FAFSA change may mean fewer rural students at a time of declining college enrollment.

The post New FAFSA form may decrease aid to farm-family collegians appeared first on Youth Today.

In the letter, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra wrote that he was “deeply alarmed” by data showing that nearly 150,000 Georgia children had lost Medicaid coverage as of September.

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

This is the second story in Capital B’s “Disconnected: Rural Black America and the Digital Divide” project, which explores the disparate effects of broadband accessibility on Black Americans in the rural South. This project is made possible by a grant from The Center for Rural Strategies and Grist. You can read our first story, “Digital Redlining and the Black Rural South,” here.

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SELMA, Ala. — On a warm afternoon in September, residents sit outside the Selma Dallas County Library, or in the parking lot in their cars, to connect their mobile phones to the library’s hotspot.

It’s rather quiet except for the sounds of muddled conversations and car engines in this Alabama town that became an epicenter for a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement. Less than a mile away from the library is the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the site of “Bloody Sunday” where 600 people were brutally battered and beaten by police officers for marching to secure voting rights. Nearly 60 years later, residents in the 84% Black town say they still struggle to obtain a basic service: adequate internet access.

Crystal Drye, who has worked at the library since the days of typewriters, says this is the norm. For some, it’s too costly to subscribe to internet service, the speeds are too slow, or they lack the skills to navigate an online landscape. As a solution, they stop by the library, said Drye, who serves as the technology director.

She knew the service became critical when residents came to watch funeral services, hop on Zoom calls, or watch graduation ceremonies. Even homeschooled students often utilize the resources. The library also purchased laptops and mobile hotspots to assist older residents and people with disabilities at their residences.

“I’ve taken our laptops to the nursing home so that a person can stream [church] service on Sunday,” Drye told Capital B. “I’ve taken it to a person to use to order their groceries when they need to because maybe they can’t drive to get it. … It’s nice that we can be a one-stop shop.”

This is a similar reality for millions of residents living without high-speed internet — especially Black folks in the rural South, where the digital divide is the greatest. In this region, about 38% of Black households don’t have home internet, a higher percentage than white people in the same region and the national average, a 2021 report from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found. In Dallas County, where Selma is located, 17% of households do not have internet access, the same percentage statewide.

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Read more: Digital Redlining and the Black Rural South 

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Over four months, I made several trips across Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi and spoke to about 30 residents, experts, and advocates. Here’s how the digital divide is disrupting their everyday lives.

The high costs of low speeds

When Hans Hageman moved from New York to the Mississippi Delta to lead the Tutwiler Community Education Center last year, he didn’t anticipate his internet would affect his productivity. On a daily basis, he juggles between whether his home in Rome, an unincorporated community, or the education center in Tutwiler would be better suited for Zoom or phone calls.

He’s missed out on potential funding opportunities because he can’t upload grant applications online due to slow speeds.

“It’s always top three on the list of, ‘Is this going to work today?’” Hageman said. “I have a meeting this weekend and I have to be prepared to close my stuff and drive real fast to see if I get a better connection to make a $25,000 ask to a foundation. I could be much more productive if I wasn’t doing that.”

He’s also noticed how the inadequate service limits opportunities for the youth to participate in virtual or global activities. Hageman signed up his students for a digital sports tournament to compete with youth nationwide. During a Zoom training ahead of the tournament, his students kept “dropping off of the call” due to bad internet connections, which forced them to miss out.

Some of the kids in the 79% Black town of 3,000, want to pursue careers in content creation, media, and photography. They have dreams of being fashion designers, chefs, and entrepreneurs. He’s also working to put together a robotics program and a drone pilot program. In the back of his mind, Hageman knows they “don’t have the bandwidth to pull this off” because of the challenges with broadband.

Unfortunately, it adds to the many reasons why they want to leave their town — a place described as a food, job, and medical desert. The only place to get food is the Double Quick gas station.

“When you’re talking to the kids, none of them want to stay, and some of it is because of their access,” Hageman told Capital B. “It breaks my heart because when they go off, they are having to play catch up.”

Despite the barriers, Hageman is on a mission to figure it out.

At the height of the pandemic, nonprofit leader Gloria Dickerson learned that many families in her hometown of Drew, Mississippi — which is about 16 miles from Tutwiler and 11 miles from Rome — didn’t have access to computers or internet at home due to affordability.

The Sunflower County School District provided one mobile hotspot per household and one tablet per child. The costs of insurance — $5 for hotspot and $25 per tablet — rested on families. In households with multiple children, the fees were too costly, and one hotspot was simply not enough. Some children could not complete schoolwork at home, which caused some students to fall further behind, she said.

