The bison’s massive front- and hindquarters rested on a blue tarp to protect them from dirt and other contaminants. Gut piles left by other hunters, frosted with March snow, dotted the hillsides around Falcon. As she field-dressed the animal, tourists headed to the park passed by less than half a mile away. “We’re using our space that we have always used,” Falcon said. “We’re just using it again now with an audience.”

Falcon’s harvest is a revitalization of Indigenous knowledge and culture. But the hunt is also a public lightning rod — part of an ongoing controversy over managing an iconic species that tribal nations, the federal government and the state of Montana all have deep and different interests in.

“We’re using our space that we have always used. We’re just using it again now with an audience.”

AT LEAST 27 TRIBES have historic ties to the Yellowstone region. In the late 19th century, the United States government forced them out as part of a nationwide effort to exterminate and assimilate Indigenous people. Treaties between tribes and the federal government in the mid-1800s established reservations across the region, but maintained hunting rights in places deemed “unoccupied.”

At the same time, bison, which once numbered between 30 and 60 million in North America, were deliberately slaughtered en masse, part of the campaign to clear the land of Indigenous people: “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone,” U.S. Army Col. Richard Dodge reportedly said in 1867. By the early 1900s, fewer than two dozen wild bison remained, deep in Yellowstone National Park.

Thanks to federal conservation efforts, bison rebounded in Yellowstone — and tribes began to reclaim their rights to harvest them. In the mid-2000s, the Nez Perce Tribe wrote to Montana’s governor, claiming their right to hunt bison on Forest Service land adjacent to the park. The state acknowledged the tribe’s sovereignty. “Today, after years without meaningful access to bison, the Nimiipuu are reconnecting with bison in the Greater Yellowstone Area, re-asserting our sacred relationship with the bison, and exercising our treaty-reserved right to hunt bison that was secured by our ancestors and promised by the United States,” the tribe said in an emailed statement. Over time, more tribes followed; last winter, eight tribal nations hunted bison outside Yellowstone, some from as far away as Washington and Oregon.

Tribal hunters entered a contentious landscape. For decades, the state of Montana, federal agencies and conservation groups have gone back and forth through lawsuits, legislation and protests over how many Yellowstone bison there should be, and where. Bison and elk in the region harbor the country’s last reservoir of a disease called brucellosis, which can cause cattle to abort and become infertile. While there have been no confirmed cases of wild bison spreading brucellosis to domestic cattle, the state still spends more than a million dollars every year to prevent its spread. If Montana loses its brucellosis-free status, it could forfeit another $10 million or more per year. Tribes, wildlife managers and park officials developed three methods to keep the park’s bison numbers down: hunting outside Yellowstone, transfer to tribes, and capture by park officials for slaughter.

“Today, after years without meaningful access to bison, the Nimiipuu are reconnecting with bison in the Greater Yellowstone Area.” 

By 2022, Yellowstone bison numbered about 6,000 — the highest since recovery began. During particularly harsh winters, when ice and deep snow block forage, the animals migrate north, searching for food. Last year, winter came on strong and early, and buffalo appeared in locations that they likely hadn’t grazed in a century.

That meant they had to pass through Beattie Gulch and other federal land, where hunters waited. Conservation groups have long criticized the park’s bison cull, but this year’s high harvest amplified that tension. Videos circulated online showed gut piles lining the road, blood streaming down the brown dirt as the offal thawed. Billboards popped up across the state, reading: “There is no hunt. It’s slaughter!” One local organization, the Gallatin Wildlife Association, wrote to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, urging the federal government to “renegotiate how (tribal) treaty rights should be enforced in a modern society.”

Bonnie Lynn, who lives across the road from Beattie Gulch, is a longtime hunt opponent. Monitoring the harvest from cameras placed around her property, she said she’s seen injured animals fleeing into the park, dozens of hunters in a firing line — even people unintentionally shooting toward each other and the road. She’s also concerned about ecosystem health: Lead poisoning from bullets can devastate raptors and other scavenging birds. “To watch this on a daily basis is emotionally draining,” she said.

Lynn, like many others, blames this year’s high harvest on federal and state mismanagement. In May, Jaedin Medicine Elk, a Northern Cheyenne tribal member and co-founder of the group Roam Free Nation, wrote an open letter to tribes that harvest Yellowstone bison. (The Northern Cheyenne Tribe hasn’t participated in the modern hunt.) “I don’t think the buffalo could go through another winter like this one,” he wrote. He said state and federal governments respect tribal treaty rights only when it directly benefits their agenda — in this case, serving Montana’s livestock industry. Bison need more room to roam, he wrote. When that happens, a respectful hunt can begin.

 

 

AT THEIR HOME in East Glacier on the Blackfeet Reservation, more than five hours north of Beattie Gulch, Christen Falcon and her partner, Wyett Wippert, threaded nylon rope through the edges of a bison hide and pulled it taut, like tightening shoelaces. This was the couple’s first experience tanning a hide on their own. Chatting about the harvest with friends and neighbors, they tossed scraps of fat and meat to their dogs, Binks and Noi. “Gonna have all the neighbor dogs over here,” Wippert joked. “They’re comin’!”

Falcon said there’s a running joke about Yellowstone bison hunters in her community: They aren’t real hunters, people say. The hunt is roadside, and the animals are accustomed to tourists wielding cameras, not guns. Still, she said, it’s better than the alternative the animals face: Many of them likely would be slaughtered by the park anyway.

Falcon works for a nonprofit that focuses on Indigenous-led research. The bulk of her and Wippert’s harvest will go to a study she’s leading that will analyze what happens when tribal members consume a completely traditional diet. Animal parts with special meaning, like the tongue, will go to knowledge-holders. Ultimately, she sees the Yellowstone harvest as a blessing; it helps everyone who hunts and receives meat connect to land, culture and identity. “That’s what sovereignty is — taking care of yourself,” she said. “And that’s what we’re trying to do here.”

 “That’s what sovereignty is — taking care of yourself.”

Tribal hunters HCN interviewed said their meat goes to family, community members, even schools. An average bison yields, conservatively, 500 pounds of steak and burger, meaning the winter’s harvest of Yellowstone bison equates to over a half-million pounds of lean meat going straight to tribal communities. In places like the Blackfeet Reservation — where census data shows a poverty rate of 31.1%, roughly triple Montana’s average — that can have a real impact on food security and nutrition. Christina Flammond, a tribal member and the reservation’s sole meat processor, waives her 85-cents-per-pound processing fee for hunters who donate half their meat to local food pantries. “I never dreamed of processing this many bison,” Flammond said one April afternoon at her facility, where a handful of bison quarters hung, aging.

BISON IGNORE STATE, federal and tribal land boundaries, so managing them requires getting parties with sometimes diametrically opposed interests to agree. That’s not easy. As last winter began, the state, federal government and tribes hit an impasse. Montana wanted fewer bison while tribal nations argued that more of the ungulates should graze the hills and valleys of the region. In the end, the park suggested there’s no science-based reason to reduce the population and proposed that at most a quarter of it — 1,500 animals — be removed through hunting, slaughter and transfer to tribes.

Tribes, as sovereign nations, set their own hunting dates and regulations. Reporting hunt numbers is voluntary, and no cumulative goals exist. As bison flooded through Beattie Gulch, the total removed from the Yellowstone population — hundreds of animals were transferred to tribes or slaughtered — exceeded the park’s proposed limit. “I don’t want to see multiple years of substantial population reduction like we just had,” said Yellowstone Superintendent Cam Sholly.

“Everybody’s freaking out that there’s Indians eating from buffalo. That’s not a bad thing; that’s actually a good thing.”

James Holt, a Nez Perce tribal member and executive director of the advocacy group Buffalo Field Campaign, said last winter’s hunt shows how Montana’s efforts to minimize the population have “led to every tribe for itself.” Lamenting the lack of a shared vision, he said, “It’s a tragedy of the commons that we’re seeing on the ground right now.” Still, there’s an opportunity for collaboration that centers both buffalo and tribes. He wants to see tribes work together to oversee a sustainable harvest, much the way Columbia River tribes cooperate on fish management.

“Everybody’s freaking out that there’s Indians eating from buffalo,” said Kekek Jason Stark, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and professor of law at the University of Montana. “That’s not a bad thing; that’s actually a good thing.”

In “Re-Indigenizing Yellowstone,” published in the Wyoming Law Review last year, Stark and his co-authors offered what he called a “road map” to empower tribal voices in America’s first national park. Their vision encompasses more than bison: They suggested that Congress could return the park to tribal management, much as it did with the National Bison Range on the Flathead Reservation. Short of that, the park should empower tribes as partners with true decision-making authority. Since so many tribes with diverse interests have connections to the Yellowstone area, they suggested creating an intertribal commission. Once that work begins in Yellowstone, Stark said, “it’s going to catch like wildfire” on other federal lands.

Right now, only two of the eight tribes with bison-hunting rights are officially part of the conglomeration of agencies and tribal entities that manage the area’s bison, via an effort known as the Interagency Bison Management Plan, or IBMP. Four treaty tribes are also serving as partners while Yellowstone works on a new environmental impact statement to replace its nearly 25-year-old bison management plan. Last year, the park published the alternatives it’s considering, with population numbers ranging from 3,500 animals to as high as 8,000 or more. The state of Montana pushed back immediately, saying all the alternatives were too high and urging the park to withdraw those population targets.

