The 2021 Data Fellowship was supported by generous grants from the California Health Care Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Fund and The California Endowment.
California Fellows
Aura Bogado, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Journalism
It took a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2019 and a 2020 lawsuit for Aura Bogado to get the records she needed to assess how the U.S. government responded to suicidal thoughts or attempts reported by migrant children in the government's custody from late January to late April 202, the first three months of the Biden administration. Bogado analyzed records to summary records to document 567 episodes in which migrant children held by the U.S. government said they had considered or attempted suicide. Of these instances, 141 occurred while the children were in Office of Refugee Resettlement custody; at least 10 attempted suicide. The records indicate that no children died by suicide. Children ages 6 to 17 who told staff that they had considered or attempted suicide before ending up in custody often were placed on safety plans and assigned counseling and close monitoring, Bogado reported, and some received outside treatment because their mental health needs couldn't be met on-site. Bogado wrote that many of the children were staying in "emergency shelters in cavernous convention centers and soft-sided military base tents stacked with hundreds or even thousands of cots... usually run by government agencies like FEMA or defense contractors with medical, border enforcement or military backgrounds." Liz Castillo, an organization with Detention Watch Network, told Bogado that the massive unlicensed facilities were not appropriate for children. “They lack not only the individualized care and support children need to reunite with their families and support systems as swiftly as possible, but also culturally sensitive systems and mechanisms to address the unique stressors and trauma children often endure not just in their journeys, but in federal custody as well,” she said.
To determine how many people are living unhoused in a community, San Francisco and most cities around the country have for years used the point-in-time count, an imperfect method that offers a 24-hour snapshot of a city’s streets. For The Frisc, an online outlet in San Francisco, Kristi Coale explored another option: coordinated entry. That method, some say, would offer more detailed data that captures who unhoused people are, where they live, what resources they need and more. Still, there’s contention about which method works best. Several nonprofit leaders who work with unhoused populations claim coordinated entry does not adequately house people of color and LGBTQ communities. Meanwhile, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing’s executive director has pledged to overhaul the coordinated entry system, but seven months after making the bold claim, there’s been little announced publicly, and requests for coordinated entry data made by The Frisc were slow to materialize. The little data that has been released show disparities, including that Black people make up 44 percent of those in the system, but only 18 percent of the people who qualify for permanent supportive housing, Coale reported. In the second part of her series, Coale takes a deep look into how San Francisco officials are addressing homelessness by declaring a state of emergency. That emergency declaration has ushered in what Coale calls “an era of no-bid contracts.” San Francisco’s Department of Homelesssness and Supportive Housing (HSH) has gone from awarding just 1 percent of all contracts on a no-bid basis in 2019 to more than 40% more recently, Coale’s reporting found. A handful of vendors have reaped the majority of those contracts. Meanwhile, HSH remains the only city department without a formal oversight commission, Coale reported. Among the organizations benefiting from the no-bid contracts was Urban Alchemy, a four-year old nonprofit that has snagged eight contracts worth $68 million. Although leaders across the city have praised the organization for its work, others have scrutinized it for unfair labor practices.
Will Huntsberry, Voice of San Diego
Will Huntsberry filed a Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain data on suicides of military personnel aged 17 – 25 for his three-part Data Fellowship project. By comparing that data with CDC data for suicides of civilian men that age, he concluded that the military rate was 80 percent higher -- 46.1 per 100,000 compared with 25.6 per 100,000. Up until the early 2000’s, the age and gender-adjusted suicide rate for troops as a whole was significantly lower than for civilians, Huntsberry reported, but has gradually crept up. As recently as 2020, age and gender-adjusted suicide rates in the military were comparable to the general population, Huntsberry noted. He also obtained records from the San Diego County of Health to analyze local suicide trends among active duty troops under 25 and found that the annual number more than tripled from 2017 to 2020 -- from 5 to 16. Military officials don't have an explanation. While mental health services are available on bases, Huntsberry's sources noted, some enlisted personnel are reluctant to access them. And the pandemic was likely to have contributed to the 2020 surge, they told him, though suicides of civilians 18-25 actually fell in 2020. Huntsberry put human faces on the statistics by telling the stories of Kellen Watelet and his cousin and adopted brother, Matt Donohoe. Watelet joined the Navy after high school and trained as a cryptologic technician -- a soldier in the ongoing cyberwar between the United States and hostile nations. Although not physically dangerous, the job is considered extremely stressful. He started drinking and using a drug called Molly. And then, at 22, he killed himself, the first military personnel in the San Diego to do so in 2020. Unbeknownst to him, his adopted brother, a Marine who was stationed in Georgia, had tried to kill himself by drinking household cleaners about eight months before. But he had second thoughts, and summoned help. “We need to make suicide not a taboo word,” Donahue told Huntsberry. “The best thing I think you can do is be direct with people. In the military they say if you’re worried about someone you should ask them directly if they’re planning to kill themselves. Because if you tiptoe around it, it can seem like you’re not taking it seriously.”
