At a hearing last week in Rapid City, S.D, a roomful of people offered more than six hours of testimony. Area tribes testified in favor of revoking military Medal of Honor awards to cavalrymen of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre.

Descendants of massacre victims and survivors answered an invitation from Oglala Sioux Tribal President Frank Star Comes Out to join the hearing on Sept. 18. The live broadcast took place pursuant to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s July order for a review of the 19 Medal of Honor awards.

Robert Anderson, the Interior Department’s principal deputy solicitor, joined review panel chair Tom James in the hearing. Anderson will prepare a report for the Defense Department, which will submit recommendations to President Biden, according to James.

The speakers carried on a century-old pressure campaign to rescind the honors that stem from one of the worst massacres in the country’s Indian Wars. In addition to being descendants of massacre survivors, many witnesses spoke from their perspectives as military veterans. It was the U.S. 7th Cavalry that gunned down over 300 unarmed Lakota men, women, and children after their surrender at Wounded Knee, S.D.

Star Comes Out, a veteran, argued the medals violated military rules of engagement, as the soldiers killed unarmed civilians. “I don’t see any honor in that… They should be court martialed instead of honored,” he said.

Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Chairman Ryman LeBeau highlighted the intergenerational trauma the massacre has inflicted on the Lakota people. “My grandmother would say, ‘There’s a pervasive sadness throughout our people.’ And I believe she was talking about that historical trauma that we all carry.” His grandmother Marcella LeBeau served as a World War II nurse and fought for revocation of the medals until her death at 102.

“The White Buffalo Calf Woman came to give us a message… This is a prophecy she sent me to tell you—that you will get these awards rescinded.”

Cheryl Dupris, retired paratrooper and sister of Arvol Looking Horse

Cheyenne River Sioux citizen Manny Iron Hawk spoke of losing his grandfather, uncle and other relatives during the massacre on the Pine Ridge Reservation. A high school teacher, he recounted his grandmother’s harrowing account of her survival. Growing up with such stories he and others said the emotional and psychological impact passed down over the years.

“We talk about trauma in the DNA, and that transferred to me—but I want to stop that,” he said. “This issue is our fight today. We need to finish it. We don’t want to pass it on to our children and grandchildren. We descendants look at this as a medicine way.”

Iron Hawk received cheers for telling officials,”You have the authority to make this right. Either revoke all the medals, or don’t revoke them at all.”

“We talk about trauma in the DNA, and that transferred to me—but I want to stop that.”

Wounded Knee Descendant Manny Iron Hawk

Janet Alkire, the first woman elected to chair the Standing Rock Tribe, linked the massacre to the prior killing of Chief Sitting Bull. She said, “Had Sitting Bull not been arrested, Wounded Knee would never have happened.”

When Minneconjou Chief Spotted Elk, known to the settlers as Big Foot, learned of Sitting Bull’s assassination, he knew there would be trouble, as Dee Brown relates in “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee.” He gathered his band and headed toward Pine Ridge. En route the 7th Cavalry intercepted them, escorted them to the place where they camped along Wounded Knee Creek. It was there the following morning that the massacre occurred.

An Air Force veteran who served in both Desert Shield and Desert Storm, Alkire said, “Medals are for valor and bravery.” The soldiers at Wounded Knee “did not demonstrate that. It’s like a slap in the face, too, because you don’t kill women and children,” she said.

Cedric Broken Nose, a descendant of Wounded Knee survivors, shared his family’s painful history, including how his great-grandfather had instructed relatives to keep mum about it. “Do not tell the story,” Broken Nose paraphrased. “Otherwise, the United States government is going to find you and do the same thing to you, too – to eliminate you.”

Cheryl Dupris, retired paratrooper of the Army’s 82nd Airborne, brought a prophecy to the hearing. She is a sister of Arvol Looking Horse, who is the designated carrier of the Great Sioux Nation’s White Buffalo Calf Woman’s sacred bundle.

“The White Buffalo Calf Woman came to give us a message to the Miniconjou,” she said. “She told us the prophecy of the military coming, the white men coming, the invaders. But this is a prophecy she sent me to tell you—that you will get these awards rescinded.”

Sicangu Lakota grandmother and water protector Cheryl Angel was among several witnesses who noted the troops at Standing Rock and Wounded Knee were acting outside their jurisdiction. They should not have deployed after the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty that reserved the territory for the Seven Council Fires of the Great Sioux Nation.

The treaties signed between Native nations and the U.S. government were supposed to uphold the welfare of her people, she said. “We signed treaties and were massacred even as we honored them,” she said. “Because we agreed to live in peace. Now give that to us,” she said.

“My relatives, it’s been over a hundred years,” said Angel. “Start somewhere. Rescind those medals, now, Biden. It’s a good time to start.”

The post Century of trauma fuels Lakota push to revoke Wounded Knee medals appeared first on Buffalo’s Fire.

” width=”224″ height=”168″ align=”right” hspace=”10″ alt=”The future of grizzlies hangs in the balance as FWS weighs delisting” title=”The future of grizzlies hangs in the balance as FWS weighs delisting” />State Fish, Wildlife and Parks has released its final EIS proposing a statewide grizzly management plan.

