Washington, D.C
Springfield's St. Cecilia Choir returns to Washington, D.C. after 30 Years
The National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., will be filled with voices from Springfield this weekend as a long-running church choir gets back to its traveling roots.
The St. Cecilia Choir, made up of children attending Christ Episcopal Church, will sing at several locations in the nation’s capital and do a little sightseeing while they’re at it.
“The choir has had a long history of travel and we haven’t traveled much since I’ve started,” said Kenny Kabak, Director of Music and Youth Ministries at Christ Episcopal. This is his seventh year leading St. Cecilia. “But the choir in 1990 did a trip to the National Cathedral, which is kind of considered to be the mother of the American Episcopal churches. Since I’ve started here, so many people have reminisced on that story with me and showed me pictures.
“As we were coming out of the pandemic, we did end up taking a small trip up to St. Louis a couple of years ago and just had an amazing experience up there. I’m a huge believer in travel in a music ensemble and what the power of travel does for musicians — especially young musicians and kids who have never been on an airplane before, who’ve never been on a big tour bus before. Washington, D.C., just felt like the next step for us.”
Choir is open to singers of all skill levels
St. Cecilia, named for the patroness of music and musicians, is open to students from third grade through high school. The group rehearses on Wednesday evenings and sings at church every Sunday morning. The choir includes singers like Saskia Stevens, a 16-year-old sophomore at Central High School, and Will Paulette, a Rountree Elementary student who will turn 9 this month.
They might not have much in common beyond their love of music, but they still come together as a cohesive group under Kabak’s direction.
“It was a little scary at first, but it’s been a lot of fun,” Paulette said. “It was something I wanted to do because I really like music and I love to sing.”
And while they’re dedicated, these aren’t necessarily singers who devote all of their time to music. Paulette is big into baseball, while Stevens no longer sings in her school choir, choosing to take part in other activities.
“I really like that (St. Cecilia) is just an environment where you’re really working together, not just for a school or a performance,” Stevens said. “I think it’s really cool because you’re with lots of different kids of lots of different ages, and it’s a very interesting community to be a part of because you don’t really get that in school or in other places in your life. I really love being able to sing with the younger kids and to be able to meet new people from different places.
“And I think that just being able to constantly be singing is something that I love. Every single Sunday we get to sing and we get to perform new music, and it’s always so deeply intertwined with the community, which I really love.”
Singers form friendships, build skills in St. Cecilia
Amelia Granger makes the trip from Bolivar to sing with the choir every other Sunday. Like Paulette, the 9-year-old was a little intimidated.
“It was scary at first because I was like, ‘Oh, I’m from Bolivar. Not many people know Bolivar people in a Springfield choir,’” she said. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it, but I thought it would be fun because I love singing and now I’m starting piano.”
Now she has several friends at St. Cecilia, including Paulette. It makes the long drive from Polk County worth it.
“It takes a long time to get there,” she said. “Sometimes I’m like, ‘No, Mom!’ When I’m asleep on Sundays and it’s a choir day, she yanks my covers off of me and says ‘Wake up’ in my ear and I don’t want to go. When I finally get here, it feels good. It’s fun to see my friends. And I like choir practice. It’s fun.”
The singers aren’t the only people relishing in those relationships and the ever-growing love of music.
“It has made (Will) want to come to church more because he has more of a purpose in being here,” said Val Paulette, Will’s mom. “And I feel like it has forged more friendships, which I think makes him want to come back for more as well. I think that’s been super helpful.”
Like his friend Amelia, Will, too, is adding to his musical skills.
“I just see him really enjoying it and I see him having to work hard at something that he really doesn’t have a lot of training in,” Val said. “He likes to sing, but we’ve never done anything with it before. He wanted to get a keyboard for Christmas and my dad ended up getting that because Kenny really wants him to learn how to read music. So he’s got a keyboard now and we’ve been talking about doing some piano lessons with that, so that it all kind of jells together a little bit better.”
‘I want the kids to like me, but I want them to love music’
All of that is music to Kabak’s well-trained ears. He recognizes that children today are busy — busier than he was — and he would never ask them to give up sports or Scouts or anything else for St. Cecilia. His hope is that they’ll see choir as just as meaningful and worthwhile, just as life-giving as any of those other activities.
