It's time for Positively Kansas.

Coming up, a struggling downtown and a shortage of doctors.

One solution could help both problems.

We'll take an in-depth look at Wichita's new medical school that's creating a lot of excitement.

Also, there are barns and then there are barns.

You'll see why this historic building is so near and dear to rural Kansas.

Plus, in our Wild Edge report, we'll get an up close look at the Kansas countryside as it springs to life after its winter slumber.

Those stories are cued up and ready to roll on this edition of Positively Kansas.

Positively Kansas is brought to you in part by.

Before investing your hard earned money, make sure your financial advisor understands your objectives.

Mark Douglass CFP Serving our community for over 25 years, providing customized financial solutions that focus on the individual.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas serves more than 900,000 Kansans in various programs.

Independent member owned Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas.

An independent licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, proudly supports PBS.

Kansas.

Program support provided by the EF Price Kosman Memorial Trust and Trust Bank Trustee.

Bringing you the Kansas Wild Edge segments on Positively Kansas.

Some say it could be a game changer that helped solve two problems.

One is a lack of doctors across Kansas.

The other is a downtown that's still struggling to thrive after decades of decline.

Chris Frank gives us an inside look at the new physicians college that could reshape life in the heart of Wichita.

In a downtown Wichita building where once mannequins were used to help sell the latest fashions.

Now modern Lifelike mannequins will be used to help train physicians.

Ha ha ha.

Oh.

Oh, my gosh.

That's real, huh?

And it's very exciting to be part of something from the ground up, because you get to create it in a manner that you think fits.

Medical education for the 21st Century.

Doctor Dr. Gangadhar will help train the next generation of Kansas physicians.

Dr. Gangadhar is the assistant dean for clinical education at the Kansas College of Osteopathic Medicine in downtown Wichita.

The way we were trained 30 plus years ago is very different from the way we would like to train our medical students today.

Dr. Gangadhar is part of the new faculty at the first College of Osteopathic Medicine in Kansas.

The new college is taking over what was once known as the Ina's building at the northwest corner of William and Broadway streets.

This is an amazing opportunity to build an osteopathic medical school from the ground up.

It allows the opportunity to have faculty think outside the box.

Dr. Tiffany Mason, a psychologist by training, is president of the New College.

The idea for establish China College of Osteopathic Medicine in Kansas grew out of a governor's task force in 2017, which determined another medical school in the state would be viable.

We know that this city really wanted to rethink how it was going to revitalize downtown and also the statistics for the state of Kansas are actually quite significant.

Now about those statistics, Dr. Mason says Kansas falls far behind the rest of the country in the number of physicians and health care quality.

In the state of Kansas.

The statistics around the need for physicians is quite significant and I would say critical.

We know that Kansas ranks right now 39th as it relates to physicians per capita.

That's extremely low.

We also know we're ranking 48th right now in health care quality.

That's extremely low.

She says those rankings justify the need for this college.

And if those numbers aren't bad enough, the trend of retiring physicians only makes the need more critical.

We know that our physicians are going to be retiring out in the next 5 to 10 years.

And so ultimately, we know that the state of Kansas does need another medical school and an osteopathic medical school to help to improve the care of our citizens and to improve the ways in which we are providing care, especially in their underserved areas.

Those underserved areas are both rural and urban.

Dr. Kimberly Long, a psychologist, is associate dean for academic affairs.

Our founding.

Dean, Dr. Joel Dickerman, has been clear from the beginning that this is a Kansas medical school and.

Our work will be dedicate added to the Kansans that our students will serve and engage with.

So absolutely, we are focusing on the needs of Kansas.

There will be 85 students in the first class, which starts in August 2022.

The school will increase enrollment each year until they reach 170 students.

Those 170 students in each of the four classes will eventually total 680 students in the downtown campus.

A student will have the advantage of a new school in the sense that they get to avail themselves of the latest technologies.

But they're also taking a little bit of a leap of faith, because this is an institution that is just getting off the ground.

What people don't realize is that that if you take the sacrum away from the pelvis, everything falls.

Apart.

Leading up to classes opening, faculty members worked on some of the teaching tools which will be used in the classrooms.

