Trump Dept of Education to investigate Ithaca schools for diversity event

ITHACA, N.Y. — Federal officials granted a request to open an investigation into the Ithaca City School District (ICSD) for its handling of an event aimed at supporting students of color, according to a Jan. 27 letter from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

Depending on the findings, the district could lose federal aid — which totaled about $1.7 million last year, according to state and district data.

The initial complaint was filed in August 2024 by Cornell University law professor and conservative blogger William Jacobson through his non-profit organization, Legal Insurrection Foundation. As part of its anti-affirmative action Equal Protection Project, the group has filed dozens of similar complaints about other educational institutions, including Ithaca College.

Jacobson alleged in the complaint the district’s handling of its annual Students of Color United Summit “reflected systemic discrimination against white students.” The student organized event often includes activities such as spoken word poetry, discussions on identity and musical performances.

The complaint sat unaddressed under former President Joe Biden. President Donald Trump has prioritized eliminating or targeting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives during the first weeks of his administration.

The development is not the first time Ithaca has found itself the target of federal scrutiny since Trump’s second inauguration: last week, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted a highly publicized arrest outside a county building.

The letter from the Department of Education, posted on Jacobson’s website and first reported by The Ithaca Times, states federal officials will investigate “whether the district subjected students to different treatment on the bases of race and color by sponsoring Students of Color United Summits that excluded white students in violation of Title VI and its implementing regulations.”

The letter did not provide a timeline for the investigation. Contact information for the sender, a “Senior Compliance Team Attorney,” was redacted in the copy of the letter posted to Jacobson’s website.

The August 2024 complaint includes screenshots of communication from various district staff and leaders stating the event is open to “students of color.” It also includes images of promotional materials drafted by the event’s student organizers.

While messages vary, one email to Ithaca High School staff in 2021 states the summit is “only for people who identify as people of color.”

Following a May 2024 letter of demands to the school district — also from Jacobson — district leaders said the annual event was open to all students, staff and educators who wished to attend, regardless of their race or ethnicity.

In a written statement to The Ithaca Voice, school board president Sean Eversley Bradwell said the district “welcomes the investigation” and that it would “fully cooperate with the Office of Civil Rights.”

Bradwell also reiterated ICSD’s 2024 response to a letter Jacobson sent to the district that year.

“Ithaca City School District programs do not exclude,” Bradwell wrote. “The 2024 program was created by students to support and affirm students of color and all students, staff and educators were invited to attend.”

In the federal complaint, Jacobson alleged the district had only opened the event to white students after he sent an initial letter of complaint to the district in May 2024. He said past iterations of the summit had excluded white attendees.

In an email, Jacobson said he’d like to see ICSD face “substantial monetary penalty” to ensure the district “gets the message.”

“Any future [federal] funding should be contingent on ICSD admitting its wrongdoing and holding the responsible staff and administrators responsible,” Jacobson said.

ICSD’s federal funding is primarily intended to provide assistance to disadvantaged students enrolled in the district. This school year, ICSD received $1.17 million in funding through the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, according to data from the New York State Education Department, which administers the grant.

The funding is allocated based on the number of students with higher-than-average needs, like those in poverty, have disabilities or are learning English as a second language. The district also receives federal funding to provide school meals to all students.

In total, ICSD budget estimates show some $1.7 million in annual federal funding could hang in the balance.

Jacobson said he also wanted the Department of Education to “compel ICSD to hire an independent monitor to oversee non-discrimination policy and implementation in the district.”

He added that his group was willing to take on that role at no cost to the district.

Jacobson said he was hopeful that the complaint would result in action now that the Department of Education is under the purview of the Trump administration.

“We are hopeful that under the new administration the Department of Education or its successor will very vigorously enforce the civil rights laws in districts like ICSD,” Jacobson said.

Trump has said he intends on dismantling the U.S. Department of Education. It’s not yet clear what would happen to the investigation should the department be shuttered prior to the conclusion of the matter.

Following national press coverage of the initial complaint in August 2024, Bradwell and ICSD Superintendent Luvelle Brown, both of whom are Black, received a litany of emails and phone messages, some of which contained racist language and threats of violence.

Neither Bradwell nor Brown offered comment on the possibility of similar messages following recent coverage of the pending investigation.

The post Trump Dept of Education to investigate Ithaca schools for diversity event appeared first on The Ithaca Voice.

The number of 18-year-olds is about to drop sharply, packing a wallop for colleges — and the economy 

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

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

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

Old Main at Iowa Wesleyan University, which closed last year. More such closings are expected as the number of college-aged students declines. Credit: The Gazette

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, shut down in June. A long-predicted drop in the number of 18-year-olds is expected to accelerate the pace of college closings. Credit: Michael P. Farrell/Albany Times Union via Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But a rescue from these other sources may not come.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A palm oil company, a group of U.S. venture capitalists, and the destruction of Peru’s rainforest

This article was produced in collaboration with Business Insider. It may not be reproduced without express permission from FERN. If you are interested in republishing or reposting this article, please contact info@thefern.org.

Two of the largest palm oil plantations in Peru are located on the west side of the Ucayali River, which flows from the Andes to the Amazon. From above, the surrounding landscape looks like stirred paint: a swirl of green amid inky lakes and brown rivers. Tibecocha, the larger of the two plantations, appears to have been etched into the jungle with a ruler and a straight razor. Its rectangular grid of roads extends over almost 8 miles and contains a million palm trees. The smaller property, Zanja Seca, is nearly the size of Manhattan.

Each year, these plantations generate about $50 million in revenue for the Ocho Sur group, whose palm oil has ended up in products ranging from Cheetos to Colgate toothpaste. The $160 million that the company’s backers, primarily US venture capitalists and private equity funds, have spent on its operations represents the largest foreign investment in agriculture in the history of the Peruvian Amazon.

The palm industry got off the ground here thanks to US development programs designed to give farmers a money-making alternative to growing coca plants, the precursor to cocaine, and the US ambassador to Peru even paid a visit to Ocho Sur’s properties last year. Ocho Sur’s operations are now so vast, and it is such a dominant force in the region’s economy, that locals refer to it simply as la empresa — “the company.”

But the creation of the plantations came at a steep price. To make way for those industrial fields of palm trees, some 30,000 acres of rainforest were cut down, a swath of destruction that one Indigenous leader called an act of “eco-genocide.” Biologists from Chicago’s Field Museum have ranked the rugged mountains that rise west of the plantations “among the most diverse of all conservation areas in Peru.” When the museum’s team surveyed the region for three weeks in 2000, it tallied 1,600 species of plants, 71 species of mammals, and more than 500 species of birds. At least 28 species were new to science.

Ocho Sur’s Tibecocha oil palm plantation, Ucayali, Peru.

Since the 1960s, more than 13% of the original Amazonian rainforest has been cleared. Most of the destruction has been concentrated in Brazil, but Peru is second on the list. If the destruction continues, Thomas Lovejoy, a former biodiversity advisor to the World Bank, has argued that the Amazon could reach a tipping point and become too hot, dry, and fire-prone to remain a rainforest. Without the carbon-absorbing capacity of the Amazon, the world would face increasing temperatures and melting the ice caps, making cities as far away as Mumbai virtually unlivable.

Seeking to be a model of sustainable development, Ocho Sur has signed pacts with local communities to conserve the native ecosystem, and its polished English-language website features a slideshow of anteaters, sloths, and monkeys. The company has replaced its trucks and tractors with mules and water buffalo and has vowed not to expand its operations into standing forest. Over the past two years, Ocho Sur says, it has spent $3 million maintaining roads and building schools and medical clinics.

When the company’s CEO, Michael Spoor, who joined Ocho Sur in 2019, talks about the company’s accomplishments, he draws a sharp line between the Ocho Sur Group and whoever it was who first staked a claim in the virgin territory. “We came to Peru in 2016 and bought two farms in Ucayali at a public auction,” he has said. “All that we have done, we have done without deforesting anything.”

Documents I obtained from a criminal investigation into Ocho Sur — along with an exclusive trove of internal company emails, bank records, and spreadsheets covering eight years of plantation operations — tell a more complex story about the role of the company’s founders in the original destruction of the rainforest. At its heart is an American businessman named Dennis Melka, who a Peruvian prosecutor has claimed is the ringleader of a “criminal organization” that passed mature plantations from one company his investors had bankrolled, United Oils, onto a second, Ocho Sur. After the transfer, I found, key personnel from United Oils remained in place — including Melka. Most importantly, prosecutors say that United Oils illegally cleared much of the plantation land, and that Ocho Sur, for all of its sustainable initiatives, is in many respects the same entity as its clear-cutting predecessor. Melka has not responded publicly to the prosecutors’ allegations and did not respond to requests for comment.

Ocho Sur’s links to deforestation have profound implications for businesses, consumers, and the environment — and what exactly counts as “sustainability” in the palm oil industry. The global market for palm oil, valued at more than $70 billion last year, is experiencing steady growth, driven by its use in products as varied as food, beverages, biofuels, and cosmetics. Last year, the European Union passed new regulations on deforestation that promised to be the strictest in the world. Companies like Ocho Sur are now racing to demonstrate that their plantations were not illegally deforested — or risk losing their share of the lucrative market. But it may not be that easy.

“Nearly everything they export has been illegally produced,” Julia Urrunaga, who leads research in Peru for a Washington, DC-based environmental organization, argues. “What needs to happen here is they need to be sanctioned, and they need to be ordered to reforest and leave.”

Michael Spoor at the Tibecocha plantation. He’s been Ocho Sur’s CEO since 2019.

In April, Michael Spoor invited me to spend a few days visiting Ocho Sur’s plantations and the surrounding communities. The company was losing buyers left and right. That month, PepsiCo, which had used Ocho Sur palm oil in its Cheetos and Doritos, became the latest global brand to be named in the media over the historic deforestation. Spoor was eager to tell his side of the story.

