For the last five years, I’ve researched Valley fever at a multidisciplinary lab at the University of California, Merced. This experience has convinced me that for my work to pay the greatest dividends for society—and to do the most to fight this terrible disease—it must take place in direct conversation with community members, clinicians, industry, and policymakers.

Valley fever is a respiratory disease caused by the Coccidioides soil fungus, which is common in the American Southwest, including Arizona and California’s Central Valley. People who work with soil in agricultural fields, construction, and landscaping are particularly at risk. Symptoms resemble those of respiratory diseases like the common cold or flu: coughs, chest pains, fevers, and body aches. This can make swift and accurate diagnosis difficult. Valley fever is estimated to kill about 200 people per year, though the true number is probably higher. In California’s Central Valley, infection rates are 90 times higher than they are in the northern part of the state—a disparity that is exacerbated by the region’s low ratio of physicians to patients.

The heavy burden of the disease in the Central Valley created the impetus for an unusual interdisciplinary collaboration between clinicians, researchers, community members, educators, and local policymakers. In 2018, two state legislators from the Central Valley city of Bakersfield, Vince Fong and Rudy Salas, proposed a $7 million bill to research and raise awareness about the disease. The bill included $3 million for the University of California to share funds between major research groups, allowing scientists who had been competitors to become collaborators—and to reach out to community partners as well. Working together, seven labs from five UC campuses split up the funding allocation.

I first experienced this new, inclusive dynamic as a grad student, when I attended a Valley fever health symposium hosted by the Bakersfield Disease Group, a local advocacy group, in 2018. As I took my seat, I noticed that the 70 or so attendees included folks in pressed suits and people in t-shirts and jeans; some showed up in work clothes, with mud still on their boots. Local elected officials updated us on legislation in the works to promote better public health education through schools and doctors’ offices. Clinical and biomedical researchers presented their work, and took audience questions. Valley fever survivors told personal stories about the difficulty of getting a diagnosis and dealing with medical bills. One described how they could barely sit up most days and rarely got out of bed.

After the programs wrapped, the symposium set up a dedicated time and space for everyone to collaborate—a ritual that made communication the norm, rather than something individuals had to seek out. It was a model of open collaboration, grounded in our common goal of fighting Valley fever.

A month later, I joined the lab of UC Merced immunologist Katrina Hoyer—who had long sought to bring in diverse voices and had lobbied for the increased state funding—as her first Valley fever graduate student researcher. The symposium was on my mind as I outlined my thesis and planned experiments. Now that I had directly seen how the disease affected individuals in the Central Valley, the magnitude of what I wanted to accomplish weighed on me: I wanted my work to make a tangible impact on the community I resided in, and I wanted it to happen during my graduate career, not decades down the line.

At the 63rd Coccidioidomycosis Meeting, at UC Davis in 2019, I came to realize how the collaborative environment could make me a more effective researcher. After my first presentation on immune responses that follow inhalation of the fungi, a doctor treating patients at UC Davis’s Center for Valley Fever challenged some of my descriptions and data.

This, of course, was stressful for a new graduate student. But the physician followed up afterwards, and contextualized his question: If my immune cell definitions did not make sense to healthcare professionals working directly with patients, it would limit the applicability of my work.

I had originally thought of my data as something only scientists could use and appreciate. Until that data culminated into a body of knowledge “big enough” or “significant enough,” it would remain too specific, too esoteric, for anyone else to find it useful. But this interaction with a senior clinician taught me that conducting “good science” was more than following protocol—it meant making science that others could immediately use, too. I needed to be more critical of how I was interpreting and presenting the research. My work could have much more reach and impact if I used accessible language. This lesson was invaluable, and I don’t think it would’ve been possible if it wasn’t for the collaborative learning environment that Valley fever fosters.

The study of Valley fever is characterized by a sense of urgency. More people are moving into regions where the fungus is endemic, and the fungus itself is expanding its range. When I first entered graduate school, I was convinced I would remain in academia for my career, but thinking about Valley fever’s increasing impacts made me anxious to do more. Seeing my impatience, Dr. Hoyer steered me towards places where I could provide direct service to the community. Though I was only required to give two public talks for my graduate program requirements, by the time I finished I had given about 15: workshops on an introduction to fungi with excited elementary students, research updates with community educators, and policy presentations to local elected officials.

The collaborative community around Valley fever inspired me to leap into the gap between science and policy. Tests and treatments for this disease may be years away. So, I’ve come to believe that the most pragmatic thing I can do in the meantime is to get involved in science communication and policy, and to continue reaching out to diverse groups of stakeholders.

This approach offers benefits across the board. Funders have the potential to transform research impact by involving diverse communities in deciding what research is conducted. Policymakers can look for ways to ensure that disease research stays attuned to community needs. And researchers can begin to build deliberate places for public discussion into conferences, meetings, and even at their home institutions. Our work would benefit from creating shared, “sacred” time for collaboration, instead of squeezing in such conversations in a hurried and rushed manner, between other obligations. And rather than gearing these social spaces only towards researchers and their work, we should invite industry, policymakers, and community members to join as collaborators rather than merely as vendors or passive listeners.

As both Valley fever and COVID have demonstrated, infectious disease impacts all parts of daily life; the response must also be multifaceted, encompassing research, education, policy, healthcare, manufacturing, distribution, and the broader community. The sheer scale of the task implies the need for broad and diverse communication and collaboration across all parties involved, and researchers like me should not wait passively for outside institutions to take the lead. We must foster strong dialogue between traditionally separated parties. The future of science is in all of our hands.

The post How Valley Fever Brings People Together appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But the discussion focused on a more specific query: How can rural education thrive?

In answering that, three veteran educators from different rural parts of California—Connie Stewart of Cal Poly Humboldt, Julie Boesch of the nonprofit California Collaborative for Educational Excellence, and Tim Taylor of the Small School Districts’ Association—offered several suggestions as they shared the stage at the Bakersfield Music Theatre.

