FAYETTEVILLE, Ohio — Ghosts populate the campus of Chatfield College.

They’re in the fading photos on the library walls of students who, over 177 years, attended the college and the boarding school from which it sprang, and of the Ursuline nuns who taught them, in their simple tunics and scapulars.

Amid seemingly endless acres of tobacco, soybean and wheat farms in a village in southwest Ohio with a population of 241, the now-closed college sits at the end of a narrow entrance road flanked by Bradford pear trees, colorless and bare in the winter gloom. Just about the only traffic on the way is an occasional stray chicken.

Chatfield has been shut down for a year now, though the buildings and grounds remain so neatly tended that they look as if they’re ready for the students to return. It’s among a fast-growing number of closed colleges in rural America, stripping communities of nearby higher education options to which young people can aspire and eventually go.

In this case, however, something unusual has happened: The assets left by the defunct college are being used to help at least some local students continue their educations past high school.

It’s a story that underscores the role played by colleges and universities in rural America, what’s lost when they close and how advocates are trying to keep the proportion of rural high school graduates who go to college from falling even further than it already has.

“It was a really great starting point for me, and it could have been a starting point for other students,” said Anna Robertson, 23, who attended Chatfield until the end.

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

Locals once saw greater potential for the college, which was founded in 1845 as a boarding school by an English-born Ursuline nun named Julia Chatfield. In the early 20th century, it benefited from being close to U.S. 50, a heavily trafficked major east-west route. And in 1971, it evolved into Chatfield College, which conferred two-year associate degrees.

“It was the heart of the area,” said Amber Saeidi Asl, who grew up next to the campus. She took courses offered by Chatfield through a dual-enrollment program while she was still in high school, and eventually went there.

Just having a college nearby inspired her to go, she said.

“The people of the area really wanted a college,” Sister Ellen Doyle, president from 1986 to 1997, said in a video history.

“A lot of kids that wouldn’t otherwise go to college felt comfortable coming here,” Mary Jacobs, a Chatfield graduate who later worked as its director of finance, said on the video. “If it hadn’t been for this college, a lot of them wouldn’t have attended college at all.”

But the interstate highway system long ago supplanted U.S. 50. Even the village where the college was located, St. Martin, was dissolved in 2011, when the population had dwindled to 129; the campus was absorbed into Fayetteville.

Like other small, rural, tuition-dependent and religiously affiliated institutions, Chatfield grew even more imperiled as Americans increasingly questioned the cost and value of postsecondary education. There are only about 80  two-year private, nonprofit colleges left, fewer than half as many as just 30 years ago.

It’s also in a part of the country that has been among the most acutely affected by a decline in the number of high school graduates and their interest in going to college. The number of students in Ohio’s public high schools slid by 7 percent from 2012 to 2022, and the percentage of them going directly to college fell to 53 percent by 2020, the most recent year for which the figure is available — nearly 10 percentage points below its peak, and well below the national average of 62 percent.

Related: MIT, Yale and other elite colleges are finally reaching out to rural students

Even though Chatfield accepted everyone who applied, and charged a comparatively low $14,080 in tuition and fees, it was down to 129 students in its last semester, according to federal data. Nearly half took their classes exclusively online.

With an annual budget of around $4.5 million, the college lost $373,520 in 2020 and $850,202 in 2021, tax records show.

“We could see the enrollment trends,” said Robert Elmore, Chatfield’s last president. “We just didn’t see how we could sustain this and continue operating.”

So the school announced in the fall of 2022 that it would shut down at the end of that semester, taking 70 jobs with it. It barely made the headlines. But it had joined more than a dozen other private, nonprofit universities and colleges in rural areas or that serve rural students that have closed or announced their closings just since 2020.

Those include Nebraska Christian College, Marlboro College in Vermont, Holy Family College in Wisconsin, Judson College in Alabama, Ohio Valley and Alderson Broaddus universities in West Virginia, Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in New Hampshire, Iowa Wesleyan University, Marymount California University, Cazenovia College in New York, Finlandia University in Michigan, Presentation College in South Dakota and Lincoln College, Lincoln Christian University and MacMurray College in Illinois.

Nearly 13 million Americans now live in places, mostly in the Midwest and Great Plains, where the nearest college or university is beyond a reasonable commute away, the American Council on Education reports. The nearest colleges to the Chatfield campus — a community college and a branch of the University of Cincinnati — are about 45 minutes away.

Related: A campaign to prod high school students into college tries a new tack: Making it simple

“For a lot of college students who are living in rural areas, it’s just not feasible to drive to one of the city universities,” said Robertson.

Helping overcome those kinds of obstacles is now the purpose of the nonprofit set up with the remaining Chatfield College endowment, which Elmore put at $4 million; the organization also claims the grounds and buildings as assets, valued along with the endowment at $11 million.

Called the Chatfield Edge, it has provided volunteer mentors, career counseling, assistance with admission and financial aid applications and other help to 21 students, and scholarships of about $1,500 per semester to 19 of them, said David Hesson, director of programs, who was an associate dean at the college.

It’s not only about getting students to college; the Chatfield Edge will also help with trade school and certificate programs. The target is low-income high school students who would be the first in their families to go to college and students who are older than the traditional age. Robertson, who now is finishing her bachelor’s degree at Asbury University in Kentucky, is among the beneficiaries.

“We said we don’t have to necessarily provide the education. But we could support them, and we know what that looks like, and we have the scholarship money to cover the gap,” Elmore said.

Other than Hesson and Elmore, the only employees left are a facilities director and the director of development. They work in the onetime student center. “We’re the whole gang,” said Hesson as he held open the door for some rare visitors. An Ursuline sister, Patricia Homan, has an office in a separate, otherwise empty building, and spends time in the library compiling an archive of the college’s history.

The small number of students it has helped so far speaks to the challenges faced by the Chatfield Edge and other organizations promoting access to college and other education after high school for young people growing up in rural places.

“A lot of the kids I knew grew up to do what their parents did,” said Saeidi Asl, who now volunteers as a mentor. “If your parents were farmers, you became a farmer. If your parents were truckers, you became a trucker.”

Related: Often overwhelmed on big campuses, rural college students push for support

That was not the case for Destiny Jones, who also was at Chatfield when it closed. “I didn’t think I was going to do well in the workforce without an education,” Jones said. “I’m a person who needs to be told how to do something.” Plus, “it was going to lead to a higher-paying job.”

Jones, who is 21, was speaking at a daycare center where she works during breaks to help make money for tuition at Mount Saint Joseph University in Cincinnati, which she now attends on her way to getting a degree in art education and becoming a teacher.

Going to Chatfield was much easier. “I didn’t feel like I had to stress about not being able to get there,” she said. Now, at Mount Saint Joseph, “I definitely get pretty homesick, especially in the middle of the semester.” As someone who is close to her family, “I didn’t want to be away.”

Chatfield’s very existence, Jones said, “made people think about college because it was close by.” Still, many of her high school classmates didn’t go. They took “blue-collar jobs, working in restaurants, doing mechanical work, construction — anything they can get their hands on.”

Rural high school graduates are far less likely to go directly to college than their suburban counterparts, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center — 56 percent, compared to 62 percent, respectively. That’s down substantially in just the last three years.

A big reason for that is a lack of confidence, said Hesson. “They don’t think they can do it. It’s unknown.” And without a college close by, “you lose accessibility.”

Related: Aging states to college graduates: We’ll pay you to stay

Rural students who do go to college generally prefer to stay close to home, research shows.

Robertson, for instance, had never driven on a highway before Chatfield’s closing forced her to transfer to her Kentucky university, nearly two and a half hours away, which has 1,395 undergraduates.

“She said Asbury is such a big college, and I cracked up, because it’s not,” said April Houk, a Fayetteville resident who is Robertson’s volunteer mentor. “She was kind of like a deer in the headlights.” So Houk sent her a bouquet of flowers and some words of encouragement at the beginning of the school year; two weeks later, Robertson had joined some extracurricular clubs, found a friend to study with and was majoring in equine science with plans to become a veterinarian.

Still, Robertson said, she misses having a college closer to home, which was also cheaper, since she could commute. Her new life “is a pretty different experience,” she said, “because I’m living away from home for the first time. It’s a much bigger campus. There’s more of a sense of anonymity. It can be a little lonely.”

Small rural colleges are more supportive, said Homan, the Ursuline nun and archivist, who also went to Chatfield and later worked there and at a tiny branch campus in Cincinnati that has also closed. “I was the cheerleader,” she said. “I found students if they didn’t show up. If they didn’t have bus fare, we would help them with that.”

Her experience of working in the area “is that the older generation says, ‘I don’t have a college education and I did fine.’ Students aren’t looking for a college education. It is not the aspiration.”

Many, when they’re older, find they do need one, however. That was the case for Jackie Schmidt, who got her associate degree at Chatfield and went on to a successful career as an office manager and accounting manager before helping start a contract manufacturing company. When she was laid off — “I was 54 and had the rug pulled out from under me” — she found “the jobs I thought I was qualified for required a bachelor’s degree.” But “I was intimidated at this age to be going back to school.”

Schmidt, now 56, found her way to the Chatfield Edge and with its help enrolled in an online bachelor’s degree program in business administration.

With rural colleges closing, she said, “I worry because not only for kids just getting out of high school but adults who decide they want to go back to school — what avenues do they have?”

Chatfield College created a sense of community not only for its students, but for the surrounding township, said Houk, who lives a mile from the campus on a 1,300-acre farm. Her husband’s grandmother worked there as a cook, and Houk went to summer camps at Chatfield and was married in the chapel. “We loved this place,” she said. “It really has a lot of history.”

She looked around at the all-but-abandoned campus. “It almost makes you emotional — the integrity it brought to the community.” Even though it’s no longer operating, she said, “I still say, ‘I live one mile from Chatfield College at the stop sign.’ It’s sad to have it gone.”

