SULLIVAN - A local company has apparently put in the low bid for phase 1 and 2 of the North Loop Road project, with the City Council sending the bid to MoDOT for approval.

N.B. West Contracting's bid of $1,168,550.34 was unanimously approved recently by the City Council. Because federal funds will be used for the project - which will extend a road north and west of Flying J to Highway AF - MoDOT and the Federal Highway Administration must approve the bid. This process is expected to take about six weeks. The funding involves $436,780.53 in federal non-attributal funds and the balance in the city capital improvement sales tax fund. This is the first year that funds are available to meet the match.

Another Sullivan-based company had the second-lowest bid. Bink's Trucking and Excavating bid $1,328,326,04.

TROY - For 50 years, hunter education has meant attending 10 hours of classroom training. Come July, Missourians will have a second option - online training plus a field day to give their knowledge a practical test. One family that has tried it is sold on the concept.

Kenny Dearing took his parents by surprise last fall when he told them he wanted to go deer hunting.

“I had taken him out to the range and let him shoot the gun and tried to entice him somewhat,” said Kenny’s father, Ken. “With him growing up and playing sports and all that, he had never showed that much interest and I didn’t really want to push him. And then he just comes up one day and says ‘I really would love to do this. What have we got to do?’”

According to Kenny, peer pressure stimulated his interest in hunting.

“All my friends go hunting,” said Kenny. “They always bring pictures to school and gloat about it. I wanted to get my own and gloat about it.”

Ken, who has been a deer hunter for 35 years, was delighted. He went to the Missouri Department of Conservation’s web page to see what legal requirements his 12-year-old son had to meet to take part in the two-day youth deer hunting season. He knew that Kenny would need to be hunter-education certified. If Kenny did not have a hunter-education certificate, Ken would need one to accompany his son on the youth hunt.

“I decided I might as well take hunter education with him,” said Ken. “You can always learn something new.”

While Ken was pleased with his son’s newfound interest in hunting, it created a bit of a time crunch. Like most families, the Dearings were busy, and only one hunter education class was available in their home town.

“Hunter education was going to take up an entire weekend,” said Ken, “and with my schedule as busy as it is and his football schedule, we were trying to find a way to do this that was a little easier for him and me. Then we stumbled across the internet-based training.”

The Dearings became part of a trial run of the Conservation Department’s new web-based hunter education. The agency tested the program in a few areas in 2006 to see how it worked and what hunters and instructors thought of it. Students worked their way through the training materials and then had to pass an online test in time to qualify for a six-hour field day that completed the training. It took some work, but the Dearings finished the online course in time.

“It was a great way to go,” said Kenny’s mother, Janet. “They did it in the evenings and had a lot of fun together.”

Kenny said the online portion of the course worked well for him, because he could work at his own pace.

“The only hard part was all the reading,” he said. “I’m not really much about reading. The field day was just like redoing everything we had already learned. It was actually kind of fun.”

Ken said the practical exercises in safe firearms handling, crossing fences and establishing safe fields of fire were priceless.

“Walking around with a stick instead of a gun helped him learn those lessons,” said Ken. “The instructors were just excellent, the way they made sure every kid understood exactly what to do. I was really impressed. I even learned some things I didn’t know.”

With both portions of the online/field day training successfully completed, Ken and Kenny were set. The used their camper at Mark Twain Lake as their deer camp, hunting on land owned by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

They hunted from dawn to dusk both days of the Youth Portion of Firearms Deer Season, using a ground blind. They saw only one deer and were not able to get a shot. But Ken said the weekend was wonderful. He got to sit quietly with his son for two days, teaching him how to pick a deer out among the fall foliage, what signs to look for on the ground, where to sit and other deer hunting lore.

Walking through the woods, Kenny surprised his dad by pointing out dangerous situations, such as a thick patch of trees where it would be difficult to keep the muzzle of his rifle pointed in a safe direction, or a spot where he might fall, losing control of his firearm.

