Bison, SD

The Beautification Committee, led by Terry Hall is busy beautifying Main Street of Bison.  They are starting out by painting the old Municipal Bar building, and will then move across the street.  John Peck’s commercial building will be the next to benefit from a facelift.  These are 2 of the many projects Terry and his team of lined up for this spring and summer.  Other projects will include:  SD Paint projects, painting of another home in Bison, trimming trees and more.

Let me be the first to Salute Bison Horizons group and their beautification committee for these steps they have been taking.

What structural changes have been made in how the community does its work/makes decisions?

As we continue with the Horizons phases we become more involved in several areas of community leadership. From the Town Board to the school district, as well as county boards Horizons is working to be involved in a variety of commuinty activities. The more places we are involved the better chance we have of making the changes needed to reduce poverty in our area. Changes can happen if people become involved and work together for a common goal.

How will your community make decisions about seeking further resources to support its plans?

Bison continues to discuss future plans for sustaining our Strategic Plan. From grants, to fundraising we are researching several avenues. We are in the process of looking into an internet business to provide jobs for the community. The blogs from other communities have helped us to gain insight into how others are making their goals a reality. Through our monthly meetings we can discuss and come to an agreement about how to move forward with our plan.

Bison’s three committees are have come up with great projects and goals.  Beautification has come up with some painting projects for the town. Also, Terry has suggest having Mary Lee do some murals  on the main street businesses for centennial celebration.  That will really make an attractive scene. 

Bison area residents have been working fervently for some time now.  The results are starting to show.  Our big Celebration Event was a success!  The night was put together to share with community members, what the Bison Strategic Planning Committee has been up to.  Members of this committee were well diversified with young adults, as well as young and older parents and teachers that included:

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If you want to learn how to surf, e-mail, chat what ever it may be, come join us on Wednesday nights.  We will have a lot of fun and you will be learning new and exciting things!   We will continue to meet the 2nd Wednesday of every month in the Bison Bar (where we have free wireless internet). Hope to see you there!!!!

Bison High School students went to Mobridge on November 7th to compete in District Oral Interpretation competition.  Every student participating on this level of competition did well.  Bison High School can brag of sending five out of seven categories on to the next round of the competition which is to be held in Pierre on Monday the 19th of November.  In Humorous category we are proud to say we have Jessica Peck performing, Accents Inc.  We see in the category of Oratory Michael Stockert performing ‘ Tear Down This Wall ‘.  Also, there was Samantha Gerbracht in Serous Play with ‘My Mother’s Touch’ and also in Poetry performing ‘ Cats ‘.  Last, and certainly not least, is our true pride and joy our Readers Theater group.  This year our inventive group preformed a piece called ‘ Huh! ‘.  This is the only category in Oral Interpretation in which more than two people work together to interpret a piece for their audience.  On our team this year we were excited to have two seniors, Emily Chapman and Samantha Gerbracht, a proud lone standing Junior, Ashleigh Goddard and our brave Sophomore boys Justin Kolb, Kyle Kopren, and Morgan Kronberg.  However we cannot forget those people who worked so hard to put together pieces for this competition so that our team and also other team could send more people on.  Most importantly was Brittany Wagner who was thrown into this competition at the last minute and did excellent.  She preformed ‘ Ice cream For Dinner ‘ in serous prose.  Also we saw Emily Chapman and Anna Johnson competing in Duet on a piece taken form ‘ The American Car ‘.  So remember to encourage these young people to strive and don’t forget to try to see them live!

Written by Samantha Gerbracht

The 2nd of 3 Strategic Planning committee meetings met at the Main Street Bakery on Tuesday, November 13th at 5:00.  We completed our Vision and Mission Statements.  We had a very diverse group working together on our Vision and Mission Statements.  We wrote this to show what we envision Bison to be in 2008.  We also wrote our goals.  All this after a wonderful meal that was, again, provided by Theo Larson.

Dan Kvale, PA-C, Bison Community Clinic

Bison Community Clinic was selected as the one and only recipient (NATIONWIDE) of the 2007 National Health Service Corps Award of Excellence.

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Kevin Weishaar did a series of 4 weeks of training on how to create a web-site. I attended training sessions. He was very informative and helpful with everything from how to create a story-board, to taking pictures and uploading them to your web-page to making our videos more user-friendly on-line. He also set each of us up with a web-site of our own off of the Bison web-site. Kevin also sent us each home with some software to help us along the way.  All of this was done to help us get one step closer to bringing our community to the rest of the world.  One of our goals was to establish an Internet business (or call center).  In this goal, we hope to bring more jobs to the Bison area. 

Learning how to Blog today in Sturgis, SD. Hope to learn new & fun things to help our community to put Bison on the map!!