Aggregator

A cool start to Tuesday, but it very well could be the warmest day this week. Spring officially begins in the evening, though with it comes a bit of a cold front.

On March 19, 1994, about 100 spectators were on hand as the 66 Park In Theatre was torn down.

No-excuse absentee voting begins Tuesday in Missouri.

Tuesday marks the day of the Illinois primary election. One of the hottest races in the bi-state area is a Republican race for Congress.

Two wildfires consumed more than 1,000 acres of the Mark Twain National Forest in late February. Firefighters contained the burns, but the unseasonably warm and windy conditions that let them spread quickly underscore the importance of the forest service's plans to set some fires on purpose.

One of the leading candidates for Missouri Secretary of State drops his bid in the race.

Meanwhile, the Mega Millions grand prize is now estimated at a whopping $875 million — the sixth-largest in game history — ahead of Tuesday’s drawing.

by Paige Pfleger, WPLN/Nashville Public Radio

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with_ WPLN/Nashville Public Radio_. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

The commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services publicly said this month that the agency was working with lawmakers to address oversight gaps at juvenile detention facilities across the state. But behind the scenes, the department is working to water down a bill that would do just that, according to one of the bill’s sponsors and others working on the legislation.

Last year, an investigation by WPLN and ProPublica revealed that the Richard L. Bean Juvenile Service Center in Knoxville was illegally locking children alone in cells and that the facility had faced few consequences even as DCS repeatedly documented violations.

In response, one Democratic and two Republican state lawmakers drafted proposed legislation that would give an independent state agency the power to require changes at facilities that violate state standards, effectively forcing DCS to act.

As it stands, DCS inspects and writes reports on youth detention centers across the state. If inspectors document persistent problems, DCS says, it can freeze or slow admissions, decrease capacity or refuse to approve a license. DCS said it has used those interventions at other facilities but never at the Bean Center.

DCS is pushing for different language that would strip the independent agency from having enforcement power and leave DCS in charge of deciding how to respond to problems.

The bill is scheduled for discussion in both the Tennessee House and Senate on Tuesday.

DCS declined to comment on the legislation but said it is working to address the problems at the Bean Center.

WPLN and ProPublica found that inspectors documented that the Bean Center had been improperly using solitary confinement for years. While DCS noted the violations in its reports, the department failed to effectively intervene. DCS says it cannot revoke the Bean Center’s license, but it has not approved its renewal either.

“The Bean Center has been in a nonapproved status for quite some time,” DCS Commissioner Margie Quin told lawmakers in a hearing this month. “We're in that facility on a quarterly basis and continue to work with them.”

But some Tennessee lawmakers and child welfare advocates say it’s not enough to simply document that a facility is out of compliance with state standards. In a letter in November, 14 Democratic lawmakers called on DCS to intervene at the Bean Center and called for the superintendent and namesake of the facility, Richard L. Bean, to lose his job.

Bean did not respond to a request for comment.

“Why is there no accountability, and why isn’t there any attempt to remedy that?” asked state Sen. Heidi Campbell, D-Nashville, one of the sponsors of the bill. She said in the past DCS has improved with oversight. “But right now, there’s nothing,” she said. “It’s just the wild, wild west.”

Despite acknowledging the ongoing problems inside the facility, DCS continues to contract with the Bean Center to place children there, paying about $175 per day per kid.

“Although the facility is not currently in an approved status, there is nothing to indicate conditions at the facility are unsafe,” Ashley Zarach, DCS communications director, said in an emailed statement. DCS said the Bean Center is no longer using seclusion and that its current violations are largely clerical. “We are holding approval to ensure the facility updates its policy and schedules an annual fire inspection,” Zarach said.

But that arrangement is part of the reason lawmakers like Campbell want a third party involved. In the time DCS has been licensing juvenile detention centers in the state, it said, it has never terminated a license.

The original draft of the bill gave enforcement powers to the ombudsman at the independent state agency, the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth. The ombudsman’s office has existed since 1996 to respond to individual complaints about DCS, but it does not have enforcement power. The commission already has access to juvenile detention centers to monitor federal standards but not state standards.

Kylie Graves, policy director at the commission, declined to comment on the bill, saying, “We are going to let the General Assembly go through the legislative process.”