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” width=”224″ height=”168″ align=”right” hspace=”10″ alt=”A cow and bull moose in Grand Teton National Park” title=”A cow and bull moose in Grand Teton National Park” />The state Game and Fish
Department confirms the first case of anthrax in Wyoming wildlife in decades.

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Editor’s note: This article was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

In a state full of rural, tucked away corners, Lincoln County is one of Montana’s most rural and tucked away.

The county of 20,000 people is located in the state’s far northwest corner, bordering Canada and Idaho’s panhandle. Its communities are dotted around the Kootenai National Forest, whose 2.2 million acres of firs, pines, spruces and towering mountains define the craggy landscape.

Libby, the county seat of 3,100 residents, is 69 miles from Eureka, the county’s second-biggest city of 1,500 residents.

Lincoln County is rural and rugged, forged by industry and ecology and steeped in a complicated history of extraction, exploitation and economic struggle. It is a place where everyone knows someone who knows your cousin — a place where the future is still being dug out of the past. 

Related: Interested in innovations in the field of higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly Higher Education newsletter.

Montana’s changing economy is palpable in Lincoln County, where formidable mills and mines once powered its small towns. The area used to be a historic powerhouse of timber and vermiculite production before shifts in the natural resource economy in the 1990s and 2000s marked the closure of nearly every local timber plant and Libby’s vermiculite mine, leaving thousands unemployed.

At the vermiculite mine, workers for decades were exposed to deadly asbestos fibers that killed hundreds, and trains carrying asbestos products blew toxic chemicals across town. As of 2021, 694 Libby residents had died of asbestos related diseases. The mine’s owner, the W.R. Grace Company, kept workers in the dark about the dangers of asbestos exposure.

It is under the shadow of the shuttered mills and mines that Lincoln County is forging ahead, crafting a future that community leaders hope will honor its history while breaking free from its dependence on extractive industries. At the center of that future is a local community college, which is helping Lincoln County residents adapt to a brave new world, building careers close to home and granting them a once elusive future in the community that raised them.

It’s a future that, according to Megan Rayome, the director of the college, is built on the premise that Lincoln County “hasn’t been left to die.”

“It was almost like a guaranteed job,” Kathy Ness, executive director of the Eureka Chamber of Commerce, said of the logging industry in Lincoln County.

On an early summer day in the small town, Ness recounted her own journey to Eureka. 

Ness “married in” to Eureka, settling in the town with her husband who was raised there. She’s been in Eureka for 45 years, a period during which she watched the economy ebb and flow, including her husband’s now long gone career as a logger. Her children and grandchildren have largely left home, seeking jobs in bigger markets. While they’d like to come home, “There’s not a lot in Eureka,” Ness said.

After decades of strong timber markets in Montana, a confluence of local and global factors began to slow the industry’s production in Lincoln County. Overharvesting led to a downturn in timber availability on National Forest land. Economic uncertainty in the 1990s and 2000s forced fluctuations in demand. Environmental litigation shut down operations. Four mills in Lincoln County shut down between 1993 and 2005, leaving more than 500 residents without work.

Following the closure of Libby’s vermiculite mine in 1991, the county’s unemployment rate reached 29%. A decade later, after Libby’s Stimson Lumber Mill closed in 2002, unemployment hit 15.8%.

“It was very damaging to the overall psyche,” Rayome, who grew up in Libby, said.

Related: Is the secret to getting rural kids to college leveraging the entire community?

Rayome is the director of Flathead Valley Community College’s (FVCC) Lincoln County Campus (LCC). LCC is a satellite campus of FVCC, which for four decades has offered career training and college courses to local students. It’s a small campus, boasting seven employees who work in its sole building near downtown Libby.

As a kid, Rayome remembers when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency set up shop in Libby in the late 1990s, tearing up lawns and attics in order to remove toxic asbestos. She remembers her father, a former miner, attending classes at LCC to learn computer skills in hopes of building a new career. She sometimes attended classes with him when he couldn’t find childcare.

Rayome also remembers moving to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, during her youth so that her mother could pursue a degree in nursing. While critical for her mother’s career, the move was disruptive for Rayome, who had known nothing but Libby her entire life.

“I did not enjoy that my mom moved me from my childhood home,” she said. “It’s a small town where you have the same friends and your family is all there. It was difficult for us, in a lot of different ways, for our family.”

Rayome finished high school in Idaho, then moved to Arizona for college, where she earned her bachelor’s and law degrees from Arizona State University.

While in Arizona, Rayome read about how people from rural communities who sought advanced degrees were often forced to leave home to do so, many never returning. The phenomenon, often called rural “brain drain,” stuck with her. She knew she needed to go back to Lincoln County.

After law school, Rayome returned to Libby to practice law. When LCC needed a director in 2020, she jumped at the opportunity.

Lincoln County’s first college program was born in 1979, after a group of local stakeholders identified a need for a college-level course in supervisory and management skills to meet industry needs. The coalition of local residents partnered with FVCC in Kalispell to bring a supervisory management certificate to Libby the next year. It proved so successful that the Libby Chamber of Commerce formed a committee to investigate expanding higher education.

Four years later, FVCC and the county reached an agreement to open a satellite campus in Libby. LCC classes were initially held in local high schools before the college found a home in an old school building on Mineral Avenue.