“Every child needs a computer at home. I see these computers as for information, but I also see it as a learning tool for the younger generation … to keep up with what’s going on in the world. Keep up with their homework. It’s just a necessity,” Dickerson said. “We can’t do it and expect these kids to thrive.”

Dickerson, who runs We2gether Creating Change in downtown Drew, opened her doors for children to use computers, and purchased iPads for every student in her program. At her building, she had a stable internet connection. About five minutes away at her home, her internet service was poor.

“It got so bad that I couldn’t watch TV. Every 10 minutes, it would go off and say it couldn’t connect. I’d call, and they’ll say, ‘Well, we can’t find anything wrong with it, maybe you need to just hit the reset button,’” Dickerson said. “You just get so disconnected. Every time you start to send an email, all of sudden it goes down in the middle of sending an email. Did that email send? Should I resend the email? It’s a mess.”

The service, which costs $75 monthly, should be better for how expensive it is, she told Capital B in September. A month before, she says, a technician finally came out, after a year and a half of calls.

Community resources aren’t available to all

In Devereux, Georgia, where Gloria Simmons has lived for over 50 years, there’s not much except a Dollar General and a few churches. She often travels for basic services, but this year, she decided the internet could help cut down on trips, specifically to pay bills and access bank statements.

One of the reasons she held out on getting the service was her lack of digital skills. Instead of relying on her daughter, who works full time, Simmons wanted to learn how to navigate the internet herself.

“We get complacent and dependent upon others. I like to try to set it up where I can at least do it and do some things on my own,” Simmons told Capital B at her home.

But, as a retiree on a fixed income, it’s too expensive, she says. She pays $60 a month for fixed wireless internet with AT&T. But some months, if she goes over her data usage, it’s $10 for each additional 50 gigabytes of data. If it increases, she says she’ll cancel the service, despite its convenience.

Back in Alabama, Henry Hall Jr. has switched back and forth between AT&T and Spectrum, formerly Charter, for years. They are two of the largest internet companies worldwide and the only options available to him. He lives in a remote area in the countryside of Selma, surrounded by trees, and his service is always “buffering,” he said. He walks nearly 20 minutes to the Selma library to use the computer and printer. Drye calls him a regular because he’s there so much.

The Selma library and the nonprofits led by Dickerson and Hageman help to provide resources to their communities to access the internet. However, many communities don’t have those resources.

In 2021, President Joe Biden signed into law the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which authorized $65 billion to fix broadband issues, including infrastructure, affordability, and digital literacy. Of that, $42.5 billion goes to states through the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program.

Currently, each state is planning how to disperse the funds, but the rollout will happen over the next four years or so. Given the history of neglect to Black communities, residents question whether the billions of dollars from the feds for broadband will reach their area.

While Hall enjoys his library visits, he hopes the federal government’s initiatives will result in better service for residents.

“It’s unfortunate that when you use the internet, it’s buffering, or if there’s too many people trying to get in on it at one time, the internet … it becomes stagnant,” he added. “As long as I get the quality,  I can use the internet when I need to use it, and that’s what I would like.”

The post How Black Rural Americans Navigate Internet Issues appeared first on Capital B News.

The new stipend for child care employees in Eagle County is funded through a lodging tax, a mechanism that Colorado communities, especially in mountain resort regions, are increasingly tapping to generate new dollars for housing and child care for people who live there. The idea is that local workers power the tourism industry, so visitors should contribute to efforts that support a stable workforce. Such taxes also reframe child care as a larger economic interest rather than just a mom-and-dad issue.

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

Our study finds that over half of Florida’s 410 municipalities will be affected by 6.6 feet of sea-level rise. Almost 30% of all local revenues currently generated by these 211 municipalities come from buildings in areas that will become chronically flooded, potentially by the end of the century.

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

Local election offices across the country are struggling to manage a sharp rise in the number of public records requests, and extensive requests coming from Local Labs in at least five states have stymied election officials, according to a Votebeat review of hundreds of records requests, as well as interviews.

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

Reading Time: 3 minutes

At six or seven years old, John Slaughter remembers getting up at night to use the bathroom and seeing his father, Eddie, asleep on the couch with his boots still on.

“I took his boots off when he was still asleep, being exhausted all day, trying to farm and work the job that he had at the time,” John Slaughter said. “He fell asleep trying to figure it all out.”

It wasn’t just the on- and off-farm work. Black farmers like him faced decades of discrimination from the federal government, and he was a tireless advocate pressing the U.S. Department of Agriculture to make it right.

