Patriot Guard escorts WWII veteran remains

LITTLE ROCK — Patriot Guard Riders will travel more than 800 miles as they transport ashes to the family of a World War II veteran whose body was discovered inside a suitcase in Arkansas in March.

KTHV-TV reports veteran

riders lined the streets Sunday in Little Rock in preparation of escorting the ashes of 89-yearold Robert D. Brooks to his final resting place.

Guard Riders will be traveling through Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, with more bikers expected to join along the way.

Brooks died of natural causes at his home in New York about a month before his body was discovered in a Prairie County field on March 5. Investigators are still trying to determine why his body was moved.

Brooks served in the military and was a gunner in a B-17 bomber’s ball turret.

School district turns buses into billboards

BOONEVILLE — A western Arkansas school district is getting paid for turning its school buses into roaming billboards.

The Boonville School District began displaying advertising decals on five of its buses that promote a program called “A Hope and a Future”

during a kick-off ceremony on Friday, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported. Superintendent John Parrish said the idea, put forward by himself and the Booneville Rotary Club, arose with the intention to raise enough scholarship money to pay for the first year of college for every graduating Booneville High School senior.

Under the program, businesses will pay to have their decals — their company logos — displayed on the sides of the buses. Seventy-five percent of the collected proceeds will be used to help repair and maintain the bus fleet, freeing up funding for other initatives.

“The program will give districts the opportunity to supplement their transportation funding, and I applaud Booneville and Superintendent Parrish for taking the initiative to launch the inaugural fleet,” wrote state Rep. Dan Douglas, R-Bentonville, who successfully sponsored a 2015 bill that allowed advertising on school buses, in a news release last Friday. Arkansas is one of 10 states in the U.S. to allow advertising on school buses.

Parrish said the number of buses used for the program will be determined by the number of sponsors. Currently there are four sponsors.