By 1987, the campus enrolled 73 full-time students, ranging from teenagers to middle-aged mothers heading back to work. According to local reporting, the campus’ “bread and butter” was non-traditional college students, including those who were looking for job changes, facing career-altering injuries or rebounding from layoffs. By 1994, enrollment had risen to 150 students.

A financial dispute between LCC and FVCC’s main campus in Kalispell nearly severed the colleges’ ties in the late 1990s, but the campuses were able to make amends.

In 2002, LCC moved to its current building, which was formerly occupied by the U.S. Forest Service.

“For the first time in the history of the LCC, we will take on the image of being a viable college in Libby and Lincoln County,” interim director George Gerard told the Daily Inter Lake at the time of the move.

Related: Rural universities, already few and far between, are being stripped of majors

LCC Director Pat Pezzelle in 2004 made local headlines after appearing at a board meeting virtually — a rarity at the time — through the campus’s first interactive, video teleconferencing (ITV) equipment. The distance learning classroom further expanded access for rural students. It was acquired through a $350,000 grant championed by then-U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns. 

According to college leaders, LCC’s success has been grounded in a collective impact framework that designs programs from the ground up, rather than the top down. It’s a model that responds directly to industry needs, carving out degree programs with local relevance and, for graduates, long-term economic benefits. 

After the Stimson Timber layoffs in 2002, college leaders vowed to retrain Libby’s nearly 300 displaced workers.

“We have to figure out what kind of training we can provide to make these people employable,” LCC instructor and advisor Chad Shilling said at a staff meeting after the closure, according to newspaper archives. “I don’t know if they’re going to be here for the long-term commitment, but we’re going to be here to take care of their immediate needs the best we can.”

FVCC President Jane Karas said she has “lots of those kinds of stories” about locals who showed up at the college’s door jobless and left with a new career. 

Karas described one student who, before being laid off by the Owens and Hurst Mill in Eureka in the mid-2000s, had “never done anything but run logs through this mill.” After enrolling in FVCC, he completed a degree in computer science and went to work in IT. 

In 2011, the college trained its first batch of welders through a 10-week program that catered to workers who had been laid off from mining and timber jobs. The program was designed to place workers at Stinger Welding, an Arizona-based bridge building company that brought 70 jobs to Libby before its closure in 2013.

When Kalispell-based Nomad Global Communication Solutions (GCS) announced its expansion into Libby in 2022, the need for welders and machinists grew. LCC worked with the local school district to launch an evening welding class at Libby High School. In its first class, the college filled seven of eight welding booths with eager learners from all walks of life.

Through the Running Start dual enrollment program, eight Libby High School students this spring passed their 3G 3/8 Welding Qualification in a college-level course. Many said they plan to expand their skills next year in pursuit of the 6G test. 

With their welding certification, Karas said, students are filling the need for skilled workers that new industry has brought to Lincoln County.

“We focus on how to be most cost-effective, support our community and meet the needs of our students and our employers,” Karas said. 

“What the college did, that is extremely important in terms of working with smaller rural communities, is to go out and establish a relationship,” Lisa Blank, executive director of workforce development for FVCC, said. “Not waiting for them to come to you, but you going out to them.”

Blank acts as the conduit between FVCC, businesses, the Montana Department of Labor and Industry, public schools and students, all of whom have a vested interest in the college’s career programs. Her job was created specifically to streamline communication between those stakeholders.

“There were lots of things going on on campus — great opportunities — but they weren’t necessarily synergistic or integrated,” Blank said. “One of the tasks that this position was given was to come up with a way to integrate the effort so that we can better leverage it for the use of students.”

Related: ‘We’re from the university and we’re here to help’

Blank sought out grants to expand LCC’s capacity in welding, commercial driving and Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machining following the expansions of Nomad GCS and Alpine Precision into Lincoln County. She helped to create a fully online land surveying program, which will begin this fall. She worked with the Montana Logging Association to buy a $100,000 state-of-the-art forestry simulator to prepare students for jobs in logging.

Blank says the college is the “linchpin” that holds together stakeholders in Lincoln County, but that it is not alone. Blank works closely with the Libby School District, Libby Job Service, the Department of Labor and companies in fields from healthcare to heavy machining.

“Everyone needs to be at the table,” she said. 

For Rayome and LCC administrators, the college’s work goes beyond developing hard skills. It is an institution that breaks down many of the barriers to higher education faced by rural students. 

“Being rural is hard,” said Tabitha Viergutz, a longtime Libby resident and the local community officer for the LOR Foundation, a community development fund that works in small towns across the West.

Sitting in a combined coffee shop and carpet store in downtown Libby, Viergutz described her own arc at the college, one that brought her to her current work in the community. 

Viergutz moved to Libby 13 years ago as a nail technician. Unable to get her esthetician business off the ground, she struggled to feed her family. She decided to enroll in LCC with the goal of earning an associates degree in social work. While at the college, she took a combination of in-person and virtual classes through the ITV system, which she described as “amazing.” When LOR needed a local leader to run its Libby branch, mentors from the college tapped Viergutz. 

“I wouldn’t have gone back to college had LCC not been here,” she said. 

