Transforming a deteriorating school greenhouse into a community garden and educational space. Retrofitting an old building to create a town’s first-ever city hall. Kickstarting a commercial canning facility to teach residents how to preserve summer bounties, increase access to healthy food and expand Indigenous food sovereignty. 

These are just a few of what could be a cascade of potential projects to raise the livability and viability of rural communities across the state if a legislative proposal to create a permanent endowment fund is approved this session. 

Sponsored by Sen. Tim Mathern (D-Fargo), Sen. Terry Wanzek (R-Jamestown) and Rep. Mike Brandenburg (R-Edgeley), Senate Bill 2097 aims to establish a $50 million Rural Community Endowment Fund to act as a permanent resource for funding projects in communities under 1,000. 

At the moment, most communities of this size struggle to navigate complex grant applications or secure matching funds required by federal and state programs, leaving them outside the fence of development funding. 

The majority do not have economic development entities working to secure grants and loans, which this legislation aims to address. 

According to 2022 U.S. Census data, 39.5% of the state’s population resides in rural, non-metro areas. 

“Some of these smaller communities don’t have the economies of scale to be able to make investments in public works or economic development,” Wanzek said. 

“The idea there is to have sustainability for a long time, to be able to have a revolving fund where small communities, if they get a loan or a grant or whatever, some of that money comes back, and then that endowment will be generating new income,” Wanzek said. 

For Sen. Mathern, it aims to preserve a “rural value system” that’s being eroded as smaller communities dwindle due to a range of pushes and pulls. 

“These smaller communities just don’t have the resources to develop programs to serve people so that they want to stay there,” Mathern said. “I think we need to keep rural North Dakota alive

for the values base that people develop there, and that serves everybody.” 

Potential galore 

As a mayor of a town with just under 140 people, Julie Hein said Wing has done well with addressing bigger infrastructure issues like water and sewer projects. But it’s the smaller things that make a community a community, outside of ensuring the faucets run and toilets flush, which are the harder asks. 

Hein has scouted around for funding to help renovate a building that would become the town’s first city hall, as well as funds to rehab the Wing Theatre, which serves as a community hall, to no avail. Estimated costs for renovating the building to house the city hall run around $250,000. 

“We don’t have the money, and there’s really no place to get grants for things like that,” Hein said. 

The city now owns the building that could become city hall. It was formerly a bowling alley, then post office, then apartments. Wing hasn’t been able to do much with it other than beautifying the exterior with a mural because of a lack of funds. 

For such a small town there’s a lot of vibrancy. Besides the theatre, there’s a relatively new gas station, a cafe, a bar and a school, mostly centered on Main St. 

It’s a similar story in Glenburn, a town of just over 400 near Minot. The school there has a greenhouse, which has been slowly deteriorating. Desiree Carlson, operator of regenerative farm Esther’s Acres with her husband, Forrest, who also works as a high school teacher, would like to rehab the facility, but funds have been hard to come by. They’d likely need about $5,000 to fix it up. 

“Anything that we want to do with it, we’ve been trying to find grants,” she said. “It’s really difficult, but the want and the need is there, and eventually it would be really awesome to get to the point where it turns into a community garden.” 

In Fort Totten, a visit by Mary Greene-Trottier to the Cherokee tribal area in North Carolina, where she witnessed an innovative canning operation attached to a community garden, sparked her interest in setting up a similar facility back home. 

“They have an area where they promote gardening, and they allow the community members to come in and make jams, jellies. It’s to teach them, so they can make it healthier, less sugar if you need less, if you’re diabetic, if you have allergies to dyes. Things like that I thought were really interesting, because you don’t really see that in a lot of communities,” she said. 

Greene-Trottier, director of the Spirit Lake Tribe food distribution program, said a canning operation like that would work well with the several community garden spaces that have been or are being established on the reservation. 

“It wouldn’t just be canning, but the ability to dry meats,” she said. “If you buy jerky, the price of it is just ridiculous.”

Greene-Trottier said she’s always looking at ways to improve the community and educate at the same time, so something like this would dovetail with ongoing cooking, gardening and other training. 

“I just think this is something that would be real unique to the community,” she said.  

Housing, property tax relief 

In other areas, tapping into funding provided by a rural community endowment could also help address housing issues, Rep. Brandenburg said. 

With the way housing costs have increased, both for purchasing a house and building new, it’s become more difficult in smaller towns, because of potential risks for developers and potential resale depreciation for buyers. 

“A person who builds a house out in rural North Dakota and spends $400,000 for a new house is probably only going to sell it for $300,000, and you’re probably going to lose $50,000 to $200,000 on it right away. That’s just the market,” Brandenburg said. 

Due to those risks, it becomes harder to find banks to finance a new build. 

“There’s just kind of a missing piece to it, and the missing piece is the assurance that if somebody builds a house, who’s going to hold that note, because, really, you’ve got some unsecured debt in that situation, and that’s the part that we’re gonna have to do some more work on,” he said. 

A rural community endowment fund partially backing projects in towns that need new housing, but where there’s a potential risk, could be another mechanism for rural progress. 

Megan Langley, executive director of rural development nonprofit StrengthenND, said with property tax reform such a headline issue this legislative session, something like this endowment shouldn’t be seen as competing with those efforts, but potentially alleviating them by sustaining and growing small communities. 

“If communities are able to bring additional people into their small towns, improve their property values, diversify their businesses, diversify their economies and be more stable and viable, they’re going to be able to do so much more and not be so dependent on property taxes,” Langley said. “This is a part of that long-term property tax relief strategy.”

The North Dakota News Cooperative is a nonprofit news organization providing reliable and independent reporting on issues and events that impact the lives of North Dakotans. The organization increases the public’s access to quality journalism and advances news literacy across the state. For more information about NDNC or to make a charitable contribution, please visit newscoopnd.org. Send comments, suggestions or tips to michael@newscoopnd.org. Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NDNewsCoop.

Mimi Brill, Windham County’s supervising public defender, remembered one remote court hearing that neared catastrophe. 

The arraignments were proceeding as normal, moving briskly from one incarcerated person to the next, she recalled. As is typical, the hearings were held from prison, and some people were expected to be released, while others would remain behind bars.

The judge called a man’s name, Brill said, and he appeared virtually from a cinderblock room. But as the brief hearing was wrapping up, the man interjected. 

“At the end he spoke up and said, ‘Wait, that’s not me,’” Brill recalled.

The person on the screen was expected to remain incarcerated. The one whose name the judge called would later be released. The mix-up almost sent the wrong man back onto the street, and kept a mistaken man in jail. 

“That was really concerning,” Brill said. “That could’ve been a disaster had he not been this honest fellow.” 

The incident is an extreme example of the pitfalls of Vermont’s remote court hearing system. 

Expanded during the Covid-19 pandemic, remote access allows defendants and others to participate in certain court hearings from home or prison, depending on their circumstances. 

Stakeholders on all sides of the judicial process — attorneys, judges, sheriff’s deputies and corrections staff — agree that remote access is useful for some hearings, particularly those that deal more with procedure than substance. In-person hearings are still the norm for trials and hearings involving evidence. 