Those can range from skeletons to virtual animation, computers and screens to teach with.

Now, because it's a new campus, faculty members can bring the latest ideas and ways of teaching to the new classroom settings here.

The virtual headsets and hand paddles a computer gamer would use are instead being used to learn about anatomy without using a real cadaver.

It's called extended reality or XOR teaching.

And what we're trying to do is use virtual systems so that they can look at the cadaver in the real case and look at the whole body integrated with all the other components that we're going to teach them at the same time in the same session.

It's like a video game.

You got those little paddles, you've got those headsets.

You see in this virtual environment, it's all cool.

But there is a serious way of teaching this and expectation of learning that underlies this entire procedure.

The hope is many of the students being trained here will be practicing within the state.

The faculty here will be working with the established clinics and medical centers to help solv And before those physicians practice on real patients, they will learn while testing their skills on a mannequin like this.

How is meant to demonstrate as a one year old?

So there's things that we can do with how so?

Dr. Carrick is able to go ahead and listen to the lung sounds of the mannequin.

Instructor is will be able to observe students.

There is a two way glass as the students do their lab work here.

New technology for instruction will be used in the classrooms.

The explosion of technology, the availability of social media and so many different resources for patients makes it a different way.

Today is how we need to educate our physicians because patients expectations are going to be different, as well as the needs of physicians are going to be different.

And all of this will be happening in a downtown Wichita building with a lot of history to it.

The classrooms, labs and offices occupy space that for decades was used to sell merchandise in what was the initial department store.

Later, this building became a macy's and then a Dillard's store.

And when the downtown stopped being a shopping destination, this became the state office building.

The face of downtown Wichita continues to evolve.

And that's part of the beauty of downtown's downtowns are that evolution of a community.

In every downtown across the country, North America, it's really the heartbeat.

It's the identity of a city, of a community, because it's where we started.

And so there's that life that continues to spur, if you will, you know, generation to generation.

And it has that lifecycle to where new things are constantly coming in.

But yet, in this case, part about the preservation of an historic building that today has very much a 21st century use.

And across the street from the school, changes are coming to the former Henrys department store building WSU Tech's National Institute for Culinary and Hospitality Education will have ten commercial kitchens to prepare students for the food service industry.

And so, again, our skyline is changing.

But again, it's always reflecting who we are as a city.

President Mason says the college will contribute to revitalizing Wichita's downtown.

And we know that our economic impact over the first 12 years of our operation will be $1 billion to the state of Kansas.

The long term demand for physicians should mean a long term demand for this college.

The Kansas College of Osteopathic Medicine could anchor this site for decades.

The physician demand is now, but it'll take years before students here can even practice medicine on their own.

The school's first graduating class will be in 2026.

Then those graduates go into residency training.

The shortest residency is three years for family practice.

So we know that our graduates really won't be out of residency at the earliest until 2029.

The plan is for those doctors to do their hands on resident training in medical centers throughout Kansas.

Dr. Gangadhar says the need for physicians will continue to grow with a projection in the next decade of a shortage, measuring 40000 to 110000 medical doctors in the United States.

The disparity is greatest in rural areas compared to urban areas.

And our mission, of course, is to help in those centers that need the help the most in rural America.

And we really need to rethink how we're training physicians and really getting them excited about wanting to stay in the state of Kansas.

Of course, there is no guarantee a new physician from the college will remain in Kansas.

It will be a huge challenge.

I'm not naive to that challenge.

This school was formed.

With the mission of training physicians, many of whom we hope will stay locally and practice in these underserved communities.

And we are confident that although the impact may not be within a year or two, that we have a long term plan to address the physician shortage and the needs of our wonderful state of Kansas.

Such an educational endeavor is meant to have a long lasting impact on the state.

I hope we're here for hundreds of years.

They're beginning is now.

This is Chris Frank reporting for Positively Kansas.

Some of the funding for the new college came from the Riverside Health Foundation board.

It contributed $15 million from the sale of the former Riverside Hospital on West Central Avenue.

Now, let's go from this city to the country.

