In June 1942, Japan’s invasion of the Aleutian islands in Alaska prompted the U.S. military to activate the Alaska territorial guard, an Army reserve made up of volunteers who wanted to help protect the U.S. So many of the volunteers were from Alaska’s Indigenous peoples — Aleut, Inupiak, Yupik, Tlingit, and many others — that the guard was nicknamed the “Eskimo Scouts.” 

When World War II ended and the reserve force ceased operations in 1947, the U.S. approached the Indigenous Yupik people of Alaska with another ask: Could the Air Force set up “listening posts” on the island of Sivuqaq, also known as St. Lawrence Island, to help with the intelligence gathering needed to win the Cold War?  

Viola Waghiyi, who is Yupik from Sivuqaq, said the answer was a resounding yes. 

“Our grandfathers and fathers volunteered for the Alaska territorial guard,” she said. “We were very patriotic.” 

But that trust was abused, Waghiyi said. The U.S. military eventually abandoned its Air Force and Army bases, leaving the land polluted with toxic chemicals such as fuel, mercury, and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, that are known as “forever chemicals” because they persist so long in the environment. The contamination was largely due to spilled and leaking fuel from storage tanks and pipes, both above ground and below ground. More chemical waste came from electrical transformers, abandoned metals and 55-gallon drums. 

Now, Waghiyi is the environmental health and justice program director at the Alaska Community Action on Toxics, an organization dedicated to limiting the effects of toxic substances on Alaska’s residents and environment. Last week, the organization filed a complaint to the United Nations special rapporteur on toxics and human rights, in partnership with the U.C. Berkeley Environmental Law Clinic. 

Their complaint calls for the United Nations to investigate how military waste on Sivuqaq continues to violate the rights of the people who live there, such as the right to a clean and healthy environment and Indigenous peoples’ right to free, prior, and informed consent to what happens on their land. 

“By exposing the Yupik people of Sivuqaq to polluted drinking water sources, air, and soil, and by contaminating local native foods; by causing pervasive human exposure to hazardous chemicals through multiple routes; by toxifying the broader ecosystem; and by not cleaning up contamination sufficiently to protect human health and the environment, the U.S. Air Force and Army Corps of Engineers violated human rights long recognized in international law,” the complaint says. 

This submission from Alaska is part of a larger, global effort to raise awareness of military toxic waste by the United Nations. The U.N. special rapporteur on toxics and human rights is collecting public input on military activities and toxic waste until April 1. The information collected will be used in a report presented to the U.N. General Assembly in October. 

The two shuttered bases in Sivuqaq, Alaska, are now classified as “formerly used defense,” or FUD, sites, overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and more than $130 million has been spent to remove the contamination. John Budnick, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Alaska, said the cleanup is considered complete but that the agency is reviewing the site every five years “to ensure the selected remedies continue to be protective of human health and the environment.” 

“We have completed the work at Northeast Cape, but additional follow-up actions may result from the monitoring phase of the Formerly Used Defense Sites Program,” he said. The last site visit occurred last July and an updated review report is expected to be released this summer.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, similarly concluded in 2013 that an additional EPA cleanup wouldn’t significantly differ from what the Army Corps of Engineers is doing and declined to place the sites on the EPA’s list of hazardous waste cleanup priorities.

A 2022 study found that so far, federal cleanup efforts have been inadequate. “High levels of persistent organic pollutants and toxic metals continue to leach from the Northeast Cape FUD site despite large-scale remediation that occurred in the early 2000s,” the authors concluded. 

The persisting pollution has garnered the attention of Alaska’s state Dept. of Environmental Conservation which oversees the cleanup of contaminated sites. Stephanie Buss, contaminated sites program manager at the agency, said her office has asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to do additional cleanup at Northeast Cape.

“These active contaminated sites have not met closure requirements,” she said. The second former base, Gambell, was classified as completed but still lacks land use controls, she noted. 

“DEC takes community health concerns seriously and will continue to provide oversight of the conditions at its active sites in accordance with the state’s regulatory framework to ensure an appropriate response that protects human health and welfare,” Buss said.

That same 2022 study found that 89 percent of the fish around the Northeast Cape base contained mercury exceeding the levels the EPA deemed appropriate for people who rely on subsistence fishing. “All fish sampled near the FUD site exceeded the EPA’s PCB guidelines for cancer risk for unrestricted human consumption,” the researchers further found. Waghiyi said the contamination displaced 130 people, and has left her friends and family with a lasting legacy of illness. 

“It’s not a matter of if we’ll get cancer, but when,” Waghiyi said. Her father died of cancer. Her mother had a stillborn child. Waghiyi herself is a cancer survivor and has had three miscarriages. 

“We feel that they have turned their back on us,” Waghiyi said of the U.S. military. “We wanted our lands to be turned back in the same condition when they turned over.” 

The U.S. military has a long history of contaminating lands and waters through military training and battles sites, including on Indigenous lands. Citizens of the Navajo Nation in Arizona and  Yakama Nation in Washington continue to raise concerns about the ongoing effects of military nuclear testing on their lands and health. In the Marshall Islands, fishing around certain atolls is discouraged due to high rates of toxicity due to nuclear testing and other military training. On Guam, chemicals from an active Air Force base have contaminated parts of the islandʻs sole-source aquifer that serves 70% of the population. Last year, a federal report found that climate change threatens to unearth even more U.S. military nuclear waste in both the Marshall Islands and Greenland. 

In 2021, the Navy in Hawaiʻi poisoned 90,000 people when jet fuel leached from aging, massive underground storage tanks into the drinking water supply after the Navy ignored years of warning to upgrade the tanks or remove the fuel. The federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to remove unexploded ordnance from the island of Kahoʻolawe, a former bombing range in Hawaiʻi, but the island is still considered dangerous to walk on because of the risk of more ordnance unearthing due to extensive erosion. 