But five years in, virtual hearings now make up about half of all hearings, according to the Vermont Judiciary, which oversees the administration of the state court system. And the prevalence of remote proceedings is wearing on those involved. Its critics say the system, designed to ease access to the courts, is in fact doing the opposite. 

“It’s a huge shift in our court system,” Isaac Dayno, the Department of Corrections’ executive director of policy and strategic initiatives, said in an interview. “It’s a more Orwellian form of justice.”

‘Neither effective or efficient’ 

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, Vermont’s court system had experimented with some remote hearings. But as the state went into lockdown, remote access became a necessity. 

And long after emergency pandemic measures came to an end, the practice has persisted. 

An overarching set of civil rules governs remote hearings in Vermont, and judges can set “standing orders” that fine-tune operational procedures in specific courtrooms, creating nuances that vary from county to county. A notice of hearing, which schedules a court date, typically specifies whether the hearing will be held in person or remotely. 

There is broad support among both prosecutors and defense attorneys for using video for hearings involving procedure and scheduling. The remote option can save travel time and facilitate access for people without transportation or who can’t risk missing work. It can also be helpful for crime victims, prosecutors say, who might not want to see a perpetrator in person. 

Joshua Bedard is incarcerated at Southern State Correctional Facility in Springfield. He said he likes remote court hearings because they prevent the corrections department from shuffling him between facilities for court dates.

“DOC would have shipped me all over the state from SSCF to Newport and back to SSCF,” he said. 

But public defenders have argued that remote court interferes with their ability to form relationships with clients and drags out the early stages of court cases. And corrections officials say the remote format often makes it challenging for defendants to actually understand what’s happening in a hearing. 

Matt Valerio, Vermont’s defender general, said he periodically surveys lead public defenders across the state about their top priorities. At a recent meeting, the group spoke unanimously.

“The number one thing of every single office is, ‘Do away with regional video arraignments,’” he said. “It’s neither effective or efficient, and the quality is awful.”

Arraignments are the first court appearance for someone charged with a crime. At such a hearing, a defendant may be released on bail or held in prison. Sometimes, they may choose to plead guilty, bringing the case to a swift end. Historically, arraignments are a defendant’s first opportunity to review the case against them, in coordination with their attorney.

Now, criminal defendants often beam into the courthouse from prison using a software called Webex, seeing the judge on a screen, hearing their charges for the first time through tinny speakers. 

During these initial hearings, defendants face the court virtually, often without ever having talked to their attorney. Their lawyers don’t know their client’s housing options, mental health issues, connections to a community or other factors that impact the first steps in a case. In contrast, in-person arraignments allow opportunities for attorney-client communication before and during a hearing.

“It’s almost a meaningless proceeding,” Valerio said of remote arraignments. “There is no establishment of an attorney-client relationship.”

Dan Stevens, a Windham County public defender, described the mess of trying to reach a client before and during remote hearings from Southern State Correctional Facility. 

“There’s one phone at Southern State for this,” he said. “There’s eight or nine attorneys fighting over this phone.”

The haphazard process means decisions that once took one hearing now require multiple court appearances, and incarcerated people are relying on prison staff to explain what’s going on.

“It’s difficult to hear. It’s difficult to understand,” said Nick Deml, the commissioner of the Department of Corrections, describing remote court hearings held in the state’s six prisons. “We’ve heard very troubling stories from our staff who are reporting this stuff.”

Those stories can sound dystopian: defendants asking prison staff to explain the outcome after a hearing is already over; courts mistaking one person for another, in one instance forcing an incarcerated person to ask prison staff, “Why were they calling me by a different name?”

Preston Lawson, who is incarcerated at the Newport prison, found himself on the wrong side of one of those mixups. 

Lawson was supposed to attend a hearing related to his grandfather’s estate. Instead, prison staff brought a different man named Preston.

“I didn’t find out about it until a month later,” Lawson recalled. 

Lost in the system

Adding to the complication, arraignments are now often done regionally, based on where someone is held instead of where they were charged. The Springfield prison, located in Windsor County, might facilitate remote arraignments virtually in Windsor County or Windham County court, even if the charges were filed elsewhere. Sometimes that means a defendant will be assigned one attorney at their remote arraignment but then be handed off to a public defender somewhere else in the state for the rest of their case. 

In some cases, Valerio said, defendants have languished in prison without being assigned an attorney due to the hand-off process. 

The defender general said he was aware of about a dozen times defendants “got lost” in the system. The additional logistics of moving from one attorney to the next increase the potential for human error. In these rare circumstances, that hand-off from lawyer to lawyer never occurs, according to Valerio, meaning people remain in jail without an attorney — up to 10 months, in one instance he recalled. 

Remote court, Valerio and colleagues said, also risks diminishing the gravity of judicial proceedings for people charged with crimes. The power of looking a judge in the eyes, or walking past one’s mother while in shackles, can’t be replicated through a screen. 

The physical distance makes the judicial process “very impersonal,” said Louis Tobin, who is incarcerated at Northern State Correctional Facility in Newport. 

“Makes you feel like you don’t matter at all,” he said.

Prosecutors have also taken issue with remote court, though their experiences differ from county to county. 

Erica Marthage, Bennington County’s state’s attorney and leader of an executive committee of Vermont’s top prosecutors, said remote hearing can be useful for the state’s southwesternmost county. For example, a defendant held in the state’s only women’s prison in South Burlington might spend 18 hours in shackles being transported to Bennington and waiting in the courthouse. 

Remote access is also useful for people who aren’t incarcerated, Marthage said. Some of these Vermonters don’t have transportation, or might have to miss a day of work to come in person, she noted. 

Marthage said she thinks the defense attorney and defendant should decide whether specific hearings should be held in person.

“If a defendant says they need to be here, then we need to do that,” she said.

Marthage also pointed out that in some family court hearings, people held in prison aren’t provided any access at all, neither remote nor in-person.

“Here’s a new one. If you are incarcerated and the state has taken custody of your children, you will not be transported to court for hearings on that case unless it is actually at the point of terminating parental rights,” Marthage said. “Why are we letting DOC off the hook and saying, ‘Well, you’re incarcerated, so you don’t get to appear even remotely to hear what’s happening with your case.’”

The total lack of access, the prosecutor suggested, opened the state up to potential litigation.

Marthage acknowledged a lack of staff and resources for the Department of Corrections was causing the problems but said the state needed to figure out a better path forward.

‘All of that burden has shifted’

Since the pandemic, the corrections department has effectively operated its own courtrooms. Its leader, Deml, is among the remote system’s most forceful critics. 

Prison staff have facilitated remote court hearings without receiving additional resources, according to corrections leadership. Those new duties are typically undertaken by caseworkers, who traditionally help incarcerated people prepare for release. Instead, they’re serving as quasi-court clerks, with their offices, or other valuable prison space, turned into satellite courtrooms. 

“All of that burden has shifted to the correctional system,” Deml said. “We didn’t have extra staff sitting around looking for something to do.”

