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.

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

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

If you appreciate our coverage, consider donating to The Ithaca Voice today during our NewsMatch fundraising campaign. Reader support is vital to our mission, and any contribution is meaningful. Thank you.

The post Three young cattle have been on the loose in Dryden for over a week appeared first on The Ithaca Voice.

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.

“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.”

The post Cornell heightens security after threats against campus Jewish community appeared first on The Ithaca Voice.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

ITHACA, N.Y.—A months-long effort to organize and sew dozens of quilts for those in need culminated Tuesday, as 63 quilts were presented to a room full of quiltmakers and onlookers. The quilts are being sent to the Alcohol and Drug Council’s new Open Access Detox and Stabilization Center, and will be placed on each bed in the facility for people undergoing treatment.

The sentiment of covering every bed in the new facility “with the warmth and beauty of a quilt created with love and care by a community member” fueled the quilters, organized by members of the Community Quiltmaking Center. The effort was coined “40 Quilts for 40 Beds” and was led by Brigid Hubberman with materials donated by Peggy Dunlop, one of the founders of the Community Quiltmaking Center.

The quilts were presented during an event at Kendal at Ithaca Tuesday evening celebrating the quiltmakers and officially dedicating the quilts to the center. In total, there were 63 quilts displayed, made by 65 quiltmakers, most of whom are local (and listed at the bottom of this article). While the initial goal was 40 quilts to cover the 40 beds in the detox center, the community’s enthusiasm produced far more than was anticipated.

Tuesday night’s event featured the parading of each of the quilts across a stage to applause, with some of the quiltmakers coming to the front and addressing the audience about their inspiration, the design and materials, or simply waxing poetic about their love of quilting.

State Assemblymember Anna Kelles, Tompkins County Deputy Commissioner of Mental Health Services Harmony Ayers-Friedlander and the Alcohol and Drug Council’s director of marketing and development, Emily Parker, were among several speakers who commended the effort and emphasized the importance of supporting people struggling with addiction.

“I can’t imagine a more beautiful symbol of connection than these gorgeous quilts, made by giant-hearted, generous, caring women,” Parker said. The detox and stabilization center has struggled to fill out its workforce as it ramped up to launch earlier this year, but is currently partially open for patients.

Ayers-Friedlander added that the quilts would help those struggling with addiction to know “your community sees you as a person,” in line with the event’s overall goal of reducing stigma around addiction and seeking treatment.

Others shared emotional and personal stories about their connections to addiction. One woman named Dorothy stitched a quilt depicting the sun at dawn, which she said represented her brother’s 30 years of sobriety. The quilt is currently hanging in the Tompkins County Center for History and Culture.

Ithaca Youth Bureau Executive Director Liz Klohmann had a particularly close connection to two of the quilts. In front of the audience, Klohmann disclosed that her son died from a fentanyl overdose in 2022. Before his death, her son had gathered a sizable amount of thread for a creative endeavor but died before he was able to put it to use. Instead, Klohmann said the thread had been used in two of the quilts that were presented Tuesday.

Quilters of all skill levels volunteered to put their stitching talents to work, including Pat Costantini. Like most others who assisted in the effort, Costantini has relatives who were impacted by substance use issues.

But Costantini said her passion for quilting was enough to get her involved.

“I love to quilt, it’s my therapy,” Costantini said. “I’m happy to be part of it, to be able to contribute.”

She has been involved in similar efforts before, and has donated some of her work to the Quilts for Valor Foundation, a non-profit that donates quilts and blankets to veterans. Her daughter-in-law organized an effort to make Christmas stockings for troops overseas when Costantini’s son was stationed in Afghanistan during the holidays, in which Costantini also participated.

Nora Burrows, another quilter, was looking for an outlet for her love of quilting, which like Costantini, pushed her to get involved. She said her quilt took months to finish, but she “loves every second of it.”

“The idea of being comforted and being in an environment that may be scary and wanting to feel some sense of calm,” Burrows said. “Quilts are, traditionally, that feeling of calm. I wanted to be a part of that.”

The below pictures were provided by NYS Assemblymember Anna Kelles.

Leisa Morris White moved to the area from Australia and said quilting had been a central way for her to make new friends in her new surroundings.

“My favorite thing to make is a community quilt,” White said. “When people join together and make things happen, it’s amazing. It brings people together and you get to know people, you really bond and make friends.”

She continued that she hopes the quilts are useful for decades to come as a source of warmth and comfort.

“I just hope [the quilt] lasts longer than me,” White said. “If when I’m gone someday, someone else is wrapped up in it, that would make me very happy.”

The post Local quiltmakers combine to supply new detox center with a homemade quilt for each bed appeared first on The Ithaca Voice.

In September 2016, with Tropical Storm Hermine bearing down on North Carolina, Kemp Burdette rented a single-engine plane and flew over Duplin County. Burdette, a riverkeeper with the environmental group Cape Fear River Watch, was worried that some of the local pig farmers might try to drain their manure lagoons before the rains hit, to prevent them from overflowing. Spraying waste is illegal right before storms because of the risk that runoff from saturated fields will contaminate waterways.

As he flew, Burdette estimated that he saw at least 35 farms spraying their fields. He took high-resolution, GPS-stamped photographs and videos documenting the apparent violations, and then filed a complaint with the state Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), hoping the iron-clad evidence would move the agency to act. He and his colleagues did the same a month later, just before devastating Hurricane Matthew. “This isn’t just one bad actor,” he said. “This was widespread—complete disregard for the rules.”

