Ten Things You Need to Know Today: 4 July 2022 | The Week UK

Ten-year-old rape victim denied abortion in Ohio

A ten-year-old rape victim in Ohio, who was six weeks pregnant, was ineligible for an abortion in her own state and forced to travel to Indiana for the procedure. Three days after the state of Ohio changed its laws after the overturning of Roe vs. Wade to outlaw terminations, the child who had fallen pregnant through the rape, attended a hospital in the state and had to be sent to the neighbouring state for the abortion.

Who is Philippines' 'Bongbong' Marcos Jr and why are some ...

(CNN) Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. is the presumptive President of the Philippines after winning a landslide in elections on May 9, according to unofficial results.

More than 30 million Filipinos voted for Marcos Jr., more than double that of his closest rival, the outgoing Vice President Leni Robredo, partial and unofficial results showed

Despite his popularity among millions of voters, many Filipinos are shocked by his win and what it means for democracy in the Philippines.

Marcos Jr. is a member of one of the country's most notorious political families. His win, analysts say, is the successful culmination of a decades-long rebranding campaign that has revived the Marcos family's name and image.

Critics have pointed to a widespread disinformation campaign, recently supercharged through social media, that has whitewashed the history of the Marcos era, when Marcos Jr.'s father ruled the Philippines through a brutal and corrupt dictatorship that ended in a popular uprising in 1986.

Here's why some are concerned about a Marcos Jr. presidency.

Global reactions

US President Joe Biden spoke with Marcos Jr. on Wednesday, congratulating him on his election win, according to a White House readout of the call.

"President Biden underscored that he looks forward to working with the President-elect to continue strengthening the US-Philippine Alliance, while expanding bilateral cooperation on a wide range of issues, including the fight against Covid-19, addressing the climate crisis, promoting broad-based economic growth, and respect for human rights," said the readout.

China's President Xi Jinping also congratulated Marcos Jr., saying the two countries would "stand together through thick and thin," according to state media Xinhua. The bilateral relationship has frayed recently over dueling claims to areas of the South China Sea, though Marcos Jr. has been building a rapport with the Chinese Ambassador in recent months.

But lawmakers in Southeast Asia have expressed concern about human rights under a Marcos administration and the impact of online disinformation.

"The generalized spread of disinformation has created an environment which has made it difficult for many voters to make informed decisions at the polling station," said Charles Santiago, a Malaysian lawmaker and chairperson of the ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights.

Presidential candidate Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. celebrates as he greets the crowd outside his headquarters in Mandaluyong, Philippines on May 11.

"Even though the electoral process has been conducted in a formally correct manner, we are concerned that voting choices based on lies and harmful narratives could have seriously undermined the integrity of the elections and democracy itself."

Human Rights Watch called on Marcos Jr. to end outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte's "war on drugs" and "order the impartial investigation and appropriate prosecution of officials responsible" for extrajudicial killings.

"Marcos should publicly order the military, police and other security forces to cease targeting activists, human rights defenders and journalists for killing and other rights violations. He should end the practice of 'red-tagging' -- accusing activists and government critics of being Communist fighters or supporters," Human Rights Watch's deputy Asia director Phil Robertson said in a statement

The Marcos era

Ferdinand Marcos Sr. ruled the Philippines for 21 years from 1965 until 1986, with the country living under martial law for about half of that time.

Tens of thousands of people were imprisoned, tortured or killed for perceived or real criticism of the government, human rights groups say.

As well as its restrictions on citizen rights and a brutal military police, the Marcos regime was marked by widespread corruption, with an estimated $10 billion stolen from the Filipino people.

Ferdinand Marcos, with his wife Imelda at his side and Ferdinand Marcos Jr., far right, on the balcony of Malacanang Palace on February 25, 1986 in Manila.

The Marcos family lived a lavish lifestyle while in power, spending money on expensive artworks, overseas properties and jewels, even as debt spiraled and millions suffered in poverty. Former first lady Imelda Marcos was famously known for her extravagance and excess spending, which included an extensive designer shoe collection.

Their supporters say the Marcos years were a boon for the country, with the building of major infrastructure projects like hospitals, roads and bridges. Critics say those projects were built on the back of widespread corruption, foreign loans and ballooning debt.

Funds from institutions such as the World Bank disappeared , with the average Filipino not reaping any benefits. Lucrative building contracts went to friends and family.

Who is Marcos Jr.?

Marcos Jr. has not acknowledged the abuses committed during his father's dictatorship and the family have repeatedly denied using state funds for their own use.

But analysts say the Marcos son benefited from that ill-gotten wealth. "My parents would never let us forget: This is not yours, this is from the people. Everything we have, all the advantages we have gained, any the successes, and any comfort or privilege we enjoy comes from the people," he said in a recent interview with CNN affiliate CNN Philippines.

Marcos Jr. was 23 when he became vice governor of the northern province of Ilocos Norte in 1980, running unopposed with his father's party.

He was governor when, six years later, his family were chased into exile in Hawaii following a People Power revolution that toppled his father's regime in 1986. Marcos Sr. died in exile three years later, but his family returned in 1991 and became wealthy, influential politicians, with successive family members representing their dynastic stronghold of Ilocos Norte.

Former first lady Imelda Marcos, second right with her daughters Imee Marcos, right, and Irene Marcos Lopez, left, and son Ferdinand Marcos Jr., second left on July 7, 2007 at the National Library in Manila.

Upon their return to the Philippines, Marcos Jr. became a congressional representative in his home province. He was again elected governor of Ilocos Norte before completing another term as a representative. In 2010, Marcos Jr. became a senator.

In 2016, he ran for vice president and was narrowly defeated by Leni Robredo -- a former human rights lawyer and his closest rival in the 2022 presidential race.

Personalities and dynasties dominate Philippine politics, with power concentrated in the hands of a few elite, influential families. Marcos Jr.'s sister Imee Marcos is a senator, his mother Imelda, now 92, was a four-time congresswoman, and his son, Sandro, was elected as a congressional representative in 2022. Imee's son Matthew Marcos Manotoc was also reelected as governor of Ilocos Norte in 2022.

The May 9 election also saw the partnership of another major political dynasty: the Dutertes.

Marcos will replace outgoing populist leader Rodrigo Duterte but the Dutertes won't be far from power. Marcos Jr.'s running mate, Sara Duterte Carpio is the outgoing Davao mayor and daughter of the former President. Partial and unofficial results have her as winning a landslide for the vice presidency.

Why people are concerned

The Marcos regime may have ended in the 1980s, but campaigners say the Marcoses were never held accountable for the scale of their misdeeds and fear Marcos Jr. could erode efforts to settle past injustices.

As President, Marcos Jr. would be head of the institutions created to investigate allegations against his family's former regime.

The Presidential Commission on Good Governance has recovered less than half the stolen wealth and active cases remain. An unsettled estate tax of the Marcos family is estimated to now be worth $3.9 billion, but there are concerns Marcos Jr. would scrub that. Imelda Marcos was found guilty of corruption in 2018 but a Supreme Court appeal remains pending and she never went to prison.

Though Marcos Jr. has said he would expand the PCGG and tackle graft and corruption, many worry justice will not be served.

About 11,000 victims of martial law abuses received some financial compensation but campaigners say they represent a fraction of all victims. "There is no more justice to hope for if Marcos Jr. becomes President," said Bonifacio Ilagan, co-convenor of the group Campaign Against the Return of the Marcoses and Martial Law.

President Duterte's administration cracked down on civil society and the media -- slapping tax evasion charges on local, independent media outlets that challenged the government's policies and claims, and arresting editors.

Some fear that Marcos will continue down Duterte's path and that disinformation will further obscure the truth, making it harder to hold those in power accountable.

Duterte is also facing an investigation by the International Criminal Court into his "war on drugs" that has killed more than 6,000 people, according to police, and his successor could influence how much access investigators get to the Philippines.

"I will let them into the country, but only as tourists," Marcos Jr. said in January, according to Reuters.

Sociologist Jayeel Cornelio said, "While one camp is celebrating, the other camp is worried about the economy, education, and civil liberties."

"The greater concern that Filipinos have has to do with the next six years. What will the economy look like in the next six years? What will happen to civil society? Will there be a clampdown on press freedom? And will the administration wipe out martial law in the curriculum? These are just some of the questions -- and these are fundamental ones -- for those who resisted the Marcoses' return to power," said Cornelio, associate professor and director of development studies at the Ateneo de Manila university.

Opinion: The Pope is wrong. Choosing to have few or no children is ...

Alistair Currie is the head of campaigns and communications at Population Matters, a UK-based charity campaigning for a sustainable human population through ethical means, to protect nature and improve people's lives. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN) Pope Francis' comments that couples opting for pets instead of children were acting selfishly, has reinvigorated an important and timely debate about the future of our species. The pontiff's comments, however, are wholly wrong.

"Today we see a form of selfishness. We see that people do not want to have children, or just one and no more. And many, many couples do not have children because they do not want to, or they have just one -- but they have two dogs, two cats ... Yes, dogs and cats take the place of children," the Pope told an audience at the Vatican Wednesday.

"This denial of fatherhood or motherhood diminishes us, it takes away our humanity," he added.

The Pope's suggestion that failing to have children is selfish is far from the truth. Especially for those of us living in countries with a large environmental footprint, the choice to have a small family, or no human family at all, is one that helps everyone -- particularly children, whose future depends on a more sustainable planet.

Additionally, a person's value, moral standing and character is not defined by parenthood. And showing love for animals is surely something that enhances and demonstrates our humanity -- rather than diminishing it.

Hidden dropouts: How schools make low achievers disappear

Heather Vogell and Hannah Fresques

ProPublica

Tucked among posh gated communities and meticulously landscaped shopping centers, Olympia High School in Orlando offers more than two dozen Advanced Placement courses, even more afterschool clubs, and an array of sports from bowling to water polo. U.S. News and World Report ranked it among the nation’s top 1,000 high schools last year. Big letters painted in brown on one campus building urge its more than 3,000 students to “Finish Strong.”

Olympia’s success in recent years, however, has been linked to another, quite different school 5 miles away. Last school year, 137 students assigned to Olympia instead attended Sunshine High, a charter alternative school run by a for-profit company. Sunshine stands a few doors down from a tobacco shop and a liquor store in a strip mall. It offers no sports teams and few extra-curricular activities.

Sunshine’s 455 students – more than 85 percent of whom are black or Hispanic – sit for four hours a day in front of computers with little or no live teaching. One former student said he was left to himself to goof off or cheat on tests by looking up answers on the internet. A current student said he was robbed near the strip mall’s parking lot, twice.

What do you know about alternative schools? - ProPublica

Sunshine takes in cast-offs from Olympia and other Orlando high schools in a mutually beneficial arrangement. Olympia keeps its graduation rate above 90 percent — and its rating an “A” under Florida’s all-important grading system for schools — partly by shipping its worst achievers to Sunshine. Sunshine collects enough school district money to cover costs and pay its management firm, Accelerated Learning Solutions (ALS), a more than $1.5 million-a-year “management fee,” 2015 financial records show – more than what the school spends on instruction.

But students lose out, a ProPublica investigation found. Once enrolled at Sunshine, hundreds of them exit quickly with no degree and limited prospects. The departures expose a practice in which officials in the nation’s tenth largest school district have for years quietly funneled thousands of disadvantaged students – some say against their wishes – into alternative charter schools that allow them to disappear without counting as dropouts.