At the Newport prison, a room typically used for volunteer programming is now holding remote hearings, limiting when the space can be used for its designed purposes.

Caseworkers’ new roles have brought hiccups, according to Zoey Paradis, who is incarcerated at Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington. 

Paradis, who’s filed a number of civil cases against the Department of Corrections, said she’s missed or been late to hearings due to technical difficulties. 

“They recently upgraded these fancy monitors for court and none of (the prison staff) know how they are used,” she said, referring to the telecommunication technology used for virtual court hearings. 

And with the new set of responsibilities, caseworkers and other prison staff have stopped performing some judicial-related functions they once took on, like printing and sharing court-related documents with incarcerated people. 

While on paper those omissions might sound small, some fear they affect liberty interests of people charged with crimes.

If a person is arraigned from prison for example, they might not immediately receive the charging documents associated with their docket, limiting their ability to understand the state’s case against them. 

“When you have a hearing and there’s an order that’s generated, you want to be able to provide that to the person right then and there,” said Teri Corsones, Vermont’s state court administrator.

With the corrections department no longer printing, faxing and emailing documents like plea agreements and consent forms, public defenders sometimes have to drive hours across the state just to receive a client’s signature. 

Both Marthage and Valerio agreed it was an issue.

“That means (public defender) Fred Bragdon from Bennington, who has, you know, way too many cases, has to drive all the way to Rutland to talk to somebody about a plea agreement,” Marthage said. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Not only do the changes place more burden on defense attorneys, but Valerio said it slows down cases.

“I think it’s actually overall contributed to the backlog, because cases can’t resolve as quickly because of all the hoops you’ve got to go through logistically to get the simplest thing done,” he said.

‘We had to set some boundaries’

Deml, the corrections commissioner, said remote court duties are “majorly impacting” the ability of caseworkers to do their jobs. 

As a result, the department has started to push back against the judiciary, limiting the hours that prisons will hold hearings, reducing the types of family court hearings they will facilitate and declining to use prison electronics for telecommunications.  

“We got to a place where we had to set some boundaries,” Deml said. “There needs to be a major burden shift back to the judiciary.”

While different stakeholders agree on a number of the problems caused by remote court hearings, the solutions are more contentious.

With the function of the judicial system reliant on not just court employees, but prison staff and sheriff’s deputies for transport, the parties are involved in something of a standoff over who should do what.

Judiciary officials, for their part, say remote hearings expand access to justice and generate efficiencies for costs like transportation, saving money in the process. The judiciary is always open to feedback, leaders said, and has a collaborative relationship with not only the Department of Corrections, but also the defense bar, prosecutors and sheriff’s departments. 

“As we understand it, (corrections’) position is they don’t have adequate staffing to be able to fully run the Webex hearings, provide access to the parties for paperwork, (and) there’s issues at times with communications we understand between counsel and their clients,” said Chief Vermont Superior Court Judge Thomas Zonay. “This is not a situation of the stakeholders not trying to work together.”

According to Zonay, the powers granted to judges allow for flexibility to address some of those challenges as they arise. A judge can virtually “step off the bench” to allow for confidential communication between an attorney and client, and in the middle of a remote hearing, a judge can decide all parties need to instead come to court in person, he said. 

As for remote court adding to the Department of Corrections’ workload, Corsones, the state court administrator, suggested additional resources could assuage the issue. 

“We certainly understand and appreciate and sympathize with the correctional facilities saying, ‘Hey, we don’t have positions that are, you know, designed for this,’” she said. “It is a burden that’s being placed on the correctional facilities that I think should be recognized and responded to.”

But Deml doesn’t see the situation as a money problem. Instead, he suggested the state could create more transportation resources — in addition to sheriff’s deputies and corrections staff already involved in transportation — to get more people to court in-person. He also argued the new responsibilities on prison staff need to be shifted back to the judiciary.

Across Vermont, 24 state transport deputies bring people to criminal hearings and court-mandated medical treatment. 

The system is more complex than it sounds, according to Annie Noonan, labor relations and operations director for the Vermont Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs. Historically, corrections staff have on occasion transported incarcerated people between facilities to create shorter drives for sheriff’s deputies, and court staff inform deputies of when transports to courthouses are needed. 

“Is the judge giving enough notice to the court operations manager? Is the court operations manager giving us enough notice? Are we giving corrections enough notice? It all goes like this,” Noonan said. “It’s really pretty intricate.”

For various reasons, including limited corrections staffing and less than perfect communication between court employees and transport deputies, that system isn’t working like it used to pre-pandemic, according to Noonan.

“These little pieces have to be kind of woven back together properly, or the system isn’t going to work,” she said. “We’ve had situations where the transport team is like, ‘We’re already on a transport, and you know, you just sent this court order out, and we’re not here to do it.’ And then, like, the judges’ heads are exploding, and we’re like, ‘Okay, well, this is not on us.’”

But the situation is collaborative, too. Zonay said the Department of Corrections and the judiciary were able to compromise on what types of hearings prison staff would facilitate remotely. Prisons have also been flexible about the time parameters set for when remote hearings will be held, according to the judge. 

“Each of the stakeholders that are part of this equation have separate and unique challenges, oftentimes dealing with adequate staffing,” Zonay said.

Facilitating remote court, he indicated, is not the jurisdiction of the courts, just like the judiciary doesn’t transport people to and from courthouses. 

“They have challenges, and we can work better together by keeping open the lines of communication and trying to facilitate the timely administration of justice in a way that works for everyone,” Zonay said. “The judiciary does not control DOC.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: ‘Wait, that’s not me’: Lawyers say remote court hearings can threaten integrity of Vermont’s justice system.

The ant scurries along on six nimble legs. It catches up to its peers, a line of antennaed bugs roaming the winding surface of a tree, perpetually hunting for food. While doing so, each unknowingly leaves antibiotic microorganisms secreted from its feet. 

That trail of tiny footprints, indiscernible to the naked eye, is remarkably effective at protecting the tree from pathogens and pests. That makes ants, in the eyes of Ida Cecilie Jensen, a legion of unlikely warriors — one humans should consider enlisting in the fight to grow food in a warming world. “Ants are a Swiss army knife,” said Jensen, a biologist who studies the symbiotic relationship between ants and agriculture at Aarhus University in Denmark. “Kind of like a multi-tool for farmers.” 

With an estimated 20 quadrillion ants on Earth at any given time, the bugs are found just about everywhere on the planet. They are also among the species humans, which they outnumber at least 2.5 million to one, have most in common with. Ants have extraordinary collective intelligence, their colonies’ weaving robust community networks and dividing labor. The social insects even wage war with one another, and build complex agricultural systems. 

Ants also have “so many of the same problems and challenges that we have,” Jensen said. “Luckily for us, they already found a lot of great solutions.” One such challenge is how to grow food while confronting climate-wrought consequences — such as an influx of spreading plant pathogens caused by warming. 

