Do you happen to have a stash of potentially valuable breakables such as glass, china and porcelain lying around your humble abode? What about collectibles such as vintage toys or heirloom furniture? Well guess what? One of PBS’s most popular shows is heading into to Kansas City.
Watch the Antiques Roadshow Special Monday, March 11, 2013 at 7pm to find out how you can be a part of the visit! Call (888) 203-1747 for YOUR tickets to the show on August 10, 2013.
Yes, Antiques Roadshow is rolling into town for the first time in 11 years. Mark your calendars…August 10th is the date…though no venue has yet been released. Like KCPT’S The Local Show on Facebook and we’ll keep you updated on any of the treasure trove of details as they become available. You have until April 8 to apply to receive two free tickets. Your chances of being selected will depend on the number of eligible applicants for each city and are not affected by how early or late you apply within the application period.
Last week, the National Council on Educating Black Children (NCEBC) hosted their annual convention at the Westin Crown Center Hotel. The NCEBC is a non-profit organization whose mission is to reinstate academic rigor and relevant teaching, improve the assessment of such instruction, and prepare the African-American learner for effective participation in a competitive global society.
Approximately 600 educators from across the United States and over 250 middle and high school students from Greater Kansas City attended the NCEBC Convention. The event featured discussions by both local and national education experts.
The Local Show shares some excerpts from the panel discussion: “Creating a Sense of Urgency to Increase Black Male Achievement: A Call to Action.” Among others, the panel included Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education Commissioner Chris Nicastro and the Council of Chief State School Officers Executive Director Gene Wilhoit. The NCEBC also recognized high achieving urban schools and individuals who have made significant contributions to urban education, and amongst the distinguished awardees was University Academy, founded by Tom Bloch, Lynn Brown, and Barnett and Shirley Helzberg.
From making office products to assembling Boulevard Beer variety packs, Alphapointe provides job opportunities to Americans nationwide who are blind or visually impaired. The year long celebration of their centennial culminates on November 12 when five-time Grammy Award winners The Blind Boys of Alabama will perform at the Midland Theater. For more details, click here.
Alphapointe started in 1911 when a small but determined group of people, led by our founder Catherine Hale, decided that the American dream of an independent and productive life should be attainable for all people, regardless of their ability to see. Dissatisfied with depending on the kindness of family or suffering the prejudices of employers, these capable and enterprising workers formed the Kansas City Association of Blind Workers and began making straw brooms in a cramped warehouse.
Today, Alphapointe is the largest employer of people who are blind in the state of Missouri and the only provider of the education and rehabilitation services necessary for people who are blind to live, work and be independent.
A new season of live theater is about to get underway at Starlight Theatre. The Swope Park theater with its iconic towers has been entertaining Kansas Citians under the stars for more than 60 years.
Starlight is one of only three outdoor theatres of its size and type still operational in the United States. The Muny in St. Louis and Wolf Trap in Vienna, Virginia are the others. With the curtain about to rise on another season of top Broadway shows and big name concert performers, we caught up with Starlight’s man in charge, Denton Yockey.
The 2012 Concert Season is also filling up with artists such as Barry Manilow, James Taylor, Crosby, Stills & Nash, My Morning Jacket, Band of Horses, Phish, B.B. King, Il Divo and many, many more.
Approximately 200,000 women and men, girls and boys in the Kansas City Metro area suffer from an eating disorder. The JFS Eating Disorder Resource Center connects individuals and their families to support services and access to treatment.
Call 913-327-4690
This week on The Local Show, we take you inside the hidden world of eating disorders. Later tonight, KCPT brings you a national documentary that chronicles the millions of Americans suffering from anorexia and bulimia. Remarkably, they are conditions that have the highest fatality rate of all psychiatric disorders. Yet, as your about to see, it’s becoming increasing difficult to get a health insurance company to cover its treatment.
You will hear several stories from people suffering from these devastating illnesses in Erasing Eating Disorders, a national public television documentary coming up at 8 p.m. here on KCPT, or immediately following The Local Show if you’re watching the rebroadcast of this program.
We take you inside a local group home for women learning to overcome their eating disorders. Thalia House in Fairway, Ks. is a six person transitional home designed to fill an unmet need–to help women who have been released from hospital for anorexia and bulimia but are not quite ready to resume their normal lives.
Coming up at 8:30 here on KCPT, POV shows Girl Model which show an unseen side of the modeling industry as talent scouts recruit pre-pubescent girls overseas.
Can we as a society help decrease these startling eating disorder statistics? We are bombarded with messages with what to eat, not eat, what diet to be on, how to look, how to dress from the media. Media messages come from movies, television, magazines, or what brand clothing we wear. Last year at Johnson County Community College, they screened the new film America the Beautiful 2: The Thin Commandments about our country’s obsession with beauty and thinness.