If a facility is in violation and doesn’t follow the ombudsman’s recommendations, the original draft would force DCS to suspend the facility’s license or, for detention centers like Bean’s, stop placing kids there until the violations are fixed.

But those enforcement mechanisms are no longer included in the DCS version.

Instead, the ombudsman would notify the facility of the problems, and if the facility doesn’t comply within a year, DCS would be notified in writing. Then “the department shall provide the ombudsman with an update on actions taken to remedy the findings by December 1, 2025, and annually thereafter,” the agency’s amendment says.

“If you de-fang it enough, you’re not going to have a useful piece of legislation,” Campbell said.

The DCS version does not detail what exactly would happen after that to a facility that is routinely out of compliance, as the Bean Center was. But it would require the ombudsman to report violations publicly to the General Assembly on a regular basis, offering some public accountability.

State Sen. Kerry Roberts, a Republican sponsor of the bill, said he is not surprised that a state agency would push back against oversight legislation of this size and scope.

“DCS is probably arguing right now, ‘Hey, a little bit of flexibility for us is a good thing,’” Roberts said. “And I think some legislators are looking at it and say, ‘Well, we're not sure that we agree with that, because we want to know that certain standards are being met in every situation.’”

Campbell said incremental progress is better than nothing.

“I would love to have a much stronger way to approach this,” she said, “but that having been said, as we say all the time around here, let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

Bruce Springsteen is ready to hit the road again.After being forced to postpone the remainder of his 2023 tour to recover from peptic ulcer disease, Bruce will kick off the latest…

Source

Lindsay Jaco was at St. Patrick's Day festivities on Saturday when she was hit.

The two tech giants are talking about licensing Google’s AI technology for the iPhone. This is precisely the kind of deal that landed Google in court over its search engine.

A bureaucratic paper chase undermines compassion and practical help for the needy, while Wall Street gets whatever it wants. It doesn’t have to be that way.

A new report by the Environmental Integrity Project compiled data on every U.S. plastics plant built, expanded or proposed since 2012, revealing massive growth in Texas.

Tom Tomorrow brings you This Modern World

by Nicole Santa Cruz

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Aleatha Child struggled to keep her Brigham City, Utah, day care open after federal funding meant to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic ended last September. She raised the fees she charged families and let an employee go.

She put some hope in the Utah legislative session. But instead of providing day cares like hers with more money, lawmakers expanded a child tax credit in a bill that also allows unlicensed care providers to take in more children.

Child concluded that her child care license could soon be useless and decided her day care will close at the end of the month.

“I’ve thought long and hard about this, I love this job and love my families but this is what’s best for my family and they come first,” she wrote in a social media post in mid-February.

Utah’s Republican-dominated Legislature adjourned this month after passing a record 591 bills during its session. Lawmakers earmarked nearly $2 billion in tax subsidies to build an MLB stadium and an NHL arena. They doubled funding for the state’s school voucher program. And they cut the income tax rate.

But they made no direct financial investment in child care, despite the end of federal pandemic relief, which since 2020 had sent nearly $574 million to Utah’s Office of Child Care for various programs.

The bill that lawmakers passed loosens regulations on unlicensed care for the second time in two years by increasing the number of children a provider can care for in their home from six to eight, if none of them are related to the caregiver. (There’s a cap of 10 total kids if some of them are related to the provider.) No more than two of them can be under 3 years old.

Some parents and providers criticized that move as potentially unsafe. In response, lawmakers added a background check requirement for all unlicensed providers, but it’s unclear how that will be enforced.

“We have two problems with child care that we hear about a lot,” Rep. Susan Pulsipher, a Republican, told a House committee. “One is the cost and one is capacity.” The tax credit could help with the cost, she said, and unlicensed providers caring for more children could boost capacity. The new rules are “a tool” that will give parents more choices. She said parents can ask about background checks and any training unlicensed providers might have received.

But licensed providers told ProPublica that the legislation devalues the licenses obtained by in-home care providers whose homes are inspected, who obtain CPR and first-aid training, and who abide by rules such as checking on babies while they’re sleeping.

The new bill, which takes effect May 1, will make Utah one of the most lenient states toward unlicensed child care. Only South Dakota allows more children in an unlicensed day care — up to 12 — according to research into state child care plans compiled by the Committee for Economic Development, a nonpartisan group of business leaders.