Plant diseases cost the global economy hundreds of billions of dollars every year, with between 20 to 40 percent of global crop production lost to crop diseases and pests. Climate change is ramping up outbreak risks by morphing how pathogens evolve, facilitating the emergence of new strains, and making crops more susceptible to infection. Most farmers and growers increasingly rely on chemical pesticides to combat these emerging issues, but the widespread use of such substances has created problems of its own. Synthetic pesticides can be harmful to humans and animals, and lose their efficacy as pathogens build up resistance to them. The production and use of synthetic pesticides also contribute to climate change, as some are derived from planet-warming fossil fuels. 

Instead of chemicals, an army of ants may march right in. Though most people view the small insects as little more than a nuisance, colonies of them are being deployed in orchards across a handful of countries to stave off the spread of crippling infestation and disease. 

In a body of recently published and forthcoming research, Jensen examined the antimicrobial effects of wood ants, a European field ant known for building dome-shaped nests in fields and open woodlands, and weaver ants, which live in ball-shaped nests within tropical tree canopies across Asia, Africa, and Australia. Her team looked at how the microbes influenced apple brown rot and apple scab in two orchards in Denmark — one commercial and one experimental — and found that wood ants effectively reduce apple scab, which can cause serious yield losses, by an average of 61 percent. The scientists also found that the number of disease-free apples more than doubled compared to when ants weren’t wielded as an alternative biological pesticide. For another experiment in Senegal, they collected weaver ants from mango orchards to investigate the bacterial communities associated with ants, discovering that they also leave microbial footprints that may inhibit fungal diseases such as mango anthracnose, which can lead to extensive yield losses. 

Past studies have found that for crops from cocoa to citrus, ants could replace insecticides in a multitude of climates and locations, reducing incidences of pear scab in pear trees, coffee leaf rust in coffee shrubs, and leaf fungal attacks in oak seedlings. Weaver ant nests used as an alternative pesticide in mango, cashew, and citrus trees have all been shown to lower pest damage and produce yields on par with several chemical pesticide treatments. For more than a millennia, the species was embraced as a natural insecticide in countries like China but never quite made its way into the agricultural mainstream in North America or Europe. The method would eventually be replaced by the dawn of synthetic solutions. Still, despite that legacy, exactly how ants take on disease has remained a scientific mystery. 

The answer, Jensen said, lies in how ants function. All species of the arthropod possess a body that is essentially hostile for bacteria because they produce formic acid, which they use to constantly disinfect themselves. Ants are also perpetually hungry little things that will feast on the spores of plant pathogens, among other things, and their secretion of formic acid and highly territorial nature tends to deter a medley of other insects that could be transmitting diseases or making lunch of some farmers’ crops. Ultimately, their greatest trick is what Jensen’s newest research reveals: Ants also inherently have antimicrobial bacteria and fungi on their bodies and feet, which can reduce plant diseases in afflicted crops, with these microorganisms deposited as the critters walk. When the bugs are cultivated in fruit orchards, they march all over trees, their feet coating the plants in microbial organisms that can curb emerging pathogens. 

Understanding why they have this effect makes it easier to promote and implement native species of ants as biological agents in fields and farms, which Jensen advocates for. She’s not only researching how to do this as a doctoral candidate, but also founded AgroAnt in 2022, a company that leases colonies to cull plant pathogens and pests to farmers in Denmark — much like beekeepers lease hives. Her research team is now looking into boosting populations of existing ant colonies already living in orchards, rather than introducing new ones. Building rope bridges between trees to help ants better get around, and increasing the number of sugary extracts left in strategic locations to feed them, can create ant population booms, which Jensen sees as a simple and inexpensive way for farmers to ward off costly bouts of crop disease. 

Others are not convinced this would be any more useful or cost-effective than existing biopesticides like canola oil and baking soda, or pest management chemicals derived from natural sources.

Kerik Cox, who researches plant pathology at Cornell University, said that many of the microbes derived from the ants in the study have already been studied, and optimized for formulation and efficacy in agricultural systems. “Many are highly effective and there are numerous commercial products available for farmers to use,” said Cox, adding that he doesn’t see “anything in this study that would be better than the existing biopesticide tools, which are registered by the [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency].” 

Jensen acknowledges there is always a risk when introducing any species — ants new to an area could push out other beneficial species, for example, or attract aphids, those small green plant-damaging insects that ants share a symbiotic relationship with. Still, she is adamant that as long as the species is native to the area and agricultural system they’re being introduced to and then properly managed, the possible benefits outweigh the pitfalls. 

On a practical note, the money-saving argument of ants pitted against synthetic products also carries a big draw; particularly given that conventional pesticides, in addition to their organic, chemical-free counterparts, have become more expensive in recent years across Europe and the U.S. Those product prices tend to climb when extreme weather shocks disrupt production, a likelihood as climate change makes disasters more frequent and severe. 

Conversely, Jensen said farmers can simply leave sugar-water solutions, cat food or chicken bones, among any number of kitchen scraps, in fruit orchards where beneficial, pathogen-combating ants are typically already present — such as weaver ants in mango orchards. If the species already dwell there, this could increase their numbers and efficiency. The technique, however, should be approached with caution depending on location, to minimize the risk of attracting potentially harmful members of the ant family. 

“I don’t believe in one solution that could fit everything, but I definitely think that ants and other biological control agents are going to be a huge part of the [climate] puzzle in the future,” she said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A secret weapon in agriculture’s climate fight: Ants on Jan 13, 2025.

Use of Maine’s yellow flag law has grown dramatically since the Lewiston mass shootings: law enforcement agencies completed more than 500 weapons restriction orders in the past 14 months, up from fewer than 100 in the three years prior to the tragedy. 

Since August, when an amendment to the yellow flag law went into effect, officers have had the option to apply for a warrant when trying to bring people into protective custody, which is the first step for a weapons restriction order.

Sagadahoc County Sheriff Joel Merry told The Monitor in August that he thought it would be a “good and relevant tool.” Yet few agencies have used it so far.

The amendment, part of a larger bill to “strengthen public safety by improving Maine’s firearm laws and mental health system,” was a reaction to the October 2023 shootings. Maine’s yellow flag law has come under scrutiny since it was revealed that deputies from the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office were aware of the shooter’s threats of violence and access to firearms, and had attempted welfare checks on him, but never pursued a weapons restriction order.

The deputies testified before an independent commission that they had no right to enter the home of an uncooperative Robert Card in order to bring him into protective custody, where he would have been evaluated by a mental health professional for his risk of harm to himself or others. If the evaluator agreed that Card posed a threat, the order would then go to a judge for final approval and Card’s weapons would have been confiscated. But that never happened.

The Maine Monitor found that law enforcement officers often lack direction for how to conduct welfare checks, and their training on mental health lags far behind the reality that cops are usually first to respond to a person in crisis.

Merry, the Sagadahoc County sheriff, said after the scrutiny his agency received post-Lewiston, he and his command-level staff discussed how they could use the yellow flag law more effectively and “take no chances” when threats are made.

Sagadahoc County deputies completed their first weapons restriction order on Nov. 8, 2023, exactly two weeks after the Lewiston shootings. The sheriff’s office has completed 23 more orders since then, the third-highest total in the state as of Jan. 6, 2025.

