University Dally Kansan / Wednesday, May 2, 1990
11
Forum links campus workers
By Pam Sollner
Let's do lunch.
That's what Cindy Riling, president of Classified Senate, wants classified employees campuswide to do together.
Classified Senate sponsored its first brown bag forum for classified employees Monday at Robinson Center. About 30 employees attended a program about the activities and services available to them.
The University's 1,000 classified employees are state paid workers, including secretaries, maintenance work
Riling said her goal as president was to bring classified employees across campus together.
"I want classified employee to get to know other classified employees and to discover what's available on campus for our use," she said. "What's fortunate is that classified employees work within their own little departments and don't know what's happening on campus."
Riling appointed Barbara Woodruff, administrative assistant at the Enrollment Center, to chair an ad hoc committee.
Woodruff said she was planning a forum for October about switching jobs and one for November about handling holiday stress.
She said she wanted classified employee to be aware of the benefits available to them on campus, such as the
By meeting and talking with other classified employees, she said, they could learn about more aspects of the University, which could help them answer questions in their departments.
"The more information you have, the better it is." Woodruff said.
Riling said she got the idea for the forum after hearing about a group of classified employees who met for an informal lunch once a month. She wanted to spread that concept to the entire campus and include more of the classified employees. So she began planning the first forum.
Peggy Baker, secretary in the German department, said lunch meetings for classified employees had been canceled.
"It's a good chance to learn how things work and learn better ways to do things from someone in another department who had the same problem," she said.
Baker asked departments in Wesco took turns organizing lunches, which 15 to 25 employees attend.
Last week, she helped organize a lunch trip with classified employees in Strong Hall. They rented a double-decker bus and ate lunch at the La Minx restaurant in Lawrence.
Sandy Patchen, executive secretary for the executive vice chancellor, said the Strong Hall lunches were mainly breakfast.
“It’s good to get out with other secretaries and discuss mutual interests and complaints,” she said.
Dressler, who also is vice president of Classified Senate, said the forums gave classified employees another way to become unified and discuss salary and benefit issues.
"More and more, it's becoming important to get information to classified employees and for us to operate as a group," she said.
"We all introduced ourselves," she said. "Everyone greeted at that at first, but in doing it, I recognized some of the differences."
Carol Dressler, secretary in the KU budget office, said she had enjoyed meeting fellow classified employees at
Experts expect large wheat harvest
By Chris Siron
Kansan staff writer
Kansas agricultural experts agree that this year's wheat harvest will be much larger than the 1983 yield, but they differ about the size of the crop.
The Kansas Wheat Quality Council's annual report released last week estimated the harvest would be the second-highest in the year, be almost double last year's output.
The council, sponsored by the baking industry, invited 46 grain experts to tour Kansas wheat fields for three years to assess their predictions for the 1990 harvest.
the Kansas Farm Bureau, Roberts said.
Tom Roberts, director of the council, said the average estimate for the state was 425.3 million bushels. Estimates ranged from 391 to 476 million bushels, the narrowest spread in the past five years.
The council's estimate is 12 percent higher than a 380 million-bushel projection released earlier this week by
If the council's guess is accurate, the 1990 crop would be 98 percent larger than last year. 213.6 million hurricanes and dust storms and lack of rain.
"You know there's optimism in our report," he said. "But we're reading the conditions as we see them in the report." We always a difference of opinion."
Neil Gumm, crop statistician with the Kansas Department of Agriculture, said the record Kansas wheat crop was about 458 million bushels in 1982. Other harvests in the early '80s reached 430 million bushels.
In tomorrow's Kansan: Rural report
The federal government will release its first 1990 wheat crop projection for Kansas on May 10, he said.
Randy Wallace, a trader for Farmers Commodities Co. at the Kansas City, Mo., exchange, criticized the report as unrealistically optimistic.
"What you've got is a blue-sky estimate," he said. "You can't take current conditions, which are very good, and use them for a changing year-long situation that could get worse."
Wallace said he and other traders anticipated a 400-million-bushel harvest.
Howard Tice, executive director of the Kansas Association of Wheat Growers, said he thought the council's estimate was too high.
"Four hundred is a good and reasonable guessestimate," he said. "The most optimistic in our office said he was 76, the most conservative said around 380."
Tice said the council's observers might have overestimated the 1990 harvest by comparing it with last year's.
"The farmers we hear from say the crops look good compared to last year, but not that great compared to others," he said. "It may just be average this year."
Tice said that an improved harvest would help farmers and the Kansas economy but that it would not affect the consumer dramatically.
"The retail business being what it is, they won't drop the product prices that much unless we have a real bin of farmers or of farmers are breathing easier."
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