In a June IBMP meeting — the first since last winter’s hunt — bison managers discussed how to move forward. Yellowstone Superintendent Sholly said there needs to be better landscape-level collaboration among all groups that hunt: “It can’t be a free-for-all.” Others, including the chairman of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, agreed. But Ervin Carlson, a Blackfeet member and president of the Intertribal Buffalo Council, said all the talk of the hunt distracts from another way of managing the population: Ramping up the park’s program to transfer living, breathing bison to tribal groups across the country.

The federal government is already in the throes of a massive effort to restore the iconic animal nationwide. A $25 million Interior Department initiative aims to partner with tribes and establish “wide-ranging herds on large landscapes,” to revitalize both ecosystems and cultures. The saga in Yellowstone shows just how difficult it can be to put those ideas into practice. In fact, Montana’s Legislature passed a resolution in April opposing federal bison reintroduction on a wildlife refuge more than 200 miles north of Yellowstone, one of several recent state-led attempts to create barriers to introducing wild bison in the state.

The future of bison management requires governmental policy decisions. But it also depends on the smaller-scale, on-the-ground actions of tribal members like Christen Falcon. “We’re Indigenizing this space,” Falcon said, warming up in a car in March, overlooking the wintry hills of Yellowstone. The dead animals, the publicly visible gore — she understands how unusual it all looks. “We’re showing this Western world that not everything is as it seems.”      

Nick Mott is an award-winning journalist and podcast producer who focuses mostly on climate, public land and the environment. He’s based in Livingston, Montana.

Taylar Dawn Stagner is a writer and audio journalist who’s an editorial intern for the Indigenous Affairs desk at HCN. She’s Arapaho and Shoshone and writes about racism, rurality, and gender. 

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Friday that federal investigators found, for the first time ever, a U.S. police department discriminates against not only Black people, but also Native Americans.

The Justice Department also made another first-time finding: the Minneapolis Police Department discriminates against Black and Native people by disproportionately using force during stops.

A two-year federal investigation sparked by George Floyd’s 2020 police murder found MPD routinely uses excessive force and discriminates against people based on race.

Investigators reviewed five years of data — about 187,000 traffic and pedestrian stops from November 2016 to August 2022 — and found MPD searches and uses force on Blacks and Native Americans more frequently than during stops of white people, even when they behave similarly.

“This is the first time we have made a finding that the police department unlawfully discriminates by using force after stops against Black and Native American people,” said Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, during a Friday news conference.

Garland launched the investigation into MPD shortly after he took office in the spring of 2021, and found MPD recklessly, routinely uses excessive force, is inadequately trained and rarely held accountable for misconduct.

Mike Forcia, a Native activist who works at a homeless shelter for Native Americans, said the finding “wasn’t shocking in the least.”

“They spent all that money to come up with what we’ve been saying for years,” said Forcia, who is a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.

Yohuru Williams, a history professor and founding director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas, said, “It was good to see that named. I think it was very important to have those experiences validated for the indigenous community, particularly.”

Police brutality is one of the reasons the American Indian Movement was formed in Minneapolis in 1968.

It’s the reason Arthur Cunningham, head of the NAACP in Minneapolis, accused the MPD in 1975 of declaring war on Blacks and Indians, he said.

And it’s the reason why in the 1980s, Native Americans said they were being targeted by police, who justified it by saying they were drunk and disorderly, Williams said.

In 1975, when the state Department of Human Rights held hearings on police and the Black community, Indigenous people said, “that’s us too,” Williams said.

“It’s a longstanding problem with the department,” he said.

Even though Minneapolis has a large number of Native Americans, their allegations of disparate treatment in traffic stops and excessive force get less attention, he said.

“Indigenous folks are still invisible in our community as a whole, even now,” Williams said. “We just don’t — for a host of reasons, all of which are not flattering to our community — recognize the disproportionate impacts on Indigenous people.”

Before Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara was hired, Forcia took him to Little Earth, a housing complex that serves mostly Indigenous people, and explained how the American Indian Movement started. O’Hara asked Forcia to speak at his ceremonial oath of office event.

Forcia agreed, and during the event, he talked about how they were planting seeds of trust, transparency and community — but planting is the easy part. The hard part, he said, is cultivating and pulling weeds.

Forcia told O’Hara he knows what it’s like to have the knee of a Minneapolis cop on his neck: He was paid a $125,000 settlement after getting beaten in 1999 by police who thought he stole a car because “I was a Native American with a jean jacket and ponytail running from the scene.”

One of the officers who assaulted him, Brian Sand, was later promoted to be internal affairs commander.

Last year, Forcia worked with Sand for a May Day Parade. Sand apologized.

“I forgave him,” Forcia said.

This article was originally published in the Minnesota Reformer. 

The post DOJ: Minneapolis police discriminated against Native Americans appeared first on Buffalo’s Fire.

Shouts and squeals echoed across the playground behind Big Sky’s Ophir Elementary as some two dozen kids reveled in one of their final recesses before the big sigh of summer break. Beneath the blistering spring sun, a young girl dashed away from a half-dome lattice of climbing bars, nearly tripping in the wood chips as she sidled up to Matt Daugherty.

“How are you doing?” he asked, his sunglasses and school ID badge hanging from the front of his blue polo.

“I did a front flip,” she replied matter-of-factly.

As Daugherty continued to stroll past, two more students raced up the sidewalk, a paraeducator hot on their heels. Daugherty’s red beard drew up in a grin as he called out, “They’re keeping you running today!” He repositioned the walkie-talkie clipped at his side and continued walking up the hill behind Ophir, past a fenced-off construction area and toward his office in a windowed corner of Lone Peak High School.

Midway through the 2022-23 school year, Daugherty joined the Big Sky district full-time as its inaugural school marshal. It’s a first-of-its-kind position in Montana, made possible by the 2021 Legislature’s passage of a law sponsored by then-Rep. Derek Skees, R-Kalispell. The post is so new, in fact, that when Big Sky’s board of trustees began considering its creation last fall, Superintendent Dustin Shipman had no peers with marshals to turn to for insight. Now Daugherty and the district are learning as they go, tending to a growing list of administrative responsibilities in the name of student safety.

In an era when the threat of violence in schools manifests in a near-constant drumbeat of national headlines, education officials across Montana have increasingly turned to infrastructure upgrades and new staff positions to prepare for a variety of gut-wrenching scenarios that no longer feel improbable. Camera systems, shatterproof glass, electronic door locks and local agreements with law enforcement agencies have become more common than not over the past decade, in districts large and small alike. 

In the past six months, threats delivered via phone, email and social media have put schools in Bozeman, Billings, Missoula and West Yellowstone on lockdown. As Bozeman Schools Superintendent Casey Bertram put it, “school violence doesn’t pick and choose communities.” Early in his 21-year career in public education, Bertram said, violence seemed more confined to rare events such as the 1999 shooting at Colorado’s Columbine High School, and schools nationwide would dramatically change their safety policies in the aftermath. Today, the specter of school violence feels different to him.

“Now it feels like they’re so close together that it feels like it could happen in your backyard, it could happen in your state, and that’s a daunting feeling,” Bertram said.

The position Skees’ bill authorized — the school marshal — was designed in large part to insert a trained defender between students and anyone who might do them harm. And that’s a position Daugherty has occupied before, first as a K-9 handler in the U.S. Air Force, then in a succession of law enforcement gigs with the Lewistown Police Department and the Gallatin County Sheriff’s Office. He spent his final eight years with the latter serving as the regional sergeant in Big Sky, during which time the sheriff’s office created a school resource officer post in the district, one currently occupied by Daugherty’s former colleague, Deputy Travis Earl.

That history has marked Daugherty with the straight back and vigilant eyes of a seasoned lawman. But he is among the first to stress that his new station is far different, and far more nuanced, than any he’s held before. He and the district are still working to determine the contours of those nuances, and articulate them to a Big Sky community filled with questions and more than a few concerns. The marshal stands as one example of the strategies schools across Montana are implementing to meet what Superintendent Shipman considers one of public education’s top priorities.

“The safety of our students is front of mind for me, be it an icy road or an active shooter,” Shipman said. “That’s one of the biggest responsibilities we as school administrators and teachers have. It’s me, it’s the principals — everybody has that responsibility on the front of their mind every day.”

Fulfilling that responsibility is now Daugherty’s primary role. Square-shouldered and fit, with the affable demeanor of a dad whose own child belongs to the student body now in his charge, he greets the district’s children daily at the schools’ front doors. His goal in doing so, he said, is to be a positive, visible presence for them — and to build the trust and rapport necessary to spot any early signs of turbulence in their lives.

“Having a [finger on the] pulse and having eye contact with kids when they’re on their way into school, with parents when they’re on their way into school, you just get a feel of where things are at,” Daugherty said.

‘WHAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED’

On April 5, 2023, Caroline Lurgio yanked down the blinds in her Hellgate High School classroom, locked the door and, with help from a student, barricaded it with tables. With the room dark, her third-period English class grouped in a corner, and a heavy stick and can of wasp spray at the ready, Lurgio waited, poised to attack anyone who might try to force their way in.

Minutes ticked by, maybe 20. Time got weird. Lurgio knew nothing about what might be happening beyond her makeshift barricade. She knew only what she’d read in an email minutes after class started, the email Hellgate’s principal, via the PA system, had directed staff to read: Hellgate was in full lockdown — a response, Lurgio gradually learned, to a threat involving a gun posted to social media by a student.

Outside, Missoula police officers and other local law enforcement personnel began systematically sweeping the school grounds, searching for the responsible student. Authorities also shut down a two-block stretch of Higgins Avenue just south of the commercial Hip Strip corridor, having quickly determined that the student was not on Hellgate property. As the search continued, so did the lockdown. Lurgio kept checking in with her students, gauging their emotional states and gleaning information they’d learned about the situation from their own social media accounts. After a while, she broke out some colored pencils and passed them around.