“If a person makes a threat that they’re going to do harm to themselves or do harm to another person, that’s probable cause to take that person into protective custody,” Merry told The Monitor this month. “I think we were aggressive in doing that.”

Most of his deputies have completed a week-long crisis intervention training course from NAMI Maine, considered the gold standard of mental health training for law enforcement. Some have also completed a training course focused on adolescents in crisis and others have taken a mental health first aid refresher course.

Mental health liaisons

Many law enforcement agencies are incorporating mental health liaisons — trained clinicians who can accompany officers on calls and help connect people to services — into their departments.

Sanford Police launched a new mental health unit around the same time that the yellow flag law went into effect, which helped officers develop a “really strong grasp” of the law, Sanford Police Deputy Chief Matt Gagné said.

“We were one of the few agencies in the beginning to really utilize (weapons restriction orders) more than most other agencies,” said Gagné, who was previously the major in charge of the mental health unit. “I attribute that to the fact that we had a dedicated unit that was leading the way.”

On the eve of the Lewiston shootings, Sanford Police had completed seven weapons restriction orders, the second-most behind State Police. As of this month, the department has completed 27 — again second to State Police.

The Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office shares a mental health liaison with all the police departments in the county, along with Brunswick Police. The liaison, who is on contract from the nonprofit mental health group Sweetser, started just days before the Lewiston shootings.

Merry said the liaison, Michael Maudlin, is “overworked” — a sign that the departments regularly use his services.

Sanford and Sagadahoc County officers have yet to obtain a warrant for protective custody. It hasn’t been necessary, Gagné and Merry said. While Gagné can’t say for sure that Sanford’s mental health first responder, Shannon Bentley, has helped officers avoid the need for a warrant, he said having a trained clinician available has been “incredibly beneficial.”

“She is a trained professional. That is her job,” he said. “Whereas police officers, we are well-trained in crisis intervention in the moment, and of course with criminal law and things like that. But we don’t have advanced degrees and master’s degrees in that field. So I think it’s greatly beneficial that our agency has somebody like that who can intervene.”

Key takeaways

The Monitor has been following the use of the yellow flag law since the Lewiston shootings by regularly requesting records from the attorney general’s office, which tracks completed orders. Here are some key takeaways:

As of Jan. 6, 2025, 95 law enforcement agencies from across the state have completed 628 weapons restriction orders since the law went into effect four-and-a-half years ago. The agencies hail from every county in the state, with the most orders in Cumberland and York counties and the fewest in Washington County.

Between July 1, 2020, when the yellow flag law went into effect, and Oct. 25, 2023, the day of the Lewiston shootings, agencies had completed just 80 orders — an average of two orders per month.

Since then, agencies have completed 548 orders, for an average of 38 orders per month. Forty-five percent of those — 247 orders — occurred on or after Aug. 9, 2024, when the protective custody warrant amendment went into effect. Thirteen agencies, including police from the University of Maine at Orono and the Maine Warden Service, filed their first order in the past five months.

Only five agencies — Bath and Cumberland police departments, and the sheriffs’ offices in Lincoln, Somerset and Waldo counties — have obtained a warrant to bring someone into protective custody, according to the data.

Men were the subject of the vast majority of orders, with men aged 25 to 54 constituting more than half of all orders. Officers cited a person’s attempts or thoughts of suicide in about three-quarters of all cases.

---

On Dec. 18, the Greenfield City Council took an action meant to, as one city councilor put it, “integrate disability justice” into local governance: passed an ordinance codifying remote access to its municipal meetings.

The state opened up the possibility of remote access to public meetings — from city councils and school committees to planning boards — amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Those temporary provisions allowing for remote access to public meetings are set to expire, however, on March 31. Gov. Maura Healey had signed the extension of hybrid access for governance meetings in 2023. 

State lawmakers have not passed any law guaranteeing hybrid access to the public. One bill, H. 4771, known as “an act to modernize participation in public meetings,” has been stuck in committee since June of last year. That has raised concerns among a coalition of groups, including the Disability Law Center, the Boston Center for Independent Living, the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, and several press organizations.

“Hybrid access to public meetings has been transformative for people who previously faced barriers to exclusively in-person meetings — people who are immunocompromised or have a disability, people who have young children or care for disabled or aging family members, people with limited transit options, and more,” the groups said in a statement. “Universal hybrid access is essential going forward.”

In the early months of 2023, the ACLU of Massachusetts conducted a survey of every city council, select board, and school committee in the state which found that “more than half of those bodies are already conducting fully hybrid or live-streamed meetings.” But some, it seems, are doing so by updating the rules of their public bodies rather than passing an ordinance — a more permanent step guaranteeing remote access in the future.

That’s what Greenfield has now accomplished. City Councilor Katherine Golub presented the ordinance to the council with an amendment. The amendment added language to ensure that all municipal hybrid meetings are “in accordance with the American Disabilities Act.” 

“What inspired it is an attempt to integrate disability justice into how I see the world and govern,” Golub said. “And an attempt to make our governing as participatory as possible.”

Golub said that hybrid meetings benefit a variety of people, allowing them to participate in their local governance. She said that hybrid meetings not only increase accessibility for those with disabilities, but for single caretakers of children like herself as well. 

Golub isn’t the only local city councilor facing that reality. In Northampton, for example, City Councilor Rachel Maiore told The Shoestring in 2023 that as a single mother of three, remote and hybrid meeting structure were “pivotal” to her ability to continue to serve on the body. 

“Our Council meetings can often run four or five hours, so for me having to secure childcare and take out food would be prohibitive,” she said at the time.

Golub said she steered and organized the developmental meetings for the ordinance. The initiative to codify hybrid meetings was presented to Golub by Massachusetts ACLU organizing strategist, Javier Luengo-Garrido, before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. (Full disclosure: Luengo-Garrido is on The Shoestring’s advisory board, which does not have any editorial role in our independent newsroom.) But the collaborative development of the ordinance started at the beginning of last year. Over the course of the year, Luengo-Garrido proposed language on behalf of the ACLU for the ordinance to Golub. Golub then brought the language to various city officials who provided input and feedback that were “integrated and addressed.”

Luengo-Garrido said that due to the pandemic, many meetings have been held remotely. The ACLU noticed an increased engagement of people with mobility issues, disabilities, and single parents to not only participate by attending meetings, but to give testimony when given the opportunity to do so in their home. He said that elected officials in Greenfield were “highly interested” in keeping civic participation accessible and that their willingness enabled them to work proactively on the development of the ordinance.

Speaking on the broader impacts of increasing accessibility, Luengo-Garrido said that the passing of the ordinance aids in the understanding of “the ways those cities can work to protect minorities” as well as “helping people access city services” and “feeling comfortable in understanding that those cities and towns are welcoming communities.” 

The ordinance was written in collaboration with various city officials, which included staff from economic development, the IT director, the communications director, and several others. 

“It’s an example of our power to create change at a local level, especially when we collaborate well,” Golub said.

Golub said she reached out to Greenfield’s IT director, Fernado Fleury, prior to the start of the present mayoral administration and was “buoyed” by his enthusiasm and willingness to support the ordinance.

