 years old, respectively. Abbie, from St. Joseph, was cheering on the sidelines of a pee wee football against Ogden, where Ryan was playing.

“Even though we went to different grade schools, I remember hearing about Ryan Rogiers and seeing him at the game,” Abbie said.

Going about their own childhoods, Ryan and Abbie met up again at St. Joseph-Ogden High School, where they ran around with similar crowds, but never were really close friends.

“He was popular, but I just always thought he didn’t care for me that much because, in a way, he didn’t talk to me a lot. Little did I know, how shy he was,” Abbie said.

“I thought he was cute. He was tall, dark and handsome.

“He was a good football player. He was popular. Because he was popular, I thought he must talk to a lot of people, but just not me.”

She does recall one moment where Ryan did talk to her, though.

“When I was 17 and Abbie was 16 I told her jokingly (or not) I was going to marry her someday!” Ryan said.

“I just laughed it off because he’d never flirted with me let alone talked to me much or asked me out. I just thought he was being silly,” Abbie recalls.

But Ryan wasn’t being silly. He was just drawn to Abbie.

In fact, he kept showing up in her life.

Abbie moved up to Minnesota during high school to live with her aunt for six months. She was enthralled with the big city and a school of about 2,000 students.

Her friends came to visit. Her boyfriend, at the time, came to visit. A group of guy friends came to visit. And Ryan came to visit.

“I introduced them to my friends. They hung out with and without me sometimes,” she said.

“I didn’t think he just drove 10 hours to come see me; I just thought they probably want to ski and hang out.”

As college students in the Champaign-Urbana area, Abbie and Ryan kept bumping into each other through a few mutual friends.

When those mutual friends decided to move to Arizona, Abbie and Ryan went with them.

The childhood friends didn’t go together, though. Abbie became pregnant with her soon-to-be husband, and Abbie moved back home to be closer to her family.

Abbie recalls seeing Ryan one more time after she had her second child a few years later.

Ryan returned to school in Carbondale, moved to San Francisco for culinary school, worked in Chicago and Tampa, served in Iraq for a year and went back to school. They were not still in contact.

Four children and nearly 12 years later, Abbie found herself in a desolate position when she was going through a divorce.

Having been disconnected from childhood friends for so long, she took to Facebook to reconnect.

“I think pretty much everyone in the world was already on Facebook,” she said. “I had been homeschooling four kids; I was just kind of out of it. I was trying to figure it out and navigate it. I found someone from high school, and then the next day, pretty much everyone in my high school was like Abbie is on Facebook now.

“I was just like confirm, confirm.

“Within the next couple weeks, I was sitting on Facebook, catching up and I got a message from Ryan.

“I was so excited. My heart just burst. I was like ‘Oh my God! Ryan Rogiers!’

“I didn’t even realize that we were friends on Facebook. It was still that new to me.”

Ryan casually asked how Abbie was doing, and at that point she knew she could confide in her long-time friend.

“I remember being like ‘I’m terrible,’ ” Abbie said. “I’m getting divorced. To say I’m devastated would be an understatement. I’m going through the hardest time in my life. How are you?

And I remember him saying, “I’m really sorry to hear that. I had no idea.”

Abbie found out that Ryan was in Chicago. Being only 2 1/2 hours away, she was anxious to reconnect.

With a few days off from work in August, Ryan visited Abbie and her children.

Between swimming, watching movies and playing, the two had a chance to just catch up.

“I started to make lunch, and Ave, who was 3 or 4 fell asleep on me. He finished lunch. She took like a 3-hour nap, so we just sat and ate.

“We got to sit and talk forever because she was asleep.

“I got to hear everything that he’d been doing and it was just wonderful,” she said. “I just thought, ‘your parents must be so proud.’ It just seemed like he had done so much.”

Abbie said that when Ryan kissed her on the porch later that night, she was “so taken by it,” but having just gotten out of a relationship and with four kids to raise, she thought Ryan would leave soon.

The next day, he told her that he could stay one more day.

“It was just so comfortable right away,” Abbie said.

“When he was leaving, he said,’I really want to give this a shot.’

The couple promised that they were going to commit to trying to make their relationship work.

“I was like, “You want to be my boyfriend? I’m 35 and I have four kids.’

“Ryan, you’re single, you don’t have kids, you don’t have any baggage. You’re being a glutton for punishment here. This is a lot.”

Little did she know, but being with Abbie and her children was what Ryan had always been seeking.

“Through our back and forth, I asked if he’d had kids or been married. He’d never been married. Never had kids. And I remember him saying in that message, ‘I just never found what my parents have.’ ”

By October, Ryan had quit his job, quit school and moved back to where he grew up with Abbie.

“The first Christmas we were together, he gave me a card that said, ‘You’re the love of my life, but not only am I so happy to be with you, finally, but you’ve given me the family I’ve always wanted.’ “

Abbie said Ryan didn’t come into the home trying to take over as an authority figure, but tenderly tried to get close to the kids.

“He just helped with the laundry, food, transportation. Just hanging out and having fun. He just tried to get close to the kids,” Abbie said.

You already know that Abbie and Ryan got married. Two-and-a-half years ago, in fact.

But that is not the end of their story. They are building new stories together.

In 2017, the Rogiers opened their farm-to-table restaurant, The Wheelhouse, located at 109 N. Main St. in St. Joseph.

When Ryan, a former chef at Alinea in Chicago, decided it was time to bring new flavors and techniquest to the St. Joseph area, Abbie was his biggest supporter.