The pandemic was a major topic of conversation, and the event’s moderator, Saul Gonzalez, KQED correspondent and co-host of “The California Report,” started by asking how it changed rural education.

Boesch, former superintendent of Maple Elementary School District in Kern County, called the past few years “a phenomenal learning experience.”

Yes, she said, it was difficult when, say, half of her small staff were out or exposed to COVID. But the “beauty of being small and rural” is that they also had “big opportunities to shift gears” to meet their students’ needs. With fewer than 300 students, she knew every child, and could figure out how to support them personally if they were struggling.

“In a small district like mine, I know everything going on,” said Boesch, who recently became the assistant director of services at California Collaborative.

Boesch said Maple was fortunate to get Chromebooks within a week of COVID, speeding the transition to distance learning. But this change wasn’t easy for many rural school districts, whose students ended up offline for quite some time.

Taylor, executive director of the Small School Districts’ Association, which represents and assists districts of fewer than 5,000 students, said when “March 13, 2020”—the day when schools were shutdown statewide by COVID—hit, it “exposed the whole digital divide issue.” “Our institution worked with the Department of Education to figure out how many kids didn’t have a device—let alone internet, let alone a hot spot,” he said. The answer was “hundreds of thousands.”

Stewart, executive director of initiatives at Humboldt, the newest Cal Poly campus, called the pandemic a necessary wakeup call. One of the changes it spurred was California’s recent $6 billion investment to expand broadband infrastructure. “The nice thing about COVID was it was all hands on deck—and it brought to light some of the issues around technology.”

“I’m very hopeful in the near future,” she continued, in a decade or so, “we’ll solve the digital divide.”

But equity issues run far beyond broadband for rural schools. Panelists agreed that, though one in four students in the United States today attends a rural school, state and federal lawmakers are not spending one-fourth of their time thinking about these kids, much less visiting their schools.

“Rural doesn’t go to Sacramento enough, and Sacramento doesn’t go out to rural,” Stewart said.

Boesch recalled how, when she first arrived at the Maple district eight years ago, the rains were so bad that there was water coming through the walls. It took years of lobbying officials outside the district, and the building of bipartisan support in the legislature, to fix the issue.

“I put 40,000 miles on my car advocating for my communities. That’s what it takes,” Boesch said.

More attention is required because the challenges in rural districts are different, panelists said. And getting more attention requires behaving more like urban school districts that go to the media, and to court, to make sure their needs are addressed.

“We need to follow the blueprint of urban schools to tell their story for what their children are up against,” said Taylor. “We don’t do that. And we don’t litigate.”

Panelists say rural schools have to get creative to provide services. Boesch shared how she was able to afford a school psychologist by splitting their salary with a consortium of other rural schools. That required negotiating a memorandum of understanding between each school, and finding an employee who was willing to serve everyone.

Rural schools don’t just lack supportive services; they also lack access to courses that help students prepare for colleges, such as AP classes.

Illustration by Soobin Kim.

But schools can compensate. “I came here to talk about solutions,” said Stewart, who encouraged high schoolers to dual enroll in community college in their areas. “Wouldn’t it be fabulous if every high school student graduated with some units at a community college? Wouldn’t it be fabulous if they all graduated with a head start?”

Students should also be encouraged to try a trade in high school, so they get to do “something they love” and learn about future job prospects.

What if there aren’t enough kids to run a school, asked Gonzalez, the moderator. When does it make sense to consider a closure or consolidation?

Students’ needs, not financial ease or consolidation plans, must come first, Boesch argued. “We have to serve all children,” no matter where they are, she said. If schools are closed permanently and the only choice left for students is to bus three hours to the nearest school district or solely virtual learning that’s putting barriers in place for their education when “it’s incumbent on us to remove barriers,” she said.

Stewart agreed, arguing for great care in such decisions. “We have to be smart about how we consolidate schools,” she said. If schools must be closed, then the next question becomes what we do with them so they’re still a benefit to the community. There are other educational needs that can be served, she said, citing successful second lives as community centers and bilingual centers.

Gonzales asked the panelists if they think there’s “a cultural bias against rural education.”

Yes, they said, but the nature of the bias may be changing. That’s because it’s no longer inevitable that people will move to urban environments. The pandemic saw people leave urban environments.

Climate change, Stewart added, is also shifting the conversation. She cited her employer—and its transition from being California State University Humboldt to Cal Poly Humboldt, with the resulting emphasis on science, technology, and the green economy— as proof of that. As a Cal Poly, Humboldt can encourage students to come not just to study but also to make lives and careers for themselves in rural Northern California.

But making space for people in rural parts of the state will only be a successful strategy if new arrivals can afford to live there.

Once upon a time, educators who moved to rural school districts were able to afford to buy their house on their salary. Now, housing prices having risen so rapidly that that’s no longer the reality for many, panelists said.

“The American dream is slipping from people in education, and we have to address that as Californians,” said Stewart. That’s why, she said, her organization is working to invest in workforce housing “so we can try to keep teachers” in the communities they serve.

Near the event’s end, Gonzalez asked the panelists to talk about the joys of small-town education. We’ve talked about the hardships, he said, but “what rocks about it?”

All the panelists spoke up at once.

It’s great to be well-known in your community, said Boesch: “We’ve seen generations of families go through school.”

It’s the ability and freedom to innovate, said Stewart: “All of us have wonderful stories of how we can quickly make change and that’s the beauty of being able to work at a rural school.”

And it’s the intimacy, said Taylor: “The school is the town. You’re part of this incredible loving, warm safe environment.”

The post California’s Most Remote Classrooms Are Surviving—How Can They Thrive? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But in parts of rural California, the pandemic also revealed silver linings. Some far-flung schools and districts in our state have made great strides bridging the digital divide, addressing teacher shortages, and supporting English learners.

Recent test scores from the 2022 National Educational Progress Assessment—the nation’s report card for K–12 schools—show just how much damage the COVID-19 pandemic and related school closures wreaked on learning. Average test scores for 9-year-old students declined seven points in math and five points in reading, wiping out nearly two decades of progress. Among Black students, average math scores fell 13 points.