“It’s amazing what colored pencils and a blank piece of paper can do,” Lurgio told Montana Free Press. “Just the calmness of drawing is something that was really helpful.”

That same day, state representatives 100 miles away in Helena cast one of their final votes on a Senate bill requiring annual reviews of school safety plans and addressing consistency concerns related to state-mandated threat assessment teams. Senate Bill 213 passed on a bipartisan 82-18 vote.

All told, Lurgio and her class sheltered in the dark for three hours before the principal announced a plan to safely dismiss students for the day. Across Missoula, 15 other public schools had been placed under so-called soft lock-ins as well, their buildings closed to outsiders but their normal routines continuing indoors. As Lurgio finally opened the blinds, afternoon sunlight poured into the room.

“I guess we hadn’t really realized how dark it had been for so long,” Lurgio said. “As soon as [the students] left, we sort of all cried a bit, a lot of letting down. At that point, you let your guard down, you recognize what happened, what could have happened.”

The following day — the same day SB 213 cleared its final House vote — a fuller picture of the goings-on at Hellgate emerged for public consumption. According to media reports, a threat of an active shooter posted to Snapchat was brought to the attention of Hellgate’s school resource officer, prompting the lockdown and an immediate response by local police, the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office, Montana Highway Patrol and the FBI. There’d been no such shooter, but Missoula County Public Schools spokesperson Vinny Giammona acknowledged that even without actual violence, an incident involving SWAT team sweeps and closed roads and locked doors districtwide “tugs at all of us.” 

“The unique thing in that scenario is there wasn’t just a lockdown at Hellgate, but that lockdown eventually led to a lock-in of all of our other buildings in Missoula,” Giammona said. “That created another layer, because now you’re messaging essentially 17 buildings that they’re in some sort of safety lock-in, lockdown, which as you can imagine is going to be scary for the majority of our parents across the city.”

Like Bozeman Schools Superintendent Bertram, Giammona has noticed a distinct change in the atmosphere around school safety. After dedicating its attention during the COVID-19 pandemic to statewide shutdowns and hybrid attendance models, he said, MCPS has now turned its focus to crafting a consistent response to any kind of crisis. That means training staff, installing more cameras, developing crisis response teams for each building, and soliciting voter support for two school facilities levies last month to help pay for additional upgrades. Both passed.

As a result, the Missoula district is already doing much of what SB 213 will now require statewide. But the Hellgate incident was a stark reminder that there are always improvements to be made. For instance, Giammona said, the difference between Hellgate’s “lockdown” and the lock-ins at other schools — where facilities were secured, but daily activities continued indoors — was murky for some parents. MCPS is reexamining the language it uses as part of a broader refinement of its real-time communication strategy. As the nature of threats to schools evolves, so does the district’s responses.

“Social media has really changed the landscape,” Giammona said. “It’s changed access, it’s changed the ability to make a threat.”

For Billings Public Schools, that evolution led to the hiring this spring of former Billings police officer Jeremy House as the district’s new safety coordinator. Like Big Sky’s marshal, the position is a first in the state’s public education system. House will serve primarily as the administrative nerve center for safety coordination across Billings schools, reviewing emergency protocols and improving preparedness. And his installment in the post comes during a school year punctuated by a December lockdown at Billings West High School — part of a rash of simultaneous phone threats that also struck schools in Helena, Red Lodge and Forsyth. 

“Social media has really changed the landscape. It’s changed access, it’s changed the ability to make a threat.”

Missoula County Public Schools spokesperson Vinny Giammona

Law enforcement quickly determined the threat was false, and the lockdown was lifted within half an hour. But according to Billings Public Schools Superintendent Greg Upham, it wasn’t the only event last fall to drive home the need for a safety coordinator. That same week, a pair of threats scrawled on bathroom walls prompted many West High parents to pull their students from school for a day. Upham said investigators “couldn’t find the source of that threat,” and classes were held on the date mentioned in the threat with a heightened police presence and what Upham described as “very, very low” student attendance. A separate threat against Billings Senior High School posted to social media that same week resulted in the arrest of one student.

“It’s like a loss of innocence,” Upham said.

When Jeremy House came on board this spring, Upham made a point to introduce him to staff at every school in Billings to talk about not just his plans for the district, but what individual educators can do to protect and care for themselves. Upham — who’s retiring this summer — sees threats of shootings and resulting lockdowns as “one more added stressor” on the school community, layered on top of evolving pandemic protocols and the heated masking debates of recent years. While Upham said he hasn’t seen those stressors dampen teachers’ enthusiasm, he does see a need to respond with strength and unity, because “we can’t just keep being the victim.”

“I just refuse to be scared all the time, and I don’t want our people being scared all the time,” Upham said. “It’s a great profession. It takes care of kids. I’m passionate about this, but this is what concerns me about retiring. I feel like I’m leaving people on the battlefield.”

“I just refuse to be scared all the time, and I don’t want our people being scared all the time … I’m passionate about this, but this is what concerns me about retiring. I feel like I’m leaving people on the battlefield.”

Greg Upham, Superintendent, Billings Public Schools 

In Missoula, Lurgio’s memory of lockdown remains vivid, an experience she said will undoubtedly live in the collective culture of Hellgate for years to come. She’s thankful that her 18-year tenure as a Montana teacher has included active shooter training, which she said should be mandatory. When the lockdown started, Lurgio already had her classroom stocked with drinking water, and privacy blankets and a bucket for a makeshift bathroom, and she knew precisely what to do, making a quick pivot from a discussion about Shakespeare’s Macbeth to the hushed intensity of a survival situation. Her demeanor, she said, seemed to reassure her students, a current of confidence cutting through the tense atmosphere.

Still, Lurgio said, she feels a profound sadness about the event. Sadness for colleagues who didn’t have her level of training, for seniors whose high school years were bookended by the descent into a global pandemic and the sudden shock of a lockdown, and for a struggling student who’d put their school on high alert.

“It’s silly to think that now my classroom is more than just a place for learning,” Lurgio said. “It’s now an environment that needs to have all these extra resources, and I need to be prepared and think about these things. Those are definitely lasting effects.”

‘WILL YOU HELP WHEN BEARS COME ON CAMPUS?’

As he continued his rounds on the Big Sky campus in May, Matt Daugherty paused outside Lone Peak High School to gaze past the battered pavement of Highway 191 at the wooded slopes of the Custer Gallatin National Forest. Behind him, workers plugged away at a $23.5 million improvement project that includes a new athletic field (already finished) and facilities for welding and other career-based instruction (still under construction). Voters had recently rejected a $19 million bond to fund phase three of the project: a new gym capable of housing the larger sports crowds Big Sky anticipates as the growing student body bumps the high school from Class C status to Class B.

Daugherty pointed to the hills across the road to the northeast, at a patch of grass still scarred by the Porcupine Fire of November 2020. The blaze torched roughly 100 acres of lowlands just a few football field lengths from the only turnoff to the district’s campus. People heard gunshots in the hills prior to the wildfire, Daugherty said, and investigators eventually traced the source of the fire to a group of target shooters. Tests conducted by the U.S. Forest Service in 2013 revealed that fired bullet metal can be hot enough to ignite dry forest fuels, as can bullets that fragment after hitting rocks.

The proximity of the Porcupine Fire to Big Sky’s school campus speaks to a point easily obscured by the persistent shadow of national school tragedies like Sandy Hook and Uvalde: Active shooters aren’t the only threat Montana schools have to prepare for. Earthquakes, hazmat spills, propane explosions, fires on or off school property — much of the responsibility for anticipating and responding to such threats is now on Daugherty’s shoulders as he updates the district’s contingency plans for a variety of potential crises and works with local entities like the Big Sky Fire Department and Big Sky Medical Center to improve cross-agency communication. When he’s not walking the halls checking in with staff and students, or lending a hand in the lunchroom, Daugherty hunkers in his sparse office to pore over black binders stuffed with notes on how to improve the district’s approach to crisis or upgrade its facilities in the most secure, cost-effective ways possible.

It’s an administrative role never mentioned in Skees’ 2021 bill, and one that prompted some entertaining questions from Ophir Elementary students when Daugherty first toured classrooms to introduce himself.

“One that came up was, ‘Will you help when bears come on campus?’” Daugherty recalled. “Which is a realistic question for our area, right? And absolutely that’s part of it.”

Many potential risks were highlighted in a March 2022 hazard and vulnerability assessment compiled for the Big Sky school board by California-based security contractor Surefox. Natural disasters, cyber threats, utility losses and viral pandemics were all rated as high-risk threats for Ophir Elementary and Lone Peak High. So too were the risks of active assailants and weapons on school grounds, though the report noted that both threats are “rated high in all schools throughout the U.S.” Consultants added that the district’s preparedness for such events is at “a higher level than most schools,” citing the existing School Resource Office (SRO) program and the utilization of “Run-Lock-Fight” training for teachers and staff.

The Surefox assessment, paid for with a $15,000 donation from the Spanish Peaks Community Foundation, paved the way for the board’s decision last fall to hire a school marshal. According to Shipman, it will also serve as “the anchor” for Daugherty’s work.

“His job is much bigger in scope than just standing here and making sure nobody comes into the school unencumbered,” Shipman told MTFP. “His job is now all emergency preparedness.”

While Daugherty started the job last fall, board trustees didn’t fully nail down his job description until early this year. One specific detail generated mixed feelings in the Big Sky community: Should he carry a gun? The 2021 law focused heavily on that question, listing a concealed carry permit as the first of three eligibility requirements for school marshals (the other two being state certification as a peace officer and current or past experience in law enforcement). The law also exempted marshals from Montana’s prohibition on firearms in public school buildings, the only other exemptions being for active law enforcement or people with prior clearance from the school board.