And a piece of Kansas history that's off the beaten path yet is one of the great landmarks of southwest Kansas.

Jim Grawe shows us why this unusual barn was thought to be the shape of things to come.

But it turns out it wasn't.

And that's what makes it so special today.

Before the advent of tractors, wheat farmers had to pull their plows, threshers in wagons with draft horses.

H.W.

Frome He had a lot of acres on his Kiowa County farm, so he needed a lot of horses and a big barn to put them in.

In 1912, he hired local builder Pat Campbell, who is believed to have consulted with Halstead architect Benton Steel, to come up with a cutting edge design.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s.

There's a really a big round barn building movement nationwide because they were thought to be cyclone resistant to an old tornado.

That didn't prove to be true, but that was coming out in agricultural journals at the time.

In the early 1900s.

The barn is actually polygonal with 16 sides.

Hay was stored above 15 stalls that ring the perimeter.

In the center, a granary where the feed was kept and then shoveled out into the stalls.

This shape was considered to be a more efficient use of materials and space, but it did require great skill to build.

Supposedly for the volume of space you got for hay storage.

It cost less to build a round barn in actual dollars lumber than it would to build a rectangular market.

But it took a lot more labor, making all these measurements and stuff to do this.

They're very much the exception because first of all, you had to have somebody who could build them.

Each one of those sections had to be built and had to come together at angles that were difficult and had to be perfectly done with.

Very, very hard to do.

The June 14th, 1912 edition of The Mole Anvil News reported that H.W.

Fromme is hauling out of lumber to build a new barn on his farm south of town.

And when completed, Mr. Froemme will have one of the largest and best arranged barns in the county.

Fromme was a self-made man.

His granddaughter says he was a German immigrant who came to the United States with $0.50 in his pocket.

He became one of the wealthiest farmers in this area.

The barn cost him $8,000.

It's an architectural wonder of Kansas.

Because I can't imagine trying to do this all by hand.

Now.

Pat Campbell is believed to have done most of the carpentry work, aided by Mr. Fromme.

That's one of the most fantastic examples of carpentry, I would say, in Kansas.

This is 50 feet tall.

The span was 70 feet.

That's very big.

But these horses are very big, too.

The barn accommodated 28 work horses and one big stallion, but only for a few years.

In 1916, from, he bought his first tractor and soon he didn't need the horses.

This design just didn't work well for parking the new automated equipment.

So this became strictly a hay barn.

It remained a unique landmark, though, and airline pilots used it as a navigation point.

But it was used less and less for farm purposes anyway.

It's always been a big deal to me.

And you have no idea how many children have been conceived in this barn.

By 1960, according to this Hutch news article, the barn had become a tourist attraction.

By 1987, Phyllis Burney, whose father in law had purchased it from the promise 33 years earlier, successfully applied to get the barn on the National Register of Historic Places.

But it was showing its age as nothing much had ever been done to it.

The shingles that were put on in 1912 were still there in 1992.

The floor was rotting away.

In 1993, Burney sold the barn for $1 to the Kiowa County Historical Society, which then applied for an $80,000 grant to restore it.

But that grant required a $20,000 match.

And we had six weeks to raise it.

And in a community of around 200 people, how do you do that?

We contacted everyone who had ever graduated from the high school and sent out an appeal and said, Do you want to save a part of your of your memories of the community you grew up in?

And the money came in from all over the country.

The restoration was a community effort fueled by pride and respect for those from the past who had helped shape rural life through the generations.

By 1995, restoration was complete, leaving 95% of the barns still original to 1912.

Structurally, it was so well designed.

It's held and it remains a fixture on the wide open landscape along a gravel road just outside Mullenville.

It's a testament to the great vision, skill and hard work that has defined rural Kansas life for generations.

Visitors are free to stop by any time to tour the barn and enjoy the quiet of the Kiowa County countryside.

Spring brings warmth and color back to the Kansas landscape, so it's no wonder it's the favorite season for many in this Kansas Wild Edge report.

Mike Blair samples a new growing season for all of its welcome wonders.

Oh, spring.

It's the time of renewal, a happy transition between the lifeless winter and the dog days of summer.

