The rush hits at noon. That’s when kids start pouring into the gym at Susquehanna Baptist Church. On a scorching Wednesday last month, they lined up to choose their lunches: pizza, subs or PB&J. Most picked pizza. The Independence, Missouri, church is one of more than 350 summer food sites around Kansas City that provides meals to kids who rely on free or reduced-price lunch during the school year. But not all kids can get to a food site. “Summer is the time when food insecurity and hunger spike for families because they lose access to free and reduced-price lunches and breakfasts during the school year,” said Crystal FitzSimons, director of school and out-of-school time programs for the Food Research & Action Center. Two government-funded food programs work to feed low-income kids over the summer. But they require kids to travel to sites daily for meals, making it difficult for kids in rural areas. And federal regulations limiting where food sites can operate leave wide stretches of those rural areas ineligible to serve meals. The majority of sites in our eight-county region — comprising Johnson, Leavenworth, Miami and Wyandotte counties in Kansas and Cass, Clay, Jackson and Platte counties in Missouri — are currently focused on the urban core. A mere 13 percent of sites serve kids outside of that densely packed metropolitan center. That’s just one site for every 100 square miles in rural areas, compared with 45 sites per 100 square miles in urban areas. [FLEX-CONTENT] The sites might not exist, but the need does. FitzSimons said…...

Our photography series, “The Art of (KC)”, brings you beautiful, thought-provoking and compelling images of our city and surrounding areas every other week. This week, we're highlighting the very picture(s) of hometown pride. From Jason Sudeikis repping KC on the national scene (and when he came into our sister studio at 90.9 The Bridge) to the unabashed "Property of Fly Over Country," we're showcasing all the ways we wear those two little letters out loud. [FLEX-CONTENT] We invite you to get out your phone, your camera, your sketchbook — whatever — and let us see your POV. — Follow us @FlatlandKC and share your interpretations with #ArtofKC....

Local music fans unleashed a collective fist pump last spring when word began spreading that Shy Boys, one of the area’s most beloved indie outfits, was back in the studio tracking its much anticipated sophomore effort. That album, “Bell House,” will release next week through Polyvinyl with an album release party at recordBar on August 4th. Much of the excitement arises from the fact that it’s been so damn long since the band released its first album. That 2014 debut was a syrupy, reverb-heavy jaunt that – despite being charmingly rough around the edges – was a strong indicator of band’s adept talent for crafting colorful pop songs. In fact, it was that same skill that earned its founding members, Collin Rausch (guitar, vocals), his brother Kyle Rausch (bass, vocals), and Konnor Ervin (drums, vocals), coveted features on indie blogs Pitchfork, Spin, and Stereogum – that generally praised the group for its lo-fi arrangements using all manner of landlocked adjectives in a ham-fisted attempt to sleuth how a band from Missouri could write such authentic surf pop. Since that time, the Boys have remained patient, consistently gigged, and added Kyle Little (guitar) and Ross Brown (guitar) to the lineup. [FLEX-CONTENT] But there was another change that served as the inspiration and central focus for the band’s new record: They all moved out of what the Rausches described as a beat up, trash-ridden old house in the West Plaza where they had been roommates for much of the band’s formation and existence. Hence, the album title. “We lived in that house…...

David Bonebrake describes himself as the kind of guy who likes order. If he sees a crooked picture on the wall, he wants to fix it. When Bonebrake, a Kansas native, saw an aerial picture of Kansas City from 438 miles above — a photo he still keeps on his phone — he noticed that the Missouri roads were not parallel with the Kansas roads. He began to wonder why the roads on either side of the state line were not parallel. So Bonebrake, 63, started asking around. He consulted the internet and asked a local librarian but didn't get an answer. That led him to the curiousKC initiative, where he asked us, “Why are the north-south streets in KCMO about 3-5 degrees off of due north compared to those in Kansas? Surveyed at different times?” Bonebrake was not the only person curious about the off-kilter layout of Kansas City. There were not one, not two, but three threads on the online forum community, Reddit, devoted to the slight tilt in the roads that run north-south in Kansas City. [FLEX-CONTENT] While theories abound on the internet, we invited Bonebrake along with us as we consulted local experts. Pat Carroll, owner of Gallup Maps in Downtown Kansas City, concurred that the Missouri roads are about 3 degrees off magnetic north. He says the reason the roads are skewed is quite simple: Missouri and Kansas roads were planned using different norths. “It’s a magnetic north problem,” Carroll said. Because a compass is a magnetized needle, it points to magnetic north. The geographic…...

