By the time the 2025 session of the Montana Legislature concludes in late April or early May, the state’s 150 lawmakers will have cast thousands of votes on proposals affecting everything from property taxes to pet insurance to human health care, ultimately forwarding hundreds of bills to the desk of Gov. Greg Gianforte.

The often-turbulent legislative firehose is a lot to keep track of even if you’re a seasoned journalist or lobbyist working in the Capitol — much less if you’re an everyday Montanan trying to follow what your representatives are doing from elsewhere in the state. The sheer volume of bills, votes and debate that flows through the Capitol halls can quite easily sweep a casual observer off their feet.

Launching for the 2025 session today, our digital Capitol Tracker guide is intended to offer a lifeline in that storm, helping Montanans ranging from Capitol insiders to bewildered citizens make sense of the quantifiable aspects of legislative proceedings. (For insight on the unquantifiable ones, subscribe to Tom Lutey’s Capitolized newsletter.)

The digital guide mirrors information presented on the Legislature’s newly revamped official website, but is intended to load faster and be easier to use, especially on mobile phones. We’re also able to supplement the sometimes-terse official data with additional information such as links to stories MTFP reporters have written about particular bills or analyses of specific lawmakers’ voting records.

You can find the guide here:

This year’s version of the tracker will be largely familiar to readers who used the 2023 edition. However, we’ve had to rework much of the logic that moves information around behind the scenes (sometimes repeatedly) to accommodate the new legislative website’s various birthing pains. As part of that work, we’ve also removed a few features we had on the prior edition while we think through how we can reconceptualize them.

As of today, the 2025 tracker includes the following functionality:

A page with information for each introduced bill (all 664 of them as of this writing), including the sponsor and the bill’s progression through the various legislative hurdles that stand between a bill and its enactment as law. Bill pages also include links to the full bill text and proposed amendments, as well as fiscal and legal notes for bills that have them.

A page for each of the Legislature’s 100 representatives and 50 senators, including their public contact information, their committee assignments, a list of bills they’ve sponsored and the results of their most recent election. Those pages also include an analysis of how often lawmakers are voting with their Republican and Democratic colleagues.

Lookup tools that let you search bills by title and number and lawmakers by name. You can also look up your district’s lawmakers by entering your address.

A couple of other notes: Due to the sheer volume of information included in the Capitol Tracker and our ongoing efforts to work with the new legislative website, we expect we’ll have a few bugs to sort out in the coming weeks. We’d greatly appreciate your help (and patience) on that front.

Additionally, while we already have some plans for features we’re hoping to add in the coming weeks, we’d love to hear suggestions about ways we could make this tool more useful to you.

You can reach our data team, Data Reporter Jacob Olness and Deputy Editor Eric Dietrich, at jolness@montanafreepress.org and edietrich@montanafreepress.org.

TAKE A LOOK: MTFP’s 2025 Capitol Tracker.

The post Our digital guide to help you track the Montana Capitol is back appeared first on Montana Free Press.

The Trump administration’s hiring freeze and buyout offer for federal workers in Coastal Georgia have left nearly 16,700 employees uncertain about their future, as they consider whether to resign or risk losing their job.

The Current is an inclusive nonprofit, non-partisan news organization providing in-depth watchdog journalism for Savannah and Coastal Georgia’s communities.

Updated at 5:35 p.m.

President Donald Trump signed executive orders Saturday imposing steep tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico and China, a move that state officials and business leaders said could disrupt supply chains and raise consumer prices in Vermont for some goods and energy products.

Citing national security concerns, Trump placed 25% tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico, and 10% tariffs on goods from China. He also declared a 10% tax on energy imports from Canada, including electricity and natural gas. 

The taxes levied against Canadian goods were expected to go into effect on Tuesday, but posts made by both Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on social media late Monday afternoon indicated that the policy would be postponed for at least 30 days. Mexican leaders had reached a similar agreement with the Trump administration earlier in the day.

As of Monday evening, the tariffs against Chinese goods were still expected to take effect Tuesday.

The tariffs, especially those levied on Canadian goods, could have far-reaching impacts on Vermont, a state whose economy relies heavily on its neighbor to the north. Canada is Vermont’s largest international trading partner, and the state imports about $2.6 billion in goods each year from Canada while exporting $680 million worth of goods in return, according to statistics from the Canadian consulate general.

Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., who hosted a roundtable with Vermont business leaders last week, said Monday morning that Trump was “creating enormous administrative havoc” and “great uncertainty” for Vermont companies.