Fleury did not respond to requests for comment. 

“Anytime you can include the public more is a wonderful thing,” Greenfield Mayor Ginny Desorgher said. “We have a huge senior population here … This allows them to participate in the meeting.”

Matt Conway, the communications director for the city of Greenfield, manages the recording of meetings for boards and commissions. Conway said that Golub worked to ensure that the ordinance was “effective, actionable, and something that the city could consistently execute and maintain.” 

Conway said the establishment of hybrid meetings is a method of having increased public engagement. And having more opportunities for people to participate aids the city’s goal of consistent accessibility in a world still living with the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic. The city also established remote access for other governing boards, including the Board of Health, Planning Board, and the Historical Commission.

Conway said that there are also other benefits to hybrid meetings on top of increased accessibility. 

“There’s nothing quite like having the actual archive of the meeting itself,” Conway said. “It’s of a great benefit to our residents, the city itself, and to anyone else looking to learn about Greenfield.” 

That includes those looking to hold local governments accountable. Justin Silverman, the executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition, told The Shoestring that having access to governance and the ability to engage with representatives is a “civil rights issue” and that access to hybrid meetings is “a matter of equity.” 

It’s unclear, though, whether those efforts to increase democracy will stay at the local level or receive broader backing from state lawmakers and the governor. The coalition of organizations supporting continued statewide hybrid-access provisions, which included the ACLU of Massachusetts, warned back in April 2024 of the consequences of failing to extend those protections.

“The countdown is on: If lawmakers don’t act this session, people with disabilities or other reasons they can’t attend meetings will be completely shut out when city councils, select boards, or school committees decide to hold meetings exclusively in person,” the statement said. “Accessibility makes our democracy stronger, and we can’t afford to close the door on these perspectives and communities.”

Previously, Healey had put forward a bill that would have left decisions on hybrid meeting access up to individual municipalities — a proposal the coalition including the ACLU called “a major step backward.”

Golub said she would like to see hybrid meeting laws codified at the state level and expressed concern over the upcoming presidency of Donald Trump and its broad impacts. 

“In a time of decreasing access for public participation at the federal level, I believe that we have a fierce responsibility to everything we can to protect public participation,” Golub said. “Our opportunity for doing that the most is on the local and state level.”

---

The Shoestring is committed to bringing you ad-free content. We rely on readers to support our work! You can support independent news for Western Mass by visiting our Donate page.

Reading Time: 5 minutes

It’s a known risk for the municipal clerks who run Wisconsin elections: Starting at 7 a.m. on Election Day, they have around 16 hours to finish counting every vote, or they may start facing accusations of a fraudulent late-night “ballot dump.”

Those baseless allegations, which sometimes go viral, have plagued election officials across the state but especially in Milwaukee, where counting often finishes in the early morning hours after Election Day. Republican candidates have repeatedly cast suspicion on the timing of results in the largely Democratic city to explain away their statewide losses.

Currently, there’s little election officials can do to finish counting ballots sooner. Under state law, clerks must wait until the morning of Election Day to begin processing ballots and counting votes, even if they received those ballots weeks earlier. 

Election officials are considering two strategies to change that. Both would require approval in the majority-Republican Legislature. At least one of them is highly likely to get signed into law in 2025. 

One proposed measure would significantly simplify early in-person voting procedures. Currently, people who vote early in person receive and fill out absentee ballots, which get set aside in envelopes and aren’t processed or tabulated until Election Day. The proposal clerks are considering, which is similar to a measure that received some legislative support several years ago, would allow early voters instead to put their ballots right into a tabulator.

The other measure, which has been repeatedly pitched and then rejected in one or both legislative chambers, would allow election officials to get a one-day head start and begin processing absentee ballots on the Monday before the election. This past session, the proposal passed the Assembly but stalled in the Senate.

Early voting, without the envelopes

The direct early voting measure appears unlikely to pass the Legislature in its current form. But experts say it would make elections more efficient and reduce the number of errors that the more complex process of casting and processing absentee ballots causes voters and election officials to make.

Currently, 47 states offer some form of early in-person voting, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Thirteen states, including Wisconsin, have in-person absentee voting, seven states have primarily mail voting with some early voting options, and 27 states have early in-person voting.

In Wisconsin, voters cast early in-person ballots at polling sites, but under state law, each ballot goes in an absentee ballot envelope that has to be signed by the voter and filled out with a witness’ address and signature, almost as if they were voting by mail. The envelopes and ballots can’t be processed until Election Day, when poll workers have to verify that each ballot is properly signed and witnessed before counting it. 

Processing these ballots as absentee ballots is time-consuming and invites errors, said Joshua Douglas, an election law professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law, who advocates for reducing the number of steps involved for voters and election officials.

The complications of the current early voting system became evident this year, when delays in the system used to print labels on absentee ballot envelopes, typically before voters fill out their ballot, forced voters to wait in long lines. That problem wouldn’t have come up if the early voting system had not relied on absentee ballot procedures. 

But even when it moves smoothly, the early voting system with absentee ballots requires extra work. For example, election workers typically serve as witnesses for absentee voters, signing and filling out their information for each voter. That requires an additional worker in many voting precincts.

Municipal clerks are discussing a proposal that would allow voters to cast ballots in person at their clerks’ offices as early as two weeks before the election, but to skip most of the absentee process — no witnesses, no signatures, no envelopes. Those voters would have to apply for an absentee ballot at the clerk’s office, but otherwise the process would be similar to voting on Election Day.

The ballots would be scanned by tabulators used specifically for early in-person voting, said Janesville Clerk Lorena Stottler, who’s also a co-chair of the Wisconsin Municipal Clerks Association’s legislative committee. Officials would wait until Election Day to generate the total number of votes from those ballots.

The proposal would reduce costs on multiple levels, Stottler said, since there wouldn’t be any absentee ballot envelopes, and fewer staff would be required in the early voting period and on Election Day to process absentee ballots. It would also lower the administrative costs of sorting absentee envelopes alphabetically and by ward, she said.

To ensure a high level of security, the proposal would require municipalities opting into the program to maintain a chain of custody, put cameras on the voting machines, and ensure that the tabulator saves an image of every ballot it scans, Stottler said.

Milwaukee, the state’s biggest city and typically among the last municipalities to finish counting votes, lobbied for such a proposal last year. Similar legislation came up in 2020, passing the Assembly but not the Senate.

Rep. Scott Krug, the former chair and current vice chair of the Assembly Elections Committee, said he could support some version of an early voting expansion, as long as all Wisconsin municipalities participated.

“My issue is finding a way to have availability in rural areas like mine,” said Krug, who lives in Nekoosa, a city of 2,500 in central Wisconsin. “So many towns have clerks with other full-time obligations. I’d only support an expansion of early voting if access were equal across the board.”

That would include set hours, set days and funding for smaller communities, he said, adding that he was willing to negotiate with advocates of the measure. In the past, funding election offices has been a tough sell in the Legislature.

Claire Woodall, former executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission and a current senior adviser at the election reform group Issue One, said the early voting proposal could help election officials, especially if every municipality had the same early voting program.