And finally, there are three things not to say to someone with an eating disorder according to the eating recovery center:
1. Why can’t you just eat?
2. Everybody hates their body sometimes
3. Yes, I’ll keep your eating disorder a secret
Eating disorders are the deadliest mental illness. A woman with anorexia nervosa is 5.6 times more likely to die than another woman of her same age. The most frequent causes of death from eating disorders are suicide (32 percent), complications associated with anorexia (19 percent), and cancer (11 percent). The average age of death for an individual with anorexia is only 34 years.
For more than twenty years, Dr. Sharon Lee has been providing medical care to the region’s poor and uninsured at her non-profit, safety net health clinic on Southwest Boulevard. Among the earliest treated at the clinic were HIV AIDS patients, when few in Kansas City knew anything about the disease. Today, it’s diabetes, high blood pressure and other health issues, all treated regardless of a patient’s ability to pay. Remarkably, Dr. Lee pays herself the same salary as the clinic’s janitor and receptionist. That’s right: an MD who makes $14 an hour. Sean Holmes produced our story.
Our KCPT Difference Maker segment has been made possible by support from the insurance firm of Haas & Wilkerson.
Kansas City has never had a major children’s musuem like a lot of big cities although there have been plenty of people over the year’s who have advocated for one and still do.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t places you can go NOW in our metro where kids can experience the wonder of discovery. We take you to a converted elementary school in Shawnee, Kansas where they’ve been filling kids with “wonder” since 1989. They call it Wonderscope.
In 1988, the Johnson County Commissioners established a task force to study programs and activities available for children and their families in the local community. The study concluded that there was a shortage of hands-on, interactive programs of interest to entire families. In response to that unmet community need, Wonderscope Children’s Museum was founded in 1989, offering exhibits and programs in a former elementary school in Shawnee, Kansas.
Also in 1989, Children’s Museum of Kansas City opened to its first group tours in the Carriage House of the Kansas State School for the Visually Handicapped. Marty Porter, the museum’s founder and executive director, had started conversations about a children’s museum in Kansas City, Kansas in 1984. In 1990, CMKC moved into the Indian Springs Shopping Center, offering exhibits, programming at the museum and through outreach, and the Recycled Materials Center.
In 2003, Beyond the Book incorporated to serve children and families with a unique hands-on approach to teaching children about the arts and sciences through literature. Beyond the Book was also committed to creating a leading-edge children’s museum experience in Kansas City.
In spring of 2006, the respective boards of Wonderscope and Beyond the Book agreed that it would be in the best interests of both organizations and the community to explore the potential for a collaborative approach to achieving the common vision for a large-scale children’s museum. In May 2007, Beyond the Book merged into Wonderscope, creating one combined entity, with a combined board, combined leadership and integrated programming. The merged organization began conversations with Children’s Museum of Kansas City. In May of 2008, Children’s Museum of Kansas City merged into Wonderscope Children’s Museum to become Wonderscope Children’s Museum of Kansas City, operating out of Wonderscope’s site in Shawnee. This merger effectively brought all of the children’s museum interests in the metropolitan area together to achieve the vision of developing a world-class children’s museum for Kansas City.
At first glance, you might not see much of a connection between the building of electric cars and at-risk, high school-aged kids, but MINDDRIVE, a Kansas City, Missouri-based non-profit, is making one. Producer Cara Myers profiles this local non-profit, where at-risk teens are not only building innovative electric vehicles, but they are also being inspired to learn and expand their vision of the future. When we’re so often told about the problems of young people, here’s a positive story for a change.
Sometimes medical breakthroughs can also bring up nagging ethical questions such as who has access to the data and how much do we want to know if the news about our future is bad?
These kinds of quandaries weigh on the minds of the staff at the Center for Practical Bioethics in Kansas City, formerly known as the Midwest Bioethics Center. They also tackle aging and end of life issues as well as disparities in health care. Myra Christopher led the organization since its launch in 1984, at least until recently when a rare form of ovarian cancer forced her to step down as the center’s CEO. She joined Nick Haines to discuss some approaches to these issues.
More than half a million children are currently trapped in the foster care system.
Being removed from a home and placed in foster care is a difficult and stressful experience for any child. Many of these children have suffered some form of serious abuse or neglect.
The Midwest Foster Care and Adoption Association based in Independence is going to some extraordinary lengths, including hiring private investigators, to try and locate family members who might be willing to adopt a hard to place child who might otherwise languish for years in the foster care system.
They call their program “Extreme Recruitment” and last year they found homes for 22 foster children, including a home for 10-year-old Demaje, whose mother abandoned him in Kansas City. In January, Demaje’s uncle was awarded temporary custody by Jackson County Family Court. Demaje has returned to his family in California.
That segment was produced by Bryan Shepard at LINC, a KCPT partner organization which works to improve the lives of children and families in the Kansas City region.
