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Amidst a worsening teacher shortage, with 40.5% of the state’s educators leaving their school districts after three years, last fall’s Teacher Recruitment and Retention Blue Ribbon Commission recommended, among other steps, increasing salary and tuition assistance. Yet in the recently wrapped legislative session, the Missouri Senate failed to act on the House’s bill to raise the state’s minimum teacher salary from […]

The post Opinion: Make public education a key industry for Missouri appeared first on Missouri Independent.

WASHINGTON — Harleigh Walker wants U.S. senators to understand she is a typical 16-year-old girl. She likes Taylor Swift. She enjoys being on her school’s debate team. And she listens way too loudly to music in her room. “I’m just trying to be a teenager in America,” she told senators on the U.S. Senate Judiciary […]

The post ‘Lobbying for my right to exist’: US Senate panel examines how states target trans kids appeared first on Missouri Independent.

WASHINGTON — Democrats on Wednesday released new campaign ads and detailed how they plan to talk about abortion access and reproductive rights leading up to the 2024 elections. Top Democratic campaign leaders said during a press call they expect the issues will be key to regaining control of the U.S. House and keeping control of […]

The post Democrats predict abortion access, reproductive rights will be key issues in 2024  appeared first on Missouri Independent.

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey did not deliver his certification of the fiscal note summary on 11 abortion rights petitions within the 24 hours ordered Tuesday by Judge Jon Beetem. Instead, Bailey filed a notice of appeal with Beetem’s court that he wanted to take the case to the Missouri Supreme Court. As of early […]

The post Missouri AG misses deadline on abortion petition as appeal is filed appeared first on Missouri Independent.

With gun injuries now the leading cause of death among children and teenagers in the United States, parents and communities are seeking new strategies to keep children safe. That’s especially the case in places like Kansas City, where children too often become innocent victims of a larger gun violence epidemic. Young people are now more […]

The post ‘They don’t know why they were shot’: MU study shows youth wounds mainly from stray bullets appeared first on Missouri Independent.

A federal judge struck down Arkansas’ ban on gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth Tuesday, nearly two years after blocking it from going into effect. Act 626 of 2021, known as the Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act, prohibited physicians from providing “gender transition” treatments like hormones, puberty blockers and surgeries to those under age […]

The post Federal judge strikes down Arkansas ban on gender-affirming health care for transgender youth appeared first on Missouri Independent.

Editors’ note: This report is part of a special States Newsroom series on abortion access one year after the U.S. Supreme Court decision struck down the federal right to abortion. In April, a Reddit user in Alabama posted a breathless message to the abortion subreddit the morning after learning she was pregnant. She guessed she was […]

The post After Dobbs, abortion access is harder, comes later and with a higher risk appeared first on Missouri Independent.

In a scathing denunciation of Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s legal arguments, a Cole County judge on Tuesday set a 24-hour deadline for the AG to certify a fiscal note summary for an abortion rights initiative petition. Circuit Judge Jon Beetem rejected every claim of authority made by Bailey for refusing to accept State Auditor Scott […]

The post Judge: Missouri AG had ‘absolute absence of authority’ to question abortion initiative cost appeared first on Missouri Independent.

Ameren Missouri plans to open four solar farms by 2026 capable of powering a combined 95,000 homes, the company announced Tuesday.  Ameren, an investor-owned electric utility serving St. Louis and eastern Missouri, said in a release it would build or purchase the four solar farms, which would have a combined capacity of 550 megawatts.  Mark […]

The post Ameren Missouri plans solar farms that can power 95,000 homes appeared first on Missouri Independent.

On an early June day, five foster children were being housed by SSM Health at hospitals in the St. Louis area not because they were sick, but because there was no other place for them to live. They had each been in the hospital an average of 56 days. There were 23 adult clients of […]

The post ‘Truly a crisis’: Missouri hospitals house children in foster care with no place to go appeared first on Missouri Independent.

Editors’ Note: This report is part of a special States Newsroom series on abortion access one year after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to abortion. WASHINGTON — One year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, the courts rather than a divided Congress are leading the […]

The post A year after Dobbs: Congress takes a back seat on federal abortion policy appeared first on Missouri Independent.

Thousands of local governments nationwide are receiving settlement money from companies that made, sold, or distributed opioid painkillers, like Johnson & Johnson, AmerisourceBergen, and Walmart. The companies are shelling out more than $50 billion total in settlements from national lawsuits. But finding out the precise amount each city or county is receiving has been nearly […]

The post Opioid settlement payouts to localities made public for first time appeared first on Missouri Independent.

In St. Louis in the 1980s, if you got caught with even a “butt of a joint,” you were going to do jail time, said Bob Ramsey, who was assistant public defender at the time.   Ramsey particularly remembers the head of the prosecutor’s marijuana task force, under then-Circuit Attorney George Peach.  “She was just absolutely […]

The post Missouri ‘micro’ cannabis license rules limit review of jail data to 20 years appeared first on Missouri Independent.

June 19th, Juneteenth, has been set aside as a national holiday to celebrate the end of the enslavement of Black people. Today is a good day to take inventory of the state of Blacks in America. There is no better place to begin than to revisit the journey of the Black family unit to help […]

The post What is the state of the Black family unit in America today? appeared first on Missouri Independent.

After decades of being celebrated at mostly the local level, Juneteenth – the long-standing holiday that commemorates the arrival of news of emancipation and freedom to enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas, in 1865 – became a federal holiday in 2021. In honor of this year’s Juneteenth, The Conversation reached out to Wake Forest University […]

The post 6 books that explain the history and meaning of Juneteenth appeared first on Missouri Independent.

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.  The makers of Roundup, the world’s top weedkiller, will pay $6.9 million for violating an agreement with the state of New York to stop making false […]

The post Roundup weedkiller manufacturers to pay $6.9 million in false advertising settlement appeared first on Missouri Independent.

WASHINGTON — Despite top U.S. military retirements beginning in less than a month, Sen. Tommy Tuberville refuses to budge on his blockade of hundreds of armed services promotions in protest of the Pentagon’s reproductive care policy instituted after the reversal of Roe v. Wade. The first-term Alabama Republican is provoking concern among his own party […]

The post Swelling crowd of top military nominees blocked from U.S. Senate vote by Tuberville  appeared first on Missouri Independent.

Kansas’ largest electric utility – also a major supplier in western Missouri – has drastically scaled back its plans to add more clean energy over the next decade and will keep open its oldest coal plant for years longer. Two years ago, Evergy announced plans to retire the Lawrence Energy Center by the end of […]

The post Evergy slashes planned renewable energy additions, proposes more natural gas appeared first on Missouri Independent.

When Missouri lawmakers passed bills restricting gender-affirming care and barring transgender athletes, many wondered: When will the governor sign the much-debated legislation? Representatives and senators signed up to receive alerts about the bills from the governor’s office and asked for signed copies of the legislation. People emailed, called and sent handwritten letters to the governor […]

The post Missouri governor’s office hid plans on gender-affirming care, transgender athletes bills appeared first on Missouri Independent.

U.S. House Republicans and GOP Govs. Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Mark Gordon of Wyoming teamed up Thursday to rail against the Bureau of Land Management’s proposed rule to allow conservation leases on federal lands. Noem and Gordon joined the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee for about half of a 4 1/2 hour hearing […]

The post Republicans from Western states attack public lands plan in heated U.S. House hearing appeared first on Missouri Independent.