The live feed from exterior surveillance cameras at Johnson County Library branches is being made available to county emergency management during the World Cup, a decision that gave some on the Johnson County Library Board pause when it was made last month.

The decision gives emergency management and law enforcement immediate access to the camera feeds through July 31. The last World Cup match in Kansas City Stadium will be July 11, but the final is July 19 in New Jersey.

At its May meeting, the library board voted 5-2 to add library exterior cameras to other Johnson County buildings, which are also providing access.

Tad Twidwell, the library’s physical security systems manager, said the request was “deliberately narrow,” allowing only exterior cameras and only for a set amount of time.

The move “is consistent with our history of coordinating with emergency management and best practices,” he told the board.

Library officials can end the access at any time if they feel uncomfortable, he said, adding the access is only available to select emergency personnel.

The library has a policy that covers video access by third parties, but it’s for recorded footage, and does not mention live access. The requestor has to ask for recorded footage and it’s reviewed in advance by library administration. Unless there’s a request for access, the video recordings are destroyed after 30 days.

“I would like to be able to revoke this — fast”

According to a briefing sheet provided to board members, the county emergency management agency “requested temporary live access to certain exterior Library surveillance cameras for emergency preparedness, public safety response, and coordination during the FIFA World Cup period.”

The footage could be shared with Johnson County Emergency Services, the
Johnson County Sheriff’s Office and “applicable municipal law enforcement partners,” if requested.

Two board members said they worried about unintended consequences. Board member Jodie Dietz, who is also a member of the Blue Valley school board, said she was concerned that the privacy of library patrons “is incredibly important” and was concerned that it be protected.

Dietz said she would be more comfortable with a slower process that requires a review of requests for camera footage.

“This livestream thing is concerning for me, honestly,” she said.

She said she’d prefer specific guardrails on how it would be used and “that it can’t be used for illegal immigration capture or something like that.”

“I would like to be able to revoke this — fast — if something were to occur,” Dietz said. “I would like to make sure we are being good stewards.”

No partnership with ICE, emergency official says

Board member Amanda Vega-Mavec said she also had reservations.

“Will they see something connected to the World Cup or is it on anything and everything during that timeframe?” she asked during the May meeting.

County Emergency Management Director Dan Robeson, contacted later, said the cameras are one tool that can be used for situational awareness at a time when a lot of things are going on with public gatherings, transportation and the weather.

The live feed will not be something department employees will be monitoring at all times, but could be called up if it’s needed, he said. There wouldn’t be enough employee time to monitor the library cameras constantly, anyway, he added.

Robeson said the county has no agreements with federal groups like Immigration and Customs Enforcement and that the access is not intended for law enforcement action.

Library officials can always shut it off, Robeson said. That might require a special meeting of the board or an independent decision by County Librarian Tricia Suellentrop, per the board discussion.

“We don’t want to ask something people don’t feel comfortable doing,” Robeson said.

A final 5-2 vote

Other board members said they supported given temporary access to local law enforcement agencies.

Board member Jennifer Hrabe said, “This sounds to me like it’s just for safety and quicker response times.”

Board member Charles McAllister said he trusts the emergency management department, having visited them and observed their preparedness exercises.

“I don’t see any danger for us or any unintended consequences,” he said.

The final vote was board members Hrabe, Chrysalyn Huff, Kelly Kilgore, McAllister and David Sims for the motion and Dietz and Vega-Mavec against.

Tony Adams, a lifelong Merriam resident, is a benefactor of one of the most integral and “unknown American history stor(ies) ever.”

As a Black child in Merriam, Adams attended South Park Grade School only a few years after the families of a school half a mile away fought against student segregation in School District 90.

In 1948, families of the 44 Black students at the nearby, dilapidated Madam C.J. Walker School filed a lawsuit, Webb v. School District No. 90, in an effort to allow their children to attend the newly rebuilt South Park Grade School.

A year later, the Kansas Supreme Court upheld a state law that prohibited small communities like then-South Park from segregating schools — a ruling that let Black children like Adams attend South Park Grade School.

For historians and community members, Webb v. School District 90 is known as a precursor to Brown v. Board of Education, which desegregated schools nationally in 1954.

Now, 77 years after that landmark Kansas Supreme Court decision, the impact of the Walker School and its community is cemented in U.S. history with a recent designation on the National Register of Historic Places.

Over the past four years, Adams, now the program manager at Philadelphia Missionary Baptist Church in Merriam, which holds services inside the former Walker School, led the charge for the building to earn a spot on the National Register of Historic Places.

For Adams, this designation means the Webb v. School District No. 90 lawsuit is a step closer to its rightful place as a footnote in history books retelling the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision.

