2020 Data Fellows
California Fellows
Kate Bradshaw, Embarcadero Media (Menlo Park, CA)
The COVID-19 pandemic spurred mass layoffs, forcing countless people to deplete savings accounts, miss rent payments and fear eviction —while still needing to feed themselves and their families. In a series published in The Almanac, Palo Alto Weekly and the Mountain View Voice, three weeklies in the Bay Area, Kate Bradshaw documented the challenges associated with combating food insecurity during the pandemic, from gaps in USDA-backed food distribution programs to added pressures shouldered by school districts to feed children learning remotely. Kate’s data analysis revealed that even as food insecurity grew throughout San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, school districts provide almost 1.5 million fewer free meals to children in need than the prior year. Her reporting also highlighted innovative efforts by nonprofits, food banks, school districts and others to combat food waste and meet families’ food needs.
Lydia Chavez and Annika Hom, Mission Local (San Francisco)
Lydia and Annika set out to document the disproportionately effect of the pandemic on the largely Latinx population of San Francisco’s Mission district. For their first story on December 31, 2020, which examined San Francisco’s claimed low overall case rate, they analyzed city data to show that the case rate for Latinx residents was almost six times higher than for White residents. In their second story in early January 2021, they reported that while experts were emphasizing the importance of testing in high-risk areas, affluent areas in Alameda County with low case rates had the most testing resources, and there were few testing sites in working class and impoverished communities overrun with COVID-19. Multiple factors cause the disparity, including private insurance payor prevalence in wealthier ZIP codes; reluctance by some individuals to get tested; and what some health experts described as a suboptimal public health testing strategy. Just weeks after the story’s publication, health officials shifted strategy and began bolstering testing resources in impacted communities. Lydia Chavez highlighted the power of such a tactic in the third part of their series, which focused on the success of siting rapid testing sites at transit stations. In their final article, they analyzed the positivity rates by race and ethnicity in people tested at the BART station over 15 days, finding an average positivity rate of 11.8% for Latinos compared, with an citywide positivity rate of 5%. The articles were rretweeted by local politicians, and advocates and community activists cited them to persuade funders to support local neighborhood vaccine and testing sites. They also caught the eye of a “Time for Kids” reporter who focuses on local journalism, and she mentioned Mission Local’s community focus in an article. Lydia and Annika were invited to a ceremony at a neighborhood vaccination and testing site where they were thanked by community residents and city officials for their coverage.
Agnes Constante, NBC Asian America (freelance, Orange County)
When Asian Americans are surveyed about their health, the results usually paint a favorable picture of a group that for the most part isn’t poor and has insurance and access to preventive care. But when data are disaggregated – separated according to people’s countries of origin -- Filipino Americans suffer greater health disparities than other Asian groups, Agnes Constante of NBC Asian America reported. In a three-part series, Agnes revealed findings from a first-of-its-kind survey that focused on Filipino Americans, who are typically lumped into data with other Asian subgroups. In the first part of the series, she focused on Filipino American health care workers, who account for about 25 percent of all registered nurses who have died of COVID-19, despite comprising just 4 percent of all registered nurses nationally. Filipino nurses are more likely than white nurses to work in high-acuity departments, like intensive care units, which increases their exposure to infectious diseases like COVID-19, Agnes reported. In the second part of her series, Agnes explored mental health, finding that 85 percent of Filipino Americans surveyed were experiencing increased levels of anxiety and depression attributed them to the pandemic — more than any other Asian American group. Among the reasons for that heightened anxiety could be living in multi-generational households; fears of infecting a loved one; diminished social interaction, which is central to their culture; and a sharp rise in hate crimes and rhetoric targeting Asian Americans through the pandemic, Agnes reported. In the final installment, Agnes explored how historical injustices dating back to the colonial era in the Philippines contributed to health inequalities for Filipino Americans and a tolerance for injustice.
The Center awarded Agnes a community engagement grant (paid for by The California Endowment) and provided her with six months of engagement mentoring (paid for by the Blue Shield of California Foundation) to assist her in connecting with the Filipino community. She partnered with Leezel Tangloa, a journalist who founded Tayo Help, a site that collects questions from Filipino-Americans about COVID-19 and offers culturally relevant answers, and together, they launched a Tayo Help Facebook group so that Agnes could learn about the community’s experiences during the pandemic and share culturally tailored news and information about COVID-19. They also hosted two focus sessions over Zoom in collaboration with the Philippine Nurses Association of Southern California and spoke with registered nurses and other health professionals. Agnes her a virtual event to share her findings with the Asian American community and elected officials. Her project received a first place award in the solutions journalism category from the Los Angeles Press Club.
