InFocus News: Recent Episodes
WSIU Staff
WSIU takes a closer look at issues around the region. From arts and entertainment, to science and nature, the environment, politics, and other topics people are talking about.
(SIU Saluki Athletics / SIU)A U.S. district judge has approved a $2.8 billion settlement in the U.S. House vs. NCAA case in a deal that will reshape the landscape of college athletics.
The 2.8 billion is back pay for athletes who missed out on NIL opportunities when they competed between 2016 and 2024.
I talked about several aspects of the deal with SIU director of athletics Tim Leonard…starting with how much of the $2.8 billion his department will be required to pay.
(Provided by Mike Baltz / Mike Baltz)Ornithologist and ecologist Mike Baltz is back with his monthly reflections on the natural history of southern Illinois for the June edition of Nature Notebook.
( siusystem.edu)Office Hours with SIU System President Dan Mahony is a monthly podcast that explores what's happening in and around American higher education.
In this episode, we explore how students prepare for life after graduation through reflections from both spring 2025 graduates and accomplished SIU alumni. The episode opens with interviews from this year’s graduates, sharing their thoughts, hopes, and questions just before crossing the stage.
President Mahony is then joined by three distinguished SIU alumni: Bill Luan (SIUE, class of 1984 & 1985), a senior program manager at Google; Terita M. Walker (SIU Carbondale class of 2001), principal of Denver East High School and 2025 Colorado High
School Principal of the Year; and Dr. Kevin M. Simon (SIU School of Medicine, Class of 2015), chief behavioral health officer for the City of Boston and assistant professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Each guest shares how their student experiences at SIU shaped their careers, offering meaningful advice to this year’s graduating class.
SIU Chancellor Austin Lane(University Communications & Marketing / SIU)Even though the summer semester at SIU-Carbondale is about to get underway, leaders at SIU-Carbondale may have one eye focused on the beginning of the fall semester and hoping for a third straight enrollment increase. They are also navigating some of the new unknowns with international students in terms of potential visa issues and federal policy changes.
WSIU's Brad Palmer talked about that and more with Chancellor Austin Lane.
(sarahlouisephotography / iStock / Getty Images Plus)An initiative is getting underway to increase access to fresh produce in southern Illinois.
Meridian Health Plan of Illinois, Incorporated is partnering with farmers markets in communities with high food insecurity across southern Illinois throughout 2025.
Through this initiative, Meridian will offer vouchers individuals can use to purchase healthy food at farmers markets along with health education materials. Meridian members who present their member ID card will receive $15 in vouchers for use during market visits throughout the 2025 season. Non-Meridian members visiting the Meridian booth will receive $10 in vouchers to encourage healthy eating, while voucher supplies last.
In addition, the participating farmers markets will double the value of SNAP/Link purchases under the Link Match program.
The initiative starts this Saturday at the Farmers Market in Carbondale. It will continue through September at Farmers Markets in Marion, Murphysboro and Anna as well.
Here is the complete schedule in southern Illinois:
The farmers markets participating in this program include:
- May 17, 2025 – Farmers Market of Carbondale
- June 24, 2025 – Food Works Mobile Market – Murphysboro
- June 25, 2025 – Food Works Mobile Market – Marion
- June 26, 2025 – Food Works Mobile Market – Anna-Jonesboro
- July 31, 2025 – East St. Louis F.R.E.S.H. Farmers Market
- August 16, 2025 – Farmers Market of Carbondale
- August 28, 2025 – East St. Louis F.R.E.S.H. Farmers Market
- September 3, 2025 – Food Works Mobile Market – Marion
- September 18, 2025 – Food Works Mobile Market – Anna-Jonesboro
- September 23, 2025 – Food Works Mobile Market – Murphysboro
(Michael Wilson/Unsplash)If your property needs some tree trimming and/or tree removal this spring, it’s probably best to hire a professional.
WSIU's Brad Palmer spoke about tips for hiring an arborist or tree service company with Better Business Bureau Regional Director Sydney Waters.
(Provided by Mike Baltz / Mike Baltz)Ornithologist and ecologist Mike Baltz is back with his monthly reflections on the natural history of southern Illinois for the May edition of Nature Notebook.
(Illinois Arts Council Agency / arts.illinois.gov)Arts leaders from across Illinois gathered in Springfield last week to lay the groundwork for future legislation and expanded state support.
One of those on hand advocating for the arts was Luke O’Neill, founder of Union Streets Arts and Vice President of the Marion Cultural and Civic Center Foundation.
WSIU's Brad Palmer spoke with him about the experience.
Left to right: SIU-Carbondale Chancellor Austin Lane, new Saluki men's basketball coach Scott Nagy and Director of Athletics Tim Leonard during Nagy's introduction event at Banterra Center on March 29, 2024.(SIU Athletics)A web article talks about a plan in the works for the Missouri Valley Football Conference, of which SIU is a member, and the Summit League, to form a partnership for football.
The Summit League does not play football, but does house four MVFC members in North Dakota State, North Dakota, South Dakota State and South Dakota.
WSIU's Brad Palmer spoke about what this partnership could mean with SIU Director of Athletics Tim Leonard.
(Alexander Grey / Unsplash)April is National Financial Literacy Month.
Illinois State Treasurer Michael Frerichs is working to raise awareness about his office’s financial literacy resources and investment programs.
WSIU's Brad Palmer spoke with him about his office’s goal of helping people make more money.
(Mika Baumeister / Unsplash)A professor at SIU-Carbondale, who is an expert on the supply chain, says while President Trump’s broad-based tariffs on imports to the U.S. have clearly had an unsettling effect on global stock markets, it could also create some underlying effects on supply chain management.
WSIU's Brad Palmer talked with SIU-Carbondale assistant professor of operations management and supply chain expert Greg DeYong.
(Provided by Mike Baltz / Mike Baltz)Ornithologist and ecologist Mike Baltz is back with his monthly reflections on the natural history of Southern Illinois.
SIU Chancellor Austin Lane(University Communications & Marketing / SIU)There are lots of potential changes in higher education at the state and federal levels.
WSIU's Brad Palmer spoke about that and more with SIU-Carbondale Chancellor Austin Lane.
(Provided by Mike Baltz / Mike Baltz)Ornithologist and ecologist Mike Baltz is back with his monthly essay on the natural history of southern Illinois.
(Provided by Mike Baltz / Mike Baltz)Southern Illinois ornithologist and ecologist Mike Baltz has his take on the natural history of the region for the February edition of Nature Notebook.
(Provided by Mike Baltz / Mike Baltz)Southern Illinois ornithologist and ecologist Mike Baltz starts the new year off with his monthly commentary on the natural history of southern Illinois.
(Illinois Secretary of State)Last week we introduced you to one of the ten finalist designs for a new Illinois state flag.
Today, we hear from another finalist. This design features a monarch butterfly, which happens to be Illinois’ state insect, encircled by 21 stars, since Illinois was the 21st state to join the union.
Two students at Fairfield High School created the design. WSIU's Brad Palmer spoke with the two students, Spresalynn Tipps and Johna Kinney, and their Social Studies teacher Hayden McDuffee, about their design.
You can view all ten finalists by clicking here.
(Better Business Bureau)As the year winds down, the Better Business Bureau is out with its naughty list of the top 12 holiday scams.
WSIU's Brad Palmer spoke about them with BBB regional director Sydney Waters.
(BBB)It’s the busiest delivery season of the year, and unfortunately, that means scammers will be busy, too.
Home delivery is the most popular delivery method for people who plan to shop online for the holidays this year – and with delivery comes the risk of scams and package theft.
WSIU's Brad Palmer talked about this issue with Better Business Bureau regional director Sydney Waters.
(Provided by Mike Baltz / Mike Baltz)Southern Illinois ornithologist and ecologist Mike Baltz is back with his monthly commentary on the natural history of southern Illinois.
One of the many participants in SIU’s annual 9/11 Saluki Stair Climb at the Banterra Center shows support for veterans.(Deangelo Handley)On this Veteran’s Day, we learn more about the work a Southern Illinois University Carbondale faculty member is doing to recruit rural veterans for a study about adjusting to civilian life.
WSIU's Brad Palmer spoke about the project with Justin McDaniel, an associate professor of public health in the School of Human Sciences.
(Provided by Mike Baltz / Mike Baltz)Southern Illinois ornithologist and ecologist Mike Baltz is back with his monthly commentary on the natural history of southern Illinois.
(Provided by Mike Baltz / Mike Baltz)Southern Illinois ornithologist and ecologist Mike Baltz returns to WSIU with his monthly commentaries on the natural history of southern Illinois.
(Brad Palmer)Gus Walz is the son of Governor Tim Walz, the democrat’s vice-presidential candidate.
Gus’ emotional appearance at the Democratic National Convention has brought his experiences with Nonverbal Learning Disorder – or NVLD -- into the public eye, sparking significant conversation on social media.
At Brehm Preparatory School in Carbondale, Deb Browne, their Speech and Language Pathologist, is an NVLD Specialist. She has been at the forefront of supporting students with the disorder.
WSIU's Brad Palmer sat down with her to learn more about NVLD.
This is an example of how folks with NVLD think LOTS OF WORDS. They need to learn how to organize thoughts, their writing, into chunks of main ideas versus details.(Deb Browne from Brehm)
(SIU Foundation / SIU)WSIU's Brad Palmer talked about moving the Day of Giving to the fall with Matt Kupec, the Vice Chancellor for Development and Alumni Relations & CEO of the SIU Foundation.
(Sen. Dale Fowler)The economically depressed community of Cairo is in desperate need of new housing, especially since the closing of two large housing units a few years ago that displaced hundreds of people.
Now, a company is preparing to construct and donate a 3-D printed duplex in Cairo. The venture will kickoff with a groundbreaking ceremony and block party on Saturday.
WSIU's Brad Palmer spoke about this unique housing project with State Senator Dale Fowler, who helped make it happen.
(Better Business Bureau)Another summer break is winding down for students in the region. That means parents and guardians are about to head out for back-to-school shopping.
WSIU's Brad Palmer spoke with Better Business Bureau regional director Sydney Waters about how parents and guardians can find great deals when shopping for back to school supplies without falling for too-good-to-be-true prices from untrustworthy sellers.
(SIU-Carbondale)The Fall Semester at SIU-Carbondale starts on August 19.
WSIU's Brad Palmer caught up with SIU-Carbondale Chancellor Austin Lane last week. Chancellor Lane updated the SIU Board of Trustees earlier this month on the enrollment picture for the campus, which he said includes a 14% increase currently in new students. He starts out talking about the 3.4% increase in summer enrollment.
(Survivor Empowerment Center)The Survivor Empowerment Center in Carbondale welcomes a number of displaced children as a result of domestic violence. These children often come in with little to no belongings with their parents, including school supplies.
That’s why there hosting a Back to School Bash in August to give away backpacks filled with basic supplies to these students in need.
WSIU's Brad Palmer spoke about this issue with Mercedes Rutledge, the development specialist with the Survivor Empowerment Center.
Deanna Price celebrates realizing her third Olympic Dream(Deanna Price)Former Saluki women’s hammer thrower Deanna Price will compete in her third Olympic Games this summer in Paris.
WSIU's Brad Palmer visits with her about the unusual U.S. Olympic Trials, what it took to get back on the world stage following a major injury, her preparations for the Olympics and more.
Deanna has also established a GoFundMe page to help fund her parents' trip to the games.
SIU Chancellor Austin Lane(University Communications & Marketing / SIU)WSIU Radio's Brad Palmer caught up with Chancellor Austin Lane late last week.
They talked about the recent Saluki Takeover in California as well as the report of a tentative deal on a new collective bargaining agreement with the SIU-Carbondale Faculty Association.
The two also talked about a Lifetime Achievement Award Lane received from the Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity as well as a potential change in date for the SIU Day of Giving.
They start with Chancellor Lane's thoughts on the Takeover on the west coast during the week of June 17.
(Kenny Eliason / Unsplash)June is Alzheimer’s Awareness Month, a good time for older adults and their loved ones to take extra precautions against scams and fraud.
WSIU's Brad Palmer spoke with the Better Business Bureau regional director Sydney Waters about why older adults, especially those living with Alzheimer’s and dementia, can be more susceptible to scams.
(Christin Hume/Unsplash
)If you are applying for jobs online, do your research before accepting an interview or employment offer. Job scammers have gotten very sophisticated.
WSIU's Brad Palmer spoke with the Better Business Bureau’s regional director Sydney Waters about how the scams work.
16-year-old Lauren Ecker from Makanda and her four-year-old dog Scout are getting ready to travel to Belgium to represent the USA as members of the American Kennel Club’s Junior Agility Team.
WSIU's Brad Palmer caught up with them at their home course in southern Illinois to learn more about their story.
The Eckers have established a PayPal account to help them raise funds at ScoutandLauren.
SIU-Carbondale associate professor of public health in the School of Human Sciences Justin McDaniel(SIU-Carbondale)A Southern Illinois University Carbondale researcher is leading an effort to change policy and remove barriers to treatment for what are called the invisible wounds of war.
WSIU's Brad Palmer spoke about this with researcher Justin McDaniel, who is an associate professor of public health in the School of Human Sciences.
(Dayempur Herbals)Dayempur Herbals annual Herbal Medicine Workshop is coming up June 22 at the Dayempur Farm on Nubbin Ridge Road north of Anna.
WSIU's Brad Palmer spoke with General Manager Terry Hickey about this year’s event.
An associate professor of microbiology at SIU-Carbondale is one of 31 researchers named to the 2024 List of Researchers to Know in Illinois.
WSIU's Brad Palmer visits with Scott Hamilton-Brehm about this recognition and the projects he and his crew are working on.
(BBB)In the first two months of this year, the Better Business Bureau reports people in Illinois and Missouri received nearly 236 million robocalls.
WSIU's Brad Palmer spoke with the BBB’s regional director Sydney Waters about how to reduce these calls; which ones are legal and how artificial intelligence is making robocalls more convincing.
SIU Chancellor Austin Lane(University Communications & Marketing / SIU)The Saluki Takeover of Southern Illinois concluded Saturday night with an event at Walker’s Bluff.
WSIU's Brad Palmer spoke last week with SIU-Carbondale Chancellor Austin Lane about how the multi-day tour went as he and his staff visited more than 20 schools in 17 counties across the region.
(Oasis Outdoors)The Marion City Council and the Williamson County Board jointly approved a $30 million proposal for the Oasis Sports Complex in Marion.
WSIU's Brad Palmer talked about the massive project with Rodney Cabaness, a managing partner with Oasis Outdoors.
(Sam Clarke/Unsplash)Spring weather might inspire you to get started on home improvement projects.
Hiring the right contractor is one of the most important things you can do to make sure your project goes smoothly.
I spoke with the Better Business Bureau’s regional director Sydney Waters about how to find a contractor you can trust.
For more information, click here.
(Katie Carl - Hunger Sale organizer)The 49th annual “Hunger Sale” is coming up April 26 and 27 in Carbondale. WSIU's Brad Palmer visited with one of the organizers of this year’s sale, Katie Carl.
(Survivor Empowerment Center)WSIU's Brad Palmer talks with Lakota Myers, a Rape Prevention Educator with the
Survivor Empowerment Center in southern Illinois, about Sexual Assault Awareness Month.
A woman reacts to totality during the solar eclipse at Saluki Stadium on April 8, 2024.(Ethan Holder )WSIU's Brad Palmer visited with Blair Allen, a producer at NASA EDGE, and Franklin Fitzgerald, a producer and videographer for NASA EDGE, to hear their thoughts on the total solar eclipse at Saluki Stadium on April 8.
A view of Saluki Stadium during totality on April 8, 2024.(Ethan Holder )WSIU's Brad Palmer recaps a remarkable day on the SIU-Carbondale campus.
Two members of the SIU Marching Salukis check out the eclipse.(Ethan Holder ) A view of the sun funnel from a telescope on the roof of Saluki Stadium.(Ethan Holder ) A science balloon released by students at Iowa State University soars above Saluki Stadium.(WSIU ) SIU student Will Sutton helping kids learn about sound and light waves inside Banterra Center during the Crossroads Astronomy Science and Technology Expo.(Brad Palmer)
Close up of a young girl smokes a disposable electronic cigarette. Bright yellow background. Alternative to regular cigarettes and vape(brillianata - stock.adobe.com / 422944137)While e-cigarette use has declined since 2019, it remains a serious public health problem for teens.
Southern Seven Health Department is increasing its Catch My Breath vaping prevention education program for that age group.
WSIU's Brad Palmer spoke with Southern Seven health educator Sydney Shelton about the program and more.
For more information, you can visit the Illinois Tobacco Quitline, Southern Seven Health Department, or call 866-QUIT-YES or (618) 634-2297.
The Tiny Desk Crashers crew featuring left to right: director Rob Rindfuss, audio coordinator Mike Arthur, co-producers Maxwell Senteny and Nathan Columbo(Brad Palmer)NPR listeners are most likely aware of the Tiny Desk Concert series, a national video music competition.
Four men in southern Illinois took it upon themselves to create a production called Tiny Desk Crashers to highlight the talented musicians in the region and to get at least 100 entries for the contest.
WSIU's Brad Palmer talked about the project with director Rob Rindfuss, audio coordinator Mike Arthur, co-producers Maxwell Senteny and Nathan Columbo.
To watch the videos produced during Tiny Desk Crashers, click here.
(SIU-Carbondale)Representatives from multiple state agencies provided updates Friday, March 8 on their preparations for the April 8 total solar eclipse in southern Illinois.
One of them, Illinois Department of Transportation District 9 bureau chief for operations Robert Graeff, discussed IDOT’s issues during the 2017 eclipse and what the traveling public can do to minimize problems this time around, especially after the eclipse as people head home.
WSIU's Brad Palmer (right) and Blair Allen from NASA EDGE (left) sitting in front of microphones in the WSIU studio discussing the upcoming total solar eclipse experience in Carbondale.(NASA EDGE)Representatives from NASA EDGE were in Carbondale last week to scout locations at Saluki Stadium as they prepare to manage the telescope streams and imagery coming in from their sites throughout North America on eclipse day.
During his visit, WSIU's Brad palmer talked with NASA EDGE producer Blair Allen.
Golden Apple Foundation President Alan Mather speaking into a microphone during a visit to WSIU on February 26, 2024.(Brad Palmer)Golden Apple is an organization that works to prepare, support and mentor aspiring teachers.
WSIU's Brad Palmer spoke with Golden Apple Foundation President Alan Mather during his recent visit to southern Illinois.
(Jud Mackrill/Unsplash
)Multiple revenue streams
They are crucial for any small business's long-term success.
WSIU'S Brad Palmer talked with Better Business Bureau Regional Director Sydney Waters about how in the current economic environment, many business owners are looking hard at their revenue sources and finding ways to improve their bottom line and their business' overall sustainability.
(Kelly Sikkema / unsplash.com)When you think of a broken heart, you may picture a cartoon drawing with a jagged line through it. But a real-life broken heart can lead to cardiac issues. Depression, mental health and heart disease have established ties. Read on for more information about how an extremely stressful event can have an impact on your heart.
Allison Campos, DNP with SIH Prairie Heart Institute answers questions about the condition. Learn how it affects the heart, the signs, the symptoms and the treatments for Broken Heart Syndrome by clicking the "Listen" button above.
SIU Law School Dean Camille Davidson speaks at the podium during the announcement of the $10 million donation on Feb. 5 from John and Jayne Simmons.(SIU Law School)The largest gift in the history of Southern Illinois University Carbondale will lead to plenty of enhancements at the SIU School of Law.
The University reports a $10 million gift from John and Jayne Simmons will impact generations of SIU-Carbondale law students and strengthen the law school’s ability to serve its students and the region.
After the news conference Monday announcing the record-making donation, WSIU's Brad Palmer spoke with the Dean of the SIU School of Law, Camille Davidson, about the importance of a major investment like this and how this money can be utilized.
In honor of the generosity of John and Jayne Simmons, the law school will be named Simmons Law School, pending approval from the SIU Board of Trustees in April.
The Simmons’ legacy at SIU, which includes a $10.2 million commitment to the Simmons Cancer Institute at the SIU School of Medicine in Springfield. Their most recent contribution comes as a major step in the ongoing $500 million Imagine SIU 2030 fundraising campaign.
John Simmons has served two stints on the SIU Board of Trustees, the first from 2004 to 2015, and he was appointed again in 2019 by Gov. J.B. Pritzker. He has previously functioned as the board’s secretary and chairman. He earned his law degree from Southern Methodist University and previously served in the U.S. Army as a combat engineer.
In 1999, John founded Simmons Hanly Conroy, one of the nation’s largest plaintiff’s law firms.
(Better Business Bureau)As we approach Valentine’s Day, the Better Business Bureau is out with a scam alert involving romance.
WSIU's Brad Palmer talked with the BBB’s regional director Sydney Waters about how if someone offers you money for nothing, there’s probably a catch and scammers are actually out to trick you out of money.
(Unseen Histories/Unsplash)The Southern Illinois Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Celebration is right around the corner.
WSIU's Brad Palmer talked about the event with Carbondale Mayor and Southern Illinois MLK Event Committee member Carolin Harvey.
The Southern Illinois MLK Community Celebration is Sunday, January 14 starting at 2 p.m. at the Carbondale Civic Center. It’s free and open to the public, pre-registration is not required.
Non-profits wanting to set up a display can learn more by calling Carolin Harvey at 618-303-1973 or by going to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Annual Community Celebration Facebook page. The deadline is January 8.
(Southern Illinois University / Provided)Recently, the leaders of Harvard, M.I.T. and the Univ. of Pennsylvania came under fire after they appeared to evade questions about whether students should be disciplined if they call for the genocide of Jews during a hearing of the House Committee on Education.
WSIU’s Brad Palmer spoke with SIU System President Dan Mahony about that and much more.
(Jason Hawke/Unsplash)If you haven’t started already, now is the perfect time to prepare your home and car for winter weather.
WSIU's Brad Palmer spoke with Sydney Waters, the regional director of the Better Business Bureau, about what to do to get ready for harsher weather.
JFK expert: John Shaw, director, Paul Simon Public Policy Institute, has written two books on John F. Kennedy, and is an expert commentator for an upcoming documentary on Kennedy that premieres on The History Channel, just days ahead of the 60th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination.(SIU-Carbondale)As we approach the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, WSIU's Brad Palmer sat down with JFK expert and director of SIU-Carbondale’s Paul Simon Public Policy Institute John Shaw.
The interview starts with Shaw’s involvement as an expert commentator in a new documentary entitled “Kennedy,” which premieres November 18 on The History Channel. The eight one-hour episodes will air in primetime from November 18-20.
(Better Business Bureau)On October 7, Hamas militants from Gaza launched a surprise attack against towns in Israel.
In response, Israel declared war on Hamas and sent airstrikes into Gaza on October 8. Thousands of people have been killed, wounded, or displaced in Israel and Gaza.
WSIU's Brad Palmer spoke with Sydney Waters of the Better Business Bureau about how to donate wisely to relief efforts.
(Southern Illinois University / Provided)Two SIU-Carbondale alumni, Roger Tedrick and his wife Sally, made a historic six-million-dollar donation to their alma mater last week. Mr. Tedrick is a member of the Board of Trustees and the SIU Foundation Board of Directors.
In honor of their donation, a planned new building on campus will be named the Tedrick Welcome Center.
I spoke last Friday with SIU System President Dan Mahony about what the new welcome center will include.
(Capitol News Illinois / https://capitolnewsillinois.com)The supply of education professionals continues to improve in Illinois despite strains brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, but persistent issues remain in certain regions of the state and within some teaching fields.
That’s the conclusion of a new report by the education advocacy group Advance Illinois, which was instrumental in the 2017 passage of the state’s Evidence-Based Funding formula that overhauled the way state funds public education.