In a letter to the board, Big Sky parent Jolene Romney expressed opposition to the proposal that Daugherty be armed while on duty, believing it would send the message to students that “we need to deal with the proliferation of guns by having more guns.” Four other community members articulated similar concerns to MTFP, echoing Romney’s hope that Daugherty’s job would focus on “deliverables” related to the myriad risks outlined in Surefox’s report. 

The same central debate — whether a “good guy with a gun” is an appropriate or effective school safety measure — has dogged parents, educators and communities across the nation. Last year, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed a law allowing public school teachers to carry firearms. Florida charted a similar course in the wake of the 2018 Parkland shooting. And lawmakers in Texas advanced a proposal this spring mandating armed security personnel in every school in the state, which Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law in June.

“His job is much bigger in scope than just standing here and making sure nobody comes into the school unencumbered.His job is now all emergency preparedness.”

Big Sky School District Superintendent Dustin Shipman

In each case, the decision to arm school employees sparked backlash from an array of stakeholders. But public opinion underscored the power of personal experience in shaping those reactions. Law enforcement groups in Ohio opposed the state’s new law based on the low training threshold — a reduction from 700 hours to just 24 — required for educators to carry firearms. Meanwhile, the New York Times profiled an Ohio kindergarten teacher who embraced the opportunity to carry a gun at school to counteract a feeling of helplessness, even as state education associations balked at the proposal. A 2022 poll of 1,008 Americans found that while only 45% favored arming teachers, 80% supported armed police in schools. Who carries a gun, and how much training they have, are key details in a strategy that’s still evolving.

Montana’s school marshal law garnered the support in 2021 of education groups including the Montana School Boards Association and the Montana Federation of Public Employees, based in large part on work the organizations had done to guarantee that those marshals meet state peace officer qualifications. Supporters framed the role as an extension of the longstanding School Resource Officer approach, now deeply ingrained in larger Montana school districts, but still out of reach of smaller communities lacking municipal police departments and geographically isolated from sheriffs’ headquarters. In Missoula, Lurgio said, she’s seen SROs at Hellgate over the years dedicate themselves to building positive relationships with students, to being “an ally for them.” The fact that the school’s SRO is armed “doesn’t bother me,” she continued, though she said she’d feel differently if the gun were concealed.

“I feel safer knowing that there is one SRO with a weapon on campus than I would knowing — or not knowing — that there are multiple weapons on campus,” Lurgio said.

Under Montana’s school marshal law, marshals are allowed to act “only as necessary” to prevent actions that threaten “serious bodily injury or death of persons on public school property.” The law directs school boards to adopt policies governing how a marshal can carry and store a firearm, and specifying the type of gun and ammunition used. As with other potentially sensitive policies, school officials can elect to keep such details confidential if disclosing them might jeopardize the safety of staff and students. Montana School Boards Association Executive Director Lance Melton explained that that authority is part of a decade-old rewrite of state provisions governing the withholding of public information that, if released, could allow threats to sidestep elements of a school’s safety response and inflict even greater harm.

“The goal [of confidentiality] was to ensure that the intent of a safety plan, which is to protect kids, would be accomplished and wouldn’t be undermined by someone intent on inflicting school violence,” Melton said, adding that detailed knowledge of Columbine High School protocols was partly what allowed the two perpetrators of the 1999 shooting to map out a meticulous plan.

Shipman acknowledged that putting guns in schools, even in the hands of a trained professional, is a “sensitive” subject. But he and Daugherty are quick to point out that armed personnel have already been a presence in Big Sky schools through the SRO program. Daugherty asserted that the majority of staff and parents he’s talked to, in his daily routine and in a series of community meet-and-greets this year, felt “much more at ease” knowing that he’s armed. It’s not just his experience, he said. It’s that he’s made being “approachable” one of his top priorities. 

“The position really hinges on having the right person in it,” Daugherty said. “Whatever school ends up taking on a school marshal role, it’s extremely important to have that right personality in there for the kids and the staff and the families.”

Whether or not a marshal is armed isn’t the only detail that’s generated questions. Romney said she also wonders about the long-term sustainability of the position. Daugherty’s salary comes not from the district’s budget, but rather from a private donation through the Yellowstone Club Community Foundation — a fact Shipman confirmed, adding that the source of the funding, which is good for five years, was one of two key factors — the other being Daugherty’s professional qualifications — that convinced Big Sky to create the position in the first place. If the district is going to get the most out of that money, Romney said, Daugherty’s work on school safety should involve parents and community partners.

“This is a really big job, and could potentially use the help of a parent committee or a community committee — to do research, to bounce ideas off of, to provide perspective,” Romney said. “I feel like that would help give the community more of a voice in this process.”

According to Romney and school officials, that’s exactly what’s happening. In the months since Romney raised her concerns to the board, the district has convened roughly 18 volunteers to help advise and assist Daugherty in bolstering safety at Ophir Elementary and Lone Peak High. Members of that committee include school staff, representatives from local emergency service agencies, and interested parents — Romney among them. She said the committee, which has met twice to date, has discussed a wide range of potential improvements, including a shatterproof film for school windows and emergency medical training for staff. Romney added that she’s offered to help identify outside funding sources for such measures.

Daugherty agrees the group will be a valuable resource on a variety of projects, starting with updates to the district’s emergency response plan. He said he sees himself being “point on all of that,” fulfilling a supervisory role, he added, that doesn’t fall under the purview of an SRO or other existing positions in the schools.

‘THE WORST DAY THAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN IN MY LIFE’

Last October, a high-speed car chase involving a half-dozen law enforcement agencies came to a crashing halt in a ditch less than half a mile from Simms High School. The incident started more than 30 miles east in Great Falls and swept southwest along Interstate 15 through Cascade and Wolf Creek before doubling back toward Great Falls along Montana Highway 200. According to the Great Falls Tribune, the suspect carjacked a separate vehicle halfway through the chase, drove southbound on the interstate’s northbound lane for a time, and allegedly attempted to run over a Cascade County Sheriff’s deputy.

It’s not the first time in his 13 years with the district that Sun River Valley Superintendent David Marzolf has been reminded of the seemingly random — and potentially dangerous — situations that can develop within a stone’s throw of a school’s front doors.

“There was a time, four or five years ago, the principal and I had to go out to the parking lot. Some guy was outrunning law enforcement from Helena, took the cut-across road, and ended up in our parking lot,” Marzolf recalled in a conversation with MTFP. “We have to deal with that stuff all the time. Well, not all the time.”

Student safety is a consistent topic of conversation among leaders in the small outlying district, and Marzolf has tried to beef up security by putting teachers through active shooter drills focused on defensive strategies and purchasing cameras for the elementary, middle and high schools that can alert administrative staff to emerging threats. Every classroom is equipped with a can of Reflex Protect, a Mace-like spray with a pistol-style nozzle and trigger. Marzolf heard about the product from Helena School Superintendent Rex Weltz back when Weltz was leading the district in Polson.

Public reaction to one of Marzolf’s most recent investments generated a mixed bag of critique. As word spread that Sun River Valley had supplemented its video cameras with facial recognition software, people reacted with interest and concern alike. The latter, Marzolf said, came mostly from state lawmakers who claimed he was “infringing on students’ rights” by compiling and storing student information. “We don’t,” Marzolf clarified, noting that the software’s data cloud stores images for only 30 days and that he alone has access to the camera systems.

Marzolf argued the software is able to alert him when a person in local law enforcement’s database shows up on a school camera. Marzolf can also upload images of people the district has barred from school grounds due to criminal activity brought to their attention by parents or law enforcement. 

“Let’s say you have a warrant for your arrest and you’re not supposed to pick up your student at our building,” Marzolf told MTFP. “We could potentially get a picture of you and put it in our camera system. And when you come up to the door, it’ll alert us that you are on premises.”

The technology didn’t come cheap — roughly $30,000, Marzolf estimates, not counting the cameras. Back in 2019, then-Gov. Steve Bullock signed a law establishing a new type of tax levy specifically to fund school safety investments. Districts can now put the question directly to voters, and the law gives local education officials wide latitude in how they can spend those dollars. The Bozeman school district got voter approval last month for two such levies, one for its elementary schools and one for high schools. Executive Director of Business and Operations Mike Waterman told MTFP the funding will support the district’s school resource officer program and salaries for school counselors, and added that he’s fairly certain Bozeman is the first district in the state to pass such a levy.

“Let’s say you have a warrant for your arrest and you’re not supposed to pick up your student at our building. We could potentially get a picture of you and put it in our camera system. And when you come up to the door, it’ll alert us that you are on premises.”

Sun River Valley Superintendent David Marzolf

But for smaller districts in particular, the cost of even assessing security strengths and weaknesses can prove restrictive. Such assessments also happen to be one of the myriad services the University of Montana’s Safe Schools Center provides free of charge, in part courtesy of a $2 million, three-year federal grant. Center Director Emily Sallee said those assessments examine every detail of the school environment, from building layouts and traffic flows to cybersecurity considerations like how students access and use the internet. Sallee’s team then translates its findings into a report that presents a prioritized list of safety needs, some of which can be prohibitively expensive.

“Sometimes schools really need, like, architectural changes to increase school safety, and that funding probably isn’t there and it’s not going to happen,” Sallee said. “But there’s always pieces you can do at less cost or less investment that have a pretty high return.”