The complaint filed last week by the Alaska Community Action on Toxics calls for the United Nations to write to U.S. federal and state agencies and call upon them to honor a 1951 agreement between the U.S. government and the Sivuqaq Yupik people that prohibited polluting the land. 

The agreement said that the Sivuqaq Tribes would allow the Air Force to construct surveillance sites to spy on the Soviet Union, but they had four conditions, including allowing Indigenous peoples to continue to hunt, fish and trap where desired and preventing outsiders from killing their game. Finally, the agreement said that “any refuse or garbage will not be dumped in streams or near the beach within the proposed area.” 

“The import of the agreement was clear: The military must not despoil the island; must protect the resources critical to Indigenous Yupik inhabitants’ sustenance; and must leave the island in the condition they found it, which ensured their health and well-being,” the Alaska Community Action on Toxics wrote in their complaint. 

“This is a burden we didn’t create,” Waghiyi said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Alaska Natives want the US military to clean up its toxic waste on Mar 19, 2025.

Reversing trend of NC rural women’s health care services drying up will require tracking, enforcement and incentives in policies and laws.

Too costly to keep, but too important to lose. Solving paradox of NC rural women’s health services is a story from Carolina Public Press, an award-winning independent newsroom. Our breakthrough journalism shines a light on the critical overlooked and under-reported issues facing North Carolina’s 10.4 million residents. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Every January in Elko, Nev., an influx of cowboys and cowboy wannabes take over the town with events like rawhide braiding workshops, bluegrass concerts and poetry readings. It’s all part of the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, which celebrated its 40th year in January.

Hosted by the Western Folklife Center, this year’s gathering was the second most attended Cowboy Poetry Gathering in its 40-year history. Kristin Windbigler, chief executive officer of the Western Folklife Center, attributes this to a resurging interest in cowboy culture among younger people.

“This year was the year that it felt like everything tipped,” Windbigler said in a phone interview with the Sierra Nevada Ally. “It felt like the median age of the attendees dropped by about 20 years.”

She said this could be because the Center has put more effort into growing their social media presence and inviting younger artists to perform.

“We have a tremendous amount of reverence for the past and for traditions, but you can’t really pass on traditions if you don’t have the up and coming generations there too,” Windbigler said.

People from all over the country and beyond visit this small eastern Nevada town to celebrate the rural West and meet with old friends. The first gathering was held in 1985 for a little under 1,000 guests, and it has grown exponentially since then.  About 14,000 tickets were sold at this year’s various events, and the Center estimates 8,000 people attended at least one portion of the gathering.

Windbigler said this bodes well for the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering’s future – as long as the Center can remain afloat.

An article published by the Elko Daily Free Press in January claimed the Center has lost more than $2 million over 12 years. In response, Windbigler said that most of that loss is due to depreciation on their office building. It can also be attributed to the Covid-19 pandemic that forced them to cancel the in-person portion of the gathering for two years in a row.

To build long-term financial stability, the Western Folklife Center is planning to turn the building they own – the historic Pioneer Hotel – back into a hotel. They already have a restaurant and bar in the Pioneer Saloon on the building’s first floor, and according to a feasibility study the Center paid for, renting the hotel rooms would likely fill their current profit gap.

They need $6.5 million to fund this project, and right now, they’re about one-third of the way there. Over the next several months, they will move into the permitting portion of the hotel project. Once that’s done – and if they can raise enough money – the project should be “shovel-ready,” Windbigler said.

Until then, their main focus is making the gathering the best it can be for as long as possible. That means honoring the many different versions of cowboy culture, including the one that existed 40 years ago at the gathering’s inception and the culture that still exists today–despite the challenges modern farming faces.

The number of U.S. farmers and ranchers has declined precipitously since the mid-1900s, while their average age has steadily increased. Small businesses have been bought up by large corporations across the farming industry, consolidating the number of operating ranches.

This means that the number of tried and true “cowboys,” – those who make a living off livestock and the land – has also declined.

But based on the thousands of people that visit Elko every January, it doesn’t seem like the interest in cowboy culture is going away anytime soon.

“I don’t really buy into all of the ‘cowboy is a dying breed’ and the ‘West is dead’ stuff,” Windbigler said. “You know, things change, but people are still out there living lives connected to agriculture.”

Her ultimate goal is to honor those lives and hopes her work can encourage younger generations to follow suit.

The National Cowboy Poetry Gathering is meant to do just that, and despite the hiccups of depreciating assets or a pandemic, Windbigler said the Western Follklife Center has no plans to stop hosting an event that many attendees return to year after year.

“The pandemic killed off a lot of arts and culture organizations like us, and we consider it a small miracle that we survived,” Windbigler said.

Yet, despite the challenges, arts and culture focused on rural life will always have a home in Elko, if Windbigler has anything to do with it.

“We live to fight another day.”

Women’s services often lose money for NC rural hospitals. State doesn’t track lost services or require hospitals to sustain care.

Financial pressures prompt women’s services cuts at NC rural hospitals is a story from Carolina Public Press, an award-winning independent newsroom. Our breakthrough journalism shines a light on the critical overlooked and under-reported issues facing North Carolina’s 10.4 million residents. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

NC data shows labor and delivery and other women’s services reduced or eliminated at rural hospitals, with negative health implications.

Deserts for women’s health care services expand in rural NC counties is a story from Carolina Public Press, an award-winning independent newsroom. Our breakthrough journalism shines a light on the critical overlooked and under-reported issues facing North Carolina’s 10.4 million residents. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Lessie Ann Patterson lived in Monticello, Illinois, for 25 years before dying in 2015 from glioblastoma, a rapidly advancing brain cancer with an average survival time of 12 to 18 months.