But scores don’t provide the full picture. As the 2021–22 school year began, a mental health crisis was taking hold among students, too. More than a third of high schoolers nationwide reported experiencing poor mental health during the pandemic, and nearly half felt persistently sad or hopeless. Students in rural areas had higher levels of anxiety and depression, partially due to limited access to care.

These declines in academic learning and social-emotional wellbeing underline the need to improve school conditions and accelerate student learning throughout the nation. We do not yet have test scores for California students, but we know student needs are acute, particularly in rural areas.

The state’s rural schools faced unique challenges during each phase of the pandemic.

In what we are calling the first phase of the pandemic, in spring 2020, they struggled on the wrong side of the digital divide. Multiple barriers hinder broadband access and deployment in rural areas. Many internet service providers do not find it profitable to serve rural areas, where low population density makes it costlier to build and maintain internet infrastructure. Making broadband affordable for rural households is also a formidable challenge. Studies show higher poverty rates in non-metro areas across the U.S.

For this reason, the abrupt shift to distance learning in spring 2020 left many rural schools in California scrambling for solutions. In 2017, 74 percent of California households had access to broadband, with access slightly lower—70 percent—among rural households. But this gap grew markedly over time. In 2019, 84 percent of California households had broadband, compared to 73 percent of rural households. More than one in four rural households still did not have high-speed internet when the pandemic hit late in the year. Without reliable internet, students cannot access curriculum, receive live instruction from teachers, complete assignments, or receive academic support.

During the second phase of COVID, in fall 2020, fluctuating enrollments destabilized rural schools. In California, K–12 enrollment statewide declined by nearly 3 percent between the 2019–2020 and 2020–2021 school years. Some rural counties experienced an exaggerated version of this trend; enrollment fell 10 percent in Humboldt, Mono, and Inyo Counties. But other rural counties gained students, bucking the statewide trend and placing greater demands on district resources. Alpine, Amador, Calaveras, El Dorado, Sierra, and Sutter counties experienced double digit growth, with enrollment increasing 17 percent, for example, in El Dorado.

Statewide enrollment dropped another 1.8 percent in 2021–2022 but counties like El Dorado, Calaveras, and Tuolumne continued to experience growth—1.7 percent, 4.5 percent and 3.3 percent, respectively. Because state funding is linked to student enrollment, declines pose significant challenges for districts—but increases create problems too. Rural districts, which have long struggled to recruit and retain quality teachers, had trouble keeping up with growing enrollment. About a quarter of rural schools nationwide were understaffed prior to the start of the pandemic, and 70 percent said there were too few candidates applying for open teaching positions for the 2022–2023 school year.

And in the third phase of COVID, as caseloads declined and California started to emerge from the pandemic in spring 2021, rural schools brought students back for in-person instruction earlier than schools in other parts of the state, in large part because providing online instruction had been so difficult. Nationwide, 63 percent of rural schools offered in-person instruction to all students in January 2021, compared to only 35 percent of urban schools; some rural schools reopened in Fall 2020. Rural districts in California reopened to all grades in early February 2021, while urban districts fully reopened in early May.

As we worked with rural schools during COVID, we also saw hints of progress.

Lindsay Unified, a small, low-income Central Valley district with 4,000 students, is successfully addressing teacher shortages through a “grow your own” approach. In 2016, the district launched a community Wi-Fi network and shifted some of its curriculum online to facilitate personalized learning. It also created a program to recruit teachers and staff, urging students to attend college on loans that would be forgiven if they returned and taught in Lindsay schools for five years. This past year, the district added a residency program to help teachers earn a master’s degree and teaching credential in one year.

In California’s southernmost reaches, the Imperial County Office of Education (ICOE) has worked with local organizations and agencies for more than 20 years to build and maintain a state-of-the-art fiber-optic communications network for its K–12 schools. In 2018, it launched BorderLink to bridge the homework gap by expanding affordable access to reliable internet at home. ICOE was relatively well-positioned when the pandemic hit to connect students to distance learning. Today the county is leveraging pandemic related stimulus money to upgrade equipment and expand capacity further.

Finally, during the pandemic, the Golden Plains district, which serves mostly English learners, used science content to enhance English language arts and English language development instruction. This integrated approach ensures that science learning and language development occur simultaneously. Before it was in place, English proficiency was a barrier for students to access science learning.

The pandemic has had a profound impact on all students’ academic and social-emotional wellbeing, and in response, school districts have enacted strategies to support their learning recovery and improve their social-emotional wellbeing. It makes sense to acknowledge the special hurdles far-flung districts face.

Fortunately, state and federal governments are investing in rural schools. In 2021, California allocated more than $6 billion to expand broadband infrastructure. Three rounds of federal funding provided more than $21 billion to California schools to support recovery and renewal, included funding for after-school programs at rural schools. Spent on equitable, evidence-based programs, these investments can help rural schools accelerate student learning, address mental health needs, and keep up with the demands of 21st-century education.

The post How Rural Schools Survived the Pandemic appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

California’s San Joaquin Valley is a place of contradictions: It is the most agriculturally productive region in the world, growing over 250 crops and grossing approximately $35 billion in annual sales of everything from fruit and nuts to livestock, wine, milk, and grains. Its 27,000 square miles reside in a geographical sweet spot, with a Mediterranean climate and land watered by once mighty rivers flowing from the Sierra Nevada mountains. The valley possesses incredible cultural diversity, too: People of more than 70 different ethnicities, speaking over 100 languages, call the region home. It is the place that gave rise, among many important cultural moments, to the powerful farmworker movement that built solidarity across race, class, and other divides.

Despite this abundance, it is also a region of deep and concentrated poverty and food insecurity. The San Joaquin Valley is the United States’ most polluted air basin for fine particles (which, when inhaled, increase the risk of a host of health problems, including early death). It is one of the surfaces on Earth most altered by humankind due to a century of mining groundwater, which has caused land to sink by as much as 28 feet in some places and counting.

