Keystone Heights Rotary Club

09/17/2026

Top reasons to join Rotary

09/16/2026

Keystone Heights teacher asks Rotary to help shelter adaptive PE trikes
By Dan Hildebran

KEYSTONE HEIGHTS — A Keystone Heights High School teacher asked the Keystone Heights Rotary Club on Tuesday to help pay for a storage shed. The shed would protect donated tricycles that students with special needs use in her physical education classes.

Club member Chuck Dickinson introduced Jessica Thomas. He said she works with students at the high school, Keystone Heights Elementary and McRae Elementary and teaches what he described as the adapted PE class. Dickinson praised her work with special needs students. He said she had come to tell the club about the program and its needs.

Thomas, who is also the high school's cross-country coach, said her request might seem small.

"I'm here to ask your help with something that may seem simple, a shed, but what that shed represents for our students is so much more," she said.

Thomas said the specially designed physical education program has received donated trikes. The trikes help students build strength, coordination, balance, independence and confidence, and let them take part in physical activity alongside their peers.

"These trikes are not simply toys or recreational equipment," she said.

Thomas said many of her students need extra support, practice and specialized equipment for activities that come naturally to other children.

Without proper storage, she said, the trikes are exposed to Florida's sun, rain and humidity, which can damage them and shorten their useful life.
She described one recent success. Last week, a student who had never ridden a bicycle learned to pedal on a trike, which is sturdier than a bike.

"It just makes my heart happy," Thomas said.
Thomas, who is in her second year in the position, said she studied recreation and sport management in college and has long been involved in the schools. She called the job "the greatest thing I've ever done in my life."

The trikes are kept at the high school. Right now, seven trikes and all of Thomas' PE equipment are stored in her portable classroom there. Some of her equipment is in a closet on the school's Pink Wing. She said the portable could be reassigned to a regular class if enrollment at the high school grows. A double trike sits outside because it will not fit through the portable's door. Before she took the job, the trikes had been kept under a breezeway outside a classroom for about five years.

Thomas said she has one class of 10 students at the high school, ranging from seventh to 12th grade. She rolls the trikes from her portable, behind the visitor concession stand, to the track, where students ride on the sidewalk. A shed near the track would put everything in one convenient place. She said the grant that supplies the trikes would let her add up to two more per class each year, but she has no room for them.

Thomas estimated she would need a 15-by-15-foot shed, which she said would cost $4,000 to $8,000. She would prefer a concrete base and would like to place the shed near the football field, where other sheds already stand. She said the Clay County School District would have to approve the location and the building would have to meet wind mitigation requirements. The request would go first to the school's vice principal, Barry Underwood, who would present it to the district.

Asked why the school district does not provide the storage, Thomas said she was not sure. She said she has asked for help and assumes budget cuts are the reason.

Thomas said she restarted Special Olympics at her school last year. The event brought together students from Keystone Heights High, Keystone Heights Elementary and McRae Elementary. It generates some donations for her exceptional student education fund, but mostly in amounts of about $100 from individual sponsors. She said she has also contacted shed companies, including asking for damaged units the school's carpentry students could repair, but has received no responses.

"So y'all are my first people to ask," she said.
Thomas added that student government has offered to raise money for the project if the shed could also hold its homecoming letters.

Club members raised several practical questions. Martin Pierce said a prefabricated portable shed would likely be easier to get approved than a built structure. He said current state code can require fire suppression systems in buildings students enter.

Dickinson added the code changes over the past 20 years ended the practice of school carpentry classes building sheds and portables for the county. He noted that storage is scarce across the campus, including in the gym. He said the adaptive PE program and its needs have grown over the past five to six years.

Scott Kornegay said that in Bradford County, prefabricated sheds must be permitted and anchored to meet wind codes. Todd Beals suggested that a repossessed shed could save $1,000 to $1,500. John Raimer said he has a source for 20- and 40-foot shipping containers. He said he would get prices and pass them to Dickinson to see whether the district would accept one.