For many musicians, writing and performing music for the public is a privilege. And though artists rights typically don’t factor into the general perception of being a kick-ass rocker, that doesn’t mean those rights should be ignored. But safeguarding those rights can often be more difficult for female artists. In my time as a practicing entertainment attorney and contributor for this column, I have been able to speak with some amazing female musicians. And I’ve learned that they are sometimes forced to endure a different set of potential infringements than those typically experienced by male musicians. As a precursor, it is not lost on this columnist that the optics of this piece is of a lawyer-bro mansplaining legal rights to a population of female artists. I openly admit that I have no direct experience with the type of abhorrent discriminatory conduct women face — my only goal here is to reinforce the general knowledge about the rights at play and hopefully provide some resources to those who may need them. Without further ado, Flatland has compiled a short list of rights that female artists need to keep in mind as they continue blessing us with their powerful art. You Have a Right To Contract With most live musical performances, bands or musicians are independent contractors — they agree with a venue, promoter or manager to perform in exchange for some form of compensation. And in that relationship, musicians aren’t afforded the same types of legal protections you might see under a typical employer/employee arrangement. While that means that venues and promoters…...

Get lost* in our new photography series, “The Art of (KC)”, where we bring you beautiful, thought-provoking and compelling images of our city and surrounding areas every other week. On Friday, the iconic Western Auto sign at 21st Street and Grand Boulevard was re-lit, thanks to funding from the Western Auto Lofts homeowners' association. In light of this illumination (ha!) we're highlighting (haha!) other signs around town. We invite you to get out your phone, your camera, your sketchbook — whatever — and let us see your POV. Follow us @FlatlandKC and share your interpretations with #ArtofKC. *We’ve captioned the photos with general addresses so you won’t actually get lost. [FLEX-CONTENT] — Follow @FlatlandKC...

As a child, Angelica Sandoval associated darkness with fear and the unknown. As an adult, she taps into her love of ceramics to combat those fears. She creates porcelain “creatures of light” as a therapeutic means to address the uncertainty she feels. “For me, light is comfort, light is this sense of hope, light is life,” she says. Once she pours the porcelain slip over the ceramic piece, the piece of art is out of her hands. “I don’t even know what’s going to happen or how the light is going to emit through the pieces until the pieces are fired,” she says. “That is also part of the joy of making them; I think that leads back into accepting what’s going to happen.” Get inside the minds of four diverse Kansas City-based artists as we explore the inner-workings of their creative souls. "Work in Progress" celebrates the process of art — its creation and its creator — rather than the finished project. Find all “Work in Progress” videos on flatlandkc.org on Wednesdays in July and online here, and watch the 30-minute film at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 9 on KCPT....

I won’t presume to know why, 50 years after his death, we haven’t named a street after Martin Luther King Jr. in Kansas City, Missouri. Despite its broad support across ethnic lines, former Mayors Ilus Davis, Charles Wheeler, Dick Berkley, Emanuel Cleaver, Kay Barnes and Mark Funkhouser haven’t been able to do it. Recently, the idea returned to the news and forefront of conversation with much fanfare, with the main challenge being where to place the designation. When a group of black clergy proposed naming Paseo Boulevard after King earlier this year, the idea met a lot of resistance. In response, Mayor Sly James initiated a community group to look at options through a series of community forums. The forums concluded in May with a proposal to the City Council to name a terminal at the new KCI for King. No proposal or decision was made on the naming of a street. So we wait. We might be late in naming the street, but we have been busy making our city a better place. As a black child growing up in the 1960s, I remember the volatile nature of the times. With Malcolm X’s racially divisive “by whatever means necessary” approach on one side, King offered another side — a nonviolent position that a created a bridge of opportunity to include all people. Naming an east-west street would be a symbolic bridge that supports King’s message of inclusion and respect. It is, after all, in the cask of isolation and separation that hate is fermented and seeps deepest into the…...

Get lost* in our new photography series, “The Art of (KC)”, where we bring you beautiful, thought-provoking and compelling images of our city and surrounding areas every other week. Swipe through the slideshow for some creative street art. Then, get out your phone, your camera, your sketchbook — whatever — and let us see your POV. Follow us @FlatlandKC and share your interpretations with #ArtofKC. *We’ve captioned the photos with general addresses so you won’t actually get lost. [FLEX-CONTENT] — Follow @FlatlandKC...

We follow two Missouri cities — Independence, which recently passed a rental inspection measure and Kansas City, which takes its to the voters in August — in this vignette that's part of our "Public Works? A Level Foundation" series. [FLEX-CONTENT] — Follow Flatland @FlatlandKC...