Adams said Webb v. School District 90 “is something that changed the course of American education history in this country, and probably the world.”

“I don’t think that’s hyperbole either, because when education was desegregated in the U.S., it had an effect all over the world,” Adams said. “My little small neighborhood did something fantastic that nobody knows about, and that’s changing pretty rapidly.”

The recognition, certified on June 4, also opens up funding opportunities in a years-long effort to restore the building to the original schoolhouse, featuring an interpretive center telling the Walker School story.

How the school paved the way for Brown v. Board

Built in the mid- to late 19th century, the Walker School started out serving both Black and white children until about 1900, when School District 90 built South Park Grade School for white children only, according to the city of Merriam.

Donna Rae Pearson, museum curator at the Kansas Museum of History, said state laws around segregation at the time prohibited communities of 15,000 people or less, such as South Park, from segregating schools.

Last year, Pearson shared that same fact at an event in the Webb Family Meeting Room at the Merriam Plaza Library where Mid-America Nazarene University students were showcasing their research on the Walker School and the Webb v. School District 90 case.

While the Walker School continued to deteriorate for almost 50 years, School District 90 in 1947 rebuilt the whites-only South Park Grade School using taxpayer dollars.

Walker School families tried to appeal the segregation to the school and Johnson County Court to no avail. That’s when the families and local activist Esther Brown in 1948 filed what became known as Webb v. School District No. 90.

Mary Webb, whose family lent their name to the 1948 lawsuit, said her father, Alfonso, attended the dilapidated Walker School. Her family lived closer to South Park Grade School than the white students who walked through their neighborhood to get to class each day.

“My dad, when he did this, he wasn’t looking for recognition based on what’s happened today,” Webb said. “He was just wanting his kids to have what the other kids had.”

In 1949, a year after filing the lawsuit, the Kansas Supreme Court upheld existing law that prohibited smaller communities from segregating students.

This allowed Black children from the Walker School to attend South Park — a full five years before school segregation was ruled illegal nationwide under Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Pearson said that people often forget efforts to desegregate schools were in progress before Brown v. Board. She said she hopes the recent designation for the Walker School is used to help remind the community about the fuller story.

“You’ve got a story in your own backyard that really talks about equality and education,” Pearson said. “I just hope they utilize that story to educate the entirety of the community and the entirety of Kansas.”

The designation is years in the making

Four years ago, when the Philadelphia Missionary Baptist Church needed a new roof, Adams said, he and other church leaders thought about applying for a grant given the site’s history.

Adams said that’s when the effort to share the Walker School’s history, and to get it on the National Register of Historic Places, all started.

The process to get a building on the National Register of Historic Places is typically an 18-month process, Pearson said.

First, a building must be at least 50 years old, Pearson said. Then, an applicant must submit what is effectively a 15- to 20-page history paper documenting the site’s location, condition and significance to a review board.

The review board determines whether the site qualifies for local, state or national designations, Pearson said.

Ciera White, communications specialist with the city of Merriam, told the Post in a Tuesday email that the city is “thrilled and could not be more proud” of the recent designation — noting that “this achievement did not happen overnight.”

“This is a remarkable piece of history right here in our own community,” White wrote. “The Madam C.J. Walker School represents an important chapter in our story as a city, and now the entire nation recognizes it.”

For her part, Webb said she and the rest of her family are happy for Adams.

Webb said Adams is the one who worked to get this recognition for the Walker School and the lawsuit, and did so “in the face of some really rough times that we’re in.”

Overall, Webb said she sees the recent designation as recognition that people cannot be excluded simply because of their race or ethnicity, “no matter how you try and pretend that that’s not what you’re doing.”

“I’m glad that it is recognized nationally as an event worthy of being remembered, because this was not easy, and it’s kind of like we’re facing the same issues again today — just in a different way,” Webb said.

Efforts turn toward fundraising for $4M restoration plan

Adams said he thought he’d have to prove the Walker School’s history in those initial efforts to get grants to fix the church’s roof.

Instead, Adams said he quickly realized the impact of Webb v. School District No. 90 was “not unknown, it’s untold.” That’s when Adams shifted his focus to cementing the school’s place in history.

Now that the school is on the National Register of Historic Places, Adams said efforts are turning back toward a restoration plan, originally put together in 2024.

Adams said that before the Trump administration rolled back diversity, equity and inclusion funding from the National Park Service, he and others involved in the restoration plan thought that it would be completed by the time the FIFA World Cup came to Kansas City.

The $4 million restoration plan, created by MultiStudio, calls for the site to be restored to the 1905 schoolhouse featuring “a mini-museum,” Adams said.

Under that restoration plan, Adams said the museum portion of the school becomes the church’s lobby.