“I would show up, I would sit down and listen to music the whole time. I didn’t really make any progress the whole time I was there,” said Thiago Mello, 20, who spent a year at Sunshine and left without graduating. He had transferred there from another alternative charter school, where he enrolled after his grades slipped at Olympia.

The Orlando schools illustrate a national pattern. Alternative schools have long served as placements for students who violated disciplinary codes. But since the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 refashioned the yardstick for judging schools, alternative education has taken on another role: A silent release valve for high schools like Olympia that are straining under the pressure of accountability reform.

As a result, alternative schools at times become warehouses where regular schools stow poor performers to avoid being held accountable. Traditional high schools in many states are free to use alternative programs to rid themselves of weak students whose test scores, truancy and risk of dropping out threaten their standing, a ProPublica survey of state policies found.

Orlando is one of 83 school districts, from Newark to Los Angeles, where regular schools increased their graduation rates by at least one percentage point from 2010 to 2014 while sending more students into alternative education, ProPublica’s analysis found. Such a pattern could indicate that traditional schools are weeding out students at greater risk of dropping out, although there are many reasons why graduation rates rise.

Concerns that schools artificially boosted test scores by dumping low achievers into alternative programs have surfaced in connection with ongoing litigation in Louisiana and Pennsylvania, and echo findings from a legislative report a decade ago in California. The phenomenon is borne out by national data: While the number of students in alternative schools grew moderately over the past 15 years, upticks occurred as new national mandates kicked in on standardized testing and graduation rates.

The role of charter alternative schools like Sunshine – publicly funded but managed by for-profit companies – is likely to grow under the new U.S. Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, an ardent supporter of school choice. In her home state of Michigan, charter schools have been responsible in part for a steep rise in the alternative school population. She recently portrayed Florida as a national model for charters and choice.

In Orlando, both traditional and alternative charter schools manipulate the accountability system. The charters exploit a loophole in state regulations: By coding hundreds of students who leave as withdrawing to enter adult education, such as GED classes, Sunshine claims virtually no dropouts. State rules don’t label withdrawals for that reason as dropping out. But ALS officials cannot say where Sunshine students actually went – or if they even took GED classes at all.

Between the day in 2012 when it first opened, and the end of the 2015 school year, Sunshine High coded 1,230 withdrawals as students leaving for adult education. At least nine of the company’s other charter schools statewide – including three in Orange County - followed a similar pattern. Not counting Sunshine, the other ALS schools in Florida reported 5,260 more such withdrawals.

ALS ran seven of the 10 high schools statewide with the most withdrawals to adult education in 2015. Sunshine ranked first. If all such withdrawals from ALS schools in Florida were counted as dropouts, the number of times that students quit school statewide that year would increase by at least 5 percent. In Orange County, the number of dropouts would jump by at least 80 percent.

The apparent suppression of the dropout rate occurred as Orlando’s district, Orange County Public Schools, geared up to win a major national education award.

In a written statement, district officials disputed that the transfers helped elevate the school system’s standing under state accountability rules. Students who quit to pursue adult education do count against the district’s overall graduation rate, even though they aren’t labeled as dropouts, they said. They did not respond to questions about whether transfers to Sunshine and other alternative charters have inflated the graduation rates of traditional schools like Olympia.

“Any national or state recognition the district has received,” the statement said, “is the direct result of our parents, students, teachers, and school administrators working hard.”

ALS President Angela Whitford-Narine said the company is continually improving at the challenging task of helping students who have struggled academically attain enough credits to graduate. The average student in ALS schools is at least two years behind, she said.

“I can’t even begin to say we have this all figured out,” she while giving ProPublica a tour of Aloma High, another charter school the company runs in Orange County. “But every day we get better at it.”

Sunshine and schools like it promise students they can graduate more quickly by going at their own pace. But Mello said students end up at Sunshine because they had trouble getting their work done.

“You go in there with bad habits and you’re already going ‘at your own pace,’” said Mello, who graduated from a regular high school in Texas and now works as a mechanic in a suburb of Dallas. “It doesn’t work like it’s intended to work.”

LEFT BEHIND

The symbiotic relationship between Olympia and Sunshine sheds light on a neglected sector of American K-12 education: a sprawling system of “alternative” schools made up of roughly half a million of the nation’s most vulnerable students.

No Child Left Behind was supposed to improve educational outcomes for students long overlooked – including those who were black, Hispanic and low-income. Yet as the pressure ramped up, ProPublica’s analysis found, those students were precisely the ones overrepresented in alternative classrooms – where many found a second-tier education awaiting them.

Barbara Fedders, a law professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, said alternative schools too frequently fail to halt students’ downward trajectory, simply isolating them, instead.

“They create little islands of segregation,” Fedders said. “If they aren’t doing what they’re supposed to do, it’s unclear why we have them at all.”

The alternative sector’s new focus on academic struggles also created a niche that charter school groups sought to fill, including for-profits like ALS.

Supporters of alternative schools say they provide more support for struggling students, and the best do – through small classes, caring teachers, flexible schedules and extra counseling and tutoring. Arkansas, for instance, has devoted “tremendous resources” to lower student-teacher ratios, specialized teacher training and project-based learning in its alternative program, said Lori Lamb, the state’s director of alternative education.

But a broad swath of the schools short-change their students, ProPublica’s analysis of federal data shows. Nationwide, nearly a third of the alternative-school population attends a school that spends at least $500 less per pupil than regular schools do in the same district. Forty percent of school districts with alternative schools provide counseling services only in regular schools. Charter alternative schools – both virtual and bricks-and-mortar – in Ohio, Georgia and Florida have been accused of collecting public money for students who weren’t in classes.

Across the country, students and their advocates report, alternative classes are sometimes taught in crumbling buildings, school basements, trailers and strip malls. Some lack textbooks and, in many, students sit in front of computers all day instead of engaging with teachers.

States often hold alternative schools to lower standards. Some exempt them from achievement goals, oversight or reporting rules other schools must follow, ProPublica found. In Florida, while regular schools like Olympia get letter grades for performance, alternative schools can opt for less rigorous ratings tied to testing progress.

Rather than lifting the performance of marginal students, alternative schools serve too often as way stations for future dropouts. While just 6 percent of regular schools have graduation rates below 50 percent, our analysis found nearly half of alternative schools do.

“What was done in the alternative programs was just shameful,” said Leon Smith, a lawyer at the Center for Children’s Advocacy, which has pushed for reforms in Connecticut. In that state, a survey of alternative education a few years ago revealed substandard facilities and programs that offered fewer class hours than regular schools did.

The effect was to demoralize students who were already demoralized.

“If you do it right, you can catch those kids and get them through,” Smith said. “If you do it wrong, it’s a dumping ground.”

FEELING UNWELCOME

One day in early 2014, Jacquline Haas was sitting in chemistry class at Olympia High when she was summoned to the guidance counselor’s office. A quiet student who had never been in trouble, she nervously left class.

Jacquline, a junior, had struggled in high school because of a learning disability that made her a slow reader. But on that day, her attitude toward school had been buoyed by the possibility of adding vocational classes to her schedule senior year. She wanted to study cosmetology.

When she arrived at the guidance office, Jacquline joined 10 to 15 other students who were also floundering academically. A man representing Sunshine High addressed the assembly. He told them the school could help them catch up on credits so they could graduate.

Jacquline was shaken, disappointed by the idea of leaving Olympia – especially given her encouraging tour of the vocational program earlier in the day.

“It just kind of popped my bubble,” she said.

She brought the brochure about Sunshine and other Accelerated Learning Solutions schools home to her mother, who reacted even more strongly.

To Jennifer Haas, the message was clear: Her daughter was not welcome at Olympia because of her borderline grades and test scores. The year before, Haas had provided school counselors ample information on her daughter’s type of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, including a professional evaluation. She felt the school had responded by trying to push Jacquline out.

“I said, ‘Jacq you’re too smart to go to these,’” Haas recalled telling her daughter after looking through the school brochure. “You’re just hanging in the crack. They’d rather you go all the way through the crack to protect their numbers.”

Those numbers include standardized test scores, graduation rates and the letter grades schools in Florida receive each year. In some cases, funding is tied to the results – and, in all cases, so are the reputations of the school and the professionals who run it.

“Everybody wants these high graduation rates because it ties in to your school grade,” said Amy Geller, a former registrar at Olympia. “It is a huge deal to schools, it affects property values, it affects everything.”

Olympia has done particularly well. The school’s leaders boast on its website that the school is the only one in the district to receive an “A” rating from the state for seven straight years. Its graduation rate of 93 percent is among the highest in the school district. The state’s strict graduation criteria require most students to maintain a 2.0 GPA, pass certain standardized tests and obtain 24 credits to graduate.

Two other students besides Jacquline, as well as a former guidance counselor, confirmed to ProPublica that Olympia has allowed ALS representatives to pitch its schools to poor-performing students in assemblies.

“They called us up to a classroom, all the kids that were doing bad and everything,” said Justin Cowans, a senior, after class ended at Sunshine High earlier this school year. He transferred out of Olympia last school year, he said, after a counselor told him he “had to leave the school because of my grades.”

FEWER DROPOUTS?

The transfers of thousands of students like Cowans from traditional schools have spurred explosive growth in Orange County’s alternative high school population. ProPublica’s analysis of federal data shows that the district’s alternative school enrollment tripled from 1,300 students in the 2009 school year to 3,900 in 2014. A driving force: Sunshine and its sister Accelerated Learning Solutions schools – Sheeler, Chancery and Aloma. A fifth ALS school, Econ River, opened last fall.

Few students earn diplomas on time from the ALS schools, whose low graduation rates are a drag on Orange County’s districtwide average. But by labeling students who left as transfers to adult ed programs such as GED classes, the ALS schools kept thousands of departures from being listed officially as dropouts. Orange County only reported 211 dropouts in 2015. That same year, countywide, its ALS schools reported 1,038 adult education withdrawals.

The transfers likely helped the school district’s test scores, too. The academically at-risk students who attend ALS schools tend to score below their counterparts at Olympia and other traditional schools. But they inflict less damage on the district’s average scores at Sunshine because it tests a smaller percentage of eligible test takers – the group that matters for accountability purposes – than Olympia does. While Olympia tested 95 percent of such students in 2016, Sunshine tested just 80 percent, state data shows. Another ALS school in Orange County, Sheeler High, tested only half of its eligible students.

Regular high schools in Orange County likely enjoyed the biggest benefit of the exodus. Evans, Edgewater, and West Orange high schools saw jumps of more than 10 percentage points in their graduation rates between the 2011 and 2014 school years. The 14 percentage point boost in Evans’ graduation rate over that period coincided with a substantial exodus of students from its neighborhoods to ALS schools. In 2014, district data obtained through a public records request shows, 170 students assigned to Evans’ zone attended Sunshine, and 101 went to Sheeler.

“I was slacking off at my old school,” said Angel Hernandez, while waiting for a ride after class at ALS’s Sheeler High northwest of Orlando early in the school year. Hernandez, then 19, said he attended West Orange High until staff there suggested to his parents that he transfer to Sheeler or Sunshine to catch up.

Olympia, which already had a high graduation rate, didn’t experience a comparable boost. Still, it saw sharp hikes in the rates for subsets of students similar to those that frequently end up in ALS schools. The graduation rate for Olympia’s low-income population rose by 7 percentage points between the 2012 and 2016 school years, for instance. The rate for its disabled students increased by 18 percentage points.

In their statement, school district officials noted the district’s overall graduation rate, which includes the performance of the charter alternative schools, has risen in recent years. “We are committed to student success and providing all students with options that lead them to graduation,” the statement said.