Belinda Barnhart, Patterson’s stepdaughter, witnessed firsthand the effects of glioblastoma in her family.

“There was no clear reason why she ended up with it,” Barnhart said in an interview. “And then when you hear about so many of them in the Monticello area, you just think about all the devastation it has caused, and it does make you want to say, ‘Why is this one area so rife with glioblastoma specifically?’”

Patterson was one of many victims of brain cancer in Piatt County that have been identified by a local researcher and health professional, Caitlin McClain.

Concerns about the number of cases came to light last year when McClain started researching and gathering information on glioblastoma cases in Monticello and Piatt County following the death of her father-in-law from the disease in 2022.

As of last fall, she said she had collected information on at least 30 cases from the past 20 years — with at least 14 deaths from the cancer in just the last five years. McClain collected her data through obituaries, surveys and speaking with residents.

She said she has had to investigate on her own because public health data lags years behind and sometimes is suppressed — that is, not disclosed — for smaller counties that would allow individuals to be identified. Piatt County’s population is about 16,700, of which just over 6,000 people live in Monticello, according the latest census data.

McClain took her findings to the Illinois Department of Public Health several times in 2024, but she said department officials did not follow the federal health guidelines for investigating possible cancer clusters and dismissed her concerns, saying the numbers did not indicate a cancer cluster.

But there is a protocol from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Cancer Society, on how an agency should respond. The CDC has guidelines for responding to reports of suspicious numbers of cancer cases and calls for public health agencies to talk to citizens and visit the community.

Glioblastoma has an incidence rate of about 3.2 cases per 100,000 people according to a 2017 study available at the National Library of Medicine. For Piatt County, the rate of brain cancer, which includes glioblastoma, from 2017 to 2021 was 9.1 for males on average. The registry counted 5 male cases during that time. It was only a 1.2 rate for females and the registry reported one case.

Yet McClain’s data shows five women living in or primarily from Monticello died of glioblastoma between 2017 and 2021 including Tina M. Purcell, a resident of Monticello since she married in 1990, and lifelong resident Connie Jean Hendrix.

“I have spoken to so many people at this point it is difficult to keep track of everything,” McClain said in October.

Citing McClain’s data and information, Barnhart, whose stepmother died, said the state department’s response has been disappointing.

“It’s incredibly disappointing that your local public health office won’t even entertain the idea that something could be going on specifically in that area, that there could be a cancer cluster,” she said.

After numerous calls from CU-CitizenAccess, Michael Claffey, the public health department spokesperson, responded in December 2024.

“I will try to find out more about this,” Claffey wrote in an email.

But with federal funding for public health under siege, Claffey said in February:

“Sorry for the slow response to this. We have really been swamped recently given all the federal changes and everything else that is going on. I don’t have anything for you at this point.”

McClain said Chief Medical Officer Arti Barnes at the state public health department asked for an update from her in early February this year, but “there has been zero communication from IDPH otherwise.”

University researchers said cases are concerning

Biomedical researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign said they are concerned about the reports of glioblastoma in Monticello.

Professor Catherine Alicia Best-Popescu, a biomedical researcher at the University of Illinois whose focus is molecular, cellular and tissue engineering, said in December that Monticello’s glioblastoma rates are worth investigating, calling the pattern a “huge cluster.” Glioblastoma, she explained, is notoriously challenging to treat due to its aggressive nature.

“It’s a really impossible cancer to treat because it can evade your immune system, evade radiation therapy,” Popescu said. “We give it a superpower in a way.”

The CDC sets clear guidelines for investigating cancer clusters, which prioritize cases with higher-than-expected numbers of rare cancers like glioblastoma. The investigations require experts to study the cancer data to establish if there is a concerning rate.

Under those guidelines, health departments’ partners and officials are expected to review data from cancer registries and other databases to monitor the estimated rates of cancer incidents routinely. The guidelines note that state resources and small populations can restrict state health departments from proactively reviewing or monitoring cancer data.

The CDC also said a cancer cluster must have one of these traits:

• There is a greater-than-expected number of a specific type of cancer (or types of cancer that are known to have a common cause).
• There are several cases of a rare type of cancer.
• The cancers are a type that is not usually seen in a certain group of people (for example, children getting cancer usually seen in adults).

For rural Illinois residents, accessing information about the occurrence of cancer in their area is difficult because cancer data are sometimes suppressed in rural areas due to concerns of confidentiality and small populations.

Suppressed means the number of cases do not show up on state maps and data.

While the goal of the U.S. Census Bureau’s privacy protection system is to protect individual identities by injecting statistical noise into aggregate population data, a study by the National Library of Medicine found discrepancies increase dramatically in rural areas, raising concerns that the new system may misrepresent population trends and demographic changes.

“Whenever we talk about it, they say, ‘Try not to be alarmed.’ We are very alarmed. We’re very upset about it. It’s absolutely unacceptable.” Popescu said.

Severity of cases questioned by public health

Last year, McClain said multiple state officials questioned whether her data indicates a cancer cluster, including those from the Illinois Cancer Registry, the state public health department and state representatives.

The Illinois Department of Public Health — tasked with protecting public health and the environment — said the number of cases was not alarming and there was no need or resources to look into the cases. Officials said McClain’s data did not indicate evidence of a cancer cluster because the rate of the cases was insufficient.

When McClain first contacted health officials in early 2024 she had documented 19 cases of glioblastoma since 2004. By October, she identified 30 cases total since 2004 — with seven cases within 2.3 square miles in Monticello.