These contradictions hold obvious perils, but also promise—that the science and resources government and industry have poured into extraction can be redistributed and focused instead on eliminating environmental racism and building just, livable communities.

I was born and raised in the heart of the valley, in Madera County. I was diagnosed with asthma as a kid, although my race and class in many ways buffered me from the worst impacts of our air pollution problems.

For five years I worked as an organizer for the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition (CVAQ), raising awareness of air pollution’s health impacts. Over and over again, decision makers, air regulators, and industry lobbyists constantly told me, and the community leaders and youth advocates I worked with, that we had to accept our fate, that where we live makes pollution unavoidable.

The unhealthy air to which all 4.3 million valley breathers are supposed to resign ourselves is partly rooted in the region’s role in feeding the nation and world. Industrialized agribusiness in the valley utilizes hundreds of millions of tons of pesticides, fertilizers, and other chemical inputs and uses polluting equipment such as tractors and nut harvesters. The region is also a major source of oil and natural gas production, which emits a slew of toxic air pollutants and contributes to smog and particle pollution. Trucks and trains traveling up, down, and across the state via freeways that run through our communities play a role as well. Catastrophic, climate change-fueled wildfires and extreme heat compound an already dire situation.

Research from California State University, Fullerton has shown that unhealthy air costs our region at least $6 billion dollars per year—paid in premature deaths, asthma attacks and other serious medical conditions, and missed school and work days. Compared to the national average, children in the San Joaquin Valley are twice as likely to be diagnosed with asthma before age 18.

The valley is a designated “sacrifice zone,” where industrial extraction and disposal takes precedence over human health—and where low-income, Black, brown, and Indigenous residents are asked to sacrifice the most. That is certainly true of south Stockton, which has some of the highest asthma rates in the state. Barred from living in other parts of the city, Filipinos immigrated there in the early 20th century, and the neighborhood became home to the largest diaspora in the nation. But in the 1970s, the state demolished large swaths of the neighborhood to construct Highway 4, an artery for the flow of goods in and out of the Port of Stockton. The port concentrates cancer-causing diesel pollution from ships, trains, trucks, and other equipment, which commingles with other pollution sources nearby, such as an industrial biomass plant that burns woody waste.

As I keep hearing, the people of south Stockton, like people across the San Joaquin Valley, have a “choice”: accept pollution-causing industries or suffer lost jobs and revenue. But I know it does not have to be this way. I have seen community-innovated solutions firsthand, in both my academic research and advocacy work in the region.

In extensive interviews with advocates, staff, and decision-makers at the San Joaquin Valley Air District, I learned that they agree on one thing: that the region needs transformation away from extractive industries in order to achieve clean air. As one decision-maker told me, “The only way you’re going to change the Air [District Governing] Board is change the boards of supervisors because they control the Air Board, and until you get a majority of the supervisors who don’t have that farmer mentality, you’re not going to be able to change the valley.” They added, “The economy has to be diversified.”

Change, however, can also come from the ground up, which I’ve witnessed in my time at CVAQ, where I returned as executive director after receiving my PhD in geography. I’ve seen how communities across the valley continue to take matters into their own hands when it comes to air pollution, to protect and improve neighborhoods. Local campaigns in Kern and Los Angeles Counties, combined with years of cross-regional organizing, have built the political will to help institute a 3,200-foot health and safety setback rule to protect people from oil drilling. The setback will help keep homes, hospitals, schools, and other sensitive receptors farther from oil wells, which increase the risks of respiratory illnesses, cancer, and other health issues for people living and working nearby.

In south Stockton, community groups like Little Manila Rising are providing asthma management services to the most impacted households, distributing resources such as indoor air filters, planting trees, and employing unhoused and formerly incarcerated community members. Little Manila Rising, CVAQ, and the enforcement division of the California Air Resources Board are collaborating on a multi-year research project that is engaging the community in studying and implementing solutions to address diesel truck traffic.

There are many more opportunities to create jobs and build a more equitable and healthy San Joaquin Valley. We have a history of building solidarity to achieve change. California has abundant science, people power, and economic resources to make good on its claims as an environmental trendsetter that prioritizes equity.

The post Where Bad Air Carries Peril and Promise appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

And such steps might just be a beginning.

A Zócalo/California Wellness Foundation event, “Can California Lead a New Reproductive Rights Movement?” delved into the role of the state and its people in efforts to restore and extend the right to abortion, and other reproductive rights. The event—at the Mercado La Paloma, a marketplace and community center in South Los Angeles—was put on in partnership with Esperanza Community Housing’s free, multidisciplinary arts festival South Central Innervisions: An AfroLatinxFuturism, which starts Saturday.

Under a backdrop of artist Dominique Moody’s painting “When We Rise, Creating Our Next LA,” the panelists spoke about what it would truly mean for California to take a forward-looking role in healthcare access.

They argued that true leadership will require building a “reproductive justice” movement, which addresses not just the legal rights of women, but larger systemic problems of racism and oppression.

Panelist Janette Robinson-Flint, executive director of Black Women for Wellness, has spoken about the differences between reproductive rights, health, and justice, and Los Angeles Times’ Sandy Banks, the moderator, started the conversation off by asking her to explain these terms, and why it matters that we define them.

“The shortcut for reproductive justice is the right to have a child and raise a child or to not have children,” said Robinson-Flint. In building such a movement, she said, the state needs to look at the intersecting questions that influence and direct your decision-making around childbearing. Are you in a place you want to be in your life? Do you have housing? A job? A healthy environment? Your answers to all these questions, she said, impact the decision on whether or not to have a child.

Barbara Ferrer, director of L.A. County Department of Public Health, built on Robinson-Flint’s answer. In 2022, she pointed out, Black women have an almost five times higher rate of maternal mortality than white women, and Black babies are dying at a rate almost four times higher than white babies.

