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Club Announcements:
The Rotary Club of North Jackson will resume in-person meetings on April 6 at the Rickhouse following authorization by the Officers and Directors. Zoom meetings will continue to be available to members and guests who choose to attend via Zoom. Reservations are required. Respond to the email from Don Roberts to make one.
Zoom meeting invites with the link and password will be sent to all club members on Mondays. The Zoom meetings will continue to start at noon on Tuesdays with club member fellowship with the meeting starting at 12:15 p.m. If you have any issues connecting to the Zoom meeting, please email Past President Greg Campbell at gregcampbell2@comcast.net.
We reserve the first 15 minutes for fellowship and give our speakers nearly 30 minutes for their presentations.
Mark your calendars for two upcoming events:
Parham Bridges' Park Work Days on March 26th & 27th
Rotary Club of North Jackson 50th Anniversary Gala at the Country Club of Jackson on July 20. The Gala will start at 11:30.
More details are to come on both events. They are listed as events in our club calendar
Birthdays and Anniversaries.
Birthdays
Rob Whitley April 2
Suzy Tubb April 5
Wedding Anniversaries:
Rich Sun & Phyllis Hollenbeck April 5
Membership Anniversaries
Uriel Pineda 12 years, March 31
Jeff Adcock 33 years, April 1
David Nicholas 36 years, April 1
Prayer. Divine Creator and Sustainer of all that is, we turn aside from things that ordinarily occupy our attention to enjoy this interlude of Rotarian fellowship. We are grateful for this and all opportunities to mingle and converse with like-minded colleagues.
Thank you, Lord, for the food to eat, work to do, and love to share. Bless our fellowship as together we seek to serve others. Amen.
Members of the Rotary Club of North Jackson participated with members of the Rotaract Club of Millsaps College in preparing a dinner for the residents of the University of Mississippi Medical Center Ronald McDonald House on March 23. The following are photos from the event.
Rotaract Club of Millsaps College members Nazm Rahat, left and Newlom Gillihan, deliver the meal to Courtney Laseter, right, evening manager at the Ronald McDonald House.
Suman Das, Rotary Club of North Jackson President-Elect, assists a member of the Rotaract Club of Millsaps with melting the queso
Rotary Club of North Jackson PR Director Bill Osborne helps prepare the meal.
From left, Lori Greer, Rotary Club of North Jackson Service Director; Taylor Smith, Rotaract Club of Millsaps President; and Don Roberts, Rotary Club of North Jackson Exec. Sec./Treasurer, shred chicken for the enchilada casserole.
Rotaract Club of Millsaps College Past President Spencer Wallace cooks corn.
Suman Das, Rotary Club of North Jackson President-Elect, assists members of the Rotaract Club of Millsaps with the meal prep, while Rotary club member Bill Osborne chops cilantro.
Grace Gore Sturdivant, Au.D., Board Member, Valerie Linn, Executive Director, and Joshua Friedel, Capital Campaign Manager, of the Magnolia Speech School spoke to the Rotary Club of North Jackson at the club’s March 23, 2021 meeting. They discussed the school and its approach to assisting hearing and language-impaired children.
Grace Gore Sturdivant completed her Doctorate of Audiology Degree (Au.D.) from Vanderbilt University Medical School and maintains professional certification through the American Speech and Hearing Association. She has recently been involved in the ACHIEVE research study at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, which studies the effects of hearing aid intervention on the progression of dementia. Dr. Sturdivant believes in the importance of delaying and preventing hearing loss in order to maintain the integrity of auditory-neural pathways vital to overall health and wellness over a lifetime.
SCHOOL HISTORY
In the early 1950s, a group of parents of hearing-impaired children in Jackson, Mississippi, began to search for a means to teach their children to talk. These parents struggled with problems of financial support, facilities, and teacher capabilities. In September 1956, Magnolia Speech School for the Deaf was chartered with Mrs. Elizabeth S. Matthews as its director. Under her very capable leadership, the school provided training to children with hearing and language impairments for over 18 years. The school grew from a single class of seven to several classes, outgrowing facilities one after the other.
DEVELOPING TEACHING METHODS
During these early years, Mrs. Matthews began to notice a few of the hearing-impaired children were having difficulties with memory and seemed to learn differently from the others. Based on this observation, Mrs. Matthews believed a different learning technique was needed. Mrs. Matthews had studied with Mildred McGiniss to learn the Association Method. After continued success using this method, Magnolia began to document and refine a cohesive program based on this methodology, and the school’s program for children with language-disorders was born.