Cheri Bustos(SIU-Carbondale (provided))Former Illinois U.S. Representative Cheri Bustos visited the SIU-Carbondale campus this week as the guest for the Morton-Kenney Public Affairs Lecture.
WSIU's Brad Palmer sat down with her to talk about the state of politics in America right now, but they started discussing her ties to SIU.
Harris Prairie, Green Earth, Inc( Mike Baltz)Ornithologist Mike Baltz continues his look at the many natural resources across our region. This month, his audio essay looks at the history of Green Earth Inc.
Colby Chapman(SIU Black Resource Center)Current SIU-Carbondale students are always looking for advice and often times they look to the past for inspiration.
SIU recently hosted alumnus Colby Chapman to talk with students and community members about her life on campus and beyond.
The current alderperson in Harvey said her path has been filled with obstacles, but the role models she met at SIU have helped her along the way.
(SIU SBDC)Entrepreneurs in the area are being called to embark on a journey of innovation and growth through the Southern Illinois 2023 Business Plan Competition.
WSIU's Brad Palmer spoke with Melissa Ray Roach – Director of the Illinois Small Business Development Center at SIU Carbondale -- about the upcoming competition.
Competitors are required to attend and complete three mandatory workshops (in Carbondale, Marion, Mt. Vernon, or Red Bud) held during the following weeks:
• The Business Plan - Week of September 18th.
• The Business Financials - Week of October 2nd.
• The Pitch - Week of October 16th.
• Local Competitions - Week of October 30th.
• Regional Competition - Week of November 13th.
• Award Ceremony - November 30th.
Applicants must meet the following criteria to participate:
• Be a start-up or existing for-profit small business, focused on innovative ideas, products, or services. Pre-venture entrepreneurs may also enter.
• Submit new ideas or expansion opportunities that are not current business operations.
• Have a business located in one or more of the following Southern Illinois counties: Alexander, Franklin, Gallatin, Hamilton, Hardin, Jackson, Jefferson, Johnson, Massac, Perry, Pope, Pulaski, Randolph, Saline, Union, White, and Williamson.
• Not be a public governmental entity, nonprofit organization, public/private school, or university/college.
For more information, click here.
Sierra Hull(Sierra Hull (provided))The Clemens Fine Arts Center in Paducah welcomes singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Sierra Hull on September 8.
At just 31, Hull already has two decades of performing under her belt.
WSIU's Brad Palmer had a chance to talk with her ahead of her performance.
People struggling with debt or seeking to fix their credit score often turn to credit relief companies.
SIU President Mahony touches on new guidance from the U.S. Dept. of Education, the start of the fall semester and an increase in fundraising for Saluki Athletics.
The SIH Second Act series focused on the importance of calling 911 and personalized first aid kits.
Ornithologist Mike Baltz continues his exploration of the many natural resources across southern Illinois.
President Mahony talks about a Supreme Court ruling on race in admissions, a new strategic plan dashboard and his expectations for the upcoming academic year.
Dale Aschemann and Tim Keller, both SIU Law graduates, were a part of a team arguing a False Claims Act case
WSIU's Jennifer Fuller reports the afternoon news and weather for Wednesday, July 12, from Carbondale, IL
Shootings can prompt faculty and administration from neighboring schools to take proactive action - many times by learning from past incidents.
Ornithologist Mike Baltz talks about the importance and opportunity of Giant City State Park
WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with Carbondale Mayor Carolin Harvey and City Manager Gary Williams
Illinois leaders are working on changes to the way state money is distributed to colleges and universities. In this edition of InFocus, WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with SIU System President Dan Mahony about the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with Kyndra Minchew and Angie Bailey of Southern Illinois Healthcare about the Southern Illinois Tobacco Disparities Partnership
WSIU's Jennifer Fuller reports on a project advocates hope will connect southern Illinois with the Metro East more efficiently and safely
WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with Illinois Public Health Association Associate Executive Director Jeffery Erdman, and Jackson County Public Health Department Client Representative Tony Wyatt about a resurgence in the Mpox virus, and prevention measures - including a vaccine.
WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with University of Missouri researcher Dr. Tyler Myroniuk about his work comparing COVID-19 outcomes in Canadian provinces and U.S. States - which produced unexpected results.
WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with Gallatin County Tourism President Mark York about the upcoming exhibit and events from Illinois Humanities and the Smithsonian
WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with Carbondale Mayor Carolin Harvey about her expectations for the role.
WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with SIUC Chancellor Austin Lane about enrollment projections, recruitment, relationship building, and more.
Ornithologist Mike Baltz explores the nature and necessity of Trail of Tears State Forest in Southern Illinois
WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with Rainbow Cafe Executive Director Carrie Vine about Pride 2023, its importance, and a new organization aimed at helping LGBTQ people who are trying to relocate from other states.
Advocates march over the Centennial Bridge, which connects Illinois and Iowa in the Quad Cities, on May 13, 2023. They called for the Mississippi River to be granted legal rights. (Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco)The Mississippi River flowed lazily under the Centennial Bridge, which connects Illinois and Iowa in the Quad Cities. Cars cruised past on a Saturday afternoon in early May, waving and occasionally honking at a long line of environmentalists who say the river is alive.
Glenda Guster was among the roughly 80 people to join the Great Plains Action Society’s Walk for River Rights — the centerpiece of a three-day summit earlier this month for Black and Indigenous organizers from across the Mississippi River basin, who, among other things, want to grant the river legal standing.
Like many making the march across the river, Guster, who held a sign saying “water is life” over her head, said the river needs more protection.
“The river has rights, just like human rights,” said Guster. “Nature has rights, and it's up to us to preserve these rights.”
According to Sikowis Nobis, the founder of the Indigenous rights organization, the goal of the summit was to build a riverwide coalition to rethink the legal framework they believe imperils life on and in the Mississippi River. The way she sees it, the existing legal system cannot confront the types of environmental disasters that are increasingly imminent – but “Rights of Nature” might.
The idea is that natural entities like rivers, trees and wildlife have the same rights as humans and thus have legal standing in a court of law. Natural entities, the legal principle holds, constitute living beings with legally enforceable rights to exist that transcend the category of property.
“The earth is really suffering, and rights of nature would basically give personhood to the river,” said Nobis. “It would allow us to have more power to keep it safe.”
Advocates march over the Centennial Bridge, which connects Illinois and Iowa in the Quad Cities, on May 13, 2023. They called for the Mississippi River to be granted legal rights. (Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco)The legal movement to grant natural entities like forests and rivers the same legal rights as humans has won meaningful success abroad, and has in recent years picked up steam in the United States. Largely Indigenous-led campaigns to recognize the legal rights of natural entities like wild rice in Minnesota, salmon in Washington and the Klamath River in northern California are setting the stage for a nascent movement for the Mississippi River.
The implications of rights of nature as a legal instrument are far reaching. Companies could be taken to court for damaging ecosystems, and construction projects with the potential to cause environmental damage could be stopped.
That's exactly what happened in Tamaqua, a small town in Pennsylvania. Thomas Linzey is a senior attorney at the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights and drafted the document to grant the small borough rights.
“It may be a radical concept, or it was 20 years ago, but we're rapidly coming to a place where without this kind of new system of environmental law, we're all kind of done, we’re kind of cooked,” said Linzey.
Ultimately, locals were able to stop sewage sludge from being dumped in Tamaqua using the new ordinance.
Linzey said that before the rights of nature movement made its way into the mainstream, it was born from the cosmologies of Indigenous people that recognized the natural world as made up of living beings – not just resources or commodities.
Spring has brought high water levels to the Mississippi River at Guttenberg, Iowa, as seen here on May 25, 2023. If the river were granted legal rights, it could be defended in the court of law. (Drake White-Bergey, Wisconsin Watch)In 2008, Linzey consulted the Ecuadorian government while it drafted its new constitution, the first in the world to ratify the Rights of Nature. In 2021, an Ecuadorian municipality appealed to the constitutional protections to overturn mining permits that they said violated the rights of nature of the endangered Los Cedros rainforest.
“The work has spread to other countries, and in the U.S. to about over three dozen municipalities at this point,” said Linzey.
Ecuador remains the only country in the world to enshrine the rights of nature in its constitution. A similar proposal was considered in Chile last year, and the island nation of Aruba is currently reviewing its own amendment addressing the inherent rights of nature. Court decisions in countries like Bangladesh, Colombia and Uganda have successfully held up the rights of nature. Local laws and treaty agreements recognizing the rights of nature are emerging across the globe, particularly in the U.S.
Lance Foster, a member of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska and a speaker at the Mississippi River Summit, said that a couple years ago, the success of rights of nature in South America got his and other tribes thinking, why not us?
“And we wondered why haven't the big rivers, like the Missouri River, and the Mississippi River, gotten those rights?” said Foster.
He said his tribe and others have created an inter-tribal resolution for the rights of the Missouri River. They hope to use it to fight industrial scale agriculture and deep mining operations.
“If the Mississippi had those rights recognized … it would be able to have standing in court for an advocate on its behalf to help clean it up,” said Foster.
Advocates marched through downtown Rock Island on May 13, 2023, demanding the Mississippi River be granted legal rights.(Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco)Two years ago in Minnesota, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe brought a suit against the Enbridge corporation’s Line 3 on behalf of wild rice, called Manoomin. And last month, the city of Seattle settled a case with the Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe over the claim that salmon had the right to spawn, among other rights.
Because the Mississippi and Missouri rivers flow through so many states and tribal lands, experts said it would be prohibitively complicated to secure legal standing for them in the courts.
But Foster said if corporations get legal rights in the U.S., why shouldn’t rivers? After all, they were here far before humans.
States like Idaho, Florida and Ohio have moved to preemptively ban the possibility that nature or ecosystems can have legal standing. Even so, Foster said the rights of nature isn’t as unthinkable as it once was. After all, children, women, Black and Indigenous people were denied rights once too — what’s stopping the river.
“It gives us a chance,” said Foster. “Now, will we take that chance as a society? I'm dubious most days, but we have to keep trying, we have to keep going to the bitter end.”
This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and the Society of Environmental Journalists, funded by the Walton Family Foundation.
It's being distributed through Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest, which reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
Copyright 2023 KCUR 89.3. To see more, visit KCUR 89.3.
Dean Camille Davidson(SIU School of Law / https://law.siu.edu/_common/images/faculty/Dean_Davidson1.jpg)WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with SIU School of Law Dean Camille Davidson about the School's Diversity Prelaw Summer Institute, it's mission and accomplishments
Lee and Karen Brocklesby stand on their farm in Christian County, Illinois. Karen has become a vocal opponent of plans to inject CO2 from ethanol plants underground in Illinois.( provided by Karen Brocklesby)This story is a part of a Harvest Public Media series on CO2 pipelines. Read our first story here.
(Chandler Johnson / Harvest Public Media)Karen Brocklesby describes herself as a farm wife and a mother — but over the past several months, she’s also become somewhat of an activist.
Brocklesby lives in Christian County, Illinois. She’s one of many rural landowners there fighting to keep a company called Navigator Ventures LLC from injecting carbon dioxide beneath her farmland.
“This potential for damaging the water for the future – to me, it just is foolishness. Especially in areas that are good farming areas,” Brockelsby said.
Brockelsby has a list of concerns about carbon sequestration. But chief among them is the worry that sequestered carbon could contaminate the area’s water supply.
“It would be a danger to both our agriculture production and, even more importantly, to the drinking water for everybody who lives in this area,” she said.
Brocklesby isn’t alone. Christian County is awash in signs and billboards urging residents to protect the aquifer from pipeline projects.
The Navigator pipeline that Brockelsby and her neighbors oppose would carry CO2 from ethanol plants through five states, including Iowa and Nebraska, to two injection sites in central Illinois. The CO2 would then be pumped 6,000 feet underground into “pore space” — tiny areas in the subsurface that are unoccupied by solid material.
And Navigator’s pipeline isn’t the only project being proposed in the Midwest. Wolf Carbon Solutions also plans to sink CO2 underground in Illinois, while Summit Carbon Solutions proposes capturing CO2 from ethanol plants in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska and South Dakota and injecting it underground in North Dakota.
Landowners like Brockelsby have been organizing for months to stop companies from acquiring the land rights they need to store carbon.
“I would like to slow them down to the point where they give up on Illinois entirely,” Brockelsby said.
Signs dot the landscape in Christian County, Illinois, opposing a plan to pipe and sequester carbon dioxide underground. Three companies want to capture CO2 from ethanol plants throughout the Midwest and store it underneath Illinois and North Dakota.(Sarah Nardi / Harvest Public Media)Why Illinois?The companies are targeting the state because of a 60,000-square-mile basin known as the Mount Simon Sandstone that geologists like Sallie Greenberg say is ideal for carbon storage.
“In geologic storage you look for something that is a container and something that is a seal,” explained Greenberg, who is a principal research scientist with the Illinois Geological Survey.
The bottom of the Illinois basin is lined with layers of rock that Greenberg compares it to a seven-layer salad. The bottom layer is composed of highly permeable sandstone and eventually capped by an impermeable layer of shale.
It’s the particular configuration of those different types of rocks that make Illinois “highly suitable” for the geologic storage of carbon dioxide, Greenberg said.
This kind of project isn’t new.
The Mount Simon Sandstone is already storing over a million metric tons of CO2 captured from the Archer Daniels Midland ethanol plant as part of a test project led by Greenburg called the Illinois Basin-Decatur Project.
The project was designed to test carbon capture and storage technology, or CCS, at a commercial scale. And it’s an example that Navigator CO2 points to as evidence that carbon sequestration works.
“Demonstration projects like ADM have been able to prove points, over time, that this absolutely can be done successfully and safely,” said Navigator spokesperson Elizabeth Burns-Thompson.
But whereas ADM is storing around a million metric tons of carbon, Burns-Thompson has said that Navigator will capture 15-million metric tons each year.
And that makes landowners like Brockelsby nervous.
“I mean what they’re doing at ADM I think is, like, 3% of what they’re proposing to do here in my neighborhood,” she said.
‘We’ve been doing this for 100 years’Large scale sequestration projects have been done before. The problem, said John Harju of the Energy and Environmental Research Center at the University of North Dakota, is that there haven’t been that many.
“There's not a lot of on the ground projects. And, you know, where do you go look at a few projects to build confidence that this does work?” Harju said.
Harju points to the Dakota Gasification Company. For over 20 years the company has been sequestering millions of tons of CO2 in a geologic formation called the Williston Basin that underlies parts of the Dakotas, Montana and southern Saskatechewan.
That basin has the same kind of seven-layer salad structure as the Mount Simon Sandstone, which is why Summit Carbon Solutions is proposing a sequestration site just north of Bismarck, North Dakota.
But landowners there have questions, and many are concerned about a North Dakota law that could compel them to sell pore space beneath their land to pipeline companies.
State Sen. Jeff Magrum said landowners should have the right not to sell, especially as they grapple with worries over safety.
“There are concerns we have because this is all so new,” said Magrum, a Republican who represents part of rural Bismarck.
He introduced a bill in January that would require companies to get at least 85% of landowners to sign on voluntarily before others could be forced to do so through eminent domain.
The measure failed, leaving the law at the current rate of 60%.
While the proliferation of companies hoping to capture and store carbon underground may be new, Greenberg explained that the science behind sequestration isn’t.
“Storage of carbon dioxide is a relatively new application. It is not an untested set of technological advancements because we’ve been doing this (for) a hundred years.”
Greenberg said the technology is an amalgamation of existing methods based on 100 years of oil and gas production. The technology has long been used in the process of enhanced oil recovery — the process of injecting carbon dioxide recovered from oil and gas production into depleted reservoirs to extract more hydrocarbons.
But when it comes to public perspective, injecting carbon dioxide into an oil field is not the same thing as pumping it underneath Karen Brockelsby’s farmland. And that’s a bind Harju understands.
“The projects are not proliferous yet,” he said. “But those that have been conducted are reassuring.”
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
Copyright 2023 KCUR 89.3. To see more, visit KCUR 89.3.
(Steve Buhman/Steve Buhman, University Communi / Steve Buhman, University Communi)WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with Interim SIU Aviation Director Jose Ruiz about the shortage of pilots, and what can be done
Alana Nii (on left) with fellow first-year University of Chicago students Pavlik Braverman and Sofia Markarian near the entrance to the Hyde Park campus. Nii's father attended UChicago but she's opposed to allowing alumni status factor into admissions decisions. (Lisa Philip / WBEZ)Every fall, fewer than 1 in 10 applicants to the University of Chicago walk beneath a flock of gargoyles adorning a fortresslike stone gate onto the main quad as admitted students.
Years ago, Alana Nii’s father was one of them.
“He had a great time,” said Nii, who grew up in Virginia. “And he really believes in UChicago as an institution.”
So Nii applied too. When she did, she got to check a box indicating she was a family member of an alumnus and warranted special consideration.
It’s a box she says shouldn’t exist. But it does, on applications to hundreds of selective universities across the country. Locally, both the University of Chicago and Northwestern have held onto the practice, called legacy admissions — despite concerns over its impact on students from historically marginalized communities.
But the pressure on these schools to reconsider the practice is growing.
Over 100 selective institutions have ended their legacy admissions policies in recent years. And in June, the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on race-conscious admissions. The justices are expected to bar universities from considering race when selecting students. This is likely to prompt schools to consider ending other practices that favor white, wealthier students at the expense of historically disadvantaged ones.
“We’re not allowed to do that … but we’ll still consider where your mommy or daddy went to college? We’ll still give this birthright advantage to people?” said James Murphy, an advocate for more equitable admissions policies with the nonprofit Education Reform Now. “That just seems to me an impossible position for any ethical institution to hold.”
Top officials at both Northwestern and UChicago declined interview requests. Leaders at other selective universities have defended legacy admissions as a way to maintain and build community amongst graduates. But critics say giving preference to applicants who are related to alumni unfairly restricts access to highly selective universities that educate many of society’s most influential decision makers.
“The main argument I’ve heard for legacies is … kids who are legacies … are more suited for the university from just a values standpoint, or care more about the university … or are willing to put in more work,” said Nii, now a first-year student at UChicago. “But if that’s true, then that should show through your application, and the end result should be the same.”
Data reported by Northwestern and UChicago show the schools give as much consideration to legacy status as they do to race. Neither is weighed as heavily as academics or extracurriculars.
“It doesn’t come down to, ‘Are people who aren’t qualified getting in because of legacy?’ ” Murphy said. “It’s … ‘Is legacy a good way to break a tie? Is legacy a good way to decide between two incredibly qualified, super talented students?’ ”
Some university leaders might answer yes out of a desire to keep alumni close.
“There’s a reasonable desire to say, ‘Let’s create generations of students, and build families that are connected to the university,’ ” said Alex Seeskin, director of the To&Through Project, an education research group at UChicago. “And I think there’s an assumption that those types of connections yield or lead to donations.”
University presidents and trustees may also fear backlash from alumni who want to build their family’s connection to their alma mater — and who want their children to receive special consideration.
“They’re going to be taking phone calls,” Murphy said. “And at board meetings, people are going to be yelling at them about how you’ve ruined it for their children.”
Maintaining the status quoHistorians say legacy admissions policies began about 100 years ago. Jewish and immigrant students had started applying in larger numbers to Ivy League colleges. Leaders at those institutions wanted to keep their student bodies white and wealthy. Giving preference to applicants who were related to alumni did just that.
Some say it still does.
“By design, it’s meant to keep … students at an institution static,” Seeskin said. “Because it’s trying to draw explicit connections between generations of students that go back to times when there were more explicit policies, about … who could and couldn’t access selective colleges.
Universities are not required to report the number or demographics of legacy students they admit. (And UChicago and Northwestern don’t.) But data made public in a lawsuit against Harvard revealed the disparities the policy can perpetuate. Harvard’s most academically accomplished legacy applicants were more than twice as likely to get in than equally accomplished peers from low-income families.
“If we care about closing the racial wealth gap, then we have to look at who is admitted to our most selective higher education institutions,” Seeskin said. “Because getting access to those institutions … is the clearest pathway we have in our society to becoming wealthy.”
In recent years UChicago and Northwestern have publicized efforts to make their universities more inclusive and equitable, including the addition and expansion of need-based scholarship programs. But both schools have seen their share of Black students grow only minimally, according to federal data, to approximately 6%.
Seeskin doesn’t blame legacy admissions entirely. There are other preferences that also advantage white and wealthy students, including for athletes and for children of faculty. But, he said, it certainly doesn’t help. He questions why UChicago and Northwestern have held onto the policy while other selective universities have dropped it. Seeskin points to their endowments, which both exceed $10 billion and, he says, could likely withstand a dip in alumni contributions.
“The question … for both of these presidents is, ‘Do you want to lead or do you want to follow?’ ” he said.
If they truly want to make equity and inclusion a priority, Seeskin said, ending legacy admissions should be their first step.
Lawmakers are in the process of shaping one of the biggest legislative packages moving through Congress this year: the 2023 Farm Bill.
Few Americans are farmers, yet the bill still has a big impact on the rest of us.
“Anybody who eats or wears clothes that are generated from natural fibers, is actually touched by the farm bill,” said Amy Hagerman, an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University and a state extension specialist for agriculture and food policy.
Congress renews the farm bill about every five years to set the stage for our food and farming systems — including what crops farmers plant.
The bill controls how billions of taxpayer dollars are used to set up crop insurance, fund crop subsidies and agricultural research to assist food production, as well as invest in sustainable agricultural practices. It also maintains food assistance programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which supports nearly 42 million Americans.
(Xcaret Nuñez / The Congressional Budget Office’s February 2023 report: The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2023 to 2033.)The farm bill consists of about a dozen sections called titles, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates the 2023 Farm Bill will cost about $709 billion over the next five years — the most expensive on record. Much of that money is spent on four major titles: nutrition, crop insurance, commodities and conservation.
With the $31 trillion debt ceiling crisis looming over lawmakers, agriculture policy experts say the cost of programs will drive farm bill 2023 policy discussions.
“There will be intense conversations around those different priorities,” Hagerman said.
A divided Congress, with Republicans having a slim majority in the House and Democrats in the Senate, sets the stage for tough negotiations as the Sep. 30 deadline approaches, and the 2018 Farm Bill expires.
What is the Nutrition Title?The Nutrition Title is the biggest piece of the farm bill pie. It’s estimated to account for 85% of farm bill spending — up nearly 10% from the 2018 Farm Bill — to support low-income food assistance programs like SNAP.
“When you get 40-some million people in a program, it's going to spend a lot of money, and so that's just the reality of it,” said Jonathan Coppess, associate professor and director of the Gardner Agriculture Policy Program at the University of Illinois.
As lawmakers look at ways to scale back federal spending, Coppess said some are looking to trim from SNAP.
“If budget is driving our whole discussion, then we're looking around for big numbers to cut,” he said. “And this is a big number, so it gets the first focus on cutting.”
Coppess said the fight to slash SNAP isn’t new when it comes to farm bill negotiations. House Republicans introduced a bill earlier this year that would establish stricter eligibility requirements, including making more SNAP participants subject to work requirements. SNAP already has work requirements and limits food assistance to three months of every three years for able-bodied adults ages 18 to 49 without dependents.
“The work requirements discussion that we hear about is rooted in this kind of mindset … that somehow these [SNAP] policies are motivating people not to work,” he said.
While Republican lawmakers, such as Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D) argue "work is the best pathway out of poverty,” Democratic lawmakers are opposed to making cuts to SNAP benefits, saying it would hurt families that most need assistance.
Meanwhile, the current U.S. unemployment rate is at 3.4%, the lowest it’s been since 1969.