Under cancer cluster investigation guidelines, the Illinois Department of Public Health is expected to review data available from cancer registries and other databases to monitor the estimated rates for cancer incidents.

But databases and cancer registries are outdated. According to the CDC, the latest cancer incidence data available are from 2021, four years ago, and recent cancer death data are from 2022. Illinois’s cancer incidence data is from 2021.

McClain said she found at least 11 people with glioblastoma died between 2017 and 2021, of which 6 were men and 5 were women.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the state public health department in November, a FOIA officer said “the Department follows CDC guidelines when determining whether and how to investigate or assess a cancer cluster.”

As of February this year, no additional investigation by the Illinois Department of Public Health had been done.

Cause of glioblastoma unclear, linked to pesticides

While glioblastoma’s exact causes remain unclear, exposure to carcinogens, radiation and agricultural chemicals has been linked to DNA mutations that drive the disease.

National studies show that pesticides, which are widely used in the county and in the Midwest, have been linked to brain cancer. This relationship can be seen in studies from the National Library of Medicine “Brain tumours and exposure to pesticides” and “Organochlorine Pesticides and Epigenetic Alterations in Brain Cancer.”

“It is my opinion that Illinois as a whole refuses to accept that agricultural chemicals pose risk to human life,” McClain said in October. “They seem to be behind in research and correspondence with the public compared to other rural states … Some farmers have left more space between their crops and the homes and schools this year once I brought the risk to their attention.”

In response to McClain asking for the city of Monticello to test the water, officials did so and saw nothing worrisome in the results, which showed no violations for disinfectants or inorganic contaminants.

Water test reports from 2023, obtained in an email from Monticello Public Works, show most regulated contaminants are within acceptable levels.

“Any time Caitlin has brought something to our attention, we’ve expeditiously looked into it and gone from there,” Monticello City Administrator Terry Summers said in an interview in November 2024.

Summers initiated water tests of the county’s water supply and found the nitrate levels were almost undetectable. He said there was no sign that the public water supply was behind the number of brain cancers.

According to the American Cancer Society, more than 1,000 suspected cancer clusters are reported to state health departments in the United States each year.

The stakes are high for those diagnosed with glioblastoma: the average survival time is just 12 to 18 months, even with aggressive treatment.

Gita Kwatra, CEO of the Glioblastoma Foundation Inc, a non-profit organization in Durham, North Carolina, said glioblastoma is the most common malignant brain tumor, with slim survival rates.

“The disease is incredibly fast, incredibly lethal cancer. There isn’t enough research funding that goes to this cancer. There isn’t enough awareness,” Kwatra said in a phone interview. “Five to seven percent of people who are diagnosed will survive to five years, and five years is important in the medical community, five years is used as a surrogate marker for beating the disease.”

The post Concerns about brain cancer cases in Piatt County grow, but Illinois public health agency yet to investigate appeared first on Investigate Midwest.

NORMAN, Okla. — Sometimes, Jakob Topper teaches his Christian faith to his six-year-old daughter using children’s Bible stories illustrated with teddy bears. Other days, he might use her kid-friendly Bible featuring Precious Moments figures as characters. One thing he knows for sure: The King James version is not on the reading list, given some of its adult themes of sexual assault and incest. 

As a parent and a Baptist pastor, Topper opposes Oklahoma’s state superintendent of public instruction’s mandate to put a King James Version Bible in every grade 5–12 classroom. The father of three is also not keen on the state’s newly proposed social studies standards that would require biblical lessons starting in first grade. 

“I want the Bible taught to my daughter, and I want to be the one who chooses how that’s done,” said Topper, who also has a one-year-old and a three-year-old and is pastor of NorthHaven Church in Norman, a university town. “If we’re talking about parental choice, that’s my choice. I don’t want it to be farmed out to anyone else.”

Norman, a central Oklahoman city of about 130,000, is an epicenter of resistance to the Bible mandate that the state superintendent of public instruction, Ryan Walters, announced last June. Opposition here has come from pastors, religion professors, students, parents, teachers, school board members and the school district superintendent, among others. The prevailing philosophy among Norman residents, who are predominantly Christian, is that they do not want the state — and namely, Walters — mandating how children should be taught scriptures. They want their children to learn from holy books at home or in church. 

Many residents see Walters’s pitch as a play for national attention, given his abundance of social media posts praising Donald Trump, who campaigned on returning prayer to schools and as president has established a White House Faith Office and a task force to root out “anti-Christian bias.” In September, Walters proposed spending $3 million to buy 55,000 copies of the Bible that has been endorsed by the president and for which he receives royalties. More recently, Walters — who in February clashed with his state’s governor for proposing that public schools track students’ immigration statuses — made media lists as a possible candidate for Trump’s education secretary. He was not picked. 

But beyond Walter’s national aspirations, the Bible mandate also seems like an attempt at one-upmanship, with other states angling to infuse Christianity into public schools. Louisiana, for instance, is in a court battle over its push for Ten Commandments posters in schools. Texas fought off Democratic opposition to approve an optional Bible-infused curriculum and financial incentives for school districts that use the materials. A slew of states have passed or promoted similar measures, including ones allowing chaplains to act as counselors in schools. Unsurprisingly, Walters, too, has advocated for displaying the Ten Commandments in every classroom and also has backed the conversion of a private virtual Catholic school into a charter school; the Supreme Court plans to hear oral arguments on the case on April 30.  

It goes without saying that Walters’s crusade is multifaceted. But fundamentally, all of his efforts amount to teaching the Bible “in inappropriate ways in public schools,” said Amanda Tyler, author of “How to End Christian Nationalism” and executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, a Washington, DC–based organization of attorneys, ministers, and others who advocate for religious freedom. “He’s saying you can’t be a good American citizen if you don’t understand the Bible,” she added. “It’s this merger of American and Christian identities, the idea that only Christians are true Americans.” 