“It completely taps into a different side of the brain,” Kabak said. “It asks for a different emotional offering than they’re probably being asked to give in the other facets of their busy lives. I see it as really rounding out the whole child. I just feel like it’s my life call to be able to provide this experience for the kids.”
Kabak calls it “sprinkling in the vegetables.”
“One of the things that I think is really poignant is I want the kids to like me, but I want them to love music,” he said. “I don’t want them to love me but like the music, because I don’t feel like that’s the way. But if they can like me, and they can trust me, and have confidence in me to provide them these holistic and unique experiences through art and expression, then they should just naturally fall in love with music.”
‘You’re so obviously a part of something, you’re very obviously valued’
Even though it isn’t the goal, the choir members say they love singing for Kabak, who Will Paulette described as “funny.”
“It’s really fun to have a director who’s kind of stern, but also is funny at the same time,” added Grainger.
Choir members also say Kabak is willing to adjust and meet them where they’re at in life.
“If you’re in a busy point and you don’t necessarily have time to come to rehearsals every single week, he’ll work with you,” Stevens said. “I think that’s really important because, obviously, people go through phases in their lives whenever they’re not at their best, or whenever they’re not able to give everything to a certain thing. I think a lot of times that means that you stop doing that thing, because you’re like, ‘I’m out of it now,’ and you just don’t go back.
“Kenny definitely encourages us that we can always come back, and he’ll ask you to come back and he’ll tell you that you’re missed or that he wants you to come back. I think the reason that I’ve continued singing here is you’re so obviously a part of something, you’re very obviously valued and you really value everybody else. There are very strong ties within the group.”
Parents have noticed that, too. Val Paulette calls Kabak the driving force.
“He’s just pretty phenomenal,” she said. “And I think that the kids see his energy and see his commitment, and just how excited he is about it, and they love him. They want to do good for him and they know he has high expectations, but he also cares about them and so I think they rise to that.”
Choir will sing from special songbook in Washington
The itinerary for the Washington trip includes cultural and educational opportunities for the singers, along with the performances. They’ll perform at the National Cathedral and they have permit clearance to sing at the World War II Memorial.
“We’ll sing impromptu at the Holocaust Museum, and then one that I’m especially looking forward to is we have a permit to sing at George Washington’s Mount Vernon as a part of one of their wreath-laying ceremonies,” Kabak said. “That’ll be really special.”
The choir has assembled a songbook for the trip, since they’ll be singing unaccompanied. The book includes familiar tunes like “Amazing Grace,” “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Shenandoah.” It also includes pieces from the “Justice Choir Songbook.”
Several choir members said they’re looking forward to singing a song called, “We Choose Love,” by Kansas City-based composer Andrea Ramsey. It was inspired by signs she saw at the Women’s March in Denver in 2017.
“You can play around with the words and make them flexible,” Kabak said. “It’s kind of like a Madlib. In rehearsal, I’m going to have the kids design their own arrangements of the song, but essentially the song is, ‘We choose love’ and then you insert the person. So, ‘Sister, we choose love. We’re marching with our sisters for our fundamental rights. We choose love.’ And then you can change those words.”
The St. Cecilia Choir will also perform “Sing For Justice.”
“In that song, basically what the kids are saying is, ‘All who want peace, sing for justice. Join in the call. Justice is love’s public story open for all. Harmony is born of difference. Notes and chords of lived experience. All who want peace, sing for justice. Join in the call,’” Kabak said.
Kabak hopes to grow choir’s culture of travel
Kabak said the group has been “fundraising our butts off all year.” It was important to him that any student who sang in the choir all year would be able to go on the trip free of charge. He said the choir has received a lot of support from parents, parishioners and the community.
“It asked for us to raise quite a big number in that case, if we were able to pull this off, to get all these kids to go for free. And we met our goal,” Kabak said. “I’m grateful to say that we’ve raised, in fundraising and gifts alone, over $20,000 this year just to make this happen. I think that’s just really a testament to the support of our community and people seeing just how critical this is to be able to offer these opportunities and experiences to our young musicians, our kiddos.”
Hopefully it won’t be another 30 years before the singers of St. Cecilia get to take another trip outside of Missouri to perform.
“I could see us one day growing the culture of travel to a place where we could probably take on something international even at some point,” Kabak said. “But Washington, D.C., just kind of felt like the right thing for this year.”