“He learned all that stuff in the field day,” said Ken. “It really stuck with him.”

Kenny got a first-deer certificate from the Conservation Department. He spends much of his spare time now reading books, watching outdoor shows and cruising the Internet to learn all he can about turkey hunting. He and his dad plan to hunt the spring turkey season.

Conservation Department Hunter Education Coordinator Tony Legg said online hunter education is designed to make formal training in hunting safety and ethics more readily available. He said the online option is designed to augment traditional classes, not replace them.

“Online training is a great thing for families with busy schedules,” said Legg. “It also is going to be a big help to people who live a long way from where hunter education classes are offered.”

He said the Conservation Department was very conscious of the need to maintain the quality of hunter education training as it designed the online course. He said the field day ensures that students get interactive time with instructors. “Nothing can take the place of a real, live teacher for certain things,” he said, “and the practical exercises add an extremely important element to the training.”

Legg said the new approach also makes hunter education more appealing to young people, who are learning to do everything online. “Serving people means making services available where they live,” he said. “For a lot of young people, that means the Internet.”

Legg said the online course covers the same material as traditional hunter-education classes. After completing the course, students can take as many practice tests as they need to prepare for the final exam. The exam itself is different for every student. Difficulty is tailored to the student’s age, and questions are selected from a pool of several hundred, yielding a virtually endless number of variations.

“The chances of getting more than one or two of the same questions on two tests are limited,” said Legg. “You have to know the material pretty well to pass, just like in a regular hunter education class.”

Passing this exam is a requirement for attending a field day and obtaining hunter-education certification. At the field day students must pass another written test. This ensures that their online test was not done by others.

“When we announced plans to offer an online version of hunter education, lots of people were understandably concerned about whether it would lower the standards,” said Legg. “We have built in safeguards to make sure that doesn’t happen. With the added hands-on training, I think online hunter education actually is stronger in some ways than classroom training alone.”

The Conservation Department plans to launch the online hunter-education course in July. Information will be available at www.mdc.mo.gov in June.

SULLIVAN - As the world oil price takes a slow dive, the local cost of fuel does not. After holding relatively steady at $3.05 for regular unleaded, the average cost (as of March 21) locally is $3.07. With gas prices in a state of flux, a short drive down the road may save a few cents -- or maybe not. Several gas-price reporting agencies reported on Tuesday, March 25 that wide swings across the Midwest should be expected during the spring.

On Friday AAA Missouri reported a statewide average of $3.06, with the lowest prices in southwest Missouri. One year ago the statewide average was $2.40.

A look around the state (as of Friday, March 21):

$2.89, Phillips, Nixa

$2.91, Kum & Go, Springfield

$3.07, average in Sullivan

$3.15, Casey's, Piedmont

$3.15, Villa, Poplar Bluff

$3.19, BP, Farmington

MERAMEC STATE PARK - At least for this location, the worst is over. According to the National Weather Service, the Meramec River reached its peak early Thursday morning at 31.75 feet, just about knee-deep shy of a new record. The bridge at the state park remained a busy spot Thursday as pedestrians stood in awe of the massive flood, with many snapping photos and filming the rare event.

"I've never seen anything like this," said Todd Dillman, of Springfield, Ill., who took a detour off Interstate 44 to see the flood. "This is actually pretty cool, but I feel sorry for the people who lose property." Others, like Dillman, darted back and forth across the bridge to see trees bobbing down the muddy river, and snapping photos of park buildings barely visible above the water. For park employees, the muddy clean-up will begin soon enough. For those downstream, the nightmare continues.

According to St. Louis media, officials at Valley Park and Eureka won't see relief until the weekend. Sandbag operations continued near Highway 141 in Valley Park Thursday evening; a levee broke just north of I-44 and west of Valley Park at Peerless Park, spilling overflow into a quarry.

For more info on historical floods in Sullivan and a chart of the flood, go to: http://www.crh.noaa.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=lsx&gage=sllm7&view=1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1