Brooke Holland, Noozhawk (Santa Barbara, CA)
Reporting from Santa Barbara for Noozhawk, Brooke Holland published a seven-part series charting the impact COVID-19 had among vulnerable communities, with a special emphasis on elderly residents living in congregate care facilities. She explored where testing sites were being established in the county and why; documented the crowded conditions in which agricultural workers commute to the fields and the risks inherent during a pandemic; highlighted partnerships and outreach efforts to educate vulnerable communities of the importance of vaccines; and shed light on COVID-19 outbreaks among senior care facilities, which accounted for at least 170 deaths in May 2020, or roughly 38 percent of the all of Santa Barbara County’s coronavirus deaths. More than 50 residents and 30 staff members tested positive at one such facility, and at least 12 skilled nursing facilities in the county reported at least one resident death connected to COVID-19 outbreaks, according to data Brooke obtained through a California Public Records Act request. Those records also revealed that 24 congregate facilities reported fatal outbreaks, including residential care facilities, independent living homes, Lompoc federal prison, Santa Barbara County Main Jail, H-2A housing for agricultural workers and a supportive housing development. COVID-19 cases among the elderly plummeted from more than 850 cases in January 2021 to fewer than 40 in June 2021 following months of successful vaccination drives. At least 85 percent of county residents 75 and older were vaccinated by June, allowing long-term care facilities to ease restrictions, invite visitors back and return to a sense of normalcy.
Sarah Jackson, The Thread, New America (freelance)
Sarah analyzed data from California and the Los Angeles Unified School District to determine whether the suspension of most preschools and Head Start centers during the pandemic was likely to affect the readiness to learn of children of children starting kindergarten in August 2021. What she learned was alarming. "Across California, data show that the youngest students have either missed school entirely, or if they did stay enrolled, had online learning experiences that were developmentally inappropriate at worst and challenging at best," she reported. "Statewide numbers show a 12 percent drop in kindergarten enrollment across California. And at Los Angeles Unified, the state’s largest school district, enrollment in preschool and early education centers dropped by 40 percent last fall from pre-pandemic levels." Sarah also chronicled efforts by childcare centers and community organizations to use the summer to help prepare 5-year-olds for school, including playgroups, summer bridge programs and family workshops. California’s young children are predominantly children of color and dual-language-learners from immigrant families, Because many low-income parents lack email, administrators are texting parents in multiple languages and conducting home visits to make the kindergarten enrollment process easier and to answer families’ questions. Sarah's participation in the Data Fellowship was made possible by a grant from First 5 LA.
Sara Kassabian, The Oaklandside (freelance)
East Oakland has long been known for its poor air quality and high rates of asthma and other breathing disorders, yet the Bay Area Air Quality Management District has insisted that the two aren’t necessarily related. Sara Kassabian, reporting for Oaklandside, a nonprofit online news outlet in Oakland, analyzed several newly available datasets on air quality and respiratory diseases to report that the AB&I Foundry is spewing higher levels of toxic emissions into nearby neighborhoods than previously acknowledged, that these emissions exceed risk thresholds and that children at Acorn Elementary School are at risk because of them. The foundry’s emissions also affect thousands of residents who live in the densely populated neighborhoods located within a half-mile, she reported. Sara also analyzed 2016-2019 data from sensors placed throughout East Oakland to determine the number of days on which the air quality was deemed unhealthy, and found that they didn’t square with residents’ views of the quality of the air they breathe, which suggests that stationary monitors may not capture disparities in air pollution levels within neighborhoods. Bolstering that view is research in 2018 by scientists at Kaiser Permanente and the University of Texas at Austin using mobile sensors, who found that the levels of air pollution can range from five to eight times higher from one end of a single city block to the other, she reported. The new data are fueling an environmental justice movement in East Oakland that aims to force companies to clean up their emissions faster than state regulators are requiring. In her second story, she reported on the largely invisible threats to children's health that lurk in their homes: mold, vermin and flaking lead-based paint. mold and pest infestations, which scientists have linked to asthma. In Oakland, Black children are more likely to have asthma than white children, largely because they are more likely to live in more polluted neighborhoods.