He battled for that — in particular, for farm loan debt relief for the Black farmers who needed it — until the very end. Slaughter died suddenly Wednesday morning after experiencing shortness of breath at his home in Buena Vista, Georgia, according to friends and family.

He was 72.

Slaughter spoke at length with Public Integrity as a source for stories about discrimination against Black farmers. He is featured in the upcoming season 3 of Public Integrity’s The Heist podcast, in partnership with Pushkin Industries. In episode four, Slaughter said he was still actively fighting for Black farmers.

“Till the day I die, or we receive justice,” Slaughter said. “Whichever come first.”

Errick Thornton, one of Slaughter’s stepsons, was grieving both his loss and the unfinished battle.

“He said, ‘For us to get out of this debt, we’re going to have to die.’ And that’s so overwhelming,” Thornton said. “He never saw what he was pushing for.”

Slaughter was born in Buena Vista but mostly grew up in Miami.

“I was like a fish outta water,” Slaughter told the Center for Public Integrity last year. “I was country when country wasn’t cool.”

Every summer break from school, he would return to Buena Vista. Eventually, in his early 30s, he moved back for good. He wanted to be a farmer. And relatives showed him the ropes.

“When you finally get stuff up and it’s growing and you finally are able to harvest it and eat it, you become full circle,” Slaughter said. “And I wanted to learn so much more about it.”

Slaughter got a loan from the USDA. But as his lending relationship with the department grew, so did his debt. He alleged that he was encouraged to open more loans, buy more equipment and take on more debt, to meet department guidelines.

“That was the worst mistake I made because when you get into it with them, you fight them forever,” Slaughter said.

In 1997, Slaughter testified at a congressional hearing the Congressional Black Caucus held on USDA lending discrimination. He also became a claimant in Pigford v. Glickman, a class action lawsuit against the USDA that resulted in a settlement for Black farmers in 1999. Slaughter always contended that the $50,000 he received as part of the settlement was too little to cover his damages.

Although he said he was able to settle his debt under the Trump administration when he asked Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue for a debt compromise, he continued to advocate on behalf of other Black farmers still tangled up in loans they saw as predatory. He organized Zoom meetings with them and alerted members of Congress to challenges they were facing with the USDA in his home state.

Politically, he was tough to pin down: He felt both Democrats and Republicans had failed Black farmers. At the local level, constituents have better contact with their elected officials, but Slaughter thought it could be tough to hold federal officials accountable, John Slaughter said. They could be too far removed from the people they’re serving and those like Eddie Slaughter, who didn’t fit neatly as a Democrat or a Republican, John Slaughter said.

Beyond his advocacy, friends and family say they will remember Slaughter’s service as a local pastor and his love of both God and his expanding family. He had six children with his first wife, Angeline, who died in 2017. About four years ago he married Gloria, who was also a widow and has nine children. Their families had known each other for years. With Gloria by his side, several family members said Slaughter’s faith in God grew.

Over time, though, Slaughter’s body started to fail him.

He was a double amputee. He told the Center for Public Integrity that he had been on dialysis for 12 years. In 2013, he had a kidney transplant. He was blind in his left eye. He had stents put in his heart. He’s had gangrene.

None of that stopped him from farming.

“He would go out there and get on that tractor and he’d plow them acres,” said Thornton, his stepson. “The biggest part that will tie me to Mr. Slaughter is probably going to be his ability to work even after some people would have call it quits.”

The post Eddie Slaughter, longtime advocate for Black farmers, dies appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

American Rescue Plan Act programs expired and the child poverty rate increased to 10%.

The post Child poverty rate rebounds after pandemic-era child tax credit ends appeared first on Youth Today.

Howard Sanders’ father began poultry farming in the 1980s, shifting away from the family’s previous practice of raising cattle and farming.

Within a few years, they had nine chicken houses on their property in Stephens, and had established one of the most prominent poultry farms in Oglethorpe County.

“There just weren’t that many poultry farms in the county at the time,” Sanders said. “Back in the ’80s, we were probably one of the largest poultry farms in Oglethorpe County.”

Times have changed, however.

Six months ago, Anthony “AJ” McKenzie, a 30-year-old cool vegetable crop and livestock farmer in North Carolina, stopped farming on his 40 acres. Last year, a drought killed at least 85% of his crop, which caused him to lose income. Usually, he’d grow his cabbage and turnip, mustard, and collard greens twice in the fall […]

The post How Black Farmers Are Navigating Climate Change With Limited Federal Support appeared first on Capital B.