And to reduce confusion and the potential for errors, Woodall said, it would be better to roll out such a program over multiple years, rather than in one go.

Michigan recently implemented a similar measure, allowing voters to cast ballots early in person and insert them directly into a tabulator. The Michigan early voting program runs for a minimum of nine consecutive days, but municipalities can offer the option for as many as 28 days total before an election. The change helped speed up election results in 2024 without leading to any notable issues.

Pre-processing ballots on Monday before election

The so-called Monday processing proposal appears likely to garner more support in the Legislature than it has in the past. For years, election officials have been lobbying for the proposal to allow election officials to begin processing ballots the Monday before an election. Resistance from Republican lawmakers appears to be withering.

The proposal, election officials say, would speed up election results that have taken longer to report as more voters choose absentee voting. And critically, the earlier results could stave off false allegations about fraudulent late-night ballot dumps, like the ones then-President Donald Trump made about Milwaukee after his 2020 loss.

The Monday processing proposal, along with the early voting one, would help election officials finish counting ballots earlier, Woodall said.

Wisconsin’s most recently proposed early processing measure would have allowed election officials to start checking absentee ballot envelopes for voters’ identity and eligibility, open the envelopes, take out the ballots, and scan them through tabulators — but not tally them until Election Day.

But despite growing Republican support, the measure has faced GOP headwinds in the Legislature. In 2020, the proposal received public hearings in both chambers but never passed out of committee. In 2022, it passed the Senate but not the Assembly. This past session, it passed the Assembly but not the Senate.

The most significant opposition in the Senate this past session came from Sen. Dan Knodl, the Republican chair of the chamber’s election committee. He said that he didn’t trust Milwaukee enough to support the bill and that he was concerned about the chain of custody for ballots. Other Republicans worried that there weren’t enough GOP election observers in Milwaukee to watch the Monday and Tuesday processes. Knodl’s opposition stalled the proposal. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, a Republican, criticized the Senate’s inaction.

This upcoming session, Knodl is in the Assembly, and he’s not leading the election committee. One of the Senate’s top Republican leaders, Sen. Mary Felzkowski, said in December that she supports the proposal.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Two changes that could speed up Wisconsin election results — and stave off conspiracy theories is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Pickup trucks with trailers and cars with yawning trunks pulled up onto untended lawns in front of buildings from which people lugged books, furniture, mattresses, trophy cases and artwork.

Anything else of value had already been sold by a company that specializes in auctioning off the leftover assets of failed businesses. At least one of the buildings was soon to be demolished altogether, its red-brick walls dumped into its 1921 foundation.

This was the unceremonious end of Iowa Wesleyan University, a 181-year-old institution that closed in 2023 after financial losses due in part to discounts it gave out as it struggled to attract a shrinking pool of students.

“All the things that are mementos of the best four years of a lot of people’s lives are sold to the highest bidders” when a college closes, said Doug Moore, founding partner of a firm that has shut down four of them in the last few years, including Iowa Wesleyan.

There will soon be many more such scenes, a preponderance of evidence suggests. That’s because the current class of high school seniors is the last before a long decline begins in the number of 18-year-olds — the traditional age of students when they enter college.

This so-called demographic cliff has been predicted ever since Americans started having fewer babies at the advent of the Great Recession around the end of 2007 — a falling birth rate that has not recovered since, except for a slight blip after the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Demographers say it will finally arrive in the fall of this year. That’s when recruiting offices will begin to confront the long-anticipated drop-off in the number of applicants from among the next class of high school seniors.

But the downturn isn’t just a problem for universities and colleges. It’s a looming crisis for the economy, with fewer graduates eventually coming through the pipeline to fill jobs that require college educations, even as international rivals increase the proportions of their populations with degrees.

Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.

“The impact of this is economic decline,” Jeff Strohl, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, said bluntly.

As fresh data emerges, the outlook is getting only worse. An analysis by the higher education consulting firm Ruffalo Noel Levitz using the latest available census figures now projects another drop in the number of 18-year-olds beginning in 2033, after a brief uptick. By 2039, this estimate shows, there will likely be 650,000, or 15 percent, fewer of them per year than there are now.

These findings sync up with another new report, released this month by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, or WICHE, which says that the number of 18-year-olds nationwide who graduate from high school each year — and are therefore candidates for college — will erode by 13 percent, or nearly half a million, by 2041.

“A few hundred thousand per year might not sound like a lot,” Strohl said. “But multiply that by a decade and it has a big impact.”

Related: Colleges are now closing at a pace of one a week. What happens to the students?

This comes after colleges and universities already collectively experienced a 15 percent decline in enrollment between 2010 and 2021, the most recent year for which the figures are available, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That means they already have 2.7 million fewer students than they did at the start of the last decade.

In the first half of 2024, more than a college a week announced that it would close. Still more new research, from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, projects that the pace of college closings could now accelerate.

Twenty-one higher education institutions defaulted on municipal bonds last year — their principal source of credit — or reported operating ratios that shrank enough to risk default, according to figures provided by the research firm Municipal Market Analytics. In 2023, the total was 17. Those compare to 22 in the previous five years combined. The bond-rating agency Fitch this month categorized the outlook for the higher education sector as “deteriorating.”

The news is not all bad. For students, it means a buyer’s market. Colleges and universities, on average, are admitting a larger proportion of their applicants than they did 20 years ago, new research by the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute finds. And tuition, when adjusted for inflation, is declining, according to College Board. (Housing and dining charges continue to increase.)

But the likely closing of more colleges is by itself a threat to the economy. Nearly 4 million people work in higher education, the National Center for Education Statistics reports. Though the most imperiled colleges tend to be small, each one that closes translates to, on average, a loss of 265 jobs and $67 million a year in economic impact, according to the economic software and analysis company IMPLAN.

While the falloff in the number of 18-year-olds has been largely characterized as an existential crisis for colleges and universities, the implications are much broader.

“It’s a problem for our country,” said Catharine Bond Hill, an economist, former president of Vassar College and managing director of the higher education consulting firm Ithaka S+R.

Related: Grad programs have been a cash cow; now universities are starting to fret over graduate enrollment

The United States has fallen to ninth among developed nations in the proportion of its population with some education after high school, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Hill pointed out.

“We should be aiming for Number 1, and we’re not,” she said. “In an economy that depends on skilled labor, we’re falling short.”

The diminishing supply of young people will contribute to “a massive labor shortage,” with an estimated six million fewer workers between now and 2032 than there are jobs needing to be filled, according to the labor market analytics firm Lightcast.

Not all of those jobs call for a college education. But many do. Forty-three percent of them will require at least bachelor’s degrees by 2031, according to the Georgetown center. That means more positions in the workforce will demand some kind of postsecondary credentials than Americans are now projected to earn. Still-unpublished research under way at Georgetown forecasts major shortages in teaching, health care and other fields, and some level of skills shortfalls in 151 occupations, Strohl said.

“If we don’t keep our edge in innovation and college-level education,” he said, “we’ll have a decline in the economy and ultimately a decline in the living standard.”