“That should be intolerable to all of us,” Ferrer said, which is why the fight for reproductive justice must be linked to the fight to dismantle racism and oppression. “You can’t separate the issues. I’ve been doing this work for a long, long time trying to address health inequities. The collective power we have is to do the work of a justice agenda and really talk about the root causes Janette laid out.”

Does that justice lens inform the state right now?

Banks said California seems most focused on securing additional funding and protecting residents or travelers to the state to access abortion.

“I think that’s up to us,” said Ferrer. “It’s really hard because we need both”—short-term actions and a long-term agenda that distributes resources fairly across the state. But she cautions “you need to be careful that your short-term agenda doesn’t wreck the real work that needs to get done.”

Banks turned to Dr. John McHugh, an obstetrician-gynecologist who is affiliated with California’s district of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. “What are the things we’re not focusing on that we should be as we build this movement?”

McHugh answered that the attacks on reproductive justice are growing and finding new targets: “The politicians that want to tell you what to do with your healthcare provider aren’t going to stop at this. They want more than that. They want more control.”

Already, he said, legislatures in other states are going after contraception and transgender care. “This issue is not just about abortion,” McHugh continued. “It’s really about controlling people. About controlling a lot of aspects about peoples’ lives.”

“Is there a sense among obstetricians and gynecologists that this is a scary time or is there a militant sense?” asked Banks. “What would you say the practitioners are feeling right now?”

McHugh said people are feeling many different things. Some are taking action—he recently saw a proposal for a floating hospital in the Gulf of Mexico to provide care. But also, he sees the fear: “Physicians and not just physicians, nurses and health care organizations, some of them are afraid and cowering and pulling back.”

For example, he’s noticed that “some doctors are afraid to provide care for patients having miscarriages or even ectopic pregnancies because of uncertainty around this.”

By Soobin Kim.

Banks agreed. “I’m hearing stories now about women who have to almost die from ectopic pregnancy before it gets to the time that now you can intervene because now it has to do with saving the mother,” she said. “If there are women who are almost dying, there are going to be women that are dying.”

Robinson-Flint observed that in this post-Roe time, health care professionals have found themselves on the front lines of a revolution. Because providers have taken an oath, she said, to provide lifesaving services to their clients, they now have a decision to make: “Will they cooperate with this regime of terror that’s going on? Will they report their clients? Will they perform services? Will they report data?” Speaking to the crowd, she emphasized, “You don’t have to cooperate. You do not have to be responsive to vigilantes who want people’s data. And you don’t have to turn people away from care you can give.”

For more than 30 million people in Texas and Oklahoma, Banks noted, California might now be their nearest abortion provider. Directing her question at the final panelist of the evening, Allegra Hill, midwife and co-owner and co-founder of Kindred Space LA, Banks asked, “How, do we meet emotional, and physical, and after-care needs of these women? Because that’s part of reproductive justice too.”

Hill called attention to California’s “full-spectrum” doulas—people who are not medical professionals but who are trained to support people through miscarriage, birth, post-partum, and more.

 “As this wave of people from out of state come here, we will have to adapt and pivot and make sure that our full-spectrum doulas are prepared to support people through traveling for a medical procedure, being separated from their own community, really meeting people here where they need the support,” said Hill.

The panelists also discussed funding for reproductive care, preventing maternal mortality (abortion access can save one-third of those lives, said McHugh), and the fall ballot measure to amend the state constitution.

Before the conversation wrapped, they responded to audience questions, as well, including one that asked if the panelists could each name a revolutionary in the healthcare field.

Banks mentioned the volunteers at Planned Parenthood. Robinson-Flint suggested that you can be a revolutionary by “exercising your autonomy”; she also cited doctors from Cuba providing healthcare around the world. Hill spoke about the “sister-friend,” somebody who can drive you to a doctor’s appointment, for instance.

And McHugh said anyone who talks about reproductive health issues is part of the reproductive justice movement.

“We need to talk more,” he said. “There’s so much shame and stigma about reproductive health issues.” But, if you feel comfortable testifying to your circle of people, McHugh said, it can “hopefully help someone else get the care they need as well.”

The post Can California Lead a Reproductive Justice Movement? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The post <i>The Marshall Project</i>’s Keri Blakinger appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Mount Shasta, California, and Ashland, Oregon did it right. Located in the California–Oregon border region where I live, they avoided economic devastation by having their survival plans well underway by the time their lumber mills began to shut down more than a half century ago.

Indeed, Mount Shasta was more than 100 years ahead of the curve thanks to a guy named Justin Hinckley Sisson, who planted the seeds for the town’s future reinvention as a recreational tourist destination. A schoolteacher from Connecticut, Sisson moved out West and reinvented himself as a rugged outdoorsman. In 1866 he opened a hotel and restaurant on the lower slopes of Mount Shasta and started taking his visitors on hunting, fishing, and mountain climbing excursions.

The timber boom that had begun around that time had pretty well petered out by 1990, when the last lumber mill closed in Mount Shasta.

By then, a wave of newcomers attracted to the recreational opportunities in the area had taken up where Sisson left off, setting up outfitting stores and offering guide services. A new ski park opened in 1985. All this was complemented by a new batch of motels and restaurants. Beginning in the late 1990s a nonprofit organization called the Mount Shasta Trail Association, fueled by grants and private donations, greatly expanded the area’s hiking opportunities, adding 20 miles of trails along lakes and rivers and on the slopes of Mount Shasta, with another 46 miles currently in the works. All in all, it added up to a smooth and vigorous transition from a timber-based economy to one based on recreational tourism.

Seventy-five miles up the road sits another former timber town, Ashland, Oregon. The last of its eight lumber mills shut down in 1967. But an English professor at the local college, Angus L. Bowmer, had already planted the seeds for the town’s reinvention. Bowmer had done some amateur acting on the side, and he got the idea of converting an unused structure in the city park into a venue for Shakespearean plays. The city of Ashland offered him $400 and funds for a construction crew—just enough support to get his project off the ground.