What is the Crop Insurance Title? The Crop Insurance Title is the second-most expensive piece of the farm bill and is estimated to account for 7% of the bill’s spending.
The title controls and funds an insurance program farmers and ranchers can purchase to protect against losing their crops to natural disasters like drought or damaging storms — but only a handful of crops are eligible for coverage.
More than 80% of all planted corn, soybean, wheat and cotton crops in the U.S. are covered by crop insurance policies on average, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, while very few fruit, vegetable and organic farms receive coverage.
Patrick Westhoff, the director of the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri, said the discussion to reform the crop insurance program and make it more accessible to smaller farmers has risen in previous farm bill cycles.
But Westhoff said it can be an expensive process, even for a special commodity.
“They're trying to find ways to make that a more affordable process to make it easier to get those programs established, even for some products that don't have as high of a value of production as some of the major crops,” he said.
While some farmers are content with the existing crop insurance program, Westhoff said others are pushing lawmakers to strengthen the program for farmers experiencing more and more crop losses due to climate change. In recent years farmers have received billions of dollars in crop insurance payouts due to extreme weather.
“We may well have a record level of indemnity payments for losses incurred because of crop problems in 2022,” Westhoff said. “But it's also because crop insurance is going to pay based on the value of the crops insured. So if prices are higher now than they were 10 or 20 years ago, that means the value of the crop’s insurance is higher.”
The Congressional Budget Office estimates crop insurance will cost over $48 billion over the next five years, which makes it another place lawmakers might look to cut spending on or use as a leveraging tool to get the changes they want in the title, Westhoff said.
What is the Commodities Title? The Commodities Title is the third major title in the farm bill and is estimated to cost $27.6 billion over the next five years for 4% of total farm bill spending.
It provides subsidy payments, money paid by the federal government, to farmers that grow certain commodities like corn, soybeans, wheat and cotton when the price of a commodity crop drops below a certain threshold.
It was a part of the original 1933 Farm Bill, a time when a quarter of the U.S. population was farmers, and the program was intended to secure the food supply by keeping farmers in business.
But it’s a policy some lawmakers and farmer advocacy groups argue only benefits large farms, Westhoff said. The Environmental Working Group, a progressive advocacy organization, recently called attention to nearly 20,000 farmers having received subsidies for 37 consecutive years.
“For the most part, the programs are set up to provide payments that are proportional to the value of production on a farm. So the larger the farm, the larger the payments,” Westhoff said.
Meanwhile, some farmers are pushing lawmakers to raise market prices as they haven’t kept up with inflation, and as a result, they have received little to no commodity payments, he said.
“We have relatively high prices for most agricultural products today,” Westhoff said. “Well above [market] prices. So under current policies, the commodity title will spend very little money in the current year.”
Crop insurance and commodity programs both indirectly impact consumer food costs as they go toward supporting the crops farmers grow and livestock ranchers raise, but Westhoff said, it’s not something that would impact grocery store prices overnight.
What is the Conservation Title? The Conservation Title is estimated to take up 3% of the 2023 farm bill spending, with a projected cost of $23.1 billion over the next five years.
It covers voluntary federal programs that encourage farmers to take on agricultural practices intended to conserve natural resources. Conservation programs aim to reduce soil erosion, protect drinking water, preserve wildlife habitat, and preserve and restore forests and wetlands.
Coppess, of the University of Illinois, said climate change will be at the center of lawmakers’ conversations surrounding the conservation title. The Inflation Reduction Act Congress passed last year invested $20 billion in conservation programs, specifically to invest in climate-smart practices over the next five years.
“This really historical investment from the Inflation Reduction Act around climate change is something we've not ever seen, to that degree, outside of the farm bill debate,” Coppess said.
Although the U.S. Department of Agriculture has already begun rolling out IRA funding, Hagerman, of Oklahoma State University, said it’s too early to tell how it will impact farm bill discussions.
“There's just so many different ways within and outside of the Conservation Title, that [investment in climate-smart practices] could come into or be done outside the farm bill,” Hagerman said. “I think this is a broader trend in moving in that direction, but with no one obvious path forward for accomplishing it.
What has happen for the Farm Bill to pass?Lawmakers in both the House and Senate need to agree on a new version of the farm bill and have the president sign off on it by Sept. 30, the expiration date of the 2018 Farm Bill.
If Congress doesn’t pass a new version in time, programs under each title are affected differently. Some programs have a permanent authorization, which means lawmakers can vote to extend them, which they've budgeted for. Other programs revert to rules from the original 1933 Farm Bill, while others just expire.
Historically, the farm bill has largely been a bipartisan effort, but with lawmakers focused on figuring out a debt ceiling plan, it could be difficult to get a bill passed in time this year.
“If they want to make any kind of big changes to that farm bill, you know, the pie is only a certain size,” Hagerman said. “So they're gonna have to make one piece smaller if they're going to make another piece larger, anywhere else.”
This story is part of Harvest Public Media's ongoing coverage of the 2023 Farm Bill.This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
Copyright 2023 KCUR 89.3. To see more, visit KCUR 89.3.
The Nutrition Title makes up the biggest portion of farm bill spending but serves the most people, more than 40 million people.(Elizabeth Rembert / Harvest Public Media) The Crop Insurance Title provides protection to farmers whose crops are impacted by natural disasters, such as drought — which affected this Kansas wheat field in 2022.(David Condos / High Plains Public Radio) The Commodities Title provides subsidy payments to farmers if the market falls below a certain threshold, for major crops like cotton, wheat, soybeans and corn, such as this field in southern Illinois.(Brian Munoz / St. Louis Public Radio)The Conservation Title encourages farmers to protect natural resources. Here a monarch rests on a blazing star which is a native wildflower and also a favorite for monarch butterflies. (Carlos Moreno / KCUR )
(Southern Illinois University / Provided)With sweeping changes taking effect for higher education in Florida, WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talked with Southern Illinois University System President Dan Mahony about his priorities for Anti-Racism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and more.
(New York Times)WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with Carl Hulse about the 2024 election and more
(Illinois State Board of Education)In the past decade, the number of Illinois high schoolers earning early college credit from Advanced Placement or Dual Credit courses has skyrocketed.
To earn college credit from an Advanced Placement or AP high school course -- students have to pass a test at the end of the year. In Illinois, scoring a 3 or higher on that test qualifies students for at least some college credit at public colleges and universities. If it’s a private school or out-of-state, it’s a bit more complicated.
But, in the past 10 years, Illinois has had the largest percent increase in the country in high school graduates scoring a 3 or higher on the AP test. Last year, over 36,000 Illinois high school grads did it.
Dr. Erica Thieman is the director of the standards and instruction department at the Illinois State Board of Education. Thieman says AP exams give those students a jump-start towards a college degree, but even more importantly, she says, it can save them a lot of money.
“If you look at the amount of money that is being saved by our Illinois families, "she said, "when they get a three or higher, they don't have to pay for that college credit -- it's in the $200 million range."
It does cost students money to take the exam. Tests cost nearly $100 a pop, with many students taking multiple exams. But in Illinois, low-income students only have to pay $7 per exam thanks to supplemental state funding.
That can be a big deal, with the typical cost of college tuition per credit hour anywhere from around $100 to $1,000 in some cases.
The state also supplies grants for schools to enhance or add more AP courses and train teachers. Joliet Township High School District has received that grant several times, including last year.
Dr. Karla Guseman is the superintendent of the Joliet Township High School District.
She says expanding AP access and offerings has been a big priority for the last decade. That work culminated with Joliet Township winning “AP district of the year” a few years ago.
“We were at 138 Students with three or higher on an exam. In 2017, we were at 645,” said Guseman. “Those numbers continue to increase through 2019. But then the pandemic, [there was a] slow dip, but now we're working our way back up.”
Along with expanding the total number of students taking AP courses, Guseman says they’re also trying to expand access to low-income students and students of color. The vast majority of Advanced Placement programs don’t mirror the school’s student demographics.
(Illinois State Board of Education)And Joliet Township is closer than many districts. They’re a majority Hispanic district and Hispanic students make up 60% of students taking one or more AP classes. But Black students aren’t equally represented yet.
That holds with state trends. Out of all Illinois students who scored a 3 or higher on AP exams last year, only 3.6% were Black. That number hasn’t changed since 2012. But the number of Hispanic students has increased significantly statewide, from 12% to over 20%.
Suneal Kolluri says it speaks to the importance of culturally-relevant curriculum. He’s an assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside. Kolluri’s researched AP courses and their impacts for years.
“If you have a curriculum that connects to students’ lives, to students’ communities," said Kolluri, "then I think you can, perhaps in a lot of respects, do a better job attracting more students."
He says, historically, the College Board, the nonprofit organization who crafts AP curriculum, hasn’t been great at connecting with Black students. There are current efforts, like a new AP African American Studies course. But even that has been criticized when the curriculum was changed after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis threatened to ban it. The College Board says the governor’s words had nothing to do with their curriculum decisions.
Kolluri says there are more existential questions about AP too. Is it a good idea to push as many kids as possible into AP classes if many don’t pass the test? There’s also a question about the test itself. Students have to pass a test at the end of the year to earn college credit.
Many colleges and universities stopped looking at standardized tests like the ACT for admission and scholarships because they argue it’s not a good barometer to measure learning. Kolluri says the College Board is actually introducing more project-based assessments and portfolios.
The College Board also has a new initiative to expand AP’s influence in schools even more, called “Pre-AP.” These are regular, grade-level courses meant to set students up for future AP classes. It kicks off next year, and Dr. Karla Guseman at Joliet Township says they are investing in it.
“All students," she said, "will either be in a pre-AP class or an AP class."
Pre-Ap does raise some initial concerns from Professor Kolluri.
“Okay, so is the College Board going to teach every class at every high school?" he asked. "How much curricular control are we trying to cede from our public-school professionals?"
But, he says, even though the current system is flawed, when you talk to students taking AP classes -- they really like them.
“It could be that they're good classes and the best teachers teach them, which I think we kind of have a sense of,” said Kolluri.
He says it’s important to cultivate a space where kids are excited about learning and challenging themselves. And, for those who pass the test, the opportunity to save a bunch of money on college credit can be too good to pass up.
Oliver Hernandez poses with a common milkweed plant in his front yard in 2020. A tiny, young monarch caterpillar and even tinier monarch eggs are visible on the underside of a leaf.(Ginger Werp)Oliver Hernandez’s front yard hums with plenty of bugs for the 12-year-old and his friends to find.
“It’s kind of fun just knowing that there are lots of caterpillars in the yard,” he said.
About a third of the yard looks like a teeny swath of prairie, with wild indigo, bee balm and, until recently, a key plant for monarch butterflies: common milkweed.
Last fall, the city of Overland Park, Kansas, told Oliver’s mother to rip the milkweed out of her pollinator garden.
That bummed Oliver because it’s a plant where brightly striped yellow, black and white caterpillars would appear each summer, grow fat on leaves and transform into the feather-light marvels of nature most famous for what they do next.
“They are pretty,” he said. “Also, whenever they become butterflies, they fly to Mexico. I think that’s pretty cool.”
Across the U.S., milkweed bans are disappearing. But this Kansas City suburb and plenty of other towns and cities across the Midwest continue to define it in their city codes as flora non-grata.
Sometimes city, county and state rules conflict, leaving homeowners to navigate mixed messages from local governments that can’t see eye-to-eye on whether to promote milkweed or kill it off.
City workers may not have much heart for enforcing these rules. The plight of the continent’s dwindling monarch population is, after all, well-known.
Ginger Werp, Oliver’s mother, got the impression that the city worker who showed up at her door in late September didn’t really like telling her to remove environmentally beneficial plants.
“Our world is becoming degraded and needs us to change,” Werp said.
In fact, Werp points out that Johnson County, where Overland Park is located, encourages homeowners to plant common milkweed and reimburses part of the cost for people who replace grass turf with native plants — including this one. The goal is to feed wildlife and fill the soil with deep roots that absorb stormwater and slow the pace of pollution washing into streams.
Werp knows about the program, because she works at a nonprofit organization that, among other things, helps the county run it.
And she knows about native plants, because wading into prairies to identify species and collect seeds for habitat restoration projects is her full-time job.
A clash of aesthetics
Oliver’s front-yard insectary likely came to the city’s attention because his mother and her neighbors have very different tastes in landscaping.
On a street lined with neatly trimmed bushes and traditional lawns, Werp’s little meadow is perhaps 12 feet by 7 feet. The tallest plants, native Maximilian sunflowers, tower above her head.
Instead of mulching the bed in the typical Suburban style (with cedar chips or other store-bought options), Werp lets fallen sycamore leaves mulch her plot.
Rather than chopping down plant stalks in the fall, she lets them stand, so her family can watch finches raid the garden for seeds all winter.
Werp knows this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.
“I’ve had some uncomfortable conversations with neighbors about it,” she said of her flower bed. “But it doesn’t bother me. … I think it’s pretty, I think it’s fun. My son and I have a good time out here.”
She supposes a neighbor became concerned that her naturalistic landscaping would hurt home resale values.
A monarch caterpillar and a milkweed beetle munch on common milkweed in Ginger Werp's garden in Overland Park last summer.(Ginger Werp)But when a city worker showed up to inspect her handiwork, he said most of the plants could stay. She only had to remove the contraband common milkweed, Asclepias syriaca.
Werp agreed and the matter ended there.
Had she refused, the city could have sent someone to remove the milkweed and charge her for the work.
Overland Park’s code allows it to prosecute violators, though it’s not clear that the city would actually pursue something so stringent against a butterfly enthusiast. The penalties include a fine of $50 to $500 and/or up to 10 days in jail.
City codes vs. conservation
Other cities in Kansas and nearby states frown on milkweed, too — usually common milkweed but sometimes its relatives, as well.
St. Louis, Lamar and Sunset Hills, Missouri, put landowners who tolerate milkweed on notice, as do Huron and Redfield, South Dakota, which define milkweeds as “dangerous and unhealthy.”
Winfield, Kansas, puts common milkweed on its list of “rank” plants that harbor rats and insects, pose fire risks or blight neighborhoods.
Sometimes, city codes hinge on context.
Prairie Village, Kansas, lists common milkweed as a no-no, followed immediately by this caveat: “Native plants contained in a native garden, such as common milkweed and other pollinators (sic), would be considered a cultivated garden and not classified as a rank weed.”
City bans on milkweed are on the way out, the National Wildlife Federation says, a fact that it welcomes.
“They have been historically very, very common,” said Mary Phillips, head of the group’s Garden for Wildlife program that aims to integrate habitat into cities and suburbs. “Particularly in the central United States.”
She traces that history to the region’s agriculture. Milkweed can sicken livestock when they eat enough of it. Animals tend to steer clear of the toxic plants, but accidental poisonings do happen, particularly if milkweed infiltrates a hayfield and gets cut, dried and served up to livestock mixed into their hay.
Cities that no longer worry about keeping cattle safe have nevertheless retained the historical opposition to milkweed.
“The real trend is that those bans are being reversed,” Phillips said. “There’s a lot of pushback to get those overturned.”
In 2017, Illinois passed two state laws. One forced cities and counties to drop milkweed bans. The other declared milkweed the state wildflower.
Illinois cities such as Ottawa still have bans on their books, but the state law trumps it.
Asclepias syriaca, or common milkweed, is the species that cities most commonly target.
This species spreads not just through its seeds, but also through underground runners.
It takes work to control it in a flower garden, which might explain city bans where they still exist.
Yet the same city codes usually allow aggressive, commercially profitable species that wreak environmental damage, such as the invasive ornamental pear trees that Johnson County Park and Recreation workers are racing to control.
Bug chow
The reality is, many cities may not have anyone on staff who knows when or why milkweed was banned.
An Overland Park spokesperson said the city considers common milkweed a noxious weed because the Kansas Department of Agriculture does.
But the state agency refuted that. It says all Kansas milkweeds are “native and beneficial.”
“As far as we know it has never been listed as a noxious weed and there is no indication that there is any interest in listing it as noxious,” a Department of Agriculture spokeswoman said by email. “While it’s not healthy for cattle to eat, they generally avoid it.”
Common milkweed was a key feature of Ginger Werp's front yard in past years. In September, Overland Park asked her to remove it.(Ginger Werp)The center of the country is a significant flyway for migrating monarchs. And on their way north from Mexico each spring, they lay eggs.
These famous travelers — by some counts, they were five times as numerous in the 1990s — can’t survive without milkweed.
A monarch butterfly can happily nectar on the blossoms of a wide variety of plant species, but its offspring eat just one thing: milkweed leaves. Without that, the females can’t produce descendants any more than humans can rear babies without breast milk or formula.
But milkweed has gotten harder to find.
“That entire (central) flyway was so heavy with milkweed many, many years ago,” Phillips said.
But today, as Monarch Watch at the University of Kansas notes, genetically modified corn and soybeans allow aggressive glyphosate herbicide (sold most commonly under the brand name Roundup) application that kills, among other things, milkweed. The plants have disappeared from tens of millions of acres of cropland.
Monarch Watch founder Chip Taylor and other researchers wrote in 2020 that restoring milkweed “is the conservation measure that will have the greatest impact” for helping the insects.
Monarch Watch distributes milkweed plants for habitat restoration, encourages the creation of pollinator gardens in cities and suburbs, and mails free plants to eager schools.
Common milkweed holds particular significance.
A 2018 study by researchers at Iowa State University and the USDA compared nine types of milkweed at 10 sites across Iowa from 2015 to 2017. They found Asclepias syriaca was one of two types where monarchs laid the most eggs.
Its decline makes some homeowners passionate about offering their yards as refuge by planting the long-maligned species, with its large leaves and spheres of pink blooms.
Mixed messages
As some governments see the plant in a new light, it can lead to conflicting messages, such as the discrepancy between Johnson County and Overland Park.
In 2014, Canada’s most populous province, Ontario, ended its battle against common milkweed. But as recently as last summer, a butterfly enthusiast there lost her milkweed-heavy pollinator garden to Toronto workers with weed wackers enforcing the city’s landscaping rules.
Lawrence, Kansas, lists common milkweed as a weed in its city code, but its parks and recreation department grows the plant in pollinator gardens.
“Our stance is that common milkweed in a properly maintained garden is perfectly acceptable,” a city spokeswoman said by email.
The city, which is part of a National Wildlife Federation pledge to support monarchs, says it can enforce its weed rule when properties aren’t properly tended.
But a citizen advisory board has asked the city commission to strike milkweed and other plants from Lawrence’s list of 56 weed species. It recommends using the state’s far shorter list.
“The list has kind of grown (over the decades) and nobody knows where a lot of this stuff came from,” said advisory board vice chairman Ben Sikes, a biologist. “Many of the species that are on there, we know are native species. Many of them are important for habitat or for food for native animals and insects.”
For example, the city weed list includes western ironweed and hoary vervain — popular food troughs for native bees and inchworms with the endearing habit of coating themselves in flower petals.
The Lawrence City Commission hasn’t acted on the recommendation.
This story was first produced by the Kansas News Service. This version is being distributed in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
Copyright 2023 KCUR 89.3. To see more, visit KCUR 89.3.
An ethanol plant is within sight of Jeff Reints' farm in Shell Rock, Iowa. Reints says the ethanol market is "fantastic" for his corn. But he's staunchly opposed to a proposed carbon pipeline that would cut through his farm that some ethanol proponents say are do or die for many ethanol plants. Supporting the ethanol industry but opposing the pipelines is a little bit of a tricky situation to navigate, Reints says. "It is a little awkward," he said, "but you have to stand for something we got to stand for our rights of property ownership."(Lucius Pham / IPR) This story is a part of a Harvest Public Media series on CO2 pipelines.
(Chandler Johnson / Harvest Public Media)Jeff Reints only has to look out across his field to see where most of his corn ends up.
“We're directly west of the Shell Rock POET ethanol plant approximately a short mile away,” he said while walking through corn stalks left from last year’s harvest.
Ethanol is a fantastic market for his corn, Reints said.
But when he found out the nearby ethanol plant would be a part of a proposed pipeline to carry away carbon dioxide, he was concerned. When he learned the pipeline would run underneath his northeast Iowa farm, he became staunchly opposed.
“This is some of the best farmland the good Lord has entrusted us with to be stewards of,” Reints said. “It's just a shame to think that just for private gain, that they're going to put that scar across our land.”
Three proposed pipeline projects would travel through Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska and South Dakota, taking CO2 from ethanol plants and sending it into Illinois and North Dakota where it would be stored underground. The Biden administration is offering big tax incentives to help the U.S. reach net zero by 2050, which some ethanol proponents say are critical for the industry.
Farmers across the Midwest are fighting the carbon dioxide pipelines — largely over property rights. At the same time, environmentalists are raising concerns over whether carbon capture is the best way to curb emissions, especially compared to other strategies in the energy and agricultural sectors.
Jeff Reints points to a map of three proposed pipelines. Navigator CO2 is proposing a pipeline that would travel under his farmland, something he adamantly opposes.(Lucius Pham / Iowa Public Radio)‘It’s life or death’Summit Carbon Solutions, Navigator CO2 and Wolf Carbon Solutions — the three companies proposing to capture CO2 from Midwest ethanol plants and pipe it underground — say the projects will lower ethanol’s carbon emissions and help the farming economy.
Monte Shaw, the executive director of the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association, said the state either needs to be friendly to carbon pipelines or risk devastation for its corn growers and ethanol plants.
“If Iowa screws this up, we’re in big trouble,” Shaw said. “We will absolutely lose a huge chunk of our industry and put the Iowa ag economy in a tailspin.”
Monte Shaw is the executive director of the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association. He says the ethanol industry is at a crossroads: "Are we going to move forward and be a part of low carbon transportation in the future and be successful? Or are we not?" Shaw says markets for ethanol are increasingly demanding fuel that has a lower carbon footprint. Carbon capture and storage pipelines, he says, will help ethanol plants get there.(Katie Peikes / Harvest Public Media)Carbon capture and clean fuel production tax credits are promised in the Inflation Reduction Act, a “game changer” for ethanol, Shaw said. It’s expected that ethanol plants that get those tax credits will be able to expand their production. But in order to qualify, the fuel that ethanol plants produce needs to meet certain emissions standards.
California and some other states have fuel standards that are pushing ethanol to lower its carbon emissions. With carbon pipelines, Shaw said, Iowa ethanol plants would survive a critical turning point in the industry’s history. Without pipelines, the state’s ethanol business could be doomed.
“It will create winners and losers,” Shaw said. “It will create plants that stay in business and plants that go out of business. So when we say that it’s life or death for many ethanol plants, that is an honest reality of where we’re at.”
A recent report, paid for by the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association, claims if Iowa ethanol plants are not able to participate in carbon capture pipeline projects but ethanol plants in neighboring states can, 75% of Iowa’s ethanol production would be lost to those states in the next five to 10 years, many ethanol plants would shut down, and Iowa’s ethanol industry would lose more than $10 billion a year without carbon capture in the state.
Ethanol is huge in Iowa.
The state is the largest corn producer in the nation and half of Iowa’s corn is used to make ethanol, mostly for gasoline fuel blends.
Yet Reints and many other farmers, as well as environmentalists, say they don’t buy the narrative that ethanol will shrivel up without carbon pipelines. Some point to better ways to sequester carbon or cut it altogether.
A solution to climate change?The proposals are creating unusual alliances between farmers, such as Reints, who are concerned about property rights and safety, and environmentalists who question whether sequestering CO2 from ethanol is the best way to cut emissions.
In February, farmers from across Iowa gathered at the Iowa State Capitol for a rally calling lawmakers to ban eminent domain, the power of the government to take private land for the carbon pipelines.
Jess Mazour, the conservation program coordinator for the Iowa chapter of the Sierra Club, helped organize the rally. She argues carbon pipelines are not a real solution to climate change.