A few quietly celebrated last fall as Kansas City was officially designated a “Creative City of Music” by The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. And though the UNESCO announcement met little fanfare, that hasn’t dampened the spirits of an excited delegation from KC that traveled to Poland this week for the next phase of the honor – collaborating with delegations from 180 cities worldwide to find ways to develop a sustainable local economy around the arts. Mayor Pro Tem Scott Wagner, who was heavily involved in the application submitted to UNESCO, felt compelled to assist in the process. “To be the country’s first City of Music was very appealing and as we promote our musical heritage locally and externally, this seemed like an opportunity to validate our musical legacy on an international stage,” Wagner said in an email from Poland. “It is what we make of it, but if we use this designation to its fullest extent, we can draw global interest in Kansas City that will mean great tourism interest. That interest can bring new business and development opportunities.” [FLEX-CONTENT] The designation is part of UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network program, which it created to promote efforts by cities that have identified creativity as a strategic factor for sustainable urban development. Applicants to the UCCN typically do so under one of its seven creative fields – crafts and folk art, design, film, gastronomy, literature, music and media arts. Kansas City’s application was submitted in June 2017, as the result of the efforts of the Wendell Phillips neighborhood association; Jacob…...

Hip-hop and testosterone-filled bravado have run hand-in-hand since the genre’s inception. And save a few brave acts over the decades, few rappers are willing to spit bars about something as vulnerable as their feelings. That’s where KC-native Joe Stanziola, aka Second Hand King, is different. Stanziola, 28, began writing tracks for his new album, “Frankie,” almost two years ago. And since that time, he fell in love, got engaged, got unengaged, felt heartbreak, and found peace. And he’s been very open about all of it – to the point that “heartbreak is OK” has become something of a running motto in his inner circles. This array of emotions is prominently displayed in “Frankie,” which represents both a spiritual and musical change of direction for the rapper and a first glimpse of “doo wop rap” – a style Stanziola lovingly originated to deal with those feelings. And in that way, “Frankie” is as much a commencement as it is a piece of art. We caught up with the King to talk about the album, his recent fits with newly found emotions, and just how he landed on his new style. On Who “Frankie” Is… “I was engaged for a year and I stopped doing everything. I was struggling. ‘Frankie’ started as me trying to understand what love was and how to cultivate real love and keep it,” Stanziola said. “And when [the relationship] fell apart, ‘Frankie’ became the same thing in a different light. As opposed to trying to find real love in someone else so I could maintain that, it…...

The U.S. takes credit for creating the Internet, and the European Union seems determined to govern it. On Friday, a sweeping new directive goes into effect called the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. Taken together, its 99 articles represent the biggest ever change to data privacy laws. The new rules have implications for U.S. Internet users too. Here are answers to three questions you might have about the new law and its potential impacts. What is GDPR? It's a new law that protects residents of the EU — people living there, including Americans. (If you're a European and live in the U.S., you're not protected.) Under GDPR, all companies that have an Internet presence — including large American companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook — have to comply. At the most basic level, GDPR expands what counts as personal data and your rights over that data. Your data is, for example, what you post on social media, your electronic medical records and your mailing address. It's also your IP address (a string of numbers that's unique to your smartphone or laptop), as well as GPS location. The directive says people have to give permission for a company to collect their data. A company can't just sign you up without explicitly asking. And the more personal the data — say, biometrics, which is considered a special category under the law — the ask must be even more clear. Europeans have a right to have their data deleted if they don't want a company to keep it. Companies have to delete…...

Rachel Miskec watches the news each night and worries she’ll see an apartment fire in Kansas City, Kansas. “If something bad happens, I know someone is going to ask us when did you go into [the apartment] last,” said Miskec, the coordinator of the rental license program for the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas. As it stands, a rental licensing inspector walks up and knocks on a door. The inspector hopes the tenant inside will answer, so they can schedule an appointment for another day. If there is no answer, there is no way — absent an administrative search warrant — that the inspector can look inside. But that wasn’t always the case. Wyandotte County has had a rental licensing program since 1996. County officials say the program is about health and safety. Some landlords argue that routine inspections violate tenants’ privacy rights. “The right to privacy trumps everything else,” said Ed Jaskinia, a Wyandotte County property manager who is also the president of The Associated Landlords of Kansas. “The tenant should have the right to say no to an inspection.” Both sides will tell you that a little-known change to the state law in July 2016 fundamentally altered the county’s rental inspection process. The law prevents inspectors from entering a rental property without the consent of tenants. The law’s impact was magnified by issues within the rental licensing department. Poor record-keeping and staff turnover have hindered the office’s performance in the past several years. The rental licensing office is looking at tenant education as a…...

Washington has an invisible problem: College students face homelessness in some of the biggest numbers anywhere. Michael is 19, transgender, and homeless. As a transgender person of color, Michael embodies some of the most sobering data on who is impacted by homelessness. Most estimates put LGBTQ people at less than 7 percent of the population. Yet a 2017 county survey found that 29 percent of homeless youth identified as LGBTQ. The same report found that people of color represent about 53 percent of homeless youth, despite people of color only accounting for 29 percent of King County, Washington’s total population. This video is from our public media friends at Spark Public. [FLEX-CONTENT] — Follow Flatland @FlatlandKC...