“These tariffs are a really bad idea for our businesses and our economy and our consumers,” Welch said. 

Amy Spear, president of the Vermont Chamber of Commerce, said that regardless of whether the policy was adopted, the confusion clouding the decision-making process was in itself a stumbling block for the state’s economy.

“Policy predictability matters,” Spear said. “Businesses thrive on stability, and volatile trade policy creates uncertainty, making it difficult for businesses to plan for the future.”

For years, Burlington-based ski brand J Skis has produced its skis at Utopie MFG, a manufacturer based in Quebec. But with the potential of a steep price hike on the imported product, Jason Levinthal, the founder of the company, said he’s concerned about how to plan for the new trade policy. 

“Going to another factory — that couldn’t happen for another two years,” Levinthal said. “And by then, I have no guarantee that these tariffs are still going to exist. I don’t even know if these tariffs are really going to exist now.” 

But whether or not the tariffs go into effect, Levinthal said, he still has to worry about navigating a new regulatory environment. 

“I need to make real time real life business decisions based on what I know now,” he said. “If I don’t, I’m going to be screwed later.”

Should it be enacted, the tax on Canadian energy also threatens to escalate costs in a state that depends on fuel and electricity from there, importing about $775 million of electricity and $420 million of fossil fuels from Canada per year, according to stats from the Canadian consulate general. 

“We’re very concerned,” said Rebecca Towne, CEO of the Vermont Electric Cooperative. 

According to Towne, the VEC gets over 40% of its electricity from Hydro-Québec, a Canadian supplier of hydroelectric power. Towne said it was still unclear how exactly the tariffs would apply to imported electricity but a preliminary estimate indicated the cooperative could face up to $2 million in extra costs for 2025 — a cost that would likely get passed down to consumers.

“Our power supply costs are ultimately paid for by our consumers,” Towne said. “We’re a non-profit. That’s how it trickles down.” 

Meanwhile, Vermont Gas Systems, the state’s sole natural gas distribution company, gets almost 100% of its natural gas supply from Canada, according to director of public affairs Dylan Giambatista. 

Giambatista said there’s still “a ton of variability” and uncertainty surrounding the implementation of the tariffs, but Vermont Gas, a subsidiary of Canadian energy giant Energir, is expecting to see dramatic cost increases.

“That 10% tariff on Canadian energy is certainly going to have a direct rate impact on our customers,” he said, noting that any rate increases would likely not take effect until this spring. 

Imports from Canada and China also play a large role in the Vermont construction industry, which depends in part on imported timber, steel, aluminum and other commodities.

Sarah Mearhoff, communications director for the trade association representing Vermont’s construction industry, said tariffs on these items could threaten to increase homebuilding costs at a time when Vermont is already seeing sky-high housing prices.

“You can imagine that a lot of framing for homebuilding is done with timber, and a lot of that in Vermont’s industry specifically comes from Canada,” Mearhoff said.

“Because housing prices are already so inflated, because the cost of constructing a single unit of housing is already at a record high…our members can’t just eat a 25% tariff,” she said. “They are not making the profit margins necessary in order to just absorb that cost. That cost is going to be passed on” 

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. said in a statement that the tariffs were “most likely illegal and definitely harmful.” 

“Given Vermont’s long-established economic ties with our Canadian neighbor, the impact on our state will be even greater,” Sanders said. “We need a rational and well-thought-out trade policy, not arbitrary actions from the White House.”

Carly Berlin contributed reporting for this story.

Disclosure: Sarah Mearhoff reported for VTDigger from October 2021 until December 2024.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont businesses and consumers face uncertainty over shifting tariff policy.

SHERMAN, Conn.—The Sherman Library, 1 Sherman Center, will present paintings by Doreen O’Connor in a show, “For the Love of Flowers,” from Feb. 21 until April 2.  O’Connor’s paintings, which […]

The post O’Connor paintings reflect natural beauty and fading farm life first appeared on Kent News, Inc.

Hundreds of thousands of eligible poor Mississippi children will miss out on grocery assistance this summer after the state missed the deadline to apply for the federal program for the second year in a row.

Families who rely on free breakfasts and lunches during the school year often have trouble making ends meet while paying for additional child care and meals during months when school is not in session. 

The program provides each eligible child $40 a month in grocery assistance. It was estimated the program would have brought in $38 million to the state last year. 

The nation’s poorest state is also the hungriest state – with nearly one in four children not having reliable access to food in Mississippi. 