Assessments provide “a baseline” for district officials, she continued, and can identify such low-cost, often overlooked improvements as keeping exterior doors locked and checking staff ID badges at school entrances. But, she added, bigger-ticket school safety items may have to compete with pressing infrastructure issues like a leaky roof. And Montana’s focus on expanding career-based instruction and its dismal national ranking on teacher pay mean safety isn’t the only long-term investment demanding dollars in school budgets that already have little, if any, room to maneuver. With the passage of SB 213, Sallee is reaching out to school leaders to build awareness that the center offers a breadth of safety-centric services at no cost in the hopes of saving districts money.

Shawn Bubb agrees that the new law is likely to create quite a bit of work for safety consultants in the coming year, with districts now required to revisit their response plans annually and certify those reviews with the Office of Public Instruction. As director of the Montana School Boards Association’s insurance services arm, he’ll be part of that process. Bubb’s organization oversees property and liability coverage for 180 of Montana’s 826 public schools, coverage that includes discounted safety assessments provided by the Michigan-based firm Secure Education Consultants. That work, Bubb said, is aimed primarily at preventative measures — improved door locks, stricter protocols for how people enter a school — “before you even talk about arming somebody.”

He acknowledges that the potential for a school shooting in Montana is “pretty scary.” Personally, he said, “I’m just terrified of it.” When he rattles off a list of the speciality funds included in the insurance he oversees, it’s easy to see why: property damage, medical expenses, counseling services, post-incident security measures, funeral costs.

“That’s the worst day that’s going to happen in my life is when I get the call when one of our members is directly impacted by one of these bad events,” Bubb said. “I’m going to be glad that we’re going to have the resources there to help them, but it’s not a day I’m looking forward to.”

According to a database compiled by the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security, Montana has experienced nine incidents of gun-based school violence since 1970, including the fatal shooting in 1986 of a substitute teacher at Lewistown’s Fergus High School — the only Montana fatality listed in the center’s data. State-specific statistics from the national nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety show that guns are the second-leading cause of death among Montana children and teens; on average, 83% of those deaths are suicides, while fewer than 20% are homicides.

‘A TOUCHY, TOUCHY SUBJECT’

After checking in at his office, Matt Daugherty strolled up and down the halls of Lone Peak High, past students studying sprawled on tables or floors and classrooms bathed in the soft glow of projectors. He peeked inside the vacant gymnasium, crowing about how the boys basketball team — the Big Horns — cruised past district for the first time ever this season and into the Class C state tournament (they lost in the second round). Outside the school library, which pulls double duty as Big Sky’s public community library, Daugherty paused.

“Mind if I duck in there for a minute?” he asked. “My daughter’s studying and I haven’t said hey to her today.”

With every student and teacher he passed, Daugherty posed the same question first: “How’re you doing?” Usually he referred to them by their first name, an ability he said he’s dedicated a lot of time to developing this spring. While filling in for the secretary at the high school’s front desk, Daugherty encouraged a student signing out for the day — already a football player — to go out for the basketball team. The student shrugged and said he’d be “rusty.”

“Even if you’re rusty, you’ve got the athleticism,” Daugherty said.

That accessibility and engagement is partly a strategy. Daugherty said he recognizes that his best tactic for heading off potential threats is to build relationships with students, teachers and parents and be alert for any signs that a kid might be having a tough time. The approach stems from the widely researched and debated belief that school violence can often stem from students struggling with their mental or behavioral health and feeling isolated, lost, or adrift.

Sallee, who also serves as an assistant professor in UM’s Department of Counseling, said that in the case of school shootings, the perpetrator is often a student who’s been expelled. A Washington Post analysis of 380 school shootings since Columbine showed that the median age of school shooters is 16. And numerous studies conducted in the U.S. and abroad have explored correlations between exclusionary punishments and antisocial or violent behavior by and among students. Education systems throughout the country have responded to such findings by adjusting their disciplinary policies and further emphasizing the importance of school counselors and psychologists, particularly in the wake of a pandemic that isolated students from their social and academic worlds for a prolonged period of time. Just three months into the pandemic, a 2020 Gallup poll showed that 45% of parents said their childrens’ mental and emotional health was already suffering due to separation from teachers and classmates. In the years since, test scores tumbled nationally, classroom disruptions spiked, and more than 80% of U.S. schools reported negative impacts on social-emotional development.

Sallee said growing recognition of the interplay between emotional well-being and violence has also changed the landscape of threat assessment to be “much more supportive, much more holistic” than in past decades. 

And part of creating a safe environment, she said, is helping to ensure that educators monitor their own mental well-being so they don’t become “hypervigilant” and “burnt-out” at school, which is why her team at the Safe Schools Center offers workshops for educators focused specifically on resiliency and healing.

“We can do youth mental health first aid, we can do adult mental health first aid,” Sallee said of the center’s work. “It’s all wrapped into the same ball of safety, whether it’s actual or perceived.”

School officials see mental health supports as promising, both in averting incidents and in responding to them. In Billings, Superintendent Upham said the district is working with its new safety coordinator, Jeremy House, to develop a “debrief team” capable of addressing the aftershocks of an event among students and staff. Even if there turns out to be no shooter, Upham said, a lockdown can put “added stress” on a school population — stress that can migrate to other schools in the district and sap the very thing that makes education possible.

“At the end of the day, if you don’t have the energy yourself to motivate [students], it makes it extremely difficult to teach,” Upham said. “What worries me is that the level of fear and trepidation and anxiety that we are feeling, it robs people of energy and they can’t stay at a level of motivation that makes them as effective as they can be.”

Vinny Giammona said Missoula County Public Schools is planning to incorporate similar staff debrief practices in the development of a district-wide crisis response team next school year. That approach could also include post-incident surveys of teachers and staff, he said, as well as guaranteeing that the district addresses any ongoing needs in the months following an event.

Recent experience in his district has led Upham to speculate about the harm that even lockdowns can inflict. When his assistant superintendent entered his office last December to inform him of the incident unfolding at Billings West High School, he recalls, she was “visibly shaking.” The district is now actively discussing what role lockdowns might play moving forward and evaluating what it might do differently in response to reported threats. Until recently, Upham said, Billings simply hadn’t taken the time to have conversations about school safety measures, and his prime motivation at every turn has been to get the topic “out in the open,” to find a balance between what the district can do to ensure the safety of its students and what parents will accept.

“It’s a touchy, touchy subject,” he said.

In Big Sky, Shipman believes the district is already well positioned to meet the mental and behavioral health needs of its students. According to him, Big Sky’s schools have twice the number of counselors required by state regulations governing school quality, which mandate a ratio of at least one counselor for every 400 students. (Shipman’s district has two full-time counselor positions.) Elementary school students also receive a weekly counseling session as part of their class schedule, just like art or music.

“We’re [as] on top of it as we can be,” Shipman said, noting that not all school shootings in American communities have been perpetrated by students, or even by people suffering from mental health issues. “It is hard to be 100% in tune with all students all the time. That’s just not possible.”

Daugherty agreed with Shipman’s assessment that mental and behavioral health resources are “very well handled” in the district. He said he maintains an open line of communication with both of the district’s school counselors, one of whom — the wife of a former colleague at the Gallatin County Sheriff’s Office — he’s known for 20 years. Daugherty may not be trained to offer such services himself, but he sees his position as more than a shield against potential violence. Like counselors, active shooter drills, emergency response plans and safety coordinators, he considers himself part of an extensive patchwork designed to protect against threats that may or may not involve a gun.

“The school ends up being the hub of our community, and there’s a lot of other things that are happening outside of school at night and on the weekends that can end up filtering back in,” Daugherty said. “It’s a matter of trying to be ahead of those things and being aware of things so you don’t get surprised.”

The post How Montana schools are preparing for worst-case scenarios appeared first on Montana Free Press.

Savanna Greywind. Daisy Mae Heath. Ashlynne Mike. The reading aloud of those names and five other missing or murdered Indigenous women and girls followed by a moment of silence opened a three-day hearing of the Not Invisible Act Commission in Albuquerque on Wednesday.  The federal commission — made up of tribal leaders, law enforcement, service […]

The post Crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people brings federal commission to Albuquerque appeared first on New Mexico In Depth.

The first COVID-19 case on the Navajo Nation came in March 2020, and by the end of the month the tribe already had in place a curfew to keep residents home.

The curfew was among the most stringent measures any U.S. tribal or non-tribal government enacted to check the spread of the virus. Violators who were issued citations could face fines of $1,000 and up to 30 days in jail.

When the tribe faced a shortage of protective gear for public safety officers, many of whom were on the front lines of the pandemic, the tribal government passed legislation to direct revenue from fines to the Navajo Police Department.

At the time, former Navajo Nation Council Delegate Wilson C. Stewart Jr., who sponsored the dedicated fund to help the police, said the department should spend whatever it needed “to keep themselves safe, to keep our police officers safe and to keep our facilities as clean as possible.”

An investigation into the aftermath of the Navajo Nation public safety measures by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism found multiple breakdowns in their implementation.

Even before citations were issued, the curfews faced sticky legal questions that public health and public safety officials had to sort through.

The nation’s nine prosecutorial offices didn’t receive guidance on how to handle the cases sent to them, and few were prosecuted.

And the designated fund for the police department to purchase personal protective equipment (PPE) never materialized because tribal administrators never set up the funding mechanism.

In the end, the investigation found, the most consequential legacy of the curfews is the impact on hundreds of residents who were issued citations and who still have them hanging over their heads as a part of their criminal history.

“The spirit of it was good – the intent – but there was nothing behind it to benefit anybody,” said former Navajo Police Chief Phillip Francisco.