The school district declined a request by ProPublica to speak with Superintendent Barbara Jenkins. In November, Jenkins was named Florida’s Superintendent of the Year.

ALS President Whitford-Narine said in a statement that enrollment trends “do not suggest that students are referred for any reason other than because an educational professional and the student and parent believe that an alternative learning environment is needed.”

The alternative education boom occurred as Orange County Public Schools – which serves more than 200,000 students, two-thirds of whom are economically disadvantaged – sought national recognition.

The district in 2014 was one of two nationwide awarded the annual Broad Prize for Urban Education, then considered by some to be the Nobel Prize for large public school systems. (The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation suspended the Prize in 2015, citing “sluggish academic results” by the nation’s biggest school districts.) Selection jurors praised Orange County not only for raising students’ achievement across grade levels, but for doing so at a rapid pace.

“Orange County demonstrates that a sense of urgency and focus can improve student achievement in a hurry,” Broad Foundation president Bruce Reed said at the time. The award put the district and school leaders in the spotlight as exemplars of urban school reform and brought Orange County students $500,000 in scholarships.

The award was no happy accident: District and school board officials had made a deliberate, multi-year push for the Broad – a journey some districts have called the “Road to Broad.”

“We thought it would take us four to five years just to become a finalist, and two to three more to win the Broad Prize,” wrote Bill Sublette, chairman of the Orange County school board, in the district’s 2015 annual report. “Remarkably, under the capable leadership of Superintendent Barbara Jenkins, last year we were named the 2014 Broad Prize winner!”

In response to questions from ProPublica, analysts working with the Broad Foundation said that, after reviewing the data, they saw no evidence that moving students to alternative charter schools boosted the Orange County district’s overall testing performance inappropriately, according to a statement released by the foundation. Award jurors did not consider the dropout rate when making the award, they said.

PUSHED TO TRANSFER

At Sunshine High, students attend four-hour sessions in a storefront with a handful of tidy classrooms off a central hallway, and work through subject courses in computer labs. A single teacher typically monitors up to 25 students at different levels and subject areas. There is no homework. The school runs three sessions a day, searching students with a metal detector when they enter. Security guards patrol the area.

Outside Sunshine one afternoon, students gave the school mixed reviews. Some shrugged and said it was okay. Others complained they couldn’t get enough help from teachers when the material was confusing. Dave Casimir, then 16, said that at Evans High, he’d had more access to afterschool tutoring. “Over here, there’s nothing, nothing, nothing at all,” he said. “It’s stressing me out.”

Mello, who went to Sunshine when it first opened in 2012, said that many students at the time knew how to get around the school’s software to log onto gaming websites, or cheat by looking up answers on the Web. “A lot of the times people flew by by doing that,” he said.

Whitford-Narine said that since 2015, the schools have blocked access to music or video streaming sites that aren’t part of classes. The schools also now have web filters that stop students from accessing sites not connected to their curriculum.

Asked how they ended up at Sunshine, several students said their traditional Orlando high schools gave them no choice: School staff told them they had to transfer to a charter school like Sunshine because they had fallen too far behind. Or, if they tried to enter the Orlando schools from outside the district, counselors told them they couldn’t enroll because their academic records were too weak, and directed them to Sunshine.

“They said I had to go here until my grades improved,” student DeShawn Tinesley told ProPublica while waiting at a public bus stop near Sunshine. He had transferred within the district from Ocoee High School, northwest of Orlando. “I was like dang, I was shocked.”

Another Sunshine student, Dai’Quan Sheals, said he tried to transfer to Evans High from outside the school district but staff there told him he didn’t have enough credits. He said they told him that, “if you’re going to spend any longer than four years in high school – if you fall behind at all – you’re basically out.”

In a subsequent text message, Sheals said, “I didn’t like what Evans did,” but added that he has done well at Sunshine. “I really like the teachers here, they work with me and my schedule, and I have been able to find success here.”

In response to questions from ProPublica, the district’s chief communications officer, Scott Howat, said that Sheals’ guardian had made the decision to send him to Sunshine.

Overall, of 32 students whom ProPublica interviewed at ALS schools in Orlando, almost half – 15 – said that because of academics, they had been denied admission to regular public high schools or told they had to transfer from them to alternative programs.

Under Florida’s state constitution, students who have not been disciplined have an “absolute” right to attend their zoned regular school, said special education attorney Stephanie Langer of Coral Gables. Schools sometimes push students and their parents to leave by telling them they won’t graduate otherwise, she said.

“It’s sort of like bullying,” Langer said.

Harold Border, Orange County’s chief of high schools, said the district’s traditional high schools are supposed to monitor and assist students having difficulty, and not send them to alternative charters if they don’t want to go. “We take those concerns seriously and we continue to emphasize with our schools that any student who comes to us that’s within our zone, we have a welcoming environment,” he said.

Students who do not want to transfer to a charter should be permitted to stay at their local high school, he said. The assemblies students described at Olympia were “not a practice that we support or promote.”

“When we get to that point, there should be discussions with parents and students in concert well before they’re speaking with someone coming in from another school,” he said.

Border said schools should monitor students to keep them from falling behind. “I would say it concerns me if their perception is that they weren’t welcome at their home high school,” he said.

Howat, the district spokesman, said transfers to alternative charters are voluntary. “We’re saying this school’s available for you to finish your diploma on time with your class,” he said. “We’re not assigning them.”

Former Olympia guidance counselor Sue Gagne said the assemblies angered some parents and students. “There were a few kids, they were offended: ‘Why would you put me in this assembly with these losers?’” she said. Some parents would come in and complain to the principal, she said, and “want us fired.”

But, she said, counselors were only trying to give students every chance to graduate. Transfers were optional. Pressure from the state and district put immense burdens on teachers, she said, making it hard for them to spare time for struggling students. It seemed, sometimes, as if there were simply no room for remediation, she said.

“It’s horrible,” said Gagne, who left education to become a real estate agent. “Life’s too short to have this kind of stress.”

Olympia’s principal, Guy Swenson, did not respond to an email from ProPublica, instead forwarding it to the district’s communications office. The school district denied a request to tour the school.

WIDESPREAD PROBLEM

Orlando schools are not unique in using alternative programs to remove struggling students from traditional classrooms. As far back as 2007, a legislative report in California warned that the state’s accountability system allowed traditional schools to shirk responsibility for low-performing students by referring them to alternative schools. The state is currently reviewing its standards for alternative schools.

In Louisiana about a year ago, lawyers for students complaining of discriminatory treatment in alternative schools in a school district near New Orleans discovered student transfers from regular schools shot up just before the state’s annual tests were given. Such transfers could be a way to avoid having scores count against students’ home schools. The complaint, filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, is still open.

And in Pennsylvania, state officials have for years allowed the test scores of students sent to alternative programs to effectively disappear – because students’ scores no longer belong to any school once they transfer. They are instead absorbed into the district’s overall totals. “Sadly, for many students, rather than providing additional supports,” noted legal advocates’ claim against the state’s alternative network, “these programs have become a revolving door which spirals students away from being able to successfully complete high school, ultimately fueling Pennsylvania's dropout rate.”

That complaint, filed with the Justice Department in 2013, is also ongoing.

While charter schools have been accused of cherry-picking top students, ALS belongs to a growing and controversial segment of the sector that instead seeks out low achievers. These students “are a little profit center,” said Jorge Ruiz de Velasco, a senior researcher at Stanford University.

Companies running schools in this niche often save costs by relying on computer programs that reduce the need for credentialed teachers. The market can be lucrative: As enrollment grew, ALS’ management fees from the schools it operates in Orange County more than doubled from $2.5 million in the 2012 school year to $5.4 million in 2015. The company says the fees pay for back-office services, such as human resources, as well as school-based support for areas such as curriculum, reading, math, security, and professional development.

ALS’ roots, however, lie in a more traditional approach to alternative schools: one that focused on discipline.

The company’s affiliate – the controversial Nashville-based Community Education Partners, or CEP – contracted with school districts to serve students with behavior problems. The company, founded by a lawyer and Republican Party operative named Randle Richardson, ran schools for students who had committed disciplinary violations in cities such as Atlanta, Philadelphia, Houston and Orlando for more than a decade. Critics called CEP’s schools prison-like and dangerous, and charged that their academics were sub-par.

Richardson said in 2010 that the alternative school CEP ran in Atlanta was used by the school district to weed out students who scored poorly on standardized tests. “It accomplished the purpose they wanted,” he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “It got disruptive kids out. It got the low performers out. I understand the pressure on school districts. …If you’ve got a place to put them where those scores are attributed, that’s a great temptation.”

In 2012, after a spate of critical media coverage, Richardson told FRONTLINE he planned to shutter CEP. In 2015, CEP assigned its management agreement for Sunshine High entirely to ALS, which had previously shared the role with CEP. Also led by Richardson, ALS now has 21 schools in Florida, three in North Carolina and one in Georgia. Its administrative base is in Nashville, though school operations are run out of Orlando.

ALS has hit trouble in some Florida school districts, facing criticism both for academic issues such as single-digit graduation rates and for its financial practices. In 2015, a state auditor accused ALS of overcharging Jacksonville’s school district, Duval County Public Schools, more than $200,000. ALS has appealed the audit.

In 2016, a former teacher at North Nicholas High, an ALS school in Florida’s Lee County, alleged in a federal lawsuit that staff there helped students cheat and tampered with grades, falsifying course completion forms for some failing students to make it look as if they passed.

The former teacher, Kenneth Williams, also reported to school district authorities that the school’s staff sometimes used personal vehicles to drive students to school on days when the state was counting attendance to increase enrollment numbers, and therefore, payments from the district. The school offered students prizes and raffles on those days to boost attendance, the teacher alleged. Williams said he was fired in retaliation for reporting violations to the school district.

The company denied the allegations in a response filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Myers, Florida. Whitford-Narine reiterated the denial, and said in a statement that Williams was terminated for “failure to perform his duties as a classroom teacher.” The case is ongoing.

ALS has waded into state political contests, with the company and its executives contributing at least $45,000 to Florida politicians and political action committees since 2015 – including sizeable contributions to the Republican Party of Florida and a political action committee called Citizens First that has taken in tens of thousands in donations from charter organizations. ALS officials have donated to local school board races, too.

And state records show that since last year, ALS has paid between $70,000 and $190,000 to lobbyists. On the company’s legislative agenda: convincing state policymakers to lower the accountability bar further for alternative education, citing students’ challenging backgrounds. The company urged state officials, for instance, not to count last school year’s performance against alternative schools, because the state made the rating more rigorous.

Whitford-Narine said the company only wants the rating system to measure its schools’ performance fairly and adequately. “The current model has multiple inherent flaws that school districts and lawmakers acknowledge,” she wrote in the statement. “Our efforts are NOT an attempt to reduce rigor.”

Most ALS students are approaching 18 years old and missing more than half the credits they need to graduate, she said. The graduation rate, which requires students to earn their diploma in four years, understates ALS schools’ successes, she said.

Staff provide extra help, career counseling and social services referrals to those who need it. Students who are struggling with reading or math can see a specialist. If students have jobs, the schools work with them to fulfill elective credits through work experience. A few students continue to participate in sports or clubs at their zoned school, she said.

Most of the students desperately need the ALS schools’ flexible schedule, she said. Some are parents or have job or family commitments that interfere with school.