Without the college, “We lose that educational opportunity and the gifts that these young people have if they were educated,” said Homan, who is now on the board of the Chatfield Edge and Schmidt’s mentor. She, too, looked around the campus. “Oh my gosh, it’s quiet. But it lives on. It does. I know that.”

This story about rural higher education 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.

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ITHACA, N.Y. — The EMS Rapid Response pilot program, designed to bolster Tompkins County’s volunteer-based emergency response infrastructure, will be funded almost entirely by a state grant, following an influx of $560,000 in unexpected funding.

New York State awarded $630,000 to the county, which covers 90% of the total estimated first-year operating costs of the program, through its Local Efficiency Program.

Funds will be distributed in the next few months, according to County Administrator Lisa Holmes. She told The Ithaca Voice a typo in the application materials led staff to believe the county could only apply for up to 10% of the total estimated costs of the pilot program.

“It should have been reversed,” Holmes said. Initially, the county applied for $70,000, which would be 10% of the estimated first-year operating costs.

Rather, the application materials were meant to instruct staff to apply for 90% of the total cost of their program, with the county to be responsible for paying for the remaining 10%.

Holmes said the Deputy County Administrator Bridgette Nugent was the first to alert the state of the typo after contacting state officials to clarify what she believed was a mistake when she saw the award amount.

“We’re thrilled about this funding,” she said. “There’s been widespread support for this program and the need for it to support our volunteer municipal ambulance services.”

Holmes announced the news at the county legislature meeting on Jan. 16.

County to cover start-up costs of new daytime emergency response service

The EMS Rapid Response program, also referred to as the Rapid Medical Response program, was created by county staff at the Department of Emergency Response (DoER) in 2023 after years of increasing pressure and strain on EMS agencies. The Tompkins County Legislature voted to approve the program the same year.

Nine fully-trained EMTs will operate three new SUVs, which will be outfitted with life-saving medical equipment.The cars will be stationed around the county to respond to emergency calls, particularly in rural areas where it takes the longest for a transport service to arrive.

While county legislators and municipal officials were unified in their support of the program from the start, they disagreed on whether or not the municipalities should contribute financially to it.

Municipal officials, particularly in rural areas in the county, were generally not receptive to contributing financially. Last year, Enfield’s town board filed a resolution in support of the county covering the costs entirely.

“We, the rural towns, are flat broke,” Robert Lynch, an Enfield Town Board member, said at a county legislature meeting in November 2023. “We can’t bankroll this. But you, Tompkins County, can.”

In November 2023, the Tompkins County Legislature voted to include a memorandum of understanding (MOU) in the 2024 Countywide Shared Services Plan to formally give Holmes guidance in negotiating financial arrangements with officials in the nine municipalities.

Holmes has an easier job now that the state is set to contribute much more than initially expected.

“We’re very glad to be able to launch [the program] and to know this early on in the year that we have the state funds to support it,” Holmes said.

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Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Future of Learning newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes every other Wednesday with trends and top stories about education innovation. Subscribe today!

In 2021, there was a sudden shift in how school board meetings around the country were conducted: Routine meetings turned heated, with angry community members often accusing educators of teaching their kids about critical race theory without their knowledge. That led to a firestorm of anti-CRT bans, intense focus on school board elections and partisan divides within local communities on education.

A new peer-reviewed study by researchers at Michigan State University and the University at Albany provides some insight into how the anti-CRT movement took hold — and the lasting consequences for how communities view their teachers and schools.

“We’ve seen debates about curriculum before but nothing that was so nationalized and spread like this,” said Ariell Bertrand, a doctoral student at MSU and one of the study’s authors.

The study examined the narratives that policymakers were using to justify CRT bans in the first 29 states that proposed them, she said. Based on the “narrative policy framework,” which scholars use to determine how policymakers and lobbyists use narrative storytelling to influence legislation, the researchers identified 11 key anti-CRT “narrative plots” being circulated.

According to the study, conservative think tanks such as the Manhattan Institute and Heritage Foundation and the group Moms for Liberty drafted specific narratives that brought CRT into the mainstream. The Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, who is considered a key architect of the anti-CRT movement, tweeted his intention in 2021 to redefine CRT “to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

The study found that the narratives created by these groups — the most common being that CRT indoctrinates children in school to feel guilty about their race — quickly took hold, Bertrand said. According to the study, since 2021, 44 states have introduced more than 140 anti-CRT laws or bans related to concepts allegedly being taught in K-12.

“We found that these narratives were having this downstream effect on people’s likelihood to even trust their local schools anymore.”

Ariell Bertrand, a doctoral student at MSU and one of the study’s authors

In addition, a survey the researchers conducted of Michigan adults in fall 2021 found that individuals who reported hearing any of the anti-CRT narratives were less likely to trust their local teachers to teach any subject fairly. People who had heard all 11 narrative plots were 59 percent more likely to support a CRT ban than individuals who had not been exposed to the ban-CRT narratives.

In surveys, Americans typically express strong support for their local teachers and schools even if they don’t hold favorable views about the nation’s public schools as a whole, Bertrand noted. But this survey challenges that pattern, showing that the anti-CRT narratives began to unravel support even for the schools and teachers people knew best, she said. The survey also found that adults who’d been exposed to the anti-CRT narratives didn’t trust teachers to discuss race or racism or choose materials to supplement curricula, and overall were less likely to support instruction on fairness and equity, she said.

“In the United States we have these really strong macro-level beliefs about public education, such as this belief that education is this cornerstone to our democracy,” Bertrand said. “We found that these narratives were having this downstream effect on people’s likelihood to even trust their local schools anymore.”

The findings also point to partisan and racial divides. Republicans and white adults were more likely to embrace CRT narratives. For example, while a Democrat who had heard all the CRT plots had a 44 percent probability of supporting a CRT ban, someone who identified as Republican had an 88 percent probability. White individuals who’d heard all the CRT plots had a 73 percent chance of supporting a CRT ban, compared to 46 percent for Black individuals.

Now, as attention shifts from anti-CRT legislation to LGBTQ student rights and banning books, Bertrand said she and colleagues believe these narratives and attacks on public education will have similar repercussions. “For generations to come these narratives could undermine people’s support for public education and funding and things like that,” she said.

The CRT study is part of a broader research project led by coauthor Rebecca Jacobsen, professor of education policy at MSU, that looks at how school board meetings have changed since 2019 as a result of anti-CRT, anti-LGBTQ+ and other national narratives.

The researchers are finding that even in places where school board candidates weren’t necessarily running on these issues, school boards made changes to how meetings are run — for example, by limiting open comment periods, adding timers counting down how long speakers may talk, and enhancing security. While these changes are a way to control heated meetings, Jacobsen said they have the long-term effect of altering how the public interacts with its schools.

“This was really an up-close-and-personal opportunity to shape politics, especially around an issue that’s so important to many people: education and the future of their children,” she said of school board meetings. “What was a well-intentioned response has potentially further distanced people and only maybe fueled some of these claims, like ‘Look, our schools are not about you or your children. Look, these people are not listening.’”

Today, the people showing up to meetings include not just parents and families who have legitimate concerns and complaints about how they want their children to be taught, she said, but community members and outsiders who are sharing misinformation about what is happening in schools. While public education is far from perfect, she said, most Americans have shared a universal commitment to supporting education.

But as partisan divides deepen around the issue, she said, “I really think that that’s beginning to wane.”

This story about CRT 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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The Biden administration’s $3.1 billion Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities grant program hopes to convince farmers and ranchers to adopt practices that will reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and sequester carbon in the ground. It also seeks to make amends for a century of discrimination by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which administers the grants. In its program description, USDA said Black, Native, and other “historically underserved” farmers needed to be a key part of all projects in the climate-smart program.

It is a laudable goal, but one that faces many obstacles. The climate-smart partnerships are just underway, but it’s clear that some of the biggest projects—the ones that got the most taxpayer money and are led by giant for-profit companies and major agricultural lobbying groups—have not thought through in any detail how they will serve BIPOC farmers.

And while strict measurements are in place for quantifying climate progress, grantees will evaluate their own success or failure on matters of equity. Also, USDA’s definition of “historically underserved” farmers includes not just ethnic and racial minorities but veterans, young and beginning farmers, women, and those operating at poverty level—so it’s possible for a project to meet the USDA’s equity goal without serving any Black farmers at all.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle for meeting the equity goal isn’t structural, but a matter of trust. The USDA’s long history of discriminating against Black farmers and other ethnic and racial minorities—by denying them access to low-interest loans, grants, and other forms of assistance—resulted in significant financial losses for those farmers over the course of the 20th century, and in many cases led to the loss of their land.

Not surprisingly, there remains a significant lack of trust in the USDA, and government programs generally, among Black and other minority farmers. Some reject anything with the federal government’s stamp on it, while others may not even be aware of farm support programs they’re eligible for.

But the equity goal is consistent with what some see as a nascent effort by USDA to improve its relationships and foster trust in these communities. In the 2021 American Rescue Plan, the massive Covid relief package, there was $4 billion allotted to debt relief for Black farmers. Some white farmers filed a lawsuit claiming discrimination, and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act revoked the promised funds and created a race-neutral program instead. Many Black farmers eligible for the original debt relief felt once again USDA had broken a promise.

“This is an area that’s clearly been a challenge for USDA for a long time,” said Robert Bonnie, USDA undersecretary for Farm Production and Conservation. “And as we think about everything we do, including climate stuff, we want to make sure we build in equity.”

The climate-smart projects run for five years, so the verdict on whether they will meet the equity goal—and even how to measure success given the lack of clear metrics—will evolve. But some projects seem designed for success, while others have work to do if they hope to benefit minority producers in meaningful ways.

The climate-smart program has two funding tiers. The first is for projects ranging from $5 million to $100 million and the second is for projects up to $5 million. Of the 141 projects announced a year ago, so far 123 have been finalized, according to USDA.