“There are tried and true ways to solve our climate crisis that are better uses of our public tax dollars than this questionable technology that puts risky pipelines in our backyards, that destroys farmland,” Mazour said.
One way to combat climate change in the ag sector would be for farmers to focus on keeping carbon in the ground, Mazour said. That includes planting more cover crops that enhance soil health and store carbon in the soil.
Asked if carbon pipelines should be a part of efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions in general, Mazour said she doesn’t see it.
“I think rather than putting a Band-Aid on emissions, let’s stop burning them in the first place,” she said.
Ethanol plants across the Midwest, including the POET Bioprocessing plant in Shell Rock, Iowa, are participating in three proposed carbon pipeline projects that would capture their carbon dioxide emissions, pipe them to North Dakota and Illinois, and store them deep underground.(Lucius Pham / IPR)The three companies proposing pipelines through the Midwest argue capturing CO2 is important to getting the U.S. to net zero emissions.
Summit Carbon Solutions says its proposed 2,000-mile pipeline will be able to capture and store 12 million metric tons of CO2 each year from ethanol plants in Midwest states including Iowa, South Dakota and Minnesota — the equivalent, it says, to taking 2.6 million cars off the road every year.
Wolf Carbon Solutions, which also plans to transport 12 million metric tons of CO2 each year through a 280-mile pipeline running from Iowa to Illinois, says it will “[lower] the carbon intensity of ethanol, bolstering its position as a premier alternative fuel.”
Navigator CO2 is proposing a 1,300-mile pipeline network from South Dakota and Nebraska, through Iowa and into Illinois. Spokesperson Elizabeth Burns-Thompson said Navigator will capture 15 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year.
“We will not meet our goals if we don't institute a variety of tools and tactics, carbon capture being one of those,” Burns-Thompson said. “Is it the golden key? No. But when partnered alongside other developments, investments, tools, technologies, that is how we make true progress and we do so in a quantifiable fashion.”
University of Minnesota engineering professor Jason Hill studies the environmental impact of energy and food. He points out that ethanol’s emissions come from multiple sources—not just the production of ethanol. That includes growing corn, producing fertilizer to grow corn, transporting the fuel, distributing it and burning it.
So while the pipelines will mean some calculated reduction of CO2, Hill said it won’t make as big of a difference as advertised.
“When you zoom out and look at the broader implications of pumping that carbon dioxide underground, the picture doesn't look so rosy,” Hill said.
One of the biggest factors he said is that the pipelines perpetuate using liquid fuel for transportation in the long-term.
“When in fact, we know that vehicle electrification, using clean electricity sources or cleaner electricity sources can more quickly get us to our carbon reduction targets,” Hill said.
The Biden administration sees both electric vehicles and carbon capture as key to curbing emissions. The Inflation Reduction Act increased available tax credits, providing $85 per metric ton for CO2 captured and stored, up from the previous $50 offered.
Recently, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed new emissions standards with more stringent tailpipe emissions and estimates that by 2032, 67% of new car and light-duty truck sales will be electric.
The view through Iowa farm Jeff Reints land toward the Shell Rock POET Bioprocessing plant, as well as soybean processing facility to the right. Reints says no matter what happens with the pipelines and demand for ethanol, there will be a market for corn or other crops.(Lucius Pham / Iowa Public Radio)Pressure on the ethanol industry — both from lower emission standards and electric vehicles — don’t worry Jeff Reints.
He said even if the ethanol industry did contract somewhat, "We've worked through thousands of other storms in farming. We'd work through that one. Ingenuity will prevail.”
Reints points across the field to a new facility, which breaks soybeans down into soybean oil for renewable diesel.
“Which is a huge new demand coming,” Reints said. “We’ll adapt.”
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
(Chandler Johnson / Harvest Public Media) Copyright 2023 KCUR 89.3. To see more, visit KCUR 89.3.
(tsingha25 / Getty Images)WSIU's Ethan Holder reports on the challenges facing law enforcement and the public, as cyber scams and other online crimes continue to grow.
(SIU System / SIU System)Following their April Board of Trustees meeting, SIU President Dan Mahony, Board Chair Phil Gilbert, and SIUC Chancellor Austin Lane discussed their work on Anti-Racism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. WSIU's Jennifer Fuller has more.
Cache River Watershed(Provided / Mike Baltz)Ornithologist Mike Baltz explores the history and mission of the Cache River Watershed.
Rows of cannabis plants growing at Revolution Global's cannabis cultivation center in Delavan, Ill., in 2020. Retail-focused and medicinal health courses were the first subject matters to pop up in college classrooms but campuses are starting to offer more agriculture-centered programs as workforce demands increase.(Charles Rex Arbogast / Associated Press)It took Illinois’ new cannabis industry less than three years to become a billion dollar business.
When marijuana was legalized for recreational use in 2020, demand for the product and people qualified to work with it soared. As the industry continues growing, companies are looking to hire people who have some cannabis knowledge – and more of those businesses are even sponsoring college courses.
That workaround is crucial since marijuana is still federally illegal, and there’s a risk schools that receive government funding could lose it by working with the actual product on campus.
Spoon River College in Macomb launched its cannabis horticulture course in 2022 with help from Nature’s Grace and Wellness, a company based in nearby Vermont, Ill. Nature’s Grace approached Spoon River about starting a course and provided a $100,000 grant to help students offset the roughly $3,000 cost.
The company existed for years as a medical cannabis provider, but the size of the operation more than quadrupled when recreational cannabis became legal. Tim O’Hern, the company’s chief operating officer, said he knows students who enroll in the course will take it seriously, and that’s good for future hires.
“It demonstrates a lot to us that, hey, that person is specifically seeking out a job in cannabis and they have a degree of passion and interest in the field,” he said.
Ascend Wellness Holdings, a multi-state operator with a large grow facility in Barry, Ill., works with Western Illinois University in Macomb.
“You can be the Rockefeller of cannabis right now if you position yourself correctly,” said Shelby Hennings, an assistant professor of sustainable horticulture at Western, which recently launched a cannabis production minor.
“I think anybody that gets in and does that, especially with a degree that gives them a calling card to say, hey, I’ve got something more to offer than the standard person, that’s what this program gives them.”
People have a lot of class choices in the Western program. Horticulture 357, Cannabis Production, is one of three core classes students have to take. But they can also choose from electives such as hydroponic plant production and crop biotechnology.
The production minor also requires a three-hour practicum, where students volunteer at facilities like those at Ascend or Nature’s Grace. Hennings said the idea is to integrate students into an actual operation as they’re getting ready to graduate with the skills the cannabis industry wants.
“Here is one right now, trained, and you can cherry pick these people,” Hennings imagines telling potential employers.
Sam Piscitello of west suburban Bartlett hopes to be one of those people. The 24-year-old is one of Henning’s students and, like many, said he grew up hearing about the ills of marijuana without hearing of its potential benefits.
Once Piscitello saw the benefits, he knew he wanted to be part of the industry.
“I just hope people actually are in this industry for the plant as well,” he said. “It’s not just the money – people have to care about the quality of the plant instead of just pushing out product.”
Piscitello was considering well-known cannabis programs at colleges in Michigan and California but chose Western to stay closer to home.
Western also offers a cannabis and culture minor in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Students in the program have to take a class called the Anthropological Study of Cannabis, and can choose from electives such as Contemporary Moral Problems; From Magic Mushrooms to Big Pharma; and Religion, Magic and Shamanism. The program is also planning a study abroad trip to Amsterdam in 2025.
Dan Schmalshof of Macomb, a member of the Illinois Independent Craft Growers Association, has been working to open his own craft grow facility while continuing to work with educators at Western and Spoon River.
“I would like to train people in this industry, whether it be on the dispensary side, or the craft side or the grow side or horticulture side, because I do have access to people like Shelby Hennings,” he said.
Elsewhere in the state, Southern Illinois University has a Cannabis Science Center available to students in the intensive controlled-environment plant production program; the University of Illinois has a cannabis production and management certificate at its main campus in Urbana; City Colleges of Chicago offers a certificate in Applied Cannabis Studies; and Joliet Junior College just launched certificate programs to gain cannabis job skills.
Despite the delays and setbacks that have beset Illinois’ cannabis industry, it’s been booming.
The state reported more than $1 billion in revenue in 2022 and officials are confident those numbers will improve this year with more dispensaries slowly opening, along with smaller operations introducing small batch, possibly more expensive “craft” products into the market.
Cannabis sales dipped in January and February this year, but March revenue numbers from the Illinois Department of Professional and Financial Regulation show a slight rebound – even from out-of-state buyers, some of whom no longer need to cross the river from St. Louis to get to dispensaries in Sauget, Collinsville or Fairview Heights.
Man at a computer with code on it(Pexels / Pexels)As time passes, more aspects of our lives become dependent on technology. With this increased dependence also comes more opportunities for online dangers such as cyber scams. Even though the public is more intelligent about online risks, people are being affected more than ever before.
According to the FBI’s most recent internet crime report, there were more than 800,000 complaints filed in 2022. This may be fewer than 2021, but the losses exceeded $10 billion, an increase of $3 billion from the prior year. Special Agent Thomas, an FBI agent working with the Springfield division on criminal matters who withheld his first name for security reasons, says scams have always been around but their constant evolution is their biggest asset.
“So these scams have kind of evolved over time and as long as there have been criminals there have been scams. But the way technology has developed now has basically the efficiency for scammers to dupe victims. A lot of it is done over various means of communication,” Thomas said.
These forms of communication could include call, text, or email but Randy Mathis, the assistant to the chief of community information at the Carbondale Police Department, says the most common scam they see in their area happens over the phone.
“For the most part nowadays, it’s usually by telephone. We still do hear of occasions where somebody is contacted through the internet. We do sometimes have text messages that people respond to. Sometimes when they are online their computer gets overtaken because they have clicked accidentally or saw something that was a good opportunity and it turned out to be a scammer, well they will actually hijack your computer and force you to pay them in order to do that. But a lot of times we see things done by phone,” Mathis said.
As the forms of communication have evolved, Agent Thomas says these scammers have become far more efficient and skilled at what they do.
“I feel like with the onset of you know the advancements in technology, the fraudsters can reach multiple victims with one click now and fraudsters have become increasingly skilled at convincing victims they are a legitimate person or organization through these various forms of communication,” Thomas said.
While the formats scammers use have evolved over time, their tactics remain very similar. Mathis says most scams try to pressure people into making fast, rash decisions.
“They want you quickly, now, let's go before you have a chance to fully think things through and then to fully realize that oh, I should have known better. A lot of times that is what you get is the feeling of, ‘I should have known better’ but that is where that emotion comes in. Emotion helps us not to stop and think about things because we were afraid or we were excited and we are not always thinking,” Mathis said.
Carbondale police have had recent run-ins with scams of this nature. In March, multiple businesses received calls from someone claiming to be law enforcement and demanding they pay money or risk facing legal action. Mathis says that the police will never ask for money over the phone.
“Legitimate law enforcement agencies or government agencies from the IRS down to your local law enforcements will never ever ask you for money over the phone. The only difference with that would be if we ever had to call on behalf of somebody and they had bond money you would come to the police department. We never accept anything over the phone,” Mathis said.
Police demanding money over the phone is just one of the many warning signs that are present in scam attempts. Agent Thomas says the list of warning signs is extensive.
“So, quite often the scammers will operate overseas and English is not their first language. So, look out for grammar or spelling errors. Also, keep an eye out for social media profiles that look brand new with little content or few friends. Never click on a random message with a link in it or any unsolicited direct messages. You know, be wary of requests to send money online via gift cards, wire transfers, payment applications, or requests to invest in cryptocurrency. Also, keep an eye out for posts or ads promoting a deal that seems too good to be true,” Thomas said.
With so many of these warning signs out there, agent Thomas says the FBI’s main plan for combating scams is by educating people about them. Mathis says the Carbondale Police Department is using multiple methods to try to educate as many people as possible.
“We have Facebook. We also have the Next-door app that we are starting to post things on. So every once and a while we’ll put some things out as far as letting people know there are scammers going on or we will directly address it if like in the case of where we had our Facebook post where somebody tried to scam by going into the messaging. We also will be able to go out to businesses or organizations and talk to them about scam prevention,” Mathis said.
Mathis says the focus stays in education because oftentimes local departments don’t have the money or time - or sometimes the ability - to track down scammers.
“A lot of times it comes down to the ability to investigate. We at the Carbondale Police Department don’t have really great resources to take our investigation outside the city limits. If it’s something that we can’t call somebody and get that information from, usually something like that we would pass on to another entity that would be able to handle that,” Mathis said.
Some of these entities may be the attorney general's office, the secret service, or the FBI. With so many cases being sent to these organizations from across the country, many may be lost, which is why Mathis and Agent Thomas say education is the key to combating online scams. To learn more about how you could help protect yourself from potential scams, click here.
Julie West holds a poster of her son, Jake, inside the Indiana Statehouse on Wednesday, March 22, 2023. Jake died from an undetected heart condition, and collapsed while playing football at his school. (Elizabeth Gabriel / WFYI)Jake West grew up in La Porte, Indiana, not far from Lake Michigan. His mother, Julie West, said he was always friendly to others.
“He was just kind and he brought other people in,” West said. “He was a type of kid that if someone wasn't included, he was going to make sure that child was included. That’s just how he was, from the time he was little.”
As an athlete, he passed all of his physicals and he didn’t show signs of underlying heart problems. He was a healthy kid — until one day, he wasn’t.
When Jake was 17, he collapsed after running a play on the football field. School staff did CPR and student trainers jumped in to help out. But he died on the field in September 2013 from an undetected heart condition.
West wonders whether her son would still be alive if his school had a plan for the use of automated external defibrillators – more commonly known as AEDs – which send an electric shock to someone’s heart to help keep them alive.
Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear signed a bill into law in March requiring schools to keep portable AEDs in every middle and high school building and at school-sponsored events. At least eight other states, including Indiana, Missouri and Ohio, have introduced similar legislation mandating schools have emergency cardiac response plans, which may include access to AEDs and a plan to use them in response to incidents of sudden cardiac arrest.
West is advocating for Indiana’s AED bill, which would require all Indiana public, charter and private schools to make AEDs accessible at extracurricular activity practices and performances, including athletics, marching band and theater, since students have an increased risk of sudden cardiac arrest at these events.
“Every child should come home from school,” said West, the founder of the Play For Jake Foundation, which works to prevent sudden cardiac arrest deaths and provides heart screenings for youth. “They should not die at school. And so schools need to be prepared for that.”
But mandating these devices is a complicated decision.
A poster of Jake West leans against a wall at the Indiana Statehouse on Wednesday, March 22, 2023. His mother, Julie West, now advocates for automated external defibrillators in schools. (Elizabeth Gabriel / WFYI)A football player’s emergency sparks national conversation
West believes people are more aware of sudden cardiac arrest than ever before after millions of people saw the Buffalo Bill’s Damar Hamlin go into sudden cardiac arrest on live television earlier this year during an NFL game. Hamlin’s heartbeat was restored on the field using an AED.
But many school districts across the country are not privileged like Hamlin to have a team of medical professionals on the sidelines. Some don’t even have athletic trainers. And the longer someone takes to use life-saving devices, the greater the chance of them dying. A person’s chance of survival declines about 10 percent every minute defibrillation is delayed, according to the journal Sports Health.
Advocates for AED legislation say there is a way to help save these lives, at least while on school grounds — learning CPR, requiring an AED to be accessible during athletic practices and implementing an emergency cardiac response plan.
Getting more people trained in using AEDs is crucial, said Dr. Kristin Burns, a pediatric cardiologist with the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.
“One of the most effective ways to get at this problem is to train children, young adults, bystanders — anyone who is around to feel comfortable jumping in and doing something and doing it quickly,” Burns said.
The machine guides users step by step, and provides written instructions for those who are hard of hearing, and verbal commands in different languages. Some AED advocates have said it’s so easy to use, anyone who can understand directions can operate the machine, including a child.
Should a potential liability outweigh saving a life?
More than 20 states currently have laws providing guidance for keeping AEDs and/or response plans on school grounds, or mandate them. Those requirements vary by state.
The chances of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest for children are low. Estimates for the number of U.S. children who experience out-of-hospital cardiac arrest each year range from 7,000 to more than 20,000. But such incidents can be fatal when they occur, with research showing survival rates as low as 11 percent.
Defibrillators cost roughly $1,000 to $3,000, and some schools may need more than one. Plus they have to purchase cabinets to store the device, carrying cases and other supplies to operate them. Then schools, with budgets and staffing already stretched thin due to COVID-19 pandemic labor shortages, must designate someone to take responsibility for these devices.
But those aren’t the only reasons that keep school districts from implementing AED protocols. It’s also the liability.
“People ask me all the time, ‘Should we get AEDs if we don't have to,’” said Richard Lazar, president of readiness systems with the AED Law Center. “And I mean, at a binary level it is, in most places, less risky to not have AEDs than it is to have AEDs.”
An automated external defibrillator guides users step by step, and provides written instructions for those who are hard of hearing, and verbal commands in different languages. (Elizabeth Gabriel / WFYI)Recently, there have been multi-million lawsuits across the country after students died from cardiac arrest while on campus. In some cases, the facilities had AEDs, but failed to use them. And these scenarios could deter some school districts and lawmakers.
“What if they didn't have AEDs in the first place,” Lazar said. “Would they still be, you know, facing a lawsuit?”
A similar question was raised during an Indiana House Education Committee meeting in March. Chairman Rep. Bob Behning (R-Indianapolis) asked if a liability issue could be raised if a law is passed requiring schools to access an AED within three minutes, but someone is unable to do so within that time limit. The bill has since been amended to “establish a goal of responding within three minutes,” rather than requiring that specific response time.
That’s why AED advocates have been insistent that it’s not just about having the device on the premises. School districts would be required to have an emergency cardiac response plan so they know where a defibrillator is located and how to use it.
School districts across the country practice drills for fires, school shootings and inclement weather. Now advocates want the same preparation for sudden cardiac arrest and arrest deaths.
When Jake West died, there was an AED on campus. But it was in the coaches’ office and not easily accessible.
“I don't judge or blame anyone in Jake's situation, because we just didn't know any better,” West said. “But now we do.”
Indiana State Sen. Linda Rogers (R-Granger) introduced similar AED legislation last year, which passed unanimously out of the Senate Family and Children's committee, and the full Senate. But lawmakers ran out of time to hear the bill in the House education committee during the short session last spring. Now West is waiting to see if it will pass this year.
Julie West listens to Indiana lawmakers debate Senate Bill 369 during the Indiana House education committee on Wednesday, March 29, 2023.(Elizabeth Gabriel / WFYI)Initiating a cultural shift
In order to make a dent in the number of sudden cardiac arrests, advocates say there has to be a cultural shift around how communities respond to these events.
Although this legislation would require AEDs and emergency response plans in Indiana schools, it wouldn’t require them in other public places. Rogers said the devices are already in many other facilities, and the proposed bill is still a step in the right direction to prevent another young life from being taken from their family, friends and community.
For Martha Lopez-Anderson, preventing sudden cardiac arrest deaths has been her mission for roughly two decades.
“I was blindsided,” said Lopez-Anderson, advocacy director with Parent Heart Watch, a national organization that wants to end sudden cardiac arrest deaths in youth by 2030. “I thought I did everything right. My son had a well-child checkup 30 days before [he died]. And according to his pediatrician, everything was great. Well, clearly it wasn't.”
Lopez-Anderson’s 10-year-old son Sean died from sudden cardiac arrest in 2004 in Ocoee, Florida. She said there’s been an uptick in interest for AEDs and cardiac response plans since Hamlin went into cardiac arrest. But she’s noticed too many groups working in silos and not together.
Last week, The Smart Heart Sports Coalition was announced to provide $1 million for CPR education and AEDs. The new collaboration is between national athletic associations such as the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, NCAA, and national health organizations like the American Red Cross and the American Heart Association.
AED advocates like West want more education centers to become nationally recognized Project ADAM Heart Safe Schools — facilities that have implemented a sudden cardiac arrest plan, an AED, training, drills and an emergency response team.
Across the U.S., 4,129 schools were identified as “heart safe” e from 2004 through 2021, said Dr. Adam Kean, associate professor of clinical pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine.
More schools likely qualify for this designation, he said, but they are working with a different organization or none at all.
Since beginning the Indiana program in 2020, only five schools have received the heart safe designation, out of the state’s roughly 1,800 public schools.
For now, West wants lawmakers to approve the bill before more lives are lost on school grounds.
“Without a doubt, lives will be saved,” West said. “Jake would still be here – my son would be 26 today here on Earth, not in heaven.”
Contact WFYI education reporter Elizabeth Gabriel at egabriel@wfyi.org. Follow on Twitter: @_elizabethgabs.
This story comes from Side Effects Public Media — a health reporting collaboration based at WFYI in Indianapolis. We partner with NPR stations across the Midwest and surrounding areas, including Iowa Public Radio, WFPL in Kentucky, Ideastream Public Media in Ohio and KBIA and KCUR in Missouri.
Copyright 2023 Side Effects Public Media. To see more, visit Side Effects Public Media.
Amelia, a 5-year-old student at Oakville Elementary School, reacts while talking to a friend during lunch. This year officials at Mehlville School District outside St. Louis have noticed fewer kids are eating lunch, while meal debt is rising. (Brian Munoz / St. Louis Public Radio)Pat Broz has been serving meals to students in the Mehlville School District outside of St. Louis for almost 30 years. On a recent day at Oakville Elementary School, the bouncing kindergarteners sliding trays toward the register were all dressed up for school pictures. She complimented their outfits as she rang up their lunches.
Yet this year, Broz said fewer students have been coming through her line compared to when school meals were free for all students.
“There was a lot more kids,” she said. “Everybody wanted breakfast and lunch.”
Her observation bears out in national data. When the program was free last year, schools served more than 80 million more meals compared to the year before the pandemic.
Broz has noticed something else — when she rings up the kids she can see that they owe money for meals they haven’t paid for. In fact, students in her district have about four times more meal debt than they typically had before the pandemic.
These changes would be worrying in just one district, but they’re trends that are multiplying in school districts across the country.
This school year started with an abrupt switch from pandemic-era free meals to a paid system. As the months have gone by, school districts across the Midwest are reporting signs that families might be struggling to afford school meals.
Now lawmakers from the state level to the highest branches of the government are looking for ways to fix a growing problem. A handful of states have passed universal free meals for students and many more are considering similar legislation. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently proposed an expansion to a free meal program, to try to feed significantly more students at high-need schools.
A student at Oakville Elementary School eats his lunch. Preliminary data on the national lunch program shows schools served almost 130 million fewer free or reduced price meals in the fall of 2022 compared to the same time period right before the pandemic. (Brian Munoz / St. Louis Public Radio)Signs of a problem
Now that families have to pay for lunches again, and low-income families have to apply to qualify for free or reduced price meals, schools are seeing cracks in the system.
The Mehlville School District is back to serving about as many meals as it did before the pandemic, but the number of students who qualify for free and reduced price meals has dropped from 30% to 26%, said Katie Gegg, director of school food and nutrition services in the district.
“Which doesn't sound like a lot, but with a district of 10,000 students, that's 400 students that might need the support,” Gegg said.
Just like those small changes add up to a lot of kids in the Mehlville School District, changes all across the country are adding up too. Preliminary data on the national lunch program shows schools served almost 130 million fewer free or reduced price meals in the fall of 2022 compared to the same time period right before the pandemic.
This year school officials say meal debt is reaching levels they have never seen. A recent survey from the School Nutrition Association found school districts had more than $19 million in unpaid meal debt, with the Midwest and Great Plains reporting the highest rates of lunch debt.