Whitford-Narine introduced a ProPublica reporter to one student, Charlotte Mims, who said she has been taking classes at Aloma after missing much of high school when her parents fell seriously - and, in her father’s case, fatally - ill. Mims was working constantly and caring for them, and she said she would not have had a chance at a regular diploma if not for Aloma. “This school is very special to me,” she said.

NO STUDENT TRACKING

One August afternoon after school let out, Sunshine Principal Margaret Olmo spotted a former student in the reception area. The student had quit school, but was thinking of returning. Olmo gave him an animated, urgent pep talk, encouraging him to register again. He could start classes as soon as the next day, she said.

If the school’s statistics were to be believed, the student was a rarity. In its first three school years, 2013 through 2015, the school told the state it had zero dropouts (though the district told ProPublica Sunshine’s dropout rate was 1 percent in 2014 and 2015).

Several Sunshine students said they knew others who had dropped out.

“A lot of kids drop out,” said Sheals, the Sunshine student. Said Juslaine Touze, who also transferred to Sunshine from Evans High: “My dad didn’t want me to come here. He thought this was a dropout school.”

Though it claimed to have no dropouts, Sunshine reported that only 100 students graduated with standard diplomas and no special conditions from 2013 to 2015, state data shows. What happened to the hundreds of other students who exited? Based on Sunshine’s reports to the state, a large number withdrew to pursue equivalency degrees.

Whitford-Narine said ALS schools will help students find GED programs if it looks like they are going to drop out. The schools also host career fairs where they bring in prospective employers and representatives of the military.

Most of the students who leave ALS schools for adult education programs have personal or family issues, worry that they will “age out” of public school at 21, or are frustrated with the time and effort it takes to earn a regular diploma, she said. “We can’t save every student, we understand that,” she said.

However, she wrote in an email, Sunshine reports that a student is enrolling in adult education based on what the student or parent says their plans are, rather than actual evidence of enrollment. The company does call students to urge them to come back in the months after they leave school, she said, but it does not keep a record of what adult programs, if any, students say they are enrolled in.

Asserting without evidence that former students are pursuing adult-education degrees appears to violate state rules.

For the code to be used accurately, state education officials require that schools have evidence students either enrolled in an adult education class or passed the GED test, wrote spokeswoman Cheryl Etters in an email. A promise to enroll is not enough. The school district is responsible for making sure documentation in students’ files backs up use of the code.

Whitford-Narine said in the statement that ALS would contact the state Department of Education for guidance and adjust its procedures if needed.

Three people who work in adult education programs in Orlando said that while they don’t always know where students come from, they were unaware of a large influx from charter alternative schools like Sunshine.

“That would be well known,” said Scott Weidl, an assistant director at Orange Technical College’s Westside Campus, which is the closest of five adult education centers to Sunshine. “I’ve never seen that scenario.” Joyce Whidden, who is director of a nonprofit called the Adult Literacy League of Orlando that has an adult education program, said she, too, had not heard of substantial numbers of students leaving charter alternative schools for adult education.

Even when it leads to a GED, adult education can severely limit students’ options and is not viewed by the Orange County school district as a desirable outcome for students young enough to attend traditional schools. “It’s not a planned path for a student,” Border said.

When told Sunshine reports sending many students to adult education, Gagne, the former Olympia guidance counselor, said she was surprised.

“Oh gosh, so they don’t finish Sunshine either,” she said. “I assumed they were finishing getting their diploma and going on to whatever they wanted to do.”

DISTRICT RESPONSIBILITY

School districts don’t have the power to hire and fire charter school personnel. But they are supposed to make sure charter schools like Sunshine are helping students.

The Orange County School District is responsible for tracking whether the schools fulfill promises made in their charter contracts related to academics. District officials said they monitor ALS schools by checking metrics kept in “notebooks” at each school site during twice-annual visits.

For Sunshine, those measures include a “completion rate” that considers how many students either graduate or are continuing to work toward a regular diploma – at Sunshine or any other school - each year. The rate was just 42 percent of students in 2014, the school said, but rose to 59 percent in 2015 and 83 percent in 2016.

Whitford-Narine cited other statistics she said show students are benefiting from ALS schools. Her statement on company letterhead emphasized in boldface that 63 percent of students gain at least two grade levels in reading and 77 percent make grade-level growth in math after attending ALS schools for at least a semester.

When evaluating charters, the district also looks at their state ratings. For alternative schools like Sunshine, the state calculates those ratings based on gains in test scores.

Sunshine High’s on-time graduation rate sunk to 3.5 percent in 2016. But it tested the bare minimum number of students required and their scores were just high enough for the school to avoid an “unsatisfactory” rating. Two ALS schools tested too few students to receive a rating at all.

Sunshine could see its contract terminated if it receives poor ratings for two out of four years – or if it fails to test enough students for two of four years.

District officials said they have never sanctioned ALS or its schools for missing benchmarks.

“We have no records indicating these schools have had any compliance issues,” a district spokeswoman said in an email.

Two years ago, the district renewed the charters of several ALS schools for 15-year terms – which state law permits for charters with “exemplary academic programming and fiscal management.” Sunshine’scontract is up for renewal in June.

Representatives from both ALS and the district said their relationship is strong.

“We have a great relationship with Orange County Schools,” Whitford-Narine said. When she offered to show a ProPublica reporter around Aloma, she asked the reporter to let the school district’s charter office know about the tour. The people running Aloma, the director of school choice services told the reporter, were “good people.”

FINDING SUCCESS

Back in 2014, when Olympia encouraged Jacquline Haas to transfer to Sunshine, her mother Jennifer was so fed up she wondered if she should simply pull her daughter out of Olympia and enroll her in GED classes. She fired off an angry email to school board members and Gov. Rick Scott’s office threatening to do as much.

“I will be happy once my daughter is finally out of the school system and being productive and less stressed than she is now,” Haas wrote.

That prospect would likely worry Olympia officials. Despite its size, Olympia sent fewer than 10 students to adult education in each of the 2013, 2014 and 2015 school years. While they aren’t technically considered dropouts, they do bring down Olympia’s lauded graduation rate.

After a tense meeting with Haas, Olympia developed a plan to salvage the teen’s academic career. A supportive guidance counselor helped find teachers who could accommodate her learning disability, and worked to get her into the vocational classes she wanted. Jacquline took online classes after school to supplement her regular Olympia school courses.

With the extra support, she passed a mandatory standardized test and even raised her grade-point-average in her senior year to 3.49 on a 4.0 scale, lifting her four-year GPA over the 2.0 required to graduate. She graduated from Olympia in 2015. She’s been cutting hair since but, for the first time, is now considering applying to college to pursue an interest in forensic science.

Haas wonders what high school might have been like for her daughter if she’d gotten help earlier. She thinks, too, about all the kids at Sunshine and other ALS schools who don’t have strong advocates.

Jacquline, who was happy to finally find success, said her senior year proved her best.

“I still hated school,” she said, “but I got through it.”

What do you know about alternative schools? - ProPublica

This story was reported by ProPublica in partnership with the USA TODAY Network. ProPublica is a non-profit investigative newsroom doing journalism in the public interest.

Turtle power, ditching Dixie: News from around our 50 states

From USA TODAY Network and wire reports

Alabama

Montgomery: Alabamians can now get limited quantities of beer, wine and spirits delivered to their homes after the first companies have gotten licensed. Lawmakers this year approved separate bills to allow alcohol deliveries from retailers to a person’s home and to allow wineries to ship directly to consumers in the state. Several companies have gotten licensed to deliver the alcoholic beverages or to ship wine, according to the Alabama Alcoholic Beverage Control Board. The ABC Licensing Division has several other pending applications for both alcohol delivery and wine shipment, spokesman Daniel Dye wrote in an email. As of Monday, four companies have so far been licensed to deliver alcoholic beverages: Shipt, Dippi, Pick Up My Things and Deerfoot Spirits. Five companies have gotten licensed to ship wine directly to consumers in Alabama: Penrose Hill Winery, James Cole Winery, Winecub, Truth Teller and Robert Young. Alcohol delivery may not yet be available everywhere as companies ramp up operations. Shipt announced last week that it is doing same-day delivery of beer and wine from Target. The company said it is working to expand delivery from additional retailers.

Alaska

Anchorage: The state’s largest airport saw a big jump in summer passengers compared to the 2020 season, when the pandemic kept many people at home. More than 877,000 passengers traveled through the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport between May and September this year compared to the same time last year, Anchorage television station KTUU reports. “The terminal was very busy this summer, so we knew it was going to be a good summer,” said Jim Szczesniak, the airport manager. Airport officials said those passengers injected more than $1 billion into Alaska’s economy. The travel group Visit Anchorage said hotel demand was up 47% over the same time period in 2020. “So we made some really encouraging gains, but we’re not back to where we were pre-pandemic,” Visit Anchorage Community Engagement Director Jack Bonney said. Both are cautiously optimistic for 2022. “I think as long as we stay on a positive course, we have a lot of really encouraging indicators for next year, but so much of this is tied up in national and global developments around the pandemic,” Bonney said. Szczesniak said he is hopeful the increase in passenger numbers will continue to climb with expanded cruises and international travel expected next year.

Arizona

Tucson: A conservation group says an additional 1,850 acres of a cattle ranch that is part of an important wildlife corridor in western Cochise County are now protected as open space. With the additional acreage, a total of 3,800 acres of the Rain Valley Ranch are now protected through conservation easements, the Arizona Land and Water Trust announced Wednesday. The ranch along State Route 82 east of Sonoita includes part of a wildlife corridor that links the Whetstone, Mustang, and Huachuca mountains. “With large properties in the Sonoita/Elgin area continuing to be purchased for single-family homes or ‘ranchettes,’ the threat of development increases for locations like Rain Valley Ranch, making its conservation critical,” the trust said in a statement. The additional protected landscape also benefits nearby Fort Huachuca by ensuring that potential electromagnetic interference with military training activities associated with the Army base remains low, the trust said.

Arkansas

Little Rock: A man who died in prison more than two decades ago is now being investigated as a person of interest in the disappearance of a girl who went missing in 1995, according to the FBI. The agency is asking the public for more information about Billy Jack Lincks, 75, who died in prison in 2000 and had been arrested for attempting to abduct a girl months after 6-year-old Morgan Nick went missing. Lincks was serving a sentence for a 1996 conviction for sexual indecency with a child at the time of his death. “Today, law enforcement may be closer than ever to identifying” Nick’s abductor, the FBI said in a news release. FBI spokesman Connor Hagan said this is the first time the bureau has publicly identified someone as a person of interest in Morgan’s disappearance. Arkansas’ missing child-alert system is named for Morgan. Hagan declined to say if investigators have any evidence connecting him to Nicks’ disappearance. Lincks was raised in Crawford County and returned to Van Buren in the 1970s after serving in the Army during World War II and working at Braniff Airlines in Dallas from 1962 to 1974, the FBI said. Lincks attempted to abduct a young girl in Van Buren at a location 8 miles from the baseball field where Morgan was taken, the FBI said, asking anyone with any information about Lincks to contact 1-800-CALL-FBI.

California

Los Angeles: The state has begun positioning equipment and locking in contracts with temporary health care workers in preparation for another possible winter surge of coronavirus cases, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday. The most populous state in the country still is doing comparatively well with the rest of the U.S. in terms of cases and hospitalizations. But Newsom warned Californians should prepare for another harsh pandemic winter even though the state is among the nation’s leaders on COVID-19 shots, with about 74% of eligible people having received at least one dose of a vaccine. While statewide hospitalizations have fallen by about half since a summer peak at the end of August, they have started creeping up in some areas, particularly the Central Valley and portions of Southern California including Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties. “We’ve seen some signs that suggest concerns,” Newsom said. California earlier this fall had the nation’s lowest case rate but is now 16th, he said, while the positivity rate for those tested for the virus is 2.3% after falling below 1% in June. Beyond the upward trend in certain parts of the state, state health officials said they are generally apprehensive because colder weather will keep people inside. There will be more holiday mingling as immunity acquired months ago begins to wane without booster shots.