The Mississippi Department of Human Services, the agency responsible for administering the program, did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Mississippi Today about its decision to opt out. Gov. Tate Reeves, who oversees DHS, also did not respond to questions about the decision, though he told news outlets last year he made the decision based on his desire to reject “attempts to expand the welfare state.” 

Springboard to Opportunities will offer cash assistance to needy families in Jackson for another summer after it launched its own program last year in response to the governor’s decision not to participate in the Summer EBT program. 

“Summer is the hungriest time of the year for millions of families across our country … This initiative was launched in direct response to Mississippi’s decision to opt out of the federal SUN Bucks program, which could have filled this hunger gap for low-income families across the state,” Sarah Stripp, the nonprofit’s director of socioeconomic wellbeing, said at a press conference at the Capitol last week. 

Springboard to Opportunities served 672 children in the summer of 2024, but there are about 324,000 children across the state who would qualify for food under SUN Bucks, according to the Food Resource and Action Center, a national nonprofit organization working to end hunger in the U.S.

Stripp urged state leaders to reconsider their decision for 2026. 

Summer cash assistance from Springboard to Opportunities is only available for Jackson families living in federally-subsidized housing. But the success of the program – boasting a drastic reduction in hunger, according to a survey – shows what kind of difference a small amount of cash can make in the hands of eligible families. 

Michelle Howard, a Jackson mother of two young boys, applied for assistance from the nonprofit last summer after seeing a flyer on her door. Before she started receiving benefits, Howard said summer wasn’t enjoyable – it was filled with stress and anxiety trying to find the extra money to cover meals and child care. 

“We already have a set amount that we’re working with throughout the year. Once the summer comes, we’re still working on that same little bit of money,” Howard, who runs a cleaning business, told Mississippi Today at the Capitol. “… Right now, when my children are in school, I maybe spend $500 a month on groceries. But when the summer comes, I might need an additional $200 or $300 a month.” 

SUN Bucks was created based on the success of earlier versions of summer food assistance programs and supported by a bipartisan group in Congress. The Biden Administration created the program to help families deal with higher food costs when children are out of school and not receiving free and reduced-price meals.

While the Mississippi Department of Education participates in other federal food programs during the summer, children – especially in rural areas – often don’t have transportation to get to the sites that serve the meals.

Sade McGee, director of food services in Yazoo County School District, said programs that require students to have transportation to get meals during summer months have low participation in her district. 

Thirty-eight states – including Mississippi’s neighboring states of Arkansas, Louisiana and Alabama – have enrolled in the program.  

The implementation of the program in Louisiana required pressure and funding from state legislators last year. Gov. Jeff Landry originally said in early 2024 that the state would not participate, but a bipartisan group of lawmakers saw differently and put up the money needed to implement the program.  

The program cost $7 million to run – half of which was paid by the federal government, the Illuminator reported at the time.  

The state got an extension and implemented the program in a short amount of time, according to David Matlock, the secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Children and Family Services. 

Matlock told Mississippi Today the rollout of the program was hard work and took a lot of coordination among state agencies, including the education department. 

He said the state plans to continue its participation. 

“Our retailers were interested in continuing this program, our families are interested in continuing this program,” he said.

The post Mississippi again turns down millions of dollars to feed low-income kids during summer months appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Egg prices remain volatile in the wake of the ongoing bird flu outbreaks, which have decimated commercial poultry and egg production across the U.S.

At the end of 2024, the epidemic pushed egg prices to the second-highest level – $4.15 per dozen – in the past decade, according to the Consumer Price Index. That’s second only to the first onset of the recent bird flu outbreaks.

Retail grocery stores were still dealing with inflationary pressures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic when initial bird flu outbreaks began across the country in early 2022.

By the end of that year, egg prices had doubled from the year before, from less than $2 a dozen to more than $4 a dozen, according to the Consumer Price Index.

Egg prices began to stabilize throughout 2023, but as new waves of bird flu hit, the price of eggs shot back up. 

Bird flu has ravaged commercial poultry and egg production, with more than 134 million birds killed since early 2022.

The recent rise in grocery staples can also be attributed to post-COVID-19 pandemic inflationary pressures, a shortage of beef cattle caused by droughts, and bird flu outbreaks. 

Beef prices climbed 22% from early 2022 to the end of last year, a reflection of the long-term ripple effects of declining herd sizes in the face of feed and water shortages. 

Grocery prices have taken center stage as activists, politicians and government agencies have denounced meat and food industry consolidation alongside alleged price gouging.