“I was so excited because we’d get to work together,” she said.

The detailed-oriented perfectionist, Ryan usually runs the kitchen. Abbie, the big-picture person usually takes care of the front end of the restaurant.

“I feel like we are a good balance that way, Abbie said. “We have different components in the business. He’s really good at his, and I’m really good at mine.”

Ryan’s soft side is what Abbie is attracted to.

“He’s so sweet. He’s introverted and quiet, but he’s the best husband,” she said.

“He’s tender and affectionate and he’s such a softie.”

For the first few years of being together, Abbie loved watching Ryan call his mom every morning.

“He knew she was sick (Alzheimer’s) and only had so much time. He treats his mom so well.

“My mother would always say, ‘you can tell so much about Ryan by the way he treats his mother.’

“I almost thought he was faking it, for a long time to show off for me. He has this innocence to him and old-school values that you don’t see anymore.”

The way Abbie relates to people is what Ryan is attracted to.

“I have always had a crush on her. She is the kindest person (and most beautiful!) I have ever met and genuinely cares for everyone she meets.

“When she is around she balances me out. I would hide from people if I had my choice and she is the opposite of that.

“She gives me a confidence in my personal and professional life I have never had before.”

Ryan said he believes that they not only have the relationship they were both looking for, but also one that their parents had.

“I can’t imagine being on this ride with anyone else,” he said.

The post A Little Ditty about Abbie and Ryan Rogiers appeared first on Dani Tietz.

The Herriott family has farmed land just south of Mahomet for generations. After returning from the Air Force in 1956, Bill continued the tradition.

“Farming is not a full-time occupation, because you do the harvest and the planting,” he said. “I wanted something year-round to do, so I decided to raise pigs.”

Herriott learned that the Landrace breed was one of the most prevalent breeds in the world, but was scarce in the United States. He traveled to Noblesville to see Landrace pigs and talked to a farmer there. As he left, the farmer mentioned he’d be putting up a new pig sign, so Herriott could have his.

The plywood sign had a white pig on a dark background. Herriott added his name and an arrow pointing to the building that housed two sows he purchased from another Landrace pig owner in Fisher. The Pig Sign has been on the corner of 1900N and Illinois 47 South since 1960.

When part of the sign fell down years later, Herriott took the sign down to fix it. The couple began receiving requests to put the sign back up from residents of Pine Tree subdivision.

After a few minor repairs, the sign was back up again.

Doug Maddox, Pine Tree resident and current Pig Sign caretaker said, “It’s a sign that everybody uses as a landmark. Not just people in Pine Tree, but everyone who lives in this general vicinity uses it to find their home. Or, if someone is coming from Mahomet or Champaign we tell them to turn at the ‘Pig Sign.’”

Through the years, the sign has been vandalized and even stolen. The original sign was mounted on 6 x 6 posts. Late one night, someone pushed the sign north, breaking it off from the bottom. Herriott never found the sign.

During the time when Herriott was designing a new Pig Sign, many people stopped at their residence to ask if they knew where the Pig Sign was. A young man riding a tractor said, “My boss said to meet him at the corner where the Pig Sign is, but I can’t find it.”

A friend of Herriott made him a show board to corral pigs at the fair. He traced the outline of the pig from the board, built a new sign, and put it back on the corner with bigger posts that can’t be broken off.

Not only is it a worry when the sign is gone, but also when the sign is covered up.

“We were celebrating our son, Ben, getting a master’s degree. We blew up a picture of Ben about the size of the Pig Sign and put an announcement on there,” Barbara said. “We were leaving our house and saw two ladies putting a note on the sign asking others not to cover the sign. She had used it on some invitations for an event that day, telling people to turn at the Pig Sign.”

“I don’t think she knew we were the owners. But we’ve told people not to cover up the sign, and there we were, covering it up,” she continued.

In 1995, Bill was diagnosed with prostate cancer. By that time, his pig business was booming with 600 to 800 pigs, and the females were ready to have babies. In a year’s time, he sold all the pigs, emptied the building, and got them off of market. By 1996, he stopped raising pigs to take care of the cancer.

“We really had great pigs. And it was important to have a sign. It served its purpose well by helping us sell the pigs. But its purpose has changed,” Bill said.

Residents from Pine Tree noticed the sign was looking a little shabby, so they asked Millie and Ernie Rosenburg, former owners of Mahomet’s Ace Hardware and friends of the Herriotts, to ask if the people of Pine Tree could update and maintain the sign.

Maddox said the Rosenburgs helped with donating supplies to preserve the sign.

Because Maddox is semi-retired, an artist, and works from home, he has taken on the task of watching over the sign. He said there are a lot of people in the community who contribute to it.

“I remember the day I was taking down the old sign,” Maddox said. “Somebody pulled up and said, ‘Don’t take down the Pig Sign! We can’t find our way home!’”

In a week, he had the new sign-up. Herriott said a couple of people have come by wanting to buy the old sign, dubbing it a landmark. But he decided to keep it.

Former Pig Signs did not have a title. When the Pine Tree residents designed the new sign they titled it “Pig Sign,” but no one is certain who put “The” in the title.

Paul Springer, Fisher, has driven past the Pig Sign throughout the years and decided to photograph it for the Champaign County Camera Club best-in-show competition at Lincoln Square Mall. Maddox said a community member noted the sign was now “famous.”

Bill and Barbara still enjoy their farm and hearing stories about the sign. Bill said, “The sign has been very much fun.”

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