Colorado

Denver: An appeals court panel on Wednesday reinstated a lawsuit filed by Republican lawmakers and a Colorado gun rights group challenging a “red flag” law that allows courts to order firearms taken away from people who pose a danger to themselves or others. The lawsuit, filed in 2019, argues that majority Democrats in the state House denied Republican lawmakers their constitutional right to have the red flag legislation be read in its entirety during debate. The bill was signed into law by Democratic Gov. Jared Polis and took effect in 2020. When one GOP lawmaker requested a reading, multiple clerks read sections of the bill simultaneously, the plaintiffs said. A second representative’s request that the bill be read was denied, they said. Democrats countered that the bill was being read on the floor at the subsequent request of a Republican lawmaker until he withdrew that request. Colorado Politics reports that a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals overturned a Denver district court judge’s ruling that the judiciary should not intrude on the prerogatives of the Legislature or other branches of government. The panel cited a Supreme Court ruling in an unrelated case that the courts can consider whether the Legislature has complied with the constitutional mandate for the reading of bills.

Connecticut

New Haven: Mayor Justin Elicker appointed Renee Dominguez as the city’s police chief Wednesday, which would make her the first woman to permanently lead the force. Dominguez has served as acting chief since March, after the retirement of Otoniel Reyes. Her appointment must be approved by the city’s Board of Alders. City and state officials believe Dominguez also would be the first female permanent police chief in any of the state’s largest cities. Several women have led police departments in smaller cities and towns in Connecticut. In the state’s largest city, Bridgeport, Rebeca Garcia is currently the acting police chief. “I am very excited,” Dominguez said at a news conference Wednesday. “My entire adult life has been dedicated to serving the community.” Dominguez became a police officer in Newtown in 2000 and moved to the New Haven police force in 2002. She is married with two daughters, ages 3 and 6. “To be the chief and have little girls is a challenge,” she said. “But what better role model than your mother. You can do whatever you want, and you can be whoever you want to be.”

Delaware

Dover: Mourners shared laughter, memories and tears Wednesday as they paid their last respects to former Gov. Ruth Ann Minner. Minner, a sharecropper’s daughter, high school dropout and widow, was the only woman to serve as Delaware’s governor, holding office from 2001 to 2009. She died Thursday at the age of 86. Friends, family and fellow politicians, including President Joe Biden, paid tribute to her during a funeral at Milford Church of the Nazarene. They recalled her as a woman who was driven by steely determination but never forgot her humble upbringing and maintained a sense of empathy for fellow citizens. “Each time she climbed up the political ladder, she always stayed grounded in the lives of everyday people,” said Biden, who represented Delaware in the U.S. Senate for decades. During her decades of public service as a state lawmaker, lieutenant governor and governor, Minner served as a mentor and role model for many of those who attended her funeral. “Like many of you in this church, I would not be here today as your governor were it not for Ruth Ann Minner. It’s just that simple,” said Gov. John Carney, who served two terms as Minner’s lieutenant governor. “She set the standard for all of us.”

District of Columbia

Washington: The district’s government has struck a deal with the U.S. Marshals Service to improve the situation at the city’s main jail after it came under criticism and the Justice Department announced that 400 federal prisoners would be transferred out because of substandard conditions. Conditions at the jail had long been a point of criticism for local activists. The issue took on a national political dimension in recent months because many defendants from the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection were being held there. Wednesday’s announcement said the city Department of Corrections and the federal Marshals Service “will collaboratively assess conditions at the (Central Detention Facility) and develop a plan to address concerns.” Mayor Muriel Bowser said in a statement that she welcomed the attention and resources to “address any deficiencies” at D.C. facilities. “We all agree: everyone who is in our jail or under our supervised care should be treated humanely and have safe conditions,” Bowser said. Supporters of several Jan. 6 defendants filed suit, alleging the defendants’ civil rights were being abused at the jail. One of those cases led to a surprise Marshals Service inspection last month, which found unsanitary and abusive conditions, according to a damning report by Lamont J. Ruffin, the acting marshal for U.S. District Court in Washington.

Florida

Fort Lauderdale: Biologists were taken by surprise by a record number of leatherback turtle nests found along some South Florida beaches this year. The 79 nests laid by endangered turtles along beaches in Broward County in the 2021 season is nearly double the previous record, the South Florida SunSentinel reports. The previous record was 46 in 2012, and the record low for leatherback nests was 12 in 2017. “It’s difficult to say why Broward County saw such an increase in leatherback nesting this season,” Stephanie Kedzuf, a biologist for Broward County who specializes in sea turtles, told the newspaper. Kedzuf said she will be curious to see whether other areas in the state saw a similar increase. Leatherbacks, named for their tough, rubbery skin, typically crawl onto beaches at night and dig holes to deposit their eggs in the sand. They are among the largest of sea turtles. The nesting season runs from March 1 to Oct. 31. During that time, coastal buildings must shield or lower their lights to prevent them from disturbing the hatchlings. When the turtles hatch, they race toward the sea to avoid crabs, birds and other predators. The lights can draw them inland, where they could be run over or trapped in storm drains. The leatherback population has declined by 40% worldwide, the National Marine Fisheries Service said.

Georgia

Atlanta: Gun maker Remington Firearms will move its headquarters from the Empire State to the Peach State. The company announced Monday that it would invest $100 million in the factory and research operation in LaGrange, southwest of Atlanta, hiring 856 people over five years. It wasn’t clear what effect the transfer would have on Remington’s operations in New York and Tennessee. The company owns the parts of the former Remington Outdoor Co. that make rifles, shotguns and some handguns after the former parent auctioned its assets in pieces last year in a bankruptcy proceeding. Remington, the country’s oldest gun maker, began making flintlock rifles in 1816. It swelled into a firearms conglomerate but faced slumping sales, complaints about quality, and legal pressure over the Sandy Hook school massacre. The current company no longer makes the Bushmaster AR-15 rifles used to kill 20 first graders and six educators in the shooting in Connecticut in 2012. “We are very excited to come to Georgia, a state that not only welcomes business but enthusiastically supports and welcomes companies in the firearms industry,” Remington CEO Ken D’Arcy said in a statement. Gov. Brian Kemp famously pointed a shotgun at another person in a campaign commercial when the Republican was seeking his current office in 2018.

Hawaii

Honolulu: Nearly 2,000 Kaiser Permanente health care workers in the state plan to strike later this month over wages and staffing concerns. UNITE HERE Local 5 said the strike due to begin Nov. 22 would affect 20 facilities across Hawaii. Thousands of Kaiser health care workers in California have already said they will strike starting Monday. Local 5 spokesperson Bryant de Venecia said Wednesday that negotiations were continuing. Kaiser and the Alliance of Health Care Unions began national bargaining in April. Local 5 has been negotiating some Hawaii-specific issues with Kaiser as well. Local 5 said in a news release that Kaiser’s latest proposal was for an “insulting” 2% wage increase contingent on the union’s agreement to a two-tier wage system under which new hires would receive lower pay. The union said Kaiser also failed to address concerns about short staffing, while workers report being stressed and overworked during the coronavirus pandemic. Arlene Peasnall, Kaiser’s senior vice president of human resources, said in a statement that Hawaii union-represented employees earn about 26% above the average market wage. She said Kaiser offered up to 4% yearly pay raises – 2% pay increases plus a 2% cash payout each year of a four-year contract. “The challenge we are trying to address in partnership with our unions is the increasingly unaffordable cost of healthcare. … Wages and benefits account for half of Kaiser Permanente’s operational costs,” she said, Hawaii News Now reports.

Idaho

Lewiston: A northern Idaho mayor has announced he’s running for governor. Sandpoint Mayor Shelby Rognstad said Monday in Lewiston that he’s running as a Democrat to defeat first-term Republican Gov. Brad Little. The 47-year-old Rognstad said he’s running to break the lock Republicans have had on the state for 30 years. “For the better part of a generation, Idaho has effectively been a one-party state,” Rongstad said, the Lewiston Tribune reports. “There are no checks and balances, no compromise, no accountability. This is dangerous. The most extreme voices now go unopposed. Commonsense leadership has been replaced by authoritarianism and culture wars.” Democrats have not held the governor’s office since 1995 or statewide elected office since 2007. Only 12 of the 70 House members and seven of 35 senators are Democrats. The Idaho secretary of state’s website lists Rognstad as the second Democrat to join the race, after Melissa Sue Robinson, 70, a transgender woman who owned a construction company before shifting to a career in telecommunications. She lists adequately funding education as a top goal. The race also includes eight Republicans. Little hasn’t yet announced his reelection plans but is expected to run and has been fundraising. Former President Donald Trump has endorsed Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin over Little.

Illinois

Chicago: A police oversight agency recommended suspension and in some cases potential termination for more than half a dozen officers following a botched 2019 raid on the home of a Black woman who wasn’t allowed to put on clothes before being handcuffed, according to a report released Wednesday. Earlier this year, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, which investigated the wrongful raid on social worker Anjanette Young’s home, noted nearly 100 allegations of misconduct by about a dozen officers. The agency’s report recommended between one day and one year of suspension for multiple officers and “up to and including separation” from the department for some officers. Police Superintendent David Brown has already moved to terminate one sergeant. The raid “reveals problems far more pervasive than any individual incident of officer misconduct,” the report said. It also noted “other concerns, including lack of adequate training and supervision surrounding the Department’s use of search warrants and the disproportionate impact of police actions on people of color.” The botched raid, first reported by WBBM-TV, and the city’s handling of it prompted anger from clergy, lawmakers and civil rights activists who decried it as racist and an affront to a Black woman’s dignity.

Indiana

Indianapolis: Public schools should treat the Black Lives Matter movement as a political group, Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said Thursday, potentially limiting the ability of schools and teachers to promote the BLM message in classrooms. “Black Lives Matter is unequivocally a political organization,” Rokita said in a news release Thursday morning. “Promoting or displaying some politically based materials while prohibiting the promotion or display of others could create a liability for schools and could violate the First Amendment.” Rokita issued an advisory opinion on how schools should treat BLM at the request of two state lawmakers amid concerns about the politicization of students’ education and what Rep. Michelle Davis, R-Whiteland, called the “controversial ideology” of BLM. Rokita’s opinion comes after months of debate around the country about how and what schools should and should not be teaching, particularly with regard to race and racism in America’s history. Conservative groups have decried the teaching of critical race theory in the nation’s K-12 schools, which do not teach the academic framework used by legal scholars to examine the intersection of race and law in America. Still, activists and parents have latched onto the term.

Iowa

Iowa City: A former Iowa State Patrol officer with a history of excessive force allegations has been indicted on a federal charge over a 2017 traffic stop in which dashcam video captured him roughing up a motorcyclist. A federal grand jury charged Robert James Smith last week with violating the motorcyclist’s civil rights by using unreasonable force during the stop near West Liberty, roughly 15 miles southeast of Iowa City. The indictment notes that the victim suffered “bodily injury” during the encounter, which means the charge could carry a maximum of 10 years in prison. Smith is set to make his initial appearance Tuesday at the federal courthouse in Cedar Rapids. Dashcam video shows Smith pulling over Bryce Yakish for speeding. The routine stop escalated immediately when Smith ran from his car with his gun drawn and pointed at Yakish, then 20 years old. Smith used his left hand to strike the face shield of Yakish’s helmet, knocking him backward onto his motorcycle and to the ground. Smith briefly put his knee on Yakish’s neck while handcuffing him. Yakish can be repeatedly heard in the video complaining of neck pain. Smith falsely accused Yakish of trying to flee and charged him with eluding law enforcement, even though he stopped immediately after Smith activated his lights and siren. That charge was dropped after a prosecutor reviewed the video and concluded it was baseless. Yakish lost his license because of the arrest, his motorcycle was impounded, and he spent the night in jail.

Kansas

Peck: A 19-year-old is getting ready to graduate from Washburn University’s School of Law in Topeka. Braxton Moral’s parents have long known he was gifted. He skipped fourth grade and took his first undergraduate class at Harvard University while still in sixth grade. As he got older, he spent his summers at Cambridge. But when the school year started, he switched to online classes so he wouldn’t miss out on experiences like prom and homecoming at Ulysses High School. “He just wants to be like everybody else,” said his mother, Julie Moral. “He’s a blessing from God.” At Harvard, Braxton developed a love for government and realized he wanted to go to law school. But what should have taken three years he completed in two and a half. Next month, Braxton Moral will receive his juris doctor degree. In February, he will take the bar exam. “When I started out, it was more about just something fun to do,” Moral said. “And then you start off, you’re like, ‘Well, I just kind of want to get better now.’ So once you get a little bit of experience, it transfers from just fine to an actual goal.”

Kentucky

Frankfort: A judge has approved a request from Kentucky regulators to force West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice to pay $2.9 million in fines for cleanup violations at some eastern Kentucky coal mines. The Tuesday order from Franklin County Circuit Judge Thomas Wingate requires that the Justice companies finish reclamation work at the mines, the Lexington Herald-Leader reports. The order also allows the state to take posted bonds to cover the work. Kentucky officials called the violations at the Justice-owned mines “among the most egregious we have seen in nearly a decade” when the original agreement with Justice was struck back in 2014. Most of the sites are surface mines. The work includes cleaning out ponds, stabilizing land, improving drainage and reshaping the land to its original, pre-mining contours. Under the agreement with Kentucky, the West Virginia governor and his son, Jay Justice, are personally, jointly liable for the $2.9 million penalty. Jay Justice runs the company’s coal, timber and agriculture businesses. The Justices have argued that they have not been able to meet the deadlines because of the economic downturn and safety concerns caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Louisiana

Baton Rouge: State government agencies lost more than 17% of their civil service employees in the last financial year. Byron Decoteau, director of Louisiana’s State Civil Service, said the turnover rate was nearly 2 percentage points higher in the 2020-21 budget year that ended June 30 than in the previous year. More than 6,000 civil service workers left state government in the latest year, including 21% who retired. Other employees were laid off, died, moved, left to go to school, got private-sector jobs or had other personal reasons, according to the report Decoteau presented to the commission that oversees the state workers who have civil service protection, called classified employees. The highest turnover rates were among prison guards at adult and youth prison facilities, the report showed – a consistent problem year after year. Decoteau noted that 10% of classified state employees currently are eligible to retire across agencies, while nearly 15% will be eligible to retire within five years. The data doesn’t cover political appointees across agencies or workers who transferred to other state government jobs.

Maine

Saco: State park campers set another record this year. Maine is home to 48 state parks and historic sites, and attendance and camping at the parks have soared during the coronavirus pandemic. Preliminary state figures showed Maine state campground attendance set a record for the second straight year, the Portland Press Herald reports. The state’s 12 state park campgrounds experienced an 8% increase in visitors from 2019 to 2020, when campers set a record of more than 270,000. This year, the number grew to about 315,000. The state parks were heavily used before the pandemic, and the onset of the pandemic led to even more use as residents and visitors sought more outdoor forms of recreation. This year’s attendance was especially high even though July, in the heart of camping season, was full of rain. State officials said they expected 2022 to be another big year for the campgrounds.

Maryland

Manchester: Five bald eagles were found acting strangely and seemingly sick in northern Maryland, prompting an investigation by state wildlife officials. William Fauntleroy found the birds Sunday in the Manchester area of Carroll County near the Pennsylvania border, The Washington Post reports. He said he saw an eagle near his mailbox that was acting weirdly and appeared to be unable to fly. The group of birds was feeding on a deer carcass, according to Fauntleroy. One died after flying into a power line. “I saw some were flying poorly,” Fauntleroy told the newspaper. “One seemed like it couldn’t get off the ground and couldn’t fly. It was acting like it was drunk.” Wildlife rescuers took the four other eagles to the Phoenix Wildlife Center in Baltimore County. Maryland Natural Resources Police spokesperson Lauren Moses said her department is “actively investigating” to figure out what happened to the birds, a federally protected species. The deer carcass the eagles ate was buried so no other wildlife would feed on it, according to Moses. She told the Post that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials were expected to take samples from the remains for analysis. “Was it poison? Was it an algae bloom? Was it something else?” the wildlife center said in a Facebook post Wednesday. “We don’t have answers yet.”

Massachusetts

Boston: Marine researchers in New England said Tuesday that they have collected data from tags that were surgically implanted in sea turtles for the first time. Scientists with the New England Aquarium who performed the work said it could lead to improvements in the way researchers monitor threatened species of turtles. The loggerheads were rehabilitated at the Boston-based aquarium’s turtle hospital and released earlier this year with the acoustic tags implanted in their bodies. Acoustic receivers in Nantucket Sound off Massachusetts showed multiple detections earlier this month, the researchers said. Scientists have long used turtle tagging to monitor the animals, but the tags have previously been placed on their shells using an epoxy. Kara Dodge, a research scientist with the aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life, said the new tagging method will make it easier to monitor injured turtles that are released back into the wild after rehab. The tags allow scientists to “assess rehabilitated turtles’ survivorship over time and resumption of normal behaviors in the wild,” she said.

Michigan

Detroit: A judge on Wednesday approved a $626 million deal to settle lawsuits filed by Flint residents who found their tap water contaminated by lead following disastrous decisions to switch the city’s water source and a failure to swiftly acknowledge the problem. Most of the money – $600 million – is coming from the state of Michigan, which was accused of repeatedly overlooking the risks of using the Flint River without properly treating the water. “The settlement reached here is a remarkable achievement for many reasons, not the least of which is that it sets forth a comprehensive compensation program and timeline that is consistent for every qualifying participant,” U.S. District Judge Judith Levy said in a 178-page opinion. Attorneys are seeking as much as $200 million in legal fees from the overall settlement. Levy left that issue for another day. The deal makes money available to Flint children who were exposed to the water, adults who can show an injury, certain business owners and anyone who paid water bills. About 80% of what’s left after legal fees is earmarked for children. “This is a historic and momentous day for the residents of Flint, who will finally begin to see justice served,” said Ted Leopold, one of the lead attorneys in the litigation.

Minnesota

Minneapolis: COVID-19 hospitalizations have reached their highest level of the year in the state, and hospital capacity continues to tighten amid an alarming surge in cases, Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm said Wednesday. The Minnesota Department of Health on Wednesday reported 5,277 new coronavirus cases and 43 new deaths, raising the state’s pandemic totals to 831,669 confirmed cases and 8,925 deaths. Minnesota hospitals were caring for 1,159 COVID-19 patients, including 257 in intensive care units. Malcolm called the new case and death numbers “extraordinarily high and concerning” and said that “right now we find ourselves in a really truly alarming spike” in new cases. “Every day now we’re seeing dozens of Minnesotans dying from an illness that they didn’t have to get, and that is beyond heartbreaking for all of us doing this work,” Malcolm said. “The tragedy of this current spike in cases is that more than ever, we have the tools and the knowledge to minimize the impact of this virus.” Those tools include vaccinations, masking in public and staying home when sick, she said. Most Minnesotans are vaccinated, but too many still aren’t, she said. And Kris Ehresmann, the department’s infectious disease director, said the problem of “waning immunity,” which appears to show up around six months after vaccination, seems to be a factor in the rise of breakthrough cases.

Mississippi

Jackson: The state has finished repairing section of highway that collapsed during torrential rainfall brought by Hurricane Ida, and the road reopened Wednesday. Two people were killed and nine injured Aug. 30 as seven vehicles plunged, one after another, into a deep pit that opened up on the dark, rural stretch of Mississippi Highway 26 near Lucedale. One of the injured people died in a hospital Sept. 11. The Mississippi Department of Transportation awarded a $1.8 million repair contract in October. A construction company met the department’s goal of getting the highway back open safely and quickly, southern district Transportation Commissioner Tom King said in a news release Wednesday. “I know how important Highway 26 is for the region, and I appreciate all the work that went into getting it open ahead of schedule,” King said. Department of Transportation Director Brad White told legislators in September that the area had already received more than double its average annual rainfall before the hurricane, and then Ida dumped more than 12 inches of rain in less than one day. The stretch of highway is on a hillside, and White said the deluge blew out a pipe that ran under the roadbed. King said work will continue until early 2022 as crews repave routes that had been used as detours amid the closure.

Missouri

St. Louis: Security camera footage, shell casings, and a small but distinctive tattoo played pivotal roles in the arrest of a man suspected in at least six killings over the past two months in the St. Louis and Kansas City areas. The St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s office on Tuesday charged Perez Deshay Reed in the shooting deaths of two people in the city in September. Reed was charged Saturday in two other fatal shootings in September in St. Louis County. He is also suspected of killing two people in Kansas City, Kansas, and the FBI has labeled him a suspected serial killer. Reed, who turned 26 on Wednesday, remained jailed on $2 million bond Tuesday. Surveillance video in Kansas helped lead to Reed’s arrest. Images captured by the cameras showed the distinctive crescent moon-shaped tattoo on Reed’s forehead. Another key factor was evidence left behind at each of the St. Louis-area shootings. “The commonality among them were handgun casings,” said Rich Quinn, special agent in charge of the FBI office in St. Louis. “We knew they came from the same handgun.” Reed is charged in the St. Louis County killings of 16-year-old Marnay Haynes on Sept. 13 and 40-year-old Lester Robinson on Sept. 26. In the city of St. Louis, he is suspected in the killings of 49-year-old Pamela Abercrombie on Sept. 16 and a 24-year-old man, Carey Ross, on Sept. 19. All four victims were shot in the head.

Montana

Billings: Tribes and conservation groups sued state environmental regulators Wednesday after Gov. Greg Gianforte’s administration dropped a legal claim against a mining executive over decades of pollution from several mines. The lawsuit was filed in state district court in Lewis and Clark County by attorneys for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, the Fort Belknap Indian Community, the Montana Environmental Information Center and other groups. Under Gianforte, the Department of Environmental Quality in July quit a legal action that sought to block Idaho-based Hecla Mining Co. and its president, Phillips Baker Jr., from involvement in two proposed silver and copper mines. Baker was an executive with Pegasus Gold, which went bankrupt in 1998, leaving state and federal agencies with more than $50 million in cleanup costs at several mines, including the Zortman and Landusky mines near the Fort Belknap reservation. A state “bad actor” law enacted in the wake of the Pegasus bankruptcy punishes companies and their executives who don’t clean up mining pollution. Under the law, companies and their senior leaders can’t receive new mining permits until they’ve reimbursed the state for past cleanup costs.