The Center awarded Sara a community engagement grant (paid for by The California Endowment) and provided her with six months of engagement mentoring (paid for by the Blue Shield of California Foundation) to assist her in ensuring that members of the community helped shape her reporting. She partnered with El Timpano, a media outlet that shares news with East Oakland’s Latinx and Mayan immigrant communities via SMS text, to send three call-outs about mold, pest, and lead paint, which helped her connect with key sources for her stories. Sara also used the texting service to provide important tips to residents for dealing with mold, pests and lead paint, which the Alameda County Healthy Homes and Vector Control departments reviewed for accuracy.
Monica Lopez, Making Contact
In 2020, Americans purchased more than 22.7 million firearms, with 1.3 million ordered in California, making it one of the biggest years for firearms sales in history. Monica Lopez of Making Contact worked with a team to produce a 29-minute radio program called “Locked Down and Loaded: The 2020 Gun Surge and Violence Prevention.” The series sought to find out who was buying firearms and why, and whether the flood of new weapons would lead to more violence, accidental injuries and suicides. Lawrence Taylor, a teacher who purchased his first firearm in 2020 after a year of civil unrest, mandatory COVID-19 lockdowns and a contentious presidential election, was typical of first-time “panic buyers.” “I feared the worst,” he told Monica. Her wide-reaching exploration of firearms purchases delved into the origins of the Second Amendment as a tool to arm citizen militias to strip Native Americans of their land; the disproportionate effects of gun violence on communities of color; and how the presence of firearms in homes increases the likelihood of death by suicide. Seventy-five radio stations around the world have broadcast the show. Monica plans a follow-up in a few months.
Lexis-Olivier Ray, L.A. Taco (freelance, Los Angeles)
When the pandemic began, health experts cautioned people to do three things to keep themselves safe and reduce their risk of getting or transmitting COVID-19: socially distance, wear a mask and wash your hands often. But as freelance journalist Lexis-Olivier Ray reported in a three-part series for L.A. Taco, the city of Los Angeles failed to provide basic services, including adequate handwashing stations, to unhoused people, leaving a community of more than 66,000 already-vulnerable people living on the streets susceptible to the coronavirus. In the first story, Lex analyzed more than 700 emails and spreadsheets obtained through the California Public Records Act to assess whether Mayor Eric Garcetti had made good on a bold promise for daily maintenance of toilets and handwashing stations in the city. Advocates for the unhoused helped him document the state of those stations, some of which had no water, soap or paper towels. Others spit sewage from faucets. More than half of the city’s 300 stations went unassessed each day, and there wasn’t a single day between April and August 2020 when all were assessed in a single day, his reporting showed. Some stations went as long as five months without servicing. In the second story, Lex highlighted inconsistencies in the siting of portable toilets throughout Los Angeles, with the placement sometimes dependent upon the City Council district. For his third story, Lex reviewed purchase orders and invoices issued by the three major vendors to report that they billed the city a total of $2 million and that they were supposed to replace soap dispensers daily, contrary to his findings. In July, Lex reported that the city was quitely pulling handwashing stations and portable toilets pulled off streets, with plans to eliminate all by October. The city reversed its decision a month after Lex reported it.
The Center awarded Lex a community engagement grant (paid for by The California Endowment) and provided him with six months of engagement mentoring (paid for by the Blue Shield of California Foundation) to assist him in connecting with unhoused residents to get their help in documenting the conditions of the portable toilets meant to meet their hygiene needs during the pandemic.