Viergutz’s story is common in Libby. A young mother, the idea of moving to Missoula or Kalispell for college was out of the question. The cost of full-time enrollment was daunting. So, too, was the idea of becoming a non-traditional student in a traditional classroom setting. 

Before financial aid — which, FVCC officials note, there is plenty of — a full semester of tuition and fees for an in-district student at LCC costs $2,810. Comparatively, an in-state resident at the University of Montana in the same semester will pay $4,273. At Carroll College, a private university in Helena, a semester costs $20,066 before aid. 

“When you become a resident of a small, rural area, that’s where your heart lies,” she said. “The idea of going to a large college just isn’t in the cards.”

Jayne Downey, director of the Center for Research on Rural Education at Montana State University, said that beyond being smaller and more affordable, rural colleges like LCC are able to draw on the “unique strengths and assets” of their small towns, building curriculum and preparing students for careers in a way that is rooted in specific community needs. 

“These smaller graduating classes, everybody knows everybody. You are known. You are cared for. Your academic needs can be addressed individually,” she said. “The places where our schools are situated — the communities are a wealth of knowledge and resources, of history and culture, of science and technology. It surrounds them.”

Viergutz is an unofficial spokesperson for the new Libby. She said the town is “changing our focus to what we have versus what we lost.”

Libby’s first brewery, Cabinet Mountain Brewing Company, just celebrated its 10th anniversary. A kickboxing studio came to town last fall. In the new Kootenai Business Park, a former Stimson Lumber facility, there’s a pickleball court and a large Nomad GCS office. Dollar General is now in Libby and Eureka. 

“I think that Libby is still very much ingrained in our history, and very much would love to see those industries come back,” Viergutz said of mining and timber. Yet, she added, there’s “a forward facing view on reality.” 

Rayome said Nomad GCS’s arrival in town “increased the upward spiral of hope.” 

“We’re seeing people not just coming in to ogle at our sadness,” Rayome said. 

Blank, FVCC’s workforce development director, said the future of LCC’s success lies not just in training workers, but in developing local leaders who can spearhead programs and help recruit a next generation. Cultivating homegrown leadership is part of the community resilience model that Blank bases her work off of. 

“We want to build leadership in these communities,” she said. “They know what they need most, and they will always know better because they live there.”

In the future, Rayome hopes to open a dedicated building at LCC for hands-on trades education. She wants to invest in new technology, revamping the college’s ITV infrastructure. Like Blank, she wants to continue to foster leaders who were born and raised in Libby — those who want to help the town move into the future. As more jobs arrive, so too will demand for restaurants, healthcare facilities, homes, schools and the workers who power them. It’s all part of the “upward spiral of hope” that she described. Though it will be challenging, Rayome said, Lincoln County will adapt to a new economic future.

“They’re doers. They believe in themselves,” she said of Libby. “It’s a community of survivors.”

The post A community college promises a rural county it ‘hasn’t been left to die’ appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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” width=”224″ height=”168″ align=”right” hspace=”10″ alt=”The grizzly bear was placed under protection of the Endangered Species Act in 1975″ title=”The grizzly bear was placed under protection of the Endangered Species Act in 1975″ />The U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service pushed its decision timeline to January 2025. States want an update by the end of October.

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Montana U.S. Sen. Jon Tester is asking President Joe Biden not to seek re-election.

Tester, who made the announcement in a press release Thursday evening, said it has become clear that Biden should end his campaign. 

“Montanans have put their trust in me to do what is right and it is a responsibility I take seriously,” Tester said. “I have worked with President Biden when it has made Montana stronger, and I’ve never been afraid to stand up to him when he is wrong. And while I appreciate his commitment to public service and our country, I believe President Biden should not seek re-election to another term.”

Tester’s announcement comes on the night Donald Trump accepts the Republican nomination for president. Trump won 56.9% of the Montana vote in 2020, and 55.6% in 2016. To prevail in his race against Republican challenger Tim Sheehy, Tester is going to have to share tens of thousands of voters with the former president. 

Tester is considered one of the most vulnerable Democratic senators seeking re-election this year, but today he became one of only two to publicly call on Biden to end his campaign. Sen. Peter Welch of Vermont did so July 10. Privately, Democratic congressional leaders have told Biden his candidacy could cost them a chance at a majority in both chambers, according to the Washington Post and several other media reports. 

Top-ballot Democrats in Montana have long had to outperform their party’s presidential candidate to win. In 2012, Tester drew 34,000 more votes than incumbent Democratic President Barack Obama to prevail in a three-way race with Republican Denny Rehberg and Libertarian Dan Cox. Tester won 48.7% of the vote, outperforming Obama by 7 percentage points.

But voters who choose both Democrats and Republicans on a so-called split ticket are becoming increasingly rare, Carroll College political science professor Jeremy Johnson told Montana Free Press Last week.

“I have worked with President Biden when it has made Montana stronger, and I’ve never been afraid to stand up to him when he is wrong. And while I appreciate his commitment to public service and our country, I believe President Biden should not seek re-election to another term.”