Hundreds of area music and film lovers will ascend atop the Central Library this Friday night for the season’s first 2018 Off-the-Wall Film Series: Summer Cinema Mixtape. The annual summer film series, co-presented by the Young Friends of the Kansas City Public Library, provides an intersection between music and film through a collection of beloved flicks the library describes as an “eccentric playlist of comedies with song-centric storylines.” Friday’s kickoff screening will feature “School of Rock,” a Jack Black-helmed, family-friendly comedy. Other films in the series include “CB4,” “Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist,” “Little Shop of Horrors” and “Pitch Perfect.” The series celebrates its 10th year this summer, and has gone from being a sparsely attended afterthought to averaging hundreds of filmgoers at each screening. Patrons are encouraged to bring their own seating, snacks and non-alcoholic beverages to the free event. Adult drinks are provided by local brewery KC Bier Co., which offers attendees two beers with admission. According to Courtney Lewis, who handles media relations for the library, the event was born out of a desire to provide the public with a social event that took advantage of the Central Library’s downtown locale. “The Central Library has a beautiful rooftop at night, but we realized that the library closes at 5 o’clock on Fridays, so nobody gets to see it,” Lewis said. “And we thought the space was just dying to have a great weekend event. So we set out to hold an event where people could go up there to watch a movie – sort of like a…...

Parenting doesn't have to be so stressful. Just ask a Maya mom.

It takes two minutes for the woman in the wheelchair to roll in front of Judge R. Wayne Lawson. It only takes another two minutes for her to be legally evicted. “You have to leave, just not today,” Lawson tells her. The plaintiff’s lawyer asks her to wait for him in the hallway. He still has six more cases to argue. Jelisa Bernardo, 28, watches all this from the second row of long wooden benches in eviction court. A little boy sits next to her. His nose is runny, and he gets up and down repeatedly from the bench. “I love you, mama,” says the boy. Bernardo gently shushes him, her fingers tight around a black binder on her lap. No one else talks, no one removes their winter coat. Courtroom 1 of the Wyandotte County Courthouse is not a place to get comfortable. The court clerk calls out lawyers in the order they arrived. The seventh lawyer is Ralph E. Lewis II. He’s here representing YTV Realty LLC, a Kansas City, Kansas-based company that has filed evictions on two tenants living at the Colony Woods apartment complex. At 9:23 a.m., Bernardo’s name is called. She takes her son’s hand and walks to the front of the courtroom to stand across from Lewis. The judge asks her if she owes $1,947. When she replies yes, he finds in favor of YTV Realty. Three minutes later, Bernardo is in the hallway waiting for Lewis, not far from the woman in the wheelchair. “I wish I never moved here,” Bernardo says. “What…...

44 days. That’s how long it took our research intern to obtain all the eviction information for Wyandotte County. Across that month and a half, Flatland’s Ryan Hennessy spent about six hours a day combing eviction records the only place they were available: on one of three public computers on the first floor of the Wyandotte County Courthouse. By Day 22, he was having second thoughts. He didn’t quit, though, and in the end combed through 4,519 individual eviction cases spanning the past two years in Wyandotte County. Before this, an analysis of evictions on both sides of the state line had never been published. [FLEX-CONTENT] Hennessy used open records requests and old-fashioned phone calls to obtain the eviction records in Jackson County, Missouri, and Johnson County, Kansas. Those came quite easily, he said. Wyandotte was a different story. The open records request received a curt denial letter from the Kansas Supreme Court, citing a 2005 order that prohibited bulk requests. Hennessy then unsuccessfully appealed to the high court in Topeka. The state’s legal attorney even reached out to FullCourt Enterprise, the New Mexico-based case management system used to maintain the state’s record system, to see if it could help out Hennessy’s research. No dice. So to the courthouse he went, the only place to access the information. There, Hennessy got into a routine. Belt off to go through the metal detector. A quick chat with the bailiff about the weather. Set up at one of the early model Dell computers with FullCourt on it, and occasionally steer confused members…...

North America's largest mammal, the American bison, is an enduring symbol of the Great Plains. Bison once ranged from Canada to New Mexico and from Nevada to the Appalachian Mountains. By 1889, their populations were reduced from 30 to 60 million animals to fewer than 1000. Bison were pushed to the brink of extinction by a number of factors, including over hunting by hide hunters, trains, competition with cattle and horses, and disease. Bison survived near extinction with the help of prescient Native Americans and early conservationists who worked to protect the species through effective federal wildlife management policy. In 2016, President Obama signed a law, making bison the country’s first national mammal. Today, bison are considered a conservation success story. More than 500,000 bison now live on the Great Plains in protected herds that range on national, state, local, and private lands. This video is from our public media partners at NETNebraska....