News

A proposal has been scrapped by the Nixon administration to borrow money from Missouri’s state universities to help balance the state’s budget.

Regional news from the KBIA newsroom:

• Schools front and center for state legislature
• Missouri's higher education commissioner wants to tie state funding to performance
• Tom Schlafly sells off most of his beer company

The 2012 Missouri legislative session is underway – and as St. Louis Public Radio’s Marshall Griffin tells us, much of the first-day talk revolved around the challenges facing the state’s public schools.

The head of Missouri’s Higher Education Department has a good-news prediction for the state’s colleges and universities: a downplay in funding cuts from legislators. By Kirk Wayman in Maryville.

Regional news form the KBIA newsroom, including:

The city of Columbia is spending $45,000 to conduct an outside review of its police department. This comes after a year in which the department has seen a host of issues, including the firing of officer Rob Sanders, as well as dueling local groups focusing on Chief Ken Burton.

This week: Missouri could gain over two hundred thousand jobs by the 2025, and the Department of Labor proposed new regulations on kids working on the farm who are under 16.

Missouri has one of the highest smoking rates in the nation -- at 21 percent, it's double the rate in states like Utah and California. But some segments of the population smoke even more. In this week's Health & Wealth update, I talk with MU researchers who have found that the smoking rate among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Missourians is much higher than in the population at large.

Regional news from the KBIA newsroom:

• MO lawmakers have to do more with less
• How do MO colleges match up against our international counterparts?