The post Egg prices continue to swing drastically, cracking already strained grocery budgets appeared first on Investigate Midwest.

By Taylor Knopf

When someone is having a mental health crisis — whether they’re thinking about suicide, acting erratically or experiencing hallucinations — they frequently end up in a hospital emergency department, mostly because there are few places for them to go. 

If a medical provider determines that the patient is a danger to themselves or to those around them, it’s standard practice to petition a judge for an involuntary commitment order. 

These types of orders typically bring law enforcement officers into the process. 

Involuntary commitments are supposed to be a last resort to mandate psychiatric care at an inpatient facility for a specified amount of time. These experiences are often emotional for the patient and their loved ones. In that vulnerable moment, a uniformed officer arrives at the emergency department to drive the patient — handcuffed in a patrol car or an inmate transfer van — to an inpatient psychiatric facility that has an available bed.

It’s a practice that many patients find traumatizing. But it will soon be changing in North Carolina.

One mother in Wilmington recounted to NC Health News her deep distress watching her 25-year-old daughter shuffle out of the hospital in handcuffs and ankle shackles attached to a chain around her waist as two officers led her to an inmate transfer van headed for another hospital. Another committed patient believed he’d been arrested and was going to jail after officers handcuffed him and drove him away from an emergency room in Chapel Hill. Parents have pleaded with medical staff to let them transport their children between facilities — some as young as 11 — but were told no.

All this occurs even as North Carolina sheriffs say they don’t want to be the ones moving patients, arguing that it should be done by mental health workers. They also say driving patients across the state to available hospital beds strains their resources, diverting sheriffs’ deputies from responding to crimes and other emergencies, sometimes for hours at a time.

For years, NC Health News has received scores of calls and emails from patients and their families shocked and traumatized by the presence of law enforcement and use of handcuffs in the course of mental health treatment. State officials and lawmakers receive the same frustrated calls from their constituents and have condemned this further stigmatization of mental health. While there have been some legislative efforts to soften the response to people experiencing mental health crises, those largely fizzled out — until now.

Out of North Carolina’s federal sign-on bonus for expanding Medicaid, state lawmakers allocated $835 million for behavioral health needs in their 2023 budget, including $20 million for a non-law-enforcement transportation pilot program for mental health patients under involuntary commitment. In December 2024, the state Department of Health and Human Services released a request for proposals from qualified transportation vendors with a plan to operate the pilot in two regions of the state.

The existing system is “the antithesis of care, and it puts them on the backtrack to recovery,” former Secretary of Health and Human Services Kody Kinsley told NC Health News. “We have been eagerly and desperately trying to decouple these two systems, as are other states, and so we’re excited for this pilot.”

Rising number of police transports

Law enforcement transports of mental health patients are happening more frequently in North Carolina. Involuntary commitment petitions increased by at least 97 percent from 2011 to 2021, according to data collected and analyzed by NC Health News. As community mental health resources dwindled and the state’s growing population needed support, more patients started showing up in crisis at emergency rooms.

In North Carolina, involuntary commitments are sometimes ordered even if a patient comes to the hospital voluntarily or if they or their guardian agrees to inpatient treatment. The reasons for this vary — from the need for a safe transportation option to the incorrect perception that a patient needs to be committed to be treated in a psychiatric facility.

Counties are responsible for the transportation of patients under involuntary commitment, according to state law, and traditionally this role has fallen to law enforcement. Involuntary commitment petitions often trigger a transportation request to law enforcement if the patient needs to be picked up in the community and taken to a hospital for an evaluation and/or transported from a hospital emergency department to an inpatient psychiatric facility, even if it’s across the state.

In 2018, North Carolina lawmakers revised the state’s mental health laws to allow more flexibility, including alternative means of transportation for patients. County leaders were told to submit their transportation plans for these patients to the state health department. In 2021, NC Health News reviewed an incomplete number of available plans provided by the state health department and found the majority of counties opted for minimal to no changes to the practice of using police or sheriff’s deputies.

Law enforcement transports are the default for patients under involuntary commitment across the United States. In October, the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law released a report that found that 43 states have some allowance for non-law-enforcement transportation of a committed patient, including North Carolina. However, the study authors wrote, most states largely rely on law enforcement because they haven’t established or invested in alternative models.

The Duke Law report evaluated responses to people in crisis nationwide and recommended that policymakers remove law enforcement from all mental health interventions as much as possible. 