Elise Reuter, MedCity News (San Diego)
Facing reports predicting a seemingly unmanageable surge of COVID-19 patients at the start of the pandemic, hospitals were facing worst-case scenarios that included sending low-acuity patients away to recover from COVID-19 at home or in field hospitals. To aid their decision-making, many turned to unregulated automated tools and algorithms, something experts have cautioned against using for high-stakes decisions. In a three-part series for MedCity News that included an in-depth podcast, reporter Elise Reuter investigated these decision-support systems implemented during the pandemic at 26 hospitals across the United States. In the first story, Elise explained the complexities of algorithms and how a successful tool used for one population can quickly become unreliable when used for populations with different demographics. An ongoing review of 200 COVID-19 risk-prediction models found that most had a high risk of bias. The Food and Drug Administration does not require such systems to be cleared as medical devices, which leaves hospitals and developers responsible for vetting them. That doesn't mean, however, that the FDA isn’t planning to regulate them, Elise reported in the second story. The agency is planning to build a framework to approve future changes of algorithms that are already in use. That’s important because algorithms can become less accurate over time as clinical processes change, new treatments are introduced or the data itself change. Pivoting toward the pandemic recovery in the final installment of her series, Elise reported from border cities in Imperial County, where she focused on inequities in vaccine distribution among impoverished communities. Elise’s articles were also distributed through the Healthcare Docket newsletter, a partnership between MedCity News and Above the Law.
Stacey Shepard, The Bakersfield Californian
Stacey Shepard of The Bakersfield Californian published two stories exploring how rural Kern County wound up with the second-highest COVID-19 case rate per capita in California. Her reporting documented disparities in where the disease hit the hardest, with farmworker communities, impoverished rural outposts and towns with prisons experiencing the highest rates of coronavirus. Her second story explored why Kern County’s vaccination rates initially lagged far behind other counties. Public Health officials attributed that to a state vaccine distribution formula that allotted Kern County fewer doses than others despite the region’s high positivity rates.
David Wagner, Southern California Public Radio (Los Angeles)
During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Los Angeles County public health officials rolled out a “Safer at Home” campaign to encourage residents to self-quarantine. With countless people living in un-permitted and often substandard housing, reporter David Wagner wondered whether those renters really were “safer at home” during the pandemic. Renters in Los Angeles face challenging conditions, with rising costs-of-living and an insufficient supply of workforce and low-income housing. Un-permitted units —in garages, closets, laundry rooms or granny flats — are often the only affordable options. Reporting for LAist and KPCC, David produced a three-part series analyzing more than 80,000 pages of city documents obtained through a Public Records Act request. Those pages revealed that in a time when renters were in crisis, city inspectors scaled back operations, a move housing rights advocates say left low-income tenants with no choice but to endure substandard conditions and landlord intimidation or face homelessness. Housing officials say it was necessary to limit inspections to reduce employees’ potential exposure of COVID-19. David illustrated the squalid conditions of one un-permitted unit where residents were being threatened with eviction. It lacked operable fire alarms and smoke detectors, had intermittent electricity and was crawling with bugs, one of which bit a tenant whose allergic reaction landed him in the hospital for two days. City inspectors had documented code violations for more than two years, but tenants hadn’t seen the building’s condition improve and or secured relocation assistance, David reported. His final article detailed the city’s attempts to bring un-permitted housing into compliance and critics’ contention that it has fallen short of expectations, with one Council member who initially supported the initiative calling it “ineffective” and “a completely worthless program.”
National Data Fellows (supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation)
Lakeidra Chavis, The Trace (Chicago)
In “Aftershocks,” a multi-part data-informed series published in both English and Spanish, Lakeidra Chavis explored the effects of gun violence on a predominantly Black neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Roseland doesn’t have the highest level of violence in Chicago, nor episodic spikes in crime. Instead, shootings are a one-every-three-days occurrence. In the past decade, more than 1,200 people have been shot there, and most survived, “creating a pervasive sense of devastation that lingers over the neighborhood,” she wrote. Lakeidra spent months analyzing citywide crime data and interviewing residents to learn about the effects on families, children and youth of living in a state of constant vigilance. She found that five in six gunshot victims survive, oftentimes with grievous injuries. More than half are children, youth and adults in their 20s, and most are Black or Latinx. “Together, they form a loose community, left to cope with PTSD, chronic pain and grief,” she wrote. In another story, she examine the effectiveness of the crime victim compensation program and discovered that just one application was filed for every 50 crimes, and less than 40% of victims who applied received any compensation to make up for lost income or pay their gun injury-related health care expenses. In her final story, she reported on how reporters elsewhere could cover the performance of victim compensation funds in their cities.
Recognition: Chavis received the 2022 NABJ Award for Excellence in the Digital Media Online Project Feature category.
