In order to be ready to handle the present and the future, the members of Leadership Owen County are keeping an eye on the past.
The 13 members of Leadership Owen County met last week at the Elk Creek Hunt Club to listen to a pair of presentations about how changes have and will have an impact not just locally, but nationally and internationally.
“It’s preparedness training,” said speaker Angie Woodward, the former director of Leadership Kentucky, who is now a leadership development facilitator out of Bullit County.
“We created a timeline of the history of the county going back 70 years,” she said. “We had a discussion about the past, then we discussed the present.”
Woodward said the goal of the presentation is to get people familiar with the history of the county, to be able to see where the county is now and what the possibilities are for the future.
Also speaking to the group was Ron Crouch, the director of the Kentucky State Data Center and a former instructor at the University of Louisville.
“We want to look at changes going on nationally, in the state of Kentucky and in Owen County,” Crouch said.
Crouch supplied data showing that from 2000 to 2030 Kentucky is expected to grow 12.7 percent, which is more than 500,000 people.
To show how people should prepare for the future, but often don’t, Crouch used as an example a period in the early 1950s when there was a large increase in children beginning school.
Crouch said schools were surprised at the high number of children enrolled, but he said they should have seen it coming, knowing that once World War II ended, people would settle down, get married, and have children, which would lead to an obvious increase in school-age children six years later.
Crouch said people should be concentrating on four main objectives — critical thinking, trends, magnitude and the big picture.
In critical thinking, he said he believes schools are relying too much on computers to teach children, and that computers should be put in the back of the classroom, not in front of students.
He said he feels too many young people have mastered computer skills, but are lacking in critical thinking skills.
He said they can obtain the data, but don’t have the ability to interpret it, and too much time in front of a computer takes away from learning about life, by living it.
In trends, he said people have to analyze trends over a long period of time and get the correct information on trends before making decisions, instead of making short term decisions.
On magnitude, he said the numbers have to be put into context, and need to be looked at in the big picture, not individual situations.
An example he likes to use is school shootings, saying that each shooting receives major attention and people become afraid to send their kids to school, when in fact, children are far safer at school than in many other arenas.
Overall, he said more children are killed outside of school, but no one looks at the big picture.
“We get used to doing something a certain way,” Crouch said. “Changing it is difficult.”

2006 Class Members
Carl Cummins
Joyce DuVall
Charlotte Elkins
Berta Gayle
Veronica Gayle
Marshall Gibson
Dave Jones
Gail Lawrence
Gayla Lewis
Chris Spurgeon
Jim See
Karen Towles
Frank Downing
Judy Hetterman

2004 Class Members
Charlotte Burke
Jude Canchola
Mark Cleveland
Gary Derringer
Beth Johnson
David Marlow
Beverly Miller
Peggie Tisch
Tony Watkins
Frank Downing
Judy Hetterman

2002 Class Members
Becky Albaugh
Troy Bramblett
James E. Cammack
Sarah Cobb
Mark DeCandia
Frank Downing
Gilbert England
Berta Gayle
Missy Hacker
Judy Hetterman
Doug Lubbe
David Lyons
Bob Marshall
Billy O’Banion
Freida Prather
Curtis Sigretto
Rob Stafford
Kim Strohmeier
Carol Tudor
Ron Vandt
David “Milkweed” Wotier

* Frank Downing and Judy Hetterman organized the 2004 and 2006 classes.

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