“Not only does law enforcement involvement blur the lines between treatment and criminalization of mental illness, people with serious mental illness are also overrepresented in law enforcement use-of-force encounters and law enforcement-related injuries,” the report authors wrote. “People with serious mental illness are over eleven times more likely to experience law enforcement use of force and over ten times more likely to be injured in law enforcement interactions compared to other individuals.”

Wrong job for law enforcement

Law enforcement officers across the U.S. have said they shouldn’t be responsible for transporting mental health patients. The North Carolina Sheriffs Association said that role should be turned over to mental health professionals. 

N.C. sheriffs say that transporting mental health patients takes officers off of other duties, sometimes for hours or entire shifts, as they drive across the state to a psychiatric hospital. It can put a strain on smaller departments with fewer resources. 

A national survey of 355 sheriffs’ offices and police departments found that an average of 10 percent of the agencies’ total budget was spent transporting patients under involuntary commitment, according to a 2017 report by the Treatment Advocacy Center. Based on the survey responses, the report estimated that law enforcement agencies spent $918 million nationwide transporting committed patients that year. The survey respondents estimated they spent 165,295 hours, which equated to 21 percent of total staff time, responding to and transporting mental health patients. 

Additionally, officers often don’t have the training or tools to respond to mental health calls. Their presence alone — with marked vehicles, flashing lights, uniforms and firearms — often escalates a situation. A study that conducted in-depth interviews with 40 young people who had been involuntarily committed in Florida found that the majority had negative experiences with law enforcement. 

“Major themes characterizing negative encounters were the framing of distress as criminal or of intervention as disciplinary rather than therapeutic, perceived aggression and callousness from police officers, and poor communication,” the study authors wrote in 2021.

The study quoted several participants, including a Latino college-aged male who said: “The sheriff’s officer […] was kind of a jerk. […] excuse my language, he’s like, ‘Don’t touch my [expletive] you [expletive] retard.’ Then, sitting in the car with that guy for an hour and 15 minutes on the drive . . . he wouldn’t shut up about how much of a piece of [expletive] he thought that people like me were. And criminals, and you know . . . he equated me with criminals. I was numb at that point.”

A multi-racial female college-aged participant said the male officer who transported her said: “Don’t mess around with me or I’ll show you who’s boss.” 

“Very aggressive for the situation,” she told the study authors. “It was really scary.”

Negative policing interactions can cause post-traumatic stress disorder, particularly for a patient already struggling with their mental health and in distress. After a traumatic mental health intervention, patients often say they are hesitant to reach out for help again. 

What are some alternatives?

North Carolina is inviting companies to come forward with proposals for how to transport mental health patients differently. Kinsley said the Department of Health and Human Services has a high bar for this contract and will be paying a premium to get a transportation service that is high quality. 

“We’re not just going to award it to whoever comes forward. Part of the reason why we have been moving slower on this than I would have liked is because we haven’t been able to find a perfect prototype in the nation,” Kinsley said when the proposal was released in December. “I have not seen another state really figure this out perfectly yet. There are some contractor companies that are doing this in a way that looks a little too law enforcement-adjacent to me. 

“We really want to center this on: What does real care and support in transport with the right resources look like?” he added.

There are some examples of mental health crisis response units in other states that respond to 911 calls related to mental illness, homelessness and substance use. Among those are the CAHOOTs program in Oregon and, closer to home, the HEART program in Durham. Rarely have teams in either state needed to call for law enforcement backup. The Duke Law report pointed to both programs as examples of non-law-enforcement groups that are able to respond safely to people experiencing mental health distress. 

“When determined to be safe, alternatives may include family, friends, medical providers, mental health professionals, ambulance services, and/or other authorized providers,” the study authors wrote. 

They cautioned, however, that mobile crisis units, which are therapeutic teams that respond to people experiencing crises in the community, “in particular seem hesitant to be tied to the [involuntary commitment] process for fear of fostering mistrust.” 

In North Carolina, one seemingly unknown allowance under state law is that a clerk, magistrate or district court judge can authorize either a health care provider of the patient or a family member or friend of the patient under involuntary commitment to transport them instead of law enforcement personnel. The health provider, family member or friend may request to transport a patient by submitting a form to the clerk’s office. Hospital staff and magistrates do not usually tell family members about this option and will not authorize it without a specific request.