Projects in the first tier are dominated by multinational corporations like Pepsi and Tyson Foods; land-grant universities such as the University of Illinois and Virginia Tech; large commodity groups like the Iowa Soybean Association and USA Rice; and nonprofits such as the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and the National Association of Conservation Districts. The second tier, meanwhile, explicitly sought projects led by historically Black colleges and universities (HBCU) and other minority-serving organizations.

Critics saw this funding discrepancy as a tacit acknowledgement that the organizations most likely to engage farmers of color lacked the resources to manage a $90 million federal grant. “Can we do it? Yeah,” says Ibrahim Katampe, a professor and administrator at Central State University, a public HBCU in Wilberforce, Ohio. “But it will just be a lot of outsourcing.”

Bonnie said the two pots of money reflect the fact that HBCUs and nonprofits focused on minority growers would be at a disadvantage competing directly against the likes of the U.S. Cotton Trust Protocol or Truterra, the sustainability arm of Land O’Lakes, both of which are leading $80-$90 million projects. “The idea was, let’s try to build something that had equity that cuts across everything, but to provide a particular option for smaller groups, smaller landowner groups, historically underserved producers, minority-serving institutions, and others that may not get in the larger grants,” he said.

In other words, while anyone can say they will make equity a priority, a minority-serving university or organization of tribal growers will have an advantage when it comes to recruiting and retaining participants who USDA has historically not served. Even if they have fewer resources.

“There’ve been so many decades of persistent underfunding, which then leads to a state of not having capacity over a long period of time,” said Antonio McLaren, who spent some 20 years managing grants at USDA and is now vice president of programs at the 1890 Universities Foundation, which represents historically Black land-grant schools that were founded in response to Blacks being denied access to states’ original land-grant universities.

He said these schools tend to be much smaller than their original land-grant counterparts in terms of faculty, facilities, student enrollment, and other resources. But they also are deeply connected to their local communities of color, and exploiting that could benefit both the farmers and USDA. “The 1890s do play a large role in helping Black farmers,” McLaren said. Their outreach and technical support efforts—sometimes supported with federal money—lead to Black farmers “being able to trust them, but also to trust USDA as well.” Because of these connections, the smaller projects should be nearly guaranteed to achieve their equity goals, which according to their proposals are often more specific and ambitious. The larger projects, meanwhile, are primarily focused on big farms, where they see greater potential for climate benefits. But their equity goals tend to be fuzzy.

The Iowa Soybean Association, for example, received $95 million to “expand markets for climate-smart corn, soybeans, sugarbeets, and wheat” in 12 Midwest and Great Plains states and support “farmer implementation and monitoring of climate-smart practices.” For-profit partners include Cargill, JBS, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola. It had enrolled more than 200 farmers through Sept. 30, and will not update its numbers again until January 2024. The project’s equity goal is for 20 percent of participating farmers to be women, veterans, and BIPOC producers, but the plan for meeting that goal is not spelled out. The situation at Central State University looks very different. It’s running a $5 million project that will convert manure from a woman-owned cattle feedlot into organic fertilizer and distribute it to BIPOC and other underserved farmers in urban and high poverty areas in Ohio and southeast Michigan. The project will reduce the feedlot’s methane emissions through an innovative manure management system that prevents the liquids and solids from separating. Without the separation, there will be fewer bacteria feeding on the manure and no need to agitate it before it gets pumped onto fields as fertilizer. The agitation, coupled with the bacteria feeding frenzy, is what leads to release of methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide. The resulting nutrient-rich slurry will lower both the farmers’ operating costs and their carbon footprint, as they will no longer have to purchase synthetic fertilizer that’s produced using fossil fuels. Funding for the project was announced in December 2022, but Central State didn’t receive its final go-ahead until late November. So recruiting participants is barely underway. But the university’s extension program has built a network of Black farmers that gives project coordinator Ibrahim Katampe confidence that urban and small rural vegetable farmers will sign on when he is ready for them, “especially those that have a minimum of 1,000 square feet to up to an acre of land.” And that group is a sweet spot for meeting USDA’s equity goal, Katampe said, because “unless you have targeted programming, it will seem to fall through the cracks.” Sharifa Tomlinson, who runs Arrowrock Farm in Riverside, Ohio, is the kind of farmer Katampe hopes to enroll. Tomlinson, a 62-year-old African American nurse, came to agriculture later in life. “Being my age and being my race and being my sex, we did not think that we could be farmers,” she said. “No one said, ‘Oh, Sharifa, when you grow up, you could be a farmer.’” In 2021, she started selling tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins, blueberries, and other produce at farmers markets. Later, she added laying hens to her operation. This year, she joined Ohio CAN, a USDA-backed program administered by the state agriculture department, that buys, processes, and freezes chicken for distribution at food banks. Raising chickens for Ohio CAN quickly became a major part of Tomlinson’s business.

Through another USDA program, Tomlinson got funding to install a high tunnel—a semi-permanent structure that protects plants from severe weather and extends the growing season. “That’s going to be a whole new ballgame,” she said, enabling her to scale up her vegetable production. In this area of the corn belt, Central State University has played an outsized role in creating a network for producers of color. Tomlinson was pleasantly surprised when she discovered other Black farmers like her, and it was one of them who encouraged her to apply for the high tunnel. She says now she’s ready to help someone else tap into a USDA program. “USDA did do some junky stuff back in the day,” she said. “It’s trying to right its wrongs now. And, so, I’m part of that.” Jordan Roach, who grows herbs, garlic, and berries at Biddy Bobbie Farm near Yellow Springs, Ohio, said she’s interested in free fertilizer, but would want to see where it’s coming from to ensure that it meets her farming objectives. Hearing that Central State would be the catalyst to connect her with the product increased her confidence. “We already have really good established relationships so that would be something I would trust,” said Roach, who identifies as Black and Indigenous. Rosemary Galdamez would love to have access to that kind of network. She is responsible for signing up minority farmers for the Iowa Soybean Association project—but first she has to find them. She hopes to do that by “connecting with other organizations in the Midwest that work with underserved farmers to build those relationships,” she said in an interview. So far, she’s produced outreach materials in Spanish and met with groups that support women and veterans in agriculture. The premise of the Soybean Association’s program is to pay farmers for measurable emissions reductions, regardless of what strategies the farmers use to achieve them. Galdamez recognizes that across the Midwest and Great Plains states, where the project is based, and in the target commodities of corn, soybeans, sugarbeats, and wheat, most farmers are white men. “There are some underserved farmers who grow corn and soybeans,” she said, “but in the Midwest specifically it is somewhat limited.” Participating farmers are asked to complete a voluntary demographic survey, which is how the project is tabulating its outreach success. In a follow-up email, Galdamez said that as of Sept. 30 “we have 49 contracts (21 percent) with participants from underserved groups. The contracts are with beginning farmers, veteran (former military) farmers, women farmers, and socially disadvantaged farmers.” She declined to provide specific data regarding whether any of those contracts are with farmers of color. McLaren, the former USDA grant manager, said the equity goals for a project like this one may have been undercut even before it was funded because none of the project’s official partners focus on BIPOC producers. “The main driver for any successful collaboration or partnership ­is developing intentionality and making sure that there is trust established from the very beginning,” he said. A project led by the grain buyer and broker ADM, for instance, included the National Black Growers Council (NBGC) from the start. Paul Scheetz, who manages ADM’s investments and partnerships in climate-smart solutions, said that was a natural outgrowth of the company’s existing relationships with the council and with the Black farmers it does business with. “Prior to the grant, we were working directly with them,” he said, noting that the company has participated in field days sponsored by the council where it meets with farmers potentially interested in selling to ADM. Scheetz said that during a brainstorming session about how to structure the grant’s incentive payments to growers, a Black farmer noted that “some of the ground that we farm isn’t always the most productive ground.” ADM had been thinking payments would be based on bushels of grain produced, but that comment prompted a reconsideration. They decided instead that payments would be based on the number of acres a farmer commits to conservation practices; that way, lower-yielding fields are not penalized. Torre’ Anderson, an agriculture specialist with NBGC, said the council will connect grantees—ADM as well as a number of other big projects the council is participating in—to the farmers they need to meet their equity goals. Anderson said ADM will require farmers who participate to join the council, which will boost its membership and help it track the number of Black farmers involved. NBGC is still working out the details of how other projects it’s working with will recruit and retain Black growers. ADM plans to enroll 3,000 farmers over the five-year life of the program, and Scheetz says all $90 million of the federal grant will go directly to them. ADM and its partners, which include Costco, Field to Market, Farmers Business Network, and Keurig-Dr. Pepper, are putting up nearly $48 million in matching funds to cover all other project expenses. ADM said that of the 500 farmers enrolled as of December 1, more than 100 are members of NBGC. The range of approaches to equity amid a vast and varied set of climate-smart projects means this USDA investment will reach every state and territory in some way. How much of an impact it has on communities that have historically been mistreated, or ignored, by federal programs will become clear over the next several years. The advantage that HBCUs and groups like the NBGC have as trusted advisers in their communities makes them critical for getting funding to farmers who might not seek them out. “We’re a conduit to help alleviate some of the tension from USDA,” Anderson said. Farmers are more likely to engage in a conversation with someone from the Black Growers Council rather than with USDA, he added, even if the subject is how to get money from USDA. Donnetta Boykin, who owns Endigo’s Herbals and Organics in Trotwood, Ohio, is part of the Black farmer network in her area. She said even if they recognize that a bit of USDA money has trickled down to them in recent years, some Black farmers remain hesitant to engage directly, especially if that means a farm visit from a stranger. “I have to trust you to welcome you into my space,” she said. “There needs to be some healing done” between federal officials and Black farmers. “And that’s not happened.”

PRIEST RIVER, Idaho —The moms seated at the conference table on Election Day were worried. They had good reason: Their poll watchers at voting sites — grange halls on dirt roads, community centers hardly larger than a bungalow— suggested things were not going their way.

