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Help bring performances back to Phillips

It has been nearly a decade since the auditorium at the former Phillips Middle School was regularly filled with the sounds of music and laughter. The site of plays, musicals, concerts and the occasional speech by presidential candidates making the rounds in advance of the Iowa caucuses has been mostly still and empty since the school closed in 2014. The classrooms up and down the hallways have been replaced by apartments, but the auditorium remains basically intact, awaiting its chance to again become a performing arts venue. Local residents will have the chance to help make the site ...

Support young readers by donating books

There are books just waiting to be read that are instead gathering dust on shelves and in boxes throughout Fort Dodge. Local residents now have a chance to get those books into the hands of eager young readers. The Fort Dodge Community Schools Foundation is seeking books that can be given to students so they have something to read over the summer. Getting books suitable for elementary school students is the big goal, but books for older kids will be accepted as well. In fact, books in any readable condition will be accepted. Folks who want to unload some books they haven’t read ...

People needed to join the ranks of blood donors

The idea of getting poked with a big needle and having some of your blood siphoned out is not at all a pleasant one. However, people who are brave enough to get jabbed and allow some of their blood to be drawn out are a type of hero commonly called a blood donor. They save a lot of lives. Donating blood takes about an hour, according to leaders of Lifeserve Blood Center, which has a facility in Fort Dodge. In that hour, a blood donor can save three local lives, they say. Blood and blood products are needed by trauma patients, premature infants, cancer patients, organ transplant ...

Using federal COVID money for airports is good move

The Fort Dodge Regional Airport is on the verge of some much needed improvements that will be done without spending local property tax dollars. The airport is eligible for $1,585,761 from the Iowa Commercial Aviation Infrastructure Fund. That money will be spent to build new hangars to house planes. The state fund has that money available for Fort Dodge, plus millions more for seven other commercial service airports in Iowa, because Gov. Kim Reynolds deposited $100 million of federal COVID relief money into it. The high dollar federal COVID relief programs have lots of detractors, ...

Group of FDSH graduates helps today’s students

Students at Fort Dodge elementary schools had a special visit this week from Mike Artell, an author and illustrator of children’s books. That visit was courtesy of a group of Fort Dodge Senior High School alumni that has been a steady, but relatively little-known, supporter of the local public schools since 1998. The Fort Dodge Senior High School Alumni Association paid the expenses for the Artell visit. Every year, the association pays for an author to visit the schools. It also funds five $1,000 scholarships for students graduating from Fort Dodge Senior High who are enrolling ...

Road workers deserve our respect

The calendar tells us that spring has arrived, and that also means the start of another season: road construction season. In Fort Dodge, we have already seen some of that as crews have been doing permanent repairs to various streets that had to be dug up to fix broken water mains. One of the year’s big projects, the reconstruction of Third Avenue Northwest, is getting started. In the coming days and weeks, more projects will begin on city, county and state roads. Barricades and orange barrels will be a common sight once more. All this work will yield smooth roads that will help ...