In his second story, he calculated the number of deaths by suicide of 18-25-year-olds from 2015 through 2020 at Camp Pendleton, the Marine base near San Diego, and found 31 -- an average of just over five a year. The Naval Base in San Diego, with 18% fewer troops, had just two suicides during the same period. “Those numbers reflect a serious, persistent and tragic problem, with concrete cultural change long overdue,” M. David Rudd, a former Army psychologist and former president of the University of Memphis, told Huntsberry about the significance of his findings. He said that the number of deaths at Pendleton, “raises broader concerns about installation culture.” Mario D’Aliesio, branch head of behavior health for Marine and Family Programs at Camp Pendleton, told Huntsberry that the base had adequate mental health resources, including 100 counselors. "If they wanna go, they’re gonna go," he told Huntsberry. Huntsberry put a human face on the Camp Pendleton statistics by telling the story of Pvt. Alex Jones, who asked to see a psychiatrist after developing psychological problems related to an injury during combat training. Instead, he was sent to a chaplain. On October 29, 2019, he fatally shot himself with his service weapon. In a letter to his family, he wrote: “I tried reaching out for help. Everyone kind of ignored it.” An investigation into his death concluded: "Pvt. Jones received appropriate and timely medical care and counseling."
In his third story, Huntsberry analyzed data from a FOIA request to report that 17-30-year-old women in the military were more than twice as likely as civilian women to kill themselves. Jenny D’Olympia, a former Air Force intelligence officer and director of the military and veteran psychology program at William James College told him that suicide attempts were rarely linked to a single trigger, but more likely to pressures unique to women in the service. Olympia told him that the military culture bore some responsibility for suicide attempts by enlisted women. “It’s hard to win no matter how hard you’re working, no matter how much you shine,” she said. To put a human face on the statistics, he profiled Jalitza Cardona, a second generation sailor who tried to kill herself after suffering from severe depression following a sexual assault, a breakup with a boyfriend, problems to work and heavy drinking. She didn't succeed. Now a civilian, through therapy she has overcome her depression.
Adam Mahoney reported for Grist and KCET on a 43 percent increase in deaths in the predominantly Latino Wilmington neighborhood of Los Angeles in 2020 and 2021, an excess death rate higher than that of California as a whole, he calculated. The increase in deaths was not just because of COVID-19, but also because of a diverse array of conditions. Mahoney's data analysis found 236 "excess deaths" — the number of all-cause deaths beyond those expected in a typical year. COVID-19 caused 104 deaths, and 80 others were attributed to homicides, accidental and unintentional injuries, Alzheimer’s disease, liver disease, heart disease, high blood pressure, strokes, and diabetes. Some of these conditions were likely caused by or exacerbated by high levels of pollution from two refineries, port operations and neary 400 other sources, he reported, and other factors include "high levels of poverty, food insecurity, and lack of access to health care." His second story, published in Grist and The Guardian. examined the link between pollution and gun violence. His analysis of California’s Department of Public Health records and the Los Angeles Times’ homicide tracking database found that at least 189 people had been shot and killed (10 of them by police) in the community since 2000 -- nearly 2.5 times as many fatal shootings as the Los Angeles County per capita average during the same period and four times the per capita rate in neighboring communities— San Pedro, Rancho Palos Verdes, and Palos Verdes Estates. "It is known that air pollutants act as stressors, eliciting endocrine stress responses in our brains that lead to irrational decisions and violent tendencies and also disturb the physical, cognitive, and emotional health of people exposed to it at high levels," Mahoney wrote. "Meanwhile, research has shown a strong correlative relationship between violent crimes and air pollution levels — and that violence rises in communities that don’t have access to public green space." His analysis of park data found that Wilmington has three times less park space, relative to its size, than neighboring communities. And EPA data shows that more than 100 times as many toxins — or 16 million more pounds — have been released into Wilmington’s air and water over two decades compared to its neighbors. Residents are trying to improve the quality of life in Wilmington by operating a community garden. “A lot of people just don’t see opportunity here, but I still have faith in my community,” said Octavio Ramirez, a community organizer and director of community gardens at the Wilmington-based Strength Based Community Change.
Mahoney's final story for Grist and High Country News reported the results of his survey of 75 households in Wilmington, which he was able to conduct with support from a community engagement grant from the Center. One in three households reported cancer, compared with one in 10 in the United States. More than half reported a family member with asthma, three times the U.S. rate. Eighty percent reported a family member with anxiety, and 70 percent with depression, more than twice the U.S. rate. Mahoney put a human face on the statistics by profiling the eight-member family of Christina and Paul Gonzalez, both 73. Three generation have had cancer; Paul’s mother, breast and skin cancer, Paul two bouts of testicular cancer and their daughter, Jennifer, 42, has acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a cancer of the blood cells, and her husband has had two heart attacks. In addition, Christina has lung disease, lupus, and fibromyalgia, and her and Paul's teenage son has been hospitalized multiple times for severe respiratory infections. For more than 50 years, the family has lived a block from the Port of Los Angeles, the nation's busiest, and about one mile from the Phillips 66 Los Angeles refinery. The EPA says that more than 2,000 pounds of chemicals that are known carcinogens or lung irritants are emitted into Wilmington's air every day, two-thirds by the Phillips 66 refinery.