There were no formal exit polls conducted in West Bonner County, where the school district covers 781 square miles over timbered hills and crystalline lakes in the north Idaho panhandle. But Dana Douglas, a fit and forceful blonde sipping on an Americano and a water bottle boosted with electrolytes (she was teaching spin at 6 p.m.) had been poll-watching at Edgemere Grange Hall, and she had her indicator for how voters were casting their ballots: “Anyone who said, ‘Hello, good morning’” was in their camp. “Anyone with a scowl” who would not look her in the eye was in the other.

“It’s going to be a battle,” she said at the table. Sitting beside her, Candy Turner, a retired elementary school teacher who had brought Ziploc bags of pear slices and dried cranberries for the hours ahead, agreed. “I think we are in trouble based on what I saw.”

After Election Day, headlines in key locales all around the country spoke of moms fighting extremists in local school board races and winning. But even as some celebrated “flipping” their school boards back, far-right groups like Moms for Liberty remain. As the organization declared in an email blast in which they claimed winning 50 new school board seats: “WE ARE JUST GETTING STARTED!”

Some people overlook school board skirmishes, seeing them as trivial. For Turner, Douglas, and many in the West Bonner County School District, they are anything but. It’s not about Democrats versus Republicans (Turner is a registered Democrat; Douglas is “a proud conservative Republican”). It’s about the viability of public education in their community.

This is not hyperbole. The national infection facing public schooling—the tug-of-war between education professionals and extremist culture warriors—has brought chaos and damage to West Bonner County. After this past school year ended, the superintendent acknowledged that 31 percent of teachers, counselors, and education leaders left the district, and scores of parents pulled their children, opting for homeschooling, online learning, or enrolling in another district. Buildings are infrequently cleaned; an elementary school principal reported at an October school board meeting that mice were running over children’s feet and hallways smelled of urine.

What has happened in West Bonner County offers a warning to public school supporters elsewhere. Douglas, Turner, and others are fighting to restore normalcy to an institution that should not be up for grabs — but is.

“We’ve been the canary in the coal mine,”Margaret Hall, the current school board chair who faced a far-right challenger, said on the eve of the November election. Hall, a soft-spoken but firm force, has served on the board for eight years, even through chemotherapy treatments for cancer. “What has to happen,” she said, “is people have to wake up and decide, ‘We don’t want someone to come in and tell us what we want. We want to decide ourselves.’”

Idaho is a conservative state and Bonner County is even more so, with registered Republicans outnumbering Democrats by almost seven to one (statewide it’s closer to five to one). Despite the nation’s bitter party politics, residents of this county have traditionally exercised a neighborly pragmatism in which the kids — or, as Douglas prefers, “our babies” — come first.

People filled in the gaps when it came to local needs, from sending groceries home with some children over weekends to teachers helping students brush their teeth or spending extra hours with struggling readers. But that spirit is now being tested by extremists who see a soft target in a stressed school district. Suddenly, the far-right’s anti-public-education catchphrases blared regularly on the national stage have become wedged into the local lexicon.

For example, “transgenderism” (described by one candidate as “boys in girls bathrooms, boys in girls sports, ‘gender-affirming care,’ and related absurdities”) became a top issue in this November’s school board race. One candidate for reelection, Troy Reinbold, a nonchalant figure who has attended meetings in cutoff shorts and exited mid-agenda without explanation, touted his work on “the strongest transgender policy in Idaho schools” and opposition to “social emotional learning,” which he called “a precursor to critical race theory.”

Hall, for her part, abstained in an August vote on a school district policy that would require teachers and staff to “refer to students by their biological sex” and students to use bathrooms and locker rooms corresponding to their genders assigned at birth, along with bar transgender girls from girls’ sports teams. She said it was confusing, poorly written, and not vetted by the board’s legal counsel (instead it was reviewed by the anti-LGBTQ Christian legal advocacy group, Alliance Defending Freedom). Hall’s campaign signs were later tagged with rainbow stickers. The policy ended up passing 4-0.

Related: Florida just expanded school vouchers — again. What does that really mean?

How a place that had long treated differences with a live-and-let-live ethos adopted the intolerant tone of national politics is anyone’s guess. Some blame an influx of newcomers. Bonner County, like the rest of Idaho, is growing, and over the past decade, the tally of registered voters has risen almost 50 percent to nearly 32,000.

But who they are and why some of them don’t support public education is a more complicated question. It’s possible that Idaho’s lax COVID-19 rules lured extremists, survivalists, and those lacking a communal impulse. There’s also a broader arc at play in a state economy that’s forced people to shift from work in local sawmills to commuter jobs that get them home later and leave them reliant on others to keep civic life running — a common pattern in 21st-century America. But Priest River, where the district is headquartered, is close-knit, populated by descendants of the six Naccarato brothers, who came from Italy to build the Great Northern Railroad in the late 1800s and stayed. That includes many mom organizers like Candy Naccarato Turner.

Priest River police chief Drew McLain dates the start of recent drama to the school board vote to rescind the English Language Arts curriculum from the well-established education publisher McGraw Hill. It had been swiftly and unanimously approved in June 2022 and was delivered to replace the curriculum that was out of print. But far-right activists objected, complaining that it included aspects of social emotional learning. Such instruction — on skills like “self-confidence, problem-solving, and pro-social behavior,” as McGraw Hill described the curriculum on its website — is a bugaboo for conservative ideologues. And on August 24 of last year, with one member missing, the board voted 3-1 to return the texts to the publisher.

The decision got the attention of moms like Douglas, Turner, and others. Whitney Hutchins, a new mother who graduated from West Bonner County schools in 2010 and whose family has operated a resort on Priest Lake for generations, started attending school board meetings. Ditto for Jessica Rogers, a mom of three daughters who had served on the curriculum committee and was upset by the reversal. Others, too, wondered what was happening.

After all, for years the meetings had been quiet affairs at the district’s storefront office on Main Street in a room with aged wood floors, folding chairs and tables, and a capacity of 34. By late 2022, such serenity was a thing of the past. People started lining up three to four hours in advance, which McLain said forced him to close Main Street for safety. Quickly, the gatherings got more and more unruly. First, McLain sent one officer, then several. At times, he called on the sheriff for backup.

Things escalated even further when Jackie Branum, who was hired as superintendent in the summer of 2022, proposed a supplemental levy, which sets a chosen amount as property tax to support local schools’ operating costs, and a four-day school week to address financial issues — then abruptly resigned. The board approved the shorter week, angering many parents. Then it appointed Susie Luckey, a popular elementary school principal, as interim superintendent until June. By May, the board had put a levy before voters that would provide roughly one-third of the district’s budget.

Supplemental levies in Idaho, which ranks 50th nationally in public school funding, had long been used for capital projects and are now essential for operations. But residents suddenly sorted into “for” and “against” factions. Signs sprouted along rural roads; arguments raged on Facebook. The levy failed by 105 votes out of 3,295 cast. Parents expressed concern at a public meeting that the district would cut sports and extracurricular activities; some worried about teacher retention. Not to mention: The district still had no permanent superintendent.

In a swift but puzzling process, the school board eventually announced two finalists for superintendent. One was Luckey. The other was a far-right former elected politician who worked for the Idaho Freedom Foundation by the name of Branden Durst. Durst was an unusual choice given his lack of school experience and the IFF’s hostility to public education. (In 2019, the president of the IFF called public schools “the most virulent form of socialism (and indoctrination thereto) in America today,” adding, “I don’t think government should be in the education business.”)

Then again, it wasn’t Durst’s first go-around: In 2022, the Democrat turned Republican ran for state superintendent of public instruction. He lost the GOP primary but in Bonner County beat his two challengers with 60 percent of the vote. Among the donors to his campaign were IFF leaders and a local resident who had opposed the McGraw Hill curriculum.

It is unclear how Durst, an abrasive outsider from 420 miles south in Boise, was so quickly ushered into contention. Jim Jones, former Idaho attorney general and a former justice of the Idaho Supreme Court, points to the IFF. He said the organization aims to “discredit and dismantle” public schools throughout the state, “starting with West Bonner County School District.”

Related: Inside Florida’s ‘underground lab’ for far-right education policies

Jones also credits the IFF for helping extremists Keith Rutledge and Susan Brown get elected to the West Bonner County School Board in November 2021 in a low-turnout race. It was a pivotal election — but people didn’t realize it then. In hindsight, Douglas said residents “got lazy and complacent and we didn’t get to the polls and put people in the district that valued public education.”

By early 2023, Rutledge and Brown — along with Reinbold, who revealed himself as a fellow extremist — had become a majority voting bloc on the five-person school board. Hall, the school board chair who works on climate change mitigation and who readily references the Idaho education code, and Carlyn Barton, a mother and teacher who describes herself as a “common sense constitutional conservative,” were at odds with the other three.

Durst’s candidacy earlier this year turned up the heat on divisions both on the board and in the community. School board meetings were packed. Militia started showing up. And while the Second Amendment is cherished in Idaho, residents were alarmed to find men donned in khaki with walkie-talkies — and presumably guns — present for conversations on children’s education.

“The militia should not be at school board meetings,” argued McLain, the police chief who claimed that one grandfather “was so pissed at the militia” that he arrived drunk with a rifle. “It’s been frustrating,” he added. “If you told me I had the choice of a school board meeting or a bank robbery, I would be way less stressed going to the bank robbery.”

Following multiple contentious meetings with Hall and Barton, who pressed board members to reconsider Durst’s candidacy, in late June, he was selected by a 3-2 vote. After his hiring was finalized, Barton charged that “the direction of our board has turned into a fascist dictatorship with an agenda which is far from our conservative point of view.”

From the moment he slid into the superintendent’s maroon Naugahyde-upholstered chair in the West Bonner County School District office, Durst seemed to relish his position of power. There was serious work to do — like negotiating a teacher contract — but he appeared far more interested in burnishing his reputation, describing his takeover as “a pilot” that others could learn from.

