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Where is Jackson County Central HS ‘little drummer boy’ now
Thomas Bidne was born with challenges but maintains his innate sense of rhythm.
MINNEAPOLIS — Editor’s Note: This story originally aired in March of 2017. Since then, Thomas Bidne has maintained his interest in music.
Currently a Freshman at Jackson County Central High School, Thomas plays percussion in the pep, jazz and concert bands. His mother, Laura Bidne, believes Thomas’ early involvement in band gave him confidence to pursue other activities such as 4-H, FFA and his school’s C-squad basketball team.
“These things matter,” Laura says. “For somebody like Thomas, we just never knew what path we were going to be on, and it’s been a good one.”
Here’s Thomas’ original story:
The opening round of the Minnesota State High School Boys Basketball Tournament is no time for a twisted ankle. But into the Target Center concourse limps Thomas Bidne, a boot on his left foot and drumsticks clutched in his right hand.
Clinging to Thomas’ other hand is his mother, Laura Bidne, who says, “Thomas looked at the nurse and said, ‘I need to be able to play in the band tonight.’”
Then Thomas did exactly that, despite his injury and despite the fact that Thomas is 8 years old.
Since January, the second grader has been playing a bass drum in the Jackson County Central High School band.
“Thomas is like a real inspiration to our whole school,” says a JCC student, cheering for the Huskies at state.
What’s inspiring to students, is not just that an 8-year-old is drumming, but that the little drummer boy couldn’t have started life much tinier.
Thomas and his twin sister Julia were delivered at 27 weeks after a difficult pregnancy. Thomas was the smallest of the pair, weighing in at a pound-and-a-half.
Surgeries followed, as did one particularly close call.
“The nurse looked at me and said, ‘I think it’s time to baptize him if that’s what you want to do,’” recalls Laura Bidne.
With too little blood flowing to Thomas’ brain before he was born, and nearly a year in the hospital after, his parents knew Thomas would face cognitive challenges his healthy sister would never know.
It took some time before they discovered their son’s uncanny sense of rhythm.
It started with Thomas tapping on toys. One home video shows Thomas keeping beat to the National Anthem with both hands rhythmically tapping the roof of his toy barn.
“He has the beat, yep, he knows the beat,” says his father, Mike Bidne.
When Thomas’ parents bought him a toy drum last Christmas, home video captured Thomas drumming with wrapping paper still on the floor and Thomas still in his pajamas.
“At first we thought he was playing,” says his mom. “And I said, ‘Mike, he’s playing the school song.’”
Half joking, Laura Bidne, who teaches at the high school, sent a video of Thomas playing the JCC school song to band director Erica Colby.
“I just said, ‘Hey, why don’t you come join us.’” Colby envisioned Thomas sitting in with his toy drum on the school song. She did not expect him to quickly learn the entire band playlist.
“He listened to a song five, 10 seconds and he was able to figure it out and keep a beat,” Colby says.
Thomas’ first appearance with the band went so well Colby invited him back. “’Yeah, but I’m gonna play one of the big drums next time,’” Colby recalls the second grader telling her. “He was ready for the big leagues.”
Thomas’ new bandmates were no less impressed.
“I’m a freshman this year so I didn’t really know the songs that well,” says percussionist Jordann Schneekloth. “And he starts playing all the songs perfect, and we all kind of look at him like, ‘Really?’”
There’s an added sense of wonder for Thomas’ parents. Just a few years ago, Thomas was highly sensitive to loud noises, refusing to even enter the high school gym during games and covering his ears when he relented.
“It was crying and, ‘Take me home, take me home,’” says his mom.
Now, Thomas sits with the drummers in the loudest section of the loudest place in the gym.
He still struggles with school work that Julia aces, but Julia can’t begin to do what her brother does with a drum.
“I always wanted him to have something that was his, that he was good at no matter what it was, to just kind of fit in and be part of something,” Laura Bidne says. “And I think the band is it.”
Sprained ankle and all, Thomas Bidne is beating expectations.
Boyd Huppert is always looking for great stories to share in the Land of 10,000 Stories! Send us your suggestions by filling out this form.
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The recall of yellow onions from Taylor Farms comes after an outbreak linked to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders.
COLORADO, USA — A food service supplier has issued a recall for onions from a Colorado Springs Taylor Farms facility due to possible E. coli contamination, according to a letter provided to 9NEWS by the restaurant chain Illegal Pete’s.
The move by US Foods comes after an outbreak of E. coli that has sickened dozens of people and is blamed for the death of one person in Mesa County. According to health officials, it has been linked to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders. The outbreak’s exact source is unknown, but the focus has been on slivered onions and the beef patties specifically used by the chain for those burgers.
McDonald’s has stopped serving the burgers.
The letter sent on Wednesday from US Food urged its customers, including Illegal Pete’s to immediately stop using the affected products.
RELATED: Food safety attorney: Lawsuits coming against McDonald’s following Colorado E. coli outbreak
It indicated that the products included were yellow onions from Taylor Farms that were either whole or diced. The recalled onions came from a Taylor Farms facility in Colorado, a U.S. Foods spokesperson said.
In a statement, Illegal Pete’s said they’re taking the issue seriously and are following all of the instructions in the letter.