But, according to Burdette, DEQ told him that the GPS-stamped images were inadequate proof. “They were basically saying, ‘There’s nothing we can do,’” he says. “They can’t stand behind evidence collected by somebody else.” Nor did they have funds to make their own aerial surveys. For evidence, DEQ said it could only review the farms’ self-reported spray logs. And in November 2016, when Burdette and his colleagues followed up, they say, all public traces of their complaints had disappeared.

For years, North Carolina regulators shielded the identities of polluting farms, burying public complaints against them and leaving those who lived nearby with few avenues for redress. Neighbors said their complaints were going unheard. 

A joint investigation by The Guardian, Food & Environment Reporting Network, and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting backs up those residents’ assessments. In response to a public-records request, DEQ released only 33 public complaints against livestock operations in North Carolina from January 2008 to April 2018. Over the same period, other hog states have registered literally thousands.

And then, abruptly, the DEQ reversed that policy this spring, saying it had validated 62 complaints against animal operations over a six-month period and then posting them online. The offenders included 11 industrial hog farms, some of which had let their waste discharge into ditches and streams. The change of policy meant that state regulators had publicly documented nearly twice as many violations in the six months ending April 2019 than in an entire decade. What happened?

*

Interview on WNCU-Durham’s The Dirt with writer Barry Yeoman and FERN editor-in-chief Sam Fromartz.

Raising hogs in North Carolina used to be a side gig to the real business of growing tobacco and cotton. Then, in the 1980s and ’90s, the industry exploded, with concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) on the state’s coastal plain housing up to 60,000 animals apiece. Most of the state’s 9 million pigs live indoors, their waste flushed through slats into open pits called lagoons. When the lagoons get too full, the waste is sprayed onto crop fields as fertilizer, though these manure pits have also overflowed and breached their walls, particularly during hurricanes, sending waste into streams and rivers.

As the industry grew, the state legislature protected it in numerous ways, even barring counties from zoning out hog farms during the key expansion years. But lawmakers couldn’t ignore the mounting hog waste, particularly when it polluted waterways.

In 1997, the legislature imposed a temporary moratorium on new farms using lagoon-and-sprayfield systems: in 2007 it made the moratorium permanent, essentially capping the number of hog farms at around 2,300. But existing industrial farms were allowed to continue business as usual, despite widespread evidence that they were fouling the rural landscape and making for noxious neighbors.

“It smells like a body that’s been decomposed for a month,” said Rene Miller, a retired truck driver from Duplin County, the heart of hog country. Sundays after church, her family used to gather under the oak tree beside the house. They danced, played checkers, and ate fried chicken, collard greens, and corn. “That was my life back then,” she said. Now, with hog waste sprayed onto a field across the road, she stays inside with the air conditioner cranked up.

A study published in 2018 by the North Carolina Medical Journal concluded that families living near hog CAFOs saw higher rates of infant mortality and deaths from anemia, kidney disease, and tuberculosis. The researchers did not establish causality. Other studies have associated the state’s hog-farm emissions with asthma, elevated blood pressure, sleep disruptions, and depression.

A University of North Carolina study, from 2014, found these issues “disproportionately affect” people of color: African Americans are more than 1-1/2 times more likely than whites to live within three miles of an industrial hog operation in North Carolina. Latinos and Native Americans are also more likely to live near CAFOs.

The North Carolina Pork Council declined an interview request, but has in the past criticized the study from 2014.  It said the three-mile radius in the study captured too many people to be meaningful, and that co-author Steve Wing, an epidemiologist, was an outspoken hog-farm opponent. (Wing died in 2016.)

In comments submitted to DEQ last March, the Council also noted that the 2018 North Carolina Medical Journal study came from a research program at Duke University that received funding from a critic of factory farming.

The industry insists health concerns are exaggerated. “We don’t think these types of symptoms or things are going on in the communities where we do business,” Kraig Westerbeek, a senior director at Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer and the state’s dominant player, said in a deposition and in reference to an older study that found increased depression, anger, and confusion among neighbors who experienced hog-farm odors. “There are studies that can say almost anything,” he added. 

*

The moratorium on lagoons and spraying only applies to new farms. Meanwhile North Carolina’s legislators appear to have continued to protect existing farms and discourage neighbors from seeking help. In 2014, for example, they passed a law keeping complaints filed with the state environmental agency confidential unless the department “determines that a violation has occurred.” State Representative Jimmy Dixon, a sponsor, said the provision was designed to protect farmers from false accusations.

“We fully expect and desire to have any violations known and exposed,” the Duplin County Republican and semi-retired poultry farmer said in an interview. “But just to throw it wide open for every Tom, Dick, and Harry to make unsubstantiated claims, like some of the people do—we believe that there is an inherent expectation that I should be determined to be innocent until proven to be guilty.”

The confidentiality measure, part of a larger bill, passed with bipartisan support.

DEQ interpreted the law to require disclosure of a complaint only when there’s a formal violation notice or penalty, which the agency has historically been loath to initiate. “We believe [that] if they find a violation of the permit, they just tell the operator, ‘Hey, this doesn’t look right. You need to address it,’” said Elizabeth Haddix, managing attorney at the North Carolina regional office of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which represents some of DEQ’s critics. “They may not make any written record of that violation.” This is how, until recently, complaints vanished.

It also helps explain why the agency located only 33 complaint records for a period of more than a decade, when queried by the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting. Other states with major livestock industries had far more: Nebraska provided 2,131 complaints; Georgia 5,652; and Texas 6,411. Iowa, the top hog producing state, provided 2,393.

The North Carolina Pork Council, in a 2019 letter to DEQ, said the “relatively minimal number of violations” in the state signaled “a robust and working regulatory system.” But even careful documentation hasn’t guaranteed enforcement in North Carolina. DEQ spokesperson Sharon Martin would not discuss the complaints filed by Burdette and his colleagues after the 2016 storms. She did acknowledge the animal-operations program “is underfunded due to the last decade of budget cuts.”

*

Feeling unprotected by regulators, North Carolinians living near hog farms have turned to the courts, with more than two dozen lawsuits by more than 500 plaintiffs, including Rene Miller, against Smithfield Foods’ hog-production subsidiary, which contracted with farmers to raise its animals.

Meanwhile others looked to the machinery of federal and state government to hold DEQ more accountable. In September 2014, the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, Rural Empowerment Association for Community Help, and Waterkeeper Alliance filed a complaint with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Civil Rights. It said that DEQ failed to consider the outsized harm to people of color when it issued that year’s permit governing nearly all large hog operations, violating federal civil-rights laws. The permit is issued every five years. 

The two sides agreed to mediation, which fell apart after five representatives of the North Carolina Pork Council and its national counterpart showed up at what the environmentalists call a confidential session. (They suspect DEQ employees tipped off the Pork Councils.) “That was unnerving,” said Naeema Muhammad, the Environmental Justice Network’s organizing co-director.

DEQ did not respond to questions about the mediation. In an email, Robert Brown, a publicist for the North Carolina Pork Council, said the mediation was “no secret” and that his client wanted “to engage in a constructive dialogue, recognizing that any resolution of the complaint would have a direct impact on Pork Council members.”

The Pork Council described the complaint as part of a “coordinated, multi-pronged attack on our farmers.”

After the mediation failed, EPA investigators visited North Carolina and interviewed more than 60 hog-farm neighbors. The residents described stenches so strong that it made them gag, vomit, and lock themselves indoors. Several also mentioned keeping silent, because “for more than 15 years, the government has been well aware of the conditions they have to live with, but has done nothing to help, so complaining to NC DEQ would be futile,” the EPA wrote in a letter to DEQ. Those who did complain reported “threats, intimidation, and harassment” by the industry.

Finally, in December 2016, advocates challenged the complaint problem head-on, filing a separate petition with the North Carolina Office of Administrative Hearings, alleging that DEQ had failed to investigate complaints against hog farms. The groups pointed to the photographic evidence of illegal spraying just before Tropical Storm Hermine and Hurricane Matthew and the later disappearance of those complaints.

This multifaceted campaign began to bear fruit in 2017, after a change of governors and leadership in North Carolina. Incumbent Republican Pat McCrory was replaced by Democrat Roy Cooper, and he appointed former Environmental Defense Fund official Michael Regan to head DEQ. “We all had high hope,” the Environmental Justice Network’s Muhammad said of the new administration.

Shortly after the inauguration, DEQ issued “notices of deficiency” to nine farms that had sprayed their fields right before Hermine, requiring the farms to take corrective action. These farms included five that Burdette said he photographed the previous September. DEQ based its findings on the farmer-reported logs.

The new DEQ leadership also sat down with the advocates and hammered out two settlements. In the EPA civil-rights complaint, DEQ agreed to tougher oversight in its permit for large hog operations. It would improve air and water monitoring, and would develop a mapping tool to analyze whether people of color were disproportionately harmed by its decisions. In the settlement, DEQ did not acknowledge wrongdoing.

In the other settlement, DEQ agreed to implement a new system for investigating complaints, and to post six months’ worth of data. The first posting covered November 2018 through April 2019, showing DEQ received 138 complaints and found 62 violations.

When it comes to how regulators handle complaints, “I think the settlement was a game-changer,” said Haddix.

But the results of these challenges to the industry have not been entirely positive. Take the lawsuits: On one hand, juries have returned five verdicts against Smithfield. The awards have ranged from $102,400 to $473.5 million, though the largest were dialed back under state law. But the legislature responded to the suits by limiting neighbors’ future rights to sue and collect damages. Dixon, who helped shepherd the legislation, called the lawsuits “an egregious grab of money” by attorneys.

Smithfield did not respond to interview requests. In an email, it called the largest award an “outlier verdict” and noted that appeals are pending.

And DEQ declined to comment when asked if it had adopted a more aggressive policy. Advocates describe what Haddix calls a “bunker mentality” at the agency—a fear of appearing too proactive. 

For example, DEQ missed its own April 1 deadline for creating the mapping tool, which meant it couldn’t be used before the agency issued the 2019 five-year hog-farm permit. When advocates asked DEQ to issue a short-term permit until the tool could be developed, the agency balked. It said the tool was “educational” and “not intended for regulatory purposes.”

“What the hell good is a community-mapping program if it’s not going to slow down the degradation?” asked Muhammad. 

In May, DEQ posted a beta version of the tool. Haddix calls it flawed; for example, it doesn’t distinguish between large and small farms. DEQ’s Martin declined to discuss the tool.

Given the legislative climate, and lawmakers’ control over the state budget, environmentalists say they’re not surprised by the timidity at DEQ. “When I think of ‘agency capture,’ it’s not just a product of willful decisions not to enforce, or willful decisions to demonstrate favoritism to the industry,” says Will Hendrick, staff attorney for the Waterkeeper Alliance. “Some of it is agency aversion to the risk that may result from taking action against an industry that is favored at the legislature.”

In calls and emails, DEQ’s Martin would not discuss the political climate or the threat of legislative backlash. Nor would DEQ officials be available for interviews.

“That is all I am able to provide at this time,” she wrote.

Updates story on Aug. 30, 2019 to elaborate on the 2018 North Carolina Medical Journal study, note Rene Miller’s participation in the lawsuits, and add that DEQ did not acknowledge wrongdoing in the EPA civil rights complaint. The photo caption of the briefcase was corrected to note that Don Webb, of Stantonsburg, North Carolina, is now deceased.

TRUMANSBURG, N.Y.—A pair of tests indicating the presence of listeria have shut down raw milk production at Trumansburg-based Remembrance Farm. There have been two positive tests for listeria since the beginning of August, both among the farm’s raw milk products. The farm is continuing to produce products using pasteurized milk, none of which have tested positive.

The New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets published its first consumer alert about the farm on Aug. 21 after its raw milk products were tested and found to contain listeria monocytogenes, which can cause listeriosis in humans. A second consumer alert was published on Sept. 22 concerning a positive test in a specific product, the farm’s Connecticut Hill Melter raw milk cheese.

There have been no human illnesses in connection to the products, according to the state’s alert. Farm officials say the products in question were exclusively for the farm’s CSA program, meaning products on local grocery store shelves have not been impacted.

“A sample of the cheese collected by an inspector from the Department was discovered to be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes,” states the consumer alert. “On September 15, 2023, the producer was notified of a preliminary positive test result. Further laboratory testing, completed on September 19, 2023, confirmed the presence of Listeria monocytogenes in the cheese sample.”

Currently, all raw milk products have been temporarily paused in accordance with state law after a positive listeria test.

Sean Waters, Remembrance’s herdsman, said farm workers have been searching for the source of the listeria positives but have been unsuccessful so far.

“We’ve continued to test positive in our raw milk despite making some pretty big changes in protocol, so that’s leading us to believe it’s somewhere within the environment that we haven’t found yet,” Waters said.

The farm has contracted with a third-party tester that specializes in raw milk testing. Initial tests came back negative, but further testing is taking place on the cows that produce the milk.

Raw milk products make up a minority of the products that Remembrance makes and sells, which Waters said has been a “saving grace.”

The other products can sustain the farm’s business, he said, while they determine the best course of action with the raw milk products.

Waters said no contamination has been found in any of the farm’s other products, including its vegetables and other dairy products from pasteurized milk. Production of those items has continued, with consistent testing in place.

“There’s some increased scrutiny given that we have had listeria in the larger farm,” Waters said. “So far, all of those results have come back totally clear. We feel pretty confident that the pasteurized milk is safe.”

Waters said the farm is optimistic the problem is short-term and he encouraged anyone concerned with the raw milk issues to reach out to the farm directly.

The post Listeria positives cause pause for Trumansburg farm’s raw milk products appeared first on The Ithaca Voice.

Her face solemn, Kati Preston held up a postcard-sized, black-and-white photograph, moving it slowly to face the 150 high school students spread across the lecture hall in New Hampshire. She wanted them all to see the image of her father, a handsome man in a dapper suit jacket, as she described searching for him with her mother at a train station in Hungary in 1945.

“We stood up on the platform,” Preston said, “and we were holding a picture of my father like this, saying to everybody who got off the train, ‘Have you seen this man?’ ”

Preston, then 6 years old, stood with her mother at the station in Nagyvárad, waiting for a train carrying Jews back from concentration camps after the end of World War II. They hadn’t seen her father, Ernest Rubin, for over a year. “The train emptied, and there was no Daddy,” Preston recalled. “My mother started to cry, and I cried.” The rapt assembly of students and teachers at Kingswood Regional High School in Wolfeboro listened in silence.

Preston and her mother returned to the train station the next day, holding up the photo again. This time, a man getting off the train walked up to them. “Don’t wait for him,” he said, explaining he’d been held prisoner in the Auschwitz death camp with Preston’s father. “He’s dead.”

Preston and her mother were the only ones among their 29 Jewish relatives to survive the Holocaust, the persecution and murder of 6 million Jews. The Nazis also killed millions of other people, including gay men, political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war and people with disabilities. Preston’s mother was born Catholic and had converted to Judaism, so the Nazis didn’t consider her Jewish, only her daughter.

For more than a decade, Preston, now 84 and the author of the young adult graphic memoir “Hidden: A True Story of the Holocaust,” has been invited to 50 to 70 middle and high schools a year to share her story. She speaks primarily in New Hampshire, her home of 40 years. Last spring, she started becoming more political in her talks, especially about the dangers of staying silent when others are scapegoated. “Ten percent of people are
very good people, wonderful people. Ten percent are pretty awful. Eighty percent are sheep, and that’s what scares me,” Preston told the students at Kingswood Regional High. “It’s the sheep that allowed Hitler to rise.”

“It’s the sheep that allowed Hitler to rise.” 

Kati Preston, Holocaust survivor who lobbied for New Hampshire’s Holocaust education law

Preston speaks frankly about the politicization of history instruction. “You have to know your history to understand where you are coming from. Don’t let them distort it,” she urges the teens, whose school of around 700 students draws from a mix of towns — poor and wealthy, conservative and liberal-leaning. She cautioned them not to let people “change your laws to stop you learning about history.”

New Hampshire schools have become battlegrounds in the culture wars over racism and gender identity, and comprehensive education on the Holocaust is in danger, experts and teachers say. In 2020, after events including the mass shooting two years earlier that killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, New Hampshire passed a law requiring instruction on the Holocaust and other genocides in grades 8 through 12. But then, in 2021, as part of a backlash to the nation’s racial reckoning after the murder of George Floyd, New Hampshire banned the teaching of “divisive concepts” such as implicit bias and systemic racism.

Now these two laws are colliding in the state’s classrooms. Some of the topics that the divisive concepts laws restrict are precisely the ones that Holocaust education experts say must be covered to prevent a repeat of history. A key part of teaching about the Holocaust and other genocides is examining how one group of people could agree to participate in the mass murder of another. The answer, in part, lies in the use of propaganda that asserts one group as inferior. Adolf Hitler modeled his depiction of Jews as an inferior race on America’s racist treatment of Black people and the study of eugenics in this country.

Letters of concern to the New Hampshire Legislature and interviews with teachers reflect that, in teaching about the Holocaust, many feel scared to discuss certain topics as a way to draw contemporary parallels because of the state’s divisive concepts law.

Kingswood social studies teacher Kimberly Kelliher is among them. She says the state’s reporting mechanism for parents to accuse teachers of violating the law — plus a monetary award offered by the parent activist group Moms for Liberty aimed at encouraging such reports — frightens her. “The Holocaust is not a single event. It is a series of attitudes and actions that led to an atrocity,” says Kelliher, who has taught social studies for more than two decades. “When we look at the divisive concepts law, if we are denying people from talking about certain things, then we’re not honestly talking about the attitudes and actions.”

“The Holocaust is not a single event. It is a series of attitudes and actions that led to an atrocity. When we look at the divisive concepts law, if we are denying people from talking about certain things, then we’re not honestly talking about the attitudes and actions.” 

Kimberly Kelliher, social studies teacher, Kingswood Regional High School

Kelliher, like other teachers I spoke with, said she now avoids the word “racism” when talking to students about the Holocaust. Others say they avoid mentioning current events and hot-button topics such as implicit bias.

But a New Hampshire scholar says it’s impossible to avoid subjects like these if we truly want to learn from the atrocities of the past. “You can’t teach about Nazi perpetrators without teaching about implicit bias. You just can’t do it. What motivates the perpetrator?” says Tom White, the coordinator of educational outreach at Keene State College’s Cohen Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Hitler took advantage of implicit bias and conspiracy theories against Jews that had existed through thousands of years of antisemitism. “The central crux of fascism is to make their followers afraid that they’re under attack by another group, that they’re threatened by another group,” White says. “Implicit bias,” he adds, “is the crux of all of this.”

Preston advocated tirelessly for New Hampshire’s Holocaust education law. It mandated that beginning last school year, education on the Holocaust and other genocides start no later than eighth grade and be incorporated into at least one required high school social studies course. New Hampshire is one of 26 states with such a law, according to Echoes & Reflections, a Holocaust education organization. Massachusetts passed a law in 2022 establishing a fund to support genocide education and training; laws requiring Holocaust education now exist in every other New England state except Vermont, where it has been approved and is pending.

Under New Hampshire’s law, instruction must include facts about the Holocaust and other genocides, plus teach students “how and why political repression, intolerance, bigotry, antisemitism, and national, ethnic, racial, or religious hatred and discrimination have, in the past, evolved into genocide and mass violence.” Teachers, state Department of Education guidelines say, should help students “identify and evaluate the power of individual choices” in preventing such behavior.

Reports of antisemitic incidents and propaganda are on the rise nationally and regionally, according to the Anti-Defamation League of New England. In 2022, the nonprofit tracked 204 antisemitic incidents in New England, a 32 percent increase from the previous year. In New Hampshire, where 183 of those incidents took place, the spike of white supremacist propaganda activity included a classmate shouting antisemitic comments at a Jewish student; a swastika and the phrase “Kill all Jews” scrawled on a rock in a public place; and a neo-Nazi group distributing stickers with the Star of David and message “Resist Zionism.”

In 2021, a year after New Hampshire’s Holocaust and genocide education act became law, the state Legislature tucked into its budget bill an unrelated provision called “Right to Freedom from Discrimination in Public Workplaces and Education.” Known informally as the “divisive concepts law,” it’s part of a wave of “anti-woke” legislation around the country that right-wing backers have identified as a way to politically capitalize on white resentment and the concern by some people that white children are being made to feel guilty about segregation and other past racial injustices.

The divisive concepts law in New Hampshire prohibits students from being “taught, instructed, inculcated or compelled to express belief in or support” that someone is “inherently superior” to another based on a particular trait, including sex, race, and religion, and also states that students cannot be taught that an individual is “inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.” Educators who run afoul of this provision can face sanctions, including loss of their teaching licenses.

“The whole concept of race superiority and guilt over the past is concerning.”

Republican state Representative Glenn Cordelli, vice chair of the House Education Committee, who cosponsored New Hampshire’s initial divisive concepts bill

Republican state Representative Glenn Cordelli, vice chair of the House Education Committee, cosponsored New Hampshire’s initial divisive concepts bill, which failed to pass as a standalone law. I met him for breakfast at Katie’s Kitchen in Wolfeboro in March. A soft-spoken 74-year-old, retired from a career in information technology, he lives in Tuftonboro, a feeder town for Kingswood High. His inspiration for the measure had come from a 2020 executive order signed by then-President Trump (later rescinded by President Biden) prohibiting federal funding for training that promotes the concepts, as the executive order put it, “that some people, simply on account of their race or sex, are oppressors; and that racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as human beings and Americans.”