On March 10, the Oklahoma Supreme Court dealt a blow to Walters’s plans: It issued a temporary stay prohibiting the state’s department of education from purchasing 55,000 Bibles with certain characteristics and from buying Bible-infused lessons and material for elementary schools. 

The stay stems from a lawsuit led by Americans United for Separation of Church and State on behalf of 32 plaintiffs, including parents, clergy, students and teachers. The group, which is suing Walters, claims the Bible mandate violated the state’s prohibition against using state funds for religious purposes and the state’s own statutes allowing local district control over curriculum.

As of now, until the court issues a final ruling, its decision marks a victory in Americans United’s attempt to stop Walters, said Alex Luchenitser, the organization’s associate legal director: “It protects the separation of church and state. It protects the religious freedom of students.” Speaking about the court’s stay, Walters, through spokeswoman Grace Kim, said in a statement: “The Bible has been a cornerstone of our nation’s history and education for generations. We will continue fighting to ensure students have access to this foundational text in the classroom.”

Meanwhile, Walters was also sued separately last summer by a parent in Locust Grove who contended the mandate violated the state and federal constitutions. The state education department has denied the claims of both suits and contended in legal briefs that using the Bible for its secular value does not violate the state’s constitution.

Walters’s mandate has also sparked concern because of the proposed social studies standards that followed. The standards, which were initially released in December and would require legislative approval, mention the Bible and its historical impact more than 40 times. Several of the standards attempt to erroneously frame the Bible, and specifically the Ten Commandments, as the foundation of American law. Biblical scholars from the University of Oklahoma and elsewhere believe these standards promote the long-standing trope of Christian nationalism, which is premised in part on the false idea that the nation’s founding documents stemmed from the Bible. (The founders were Bible readers, but not necessarily fans of the same versions or holy texts in general. In fact, Thomas Jefferson cut up pages of the Bible to remove mention of miracles or the supernatural.)

For example, Walters’s standards would require students in first grade to learn about David and Goliath, as well as Moses and the Ten Commandments, because the standards cite them as influences on the American colonists and others. Second graders would be asked to “identify stories from Christianity that influenced the American colonists, Founders, and culture, including the teachings of Jesus the Nazareth (e.g. the ‘Golden Rule,’ the Sermon on the Mount).” 

Related: Inside the Christian legal campaign to return prayer to public schools

“These new standards,” said a news release from the state department of education, “reflect what the people of Oklahoma — and all across America — have long been demanding of their public schools: a return to education curricula that upholds pro-family, pro-American values.” (Walters’s press office, despite repeated requests, did not make the state superintendent available for an interview.)

Critics in Oklahoma and elsewhere see Walters’s Bible mandate as part of a broader Christian nationalist movement. “I think Oklahoma is the test case for the nation,” said Dawn Brockman, a Norman school board member.

Walters, though, has been steadfast in his belief that the mandate is legal and critical for the education of Oklahomans. In the fall, after Americans United sued, Walters wrote on X: “The simple fact is that understanding how the Bible has impacted our nation, in its proper historical and literary context, was the norm in America until the 1960s and its removal has coincided with a precipitous decline in American schools.”

But nothing is simple about the history of the Bible in America’s schools. When public schools started to open in the 1800s, some required regular Bible readings. From the beginning, that practice was controversial: Schools typically favored the King James Version, pitting Protestants against Catholics, and riots over school Bible readings broke out from the 1840s into the 1870s, said Mark Chancey, a professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. By 1930, 36 states allowed Bible reading to be a requirement or an option, but another dozen banned such activities.

A few decades later, a Pennsylvania family sued their school district for heeding the state’s 1949 law requiring the reading of 10 Bible verses and the recitation of prayers at the start of each school day. In 1963, just a year after a similar opinion, the Supreme Court ruled that requiring in-school Bible readings and prayers was unconstitutional. After those rulings, daily teaching from the Bible, for the most part, was halted, Chancey said, but backlash continued, with critics charging that removing prayer and Bible readings from schools had led to a decline in the morality of schoolchildren. 

Related: Teachers struggle to teach the Holocaust without running afoul of new ‘divisive concepts’ laws

In subsequent decades, the Supreme Court ruled against clergy-led prayer and prayer over the loudspeakers at football games in several school-related cases. But in a seeming reversal, in 2022, the high court ruled in favor of allowing a football coach to conduct midfield, postgame prayers, shifting the legal landscape. The majority’s opinion on the football coach’s prayer has prompted politicians and states to further test the limits of the separation of church and state. In February, lawmakers in Idaho and Texas even proposed measures to allow daily Bible readings in public schools again. 

In Norman, many teachers reacted to news of the Bible mandate with concern and fear. Spanish teacher Darcy Pippins, who is in her 27th year at Norman High, said she sometimes teaches about Catholicism because it is the religion of the Spanish-speaking world. But putting a Bible in every classroom and teaching from it is different. “I just don’t feel comfortable,” said Pippins, also a parent. “I’m not qualified to teach and to incorporate the Bible into what I teach.’’ 

Other teachers, said Brockman, the school board member, worried about professional repercussions were they not to follow the mandate, given that Walters had already targeted at least one Norman teacher in the past for objecting to bans on particular books. 

Nick Migliorino, the public school system’s superintendent since 2017, was the first superintendent in the state to publicly oppose the Bible mandate. When asked about it in a July interview with a local paper, he responded: “I’m just going to cut to the chase on that. Norman Public Schools is not going to have Bibles in our classrooms, and we are not going to require our teachers to teach from the Bible.”