Martinez-Pogue looked into whether the Santa Barbara area is adequately serving the needs of residents with mental illness. In the first in a series of articles, she noticed that Santa Barbara is unique among California counties in that police officers cannot place a person suffering from acute mental illness on what’s known as a “5150 hold” – mandatory hospitalization for three days. Instead, they have to await arrival of someone from the Behavioral Wellness Department’s mobile crisis team to evaluate the person, which delays treatment. And often no psychiatric beds are available, so a person confined on a 5150 hold is held in a hospital emergency department until a psychiatric bed opens. Often, that doesn’t happen before the hold expires. About one in 10 the holds at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital between January and November expired before a bed was found; at Marian Hospital in November 2021, the holds on almost one in three persons expired before a bed was found, and they were sent home without treatment. It took an average of nearly three days for a bed to open at Santa Barbara County’s Psychiatric Health Facility for a Marian patient confined on a hold.
For her second piece, Martinez-Pogue analyzed the costs to the county of sending psychiatric patients to other counties when its own 16 beds are full. The county contracted with Aurora Las Encinas in Pasadena -- 150 miles from the northernmost part of the county -- to pay $2.1 million over three years, between fiscal year 2019-2020 and fiscal year 2020-2021. If no beds are available there, it pays other hospitals $523 to $1,575 per day. Between August 2020 and January 2021, the county had 160 placements at 29 out-of-county hospitals, resulting in nearly 1,000 bed days, according to Noozhawk’s analysis. The local bed shortage is not only expensive for the county, but makes it hard for families to be involved in their loved ones care, since the receiving hospital may be hundreds of miles away. The state ranks Santa Barbara County ranked sixth worst among California’s 58 counties for meeting the need for acute mental health inpatient care.
In her third story, she looked at why the county’s $1.7 million Crisis Stabilization Center was so under-utilized, with an average of only 1.3 people served per day between 2015 and 2021. The main reason, experts told her, was its design as an unlocked facility. “Because of the way they chose to operate it and structure it, it’s been absolutely useless,” George Kaufmann, former president of the county chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, told her. One of the intents was to reduce the number of patients on 5150 holds, but they increased by 35% from 2018 to 2021 at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital and 16% at Lompoc Valley Medical Center, according to data obtained by Noozhawk.
Holly McDede, KQED Public Radio
McDede examined the success of San Francisco’s policy of “harm reduction” for drug abusers. For her first piece, McDede visited he Tenderloin Linkage Center -- the city’s new one-stop social service site — where people who are homeless or addicted to drugs can go to get help, including housing, treatment and social services. In the second and third months of 2022, the center recorded more than 20,100 visits, but only 110 resulted in referrals for treatment and only 15 led to treatment, McDede found. Staff have also overseen more than 50 overdose reversals using naloxone. But advocates for the homeless and drug users say that the city needs to speed up the provision of key services like housing and drug treatment.
In her second piece, McDede looked into the history of the policy, which dates to 2000, when the San Francisco Health Commission adopted harm reduction as an official public health policy. (Harm reduction refers to a philosophy of making it safer to use drugs rather than criminalizing those who do so.) During the three years before the policy was adopted, heroin-related causes were the city’s single-largest cause of accidental death. Early harm-reduction efforts included distribution of naloxone, which can reverse an overdose, and syringe-exchange programs. As fentanyl, a synthetic drug, entered the local market in 2017, the city’s policy has been tested. Fentanyl-linked deaths grew from 37 in 2017 to 518 in 2020 before falling to 474 last year, McDede reported. (Another 201 persons died from overdoses of other drugs.) Advocates for the harm reduction policy say that it has kept deaths from increasing. In 2021 alone, the distribution of naloxone led to 8,985 confirmed reversals of overdoses.
For her third piece, McDede spent time with residents and staff members at San Francisco’s Hotel Whitcomb, which provides shelters to 400 people who were previously unhoused, many of whom are drug users. Preliminary data from the San Francisco Medical Examiner’s Office indicate at least 18 people fatally overdosed there from April 2020, when it opened, to April 2022 – accounting for more than a quarter of all overdose deaths in hotels that were opened to house vulnerable San Franciscans during the pandemic. But public health officials say the overdose rate is lower in the hotels than on the street. Staff and residents say they have been traumatized by witnessing overdoses –many reversed through the administration of Narcan, but too many not.
For a long-form piece for Mother Jones, Rios analyzed census data and sheriff’s department lockout notices in five California counties from March 13, 2020, to October 2021. He found that evictions disproportionately affected residents of majority-Latino and majority-minority neighborhoods, even though fewer occurred than pre-pandemic. Rios found that across all of the five California counties he reviewed, 1.27 lockouts occurred in majority-Latino neighborhoods for every one in a majority-white neighborhood. (Note: Rios’ analysis does not show that Black and Latino renters faced higher lockout rates because sheriff’s departments’ data did not include race.) Rios’ findings were consistent with research by Princeton’s Eviction Lab, which has found that that Black and Latino renters overall faced a disproportionately high risk of being evicted during the pandemic. Rios also reported on the adverse effects on children whose families had been evicted, including prematurity, low birthweight, executive functioning, mathematical reasoning, and language skills. He put human faces on the research by profiling the family of Gabriel Guzman and Elena Porras, which was evicted twice within about 15 months from homes in Chula Vista, CA. Porras suffered from stress, their-10-year-old daughter grew clingier than usual and their 4-year-old daughter began coming into her parents’ bed in the middle of the night. The couple recently filed for bankruptcy, which will put their second eviction notice on hold for 90 days. “I had a lot of feelings, but the worst one is I felt that I had failed my kids,” he told Rios. Rio has since joined The Guardian as a US-based correspondent.