Montana U.S. Sen. Jon Tester

After President Biden proved frail and slow to respond during a June 27 presidential debate with Trump, Tester began showing doubt that he thought Biden could win the race, initially saying that he would collaborate as a senator with whichever candidate won the presidency if and when it made sense for Montana. 

Then last week, Tester said, “President Biden has got to prove to the American people — including me — that he’s up to the job for another four years.”

Bill Clinton was the last Democratic presidential candidate to win Montana, in 1992, with less than 40% of the vote, a feat made possible by the popularity of third-party candidate H. Ross Perot.

Tester has a substantial fundraising advantage over Sheehy. Tester has raised $43.7 million to Sheehy’s $13.7 million. Sheehy’s total includes $2.6 million the candidate contributed to his own campaign.

Campaign cash doesn’t necessarily translate to votes. In Montana’s 2020 Senate race, Republican incumbent Steve Daines captured 61,000 more votes than Democratic challenger Steve Bullock, who had twice been elected Montana governor. Bullock not only outraised Daines by $16 million, but he also outspent the incumbent by $14.4 million. Daines won 55% of the vote to Bullock’s 45%.

The post Tester calls on Biden to end campaign appeared first on Montana Free Press.

The city of Kalispell is considering amending or revoking the permit for the area’s only low-barrier homeless shelter following a rash of complaints from area residents about how it has impacted their neighborhood. 

The Kalispell City Council has been grappling with complaints about the Flathead Warming Center on North Meridian Road over the last few weeks, and shelter officials will have the chance to respond to those concerns next month. Opponents of the shelter in its current location point to an increase in crime in the area since it opened in 2020, as well as strewn trash, drug paraphernalia and more. But proponents say the warming center shouldn’t be blamed for the Flathead Valley’s homelessness crisis, which has grown amid a loss of services and a spike in home and rent prices. 

The Flathead Warming Center opened in late 2019 as a low-barrier shelter near downtown Kalispell. (Many shelters require people staying there not to be using drugs or have a criminal background, but a low-barrier shelter does not have those requirements.) It is open nightly from October until April. When the shelter first opened it had 20 beds, but today it has 50. Executive director Tonya Horn said those beds are full almost every night, and the shelter often has to turn people away.  

“This was supposed to be for Kalispell locals, but it’s grown into something very different.”

Kalispell City Council President Chad Graham 

But since the shelter opened at its current location in 2020, there have been a number of complaints about the facility and its impact on the surrounding area. In recent months, Kalispell City Council President Chad Graham and others have raised those issues during meetings and have accused the warming center of not helping alleviate the impacts. Graham said he’s heard from constituents who have found human waste and drug paraphernalia in their neighborhood. He also said the warming center is attracting more homeless people to the area. 

“This is not what I signed up for,” Graham said of his past support for the conditional use permit for the shelter during a recent meeting. “This was supposed to be for Kalispell locals, but it’s grown into something very different.” 

It’s not the first time the warming center has been blamed for the area’s increasing homelessness. In 2023, the Flathead County Board of Commissioners wrote an open letter to the community encouraging it to stop enabling the “homeless lifestyle” and said that people from other communities were coming to Kalispell because of the center’s services. But Horn said there is simply no evidence that homeless people are coming to Kalispell from elsewhere because of the warming center. According to a survey of those who have stayed at the shelter, Horn said, 94% of people there have either lived in the Flathead Valley for a year or more or have some connection to the area (either a job or family who live in the area). 

Horn said she believes the increase in homelessness in the area can be directly attributed to the loss of mental health services and skyrocketing home and rent prices. 

“The idea that if you don’t serve the homeless population they’ll just go away is based on the false premise that these people are not from here,” she told Montana Free Press.

Regardless of where the people are coming from, some members of the city council have said it needs to address the neighbors’ complaints, which is why it’s considering changes to the warming center’s permit. 

“The idea that if you don’t serve the homeless population they’ll just go away is based on the false premise that these people are not from here.”

Warming center executive director Tonya Horn 

During a council meeting in May, City Manager Doug Russell presented stats showing that the number of calls for service in the warming center area (a half-mile radius of the address) to deal with anything from trespassing to criminal mischief has increased by 90.5% between the three years the facility has been open and the three years before it was open; citywide calls during that time have increased 51%. 

But City Councilor Ryan Hunter said it was inappropriate to blame the warming center for all of the increase in crime in the area and that closing the facility would only make the issue worse. He encouraged city officials to work with the warming center and other area non-profits to address the root causes of homelessness.

“The problems we have are much bigger than the warming center,” he said during a recent city council meeting. “It’s unrealistic to think they can solve this all by themselves.”

Warming center officials will have a chance to defend the shelter during a hearing on July 15, after which the city council will consider its next steps. 

The post Future in doubt for Kalispell shelter amid neighborhood complaints appeared first on Montana Free Press.

The MT Lowdown is a weekly digest that showcases a more personal side of Montana Free Press’ high-quality reporting while keeping you up to speed on the biggest news impacting Montanans. Want to see the MT Lowdown in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here.

Like a lot of journalists, I’ve been using the Associated Press Stylebook as a reference, if not necessarily a dictate, for almost as many years as I’ve known how to type. Whether we’ve ever worked for AP or not, the news agency of record’s standard-setting ubiquity has made the Stylebook the go-to for guidance on everything from hyphenation to media law to the validity (and otherwise) of public opinion polling for multiple generations of reporters. 