The Duke Law study authors examined a model in Oklahoma called OK RIDE CARE which contracts with that state’s department of health and human services to provide “trauma-informed transportation services” in unmarked vehicles. The Oklahoma service requires its transporters to be trained in client rights, a therapeutic curriculum approved by the state health department, CPR/first aid, HIPAA compliance and patient confidentiality. 

The post NC moves to end police involvement in transporting mental health patients appeared first on North Carolina Health News.

What you need to know:

• Mat-Su School District Superintendent Randy Trani and top district officials met with parents, teachers and students at Mat-Su Central this week to explain proposed program changes that could dramatically alter the school’s structure and costs to families.
• The district faces a $22 million deficit and aims to increase local state education funding by changing how per-student payments are calculated for Mat-Su Central. The restructuring could generate about $3.3 million in additional funding in the first year. The proposal would administratively split Mat-Su Central into two schools, increase district correspondence school allotments, raise class fees and offer lower graduation requirements.
• Parents and advisory members worry the changes will affect the school’s community-focused, family-oriented atmosphere. The proposal will be considered at a Feb. 5 school board meeting.

---

WASILLA — Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District officials sought to allay parents’ and teachers’ fears about major proposed changes to Mat-Su Central school’s operations and funding during a meeting this week, even as details about how those updates will fully affect families remained unclear.

Top district officials, including Superintendent Randy Trani, met with several dozen staff, families and students at Mat-Su Central’s Wasilla campus Tuesday afternoon for a nearly two-hour emergency meeting of the school’s Academic Advisory Council.

The meeting followed about a dozen days of rumors and uncertainty within the school about how the changes would affect enrolled families and existing staff, some of whom feared for their jobs as a result of the announcement, they told Trani during the meeting.

A program restructuring proposed by Trani at a school board meeting this month would administratively split Mat-Su Central into two schools, reclassifying its in-person classes as a hybrid brick-and-mortar school with new staffing and administrative requirements under state rules. The plan would keep the day-to-day operations of the correspondence program largely unchanged while introducing a new payment structure for enrolled families.

School staff and families said they were not notified of the changes before the announcement. The proposal must be approved by both the school board and state education officials. The school board will consider the plan at its Feb. 5 meeting.

The proposal is key to a district effort to boost incoming education funding by updating how the state calculates per-pupil payments to Mat-Su Central while also attracting more homeschooled students to the program, district officials said.

The district faces an estimated $22 million deficit for next year and will propose budget cuts, officials said at the school board meeting. If approved, the Mat-Su Central program change could generate about $3.3 million in additional funding within the first year, they said. Officials hope to have the changes in place by August.

Mat-Su Central, the district’s largest school with about 2,800 students, operates as a homeschool correspondence program with some face-to-face classes taught by district teachers or vendors. About 500 students enrolled in one or more of those classes this school year, according to district officials. A new 45,000-square-foot, $24 million Mat-Su Central school building, funded by the borough, will be completed this spring and will include nine classrooms.

Unlike the district’s brick-and-mortar schools, some of which receive $12,000 per student, Mat-Su Central is funded by the state as if it did not offer in-person classes, officials said. Instead, it receives the lower correspondence student rate of about $7,000 per student, about $3,000 of which is passed on to families as the state’s home education allotment.

If approved, the Mat-Su Central proposal would change that calculation, officials said. The restructuring would allow correspondence students to enroll in hybrid program classes on an as-needed basis, much as they do now, while the district would be reimbursed at the higher in-person rate. Students from other district schools could also take those classes, which could be offered at nontraditional times such as nights and weekends, officials said.

The hybrid program would also introduce a high school diploma option with requirements set below the district’s current 25.5-credit standard, a change that officials said would attract students who do not want the full district diploma and are currently enrolled in other programs elsewhere in the state.

“We’re facing a $22 million shortfall — things will need to be cut,” Trani said at the Tuesday meeting. “This is a way not to cut things.”

An estimated 3,000 Mat-Su students are enrolled in correspondence programs outside the district, according to state education data.

The updates would also likely allow the district to pass along higher state education allotment payments to enrolled correspondence school families – about $4,000 instead of the current $3,000. At the same time, class fees would likely increase significantly to better reflect the cost of providing them, officials said.

Families currently pay $50 for most classes offered at Mat-Su Central and pay nothing to enroll in secondary classes at neighborhood schools, which are available on a case-by-case basis. Under the new structure, families will likely pay hundreds of dollars per class, and neighborhood school enrollment would no longer be free, officials said.

The district has not yet determined the final proposed allotment amount, the new class fees, or whether both programs will be overseen by Mat-Su Central’s current administrators, Trani told parents at the meeting. Fees will likely be set on a sliding scale based on grade level, subject and other factors, he said in an interview. Administrator decisions are in progress, he said.

Advisory committee members, administrators, teachers and parents at Tuesday’s meeting said that while they understand the need to raise class fees, they are concerned that the overall changes will fundamentally alter what they value about the school, including its current administrative team.

“I will not just leave Mat-Su Central; I will leave this school district if you do not retain them,” parent Heather Lockwood said of Mat-Su Central Principal Stacey McIntosh and Assistant Principal Nathan Chud. “And if you do not put them in full charge of this program, you will find other students that don’t attend the on-site classes will leave.”

Advisory committee members and school staff also said they resent Trani’s initial announcement and presentation of the program change this month because of how he discussed the school’s performance and his comments about the committee.

Mat-Su Central has the lowest graduation rate in the district at about 73%, in part because some students drop out to enroll in other correspondence schools with lower graduation requirements, according to district data. While Trani noted the dropout cause during his board presentation, parents and staff said he did not sufficiently emphasize the challenges it poses for the school.

During the same board meeting, Trani also described the nine-member advisory committee as a group that is no longer needed.

Established by school board policy, the committee includes parents, staff and district representatives and is charged with making recommendations on school policy and budget. It was created to allow the school to operate as a district-run program with some of the freedoms of a charter school, Trani said.

“I call them the blue extension cord — the extension cord that used to run something very important, but now just this blue extension cord would keep walking across the top of it. We wonder why it’s there,” he told the school board.

Parents and advisory members objected to that characterization.

“This group of people here … They were publicly referred to as the blue extension cord you keep stepping over,” said Andrew Lockwood, a parent who also teaches classes at the school and at Mat-Su College. “But that’s not how we see them. We listen. We chose them, and we listen to their advice.”

Siyen Emmert, an advisory committee member who also served on a group that guided plans for the school’s new facility and who has been involved with the school for more than a decade, said she worries the new program will hurt the school’s family-oriented atmosphere.

“I’m not sure that that’s totally recognized by the district, that this is a very community-based, family-based program,” she said in an interview after the meeting. “We really focused on how to make this a family-oriented space. So it was not designed for what he’s talking about as a hybrid model. It wasn’t designed for kids to come for four classes at a certain time of day.”

— Contact Amy Bushatz at contact@matsusentinel.com

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Welcome to Mile Markers, a bimonthly newsletter about rural higher education. I’m Nick Fouriezos, an Open Campus national reporter who grew up at the crossroads of suburban Atlanta and the foothills of Appalachia.

Today’s Roadmap

01: Postcards: How will new rankings effect rural institutions?

01: Postcards

Tim Knowles holds a fascinating position in American education.

He is the 10th president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, an organization that has shaped American education for the past century, creating Pell grants, the Education Testing Service (ETS), and standards for engineering, law, medicine, and schools of education.

Yet despite that history, his position holds has a distinctly entrepreneurial bend. Every decade or so, the organization hires a president and tells them not to live in the present, but the future.

“The charge is to look around the corner, and tell us what we should be thinking about not tomorrow, but five to 10 years out,” Knowles said. The entrepreneurial kick suits him, given his previous experience as founder of the Academy Group and of the University of Chicago Urban Education Institute and its Urban Labs.

The Carnegie president enters at a time where one could argue that looking ahead is more critical than ever, with the pace of change ever increasing. In this conversation, I discuss with him how rural communities are being affected by the debates shaping education today. This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Q: How do our current systems often miss rural students?

When we analyzed “portraits of a graduate” — visions of what students should be able to do after high school — we discovered what I’d call an invisible American consensus across rural, urban, suburban, red, and blue communities. Despite our supposedly divided times, communities consistently prioritize the same core skills: communication, collaboration, critical thinking, curiosity, civic engagement, creativity, and hard work.

These are precisely the skills that predict success and are in high demand from employers. Yet until we can reliably and validly measure these things, they won’t have real currency, and we will use where you went to school as primary proxy for quality. 

Think about a student in rural Iowa who wakes up at 4 AM, works on the family farm, gets to school on time every day, does their homework, maintains good grades, and holds a weekend job. Those activities, aggregated up, are clear signals of persistence. We need to figure out both how to capture that and then make it legible to employers and the post-secondary sector.

