Welcome to the Weekly Roundup, where we bring you the top stories from today’s Dayton Daily News and major stories from the past week you may have missed.
This week, that includes a new tool to analyzed the financial health of local school districts, and … pickleball!
The first I heard of pickleball was maybe 17 years ago. I was a reporter at the Journal-News and they were building some new courts in West Chester Twp. So I know it’s been around for a while. But the first time I played the game was maybe three years ago. Confession: I now drive around with pickleball equipment in my trunk.
• Growing popularity: I’m not alone. Reporter Dave Jablonski found the sport has been around for a while, but is exploding in popularity. Read his full story here.
• New courts: Dave’s story lists new courts opening in Centerville, Hamilton, Xenia, Riverside and Springfield.
• Going pro: Jade and Jackie Kawamoto, twin sisters who played tennis at the University of Dayton, graduating from UD in 2018, were introduced to pickleball by their dad and now are professional players in Major League Pickleball and in the Professional Pickleball Association.
• ‘One more’: Jeff Jett, a local coach and player who co-founded Black Barn Pickleball, compares the game’s addictiveness to golf: “You just can’t perfect it. If you just lost, you want to improve on it. A game is over in 12 to 15 minutes tops. You think, ‘Well, just one more. I can’t end that way.’ If you won, you think, ‘Wow, this is great. I want to keep this going.’ The joke is, ‘Just one more.’ That‘s kind of the theme of pickleball. Let‘s play just one more.â€
School financial health
Our education reporter Eileen McClory has exhaustively covered Ohio’s school funding debate and the success or failures of local levies. This week, she analyzes the financial health of area schools.
• First, the good news: According to an analysis by this news outlet, most of the local schools that provided data to the state appear to be fiscally healthy.
• The bad news: Springboro Schools in Warren County was one of two local school districts that the auditor’s office flagged as having possible issues in two or three years.
A group of pastors are asking the Butler County commissioners to void the contract the sheriff has with U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement and exit the deportation business.
What was once a wall of trees along Wilmington Pike has become the thriving Cornerstone of Centerville North, anchored by Costco, Kroger and Cabela's, and featuring several smaller stores, housing, a hotel and restaurants.
As the federal government weighs the future of a program that allows some employers to pay workers with disabilities less than minimum wage, a Dayton area lawmaker has proposed phasing out the practice over the next five years.
Three Birds, a new restaurant by The Idea Collective, a hospitality development company that owns Sueño and Tender Mercy in downtown Dayton, will open to the public on June 10.
Homeland Security listed places it said deliberately obstruct immigration laws and endanger American citizens. Warren County sheriff, prosecutor say list is wrong.
Kettering Health hopes its phone systems and health records software, Epic, will have more functionality next week, the hospital organization said in its latest update, which also recognized that a “small subset†of its records were accessed by an unauthorized user.