In the Sioux City Community School District in Iowa, students currently have about $22,000 dollars in debt. Rich Luze runs nutrition for the district and said the government could have handled this change better.
“Giving it for two years, or whatever, and then abruptly stopping it, instead of phasing it down … that could have helped families prepare to readjust and rethink,” Luze said.
School nutrition professionals and experts say a few trends have led to fewer families qualifying for the subsidized or free meals. Many families didn’t know they needed to reapply after two years of automatic free meals. Gegg in St. Louis also said the application can be confusing, especially for the many families in her district whose first language is not English.
On top of that, a few years of rising wages could have pushed some families out of the program. To get free meals this year, a family of four has to make less than $36,000 dollars a year. Although the USDA adjusts that number for inflation, food and housing prices are increasing, said Crystal FitzSimons, a director for the Food Research and Action Center.
“Those place a tremendous amount of stress on a household food budget and household budgets overall,” FitzSimons said.
Policy solutions
Policymakers are looking at these changing numbers and searching for ways to get closer to the pandemic-era free meals.
California, Maine, Colorado, Minnesota and New Mexico have all passed legislation to make school meals free for all kids. Other states have passed temporary legislation and many more are considering similar policies.
The Biden administration is also looking for solutions. The USDA proposed a new rule to expand something called the Community Eligibility Provision. It allows schools and districts with a lot of high-need students to serve free meals to all of their kids. The USDA wants to lower the threshold of high-need students from 40% to 25%, allowing more schools to qualify for the program.
“We're providing greater flexibility, more participation in the program, resources that take a little of the pressure off,” said U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, while announcing the plan at a school in Greeley, Colorado.
Before the pandemic, about one in three school districts in the U.S. were already serving free meals to all students through community eligibility. FitzSimons says this proposal could bring even more in.
“This is a really wonderful thing, because it increases the number of schools that can opt to offer free meals to all their students,” FitzSimons said. “... but it doesn't actually increase the amount of federal funding that the school would receive. So we're still hoping that maybe Congress would put in additional funding.”
President Joe Biden requested $15 billion dollars over the next 10 years in his 2024 budget to fund expanded access to the Community Eligibility program. The administration says this would expand the program to an additional 9 million children.
Because states or schools currently have to fund these programs themselves, not all eligible districts choose to participate. In the U.S, about 75% of eligible schools chose to adopt the program last school year and some of the states with the lowest rates of adoption are in the Midwest.
Elston, a 6-year-old Oakville Elementary School student, looks toward a classmate during lunch. The USDA recently proposed lowering the threshold for districts to qualify for the Community Eligibility Program — allowing 25% of the student population to be high-need, down from the current 40% requirement.(Brian Munoz / St. Louis Public Radio)In Nebraska, about 12% of eligible schools took part in the program last year, the second-lowest rate in the U.S.
Nebraska’s legislature has multiple bills to try to implement universal free school meals. Like some other states that have sought to do this, the policies try to incentivize more school districts to sign up for the community program, to maximize the amount of federal funding schools receive.
State Sen. Eliot Bostar, a Democrat who represents part of Lincoln and sponsored one of the bills, said the biggest hurdle in his state will be the price. The state legislature’s fiscal analyst estimates the policy will cost more than $55 million in its first year.
“It's my responsibility to convince my colleagues in the state legislature that this is a worthwhile investment for Nebraska to make in its students and its families,” Bostar said.
Bostar said he thinks the free meals during the pandemic demonstrated the value of a program like this.
“It's difficult to have a family these days, it's expensive,” he said. “And so anything that we can do to make it a little bit easier to lighten the load or ease the burden is worthwhile.”
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues. Follow Harvest on Twitter: @HarvestPM.
Copyright 2023 KCUR 89.3. To see more, visit KCUR 89.3.
Amelia, a 5-year-old student at Oakville Elementary School, reacts while talking to a friend during lunch. This year officials at Mehlville School District outside St. Louis have noticed fewer kids are eating lunch, while meal debt is rising. (Brian Munoz / St. Louis Public Radio)Pat Broz has been serving meals to students in the Mehlville School District outside of St. Louis for almost 30 years. On a recent day at Oakville Elementary School, the bouncing kindergarteners sliding trays toward the register were all dressed up for school pictures. She complimented their outfits as she rang up their lunches.
Yet this year, Broz said fewer students have been coming through her line compared to when school meals were free for all students.
“There was a lot more kids,” she said. “Everybody wanted breakfast and lunch.”
Her observation bears out in national data. When the program was free last year, schools served more than 80 million more meals compared to the year before the pandemic.
Broz has noticed something else — when she rings up the kids she can see that they owe money for meals they haven’t paid for. In fact, students in her district have about four times more meal debt than they typically had before the pandemic.
These changes would be worrying in just one district, but they’re trends that are multiplying in school districts across the country.
This school year started with an abrupt switch from pandemic-era free meals to a paid system. As the months have gone by, school districts across the Midwest are reporting signs that families might be struggling to afford school meals.
Now lawmakers from the state level to the highest branches of the government are looking for ways to fix a growing problem. A handful of states have passed universal free meals for students and many more are considering similar legislation. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently proposed an expansion to a free meal program, to try to feed significantly more students at high-need schools.
A student at Oakville Elementary School eats his lunch. Preliminary data on the national lunch program shows schools served almost 130 million fewer free or reduced price meals in the fall of 2022 compared to the same time period right before the pandemic. (Brian Munoz / St. Louis Public Radio)Signs of a problem
Now that families have to pay for lunches again, and low-income families have to apply to qualify for free or reduced price meals, schools are seeing cracks in the system.
The Mehlville School District is back to serving about as many meals as it did before the pandemic, but the number of students who qualify for free and reduced price meals has dropped from 30% to 26%, said Katie Gegg, director of school food and nutrition services in the district.
“Which doesn't sound like a lot, but with a district of 10,000 students, that's 400 students that might need the support,” Gegg said.
Just like those small changes add up to a lot of kids in the Mehlville School District, changes all across the country are adding up too. Preliminary data on the national lunch program shows schools served almost 130 million fewer free or reduced price meals in the fall of 2022 compared to the same time period right before the pandemic.
This year school officials say meal debt is reaching levels they have never seen. A recent survey from the School Nutrition Association found school districts had more than $19 million in unpaid meal debt, with the Midwest and Great Plains reporting the highest rates of lunch debt.
In the Sioux City Community School District in Iowa, students currently have about $22,000 dollars in debt. Rich Luze runs nutrition for the district and said the government could have handled this change better.
“Giving it for two years, or whatever, and then abruptly stopping it, instead of phasing it down … that could have helped families prepare to readjust and rethink,” Luze said.
School nutrition professionals and experts say a few trends have led to fewer families qualifying for the subsidized or free meals. Many families didn’t know they needed to reapply after two years of automatic free meals. Gegg in St. Louis also said the application can be confusing, especially for the many families in her district whose first language is not English.
On top of that, a few years of rising wages could have pushed some families out of the program. To get free meals this year, a family of four has to make less than $36,000 dollars a year. Although the USDA adjusts that number for inflation, food and housing prices are increasing, said Crystal FitzSimons, a director for the Food Research and Action Center.
“Those place a tremendous amount of stress on a household food budget and household budgets overall,” FitzSimons said.
Policy solutions
Policymakers are looking at these changing numbers and searching for ways to get closer to the pandemic-era free meals.
California, Maine, Colorado, Minnesota and New Mexico have all passed legislation to make school meals free for all kids. Other states have passed temporary legislation and many more are considering similar policies.
The Biden administration is also looking for solutions. The USDA proposed a new rule to expand something called the Community Eligibility Provision. It allows schools and districts with a lot of high-need students to serve free meals to all of their kids. The USDA wants to lower the threshold of high-need students from 40% to 25%, allowing more schools to qualify for the program.
“We're providing greater flexibility, more participation in the program, resources that take a little of the pressure off,” said U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, while announcing the plan at a school in Greeley, Colorado.
Before the pandemic, about one in three school districts in the U.S. were already serving free meals to all students through community eligibility. FitzSimons says this proposal could bring even more in.
“This is a really wonderful thing, because it increases the number of schools that can opt to offer free meals to all their students,” FitzSimons said. “... but it doesn't actually increase the amount of federal funding that the school would receive. So we're still hoping that maybe Congress would put in additional funding.”
President Joe Biden requested $15 billion dollars over the next 10 years in his 2024 budget to fund expanded access to the Community Eligibility program. The administration says this would expand the program to an additional 9 million children.
Because states or schools currently have to fund these programs themselves, not all eligible districts choose to participate. In the U.S, about 75% of eligible schools chose to adopt the program last school year and some of the states with the lowest rates of adoption are in the Midwest.
Elston, a 6-year-old Oakville Elementary School student, looks toward a classmate during lunch. The USDA recently proposed lowering the threshold for districts to qualify for the Community Eligibility Program — allowing 25% of the student population to be high-need, down from the current 40% requirement.(Brian Munoz / St. Louis Public Radio)In Nebraska, about 12% of eligible schools took part in the program last year, the second-lowest rate in the U.S.
Nebraska’s legislature has multiple bills to try to implement universal free school meals. Like some other states that have sought to do this, the policies try to incentivize more school districts to sign up for the community program, to maximize the amount of federal funding schools receive.
State Sen. Eliot Bostar, a Democrat who represents part of Lincoln and sponsored one of the bills, said the biggest hurdle in his state will be the price. The state legislature’s fiscal analyst estimates the policy will cost more than $55 million in its first year.
“It's my responsibility to convince my colleagues in the state legislature that this is a worthwhile investment for Nebraska to make in its students and its families,” Bostar said.
Bostar said he thinks the free meals during the pandemic demonstrated the value of a program like this.
“It's difficult to have a family these days, it's expensive,” he said. “And so anything that we can do to make it a little bit easier to lighten the load or ease the burden is worthwhile.”
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues. Follow Harvest on Twitter: @HarvestPM.
Copyright 2023 KCUR 89.3. To see more, visit KCUR 89.3.
(City of Carbondale / explorecarbondale.com)WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with Carbondale City Manager Gary Williams
(Illinois Public Media / Provided)WSIU's Jennifer Fuller chats with the Host of "The 21st," Brian Mackey.
WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with SIU's Bob Baer and Eclipse Chaser Mike Kentrianakis about their experiences with the 2017 solar eclipse, and their expectations for 2024.
(Southern Illinois Irish Festival/Provided / https://scontent-ord5-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t45.1600-4/343238235_6313200902828_6346608346044555687_n.jpg?stp=c0.78.526.526a_cp0_dst-jpg_q75_spS444&_nc_cat=111&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=67cdda&_nc_ohc=L-tMQbQkIrEAX_aBTjh&_nc_ht=scontent-ord5-1.xx&oh=00_AfDjooPDGFXuNIBlU3mHSBq0S7-tN7YmVCabLqs2hXfrKg&oe=644EE5A2)The Southern Illinois Irish Festival is this Saturday, April 29th at Turley Park from 10am to 6pm. Leah Lerner spoke to Thomas Grant about the upcoming festivities and you can hear the conversation in the link above.
The family friendly event will offer live music all day, food and pints along with a special brew just for the festival. There will be contests for kids that will judge the most freckles or the most read-headed kid. Adults can enter the limerick contest, the hairiest legs or the contest for the best Irish costume. Take pictures with a giant leprechaun and hear bagpipes from different countries.
A special memorial tent will pay tribute to Bryan Kelso Crow, host of Celtic Connections. Hear music from Celtic Connections and remember Bryan's contribution to the SI Irish Festival, Celtic Music and more.
Find additional information about the Southern Illinois Irish Festival on their Facebook Page.
(SIU)WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with Paul Simon Public Policy Institute Director John Shaw about the new program for up-and-coming leaders
(Southern Illinois University / Provided)WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with Dan Mahony ahead of the SIU Board of Trustees meeting on the Carbondale campus
Author Treesong has penned a new book of poetry(Treesong / Provided)WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with Carbondale Author Treesong about his new book, "All The Climate Feels."
You can find more information at https://treesong.org/.
Volunteer pilots fly patients to get abortions and gender-affirming medical care from states with bans to nearby states where the services are available.(Rose Conlon / Kansas News Service)The pilot, clad in a blue windbreaker, recently pulled his single-engine, four-seater prop plane onto the tarmac of a small municipal airport.
The airport sits in a state where abortion is now banned in virtually all cases. But a short flight away in Kansas, abortion remains legal. That has launched a wave of travel from across the South and Midwest in pursuit of pills and procedures that used to be legal all across the U.S..
Michael is part of a growing group of pilots of small private planes who have begun ferrying people across state lines to get abortions and gender-affirming medical care, even if it means flouting local restrictions. They're volunteers with Elevated Access, an Illinois-based group that coordinates the flights. NPR agreed to use his first name only due to the potential for harassment and legal action.
The flights, which are free to passengers, spare people seeking this medical care from the delays and costs that go along with commercial flights or travel by bus or car. And it allows them to travel anonymously and leave no paper trail, by skipping security at commercial airports.
"There are tons of little airports like this dotted all over," Michael said. "I try to avoid the big airports. Usually, we fly into one that's closer to where they live."
The pilots donate their time and the use of their planes. Most also cover the cost of fuel, because private pilots can't legally be compensated for flying. (Elevated Access is trying to get an exemption that would allow the organization to reimburse fuel costs.)
Private flights spare people seeking stigmatized medical care from the costs, delays, and security checkpoints that go along with traditional travel.(Rose Conlon / Kansas News Service)Help during difficult momentsRecently, Michael took a woman back home to the Deep South after an appointment at a Kansas clinic. He loves to fly — he also does volunteer flights for an animal rescue group and he jumps at the chance to take his family and friends up in the sky. But an Elevated Access flight feels different, Michael said.
"It's maybe not the best time in a particular person's life, or they're going through a sensitive thing," he said. "So I treat that with a lot of reverence."
Only a handful of people in Michael's life know he's part of the budding network of people helping women get abortions that have suddenly become illegal in their home states. He says some members of his family and some of his pilot friends oppose abortion. That's, perhaps, not surprising — pilots tend to be more conservative than Americans generally. Fewer than 10% are women.
Soon after Roe v. Wade was overturned last summer and Elevated Access was launched, Michael posted a link to the organization in an online pilot forum. The blowback came immediately.
"It was obviously a polarizing thing to have shared," he said. "I'm glad I made quite a few pilots aware of it, even if it raised some ire." Still, the angry response has made him less likely to talk about his involvement with the group, he said.
For pilots like Michael, most of whom have day jobs, the flights offer a chance to keep their flying skills sharp while supporting a cause they believe in.
But for people trying to get to an abortion appointment several states away — maybe with just a few days' notice — the private flights can be life-changing.
They can turn a multi-day drive into just a couple of hours, or make flying much simpler by cutting out a trip to the nearest commercial airport which could be hours away.
And Elevated Access lets the passengers remain virtually anonymous. Pilots are only given the passenger's first name and weight (to avoid exceeding a small aircraft's weight limits).
"We don't check ID because that's not part of private aviation," said the founder of Elevated Access, who goes by Mike, and also asked that we not use his last name because he's concerned about possible legal risk or online harassment. "There's no ticketing or TSA or anything like that. If somebody feels like they need to use a fake first name, they can definitely do that."
Elevated Access pilots volunteer their time and the use of their planes to help people reach abortion appointments states away. The organization has vetted more than 200 pilots so far.(Rose Conlon / Kansas News Service)Skirting a gray area in state lawsPilots are instructed not to ask passengers why they're traveling. That relieves passengers of any pressure to explain or justify the services they're seeking, and also gives the pilots plausible deniability in the face of potential legal threats. Some states are considering prosecuting those who help people get abortions, and Texas has already made them liable to lawsuits.
No existing laws specifically target interstate travel, although Idaho could soon make it a crime to help a minor travel out of state for an abortion without parental consent. Still, legal experts say flying for Elevated Access could involve some legal risk.
"You could see an aggressive prosecutor trying to say, under the current laws, that, 'We are going to charge this pilot with being an accessory to murder or an accessory to abortion,' " said David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University. "We haven't seen prosecutors try that yet. But there's good reason to believe that's on the horizon."
Rachel Rebouché, dean of the Temple University Beasley School of Law, said there's also a possibility that federal officials could place restrictions on abortion-related travel in U.S. airspace.
"This current administration would not try to use federal aviation powers to penalize people who are flying rather than driving," she said. "But in years to come, depending on who's elected, an anti-abortion administration could try to do that."
Elevated Access has completed "dozens and dozens" of flights and is growing rapidly, Mike said. More than 200 pilots have been vetted and more than 1,000 have expressed interest.
"We don't share our full numbers because we don't want to become a target," Mike, the group's founder said.
The flights represent only a tiny part of the abortion-related travel that has accelerated since last summer, when some states began enforcing abortion bans.
However, it's a window into the increasingly unconventional tactics of the underground groups that are working to keep abortion accessible to people across the country.
Abortion rights organizations are striving to be nimble in the face of legal uncertainty, Rebouché said.
"The threat of passing a law can itself chill behavior — or incite people to organize in different ways," she said. "It's an interesting dynamic, how this push-pull of potential policy is shaping both care [and] advocacy strategies."
Elevated Access typically works with partner groups to coordinate flights, usually after other options have been exhausted — if a patient isn't old enough to rent a car, for example, or if their commercial flight was canceled.
There are no laws specifically targeting interstate abortion travel, but the pilots still assume some legal risk.(Rose Conlon / Kansas News Service)Escaping an abusive situation and seeking careMike says the idea for Elevated Access arose out of his experience volunteering with another organization, Midwest Access Coalition, which helps people coordinate and pay for abortion-related travel.
"I wanted to learn about abortion access because I thought pilots might be able to help," Mike said.
Alison Dreith, Midwest Action Coalition's director of strategic partnerships, said she's connected several clients with Elevated Access. Most have low incomes and some have never flown before.
The organization's first official passenger flew from Oklahoma to get an abortion in Kansas City, Kan., last summer.
"She was a bit nervous about flying," said Dreith. "But the pilot was able to walk out into the parking lot and walk her directly onto the airfield. It really feels like a V.I.P. experience."
Dreith said the flights prove particularly useful for people who don't have the documents needed to fly commercially. That group could include undocumented immigrants — or people escaping abuse, such as one of her recent clients, who contacted Midwest Access Coalition in December for help getting an abortion.
"She was in a domestic violence situation where her abusive partner had destroyed her ID and birth certificate," Dreith said.
Dreith initially traveled to North Carolina to help the woman get safely away from the abusive partner and to a nearby clinic that provides abortions. The woman thought she was around 16 weeks pregnant — so still legally eligible for an abortion under the state's 20-week limit — but wasn't certain because her partner hadn't allowed her to get an ultrasound or any prenatal care.
When she got to the clinic, the woman learned she was just past the state's limit. That's when Dreith contacted the staff at Elevated Access, who organized a flight to the St. Louis area, where the woman was originally from.
After crossing the Missouri state line into Illinois, the woman was able to get an abortion. She also sought help from a domestic violence group and is now living on her own.
"She had been suicidal because she thought she was never going to get out of her situation," Dreith said. "I don't even have the superlatives to describe how thankful she was."
Rose Conlon reports on health for KMUW and the Kansas News Service. She's on Twitter at @rosebconlon.
This story was produced by the Kansas News Service, a collaboration of KCUR, KMUW, Kansas Public Radio and High Plains Public Radio focused on health, the social determinants of health and their connection to public policy.
Copyright 2023 KMUW | NPR for Wichita
(SIU / Provided)WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with Director Angela Schultz about the SIU Sondheim Tribute Revue
(Mr Cup/Fabian Barral / unsplash.com)In Jackson County, Michael C. Batinski, author and professor emeritus of history at SIU Carbondale, will host three presentations that examine the forgotten history of Jackson County and Southern Illinois. Presentations are based on his book titled, “Forgetting and the Forgotten: A Thousand years of Contested Histories in the Heartland. The series will examine the role of “pastkeepers” and their roles as gatekeepers of local narratives. These pastkeepers highlight the history of Jackson County and Southern Illinois while hiding or marginalizing other narratives such as the treatment of Native Americans, African Americans and immigrants. All three presentations are free and open to the public.
At the Depot: Restoring Carbondale’s StoryWednesday, April 12 5-6:30 p.m.
Carbondale Public Library. Hosted in person and online. Online registration for this lecture is available at register.CarbondalePublicLibrary.org/Batinski
Jackson’s Civil War: Rediscovering Anew
Thursday, April 13 6-7:30 p.m.
The General John A Logan Museum in Murphysboro
Refreshments will be provided
Waiting for the Train: Carbondale’s Long Civil Rights Movement
Saturday, April 15 4-6 p.m.
Eurma Hayes Center in Carbondale
Refreshments will be provided.
For more information, visit www.SIQuaker.org or contact Tom Hensold at 618-525-4578 or tchensold@frontier.com.
SIUC Chancellor Austin Lane(Southern Illinois University / Provided)SIU Carbondale administrators have been working to answer questions about the university’s Distance Education funds over the last few weeks.
WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talked with Chancellor Austin Lane about it, to get some clarification.
(Mike Baltz / Provided)Ornithologist Mike Baltz examines the history and mission of southern Illinois' Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge
Students help run the Circle C Market in rural Cody, Nebraska, as part of classwork. As rural areas struggle to keep traditional grocery stores, some communities are finding other solutions.( Nebraska Public Media)For about five years, Emerson, Nebraska, had no grocery store, leaving residents to drive at least 20 miles for a full-service grocery.
Then last year the community came together to support a new co-op, and Post 60 Market moved into the old American Legion building.
Manager Brian Horak said the village of 824 people invested nearly $160,000 in the store.
“With being a co-op and so many people bought in – it's like you got multiple owners who have just as much commitment to see this thing succeed,” Horak said.
Investors receive discounts and dividends and elect a board of directors each year to oversee large financial decisions.
Yet in many small towns, a grocery store is a thing of the past.
According to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 76 counties nationwide are without a single grocery store, and 34 of those counties are in the Midwest and Great Plains.
Rural communities have been losing population for decades making it harder for businesses to stay afloat, said Rial Carver, program leader for the Rural Grocery Initiative at Kansas State University.
“So as small towns get smaller, that means fewer sales coming in the door for our grocery store,” Carver said.
Big box stores and grocery consolidation have added even more pressure on local grocers. A recent USDA report shows the percentage of grocery sales from the nation’s top 20 retailers more than doubled from 1990 to 2020, while the consolidation was more pronounced in rural areas.
The Rural Grocery Initiative was created in 2006 to help establish and sustain grocery stores in rural communities throughout Kansas.
Rial Carver is program leader for the Rural Grocery Initiative at Kansas State University. ( Rural Grocery Initiative)Carver said innovation can help keep stores in small towns.
“We've seen success with communities kind of becoming engaged through cooperatives, through public-private partnerships,” Carver said. “We've even seen nonprofits and school-run grocery stores, as well as municipally-run stores in communities.”
The Circle C Market is a good example.
It’s run by the Cody-Kilgore school district in Cody, Nebraska, a town of just 167.
“We are vital to the community,” said teacher and store manager Liz Ravenscroft. “The next closest grocery store is 40 miles to the east, and the other closest grocery store is an hour to the west.”
The store got started in 2008 with the help of several national organizations and a grant from the USDA. The Village of Cody owns the building, while the school district and a local non-profit, Cowboy Grit, helped finance the store.
Each semester about eight students help at the Circle C Market as part of a class, learning important skills from Ravenscroft.
“I teach them how to do the different orders, like pop orders and chip orders,” she said. “I also have students that I teach how to do billing.”
For small stores, meeting the needs of an individual community is critical to remain in business.