Nebraska

Lincoln: A coalition that includes labor unions and civil rights groups has launched a website and social media pages in its drive to get a measure to raise Nebraska’s minimum wage to $15 an hour on the ballot next year. Raise the Wage Nebraska says it wants to highlight the stories of the 195,000 Nebraska residents who’d see higher pay, the Lincoln Journal Star reports. The coalition needs to collect 87,000 signatures on petitions by July 2022 to get its proposal on the ballot in November 2022. The measure would increase the minimum wage by $1.50 annually until it reached $15 in 2026. After that, there’d be an annual cost-of-living increase. Nebraska voters widely supported raising the minimum wage in 2014. Nearly 60% backed an initiative that increased it from $7.25 an hour to its current $9 an hour. Business groups oppose the measure, saying it could hurt small-business owners who already are having difficulty filling jobs as the country emerges from the coronavirus pandemic. Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts also is opposed. But supporters said raising the wage will help people living in poverty and working multiple jobs to make ends meet.

Nevada

Carson City: The Legislature is finally set to start redrawing the state’s political maps. Gov. Steve Sisolak announced Thursday that lawmakers would convene for a long-delayed special session focused on redistricting at 1 p.m. Friday. Sisolak said in a statement that he was looking forward to “an efficient and productive session” that will fulfill the Silver State’s constitutional duty to revise every federal, state and local voting district after each census. The redistricting process is controlled by whichever political party holds the Legislature, often resulting in districts that favor one party over the other, a process known as gerrymandering. Bitter battles over this practice happen often in Carson City, where a court-appointed panel had to finish drawing boundaries on which politicians couldn’t agree in 2011. The undertaking was almost equally toxic in 2001, when there were also legal challenges, then a special session called after remapping efforts repeatedly stalled in a split partisan Legislature. Draft maps debuted Tuesday point to the possibility of a more harmonious redistricting session in 2021, though Republicans are likely to take issue with proposed changes that could make the state’s two battleground congressional districts more Democratic-leaning over the next decade.

New Hampshire

Concord: After rejecting millions of dollars to help increase the state’s vaccination rate, the Executive Council on Wednesday reversed course and approved $22 million for the effort, along with a nonbinding resolution that condemns vaccine mandates. Last month, the Republican-led council, a five-member panel that approves state contracts, rejected $27 million in federal vaccination funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over concerns that language in the grants would have bound the state to follow federal directives and mandates related to COVID-19. The language the Republicans opposed has appeared in other contracts they approved, and both Republican Gov. Chris Sununu and Attorney General John Formella said it does not in any way impede the state’s sovereignty. Later in October, the council voted to use $4.7 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act funding to help community health centers and regional public health networks set up school-based and community vaccination clinics. With the approval of Wednesday’s funds, that money will now be repurposed. “We are moving full steam ahead,” Sununu said in a statement Wednesday.

New Jersey

Asbury Park: Garden State businesses owned by people of color were more likely to lose money during the early months of the pandemic and less likely have access to the credit they needed to make up for it, according to a study released Wednesday. The report showed Black- and Latino-owned business were at a particular disadvantage when it came to the government’s main emergency finance plan, the Paycheck Protection Program, forcing them to rely on their own savings to survive. “It was a bit of a worry; it was a bit of a panic attack,” said Tashianna Gayle, 34, owner of Hair Haven, a salon in Asbury Park. She was told she didn’t qualify for a PPP loan because she had only been open for a month before the pandemic hit. The report by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and the New Jersey Economic Development Authority was designed to look at how racial disparities during the pandemic’s economic crisis played out among small businesses in the state. “It’s discouraging and, sadly, not surprising that the pandemic hit Black- and Latino- owned businesses especially hard,” said Tim Sullivan, the New Jersey EDA’s chief executive officer. The agency rolled out a low-interest micro-loan program Wednesday that aims to address the disparity.

New Mexico

Albuquerque: Two of the state’s largest hospitals announced Thursday that they would be focusing on patients who need care the most, meaning procedures that aren’t medically necessary will likely have to be delayed. While most patients are not dealing with coronavirus infections, officials at Presbyterian Healthcare Services and University of New Mexico Health say the ability to grow the capacity that was built over the past year due to the pandemic is now limited by space and the availability of health care workers. The two hospitals announced they were activating crisis standards of care, noting that it’s not really a shift in policy but rather a continuation of how they have been managing the crush of patients since last winter. “It’s really important to recognize we are not deallocating care. That is not part of this. We are not triaging and denying care,” said Dr. Jason Mitchell, Presbyterian’s chief medical officer. “At this point we are trying to make sure that every patient has care in a bed across our state and even in surrounding states.” He saud the decision will not be to take a patient off a ventilator, for example, but rather to find other hospitals within New Mexico or in neighboring states that can take patients or directing patients with less severe issues to urgent care clinics or other providers.

New York

Albany: Six state correctional facilities will close next March in a cost-saving move amid declining inmate populations, officials announced Monday. More than 1,700 people work at the six upstate New York facilities, which house more than 1,400 inmates. The inmates will be sent to other locations, and no layoffs are expected from the closures, which are projected to save $142 million, according to the release from the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. The corrections agency said it will work with unions to provide staffers with transfer opportunities to other facilities or to other state agencies. The facilities set for closure March 10 are Ogdensburg Correctional Facility, Moriah Shock Incarceration Correctional Facility, Willard Drug Treatment Campus, Southport Correctional Facility, Downstate Correctional Facility and Rochester Correctional Facility. The governor was authorized by the Legislature this year to close state prisons amid a long-term drop in inmates. There are currently 31,469 inmates in state correctional facilities, down from a systemwide high of 72,773 in 1999. The agency said officials looked at multiple factors before making the decision, including physical infrastructure, program offerings, facility security level, proximity to other facilities and health services.

North Carolina

Raleigh: A trial judge on Wednesday ordered the state to pay out $1.75 billion to help narrow public education inequities, angering Republicans who said the directive usurps lawmakers’ constitutional authority over state coffers. Superior Court Judge David Lee, who is charged with overseeing corrective responses related to school funding litigation that began over a quarter-century ago, said the legislative and executive branches have been afforded every courtesy over the years to act decisively. But “this court’s deference is at an end at this point,” he said. The judge’s action likely will set up a constitutional showdown among the three government branches. Lee said his order wouldn’t take effect for 30 days, giving GOP leaders at the Legislature or others time for a legal challenge, which is likely. Republicans say that only the General Assembly can appropriate funds in state accounts and that Lee is violating the state constitution if he acts contrary to that. The state Supreme Court ruled in 2004 in the Leandro lawsuit – named after an early student plaintiff – that while North Carolina’s children have a fundamental right to the “opportunity to receive a sound basic education” under the constitution, the state had not lived up to that mandate.

North Dakota

Bismarck: A storm system that is expected to bring snow to the state late this week could help improve persistent long-term drought conditions. Forecasters are expecting 2 inches to 4 inches of snow in the eastern half of the state, with up to 6 inches in the northeastern corner of North Dakota. Wind gusts of up to 60 mph are expected along with the snow, potentially making travel difficult, according to forecasters. Drought conditions that brought hardships for ranchers and farmers this summer have made marked improvement. In eastern North Dakota in recent weeks, much of the region is no longer listed in any of the four drought categories, the Bismarck Tribune reports. Much of the central and west regions remain in severe or extreme drought, but even those areas have improved dramatically from last summer. There is no change in this week’s U.S. Drought Monitor map, which is updated every Thursday. “In the Dakotas, where long-term drought is still ongoing, livestock water quality and (mule deer) fawn production were both reported to be suffering as a result of the drought,” wrote National Drought Mitigation Center Climatologist Curtis Riganti. Harvest is mostly wrapped up in North Dakota, though about one-fifth of the corn crop and one-third of the sunflowers remain in fields.

Ohio

Toledo: A polar bear who was a fixture at the Toledo Zoo for more than two decades has died due to kidney disease. Michael Frushour, the zoo’s curator of mammals, told The Toledo Blade that the bear named Marty was euthanized Nov. 4, less than a month shy of his 25th birthday, Marty had been diagnosed a couple of years ago with what Frushour described as “age-related kidney disease.” Zoo officials had recently noticed that Marty wasn’t eating as much as usual and had become less active. An examination determined his kidneys were functioning very poorly, so they decided to have him euthanized. Marty was born in late 1996 and came to the Toledo Zoo from Chicago in 1999. In 2007, he went to the Pittsburgh Zoo for a year before he returned to Toledo. Marty and the Toledo Zoo’s female polar bear, Crystal, had several cubs together, and zoo officials believe Crystal – who turns 23 this week – may be pregnant again. The zoo hopes to replace Marty with another male polar bear, though it’s not yet clear when that might happen.

Oklahoma

Oklahoma City: Gov. Kevin Stitt on Wednesday directed the State Department of Health to stop issuing birth certificates listing a nonbinary option instead of designating a gender, despite a settlement agreement in a civil case in which the agency agreed to do so. The first-term Republican said in his order that his administration never reviewed or approved the settlement agreement, which requires the Oklahoma State Department of Health to amend birth certificates in a manner not permitted under Oklahoma law. The order directs the department to cease amending birth certificates in any way not specifically authorized under state law and to remove from its website any reference to amending birth certificates for nonbinary people. People who are nonbinary do not identify with traditional male or female gender assignments. Stitt also directed the Legislature to pass legislation when it returns next year to specifically prohibit the issuance of birth certificates with nonbinary designations. Freedom Oklahoma, which advocates for nonbinary and LGBTQ people, said in a statement that while the state is facing scrutiny over how it carries out executions, “it felt easy for the governor to try and refocus media narratives and partisan pressure by attacking some of the most marginalized and historically excluded residents of our state.” Nichole McAfee, executive director of Freedom Oklahoma, said the governor does not have the authority to overturn an agreement entered into in a court of law.

Oregon

Salem: A school board that recently banned teachers from displaying symbols including those supporting gay pride and Black Lives Matter has abruptly fired the superintendent, deeply upsetting members who opposed the move. The escalating disputes in the Newberg School Board come as schools nationwide have become battlegrounds, with arguments over vaccine and mask mandates, how racism is addressed in teaching, instruction related to sexuality and gender-neutral bathrooms. After Superintendent Joe Morelock was fired in a Zoom meeting late Tuesday night, board member Brandy Penner said Wednesday she believes the conservative board members fired Morelock because he didn’t aggressively implement their ban on controversial symbols, adding that the policy didn’t define what symbols would be unacceptable. Rebecca Piros – one of three who opposed his firing – told Morelock she was sorry. Morelock replied: “Just remember that from the darkest dark comes the brightest light, so everything will work out eventually.” Piros broke down in tears when she heard those words. On Wednesday, some residents of Newberg, a town of 23,000 about 25 miles southwest of Portland, erected signs quoting Morelock’s reply to Piros. Newberg Equity in Education, a group composed mostly of parents who oppose the school board’s recent rightward tilt, planned a demonstration Thursday at the school district office.

Pennsylvania

Pittsburgh: Justice was not blind when a lawyer dropped his pants after repeatedly setting off a metal detector at a courthouse. Jeffrey Pollock, 59, was trying to pass through security outside family court Wednesday, but the machine kept sounding an alarm, authorities said. The lawyer told guards his suspenders were causing the alerts, and he could not remove them. The guards asked him to keep trying until the alerts stopped. “After a heated discussion with the guards, Pollock unhooked his suspenders, dropped his drawers, took them off, and placed them in the bin to go through the metal detector,” the Allegheny Sheriff’s Office said in a news release. Authorities said Pollock stood in his shirt and underwear. He was charged with disorderly conduct. “I used poor judgment,” Pollock told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. “I was trying to make a point.” The sheriff’s office noted “that visible underwear is not part of the dress code.”