The company’s headquarters are on the fifth floor of the Wyndham hotel in the regional capital of Pucallpa, a city of 300,000 on the banks of the Ucayali River. When I met Spoor in the lobby one morning, he was wearing what passes for executive attire in these parts: a loose nylon shirt, khaki pants, and hiking boots. He looked more like a tourist heading off to hike the ruins of Machu Picchu than the head of a palm oil empire.

The son of a Protestant minister in Iowa, Spoor earned a degree in civil engineering before working for Exxon and leading companies that recycled spent oils and other industrial waste. One of his operations, NewStream, which Spoor ran from 2008 to 2014, was accused by the Massachusetts attorney general of illegally dumping wastewater tainted with lead, chromium, and other hazardous chemicals into a municipal treatment facility that flows into the Ten Mile River. In April 2014, Spoor signed a consent decree on behalf of NewStream to settle the case and the company paid a fine; he has denied that NewStream released any hazardous waste. Two months later, he headed to Latin America. His first stop was Mexico, to run another waste recycler. Then, in 2019, he joined Ocho Sur to oversee a different kind of cleanup.

Before accepting the position, Spoor visited the plantations with one of Ocho Sur’s shareholders. He marveled at the efficiency of the African oil palm, which can produce five times as much edible oil per acre as corn or soy. Every 10 days, each tree develops a 50-pound cluster of fruits oozing with thick, red oil. They will keep producing for the next 20 years. The catch is that oil palm can be profitably grown only within 10 degrees of the equator, a region that overlaps with the planet’s most biodiverse ecosystems.

As environmental activists raised the alarm about the palm oil industry’s toll on the tropical forests of Southeast Asia two decades ago, Unilever, the world’s largest buyer of palm oil, teamed up with the World Wildlife Fund and other parties to establish the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil. The roundtable launched a program in 2007 that certifies growers whose plantations are not on recently deforested or contested lands. Only a fifth of palm oil sold across the globe was certified by 2022. Spoor’s mission was to get Ocho Sur’s crop certified as deforestation-free, but exactly what that means depends on when you start the clock.

Spoor and I headed out of Pucallpa in a four-wheel-drive truck driven by Krassimir Doldourov, a chain-smoking Bulgarian who oversees the plantation’s road maintenance work. After an hour, Doldourov swung onto a dirt road with tire-swallowing holes. We passed abandoned farms, cattle pastures, and stray dogs, but not much forest. Finally, Doldourov maneuvered the truck down the scoured bank of a large, brown river, a tributary to the Ucayali, and onto the platform of Ocho Sur’s pontoon-style ferry, powered by two outboard motors.

On the other side of the river, we passed a series of signs Spoor had installed when he took the job. “We work in harmony with nature,” read one. “We protect wildlife,” read another. “We conserve forests,” read a third.

Julia Urrunaga, who leads research in Peru for the Environmental Investigation Agency, says of Ocho Sur, “They need to be ordered to reforest and leave.”

As Spoor pointed out, most deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon today comes at the hands of small-scale farmers, and he wanted to convince me that industrial agriculture, which had deepened climate impacts elsewhere, could achieve the opposite here. Ocho Sur is the largest formal employer in the Department of Ucayali and accounts for about half of its exports, meaning that it provides economic opportunities to thousands of people who might otherwise be clearing forest for cattle or short-lived crops like banana or cassava. Oil palm, as he rightly noted, can sequester more carbon than such annual crops, though studies have found it absorbs less than half that of a standing forest. “It’s a permanent crop that’s going to grow for decades and decades and decades,” he said.

“What is it that people are going to do here in the jungle?” Doldourov asked. “They are going to grow coca.”

In Spoor’s view, only sustained investment could lead to the cultivation of valuable crops like oil palm on all the degraded land we had passed. If not, he said, settlers will keep clearing primary forest and abandoning the spent land a few years later. Fighting this migratory agriculture was one of the goals of Peru’s National Plan to Promote Oil Palm, enacted in 2000, which helped attract the company’s investors to the region over a decade ago. “Those plantations, 20 years from now, will be the greenest areas in the whole zone,” Spoor said. “People are going to look back and go, ‘Wow, look at those two islands of green!’ and, in some weird way, that will have been the result of what we started.”

To dig deeper into the origins of Ocho Sur’s plantations, I flew north to the jungle city of Iquitos to meet with William Park, a self-described “eco-social entrepreneur” from Bronxville, New York. Over an açai bowl at the Dawn on the Amazon Café, a favorite spot for travelers and expats, Park relayed his life story. He had served in the Marine Corps and earned a biology degree in college, but a childhood meeting with the founder of the organic food company Arrowhead Mills shaped his unconventional path. After a job running sales for a hemp apparel company, he lit out for Peru, where he launched Eco Ola, an export business in Amazonian superfoods, with the goal of helping local communities develop sustainable economies from their native forests. Operating between two worlds — conservation and business — made him particularly suited to recognize what had unfolded here on the Amazon River back in June 2013.

One day, Park was sitting on this same patio when he heard troubling news from a friend who lived upriver in Tamshiyacu, an isolated village on the edge of an uninterrupted swath of rainforest that stretched for hundreds of miles. The region, which is believed to have the world’s greatest concentration of uncontacted Indigenous groups, is also home to several threatened species, including the bald-headed uakari monkey. “It’s a vitally important area,” Park said. Now, according to Park’s friend, a massive palm oil plantation was springing up in the area. Workers had been conducting surveys and slashing paths with machetes.

Oil palm fruits being processed at Ocho Sur’s mill in Ucayali. Every 10 days, each tree develops a 50-pound cluster of fruits oozing with thick, red oil.

Initially, Park was skeptical. He often heard rumors of new megaprojects, but they usually fell apart before they got off the ground or turned out to be scams. Tamshiyacu seemed too remote to be worth anyone’s while, he thought.

He was wrong. Before long, workers showed up there with two dozen bulldozers and excavators. They proceeded east, widening and grading a dirt road for some 6 miles until they reached their destination. “Clearcutting happening now, the neighboring communities are not happy,” Park wrote to an environmentalist he knew. “The name of the company and its international affiliations are not known but it is rumored to be a Malaysian company.”

His email eventually landed in the inbox of Matt Finer, a scientist then with the Center for International Environmental Law in Washington, DC. Finer hunted for satellite images to confirm the devastation, while other environmentalists followed a paper trail to figure out who was behind the operation. Julia Urrunaga, who works as a researcher with the Environmental Investigation Agency tracking deforestation in the region, discovered a network of companies recently registered in the region. First, she found “Plantaciones de Loreto” based in Iquitos, then “Plantaciones de Ucayali.” Ultimately, she unearthed more than two dozen interrelated companies. Like a series of nesting dolls, six of these companies were owned by two shell companies in the British Virgin Islands, which were in turn owned by a Cayman Islands-based company called United Oils Limited. This corporate labyrinth obscured the true shareholders and decision-makers, but one figure stood out in the records: Dennis Melka.

Workers at the Ocho Sur palm oil plantation.

In business records Urrunaga obtained and recently shared with me, Melka is the only one authorized by each of these entities to approve payments for “an unlimited amount.”

Melka, Urrunaga learned, was a venture capitalist who had made his name developing palm oil plantations on Borneo, but she couldn’t find much detail about his plans for Peru, or even what crops he planned to grow. Images online showed a sharply dressed man in his late 30s with a bald head and blue eyes.

Finer, meanwhile, got his hands on the first clear satellite images showing strips of bare, red earth in the forest as the Tamshiyacu plantation took shape. Finer notified a journalist at the local newspaper, La Región, and a photograph of the naked landscape ended up on the front page. “Where is the environmental prosecutor?” the paper asked.

They didn’t yet know that Melka’s clearing and planting was already further along in Ucayali.

When I first heard about Melka’s role in these events some years ago, I tried to talk to him in person at a conference in San Francisco. He was in his element, pitching investors, and looked relaxed in jeans and a blazer as he handed me his business card in a hotel banquet hall. He would be flying to Peru a few days later. When I started to ask about the deforestation allegations against him, his face grew tense, and he waved me away. “I created thousands of jobs in Peru,” he said. “Leave me alone.”

From what I learned without his cooperation, Melka grew up in Marin County, California, and his first job out of college was at Credit Suisse in New York. After postings in London and Prague, he found his niche in the free-market mecca of Singapore, where he set up his own venture capital fund in 2006.

In those days, palm oil was booming on Borneo, a 90-minute flight to the east. “When I started meeting the companies and talking to them, I realized this was a phenomenal business,” Melka later told a Singaporean publication. “That’s something I want to get into.”

His biggest problem was that most available land on Borneo and other parts of Indonesia and Malaysia was controlled by Indigenous people or held in state forestry concessions. “Without special connections within the government, you won’t be able to secure this land,” a former Melka employee told me. Melka soon made those connections through a business partner, Graeme Iain Brown, whose father-in-law, according to an industry report, was a former Indonesian cabinet minister.

In 2009, Melka and his partners founded a company called Asian Plantations that obtained 50,000 acres of rainforest through what the company called “non-competitive” negotiations based on “long standing local relationships.” They proceeded to clear-cut their land and plant oil palm, according to satellite analyses conducted by the Environmental Investigation Agency. Six years later, as a member of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, they sold that operation to Felda Global Ventures, the third-largest palm oil company in the world, for almost $200 million. (Brown told me the notions that they had deforested any land or benefitted from family connections were “totally false.”)

Malaysia and Indonesia dominated global palm oil production at the time, but usable land was predicted to run out by the end of the decade and Melka was already on the hunt for new territory. Company emails show that he reached out to government officials in the newly created country of South Sudan and in Myanmar, which was just opening for business after emerging from a military dictatorship. But Peru topped his list.

Under President Alan García, Peru was welcoming foreign investors with open arms. Not only was García’s government offering sweetheart deals to foreign investors under its National Plan to Promote Oil Palm, but the country had more than 3 million acres suitable for oil palm. “Tax free at all levels!” Melka raved in an email to a London-based investment advisor. “Labor costs at US$11.50 per day. . . !” And, unlike in much of Southeast Asia, Peru allowed foreigners to own plantations outright. Palm oil, as he put it in his pitch, was “the most profitable crop that humans can grow outside of narcotics.”