Laura and Don Palmer first started Prairie Market in Paullina, Iowa, eight years ago. Like many businesses in the town of 952, they struggled at first. Then they adjusted their hours, staying open on nights and weekends to cater to their customers, who often commute long distances.
Laura and Don Palmer opened Prairie Market eight years ago in Paullina, Iowa. Laura Palmer likes the look and feel of Trader Joe’s, a national grocery chain, and she tried to emulate their style. ( Prairie Market)“They appreciate the hours — that they can actually get here and on Sundays,” Palmer said. “They're like, ‘What did we do before you were open on Sundays?’”
Palmer said focusing on the fresh food helps them stand out from nearby discount stores. They also work to appeal to current tastes. Palmer painted the store’s facade teal as a nod to a well-known chain.
“My favorite store was Trader Joe's and that's kind of what we have tried to replicate the store after,” Palmer said. “People come in the store, especially young people, they want to come in and they want it to be vibrant and clean and organized.”
In Emerson, Post 60 Market manager Brian Horak said two things create success for rural grocers.
“Friendliness and cleanliness. That's the two key things,” Horak said. “I mean you get the Walmarts and Hyvees and stuff like that, but they're not gonna know you by name. We’re gonna know you by name. We're gonna know what you want.”
This story first appeared on Nebraska Public Media. This version was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues. Follow Harvest on Twitter: @HarvestPM
Copyright 2023 KCUR 89.3. To see more, visit KCUR 89.3.
Bob Odenkirk(Photo by Sharon Alagna)WSIU's Jennifer Fuller sits down with Bob Odenkirk to talk about how he got started
Obesity Spelled with Scrabble Pieces(Anna Tarazevich / Pexels.com)While the world has been chaotic over the last few years, many problems have been somewhat neglected, including the rising tide of childhood obesity.
Data shows childhood obesity has been steadily rising for years with many actions trying to combat this making very little change.
According to the CDC, the prevalence of obesity among children aged 2-19 was 19.7% from 2017-2020, affecting 14.7 million children.
These may be some of the recent numbers, but this issue has been growing for a long time.
Dr. Kurt Martin, a longtime family practice and internal medicine physician in Carbondale, says he has seen the increase of childhood obesity in his practice for decades.
“Over the last 20 to 30 years we’ve seen a larger number of children and adults who could be defined as obese and an even greater number in severe obesity,” Martin said.
Martin says the increase in obesity rates is complex, with multiple factors that need to be addressed.
“A combination of things. A decrease in physical activity may be linked to social media and increased screen time, an increase in empty calories that both kids and adults get in the form of drinks, simple carbohydrates from things like snack foods, and a decreased emphasis on physical activity in schools,” Martin said.
While some schools are cutting back on physical education, many changes have also been made to the food they can serve to try to mitigate the issue of childhood obesity.
During the Obama administration, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act brought a focus on healthier options such as roasted vegetables and organic offerings and earlier this year, new nutrition standards for schools were proposed to limit added sugars.
Dr. Lukasz Dabrowski, a pediatrician in Carbondale, says these changes are very good but it's challenging for schools to enact change.
“Schools are trying to accommodate certain guidelines. So, some of the things on there could always be potentially made a little healthier but it's always a struggle simply because of associated costs. How do you get the kids to eat it? I would definitely say the blame would not be on the schools,” Dabrowski said.
Dr. Martin agrees that these changes are needed but thinks more needs to be done outside the school.
He says, in many cases, there needs to be a whole house intervention.
“They did an interesting study where they took kids at risk for obesity and sent them to a physical therapist to teach them an exercise program and sent them to a dietitian to get good nutrition and it didn’t have much effect. They took the parents and did the same thing to the parents and that really did have a significant impact on kids.So, it is best if you do it as a whole house kind of intervention” Martin said.
Doctor Naeem Qureshi, a psychiatrist and medical director of behavioral health at St. Joseph Memorial Hospital, says a lack of knowledge from parents about health risks can lead their kids to develop long term unhealthy habits that are hard to break.
“A child with obesity does not sleep well. If they do not sleep well, then the next day they are more tired. They are stressed out, they will eat more. They will gain more weight and it’s a vicious cycle. It’s difficult to break unless we do an intervention in between,” Qureshi said.
Dabrowski says something as simple as juice would shock parents if they knew the amount of sugar inside it.
“So, if someone were to convey to families that hey, in that juice, there’s ten teaspoons of sugar. They would be like wow, maybe we don’t need ten t-spoons. Maybe one tea-spoon would be good enough. You know stuff like that, so, I am sure there are plenty of opportunities. The question ends up being, what is the best approach to that” Dabrowski said.
Family doctor Kurt Martin says these unhealthy habits can lead to health conditions that many kids and parents won’t believe they need to worry about from such a young age.
“An increased risk of depression, diabetes, high blood pressure, increased risk of stroke and cardiovascular disease are all present,” Martin said.
According to the CDC, other health risks are Gallbladder disease, sleep apnea, breathing problems, body pain, difficulty moving, and many forms of cancer.
Many of these issues are physical - but Qureshi, a Psychiatrist, says there are numerous mental health issues that can also arise from obesity.
“We are seeing patients who are dealing with obesity, obviously they are more socially isolated, they are having more stigma against them, and more discrimination. They are less active so they are less involved in social activities. We see kids complain of being bullied. Academic performance has declined. So, we have seen the effect of obesity on mental health and the effect of mental health on obesity,” Qureshi said.
With so many issues stemming from each other, Qureshi says this can be a complex issue to treat.
He says each person needs an individualized treatment plan.
“It will require a biopsychosocial model of treatment. It’s a family issue when we have an obesity challenge going on. We wanna make sure we provide the right education to the family members so they understand the effect of whatever is going on in their life on obesity and the effect of obesity on the person in their family,” Qureshi said.
To lower some of these risks, Dabrowski recommends getting kids used to healthy eating habits, such as drinking more water.
“So, the ultimate goal is not to allow our kids to be essentially drinking their calories. So, if we can focus on water, that is a great way to at least start them on the healthy path,” Dabrowski said.
Afroza Hasin, a nutrition professor at SIU, recommends kids have a diet that cuts out processed food with a lot of added salt, sugar, and fat and replace them with nutrient dense foods.
“They should be eating foods that are dense in nutrients. So we call those nutrient dense food choices like whole grain products, fruits and vegetables, and low fat or fat free dairy products,” Hasin said.
She says there have been many initiatives across the country to help educate parents on healthy lifestyles, such as the CDC's Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child initiative.
“Among many components of the WSCC model, there is physical activity, nutrition, health education, and counseling where they involve the community members, invite the parents and people from health services to address the issues of childhood obesity and the health of our children” Hasin said.
For more information about this program and others that are working to educate parents, click here.
(City of Carbondale / explorecarbondale.com)WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with Carbondale City Manager Gary Williams about the plans for next year's budget
(Getty Images/WSIU / Getty Images)WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with Regional Superintendents Lori LeQuatte and John Meixner about how their districts are dealing with the teacher shortage, and what can be done to close the gap
(SIU / Provided)WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with Author and SIU English Professor Rafael Frumkin about his new novel and its inspiration
State and federal lawmakers are concerned about foreign entities buying U.S. farmland. (Andrew Tade / Kansas News Service)A proposed corn mill processing plant was expected to be a big economic boon for Grand Forks, North Dakota, bringing hundreds of jobs.
Then the U.S. Air Force weighed in at the request of North Dakota’s two U.S. senators — finding the Chinese-owned project’s proximity to a military base made it a "significant threat to national security."
The city council voted the project down soon after.
U.S. Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-ND, said it was a clear decision to stop the project, given current U.S.–China relations.
“It’s quite coincidental that just within hours or days of the Air Force letter arriving, China had a spy balloon 55,000 feet above Montana,” Cramer said.
That spy balloon, the eventual rejection of the corn mill and a similar incident with a wind farm in Texas has put a spotlight on Chinese ownership of farmland. According to USDA data, foreign holdings of U.S. farmland increased by an average of 2.2 million acres a year from 2015 to 2021. The data also shows that China owns less than 1% of the foreign-owned land, while Canada, the largest investor, owns 31%. (Experts also caution there are issues with how that data is collected.)
Now federal lawmakers want to crack down and a flurry of bills has been introduced in state legislatures across the Midwest and the rest of the nation.
“I think (what happened in Grand Forks) was really an example to the rest of the country that, you know, be careful when it comes to dealing with investments from China,” Cramer said.
Federal actionSen. Cramer is co-sponsoring two federal bills, the Promoting Agriculture Safeguards and Security (PASS) Act and Foreign Adversary Risk Management (FARM) Act.
The former would blacklist China, Iran, North Korea and Russia from buying farmland, while both bills would place the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture onto the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, giving the USDA more input into potential land purchases.
Cramer said the legislation targets a big issue for both Republicans and Democrats.
“There's such an overwhelming concern about China's role in America and their intentions that we will get something passed in a strong bipartisan, bicameral way,” he said.
While the PASS Act and the FARM Act are the main bills to keep an eye on this year, other bills from the previous Congress might be reintroduced, according to Renee Johnson, an agriculture policy specialist at Congressional Research Service.
“There’s lots in the pipeline. It’s hard to keep up,” she said during a presentation at the USDA’s 2023 Agricultural Outlook Forum in February.
In January, lawmakers created a Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party that focuses on economic and security threats from China.
The House Agriculture Committee also turned its attention to getting more accurate data on how much U.S. land is foreign-owned. The committee requested that the U.S. Government Accountability Office do a study of the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act, also known as AFIDA, the law that requires foreign investors to report to the USDA and provides the data on foreign ownership.
“The data is incomplete,” Johnson said. “There’s limited ownership, transparency. A lot of the investors. They’re known identity havens, so we don’t really know what the true nationality is.”
State actionThere are 14 states, many of them in the Midwest, that already have laws on the books preventing or restricting such purchases. Still, more restrictions are making their way through state legislatures in more than half the states in the nation.
“There's so many proposals. It's insane,” said Micah Brown, a staff attorney at the National Agricultural Law Center, who has been keeping track of the laws and bills in each state.
Two Iowa House bills would ban Chinese ownership of property in the state. In Kansas, a Senate bill would prevent all foreign ownership of land, while another Senate bill and House bill would target “foreign adversaries.” Illinois has three similar bills in the House.
Brown said that foreign land ownership has come up time and time again since colonization. He’s pinpointed four waves of “political flashpoints” throughout U.S. history. Currently, he said, we’re seeing a fifth wave.
“Especially in 2023 with all these proposals, proponents of these bills, lawmakers that are proposing these bills are really saying the reason is national security,” said Brown.
Some states are even reversing course.
Just 10 years ago, Missouri moved to allow up to 1% foreign ownership of its farmland, just ahead of the Chinese company WH Group buying out Smithfield Foods, a large pork producer and food processing company with facilities in the state. (According to USDA data, the state is over that 1% threshold.)
Bill Eigel, a Missouri state senator, is sponsoring one of the 16 bills moving to restrict foreign ownership again. The Republican said food security is the main issue.
“I don't want China to own our ground,” he said. “I honestly don't want European countries to be able to buy our ground, because that's American ground that is feeding our population, and we need to maintain that sovereignty.”
Land AccessThe Missouri Rural Crisis Center has been working on the issue of foreign ownership of farmland for more than a decade and supports completely stopping all foreign purchases. Even before the Smithfield sale, corporate consolidation was pushing local farmers out, according to the center’s communications director, Tim Gibbons.
“We have a systemic problem right now,” he said. “And that problem is major parts of our food and livestock markets and industry are controlled by just a few multinational and increasingly foreign corporations.”
That means less revenue for smaller family-owned farms, which can eventually push them out of the industry, Gibbons said.
Yet efforts to limit foreign ownership are just a small piece of the puzzle in keeping land in the hands of U.S. farmers, according to Francine Miller, an attorney at Vermont Law and Graduate School.
“I wouldn't say that there is no issue with foreign ownership,” she said. “But the ways that it is being talked about are, in my opinion, very much for political purposes, and not really because there's all these national security issues that are coming up.”
She said the national attention on Chinese ownership of agricultural land is taking away from the fact that investors, including those in the U.S., are driving up farmland prices.
“The focus on this issue obscures the issues that many of us are trying to work on on improving land access for beginning (farmers) and people of color farmers and people who've been denied access to land in America,” she said.
In order to keep the number of U.S. farms from slipping further, Miller said she hopes Congress will provide more support for small farmers as the farm bill comes up for renewal this year.
Eva Tesfaye covers agriculture, food systems and rural issues for KCUR and Harvest Public Media and is a Report For America corps member.
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
Copyright 2023 KCUR 89.3. To see more, visit KCUR 89.3.
SIU's President testified before lawmakers this month, and talked with WSIU's Jennifer Fuller about funding needs and priorities
Pete Peterson(File)Popular actor and SIU-Carbondale graduate Bob Odenkirk is headed back to campus for a degree presentation and Q&A session at Shryock Auditorium.
Odenkirk’s latest TV series is entitled Lucky Hank, based on the book Straight Man by former SIU English professor Rick Russo.
WSIU’s Pete Peterson was chair of the English Department during Russo’s time in Carbondale and is quite familiar with Straight Man.
Brad Palmer talks with Pete about the book and what he’ll be tracking in the TV adaptation.
Series logo(WSIU / WSIU)WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with Heartland Library System's Leah Gregory, and Collinsville Middle School Librarian Michael Hayman.
You can hear more from Leah and Michael on WSIU InFocus - March 30 on WSIU TV, or anytime on our YouTube Channel.
(Better Business Bureau / Provided)WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with the Better Business Bureau's Whitney Quick.
You can find more information at BBB.org.
Natalie Phelps Finnie(ilga.gov / ilga.gov)Illinois Public Radio's Melba Lara of WBEZ talks with IDNR Director Natalie Phelps Finnie
SIU's SBDC Day is celebrating National SBDC Day on March 15 with an Open House for the region to learn more.
You can find out details at this link.
SIUC Chancellor Austin Lane(Southern Illinois University / Provided)College students are seeking more opportunities, services, and a sense of belonging. WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with SIUC Chancellor Austin Lane about how the university is adapting and evolving
(Mike Baltz / Provided)Mike Baltz provides his monthly commentary on environment and nature issues in southern Illinois and around the globe
Guilyana Gamero - former Rockford youth poet laureate( Frank and Harvey Film Production)In 2021, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health awarded $250 million in grants to fight COVID-19 and improve health literacy in some minority communities. Rockford was one of them. City organizations and another institution used this grant to increase health literacy.
Rockford Ready is an initiative that aims to improve health literacy in the community. It partnered with the University of Illinois in Chicago to help spread the message through poetry in English and Spanish. A six-part video series was created in partnership with Rockford Ready, the City of Rockford and the Rockford Area Arts Council. It was directed by Corbyn Tyson of Frank and Harvey Film Productions.
Guilyana Gamero is a former Rockford youth poet laureate. She wrote poems and performed for the series. Her goal is to help bridge communications across generations. In an interview that took place last year at the beginning of the initiative, Gamero said Rockford Ready was building the confidence of some of the city’s residents.
“It's an important message because sometimes you're scared to ask questions,” she explained, “but it can be really difficult to like, actually admit that you don't know something, or it can be a really difficult thing, and it's more common than you would expect.”
Gamero said she acted as a translator for her father.
Paula Allen-Meares is a professor of medicine at the University of Illinois in Chicago and Chancellor Emeritus of the university. She leads a program on health literacy. Allen-Meares says she loves poetry.
“But adding the poetry series with the youth voices, I think creates a lot of opportunity for the intergenerational transfer of knowledge and sharing of knowledge,” she said. “So, again, I just want to say it added huge value to the initiative.”
Anqunette Parham is the executive director of health and human services for the city of Rockford. She said using poetry was a great avenue to help people communicate with their doctors.
"We know that, you know, art imitates life," she said. "And so in this instance, it was really a great avenue to honestly just highlight some of the intricacies of life and some of the nuances around communicating with, you know, with your provider with the health care system, and just how people of color often feel when we are engaging with these spaces."
Parham said the importance of health literacy and advocacy doesn’t begin in adulthood so it’s important for young people to learn about this type of advocacy and to feel comfortable about speaking up.
Allen-Meares mentioned a survey that focuses on adult literacy done by the National Center for Education Statistics that shows work needs to be done in the adult population.
“And in the United States, we found that 12% of Americans, adult Americans, had a difficult time with complicated health literacy tasks,” she said.
She said she’s hoping that the Rockford Ready initiative is able to put a dent in that number.
Parham says in addition to the poetry series, Rockford Ready is using other avenues to get the word out.
“We've produced what we call Ask Your Pharmacist, which is like a Facebook Live, where we go over a variety of health literacy topics in a variety of settings,” she added. “We've created toolkits for the use of individuals and community organizations and healthcare organizations.”
The group has also created education around health literacy and cultural humility for health care professionals and other community leaders.
Parham says talking about the importance of improving health literacy for people of color in the community has also brought community organizations together.
“It's really allowed them to get engaged in a very meaningful way about something that we're very hopeful can have a lasting impact in our community,” Parham said.
Allen-Meares said the goal is to make Rockford healthy.
The poetry series and other educational tools for health literacy can be found on the Rockford Ready Facebook page.
Copyright 2023 WNIJ Northern Public Radio. To see more, visit WNIJ Northern Public Radio.
Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulius visits with employees and managers at a Peoria DMV during a visit on Thursday, Feb. 23, 2023.(Collin Schopp / WCBU)Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias says his priority since taking office in January has been “modernizing” the Secretary of State’s Office. WCBU spoke with Giannoulias during a visit to a Peoria DMV to learn more about what modernization looks like and how Illinois residents could benefit.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
I was curious about your stance on House Bill 0867. It’s a “one license plate” bill, it’s something that’s been suggested a few times in the past. Would you support a single license plate bill in Illinois or not?
Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias: I'm going to have to take a look at it. But right now, we do not support it.
There’s been an ongoing conversation about the possibility of digital driver's licenses, not just in Illinois, but across the country. Is that a measure that your office would support? And how do you begin overcoming the hump of technology access when it comes to a digital driver’s license?
Giannoulias: Well, I think more broadly, we have to modernize the Secretary of State's office. That's why I've been traveling across the state visiting our facilities. We have to bring new technology and modernization into every element of the Secretary of State's office. We want to eliminate the time tax that people are paying just to access government services. So one of the components of that, eventually will be digital IDs, digital driver's license. In the meantime, we announced our skip the line program, people can schedule an appointment, we're going to have an app, we're looking at electronic car titles. So modernization will be at the forefront of everything we do. And I'm excited about that.
So is the intention that a digital ID or digital driver’s license would replace a physical one? Or is the idea that it would be an alternative, another option?
Giannoulias: At first, it'll be an alternative. And I think, you know, again, ultimately, other states are doing it. Ultimately, it'll probably be where everyone in the country goes. You know, no one really expects Illinois to be the first [to] a lot of this new technology, but we can't afford to be the last either.
How are you aiming to modernize the DMV experience?
Giannoulias: Again, a lot of it centers around our skip the line program, the ability to schedule an appointment. We don't want people waiting in line, you know, we don't want people taking a long time. So modernization, we're gonna have a new website. Digital driver's license, digital IDs, will change the way we conduct business. This is a customer service business. And everything we do is going to be based around making that customer experience a little smoother.
The Secretary of State’s Office handles some other things, though I guess it’s most well known for the DMV, does modernization touch any of the other responsibilities of the office?
Giannoulias: Yeah, it touches it all, you know. Business services, for example, if someone wants to start a business in Illinois, they come through our office, we want to make that whole process a lot more efficient. Our securities division, our libraries, you know, we're the state's chief librarian. We want to end that, narrow that digital divide by more online resources and our licensed to read programs. So there's a lot, every single department will be impacted in a positive way with new technology.
You mentioned the libraries are one thing the Secretary of State office is responsible for. At a time when there's a lot of discussion in states across the country about what books should or shouldn't be in a library, do Illinoisans need to have any concern about those sorts of conversations here?
Giannoulias: You're going to be hearing more from us on the subject soon. Fundamentally, you know, I think the banning of books is dangerous. I think it goes against the very foundation of what education should be about, which is teaching young boys and girls to think for themselves. So I'm, hopefully you know, it doesn't flare up a worry, you're going to be hearing more from us on that.
You bill yourself as an expert at kind of reaching across the aisle. The best example I can think of is [your electoral opponent, Republican candidate] Dan Brady, being on your transition team. How do you plan on continuing to express that willingness to work across the aisle moving forward?
Giannoulias: Well, you know, again, the Secretary of State's office is a customer service office. I've always believed that the government should be about public service, helping others. I've always worked well with folks, whether they're Democrats or Republicans. I don't care if someone’s smart and they have good ideas, let's work together and help people. So maybe that's a naïve way of thinking. But from my, from what, you know, when I talked to voters, that's what they want to see more of, not less of.
What are some of your other main priorities in these early days of your tenure?
Giannoulias: So again, modernization is going to be key. Ethics and transparency, rebuilding trust in government. On my first day in office, I signed an executive ethics order. We have to rebuild that trust in government, again, whether you're a Democrat or Republican, we want to increase transparency. Lobbyist registration reports, everything within our office to help increase transparency will be, I think, positive. We're also as I mentioned, our libraries will be a huge focus of what we do, and just in general, eliminating the time tax that people pay for government services.
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Radhika Rao(Photo provided / University Communications and Marketing)WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with SIU Law Ryan Bioethicist Radhika Rao about her upcoming lecture
WSIU News Updates (WSIU / WSIU)WSIU's Jennifer Fuller reports the news at Noon for Tuesday, March 7, 2023.
Farmer Tim Gottman stands in the distance overlooking a harvested corn field on his farm in northeast Missouri. The green vegetation in between the old stalks is rye, a cover crop that can help keep the soil healthy.(Jonathan Ahl / St. Louis Public Radio)Tim Gottman’s 2,400 acre farm in northeast Missouri looks harvested, but among the remnants of corn stalks are blobs of green plants that are thriving despite the cold and windy conditions of late winter in the Midwest.
His land includes wide swaths that gently slope away from the road, and the water from a recent rain is pooling up in some places.
“All this water would be running that way and if this green, the wheat and rye weren't here, it would just allow the water to run faster and take the soil with it,” Gottman said. “And when the soil is leaving your fertilizers going with it.”
Gottman is a big fan of cover crops, and he says they are working to improve the bottom line on his corn and soybean farm. And he’s not alone.
The University of Illinois completed a study late last year using a combination of USDA reports and satellite images to produce the most accurate survey of cover crop usage in the Midwest. The study found In the past 10 years, the number of acres with cover crops tripled — from 1.8% to 7.2%.
It’s a big jump, but still a small number of acres.
“It is certainly not at a level that would be necessary for some of the challenges, like the water quality challenges like soil erosion,” said Jonathan Coppess, director of Agriculture Policy at the University of Illinois. “It's going to take a lot more acres to get there.”
Cover crops also received a temporary boost, thanks to COVID-19 relief money. The Biden administration spent $60 million on subsidies for more than 12 million acres of cover crops during the 2020-2021 growing seasons.
Tim Gottman on his farm in northeast Missouri(Jonathan Ahl / Harvest Public Media)While that money was temporary, Coppess said it may set the stage for more sustained efforts to incentivize cover crops.
Coppess and other cover crop advocates hope that a big leap could come if more incentives are put in the farm bill, which is up for renewal this year. With all the benefits of cover crops — from reducing fertilizer use and costs; increasing yields; limiting erosion and keeping carbon in the ground — Coppess said there could be more bipartisan support for incentives.
“It can maybe help jump start that by showing, you know, funds going in for this practice will get response on the ground, and we can measure it,” he said.
The current farm bill expires in September, and incentives for cover crops will be a tiny sliver of what looks to be a more than a half a trillion dollar package.
Cover crop usage is also getting endorsements from large agriculture groups, including the National Corn Growers Association and American Soybean Association. Kurt Boeckman is director of Environmental Programs for Missouri Corn Growers Association and also works on national initiatives. He said while there has been a lot of progress, there needs to be more.
“I am a little bit surprised that we're only at 7-8%, and I think that's part of the effort now, is to figure out, ‘Okay, how do we get that 15% in the next five years,’” he said.
Boeckman’s focus has been on education and getting resources to farmers who want to plant cover crops. He said the farm bill could be part of that expansion, but he also thinks it’s important for farmers that it’s a choice — not a mandate.
“We don't want farmers to be forced into planting cover crops on their acres. We want them to make those decisions,” Boeckman said. “They know their land better than anyone.”
Gottman agrees. Even though he uses cover crops on 65% of his fields, he said farmers have to do it for the right reasons, specifically that it works for them and improves the quality of their land.
“Chasing grants and programs doesn’t work. You have to be committed,” he said. “For me, it's more to make the land at least as good as it was when we got it, if not better because we're just stewards of it.”
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues. Follow Harvest on Twitter: @HarvestPM.
Copyright 2023 KCUR 89.3. To see more, visit KCUR 89.3.
WSIU News Updates (WSIU / WSIU)WSIU's Jennifer Fuller reports the Noon News for Monday, March 6 from Carbondale, IL
Regan Kerkman checks one of the Nebraska Mesonet weather stations near Valparaiso in southeast Nebraska. He visits each of the network’s stations four times a year to check on equipment and calibrate instruments, but funding cuts have forced the closure of some stations.(Elizabeth Rembert / Harvest Public Media)In fields and pastures across Midwestern and Great Plains states, unmanned weather stations quietly record data on temperature, precipitation, humidity, soil conditions, wind and other factors.
It’s fed to farmers and ranchers, emergency weather responders, scientists, crop insurers and agencies like the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Yet in many Midwestern states, funding for mesonets — the statewide weather monitoring networks — is less than reliable.
In Nebraska, decreased funding means the state’s mesonet has just one dedicated employee to visit 55 stations four times a year. Regan Kerkman used to split the state in half with a colleague, but these days he’s responsible for trekking across Nebraska’s 77,000 square miles alone.
Kerkman used to split the state in half with a colleague to visit the stations, but now he’s the office’s only mesonet technician. (Elizabeth Rembert / Nebraska Public Media)And last year, Kerkman wasn’t just checking on stations. He was closing them down. After years of decreased support from the state government and public university, the Nebraska Mesonet’s budget was at a breaking point.
Even with hodgepodge support from individuals and local conservation districts, the program was too strapped to keep all its stations open.
Kerkman broke down fences and packed away equipment for storage at the mesonet office.
“Other than a bare spot from where we dig up our soil sensors, it’s pretty hard to tell that anything was ever there,” he said.
The network got a cash infusion from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to prevent more closures, but it was a blow for a network that was established as a national standard in the 1980s.
“We're kind of running on a skeleton shop right now, just scraping by, I would call it,” Nebraska climatologist Martha Durr said.
Patchwork fundingThe Nebraska Mesonet isn’t the only network stringing together support in the region.
“The biggest thing is people think weather data is free,” said John Travlos, the Missouri Mesonet’s co-director. “Stable funding lines are limited and the bulk is sponsorships, contracts and grants.”
Travlos, who works for extension at the University of Missouri, is the only full-time employee running the network after the state’s longtime climatologist and mesonet director recently retired.
An interim director, part-time staff and local partnerships also help to maintain the stations, and Travlos works to secure funds from sponsorships, contracts and grants to cover those positions, as well as his own.
“I am not paid on a line item by the university,” Travlos said. “I’ve been finding my own salary dollars.”
In Kansas, the mesonet gets funding for full-time staff salaries from Kansas State University. But network manager Chip Redmond said the program grapples with grant funding inconsistency when it comes to supporting additional staff to keep up with its network.
Illinois manager Jennie Atkins said patchwork funding has limited her monitoring program to just 19 stations to cover the entire state, almost 58,000 square miles.
“The real issue for us is, without having the state funding, we’re not growing,” she said. “These 19 stations are great, and they’re doing everything they can. But they’re only 19 stations. We’re missing events, especially in rural Illinois where there’s no other public weather data available.”
Atkins said they only got limited data on a derecho that swept through northern Illinois, and completely missed a rainstorm that flooded a small town.
What’s lostThe consequences of fewer stations are also coming to a head in Nebraska.
Dennis Schueth manages the Upper Elkhorn natural resource district in northern Nebraska. His team uses mesonet data to conserve groundwater and help farmers make irrigation decisions.
“We use that as a tool to show that you may have over irrigated, or maybe you under irrigated, or maybe you're just right,” he said. “It’s really important for farmers to understand.”
But now they’re doing it with a lot less information. Schueth’s district lost four of its five nearby stations.
“The farmers are being hindered by not having this data,” he said. “It leaves them in a void of decision making, and that’s lost unless we get those stations replaced.”
The Nebraska Mesonet stations measure temperature, sunlight, precipitation, humidity, soil conditions, wind direction and speed and other factors. Most observations are recorded every minute of every day. (Elizabeth Rembert / Harvest Public Media)The district’s board didn’t want to raise property taxes to cover the station’s costs — and they said farmers could use weather apps instead of mesonet data.
It feels short-sighted to Schueth. Apps might not be as accurate, especially when it comes to water management.
“It's just kind of disappointing,” he said. “Numerous state agencies, elected officials say that water is such an important deal, but then it ended up that we don't want to fund it.”
Mike McDonald agrees. He farms corn, beans and cereal grains and grazes cattle in southeast Nebraska. He said he uses mesonet data to monitor moisture levels to help him make crop decisions and how to structure his grazing cycle.
“You can get that information from other sources,” McDonald said. “But when I get it from the mesonet I know I have reliable, accurate data from an independent party. Not from a company that’s trying to make money off me.”
McDonald — who’s also involved with No-till on the Plains, a non-profit concerned with preserving soil health — is thinking of more than just planting decisions. He’s worried about how a lack of information could slow research and action on climate change.
“Would we be able to be proactive against climate change without the mesonet? And have ways to inform policy on water conservation and flooding prevention? No,” McDonald said.
Atkins has seen how private weather stations can come up short in collecting accurate data. When she visited a site in central Illinois in early February, the station was reporting it was 103 degrees.
“There’s always the quality control issue with private stations,” she said. “People can look at our information and know they’re getting a good data point. But that costs money.”
In Nebraska, it costs about $5,000 annually to maintain one weather station, according to University of Nebraska vice chancellor Michael Boehm. Funding stems from the state government, the public university, private sponsors and grants, but it’s come up short – the network planned to shut down about a quarter of its stations last year. (Elizabeth Rembert / Harvest Public Media)One state has invested in a robust program — the Oklahoma Mesonet reliably gets about half its budget from the state government.
Director Chris Fiebrich says the support means he doesn’t have to agonize over things like making payroll.
“We can have our staff looking at new technologies, we can have them developing new models, developing new products.”
The bandwidth goes toward training emergency managers, alerting firefighters on changing wind during wildfires or predicting where wheat is in its growing cycle.
“We want to be the foundation for lots of decision-making across the state,” Fiebrich said. “Whether it’s closing an intersection due to flooding, or postponing a high school football game or giving the National Weather Service information on whether they should issue a warning.”
Fiebrich said Oklahoma’s government seems to recognize the importance of accurate weather information for public safety, especially in tornado alley. He said the program doesn’t take the funding lightly and is committed to working with data users, who become passionate supporters of the service.
Last year, instead of checking on stations, Kerkman was closing them down after low funding forced cuts. He broke down fences and packed away equipment for storage at the Nebraska Mesonet office. “Other than a bare spot from where we dig up our soil sensors, it’s pretty hard to tell that anything was ever there,” he said. (Elizabeth Rembert / Harvest Public Media)In Nebraska, Durr said she’s still trying to educate users about the connection between stable funding and the ability to support new technology and products.
“Often I'll get emails from people saying ‘Hey, Oklahoma has this, why don't you all have this?’ and well, that would be great. That'd be awesome,” Durr said.
She said she hopes station closures help people realize how important the resource is.
“I did get questions as to ‘Wait a minute, we had stations there. Why did that go away?’” Durr said. “And I'm thinking, well, this is a consequence, if we're not well funded, we can't keep stations open.”
To Durr, being well-funded means having a stable foundation of support.
“We can’t keep relying on little pots of money, because that puts each station at risk,” she said. “If we’re not broadly funded as a program to monitor weather all across Nebraska, then stations will continue to come and go over time.”
Rude awakening sparks actionMichael Boehm, the University of Nebraska's vice chancellor for the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resource, said after years of tight funding, station closures got people’s attention.
“It came to a head where a number of folks realized we need to be serious about this,” he said. “And now we’re rolling up our sleeves and talking about what support can look like.”
A new bill in front of Nebraska lawmakers proposes earmarking about a million state dollars to the mesonet over the next two years.
The Nebraska Farm Bureau is one organization that pushed for the bill, when the group’s members flagged the issue.
“We’re really still in a significant drought, and the mesonet is one of the ways that we get information,” said Mark McHargue, the state farm bureau president. “It’s important for making decisions and it’s important even for federal assistance. Agriculture depends on really good climate data.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Mike McDonald uses mesonet data for decisions on when to irrigate. In fact, he uses the data for making crop decisions.
Follow Elizabeth on Twitter: @Ekrembert
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues. Follow Harvest on Twitter: @HarvestPM.
Copyright 2023 KCUR 89.3. To see more, visit KCUR 89.3.
Joel Tyndall, left, laughs with Nikki Pinkelman, the Cedar County Transit Manager, on Friday, Feb. 17, 2023, before his trip to Norfolk, Nebraska for a dialysis appointment. Tyndall lives outside of Hartington and credits the Cedar County Transit Program with allowing him to keep up with his busy schedule, despite being a double amputee above the knees and living out in the countryside. (Forrest Czarnecki / Special to Harvest Public Media)Joel Tyndall lives off a gravel road in northeast Nebraska, miles away from the nearest town. As a double amputee, his car has been collecting dust in his garage.
Some have suggested he could move closer to the biggest town in the area, Norfolk, where he has three dialysis appointments a week to manage his diabetes.
But it hasn’t come to that — thanks in part to the Cedar County Transit — which works a little like a rural Uber; anyone can call to schedule a ride.
“I'm gonna leave my home?” Tyndall asked. “No, as long as this transit continues to run I'll be using it for just about everything. These guys help me out more than you would believe.”
Joel Tyndall, in wheelchair, makes his way down a wheelchair ramp as Nikki Pinkelman, left, looks ahead on Friday, Feb. 17, 2023 at Tyndall’s home outside of Hartington, Nebraska. Tyndall uses the Cedar County transit services to make his weekly dialysis appointments in another town. (Forrest Czarnecki / Special to Harvest Public Media)In rural areas, residents can be miles away from essentials like doctors and grocery stores instead of minutes. Without transportation, people who don’t have a car or can’t drive often have to move closer to services.
More than a third of state rural health offices reported lack of transit was the biggest barrier to elderly people staying in their homes, according to research from Carrie Henning-Smith, who studies rural health at the University of Minnesota.
Rural America tends to be sicker, poorer and older than its urban counterparts. Henning-Smith said the negative-but-true statistics make it even more important for rural residents to be able to access transit.
“There's greater need for transportation among older adults in rural communities, but more transportation challenges in getting people where they need to go,” she said. “And that will only increase as the years go on, and the population continues to age in rural places.”
A Cedar County transit van makes its way down a rural road on Friday, Feb. 17, 2023. Cedar County’s public transit program serves a rural community and will take riders anywhere they want, as long as it’s within 200 miles and on a weekday between 6 a.m and 6 p.m. (Forrest Czarnecki / Special to Harvest Public Media)Providers like Cedar County Transit help fill in the gap. The northeast Nebraska county has had some level of public transportation since about 1980, although it’s come a long way since then, according to manager Nikki Pinkelman.
They now have 15 vans, 15 drivers and a full-time scheduler. The operation recently launched services into a bordering county and moved into its own building.
Pinkelman said the community has embraced the expanded service.
“You used to rely on your neighbor, or maybe you relied on your wife or your kids. But most families now, both parents are working,” she said. “Or maybe your kids don’t live close, and you don’t have someone to take you.”
Anyone living in Cedar County and parts of Knox County can schedule a ride, as long as it’s within 200 miles and on a weekday from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.
The service runs on money from the state and federal government, grants and contracts and local community funding, as well as fare for rides. In fiscal year 2021, that came to a total of nearly $382,000 with nearly $234,000 in federal funds; close to $61,000 from the state; about $59,000 in local funding and almost $28,000 in rider fees.
Fees are based on round trip mileage and range from $3 for an in-town destination to $75 for a 400-mile trip. Pinkelman said she’s conscious that some riders may be on fixed incomes and tries to keep costs as low as possible. The service can also bill Medicaid for recipients who use transit to get to health appointments.
Cedar County Transit has loadable fare cards that can also be given as gifts. That was Rita Meirose’s Christmas present this year from her kids. Now she books rides with the bus multiple times a week to grab groceries, pick up her prescriptions, get to hair appointments and play cards with friends.
Rita Meirose, right, shares a laugh with Burnell Herbolsheimer as he loads a case of 7-Up into her cart while Meirose shops for groceries on Friday, Feb. 17, 2023, in Hartington, Nebraska. Meirose takes advantage of the Cedar County transit services during the winters because she does not like driving in snow and ice.(Forrest Czarnecki / Special to Harvest Public Media)She doesn’t like driving during the winter and says using the transit service is easier.
“We have a lot of elderly here, people like myself, and a lot of them just can't drive anymore,” Meirose said. “I can drive; I still have a whole year on my license. I’m not afraid of driving, but I don’t like to drive on ice.”
Providing public transit in rural areas is a difficult task, but a patchwork of services serves towns and counties throughout the Midwest and Great Plains.
While federal and state government programs cover the bulk of costs for rural transit programs, local match is required for up to 25% of expenses. Cedar County Transit manager Nikki Pinkelman said community support is crucial. "You have to have local funding and then build from there," she said. "If you don't get that support you don't have anything, because we have to pay all of our costs up front and then get reimbursed."(Nebraska Department of Transportation)Kansas was tied in 2019 for the most rural transit agencies in the nation, and in Iowa 35 providers serve riders across the state’s 99 counties. In 2020, Oklahoma developed a transit plan to help it become a “top 10 state in transit” by 2040.
Missouri’s “Operating Above the Standard” Transit, or OATS, is the largest agency in the country and operates in 87 counties. But it doesn't reach every corner of the state.
Sandra Morris realized transportation was a big barrier to rural health when she began working at the Ozarks Medical Center in West Plains, Missouri, where OATS does not have service.
The poverty, the rough terrain and the lack of nearby friends and family made it hard for people to keep their appointments. That’s especially true for people seeking help from the behavioral health center.
“Those patients have, for the most part, burned their bridges. So there’s no one to bring them in,” Morris said. “You can throw all the money at mental health you want, but until you provide a way for patients to get here and have return appointments, you’re setting them up for failure.”
The Ozarks Medical Center is at the heart of HealthTran — a transportation service run by the Missouri Rural Health Association that began in 2014 as a way to get people to their medical appointments. Nearly 10 years later, it’s expanded to include rides to places like grocery stores, pharmacies and libraries.
Morris leads education and training at HealthTran and said rural transportation does not come easy or cheap.
“But how expensive is it if you don't provide it? What is the cost to your community?” she asked. “What is the cost to the citizens you're there to serve? It will pay its way, the services provided will pay its way.”
The National Transit Database reports 82% of counties nationwide had some level of rural transit available in 2019. Henning-Smith is quick to point out that still means 18% of counties don’t have a public option.
She said that may isolate people who usually have a deep knowledge about their hometown and often provide the intimacy and connection small towns are known for.
“In an era when some rural communities are losing population, it's really important to think about ways to make sure that everyone has a chance to feel socially connected, socially cohesive, active and engaged and vibrant,” Henning-Smith said.
Cherry County sits on the northern edge of Nebraska and is just over 6,000 square miles in size, larger than the entire state of Connecticut. Here, the sign greeting visitors sits above a snow drift on Thursday, Feb. 2, 2023, at the edge of the county. (Forrest Czarnecki / Special to Harvest Public Media)Cherry County in western Nebraska was one of those counties. It’s the state’s biggest county, with a footprint larger than Connecticut. But for years, Cherry County had no public transit.
Assisted living facilities and a nursing home used to provide shuttle service to its residents in Valentine – Cherry County’s biggest town – but the owners shut down shop in 2021.
Peg Snell said she reached a breaking point after noticing elderly residents walking to the hospital in the heat, a few blocks away from Prairie Estates, the independent living center she manages.
Something had to change, and she quickly became an advocate for bringing transit to Valentine. Snell pushed city officials to ask Open Plains Transit, an agency covering the Nebraska panhandle, to expand their services into the town.
“It's like, why wouldn't we do this? It's going to be a cost, but it's going to keep our elderly in our community,” she said. “We could have a great system because right now we have nothing.”
Peg Snell manages the Prairie Estates Assisted Living Center in Valentine, Nebraska. Snell was instrumental in bringing the Open Plains bus services to town. Here she poses on Friday, Feb. 3, 2023, at Prairie Estates.(Forrest Czarnecki / Special to Harvest Public Media)Jonnie Kusek is director of transportation at Open Plains and said she knew the agency had to help when she got the call from Valentine. To Kusek, accessible transportation can change lives.
“It’s really important that we give people opportunities to go out and live in their communities,” she said. “Transit should revolve around what people’s needs and their lives are. People’s lives shouldn’t revolve around when transit is available.”
Representatives from Cherry County, a senior living center, the hospital, tourism, health and human services and residents packed a townhall and showed Kusek there was real interest and need in Valentine.
The bulk of funding for the service comes from state and local government, with certain costs requiring a local match of up to 25%. The project also received commitments from the Pestel Charitable Foundation in Valentine and the Cherry County Hospital.
In November, big white buses started appearing on Valentine’s streets.
Nearly half of the rides so far have been for medical appointments. Kyle Kellum leads Cherry County Hospital and said it’s helped the hospital’s bottom-line by reducing missed appointments, and he hopes it can improve the health of the entire community.
“If we can get folks in and do the preventative stuff, it really keeps folks out of the ER and keeps them healthier long term,” Kellum said. “But sometimes getting here is tough.”
Lorin Veel, a longtime resident of the Prairie Estates Assisted Living Center in Valentine, Nebraska, elected to not have a colonoscopy last fall because he didn’t have a ride back to Valentine from the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Fort Meade, South Dakota. Veel, one of the center’s earliest residents and an avid blues guitarist, plays his guitar on Feb. 3, 2023, at his home in Prairie Estates.(Forrest Czarnecki / Special to Harvest Public Media)Lorin Beel lives at Prairie Estates and said he put off a colonoscopy last fall because he didn’t have a way to get back to Valentine from the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Fort Meade, South Dakota.
“I couldn’t find nobody to go with me. I have no family really to speak of, and I’m single,” Beel said. “Now I can say ‘I’ll get the heck out of your hair, just get that old bus up here and away I’ll go.’”
For some residents it’s meant the difference between staying or leaving their homes.
Jim Ducey teared up as he talked about what a tough winter it’s been. If not for the bus, he’s not sure he could have remained in the community.
“I did not want to leave Valentine,” Ducey said. “I'm still here and that is because the transit service arrived at the perfect time.”
A tractor trailer carrying farm equipment passes through on Friday, Feb. 3, 2023, in Valentine, Nebraska. Agriculture and tourism are among the largest economic engines for the vast Cherry County.(Forrest Czarnecki / Special to Harvest Public Media)Right now the service is only available within Valentine city limits, leaving the rest of Cherry County’s 6,000-square miles without a public transportation option.
But Snell said she hopes it’s only the beginning. There’s been interest from Cherry County commissioners on expanding the service area.
“This is such a great thing for this community,” Snell said. “But there’s a lot of people outside of Valentine. And I just hope we can keep it going, and it can continue to grow the way it has so far.”
Follow Elizabeth on Twitter: @Ekrembert
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues. Follow Harvest on Twitter: @HarvestPM.
This story was produced with the help of a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network.
Copyright 2023 KCUR 89.3. To see more, visit KCUR 89.3.
The Stilwell Public Schools District opened the Stilwell Schools Day Care in late 2019 in an effort to try and recruit new teachers. It’s one of the only day care centers in the town of nearly 4,000. (Xcaret Nuñez / Harvest Public Media)When Matthew Brunk took a job as a school principal in Stilwell, Oklahoma, he commuted to work from a larger community almost an hour away.
He and his wife faced a major hurdle in moving back to Brunk’s hometown — there was no day care facility for their two-year-old.
“I mean, talk about panic,” he said. “We had no idea what we were going to do.”
But then Brunk brought up his struggles to the superintendent of Stilwell Public Schools, and they soon settled on a novel idea: opening up a day care for the district’s staff.
The move has helped attract more teachers to Stilwell since it opened in late 2019, said Brunk, who is now assistant superintendent of the district.
“We've actually hired two teachers that were not from Stilwell. They were just across the border in Arkansas and came specifically to our school because they could not find child care in their town,” he said.
Matthew Brunk, Stilwell Public Schools assistant superintendent, helped start the district's day care and now oversees it. "To be able to find child care and know that you're dropping off your kid at a place that's going to keep them safe, that's going to love them and take care of them, that’s the best peace of mind you can have as a parent." (Xcaret Nuñez / Harvest Public Media)The lack of day care in Stilwell isn’t an unusual case — nearly 60% of families living in rural areas don't have access to child care, according to the Center for American Progress, an advocacy group that has published studies on the issue.
That leaves rural families to cobble child care together with friends and family or drive miles to the nearest day care. It sometimes means one parent has to give up their job entirely.
The severity of the issue most recently grabbed the American Farm Bureau Federation’s attention. The agriculture organization recently listed increasing access to child care in rural communities as a priority for the upcoming 2023 Farm Bill.
Emily Buckman, director of government affairs for the American Farm Bureau Federation, specializes in rural affairs for the organization and said the move came about after hearing concerns from young farmers and ranchers.
“They see it as one of those elements that is kind of a make or break for folks wanting to live the rural life,” she said. “And we see [young farmers, ranchers and rural folks] as the future of our organization, so we certainly want to listen to their concerns, and ensure that those are heard as we look forward to this next farm bill.”
Increasing access to child care in rural areas is important to families, but it's also an economic development issue, said Shoshanah Inwood, a rural sociologist and an associate professor in the School of Environment and Natural Resources at Ohio State University.
“When families don't have access to child care, somebody needs to leave the workforce to stay home and take care of the children,” Inwood said. “So that's sacrificing additional household income.”
Parents leaving the workforce will cost the U.S. economy an estimated $32 to $50 billion dollars over the next 10 years through direct losses of household and business taxes, loss of productivity and household income, according to the Bipartisan Policy Insitute.
Ashley Fajkowski is a mom of three living on the outskirts of Rolla, Missouri. She left her job in 2014 to care for her first child while her husband worked. She had hoped to return to work but found the only child care options she was comfortable with were at least an hour away from town.
“We were really surprised having moved from St. Louis that there was no child care unless you went through a church or an in-home sort of day care,” Fajkowski said.
When her son entered kindergarten in 2020, Fajkowski planned to reenter the workforce. But weeks after she was offered a job as a social worker, she learned she was pregnant with twins.
“I mean, the decision kind of made itself, but I really struggled with it a lot, especially at first,” she said. “I was so ready to return to work.”