So I feel a special sense of personal satisfaction at the news, announced this week, of MTFP’s new story-sharing partnership with the Associated Press. 

What will Montana Free Press readers get out of the deal? Free access to Associated Press stories covering news made in Washington, D.C., by Montana’s elected and appointed federal officials. Montana’s federal delegation regularly throws its weight around, and AP reporters on the ground in the nation’s capital are well-positioned to report on what Montanans’ representatives are doing in the halls of federal power. The AP stories we publish will be individually selected by our Montana-based team of editors.

What does AP get out of the deal? The ability to share Montana Free Press stories with AP member papers locally, regionally and nationally. That means more readers for our reporters’ best work. MTFP is built on the premise that accurate information is power — and that the more people it reaches, the more powerful people become.

We pride ourselves here at MTFP not just on the quality of reporting that our readers’ support makes possible, but also on our staff’s relentless focus on finding new and often collaborative ways to produce and provide news. That focus is a necessity for organizations that want to survive and thrive in the ever-changing journalism business. MTFP is proud to be one of those organizations, and we’re excited to partner with another one to bring you even more comprehensive coverage of news that matters to you. 

READ MORE: Associated Press announces new content-sharing agreement with Montana Free Press.

—Brad Tyer, Editor

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Happenings 🗓️

Montana’s primary election wraps up this coming Tuesday, June 4. The primary, where voters select party nominees to advance to the November general election, isn’t the final step in this year’s political process, but it is an essential decision point, especially in political districts that tilt strongly toward a particular party. The primary winners in those districts on Tuesday will cruise into November with strong if not overwhelming winds at their backs.

Once polls close at 8 p.m. Tuesday, we’ll cover results as they’re available from county election offices. Our homepage will also feature an interactive dashboard with live results courtesy of the Associated Press. Readers who want to follow that coverage throughout the evening should keep a tab open to our homepage at montanafreepress.org.

Depending on how fast county election administrators can complete their ballot counts, outcomes in close races may not be clear until late Tuesday night or Wednesday — or even later in cases where a recount becomes necessary.

We’ll continue to cover election results over the week as necessary, sharing the stories via our website, email newsletters and our usual social media accounts. If you’re interested in hearing our newsroom staff discuss Tuesday night’s results, we’ll also be holding a live online event Wednesday evening from 7 to 8 p.m. (you can sign up for that here).

If you’re an eligible Montana voter who hasn’t yet cast a ballot, you can do that in person at most polling places between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m. on Election Day. If you’re voting via an absentee ballot, you should now physically deliver it to your county election office or another ballot collection site instead of putting it in the mail. You can also register to vote or update your registration status with your county election office through the close of polls on Election Day.

See more: MTFP’s 2024 Election Guide.

—Eric Dietrich, Deputy Editor

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By the Numbers 🔢

Number of absentee ballots submitted to county election offices statewide for the June 4 primary as of May 30, according to the Montana Secretary of State’s website. That’s out of a total 448,689 sent to voters, for a statewide return rate of 38% so far.

Last week, the secretary of state’s office launched a new interactive map with daily updates on absentee ballot counts per county. As of the latest update Thursday night, Yellowstone County saw the largest number of ballots returned — 27,996 — while Liberty County reported the highest rate of return — 51%, or 364 ballots received out of 716 sent to registered voters.

—Alex Sakariassen

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Glad you Answered 🙋🏻

“In our region of the Hi-Line, we have discovered that in the five counties we serve, there is only enough certified child care slots to accommodate about 15% of the working families that need it.”

—Rep. Paul Tuss, D-Havre, in a comment submitted during Montana Free Press’ virtual Reporting Journey event on May 29. 

The event focused on MTFP’s recent in-depth coverage of the state’s childcare crisis, which last year prevented an estimated 66,000 Montana parents from fully engaging in the workforce. The article, a collaboration with national education news nonprofit Open Campus, included a survey soliciting reader feedback on their own experiences with childcare access, affordability and quality challenges. Responses so far have further confirmed the severity of the struggles Montana working families and childcare providers are facing, with respondents indicating that provider wages don’t appear to be high enough and in some cases saying childcare issues have made them anxious about starting families of their own.

If you have a story you’d like to share with MTFP, we’d welcome the opportunity to hear it here.

—Alex Sakariassen

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Highlights ☀️

In other news this week —

It remains unclear who’s going to cover the costs of major law enforcement efforts on the Flathead Indian Reservation. As MTFP contributor Justin Franz reports, Lake County historically provided felony law enforcement on most of the reservation through its sheriff’s office under an agreement that avoided the situation faced by most other reservations, where felony law enforcement is handled by federal authorities or simply falls through the cracks. Lake County commissioners have recently balked at the estimated $4 million annual cost of those efforts, however, arguing the bill should be covered by the state of Montana.

A group in Great Falls is fundraising in an effort to preserve a parcel of state-owned open space just outside city limits along the Missouri River. As MTFP Local reporter Matt Hudson writes, backers hope to secure an easement that shields the 79-acre parcel, which is state trust land set aside to generate revenue for public schools, from development.

Signature gathering is ongoing for an initiative that could see a constitutional abortion rights question placed on the November ballot. As Mara Silvers reports, both proponents and opponents are ramping up organizing tactics as a June 21 deadline looms.

And, as we assume you’ve already heard, a New York jury found former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony charges stemming from his efforts to keep an extramarital affair with a porn star from becoming public knowledge during his 2016 presidential campaign. We reported on how Montana’s majority-Republican congressional delegation reacted to the verdict here.

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On Our Radar 

Amanda — I still remember sitting at a burrito shop in Billings and reading my first essay by adventure writer Tracy Ross more than a decade ago. It was a funny and honest piece titled “You don’t bring me Clif bars anymore.” I expect her recent offering, “My adult kids found themselves in nature. Will my youngest lose herself in her phone?” will have a similar lasting effect.

Alex — The Hechinger Report this week penned a fascinating dispatch from a four-year-old publicly authorized charter school dedicated to giving expecting and parenting teenagers a viable path to completing their secondary education. According to the story, Lumen High School now enrolls roughly 60 teenage mothers and fathers and offers full-day childcare for their children.

Arren —  Basketball legend Bill Walton passed away this week. While I could share any of the many beautiful recent obituaries that describe his storied career, Grateful Dead fandom, arrest for protesting Vietnam as a player at UCLA and more, I think I’d rather highlight a piece written from when he was alive: this New York Times Magazine profile that sees Walton sitting down with the writer at the San Diego Natural History Museum.   

JoVonne — Glacier County residents have seen a big increase in property taxes over the last year with little explanation from state revenue officials about why. Lee Newspaper’s Nora Mabie reported on residents’ concerns. 

Matt — Published prior to the Minnesota Timberwolves’ final NBA playoffs defeat, this Star Tribune piece is a glimpse into the Wolves fandom of poet and author Hanif Abdurraqib. It captures the intersection of hopefulness and the ability to overlook tough odds that all sports fans demonstrate from time to time.

Mara — The Flathead Beacon had a striking piece this week about how local mobile home park residents are grappling with eviction notices after properties change hands — and what housing organizations are trying to do to help. 

Eric — This column from City Bureau, a Chicago-based news nonprofit, got my thinking gears spinning this week about what journalism is and isn’t useful for (and what sorts of readers it does and doesn’t tend to serve effectively). But then again, I’m a sucker for a fresh Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs analogy.

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This school year, Montana, a state with fewer than 8,000 teachers, had 1,000 unfilled teaching positions. Meanwhile, Dutton-Brady Public Schools, a rural district about an hour from the Canadian border, easily filled its three vacancies.

Administrators credit a blue-hued room strewn with toys and highchairs: Little Diamondbacks Daycare, which is located inside the district’s K-12 school, steps from the cafeteria and the library. On a chilly Monday morning, children were trying on costumes, riding rocking horses and enjoying a rowdy game of musical chairs.

Eight-month-old Rowan watched the action from the arms of a staffer. Rowan’s mother, Jessica Toner, is a rookie teacher who heads the third-fourth grade classroom down the hall. Though Toner was offered four higher-paying positions in Great Falls, where she lives, she could neither find nor afford decent child care. “I called probably 15 different day cares,” she said, but they either didn’t have openings or were too expensive. “It was a nightmare.”

Toner hadn’t considered Dutton-Brady, which is a 32-minute drive from her house. But when she heard it had an opening — one that came with subsidized day care — she applied. “That’s what drew me,” she said. “And then I came to find that I love it out here.”

In-school day care can be found across the U.S., from Maine to Oklahoma and Colorado. It’s one way to tackle two crises: a shortage of qualified teachers and a shortage of quality child care. Recent data suggests that 79% of U.S. schools with teacher vacancies had difficulty filling them, while half of Americans live in “child care deserts” — communities that have at least three times as many children as licensed child-care slots. In many places, including Montana, both issues are more acute in rural areas. And of the 10 states with the highest rates of residents living in child-care deserts, seven are in the West.

Ask anyone involved with school-run day care, whether staff, clients or administrators, and they’ll probably say they’re delighted to have it. Experts, however, warn that it’s not a panacea. “All of this is well-intended,” said Chris Herbst, a professor who studies child care at Arizona State University. “But none of this is a sustainable, broad-based, fully funded solution to a long-standing problem.”

IN THE SPRING OF 2022, Dutton-Brady faced several teacher retirements. Superintendent Jeremy Locke knew it would be hard to replace them; it always was.

The Dutton-Brady School District is deeply rural, serving 131 students in a 625-square-mile region, an area larger than Grand Teton National Park. Its main school is in Dutton, and two others are located on colonies of Hutterites, an isolated Anabaptist religious sect. Dutton, which is the only town for miles, is home to two taverns, a water tower, a bank and a gas station that also sells fertilizer and livestock feed. There’s not a single stoplight.

Recruiting teachers has long been difficult; at times, the district has had to lure teachers from as far away as the Philippines. And veteran teachers rarely apply. Most recruits are like Toner: recent graduates who are just starting out, and perhaps starting families.

