President Sofie Ameloot welcomed everyone to the Centerville Rotary Club and led reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance. Brian Hayes provided the prayer.

 

Our inspirational quote from Don Overly "Be thankful for what you have – “Don’t count the days, make the days count.”  Mohammad Ali

Thank you to our greeters today Bob Fry and Dan Johnson

May is Rotary’s Youth Service Month

Recap and LOOKING AHEAD:

 

Announcements:

 

Jeff Senney and Uriah Anderson introduced their guests today.

 

Happy Bucks: We still have some raffles left over- we will hold a small raffle for the remaining weeks of Operation Warm as our recipient. We really had a great push last week when Kelly challenged a match for $1,000. Let’s see if we can continue that.

 

Pat Beckel raffled two gift cards each worth $25 for Meridian and Archers. Lisa Goris-May won the bid in the amount of $100.

 

Pat Beckel was our Sergeant at Arms with assistance by Brian Hayes.

 

1.Pat Beckel – Community event coming up at St. Leonard called Merchant Market on Sunday where 15,000 local residents come up, & over 100 vendors set up along with food trucks, games, and music. It is supposed to be sunny with a high of 73. It should be perfect. Come out and support your local businesses. My happy bucks, the first one, I cannot participate in the Golf outing every year and it stinks as I am by far the best golfer among all of you and I will take all the prizes. You always have the Golf Tournament during my son’s men’s gymnastics national championship. My youngest son completed his last meet and my freshman in college from Ohio State placed 2nd placed and it was a great time.  I will be empty next year and should be able to participate. Another happy buck is when Kelly moved to town, he came into my cigar shop and what an amazing individual. He got involved in every single thing in our community. It wasn’t to get his name out there or it wasn’t for business, it’s his heart. He is emotional just like me. He is an emotional human being just like me, and it will almost be impossible to replace him. Anywhere he goes he will be incredibly successful. Kelly, thank you for all you have done and changing how we do things around here and showing us how to do it better.

 

2. Brian Hayes – five coats

3. Ernie – happy that there is no rain today.

4. Crissy Allums – for Kelly.

5. Lee Hieronymus – new push from the federal government to put whole milk back in school meals after more than a dozen years after higher -fat milk was stripped from school meals to slow obesity in American kids and boost their health momentum is growing to put it back.

6. Don Stewart – for Kelly.

7. Lisa Goris May – 4 coats and she is happy because her youngest daughter receiving her master’s degree last week. They are going to Disney together from June 1-8 as her daughter wanted to go to Disney to celebrate her great accomplishment.

8. Mike Weir – happy to find a parking spot today.

9. Kelly McDonald – grateful

10. Sofie Ameloot – IOU from last week, for Kelly and her daughter being accepted for her master’s program in Netherland.

11. Uriah Anderson – for his guests and for Kelly.

12. Adam Manning – for Kelly and he won 3 out of the raffle prizes.

13. Frank Perez – will give $5, $2 for Kelly, thank you for everything and $3 more if he, Kelly agrees to stay.

14. Chuck King – for Kelly.

15. Brad Huffman – for guests and Kelly. Your legacy will continue Kelly and please stay in touch.

16. Mark – family and extended happy family were extremely happy to receive 9 bottles of Bourbon from raffle.

17. Ashley Walton – for Kelly and very happy to see everyone again.

18. Jeff Senney – happy to be back from Washington, DC from babysitting his grandchildren (2 year old and 6-month-old).

19. Jim Harris – just happy to back from five days of vacation in Texas to attend grandson’s PhD graduation and happy to spend time with great grandchildren.

20. Harvey Smith – for Kelly and all he has done for our Club. Thank you for sharing your life with us.

 

 

Kelly McDonald introduced Dennis Grant, who is our guest speaker today. Dennis is the CEO of United Rehabilitation Services, a Rotarian from the Dayton Rotary Club, but a resident of Miamisburg. He was a special ed teacher.

 

Dennis’ Presentation:

 

Mission

United Rehabilitation Services (URS) mission is “enhancing the quality of life for children and adults with disabilities or other special needs.”

 

Vision

URS will be Greater Dayton’s leader in providing specialized programs that enhance the quality of life for children and adults with disabilities or other special needs. Our services will promote independence, community inclusion and support for families.

 

Values

United Rehabilitation Services (URS) values are Excellence, Customer Focus, Integrity & Continuous Improvement.