The first two productions occurred in 1935 and became an annual event: the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. By the 1960s the festival had established Ashland as a major theatre town that drew fans of the Bard from up and down the West Coast. By 2019 the Ashland Chamber of Commerce estimated that over 100,000 visitors were showing up at the theatre festival each season. Its success has spawned a number of other live theatre venues.

What do these two successful town reinventions have in common? They both carry the promise that visitors to the town will leave their drab, boring lives behind and find something new and exciting.

A successful reinvention is a high tide that raises all boats, attracts that surge of hikers and skiers and theatre-goers who fill the hotels and restaurants and keep the cash registers in the retail shops humming.

But what happens when the tide doesn’t roll in?

The small town where I live, Dunsmuir, California, provides an example of what happens when you don’t have a plan B. Dunsmuir is just 10 miles down the road from Mount Shasta. In its heyday Dunsmuir was a thriving railroad hub for passenger trains, equipment repair, and crew changes. Ten passenger trains came through every day, but now most of that has gone away. It’s down to two passenger trains each day, and freight train crews are less than half what they were in the days of steam locomotives.

There was no plan B in place before, or during, the railroad’s decline. So now, more than half a century later, well-intentioned people here are playing catchup, trying to bring the town back to life, but through piecemeal efforts: a new art gallery, a small performing space, a microbrewery, some pretty good restaurants.

None of this adds up to a solid rebranding. The town has shrunk from 2,200 in population when I moved here 26 years ago, to 1,700 today. This is despite a number of elements in Dunsmuir’s favor: the Sacramento River runs right through Dunsmuir. It’s considered one of the best flyfishing destinations in California. Hiking trails abound, and the slopes of Mount Shasta and the ski park are a short drive away.

But new enterprises tend to come and go at a high turnover rate, like the outfitting store that only lasted a couple of months. An entrepreneur from Oakland, who’d made a bundle selling novelty items in China, bought up a half dozen downtown properties 20 years ago and promised that it would be the beginning of the town’s revival. Those buildings still sit empty. It’s tough to get a plan B going in a depressed economy.

In their book, Our Towns, the journalists James and Deborah Fallows found common factors in successfully reinvented towns across the United States. Among them was an openness to newcomers, to new people bringing new talents and ideas to their new homes. In these “open” towns the newcomers often find opportunities to reinvent themselves, to apply whatever skills and talents they may have in new ways in this new, stimulating environment. The retired accountant who made his own beer at home opens a microbrewery. Or the English professor gets into the theatre business. Or that Connecticut schoolteacher opens a hotel and starts taking his visitors on hunting and fishing excursions.

In Dunsmuir we see similar personal transformations that could plant the seeds for a successful town reinvention: A former stock and bond trader from the Bay Area took over the flyfishing shop. A former bank executive from San Francisco runs the hardware store.

Every small town has its share of talented, enterprising folks, the ones who get the art galleries and the microbreweries going. But they can’t do it alone. They need visitors and ideas from elsewhere. And people need to direct their positive energy and talent in the same direction, and come up with a theme, a story for their town to tell. Otherwise, they’re likely to have a nice, quiet town with a lot of empty storefronts.

The post If Small Towns Want to Survive, They Need a Plan B appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What, then, could be a more fitting setting—and metaphor—for our Zócalo/ California Wellness Foundation event co-presented with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, “How Can Our Communities Escape Polarizing Conflict?”

Fortunately, unlike the prehistoric beasts felled by the intractable tar pits, our panel of experts doesn’t believe that hope is lost for humans who wander into sticky situations. Instead, they agreed, it’s possible to de-escalate the cycle of perpetual conflict by practicing active listening, embracing curiosity, and welcoming complexity back into the conversation.

Amanda Ripley, author of High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, the book that inspired the conversation, began the evening by explaining that not all conflict is created equally. Sometimes, we need it to challenge one another. She defines this as “good conflict,” in homage to late U.S. Rep. John Lewis’ “good trouble.” But once there’s no sense of movement—no “flickers of curiosity” left—that’s when you have high conflict. The term comes from high-conflict divorce, characterized by hostile, aggressive and destructive behavior between the ex-partners.

Gesturing to the tar pits bubbling behind the audience, Ripley said that once you’ve ended up in high conflict, you’re stuck. To avoid getting into the tar pits, she advises, look out for the “trip wires,” such as corruption (or perceived corruption), humiliation (“the most under-appreciated force driving high conflict”) or people who exploit conflict for their own ends, whether for power or for profit or even because of psychological issues (what Ripley calls “conflict entrepreneurs”).

UCLA sociocultural anthropologist Kyeyoung Park brought historical perspective to the conversation, demonstrating how conflict entrepreneurs have fanned the flames of conflict throughout history. In her research on the 1992 Los Angeles civil unrest, she showed how such actors played on existing tensions between Black Americans and Korean Americans in South L.A.

Now, 30 years later, she said, it’s clear why a white judge giving a Korean immigrant store owner no prison time for killing 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, a Black teenager the owner believed had been shoplifting, became a flashpoint. The incident occurred less than two weeks after the beating of Rodney King by four white LAPD officers, and as Park explained, “people saw it as an honorary white sentence, not a Black sentence.” The media, the criminal justice system, and government officials, Park added, exploited and escalated this situation “beyond the control of ordinary people.”

“Do you see echoes of this conflict in current struggles?” asked the evening’s moderator, L.A. Times columnist Erika D. Smith. “Absolutely,” said Park, noting that the Black Lives Matter protests were incited by police violence killing African Americans, yet media outlets still ran articles that turned the unrest into a “Black-Asian or Black-Korean conflict,” because many local business owners whose stores were damaged by looting were Korean American and Chinese American.

“I’m losing my respect for NPR,” Park said frankly. “Things are a lot more complex, but the media is so quickly reaffirming here is Korean American/Black American tensions.” They’re always looking for conflict, she continued, rather than reporting on coalition-building, like Asians for Black Lives Matter.

Image by Soobin Kim.

Turning to the final panelist, former California Superior Court judge B. Scott Silverman, who is now a mediator, Smith asked, how can we get out of this cycle of conflict? What are great tactics of mediation? For individuals or massive societal problems?