EXPANSION OF SERVICES
Within a few years, the school gained full accreditation by the State Department of Education and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Shortly thereafter, an emphasis was placed on the expansion of services into new and innovative areas, such as audiological services, a hearing aid bank, financial aid for low-income families, and an early intervention program.
In June 1994, Anne Sullivan, M.Ed., CED, became the executive director of Magnolia Speech School. Ms. Sullivan, with certification in both Hearing Impaired and Speech/Language, had previously spent 14 years at Magnolia where she began as a student teacher and rose to the rank of assistant director. Ms. Sullivan retired in 2012.
Prior to becoming executive director of Magnolia Speech School, Valerie G. Linn, M.S. in Communicative Disorders/Speech Pathology, was the executive director of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation in Jackson. Prior to her work as a non-profit executive director, Valerie worked for over 24 years as a pediatric speech/language pathologist. She served in various capacities, including clinic director and senior speech/language pathologist, at the Mississippi Society for Disabilities (formerly MS. Easter Seal Society), and as a speech/language pathologist at the Children’s Rehabilitation Center, Willowood Developmental Center and in county school districts.
PIONEERING SPEECH AND HEARING PROGRAMS
Today, Magnolia Speech School continues its tradition of incorporating the latest information and technology to help our students succeed in the mainstream. Magnolia Speech School joins other “OPTION” programs worldwide to provide quality listening and spoken language instruction for children who are identified as deaf or hard of hearing. In addition, we are one of this country’s pioneer programs in coupling sensory integration and classroom instruction. A revised, updated, and unique “Magnolia Speech School Curriculum” is now the foundation for our instruction, provided by skilled teachers and support staff in small groups and in individual therapy.
Dr. Sturdivant discussed how children are tested for hearing capability at birth and that since the 1980s cochlear implants have made it possible for the hearing-impaired to hear and speak normally.
We thank Sturdivant, Linn, and Friedel for their presentation and for the work they are doing to assist speech and language-impaired children. Linn and Sturdivant are shown in the following photos during their presentation. Linn is accompanied by 5-year old student Coy Watkins.
Karen Utterback, RN, spoke to the Rotary Club of North Jackson at the club's March 16 meeting. The subject of her presentation was Vigilant health which is an organization dedicated to reducing employers' health costs by managing their employees' health. Depending on the employer, Vigilant can work to manage diabetes care costs or offer an on-site clinic for the employees. For example, Vigilant works with the State of Mississippi to manage its employees' diabetes care. Vigilant's results have shown a 33% decrease in medical claims, an 85 % engagement rate in its clinics, 42% fewer hospitalizations, and 95% control of diabetes patients. Utterback said that Vigi;ant eliminates healthcare disparities between groups and delivers the same clinic and financial results in every group, every place, every time. she said that Vigilant ovwns the financial risk for healthcare for self insured employers, community health systems, and health plans. The differences between the Vigilant system and traditional payers are:
Vigilant uses an Advanced Care Model, patient engagement with internal medicine type encounters, and it follows and manages population health.
Vigilant has a track record of success in the effective use of technology in delivering and managing health care. That technology is:
interactive real-time video,
live audiovisual with patients and with community physicians to facilitate collaboration.
Utterback presented patient success stories and payer success stories to further support her statements. She cited the City of Vicksburg, MS with 10% savings in health plan costs which permitted 3% employee pay raises without raising taxes and Farm Bureau Insurance which stated that the company has gone three consecutive years without an increase in health plan premiums. Both organizations experienced improved health outcomes
We thank Utterback for her presentation and for the work that Vigilant is doing. A video of her presentation and the entire meeting can be seen at the following link https://vimeo.com/525654380.
The following photo is of Utterback during her presentation.
The Rotary Club of North Jackson donated dictionaries to the Mississippi Humanities Council recently. The dictionaries will be used for the Council's Prison Education Project. Through the program, students in three correctional facilities are taking college courses. Since they have no internet access, a physical dictionary is a necessary tool for success. Shown are Greg Campbell, Immediate Past President, Rotary Club of North Jackson and Carol Anderson, Assistant Director of the Miss. Humanities Council.
The Rotary Club of North Jackson will have a service project at Parham Bridges Park on Friday March 26th and Saturday March 27th to refurbish some signs, clean up fallen limbs and other needed task. Shown planning the service project are from left, David Barrett, club member; Lee Carney, club president; Suman Das, club president elect and Ison Harris, Jr., director of City of Jackson Dept. of Parks & Recreation.