Chloe Lee Rowlands, Bay City News Foundation
Chloe Lee Rowlands reported a three-part series -- including numerous data visualizations -- on how the expected growth in the Bay Area’s population of residents over 65 is likely to exacerbate the current housing shortage and also strain public transportation, health care systems and affordable housing. Rowlands consulted a variety of data sources for her series, including the California Elder Index, produced by UCLA’s School of Public Health; the California Department of Finance’s Demographic Research Unit; and the UC Berkeley Labor Center. In her first piece, she reported that California’s population of residents 65 and over is expected to grow by two-thirds over the next two decades. “Without significant investment in planning, many older Californians face an increasingly bleak existence,” she wrote. UCLA’s 2015 Elder Index report found that 46.5% of single elders in California were unable to afford the basic cost of living. And the UC Berkeley Labor Center has found that seniors of color, on average, have half the income of white seniors. Rowland’s first story also reviewed the element of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2019 Master Plan for Aging, a roadmap aimed at making California “the most age- and disability-friendly state in the nation.” Her second story examined how well California residents approaching 65 are prepared to cover the costs of living once they retire, noting that one in five live in poverty. She reported that UCLA’s Elder Index calculated that the annual basic cost of living in 2019 for a single elder in the Bay Area was $35,376 –about 25% higher than the California average. Yet one quarter of people over 65 rely almost entirely on their Social Security benefits -- an average of about $18,000 per year for retirees and $15,000 per year for people who are disabled. Her third story looked at where seniors will live as housing prices continue to rise. UCLA researchers have calculated that 26% of all elders and 50.4% of renters are unable to afford the cost of living in their areas. “You shouldn’t be seeing 80- and 90-year-olds at homeless shelters. You just shouldn’t. That’s just morally, morally wrong,” Priscilla Essert, executive director of Vintage House Senior Centercomments, told her. “It’s so wrong to have people work their whole lives and then have no home.” Rowlands reported that tax matters prevent some older Californians from downsizing because they are reluctant to pay capital gains taxes on the appreciated values of their homes. Isolation -- and fear of it -- compounds problems for people who are aging. Essert told Rowlands: "There are all sorts of issues facing seniors, but the number one is isolation."
In a three-part radio series for KCBX, Central Coast Public Radio, Bethany Thornton, a freelance journalist, examined whether the health care work force on the Central Coast was adequate to meet the needs of the region’s aging population. In her first story, she noted that the region has a higher proportion of residents 65 and older than the rest of California, and older people generally have more health care needs. The region already has a shortage of nurses, as well as specialist in cardiology and ophthalmology, and nursing homes beds, experts told her, and the situation is likely to worsen. In her second story, she took a deeper look at the reasons for the local nursing shortage. Neither of the region’s two public universities trains nurses, although an associate nursing degree (ADN) is obtainable from local community colleges. But because of limited slots, a qualified applicant often has to wait two to four years to be admitted to an ADN program.Those seeking a bachelor's degree in nursing must move away or pursue hybrid programs through Cal State Universities. In her third story, she examined the growing demand for “memory care” for people with dementia, including adult day care centers and nursing homes.
Beau Yarborough, Southern California News Group
Yarbrough reported a package of four stories on bullying in public schools, which included a data analysis of the varying rates of bullying reported by students in different school districts.looked into how pervasive bullying is in schools and how some schools have managed to reduce it. For his first piece, he analyzed California Healthy Kids Survey data to calculate that 33.5% of middle school and high school students surveyed said they had been bullied or harassed in the previous 12 months. How seriously districts take bullying and succeed at preventing it varies widely, Yarbrough reported, with 59% of students in some districts reporting having been bullied or harassed compared with 11% in some others. The California Healthy Kids Survey, which administered anonymously every year in three-quarters of California school districts, also found that between 2017 and 2019 more Asian and Pacific Islander students were bullied than students of other ethnic backgrounds and that LGBTQ students were also disproportionately likely to be bullied. In his second story, he examined what distinguishes schools with low rates of bullying from those with high rates and found that the key factor was more attention to mental health, including hiring additional counselors and implementing stronger anti-bullying policies and procedures. A particular challenge is cyberbullying, he reported, and some districts monitor students’ visits to online sites using district equipment; create online portals to report bullying; and post QR codes around the campus so students can easily report. He also provided tips to parents about how to tell if their child is being bullied, including watching for signs of depression.
In his third story, he reported on efforts, often student-led, to change schools’ cultures. The California Healthy Kids Survey has found that LGBTQ students are consistently bullied twice as much as straight students at all grade levels in middle and high school, and in many schools, students have formed Gay/Straight Alliances in which straight students provide support to gay students. Racial bullying is also a major problem. Because of the disproportionate bullying of students from some minority racial groups, the San Bernardino City Unified School District brought together parents, community members, faculty and students to develop an anti-bullying strategy. In a sidebar, he revisited the death of Diego Stolz, 13, whose death at the hands of bullies was videotaped by other students during a school day at a Moreno middle school on September 16, 2019. The aunt and uncle who were raising him and his brothers had told the assistant principal a few days before that he was being bullied, and the administrator told them they would suspend be suspended, but they weren’t. The family has filed a wrongful death suit against the school district, the principal and the assistant principal. Meanwhile, the district has changed its bullying reporting system to make administrators more accountable for following through and has also changed its training for assistant principals, who handle student discipline. Diego’s family would like to see more meaningful changes.