Cordelli told me he was concerned about teachers indoctrinating students and schools promoting critical race theory. That legal theory, which emphasizes that racism is systemic and therefore embedded in US policies and programs, has been a focus of the latest wave of conservative attacks on public education, even though it’s not commonly taught in K-12 schools.

“The whole concept of race superiority and guilt over the past is concerning,” Cordelli said, citing a complaint and resignation from a Manchester public school employee over training that discussed white privilege. (“I question,” Cordelli added, “whether there is systemic racism in New Hampshire.”)

Cordelli, who voted for the Holocaust and genocide education requirements, thinks teachers should not make direct connections to ideas such as implicit bias or systemic racism when teaching about the Holocaust. Rather, he believes that in open discussion, students can connect the dots between the past and present themselves without their teachers drawing conclusions for them.

He emphasized that the Holocaust education law and the divisive concepts law are not in conflict with one another. No one testifying before the education committee had “link[ed] instruction of the Holocaust with the divisive concepts bill” before it passed, he said. “That has not come up as an issue for teachers.”

But teachers and others around the state disagree with that point of view. The state’s two largest teacher unions are suing the New Hampshire education commissioner, the attorney general, and the head of the human rights commission to repeal the divisive concepts law, citing the chilling effect it is having on teaching. Deb Howes, president of the American Federation of Teachers-New Hampshire, says the law’s title, which includes the words “Right to Freedom from Discrimination,” is downright Orwellian in its doublespeak, given the law itself “is in effect chilling speech on the very concept of discrimination against various marginalized groups.”

“The divisive concepts law is so broadly worded. None of us are teaching that anyone deserves to be inherently oppressed, but we also know that when you’re talking about either history or the impact of history on current events, there are people who are oppressed and it comes from somewhere.”

Deb Howes, president of the American Federation of Teachers-New Hampshire

The vagueness of the divisive concepts law is one of teachers’ biggest concerns, Howes adds. “The divisive concepts law is so broadly worded. None of us are teaching that anyone deserves to be inherently oppressed, but we also know that when you’re talking about either history or the impact of history on current events, there are people who are oppressed and it comes from somewhere,” she says.

Many teachers I spoke with worry about parents reporting them. Some have seen this atmosphere building for years. One New Hampshire assistant principal recalled an incident from more than a decade ago that happened to her while she was teaching: a parent overheard her say the word “Nazis” and reported her to the principal. But she was, in fact, leading a lesson about the diary of Anne Frank.

In November of 2021, the New Hampshire chapter of the group Moms for Liberty tweeted an offer of a $500 bounty to the first person who caught a teacher breaking the divisive concepts law. Tiffany Justice, the Florida mother of four who cofounded Moms for Liberty, emphasizes that her group targets the teaching of CRT, and the divisive concepts law has no effect on teaching about the Holocaust. “The idea the Holocaust couldn’t be taught in its entirety with all honest truth is a ridiculous thought,” she told me. “This is a manufactured argument.”

In November 2021, New Hampshire’s education department posted an online form for people wanting to lodge complaints against teachers. Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut was concerned about teachers “trying to impose a value system on impressionable youngsters,” according to an April 15, 2022, news release (Edelbut declined to comment for this article through a spokesperson).

Since November of 2021, only one charge related to the divisive concepts law has been filed against a teacher, the state said in response to a Hechinger Report/Boston Globe Magazine public information request. (The state human rights commission, which fields complaints against teachers under the divisive concepts law, declined to provide further information, citing its confidentiality rules regarding complaints.)

Meanwhile, many school districts, including Governor Wentworth Regional School District, where Kingswood is located, have received freedom of information requests from people wanting to know if particular books were being used and asking to see all curricula or teaching materials with particular words, including “justice” and “diversity.”

“Clearly, there are individuals and groups that are racist, homophobic, misogynistic. We can’t call them out for it?”

New Hampshire State Representative Peter Petrigno

In January, Democratic lawmakers in New Hampshire proposed a bill to repeal the divisive concepts measure, citing the chilling effect and the upheaval the current provision has already caused among educators. “I’m a German historian,” said state Representative Nicholas Germana, a professor at Keene State, during a public hearing earlier this year. “I can’t imagine for the life of me that a [measure] like this would be introduced in Germany today.”

In March, the proposed repeal died in the House. State Representative Peter Petrigno, its prime sponsor and a Democrat, said he was doubtful it ever would be passed, given the Legislature’s Republican majority, but he pledged to keep trying. “Clearly, there are individuals and groups that are racist, homophobic, misogynistic. We can’t call them out for it?” says Petrigno, a former social studies teacher. “I don’t know how you can have a lesson on the Holocaust and genocide and the issue of racism can’t come up. Inevitably, it’s going to.”

In her talks, Preston first paints a picture of a happy, privileged life in early childhood, then, little by little, unspools how she, as a Jewish child in Nazi-occupied Hungary, lost every right she had — and nearly her life. It’s a real-life lesson on racism — the Nazis considered Jews a race — against one group of people.

In 1944, when Hungary fell under German occupation, Preston was weeks away from turning 5. Preston’s father ran a wholesale fish business and often brought a fresh carp home for dinner, putting it in the bathtub to keep it cool. The young Preston would visit the fish there, she remembers. “I would say, ‘Look, I’m so sorry we’re going to eat you, but you’re going to taste so good,’ ” she told the Kingswood students, sparking laughter. Preston recalls, too, the joy of regular visits by her father’s relatives. “I basked in this wonderful love of all of these people.”

Change happened gradually at first. The Nazis began prohibiting Jews from going to school or work, and then other places. “There was a special bench with a yellow stripe on it, and it said ‘Jew,’ ” she tells students. “I could no longer go to the swimming pool with my daddy because that would be ‘contaminated’ by us.”

Roundups of Jews began, and her father and all of his relatives were taken to a fenced-in ghetto. Preston was supposed to go, too. At first, her mother hid her at home. Then a dairy farmer, grateful to Preston’s mother for making her wedding dress, offered to hide the girl in her barn, taking her there in a farm cart. One day, soldiers came and Preston heard them say to her rescuer, “Where’s the Jew? We have information you’re hiding a Jew.”

“I open my eye and a big black boot is right next to my head, and then a bayonet comes down an inch away from my head and gets stuck in the wood next to my face. Then he pulls it out and they leave. That’s somehow when my real childhood ended.”

Kati Preston, Holocaust survivor who advocated for New Hampshire’s Holocaust education law

After searching the house, the soldiers headed to the barn and climbed up to where Preston had buried herself under hay. “I open my eye and a big black boot is right next to my head, and then a bayonet comes down an inch away from my head and gets stuck in the wood next to my face. Then he pulls it out and they leave,” she recalls. “That’s somehow when my real childhood ended.” She stayed in the barn for three months until the war was over.

Preston and her mother learned the details of what had happened to her father from the man at the train station. After her father and another prisoner at Auschwitz stole a piece of bread, both were stripped of their clothes, beaten, put in a dog kennel, and left in a field.

“It took my father two days and a night to die,” Preston told the students, as one girl covered her face in horror.

That man from the station went on to marry Preston’s mother. A few years later, he told Preston how at Auschwitz, the Nazis had made him go in one group and his first wife and their daughter, 11-year-old Dita, were directed to another — the group that was sent immediately to be killed in the gas chambers. At her school presentation, Preston raised high a photo of Dita, a girl with long braids. “She was only a few years older than me, and this little girl was killed only because she was a Jew.”

The day after Preston’s talk at Kingswood High, Kelliher led a discussion about it in class. The 14 juniors and seniors sat in a circle as their teacher turned down the lights and said quietly, “Let your eyelids be soft on your eye- balls. Take a breath.” Moments later, she tapped a chime, then asked for their impressions of Preston’s presentation.

One thing really stuck with Tegan Perkins-Levasseur, he told his classmates: It took Preston 50 years to stop feeling her own sense of hate. “I have four sons,” Preston had recollected, “and every time I gave birth to one of my sons, I was giving the finger to Hitler.” Perkins-Levasseur added, “It really made me think she has such strength.”

Next, the teacher asked, “What contributes to people becoming the evil that Nazis were?”

Austin Johnson, a senior, said Hitler came to power at a time of economic woes for Germany. “When you have a leader that comes in and says, ‘Everything will be great,’ says, ‘We’re going to make this place great,’ you can get an entire country to do what he wants,” he said. Another student, Gabe Hibbard, offered, “One of the factors was really the propaganda and teaching the Nazis that ‘hey, it’s OK to bully Jews.’ ”

Kelliher nodded, and then she asked, “Are there parallels to this in the world today?”

This is as close as Kelliher would get in class to connecting the Holocaust to today. She offered no answers to her question, and students did not latch onto it. Kelliher moved on.

“It really has had a chilling effect on teachers new to the classroom, especially teachers who may not have knowledge on teaching about genocide. What has happened is teachers are saying they’re not going to teach it at all.” 

Evan Czyzowski, a Bedford, New Hampshire, high school teacher

After class, Kelliher said the divisive concepts measure was on her mind as she taught. “It’s just a little more pressure on the words I choose.” Rather than risk a parental complaint, she puts the burden on students to bring up concepts such as systemic racism. She resents the threat hanging over her while she teaches. “It’s the stress of having to manage all of this and making sure that you’re educating them in a way that they need to be educated about these topics.”

Unlike Kelliher and some of her other colleagues, one Kingswood social studies teacher I interviewed supported the divisive concepts law and said it did not affect his teaching. He did not want his name used, partly because his view of the law is unpopular, particularly among other educators. Teachers should “stick to the facts” and help students develop the skills to reach their own conclusions, he said. “I think the kids are sophisticated enough to make the connections.”

Nicholas Germana, the German history professor and state legislator, disagrees that students will make the connections. Without teachers to help connect the dots between the past and today, he fears studies will make incorrect inferences, or draw no conclusions at all, he says. And yet helping them make such connections is “exactly the kind of thing you could lose your teacher’s license over.”

Elements of totalitarianism are not new in the United States, says Germana, noting that in the 1930s, the German American Bund organization, a U.S. group supporting the Nazis, held a rally at Madison Square Garden with a picture of George Washington and the Nazi swastika on display. The America First movement was founded in 1940.

“[The America First movement] is associated with things Trump talked about when he be- came president . . . the Muslim ban, the birther lie about President Obama, and the cozying up to strongmen like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin,” Germana says. “You put yourselves in a dangerous situation of thinking those forces are still not present in your society.”

The Proud Boys, a far-right group with leaders among those convicted of plotting the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, is one such example, Germana says. “You can compare Proud Boys to the creation of terrorist political cells in Germany. When you see the normalization of violence [today], the parallel between now and the 1920s is frightening.”

At a January 20 training on Zoom for about 24 teachers from around New Hampshire, Tom White of Keene State tried to reassure teachers that New Hampshire’s Holocaust education requirements permitted them to talk about political oppression, bigotry, and implicit bias, despite their fears. “What I’m trying to argue today is you are safe in dealing with difficult topics,” he said, though he went on to add that it didn’t mean pressure will not come from particular groups that traffic in fear and intimidation.