A scarcity of labor is already complicating efforts to expand the U.S. semiconductor industry, for instance, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company warns. It’s a major reason that production at a new $40 billion semiconductor processing facility in Arizona has been delayed, according to its parent company.

A worker shortage of this magnitude hasn’t happened since the years immediately after World War II, when the number of young men was reduced by death and disability, said Strohl and others. And this one coincides with a wave of retirements among experienced and well-educated baby boomers.

Related: Universities and colleges search for ways to reverse the decline in the ranks of male students

“It’s kind of a remarkable moment in our history,” said Luke Jankovic, an executive vice president and general manager at Lightcast. “We have a lot of people moving from economic producers to economic consumers, and there just aren’t enough people coming up behind them to replace them.”

The falling number of 18-year-olds is compounded by other issues, including a sharp drop in the proportion of Americans in the labor market — particularly boomers who retired early and men derailed by substance abuse or incarceration. The proportion of men 20 and older in the workforce has declined from more than 76 percent at the start of the Great Recession to around 70 percent today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.

Falling enrollment, meanwhile, has been made worse by a decline in perception of the value of a college or university degree. Fewer than one in four Americans now say having a bachelor’s degree is extremely or very important to get a good job, the Pew Research Center finds. Of the waning number of high school graduates, the proportion going straight to college has also fallen, from a peak of 70 percent in 2016 to 62 percent in 2022, the most recent year for which the figure is available.

“The sector continues to fight against that narrative that it’s out of reach from a financial perspective and that it’s not worth it from a value perspective,” said Emily Wadhwani, a senior director at Fitch who works on higher education. “The only thing then that will promote stability in the sector again is a renewed sentiment that it’s worth it.”

The drop in the number of high school graduates through 2041 is projected to be most severe in the Northeast, Midwest and West. In all, 38 states will see declines, WICHE estimates, some of them much steeper than the national average: 32 percent in Illinois, 29 percent in California, 27 percent in New York, 20 percent in Michigan, 17 percent in Pennsylvania.

Related: ‘Easy to just write us off’: Rural students’ choices shrink as colleges slash majors

“Institutions that continue to rely on the traditional undergraduate market to pay the bills are going to be in trouble,” said Scott Jeffe, vice president for research at Ruffalo Noel Levitz.

In places where the number of high school graduates remains stable or increases, meanwhile, it will be largely because of one group: Hispanic students. The proportion of high school graduates who are Hispanic, nationwide, is expected to rise from 26 percent to 36 percent by 2041. But Hispanic college-going is below the national average and has been going down, U.S. Department of Education statistics show.

All of these things present “a combination of factors that we haven’t seen before,” Wadhwani said.

“The most perplexing set of issues to face higher education planners and administrators in a generation,” WICHE President Demarée Michelau called them.

There are customers for colleges other than native-born 18-year-olds, of course, including international students, students who are older than 18 and graduate students.

But a rescue from these other sources may not come.

The number of international students fell by 12 percent when compared to competitor countries during Donald Trump’s first term as president, researchers at Texas A&M University have found; now that he is about to start a second term, 58 percent of European students say they are less interested in coming to the United States, according to a survey by the international student recruiter Keystone Education Group.

Despite colleges’ attempts to recruit them, the number of students over 25 has fallen by half since the Great Recession, the Philadelphia Fed calculates.

And the proportion of Americans aged 25 to 44 enrolled in graduate programs is also down, according to the higher education research and consulting firm Encoura.

Back on the campus of Iowa Wesleyan, the old gym was stripped of its wood flooring and whatever else had value, then ripped down. The cornerstone fell into the pile of rubble. It bore the date of the college’s founding: 1842.

“In so many of these towns, their identity is inextricably linked to the college that’s been there forever. It’s a huge source of local pride. It’s also a big source of good-paying jobs that are not replaceable,” said Doug Moore, the man who oversaw the university’s liquidation. “It is brutal and painful.”

More colleges and universities will likely go under the auctioneer’s gavel and the wrecking ball, however, Moore said.

“You have a staggering number of variables” facing colleges and universities, he said. “It’s supply and demand. You’ve got to evolve and adjust or die.”

Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556 or jmarcus@hechingerreport.org.

This story about the enrollment cliff was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

The post The number of 18-year-olds is about to drop sharply, packing a wallop for colleges — and the economy  appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

CHOTEAU — A fire damaged part of the Choteau Acantha’s building between 2 and 4 a.m. Tuesday. No one was injured. The blaze nearly destroyed one of the building’s three rooms and severely damaged items in adjacent rooms.

Officials have not yet determined the cause of the fire at the newspaper’s office. The Teton County Sheriff’s Office and Teton County Fire & Rescue  declined to comment Tuesday on the ongoing investigation.

The Choteau Acantha is a weekly publication that serves Choteau and the surrounding communities. Owners Melody and Jeff Martinsen purchased the paper in 1990. In their roughly 35-year tenure, they have not missed publishing an edition.

The Martinsens said they will still deliver the weekly newspaper Wednesday morning. The Choteau Acantha staff sent this week’s edition to be printed in Bozeman on Monday night. On Tuesday, a representative of the newspaper picked the print editions up from Conrad. The Martinsens spent Tuesday morning picking ceiling tiling off their label maker, labeling the newspapers with delivery addresses and then dropping off the copies at the post office for distribution.

“We have no intention of letting this stop the 131st year of continuous publication of the Choteau Acantha,” Melody Martinsen said in an interview Tuesday. “We pick up the pieces and we keep going on.”

The blaze was first reported by Caine Gray, a bartender working roughly a block away from the Acantha building at the Choteau American Legion.  Gray noticed thick smoke in the street when he left work around 2:20 a.m.

“The way this was concentrated, I knew something wasn’t right,” Gray said. “So I hit the alleys.”

Gray called the Teton County Sheriff’s Department before driving around Choteau in search of the fire. In 2021, Gray rescued his two children from his blazing home in the middle of the night. Within minutes, he spotted smoke billowing from the window’s of the Acantha building. Teton County Fire & Rescue, Fairfield Volunteer Fire Department and Choteau Volunteer Fire Department sent  25 firemen and five engines to put out the blaze.

We have no intention of letting this stop the 131st year of continuous publication of the Choteau Acantha. We pick up the pieces and we keep going on.

Melody Martinsen, Choteau Acantha Editor

Melody and Jeff Martinsen salvaged six computers in addition to several other pieces of equipment and assorted documents. Though the rescued items sustained some damage from smoke, soot and water, “they’re all in working condition, which is an amazing testament to how fast our firefighters locked it down,” Melody Martinsen said.

“The whole staff, they’re great people,” Gray said. “We would do anything and everything for them.”

Community members have offered the Martinsens and Choteau Acantha staff workspaces, office supplies and food.

“They say it takes a village,” Gray said. “ And I think Choteau’s about the best village you can get.”

The post Fire damages Choteau Acantha newspaper building appeared first on Montana Free Press.

The state’s electric grid operator issued a weather watch until Friday but says it doesn’t expect power disruptions as demand rises.