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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BURLINGTON, Vt. — In his first year in graduate school at the University of Vermont, John Ball lived in a dark studio apartment in the basement of a building three miles from the campus.

With utilities, it cost him $1,500 a month — more than the national median rent.

“I just needed a place, and I was, like, OK, I’ll live anywhere, basically,” said Ball, who is working toward a doctorate in cellular, molecular and biomedical sciences. “Trying to find an apartment was a nightmare.”

Ball spoke as he was moving for the fall semester of his second year into a brand-new apartment in the first-ever housing to be built by the university for graduate students.

It’s one of a small but growing number of efforts by higher education institutions to address what has become, along with food, the fastest-growing cost of college: a place to live.

“I don’t think [students and their families] think it’s going to be as expensive as it is,” Ball’s father, Steve, said as he helped his son lug furniture and boxes into his new home, where monthly rents begin at $1,059 for a room in a three-bedroom apartment with two bathrooms. Housing prices at and near colleges, he said, have gotten “absolutely ridiculous. It’s insane.”

Like UVM, other institutions are building housing for graduate students who have previously been largely left to fend for themselves. Some, including the universities of California at Berkeley and Santa Cruz, are adding large numbers of undergraduate dorms. A few, like the University of Texas at Austin, are offering scholarships for housing.

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“When you think of an average family thinking of where to send their son or daughter, that rent-plus-food piece is getting to be a bigger chunk,” said Jay Hartzell, president of UT Austin.

Though students and their families often focus on tuition, the cost of housing is going up much faster. Annual increases in college and university tuition have been shrinking, new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond finds. Tuition actually fell, when adjusted for inflation, between 2020 and 2023, the most recent year for which the figure is available, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

But the cost of room and board rose by 14 percent more than inflation between 2010 and 2020, the College Board reports. At public universities, in-state students now pay more for room and board than for tuition.

Undergraduates living off campus face an average of $11,464 a year in food and housing costs, which the National Center for Education Statistics groups together. Room and board for undergraduates who live in dorms on campus is an even higher $12,917.

“Tuition hasn’t been growing, but housing costs are growing,” said Jason Cohn, research associate at the Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute. “The college affordability conversation should really be moving to living expenses.”

The cost of housing isn’t just a problem for college students. Rents in general are up by 33 percent since the start of the pandemic, the real estate company Zillow says. But many cities with a preponderance of college students have higher-than-average monthly rents, including New York ($3,650 a month), Boston ($3,295) and Santa Cruz, California ($3,400).

Rents for student housing at 175 universities tracked by the real estate data analytics firm RealPage rose by 5 percent in the year ending in April .

“Many university towns and cities are experiencing the same housing issues as the rest of the country: escalating rent prices and higher costs,” said Mary DeNiro, executive director of the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International, or ACUHO-I.

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

In Burlington, monthly rent is $2,200 a month, according to Zillow — higher than the median, thanks in large part to an influx of highly paid remote workers who moved here during the pandemic and pushed housing prices up. Vermont is now tied for fourth place with Kentucky among states that have the lowest proportion of available rental units, behind only Massachusetts, Maine and New Jersey, according to the Census Bureau.

“There were no vacancies” in Burlington, said Alexis Roberson, a third-year doctoral student from Los Angeles who was also moving into UVM’s new graduate residence; even though financial aid completely covers her tuition, she almost deferred her admission for a year because of the cost of housing. “It was kind of a shock.”

Balloons in UVM green and gold welcomed new tenants to the 62-unit building, called Catamount Run, which the university developed in partnership with a private company. Managers handed out keys, salty snacks and Gatorade to arriving students as workers with noisy power tools on high ladders made finishing touches. The building is already fully rented.

“There was a fair demand from graduate students” for university-supplied housing, said Richard Cate, vice president for finance and administration at UVM, which hopes to nearly double its graduate enrollment.

Undergraduates are also struggling to pay for living expenses. Half of what it costs to attend a community college now goes to room and board, according to the College Board. So does 44 percent of the total amount that in-state students spend to go to public universities and nearly a quarter of what students at private, nonprofit colleges pay.

Related: Universities and colleges that need to fill seats start offering a helping hand to student-parents

Because of these costs, even in places where federal, state and institutional grants cover much of a student’s tuition, or tuition is free, “that doesn’t mean that college is necessarily affordable,” said Cohn, of the Urban Institute.

More than 40 percent of students who get enough grant aid that they pay zero in tuition and fees have to take out student loans to cover housing and other costs, the Urban Institute found.

“There’s just a portfolio of challenges that are facing these students,” said Justin Ortagus, director of the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Florida and co-author of another study that found high living expenses are among the reasons students drop out. “And additional financial burdens, led by housing costs and paying rent, are at the top of that list.”

A fixation on tuition, however, means that housing costs can come as a surprise, Ortagus said. “It doesn’t always go into the mental calculus of these students and their families.”

One result is that students who can’t afford to live on or near a particular campus may enroll but then drop out, forgo college altogether or choose somewhere less desirable but cheaper, he said.

“It can blindside a lot of people. Students will end up in college and then realize that they’re rent burdened,” said Henry Taylor-Goalby, a senior at the University of California San Diego and student housing officer of the University of California Student Association.

California has among the most expensive housing in the country. A study for the state assembly found that nearly 20 percent of students at community colleges, 10 percent at California State University campuses and 5 percent at the University of California schools had experienced homelessness.