Rhode Island

East Providence: An 89-year-old has achieved a goal he spent two decades working toward and nearly a lifetime thinking about: earning his Ph.D. and becoming a physicist. Manfred Steiner recently defended his dissertation successfully at Brown University. Steiner said he cherishes this degree because it’s what he always wanted – and because he overcame health problems that could have derailed his studies. “But I made it, and this was the most gratifying point in my life, to finish it,” he said Wednesday at his home in East Providence. As a teenager in Vienna, Steiner was inspired to become a physicist after reading about Albert Einstein and Max Planck. He admired the precision of physics. But after World War II, his mother and uncle advised him that studying medicine would be a better choice in turbulent times. He earned his medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1955 and moved just a few weeks later to the United States, where he had a successful career studying blood and blood disorders. Steiner studied hematology at Tufts University and biochemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before becoming a hematologist at Brown University. He became a full professor and led the hematology section of the medical school at Brown from 1985 to 1994.

South Carolina

Columbia: The amount of money in state bank accounts continues to grow thanks to a quick recovery from the economic shock of the COVID-19 pandemic and people spending money much faster than experts predicted. The latest estimate released Wednesday said South Carolina lawmakers will have nearly $1 billion more to spend this budget year, according to the state Board of Economic Advisers. That boosts the money over which the General Assembly has control to nearly $11 billion and doesn’t count the roughly $3 billion in federal COVID-19 relief money coming to South Carolina. It also doesn’t count about a $1 billion surplus after the state closed the books on the fiscal year that ended June 30. Predictions that economic growth would slow because of supply chain issues, consumers slowing their spending or dwindling federal stimulus money didn’t come true. The 13.2% growth in the 2020-21 fiscal year budget was the largest in at least 40 years, the board said. South Carolina sales tax collections continue to soar, growing by $500 million to $3.8 billion in the past fiscal year. Corporate tax revenues have also risen sharply thanks to retailers benefiting from all that extra money being spent. The state’s economic experts still think the rapid rise in revenue can’t continue.

South Dakota

Sioux Falls: Only 45% of educators are teaching required standards on Oceti Sakowin Essential Understandings, according to a new survey by the South Dakota Department of Education. OSEUs are basic understandings of Lakota, Dakota and Nakota culture and history. The standards were approved by the Board of Education Standards in 2018, which should make them required for all K-12 students, but DOE officials have said in the past that they were unsure how broadly OSEUs were used and that they weren’t required. Lawmakers have drafted bills to make sure OSEUs were required, but such a bill was shot down in the 2021 session. News of survey results comes months after it was revealed the DOE removed more than a dozen explicit references to the Oceti Sakowin from a draft of social studies standards before they were released to the public. That issue caused state-level protests and outcries from residents and educators. Weeks later, Gov. Kristi Noem ordered the DOE to restart the standards revision process to include more input from stakeholders, including Native Americans. But educators and Indigenous education advocates are still calling on Noem and other top education officials to resign after their mishandling of the social studies standards process.

Tennessee

Lynchburg: The distillery producing Jack Daniel’s whiskey is teaming with a military support group to help service members and their families get home for the holidays. More than 1,700 service members and relatives will head home through “Operation Ride Home,” organizers said. That’s the most participants in program history. In its 11th year, the program provides financial assistance to active-duty, junior-enlisted military members and their families to travel to loved ones’ homes nationwide. The Jack Daniel Distillery teams with the Armed Services YMCA to offer the assistance. Service members from the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard have been assisted with travel to every state. “We are absolutely thrilled they’ll get to reunite with their loved ones this year,” said Chris Fletcher, Jack Daniel’s master distiller. “Providing some financial assistance to see that they make it home is the least we can do.”

Texas

Austin: An 18-year-old man has been arrested and charged with arson for a fire at a synagogue, officials said. Franklin Barrett Sechriest was held on a $100,000 bond for the Oct. 31 fire at Congregation Beth Israel, KVUE-TV in Austin reports. According to the Austin Fire Department, the fire was a “small exterior fire” that caused no injuries but resulted in an estimated $25,000 damage, including the synagogue’s wooden doors. Arson investigators said broken glass indicated an item might have been thrown at the building, and a flammable liquid accelerated the fire. An arrest affidavit describes surveillance videos from multiple cameras on the property showing a suspect resembling Sechriest driving a black sport utility vehicle registered to a woman living at the same address as Sechriest. The fire at the synagogue came a week after a string of antisemitic incidents, including an antisemitic banner displayed from an overpass on a heavily traveled boulevard. It was not immediately clear if the fire was connected to those incidents.

Utah

Salt Lake City: Southern Utah’s Dixie State University is poised to change a name often associated with the Deep South and slavery after the Legislature approved a new name Wednesday over local backlash. The Republican-controlled Legislature voted to change the name to Utah Tech University after multiple executives from the burgeoning tech sector said the Dixie name is often met with confusion and distaste as the institution grows. GOP Gov. Spencer Cox is expected to sign the bill. The term got new scrutiny following a national outcry against racial injustice after the death of George Floyd. “This process is not about cancel culture. No one is trying to erase the great history of this beloved institution,” said Republican Rep. Kelly Miles, who sponsored the name-change bill. “We as Utahns pride ourselves in our forward thinking … it just makes sense that our students in this great state will be better served by the name Utah Tech University.” A compromise provision will keep the name Dixie on the main campus in St. George, a city near the Arizona border that’s among the fastest-growing in the country.

Vermont

Lyndon: A federal grant will go toward helping the state to educate more nurses. Northern Vermont University and Vermont Technical College announced Wednesday that the $240,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce would be used to expand Vermont Technical College’s existing nursing program at Northern Vermont’s University’s Lyndon campus. Vail Hall on the Lyndon campus will be transformed into the Clinical Nursing Education Center, complete with a nursing instruction classroom and skills and simulation lab spaces. “Addressing Vermont’s nursing workforce challenge requires increasing opportunities for Vermonters to pursue careers in nursing,” Democratic U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy said in a statement. Officials say the number of new registered nurses in Vermont declined 69% from 2007 to 2014. It’s estimated that Vermont needs 900 skilled nurses per year. In 2019, 421 completed licensed practical nurse or RN programs.

Virginia

Arlington: President Joe Biden saluted the nation’s military veterans as “the spine of America” on Thursday as he marked his first Veterans Day as president in a wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. “There’s nothing low-risk or low-cost about war for the women and men who fight it,” said Biden, whose administration earlier in the day announced a federal effort to better understand, identify and treat medical conditions suffered by troops deployed to toxic environments. Earlier in the week, members of the Chief Plenty Coups Honor Guard from Pryor, Montana, placed flowers in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and saluted the unknowns. Dozens more Crow Nation representatives, including students from Plenty Coups High School, followed suit Tuesday morning – the first time in 96 years the public and visitors had been allowed to approach the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It’s a privilege typically reserved for the sentinels of the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment, “The Old Guard,” according to the Arlington Cemetery. The flower ceremony kicked off a two-day centennial commemoration event. The dedication of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier took place Nov. 11, 1921, according to the National Archives.

Washington

Seattle: Amtrak Cascades will resume service Nov. 18 on the Point Defiance bypass between Tacoma and Olympia, nearly four years after a deadly derailment there. The first train to use the bypass is scheduled to leave Seattle at 7:22 a.m. and arrive at the new Tacoma Dome station at 8:08 a.m., according to an Amtrak statement. The first northbound train will leave Eugene, Oregon, at 5:30 a.m., stop in Portland and arrive in Tacoma at 10:54 a.m., The Seattle Times reports. Amtrak said eight trains – including Amtrak Cascades and Coast Starlight – will use the bypass daily, with additional trains added as COVID-19 restrictions ease. Additional safety measures and most of the National Transportation Safety Board’s recommendations have been implemented following the 2017 derailment, Amtrak said. The other recommendations are being pursued, the statement said. Key among the improvements is the installment of activated positive train control, which uses GPS technology to stop or slow a train before a collision or derailment occurs. The NTSB first called for widespread use of the crash-preventing technology in 1990, and in 2008 Congress mandated that it be installed on every passenger route and high hazardous material route across the U.S. within seven years.

West Virginia

Huntington: Health care coverage has been stopped for striking maintenance and service workers at a hospital, according to a union. About 1,000 members of the the Service Employees International Union District 1999 went on strike last week at Cabell Huntington Hospital after their contract expired. Union organizing director Sherri McKinney said in a statement that the coverage was cut off without notification to striking employees and union retirees, The Herald-Dispatch reports. Hospital human resources director Molly Frick said in a statement that “union leadership was well aware that a strike would result in the cessation of pay and benefits. Any employee who wishes to return to work will have all benefits restored, including healthcare insurance.” A Cabell County judge issued a preliminary injunction Wednesday that was sought by the hospital prohibiting the union from certain activities outside the hospital. Frick said the activities include loud noises, such as the use of bullhorns and loud music, that have disturbed hospital patients. The injunction also prohibits strikers from honking horns and encouraging drivers to honk, blocking hospital entrances, interfering with traffic at the hospital, or making threatening statements to anyone trying to enter or leave the hospital’s campus.

Wisconsin

Milwaukee: People who receive a COVID-19 vaccine at a Saturday clinic at Fiserv Forum will get to have their picture taken with the Milwaukee Bucks’ championship trophy, according to a Milwaukee Health Department news release. The health department and the Bucks are teaming up for a vaccine clinic from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday in the atrium of Fiserv Forum. “Everyone vaccinated at this clinic will have the opportunity to take a photo with the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy,” a news release said. The focus of the clinic is on children ages 5 to 11, and the clinic’s offerings will include pediatric Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines. “Vaccination is the best tool to keep ourselves and our children safe from COVID-19,” Milwaukee Health Commissioner Kirsten Johnson said in a news release. “We hope the opportunity to ‘take a shot’ in the home of the 2021 World Champion Milwaukee Bucks will encourage Milwaukee children and families to get vaccinated.” The clinic will also offer first, second and booster doses of Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines for eligible individuals, the news release said. Flu shots will be available as well. Those under the age of 18 will need permission from a parent or guardian to receive a vaccine.

Wyoming

Jackson: A grizzly bear and her four cubs who are already well-known to wildlife watchers got even more attention by taking a nighttime stroll through the city. Security video showed the bears wandering around downtown Jackson on Tuesday night, according to local police. Police and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials shooed the five bears into a less populated area near town, the Jackson Police Department said in a statement Wednesday. Grizzly No. 399, so named for an ear tag she received after being trapped for study, has been familiar to wildlife watchers for years. She’s had a reputation for lingering with her cubs near roadways in Grand Teton National Park, making her arguably the Yellowstone region’s most well-known grizzly. Biologists speculate that hanging around people helps keep away male grizzlies, which are known to kill cubs. Charming as it may seem for a mother bear and four yearling cubs to roam a tourist town, the bears’ behavior has worried wildlife managers. The bears have been raiding garbage, bee apiaries and animal feed in the Jackson area, raising the risk of a dangerous encounter with people. On Saturday, biologists trapped three of the four cubs. They put tracking collars on two in the hope that knowing the bears’ whereabouts will help prevent problems.

From USA TODAY Network and wire reports