Bill Cosgrove, a retired pediatrician and advocate for early childhood education, said in an interview with ProPublica that leaving so many children in the care of one adult can hamper their development.

“It’s the definition of neglect,” said Cosgrove, who testified in Senate and House hearings on the bill.

Child care advocates, parents and providers asked Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, to veto the bill, but Cox signed it March 14.

A recent investigation by ProPublica found that though Utah bills itself as the most “family friendly” state in the nation, it does too little to ensure that care for children of working parents is accessible and affordable. Numerous researchers have detailed the lack of available child care in the state. A 2020 report by the state’s Office of Child Care found that Utah’s child care capacity was meeting only 35% of its needs. A 2018 analysis found that a larger proportion of people in Utah live in areas with few or no licensed child care facilities than in any other state.

After the state received the federal relief funding in 2020 and 2021, the number of licensed child care slots rose by about 30% over two years, according to a report by Voices for Utah Children, a children’s advocacy group.

In January, nonprofits, businesses and child care providers penned an open letter to lawmakers asking them to invest in child care. “Without government investment, families are left with low-quality options that endanger children, and disincentivize providers. We are calling on the Utah Legislature to invest more dollars into the childcare industry. With cross sector collaboration between business, the philanthropic community, and government entities, we can address this crisis and become a model for the nation,” they stated in the letter.

After months of financial struggles, Child plans to close her home day care. (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

House Speaker Mike Schultz, a Republican, told reporters in February that funding should be part of Utah’s solution to the child care crisis, but it wasn’t lawmakers’ first priority.

“We have to focus on the supply, and then you can focus on the funding,” Schultz said.

Proponents of the bill said that it offers more choices for parents. Nicholeen Peck, president of the Worldwide Organization for Women, a conservative faith-based group, testified in favor of the legislation. Peck said that her mother cared for five children on her own. The bill would allow someone like her mother to potentially care for five more, which is “not that many.”

“I think it also opens the door for really great people in the community to be able to offer their services more so that people don’t have to be just randomly dropping their children off at somebody that they don’t know,” she said.

At least one study shows the bill is likely to be ineffective at boosting supply. According to an August 2022 policy brief by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, a nonprofit that represents educators and issues accreditations, there’s no correlation between regulations and child care supply. “Efforts to loosen regulations, driven by a goal of increasing supply and program revenue, will actually have the opposite effect by driving educator burnout and turnover even higher,” according to the policy brief.

“It’s already a stressful job,” said Anna Lovejoy, acting senior director for early childhood policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning public policy group that worked on the brief. “So when you add more children to the mix, it actually can lower morale and increase provider turnover, which is not good for quality because you need those stable and consistent relationships with caring adults to support the children’s development.”

Utah’s Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees licensing and background checks, said in a statement that it is “working through the details” on how to administer the required background checks.

Enforcing the requirement will be difficult unless there’s a “tattletale system,” said Jamie Bitton, the owner of a child care center in Ogden, Utah, and the president of the Utah Private Child Care Association. “There’s no minimum safety precautions for someone just to babysit children in their homes,” she said. “And it’s scary.”

Child, the day care operator who is closing her business, said as a licensed provider she’s been subject to announced and unannounced visits by state inspectors. And she’s taken numerous trainings on child development in order to maintain her license.

“They’re trying to solve a problem, but I feel like they’re going to make it worse,” Child said. “We can live without stadiums, but as long as we have children and need to work, we cannot live without child care.”

Correction

March 19, 2024: The story overstated the number of children South Dakota allows in unlicensed day cares. The state allows up to 12 children in such day cares, not 13.

To fight climate change, the world needs copper. The third largest deposit on the planet is in Arizona, a site the San Carlos Apache say is “like Mount Sinai to us.”

Mitch Helton of Villa Ridge, MO joined the Real Rock Army today

Source

Interior designer Heather Helms spearheaded a project that called for a refresh of the kitchen and primary bathroom. Ultimately, she gave the whole house a new look.

The new bridge will connect key attractions in Midtown St. Louis, including City Foundry and Armory STL.

Return to a time when steamboats ruled the river. The one-hour narrated riverfront cruise aboard the Riverboats at the Gateway Arch explores the history of downtown St. Louis, including the […]

The post St. Louis Riverfront Cruise appeared first on Explore St. Louis.