Other superintendents followed, and by late July, at least 17 school district leaders said they had no plans to change curriculum in response to the Bible mandate, according to a report by StateImpact Oklahoma.

In an interview at his district’s headquarters, Migliorino emphasized that his school system already teaches how different religions affect history. Bibles, he noted, are accessible to students through the library. Migliorino added that the state superintendent had no authority to make school districts follow the mandate and that it would result in pushing Christianity on students. 

“It’s a captive audience, and that is not our role to push things onto kids,” he said. “Our role is to educate them and to create thinkers.”

Oklahoma already has a 2010 measure allowing school districts to offer elective Bible classes and to give students the latitude to pick the biblical text they prefer to use. But unlike Walters’s mandate, it allows for different biblical perspectives, said Alan Levenson, chair of Judaic history at the University of Oklahoma and a biblical scholar. Even still, there has never been widespread interest in a Bible elective in Norman, said Jane Purcell, the school system’s social studies coordinator. Nor was there much interest in such a class when she taught in Florida. Since 2006, at least a dozen states have passed laws promoting elective Bible classes.

This may be, in part, because educators worry about potential issues with teaching Bible courses, said Purcell: “It’s very easy for it to appear to be proselytizing.”

Related: How one district has diversified its advanced math classes — without the controversy

Walters, for his part, has not taken any of this pushback in stride. At a July 31 state board of education meeting, he lashed out against “rogue administrators” who opposed him, saying of the left: “They might be offended by it, but they cannot rewrite our history and lie to our kids.”

After the public schools superintendent publicly rejected Walters’s mandate, community members and teachers in Norman expressed relief. Meg Moulton, a realtor and mother of three, came to a July board meeting to thank the superintendent in person. “I’m a Christian mama,” she said. “I love teaching my kids about God. I love going to church.” 

But, she added, “Ryan Walters’s mandate makes it so that teachers and students who may not be Christians…[or] who may believe something different, are going to be essentially forced to learn something that they may not believe in.” 

Students and others I met with at a popular Norman coffee shop said they were concerned about how Walters’s mandate could affect religious minorities, women, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. “What Ryan Walters is trying to push goes in line with a lot of trends of kind of pushing back against LGBTQ,” said Isandro Moreno, a 17-year-old senior at Norman High. 

Phoebe Risch, a 17-year-old senior at Norman North, the town’s other public high school, said Walters’s mandate was part of what motivated her to restart her high school’s Young Democrats club and recruit roughly 30 members. Risch, already upset about her state’s readiness to ban abortion following the Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe v. Wade, fears that requiring Bible-based instruction could lead to the promotion of the idea that women are submissive. “As a young woman, the implications of implementing religion into our schools is a little scary,” she said, “especially because Oklahoma is already a very conservative state.”

Among the half dozen teens attending a confirmation class in December at Oklahoma City Reform temple B’nai Israel, most opposed the mandate, except for one. She said she supported it as long as the classroom teacher was careful and encouraged critical thinking. 

One teen recounted tearily how, during class the previous week, a friend had drawn a swastika on her paper as a taunt. “Stuff like that is so normalized,” she said. “It’s antisemitism. If that’s so normalized, normalizing Christianity further, it’s just worse.”

Imad Enchassi, an imam who oversees an Oklahoma City mosque and serves as chair of Islamic studies at Oklahoma City University, echoed similar fears for the Muslim community. “We’re already experiencing Islamophobia. Muslim kids who wear the headscarf already have been told they’re going to hell because they don’t believe in the Bible or they don’t believe in Jesus,” he said. “When curriculum mandates one religion over the other, that will further isolate our children.”

Some Oklahomans, though, do support the mandate. And at one of the state board of education meetings where Walters touted it, three residents expressed support for the idea — during public comment — as did at least one board member. That board member said he thought biblical literacy was important, while other supporters see the Bible mandate as a way to instill morality in the public schools. Ann Jayne, a 62-year-old resident of Edmond, about 15 miles north of Oklahoma City, makes a point of letting Walters know on his Facebook page that she’s praying for him, because she believes public schools need to instill Christian values. “I think we need church in the state,” she said. “I don’t see a problem with God being back in the school. Nobody is forcing them to become a Christian.”

Since last summer, Walters’s efforts to push Christianity have only become bolder. In mid-November, he announced the opening of the Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism, which would, among other things, investigate alleged abuses against religious freedom and patriotic displays. Two days later, he announced that he was sending 500 Bibles to Advanced Placement government classes. He also emailed superintendents around the state with the order to show their students a one-minute-and-24-second video announcing the religious liberty office and praying for newly elected President Trump.

At a Christmas parade in Norman in early December, some residents called the video embarrassing, with many superintendents, including Norman’s, having declined to show it. However, while many residents seem to abhor the Bible mandate, they do not agree on how religion should be handled in public life. Despite some religious diversity and some liberal leanings common in a university town, Norman skews religiously conservative. That dichotomy means many residents see the Bible as so sacrosanct that they don’t want it taught in schools, yet they see no problem with other Christian-oriented school activities.

In some cases, residents like school board member Brockman, who is also a former teacher and lawyer with training on the First Amendment, have objected to school promotion of the religious aspects of Christmas. When she was a teacher at one of Norman’s two high schools, she asked to stop the playing of overtly religious Christmas songs in the halls during passing periods. She saw it as a “gentle reminder that the Supreme Court says we need to remain neutral on religion.” Her wish was granted. “They took it down with some consternation and played the Grinch in my honor.”