“When we’re talking about things that matter to us, it’s, ‘Oh my god, I have to start thinking about where I’m going to live next year,’ ” Taylor-Goalby said.

“Housing is a human necessity, and yet it’s the thing people try to compromise on just to get an education.”

Berkeley, where the surrounding median monthly rent is $2,685, is in the midst of doubling its number of dorm rooms, with the goal of guaranteeing two years of on-campus housing for undergraduate students, and the University of California, Santa Cruz (median monthly rent off campus: $3,400) plans to increase its bed count by 40 percent by 2030. Both initiatives have been at least partly delayed by lawsuits from neighbors, but Berkeley was cleared by the state Supreme Court in June to move ahead, and a California state law passed last year is aimed at making it harder to block new student housing.

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

Yet neighborhood opposition, zoning restrictions and the escalating price of labor and materials continue to be obstacles to new dorms. While UVM’s partnership with a private developer made the public university’s graduate housing possible, for instance, it suspended plans to add housing for 545 more undergraduates on campus because of the cost.

Some universities are using other strategies. In addition to renovating a building with 778 beds for undergraduates and developing a 784-bed residence complex for graduate students, which opens this fall — its first new graduate housing in 40 years, Hartzell, the president, said — UT Austin last year started putting aside $5.8 million annually for on-campus housing scholarships of up to $1,800 per year to 3,500 students.

“I expect you’re going to see more of this on urban campuses like ours, especially where those communities are booming like Austin is,” said Hartzell.

Median monthly rent in Austin is $2,250.

Vanderbilt University in Nashville opened a new housing complex last year for graduate and professional students, but this year also increased stipends for its nearly 1,900 doctoral students, citing the city’s high cost of living; median monthly rent there is $2,299.

In Seattle (median monthly rent: $2,184), Cornish College of the Arts has started soliciting alumni contributions toward a fund to help its undergraduates pay for on-campus housing. The college previously used money from its financial aid budget to offer housing scholarships, but the demand has grown so much that more is needed, said Sharron Starling, its director of admissions. Thirty percent of students qualify for the assistance, Starling said.

Cornish is in a neighborhood where well-paid tech workers have pushed up the cost of housing, and “students can’t come if they don’t have a place to live,” she said. “That’s it, first and foremost.”

Still, the price of on-campus housing — which is firmly under universities’ and colleges’ control — is rising even faster than the cost of off-campus housing.

DeNiro, of the housing officers’ association, said this is partly because of demand for more services, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic.

“In some cases that means more staff to help with issues around mental health, anxiety, providing more ways to develop community,” she said. “For many students, they just demand more out of their college housing experience, and their parents demand more.”

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

On-campus housing has other advantages, DeNiro noted, since students only have to pay for it during the academic year; that saves money when compared to the 12-month leases often required for off-campus apartments. Utilities and trash removal are included in the price, living close to classes avoids commuting costs and students who live on campus are slightly less likely to drop out, an ACUHO-I survey found.

“Proximity matters,” said Hartzell, at UT Austin. “If we chase students out to the periphery of the city [to find affordable housing], they won’t have the same experience. Some students might decide they need to build in a part-time job.” Spending time getting to and from the campus “just makes it that much harder to devote their time to their studies.”

At Vanderbilt, a study that led to more graduate housing being built found that 30 percent of graduate students lived five miles or more away from the campus.

But as colleges’ revenue from tuition thins, according to the credit-rating company Fitch, it’s revenue from housing, dining and other auxiliary services is also increasingly important to them; University of Tennessee, Knoxville head of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Robert Kelchen estimates that most small public colleges and universities depend on these sources for between 10 and 25 percent of what they take in.

In the competition for a dwindling supply of students, universities and colleges are also adding high-end amenities to campus dorms, which residents complain increase the cost.

The new graduate housing units at Vanderbilt, for instance, come with fully equipped granite-counter kitchens, “hardwood-inspired” floors, washers, dryers, a 24-hour fitness center, a coffee shop, a grocery store and an outdoor barbecue area; monthly rents range from $1,405 for a studio to $2,906 for two bedrooms with two bathrooms. A Vanderbilt spokeswoman declined to provide anyone from the university to talk about its housing.

Those kinds of expensive extras are showing up in many places, said Taylor-Goalby, the California student association housing delegate.

“There’s been a ballooning of amenities,” he said. “We get apartment-style rooms. We get full kitchens. We need student representation for people to be saying we don’t need all those things.”

Meanwhile, demand for campus housing typically exceeds supply. Dorms on public university campuses can accommodate only a third of full-time undergraduates, the Urban Institute says, and at private, nonprofit colleges, a little more than half. And first-year students often don’t have a choice; they’re required to live in the dorms. These things mean that colleges will likely fill on-campus rooms no matter what they charge.

The effect of housing costs on people’s willingness to pay for college may lead more institutions to try to moderate the price of it, however, said Ortagus, the higher education researcher.

“There’s concerns about enrollment, and I do think that is driving colleges paying attention to these dynamics,” he said.

There’s one more important pressure at play: Students are driving up housing costs for everybody else, and communities are urging universities to help them fix the problem.

In high-priced Boston, nearly 38,000 students live off campus, the city estimates, “placing significant pressure on the rental market” in the neighborhoods where they’re concentrated. Officials are pushing universities and colleges to build more on-campus dorms.

“If we pull our students out of the market and put them in our housing, there’s now more affordable housing in the rest of the city,” said Hartzell, in Austin. “By adding supply we’re actually helping the entire city.”

Students said they’d just be grateful for reasonably affordable places to live.

Housing “was a big part of my budget-making process,” said Sophia Mokhtarian, a first-year UVM medical student from San Diego, who was wheeling her luggage into Catamount Run. “This new housing definitely was a pro.”

This story about the college housing costs 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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Editor’s note: This story contains racist and crude language.

ITHACA, N.Y. — Ithaca City School District (ICSD) superintendent Luvelle Brown and Board of Education President Sean Eversley Bradwell, who are both Black, said they received racist and threatening messages in the days after an anti-affirmative action group filed a lawsuit against the district.

The lawsuit, which garnered national news attention, alleges discrimination by the school district against white students. The lawsuit cites a poster advertising the school’s annual Students of Color United Summit, which invited students of color to attend. The school district later sent an email stating that all students were welcome to attend the event.

Bradwell first mentioned the threats during a school board meeting on June 11, which took place after a tense final budget hearing. 

“Some of those stories were picked up by various organizations, which resulted in significant amounts of threats to the superintendent, as well as myself,” Bradwell said. “Death threats, vulgar language, voicemails, things that would make one wonder why would you volunteer for a position [on the school board] if you’re going to have your family or your lives threatened.”

During the June 11 meeting, Bradwell said district officials had been in contact with local law enforcement regarding the threats.

In an email, Brown provided two audio recordings of voicemail messages sent in the days since May 28, when news of the lawsuit broke.

The messages appear to have been sent shortly after the story was picked up by Fox News and other national outlets on June 5, extracted metadata shows.

The caller on the first voicemail calls Brown a “racist-ass fucking n*gger.” The man also uses multiple slurs in reference to Black, Asian and gay students.

The man, who described himself only as a “concerned citizen,” threatened to have ICSD “shut the fuck down” and said Brown will be “out of a fucking job” if he has “anything to do with this.”

The caller who left the second message called Brown “another racist Negro” and made fun of his name before delivering a slew of insulting stereotypes about Black people.

Brown also cited the threatening messages as part of his rationale for not renewing his contract as superintendent beyond June 2028.

Brown described his work heading the district as “physically taxing, communally taxing, emotionally taxing, and personally taxing” adding that he had received “multiple messages of hate and threats in response to leadership decisions made with the best intentions” within the past few weeks.

The messages also came amid heightened scrutiny and local criticism of the superintendent and board members during this spring’s tumultuous school budget debate. The messages Brown provided, however, do not explicitly mention the budget and it is unclear if the two callers were local.

The Ithaca Voice filed a public records request to obtain any other threatening messages received by district personnel and school board members in the days since the lawsuit. ICSD is still working to fulfill the request.

The post Ithaca school officials receive racist messages after anti-affirmative action lawsuit appeared first on The Ithaca Voice.

LEXINGTON, Neb. — Naidid Aguilera was feeling stuck.

Stuck at her job at a Tyson meatpacking plant. Stuck in a central Nebraska town after emigrating from Mexico roughly 15 years earlier with her husband. Instead of working in her dream role as an elementary school teacher, she spent her days hauling cow organs for inspection. 

Then she learned about one group’s effort to expand access to high-quality child care here, specifically for families who speak little English, through free training and help navigating state licensing laws. The classes would be entirely in Spanish, eliminating one of the single-biggest hurdles for expanding care in this town of 11,000, where 2 out of 3 residents are Hispanic. For years, it had just one Spanish-speaking child care provider.

As Aguilera dialed the phone to sign up for classes, she recalled feeling overcome with emotion because she had believed her goal of working with children was left back in Mexico.

“The only question they really asked me was why I would want to pursue a child care license,” Aguilera said through a Spanish interpreter. “My response was, ‘I want to do more than where I’m at right now at Tyson and move further in life. I’m looking for another opportunity.’”

Through the local advocacy of several organizations, the community will have nine Spanish-speaking providers by this summer — including Aguilera. Although Lexington still has a waiting list of 550 children in need of care, the town’s child care gap has been cut by nearly 100 children with the addition of new providers, according to local data. 

A nonprofit group called Communities for Kids, partnering with other organizations, began training providers after community surveys revealed the town’s need for Spanish-language child care. The group, founded in 2017, helps develop quality early care and education programs in Nebraska communities that don’t have enough of them.

“If you can’t communicate, or your culture is different, trusting a white English-speaking woman with your child — that’s a lot of trust,” said Shonna Werth, Communities for Kids’ assistant vice president of early childhood programs.

At the time, with only one bilingual provider, most Hispanic families were shuffling their children among neighbors or family members for care. It was the only way for Spanish-speaking parents to communicate with a provider directly.

Some parents employed by the local meatpacking plants worked split shifts to ensure their children were with someone they could communicate with.

“You wonder, ‘Where are those kids? What experiences are they having?’” Werth said. 

Related: Our biweekly Early Childhood newsletter highlights innovative solutions to the obstacles facing the youngest students. Subscribe for free. 

There’s a lack of Spanish-speaking or bilingual early childhood education providers across the nation, said Tania Villarroel, early childhood senior policy analyst for UnidosUS, a Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization. One of the barriers to growing the child care workforce is the process of getting certified.

“It’s a resource to speak Spanish, but if you don’t have good English skills, it can also be really hard to get those degrees,” Villarroel said. “It benefits Latino children to have a Latino provider because they have the same lived experience, same heritage — it’s easier for them to connect to families, to get more family engagement.”

Recent research from the National Research Center on Hispanic Children & Families found that Latino families across the United States consider multiple factors when trying to find child care, like schedule flexibility and whether the provider offers culturally responsive care for their children.

“Some [places] serve only Hispanic children, and they have Hispanic providers. But then other sites have no Hispanic children, and probably no Hispanic representation. So we see this sort of segregation going on,” said Julia Mendez, a researcher for the center. “There’s the families who are seeking the care and the families can’t find what they need, because it’s not available.”

Mendez said it’s common for home-based care to be of lower quality for Hispanic families, becauseif their providers don’t speak English, they have fewer opportunities for professional development or credentialing.

Boosting the quality of Lexington’s child care — not just its accessibility — was crucial, Werth said. She joined two local child care advocates, sisters Stephanie and Maricela Novoa, to implement the free training. Maricela Novoa is an early learning bilingual specialist providing assistance to early childhood educators through the Nebraska Department of Education. Stephanie Novoa, a realtor, also works with Communities for Kids and volunteers as a special advocate with the courts.

The training in Lexington began in 2021 with a program called the “Professional Learning Series,” which included 55 hours of classes on the licensing process or required skills for high-quality early childhood education. The series was taught exclusively in English – and did not attract Spanish-speakers.

Another series followed in 2022, and this time, there was a professional interpreter and headsets available for translation. The class was held every Tuesday night from August through November at the local YMCA, with free child care and food available.

“We were kind of building that foundation of [making] sure there are things that if they want to get licensed, this will be useful for them if and when they ever get there,” Werth said. “Like, let’s not just do training for the sake of training, but training that has a dual purpose. They’re building their education and their skills so that they can have better interactions with the kids they are caring for or as parents, because not all of them are on that trajectory of being a child care provider.”

Related: Our child care system gives many moms a draconian choice: Quality child care or a career

Werth said when the classes first opened, the goal was to reach five or six participants. Twenty showed up.

“Midway through the classes, participants would bring a neighbor or a friend. And so we had to close the class because it was a small room,” said Maricela Novoa. “It was just that word of mouth, that trust piece — this is safe, this is good. This is something that you’ll value.”

Next was a 10-week business class in 2023, followed by courses on parenting and safety that were provided in English with a Spanish interpreter.

Aguilera said she remembers many long days last spring working at the meatpacking plant, then attending classes in the evening.

“The classes were one after another, but at the same time that was nice because it was just all over at once,” Aguilera said. “I was tired, but it was very worth it.”

Werth said it was slow-going to license the nine women, especially when they ran into language barriers.

“Stephanie and I met with six or eight participants one night. They all brought their licensing packets, and we sat down with them to help them just try to work through that. And [it] took hours to do, which should not be the case,” Werth said.

It took several hours more to help participants navigate an online class. Most of them had little experience working with technology other than their phones. Werth recalled the library closing around them one evening as they helped participants use computers for the first time.

Maricela Novoa said the lack of Spanish materials or Spanish-speaking representatives is a constant hurdle for future providers. Even now, a Lexington resident could call a state agency for help but not get anyone on the phone who can speak Spanish.

“It does get tiring, because you’re the only person in the room saying, ‘Hey, is this available in Spanish?’ when there’s a new resource available,” Maricela Novoa said. 

Mendez, of the National Research Center on Hispanic Children & Families, said her organization calls these obstacles “administrative burden.”

“It’s true across the board that any barrier, like a language barrier, can keep people out,” Mendez said. “With administrative burden, you have to learn what the resources are, but first, you have to know about them. And then you have to navigate the systems to try to figure out how to get the credential or the support that you’re looking for.”

Related: In-home child care could be solution for rural working parents

Just a few years ago, Miriam Guedes was the only Spanish-speaking child care provider in Lexington. She started a daycare on her own after being a paraprofessional at the public school district’s preschool for 19 years.

She obtained her license by herself — an uphill battle, she said, with all the paperwork in English — but soon wanted to do more, although she didn’t know how. 

Guedes, whose business is attached to her house, said people started knocking on her door asking if she had room for more kids, but she could take only eight at a time. 

“People were coming in, asking for more and more and more,” she said.

She learned about the free training being offered through Communities for Kids and signed up. The training gave her business experience and the skills to expand her certification, allowing her to care for 12 children at once at her center, “Blooming Daycare.” Now she’s a mentor to Aguilera and the other women who are getting licenses.

Aguilera opened her own child care business, “El Niño Del Tambor Daycare” early this spring. The name means “little drummer boy.” It’s in her basement, recently renovated to include cribs, small chairs and a table, organizers filled with colorful books and crafts, an alphabet rug and more. Her new license is taped to a marker board at the entrance.

She enrolled her first child mid-March and now has four children in her care, in addition to two of her own children. Aguilera said she could easily see herself hiring an assistant and taking on more children in the near future.

It’s something that changed her life for the better, she said.

“When I first started taking in kids, I kind of broke down a little bit because it came full circle,” Aguilera said. “I didn’t have the opportunity to stay home with my kids. And now I get to do this. I’m so happy.”

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

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ITHACA, N.Y.  — A local authority approved millions of dollars of additional tax breaks across three projects without holding what appears to be legally required public hearings.

The Tompkins County Industrial Development Agency (IDA), which has the power to authorize tax breaks for developers, is required by state law to hold a public hearing before its seven-member board of directors votes on whether to provide a project with more than $100,000 of financial assistance.

The requirement to hold a public hearing applies whether the vote is on an initial tax break agreement or an amendment to an agreement, according to the New York State Authorities Budget Office (ABO), the state agency charged with promoting accountability and transparency in Industrial Development Agencies. 

While public hearings are consistently held before a vote on an initial agreement, the IDA’s board members appear to have bypassed the public hearing requirement before approving an additional tax break at least five times, according to a review The Ithaca Voice conducted of the 62 active projects listed on the Tompkins County IDA’s website. 

The five additional tax breaks issued without a public hearing total about $2.9 million.

In a statement, Heather McDaniel, the president of the nonprofit Ithaca Area Economic Development which administers the IDA, disagreed that the IDA was supposed to hold a public hearing in order to increase previously authorized tax incentive agreements. 

“Currently, State regulations do not explicitly require an additional public hearing.” McDaniel said in a statement.

She said the Tompkins County IDA “prides itself on providing incentives that support projects that are in the public interest. We are open and transparent with our processes.”

McDaniel’s statement appears to conflict with that of state officials, as well as legal experts and a former IDA board member.

An ABO spokesperson said in an email that IDAs “must hold a public hearing prior to providing any financial assistance to any project, including an amendment of financial assistance to an existing project, in an amount of more than $100,000.”

The spokesperson said the ABO’s comment is not intended to be a “formal legal opinion” since the agency is not authorized to issue them.

An article written by three attorneys and published in August 2020 in Tax Notes, a publication that serves tax professionals, affirms the public hearing requirement.

In December 2019, then-IDA member Jennifer Tavares also acknowledged the public hearing requirement. Minutes from an IDA meeting that month show Tavares said a “new public hearing would be triggered if there was a change in benefits to the project larger than $100,000,” while she discussed amending a tax incentive agreement with other board members.

The Aurora, a 141-unit market-rate housing development on Ithaca’s Northside, represents the most recent case where the IDA failed to hold what appears to be a legally required public hearing. The project received an amendment in May to the original tax break it was given in November 2020. As a result, the tax breaks supporting the project increased from about $6.6 million to $7.4 million.

IDAs have the authority to give out local property, sales and mortgage tax exemptions in the pursuit of economic development. In order to receive a tax break, project developers need to attest that they could not complete the project without the incentive they applied for. They must also submit financial documentation.

The Aurora is the last project to complete the three-phase Carpenter Park development, also known as Cayuga Park, near the GreenStar Food Co-op along North Meadow Street. 

Park Grove Realty, the Rochester-based development company behind the project, has already constructed the Cayuga Health medical office facility and a 42-unit affordable housing building as a part of the Carpenter Park site.

Representatives from Park Grove told the IDA’s Board of Directors at their May 8 meeting that “economic headwinds” in the post-COVID economy made it necessary to receive a larger tax break in order to construct the Aurora.

The Aurora’s price tag jumped from a projected $47.1 million to $60.4 million, according to Park Grove. The developers said they also planned to reduce the number of units in the building from 161 to 141 to reduce costs, according to information submitted to the Tompkins County IDA. 

Tim Crilly, director of development for Park Grove Realty, urged the Tompkins County IDA’s board of directors to approve the additional tax break during the May 8 meeting. 

“We’re before you today, we want to get in the ground, we want to get this thing done as quickly as possible,” Crilly said.

In the past, the IDA has held public hearings when it amends a tax break agreement for a project if it involves a significant change to the building’s use or overall size.

Some IDA board members voiced concern that a public hearing would push back construction by another month, and that they wanted to see the long-delayed Aurora project completed. 

IDA board member John Guttridge, noted the Aurora couldn’t finalize its financing agreements until the IDA approved the increase to the tax break agreement. During the meeting, Guttridge asked if there was any legal requirement for a public hearing. 

The IDA’s legal counsel, Russell Gaenzel, told board members there was no “bright-line rule” in state law that would require a public hearing to increase the tax break the developers of the Aurora were seeking. 

The IDA could hold a public hearing for the Aurora project if the board desired, he said, but the decision should be driven by the developers’ time constraints.

The IDA’s board of directors ultimately decided not to hold the hearing.

Construction began on the Aurora job site just days after the project received the increase in its tax break from the IDA. 

While public hearings may see poor attendance — and IDA members have no obligation to act on specific recommendations from the public — they are commonly recognized as an important opportunity for public engagement and act as another layer of transparency.

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The students were the last to know.

On April 29 – just a week before finals – Wells College announced that it would close. The last-minute decision by the 156-year-old liberal arts college in upstate New York sent students rushing to find new colleges for the fall. And it threw newly accepted students, who had already put down deposits, into a frantic scramble to see if the colleges they had turned down would take them back. Faculty members, having missed the academic hiring cycle, were left facing unemployment.

But there is mounting evidence that Wells administrators knew for months that the college would close, even as they made public assurances that all was well.

Wells quietly made student transfer arrangements with another college last fall, according to Wells’ accreditor. And Wells agreed earlier this year to convert the land-use zoning for the campus from institutional to mixed use, which would allow the buildings and land to be used, and sold, for non-educational purposes.

Wells joins a parade of colleges that have been closing this year at a rate of one per week, as enrollment dips and pandemic-era aid dries up. The process is never easy, throwing students’ lives into chaos, ending employment for faculty in a field where jobs are scarce and, in some cases, adding extreme stress to small-town economies. But abrupt closures put this process on steroids.

“What concerns me here is that there’s no accountability,” said Anna Anderson, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center and a Wells alum. “The students were given just days to pack up and leave … if an institution that’s this respected can do something that’s so horrible, what’s to stop others from doing the same thing?”

Wells has struggled with enrollment declines and budget crunches for years, but recently administrators had assured faculty and local leaders that it was in fine shape.

In late February, two months before announcing the closure, Wells president Jonathan Gibralter wrote to the board of trustees of the Village of Aurora, where the college is located, that rumors about the college shutting its doors were unfounded.

“Let me assure you that we are accepting enrollment deposits for the fall semester — our fall to spring retention rate for our students is higher than it has been in several years,” Gibralter wrote in a statement. “We are hiring staff and we are developing an operating budget for the next fiscal year. We are full steam ahead.”

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

One week before the college’s board of trustees voted to close, Wells posted a message on its Facebook account encouraging new students to visit the college for an “admitted students’ day.”

Faculty members say they were never told that the college was in danger of closing, even though they asked regularly about the state of the college at monthly faculty meetings.

“When the budget was presented to us, if you looked at the numbers, it was pretty grim,” said Laura McClusky, who has been a professor at Wells for 23 years. “But if you listen to the narrative, it was, ‘We’re doing great. Retention is up, the number of applications is up.’”

Even as administrators were assuring faculty that the college was in good shape, Wells was already making arrangements as early as last November with other institutions for them to become what’s known as a “teach-out” partner. That designation signals to a student that an accreditor has approved a college as an appropriate place to continue their education when their current college closes.

“There seems to be evidence that they were preparing at that time,” said Nicole Biever, who is the chief of staff at Wells’ accreditor, Middle States Commission on Higher Education.

At the same time, the Village of Aurora’s ad hoc zoning committee was working alongside Wells administrators on a proposal that would convert most of the college’s campus from institutional to mixed-use zoning. The move would allow the use, and sale, of buildings for purposes not related to the college. The village board of trustees voted in favor of the change in March and has submitted the plan to the state for approval.

Wells officials acknowledged its previous agreements with other institutions.

“The College, over the course of many months, prepared itself should the Board make the difficult decision to close the institution,” Kristopher LaGreca, Wells vice president of marketing and communications, said in an email. “The Board and senior leadership worked out confidential agreements with other institutions to support our students in the event of a closure.”

In response to questions about the re-zoning, LaGreca said that Wells had “continuously looked to divest in non-academic properties in order to bridge gaps in annual budgets.”

He added that the decision to close was “centered on what was best for our students, our prospective students, and their families.”

“Wells College faces significant financial challenges,” Gibralter wrote in a letter announcing the closure. “We conducted a comprehensive review of the institution’s financial health and future sustainability, including an independent analysis, which has led to the necessary conclusion of closure.”

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

The college told faculty earlier this semester that there was a new articulation agreement with the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, which would bring in online students. But the deal collapsed and with it went the hope of an enrollment boost.

Members of the board of trustees declined, or didn’t respond to, requests for comment about why the decision was so last-minute, but the vote was not unanimous. The board has agreed to meet with faculty to explain the timeline next week, according to two faculty members with knowledge of the planned meeting.

Abrupt closures can make it much more difficult for students to earn a degree.

“You often see these domino precipitous closures, where students will go to a school that closes and then they’ll be funneled into the school that most wants their money,” said Jessica Ranucci, a supervising attorney for the New York Legal Assistance Group. “The school that most wants their money is a school that’s teetering on the brink, and then that school closes.”

Unfortunately, being an accreditor-approved teach-out college doesn’t necessarily mean an institution will stay open. Middle States had designated Wells as a teach-out school for Cazenovia College and Medaille University, both of which closed last year – forcing students who had just arrived at Wells in the fall to find a new college for the second time.

“To take on students from other places that have closed when you yourself might be closing is just horrible,” said Meghan McCune, a Wells alum and former trustee who is also a professor at Northern Michigan University. “Not to mention, faculty and staff. It’s really hard to find other positions, and it’s completely out of the academic cycle. There’s no way that most people are going to be able to find something. All the hiring is done now.”

Students were stunned by the announcement.

“You don’t think your school is going to close down when they’ve given you a lottery number to choose your room for next year. They’ve let you pick out your classes for next year. They’ve let you order your gowns for next year,” said Olive Blair, 20, who just finished her junior year and is the class president. “It was a shock to say the least.”

A paper proposal for a fall conference was due two days after the announcement was made and she spent the week scrambling to find another college where her credits as an art history major would transfer, not to mention ensuring that the finances would work.

Last year, 82 percent of Wells’ roughly 350 students had federal student loans and close to half received Pell grants, federal aid that goes to low-income students.

“It doesn’t make sense to me that they had to wait until the week before finals,” said Blair. “Did you just realize we don’t have enough money?  You can’t be that dysfunctional. Something must have been known prior to this.”

People with an inside track were well aware of the problems.

“It was the elephant in the room. We’ve been talking about it for 15 years,” said Bonnie Bennett, who was mayor of Aurora from 2010 until 2022. “But whenever anyone raised the issue of Wells closing, they would deny it. They would say, ‘You’re anti-Wells.’”

Related: Getting a college degree was their dream. Then their school suddenly closed.

Wells was put on probation in 2019 by Middle States, requiring that, among other things, it show evidence of “adequate fiscal and human resources” and proper financial planning. The following year, in the height of the pandemic, a letter was sent to alumni saying that the college could close if it didn’t raise money quickly. The fundraising appeal worked – alumni donated millions of dollars. The college also received $3.5 million between 2020 and 2022 from pandemic-related federal funds.

In light of the college’s financial struggles, some faculty members and students are upset about the money spent on President Gibralter’s compensation. In fiscal year 2019, just after Wells was put on probation, Gibraltar collected more than $78,000 in bonuses, bringing his total compensation to more than $386,000, according to federal tax filings. The following year, as the college was begging for donations, he took in more than $345,000 and in fiscal year 2021, the last year for which figures are available, his total compensation was more than $368,000. (The college declined to comment.)

CNYCentral first reported Gibralter’s bonuses.

Middle States took Wells off probation in the summer of 2021, despite enrollment having cratered to about 330 that year from about 420 the previous one.

An independent audit of the college in 2022 also showed that it had been dipping into its restricted endowment earnings. And it was discounting its tuition at an average of 70 percent in the 2021-22 academic year.

When asked why Wells was taken off probation, given its ongoing financial troubles, Biever said Middle States continued to monitor Wells over the next four years, sending teams to visit the college.

“In addition, the Commission required the institution to submit reports including financial information multiple times,” Biever said in an email. “When institutions submit reports, the Commission examines the evidence submitted by institutions and considers that information as part of the multi-level decision making process.”

After Wells announced it was closing, Middle States put it back on probation, citing the abrupt closure and its failure to make plans to ensure the well-being of its students. But the move will have no impact on current students or faculty.

Middle States has yet to approve any of two dozen teach-out colleges announced by Wells even though the college held a campus fair on May 3 with some of the institutions.

The New York State Department of Education said it wasn’t notified about the closure until the weekend before it was announced.

State Sen. Rachel May introduced a bill last week that would require colleges to provide notice of closure at least a year in advance, host public meetings about the decision and provide students with teach-out agreements at least six months in advance.

Students from closed schools usually don’t make it to graduation. Fewer than half of students at closed colleges end up transferring to other institutions, according to a 2022 study, and more than half of those who did transfer left their new college without graduating.

Faculty and staff are scrambling to find jobs, but at this point it’s almost impossible for them to find an academic position for next year. They will lose their health insurance coverage at the end of June (they have an option to pay a COBRA to extend the coverage). The college has said it doesn’t have the money to give them severance payments, although some faculty are wondering about the millions of dollars in assets in the property the college is sitting on.

“Someone would ask about the financial health of the college at every faculty meeting, but they never said there was any danger of closing,” said Andrew Hunt, who was a visiting assistant professor of theatrical design and technology at Wells. “That’s the complaint many of us have. You should have said something.”

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

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In January, with the almond bloom in California’s orchards a month away, beekeepers across the country were fretting over their hives. A lot of their bees were dead, or sick. Beekeepers reported losing as much as half their hives over the winter.  Jack Brumley, a California beekeeper, said he’d heard of people losing 80 percent of their bees. Denise Qualls, a bee broker who connects keepers with growers, said she was seeing “a lot more panic occurring earlier.”

Rumors swirled of a potential shortage; almond growers scrambled to ensure they had enough bees to pollinate their valuable crop, reaching out to beekeepers as far away as Florida, striking deals with mom-and-pop operations that kept no more than a few hundred bees. NPR’s All Things Considered aired a segment on the looming crisis in the almond groves.

By May, it was clear that California’s almond growers — who supply 80 percent of the world’s almonds — had successfully negotiated the threat of a bee shortage, and were expected to produce a record crop of 2.5 billion pounds, up 10 percent from last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

But the panic, it turns out, was justified. The results of this year’s annual Bee Informed Partnership survey, a collaboration of leading research labs, released Wednesday, found that winter losses were nearly 38 percent, the highest rate since the survey began 13 years ago and almost 9-percent higher than the average loss.  

The panic underscored a fundamental problem with the relationship between almonds and bees: Every year the almond industry expands, while the population of honeybees, beset by a host of afflictions, struggles to keep pace.

“We are one poor weather event or high winter bee loss away from a pollination disaster,” Jeff Pettis, an entomologist who at the time was head of research at the USDA’s Bee Research Laboratory, said in 2012. And while the disaster Pettis warned of hasn’t struck yet, its likelihood grows each year.

There would be no almond industry without the honeybee, which so far is the only commercially-managed pollinator available in sufficient numbers  to work California’s almond fields. The industry is in the midst of a boom, as Americans eat more almonds than ever. We consume more than two pounds per person each year in our granola bars, cereals, milks, and regular old nuts, fueling an $11-billion market.

It’s not clear that boom is sustainable. Though concern about a bee shortage seemed acute this year, the pollination market for almonds has been tightening for more than a decade. In 2005, fear of a pollinator shortage was so great that the government allowed wholesale importation of honeybees for the first time since 1922.

California’s almond industry spreads over 1.4 million acres of the Central Valley. During bloom, which typically unfolds over three weeks in February, these orchards require the services of some 80 percent of all the honeybees in the country.

Honeybee colonies, on the other hand, have been dying at high rates. Historically, colonies died mostly during the winter. So when the Bee Informed Partnership started tracking colonies in 2007, it only looked at winter losses, which have ranged from 22 percent to this year’s nearly 38 percent. Along the way, researchers realized that beekeepers had started losing a surprising number of bees in the summer, too, a season when all should be going well for bees. They started tracking annual losses in 2013, which have ranged between 33 percent and 45 percent. The loss for the year ending March 31 was 41 percent.

The threat to the bees is multifaceted and existential. The varroa mite, an invasive species of external parasite that arrived in Florida in the 1980s, literally sucks the life out of bees and their brood. Herbicides and habitat loss have destroyed the bees’ forage. An array of pesticides, including dicamba and clothianidin, have been found to damage the bees’ health in a variety of ways, weakening their immune systems, for instance, and slowing their reproductive rate.

The process of getting the bees to the almonds adds another stressor. Each January, the sluggish bees are prodded into action much earlier than what would be their normal routine. They are fed substitutes for their natural foods of pollen and nectar so they will quickly repopulate the hive to be ready for almonds. They are then loaded onto trucks and shipped across the country, plopped in an empty field and fed more substitute food while they wait for almonds to bloom.

“We’ve had to bend the natural behavior of honeybees around almonds,” said Charley Nye, who runs the bee research operation at the University of California, Davis.

One reason beekeepers are less inclined to talk about this distortion of nature is that almond pollination has become their biggest single money-maker of the year, accounting for about one-third of their annual income in 2016. No other crop pays as well as almonds, so if a beekeeper misses almond pollination, it could cripple his business.

“They’re not dead, but if they don’t make it to almonds, then from an economic standpoint, they’re as good as dead,” said Gene Brandi, a California beekeeper, back in January when the panic was in full bloom.

In 2018, California had 1.1 million acres of almond trees bearing nuts and another 300,000 acres of trees still too young to need pollination. Each acre of mature trees is supposed to be pollinated by two honeybee colonies. There are between 10,000 and 15,000 bees in a colony when they arrive in the almond fields, and for the last four years, the U.S. has averaged 2.67 million colonies right before almond bloom.

You can do the math, but like Nye says: “As the almond acres grow, the demand for colonies seems to be outpacing the number of colonies that exist.”  

The tight market has forced growers and brokers to expand their search for bees. “It used to be that we only dealt with operations that managed at least a thousand to 3,000 hives,” said Pettis, the former USDA entomologist. “Now people are pulling bees from smaller and smaller operators. They’re pulling bees literally out of people’s backyards and putting them on trucks to pollinate almonds. And while we used to only move bees from west of the Mississippi River, now we go all the way to Florida and New York state.”

Growers are also hedging their bets by securing more bees than they actually need, a strategy that only exacerbates the tight market.

The intel used to gauge the number  of bees in the country is surprisingly imprecise. The bee count offers just a small snapshot in time and relies on beekeepers’ responses to a poll. The numbers are approximate, with undercounts more likely than overcounts. Yet the trend lines are clear: Unless something changes, at some point in the near future we won’t have enough bees.

Limiting colony losses is one way to change the trend. The honeybees’ biggest threat is the varroa mite. The USDA, Project Apis m., and both beekeepers and bee producers are currently conducting trials of a varroa-resistant bee that will work for commercial beekeepers. Also, researchers have been working for years on a backup to the honeybees for early-season crops like almonds. This bee, the blue orchard bee, is in the early stages of commercial production, and it will be years before it could make significant inroads in replacing some of the honeybees.

Meanwhile, there are signs that almond growers are becoming more amenable to bee-friendly practices such as modifying pesticide use and planting flowers in their orchards that would provide alternate forage for the bees while they wait for the almond bloom. Nye said some growers are getting “a little more sensitive to the job the honeybees are doing; they seem to be investing more in pollinators.”

Ultimately, a big part of the solution may be to reevaluate the number of colonies deployed per acre. “Those standards were set many, many, many years ago,” said Bob Curtis, a pollination consultant with the Almond Board of California, and a lot has changed since then.

For the last 12 years, almond groves have produced one-third more nuts than they did in the dozen years before that. Some orchard management practices have changed in that time, but growers also began requesting, and paying a premium for, stronger hives that contain more bees. Today, most of the colonies that go to almond groves contain twice as many bees as they did in decades past. Whether the higher production rate of the almond trees is due to more bees per colony, different management practices, or some combination of factors is hard to say.

Curtis said the Almond Board is undertaking new studies to determine if the stocking rate could be adjusted, which would ease the pressure on embattled beekeepers to keep up with the surging almonds.

A lower stocking rate would also ease the stress on the bees themselves, but it wouldn’t stop them from dying in excessive numbers. Reversing that trend will require dramatically different approaches to everything from how we farm to how we use our land — things not likely to change anytime soon. The disaster Pettis warned of remains a very real possibility. Honeybees continue to be in a fight for their lives.