Early challenges

Following the nation’s first COVID-19 case, the Navajo Department of Health issued the first public health emergency order on March 18, 2020.

Residents were placed under curfew starting March 30, 2020. Each day, residents were ordered to stay home from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m.

As COVID-19 cases climbed, health officials added lockdowns that spanned 57 hours during the weekend, starting April 10, 2020.

The police department faced two challenges in the early weeks of the pandemic, according to Francisco.

The first was keeping officers safe from the virus as they responded to calls for service.

Like many law enforcement agencies across the United States, the tribal police department faced shortages of face masks, gloves and other PPE as COVID-19 spread.

The second problem was enforcing the curfews.

The department was put in charge of enforcing them after the matter was discussed by administrators in the executive branch, including the president’s office and the health department, Francisco said.

The Division of Public Safety and the Navajo Department of Justice also had to figure out if the curfews were legal because there was no tribal law that specifically addressed people violating public health orders or adults breaking curfews.

The tribe has curfew laws for minors.

But because there was none for adults, officials used the offense of criminal nuisance, defined in the tribe’s criminal code as a person who “knowingly or recklessly creates or maintains a condition which endangers the safety or health of others.”

“There were a lot of challenges in trying to balance people’s rights and freedoms versus trying to enforce an order that was meant to protect the public from a health crisis,” said Francisco, who is now police chief of the Bloomfield Police Department in New Mexico.

Curfews in Navajo Nation begin

The police department was ready to begin issuing citations the first weekend the curfew went into effect.

In the days before, the department set up checkpoints to inform the public about curfews and to encourage them to stay home.

The former chief had the task of announcing that police officers would start citing people for not complying with curfews, outlining the measures on April 3, 2020, during a town hall that live streamed on the Navajo Nation Office of the President and Vice President Facebook page.

The first weekend of curfews officers issued 115 citations, according to a news release the police department issued on April 13, 2020.

“The enforcement was successful in that we saw a decline in the number of people traveling during the weekend,” Francisco said in the release. “An operation of this capacity takes a lot of planning and coordination, and our districts did a great job in enforcement efforts.”

Exceptions were made if travel was for emergencies, or if the person could prove they were an essential worker. “The intent and purpose of the curfew was to restrict the movement of individuals on the Navajo Nation and minimize the growth and spread of COVID-19 in communities,” the release stated.

As the number of COVID-19 cases declined and vaccines became available, the curfews became less restrictive. The daily curfew was discontinued on Aug. 6, 2021.

Officers across the police department’s seven districts issued 726 citations over the 16 months the curfews were in effect, according to statistics released by the police department.

The Tuba City District had the most citations at 207; the Chinle District, 172; Kayenta District, 169; Shiprock District, 56; Window Rock District, 44; Crownpoint District, 41; and Dilkon District, 37.

Figures included in quarterly reports from the Navajo Nation Department of Justice, however, show a higher number of citations.

Their figures show 1,280 total citations.

Lawmakers back police fund, but don’t set it up

In late 2020, former tribal council delegate Stewart sponsored a bill to direct revenue collected from curfew violations to the police department to buy PPE.

Members of the 24th Navajo Nation Council and then-President Jonathan Nez supported the financial initiative to help the police department.

The measure, however, required the Division of Public Safety to set up a special fund management plan, so that revenue from the citations could be put into a separate fund for police use.

Supporters of the bill said the fund management plan would prevent any fines from going into the tribe’s general fund.

In the tribal council resolution Nez signed, the public safety division had 30 days to present a fund management plan to two tribal council committees as part of the process to establish the fund.

No plan was ever presented, and the fund was not established, the tribe’s legislative services office and the controller’s office confirmed.

“No revenue source was generated due to FMP (fund management plan) not being established,” the police department said in response to questions about the fund.

Former Division of Public Safety Executive Director Jesse Delmar declined to comment about the fund and referred questions to the current division director. “I no longer have a voice with the Navajo Nation government,” Delmar wrote in an email on April 20.

Since no fund was set up, any amount collected from fines was deposited into the tribe’s general fund.

In the end, the police department did get enough protective gear, Francisco said. It received federal COVID-19 funds and was also able to use PPE that the tribe’s casinos weren’t using because they were closed.

At any given time, Francisco said, 25 percent of his officers were sick with COVID-19 and out of commission.

The virus also sickened or killed frontline workers from other agencies.

Among those who died from the virus were Navajo Police Officer Michael Lee, a 29-year veteran of the department, and Esther Charley, a criminal investigator. Both died in June 2020. Approximately 2,100 people died of COVID-19 on the Navajo Nation, according to the Navajo Department of Health.

Case dispositions unknown

Chief Prosecutor Vernon L. Jackson Sr. did not respond to repeated requests for information about how the citations forwarded to the nation’s prosecutors’ offices were handled.

Francisco, who left the police department at the end of 2021, said only a handful of cases were ever properly adjudicated.

“From my understanding, there was only maybe one or two cases that ever went in front of the judge and were ever found guilty,” he said.

Because of the pandemic, tribal courts were operating on a reduced schedule while the curfews were in effect.

As a result, Francisco said curfew citations went “on the back burner.”

“Most of those cases weren’t heard ever, or maybe a year and a half out,” he said.

Quarterly reports from 2020 and 2021 from the Navajo Nation Department of Justice mention that 1,280 citations were received by the prosecutors’ offices. But the reports mention only one case that resulted in a sentence.

In 2020, a defendant was sentenced to 30 days in jail after a plea agreement that included a charge of criminal nuisance for curfew violation.

“This defendant had prior criminal convictions and appeared for arraignment on the criminal nuisance charge after being arrested for a Violence Against Family Act offense,” according to the report.

A district prosecutor who did not want to be identified because the person was not authorized to comment, said citations came to the district offices without narratives that would help them prosecute a case.

References to citations in other reports indicate that many of those cited have not had their cases resolved because the courts have not summoned defendants to appear.

Most of those cited were released on their own recognizance, according to the justice department reports, with return dates for reappearance set many months into the future.

“Each district court has opted to treat these return dates differently, with some of the return dates being ignored completely,” according to a justice department report from January 2021.

This story was produced by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, an initiative of the Scripps Howard Foundation in honor of the late news industry executive and pioneer Roy W. Howard. Contact us at howardcenter@asu.edu or on Twitter @HowardCenterASU.

For more stories from Cronkite News, visit cronkitenews.azpbs.org.

The post Curfews saddled hundreds with citations, netted no money for Navajo police appeared first on Buffalo’s Fire.

The U.S. Supreme Court said the United States is not required “to take affirmative steps to secure water for the Tribe” because that provision is not explicitly stated in the Navajo Treaty of 1868, according to its ruling in a 5-4 vote in Arizona v. Navajo Nation, released Thursday.

The case was the third and final federal Indian law case this term.

Thursday’s decision reverses a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. The tribe cannot proceed with a claim against the Department of the Interior to “develop a plan to meet the Navajo Nation’s water needs and manage the main stream of the Colorado River in the Lower Basin.”

The court also ruled that the tribe cannot present a cognizable claim of breach of trust.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the opinion and was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett.

“And it is not the Judiciary’s role to rewrite and update this 155-year-old treaty,” Kavanaugh wrote. “Rather, Congress and the President may enact—and often have enacted—laws to assist the citizens of the western United States, including the Navajos, with their water needs.

Kavanaugh went on to write that the United States has no similar duty with respect to land on the reservation and it would be “anomalous to conclude that the United States must take affirmative steps to secure water.”

“For example, under the treaty, the United States has no duty to farm the land, mine the minerals, or harvest the timber on the reservation—or, for that matter, to build roads and bridges on the reservation,” Kavanaugh writes. “Just as there is no such duty with respect to the land, there likewise is no such duty with respect to the water.”

The Navajo Nation argued that securing water rights to the Colorado River for the tribe fell under the federal government’s trust obligations that were being unfulfilled.

Critics immediately reacted to the decision saying it is a virtual theft of water from the Navajo Nation.

Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren and Speaker of the 25th Navajo Nation Council Crystalyne Curley shared their disappointment in the decision in a joint press release.

As president, Nygren said it is his job to protect the people, land and future and that he remains “undeterred in obtaining quantified water rights for the Navajo Nation in Arizona.”

“The only way to do that is with secure, quantified water rights to the Lower Basin of the Colorado River,” Nygren said in the statement. “I am confident that we will be able to achieve a settlement promptly and ensure the health and safety of my people.”

“Today’s ruling will not deter the Navajo Nation from securing the water that our ancestors sacrificed and fought for — our right to life and the livelihood of future generations,” Curley added.

As he has done in the past, Justice Neil Gorsuch laid out the history of the tribe and the surrounding circumstances that led to this point in his dissenting opinion. He writes that it is known that the United States holds some of the tribe’s water rights in trust and the government owes the Navajo Nation “a duty to manage the water it holds for the Tribe in a legally responsible manner.”

In his concluding paragraphs, Gorsuch writes that the tribe has tried nearly everything and poses the question, “Where do the Navajo go from here?”

“The Navajo have waited patiently for someone, anyone, to help them, only to be told (repeatedly) that they have been standing in the wrong line and must try another. To this day, the United States has never denied that the Navajo may have water rights in the mainstream of the Colorado River (and perhaps elsewhere) that it holds in trust for the Tribe,” Gorsuch writes. “Instead, the government’s constant refrain is that the Navajo can have all they ask for; they just need to go somewhere else and do something else first.”

Derrick Beetso, Navajo, is an attorney and director of Indian Gaming and Self-Governance at Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. He also is a board member of IndiJ Public Media, the non-profit that owns ICT.