It was more than a clever line.

Over the past 30 years, the rise of the palm oil industry in Peru has been directly stimulated by the United Nations and by the US Agency for International Development, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars there funding organizations that work to redirect coca farmers toward alternative crops. The first oil palm project, spearheaded by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in 1991, helped 270 families in Ucayali — largely refugees fleeing Shining Path guerillas — to establish 3,000 acres of oil palm along a highway near Pucallpa. The United States later financed a mill that would be run by a farmer cooperative.

Bruno Tangoa, chief of the Shambo Porvenir indigenous community in the Ucayali region, who grow palm oil for Ocho Sur on their land.

Rolf Wachholtz, an economist hired to evaluate one of the UN’s coca-eradication programs in 2010, praised it for improving the livelihoods of farmers but stressed that the UN needed to “focus more on environmental issues,” including deforestation.

Melka worked to take full advantage of the government aid. After making connections with diplomats and development agencies in multiple countries, he was even hired by USAID to provide a financier’s perspective on its work in Peru. “The Peruvian industry needs scale,” he said in a draft report he prepared in 2010. “All UN & USAID efforts should be focused on growing the productive resource and planting land.”

That November, he repeated the theme when he gave a talk in Lima organized by the UN, along with his business partner Bill Randall, the managing director of Pacific Agri Capital, a private equity firm that Melka founded in 2008 to fund his Malaysian plantations. Peru still had only 100,000 acres of palm under cultivation, and Melka was seeking to triple that number, according to a documentary film, “The King of Cocaland.” “He could impress anybody,” said Wachholtz, the UN evaluator, who was in the audience that day. “I found it crazy.”

The next day, Melka established the first eight Peruvian corporations for the plantations he wanted to develop — several of which, according to company records, would be acquired by his offshore holding company, United Oils. In a letter to local authorities, he wrote that his company had “extensive experience implementing the world’s best practices for environmental stewardship.”

During a meeting at the US Embassy in Lima, Melka was introduced to Alfredo Rivera Loarte, an agronomist at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. Melka promptly hired him as a consultant to oversee plantation operations. Rivera’s son Julio also came on board, as did another UN employee, Maria Teresa Trigoso. Doldourov, who drove Spoor and me around during my visit, had also worked at the UN, and built roads for United Oils before joining Ocho Sur.

Along with United Oils, Melka created United Cacao, having decided that the Tamshiyacu plantation to the north was better suited for that crop. Melka boasted of his UN ties every chance he got, writing in one pitch document that his senior managers collectively had several decades of experience with the organization.

Over the next three years, Melka raised $38 million for United Oils, according to the company’s shareholder records. Seed funds came from wealthy friends and friends of friends, some of whom told me they hadn’t fully appreciated what they were supporting.

“At some point I had started to learn more about orangutans and how they were being impacted by palm oil plantations” on Borneo, said one American investor, who was so ashamed by his participation that he asked me to withhold his name. “Oh, fuck,” he remembered thinking. “I just put my money with someone who is clearing forest in the Amazon.”

Melka quickly lined up more than a dozen investors. Early financers included Eric Varvel, then the CEO of Credit Suisse in the Asia-Pacific region and Steadfast Financial, a New York hedge fund with over $8 billion under management. At the company’s launch, the majority shareholder, with $10 million in equity, was a fund managed by Randall at Pacific Agri Capital. Randall’s fund received $3 million in capital from Anholt Services, a holding company that managed the $2 billion trust left behind by the Danish petroleum shipping magnate Torben Karlshoej, who founded Teekay. Though Anholt was an indirect investor in United Oils, the company received a privileged view of the company’s inner workings directly from Melka, according to a confidentiality agreement signed in September 2012.

In 2014, after being assured by local counsel that Melka was complying with Peruvian laws, Anholt joined with a core group of shareholders in providing United Oils with an additional $48 million through a private bond offering. “The business can support easily US$50m in debt or so (or more),” Melka assured a shareholder in an email. He had purchased $7 million of the company’s debt himself.

Melka told his shareholders that he was aiming for an initial public offering on either the Nasdaq or the London Stock Exchange in early 2016. “We’ve been meeting with mid-tier investment banks with positive feedback,” he wrote. “Granted i-banks will always whisper ‘sweet nothings’ in a client’s ear but at least there is interest.”

The next challenge was acquiring land for the plantations. Outside conservation areas and Indigenous communities, much of the Peruvian Amazon was in the hands of regional governments: Undivided, untitled, and unclaimed, it was controlled by a glacial bureaucracy in a country where government corruption was widespread.

With his fresh infusion of cash, Melka needed to either find large blocks of land that cash-strapped authorities in Ucayali were willing to swiftly title and sell to him directly, or buy individual properties from homesteaders — settlers who had obtained “certificates of possession” for untitled state lands by proving they had used it continuously for at least one year. According to Juan Luis Dammert Bello, a Peruvian geographer who has studied the growth of plantations in the Amazon, buying land from settlers is an attractive loophole for large developers who are restricted from clearing forest themselves.

Increasingly, shady intermediaries known as land traffickers were organizing peasants to invade untitled lands and then packaging and selling the properties for a profit. Sometimes, the “settlers” they enlisted never actually set foot on the land they were claiming: They just signed a document asserting that they had. Land-trafficking mafias, which operate in every region of Peru, have allowed developers to launder unclaimed swaths of rainforest into legal farmland. But experts say Melka’s enablers would be the first to carry it out on such a large scale.

“Melka is the game changer,” Dammert told me. “There is a before and an after.”

Melka used his UN ties to identify promising opportunities, according to “The King of Cocaland,” the documentary film about Hans-Jochen Wiese, the leader of the UN’s alternative development program in Peru. “I was supposed to designate land suitable for growing oil palms,” Pablo Ramírez Mori, an official with the regional agriculture authority in Ucayali told the filmmakers. Wiese, Ramírez said, “agreed to this or that zone.” Ramírez declined my request for an interview, saying it was “up to the authorities to follow the process”; Wiese, who died in an accident last year, had said his only goal in helping Melka was to help the Peruvian people.

In 2012, Melka acquired the 17,000-acre Tibecocha property, which included 222 parcels owned by an association of farmers. The association’s members had obtained certificates of possession years earlier under questionable circumstances, according to Dammert’s research. Apart from the extraction of high-value timber, Peruvian auditors found little evidence that they had cultivated it in a sustained way during their tenure, as required under the law. Most of them didn’t even live nearby. Dammert has called it a textbook example of “ghost titling,” where government officials create an association whose ranks they fill primarily with friends and relatives, hoping to profit from a subsequent sale. One sales contract, for a 109-acre parcel, indicates that Melka paid members of the group about $100 an acre.

Some 10 miles west of Tibecocha, Melka obtained a second property, Zanja Seca, by different means. This included 11,000 acres of state land in Ucayali that had already been surveyed and would soon be mass-titled in an effort to support a hundred or so subsistence farmers who had abandoned coca under a USAID-funded program. As soon as they received their certificates of possession, these farmers were hoping to plant cacao and oil palm. But after a massive fiscal decentralization, the Ucayali government was in need of cash. Ucayali authorities began dragging their feet in finalizing the homesteading paperwork, according to a legal complaint filed by the farmers. Then, to their great surprise, Melka purchased all 11,000 acres directly from the state for a steal: $25 an acre. (This month, three officials were sentenced to prison by an anti-corruption court for abuse of their positions in making that deal.)

With his lands in hand, Melka hired contractors to bulldoze the forest, burying the trees in trenches to improve the poor tropical soil. Analyses of satellite images conducted by the Peruvian government and environmental groups indicate that more than 90% of the Zanja Seca and Tibecocha properties were covered with primary or secondary forest at the time Melka took ownership. A million palm seeds were soon imported from Ecuador, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Ivory Coast. Worker camps, dining areas, and soccer fields were erected.

With Melka’s development of the plantations came new roads, followed by more homesteaders, speculators, and land traffickers, according to Dammert and other researchers. Oil palm spread in the uplands, rice crops in the peatlands. Land conflicts were on the rise. Melka’s two plantations were like a tightening vise, forcing communities in the middle to decide whether they would work with the company or against it.

The Tibecocha plantation stretches across 17,000 acres of what was once rainforest.

One of the communities trapped in this vise was Santa Clara de Uchunya, an Indigenous Shipibo village tucked away in a looping bend of the Aguaytía River, a tributary of the Ucayali. The Peruvian state granted the community about 540 acres in 1986. It wasn’t much, but they had only to cross the river to hunt wild game, gather native fruits, and harvest natural dyes for pottery and textiles they sold in local markets. Now, those forests were being cleared.

In an April 2015 letter to the director of the regional agriculture authority, the leaders of Santa Clara de Uchunya complained about their situation. “Our ancestral territory has been granted to Plantaciones de Pucallpa for the planting of oil palm,” they wrote. They requested a territorial expansion to make up for what was being lost. And to help their cause they summoned a prominent Indigenous activist, Washington Bolívar Díaz, a descendant of the neighboring Kakataibo people.

Bolívar had helped found a federation uniting nine Kakataibo communities and became an eloquent defender of Indigenous rights. He was immediately recognizable by his long hair and the beaded necklaces and headdresses he wore for meetings.

In May 2015, Bolivár filed a legal complaint with Peru’s Public Ministry, which has the power to launch criminal investigations. In it, he alleged that corrupt officials in the regional agriculture department had conspired with Melka’s company to steal and deforest their lands. He described visiting the Tibecocha property one morning that month with a contingent from Santa Clara de Uchunya as part of a government inspection. Bolívar said he was shocked to hear “crying baby monkeys” and “wounded animals looking for their mothers” as the sun beat down on a landscape that had become “a cemetery of trees.”

Melka tended to move fast, and that held true as he snapped up land. A new, stricter agricultural law had gone into force in Peru in 2012, but he didn’t wait for the government’s sign-off on an environmental management plan or obtain a “change of use” authorization to demonstrate the property’s suitability for growing crops, according to a 2022 audit by Peru’s comptroller general. Nor did he leave 30% of the property’s forest cover intact, as required under the law, the audit found. In some cases, the audit said, Melka had cleared property he did not even own, including several hundred acres of a state-owned timberland known as the Biabo Cordillera Azul, which abutted the Tibecocha lands.

None of that corner-cutting stopped Melka from working toward his dream of earning environmental plaudits for his palm oil. In October 2013, a United Oils subsidiary, Plantaciones de Pucallpa, joined the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil. Becoming a member was the first step toward getting the farm certified as 100% sustainable, which could mean a 2% to 7% premium in US and European markets. According to roundtable records, Melka’s subsidiary affirmed that it had not cleared any forest for Tibecocha. Melka prepared for certification by commissioning an art-deco-style poster showing a worker hoisting a palm seedling in front of a pale yellow sun. “United Oils,” it reads. “World’s Finest Palm Oil.”

An Ocho Sur weighing station. The company purchases oil palm fruits from local growers it has verified as deforestation-free.

Government investigators were now fanning out across Ucayali to interview hundreds of suspects and witnesses, as part of the criminal investigation that Bolívar’s complaint set off. They soon discovered Melka was on the verge of pulling off his most brazen scheme. To skirt the reputational risks of buying more land directly, his employees had begun selecting parcels for homesteaders to clear themselves, then lending them money for fertilizer and seedlings.

They would effectively become contract farmers for United Oils — in debt to the company from the moment they set foot on their new land.

Melka’s team had pitched the idea directly to farmers. “What is oil palm? Where will it take us?” one of the sons of Alfredo Rivera, the manager Melka hired after his decades with the United Nations, told a group gathered near Zanja Seca, according to a transcript by a researcher who attended the meeting. “Look, how I have credit cards like a casino! One for my wife, one for me, another one for my wife, and another one for me. That is what oil palm is.”

The farmers’ paperwork would get fast-tracked by the regional agriculture director, a man named Isaac Huamán Pérez who was a true believer in the promise of oil palm to alleviate poverty. “What alternatives do we have?” he asked me. Though he said he had never met Melka, he had longstanding ties to the United Oils team. He had known Alfredo Rivera since the 1990s. Huamán also told me he was “a great friend” of Ulises Saldaña Bardales, the former mayor of Pucallpa whom Melka had hired as institutional relations manager.

One of the farmers who seized the opportunity was Freddy Monteluiz Paima, who lives with his wife and two children in the community of Esperanza, a village on the left bank of the Aguaytía. When I arrived at his wooden home one May afternoon, he told me that he had no idea what oil palm was until Melka’s people arrived.

But the money sounded good, and he said he happily joined 16 other residents in 2015 who heeded the company’s call. They grabbed their chainsaws and piled onto several tuk tuks, heading out to a 500-acre plot of land that a local land trafficker had told them they could claim as their own to cultivate oil palm for the company. “That is where the conflict began,” he recalled.

Melka had sought to bring another 12,000 acres into cultivation through this sharecropping strategy. In fact, a total of 128 certificates of possession, totaling at least 7,000 acres, were rubber-stamped by the titling division overseen by Huamán, the regional agricultural director. Apart from Monteluiz and a few others from Esperanza, most of the other new landholders had no connection to the area; some went to relatives of Huamán or other officials in his office, according to a prosecutorial report I obtained. When Ucayali’s field-titling team visited the area in September 2015, the settlers could not even point out their own parcels. The property lines had all been drawn in a back office in Pucallpa, signed off on by the town’s mayor, who was working with the land trafficker. The process was so haphazard that some of the parcels Huamán approved were partway inside a lake.

The plan quickly backfired. On September 24, 2015, according to prosecutors’ records and interviews with participants, Bolívar and a few dozen residents of Santa Clara de Uchunya, outfitted with rusty machetes and rifles, headed out to the disputed land to confront the settlers. Monteluiz and his companions fled into the jungle, leaving behind their chainsaws.

By then Julia Urrunaga, of the Environmental Investigation Agency, had published the first detailed report on Melka’s modus operandi in Malaysian Borneo and Peru, arguing that a failure to prosecute him would be “to expose Peru’s national forest patrimony to rampant illegality and ultimately deforestation.”

“The cost is simply too high, the victims too many, for Peru not to act,” she and her colleagues wrote.

Peruvian regulators had issued a stop-work order to the Zanja Seca plantation for failing to comply with environmental regulations; now they ordered work to halt on the Tibecocha plantation too. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil followed suit with its own stop-work order.

In a response to the roundtable, the company wrote, “Most of these lands had been degraded by the illegal cultivation of coca, and by other exploitations of the forest, such as illegal timber and migratory cultivation over 40 years.” As for the growing international controversy, Melka responded by lashing out. In one unsigned email to a Czech journalist, he called Bolívar “a total fraud” and warned the reporter to “cease and desist from attacking our company.”

For over a year, Melka was able to defy the stop-work orders and operate without consequence. He could not, however, operate without capital. The first revenue from palm oil sales wouldn’t arrive until the end of 2016, and he was so underfinanced, according to one investor, that he wasn’t spending enough to adequately fertilize the trees. “Bank accounts are empty,” Melka emailed his board. “Suppliers are physically protesting outside the office doors.”

That February, United Oils defaulted on a $5 million interest payment on its corporate bonds. The $48 million principal would be due in six months time. Melka wrote his shareholders to say that his attempts to obtain bridge financing had gone nowhere. United Oils was on the verge of insolvency, and Melka would soon be publicly named in a criminal investigation against the company and its collaborators.

The crisis pitted Melka’s investors against one another. Some shareholders stood to gain in a bankruptcy and some stood to lose, depending on how much of the company’s debt they held.

The company’s final balance sheet, dated March 2016, tallied the company’s assets at $77 million. If a foreclosure auction reaped offers in that ballpark, the surplus could pay back most of what the shareholders had put in, and then some.

But debt trumps equity, and Anholt, the lead creditor with more than a third of the debt, had oversight over any sale. That gave Bill Randall of Pacific Agri Capital grave concerns: Though Randall’s funds had been pivotal in the company’s early days, they had only purchased 6% of the company’s debt. Anholt, he warned in a May 11 memo, might try to “keep the price of the assets as low as possible and attract as little number of bidders for the assets as possible.”

Under Cayman Islands law, Anholt’s lawyer wrote back, creditors had no obligation to achieve the highest possible price. As for Melka, company balance sheets show that his stake in the plantations would remain around 15% after a sale. (Randall did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and Anholt referred all questions about its investment to Spoor.)

Advertisements soon appeared in the pages of El Peruano and The Jakarta Post inviting interested bidders to participate in a public auction of the plantations. On the auction’s final day, July 14, Anholt and the other bondholders acquired all of United Oils’ assets in exchange for forgiveness of their debt.

The new company’s name: Ocho Sur.

Corporate records indicate that 18 of the 19 shareholders in Ocho Sur funded entities that bankrolled Melka’s work clearing and planting of the rainforest between 2012 and 2014. With Melka and other key personnel from the early days remaining involved, the only truly new player was Amerra Capital Management, a New York private equity firm whose funds purchased $10 million of United Oils’ bonds.

According to Peruvian prosecutors, Amerra had been told in a due-diligence document that United Oils had “caused the deforestation of approximately 7,000 hectares.” Amerra’s managing partner, Craig Tashjian, declined to comment, but a person who worked on the portfolio told me the information they received on the legality of the plantations was inconclusive. “We looked at this so many times,” he said. “It’s not like the investors took it for granted that Melka was right.”

Álvaro Rodás Farro, the prosecutor specializing in organized crime who named Ocho Sur in the case against Melka, has argued that the transfer of the mature plantations was part of a criminal conspiracy in which Melka was the ringleader. He dubbed the maneuver “covert business succession.”

The company has robustly denied this claim. “Ocho Sur is not the continuation of any previous company,” the company wrote in February in response to a new report from the Environmental Investigation Agency. “It is incorrect and impossible to attribute to it any alleged actions that occurred before its existence.”

As for the tight-knit circle of environmentalists in Peru who had been tracking Melka for the last several years, they were in the dark during the 2016 transition.

Unless you had a budget for bodyguards — and Lucila Pautrat Oyarzún, the forest engineer who runs Kené, a tiny Peruvian environmental NGO, certainly didn’t — it was too dangerous to travel to Pucallpa at that time. Since 2010, at least 29 environmental defenders have been killed in the Peruvian Amazon. Pautrat instead monitored the situation from Lima, in a modest third-floor apartment where the shades were always drawn, messaging with government informants and managing undercover investigators.

It wasn’t until January 2017 that Pautrat first saw the name Ocho Sur in a document she obtained from the Peruvian business registry. Then she got a tip that Melka was still visiting Pucallpa, in his roles as a consultant and a member of the board. In fact, she learned, several key players — including Alfredo Rivera, Ulises Saldaña, and Krassimir Doldorouv — continued working their old jobs for the new company. Ocho Sur kept the same United Oils offices in what would become the Wyndham hotel. The signs were simply updated.

The campaigns against Ocho Sur — funded by what he called a “powerful, transnational ideological machine” with “limitless” cash — had cost the company millions in legal fees.

Michael Spoor

Pautrat believed that she was witnessing a greenwashing operation of epic proportions.

Soon, some of United Oils’ enablers, including Isaac Huamán, were sentenced to prison for obstruction of justice. But the plantations were receiving fresh investment; Amerra brought a crop consultant over from England, and the shareholders put their money into building a state-of-the-art mill.

Michael Spoor was hired in 2019 after being recommended by an old friend, Joseph Massoud, the managing director of Anholt. Spoor said the overlap in employment in the company was not “surprising or suspicious” given how few qualified professionals are available in the region.

One of his first acts after taking the company’s helm was to get rid of Melka. “I went to the board of directors, and I said, ‘I don’t think we have a chance of success if he remains associated with the project,’” Spoor told me. The company bought out Melka’s shares and ended his consulting contract.

Next, Spoor and the company’s lawyers worked to get the $2.5 million in fines the company owed to government agencies overturned. In order to get the land reclassified as farmland, they had to pay the state approximately $450,000 to cover harvest rights for the timber that Melka had chopped down. In any event, Spoor thought he was making progress toward resolving the outstanding claims against the company. Then, in 2022, Peru’s comptroller general released three audits, concluding that, despite the agency reversals Spoor had orchestrated, Ocho Sur’s plantations could never be brought into compliance with existing laws. Spoor took issue with the agency’s findings, saying the officials had “overstepped their legal competence.”

Spoor has little good to say about the environmentalists who have sought to hold his plantations accountable. The campaigns against Ocho Sur — funded by what he called a “powerful, transnational ideological machine” with “limitless” cash — had cost the company millions in legal fees. They had also led it to be blacklisted, he said, by some of the world’s largest food companies, including Nestlé and PepsiCo, and by such prominent commodities traders as Bunge and Louis Dreyfus.

In the past year, Ocho Sur and its supporters have participated in a slew of news coverage critical of environmental NGOs — what Peru’s right wing calls the “caviar mafia.” Willax Television, the Peruvian counterpart to Fox News, ran a story early this year claiming, without evidence, that Pautrat was hiding millions of dollars in an offshore account. One of Ocho Sur’s lawyers made a cameo.

“If I had this money,” Pautrat told me, “I would be living in Italy.” Kené’s annual budget is $160,000.

One day in Pucallpa, Spoor connected me to one of his trusted advisors, Álvaro Agurto Mazzini, a gregarious entrepreneur who has been promoting Ucayali’s economic development for over a decade. He wanted me to meet Ulises Saldaña, one of the employees whom Ocho Sur inherited from the Melka days and who now served as the community-relations manager.

Saldaña emerged from an open-air restaurant with two coworkers and a broad-shouldered man in blue jeans and a Henley shirt. This third man stood out because his hair was pulled into a high ponytail atop his shaven head. It was Washington Bolívar, the activist who had helped Ucayali’s Indigenous communities fight the palm oil plantations. Once Ocho Sur’s most outspoken enemy, he had become the company’s supporter.

“He knows that Ocho Sur is defending the truth,” Agurto said. “That the NGOs are shit.”

“The situation changes,” Bolívar said, “because what we want is to improve the quality of life of the people.” He now frequently appears in the media as an Indigenous voice lambasting NGOs.

Bolívar was not the only one who’d switched sides. In 2019, the state government granted Santa Clara de Uchunya a chunk of forest adjacent to Ocho Sur, which tripled the community’s size to 1,544 acres. After an election in January 2022, their new leader, Wilson Barbarán Soria, wrote prosecutors asking them to drop the community as an “aggrieved party” in the criminal case against the company, because it was now in “good relations” with Ocho Sur.

Saldaña arranged to take me to visit Santa Clara de Uchunya the following day. When we arrived, a group of residents were gathered under a metal canopy as a television blared. We found a quiet place to speak with Barbarán, the newly elected leader.

“We are not going to live like our parents had lived,” he told me. “We want to better ourselves.” He said his people now had the chance to obtain an education to become teachers, lawyers, and police officers.

In his view, Ocho Sur had helped make all this possible by providing benefits like a Starlink terminal, a new health post, and a better road. “Thanks to la empresa, we have a line of communication to the internet,” Barbarán said.

In turn, Santa Clara de Uchunya had signed a pact with Ocho Sur to preserve its newly acquired forests for the next 25 years. It was a critical final step for Ocho Sur in legalizing its plantations. Since Melka had failed to preserve 30% of the forest he’d purchased, as required under Peruvian law, Spoor needed to offset the deforestation by guaranteeing conservation elsewhere.

As Saldaña jumped in to explain that the conflict with the company had been blown out of proportion by the media, a woman emerged from the house next door and interrupted our conversation. “Señor, Ulises,” she said, “why do you deny it?” There was an awkward moment as Saldaña calmly ignored her, saying that the majority of the community fully supported Ocho Sur.

Luisa Mori Gonzáles at home in Santa Clara de Uchunya. She leads a group of 10 families who remain opposed to Ocho Sur.

I later learned that the woman was the daughter-in-law of a woman named Luisa Mori González, who heads an organization made up of the resistance — a group of 10 or so families who remained opposed to Ocho Sur and didn’t share Barbarán’s rosy assessment of the community’s prospects.

I found Mori in the back of the house, seated at a table near a wood fire stove, where a splayed possum was about to be cooked in a blackened pot. She expressed indignation about the pact the community had signed with the company, saying they were still a long way away from securing enough forest for their own future.

“Where are we going to work during the next 25 years? Where are we going to hunt animals like this?” she said, gesturing to the stove. Though the agreement with Ocho Sur allowed hunting and gathering in the forest, she said too many natural resources had already been lost. It was no longer possible, she said, to find the apacharama tree, whose bark was traditionally burned to ash and used in pottery.

“I am taking this position so as not to be tricked by the businessmen, the millionaire entities that are going to fool us with 1 kilo, 2 kilos of rice,” she said. At stake, she said, was the future of the community. “Life is not bought — life is borrowed,” she said. “Just as my ancestors left our territory for me, so I am going to leave it to my children and to my grandchildren.”

Later that day, Spoor and I met for lunch at a cabana with a palm-thatch roof overlooking the dark waters of Tibecocha Lake. It’s a lovely spot on the edge of the property where Spoor has brought many of his influential guests. As the company chef prepared us a meal of risotto and breaded arapaima, an Amazonian fish, we leaned against the railing, gazed out at the forest on the opposite bank.

He told me he was proud to have opened a new weigh station to purchase palm fruits from farms it has verified as deforestation-free. “It is literally a cash register for farmers,” Spoor said. “Farmers who used to grow coca leaves are happy to switch to palm oil.” Peru’s ministry of agriculture liked the idea enough to finance families seeking to grow oil palm for Ocho Sur and other local mills on previously degraded land. Diane Farrell, the US deputy undersecretary of international trade, even attended a launch event at Ocho Sur’s nursery.

As Spoor and I talked, I noticed a fresh clearing in the lakeside forest, where rice shoots were sprouting from the soggy soil. It had been leveled just six months earlier by farmers from Esperanza, who had once sought to grow oil palm for Melka. “It was a devastating surprise,” Spoor said. He had been hoping, he said, to conserve that land to add to the company’s offsets.

Since Melka’s arrival in 2010, the Ucayali region has experienced the highest rate of deforestation in Peru. In addition to the land-clearing on Tibecocha and Zanja Seca, one study documented 6,000 acres of forest destroyed from 2011 to 2016 by four communities that now grow oil palm on some of those lands for Ocho Sur. Coca farming, meanwhile, has increased by a factor of five. Researchers who have evaluated the impact of the USAID and UN eradication programs concluded that while they had produced some benefits, they sometimes pushed “marginalized coca growers into more precarious positions, often leading them to replant coca in more distant forests.”

A spokesperson for USAID told me that the agency now works to limit deforestation by helping small coffee and cacao growers increase production and that the US government “will continue to partner with and strengthen institutional capabilities of Peruvian agencies involved in counternarcotics efforts.” Candice Welsch, who heads the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in the Andean region, said the office’s strategies had evolved in the decade since Hans-Jochen Wiese was leading alternative development. In 2022, the UN approved a resolution prioritizing biodiversity protection in its development work. “We never advocate for monocultures,” Welsch said.

When I asked Spoor recently how Ocho Sur could ever escape the land-clearing its plantations were built upon, he challenged me to identify anyone in the region who was truly worse off because of it today. “Do you think 10 years from now, 20 years from now, people will say this is a tragedy?” he asked. “I’m puzzled by this ideology that wants to keep people in poverty.” He told me he hoped my story would focus on the “paradox of human progress” and show how “even amidst despair, seeds for a better future can take root.”

A mature oil palm in Shambo Porvenir.

For Ocho Sur, achieving that dream has meant erasing history. The company has vigorously challenged its inclusion in Rodás’ criminal case against Melka, filing a countersuit claiming that the prosecutor had overstepped his powers and engaged in “ideological persecution.” Rodás’ office told me formal charges were imminent.

But the real battle over the company’s future and the definition of deforestation has already shifted from the courts to the politicians.

In January, Peruvian lawmakers granted amnesty to landowners who, like Melka, had cleared their land without first obtaining the change-of-use authorization. Supporters of the new law have said it will help formalize the farming sector, but the move has been challenged in court on the grounds that it could worsen conflicts between settlers and Indigenous communities. Fighting in favor of the amnesty is a familiar name: Washington Bolívar. He is represented in these efforts by the law firm Estudio Ghersi, which is also defending Ocho Sur in the criminal case.

One of the biggest obstacles to Ocho Sur coming into full compliance with Peruvian law is its lack of an approved environmental management plan, but a separate regulation, enacted in June, gave companies across the Peruvian Amazon a chance to retroactively obtain the needed approvals.

A few months after my visit, the Amazon was engulfed by record wildfires that incinerated over a hundred million acres of rainforest. The forests of Ucayali were among those going up in flames. In a climate of impunity, farmers and land traffickers had set hundreds of fires to clear new land for crops. These fires, I was told by one human rights organization, had swept through part of Santa Clara de Uchunya’s new territory.

The firefighting crews had taken up residence in housing provided by Ocho Sur.

The European Union met the moment by voting last month to postpone its new deforestation regulations for a year.

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Rhinebeck Schools Encourage a New Pledge, “Wait Until Eighth,” to Keep Smart Phones Away from Teens Until High School

County still reliant on motel rooms to shelter homeless this winter

ITHACA, N.Y. — It’s been two weeks since Tompkins County opened its temporary winter homeless shelter in a converted bank in downtown Ithaca. In the shelter’s first week of operation, fewer than half the people seeking shelter county-wide were housed there.