He played a video clip of a teacher in Germany talking about her country’s commitment to teaching schoolchildren about the Holocaust to prevent genocide from repeating. “I also want Americans to think about what they would say if Germany all of a sudden decided ‘OK, we’re no longer teaching [about] Nazi Germany in schools because it’s too difficult for children to learn about that at age 10,’ ” she said in the video. But learning at age 10 that her grandparents’ generation and people she’d known or loved had helped perpetrate the Holocaust did not traumatize her, she continued. Instead, it made her a more politically aware, informed citizen.

Despite White’s reassurance, some teachers at the workshop said they remain afraid and struggle with how to have difficult conversations with students. One teacher spoke of an administrator accusing her of promoting a liberal agenda; others said their administrators had given little or no guidance on how to deal with the divisive concepts law and its fallout. “It really has had a chilling effect on teachers new to the classroom, especially teachers who may not have knowledge on teaching about genocide,” said Evan Czyzowski, a Bedford, New Hampshire, high school teacher who co-taught the workshop with White. “What has happened is teachers are saying they’re not going to teach it at all.”

“If we’re learning about the Holocaust but not thinking about how that should inform our future decision making, what’s the point of learning about it? If it’s something bound in the past that has no relevance to today, I think we’re missing the point.” 

Sean O’Mara, a social studies teacher at Keene Middle School

At the workshop, Morgan Baker, a teacher at Conant Middle High School in Jaffrey, sought advice from White. “You used the phrase ‘systemic racism.’ If I’m being honest with you, that’s not a phrase I’m comfortable using in my classroom,” said Baker, who said students have come into his classes carrying Confederate flags or displaying it on T-shirts or hats. “I’m a new teacher . . . It’s a lot to wrap my head around. How do I do this without dealing with a lot of backlash?”

In his answer, White shared an anecdote about a ninth-grade student who shouted “Proud Boys Rule!” in the middle of a lecture on the Holocaust at a New Hampshire high school. When White asked the student why he felt that way, the student explained why he thought the Proud Boys were important and that he disliked Biden, alleging that the president was a pedophile.

Eventually, White recognized that the student had misinterpreted a photograph — popular in online conspiracy theorist circles — of Biden comforting his granddaughter at her father’s funeral. When White explained the picture, the boy was taken aback and pledged to remove his social media posts spreading the misinformation. White advised Baker to start a similar conversation with students displaying the Confederate flag.

After the workshop, Baker and his colleague Susan Graage, who teaches about the Holocaust in literature classes, tell me they appreciate White’s advice but remain worried. Some students will just blurt out “Hitler” and laugh, Graage says. “I feel like that didn’t happen 10 years ago.”

Teaching about racism in general is the main target of divisive concept laws, and the law has hurt attempts to teach about hate in all of its forms, New Hampshire teachers told me in interviews. An English teacher at Kingswood, Sarah Straz, says some community members’ right to know requests searching for references to diversity and related topics have instilled fear in some teachers. And yet, she says, in a predominantly white school like hers, it should be an imperative to make sure the students know about the historical oppression of African Americans and how it relates to today.

At least six other states have both Holocaust education mandates and divisive concepts laws, according to Jennifer Goss, program manager of Echoes & Reflections. Despite assurances to the contrary, she believes the laws, in addition to negatively affecting instruction on Black history, are leading to restrictions on Holocaust education. Several schools around the country, for example, have pulled a graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl” because of her ponderings about human sexuality and kissing a female friend, which critics describe as promoting a homosexual agenda. In Colorado, a state board member tried to remove the word “Nazi” from standards on Holocaust education to, as Goss says, “deemphasize the role of a nationalistic political party in the Holocaust.”

White himself has experienced resistance to language he has used. In April, after he spoke to the roughly 200 eighth graders at Keene Middle School, a parent complained to the principal that White referred to the Nazis as a right-wing movement and compared them with today’s Republican Party in America. The parent did not attend the talk and was basing the complaint on what their child had relayed. White says he didn’t make a comparison to the GOP, but that he had referred to the Nazi party as right wing because that’s a historical fact.

Sean O’Mara, a social studies teacher at Keene Middle School who attended that talk, frets about the current atmosphere’s effect on teaching history. “If we’re learning about the Holocaust but not thinking about how that should inform our future decision making, what’s the point of learning about it?” he asks. “If it’s something bound in the past that has no relevance to today, I think we’re missing the point.”

Kati Preston plans to speak at schools for as long as she’s able. She’s troubled when she hears about book banning, a hallmark of the Nazi regime. “It worries me because I see parallels,” she says. Still, the students she meets give her hope. Inevitably, moved by her words, some stand in line to meet her and exchange hugs. Some write letters: An eighth grader recently wrote her to say he was ashamed by some of his behavior and that her speech made him want to be a better person.

Some students, such as Tegan Perkins-Levasseur at Kingswood, seek her wisdom in the question-and-answer period after her talks. “What’s one thing you would tell the younger generation today about what happened back then?” he asked her at Kingswood High.

“I think I would tell them to get an education. The more you know, the less you fear. The less you fear, the less you’re violent,” Preston responded. “Most things happen because you’re afraid of the ‘other.’ I think education makes us more equal.”

This story on learning about the Holocaust was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, in partnership with The Boston Globe Magazine. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post Teachers struggle to teach the Holocaust without running afoul of new ‘divisive concepts’ rules appeared first on The Hechinger Report.