National Data Fellows
Emily Bader, Sun Journal (Lewiston, Maine)
Emily Bader's Fellowship project, Legacy of Pain, looked into how the opioid crisis has evolved in Maine, how it has impacted the child welfare system and whether the system, which has had its budget cut in recent years, was equipped to support families in which parents’ substance use disorder put children as risk. In her first story, she examined data from the Maine Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to describe drug abuse trends in the state, which experienced a steady increase in the prescribing of opioids in the early 2000s. From 2006-2016, prescription rates climbed in every Maine county but Lincoln, reaching an average of 31 pills a year for every Mainer. An unintentional effect of Maine's 2016 crackdown on doctors who over-prescribed narcotics: the development of a black market that contributed to a huge increase in the number of fatal overdose each year since 2015. In 2015, 349 Maine residents died of overdoses, roughly half from prescribed narcotics and half from illicit drugs. As of September 2021, 284 Maine residents had died that year of a pharmaceutical drug-related overdose, compared with nearly 400 who had died from a street drug overdose. In a sidebar, Bader profiled Todd Papianou, 55, a high school teacher, who feels lucky to have escaped addiction after being prescribed opioids for back pain.
In her second piece, Bader delved further into the emergence of the heroin and manufactured illicit drugs (like fentanyl) epidemic. As of September 2021, 284 Maine residents had died in 2021 of a pharmaceutical drug-related overdose, compared with nearly 400 who had died from a street drug overdose. Critics say that some of these deaths could have been avoided if physicians had provided helped users of prescription opioids safely wean themselves from their dependencies, as one physician Bader profiled, Dr. Candice McElroy, has done for about 100 patients.In her a sidebar with her second piece, Bader told the story of a family with a multi-generational opioid addiction problem. Nikole Powell's father was a heroin addict who disappeared for long periods of time, and, when he was home, often beat her. At 12, she was kidnapped by six member of a motorcycle gang, raped repeatedly and hospitalized for months. Her father killed one of the rapist and was sent to prison. Nikole was initially placed in foster care and three years later sent to Maine to live with her mom, stepdad, and two siblings. At 19, she developed an opioid use disorder after being prescribed a high dose of oxycontin because of an injury in her construction job. She struggled with addiction for more than a decade, eventually buying and selling drugs on the street. She was jailed several times for domestic abuse, and in 2020 sentenced to prison for drug dealing. With help from a peer support group, she's gotten sober. In her third piece, Bader focused on what some experts believe is the root cause of both drug addiction and family dysfunction: untreated trauma. And in her fourth piece, she spoke with experts about their views on how Maine needs to strengthen its services to people suffering from substance abuse disorder. Bader capped the series with an explanatory story about the data sources she used.
Daniel Gonzalez, Arizona Republic and USAToday Network
Gonzalez reported a three-part series, “Disrupted: COVID and Latino Learners,” published in both English and Spanish, on how the COVID-19 pandemic had affected the education of Latino children in Arizona. For his first part, he analyzed how students classified as English language learners (ELL) had fared and found that they scored the lowest on state tests for English and math during the 2020-21 school year, when compared with all students as well as nine student subgroups, including students with disabilities. Fewer than 2% passed the standardized math and reading exams, compared with 38% of all students passing the reading test and 31% passing the math test. Gonzalez put a human face on the challenges many English language learners face by profiling Fernanda, whose Mexican American family of five speaks mostly Spanish at home. Fernanda spent parts of first and second grades getting her schooling remotely at home through an iPad provided by the school district. But she had to deal with with an erratic internet connection and distractions caused by her younger siblings. Her mother tried to help her with her homework, but struggled because of limited English.
His second story focused on some of the reasons for the learning loss during the pandemic – disenrollment from school and excessive absences. He told a statewide story by focusing on the efforts of one school principal -- Tony Alcala of Galveston Elementary School – to reduce disenrollment and absenteeism at his school. In fall 2020, Galveston lost 33 students, and then 80 students in 2021—an enrollment decline repeated across the state. Gonzalez’s analysis of state data found that enrollment of public school students in Arizona fell by 3% in October 2020, compared with 2019 -- a loss of nearly 38,500 students – following a 1% annual growth rate in the previous decade. Although the state doesn’t collect data on the reason for disenrollment, a state education officials told Gonzalez that she believes that many older Latino students disenrolled because they had to care for younger siblings while parents worked outside the home. Even students who stayed enrolled missed more school days than usual, with 22% of all K-8 students chronically absent (missing 18 or more days) in the 2020-2021 school year -- up 8 percentage points compared with May 2019. Arizona plans to use part of its $4.1 billion in federal stimulus aid to provide summer classes to students who fell behind during the pandemic catch up, as it did last summer.
For his third story, he analyzed college enrollment data to report that the pandemic disrupted the college plans of thousands of Latino students in Arizona, leading to sharp decreases in Latino enrollment at local community colleges and at Northern Arizona University, one of three state universities, but increases at the other two, the University of Arizona and Arizona State University. Over all, the number of Latino undergraduates enrolled at all three of the state’s public universities increased 10% during the pandemic, a bright note. But the decrease at community colleges is particularly alarming, he reported, because many Latino students start in them and then transfer to four-year colleges.