The temporary facility is part of a state-mandated program called “Code Blue” that requires counties to provide shelter, no questions asked, on nights when the temperature dips below freezing. 

The newly opened facility is the result of a major last-minute effort to stand up Code Blue services after the county was unable to hire a non-profit organization to manage the program, as it had in the past.

Tompkins County Administrator Lisa Holmes said on average, about 38 people sought shelter under Code Blue per night — roughly equal to the same period last year. Of those people, between 7-15 people a night stayed in the shelter.

The rest were housed in motels, as they had been prior to the opening of the temporary shelter on Nov. 25.

County officials have said one of their goals for the Code Blue program this year was to shift away from usage of motel rooms, citing concerns over cost and safety. Officials have also expressed a desire to encourage people to get shelter via a separate program that requires participation in job training and addiction treatment, among other prerequisites.

In prior years, the non-profit that operated Code Blue chose to house people almost exclusively in motel rooms during the winter months.

The county’s approach to the Code Blue program is decidedly spartan compared to last year. The former bank is set up as a congregate shelter, where beds are laid out in an open room with little privacy. 

People staying there must check their belongings in plastic storage bins and cannot bring any bags into the main shelter. There are restrooms but no shower facilities, and there are strict limitations on who can enter the building and when.

Some advocates and elected officials have questioned whether the county’s “tough love” approach will dissuade people from seeking shelter from dangerously cold weather.

Last week, a man died sleeping outside, just one block away from the new emergency shelter. A county spokesperson could not confirm or deny if the man, Roland Hoyt, visited the shelter that night, but said that if he did, he would not have been turned away.

Tompkins County Department of Social Services Commissioner Kit Kephart said while housing people in motel rooms may be more compassionate, doing so comes with additional costs and risks.

“[One] challenge with hotels is that once the door closes, you don’t know if that person is safe,” Kephart said at a recent press event. “They might be using substances and overdose.”

The county likely will not be able to fully phase out the use of motels any time soon. Many traditional, congregate shelter facilities are not able to accommodate certain people, like families with children, people with certain disabilities and those convicted of certain crimes. 

Ultimately, Kephart said, the goal is to have people apply for shelter through the more rigorous application system that is in place year-round — known as Temporary Housing Assistance (THA) — rather than through Code Blue. 

Currently, the people who apply and qualify for shelter through THA are almost exclusively housed in motel rooms. The county’s only year-round homeless shelter shut its doors in November after the county was unable to renegotiate a contract renewal with its non-profit operator.

While day-to-day numbers vary, the number of people who got shelter through THA was roughly double that of those seeking shelter through the lower-barrier Code Blue program. Some 74 people received shelter through THA, including four children.

When people seek shelter through Code Blue, they do not need to meet requirements they’d ordinarily face during the rest of the year. Such requirements may include limits on income, sobriety or participation in addiction recovery counseling. People also need to show that they’ve exhausted all other options for housing. 

Some advocates have said the requirements can be difficult to navigate, even with assistance from a caseworker.

Kephart said that while the THA program has more hurdles, it provides more comprehensive assistance than Code Blue.

“There’s much greater services that go along with the THA sheltering than there are Code Blue,” Kephart said. “Code Blue [sheltering] is really a mechanism to keep people off the street and warm and to get them through the night, whereas THA is really about building people’s ability to get into permanent housing.”

If you anticipate you may need to access emergency shelter, you can find more information and resources here or by calling or texting 2-1-1. During normal business hours, visit the Department of Social Services at 320 W. State Street, Ithaca, NY. After 5 p.m., go directly to the shelter, located at 300 N. Tioga Street, Ithaca, N.Y.

New York State requires counties to provide shelter to anyone who asks when evening temperatures drop below 32 degrees Fahrenheit, regardless of disability status, income, sobriety or other factors.

The post County still reliant on motel rooms to shelter homeless this winter appeared first on The Ithaca Voice.

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

CLEVELAND, Miss. — Although she won a scholarship to Mississippi State University, two hours’ drive away, Shamya Jones couldn’t get there because she had a new baby and no car.

So she enrolled instead at a local community college, then transferred to the four-year campus closest to her home in the rural Mississippi Delta — Delta State University.

She planned to major in digital media arts, but before she could start, Delta State eliminated that major, along with 20 other degree programs, including history, English, chemistry and music .

“They’re cutting off so much, and teachers [are] leaving,” Jones said. “It’s like we’re not getting the help or benefits we need.” The cuts “take away from us, our education.”

That kind of frustration is growing. Rural Americans already have far less access to higher education than their counterparts in cities and suburbs. Now the comparatively few universities that serve rural students are eliminating large numbers of programs and majors, blaming plummeting enrollment and financial crises. Many rural private, nonprofit colleges are closing altogether.

“We are asking rural folks to accept a set of options that folks in cities and suburbs would never accept,” said Andrew Koricich, a professor of higher education at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. “It’s almost like, well, ‘This is what you get to learn, and this is how you get to learn it. And if you don’t like it, you can move.’ ”

When programs at rural colleges and universities are eliminated, “It’s not just, if this institution doesn’t do it, another one can pick up the slack,” Koricich said. “It’s that if this institution doesn’t do it, it just does not happen. It is not offered. It’s not an option.”

Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to Hechinger’s free biweekly higher education newsletter. Want to learn more about rural higher ed? Try the free biweekly Open Campus rural higher education newsletter.

While large-scale cuts to majors in the years during and since the Covid-19 pandemic have gotten some attention, what many have in common has been largely overlooked: They’re disproportionately happening at universities that serve rural students or are in largely rural states.

Rural-serving institutions are defined by the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges, which Koricich directs, as those that share such characteristics as being located in counties classified as rural and a certain distance from metropolitan areas.

SEE WHICH SCHOOLS ARE CUTTING MAJORS

Even some flagship universities that serve rural places are making big cuts. The most widely reported were at West Virginia University, which is eliminating 28 undergraduate and graduate majors and programs, including most foreign languages and graduate programs in math and public administration. The University of Montana is phasing out or has frozen more than 30 certificate, undergraduate and graduate degree programs and concentrations. A similar review is under way at branch campuses of Pennsylvania State University.

But most of the cuts have occurred at regional public universities, which get considerably less money from their states — about $1,100 less, per student, than flagships — even as they educate 70 percent of undergraduates who go to public four-year schools. These kinds of schools are also more likely than other kinds of institutions to enroll students from lower-income families and who are the first in their families to go to college.

St. Cloud State University in Minnesota is cutting 42 degree programs, for example, including criminal justice, gerontology, history, electrical and environmental engineering, economics and physics. The University of Alaska System scaled back more than 40, including earth sciences, geography and environmental resources and hospitality administration. Henderson State University in Arkansas dropped 25. Emporia State University in Kansas cut, merged or downgraded around 40 undergraduate and graduate majors, minors and concentrations.

The State University of New York at Fredonia is dropping 13 majors. SUNY Potsdam is cutting chemistry, physics, philosophy, French, Spanish and four other programs. The University of North Carolina Asheville is discontinuing religious studies, drama, philosophy and concentrations in French and German.

Related: In this shrinking Mississippi Delta county, getting a college degree means leaving home behind

Among the many other regional public universities that are dropping programs and majors are Missouri Western, Eastern Kentucky, Arkansas State, Dickinson State in North Dakota and the University of Nebraska at Kearney. North Dakota State University has proposed cuts to 14 programs; the university did not respond to questions about the status of that plan.

“Some institutions have no other options” than to do this, because of financial problems and plummeting enrollment, said Charles Welch, president and CEO of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and a former president of both Henderson State and the Arkansas State University System.

At Delta State, for instance, enrollment is down by nearly a quarter since 2014.

A drop in tuition revenue stemming from that decline created an $11 million hole in the university’s budget, President Daniel Ennis, told the campus last year. When Ennis got to Delta State, he also found the university was overestimating its revenue from facilities and merchandise.

“At a certain point there’s going to be less of everything — personnel, money, equipment and opportunities — because we have to right-size the budget,” Ennis said.

But the American Association of University Professors, which represents faculty, said in a report that administrators are exploiting these problems to close programs “as expeditiously as if colleges and universities were businesses whose CEOs suddenly decided to stop making widgets or shut down the steelworks.”

Many of the programs affected are in the humanities and languages, making those disciplines less available to rural students than they are to urban and suburban ones.

A banner hangs from a lamppost on the campus of the University of North Carolina Greensboro. The university is one of many that are cutting large numbers of programs and majors. Credit: Alycee Byrd for The Hechinger Report

These subjects “do much of the work of helping students dream beyond their realities,” said Michael Theune, who chairs the English Department at Illinois Wesleyan University, a private, nonprofit school that is also eliminating majors. “We are paring down the sense of the vastness of our world and the possibilities of university students to experience it differently.”

But Welch said states are often simply trying to reduce duplication among campuses in the same systems and compensate for having less financial support than flagship universities receive.

“The challenge that our institutions have is that they tend to be lower resourced than institutions in urban areas, or flagship institutions. They can’t rely on big endowments,” Welch said. The pandemic, he said, “threw a whole additional layer on top of what those institutions were already facing.”

Some rural-serving public universities and public universities in largely rural states have now undergone repeated rounds of cuts. Youngstown State University in Ohio, for instance, axed Italian, religious studies and other majors in 2021, then six more three years later. In all, more than 25 programs have now been eliminated there, many of them in the humanities.

The university points out that there were no students at all in 10 of those majors. But students and faculty say it was still important to offer them.

Owen Bertram, a senior theater studies major at Youngstown State University, which has eliminated more than 25 programs and majors. Bertram is about to graduate, but says he hears his classmates asking the questions, “Do I stay?” “Do I leave?” “Is it worth it?” Credit: Amy Morona for Open Campus

“It is easy to just write us off as, ‘Oh, well, do they really need that school?’ when there are so many other majors,” said Owen Bertram, a senior theater major whose program has so far escaped the cuts. “But I don’t think it’s that simple.”