Related: Teaching global warming in a charged political climate

Residents have also quibbled over what to call the parade featuring Santa each December. Should it be called the Norman holiday or Christmas parade? It’s now known as the Norman Christmas Holiday Parade. In early December, the city’s mix of liberal and conservative influences shone through the glitz during the parade. The Knights of Columbus float had a sign that said “Merry CHRISTmas.” Norman’s Pride organization participated, with its human angels wearing wings lit up in rainbow colors.

Tracey Langford, watching the parade from the back of her SUV, was dressed in a red stocking cap and a red sweatshirt that read “Santa, define good,” a jab at the fact that she is a lawyer who cares about legal definitions. To her, the Bible mandate is a clear violation of separation of church and state.“Every home here has a Bible…. We don’t need to spend a dollar to get a Bible in every classroom,” said Langford, a lawyer at the University of Oklahoma and a parent of a first grader in Norman schools and a 15-year-old in a private school. 

Traci Jones, a parent of both a Norman sixth grader and fifth grader, likewise asked, “Who’s supposed to be teaching these kids the Bible? Is it just a random person? What if it’s an atheist or someone who has totally different beliefs than me?” As a nondenominational Christian, she added, “I think it’s wack to ask these poor teachers to teach that.”

What happens next may ultimately be decided in a courtroom. There is no sign yet when final opinions may be issued in either lawsuit.

State lawmakers at recent appropriation hearings said they were worried about the directive’s constitutionality, and in fact, in March, the Senate Appropriations’ Education Subcommittee  said it did not consider Walters’s $3 million request to purchase Bibles. The next day Walters announced he was launching a national campaign with a country singer to get Bibles donated to Oklahoma schools. (The legislature gets the final word on the Bible purchases, a line item in the education budget, and the standards, which the state board of education approved in late February.) Meanwhile, the fate of religion’s place in public schools on a national level likely will rest with the Supreme Court, with various lawsuits against state measures promoting Christianity making their way through the court system.  

In Norman, Jakob Topper, Kyle Tubbs and other Baptist pastors I met with at the headquarters of a statewide Baptist church organization were increasingly aghast at Walters’s mixing of religion and politics. Rick Anthony, pastor of Grace Fellowship, a Baptist church, centered his November 17 sermon on such concerns. “Almost comically, we’ve heard this week about a video made that was ordered to be shown to all children in the public schools and then sent to their parents,” he said. “Our question is…where are our voices as our political leaders cozy up to faith leaders, all the while destroying our faith institutions?” 

Kaily Tubbs, Tubbs’s wife and a fifth grade teacher in Norman schools, said the mandate conflicts with her personal belief on how faith should be handled in schools. She spoke also as a mother of a kindergartener and a third grader, both in Norman schools. “Our faith is really important to us,” she said. “I don’t want it to be used as a prop in a classroom.”

Topper said that at his church, the majority of his congregation believes in separation of church and state. He said he is aware of the religious diversity that exists in his town, too, and has both Muslim and Jewish neighbors. Like Anthony, he spoke with his congregation about Walters’s mandate, though in an informal weeknight meeting at his church, rather than as part of a formal sermon. “I wish,” he said, “that Jesus was left out of schools and left for the religious realm.”

Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org.

This story about Bibles in schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post How Oklahoma’s superintendent set off a holy war in classrooms appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Southwest Memorial Hospital in Cortez, Colorado, received more than 59,000 patient visits last year. That’s enough to treat everyone in Cortez and surrounding Montezuma County twice.

Staff call the small hospital a bedrock of both medical care and the local economy. 

But warnings that the Republican-controlled federal government might cut Medicaid funding have community members worried about the facility’s future. 

They are not alone. Nationally, health policy experts warn that any cuts to Medicaid are likely to cause more trouble for rural hospitals than urban ones. That’s due in part because rural residents are more likely to be enrolled in Medicaid

In Montezuma County, 36% of the population is enrolled in Medicaid, which is publicly supported medical insurance for lower-income Americans. Southwest Memorial Hospital, a nonprofit hospital, expects about $20.5 million to come from the Medicaid reimbursements in 2025. That’s nearly a quarter of their expected revenue for the year, according to CEO Joe Theine. 

If that revenue is threatened, the healthcare system would have a hard time adjusting without affecting the services they can offer. 

Theine said that the hospital is planning for growth in 2025. But if Medicaid is cut, the hospital would have to consider their level of services, the same way a family would have to revise its spending if it lost a big part of its income. 

“If [you] had a 25% reduction in household income, you have to make some different decisions other than just around the edges,” Theine said.

Any such changes could affect the community’s level of health services and the local economy.

The hospital employs nearly 500 locals, including employees with young families that support Cortez’s public schools, Theine said. “The ripples of a hospital in a rural community are many beyond just the health and wellbeing of the people we serve directly,” he said. 

Medicaid reimbursement is a crucial part of Southwest Memorial’s funding, despite reimbursing less at lower rates than private insurance. 

“If a patient comes in and has Medicaid as a pay source, even though it may pay less than the average cost for that service, it still is contributing to paying for that fixed cost of having the emergency room open,” said Theine, “If that same patient no longer has insurance and is unable to pay, we still take care of them. But now there’s nothing coming in that’s contributing to keeping all of those services available.” 

GOP Legislation Could Threaten Rural Healthcare Systems

A March 5 letter from the Congressional Budget Office to two Democratic representatives said that House Republicans won’t be able to meet their budget target of $1.5 trillion in cuts without slashing Medicaid and Medicare.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said Medicaid was safe under Republican lawmakers, but the math doesn’t add up with Trump’s determination to drop the national deficit by more than $1 trillion, according to Democrats.

“There have been proposals around reducing or eliminating that federal match for [Medicaid] expansion populations,” said Carrie Cochran-McClain, chief policy officer of the National Rural Health Association.