He said the opinion acknowledges that the tribe does have water rights, although they are unquantified.

“The tribe itself is pretty much in the same position they were in before this litigation and in some respects has to go back to the drawing board to figure out how they can get the administration to move forward on assessing their water needs,” Beetso told ICT.

He added that the Supreme Court is just one branch of the government and the Navajo Nation may switch focus to the Biden Administration and Congress in the future.

“The administration can do all the things that the tribe’s asking them to do without a court telling them to do it,” he said. “And so I think the Navajo Nation can shift gears and put a lot of pressure on the Biden administration and see what can get done under this administration.”

Native American Rights Fund executive director John Echohawk, Pawnee, said in a joining statement with the National Congress of American Indians that the decision condones a lack of accountability by the U.S. government.

“Despite today’s ruling, Tribal Nations will continue to assert their water rights and NARF remains committed to that fight,” Echohawk said.

Fawn Sharp, Quinault, called the decision a setback but added tribes and Native organizations will continue to fight for and defend tribal sovereignty and the preservation of Indigenous ways of life.

“Water is necessary for all life, and when our ancestors negotiated agreements with the United States to secure our lands and our protection, water was understood and still is understood to be inseparable from the land and from our peoples,” Sharp said in the statement. “Today, the Supreme Court has once again assisted in the United States’ centuries-long attempts to try to get out of the promises they have made to Tribal Nations by stating that treaties only secure access to water, but do not require the United States to take any steps to protect or provide that water to our people.”

The court ruled in mid-June on the other two federal Indian law cases. The high court affirmed the Indian Child Welfare Act in a major win that was celebrated across Indian Country. The same day the ICWA opinion was released, the court also ruled on Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians v. Coughlin.

In that ruling, the court stated that tribes cannot use sovereign immunity in Bankruptcy Court.

The court still has a number of cases to rule on before taking a summer break. The justices will return for the next term starting in October.

The opinion on Arizona v. Navajo Nation can be read here.

The post Supreme Court rejects Navajo Nation’s water rights trust claim appeared first on Buffalo’s Fire.

You might see Elizabeth Johnson’s semi-tractor trailer traveling the U.S. interstate highways, especially between Colorado and Nebraska.

And if you do see it, there’s no way you can miss Johnson’s message.  The entire trailer carries the simple direct message: “Invisible No More.”

It’s a message meant to bring attention to the plight of missing and murdered Indigenous women whose cases are unsolved.

Johnson — a member of the Ho-Chunk Tribal Nation of Nebraska — has been spreading the message since 2017.

“My message as a woman is, if any woman sees this semi-truck and needs help, me and my dog Delilah will help you to safety,” Johnson said. “Knock on my semi-truck door.”

There are an estimated 506 cases of missing or murdered indigenous women across the country. And that’s likely an undercount due to bad data, according to the Urban Indian Health Institute. Of that number, 128 of the women are considered missing, while 280 were known murdered. Another 98 are cases of unknown status, according to the Urban Indian Health Institute.

The group surveyed 71 police stations and one state agency and found 5,712 missing and murdered Indigenous cases were reported in 2016. But of those, only 116 were logged in a Justice Department database.

According to the National Institute of Justice, as of May 2023, 84.3% more than 1.5 million American Indian and Alaskan Native women experience violence in their lifetime. Victimization of American Indian and Native woman is 1.2 times higher than white women.

Johnson and her family moved to Winnebago in Nebraska when she was five, and she was raised as a tribal member of the Nebraska Ho-Chunk tribe and given the name Rainbow Woman.

She left home when she was in her preteens and has kept moving.

“I don’t know if God would bless me to go further in my trucking industry or this is the end of my travels, but when I see family, I want to make an apple pie,” Johnson said.

Nebraska is always her home, she said, but so is Colorado because her son and grandchildren live in Brighton. She spends half her time with them.

Johnson started her mission because she was a victim of abuse herself. It was a two-way abusive situation, she said:  He was abusive to her, but she fought back.

“He would put me on his lap with a knife at my throat,” Johnson said. “It was a toxic relationship. I left, and I was done. As soon that door closed, God, or wherever you want to believe, started to open other doors for me.”

She had worked as a construction driver in the summer and fall. She was laid off in the winter but guaranteed to return in the summer. Even so,  she said she needed a more consistent job, and she needed reliable transportation to do that. She found a pick-up truck she liked and approached a bank looking for a loan.

“They never wanted to give me a loan, but I told them if you don’t give me a loan, I’m going to go somewhere else,” she said. “This is income that comes to your bank and comes back out. They gave me the loan, and I purchased a brand-new Silverado. When I purchased the truck, that was when I left the man. I thought I was going to die leaving him and was heartbroken, but I left.”

Johnson said she drove the Silverado for a while, and although it was nice to drive a cute truck, she was still broke.

“I went back to the bank and asked for a loan to trade off the Silverado for a used semi to make money,” she said. “I told the banker it was a win-win. I could make money at the same cost Silverado. The woman sat across from me and said, ‘I’m going do it for you’. Usually, they didn’t give business loans.”

That opened a door for Johnson, and she started her trucking company, Ho-Chunk Trucking, in 2017. After a couple of years, she was able to upgrade and buy a new semi-truck. Then, after a couple’s years of hauling other companies’ trailers, she took out another loan and purchased her own trailer in 2020.

“I wanted my own trailer because women in the industry are treated badly. It’s a whole other story,” Johnson said.

Johnson said that once she had a trailer, she started thinking about it as a platform for other Native American women.

“I went through hell and back. What is the message I wanted to say to the world?” she said.

Johnson decided to do a custom wrap on her trailer with a message about Indigenous women. She also included pictures of her family dressed in regalia and a friend dancing pow-pow and included information about 500 gone missing or murdered women.

One photo, showing a woman with a red hand over her mouth, is her niece Jalisa Horn who was left for dead from abuse and had to crawl to get help. Horn agreed to add her photo to draw attention to the message.

Gov. Jared Polis signed Senate Bill 22-150,  a law requiring official reports of missing indigenous people within eight hours. Missing children must be reported to law enforcement within two, under the law.

The act also requires the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to work on investigating missing or murdered indigenous persons and also work with federal, state, and local law enforcement to effectively investigate the cases.

In addition, an alert system and an agency called Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives are responsible for reporting and improving the investigation of missing and murdered Indigenous women and addressing injustice in the criminal justice system.

This story was previously published by Colorado Community Media and is being republished from AP StoryShare.

The post Brighton trucker offers a message and sanctuary for Indigenous women appeared first on Buffalo’s Fire.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday morning that tribes are like any other state or government and cannot use sovereign immunity in Bankruptcy Court.

The ruling derails an argument made by the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, which tried to extend the reach of tribal sovereign immunity in bankruptcy proceedings.

“The Code unequivocally abrogates the sovereign immunity of all governments, categorically. Tribes are indisputably governments. Therefore, unmistakably abrogates their sovereign immunity too,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said in the opinion of the court.

Sovereign immunity is a legal doctrine that basically means a government cannot be sued unless it wants to.

Last year, the Supreme Court reviewed Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians v. Coughlin, which was to determine if tribal governments fall under the bankruptcy code’s definition of governments that possess the power of sovereign immunity.

“I know the other side saying, ‘Well, Mike, now tribes are aligned with all the municipalities.’ But it doesn’t say that,” said Mike Andrews, former staff director and chief council for the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. “Just as Justice (Neil) Gorsuch said they moved tribes into foreign governments and quite frankly, we’re not. We’re tribal governments and we were here before the United States. So, (it’s) a little disingenuous, to be perfectly honest.”

Andrews added this ruling is a slippery slope and could bring forward more cases to the Supreme Court that shouldn’t be decided by the courts.

“I thought that the Supreme Court stepped in as the legislature,” he said to ICT. “You often hear about justices legislating from the bench.”

Andrews was disappointed in the ruling because the Supreme Court should have sent this issue to Congress to decide.

“Let’s be clear, it’s not like the court’s going to go out and do a consultation. No, they’re not,” Andrews said.

One form or another of the Bankruptcy Act has existed since 1800. There have been five different Bankruptcy Acts passed since its first iteration. There have been over 40 amendments made to the act.

“There’s been 46, 47 amendments to the Bankruptcy Act and not one person decided, ‘Oh, we should add tribes.’ Maybe there’s a reason for that,” Andrews said. “I think that’s up to tribes through the legislative process, not the judicial process to make those determinations. Part of me feels this was a departure in that decision today. I think it was, quite frankly, an infringement on tribal sovereignty. It was watered down today.”

History of the case

After a borrower declares bankruptcy, all creditors, including governments, are not allowed to attempt any debt collection.

The Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians owns a payday loan company called Lendgreen. In July 2019, the company lended $1,100 to Brian Coughlin who declared bankruptcy before the loan was repaid.

Despite bankruptcy code, Lendgreen continued to try to collect the debt. In 2019, Coughlin sued Lendgreen and the tribe in Bankruptcy Court to force them to comply with bankruptcy code. He also sued for emotional distress and attorney fees.

The tribe argued they can’t be sued because the bankruptcy code doesn’t explicitly say tribal governments. Instead stating “other foreign or domestic government.” The tribe argued it is neither a foreign or domestic government. So, the bankruptcy code should not apply in this case. Therefore, the tribe can use sovereign immunity in Bankruptcy Court.

This argument leaned on tribal governments’ unique status in the United States.

The Bankruptcy Court agreed with the tribe.

In May 2022, the case went before the First Circuit Court of Appeals, which concluded that tribes cannot use sovereign immunity in Bankruptcy Court.