They also noted that they don’t use a diced/ sliced white onion product that has been identified as a possible source of E. coli. The company said Taylor Farms issued a blanket recall from a certain lots.
The Centers for Disease Control said as of Tuesday that 49 people in 10 states have gotten sick, including 26 illnesses and one death in Colorado. Nine people have been sickened in Nebraska.
At least 10 of Colorado’s cases were reported in Mesa County in western Colorado, according to the county health department spokeswoman.
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment said the 26 people who have gotten sick in Colorado live in nine counties: Arapahoe, Chaffee, El Paso, Gunnison, Larimer, Mesa, Routt, Teller and Weld. They did not necessarily eat at McDonald’s locations in the counties where they live, the health department said.
The CDC said 10 people across the affected states have been hospitalized. The outbreak also includes a child hospitalized with severe kidney complications.
Everyone interviewed said they ate at McDonald’s before getting sick and specifically mentioned eating a Quarter Pounder hamburger, according to the CDC. The agency said infections were reported between Sept. 27 and Oct. 11.
The author of a popular New York Times opinion piece says parents do themselves and their kids a service by doing less. Is that true?
How do you approach parenting your child?
An article from the New York Times is stirring up a lot of debate around this loaded question. The piece is titled, “Parents Should Ignore Their Children More Often” By Darby Saxbe, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Southern California.
The article discusses how in today’s society, children are at the center of our attention and parents are constantly engaging and entertaining them. Parents can feel guilty if kids get bored doing mundane chores, so parents keep them preoccupied with “fun” kid stuff.
Saxbe suggests that parents do themselves and their children a service by doing less. In the article, the professor’s lesson is to let children learn from watching and observing. If kids can learn to tolerate boredom, parents can raise patient, imaginative children.
KARE 11 Sunrise anchor and parent Alicia Lewis decided to look at the differences between “helicopter” and “free-range” parenting styles. Free-range is when parents take a hands-off approach.
Lisa Bunnage, a parenting coach who owns BratBusters Parenting, said most parents try to play the “Pleaser Parent” but there is a time and place for any parenting style.
“If we’re at an airport, I’m a helicopter parent but if it’s at school and they’re having problems with the teacher, maybe they don’t like a teacher or something and I just hands-off, you deal with it. I don’t get involved in that.”
If you’re interested in learning more about parenting styles and the affect they can have on a child, here’s an article from the Mayo Clinic that explains the four types: authoritarian, authoritative, permissive and neglectful.
A three-judge panel of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals took up a challenge to the Biden administration’s SAVE student loan repayment program.
ST PAUL, Minn. — Supporters of President Biden’s latest student loan repayment plan gathered outside the federal courthouse as a three-judge panel from the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals heard the most recent challenge to it.
The SAVE — or Saving on Valuable Education — program aims to reduce student debt by $170 billion, a scaled-back plan the U.S. Dept. of Education created after the courts struck down Biden’s plan to cut college loan debt by $430 billion. The program expands the scope of an existing income-based repayment program by shortening the repayment terms and erasing some of the interest.
“This isn’t just about repayment. This is an attack on everyone who had a dream and worked hard to go to college, but didn’t have rich parents who could write a check,” Melissa Byrne of the We the 45 Million organization told reporters outside.
“This debt takes away the American dream and turns it into a debt sentence that last and lasts and lasts.”
One of those who spoke at the press conference was Alyssa Barnes, a U.S. Navy Gulf War veteran from Maine, who says she won’t be able to repay the $130,000 in debt she incurred in undergraduate and graduate school, while trying to support herself and two sons as a single mom.
“I feel a lot of regret that I didn’t know what I didn’t know when I took out those loans,” Barnes told KARE. “Over a third of by debt is just from interest accruing over the years — $37,000 is just interest. During COVID I called them to try to refinance and they just hung up on me.”
Missouri’s Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey led the legal attack against the plan and was joined in the effort by several other Republicans attorney generals. He has challenged the legality of using the current repayment plan to cancel interest debt, and more generally asserts only Congress can craft such a program.
Bailey, speaking on the Christian Washington Watch podcast, said Missouri has legal standing to challenge the repayment program because the state’s higher education system will lose funding if the state’s student loan program known as MOHELA can’t collect fully on student loans.
“They owe money to the State in the Lewis and Clark Discovery Fund used to pay for capital improvements in higher education facilities, and they also fund scholarships. So, there’s direct, concrete harm to the State of Missouri if those student loan payments to MOHELA are canceled by President Biden’s plan.”
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Democrat, took his GOP counterparts to task during Thursday’s news conference outside the courthouse.
“Here come these AGs who are supposed to be the people’s lawyer of their states, and they fight tooth and nail to block opportunity,” Ellison said.
He said the SAVE program was modest, not earthshattering.
“Look, we ask people to better themselves, to pursue education, to get more education so they can make a greater contribution to themselves or their family and community, and then what we do is say? ‘Here’s a bunch of debt!’ Unless you’re rich!”
During Thursday’s oral arguments the three judges, all appointed by Republican presidents, appeared to be skeptical of the government’s argument that SAVE program can be expanded the way the Biden Administration has done.
The U.S. Supreme Court already decided the Republican AG’s lawsuit can proceed, and asked the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals to rule on the merits of the challenge.