Kyeland Jackson, Twin Cities PBS
Medicaid helps pay healthcare costs for low-income Americans, but many who utilize the safety net program are unaware that their homes could be taken by the federal government to pay for the costs of care. For Twin Cities PBS, Kyeland Jackson investigated the impacts of the Medicaid Estate Recovery program, and how it might be impacting intergenerational wealth, worsening inequalities in his series, Pennies on the Dollar. The first part of his series exposes the capriciousness with which the federal government can act, first citing to one Medicaid enrollee’s son after putting a lien on his family home that the amount he owed on his late mother’s healthcare bills totaled $187,120; then months later when the housing market boomed government officials canceled the first deal and doubled the lien amount. Jackson found that in Minnesota, more than 64,000 residents have paid into the estate recovery program, totaling $250,000,000. It’s less than 1% of what the state spends to cover people on medical assistance. The estate recovery program may be destroying intergenerational wealth building opportunities that “place an unequal burden on people of color, compounding existing wealth inequalities among racial and ethnic groups,” according to a Congressional report Jackson cited.
In his second story, Jackson reported that states that don’t take part in the estate recovery program risk losing federal funding. West Virginia, for example, sued the federal government, calling the estate recovery requirement a “betrayal of The New Deal.” It lost. Similarly, Minnesota delayed its estate recovery program until the federal government threatened to withhold Medicaid funding. The program can be subverted by those with the means and resources to find the financial loopholes, something that the most vulnerable families don’t typically know, a guardianship attorney told Jackson, calling the program “regressive.” Opponents of the program say that the potential liens and loss of estates by enrolling aren’t well communicated, and that it can leave family members who share tenancy with the deceased homeless. A federal bill co-sponsored by U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat representing Minnesota's 5th Congressional District, could overturn the federal mandate for estate recovery, and give all states a chance to end their programs, Jackson reported as part of his series. Advocates quoted in Jackson’s reporting hold California up as a model example of Medicaid estate recovery reform.
Jenna Kunze, Native News Online
Jenna Kunze reported a three-part series for Native News Online about the intergenerational effects on residents of the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota of the federal government's now-abandoned practice of separating Native children from their families and sending them to boarding schools often many hundreds -- even thousands -- of miles away. For her first story, Kunze journeyed to the Rosebud reservation in May 2022 to talk to tribal elders who had spent parts of their childhoods in boarding schools. Duane Hollow Horn Bear, now in his 70s, attended the Saint Francis Mission School, operated by the Catholic Church, from age 8 through 20. After graduating, he served in the military in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and returned “as a drug addict, alcoholic, lost and angry.” The most lasting demage from the boarding school experience, he said, was not learning how to live in a family. “Boarding school sent a lot of children out into the world without parenting skills,” Hollow Horn Bear told Kunze. "Although they brought children into the world, the knowledge of raising children just wasn’t there.” The boarding school Hollow Horn Bear attended is now called Saint Francis Indian School and is run by the tribe. Hollow Horn Bear volunteers there to teach children about Native traditions.
For her second story, Kunze talked to residents of the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota about how their parents' or grandparents' experiences in boarding schools aimed at "Americanizing" them affected them, a phenomenon known as "historical trauma" or "intergenerational trauma." Epigenetics esearchers have found that the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, Dutch survivors of a post-World War II famine and Chinese survivors of a different famine experienced changes in a stress-related gene that possibly made them more vulnerable to stressors. Now, a first of its kind study is looking at the epigenetic impact of Indian residential schools on Indigenous peoples in Canada, where education for First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children was modeled after the U.S .boarding school system. But even if the researchers find biological evidence of their parents' or grandparents' stress in their descendents, it does not mean that they cannot be made whole. "Even if they are embedded, they can be altered by diet and other experiences,” Hymie Anisman, a neuroscientist ain Ottawa, Canada, told Kunze. “So you can sort of unring the bell…presumably, if somebody with an epigenetic change was raised in a very good environment with good parenting, good nutrition and so forth, some of these epigenetic changes may be undone.” That's exactly how LeToy “Toy” Lunderman is trying to make sure that her children and grandchildren don't suffer from the after-effects of their great grandparents' and grandparents' boarding school experiences, as she believes she has. As a child, she told Kunze, “I made no connection between boarding schools and how my family was growing up, which wasn’t very much different than other families—a lot of alcoholism, a lot of violence, unhealthy relationships, poverty. Boarding school created that. But we didn't know that back then.” Now 46, Lunderman works with famlies on the reservation to help them recover their pasts heal from the trauma inflicted on her community.