Related: After its college closes, a rural community fights to keep a path to education open

His classmates who will be affected by the changes “are such creatives at heart, and they all came here because they loved what they were doing,” said Bertram, who is also student government representative for the university’s College of Creative Arts. He said it’s hard to watch these students struggling with the questions, “Do I stay?” “Do I leave?” “Is it worth it?”

For rural students, there are few other places to go. About 13 million people live in higher education “deserts,” the American Council on Education estimates, mostly in the Midwest and Great Plains, where the nearest university is beyond a reasonable commute away.

“It is creating a second class of people to say, ‘You pay your taxes just like everybody else does. You vote like everybody else does. But you just can’t have the same choices as everybody else, because there aren’t enough of you here,’” Koricich said.

“In a lot of rural places, the idea of choice is sort of a fiction. If you only have one option, you don’t really have choice.”

In many cases, this particularly affects low-income and Black students. At the University of North Carolina Greensboro, for example — another institution in a largely rural state, which is in the process of phasing out 20 degree programs, including anthropology and physics — more than half the students are low-income and 35 percent are Black, according to the university.

Holly Buroughs sits in front of the Jackson Library on the campus of the University of North Carolina Greensboro. A physics major, Buroughs started a petition protesting the elimination of 20 degree programs — including physics.
Azariah Journey is a second-year graduate student in history at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, which is cutting 20 degree programs. “Is a first-gen student like me going to come next year and not see the UNCG that I fell in love with and the opportunities I had?” she asks. Credit: Alycee Byrd for The Hechinger Report

“UNCG should be a place where anyone should be able to come and get an affordable education in whatever they want,” said Holly Buroughs, a physics major who started a petition protesting the cuts.

“Is a first-gen student like me going to come next year and not see the UNCG that I fell in love with and the opportunities I had?” asked Azariah Journey, a second-year graduate student in history who comes from a rural town in Kentucky.

Meanwhile, more than a dozen private, nonprofit universities and colleges in rural areas or that serve large proportions of rural students have closed outright since 2020; some of the rural private institutions that remain are also axing majors.

The proportion of rural high school graduates going to college at all is falling. Fifty-five percent enroll right after high school, down from 61 percent in 2016, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

Related: A community college promises a rural county it ‘hasn’t been left to die’

Dominick Bellipanni is one of the last remaining music students at Delta State as the department is being phased out. He received a scholarship, which he isn’t sure he would have gotten if his only options to study piano had been at the state’s larger, more competitive universities.

Bellipanni is from Indianola, a once-busy crossroad 30 minutes from the university, where he grew up hearing stories about businesses that once operated there but closed.

Dominick Bellipanni, a music major at Delta State University in Mississippi, standing in front of the music building. The university is phasing out its music program. Credit: Molly Minta for Open Campus

“Used to be, used to be, used to be,” he remembered people telling him.

Now he’s hearing that again.

His professors talk about how there used to be more music recitals, more scholarships, more money, said Bellipanni, who said he plans to leave the Mississippi Delta when he graduates.

“All you hear is, ‘We used to have this, because we used to have more students.’”

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

This story about rural college majors was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on strengthening local coverage of higher education. Reporters in the Open Campus Local Network who contributed: Mississippi Today’s Molly Minta, WUNC’s Brianna Atkinson and Signal Ohio’s Amy Morona. Sign up for Hechinger’s higher education newsletter. Listen to Hechinger’s higher education podcast.

Rural-serving public universities cutting degree programs

  • St. Cloud State University in Minnesota is cutting 42 degree programs, including criminal justice, gerontology, history, electrical and environmental engineering, economics and physics.
  • The University of Alaska System scaled back more than 40 programs, including earth sciences, hospitality administration and geography and environmental resources.
  • West Virginia University is eliminating 40 undergraduate and graduate majors and programs, including most foreign languages and graduate programs in math and public administration.
  • Henderson State University in Arkansas dropped 25 programs in disciplines including history, political science and biology.
  • Emporia State University in Kansas cut, merged or downgraded around 40 programs and majors in English, physics, history and chemistry, all language courses except Spanish and minors in French, German and journalism.
  • The University of Montana is phasing out, has frozen or has announced that it will closely monitor more than 30 certificate, undergraduate and graduate degree programs and concentrations.
  • Delta State University in Mississippi has eliminated 21 degree programs, including history, English, chemistry and music.
  • North Dakota State University announced plans to phase out 14 programs, including food safety and soil science, and has proposed getting rid of 10 more. The university did not respond to questions about the status of this process.
  • The State University of New York at Fredonia is dropping 13 degree programs, including sociology, philosophy, industrial management, French and Spanish.
  • The University of Nebraska at Kearney is cutting nine degree programs, including geography and recreation management.
  • SUNY Potsdam is eliminating chemistry, physics, philosophy, French, Spanish and four other degree programs.
  • The University of North Carolina Asheville is discontinuing degree programs in religious studies, drama, philosophy and classics, and concentrations in French and German.
  • Missouri Western State University eliminated majors, minors and concentrations in English, history, sociology, political science and other subjects.
  • Eastern Kentucky University shut down economics and other majors.
  • Arkansas State University has shed programs in multimedia journalism and music, a master’s degree in criminal justice and others.
  • Dickinson State University in North Dakota eliminated communication, information analytics, math, math education, music and political science, a university spokesperson confirmed.

Rural private colleges closing or cutting majors

In addition to rural-serving public universities and colleges, more than a dozen private colleges serving rural places have closed since 2020.

  • Chatfield College in Ohio
  • MacMurray College in Illinois
  • Nebraska Christian College
  • Marlboro and Goddard colleges in Vermont
  • Holy Family College in Wisconsin
  • Judson College in Alabama
  • Ohio Valley University in West Virginia
  • Lincoln College in Illinois
  • Marymount California University
  • Cazenovia and Wells colleges in New York State
  • Finlandia University in Michigan
  • Presentation College in South Dakota
  • Iowa Wesleyan University
  • Bacone College in Oklahoma lost its accreditation, filed for bankruptcy and stopped enrolling students

Many rural private institutions are also axing majors, including:

The post ‘Easy to just write us off’: Rural students’ choices shrink as colleges slash majors appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

What might happen if the Education Department were closed?

By now, you know about the endless speculation on whether the incoming Trump administration might close the U.S. Department of Education. It remains just that: speculation. Congress would have to be involved, and even a Senate and House controlled by the same party as President-elect Donald Trump would not necessarily go along with this idea.

However, in a statement about his nomination of Linda McMahon for education secretary, Trump underscored his campaign pledge to disband the department, saying, “We will send Education BACK TO THE STATES, and Linda will spearhead that effort.”

The mere specter of shuttering an agency that commands more than $200 billion has led parents, students, teachers, policy experts and politicians to wonder about (and in some cases plan for) the possible effects on their children and communities. Collectively, state and local governments spend far more on education than the federal government does. With federal dollars connected to many rules about how that money can be spent, however, the Education Department does play a significant role in how schools and colleges operate. Deleting the agency would not undo federal law providing money for students in rural places, with disabilities or who come from low-income families, but doling out that money and overseeing it could get messy.

This week, Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota introduced a bill to unwind the Education Department and spread its work across other federal agencies.

The Hechinger Report tried to answer some of the questions raised by the possible dismantling of the department, consulting experts and advocates on student loans, special education, financial aid, school lunch and beyond. 

Nothing is out of the realm of possibility, however complicated. A much smaller agency that guided Congress on science, the Office of Technology Assessment, simply had its budget set to zero back in 1995 — and just like that, it was gone. The Education Department, created in 1979, reaches far wider and deeper, into essentially every community nationwide. Its impact is felt not so much in what students are learning every day but whether their schools can pay for the special equipment or training that might be essential for some students with disabilities; if they can pay to have an extra teacher to work with struggling readers; whether a student from a low-income household can get federal grant money to pay for college; and whether a college student with a federally backed student loan might ever have it forgiven.

Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.

At the same time, many education programs, as well as some that touch schools, exist entirely outside of the Education Department. It doesn’t oversee the education of students whose parents live on military bases, for example, or students who attend school on Native American reservations. (Those programs are managed within the Defense and Interior departments, respectively.)

The Education Department also doesn’t run the school lunch or breakfast programs, which are overseen by the Agriculture Department. The nation’s biggest child care programs for low-income families? Those aren’t part of the Education Department’s job, either; they are managed by the Department of Health and Human Services.

We tried to explain all of that here. What questions do you have that we didn’t answer? Write to us: editor@hechingerreport.org. We will update this list.

Early education

What would happen to federal early education programs?

The most well-known and biggest federal early childhood programs, Head Start and the Child Care Development Block Grant, are not a part of the Education Department — they’re administered by the Department of Health and Human Services. So they would not be directly affected by an Education Department shutdown.

But Education does oversee and pay for some smaller early learning programs and early childhood research. For example, the Preschool Development Grant Birth through Five, provides funding for state early learning programs and is overseen jointly with HHS. Other programs, such as Promise Neighborhoods and Full Service Community Schools, also address the early years and family support.

The Department of Education also is home to several research centers that focus on young children, many of which conduct long-term students or research aimed at improving the lives of infants and toddlers with disabilities. Those programs, if they were not cut, would have to move to another agency.

K12 Education

What happens to Title I and other money that the department doles out?

Closing the Department of Education would not undo it. Title I — a program established in 1965 that provides money to schools with large numbers of low-income students — is part of federal law. If the Education Department were to be eliminated, the most likely scenario is that Title I money would flow through another federal agency. Major cuts to the program are unlikely.

While Trump and others close to him have said they would like to cut federal education funding streams like Title I, any cuts would need to go through Congress — where that funding has broad political support among both Republicans and Democrats. That is especially true for Title I: Almost all school districts in the country get a share of that money.