Two representatives of CSPAN spoke to the Rotary Club of North Jackson at the club’s March 9, 2021 meeting. In their presentation, they discussed the various CSPAN channels and the fact that CSPAN is not publicly funded, but gets its funding from the television broadcast networks.CSPAN is an acronym for “Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network.” It is a nonprofit organization that was founded in 1979. It was initially devoted to televising sessions of the U.S. House of Representatives but later expanded, with the creation of additional channels, to air coverage of the U.S. Senate and other government proceedings and public affairs programming.
C-SPAN was the brainchild of Brian Lamb, who came up with the idea while working at a cable industry trade magazine; he later served as the network’s CEO (1979–2012). C-SPAN debuted on March 19, 1979, and was available in some 3.5 million homes. The following year, it introduced a call-in feature, which became extremely popular. In 1981 the network began broadcasting daily, and the following year it moved to a 24-hours-a-day schedule. Although it initially focused on the U.S. House of Representatives, in 1986 the Senate agreed to televised coverage, and C-SPAN2 was introduced to carry those proceedings. C-SPAN3, which began airing in 2001, covers live political events and airs archived historical programming. In addition to the U.S. government, the network also occasionally airs coverage of the British Parliament, the Canadian Parliament, and other governments whose proceedings might be of some importance to viewers. In 2010 C-SPAN was available in more than 100 million households.
C-SPAN does not receive funding from the government. Instead, its operating revenues are paid by license fees collected from the cable systems that offer the network to their customers. Its board of directors is composed of executives from television operating companies. Adhering to its policy on neutrality, C-SPAN does not sell advertisements or sponsorships. By airing unfettered video coverage of speeches and legislative proceedings, C-SPAN gives those in office and other figures of public interest a channel through which they can reach the public without the filters of traditional media outlets.
The following is a photo of Jaden Green in the CSPAN Control Room from which she spoke.
Green said that CSPAN covers the Mississippi Book Festival each year. She showed photos of the festival and of JPS’ Northwest Middle School on Medgar Evers Blvd.
We sincerely appreciate the presentation and the fact that CSPAN offers unbiased, unfiltered coverage of our federal government and of both the Canadian and British governments. A video of the meeting and of the CSPAN presentation can be seen at the following link: https://vimeo.com/522383172.
Mississippi Free Press (MFP) Founding Editor Donna Ladd spoke to the Rotary Club of North Jackson at the club’s March 2 meeting. Ladd is an award-winning journalist from Philadelphia, Miss. After leaving the state the day after she graduated from Mississippi State, vowing to never live here again, she returned 18 years later with a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia. She co-founded the impactful Jackson Free Press in 2002 in order to bring an in-depth news source to the state that would not shy away from historic effects of structural, institutional, and systemic racism—how the past connects to the present—in a way no other media outlet had done in Mississippi.
Ladd has won many awards for columns, political columns, editorials, feature writing, and investigative work, and has shared in a number of public-service journalism awards for her work in Mississippi, from helping put an old Klansman, James Ford Seale, in prison for the kidnapping and murder of two black teenagers in 1964, to deep systemic work on the causes and solutions of crime and violence now in the capital city and the embedded racism in the criminal justice system since the time of slavery.
In 2001, Ladd received a Packard Future of Children fellowship to study the discriminatory application of school discipline on children of color and the cradle-to-jail pipeline. More recently, she was a three-year W.K. Kellogg Foundation leadership fellow, deep-diving into systemic inequity and pathways to “truth, racial healing, and transformation” in her home state. The fellowship led to her efforts to change the narrative about race through the Mississippi Youth Media Project, in which she started to train young people to challenge the media narrative about them and their communities. She has trained many award-winning journalists over the years.
Ladd spoke to the Rotary club about the mission and fundamental principles of Mississippi Free Press. She emphasized that the principles of the MFP are consistent with Rotary’s 4-Way Test: “Is it the truth, Is it fair to all concerned, will it build goodwill and better friendships, and is it beneficial to all concerned?”
Ladd also discussed the fact that MFP is a digital nonprofit that is relying on donations for its success. While MFP is not a 501c(3) nonprofit, tax-deductible donations can be made for MFP to the Community Foundation for Mississippi at 119 S. President St., Jackson, MS 39201.
We thank Ladd for her presentation to our club, for returning home, and for her journalism work. She is shown in the following photo:
