News by Scott France

Jefferson County farms, food banks, and school districts are scrambling to plug holes created by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) termination of funding for two programs that provided more than $1.1 billion for schools and food banks to purchase food from local farmers and producers in the U.S. 

“This was an 100% gut punch for agencies like ours around the county,” said Patricia Hennessy, Executive Director of the Jefferson County Food Bank Association (JCFBA). The four food banks and one mobile unit operated by the JCFBA serve an average of 3,400 households per month. The number of households served rose 24% in 2024, according to Hennessy. “We might not find funding to replace the sudden shortfall,” Hennessy said. “Our largest line item is for food, and we need money to pay our staff and bills.”

The purpose of the programs was to maintain and improve food and agricultural supply chain resiliency. The food served feeding programs, including food banks and organizations that reach underserved communities. In addition to increasing local food consumption, the funds help build and expand economic opportunities for local and underserved producers.

The elimination of the two programs will affect local organizations in different ways.

Kai Wallin, Community Liaison with the Port Townsend School District, said that the District received funding from both programs, the Local Food for Schools (LFS)  and the Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA). “We will still buy locally what we can, but without this matching grant from the USDA helping us purchase local ingredients, our dollars won’t go as far, and we may need to buy more conventional, non-local ingredients to fill the gap,” she said.

“People have come to rely on this funding for meeting the demands for healthy food”

Other school districts in Jefferson County might not be as adversely affected by the cuts as the Port Townsend school district. Neither the Quilcene School District nor the Brinnon School District received any funding from either of the two programs, according to Ron Moag and Trish Beathard, superintendents of those respective school districts.

The Chimacum School District receives USDA funding through the Washington State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI), and is uncertain of the eventual effect on its funding pending finalization of  OSPI’s budget, said Kelly Liske, Executive Director of Business and Finance at the District. 

The Olympic Peninsula Community Action Program (Olycap) had an LFPA grant that served nine sites in Jefferson and Clallam counties. Between August 2023 and December, 2024, LFPA funded food purchases from farms in Jefferson and Clallam counties and distributed 135,875 pounds of produce to these nine sites.

Jefferson County food banks, local farmers and school districts with whom we talked say that the USDA’s decision is likely to increase food insecurity among vulnerable populations and create economic hardships for these farmers who previously supplied local produce to schools and food banks.​

“People have come to rely on this funding for meeting the demands for healthy food,” said Sallie Constant, Farm to Community Coordinator with Washington State University Extension for Clallam and Jefferson counties.

LFS was a cooperative agreement between the federal government and state entities (OSPI in WA) to identify producers of Washington-grown products and make those products available for free or at a subsidized cost for schools. For the 2025-2026 school year, $660 million was going to go towards purchasing regional foods such as salmon, berries, lentils, tortillas and squash and providing those foods to schools at half market price. The contract for this coming school year was canceled, so while these products will still be available, they will no longer be subsidized by the USDA, according to Danielle Williams with the WSU Clallam County Extension.

”The people who grow our food contribute to our local economy and food systems,” Hennessey said. Karyn Williams, owner of Red Dog Farm, said that the farm fills one order per week from Olycap, totaling approximately $50,000 annually, all of which will be eliminated. “I feel for people receiving this food, as well as my crew who get great satisfaction that the food they are growing feeds less advantaged people,” Williams said.

Hennessey is concerned about the consequences for seniors, houseless, domestic violence victims, and veterans, many of whom don’t have the capacity to shop in grocery stores if they can even afford to buy food. “Our mission is to “provide food to people in need,” Hennessey said. “They pulled the rug out from under us.”

Addendum:

The Beacon has learned that food bank officials in six states are reporting that up to $500 million dollars in funding for food banks through the USDA emergency food assistance program has been frozen. The New York Times reports that USDA representatives cannot be reached for comment. The Times reports that Vince Hall, the Director of Government Relations for Feeding America, a nationwide network of over 60,000 food, pantries and distributors, said that rural communities are likely to be most deeply affected. Emergency food assistance programs like this are “the food lifeline for rural America” because they come with funding to improve food storage and distribution, which can be more challenging in rural areas.

Anyone interested in supporting local purchasing for food access they can donate to the WSU Extension Olympic Peninsula Farm to Food Bank Fund or donate to their local food bank- JCFBA donations.

By Grace Vitaglione

This article was written with the support of a journalism fellowship from The Gerontological Society of America, The Journalists Network on Generations and The Silver Century Foundation.

Kristin Goforth and Lauren Cox, twin sisters aged 49, moved their father into a Piedmont Triad-area assisted living facility on March 13, 2021. Rick Goforth, then 75, was in good health; he was an avid walker who enjoyed being outside. But he was exhibiting signs of dementia — he had wandered off twice — so they decided a facility specializing in memory care would be safest.

He entered the facility at the lowest level of care available, passing all the assessments for activities of daily living such as independent bathing and eating.

Two months later, Rick was dead.

The sisters said they watched their father undergo a “drastic” decline in the facility; days after his arrival, he fell and broke his wrist. It turns out facility staff were giving Rick medicines the family hadn’t known about, including administering his usual dose of Xanax three times a day instead of his prior regimen of only once a day. Plus, he was getting extra “as-needed” doses. 

Because of the broken wrist, he lost the ability to use a knife and fork, nonetheless the staff didn’t cut up his food for him, Kristin said. 

Rick started falling repeatedly and staff put him in a wheelchair against a wall, with a table blocking him from moving.

Near the end of April, the family took him to the hospital – he was severely dehydrated, malnourished and in acute renal failure — “basically hospice-ready,” Cox said. 

Rick died a couple weeks later.

The sisters had difficulty finding justice for their father’s death. First, the family called the county department of social services, which said they didn’t find anything wrong at the facility. Then they complained to the state, which found the facility had violated regulations resulting in death or serious physical harm, abuse, neglect or exploitation of a resident. Eventually, the state fined the facility $19,000.

Cox called that “a slap on the wrist.” The family sued the facility and came to a settlement subject to a confidentiality agreement that limits Cox from being able to say more. 

Advocates say Goforth’s story is an example of how the regulations overseeing assisted living facilities in North Carolina can be out of date, and public officials’ enforcement of those regulations can vary from county to county.  

When officials do fine facilities for violations, facilities have the ability to negotiate those penalties down to very little, advocates said. A NC Health News analysis found that fewer than half of penalties levied in the last three years were paid in full by facilities. 

Assisted living over time

In North Carolina, assisted living facilities are referred to as “adult care homes” or “family care homes.” There are more than 1,200 of these facilities in the state, according to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, and they can range in size from family care homes — licensed to have two to six residents — to larger adult care homes licensed to have more, with some housing more than 100 residents. 

Residents of these homes may need help with activities of daily living, such as eating, dressing and bathing. They may require 24-hour supervision, but they don’t need regular nursing care. These residents are supposed to have less-complex health needs than those in skilled nursing facilities, or nursing homes, where residents’ needs require regular medical intervention.

The severity of patients’ conditions in adult care homes has become more profound over the years, said Mary Bethel, board chair of the NC Coalition on Aging. People who in the past would have been placed in a nursing home now live in adult care homes, she said.

In recent decades, adult care homes were also the destination for many former psychiatric hospital patients when the state undertook a process of deinstitutionalization for people living in them, said Hillary Kaylor, an ombudsman who advocates for residents in long-term care in Mecklenburg and eight surrounding counties.

Many of the facilities weren’t prepared to take on that mental health population and weren’t given support to do so, she said.

“We over-built [the industry], we under-supported, and then we expected a lot,” she said.

Eventually, North Carolina’s overreliance on adult care homes to house psychiatric patients led to a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice over improper institutionalization of mental health patients in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the subsequent Supreme Court Olmstead decision. 

‘Working with an old book’

Adult care homes are regulated primarily at the state and county level, whereas most nursing homes, which can receive Medicare payments, have to follow federal rules as well.

Kaylor said oftentimes, the rules for care in an adult care home are set by a contract between family members and/or residents and the facility, so the levels of care can vary. Some facilities may have a registered nurse there eight hours a day, and some may have one that only visits twice a week, for example, she said.

But as patients’ conditions in adult care homes become more severe, Kaylor said that might call for updated regulations to accommodate those changes.

“Sometimes we’re working with an old book,” she said.

There is an enhanced license associated with having a special care unit, or a secure wing specifically for dementia patients, said Elizabeth Todd, lawyer for the Goforth family. Her practice focuses on nursing home and assisted living negligence. 

Facilities must apply for the enhanced license, which comes with higher staffing and training requirements. But some facilities can get around those rules by calling their dementia wing a “memory care unit” and just locking the door, she said. 

In adult care homes, most of the regulations are pretty generic, Todd said.

In contrast, “there’s a regulation for everything in a skilled nursing facility,” she said. “I don’t want to call it the wild west in adult care homes, but it’s not far off.”

The rules governing adult care homes have to be “readopted” every 10 years; the most recent round was completed in 2025, according to a NC DHHS spokesperson. Many areas were strengthened in the last few years, including infection prevention and control, emergency preparedness, administrator and management requirements, and resident discharge requirements.

Jeff Horton, executive director of the NC Senior Living Association, an advocacy organization for adult and care homes, said regulations have become much more stringent over the last couple decades to keep up with acuity levels.

For instance, positions such as medication aides and personal care aides have to undergo a certain amount of training, he said.

If the state were to increase requirements, such as requiring adult care homes to have registered nurses on staff, then the state should also increase reimbursements to facilities that receive public funds, Horton said.

Vacancies and turnover at the state level

Adult care homes are monitored by county departments of social services and the NC Division of Health Service Regulation through complaint investigations and annual surveys.

The state regulatory division had a 25 percent vacancy rate in March 2025 and a turnover rate of 11 percent in 2024, according to a NC DHHS spokesperson. In the past two years, that turnover rate was even higher.

Former Gov. Roy Cooper’s last four recommended budgets included additional positions for adult care surveyor positions, but the NC General Assembly didn’t put funds for additional inspectors into any of their final budgets.

Complaints to the state about adult care homes and family care homes have also increased, the spokesperson said. From 2020 to 2024, complaints rose over 22 percent.

At the county level, regulation can vary depending on resources, Kaylor said. For example, Mecklenburg County has staffers focused solely on adult care homes, but in more rural counties, social services staffers end up stretched thin.

Adult care homes in the eastern part of the state have complained they face stricter enforcement than those in the west, according to Horton. County social services staff in the east tend to be more aggressive and levy fines more readily, association members have told him.

New Hanover County Social Services Director Tonya Jackson said in a statement over email that the team works with staff from the state Division of Health Service Regulation to make sure all complaints are investigated and addressed promptly.

“Additionally, county staff participates in standardized state training each year to ensure a full understanding of rules and regulations,” she said.

The state division gives the same training to all county social services staffers who monitor adult care homes, said a DHHS spokesperson, and the state can provide technical assistance as needed. Situations can vary in each facility, so enforcement happens differently according to each specific place, the spokesperson said.

Inconsistent enforcement

Bill Lamb, a longtime advocate for seniors, sits on the board of directors of the advocacy nonprofit Friends of Residents in Long Term Care. He said the wide variation in penalties and citations across the state shows that enforcement is inconsistent. 

Lawsuits like the one pursued by the Goforth family are sometimes the only way to hold a facility accountable, Lamb said.

Yet even then, some facilities have clauses in their contracts that require residents or family members to agree to settling disputes through arbitration rather than in court. When a consumer signs admission papers for themselves or a loved one into a facility home, these clauses are often tucked among the dozens of pages of legalese in the contract. 

Such provisions eliminate the opportunity for a consumer who ends up in conflict with a nursing home to go to court. Plaintiffs often win less money in these types of cases, Todd said.

State lawmakers have also enacted a cap on noneconomic damages, such as compensation for pain and suffering, for medical malpractice in North Carolina. Those are usually the primary type of damages in a case against an assisted living facility, Todd said. 

That cap can make it harder for plaintiffs to find a lawyer who will take the case, which can take months or even years to pursue. Lawyers often are paid a percentage of the damages as payment, she said.

“The caps on damages is unjust primarily because there is absolutely no limit to the amount of damage these facilities can do, but there is a limit to what they have to pay for having killed people,” Todd said.

‘A leaky bucket’

When state or county inspectors find that an adult care home violated a regulation, they can levy a penalty. If facility administrators disagree with that finding, they can appeal through an Informal Dispute Resolution or go to the state Office of Administrative Hearings. 

Fewer than half of the penalties levied against adult care homes in the past three years were paid in full, according to records from the N.C. Division of Health Service Regulation analyzed by NC Health News. Around 26 percent of the penalties were settled with the state, 11 percent were not paid and referred to the Office of the Controller, 13 percent were in the appeal process and 4 percent were blank.

Lamb said those numbers showed a lack of full accountability.

“That’s a pretty leaky bucket if you ask me,” he said.

Wealthier chains of adult care homes can “lawyer up” and drag out the appeal process, Lamb said, sometimes for years.

Using penalties effectively 

The maximum penalty for a violation resulting in death or serious physical harm, abuse, neglect, or exploitation to a resident is $20,000 for an adult care home, licensed for seven or more residents. The facility can then be fined up to $1,000 each day the violation remains unaddressed.

“That’s what a life is worth in our state,” Lamb said. 

Horton was previously a nursing home regulator, and he said there are times when regulators get things wrong — that’s why it’s important to have an appeals system. A settlement isn’t always bad, either, he said, as sometimes that means the penalty is waived in lieu of extra staff training.

Training can make more of a difference towards improving outcomes than a penalty, Horton said. Penalty dollars don’t flow back into any part of the long-term care system, though. They are designated — by law — to support the local school district.

While penalties can be a deterrent for breaking the rules, Horton said it’s important to look at the end goal of what they achieve in terms of improving care.

If the facility demonstrates a pattern of breaking the rules, state surveyors can suspend admissions, as well as downgrade, revoke or suspend their license, according to NC DHHS. If the facility has outstanding unpaid fees, the department will not issue them a new license or renew their license.

Despite her family’s settlement with her father’s facility, Kristin Goforth said she still doesn’t feel good about the situation — there should be better protections for older people. Lauren Cox said there should be more accountability for facilities overall.

“This can’t be the way we treat people who have spent their entire life contributing to society…they work, they pay their taxes, they do everything right, and then at their end of life, we do this?” Cox said.

The post ‘A slap on the wrist’: families and advocates call for increased accountability from assisted living facilities  appeared first on North Carolina Health News.

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Amy Cronin DiCaprio’s son, now 14, was born with congenital heart and lung defects. He underwent major surgeries in infancy, including one to remove a lobe of his lung, and open heart surgery just two weeks later. She said he suffers from significant behavioral health challenges as well and is on several prescription medications.

For health insurance, Cronin DiCaprio, a mother of two, relies on MassHealth — Massachusetts’ program that administers both Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP. For her and her family, those programs are the only way they can receive health care.

“If we lost MassHealth, we just wouldn’t be able to do that anymore,” she recently told The Shoestring, warily twisting a ring on her finger. “We would just… there’s no way we could afford it.”

Those are very real fears for Cronin DiCaprio and millions of others across the country.

President Donald Trump and Republicans are currently preparing a budget that seems certain to contain significant cuts to Medicaid and CHIP, which some 2 million Massachusetts residents rely on through MassHealth. Nationwide, another 72 million Americans receive coverage through Medicaid.

These programs provide critical health services for individuals and families like Cronin DiCaprio’s. Currently unemployed after working in the non-profit public health sector, she said her home is in preforeclosure and the prospects of her family losing health coverage at this time is “terrifying.”

“Masshealth has been amazing in terms of being able to see specialists,” Cronin DiCaprio said. Her eldest son relies on continuous follow-up care including annual heart screenings, visits with pediatric pulmonology specialists, behavioral health specialists, and prescription medications.

Now, state and national lawmakers, human rights groups, and ordinary people are raising serious concerns about the future of these programs under the current presidential administration.

“The threats are real, and I don’t want to minimize the threats and the amount of money on the table,” Massachusetts State Sen. Jo Comerford, D-Northampton, told The Shoestring in a phone interview. “It is a hole that is unfillable by the state when we look at all of the other major holes that have emerged from reckless and dangerous Trump administration actions.

Comerford said she “can’t minimize the devastation” of Trump and Republicans’ massive cuts to federal programs.

“We’re seeing rollbacks across every agency we care about,” she said.

***

During the first week of his presidential term, Trump caused far-reaching confusion, outrage, and fear with a slew of executive orders and an Office of Management and Budget memo that froze federal funds. The wording of the memo said that agencies whose work was in any way contradictory to the new ideology, outlined in the president’s executive orders, would need to find and assess those contradictions so the presidential administration could then decide the best uses for the funding “consistent with the law and the President’s priorities.”

Following the OMB memo, states reported being “cut off” from access to Medicaid systems. States regained access shortly afterward and the federal government has claimed that was caused by a technical “outage.”

Just a few days later, Trump’s billionaire buddy and the country’s biggest campaign donor to Trump and Republicans, Elon Musk, and his band of teenage and early 20’s tech bros who constitute the so-called Department of Government Efficiency were given access to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services. They reportedly accessed key payment and contracting systems. This further compounded public and legislative fears that Medicaid and Medicare programs would be targeted for significant cuts.

The OMB memo has since been rescinded, but challenges in accessing federal funding have continued for many of its recipients.

In the weeks following, Republican lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives voted to advance a budget proposal that directs the Energy and Commerce Committee, which has authority over Medicaid, to find $880 billion in cuts.

Some Republican lawmakers, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have since claimed these proposed federal funding cuts will not affect Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security because the budget plan passed on Feb. 25 does not specifically contain the words “Medicare,” “Medicaid,” or “Social Security.”

Many experts have said this is misdirection, noting that it would be a near financial impossibility to make the proposed cuts without taking from at least one of those programs.

“Both Speaker Johnson, other House Republican leaders and President Trump have said that they do not want to cut Medicare,” Georgetown University health policy expert Edwin Park recently told NPR. “So if you take Medicare off the table, Medicaid constitutes 93% of all mandatory spending that remains under the jurisdiction of the Energy and Commerce Committee.”

This conclusion from Park is also supported by a Congressional Budget Office report from March 5.

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When asked for an interview about the House budget in early March, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey told The Shoestring in a statement that the “budget resolution threatens the health care of 2 million Massachusetts residents.”

“It would nearly double health care costs for hundreds of thousands of Massachusetts residents who rely on the Affordable Care Act and increase grocery bills for more than a million children and their families by gutting food assistance,” the statement said. “The Senate needs to reject this shameful attack on the health and wellbeing of children and families in Massachusetts and across our country.”

Healey’s response outlined the categories of people receiving coverage under Medicaid programs who were vulnerable to losing health services and coverage, which included people with disabilities, pregnant people, and newborns. Healey said one in four Massachusetts residents received some form of Medicaid coverage.

While the proposal has been met with nationwide disapproval from constituents across political parties, lawmakers passed another Republican-led stop-gap spending bill on March 14 — together with support from Democrats led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — that will fund the government through September.

Johnson and other lawmakers have defended the cuts, saying that the money will come from the elimination of “waste and fraud,” without citing any specific evidence. Musk, meanwhile, has seemingly referred to people receiving services through federal programs as “the parasite class.” Last month, he reposted a meme on social media that referred to “watching Trump slash federal programs knowing it doesn’t affect you because you’re not a member of the Parasite Class.”

***

With strict eligibility guidelines, it is hard to imagine where $880 billion worth of fraud might be in the Medicaid system.

Cronin DiCaprio and her family briefly lost coverage this past July due to missing a letter from MassHealth requiring her to update her household information and income — one of a list of annual requirements for maintaining coverage under the program.

During this gap in health coverage, Cronin DiCaprio said she ran out of prescription medications for herself and her older son, medications that cannot be stopped immediately and must be slowly tapered off. This gap came at a time during which the Fourth of July holiday closed and delayed many state and local offices.

“I was in the drive-thru pharmacy line at CVS in tears,” she said. An “incredibly kind” and “resourceful” pharmacist researched brand options and located every coupon and savings option that he could, but in the end she said she still ended up paying more than $2,000 for about two weeks of medication.

“I’m literally sitting in our house like a hysterical chemist, you know, trying to figure out how to taper him down on the antipsychotic meds that we had left so that he wouldn’t run out completely,” she said.

“It just feels like such an immovable obstacle, the cost associated with all elements of healthcare are really shocking,” she added.

Cronin DiCaprio also acknowledged a certain amount of privilege and agency due to her education — she has two master’s degrees — and her work-from-home job that allowed her to access and navigate the complex and time-consuming Medicaid system and ultimately regain health coverage for her family. Her job allowed her the flexibility to leave her phone on hold with the MassHealth system waiting to reach the relevant department staff for hours at a time on her desk while she did her regular work.

These hours-long wait times exist at current staffing and funding levels for the Medicaid program.

In addition to long wait times and complex paperwork, there are other barriers to coverage in the Medicaid system. The writer of this article, for example, receives Medicaid coverage based on disability status. This type of coverage, called CommonHealth, is re-evaluated annually, in some cases every two years. In addition to financial and residency verification requirements, Medicaid recipients of this designation must complete “disability supplement” paperwork rehashing their entire health history and seeing a state-selected provider for “evaluation.” For this writer, that is decades of health history spanning dozens of providers.

That system of “means testing” — and threats of getting kicked off disability insurance — simply doesn’t exist in the many countries worldwide that provide universal health care.

This eligibility process is not easy to navigate while living with, or caring for someone with, significant health issues. Challenges aside, if this Medicaid coverage disappeared, there is not currently an affordable health care alternative available for this writer.

While lawmakers continue to clash on spending packages, individuals and families across Massachusetts and the nation are waiting with worry and fear for their loved ones and community members.

”Even if we had to pay anything towards it, you know, we would just skip it, which is horrible to say, but that’s the position that we’re in,” Cronin DiCaprio said. “We would need to prioritize his prescriptions, you know, and he’s relatively stable in terms of his cardiac health, we would just, I don’t know, we would need to prioritize.”

***

It isn’t just patients who will suffer from cuts to Medicaid funding. Health clinics in rural Minnesota have reportedly already seen a bit of the impacts that would result from the funding cuts. During the federal funding freeze earlier this year triggered by the OMB memo, some clinics reported difficulty making payroll with some having to furlough staff.

These clinics, called community health centers, typically receive a significant portion of their operating costs from federal funding through Medicaid payments and federal grants. There are 15 community health centers here in the Connecticut River Valley, according to the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers website, and many more across the state.

Federally qualified health centers, like CHC’s, play a critical role in providing health services, accepting patients regardless of their health insurance status, and providing services ranging from dental care to pediatric care and senior care. These centers also offer other social services like connections to food banks and housing services, which are also funded through federal grant support and contribute to community health and wellbeing. Funding cutbacks put all of these things at risk.

The loss of these centers will further burden the for-profit medical system as well. A 2020 study focused on Massachusetts concluded that federally qualified health centers, like CHC’s, increased access to health care in underserved areas and reduced spending on visits to emergency departments for non-emergency health needs.

Individual health providers will not be immune to these cuts either.

Cronin DiCaprio’s son has been seen by the same cardiologist since his open heart surgery in his first year of life. The family has been able to follow this doctor through his transition to private practice because of the MassHealth coverage at its current funding levels. Many providers will be forced to choose between keeping patients and being financially viable if cuts are made to the program.

When asked specifically what these funding cuts might look like locally, Sen. Comerford said she couldn’t speculate.

“We can certainly understand individual circumstances, but I don’t know what the systemic circumstances would be because you’d have to understand the scope from the federal government and then the state’s response,” Comerford said. Things are changing rapidly and people, families, workers, and businesses will be hurt by these actions, she added.

State Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa, D-Northampton, similarly did not have a specific answer for what the local impacts of the cuts might look like.

“It’s not looking good,” she told The Shoestring in a March 14 interview.

Sabadosa said a lot will depend on the magnitude of the cuts.

“In broad strokes, we’re talking about people losing their health insurance if the cuts are as they have indicated they may be,” she said. “Western Massachusetts has a large number of residents who are on Medicaid.”

Sabadosa was certain that Massachusetts hospitals and community health centers would feel the impacts of these cuts with many of their patients’ payments coming from Medicaid coverage.

“We won’t be able to make up for all of these losses and so we’ll have to figure out a way to try to mitigate the situation to the greatest extent possible, and it’s going to be extremely challenging,” she said.

The cuts proposed in the House budget “would likely translate to billions of dollars of revenue cuts from MassHealth per year,” a statement by Healey’s office said.

In addition to potential loss of individual health care and overall state budget impacts, Healey’s statement said “ripple effects” will include losses of jobs at hospitals and other health care positions, negative impacts on caregivers relying on long-term care services for loved ones receiving Medicaid coverage, and mounting pressure on an “already fragile health care system” potentially impacting health care access for all residents across the state.

Public outrage at lawmakers’ town halls nationwide has been so widespread it prompted Johnson, the Republican House speaker, to advise GOP lawmakers not to attend their own town halls.

When asked what was being done by elected officials in Massachusetts to evaluate and mitigate these cuts, Sabadosa said Massachusetts was “leading” in bringing lawsuits against the federal government and Trump administration in court. She also said public pressure does seem to be having some impact, and possibly stalled or reversed some actions taken by the Trump administration so far. She said people should continue to contact their federal representatives and show up to their town halls.

“Unfortunately, our federal government is not a reliable partner at the moment,” she said. “In fact, I would argue that they are abandoning the states. And because that is happening, we need more people to step up locally, however that may be, to support each other.”

Comerford had a similar response to those questions, saying Massachusetts was quickly challenging federal actions in the courts, and encouraged constituents to continue to contact her office.

“We’re fighting like hell every day to protect our people,” she said. “That is my job. 
I’m gonna keep resisting and fighting and backing,” Comerford said. “We believe the state can, and should, be a line of defense and we will keep pushing.”

The owner of the Kemmerer coal mine laid off 28 workers on Friday, according to a Kemmerer Operations, LLC press statement. The job losses, which amount to roughly 13% of the mine’s workforce, followed months of rumors of possible cuts in the southwest Wyoming energy town.

“The workforce reduction is part of its ongoing efforts to align operations with current coal market conditions, including those caused by the pending natural gas conversions of several coal-fired power plants in the region,” according to the statement. “[Kemmerer Operations] appreciates the contributions and hard work of the impacted employees, and values its long-standing partnership with the United Mine Workers of America.”

In an email to WyoFile that included the press statement, Kemmerer Operations President and General Manager Don Crank said, “No further comments will be provided.”

Employees who received pink slips will work until sometime in April, according to Lincoln County Commission Chairman Kent Connelly, who said he received a call from Crank regarding the layoffs.

“Everybody’s been watching what they’re going to do, so I can’t say that it was a surprise,” Connelly told WyoFile by phone, noting that rumors of layoffs have been circulating in the community. “They finally admitted it,” he added.

The company also announced Friday it was moving from three shifts to two shifts, which means the mine will no longer be a 24-hour operation, according to Connelly.

The commissioner said he doesn’t know who in particular is being laid off. Though the job losses are sure to hit hard in the small towns of Kemmerer and Diamondville, many workers at the mine commute from all over the southwest region, including from Evanston, Mountain View, Lyman and even towns in Utah and Idaho.

Multiple new construction and industrial projects are planned or already underway in the region, Connelly noted, including TerraPower’s Natrium nuclear power plant and a major trona mine expansion outside Green River.

“I hope they will get on with these other new places that will be hiring staff,” Connelly said.

The mine produced 2.4 million tons of coal in 2024 and employed 215 workers, according to federal data. It produced more than 4.2 million tons in 2017 and employed 279 workers in the fourth quarter of that year.

News of the layoffs comes in the same week that President Donal Trump renewed promises to bring back “clean, beautiful coal.”

The post Kemmerer coal mine lays off 28 workers appeared first on WyoFile .

DERBY LINE — Local Canadian officials hosted a press conference Friday to condemn the U.S. government’s decision to limit Canadians’ access to an iconic library and theater that straddles the northern border in Vermont.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said Friday afternoon that beginning Monday, the agency would be restricting Canadian access to the entrance of the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, which is on U.S. soil, attributing the decision to safety concerns. Staff and library card holders are allowed to access the entrance until October, when limitations are expected to become even more stringent, the agency said.

“The goal of this phased rollout is to provide members the opportunity to obtain the necessary travel documentation without negatively impacting library operations,” Ryan Brissette, a spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a written statement. 

“On October 1, 2025, all visitors from Canada wishing to use the front entrance will be required to present themselves at a port of entry to enter the library from the United States,” with some exceptions provided for handicapped access and emergencies, he wrote. 

First opened in 1904, the library and opera house is situated between Derby Line and Stanstead, Quebec. For more than 120 years, the library has enjoyed a unique status as a neutral space, where those in Canada can enter U.S. territory to use the space without first going through customs. The building is a heritage site and has long been considered a symbol of the close relationship between the two nations.

On Tuesday, however, U.S. Customs and Border Protection informed library staff that the longstanding arrangement was over, according to Sylvie Budreau, president of Haskell’s board of trustees. 

“No matter what this administration does, it will not change the fact that Stanstead and Derby Line are friends and partners forever,” said Stanstead Mayor Jody Stone said at the press event. “Without borders you wouldn’t even know that we are two separate communities. 

According to Budreau, U.S. Customs and Border Protection had similarly moved to restrict access from the Canadian side of the border in 2022 but ultimately agreed to let the operation run as usual.

“They have more support now,” she said.

The library plans to open a service entrance on the northern side of the building for Canadian patrons to use, which they hope to renovate in the coming months, Budreau said.

Within the library, it would be “business as usual,” she said, and there are no plans to restrict patrons’ movement within the library, which is bisected by a line of tape representing the international border. 

Dozens of people from both sides of the border gathered outside the building Friday to watch the press conference and protest the decision. 

Among them was Clement Jacques, a lifelong Stanstead resident who said he was “not comfortable at all” with the change. 

Wearing a bright red hat that read “Canada is Not for Sale,” Jacques said he was a library card holder and had been coming to Haskell for decades.

“This building is used by both countries,” he said angrily. 

The announcement came just weeks after U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem visited the library, as first reported by VTDigger, during a whirlwind trip to Vermont following the death of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent David Maland.

During that visit, Budreau said, Noam crossed back and forth over the line of tape on the floor that represents the international border while saying, “U.S.A number one” and calling Canada “the 51st state,” echoing a common taunt from President Donald Trump.

Since then, tensions between the two nations have continued to soar as Trump continues to wage an on-again off-again trade war against Canada while suggesting that the U.S. should annex the country. 

Still, Canadian officials at Friday’s press conference were eager to reaffirm the close ties between the two nations. 

“The Haskell Free Library & Opera House is a testament to the amazing relationship between our two communities,” said Marie-Claude Bibeau, who represents the Compton-Stanstead district in Canada’s House of Commons. 

Earlier this week, Bibeau joined Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt. at a roundtable discussion in Newport, where she denounced Trump’s controversial tariffs on Canadian goods. 

“Our border community is strong and this will only further our strength and our ties,” Bibeau said Friday. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: U.S. to restrict Canadian access to historic Vermont library straddling northern border.

Hurricane Helene wrought historic devastation when it hit western North Carolina last September. Nearly 100 people were killed in the region and thousands were left injured, traumatized or homeless.

Hundreds of volunteers arrived within hours and began assisting with everything from food delivery to housing to medical care. Their presence was a godsend. But for many of the area’s medical professionals, the crisis underscored their own advantage: They knew the place, the people, the culture.

“A lot of questions I don’t have to ask my patients, because I know already,” said family medicine physician Tim Bleckley, who returned to his hometown of Franklin after residency to take over the practice of a retiring doctor.

Rural Americans are more likely to suffer from, and die prematurely of, a number of chronic conditions, including cancer, heart disease and diabetes. Effective management of such diseases is bolstered by long-term doctor-patient relationships, and studies show that cultural awareness provides a firm foundation for these relationships.

Cultural awareness is, essentially, having an understanding of and being sensitive to a community’s customs and rhythms. For health care providers, it’s having a sense of what your patients arrive with when they enter your office.

Bryan Hodge is chief academic officer for the Mountain Area Health Education Center. He’s tasked with convincing young health care professionals of the virtues of practicing medicine in a rural community. Hodge said in the storm’s aftermath, he felt “so much pride and inspiration for the way in which people showed up.”

He also witnessed “the value of knowledge of the fabric of a community.” Those attuned to its rhythms were uniquely well-placed. It reinforced Hodge’s conviction that “the more local the care can be, the better.”

A ‘Comfort Zone’

Health care administrators in Appalachia are striving to meet two objectives at once: addressing a critical shortage of providers by nurturing homegrown talent.

Case in point: Tim Bleckley.

Bleckley was born with a heart defect and underwent surgery at a month old. While initially pediatric cardiology was his ambition, he changed his mind while in residency. He wanted to go home to Franklin, but knew the town was too small to sustain such a practice. So he chose family medicine instead.

His patients, he believes, are in a “comfort zone” when they visit him. They like that he’s aware of what they experience, how they operate, “the things that matter to them.”

“Primary care is very personal in terms of understanding where people come from, and understanding what their lives are like,” he said. “People are very comfortable with the fact that I’m a hometown boy who’s come home, and they feel very at ease coming to see me.”

He’s been able to translate that cultural awareness into change, one step at a time. He knew that his patients — like so many mountain folks — have a tendency to take the advice of their doctor without question. He wanted them to take more ownership of their care, to know why they’re taking a particular medication, when it should be taken and potential side effects. He uses the teach-back method to have them describe what they’ve been told about medications their cardiologist or nephrologist prescribed.

“I want them to feel confident they know what they’re doing.”

Rivers Woodward had a similar career trajectory.

When Woodward was a junior in high school, his sister was stricken with an illness for which traditional means of medicine proved inadequate. The family turned to Patch Adams — a physician with an alternative approach to medicine (and the subject of an eponymous motion picture starring Robin Williams) — and she made a remarkable recovery.

This experience inspired Woodward to pursue a career in health care, to help reinvent the way it’s delivered. Further, he wanted to realize that ambition in a rural community.

Like Bleckley, Woodward was raised in Franklin, in rural Macon County. Today, he’s a family medicine physician at Blue Ridge Health, a federally qualified health center in the town of Lake Lure, in the same mountain region in which he was raised.

Studies show that those who were raised in a rural community or trained in one are more likely to practice in a rural region. Both are true of Woodward. While in medical school at the University of North Carolina, he was selected for the Rural and Underserved Scholars Program, a collaboration of the University of North Carolina and the Mountain Area Health Education Center.

“Things move at a different pace” in a rural community, Woodward says. His sense of that serves him well. His cultural awareness provides a foundation from which he offers empathetic care, which, he says, entails “listening with curiosity because I actually want to know someone’s experiences.” It requires listening without judgment.

Regardless of where you come from, rural cultural awareness can be learned with time and patience, assuming you’re receptive to it. But for many, it requires a reset.

“The more insular your upbringing,” Woodward says, “whether that’s in New York City or in Macon County, the more difficult it is to tap into cultural humility with people who may not look like or speak like or think like you.”

Woodward’s upbringing was an unconventional one; learning was experiential. His family took extended trips through Latin America, traveling by bus, staying with local families.

At times, he felt tensions in his relationship with his hometown: that he was somewhat “other.” He says his practice of rural medicine, listening with curiosity, has allowed him “to heal that tension.”

Designing a New Model

In reflecting on his community in the weeks since the storm, Woodward references a paper written for the Episcopal Relief and Development agency on the emotional stages of a community that’s experienced a natural disaster.

“There’s a peak immediately afterwards that’s fueled by adrenaline and cortisol,” he explains, “survival mode, basically.” Next is “this feeling of the community coming together and supporting each other, which we saw.

“But then after that, there’s this long downhill slide into disillusionment, before the upward slope of rebuilding.”

There’s much work to be done in Western North Carolina. Its health care needs, like those of most of rural America, are urgent; solutions require systemic change.

Bryan Hodge recalls so many people being overwhelmed by the attention they were extended in the aftermath of the storm. They were accustomed to going without. This underscored for him the critical need for an overhaul of rural health care. And it underscored the heightened importance of cultural awareness to inform that overhaul.

Woodward was recently named Blue Ridge Health’s associate chief medical officer. One of his primary responsibilities is to help design new systems of care for its rural clinics.

“My hope is to leverage all of the resources we have within a really large organization to make sure that we’re meeting people where they’re at, regardless of their location and their condition,” he says.

This could mean, for example, recognizing what a huge issue transportation is in rural communities and taking better advantage of telehealth, or providing more home visits.

Tim Bleckley’s immediate community was spared from major damage in the storm. But a number of his patients live in communities that weren’t. The morning after, he was on the road, checking in on those he couldn’t contact.

“These are people I know,” Bleckley says. “They’re not numbers.”

He plans to continue to practice medicine in his hometown, using his cultural knowledge of the place to improve care, one patient at a time.

“I never regret or feel like I should have done this differently. Not at all.”

The post In North Carolina, Helene’s Destruction Underscores the Value of Homegrown Rural Health Care appeared first on 100 Days in Appalachia.

In early December 2023, through a scrim of swirling flurries, Mackenson Remy steered his minivan past an open gate in the security fence surrounding a gray concrete factory along Highway 85, on the northeastern edge of Greeley, Colorado. Remy was still relatively new to the state, and he’d never been to Greeley before. He didn’t really know anything about the plant either, only the three letters he’d been told to look for—JBS—and what he’d heard: that they had jobs. Lots of jobs.

Remy is originally from Haiti. He’s in his 30s with braided hair and a thin beard. He has a wary way about him but also a restless hustle. About 10 years ago, he moved from Port-au-Prince to Boston, and for a while that was all he knew of the States. But when his wife, who is in the military, was stationed in Colorado Springs in early 2023, he started working at a Marriott there, driving shuttles of pilots to Denver International Airport. Despite constantly retreading the same ground, the view along the eastern front of the Rocky Mountains, with Pikes Peak soaring in the distance, never failed to impress him.

Remy had a TikTok channel, so he started shooting videos with narration in Haitian Creole and sharing them with his few dozen followers back home and those recently arrived in the United States. As Haiti has unraveled over the last few years, hundreds of thousands of migrants have fled the widespread violence and landed in the US in search of a better life. “I just started to show them how Colorado looks,” Remy said later. “ Couple people, they told me, ‘You’re always talking about Colorado is nice, it’s beautiful. How about the jobs over there?’” For those Haitians with temporary visas, having full-time work could help their case to stay.

So Remy, who has a green card, figured he’d ask around. He was always driving by big businesses—warehouses, factories, construction companies—so why not drop in and see if they had any openings? One woman told him her company wasn’t hiring, but she knew a place where they were always looking for new workers: JBS. The company is the world’s largest producer of meat, especially beef. If you’ve recently eaten a burger at McDonald’s—or anywhere, really—there’s a good chance the meat came from JBS.

Remy looked up the address of the company’s plant in Greeley, about two hours from Colorado Springs. It was starting to snow, but he set out anyway. After navigating the icy highway and a long line of cattle trailers idling on the shoulder waiting to be admitted to unload their livestock, Remy inadvertently entered through the facility’s exit. Meatpacking plants usually have security tighter than Fort Knox—it’s illegal in several states, but not Colorado, to photograph or shoot videos near their property—but there Remy was, phone out and already recording, as he circled the parking lot. He looked for anyone he could ask about available jobs. Finally, a security guard stopped him and provided the name and phone number for an HR employee named Edmond Ebah.

Ebah, who had started at the plant after migrating to the United States from Benin in 2017, told Remy that JBS had about 60 positions available slaughtering, butchering, and packaging the meat. Yes, it was hard work, he emphasized. (According to data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, jobs at meatpacking and poultry companies are consistently among the country’s most dangerous.) But Remy’s Haitian followers could make good money. Best of all: It was a sure thing. If they came to Colorado, he would find them a job.

So Remy went home and cut together a montage of his footage from inside JBS and around Greeley and recorded a voiceover with the information from Ebah. This isn’t a job for lazy people, he says in Creole. But you don’t need to know English. And, if they came, Remy told his followers, he knew places they could stay. “Those apartment is pretty close from the job,” he told me later, translating the voiceover. So if you’re interested? “You can text me, tell me when you want to come.” He posted the video that night and went to bed.

The next morning, he checked TikTok. Most of his videos only got a few dozen views, but this one had been shared by a Creole-speaking influencer who often went by the handle JeanJean Biden—and it had gone viral. It was already at 35,000. Remy’s phone started blowing up, flooded with direct messages from people who wanted to know more. But Ebah had told him that they only had several dozen positions, so Remy texted him right away. Ebah seemed unconcerned. “100 200 people,” he texted back. “Have them just book theirs flights tickets to Colorado, you and I will take care of the rest…”

Remy told me he was still worried. Where would people live?

“Tell everyone just to come,” Ebah replied. “Don’t worry anymore about where there are going to live, trusted me.”

[I]n February, the Trump administration announced that it would rescind the temporary protected status of more than 200,000 Haitians who had entered the United States legally during Joe Biden’s presidency.

Ebah and his supervisors at JBS came up with a plan. The company struck a deal with the Rainbow Motel, a tiny motor lodge less than a mile down the highway from the plant, to house new Haitian workers recruited by Remy’s TikTok.

But as these workers started to show up, it became clear that the job proposed in the videos was even harder than advertised. A local union representing workers at JBS, in complaints filed with multiple government agencies, would describe conditions at the motel as “squalor.” And inside JBS, the complaint says, this new crop of Haitian workers was asked to work at “dangerously unsafe” speeds. This past September, the union publicly accused JBS of abusing immigrant workers and human trafficking. (A JBS spokesperson told me that the company takes the safety and welfare of its employees seriously and that it follows all laws and regulations. The spokesperson also said that no substantiated evidence was provided that tied Ebah or company leadership to the claims outlined by the union.)

Since Donald Trump was elected to a second presidential term, things have only gotten worse. In January, Trump fired enough members of the boards of federal worker protection agencies to temporarily leave those bodies without a working quorum, effectively killing any investigations. Then, in February, the Trump administration announced that it would rescind the temporary protected status of more than 200,000 Haitians who had entered the United States legally during Joe Biden’s presidency. Trump reportedly intends to establish detention camps on military bases, including one in Colorado, to hold migrants while they are processed for deportation. Against this backdrop, the story of the workers in Greeley takes on new urgency and raises pressing questions. What does this country owe to the people it has admitted on humanitarian grounds? And what will we do without the workers who produce the lion’s share of our food?

Twenty years ago, at least one-quarter of all meatpacking workers were undocumented immigrants, mostly from Mexico. That changed on a single day. On December 12, 2006, Immigration and Customs Enforcement simultaneously raided six Swift & Company beef plants spread out across the country—in places like Grand Island, Nebraska; Cactus, Texas; and Greeley, Colorado. Federal agents and local law enforcement, many dressed in riot gear, entered and arrested 1,300 undocumented workers on charges of immigration violations and identity theft. It was the largest workplace immigration raid in American history. At the Greeley plant alone, 252 workers were arrested.

Swift needed to replenish its workforce fast. A Senate bill proposed expanding guest worker visas, but as a company spokesperson at the time said, “Our needs are year-round.” But few American workers were interested. Within about a month, the company reported its loss at $30 million. News reports at the time detailed the company’s attempts to start recruiting refugees who had migrated to the United States from places like Somalia and Myanmar. “Our survival was at stake,” a company executive said. But it wasn’t enough. In July 2007, Brazilian-owned JBS acquired Swift in a $1.5 billion all-cash deal.

With the purchase, JBS became the largest beef processor in the world. Months later, the company announced it would hire enough new workers to staff a second shift in Greeley, including some 400 Somali refugees. And soon, the rest of the industry followed JBS’s lead. Today, in many packinghouses, refugees account for as much as a third of the workforce. But most don’t last long on the line. The turnover rate is somewhere between 30 and 40 percent each year—one of the highest of any US industry. The reason is simple: The work is not only relentless, but often grueling.

These jobs are essentially like working on a dis-assembly line, a standard factory run in reverse. The live cow walks off the back of a cattle trailer and is slaughtered, then gets broken down into steaks and roasts and ribs and hamburger meat. When parts of a carcass slide by on the chain conveyor system, workers sink large meat hooks into those cuts—heavy loins or shanks or slabs of ribs—and then carve with a knife held in their other hand.

The pace of the chain is so fast—around 300 cattle per hour—that many can barely keep up. Workers at JBS and their union say the speed of the line makes serious injuries more commonplace. Complaints filed with OSHA detail ghastly injuries: a worker who was killed when he was hit in the head by falling machinery and knocked into a vat of chemicals; a worker whose arm had to be amputated after it was pulled into the sprockets of a conveyor belt. But more often, the injuries are from repetitive stress. Workers clutch the meat hooks for so many hours in such cold temperatures inside the refrigerated plant that they end up with carpal tunnel syndrome or trigger fingers or ulnar nerve palsy, known as claw hand.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, those jobs became increasingly deadly. Early in the outbreak, after packing plants were forced to close, Trump ordered them to reopen. Before JBS even had Covid safety protocols in place, it brought workers back to the line. In the Greeley plant alone, six workers died and hundreds were sickened when the company refused to heed union demands for a temporary shutdown. A Senate investigation—prompted in part by reporting I did with Esther Honig for Mother Jones and the Food & Environment Reporting Network—led OSHA to fine JBS $15,000 for failing to protect employees from exposure to Covid, a drop in the bucket compared to the meatpacking giant’s record revenue of $51 billion that year.

In September 2021, after months of negotiations, Kim Cordova, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 in Denver, finally reached a new collective bargaining agreement for workers at the Greeley plant. Cordova told me she pressed Tim Schellpeper, CEO of JBS USA, for improved safety standards, higher wages, more paid sick leave, and better health care benefits. Schellpeper finally gave in to the union’s demands—but in some ways the victory was short-lived. After JBS was found to have been using a third-party cleaning company that had been employing children, the Brazilian owners ousted Schellpeper and installed Wesley Batista Jr.—the son of one of the owners—as the new American CEO in May 2023. (JBS characterized these moves as a “reorganization”; the company settled a federal investigation into child labor charges for $4 million in January.)

Batista would prove less amenable to the union’s demands. Cattle prices had begun to climb as JBS reported a shortage in supply. Batista instituted a new work plan at the Greeley plant that Cordova told me is aimed at getting some of those profits back: the white bone program. “What the company is trying to do,” Cordova explained, “is get as much of the meat off a bone, as much yield off the animal, as possible. It’s literally a white bone.” She said this change meant more cutting. More repetition. More exertion. And all at a dizzying pace—“line speeds we had never seen before.”

Workers started quitting. And Cordova said the culture had shifted; union members weren’t willing to work under hazardous conditions anymore—they mobilized, staged walk-offs, or left for good. The union said JBS responded by looking for a more vulnerable and compliant workforce. “JBS needed a new group of workers to come in,” Cordova said, “so that they had more control over them, especially to work at this high speed.”

This was all in the air when Edmond Ebah met Mackenson Remy in December 2023. After Ebah began working on the slaughter side of the operation in 2017, he quickly rose to become an HR supervisor—in part because he speaks seven languages. But he was especially focused on recruiting new workers from his native Benin. In 2020, with JBS struggling to keep its lines running amid the pandemic, Ebah helped hire at least 30 new recruits from his home country, collecting newly created referral bonuses worth up to $1,500 per employee. He bought a van and started an LLC to carry them to and from the plant.

JBS presented Ebah’s story as a manifestation of the American Dream. He was building a private business on the side by providing jobs to his countrymen and a stable workforce for his employer. A banner with his picture above the word “humility” hung in the plant’s main hallway. The company posted to its LinkedIn page congratulating Ebah when he became a US citizen, and it touted his good work in recruiting new employees by producing a two-minute promo video shared on its website and social media channels. The camera work is all soft focus and slow motion. Ebah narrates his experience at JBS over a bed of lush strings. “I’m happy to do what I’m doing,” he says. “I can help people come to work for JBS.”

But after Remy’s TikTok video unexpectedly went viral, people started pouring in—more than Ebah could house at the Rainbow Motel. A hundred. Two hundred. And still, people kept coming.

Auguste calls his journey from Haiti to the United States “an epic experience.” Violent gangs now control about 90 percent of Port-au-Prince. Fearing for his safety, Auguste (not his real name) flew to Brazil in March 2023. From there, he set off north, traveling across 10 countries, walking and hitching rides for thousands of miles. The journey included hiking across the Darién Gap—a 60-mile expanse of thick rainforest at the Colombia–Panama border that separates South America from North America. He slept on the jungle floor, woken in the night by the sounds of wild animals. He was always on guard because people warned him of armed thieves who would rob people—or worse. And then, of course, there were the dead. He saw bodies of people along the way who would never finish the journey. In lakes. On the shores of rivers. By the roadside.

Yet Auguste was never afraid. He believed in himself. He had faith that if others had made this journey, then he could make it, too. And he did. It took a month, but he finally reached Mexico, where he immediately used the online app CBP One to apply to enter the US legally via temporary protected status—TPS for short.

The Biden administration made extensive use of TPS. When Biden first took office, he used this executive authority to protect Afghans after the Taliban retook Kabul. Then he extended the policy to Ukrainians after Russia invaded. Between 2021 and 2023, Biden took a more controversial stance—expanding TPS to include people fleeing dictatorships and gang violence in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Haiti. Today, Haitians make up one of the largest groups with temporary protected status.

Biden’s decision allowed Auguste to legally live and work in the United States—without a path to citizenship, but also without the threat of deportation. Auguste entered the country in May 2023 and made his way to Baltimore, where he stayed with family. Until his work visa was approved, he was unable to make money and would often go hungry. But, he told me, “It’s easier to live without food than it is without hope.”

He’d been in the US for six months when a friend showed him Remy’s TikTok. Auguste was skeptical at first, so he let his friend go ahead to Greeley. When the friend reported back that the job was legit, Auguste booked his flight to Colorado. He says he paid Remy $120 for a ride from the Denver airport to the Rainbow Motel. That’s when he realized the hardships he’d endured to make it to the US weren’t exactly behind him.

All the workers packed into the motel’s tiny rooms were in a strange place, with little to no money. There was also nowhere to make food. Auguste says that at one point, they got a hot plate so they could cook. But when the motel managers found out, they stopped them. Those managers later reported to JBS that it appeared workers had been using the bathtub as a cutting board. Auguste explained that the motel was off a busy highway with little around for miles. It wasn’t easy to walk anywhere to eat. Plus, it was the dead of winter and freezing outside. They had no money to order a ride, and if they did, what would they tell the driver? Many didn’t speak English. They felt stranded.

And then, there was the work. Auguste didn’t want to say where, exactly, he is on the line, for fear he could be identified. But he is on the “cold side,” the refrigerated side of the plant where beef is trimmed, cut, and packaged. He works with a meat hook and knife. He told me he was shocked by the speed and strain of the job. He’s not alone. I spoke to four current and former line workers from Haiti who said the pace was fast and kept getting faster as more Haitians were hired. The Denver Post reported that one worker filed a formal complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging that JBS intentionally discriminates against Haitian workers by subjecting them to unsafe and unequal working conditions.

According to the complaint, the speed of the chain on the A shift is usually between 250 and 300 head of cattle per hour. But as Haitians arrived and were put on the B shift, which runs from about 2 to 11 p.m., the chain speed at night allegedly pushed past 400 head per hour, to as much as 430. “We have people that have been working at the plant for 10, 15 years,” one union representative told me. “They have never seen any chain speed going over 390.”

Cordova, the Local 7 president, said complaints started pouring into the union offices. “New hires are now largely comprised of Haitian refugees,” an official complaint filed by the local with the Department of Labor alleges. The complaint claims that JBS “increased chain speed to dangerously unsafe levels when these workers occupied the line.”

The alleged exploitation didn’t stop there, according to the union complaint. The union suspected that applications for this new group of workers were being submitted with one mailing address for everyone—Ebah’s home address. “The hiring manager and connected individuals likely have control over incoming mail to these workers,” the union alleges. Letters were withheld. And Haitian workers were forced to sign documents in English that waived their rights after on-the-job injuries, “with workers not understanding what they were being asked to sign.” Many, Cordova said, felt trapped.

Meanwhile, Auguste and his fellow Haitians would go back to the Rainbow Motel with little to no food, a line for the bathroom, and only the floor to sleep on. One woman told me that the conditions were so bad there that she agreed to be “the girlfriend” of a more established line worker, just to have someplace safe to stay and something to eat. At one point, there were almost 50 Haitian workers staying in only nine rooms.

“I feel like I was being treated as a slave.”

Auguste

Auguste told me he can’t shake the humiliation. Every day at work, he walked through the slaughter side of the plant, where each cow has its own little holding pen, but he was expected to share a tiny space with five of his co-workers. He found himself thinking the cows had it better. “I feel like,” he said, “I was being treated as a slave.”

“I would not say I’m a victim of the process,” Tchelly Moise told me, “but I was a direct witness.” It’s hard to know whether the union would have even been aware of the dismal conditions at the Rainbow Motel if it weren’t for Moise, a Haitian line worker at JBS who had taught himself to speak nearly flawless English by watching YouTube videos and then working in a call center. Moise came to the US via a long journey from Nicaragua in 2023 after he was shot in the chest in a robbery and nearly died. Once he was allowed into the United States, he discovered his cousin had found a job working at JBS through a TikTok video.

Moise flew to Colorado and his cousin drove him to the Greeley plant for an interview, where his language skills quickly came into use. None of the other applicants spoke English, and the HR manager was struggling. Moise translated for 30 job interviews and was offered a job in the packing plant on the spot.

In the meantime, his cousin had started to pick up extra money—as a driver for Mackenson Remy, who was shuttling in recruits whom he’d connected with Ebah at JBS, taking them to work and driving them around town. Moise was along for one of the pickups at the Rainbow Motel. “You have eight people inside of that one little motel room with one bed, one bathroom, women and men at the same time?” he told me. “It was a very bad situation.” Moise said the motel finally got so packed that Ebah was forced to rent a house nearby. But it wasn’t much better.

There were around 40 people living inside a five-bedroom house, he said. “I’m saying people sleeping on the floor, on the blanket, people everywhere. And at some point, they didn’t have electricity in the house and it was winter, so you can imagine how bad the situation was.” Other workers, including Auguste (who lived at Ebah’s rental house for five months), confirmed that the electricity and water often went out.

Because Moise is fluent in English, some of the Haitian workers asked him to carry forward complaints to the union. Cordova soon told JBS that Ebah was charging workers for rides to work and putting his name on referral bonuses. JBS opened an investigation in December 2023 into Ebah’s activities, suspending him for several months during the process. Lawyers conducted more than a dozen interviews with employees.

But when the investigation was complete, Ebah was merely reprimanded, and he returned to JBS’s plant. Remy and Ebah continued their recruitment work. Cordova continued to press the company before finally reaching out to a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. In August 2024, JBS opened a second investigation.

The next month, the Journal published its story. Remy was featured throughout, alongside allegations of exploitation from the very Haitians he thought he was helping. Some workers alleged that Remy was working with JBS and getting paid $3,000 for every worker he brought to Greeley. He denies this. He says the company never paid him anything. (A JBS spokesperson said Remy never worked for the company and it notified local authorities and banned him from the premises.)

With these allegations made public, JBS was forced to respond. In an email to the Journal, JBS said it fired the two HR managers above Ebah and that Ebah was moved to a different facility in Greeley. The company said it also put in new training programs to teach employees about proper recruitment.

Still, the union kept demanding answers. “We have been dealing with what we believe is human trafficking and exploitation,” Cordova said, arguing that the workers were brought to Greeley under false pretenses. They were promised a good job and a place to stay but instead found unsafe work conditions and substandard housing.

JBS maintains that its leadership didn’t know what was happening at the Rainbow Motel, but I’ve seen the texts between Ebah and Remy. Ebah asked Remy who was being checked into the Rainbow Motel. Remy replied with five and six names to a room. After the Journal article came out, Ebah abruptly cut ties with Remy and hasn’t been in contact with him since.

The union hoped for a federal investigation into JBS. But that’s looking less and less likely in the current political climate. “While we were exposing this,” Cordova told me, “Trump, during his campaign, made up these crazy statements that Haitian workers were eating people’s pets—you know, their cats and dogs.” Now the Trump administration plans to evict them.

In the days after his inauguration, Trump issued a series of executive orders directing federal agencies to go after undocumented immigrants. Then in February, his administration started to go after legal immigrants, rescinding the temporary protected status of Venezuelans and then Haitians. If that policy remains in place, more than a million people will be forced to leave the country before August 3, including nearly all the Haitian workers who arrived at the JBS plant in Greeley because of Remy’s TikTok video.

When I spoke with Moise the day after TPS was revoked for Haitians, he was still in shock. “I can tell you honestly,” he said, “this is the first time I feel like this is really happening.” He told me that he kept thinking that Trump officials would look at the violence in Haiti—where more than 5,600 people were killed in 2024 alone—and conclude that they simply couldn’t send people back home. “Going back to Haiti is a death sentence, really,” Moise told me. “ We left the country, obviously, because it was very bad. You’re talking to some members at the plant, and they are telling you, ‘Man, my cousin just got killed today,’ or ‘My family members, they just burned down their house.’ So it’s getting worse every day.”

None of that seems to matter to this administration. The man in charge of Trump’s deportation plans—and his new deputy chief of staff for policy—is immigration hardliner Stephen Miller, who has said his goal is to arrest and deport as many immigrants as possible. He has vowed to use federal law enforcement, National Guard troops, and local police to carry out major sweeps of public spaces and raid workplaces. Those plans make little sense to Cordova. “This workforce is an immigrant workforce,” she told me. “The industry would collapse without these type of workers.”

Not to mention what this would mean for us, the consumers. In his campaign, Trump promised he would lower grocery prices. Instead, tariffs on Mexico and Canada threaten to send food prices soaring. Deporting the immigrant workforce that meatpackers depend on would halt processing at every stage of the supply chain, from feedlots to the packinghouse floor. This would drive up prices for Big Macs and Outback steaks, but also for chicken breasts and pork chops at grocery stores, for Hormel bacon and Campbell’s soup and Oscar Mayer hot dogs.

“I feel like us, the immigrants, we are a good part of the economy,” Moise told me. “Most of the jobs that we are doing, people who are born in this country are not actively looking to do those jobs.” This is why Moise said he’s confused. If mass deportations hurt not only JBS, but the economy as a whole, why do it? He’s left with only one answer. “ I think it’s just hatred against people with different skin color, because that’s the only logical thing that I can actually see.”

Given the animosity and the threat of deportation, you might expect that Moise would be making plans to flee to Canada or elsewhere, but for now anyway, he says he’s planning to stay put. After witnessing how badly new hires were being treated at JBS, he left his job there and now works for the union. He has retained an immigration lawyer and has a pending asylum application. But if Trump sets up deportation camps and fast-tracks hearings, as he has threatened to do, Moise doesn’t know what he’ll do.

Neither does Auguste. He still works at JBS. After about six months, he was able to save enough money to move into his own place, with his own bed and bathroom. But it all comes at a cost. The white bone program is still going on at JBS in Greeley. And Auguste told me that he can no longer fully close his left hand—an injury he says is a result of gripping a meat hook for hours without breaks, of his work being too fast and too repetitive.

Despite everything, Auguste told me he’s still glad to be in the United States, because his life is stable now. He knows all the things Trump has threatened to do, but he’s trying to stay optimistic. Because he doesn’t believe Americans will really let mass deportations happen. After all, he said, “the USA is the mother of democracy.”

It’s hard to share Auguste’s hopeful outlook. Yes, it’s possible that federal courts might intervene, hearing lawsuits from Haitians as they already are in cases brought by Venezuelans. Or some governors might step in. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis has vowed to help companies “retain their employees who are doing work critical to our economy—whether in agriculture, construction, service, or industry.”

But this broad-sweeping government crackdown? It will be difficult to oppose. It’s what Americans voted for.

Moise said he fears most Haitians don’t understand this. “I don’t think they really see the threats that is coming,” he told me. “A lot of them, they feel secure, maybe because of TPS, because they know they already filed for asylum. So I don’t think they know the power that Trump is actually going to have.”

Moise said he feels like his life is in Trump’s hands now. His life and the lives of thousands of other JBS workers in Greeley—and at dozens of similar plants in similar towns across the middle of America. The nearly million people who were granted entrance to our country because they were in danger and they sought protection within our borders. They followed all the rules—filled out the paperwork, allowed their cheeks to be swabbed, their fingerprints to be taken. They risked everything to come here and were allowed to cross the border legally. They trusted the United States to grant them asylum and protect them.

Kristina Reser-Jaynes can still recall a time when she’d never heard of school vouchers. Then, a few years ago, the Kickapoo school district in Southwestern Wisconsin that her daughters attend confronted a challenge all too common in small rural communities these days: a declining number of kids.

“I started looking into the causes of our declining enrollment and just trying to get better informed,” says Resar-Jaynes, 57, who grew up in this scenic corner of Wisconsin. “And this talk about vouchers kept coming up.”

Wisconsin is home to the oldest private school voucher program in the country—an experiment in which the state, starting in 1990, paid the private school tuition for 1,000 low-income children in Milwaukee. Today, the state spends more than $700 million toward the cost of private school education across the state, and communities like Resar-Jaynes’s are beginning to feel the effect.

During the 2023-24 school year, 11 students in the Kickapoo school district received a voucher to attend a religious school at a cost of $113,811 to local taxpayers, an increase of more than 400% from the previous year. Those numbers might not seem eye-popping, but in a pint-sized district with limited resources, the loss of a handful of students translates into program cuts for the remaining student body. And with vouchers in the state set to expand again next year, Resar-Jaynes says she fears for the viability of small rural districts like hers.

“In a little community like ours, the school is one of the few places we have left where we come together as a community,” says Resar-Jaynes. “We set aside our differences and we cheer on all our children in sports and in the arts. How can we allow that to be put in danger of being lost?”

Growing pains

That’s a question a growing number of rural communities face as private school voucher programs expand across the country. Sixteen states, beginning with Arizona in 2022, have now adopted so-called universal vouchers that allow virtually all families, no matter how wealthy, to use public tax dollars to pay for alternatives to public schools. In February, Tennessee and Idaho became the latest to join the voucher club. Texas, where Republican Governor Greg Abbott has made enacting vouchers his signature political cause, is the likely next member.

The programs go by different names and embody different approaches. Tax credit scholarships reward wealthy donors and corporations for contributing to private school “scholarship” groups. Traditional voucher programs allow parents to spend public funds on private schooling. Education savings accounts, meanwhile, function more like an education debit card loaded with tax dollars, which parents can use on a variety of education-related expenses. Whatever the specifics of the program, the goal is the same: to move students away from public schools and into private religious schools and to subsidize parents whose kids already attend them.

The project comes with the backing of some of the richest people in the country, including former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and hedge fund billionaire Jeff Yass, who together have devoted tens of millions to the cause of voucher expansion. It’s also a top priority of Trump officials, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has urged parents to pull their children from public schools in favor of religious homeschooling or explicitly Christian education.

The swift expansion of vouchers through red states reflects a major shift in direction by the school choice movement, which for decades has sought to build bipartisan support for the cause using the language of civil rights. Sensing an opportunity during the Covid-19 pandemic, voucher proponents embraced a sharply partisan strategy. In the name of “parents rights,” and with the aid of well-funded conservative groups including Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education, they leaned into explosive school culture war issues. Support for vouchers was now redefined as a “litmus test” for Republicans. Their first targets: deep red states where rural Republicans have long cast deciding “no” votes against voucher expansion.

That strategic shift has proven wildly successful. In one state after another, anti-voucher Republicans, almost all rural, have been defeated in GOP primary elections, swept out of office by a tidal wave of money from deep-pocketed pro-voucher groups. But knocking out rural legislators in states like Iowa, Texas and Wyoming, is not the same as eliminating long-standing rural opposition to vouchers.

In 2024, rural voters in three states—Nebraska, Kentucky and Colorado—sent a loud reminder that when it comes to spending tax dollars on private religious schools, they remain deeply opposed, despite Donald Trump’s embrace of the issue. In Kentucky, for example, opponents of a proposed constitutional amendment that would have allowed the state to fund “non-public” school options, warned rural Kentuckians that vouchers could force public schools in rural communities to close. One hard-hitting ad reminded voters of the lifesaving role played by their schools in the aftermath of the floods that ravaged the state in 2022. “Public schools saved us. It’s where everyone could find food and shelter.”

Rural voters responded, as voters in the state rejected the amendment by more than 60%.

Such lopsided results reveal a major weakness in the voucher movement’s strategy of targeting rural legislators. Knocking out GOP holdouts is one thing; convincing rural voters to walk away from their local public schools, even in our era of hyper-partisanship, is something altogether different.

Fighting rural decline

Lance Groves, 34, is a fifth-generation Texan on his father’s side. He grew up in the west Central part of the state near Possum Kingdom Lake, and today runs the family’s mechanical contracting business with his brother. Groves is also a passionate advocate for economic redevelopment in a part of the state that has long suffered from population decline and “brain drain,” as young people leave these small rural communities for more opportunities elsewhere. Now, those efforts are imperiled.

“The consequences of a voucher system in Texas would just completely wreck everything we’re trying to accomplish out here,” says Groves, who, with his brother Corey, started a documentary series called Rural Route Revival that chronicles the duo’s work to bring struggling Texas towns back to life.

Groves’s concerns extend beyond the state’s proposal to provide families—no matter their income—with $10,000 in order to pay for private religious education. His former state representative, Glenn Rogers, a large animal veterinarian who initially ran for office in 2019 out of concern that rural Texas was underrepresented in the state legislature, was one of nine Republicans to get primaried last year for opposing school vouchers.

Rogers ended up losing his seat in a rematch with Mike Olcott in a wildly expensive campaign that often had nothing to do with vouchers but instead focused on Rogers’s alleged failure to support Gov. Abbott’s border policy. “The other thing he said about me was that I consistently voted with Democrats,” recalls Rogers. “That was a 100 percent lie.”

Two years previously Rogers narrowly defeated Olcott, thanks in part to support from Gov. Abbott. This time Rogers opposition to Abbott’s education savings account plan made him a target. Olcott—who firmly supports Abbott’s so-called parental bill of rights amendment to the Texas Constitution—racked up endorsements not only from the governor but from Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

As a result, this part of rural Texas no longer has an advocate for the public schools that serve as its anchor, says Groves.

“We lost a solid guy, a great rancher from a great family,” says Groves. “And for what?”

On the far western edge of the state, in the Panhandle community of Spearman, newspaper editor Suzanne Bellsnyder has been making the case to anyone who will listen that vouchers represent the latest round of disinvestment from rural Texas that has now been playing out for decades. In the competition for scarce resources, communities like Spearman (population 3,000) will inevitably come up short against their more powerful metro counterparts.

“The state of Texas already cannot fund public schools appropriately. Now we’re going to try to find a completely second system of public schools that only certain students are going to have access to,” says Bellsnyder. “You can see what happens next. There are not going to be enough resources to go around and our communities are going to be defunded.”

The Spearman schools are currently considering moving to a four-day school week, in part to save money, a shift that many other school districts in the Panhandle have already made. Bellsnyder fears that the loss of further state funds to vouchers will mean program cuts, staff layoffs and, ultimately, the closure of schools.

Recent evidence from other states that have enacted universal school vouchers shows that she is right to worry. In Iowa and West Virginia expansive new voucher programs are exacerbating the fragile math of funding rural education.

In West Virginia, the education savings account program known as the Hope Scholarship provides $4,900 per student to be used for private schooling, homeschooling, microschools and a broad range of education-related expenses. But West Virginia’s shrinking population also means declining student enrollment. Now a policy that essentially incentivizes students to leave public schools is exacerbating the numbers problem, resulting in multiple rounds of school closures.

“Most towns die after a closure of a high school,” said Charles Goff, mayor of Hundred, a town of 242 in Wetzel County, West Virginia, in an emotional speech to state school board members last year. “[Towns] lose incorporated status, lose elected officials in town, and it leads to fire departments closing and town charters being revoked. That includes losing EMS. We are an hour away from the hospital, and fire and EMS are crucial in our community.”

It’s not hyperbole. In their massive, first-of-its-kind survey of rural political attitudes, scholars Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea found that rural schools play an outsized role in helping define the sense of place that is at the heart of contemporary rural identity. And decaying rural schools, trapped in the cycle of rising costs and diminishing revenues, can create a community death spiral. “A town’s demise can come in fits and starts over a long period,” they write, “but when the local school is boarded up, the death bells chime with a deafening resonance.”

Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement is A 50-year-old advocacy organization that rose to prominence during the farm crisis that rocked the state in the 1990s. These days, the group is sounding the alarm that threats to rural public schools are a threat to rural communities.

“Family farms and strong public schools were once the life blood of our rural communities in Iowa,” says Tim Glaza, special projects director for the group. But the state’s political leaders no longer seem to share that view.

Nearly 30,000 students in Iowa now receive state funding to attend private schools, thanks to a two-year old state voucher program. According to state data, 16 public schools, many of them rural, have closed since the voucher program began, while 36 new private schools have opened. While the overwhelming majority of students in the program never attended public school, even the loss of a few students can quickly translate into agonizing budget choices for shrinking rural districts, especially those for whom raising property taxes is a political non-starter.

The full impact of Iowa’s program, meanwhile, has yet to be felt. In its first two years, participation was limited by income. This year, those limits come off, meaning that the state will soon pick up the private school tuition bill for even the wealthiest families.

“The refusal to adequately fund schools combined with a voucher program that funnels public money to private schools is going to mean more school consolidation and closures, and more flight from our small towns,” says Glaza.

Backlash brewing?

The first two months of the second Trump administration has considerably darkened the prognosis for the nation’s rural schools. In addition to the state-run universal voucher programs reshaping education in red states, Trump and his allies are pushing for a federal voucher plan. The Educational Choice for Children Act (H.R. 833), introduced into Congress in January, would incentivize wealthy donors and corporations to donate to so-called scholarship-granting organizations in exchange for unprecedented tax breaks. Education secretary Linda McMahon has indicated that expanding private school choice is among her top priorities.

The federal approach would move vouchers into blue states as well as circumventing opposition among Trump’s own base. The lead sponsor of the legislation that would create a federal voucher program, for example, represents rural Nebraska, where his own constituents voted overwhelmingly last November to repeal a similar program. As one voucher proponent put it, “Rural voters have ‘emotional’ connections to their local public schools that are difficult to dislodge.”

Trump’s ongoing efforts to dismantle the Department of Education will also fall heavily on rural schools and the students who attend them.

Rural schools are highly dependent on Title 1, the 50-year-old program created to ease the nation’s vast school funding disparities. As education writer and retired rural education Peter Greene observed, rural schools are likely to take a double hit if the administration repackages Title 1 funds as block grants, which states then convert into voucher funds.

“Those districts will see a loss of funding and will have limited ability to replace those funds by raising local taxes. At the same time, they are not attractive markets for any high-quality education-flavored businesses,” writes Greene. “Those communities are more likely to end up with a ‘school’ aisle in their local Dollar General.”

The slash-and-burn-style budget cutting that is a hallmark of our DOGE era is also hitting rural schools hard. The Agriculture Department recently axed two programs that gave schools and food banks money to buy food from local farms and ranchers, halting more than $1 billion in federal spending. Even Trump’s effort to unwind his predecessor’s commitment to green energy could take a toll on schools.

In Missouri, where one out of three school districts have adapted a four-day week, largely in response to economic pressures, the only rural districts that still provide five days of school rely on taxes paid by wind farms. “When Trump and his Republican allies take aim at green energy, this is what they’re talking about,” says Jessica Piper, executive director of Blue Missouri and the author of the newsletter, View from Rural Missouri.

But if the emerging policy landscape looks bleak for rural education, funding cuts and school closures are also deeply unpopular among rural voters, including Trump’s most ardent supporters. Liv Cook spent years as a special education teacher in rural southeastern Tennessee. These days she works as public education campaign organizer for SOCM (pronounced “sock-em”), the Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment, statewide membership group founded in 1972 to organize grassroots resistance to mining companies and in the coalfield communities of the Cumberland Mountains. The group’s organizing work has since expanded statewide, including their #PublicSchoolStrongTN campaign to counter attacks on public education.

When the Tennessee Republican-controlled legislature adopted a $447 million universal voucher program in January, it was over the opposition of many rural communities, including southeastern Tennessee, says Cook. “Vouchers are now seen as a conservative value but there’s a big disconnect with these rural folks. They love their home schools and their teachers.”

Last year, when Tennessee Republicans floated the idea of refusing more than $1 billion in federal education funding over objections to expanded student civil rights protections, Cook spent months going door to door talking to voters about what such cuts would mean for local schools.

“When people learned that their elected officials were talking about less money for local schools they were shocked,” recalls Cook. “Everyone could list off the things that their local schools and teachers desperately needed, and finding out that the plan is actually to privatize and make a few people even more money, was just infuriating to them.”

SOCM was part of a sprawling coalition that fended off vouchers in 2024; they weren’t so lucky this time around. Still, Cook remains convinced that the unique tie between rural voters and their public schools offers a vehicle for not just resisting bad policies, but demanding approaches that strengthen rural communities.

“We ask our neighbors what they want their schools and their kids and the answer is ‘everything,’ ” says Cook. “That’s a powerful place to start.”

The post In Red States, Rural Voters Are Leading the Resistance to School Vouchers appeared first on Barn Raiser.

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Medicaid Cuts Could Upend Lives of Children With Disabilities. Can California Do More to Prepare? was first posted on March 19, 2025 at 9:37 am.
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