“In my field the biggest problem is high conflict cuts off constructive communication,” he said. In his current work as a mediator, he tries to figure out ways for people to communicate more effectively. “People get distracted by issues that are real and meaningful but don’t get to the heart of what the dispute is,” he said, adding that one of his roles is to give people a chance to vent. His ultimate goal: steering disputants off the peripheral topic and toward a more constructive one.

People don’t know how to listen anymore, Ripley agreed. As an investigative journalist, she wants her profession to start asking different questions, and really listen to people and let them feel understood. “We always flit around the surface like a moth to the flame,” said Ripley. “There were deeper underlying reasons why African Americans were upset that Korean Americans couldn’t solve, but could understand better.”

There’s space to do more nuanced work through storytelling, Ripley said. She cites the Solutions Journalism Network as a new model of coverage that can go deeper and find “the understory” that helps people better understand themselves and their opponents, so they can “start to have the right fight with the right people.”

“What would your perfect L.A. look like without high conflict?” Smith asked the panelists, wrapping up the conversation.

“I don’t think that’s possible but what I do think is possible is institutions and practices can proliferate and develop that can reduce the amount of high conflict and intervene early,” said Silverman. He cites, for instance, how the Los Angeles County Bar Association is offering a variety of pro-bono family mediation programs that help people resolve divorce cases without going to court. “We’ll never completely wipe out high conflict but we can institutionalize to a greater degree processes and organizations to help people get past it,” he said.

Park agreed that it’s unrealistic to think about L.A. without high conflict. “But,” she said, “we have to understand what’s leading to conflict and what we’re trying to do.” The good news is, people want to hear about constructive approaches. During her research, she spoke with Korean immigrant merchants who were eager to know what other merchants were doing to help alleviate shoplifting in positive and non-punitive ways. Many were inspired by a story she shared of a local merchant who used a reward system to give kids candy for free if they did well in school. “Kids don’t have money, but kids want sweet things,” said Park. By understanding the root of why young people might be tempted to shoplift, we can address the problem better.

Closing out the night, Ripley doubled down on the need for more complex storytelling to communicate the root issues of our time.

“Every great story needs conflict—we’ve been told that over and over again,” she said. But the problem is that we’ve been defining conflict too narrowly: “The complexity in streaming TV right now is 1000 times greater than complexity of people we write about. That’s weird. In a better world, good conflict journalism would look like streaming TV.”

The post Why Conflict Should Look Like Streaming TV appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The event—titled “What Would the End of Mass Incarceration Mean for Prison Towns?”, which also was accompanied by a collection of essays on the subject—was held at Veterans Memorial Building, on Main Street in Susanville, California. Susanville has a population of 16,000, nearly 7,000 of whom live in its two prisons. The state of California has announced its intention to deactivate the older of the prisons, California Correctional Center, by June 30, 2022; the city has brought a lawsuit to stop CCC’s closure.

The panel—which brought together a leading scholar of prison towns, a former correctional officer and current mayor of another small California town, and the president of Susanville’s local community college—linked Susanville’s current predicament with national debates about criminal justice. In different ways, the panelists made the case that the challenges of ending mass incarceration are linked to America’s failure to invest in and develop its rural communities.

“There are opportunities in rural America,” said University of Wisconsin sociologist John M. Eason, author of Big House on the Prairie: Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation. “And we haven’t focused enough on giving rural communities enough attention to wean themselves off of caging people.”

The event was moderated by Marshall Project staff writer Keri Blakinger, who noted that she herself had served time in prison. She pressed the panelists on why towns become dependent on prisons, and how they might take a different economic or civic path in the future.

Eason, who also directs his university’s Justice Lab, said that while there is considerable attention on the inequality prisons create, we often overlook that prisons were built on inequality. Rural communities with high poverty rates are more likely to have prisons. At several points, he noted that the late-20th-century boom in prison construction has often been the country’s only public works program for rural places.

Eason detailed how he has mapped and created data sets on all state-owned prisons built in the United States—more than 1,600—and analyzed the towns where they are located. When you compare towns with prisons to similar towns without prisons, the prison towns see a rise in median home value and median income, and decreases in unemployment.

But that isn’t the whole story: “Rural communities are sending more people to prison than ever,” he added.

Eason called Susanville an “outlier” among prison towns for various reasons, including being whiter and more Republican than many such communities, and having unusual infrastructure strengths. But he also noted that Susanville was representative of communities that became dependent on prisons after losing major industries.

Historically, Susanville attracted a young male labor force to work in timber, mills, and farming, another panelist, Lassen Community College President Trevor Albertson, explained. But when the first prison, CCC, came in the 1960s, he said, the prison paid more than in the mills, which began to close. With the arrival of the second prison 20 years ago, prisons became dominant economically, at some cost to the town’s commercial vibrancy.

Albertson said that the state’s announcement of its intent to close CCC, and the litigation to stop the closure, had created uncertainty for the town and for prisoners. His community college, whose student body includes inmates, could lose about 200 full-time enrollments. They’ve been working to make sure that their students continue to receive education, whether they stay or are moved to other facilities.

Image by Soobin Kim.

“Where it has been troubling and really problematic with the closure … is the not knowing. I know it wears on folks in town, I know it wears on folks working inside the prison,” said Albertson. The inmates are not immune, either. “No one asks about the folks in that prison.” Those students’ concerns are particularly troubling, he added, because “when you can’t control your own life, how can you control your education?”

Another panelist, retired correctional officer Alma Beltran, is the mayor of Parlier, a city of more than 14,000 people in Fresno County. She spoke extensively about Avenal State Prison, where she said she took a job because of the good pay, job security, and opportunity for advancement.

She also detailed how the town of Avenal depended economically on the prison. Prison employees and sub-contractors drove home buying, apartment rentals, and retail sales. And the spike in Avenal’s population numbers, as a result of the growing numbers of inmates, made the city eligible for more federal and state funds based on population.

