Students Hired to Research Miner County Statistics

Contact: Teresa Poppen – 772-5153; poppent@alliancecom.net

Six high school students have been hired by Miner County Community Revitalization to do research and analysis on Miner County as part of the Community Plan.

Zach Calmus, Matt Kilbourn, Jonea Wunder, Trenna Haak, Charlie Stangohr and Katie Poppen began collecting data last week.

These students will be researching information from the 2000 Census along with several other sources. Data collected on Miner County will be compared with similar data of the surrounding counties of Lake, Sanborn, Hanson, McCook and Kingsbury. After compiling the data, students will be analyzing the numbers to understand what the information means to Miner County.

“Students are able to link the practical use of government and the economic reality of why rural counties are struggling,” Larry Holland one of the project supervisors said. “Students have the benefit of learning about their county while developing the skills of resources that will benefit them wherever they go.”

Topics that the students will begin doing research on are: income, elderly, transfer payments, population and agriculture. Upon completion, students will be available to present their reports.

Students will work on this project through the summer months with plans to have it available to the public in September. This will be an ongoing project to measure what is happening in Miner County.

Larry Holland and Mary Stangohr are assisting and supervising these students and their work. Dr. Daryl Hobbs, Rural Sociologist from the University of Missouri, will be training students and overseeing this project.

According to Holland, the research and analysis that the students are doing are the things college juniors and seniors are doing. He noted further that as a community, we can not know where we’re going unless we know where we’ve been.