This is particularly important for rural communities, where there’s often evidence of excellence that isn’t made legible in traditional metrics. Complicating matters, the skills we’re talking about are also highly context-specific — the same student might show incredible persistence in certain settings but struggle in others. Understanding and measuring that complexity is key to leveraging the extraordinary talent across the United States and creating meaningful change in education.

Q: Where do you think the American higher education system is shifting?

One of our most lasting and influential contributions that emerged from the Foundation, sharing both the K12 and the postsecondary sectors is the Carnegie Unit or ‘credit hour’. The credit hour is the bedrock currency of the education economy. It has infiltrated everything. It shapes the daily work of teachers and professors, it determines what goes on a transcript, it’s how we define accreditation, and it is central to who gets financial aid. In essence, the Carnegie unit has become the system, essentially conflating times with learning. I am convinced that’s really ripe for disruption.

++ The inspiration for California’s ‘grand experiment’ at community colleges? Wisconsin (via our partner CalMatters)

++ California wants to give degrees based on skills — not grades. It’s dividing this college (via our partner CalMatters)

It was literally in 1906 that Carnegie stood up and said “a 4-year degree should be 120 credits,” and, today, it remains 120 credits. But we have learned a huge amount since then, from neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists and learning scientists, about what knowledge is and how it’s acquired.

The idea that time and learning (and place and learning) should be conflated doesn’t take into consideration what we now know. If all goes well, in the decade ahead we will see a renaissance across the post secondary sector, as new models come to be that are more affordable, more experiential, and don’t walk in lock step with the Carnegie unit.

Q: How is Carnegie rethinking its classifications for postsecondary institutions?

While we’re maintaining the research classifications (like R1 institutions), we’re also introducing a new universal classification focused on economic opportunity. For every institution that receives federal money — about 4,000 of them — we’ll look at two main factors: access (who they are enrolling, using Pell grant data) and earnings outcomes eight years after graduation.

++ Texas universities seeking top research status will have a clearer path under new rules (via our partner The Texas Tribune)

Importantly, this isn’t a ranking system. We’re grouping like institutions and comparing them to each other. For instance, we’ll look at how rural two-year associate degree programs compare to similar institutions in terms of increasing access and improving outcomes. This distinction is important. You can’t compare what someone might make in a rural area to suburban Los Angeles, let alone rank them against one another. So we’re doing a lot of work to get these measures right based on available data.

Q: How will rural education and students be affected?

This could particularly benefit rural institutions that serve disproportionate numbers of low-income families. About 25 states already have laws or regulations connected to the Carnegie classifications, and federal departments like NSF, NIH, and NASA use them to direct resources. 

We want to identify and support institutions that are actually delivering for large numbers of low-income young people in meaningful ways. This is about making the post-secondary sector a much more vital engine for social and economic mobility. And in rural areas particularly, we need to better recognize and support the unique ways that schools and colleges contribute to their communities.

Q: Why do you feel like there is more of an appetite for actually changing higher education now, compared to in the past?

There are many forces driving change in postsecondary. The cost of higher education is out of reach for millions of Americans. Confidence in higher education is at an all time low.  And there are fewer college age students in general. All these factors are putting real pressure on higher education to explore new designs. The demand I see for a new approaches is remarkable. And it is not just at the post-secondary front. 

There are a lot of states that are saying the K-12 system isn’t working nearly as well as it could. They are reinventing the high school diploma and degrees to ensure more young people earn credentials that don’t conflate time with learning, and instead focus more decidedly on outcomes. For instance, in Indiana, they are making earning a real-world credential a requirement for all high school graduates. 

++ Ivy Tech auto students hope EV skills will help their careers (via our partner Mirror Indy)

You’re also seeing a massive lean toward CTE, supported by unusual bedfellows, with many conservative states making it more available to more students, and even Randi Weingarten and the American Federation Teachers (the largest teachers’ union in the nation), making it a priority of the institution she leads. 

And clearly, the pandemic has created significant momentum for change, leading to precipitous drops in literacy levels, and giving license to young people to “vote with their feet”, resulting in serious and well documented challenges with chronic absenteeism — that aren’t going away nearly as quickly as hoped.  These negative trends are also powerful forces for change. 

At the end of the day, we need to ensure our systems are valuing and measuring the right things. Of course this includes algebra and math. And it must include the skills we know predict success in work, in school and in life. 

My hope is that by focusing both the K12 and post secondary sector on outcomes that matter, and directing public policy and public capital to the places that create genuine opportunity — even if they’re doing it in ways that don’t fit traditional models — the nation can accelerate economic opportunity for everyone.  

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