Richard Segall cautioned that the cost exceeds the club's current resources. He said even a token donation would require a fundraiser. He said a Rotary district grant would be the most practical way to raise that much money. However, he said, the application is a yearlong process, requires the school district's participation, and must answer tough questions from a review committee. Those include why the problem exists and why other Rotary clubs in the district should pay for it.

Members noted the club has used district grants before, including one that bought cooking equipment for the school's concession stand. That project also required paperwork and approval from the school district.

Another attendee suggested Clay Electric Cooperative's Operation Round Up program, which she said now awards up to $20,000 per application.

Other business
Beals said the club's recent soccer tournament netted $2,783.82. He said members will need to decide how much to give back to Trevor Waters and his soccer association for its program.
Beals also announced that Keystone Heights will host its own National Night Out on Oct. 6 at the pavilion or beach parking lot area. The Clay County Sheriff's Office is holding a separate countywide event at the Clay County Fairgrounds but kept a Keystone Heights location because residents here would have a harder time getting there. Planned attractions include classic cars, the Jeep Club of Keystone Heights, Kona Ice, a lunch vendor, the fire department and the sheriff's forensic unit with a blood spatter demonstration. Beals said he will set up a Rotary tent and is looking for volunteers. After members recalled poor attendance last year, Beals said promotional flyers are going out earlier this year.

Segall reported that the club's new foundation has draft bylaws, which its board would review after the meeting. He said the club hopes to submit its application for federal tax-exempt status this week. Until that status is granted, he said, members must not solicit donations for the foundation; any money must go to the club itself. The foundation board may need two more members to make a quorum easier to reach.

Jim Swar noted that Rotary International's foundation already has tax-exempt status. He said he was disappointed that the club program lists no Rotary Foundation chair and only one sustaining member. He urged members to give $100 a year to the foundation's programs. Raimer told him he could ask to be placed on a future program to discuss it.

Raimer announced a joint Christmas party with the Starke Rotary Club on Dec. 16 at Kornegay's home. A sign-up sheet circulated so organizers can plan food. Kornegay said Tony's in Starke has catered the event in past years.

Dickinson reminded members who plan to volunteer at the concession stand to complete the online volunteer registration before Oct. 9.

09/16/2026

Young farmers tell Keystone Rotary their beef business has outgrown its trailers

BY DAN HILDEBRAN
[email protected]

A husband-and-wife team that walked away from careers in the Navy and at Amazon to raise cattle full time told the Keystone Heights Rotary Club that their three-year-old beef business has grown faster than the equipment they haul to farmers markets.

Kelsey Waters and Tyler David, owners of W.D. Cattle Co., are seeking approval for a storefront in Alachua County that would give them cold storage and a pickup point for online orders. They hope to open it in late spring or early summer of next year.

“That’s part of the scaling that we’re having to do, because we are moving so much product,” Waters said. “We just aren’t able to keep up with our smaller trailers.”

Waters grew up in the Keystone area; the family land is in Hawthorne, but her mother taught in Keystone and Kelsey went to school and made friends there. She played softball at Stetson University, then spent eight years at Amazon before leaving in 2025 to farm full time. David was stationed at Naval Air Station Jacksonville when the two met at church. He returned from deployment in 2022; they married in April 2023 and, Waters said, started planning the business the day after the wedding.

“Full-time farming is not for the faint of heart,” she said. “But I would not have it any other way.”

A separate operation
The couple runs the business on three principles, David said: legacy, stewardship and abundant life. Waters’ family has been in the cattle business in Hawthorne for six generations, and the couple are the sixth generation on the family property.
But W.D. Cattle Co. is not part of the family operation, Waters said, and she wanted that clear.

“Tyler and I went off on a limb,” she said. “We sourced our own property, sourced our own animals.” The couple leases equipment from her family and from others, but the two businesses are separate, her parents run a cow-calf operation of roughly 200 to 250 head, while the couple’s own herd numbers about 80 and is sold directly to consumers.