This was a chance, he told me in multiple interviews, to use the district to test his “ideas that are frankly unorthodox in education,” including some rooted in his Christian values. He wanted intelligent design taught alongside evolution in biology classes. He was working to have a Christian university offer an Old Testament course to high school students at a Baptist church near their school. He hoped the district would adopt curricula developed by the Christian conservative college Hillsdale in Michigan.

Durst also cast himself as a model for how non-educators could take charge of a school district. He boasted that national far-right figures were in touch and encouraged him not to “screw this up.” As he put it, “I broke into the club. I got a superintendency without having to go through the traditional process of doing it.” Indeed, he had not been a school principal, administrator, or classroom teacher.

Related: Teachers struggle to teach the Holocaust without running afoul of new ‘divisive concepts’ laws

That lack of process was a major problem for the state Board of Education, which in August gave the district notice it was not in compliance with Idaho law, a determination that jeopardized tax dollars critical for funding the schools. A letter sent to Rutledge, the chair at the time, cited budget irregularities, missed school bus inspections, concerns about discipline rates of special education students, and the failure to file forms to access federal funds. But the main issue, the state’s board said, was the district’s “decision to employ a non-certified individual as superintendent.” Durst had sought emergency certification but was rebuffed by the state.

All of the uncertainty and division grew so dire that teachers found themselves struggling to carry on, leaving many no choice but to give notice. “It breaks my heart that I had to leave,” Steph Eldore, a fixture at Priest Lake Elementary School for 26 years, told me over tears in late August. With her daughter starting high school, Eldore and her husband, Ken, who had been director of facilities and capital improvements for 16 years, quit the district, finding jobs and enrolling their daughter elsewhere.

By the end of summer, 27 teachers had retired or resigned, along with 19 other staff members, including the director of special education, a school principal, and three counselors. Families followed. By fall, school district enrollment was down to 1,005 students, 100 less than projected. Even McLain, the police chief, had rented a place in Sandpoint, about half an hour from Priest River, and enrolled his two high school–aged children there. “We call ourselves the Priest River refugees,” he said. SergeantChris Davis, the district’s school resource officer, similarly said his daughter has opted to finish high school online. All in all, the Lake Pend Oreille School District in Sandpoint, whose permanent levy offers steady funding, reported 43 student transfers from West Bonner County School District.

Others, of course, remained. As the school year began, the West Bonner County School District 83 (“Strive for Greatness”) Facebook page was active with notices of cross-country races, soccer games, and picture day. But behind the sheen of normalcy were problems. A shortage of bus drivers led the district to cancel or combine routes. Many students’ commute times doubled, upsetting parents whose young children got home after dark, while other students had no bus transportation at all. There were also issues with school cleanliness. Kylie Hoepfer, a mom of a fourth grader, took on cleaning mouse turds on the bleachers at her daughter’s volleyball game. “I had heard about the mice problem but sweeping it all up was pretty gross,” she recalled.

The biggest hurt for families, however, was the loss of seasoned teachers. The district hired new ones, but a number of them soon quit. Trinity Duquette, a 1997 graduate of the high school, said her 8th-grade daughter “is on her third language arts teacher this year,” each with different styles and expectations. “They have been assigned essays and had a turnover in the midst of the assignment.”

For Paul and Jessica Turco, who built strong bonds with their son’s special education teachers who have since left the district, the loss “was like breaking up a family.” They said it was weeks into the school year before the new teachers read their son’s Individualized Education Program, the written plan outlining his learning needs. “It was like he was starting from the very beginning rather than a stepping stone from where he left off the prior year,” said Jessica. And it’s showing. “We have been dealing with constant outbursts,” she added, and “when he comes home from school, he doesn’t want to talk about his day.”

While watching the disruption, Hutchins, the new mom whose soft features belie a fierce frankness, made a decision: She and her husband were moving to Spokane, Washington. “I’m not going to raise my daughter here,” she said, curling into a leather chair at her family’s resort. Hutchins’s brother is gay. Watching his experience in school had been painful, and the hostility toward LGBTQ+ students seemed to be growing worse. “This is horrible to say,” Hutchins said after Durst’s hiring, “but the right-wing extremists, they are taking over our community.”

She wasn’t the only one thinking that — but not everyone was in a position to leave. Rogers, the mom of three who was on the curriculum committee, and her husband had recently built a home with sweeping views of Chase Lake. There was no moving away. So, she got involved at the school, first as a volunteer, then as a paraprofessional, and, more recently, teaching technology. Initially, she hadn’t wanted to get political, but soon, it no longer felt like a choice.

Back in late 2022, after the school board rescinded the McGraw Hill curriculum and voted for a four-day week, parents like Paul and Jessica Turco reached out to Turner, the retired elementary school teacher, who dialed up Douglas, the Election Day poll-watcher. “I called Dana and said, ‘The kids want some help,’” Turner recalled.

Although Douglas grew up over the state line in Newport, Washington, she married her high school sweetheart from Priest River and now bled Spartan orange. They had built a thriving family business, sent two children through the local schools, and had grandchildren enrolled. She understood that what she saw happening was at odds with what she stood for.

“I am a Republican. I am a Christian conservative,” said Douglas. “But I am 100 percent pro–public education, and I am pro–every child, and I will do anything for this community to embrace everyone and to love everyone.”

She, Turner, and others, including Hutchins, Rogers, and the Turcos, began meeting. How to take back the district? It started with the school board and, said Douglas, included a notion that should seem obvious: “getting people who value public education” to serve.

By the summer of 2023, they had collected signatures for a recall vote of Rutledge and Brown, the board’s chair and vice chair respectively. The group’s slogan—“Recall, Replace, Rebuild” — blossomed on signs in downtown storefronts, in yards, and banners posted in fields. The group collected endorsements, video testimonials, and built a website. By the time they were days out from the August 29 vote, their numbers had swelled. Over 125 people gathered in the wood-beamed great room at the Priest Lake Event Center for what was part rally, part check-in: Who could pick up “WBCSD Strong” T-shirts? Who would hold signs at key spots ahead of the vote?

Related: Inside the Christian legal campaign to return prayer to public schools

Recalls usually fail. But in West Bonner County, the result was resounding. With a 60.9 percent turnout, Rutledge and Brown were recalled by a wide margin. But then, after the election but before votes were officially certified, Rutledge and Brown posted notice of a board meeting for Friday, September 1, at 5 p.m., just before Labor Day weekend. The top agenda items — “Dissolve Current Board of Trustees” and “Turn Meeting Over to the Superintendent”— raised alarms.

“I read the agenda and I was irate,” said Katie Elsaesser, a mom of two and a lawyer whose office is near the school district office. “I immediately started calling people.” She texted her husband that she would miss their son’s soccer game, then drafted a complaint, finishing at 2 a.m. In the morning, she drove to the district court in Sandpoint. One hour and fifteen minutes before the meeting was to take place, Elsaesser got a ruling to halt it. McLain delivered the news to the crowd in the high school cafeteria. “You would think I scored a touchdown,” he said.

In another strange twist after the recall, the board could not hold several meetings because Reinbold failed to show. Without a quorum, which required three present members, business halted. Finally, after a former school board chair alerted county officials, the sheriff agreed to investigate. Reinbold reappeared, and in mid-October, the board finally filled the vacant seats with two people who supported the recall.

With his options running thin, on September 25, 2023, Durst announced plans for “an amicable and fair exit.” For the fourth time in less than two years — since a longtime superintendent retired in June 2022 — the district was again seeking a new leader. Hall reached out to Joseph Kren, a former principal at the high school who had also served as superintendent in a nearby district. Kren was enjoying retirement—he got Hall’s call at 9:30 p.m. before he was to wake at 3:30 a.m. to go elk hunting. He would agree to a 90-day contract (the four-day week means it runs through March).

His appointment was greeted with relief. Kren, a serious-faced former wrestler, is religious but not ideological. On the sixth day of his new job, occupying the same spot Durst had just vacated, Kren showed me the silver-colored crucifix he had hung above his desk. Kren was clear that his faith “has guided [him]” but has “never gotten in the way.”

Growing up with a brother who was deaf, Kren said, has made him attuned to matters of inclusion and accommodation, which he called “a legal and moral responsibility.” His only agenda was to put things right. By Thanksgiving, he told me, the district had corrected state compliance issues, and he was working to add bus drivers. With so many turnovers, he acknowledged “disruptions can and do occur.” But his plan, he said, was steady: to “roll up [his] sleeves and work alongside” staff and to make “firm, consistent, morally sound decisions based in fact and the law.”

The November 2023 election would be pivotal. With the two school board replacements set — picked by the recall supporters who lived in the two school zones that had been represented by Rutledge and Brown — the other three zones’ seats were on the ballot. The pro-recall crowd wanted to boot Reinbold and reelect Hall and Barton. The election, in essence, would decide which side had a majority.

But each had challengers. Hall faced Alan Galloway, a sharp-jawed army veteran and cattle rancher who opposed “transgenderism,” efforts “to impose the outlawed teaching of CRT through SEL or any other ‘trojan horse’ scheme,” and a levy. He circulated a controversial letter with inflammatory claims, including that Hall had “failed our children by delaying action related to bullying, dress codes and Pornography within our schools.”

Barton faced Kathy Nash, who had pushed to rescind the curriculum, was treasurer of the Bonner County Republican Central Committee, and connected to far-right figures at the state level. Two of the far-right candidates shared a campaign treasurer and campaign finance reports show some of the same people donating to the three far-right candidates.

In other words, there were teams. Jim Kelly, Nash’s campaign manager, said Nash would bring scrutiny to school finances — and provide representation to those wounded by the recall. Kelly told me, “The big concern for Kathy, and for a lot of us, is that the school board is going to be 100 percent lopsided,” if the candidates he backed, whom many would consider far-right, were not elected. “People are objecting that there will not be a conservative voice.”

And yet, Nash’s opponent, Barton, was a conservative Christian. As was Reinbold’s challenger, Elizabeth Glazier, whose website described her as a “Proud Republican & Conservative Christian” who opposed the four-day week and the hiring of Durst. The race was not conservatives against liberals or Republicans against Democrats. It was, as locals told me, a referendum casting those who cared that students had books, buses, and teachers with a decent wage, against those who embraced extremist rhetoric.