In response to questions offered in the YouTube chat room or by text, panelists addressed Susanville residents and their current predicament directly.

“You are very important because you are the first rural institution to close,” Beltran said of the CCC prison. But she added, it won’t be the last—she anticipated seeing Avenal on an upcoming list of closures. “Other cities need to look at what’s happening here, because they might be next.”

Albertson, the community college president, said that “there’s something next” for Susanville. There is economic development money to “reskill” people who need new jobs as well as the possibility of creating a new “center of gravity” that would draw people to the region.

He offered an idea for one such entity: Susanville’s beauty and location make it a strong candidate to be the home of a new national cemetery, which could draw visitors and help the local economy.

“There has to be something beautiful after there has been something ugly,” he said.

Eason, in addressing Susanville, said that many urban people don’t care about rural places, so Susanville has to do the work itself.

“My question is: what’s the local infrastructure that is compatible with growth industries?” Eason asked. “How much investment would it take? This isn’t something you snap your fingers or change overnight.”

Susanville needs a plan, and he offered personally to assist the town in putting one together—because its future is crucial for rural communities everywhere. “If you want to close prisons,” he said, “you have to give rural communities some options.”

The post After the Prisons Close, Where Does That Leave Rural Communities? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s the predicament facing Susanville, a small town that is the seat of Lassen County in northeast California.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration is righteously trying to close prisons, a historical reversal and acknowledgment that the state has incarcerated too many people for too long. But it is wrongfully targeting one of Susanville’s two state prisons, the California Correctional Center (CCC), for closure later this year. Shutting down CCC would reduce the town’s population, cost jobs, and weaken the town’s economy and healthcare infrastructure.

And state officials don’t seem much to care.

There is no discernible plan for mitigating impacts on the community. They have yet to offer a full accounting of the reasons for their decision, which came with little warning or justification. Indeed, before the state’s announcement last year of its intent to close CCC, the Susanville facility had not shown up on lists of California prisons that should close, whether compiled inside or outside of government.

In the absence of public explanation, it’s fair to wonder about the real motives behind the attempted closure. California’s rush to construct prisons in previous generations was driven by politics, not careful consideration of human impacts. Will the state, in moving to close prisons, repeat that same mistake?

What’s most puzzling about the decision is that there is an obvious alternative prison for closure: the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco, in Riverside County. The Norco facility has been in such disrepair—reports have cited cockroaches, rodents, poor drinking water, terrible bathrooms, and dangerous electrical systems—that Gov. Jerry Brown tried to shut it down a decade ago. In 2016, it appeared all but certain to close, but the state gave it a reprieve in order to have the flexibility to stay below a complicated cap on populations in some facilities.

Even if Norco can’t be closed, there are other, better places to shut down than Susanville’s CCC.

Last year, Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), a coalition of groups working on criminal justice reform, put out a list of 10 prisons the state should close, based on five criteria (health conditions, overcrowding, costs, location, and homicide-suicide rates) and surveys of formerly incarcerated people and their families.

Norco was on the list. So was the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi, California Medical Facility in Vacaville, California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo, California State Prison Los Angeles County, and five prisons in the San Joaquin Valley (Avenal State Prison in Kings County, California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility in Corcoran, Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, and Kern Valley State Prison and North Kern State Prison in Delano).

CURB has welcomed the attempt to close the Susanville prison, noting that its remote location makes it hard for families to visit. (The report also suggests closing all 34 state prisons if possible). But the coalition has criticized the Newsom administration’s process for prison closings as arbitrary and confusing.

That’s an understatement. And the way Susanville is being closed has the potential to undermine the movement away from mass incarceration. The state needs to think about local context, and not just the prison system itself.

Compare the likely impacts of closing Norco’s facility versus closing Susanville’s. Shutting down Norco would likely be an economic boon, officials there have said; the prison site is in a busy part of the Interstate 15 corridor in Riverside County and could be redeveloped as a hotel, or for other business purposes. But in Susanville, geographically isolated in far northeast California, any closure would do real damage.

Correctional officers at the closed prison won’t lose their jobs, but they will be reassigned elsewhere, likely forcing their families to move. And that’s a body blow in a place like Susanville, both economically—officers are well-paid—and because it’s a community in which officers are leaders in civic organizations. Prisoners represent a significant portion of Susanville’s population, more than 6,000 of the town’s 16,000 people; losing one of the prisons means losing funding tied to population. And the town’s healthcare infrastructure, including its hospital, depends in part on serving the people who live and work at the prison.

But such local realities are taking a backseat to politics in this decision. Norco is in the populous and economically growing Inland Empire—a competitive region where Democrats have been making gains—while Susanville is small and on the wrong side of California’s political divide. Lassen County had the highest vote share in the state both for President Trump’s re-election, and in favor of the failed 2021 recall of Gavin Newsom.

Of course, the location of prisons has always been a political issue, with many communities preferring not to host. Lassen, which very much wants to keep the CCC in operation, knows this, and its leaders have emphasized the community’s devotion to its prisons.

In one extended community meeting on the Susanville courthouse steps that I attended last year, State Sen. Brian Dahle, a former Lassen County supervisor, talked emotionally and practically—in ways that did not satisfy the angry crowd—about how Susanville might convince Gov. Gavin Newsom to negotiate with the town, and to close a different prison instead.

“Let’s think like Democrats,” one local community leader declared as they strategized.

But it’s not clear if negotiated settlement is possible. Susanville has taken the fight to court, challenging the shutdown on the grounds that it violates the California Environmental Quality Act. The announced date for deactivating the prison is June 30, 2022, but the legal fight may extend beyond that.

And there is a new political dimension. Dahle, the state senator, has announced his candidacy for governor, and one of the pillars of his platform is public safety. With higher profile Republicans skipping the race, he is considered the leading GOP candidate. If he makes it through June’s first round election, as seems likely, the debate about prison closures, in Susanville and elsewhere, could soon become a statewide issue.

The post California Is Closing the Wrong Prison appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.