(NEWS FROM THE STATES) – Visitors from across the United States traveled to the National Mall Thursday for the opening day of the Great American State Fair, a days-long event that is part of President Donald Trump’s Freedom 250 celebration of the nation’s semiquincentennial.
States and territories showed off cultural and agricultural exports at exhibits stretching nearly a mile. Attendees snapped photos on the small Grand Ole Opry stage in the Tennessee booth, kids tried putt-putt at Indiana’s miniature golf course and cowboys rode horses at Montana’s rodeo.
A 110-foot Ferris wheel slowly turned at the center of the freshly manicured lawn, framing the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol in the distance on either side. Nearby stood a model of Trump’s controversial “triumphal arch.”
People collected swag from each state — drawstring bags from Ohio, stickers from South Dakota, snacks from Tennessee — and could receive a stamp on state fair passports.
The fair is part of the larger Freedom 250 programming and kicked off Wednesday night with a rally on the mall featuring a speech from the president that closely resembled his remarks along the 2024 presidential campaign trail. The festivities will continue over Independence Day, when Trump will deliver a second speech followed by what is promised to be an impressive fireworks display.
The president will visit North and South Dakota as part of his Freedom 250 tour for the opening of the Teddy Roosevelt presidential library and Independence Day eve fireworks above Mount Rushmore.
Freedom 250 then extends into August with a high school athletic competition in Washington, D.C., dubbed the “Patriot Games” and a Freedom 250 INDYCAR race around the National Mall.
The administration’s celebration is separate from the America250 commission, created by Congress a decade ago, and which has its own nationwide programming this year.
From Lake Erie to the Ohio River
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and first lady Fran DeWine greeted guests in Ohio’s pavilion. The couple posed for photos in front of a map of the Buckeye State.
“We wanted to see on the wall all the different things, from Lake Erie to the Ohio River, all the different fun things you can do in Ohio,” the Republican governor said, adding the state has local celebrations and initiatives planned for the 250th anniversary, including “Movies in Ohio” for community showings of films that feature the state.
Ohio’s first lady showcased a children’s literacy exhibit on the opposite wall and touted the roughly 427,000 participants in the state’s partnership with the Dolly Parton Imagination Library, a program that mails free children’s books monthly to households with kids under age 5.
“We’ve mailed out 27 million books. We know that a child’s brain is 80% developed by age 3, so we want to get them those books early,” she said.
Reflecting on America’s milestone birthday, the governor said, “We’re always a work in progress, Ohio’s a work in progress, this country is a work in progress.”
“I think you know the thing we need to keep in mind, all of us, is there’s some essential core principles that we all believe in. … We may disagree about different policies, but the core principles are the same,” he said.
Cartwheels on the lawn
People from various states walked from exhibit to exhibit, while stopped in the nation’s capital during road trip vacations.
Tanya Geders, 43, of St. Louis, Missouri, did a cartwheel in the mall lawn, trying to persuade her son to join in. The family stopped at the state fair on their way to Virginia Beach.
“We’re like, well, if we go to the ocean, we can go to D.C. and what a better time to be here than the 250th anniversary,” Geders said.
Robyn Toman, 71, of Severn, Maryland, escorted her 12-year-old grandson Miles to meet DeWine and grab a photo with the governor.
Toman said she remembers the country’s bicentennial.
“I was a kid about his age, and I came in 1976. I said, ‘We’re gonna go, let’s go down to D.C. for a couple days and see this,’” she said.
“We’ve enjoyed it. We went over to the archives yesterday, and saw the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights. And, oh, that was so nice, that was fantastic.”
Not all states are there. A spokesperson for Washington state’s lieutenant governor’s office told States Newsroom the administration declined to join because of “the costs to the state associated with participating.”According to news reports, Connecticut, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont did not contribute exhibits, though many are still represented by flags outside the individual booths.The state officials did not immediately respond to States Newsroom for confirmation.
All states that reportedly did not participate, with the exception of Vermont, are Democratic-led.
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Washington, D.C
DC reaches settlement with man detained while protesting troops with Darth Vader song
The District of Columbia has reached a settlement agreement for an undisclosed amount of money with a resident who claims police illegally detained him for following an Ohio National Guard patrol while playing Darth Vader’s theme song from “Star Wars” on his phone — an act of protest against the Trump administration’s federal law-enforcement surge in the nation’s capital.
