Small Bits of News You Didn’t Know You Needed

Man asks cops for help with burglary

A Lexington Ky. man picked the wrong people to ask for help breaking into a house.

Police say 20-year-old Thomas Everett Finnell approached two police officers who were working out of uniform conducting surveillance in the area and tried to enlist them in going into a house to "steal guns and a TV."

A citation filed in Fayette District Court says officers searched Finnell's home and found a pipe with residue under his bed. Finnell was arrested and charged with first-degree conspiracy to commit burglary and possession of drug paraphernalia.

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Girl punished after waiting to report sex act

A Dayton, Ohio woman said that an Ohio charter school is punishing her daughter for not immediately reporting that she saw two classmates having sex on a school bus and for changing her seat during the bus trip.

Saundra Roundtree said that her 14-year-old daughter told her she changed seats with a boy who wanted to sit beside another girl on a Dayton View Academy school trip last month and then saw the two having sex.

The 14-year-old told her mother the day the bus returned April 22 about what happened on the trip to tour out-of-state colleges, but said she was afraid to report it to school officials.

"She wasn't sure what the boy might do in response," Roundtree said. "He might have retaliated against her."

Roundtree told school officials what her daughter said she witnessed, and they said they would investigate

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Students to get wake-up calls

High school students with tardiness problems will soon be receiving wake-up phone calls to help them get to class on time.

Officials at Marshalltown High School said the nearly 250 students who have been tardy five or more times since March will be receiving automated calls between 6:30 a.m. and 6:45 a.m. on school days to help them get out of bed and ready for school on time.

"If we can get them out of bed which is half the battle and into school then it will work," Dean of Students Lisa Wunn said.

The idea was suggested by a counselor after finding many tardy students gave the excuse of not having an alarm to help them get up in the morning. The program will begin before the end of the school year to serve as a pilot program for next fall.

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New home for pencil sharpener 'museum'

Tourism officials have made a point of displaying the hundreds of pencil sharpeners collected by an Ohio minister who died last summer.

The Rev. Paul Johnson had kept his collection in a small shed he called his museum, outside his home in Carbon Hill in southeast Ohio. A new home for his more than 3,400 sharpeners was dedicated inside a regional welcome center.

Johnson started collecting after his wife gave him a few pencil sharpeners as a gift in the late 1980s. He kept them organized in categories, including cats, Christmas and Disneyland. The oldest is 105 years old.

An Ohio Senate proclamation calls the new display "a fitting tribute" to Johnson, a World War II veteran.

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