Jen Christensen, CNN (Atlanta)
In rural Randolph County, Georgia, Jen Christensen, a CNN producer and writer, followed a group of door-knocking volunteers on an uphill battle to vaccinate residents against COVID-19. Jen’s reporting reveals why this county in the heart of the historic black belt has a vaccination rate that lags behind the state average, one of the lowest in the nation. Residents of these types of rural communities are more likely to be hospitalized and die from COVID-19, and lagging vaccination rates could threaten pandemic recovery for the entire nation, Jen reported. The region not only faces barriers to vaccination, but also lacks access to basic health care services. More than an hour from the nearest major highway, Cuthbert’s residents are mostly impoverished and lacking the internet access needed to make vaccine appointments; about one-fifth do not have access to a vehicle. Just one ambulance covers the 430-square-mile county, and the area’s only hospital shut down in October, just weeks before most communities began experiencing the worst of the COVID-19 surge. In the early months of the pandemic, the town had the highest COVID-19 case rate in the state. In her second piece, Jen reported that financial and staffing pressures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic had led to the closure of 21 hospitals around the country in 2020 -- the most since records started being kept in 2005. Among them was Southwest Georgia Regional Medical Center, the only hospital in rural Randolph County, Georgia, which had the state's highest COVID-19 case rate through April 2020. "The county ranks near the bottom for health outcomes in Georgia.," Jen reported. "The difference in life expectancy between the counties in metropolitan Atlanta and Randolph County is four to six years." Now, the closest ER is across the state line, in Alabama, about a 40-minute drive, and it's at least an hour to the closest in-state hospital and emergency department in Albany. Although the 2020 CARES Act is providing .$8.5 billion from the American Rescue Plan later this year, it comes to late to save the hospitals that closed last year, most of them in rural areas.
Gabrielle Emanuel, GBH (Boston)
Gabrielle produced a three-part radio series and a long-form Web piece on why doctors know so little about the causes of pre-term birth and what they think should be done to rectify that. One in 10 babies is born prematurely (more than three weeks before the due date), leading to $17 billiion in medical bills each year, most of them paid by Medicaid. Prematurity is a leading cause of infant mortality in the United States: of the roughly 20,000 children who die each year before their first birthday, two in three are born preterm. Experts blame the staggering cost on a lack of research and investment in prematurity. Her data analysis found that clinical trials aimed at preventing preterm births lag far behind trials aimed at other conditions. Since 2000, there have been more drug trials for erectile dysfunction than for prematurity in pregnant women in the United States. And she found that there are more than twice as many clinical trials aimed at infertility — helping women get pregnant — than at preterm birth — helping women stay pregnant. “Every few weeks you get a publication that revolutionizes the way we treat some condition in other fields of medicine. We don’t see that in pregnancy,” George Saade, the former president of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine told her. "Women’s health is the last frontier.” Even with expert care during delivery and after birth, premature babies can have lifelong health challenges. And the problem disproportionately affects Black babies, who are almost 50% more likely than a White baby to be born prematurely. Experts told Gabrielle that there are three major hurdles that stand in the way of more research: "insufficient funding, fear of studying pregnant people, and drug companies that are hesitant to invest."
Nina Feldman and Alan Yu, WHYY Philadelphia
Since 1997, more than a dozen maternity units in Philadelphia shut down, victims of low reimbursements for births covered by Medicaid and skyrocketing costs of liability insurance. Privately-owned Hahnemann University Hospital closed its doors in 2019, leaving more than 800 pregnant women wondering where they would deliver their babies. For their Data Fellowship project, reporters Nina Feldman and Alan Yu of NPR member station WHYY explored how the shutdowns impacted health outcomes for mothers and newborns. Among their findings were that as maternity wards shuttered, more babies were delivered without prenatal care, and infant mortality rose, but the dire consequences that were feared were somehow avoided. The Nina and Alan pivoted to explaining how disaster was averted. Nina and Alan explored how the labor and delivery unit leaders at hospitals that retained maternity services worked together to avert disaster. Their reporting revealed the financial burden that hospitals bear to deliver babies, particularly when a large portion of births are to women who are uninsured or covered by public insurance.