That split, Waters said, reflects the central problem facing younger producers: getting access to land and capital. With David farming for the first time, she said, the operation is a preview of what agriculture is going to look like going forward.

Their property straddles the Alachua-Putnam county line. They have no employees.

From whole animals to tallow lotion
Customers can buy a whole or half animal down to a single steak, David said. The couple also raise pasture chickens alongside the cattle and sell eggs, and they have pork and cheese partnerships with producers from Hawthorne to Tallahassee. Bone broth, cooking tallow, tallow skincare, pet treats and bones round out the line.

“We try to use up every part of the animal,” David said.

Red meat goes to a processor in Monticello for USDA-inspected slaughter, he said. Poultry is processed on the farm. Permitted, inspected trailers carry the products to farmers markets in Ocala, Ponte Vedra, Palm Coast and St. Augustine, and online orders ship by UPS in insulated boxes with dry ice, usually within 24 hours of leaving the farm for Florida addresses. Boxes have gone as far as Idaho, New Mexico and Seattle.

Asked what separates their ribeye from a supermarket ribeye, Waters pointed to traceability and dry aging.

“If you want to know exactly what that animal ate, if you want to know how long it was on grain, how long it was on grass, we can provide that information to you,” she said. The beef hangs 21 to 28 days, which she said darkens the color and deepens the flavor.

The cattle are not grass-finished, David said. They have lifetime pasture access and get a grain supplement for the last 90 to 120 days to build marbling but are never confined to a feedlot. The smallest paddock the couple use is 10 acres, and animals are rotated. The operation uses no hormones, antibiotics or steroids, he said.

Restaurant wholesale is largely out of reach, Waters said, because the margins restaurants need are hard to meet against national suppliers.

A seat at the table
Both are in their first year of a two-year term in the Florida Farm Bureau’s Young Farmers and Ranchers leadership program, which selects 20 members statewide. Waters also holds a seat on the Farm Bureau’s state board through the program.

The program is meant to bridge the gap between FFA and 4-H, which members age out of at 18, and the rest of an agricultural career, Waters said. It runs to age 35 — young by the standards of an industry where the average producer is 65 and getting older.

The training has included trips to Tallahassee, where the couple met with U.S. Reps. Kat Cammack and John Rutherford and Sen. Rick Scott, and where Waters’ state board sat down with U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, a candidate for governor. A trip to Washington is planned for the coming year.

“Politics are slow. They move very, very slow,” Waters said. “I am not a slow-moving person, so it has definitely been a learning curve, but it’s been a very good one.”

The couple donates beef to Seamark Ranch, the foster family community off State Road 16 in Clay County and said they hope to begin supplying the Hawthorne food pantry.

As for the hours, David said they are unpredictable. The night before, the dogs alerted the couple to headlights at the gate — trespassers who had parked golf carts and walked into the pasture hunting mushrooms. The couple were up past midnight.

“Sometimes it’s a nine to five,” he said, “and sometimes it’s a five to one.”

Market dates and an annual schedule are posted at wdcattleco.com, where customers can also sign up for the farm’s email newsletter.

08/19/2026

KH city manager on Amendment 3: We will survive. Click here for more- https://bctelegraph.com/kh-city-manager-on-amendment-3-we-will-survive/

08/05/2026

The lesson in the classroom didn’t take, but on the job site, he got it in 20 seconds. VyStar VP addresses Keystone Heights Rotary. Click here for more- https://bctelegraph.com/the-lesson-in-the-classroom-didnt-take-but-on-the-job-site-he-got-it-in-20-seconds/

05/14/2026

05/14/2026

Rotarians in Action! We always enjoy fun & fellowship but this morning we spent some quality time cleaning up our Adopt-A-Mile on St. Rd 100. Join us any Wednesday Morning at 8 am at Montgomery Conference Center. We would love to have you!

04/17/2026

Rotarians in Action doing good for kids in our community! Interested in what we are all about? Join us on Wednesday at 8 am for breakfast at Camp Montgomery!