Related: Who picks school curriculum? Idaho law hands more power to parents

At various polling places on Election Day, far-right campaign volunteers were overheard promising that Nash and Reinbold would keep boys out of girls’ bathrooms.

For parents who rely on the public schools, this kind of allegation was maddening. “It’s just paranoid bull honkey,” said Jacob Sateren, a father of eight (six in the schools). We met at a coffee shop across from the junior high on Election Day shortly after he had voted. Sateren, who’d turned a challenging childhood into a successful adulthood building pole barns, laughs when people call him “a woke liberal.” (His Facebook profile features an American flag emblazoned with the Second Amendment, he pointed out.)

He finds charges that schools are “indoctrinating” children absurd. “I haven’t had any of my kids come home and talk about any crazy weird stuff. And even if they did, if you are an involved parent, it doesn’t really matter. If teachers at the school are teaching my kids something I disagree with, it’s my job to be paying enough attention to catch it,” he said. “I don’t know why people get worked up. There is always going to be stuff you disagree with.”

On the day before the vote, under steady rainfall, Hutchins, Rogers, and another volunteer placed signs along Route 57 across from Priest Lake Elementary School, a polling station. Rogers’s youngest daughter skipped while twirling a child-sized umbrella. “A lot of people are very confident of Margy winning — we are not,” said Rogers, referring to Hall by her nickname.

There was good reason for concern. In the end, Hall did best Galloway by a 60-40 margin. But as Douglas and Turner had feared, Nash defeated Barton, and Reinbold won over Glazier. Retaking the district would not be quick or easy. Yet having a majority on the board offered relief. “We can rebuild,” said Douglas.

Hall, however, was concerned about the division that had eroded support for public education in the first place. The question on her mind was how to bring calm. On the eve of the election, she had made a soup with red lentils, ginger, and coconut milk, which she ladled into small ceramic bowls. As she sat at her dining table talking and eating, she rose periodically to let her dog, Cinco, outdoors, accompanying him with a flashlight. Because of a defect at birth, he now has only three legs; there were cougars and a pride of mountain lions in the dark woods.

Between trips, she shared her idea of creating random seating assignments at the round tables in the high school cafeteria where school board meetings were now held, a strategy for encouraging residents on each side to sit together and actually converse. “How tired are people of the fighting and name-calling and bashing?” There was much work to do — a new levy needed, a curriculum people agreed on, teacher contracts, luring families back — but she told me it started with “trying to work as a team, to balance perspectives.”

The day after the election, with the reality of the mixed board clear, Hall offered a sober assessment. “My work,” she said, “is definitely cut out for me.”

This story about West Bonner was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter. Laura Pappano is the author of School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics and the Battle for Public Education, to be published by Beacon Press in January 2024.

The post The (mostly) Republican moms fighting to reclaim their Idaho school district from conservatives   appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

DRYDEN, N.Y.—Three feeder cattle — or weaned calves — are loose in the normally quiet rural town of Dryden. News of the bovines’ escape has caused some slight disruptions at nearby Dryden Elementary School.

The calves have been at large for over a week. They escaped from the Empire Livestock Marketing auction house in the Village of Dryden on Nov. 20 at about 4:20 p.m., according to auction house owner Heidi Nicholas.

Nicholas said that four calves escaped while they were being delivered and unloaded into the auction house, one of which has since been captured.

“The farmer that brought them in with a trucker [had] actually opened the gate and didn’t realize that his trucker had pulled away from the dock,” Nicholas said.

Nicholas said auction house employees are “not turning a blind eye” to the situation and have been working through Thanksgiving and the weekend to capture the loose cattle. She said two have black coats, and one is tan and belted.

Nicholas said Empire Livestock Marketing is working with the Village of Dryden police to track down the rogue calves. Unfortunately, there are few leads to go off of at the moment.

“We have no idea where they are,” Village of Dryden Police Department Chief Josh Tagliavento said Tuesday. Although, he’s “pretty sure” the calves are no longer in the Village of Dryden.

“We believe that they’re not in the village because I’m pretty sure if there were three cows walking around, we probably would have gotten the call,” Tagliavento said.

The calves were reportedly last seen in front of the Dryden Fire House Monday evening, where an attempt to lure them into captivity with a bucket of sweet feed failed.

The news of cattle on the loose in Dryden was spread by the Dryden Central School District (DSCD) in an announcement on Instagram Tuesday, but the school district said that the three young cattle on the loose were wild bulls that would charge if approached.

“The bulls should not be approached,” DSCD said in its announcement. “Leave your red cape at home.”

Empire Livestock Marketing’s auction house is just a short walk away from Dryden Elementary School, and DCSD moved to bring recess indoors “out of an abundance of caution.”

However, it appears that officials in the school district misunderstood the situation. Nicholas said the cattle her employees and her are tracking down are not bulls, but weaned calves, and are likely about 18 months old and just between 600 pounds and 800 pounds.

“When you say a bull, probably the general public would think, ‘Oh, my God, there’s a 2000-pound bull running around the neighborhood,’” Nicholas said. “No, that’s not the case.”

DCSD officials were not available to comment ahead of publication, but DCSD updated its statement Tuesday after being contacted by the Village of Dryden Police Department and Empire Livestock Marketing.

“Apparently, the bovine that escaped were incorrectly identified as bulls and are in fact feeder cows,” the update said.

DSCD said it intends to keep activities at Dryden Elementary indoors for the remainder of Tuesday, “but most likely will resume normal activities tomorrow, while just keeping an eye out for the three ‘musketeers.’”

Nicholas described the young cattle as skittish.

“They’re more afraid of you than you would be of them,” Nicholas said.“[But] certainly, everyone should be cautious.”

Nicholas encouraged anyone who catches sight of the calves to contact her directly. The Village of Dryden Police Department is also seeking information.

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Heidi Nicholas, owner of Empire Livestock Marketing: 315-985-5110

Village of Dryden Police Department non-emergency number: 607-844-8118

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Update (Oct. 30, 1:20 p.m.): New York Governor Kathy Hochul visited Cornell’s campus Monday morning in the wake of the threats posted online against Jewish students. Hochul’s visit was announced last-minute before she arrived on campus.

She appeared with a crowd of Cornell students, law enforcement personnel and Cornell University President Martha Pollack.

“No one should be afraid to walk from their dorm or their dining hall to a classroom. That is a basic right that every New Yorker has outside of campus, but particularly on a campus because these are young people who are in an environment that is intended to protect them as well, and their parents need to know this,” Hochul said.

Hochul said the New York State Police and FBI have been notified to assist with the investigation into the threats.

“This community will start to heal. It’s been horribly painful,” Hochul said. “They will come together because the terrorists, the people who are threatening them will get no refuge here. They will find that this community is made stronger and defiant and will resist any sense that they’ll change their way of life because they’ve been threatened by people with such hate in their hearts.”

Other entities have also published condemnations of the threats, including the Cornell Coalition for Mutual Liberation and the Tompkins County government.

Original story (Oct. 30, 5 a.m.):

ITHACA, N.Y.—Cornell University is heightening security on campus after threats were made online against the school’s Jewish community.

Cornell police and President Martha Pollack both acknowledged the threats, which were posted to the GreekRanks forum online. At least one of the threatening posts, titled “if i see another jew” [sic], is still visible as of early Monday morning and contains graphic threats against Jewish students.

Another post, which has apparently been removed, threatened to “shoot up” 104West!, a building on campus with a kosher dining hall and adjacent to the Center for Jewish Living. Others that have been removed contained similar sentiments and violent threats.

It’s unclear who was behind the threats or if they were made by anyone affiliated with the university. The posts were made under various pseudonyms, including the username “hamas,” referring to the group responsible for the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel that have led to an ongoing offensive by Israeli military forces against Palestinians in Gaza. In the aftermath, thousands of people have been killed or injured during the war over the last three weeks.

Police said they are investigating, but did not disclose details of who they believe to be responsible.

“The Cornell University Police Department is investigating posts located on a website that contain threats of violence directed at religious groups across the campus,” according to a Facebook announcement from Cornell police. “Evidence suggests the targeted locations were intentionally selected because of the perpetrator’s bias. The investigation is continuing.”

Additional security was stationed outside of 104West! on Sunday in response to the threats.

Pollack condemned the threats in a statement released Sunday. She also noted that the FBI had been notified of the threats to investigate the matter as a “potential hate crime.”

“Threats of violence are absolutely intolerable, and we will work to ensure that the person or people who posted them are punished to the full extent of the law,” Pollack said. “The virulence and destructiveness of antisemitism is real and deeply impacting our Jewish students, faculty and staff, as well as the entire Cornell community. This incident highlights the need to combat the forces that are dividing us and driving us toward hate.”

During the day Sunday, Cornell’s Hillel chapter encouraged students to avoid 104West! out of an abundance of caution after the threats. Pollack had previously announced there would be increased police presence on campus earlier in October.

The threats come during a tumultuous month on campus. Several rallies have been held throughout the month on Cornell’s campus, supporting both Palestinians and Israelis, though all have been peaceful.

There have been several reports of graffiti that is critical of the Israeli government on campus, and Prof. Russell Rickford is on leave after comments he made about the conflict at a rally on the Ithaca Commons sparked outrage and drew a rebuke from Cornell administration.

Cornell community divided: rally backs Prof. Rickford as national headlines swirl

“In the days ahead, we will work to reinforce a culture of trust, respect and safety at Cornell,” Pollack wrote Sunday. “Regardless of your beliefs, backgrounds or perspectives, I urge all of you to come together with the empathy and support for each other that we so greatly need in this difficult time.”