Stephanie Lamm and Alex Stuckey, Houston Chronicle
Lamm and Stuckey spent six months investigating whether Texas school districts were meeting nationally accepted standards for providing students with access to mental health providers. They analyzed state staffing data since 2013 at all 1,200 public school and open-enrollment charter districts in Texas for their project, “In Crisis.” In the first story, they reported that “at no point since 2013 did any Texas school district have the professionally recommended student-to-provider ratios for school counselors, social workers, nurses and psychologists. “That means for nearly a decade, more than 5 million kids in Texas schools each year have gone without appropriate access to mental health professionals,” they noted. The school districts blame a lack of funding and board decisions that prioritize parents’ preference for the maintenance of low teacher-student ratios. In their second piece, they told the story of Fred Garcia, 19, who had an IQ of 62, was bullied at school and in his neighborhood and had struggled for years with depression and anxiety. His high school had one counselor per 567 students and one psychologist per 1,770 students (national standards call for one counselor per 250 students and one psychologist per 500 students). He was unable to access appropriate mental health resources in high school and started threatening suicide and running away. When he was arrested in October 2021, his mother was relieved, because she thought he would get the mental health help he needed. But while jailed in Harris County, a fellow inmate beat him to death. Fred’s fate “is a devastating reminder of how mentally ill kids can fall through the cracks: They end up in crisis, on the streets or thrust into the adult mental health system where psychiatric beds are so scarce jail is often the only option,” Lamm and Stuckey wrote. For Part 3, the reporters visited the Sanger Independent School District’s Challenge Program, a model initiative that provides troubled children with mental health counseling and a supportive educational environment. The youth served are “the so-called worst of the worst behaved; the ones whose mental health issues, be it anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder or anger, get so much in the way of their academic pursuits they’re often shipped here from other districts,” the reporters wrote. Sanger gets no dedicated funding from the state for counselors, psychologists, nurses and social workers, but school officials aggressively apply for grants to bolster mental health resources. “We don’t have some magic pill,” said Ruby Henline, a counselor at the district’s sixth-grade campus. “This is something that can be duplicated.” In their final piece, Lamm and Stuckey reported on solutions that Ann Hughes, Sanger’s director of Social Emotional Learning & Behavior Intervention, recommended that other districts look into.
Justin Murphy, Rochester Democrat & Chronicle
For his Data Fellowship project, "The Forest in the City," Justin Murphy analyzed tree canopy data from EarthDefine; housing status and income information from the U.S. Census American Community Survey 2019; and temperature information from NASA/USGS Landsat Program to look at which neighborhoods in Rochester benefit from tree canopies – and which don’t -- and how that affects the health of residents. In his introductory package of stories, published online on April 7, 2022, and in print on April 14, he showed how disparities in tree cover are rooted in century-old public policy choices, such as reserving the northeast quadrant of the city for large properties occupied by the wealthy, who had the means to landscape extravagantly, and funneling immigrants into the northeast section, which is dominated by rental properties with few trees. The issue is not just about beauty; there’s plenty of research about how access to green space -- particularly trees – has numerous health benefits, including better mental health. In Rochester, residents living in neighborhoods with the fewest trees are more likely to report poor mental health than those in neighborhoods with the most trees, he noted, even after controlling for income. In his second piece in the introductory package, he explored the role that decisions by Rochester’s fabled nursery owners played in which areas of the city were beautified. Rochester was known as “the flower city” for several decades in the 19th Century. But an insect infestation wrecked the nursery owners’ supply change in the last few years of the century, and the nursery owners developed their expansive properties as housing; the legacy of those decisions is that Rochester’s South Wedge and Highland Park neighborhoods are beautifully landscaped and attract well-off owners. The northeast section of Rochester, which today is populated mostly by less well-off renters, had extensive railroad operations, which made them less attractive for the development of high-end housing.
In a sidebar, Murphy summarized the benefits of having trees -- cleaner and cooler air, better mental health, higher property values and less crime – and told readers how they could get the city to plant a free tree near their homes. In another sidebar, he described the methodology he used to map every tree in the city. And in a third sidebar, he interviewed Rochester’s mayor about his views on the importance of trees to residents. More recently, Murphy wrote about the history of Washington Grove, a 26-acre old-growth hickory and oak forest that provides many Rochester residents easy access to forested trails, but because it abuts a reservoice, is hard to reach from the city's most diverse neighborhoods. As part of the project, the paper has asked residents to fill out a survey describing their favorite tree in the city, and Murphy plans to report the results in the future.
Impacts: The city of Rochester is updating its urban forest master plan, and Mayor Malik Evans has committed to a net increase of 6,000 trees before his term ends in December 2025. The Landmark Society of Western New York cited Murphy's reporting in January 2023 when it recommended that Rochester's trees be included in its annual Five to Revive listing of priorities for revitalization.
Homelessness skyrocketed 150% in Augusta, Georgia in one year, but at the same time homeless kids in the classroom decreased by 65%. For WRDW’s I-Team, Liz Owens investigated the impacts that homelessness has on children throughout the region, telling the stories of families whose kids are falling between the gaps. The first part of her series was told through the eyes of Alissa, a mother of four living in her car as a winter storm approaches. “They say they want to go home a lot, and they’re not understanding that we don’t have a home right now,” Alissa told Owens. Navigating through the maze of programs and agencies to help unhoused families is challenging — so challenging that Owens and her team did the legwork for Alissa and secured a place for them in the only shelter in Augusta that accepts families. However, even after they found shelter, they encountered a series of Catch-22s for services to help get the kids into school: a school official could offer bus service, but not right away; they could give them cab vouchers, but not if they don’t own child car seats; Alissa could drop off her kids by foot, but not pick them up since there isn’t enough time to get back to the shelter to secure their beds for the night. All the while, Alissa’s kids and scores of others across Augusta in similar situations rack up absences from school and suffer the lifelong consequences.