So, at a meeting that spring, Locke and the Board of Trustees seized upon the idea of opening a day care center to boost recruitment and retention. They scrambled to get the paperwork, financing and staffing in order before the 2022-’23 school year began. “We had to make it work,” Locke said. “Or else we knew that we were going to be dead in the water as far as staffing goes.”

Little Diamondbacks now serves 21 children, ranging from a few months to 5 years old. Dutton-Brady teachers pay up to $270 per child, per month for full-time, year-round care, a rate that is subsidized by state grants and by non-staffers who pay full tuition, up to $540 a month.

Staffing the facility has been a constant headache — it’s tough to find child-care workers anywhere, let alone in such a rural county — but Locke said it’s been worth it. “If we didn’t start this day care last year, we would not have filled our three openings,” he said. “We have no teacher shortages right now.”

In-school day cares exist elsewhere in rural Montana, too. Ekalaka, a town of 399 people on the eastern edge of the state, opened its center in August 2022. Browning, located on the Blackfeet Reservation in northwest Montana, started its facility in 1985; it was initially meant to serve teen mothers but now serves mostly staff members.

Browning’s superintendent, Corrina L. Guardipee-Hall (Blackfeet-Cree), used the day care when her children were small. “It really helped me be able to be a teacher and eventually administrator and now a superintendent,” she said. “It did help retain not only me as an employee, but also other people around the district.” It’s also a recruitment incentive: Guardipee-Hall noted that two new teacher assistants submitted day care applications for their children immediately after being hired.

“If we didn’t start this day care last year, we would not have filled our three openings.”

Montana’s school-based day care centers would seem an ideal way to attract and keep teachers. But Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education and economics at Brown University, said they don’t address the root causes of shortages: low wages and decreased public perceptions about the profession’s prestige. Plus, day care centers support teachers for only a short time during their career, if at all.

“There are a lot of initiatives to compensate teachers in ways other than actual wages,” Kraft said, referring to efforts to subsidize student loans, housing or child care. “All of those have potential, although I would argue that it may be more effective to simply take the cost of those programs and fold them into higher teacher pay.”

In that regard, Montana has a long way to go: Its starting teacher salaries rank 51st in the nation. When the Learning Policy Institute, a national nonprofit, adjusted for cost-of-living differences, it found that the average starting salary for a Montana teacher was only $36,480 — far behind neighboring Idaho ($44,150) and Wyoming ($51,530).

As for why school districts might provide housing or child care before increasing wages, Kraft explained they might be “hesitant to commit to permanent and substantial pay raises with some uncertainty about the fiscal climate.” Besides, he noted, compensation must be negotiated with teachers’ unions — “often a time-intensive and slow process” — whereas a district can unilaterally decide to open a day care.

Ultimately, Kraft said, solving the teacher shortage will require major policy changes, as well as “generational shifts in how we perceive the profession.”

IN RURAL AREAS, in-school day care centers aren’t merely useful to the school; they also serve the community. About half of Little Diamondbacks’ regular attendees are the children of non-staffers, some of whom drive from nearly 40 miles away. Ekalaka’s facility, which is also open to community members, is the only licensed one in the county.

In rural Colorado, the West Grand School District, between Steamboat Springs and Breckenridge, has had an early childhood center since 2018. West Grand opened its facility after several teachers quit because they couldn’t find child care, but administrators soon realized it would address a greater need: The town has just one other licensed day care, and it’s often full.

The school’s day care center now serves roughly 22 children, only seven of whom are the offspring of teachers. “We knew we needed to (open it),” said Superintendent Elizabeth Bauer. “Not just for our teachers, but for our community.”

Hannah Wynd, who works for the local health department, said she might have had to move if she hadn’t gotten a spot at West Grand. “I, quite frankly, would not have a job if it wasn’t open and it didn’t have room for my children,” she said. “It’s super important, what it’s provided for my family.”

Experts don’t dispute the critical role these facilities play in families’ lives. In-school day care centers have been “introduced or enacted by well-meaning people who are probably frustrated that nothing is happening federally and are taking it upon themselves to try to better their community,” said Herbst, the Arizona State University professor.

“I, quite frankly, would not have a job if it wasn’t open and it didn’t have room for my children.”

Yet ultimately, Herbst believes such changes are “piecemeal,” and that true change must happen on a national scale. He wants Congress to support child-care subsidies, like those that were initially included in President Biden’s Build Back Better plan.

In the meantime, rural administrators, teachers and parents plan to keep doing what they can to keep their jobs local, their schools open and their kids cared for. (That includes obtaining additional sources of funding for their day cares: Dutton-Brady’s largest grant recently ran out, and West Grand is seeking new community funding partners.)

They don’t have the luxury of waiting for policymakers to decide their fates.

Because here’s the picture Locke painted: If Dutton-Brady loses a single teacher, it may not be able to replace them. If the school loses a second teacher, and a third, it could end up being assimilated into a bigger district. And then the community hub, the heart of the tiny town of Dutton, would be gone.

“We don’t have an option to not figure it out, because when we don’t, everything dries up,” Locke said. “It’s really an existential threat.”

Susan Shain reports for High Country News through The New York Times’ Headway Initiative, which is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as fiscal sponsor. All editorial decisions are made independently. She was a member of the 2022-’23 New York Times Fellowship class and reports from Montana. @susan_shain

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