 

 

Lot of things going on right now in the world of people with disabilities. I spend a lot of time just monitoring changes both locally and on the national level as to what’s happening. The trend right now that we see is a huge increase in terms of the needs of both kids and adults with disabilities. You got pressure on both ends. If you look at the most recent CDC reports, they basically indicated that there is about a 17% increase in the number of children diagnosed with disabilities just in the last few years between the ages of 3-17. That is concerning enough. The last report they did four years ago says there was a 21% increase, so we keep seeing those numbers go up.

 

 

Right now, statistically we have 1 in 6 children that you will find between 3 and 17 years old that are diagnosed with developmental disabilities. And we’ve heard a lot about autism; it’s been in the news a lot talking about new research they want to do etc. But we’ve seen a pretty dramatic increase in the number of kids diagnosed with autism. Originally as a special ed major in college, I did not even know what autism was. It wasn’t in my book. I worked in psychiatric for children where we have 12 children with severe autism. I have to learn about it as we were not being taught about it.

 

 

I had to learn about autism. We’ve gone from 2,000 and I’m talking about way back in 1976. In 2000 there’s only one child out of 155 and now we are seeing one child out of 32 kids is diagnosed being autism spectrum. I am going to tell you from my own experience; we have the only childcare program in the State of Ohio that has nurses as well as OTP speech therapists so we cannot even take medically fragile children. At one point we had 2 babies who were in our infant room that were both on oxygen. We see a lot of challenges. We do g-tube feeding, catheterization, seizure monitoring, etc. We can do a lot for these kids and provide meaningful support to help them. So, we see the growing needs are there and we also see these kids who were also diagnosed later and now they are diagnosing them as early as 2 and 3 years old which is important because we can implement therapies early on, take advantage of the fact that when you think of rapid brain development and neuro pathways are being formed between 0 and three and really up to five and even seven but that’s peak period that we can really intervene and make a difference. So, it is critical that we are be able to do that and the reasons why we see the numbers growing because we are diagnosing much more effectively and much earlier on. That need is there, and it gives us pause as we see a lot of pressure and reductions in funding. For adults, 1 in 4 people have physical disability. People with disability actually are living a lot longer.

 

Part of the reason I got into this was because my uncle was institutionalized with paranoid schizophrenia for a very long time. And you see this kind of thing and we’ve come a long way from that. But those people’s parents were told that they may only live until they are 20 or 30 years and your best decision was just to put them away and many did that for generations. They kept them home, they put them in the attic or in the basement as they did not want people to know as some people suspect that there is some genetic problem and they were ashamed, and it was a terrible situation. Now people with disabilities are now living in their 60s, 70s and 80s.

 

So, we are seeing good medical care and attention provided for these folks and giving them a chance to have meaningful and productive lives. Because these people are now living longer it requires a long period of care. We serve infants starting at six weeks of age. We have an adult daycare program that is in their 80s. We have one gentleman who is in his 90s. We are able to keep them alive and provide them with meaningful existence. We get them out in the community, and they are having fun. The American Disability Act really made a huge difference to create a much more accessible community physically to encourage people to open their doors for people with disabilities. It comes a long way, but what we really want to see is how we make these people a part of our community. We have an employment service program. We work with high school kids with disabilities as well as adults. We help train. We have summer youth work experience with disabilities. We have 42 I think who will be starting the programming in about three weeks. We put them in jobs out in the community where they can learn skills with one of the job coaches providing supervision and training, so the employer doesn’t absorb this responsibility. It gives them a chance to develop skills to learn about the world. The Old Bag of Nails is actually one of our sites last year for summer jobs and they invited us again. They were so impressed with the skills of these kids that they hired one of them and is still working there a year later. I think we have done a much better job in school. We strive to provide a more inclusive environment.

 

 

The cost of providing special education services is very challenging. In Montgomery County Montgomery County Board Developmental Services last fall was facing a $10 million shortfall in their budget. The county pretty much told them that they have been subsidizing them with funds for the last three years and they are on their own. Next year they will subsidize one more time but by 2027 they will be on their own. The need continues to grow, and we need funding to provide help for people with disabilities.

 

Please vote for LEVY in November.

 

 

GREETERS next week are Chuck King and Pat Beckel .  

Speaker will be Ruth Bowling of Rotary’s Healing Partnership with Advent Hall. 

Sofie’s challenge to bring a friend continues!

 

 

5/22/25  Chuck King & Pat Beckel

5/29/25.  Adam Manning & Larry Marchand