The second part of Owens’ series revealed that Richmond County School District had 473 high school students missing from class this year. That’s more missing high school kids this year than the previous total of missing students across all grades, Owens reported. Some who are homeless face nearly insurmountable challenges. For example, Nina — a Glen Hills High School student whose family is unhoused —began living in the local shelter when her school went virtual during the pandemic. She couldn’t attend class or do her school work because the shelter is only open between 4 p.m. and 8 a.m. When school returned in-person, she was offered no transportation support to get to class from her district. Despite the depth of the problem, the Richmond County School District maintains no specific outreach program to track chronically absent students and offer them assistance to get back to class, Owens’ found. That district maintains a 74% graduation rate — the worst in the state.
So, where’s the state and federal funding going to help address the growing needs of assisting students who are unhoused? Owens asked this question in the third part of her series, and administrators told her they were awaiting a near $350,000 grant from the American Rescue Plan to help provide support. But Owens and the I-Team found that the district had already been awarded millions in state funding, in part, to address “at-risk student populations” that include children who lack stable housing. Owens’ final installment of the series laid bare how Richmond County’s method of tracking students is “a maze of confusion,” and explaining to viewers where gaps exist in the data. Through her analysis, she found more than 3,000 students in Richmond County who were unaccounted for through the data. She also found a whistleblower had filed suit against the district alleging a pattern of officials not following the federal McKinney Vento Act, which ensures students without permanent housing receive continuous, stable education. At the same time, truancy complaints are up 115% in juvenile court and dozens of teenagers are booked in the adult jail in the county, nearly all of whom are unaccounted-for Richmond County students, Owens found. “When you don’t get an education, there’s only two places left — and that’s prison, or the graveyard,” a Richmond School District board member told Owens.
Elizabeth Thompson, North Carolina Health News
When COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns first began, it forced schools across the United States to make an abrupt switch to remote, at-home learning. It had an unintended and beneficial impact for many — the number of students being referred to the juvenile justice system through school-based complaints dropped dramatically, reported 2021 Data Fellow Elizabeth Thompson. She took an in-depth look at the issue for North Carolina Health News in a series called “When kids’ cries for help become crimes.” School-based juvenile justice complaints in North Carolina dropped to about 30 percent of total complaints during the 2019-2020 school year, Thompson reported in her first story. By the 2020-2021 school year, that figure dropped to about 7 percent. Social justice advocates cite it as proof positive that a school-to-prison pipeline exists. “The pandemic really showed us that students are being really transferred from the school system to the justice system,” Marcus Pollard, a staff attorney with the Justice Systems Reform Council told Thompson. Students of color are disproportionately impacted, Thompson reported. Although they make up just 20 percent of the population of children in the state, Black kids received almost half of all school-based juvenile justice complaints. Advocates say they are unfairly targeted by on-campus school resource officers (sworn law enforcement officers who work in schools) and that offenses that funnel a child into the juvenile justice system are minor infractions, such as disorderly conduct, getting into fights or simple assaults that are frequently “cries for help.” Meanwhile, taking students out of school through suspension puts them further behind educationally.
Despite plummeting numbers during the pandemic, North Carolina juvenile justice officials expected the number of complaints to increase with students returning to classrooms, Thompson reported in her second story. Meanwhile, for students with disabilities, or those who were bullied or taunted, online school was beneficial, a disability rights attorney told Thompson. In the third part of her series, Thompson explores the correlations between literacy rates and imprisonment, noting that children who don’t read at grade level experience frustration, embarrassment and act out in class. Meanwhile, a North Carolina Health News data analysis found that 70% of Black students in fourth-through-eighth grade were not proficient in end-of-year reading exams compared to 40% of white students. Poor literacy rates are such a strong predictor of incarceration that the director of one youth justice clinic that offers legal services for juveniles in North Carolina said the first thing she does when she meets a new client is read them their police records. “I just read it to them because I do not think that they can read it. Well over half of them really struggle,” she told Thompson
William Wan, The Washington Post
In a long-form piece, Wan, an enterprise reporter, examined a growing trend in the United States – relinquishment of custody of a child to the state so that the child can get mental health treatment. Wan profiled Lisa Rowe, a North Carolina mother who gave up parental rights to her 17-year-old son after his increasingly violent behavior led her to fear for her life. He had developed serious behavior problems as a preschooler and starting expressing suicidal thoughts when he was 10. Several residential treatment centers refused to admit him because his needs were too complex. Finally, a facility in Texas, 600 miles from her then-home in New Mexico, agreed to accept him. After three weeks, the fifth grader was sent home because he was being beaten up by other patients, leaving him with post-traumatic stress disorder. At 15, he threatened to “shoot up a church” and kill the ER doctor who treated him after an overdose. The year he turned 17, Rowe called the police 17 times because she feared he would harm her. After Rowe’s petition to give up her parental rights was approved, the state procured a spot in a psychiatric hospital for him – but only for 30 days. “I love him. I miss him,” she told Wan. “But the thought of living alone with him again, unable to keep him safe, to keep myself safe … I have to draw the line somewhere. I’m allowed to have a line, aren’t I?”