So it’s unlikely Title I “would ever see an actual cut, and certainly not a substantial cut,” said Nora Gordon, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. She said even members of Congress who are hostile to other federal programs that allocate funds for low-income families would be reluctant to defund Title I.

Related: What education could look like under Trump and Vance

Do I have to worry about special education?

There would be bureaucratic upheaval if another agency took on oversight of education of students with disabilities, but the special education law itself, and the money allotted to it, would not change without an act of Congress.

The law now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was passed in 1975, four years before the Education Department was formed. At that time, it was administered by the department of Health, Education and Welfare (now known as the Health and Human Services department).

About 7.5 million children are now served under the IDEA. For fiscal 2024, the department oversaw about $14 billion in funding for school-aged children, with smaller pots of money going to infants, toddlers, and other special education-related programs.

Through the Education Department, the government sets rules for states, districts and schools about how children should be identified for possible disabilities and how families, parents and schools should work together to create a child’s “individualized education program,” a menu of the supports and services they should receive.

Does this mean everyone will get a private school voucher?      

Regardless of the future of the Department of Education, Trump could, with the support of Congress, take some action to expand school choice nationwide. Republicans in their official party platform made universal school choice, in every state, a top priority. The idea didn’t go far under Trump’s first education secretary, but political headwinds may make it easier for him to achieve some policy wins this time.

During the first Trump administration, then-Secretary Betsy DeVos pushed to expand school choice, largely through charter schools and private school vouchers. Congress, however, ignored her budget request in 2018 for $400 million to fund their expansion. A year later, DeVos pitched $5 billion in tax credits for individuals and businesses that contribute to scholarships for students to attend private schools. Trump resurrected the idea in early 2020, and again as an option for parents frustrated with prolonged school closures during the pandemic. A bill to create the tax credits died in committee.

As part of the agenda for his next term, Trump has pledged to allow families with a 529 college savings plan to spend up to $10,000 a year per child on homeschool education. The GOP also wants to expand education savings accounts, or ESAs — a polarizing program that allows families to pull their children out of public school and use a portion of state per-pupil funding on private school tuition, homeschool supplies and other educational costs. At least a dozen states since 2020 have created ESA programs, with some offering universal enrollment regardless of a family’s income level and with few restrictions on taxpayer money being spent on religious education.

Rural opposition has stalled such legislation in states like Texas, and voters in November rejected school choice measures on ballots in three states. But in recent years, the Supreme Court has expanded the religious rights of parents and sectarian schools. Trump’s next education secretary is also likely to have an easier time clearing school choice legislation with Republican control of both the House and Senate.

Related: School choice may have its biggest moment yet

What would happen to school lunch, and free and reduced-price school lunches?

Nothing. Eliminating the Department of Education would likely have little or no impact on the school lunch program. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, not the Education Department, runs the vast National School Lunch Program, although the data collected by schools about the number of students who qualify for low-cost or no-cost breakfast and lunch powers a lot of the education agency’s work. About 30 million kids participate in the program on a given school day — including students at public charter schools and some nonprofit private schools.

During Trump’s first term, as part of a collection of pandemic-related measures, he approved providing school lunches to all students, regardless of their household income. Several states have since kept up that effort since the pandemic option expired, offering free meals to all students no matter their family earnings. And a growing number of schools in other states now offer meals to all students if a large enough number qualify for free lunches. Earlier this year, a Republican budget proposal, called Fiscal Sanity to Save America, said that option should be eliminated.

Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, created by the conservative Heritage Foundation, but that document also calls for reining in spending on school meals. “Federal school meals increasingly resemble entitlement programs that have strayed far from their original objective and represent an example of the ever-expanding federal footprint in local school operations.”

What happens to education research and the tracking of students’ academic achievement?

The work of the Institute of Education Sciences, the research and statistics arm of the Education Department, is mandated by law and would not disappear overnight even if the agency were abolished. IES collects and aggregates data from more than 19,000 school districts around the country to give the public a national picture of our decentralized educational system, from counting the number of students and dollars spent on schools to tracking class sizes and years teachers stay in the job. IES disburses millions of dollars each year to researchers to develop new ideas for improving instruction, and it evaluates programs afterward. One-fourth of IES’s $800 million a year budget goes to administering the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, which is an important yardstick for measuring academic achievement among fourth and eighth graders.

All three of these functions — statistics collection, research and assessment — theoretically could be transferred to other agencies, according to former IES director Mark Schneider, whom Trump appointed to a six-year term during the former president’s first term. Education research could shift to the National Science Foundation, which already awards grants for educational research along with the Department of Education. The statistics unit, also known as the National Center for Education Statistics, could be folded into the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is the main statistical agency of the federal government. A new home for the NAEP test is less obvious.

Schneider said that talk of eliminating the department may invite more scrutiny into what its research arm does. Advocates could try to capitalize on this scrutiny as an opportunity to lobby for an overhaul of the research division, he said.

Higher Education

What happens to student loans if the Department of Education is abolished?

Student debt won’t disappear even if the Education Department does. The federal agency contracts with the loan servicers that manage nearly $2 trillion in student loan debt and oversees the programs that can lead to loans being forgiven, such as for teachers and people who work in public health. “The terms and conditions of the loans don’t change just because the agency changes,” said Betsy Mayotte, president of the Institute of Student Loan Advisors, which offers advice and guidance on student loans to borrowers. If there is no Education Department, it’s likely that student loan oversight and debt collection would shift to the Treasury Department. “I expect that at least initially the servicers wouldn’t even change.”
Aside from that,Republicans in Congress, who will soon control both chambers, have proposed a College Cost Reduction Act, which would increase the amount of federal Pell grants for third- and fourth-year college students pursuing bachelor’s degrees in fields considered to be in high demand. It would also simplify the student loan repayment process and end certain kinds of loans available to parents, graduate students and low-income learners. It would hold colleges and universities, rather than taxpayers, responsible for loans on which their students have defaulted.

The Biden administration’s relentless and embattled attempts to forgive some student loan debt are almost certain to come to an abrupt end. Many have been blocked by courts anyway, and Trump and his allies have characterized them as an unfair transfer of wealth from people who didn’t go to college to people who did.

What about grants and aid for paying for college, and the FAFSA?

Even without an Education Department, it is unlikely that the Pell grant — which most low-income students use to help pay for college — would disappear. Congress controls who is eligible for Pell, so the Trump administration couldn’t decide on its own to change or take away the grant. Pell has long had bipartisan support in Congress, and it is very unlikely that a Republican-controlled Congress would get rid of a grant that is relied on by so many constituents.

House Republicans have, however, proposed changes to eligibility and the award amount. A version of the College Cost Reduction Act has a chance of passing since Republicans will soon control Congress. The bill would peg the Pell award to the median cost of a college program, instead of basing it on the particular cost of the program or college where a student is enrolled. In practice, this means students enrolled in a program that is more expensive than average, whether due to the price set by the institution or due to a higher cost of living in that area, could see their award reduced. In addition, the determination of financial need would no longer take into account a family farm where the family resides or a family-owned small business that has fewer than 100 employees.

McMahon, Trump’s nominee for education secretary, also supports changes to Pell. She wrote an opinion piece in September promoting what’s known as “short-term Pell.” Right now, for the most part, Pell can be used only to pay for education programs that last 15 weeks or more (about one semester). McMahon supports a bill, which has some bipartisan support, that would allow federal aid dollars to pay for short-term programs that train students for particular jobs.

Critics worry such an expansion could take Pell dollars away from traditional programs. They note many short-term programs (for example, welder and HVAC programs) are already Pell-eligible and that shorter programs, including many run by for-profit companies, often don’t have good results. A recent report showed no improvement in employment for students who used short-term Pell.

While last year’s FAFSA rollout was broadly criticized, there seems to be no appetite to further complicate students’ ability to access federal financial aid. In fact, the College Cost Reduction Act includes a requirement that would simplify and standardize college financial aid offers so that students have an easier time understanding and comparing them.

Related: How four universities graduate their low-income students at much higher rates than average

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

The post What might happen if the Education Department were closed? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Elderly driver crashes car into poll site, briefly disrupts voting

ITHACA, N.Y. — An elderly woman accidentally drove her small car through the window of the poll site at the Linderman Creek apartment complex around noon Tuesday. There were no injuries reported and none of the election equipment was affected. Officials moved the polling site to a different community room located elsewhere on the property.

Voting resumed at 1:57 p.m., just 87 minutes after the incident was reported. Voters who still need to cast their ballot can do so at 101 Conifer Circle, downhill from the original polling center. 

County officials said they “can confirm no malicious intent related to the accident.”

Ithaca Fire Department (IFD) Chief James Wheal said that while no one was harmed, the structural damage to the building made it unsafe for voting.

“That dispatch made us nervous,” Wheal said. “It sounds troubling on a day like this.”

Wheal said IFD received the initial call at 12:30 p.m. 

“Fortunately, it’s early in the day, so there’s time for people to figure out their plans,” Wheal said. 

If anyone was prevented by from voting by the incident, they can go request an affidavit ballot, said Tompkins County spokesperson, Dominick Recckio.

The driver, Debbie Strite, said she accidentally crashed her car while trying to park. She said she intends to vote for Kamala Harris.

Strite said protecting women’s rights and their securing access to abortion were the biggest issues driving her to the polls. She accidentally stepped on the gas instead of the brakes and ended up driving through polls instead, she said.

Dave Smith, a poll worker, was walking through the polling site when he heard a big crash.

“I saw glass coming down on the car inside the building,” Smith said. “Everything as I watched was being spread across the room.”

The debris did not hit the voting machines, he said.

After a brief examination, first responders deemed Strite in good health. She was taken home by a Sheriff’s Deputy. 

“I think the other guy is not good,” Strite said before leaving the poll site. “Anything [Harris] does, I think will be better than him.”

Correction 5:15 p.m.: A previous version of this story misspelled the word “brakes.”

The post Elderly driver crashes car into poll site, briefly disrupts voting appeared first on The Ithaca Voice.

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