This has been upheld by the Supreme Court in an 8-1 decision by the justices. The sole dissenting opinion came from Neil Gorsuch, the only justice with extensive knowledge and experience with federal Indian law.

Justice Neil Gorsuch dissents

Gorsuch essentially argued that tribal governments should not be included in the language of “other foreign or domestic government,” saying tribes should be explicitly named in laws to avoid these generalizations.

“Respectfully, I do not think the language here does the trick. The phrase “other foreign or domestic government” could mean what the Court suggests: every government, everywhere,” Gorusch wrote in his dissenting opinion. “But it could also mean what it says: every “other foreign . . . government”; every “other . . . domestic government.” And properly understood, Tribes are neither of those things.”

Gorsuch added these language interpretations should be handled by Congress not the Supreme court.

“All this explains the now-familiar clear-statement rule that this Court has endorsed on countless occasions,” he wrote. “If Congress wishes to abrogate tribal immunity, its “decision must be clear.” And the Legislature must “unequivocally express” its decision in the text of a statute.”

He asserted that tribes are neither foreign or domestic nations, so they shouldn’t fall under that definition.

“Read in context, the term ‘domestic dependent nations’ is really a term of art meant to capture Tribes’ ‘hybrid position’ between ‘foreign and domestic states,’” Gorsuch said.

Later in his opinion he added, “And their unique character makes their brand of sovereign immunity ‘not congruent’ with the immunity other sovereigns enjoy.”

Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians v. Coughlin is two of three federal Indian law cases in Supreme Court hands. The decision for Haaland v. Brackeen, an Indian Child Welfare Act case, was also released Thursday. Arizona v. Navajo Nation is the third case to be decided. The high court has 23 more cases to decide on by the end of the month. 

The post Supreme Court: Tribal sovereign immunity doesn’t extend to bankruptcy court appeared first on Buffalo’s Fire.

The Supreme Court handed down a major decision Thursday in the Haaland v. Brackeen case, affirming the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act by a 7-2 vote.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito were the lone justices to dissent.

The decision represents a major victory for federal Indian law and tribes across the nation.

The Indian Child Welfare Act was enacted in 1978 and its purpose is “”…to protect the best interest of Indian Children and to promote the stability and security of Indian tribes and families by the establishment of minimum Federal standards for the removal of Indian children and placement of such children in homes which will reflect the unique values of Indian culture…,” the Bureau of Indian Affairs website states.

For years, tribal leaders and Native organizations have long seen ICWA as the “gold standard” for child welfare.

Oral arguments on the landmark case took place in November. Indigenous people from around the country traveled to Washington, D.C. for the hearing.

Kimberly Jump-CrazyBear, Osage and Oglala Lakota, was one of many who showed up to show support for the Indian Child Welfare Act.

“I’m just here on behalf of all of you who can’t be here today. To help lend my voice,” she told ICT before the oral arguments for Haaland v. Brackeen began. “Without our children, we don’t have a people anymore.”

Tribes, Native organizations, advocates and allies cheered for the decision reposting sentiments like “tribal sovereignty wins” or “ICWA stands!” 

This is a breaking story, check back to Buffalo’s Fire for updates.

The post Supreme Court affirms ICWA appeared first on Buffalo’s Fire.

Efforts by Montana legislators and Gov. Greg Gianforte to tackle Montana’s childcare shortage this year have produced several new laws, including measures that expand a program helping lower-income families pay for care and exempting small, in-home daycares from state licensing requirements.

The former measure, a $7-million-a-year expansion of the state’s Best Beginning’s program, had been a particular priority for Democrats and childcare advocates who had spent weeks waiting for word on whether Gianforte, a Republican, would sign the measure.

In a statement Wednesday, Gianforte’s office touted the expansion of the Best Beginnings program as part of his broader “pro-family, pro-jobs” budget.

Legislative Democrats had worried the Best Beginnings bill was becoming a political football as the governor sought to derail veto override efforts on other bills. In a statement Wednesday, they called the bill “the most significant investment in childcare in the state’s history.” 

“Ensuring Montana families have access to quality, affordable childcare means our economy can thrive — and so can our communities and kids,” bill sponsor Rep. Alice Buckley, D-Bozeman, said in the statement. “I am so proud we have finally taken action to address our state’s childcare crisis.” 

The Legislature passed the Best Beginnings bill, House Bill 648, April 28, but it was only transmitted to the governor for his signature this week after spending more than a month waiting on an administrative signature from Senate President Jason Ellsworth, R-Hamilton.

Childcare is both a major cost-of-living issue for Montana families and a significant economic challenge as the cost and availability of care limits how much many parents, women especially, can work at a time when the state is facing a tight labor market.

Research by the Montana Department of Labor & Industry estimates the state has licensed childcare capacity for only 43% of kids who need care. Labor department economists also say childcare for kids under 5 costs Montana families $16,269 on average in 2022 — a figure equivalent to a quarter of the state’s median household income and well above the 7%-of-income figure used as an affordability benchmark by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

(The labor department’s economists estimate that need by tabulating the number of kids under age 6 who live in homes where both parents are employed or actively looking for a job. They note that many working parents likely default to unlicensed care.)

That shortage, labor department economists say, has a direct impact on the state’s workforce. They estimate family responsibilities or a lack of childcare kept 23,000 Montana parents from working last year and forced another 45,000 to work fewer hours.

Tori Sproles, who runs Child Care Connections, a Bozeman-based agency that works with parents and childcare providers, said in a recent interview that the conundrum is that childcare is both prohibitively expensive for many families and a high-overhead industry that fails to pay well enough for childcare business owners and their staff to readily make ends meet.

“The biggest hurdle is the affordability of it on both ends,” Sproles said.

The Best Beginnings bill makes the program available to slightly higher-income families, shifting its eligibility cutoff from 150% to 185% of the federal poverty line. At the 185% level, a family of four would qualify for the program at an income of $55,000 a year and a single parent with one child would qualify with an annual income of $36,000.

The bill caps how much participating families pay, limiting their childcare expenses to 9% of their income. It also shifts the program’s reimbursement policy so that payments are no longer tied to attendance requirements — a policy that proponents say can put parents and providers in a bind if kids have too many sick days. 

The governor’s budget office estimates HB 648 would add about 700 children to the program and increase its cost by about $7 million a year.

Other bills focused solely on regulatory pieces of the childcare puzzle without putting additional public dollars toward subsidies.

Most notably, Rep. Jennifer Carlson, R-Manhattan, sponsored House Bill 556, which exempts many small, in-home daycare operations from licensing administered by the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services. Anyone caring for up to six kids in a private residence will no longer be required to seek a license unless they participate in Best Beginnings or other public subsidy programs.

The state’s existing regulations require licensing when someone is providing “supplemental parental care” to three or more kids, excluding their own children.

Carlson said recently that she thinks licensed daycare programs make sense in larger cities, particularly for families who don’t have a reliable network of family or friends to fall back on. But she argues it’s a different situation in small towns where people know their neighbors well enough to know who they trust looking after their kids and routinely flout the letter of the current rules.

“The government does not have to run every single part of our life,” Carlson said. “People have been watching other people’s children since the dawn of man.”

As the bill worked its way through the Legislature, opponents argued the state licensing process provides a way to ensure that people who are running childcare businesses are subject to requirements like background checks, home safety inspections and first-aid training.

Sproles, who testified against the bill, said in May that people who provide unregulated care have rarely been prosecuted. She also said she’s concerned that exempting more small providers from licensing could put parents in situations where they mistakenly assume a daycare provider has been vetted by the appropriate authorities.

“There are people out there who drop off their kids to people they don’t know — and nobody in that house is going to be background checked,” Sproles said. 

“Just because someone has a license isn’t a guarantee of safety,” countered Carlson, pointing to a 2022 audit that found the health department had in three cases approved childcare licenses at addresses also listed as the residence of someone on the state’s sexual and violent offender registry. “As a parent, it’s your responsibility to know who’s watching your kids, not the state’s.”

Another bill sponsored by Buckley, House Bill 187, explicitly defines providing home-based childcare as a “residential” use of property rather than a “commercial” one, a statutory tweak intended to shield small daycare providers from being constrained by restrictive homeowners association covenants. It passed with bipartisan support and was signed by the governor April 19.

Gianforte also approved a Republican-sponsored bill, brought by Rep. Terry Falk, R-Kalispell, to relax some currently required daycare center staffing ratios, allowing among other changes a 6-to-1 instead of a 4-to-1 provider-to-child ratio for 1-year-olds and a 20-to-1 rather than a 14-to-1 ratio for kids 6 and older. The new law, House Bill 422, also allows some staffers caring for kids 2 and older to work in another room during nap periods.

Falk argued the changes better align Montana law with national standards and will make it easier for childcare centers to pay workers sustainable wages. Opponents countered that they believe the lower ratios are necessary to keep kids safe and that loosening the regulations will make childcare workers more likely to burn out. The bill passed with support from all Republicans and opposition from nearly all Democrats.

Democrats brought several other bills, unsuccessfully, to put additional public dollars into childcare support. One bill would have created a $1,600-a-year tax credit to supplement childcare worker wages. Another would have put $150 million from the state’s budget surplus into a childcare trust fund, where interest earnings would have been used to produce a long-term revenue source for childcare scholarships.

Sproles said she was pleased with the conversation that happened around childcare at the Legislature but thinks more action will be necessary to address the challenge.

“We’re not done,” she said. “These are baby steps toward some of the bigger things we need to tackle as a state.”

The post Childcare is scarce and spendy. Here’s what Montana lawmakers are doing about it appeared first on Montana Free Press.