New life is everywhere.

Abundant from birds to plants to animals again surrounded by food of plenty, wildflowers, color, outdoor Kansas butterflies and insects are abundant.

The parents are busy with their young.

A drive through wild.

Lands is sure to.

Offer a trove of wondrous observations.

I'm Mike Blair.

Four Positively Kansas.

Next week, Mike focuses his cameras on a colorful wildflower that's not native to Kansas yet has taken its place among the most beautiful names like Lincoln, Roosevelt and Reagan are names that still command great respect across America and around the world.

And as Spencer brings us the story of a Winfield couple whose hobby is honoring America's presidents in a very special way.

Walk into the home of Bob and Mary Hartley and you'll be greeted with a hefty dose of American history.

Along the main hallway, you'll find a presidential collection that rivals some museums.

And if you look closely, you'll see that this is no ordinary display.

The Hartleys are avid collectors of United States presidential signatures.

Retired journalist and Winfield resident Bob Hartley explains how this unique hobby began.

For years I've been a student of the presidency and I accumulated at one time, accumulated by biography, published biographies of all the presidents and and even read some of them.

And so so there's a bit of history regarding that.

And and then, strangely enough, and it had to do mostly with my work on newspapers.

I was present at in several situations with presidents.

A student of history, Bob, has been acquiring presidential signatures for decades.

The Hartley collection includes signatures of various leaders before their presidency as the American president and post-presidency as well.

The signed documents vary in nature, from routine presidential correspondence to signed land deeds to signatures with a Kansas significance.

In Bob's office, he keeps personal photographs of some of his encounters with American presidents from his days as a newspaper editor, a job that afforded him the opportunity to shake hands with the commander in chief on the campaign trail, at conferences, and even at the White House.

Bob says he's had the most encounters with President Richard Nixon, but recalls that his very first encounter with the future president occurred as an undergrad at the university of Kansas.

At the time, Bob was a reporter for the University Daily Kansan and John F Kennedy visited the campus.

Was stationed in the behind the curtain.

That that he partied and when he came out to speak and and I remember him coming up the stairway to go to the podium and I was standing there and he went by.

And what I remember was that as he walked out in front of the people, he took his hand and roughed up his hair on his head.

And then he walked out to have his picture taken and so on.

So anyway, those kinds of things which are not in the in the moments of history, not much.

But for me, they helped build this interest.

Bob expanded his journalism career and eventually began writing books about history.

A book he wrote about President Chester Arthur's trip to Yellowstone further fueled his passion for presidential history.

But the capstone to Bob's interest was a meeting with Illinois Senator Paul Simon, whose own presidential signature collection inspired Bob's hobby.

And he had them all framed and on display in his house.

And I remember asking him why he had done that and why had he.

No, but I mean, he had the house was full of them.

And he said, I feel as I walk into my house every day that I'm I'm in the presence of history.

And he said it.

He said, it's the best way for an individual to learn about the presidency.

And I think I always remembered that.

And when I got the bug, as it were, to acquire them, I think it was he was the inspiration for that.

To date, the Hartleys have 23 presidential signatures and while that's only half of the total number of U.S. presidents, Bob doesn't necessarily feel compelled to complete the set.

He says it's both a matter of affordability and having enough room in the house.

For now, the couple is happily retired in Winfield, enjoying their collection and sharing it with family, friends and fellow presidential history enthusiasts.

In Winfield, I'm Anna Spenser for Positively Kansas.

That's all we have for you this week.

positivelykansas@kpts.org is our email address.

If you have a story idea, you always need them.

Until next time.

I'm Sierra Scott.

See you again soon.

Positively Kansas is brought to you in part by program support provided by the F. Price Cossman Memorial Trust and Trust Bank Trustee bringing you the Kansas Wild Edge segments on Positively Kansas.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas serves more than 900,000 Kansans in various programs.

Independent member owned Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas, an independent licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, proudly supports PBS's Kansas.

Before investing your hard earned money, make sure your financial advisor understands your objectives.

Mark Douglass CFP Serving our community for over 25 years, providing customized financial solutions that focus on the individual.