Now Fajkowski said she and her husband are hoping to move out of their small town to be closer to family members and more day care options.
Ashley Fajkowski plays with her children at her and her husband's home near Rolla, Missouri. They were surprised to learn the community had limited and expensive child care options.(Jonathan Ahl / Harvest Public Media)The Fajkowskis’ struggle to find child care is not unique.
Nearly 30% of Missouri parents reported leaving a job or not taking a job in the last 12 months because of issues accessing child care, according to a report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.
But it’s an issue that disproportionately affects women, and COVID-19 only exacerbated it, said Wendy Doyle, president and CEO of United Women’s Empowerment.
“The most critical issue in Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma we know from our research reports is child care is the most significant economic barrier holding women back,” she said.
She said families in rural areas have even fewer options.
“It’s not uncommon in rural communities, that on Monday, Tuesday, you take your child to one location. Wednesday, Thursday, you've moved to another location; just piecing it together because of lack of resources,” Doyle said.
“And we're just looking at this point of availability, we're not even talking about accreditation or quality; it's just looking at, ‘I just need to get to work.’”
As of November 2022, the child care sector has lost about 8% of its pre-pandemic workforce, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Doyle said United WE approaches the lack of child care accessibility as a workforce development issue. Its Status of Women in Missouri report highlights how more child care facilities would help meet the demand and better pay would retain child care workers. State licensing regulations could also be streamlined, Doyle said, to ensure quality care but also speed up establishing new facilities.
There are no simple solutions to creating access to quality child care for rural areas, according to Inwood, the rural sociologist.
“It's both having the presence of child care, but also the degree to which it's affordable,” Inwood said. “It’s also a quality place that you feel comfortable leaving your children.”
One proposal she and a colleague have made is to create an experimental program through USDA Rural Development and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Joint Resource Guide to make funds available for communities to implement the type of child care they need.
“That may be funds to actually build facilities, pay individuals to expand hours or use it for professional development of in-home care providers,” Inwood said.
Inwood said she and her colleague would then analyze how the funds were used and assess what seemed to work best and help scale up the program to target best practices.
As for the Stilwell Schools Day Care, Brunk said there’s a waitlist for families. But the district will open a larger facility at the end of the month, expanding care from 12 children up to 20.
“We don't want anybody that's great for our school system and great for our kids to turn down a position because of the lack of child care in the community,” he said.
Xcaret Nuñez covers agriculture, food systems and rural issues for KOSU and Harvest Public Media and is a Report For America corps member.
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues. Follow Harvest on Twitter: @HarvestPM.
Copyright 2023 KCUR 89.3. To see more, visit KCUR 89.3.
(Southern Illinois University / Provided)WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with SIU System President Dan Mahony
The Illinois State Museum is highlighting all things "X" in "Growing Up X"(Illinois State Museum / Spencer Films)Those born between 1965 and 1980 know that being part of Generation X is a unique experience in a time frame that saw the world go from analog to digital, from rotary phones to cell phones, and from hand-writing notes to personal computers.
Now you can experience those years all over again by visiting the Illinois State Museum in Springfield. Julie Staley has more on what it was like through the exhibit called "Growing Up X."
Iowa Legal Aid employees work at the Linn County Eviction Diversion Help Desk, which provides free legal assistance to residents facing eviction.(Natalie Krebs / Side Effects Public Media)The trouble for Rolland Carroll started last fall.
That’s when the 61-year-old said his apartment complex in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, informed him that his federal housing aid for his one-bedroom apartment had been reduced months ago.
He owed more than $2,000 in back rent.
“I was in shock,” Carroll said. “Like, how the heck could I owe this amount of money without you guys saying something months ago?”
Carroll doesn’t own a car and works odd jobs through a local temp agency. He struggled to pay the back rent and come up with $339 for his portion of the monthly rent.
“November and December – there had been hardly any work at all. So I was in a real bind,” he said.
A few days after Christmas, his apartment complex filed to evict him.
Carroll said he was worried because local shelters were full and he has many chronic health issues that cost money.
“I'm diabetic. I have arthritis. I have asthma. I’m just a total mess,” he said.
With the help of nonprofit Iowa Legal Aid, Carroll successfully got the case dismissed at his hearing in mid-January because his apartment failed to give him sufficient notice.
Now, he said he’s still struggling to pay rent and his apartment continues to send him notices threatening to file another eviction.
It’s taking a toll on his health.
“I've been so darn stressed out,” Carroll said. “My mental health is really poor at the moment.”
Eviction as a health issue
With the end of pandemic-era housing support like eviction moratoriums and federal rental assistance, many Midwesterners face housing insecurity.
Eviction filings in Iowa have been increasing for the past decade. After a short dip in 2020 and 2021, they hit a record high of more than 18,000 in 2022, according to Iowa Legal Aid data.
The eviction moratorium issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ended in mid-2021.
And Iowa – like most states – ended its federally-funded emergency rent and utility program last year.
“Rent makes up a huge portion of the household expenses,” said Nick Graetz, a postdoctoral research associate with Princeton University’s Eviction Lab. “And it’s just been spiking at unprecedented rates during the pandemic. But rents have been outpacing wages for decades.”
Since March 2020, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment has increased 13% percent in Iowa, nearly 18% percent in Missouri and more than 26% percent in Indiana, according to the U.S. News and World Report.
Eviction filings are trending upward in Indiana and Missouri, too.
Facing eviction can take a huge toll on someone’s health, Graetz said.
“The result is that people go from paying 60% of their income on rent to 70% of their income on rent, and sort of just have to absorb that cost by forgoing things like preventative health care, facing higher food insecurity, you know, things like that,” he said.
According to a literature review published in the journal Social Science and Medicine, studies have tied eviction to depression, anxiety, high blood pressure and child maltreatment.
A 2021 study published in the journal Pediatrics found women in Georgia who faced eviction during pregnancies were more likely to have children with lower birth weights.
Chronic health issues or a health emergency can also put a renter at higher risk for eviction.
“It's hard when you're trying to navigate something like that, “Graetz said. “Maybe [you] fall behind on rent, and then you can quickly get into this space where it becomes really difficult to avoid an eviction filing.”
Possible legislative help
Federal and state lawmakers have proposed a variety of policy solutions to combat evictions, including new tenant protections and expanding emergency rental assistance programs.
Iowa lawmakers have allocated more than $300 million for tax credits to incentivize developers to build affordable housing.
Minnesota lawmakers are considering a rent voucher program that could help 220,000 households.
However, it’s often unclear which policies are most effective, said Katie Moran-McCabe, the lead law and policy analyst at Temple University’s Center for Public Health Law Research.
“We often don't see those laws being evaluated,” she said. “So is the law working? Is it doing what it's intended to do? Are there any unintended consequences?”
Nonprofit programs step up
One growing solution has been eviction diversion programs, like the eviction diversion help desk program run by Iowa Legal Aid.
The nonprofit launched the program in spring 2020, which placed an eviction help desk in the courthouse of Polk County, Iowa’s most populous county.
Similar programs exist in Illinois and Missouri.
Iowa Legal Aid started its first Eviction Diversion Help Desk in Polk County, Iowa, in spring 2020. Since then, it’s opened desks in five other courthouse across the state.(Natalie Krebs / Side Effects Public Media)The rapid rise in requests for eviction assistance compelled the Iowa Legal Aid to reshuffle its priorities, executive director Nick Smithberg said.
“Basically, it's structurally changed our organization,” he said. “Where historically housing work was about a quarter of our caseload, it's risen to half.”
Since 2020, the program expanded to five other county courthouses. Smithberg said he would like to see it in more.
“I think that we're going to see a very, very disturbing time in the history of this state,” he said. “It's just an all-time record. I don't think people have seen the effects of something like this for a sustained period of time. And I think that it's going to be very eye-opening for a lot of folks when you start seeing people out on the streets.”
Eviction is a civil proceeding, which means defendants are not constitutionally guaranteed the right to an attorney the way they are when facing criminal charges.
In the Midwest, only a handful of cities in Ohio, Missouri and Minnesota legally guarantee renters facing eviction a right to an attorney.
Most renters fighting evictions – who are disproportionately women, people of color and those with disabilities – rely on programs, like Iowa Legal Aid, if they’re available.
Jon Biderman, an attorney with Iowa Legal Aid who helps run the eviction help desk at the Linn County courthouse in eastern Iowa, said his job is often to work out a deal with landlords so renters can have more time to come up with a plan.
He wants to help tenants avoid adding an eviction to their record, which can make finding housing much more difficult.
“Homelessness – being put out – is such a crisis for a person that if you're able to prevent that, or even buy them a week, that can really make a difference in a person's life,” he said.
Iowa Legal Aid attorney Jon Biderman works at the Linn County Eviction Diversion Help Desk where he, along with another attorney, represent clients in about a dozen eviction cases daily.(Natalie Krebs / Side Effects Public Media)Other programs like the Health and Human Rights Clinic at Indiana University’s Robert H. McKinney School of Law have also shifted their priorities away from other health care-related cases, like access to insurance and affordable prescription drugs, to focus more on housing.
“Originally we did mostly access-to-health care type work,” saidFran Quigley, a clinical professor at IU, who directs the clinic. “But during the pandemic, the most critical need we saw in our community was responding to housing.”
Quigley said it’s going to take much more than eviction diversion programs like his to tackle this growing public health crisis.
He said he’d like to see major policy changes, like stronger tenant protection laws and much more funding behind federal housing vouchers, to keep people in their homes.
“We, as a nation, make a mistake of treating housing as a commodity and not a right,” he said.
This story comes from a collaboration between Side Effects Public Media, based at WFYI, and the Midwest Newsroom — an investigative journalism collaboration including IPR, KCUR 89.3, Nebraska Public Media News, St. Louis Public Radio and NPR.
Copyright 2023 Side Effects Public Media. To see more, visit Side Effects Public Media.
(SIU School of Theater and Dance / theateranddance.siu.edu)WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with SIU Assistant Professor Matthew Williams, the Director for this performance of Agatha Christie's Mousetrap.
You can get more information, and tickets, through the SIU School of Theater and Dance.
Student Behind back of books( pexels.com)In 2023 many people believe that the pandemic is over - but many schools across Illinois are still experiencing the devastating effects of COVID-19.
Experts say the lockdowns, quarantines, and frequent exposures have caused many students to fall behind in their academic, social, and behavioral development. Now that schools are mostly back to normal, teachers are faced with the daunting task of catching these kids back up while keeping the other kids progressing.
Chris Simpson, the Superintendent of the Richland County School District, says it is still up in the air as to how long that will take.
“It’s also difficult to determine how long lasting and how impactful that is going to be. Are we looking to try and address something that is going to be corrected over one or two school years and we can get students caught up or is it something that is going to persist even longer? I think that's a question that still remains to be answered” Simpson said.
While he may not know how long it will take, Simpson says he is still taking action to get students back where they need to be. Richland County has begun increasing staff and lowering the number of students in each class to increase the amount of hands-on instruction for each student. This may help academically, but Simpson has a completely different plan for helping younger students with their behavioral development.
We have been fortunate that we have been able to have a grant partnership with a local health department that provides some behavioral health services for our students and provides counseling services within the school for some of our students” Simpson said.
Richland County leaders may not know when these plans will bring the kids back up to speed, but some school leaders across the state believe their students are already caught up. The Superintendent at New Simpson Hill Grade School, Joe Nighswander, says their after school tutoring and summer school programs have helped bring their state test scores back to their normal range.
“So New Simpson Hill, we saw the same thing. We had a 32.6 percent in math meeting or exceeding. Then after the pandemic, that dropped to around 21 percent. Now we are back at roughly over 30 percent” Nighswander said.
He also credits the school’s ability to come back to in person instruction in the fall of 2020 with a test-to-stay policy as a massive help to their progress.
“We were kind of fortunate here at New Simpson Hill because we’re a small district. The year after the pandemic, we were in school full session. We didn’t have group A show up one day and group B show up another day. Here we were able to do that and social distance them in the cafeteria, so we had every kid here every day” Nighswander said.
In Johnson County, Vienna High School has also seen lots of success in catching their kids up since they came back to in person instruction in the Fall of 2020. Vienna High School superintendent, Josh Stafford, says their school is now better off due to the pandemic. He says being forced into online learning has helped teachers, students, and administrators learn how to implement it into the day to day teaching at their high school.
“Students have access to these online learning management systems even though they are in the classroom face to face. I can get home, pull out my Chromebook or whatever my device of choice is and pop up the video of the lecture that my teacher gave today. They can pull that out and rewatch that instructor teach that lesson. All of the content is there, the references are there, and their parents have access to that to help support that learning outside of the normal school day. That’s a huge win. We’ve never, our students have never, and our parents have never had that level of access” Stafford said.
This dual instruction has helped students succeed within the high school classroom and their college classroom.
“Out of the southern 52 high schools in Illinois, by percentage, we are in the top five percent of having Illinois state scholars and that continues to be the case. We have over 12 percent of our senior class graduating with their associates degree this year” Stafford said.
Stafford says the pandemic has forced them to become proactive with their students' futures. He says they have hired student success coaches to help guide students along the path to whatever their desired career is.
“Ten times a year is the exposure we are trying to get. Is to say: hey what are you thinking post high school? What is that gonna look like? Do you want to go into a career of journalism? Do you want to go into a career of, fill in the blank whatever it is and whatever that career interest is or those career interests are, what’s a pathway to get there. They’re sitting down and developing a roadmap of what it looks like” Stafford said.
They have multiple career paths including aviation, health occupations, and education. While some high schools are helping kids be prepared for college, many students are still struggling in their early college years. Christie McIntyre, Associate Director and Professor in the School of Education at SIU, says it is difficult to pinpoint why students are struggling.
“So one of the things that has been a topic of discussion for the last year and a half is what support do we need to be putting in place for all students at this time because we do see students that are struggling going through courses. It's hard to pinpoint whether the struggles are due to the modality, meaning online, hybrid, or face-to-face, or are students struggling at times because of social emotional struggles. We do see that more than we ever saw it before” McIntyre said.
McIntyre says a factor in student academic struggles is that asynchronous online courses are not meeting the needs of the students.
“He had done an inventory of how many classes we are offering this semester, how many are online, how many are hybrid, and how many are face to face. Then his question to all of us was: are we meeting the needs of our students; is this what our students want? What we’re finding as far as performance goes is that asynchronous courses are not serving students well and students are telling us they’re not as happy with asynchronous coursework” McIntyre said.
Kiely Corinthian, a Freshman at SIU, says her online courses have lowered her motivation within the class.
“Further down the road, I started being less motivated to do school work. Just staring at a computer all day was weighing on me. So that, in a way, affected me” Corinthian said.
McIntyre is trying to fix this within her own department but she believes more needs to be done. She says too often, colleges and universities focus on retention - but not specifically how well the students are doing in their classes.
“I think there needs to be a larger faculty discussion about outcomes, learning outcomes related to asynchronous coursework versus synchronous versus hybrid versus face to face” McIntyre said.
This conversation is being had at all levels with many schools in the state making progress towards helping their students after the pandemic. Even with this progress, there is still much work to be done to help kids take their world that was turned upside down and try to make it right again.
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You can get tickets and more information at symphony.siu.edu.
SIUC Chancellor Austin Lane(Southern Illinois University / Provided)WSIU's Jennifer Fuller talks with Austin Lane about his plans to keep students enrolled, once they arrive in Carbondale
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Alquist 3D "printing" the walls for a new home(Alquist 3D)For Alquist Founder and CEO Zack Mannheimer it all started while working for a consulting firm helping cities with economic and workforce development. A key part of that was the attraction and retention of workers, and the number one problem there was housing - his firm could solve other problems for its clients, but not that one.
Then several years ago he heard about 3D printing, became obsessed with the idea, and working with Virginia Tech University, printed his first home a year ago.
"The way it works is you lay a foundation traditionally. The printer which is a very large robot - there are two styles, there's a robot arm printer and there's a gantry printer - we've been using the gantry although we're moving to a robot shortly. The printer gets set up on the foundation, we mix all of our material on site, so the raw concrete mix which is a reinforced concrete gets delivered to the site, we pour that through a silo into our pump and the pump system mixes it with water, then the material is pumped through a hose directly to the print head, and it lays out layer after layer of material until you have your wall sytem."
The printer nozzle lays out two walls, with a gap in between for electrical and plumbing, and for insulation.
"There really is no limitation except for imagination. We've only printed one story so far. We've gone as big as 1,600 square foot but you can go as big and tall and you like. There are printers on the market that are capable of going up four stories and new ones come online all the time. That being said, there's only three instances of anyone printing above one story so far in the world. We do plan on printing more than one story later this year but technically there's no limitation it's just adapting to the technology."
Since building houses using 3D printers is still very much in the experimental phase, the cost savings are minimal so far.
"Three D printing methods allow several cost savings. So first of all you can print faster than you can put a traditional framed wall system. We can print the exterior walls of a home in anywhere between 18 and 25 hours depending on size and location. Secondly you have a labor savings. We technicaly only need two humans to operate the printer - today we use three or four and as the teams get more experienced that will decrease. And the material itself costs less than lumber"
But by 2025, Mannheimer says savings could be 30 per cent versus the cost of building a traditional home.
"There's lots to learn still.There's no perfect printer on the market and there's no perfect material. Of course concrete is great but it's far from the greenest material on the market - we know that and we want to get away from that. We're going to be experimenting this year with new materials with recycled products in it with hemp in it with other renewables and trying to make the material stronger, greener, and less expensive - that is an on going pursuit. But there's still a lot to learn, the pump systems to get stronger, the machines need to get faster, and the workforce needs to get bettet trained."
Alquist 3D will build its first homes in Iowa this year, with four in Muscatine this spring and six more in the fall. Then it'll build some more in western Iowa, in Lennox and Malvern. And he's talking with other communities about future projects.
Classes on 3D printing using concrete will begin in the fall at Muscatine Community College. You can watch a video of 3d home printing on the Alquist 3D website.
Copyright 2023 WVIK, Quad Cities NPR. To see more, visit WVIK, Quad Cities NPR.
Emiquon covers nearly 7,000 acres of restored floodplain in central Illinois.(Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco / Harvest Public Media)The remnants of the old levee are still visible at The Nature Conservancy's Emiquon Preserve in central Illinois, although these days it no longer holds back the Illinois River.
Now what was once corn and soybean fields is nearly 7,000 acres of lush restored wetlands.
Doug Blodgett grew up just across the river from what would eventually become the preserve. He remembers hearing old-timers reminisce about the days when there’d be so many geese migrating through the floodplains that they’d blot out the sun.
He wasn’t quite sure he believed those stories, until one day a few years into the restoration.
Doug Blodgett, a senior advisor at the Nature Conservancy, talks about the history of Emiquon(Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco)"There were, I don't know, 100,000 snow geese out here, and they all got up at once," he recalled, "... and the sun just disappeared, you could not see a ray of sunlight shining."
Blodgett, a senior advisor at The Nature Conservancy, is easing into semi-retirement this year. Seeing thousands of birds, waterfowl and native plants return to the Illinois River Valley since the restoration began in 2007 has given him hope that there are more wetlands out there waiting to be restored.
In addition to providing safe resting grounds for wildlife, wetlands serve as natural water filters, and can also reduce flooding during major rain events by giving water a place to sit and soak in.
But an ongoing U.S. Supreme Court case, Sackett v. EPA, could roll back the federal government’s authority to regulate wetlands and potentially trim their protections altogether. That worries conservationists such as Blodgett, who says Illinois has lost 90% of the state’s original wetlands. Many other Midwestern state’s have lost over 50%, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
"We don’t have enough now, and we can't afford to lose more,” Blodgett said. “So it is of great concern of how this comes down and ultimately, the impact that it has on existing wetlands."
(U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)The challenge to the Clean Water ActThe U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in October for the Sackett v. EPA case, a 14-year-long legal battle launched from the backyard of an Idaho couple, the Sacketts, who were seeking to fill their lake adjacent property with gravel. The EPA stopped them.
The case, which has been to the high court twice now, is aimed at challenging the federal protections the Clean Water Act provides to some waters and wetlands that fall under the definition of Waters of the United States, commonly called WOTUS.
A recent study from the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy has found that the ruling could have wide-ranging impacts and leave wetlands management up to states.
Mark Davis served as advisor on the report and has worked on wetland issues for 30 years. He said what’s at stake is the federal jurisdiction of the government over the nation's most valuable natural resource, water.
“It will mean that there are many important waters and wetlands that are no longer protected by law at all,” he said.
Larger wetlands, like Emiquon, will likely remain untouched, according to Davis. But smaller, more isolated wetlands and streams may lose protections.
The Clean Water Act, passed in 1972, left wetlands protection very much up for interpretation. The law mentioned only “navigable” waters be included under WOTUS, giving them federal protection. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers later added “adjacent” wetlands, a move upheld by a 1985 Supreme Court decision.
Over the decades there were several challenges around just what could be considered “adjacent” wetlands.
Federal regulatory powers over wetlands remained relatively unchanged until 2006, when Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote a case opinion stating a wetland should be under WOTUS protection if it shares a “significant nexus” with navigable water, meaning the water in the wetland would eventually head downstream.
In 2012, the Emiquon Complex was designated as a Wetland of International Importance under the Ramsar Convention.(Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco)Scott Strand, a senior attorney with the Environmental Law and Policy Center, said that under the Obama administration, the EPA and Army Corps more substantially outlined the “significant nexus” standard. Strand said the rule didn’t last long.
“That became controversial and it eventually gave way,” he said.
Courts across the country filed injunctions against the Obama era rule, and then the Trump Administration repealed it outright in 2019. The following year, the Biden administration yet again asked the EPA to revisit the rule, and in late December, the EPA finally released its latest version.
But the Sackett case could send the agency back to the drawing board, according to Paul Botts, the president and executive director of the Wetlands Initiative.
“The issue in that case is to what degree the current Clean Water Act gives the U.S. EPA authority to regulate isolated wetlands at all,” he said. “If a majority of the court decides that it does not, then no U.S. EPA rule on the topic is valid.”
A patchwork of policy and protectionShould the court rule in favor of the Sacketts and limit the federal jurisdiction of agencies like the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers to regulate the nation's wetlands, it would fall to individual states.
The Tulane study found that 24 states rely on the Clean Water Act to regulate wetlands in their states. That means that they would have limited wetland regulations if the Supreme Court narrows the scope of the Clean Water Act.
Leaving regulation to states could result in a patchwork of protections, according to Maisah Khan, policy director with Mississippi River Network.
“Relying on different states to make up different rules ignores how what happens in one part of the Mississippi River has impacts on another,” Khan said.
The Mississippi River basin is an interdependent system, which covers over 1.3 million square miles and 31 states. Environmental laws in each of those states impact the others.
For example, fewer wetlands to soak up pollutants in the upper basin means more of those pollutants will instead end up rushing downriver, adding to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
Millions of migratory birds find refuge in the restored wetlands every year.(Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco)The Supreme Court is expected to return a decision on the Sackett case sometime early this year.
For now, the future for many of the country’s wetlands, especially those seemingly isolated from rivers or streams, remains uncertain.
Yet at Emiquon, life will go on.
Scientists have documented about 93% of Illinois’ threatened and endangered bird species associated with wetlands at the preserve. Blodgett thinks it could be more.
“I'm pretty sure the other 6 or 7% are out there,” he said while looking out across the wetlands. “We just haven't had the right person at the right place at the right time to see them.”
Madeline Heim, a reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, contributed to this story, a collaboration between the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk and Harvest Public Media.
The Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk is an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.
Harvest Public Media is a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest based at KCUR in Kansas City.
Copyright 2023 KCUR 89.3. To see more, visit KCUR 89.3.
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