Fundraising efforts to bring that restoration plan to fruition are starting soon, Adams said, with details to come on the church’s website.

While he thought the restoration would have been completed by now, Adams said, he is hopeful that the recent national designation gives the effort “a big boost.”

“Our history will be captured forever,” Adams said about the restoration plan. “It would be quite an accomplishment.”

Renderings of the restoration plan are included in the document embedded below, starting on page 15.

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Keep reading awards and honors news: ‘Stay strong in the wind’ — How a cherry tree in Prairie Village honors Sarah Milgrim’s legacy

U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids held a roundtable in Shawnee with local officials and stakeholders about bison herd restoration as part of her America 250 week here in town.

She said the discussion helped her appreciate the importance of both preserving the American bison and increasing the large mammal’s population.

“It actually has these broad-sweeping impacts … around the ecosystem, around the wildlife and the way that focusing on preserving and increasing the bison population is actually helping our grasslands,” Davids said. “It’s helping our pollinators. It’s helping the entire ecology.”

An issue that came up was how managing the health of grassland prairies directly affects bison herds.

“One of the things that’s really different about the prairie compared to other kinds of ecosystems is that for a tropical forest or old-growth forest, you might set aside a reserve— the idea is, ‘Let’s leave it alone and not disturb it.’ And prairies require disturbance. They require periodic fires; they require grazing. They really need management,” said Kansas State University professor emeritus John Blair, recent director of the Konza Prairie Biological Station.

Blair pointed out how indigenous people used to manage prairies with fires and knew that bison were attracted to recently-burned areas. More recently, he said, researchers tracked bison using collars and found that this still holds true.

“It creates this shifting mosaic of different habitats types that move across the landscape, and that contributes to the kind of biodiversity we’re trying to support,” Blair said.

Christopher Kennedy, secretary of the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks, said he appreciated a good conversation about managing bison herds, interacting with tribal nations and “how we can not just preserve bison but how do we preserve the overall ecosystem that provides for bison and a plethora of other species.”

The Nature Conservancy has two herds of bison in Kansas, said Tony Capizzo, the group’s Flint Hills Initiative director. One of them, with 85 animals, grazes on 1,500 acres of the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve.

“Grasslands are one of the least-protected and most vulnerable ecosystems across the world, and in North America, we’ve lost 70% of our grasslands generally, and for tallgrass prairies like the Flint Hills, we’ve lost 96% of the original tallgrass prairie. … When we talk and think about bison management, it’s really in that context of how we support healthy grasses broadly,” Capizzo said.

He said that having the bison designated as the country’s national mammal in 2016 has helped the public make a connection to the grasslands.

It’s something that also helped Davids connect to the issue.

“When you think about the long history of the country, the American bison as our national mammal and something that really is a symbol particularly of the Great Plains, it prompted us to want to dig a little bit deeper on the work that Kansas specifically is doing,” she said.

Davids said that the information she learned during the conversation may help her in the future when working on bills concerning grasslands conservation, farms and USDA programs.

Fox is about to take over the TVs in more than 100 million homes worldwide. On Monday, Fox announced that it's acquiring Roku, the streaming middleman that serves as a portal for viewers to hop into services like Netflix, Disney Plus, Hulu, and more. The $22 billion deal may not change Roku's familiar purple interface, but it could put Fox in control of your data behind the screen.

During a call with investors, Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch said the plan is to keep the two companies separate. Fox aims to grow its business by adding Fox Sports, news content, and local stations to Roku - one of the most popular streaming device and smart TV platfor …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Fox has announced that it's acquiring Roku outright, in a deal that values the streaming company at $22 billion. Once the deal is complete, Fox content will be promoted more heavily than before on Roku streamers and smart TVs.

The deal will see Fox's TV networks and Tubi streamer combine with Roku's network of streaming devices, smart TV software, and The Roku Channel. The companies say in a press release that by combining they'll become the third-largest player in the US TV industry by viewing share.

"This is a defining moment for Fox, and a natural extension of the deliberate and focused strategy we have been executing for nearly a decad …

Read the full story at The Verge.

A copy of Super Mario Bros., still in the box and sealed with its original sticker, just sold at Heritage Auctions for $3 million. That absolutely crushes the previous record of $2 million, also for a copy of Super Mario Bros., in 2021. That sale also came hot on the heels of a controversial auction of Super Mario 64 for $1.56 million.

Part of what drove the price of this particular copy so high is that, according to Heritage Auctions, instead of shrink wrap, this 19895 second run was sealed with a glossy sticker, which was discontinued shortly after. The site claims it's the earliest known sealed copy of the game in existence. It's also gr …

Read the full story at The Verge.