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By the time the sun came up over the rolling green hills of Harrells, North Carolina, on June 23, 2021, a charred metal platform was all that remained of the old trailer. An investigation by the local fire department determined that the fire started at the electric stove in the kitchen. From there, it climbed the cabinets, spread to the living room, and tore through the two bedrooms. Within 30 minutes, the entire structure had been consumed by flames. A photo taken of the aftermath showed a pile of blackened debris, the charred coils of a mattress the only thing that suggested people lived there.

Parked beneath a thicket of tall trees and surrounded by miles of farmland, the trailer was where two cousins, Vicente Gomez Hernandez and Humberto Feliciano Gomez, were meant to spend the summer of 2021. They had traveled there from their Mixteco Indigenous community in San Juan Mixtepec, a rural town in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Now they’d be returning in body bags.

Gomez and Feliciano were two of the hundreds of thousands of temporary agricultural workers who come to the U.S. each year through the H-2A visa program. It’s the federal government’s most important farm-labor pipeline — and it gets bigger every year. Yet for many visa recipients, the promise of steady work and decent pay quickly devolves into a nightmare of labor trafficking, wage theft, and unsafe living conditions that can lead to injury or even death.

Federal law spells out numerous protections for H-2A workers. They are to be reimbursed by their employer for the cost of their travel, for instance, and be provided free and safe housing as well as a competitive hourly wage.

But too often these laws are poorly enforced at both the state and federal levels. That lack of oversight creates opportunities for workers to be exploited, cheated, and abused.

Once workers arrive at their destination in the U.S., they’re at the mercy of a patchwork of enforcement that varies greatly depending on the resources available in a given state. For instance, previous reporting by Investigate Midwest found that in Missouri a lack of funding led to a lax inspection process that was easily abused and led to H-2A workers living in deplorable conditions.

Should workers find themselves at the hands of an abusive employer they have few options. They are not allowed to seek employment elsewhere because their visa is tied to their original employer. If they leave that position, they forfeit their visa and risk deportation. If they report abuse, they can face retaliation and be blackballed by both H-2A recruiters and employers, making it difficult to ever return to work legally in the U.S.

“H-2A workers, by the very nature of the program, don’t have any control over their work environment,” said Joan Flocks, an emeritus law professor at the University of Florida who specializes in agricultural labor.

For these reasons, experts say, most abuse in the H-2A program goes unreported, as too often workers are forced to choose between fair treatment and financial opportunity.

In September, the Department of Labor announced a set of proposed rules designed to strengthen protections for H-2A workers. These include making the recruitment process more transparent and giving workers options to advocate for better conditions, like working with unions. The rules are open to public comment until November, and while worker’s rights advocates, including United Farm Workers, support them, it remains to be seen how effective they will be.

The H-2A visa is supposed to be a safe alternative to crossing the border illegally — a win for both farmworkers and farmers. With the visa, Gomez and Feliciano expected to earn $13.15 an hour picking sweet potatoes and blueberries — a fruit they’d never tasted before coming to the United States.

Instead, the men were exploited from the start. When they began working they were in debt, living in a squalid trailer, and were never paid the full wages they’d come all that way for. Then they died in a fire, the exact cause of which remains unclear.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the number of H-2A workers has grown steadily over the past decade. In 2022, some 300,000 came to the U.S., up 15 percent from the year before and more than triple the number of workers in 2012.

H-2A workers spend several months clearing fields, planting crops, and harvesting fruits and vegetables, often in exchange for wages that would be inconceivable in their home country. More than 90 percent come from Mexico, and without them much of the United States’ home-grown produce would not make it to the grocery store.

Yet problems like those that Gomez and Feliciano encountered have plagued the H-2A program since its creation, in 1986.

Cases of abuse and exploitation are well documented across the country. Examples from just this year include a 28-year-old man in Florida who died of heat exposure after employers failed to provide him with adequate water and rest. In Utah, the president of the local Farm Bureau was caught physically assaulting one of his H-2A workers and is now under investigation for human trafficking. And in California, workers had their visas recalled after speaking out about unsafe conditions. While these stories rarely make headlines, in 2021 a federal investigation, Operation Blooming Onion, brought the issue to the nation’s attention. The multiyear probe uncovered a transnational human trafficking operation, headquartered in Georgia, that forced more than 100 H-2A workers to endure deplorable living conditions and what investigators called “modern day slavery.”

From 2018 to 2020, a hotline run by the Polaris Project, a nonprofit that fights human trafficking, identified 2,841 H-2A workers who had been subjected to labor trafficking. Over half of these workers reported being threatened with deportation after demanding decent living conditions or the wages they were owed. Others alleged that their employers withheld or destroyed their immigration documents as a means of control. In addition, nearly a quarter of the workers said the debt they incurred in order to get their H-2A visa, including invalid recruitment fees, was used to coerce them into working against their will.

Yet experts say that these cases don’t capture the full scope of the problems with H-2A, in part because workers are reluctant to report abuse but also because the agencies responsible for preventing abuse are underfunded and understaffed.

According to research by the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank, the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, which is supposed to investigate reports of abuse in H-2A, has seen little increase in funding since 2006. In the ensuing years the number of H-2A workers has increased more than 500 percent.

As a result, the odds that an H-2A farm will be inspected are less than 1 percent, which can lead to a low level of compliance with labor laws, said Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute and the author of the report. “Farms can pretty much do whatever they want and there’s a very low likelihood they’ll ever be investigated,” he said.

In a written response, a spokesperson from the Department of Labor said the agency makes “strategic use of the funds appropriated by Congress,” and that it “regularly carr[ies] out thorough investigations of employers and farm labor contractors.”

When it comes to housing, the H-2A program also has strict regulations in place, but the reality is that those rules are often poorly enforced by the state agencies that oversee them.

In North Carolina, for instance, there were just eight compliance officers in 2022 responsible for the pre-occupancy inspections of 2,061 farmworker housing sites, according to the North Carolina Department of Labor (NCDOL). Each officer was responsible for 257 sites. That’s in addition to their other duties, which include enforcing a host of federal farming regulations and running training sessions across the state.

In an email, NCDOL acknowledged the rapid expansion of the H-2A program in the state and said it had received funding this year for two additional inspectors: “As more agricultural employers rely on the H-2A program to meet their workforce needs, NCDOL ASH [Agriculture Safety and Health Bureau] expects the number of registered migrant housing sites to increase as well. We are grateful for the additional two positions given to us by the N.C. General Assembly in the last budget and of course, we would always welcome more inspectors to help the department meet its obligations.”

“Farms can pretty much do whatever they want and there’s a very low likelihood they’ll ever be investigated.”

Daniel Costa, Economic Policy Institute

At the trailer where Gomez and Feliciano lived, the NCDOL inspector found no deficiencies in a pre-occupancy inspection. Investigate Midwest reviewed a copy of the report, which was completed on Feb. 24, 2021, just months before the fire. It included no details about the condition of the trailer; a single box was checked stating that it met all federal standards. (According to its annual report that year, 51.9 percent of housing inspected by the NCDOL were found to have no violations.)

But a worker interviewed by Investigate Midwest, who spent the previous summer in the trailer where Gomez and Feliciano died, described it as barely livable.

The worker, whose identity we are protecting because he fears reprisal, said the floor was full of holes and the water and electricity would often go out. Washing clothes and dishes took place out behind the trailer, he said, with a plastic bucket and water spigot. According to the worker there was no air conditioning or fans and the windows were covered with plywood. He said the trailer was infested with cockroaches and at night, as the workers lay on bare mattresses on the floor, the scurry of mice was loud enough to keep them awake.

Once workers are living in H-2A housing, a state inspector may return to make sure the housing is being properly maintained. However, follow-up inspections during the growing season are rare.

According to NCDOL’s 2022 annual report, only 16 of the state’s 2,052 permitted sites – just 0.7 percent – were randomly inspected once workers were living there.

Thomas Arcury is a public health scientist at Wake Forest University who has spent close to 30 years researching issues pertaining to farmworkers in the state. As part of his research, Arcury inspected many housing sites while workers were living there in the 2010s. He found that 41 percent of housing he inspected did not meet state safety standards due to everything from rodent infestations and broken appliances to having more occupants than the permit allows.

“Even if it passes inspection,” he said in an interview, “you wouldn’t want to live there. If you want my impression, farmworker housing is dangerous.”

It was only in the last 15 years that word of the visa program arrived in San Juan Mixtepec. Before that, a chance to work in the U.S. meant paying thousands of dollars to a smuggler and then risking your life to cross the border illegally. It was a path that many, mostly young men, chose as a means to escape the extreme poverty that plagues Oaxaca.

In 2019, Gomez learned about the visa through another cousin, Valentino Lopez Gomez, who worked as an H-2A recruiter and labor contractor. While U.S. farms will often hire H-2A workers directly through recruiters, increasingly they work through labor contractors, like Lopez, who function as the official employer. Worker advocates say this provides farm owners plausible deniability if things go wrong. Lopez, who was certified by the U.S. Department of Labor, hired men and women from San Juan Mixtepec and brought them to North Carolina where he contracted them out to local farms.

Gomez was 39, with a wife and two kids, and he needed to earn more money. Surviving in San Juan Mixtepec was becoming ever harder. Drought was killing the crops that had supported the community for millennia. He told Feliciano, who was in his early 30s and eager to start a family, about the opportunity. Initially, Feliciano didn’t want to go. He was scared to travel so far away. But Gomez reasoned that the visa was safe and that Lopez was family. Surely they could trust him to look out for them in America.

In 2020, the two men joined 38 other workers from their village who had been recruited by Lopez to harvest blueberries on Ronnie Carter Farms and Hannah Forest Blueberry farms in North Carolina. Gomez and Feliciano lived that summer in the same trailer where tragedy struck the following year, along with the worker who described the trailer’s decrepit conditions to Investigate Midwest. Not much is known about the cousins’ experience on that first trip. But family members said that they earned barely enough to cover the debts they incurred to get there.