That match was part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, which provides federal funds to states to expand eligibility for Medicaid to families that earn up to 38% above the federal poverty line. A later Supreme Court ruling made Medicaid expansion optional. Currently, all but 10 states have accepted federal funding and expanded Medicaid.

According to a 2023 report from the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC), an organization that advises Congress on healthcare policy, hospitals in states that expanded Medicaid under the ACA don’t have as many uninsured patients as those that didn’t adopt expansion. Medicaid expansion can save hospitals money by increasing the share of its patients who are covered under some form of insurance. 

An analysis of 600 research papers on Medicaid found that expansion led to drops in the uninsured population and economic improvements for both states and healthcare providers. In the fiscal year 2020, the cost of uninsured care represented 2.7% of the total operating expenses in states that expanded Medicaid, compared to 7.3% in states that haven’t expanded. 

Medicaid expansion under the ACA also means states can spend less money on mental health and substance use treatments because federal matches help pay for them. 

“States can come up with a number of different ways that they finance their Medicaid programs, and it varies across the board,” Cochran-McClain said. “They can use specific kinds of fees or taxes to help support the Medicaid program.”

Reducing or eliminating that federal match would leave states with the option to either reduce the number of Medicaid enrollees, or to come up with another method of funding care for the expansion population. But some states might not be able to make up the funds.

Rural Residents Are More Likely to Receive Medicaid

The loss of that federal money would be especially hard on rural health-care providers, Cochran-McLain said. That’s because a greater share of the rural population relies on Medicaid compared to urban and suburban areas.

Nonmetropolitan, or rural, counties have slightly higher Medicaid enrollment rates than metropolitan counties. Nationwide, 24% of residents in rural counties received Medicaid either alone or in combination with another health insurance method in 2023, compared to about 20% of the metropolitan population that year. 

In Colorado, 23% of the nonmetropolitan population and 18% of the metropolitan population received Medicaid in 2023, according to a Daily Yonder analysis of Census data.

Of the 47 states that have nonmetropolitan counties, 43 of them have higher Medicaid enrollment rates in rural areas compared to metro ones. 

“There is a really direct and strong relationship between Medicaid coverage levels and the financial viability of rural hospitals,”  Cochran-McClain said. “In states that have expanded Medicaid, we saw an improved hospital performance, rural hospital performance and smaller rates of vulnerability for rural hospitals.”

Expanding Medicaid to include more low-income individuals saves states money by reducing the cost of providing care to the uninsured. 

States that have not expanded Medicaid leave their rural healthcare systems more vulnerable to financial crises.

“Whether it’s Medicare or Medicaid, it’s a really important revenue source and source of coverage,” said Cochran-McClain.

How Does Medicaid Work in Colorado?

Colorado lawmakers voted to expand Medicaid coverage in 2009, ahead of implementation of ACA. The state simultaneously created a hospital provider fee program that funds the state’s portion of Medicaid. In Colorado,  the federal match rate comes to 63.6%. The hospital provider fees pay the rest..

Many states use provider taxes or fees to fund Medicaid programs at the state level. Colorado taxes hospitals and healthcare providers 5.5% of revenue (the fee cannot exceed 6%) with a program called the Colorado Healthcare Affordability and Sustainability Enterprise (CHASE). That money is then matched by the federal government at 90%, as long as the population falls under the ACA expansion eligibility.

Colorado’s CHASE funds go to offsetting the difference between Medicaid reimbursement and the actual cost of a service. Medicaid typically reimburses a provider around 50% of cost, said Tom Rennell, senior vice president of financial policy and data analytics for Colorado Hospital Association.

Rennell said that CHASE “helps out our rural hospitals more than our urban hospitals. Our rural hospitals pay in less fees and our rural hospitals receive more of the distribution.”

Increasing taxes and fees from healthcare providers  are one funding source that could help bridge the gap if federal funding is cut, said Rennell. 

In Colorado, the state legislature has a constitutional requirement to have a balanced budget. That budget is currently facing a $1.2 billion deficit, some of which is caused by rising Medicaid costs. Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) restricts government spending to population growth plus inflation, meaning that any additional tax revenue over that formula is returned to taxpayers. 

This means that even if the state has the revenue to balance the budget, it’s incredibly difficult to reallocate those funds to other programs, like Medicaid.  Colorado voters have historically been very protective of TABOR refunds. Raising taxes to fund Medicaid is also not an option in Colorado under TABOR. 

“The state’s already wrestling with a billion dollar shortfall in our upcoming year, and then add onto that potential additional shortfall from this federal funding. And those really start to add up to some real sizable impacts that the state is going to have to deal with,” said Rennell. 

The Colorado Hospital Association estimated that federal Medicaid cuts could cost the state $27.2 billion over the next five years, depending on specific cuts. 

Rennell sees the potential cuts affecting rural hospitals disproportionately. “This funding from the federal government is their lifeline. It is what keeps those rural hospitals operating. And if you cut the lifeline, they will have to make difficult choices.” 

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The post GOP Cuts to Medicaid Could Threaten Rural Hospitals appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

Con el objetivo de responder a la falta de acceso a servicios de salud, la organización Vecinos en el oeste de Carolina del Norte inaugurará una clínica que brindará atención médica gratuita para personas de bajos recursos y sin importar el estatus migratorio.

La entrada Nueva clínica ofrecerá atención médica y apoyo legal a migrantes en el oeste de Carolina del Norte se publicó primero en Enlace Latino NC.

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Nueva clínica ofrecerá atención médica y apoyo legal a migrantes en el oeste de Carolina del Norte was first posted on marzo 14, 2025 at 6:00 pm.
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