A court filing late Thursday says the plaintiff, Sam O’Hara, will drop his lawsuit’s claims against the District and four Metropolitan Police Department officers within three business days of receiving the settlement payment. The filing doesn’t specify a dollar amount for the deal between the district and O’Hara, who is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia.
In an email on Friday, an ACLU spokesperson referred to the settlement’s financial terms as “a significant amount” that O’Hara “is pleased with” but said they aren’t disclosing the dollar figure to protect his privacy. A spokesperson for D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb’s office declined to comment on the settlement.
O’Hara’s agreement with the district doesn’t resolve his related claims against an Ohio National Guard member. Attorneys for the Guard member, Sgt. Devon Beck, have asked a judge to dismiss O’Hara’s claims against him.
“He was there because that was his assigned duty,” Beck’s lawyers wrote. “This was not an accidental encounter or a one-time disagreement on a public sidewalk.”
An earlier court filing, in February, said O’Hara had reached a settlement agreement “in principle” with the district. In response, a judge agreed to suspend the case while they negotiated terms.
O’Hara sued the district last October, claiming police officers violated his First Amendment rights to free speech and his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable seizures and excessive force.
The ominous orchestral music of “The Imperial March” from Star Wars movies was the soundtrack for O’Hara’s peaceful protests against President Donald Trump’s ongoing deployment of Guard members in Washington. Millions of TikTok users have viewed O’Hara’s videos of his interactions with troops, according to his lawsuit.
A series of major events tied to the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations promise to bring big crowds and heightened security. On the News4 Rundown: That security is likely to include more National Guard troops as a new report says there’s a limit to their impact on safety in D.C.
O’Hara, an artist who works in the hospitality industry, says he didn’t interfere with the Guard troops during their Sept. 11, 2025, encounter on a public street. One of the troops summoned Metropolitan Police Department officers, who stopped O’Hara and kept him handcuffed for 15 to 20 minutes before releasing him without charges, according to the lawsuit.
“The law might have tolerated government conduct of this sort a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. But in the here and now, the First Amendment bars government officials from shutting down peaceful protests,” the suit says.
Trump, a Republican, issued an executive order declaring a crime emergency in Washington last August. Within weeks, hundreds of Guard troops and federal agents were helping police patrol the city. The surge inflamed tensions with residents of the heavily Democratic district. Hundreds of Guard members remain deployed in the district nearly a year later, with no clear end in sight.
The overhaul is the first in more than a decade and comes in response to feedback that it’s hard to find information on the current site without being efficient at using Google or other search tools.
The D.C. government’s website is getting a complete revamp, a step city leaders hope will make it easier for residents, visitors and business owners to access the help they need.
The District unveiled a beta version of the new DC.gov — beta.dc.gov — and plans to have the redesigned site ready to launch before the end of the year.
The website’s overhaul is the first in more than a decade. It comes in response to feedback that it’s hard to find information on the current site without being efficient at using Google or other search tools.
“This website, it’s really going to eliminate the alphabet soup that you have to remember every day,” said Stephen Miller, the District’s chief technology officer. “So, do you need to know that it’s DPW that’s picking up your trash, or you just need to know that it’s dc.gov?”
The site is built on Drupal 11, which the city said has stronger built-in security features. It includes an integrated calendar and sections for seasonal government services.
Popular searches, based on site traffic data, will also be featured prominently on the main page.
“It’s going to show you, here’s popular services today, based on being a resident, based on being a new resident, based on being a job seeker, based on being a business owner, or based on just being a general resident of the city,” Miller said.
The project cost about $500,000 in dedicated funds.
“We’re setting this up so that you can just go in, say, ‘My trash was missed,’ and it’s going to tell you exactly how to fix that problem,” Miller said.
D.C.’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer is collecting feedback. Residents can leave comments on the beta site and at events at Haynes Senior Wellness Center and Eastern Market, among others, in the coming weeks.
An artificial intelligence-powered search tool, built using Google’s AI technology, will be included on the new DC.gov site after its official launch.
The District, Miller said, is “trying to clean up our content, because what we want to make sure is when we put AI into this site, it’s giving you the right information.”
“We see a lot of future use with AI,” Miller said. “I’d love to get to a point where it’s, ‘Hey Siri, renew my driver’s license,’ and we’ve laid out the foundation for something like that to happen in the future.”
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