In October 2022, 13 of the workers Lopez recruited that year filed a civil complaint in federal district court for the Eastern District of North Carolina alleging that Lopez charged workers recruitment fees that were between $1,200 to $5,245. Again, under Labor Department rules, these fees are prohibited. Many of the fees were paid with high-interest loans, meaning the workers started the harvest season in debt.

Once the workers arrived in North Carolina, according to the complaint, Lopez confiscated their passports. This is how he allegedly coerced the workers; if they didn’t do as he said, he’d call immigration enforcement. The workers claim he refused to reimburse them for the cost of travel from Mexico, as is required by DOL rules. He also allegedly pocketed some or all of their wages. In one instance, the complaint claims, Lopez tried to extort a female worker for sexual favors.

“Year after year we hear the same gruesome set of facts from farmworkers that are recruited to work on North Carolina farms and our docket of federal trafficking cases reflects that.”

Caitlin Ryland, Legal Aid of North Carolina

The case is pending, but if Lopez is found liable the workers may eventually be eligible to receive special visas that would allow them to remain in the U.S. permanently.

Neither Lopez nor his lawyer responded to multiple requests, via email and phone, for comment.

Caitlin Ryland, who represents the workers in the case, has spent the last 15 years at Legal Aid of North Carolina, a nonprofit that offers pro bono legal services. In that time she’s seen H-2A workers increasingly become targets of criminal behavior, including debt bondage, fraud, and human trafficking.

“Year after year we hear the same gruesome set of facts from farmworkers that are recruited to work on North Carolina farms and our docket of federal trafficking cases reflects that,” Ryland wrote in an email to Investigate Midwest.

Gomez and Feliciano were not plaintiffs in the civil complaint, but according to Ryland they were among the workers from 2020 whom the federal Department of Labor had identified as being owed either wages or travel costs that Lopez never paid or reimbursed.

Nevertheless, the two men decided to return the following year. According to interviews with their families, going to North Carolina was still the best option they had. This time, the families said, the cousins each needed around $2,000 up front for Lopez’s recruitment fee and for travel costs. In a town where most people earn around $12 a day, this was a small fortune. The cousins borrowed money from several community members at 5 percent interest. It was a gamble, but if everything went as planned they could pay off the debt and still bring home around $3,000 each.

The cousins’ experience is fairly common in the H-2A system. In 2019, Centro de los Derechos del Migrante (CDM), an international workers rights organization, interviewed 100 H-2A workers about their experience in the program. More than a quarter said they had paid a recruitment fee. Abigail Kerfoot, an attorney with CDM, said the real number is likely much higher, and that this abuse is so pervasive in part because U.S. authorities are unable to police this activity because it takes place in a foreign country.

“Obviously, there’s a country-to-country relationship with Mexico that the United States has to take into account,” she said.

In a written response, a Department of Labor spokesperson said that while the agency can fine and debar labor recruiters caught charging illegal fees, “the division has no enforcement authority over entities located outside of the U.S. and its territories.”

On a Tuesday afternoon in late June 2021, Gomez and Feliciano got back to their trailer after a long day spent digging sweet potatoes. A third worker, Luis Rojas, was staying with the cousins at the trailer. Rojas slept in the living room, while the cousins each had a bedroom. According to a statement Rojas gave to the county fire marshal, the men marked the end of the day with three beers each. Then, as they often did, they called their families over WhatsApp.

Around 8 p.m., the men made a dinner of fried fish and, according to Rojas, they each had two more beers before going to bed.

At about 1:30 a.m, according to his statement, Rojas awoke feeling an intense heat on his face. The trailer was filling with smoke, and he saw that the kitchen was on fire. He ran to the back door of the trailer, but it wouldn’t open. As Rojas struggled with the handle, he said he heard Feliciano shouting and saw him go to the bedroom where Gomez slept. Then the door swung open and Rojas stumbled into the night air. He ran across the street to a house where other workers lived to get help.

What happened that night has been pieced together from the Sampson County Fire Marshal’s Fire Origin and Cause Report, Rojas’ account, and several statements from other workers who witnessed the fire. It isn’t clear whether Feliciano went to bed or stayed up, but at some point he apparently decided to make something else to eat. He turned on the electric stove, which had only two working burners. According to the report, the fire “most likely” originated in the front right burner. The investigator said two possible causes of the fire that he could not rule out were “failure of a component of the stove” and “occupant negligence.” So it’s possible that Feliciano accidentally started a grease fire that quickly spread out of control. Or it could have been the stove that was faulty and sparked the first flame.

We know that Feliciano caught fire, and investigators suggested he might have run to the bathtub to try to extinguish his burning clothes. There is nothing in the report about whether the trailer had running water that night. All the while, Gomez apparently remained asleep in his room. The pre-occupancy inspection, carried out just months before, doesn’t note whether the smoke detectors were tested, but Rojas said he doesn’t remember hearing them. When Investigate Midwest asked to speak with the inspector for clarification, the request was denied.

Both the deputy and chief fire marshals also declined Investigate Midwest’s request to interview them about the case.

At 1:35 a.m. a worker living in a house next to the trailer ran to alert Lucas Carter, who lived nearby. Carter, who owned the trailer and was listed as the farm’s president in its annual report, called the fire department. Carter did not respond to three phone calls seeking comment.

“When this happens, the recruiters extort them, and in the worst scenarios they are blackmailed and threatened, even though the companies in the U.S. already pay the recruiters for each person they bring in.”

Rey Martinez Lopez

Other workers attempted to rescue Feliciano and Gomez but were repelled by the heat and flames. Mobile homes, especially older ones, are made of lightweight synthetic materials and burn quickly. Their narrow layout can trap people inside. The workers pulled off a section of the trailer’s siding, creating an opening into Gomez’s bedroom. He was unconscious, so the men dragged him out on his mattress. Thirty minutes after the fire began, paramedics and firefighters arrived but were unable to resuscitate Gomez. Feliciano was found dead in the bathroom.

In their report, investigators speculate that Feliciano likely started the fire as a result of being intoxicated. The county medical examiner determined that Feliciano had a blood-alcohol level of 0.3 percent, or nearly three times the legal limit in North Carolina, suggesting he was “acutely intoxicated.” Gomez’s blood-alcohol level was around half that.

The scenario outlined by investigators is certainly plausible, but there are reasons to think that the trailer’s condition could have played a role in what happened that night — not least of which are the well-documented problems with H-2A housing around the country. In this case, investigators were unable to rule out the possibility that the broken stove started the fire. And the condition of the trailer, as described by the worker who lived there with Gomez and Feliciano the previous summer, differs significantly from what is suggested by the pre-occupancy inspection report approved by NCDL which found no violations. Rojas, too, in his witness statement, described the trailer as “disgusting,” said they had gone a week without hot water, and that he had never been told how to use the fire extinguisher or given any instruction on what to do in case of a fire or other emergency. Finally, while the NCDL inspection cited no problem with the trailer’s smoke detectors, Lucas Carter, the owner of the trailer, told the fire marshal’s office that he could not confirm that it had working smoke detectors on the night of the fire.

According to the workers’ families in Oaxaca, neither Lopez nor Lucas Carter called them after the fire. It was another worker, also from San Juan Mixtepec, who called a member of Gomez’s family to tell him the news. The disaster was so far away and so abstract that for weeks many family members didn’t believe it had actually happened. They would anxiously check their phones, hoping for a WhatsApp message from one of the men to clear up what must have been a misunderstanding. But a month later, when their bodies arrived home, everyone was forced to accept the new reality.

In San Juan Mixtepec it’s customary to pray over the body of the deceased for eight days while the family receives mourners. Each day, some 200 people came to pay their respects to Feliciano, and the family poured sodas and served menudo and sweet breads. Similarly, Gomez’s family mourned his passing by hosting loved ones and praying over his remains.

At the end of eight days, Feliciano was buried, and the family could finally find some closure. But now, in addition to the cost of funeral services, they had to contend with Feliciano’s debt, which was around $11,000.

Feliciano’s family borrowed money, interest-free, from relatives in the U.S. to pay back what he had borrowed from neighbors. Now Feliciano’s father is working on other farms to pay back the family, leaving his own crops and animals unattended.

Each year, as many as 250 people are recruited from San Juan Mixtepec for H-2A visas. Like Lopez, the recruiters are locals, and they charge their neighbors anywhere from $1,000 to more than $5,000 for visa applications that are supposed to be free. The town’s leaders agree that the H-2A program provides much needed economic opportunity, but they’ve grown concerned about abuse.

According to Rey Martinez Lopez, who spoke as a representative of the San Juan Mixtepec community, many workers will return from a season in the U.S. without having earned enough money to repay the recruitment fee. “When this happens, the recruiters extort them, and in the worst scenarios they are blackmailed and threatened, even though the companies in the U.S. already pay the recruiters for each person they bring in,” he said.

Martinez says that none of the families of workers who die while working on H-2A visas is compensated by the U.S. government or by the farms that hired them. He believes the workers should receive life insurance so that their families will be taken care of financially. More importantly, Martinez said, he wants the U.S. government to investigate and punish corrupt recruiters.

In December 2022, the U.S. Department of Labor debarred Lopez from working as an H-2A foreign labor contractor for three years after an investigation determined that he “confiscated workers’ passports … failed to pay weeks of wages to more than a dozen workers, did not pay the inbound and outbound transportation expenses for workers, and charged workers fees between $150 and $8,000 to participate in the federal program” during the 2020 and 2021 growing seasons. It also fined him $62,531 in civil penalties. The investigation also led to the recovery of $58,039 in wages owed to 72 workers. His debarment will last until 2025, at which point he could be allowed to resume his work as a labor contractor.

In San Juan Mixtepec, meanwhile, where most homes have dirt floors and no indoor plumbing, Lopez’s house sits prominently on the side of a hill. The two-story structure, built of cement and white stucco, is surrounded by a tall cinder block wall with an imposing iron gate. People in the community said it’s been years since Lopez has visited. In his absence, the house is a reminder for community members and neighbors of dreams that ended in misery.