Rebecca Lindstrom-Baumann, WXIA (Atlanta)
For parents in Georgia raising children with developmental disabilities, mental health disorders and behavioral health issues, the state acknowledges that getting help “can be a long and difficult process” — so difficult that more than 1,648 children were turned over to the state child welfare agency by their parents over the last five years. Investigative reporter Rebecca Lindstrom-Baumann of Atlanta’s NBC-affiliate, WXIA, reported a multi-part series, #Keeping, that shared the stories of parents who sacrificed custody of their children so they could access needed resources. Through records requests and dogged reporting, Rebecca assessed data on children who were abandoned in Georgia, including their ages, diagnosis and what happened to them after coming into care. The landing page for her series can be found here. In the first part of her series, #Keeping Kayleigh, Rebecca told the story of Kayleigh, a teen with severe developmental disabilities whose mother relinquished custody to the state. Kayleigh was prone to fits of aggression and diagnosed with ADHD and PTSD; she also had a habit of running away. After Kayleigh tried to kill herself, her mother turned over custody to the state. “Never did I want my child to leave my home,” her mother said. “I just wanted help.” Roughly 12 percent of all parents who abandoned children did so because they couldn’t cope with the child’s behavior. Rebecca returned to Kayleigh twice more. For one of these followups, she obtained footage from officers' body cameras to contrast the outcomes depending upon whether police have been trained in intensive crisis intervention. In one filmed encounter triggered by Kayleigh's refusal to leave a gas station parking lot, she was handcuffed and arrested, spending three weeks in a county jail. In a subsequent encounter, three police officers who had intensive crisis intervention training helped her calm down, and she went home instead of to jail. Her second followup on Kayleigh reported on how she was lured into sex trafficking and later raped by the man who pimped her. (He is jailed awaiting trial on rape and battery charges.) Rebecca then told Jacob Austin's story. Jacob, 16, has poor executive function skills, ADHD and autism, and was often violent both in school and at home. Although federal law requires insurance companies to provide the same coverage for mental health issues as for medical issues, the parents' coverage wouldn't pay for the residential treatment they were told he needed, and they relinquished custody to the state so he could get it. In #Keeping Bradley, she reported that an insurance company suggested that the mother of Bradley, a non-verbal teenager with autism, give custody of her child to the state to cover the costs of residential care, which she declined to do, instead negotiating an agreement with the state to continue to pay for his residential care in another state while they search for therapists to work with him at home. Her #Keeping Jaylen focused on Jaylen, who has severe autism and is nonverbal, but didn't get the applied behavioral therapy that could have helped him when was younger, and now, at 17, is deemed to old to benefit. #Keeping Trey focused on therapeutic foster care as a solution for families with children whose behavior problems they can't manage -- but whose capacity is limited to 77 children a year. Meanwhile, in 2019 the state housed 600 teenagers for whom placements couldn't be found in hotels at a cost of $1,400 a day. Here's a link to the first 30-minute special, which combines the first three stories.
Rebecca kept finding more stories that indicated that barriers to appropriate care were a major problem for many families in Georgia. In #Keeping Ava, Rebecca next told the story of Ann Bullard, who spent seven years lobbying for the passage of Ava’s Law, which, since 2015, has mandated that insurers cover treatments for autism. Once a nonverbal toddler, Ava is now a cheerleader at the top of her class as a dual enrollment student at Georgia Southern University. But the promise of Ava's Law hasn't been fully realized, Rebecca reported, because of a shortage of mental health professionals who can provide evidence-based treatments. #Keeping Sheldon, Rebecca's final profile, recounted the story of Sheldon Elliott, a nonverbal 14-year-old with Down Syndrome whose mother left him at Atlanta's public hospital in December 20 with a note that included his name, birthday, and a simple message: "My mom needs help." A news story about what was initially characterized as an abandonment is what drew Rebecca's attention to the issue on which she focused her Data Fellowship project on "trading custody for care." Rebecca tracked down Sheldon's mother, Diana, who had initially been arrested, to find out how things had turned out for the family. Now living in Ohio, Diana told her, her family, including Sheldon, is getting the support they needed. The story also reported the measures that Georgia has taked as a result of Rebecca's reporting. Lawmakers supported Speaker Ralston’s request for an additional $58 million in the 2022 fiscal year budget to increase access to mental health services in the community and schools. The budget also set aside $7 million for a behavioral health crisis center for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. And Speaker Ralston has also proposed his year, he’s already proposed another $20 million to increase funding for law enforcement crisis intervention training, establish more crisis beds and expand mental health accountability courts. Lt. Governor Duncan told her more action is needed. “I don’t think we start in one lane and I think maybe that’s what we’ve seen play out in the past," he said. "We’ve started down a lane, singularly focused on a regulation or appropriations or legislative change. I think we need to move with equal amplitude on all, so that we arrive at the finish line as quickly as we possibly can.”
Kate Martin, Carolina Public Press (Asheville, NC)
Child Protective Services social workers in North Carolina are supposed to operate by the same rules and policies across the state, but ambiguous state rules have led to local interpretations that result in widely divergent outcomes for children and families. In a four-part series called “Patchwork Protection,” Kate Martin and a team of reporters from the Carolina Public Press investigated systemic issues leading to inequities in child welfare policies across the state. In the first story, Kate analyzed a decade’s worth of data from all 100 counties in North Carolina and found that children were separated from their families at higher rates in some counties than others. For example, over a six-year span, Gates County removed no children from homes at all, which critics say may mean that abused children were left in homes where they continued to be at risk, Kate reported. Lack of a central office and regional hubs to provide resources for county social workers — something other states have – is a systemic problem. There are also uneven levels of experience among the ranks of social workers. Nearly 30 percent of all child welfare positions were vacant statewide, and roughly three of four workers had five or fewer years of experience, Kate’s reporting found. The second story illustrated through a variety of personal stories how deficiencies within the Department of Social Services can lead to irreparable harm, including a case of a child who was adopted after his mother died, without relatives being notified. Addressing these issues has been hampered by a lack of data due to counties’ inconsistent use of a statewide case management system, Kate reported in the third story. Social services leaders say that the system is slow and inefficient, despite the state’s investment of more than $108 million. The result is that social workers use patchwork methods to document cases, which provides no means for counties to share data in real time. Roughly three in five counties still use paper to track child welfare cases, Kate found. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has little authority to hold state and county agencies accountable, Kate revealed in the final story. She pointed to the child welfare system in Georgia, which is similar in size, demographics and politics, as a model for how North Carolina’s system could be fixed. Kate discussed her project in an 18-minute podcast, Tested, hosted by North Carolina Public Radio (WUNC) and on Spectrum News’ Capital Tonight show. A legislator is considering proposing reforms as a result of reading Kate’s series. In a sidebar, she reported the responses of the lieutenant governor and nine legislators when asked what role they thought mental health parity and issues surrounding child abandonment should play in the 2022 legislative session.
Janine Zeitlin, USA Today Network Florida/News-Press/Naples Daily News
Reporting from Florida, Janine Zeitllin of the USA Today Network produced a five-part series in English and Spanish exploring the toll that COVID-19 has taken on farmworkers and their families. Her series helped shed light on the lack of early planning to vaccinate vulnerable agricultural workers. Janine started her series in January 2021 by highlighting state vaccine distribution practices that ran counter to guidelines set by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC reasoned that essential workers, including farmworkers, faced a higher risk of COVID-19 since they must work on-site and were unable to socially distance at work. Despite reports of outbreaks in such workplaces, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration put seniors ahead of workers for vaccines, Janine reported. Still without a vaccine rollout plan for farmworkers three months later, State Agricultural Commissioner Nikki Fried began pressuring DeSantis to prioritize agricultural workers, Janine reported in her second story. Still, Florida’s government never laid out a plan to specifically vaccinate farmworkers. Meanwhile, studies at the time found that Latino food and agricultural workers faced a 59% higher risk of mortality during the pandemic. By the time DeSantis approved vaccinations for anyone over 18, making farmworkers eligible, it was March 2021, nearing the end of harvest season. In her third story, Janine documented the logistical challenges of vaccinating the state’s 100,000 farmworkers, many of whom are migrants, before they traveled north for work. In the fourth story, she reported on local efforts to educate farmworker populations on vaccine access. Until May 2021, the Florida Department of Health required a state ID or other proof of state residency to receive a vaccine — a barrier for agricultural workers, many of whom are undocumented or in the country on temporary H-2A work visas. In a series of videos included in her final installment, Janine interviewed farmworkers and their children, who shared raw stories of their struggles during the pandemic. Children told of attempting to attend class virtually with spotty internet connections and their parents lacking the technological skills to help them with their homework. Health care administrators as well as the state Agricultural Commissioner cited Janine’s reporting when pushing state officials to bring vaccines to certain farmworker communities.