Rural Colorado school administrator in hot water for trying to do the right thing?

The Colorado Sun reported a few days ago from Brush, population 5,399, under the headline, "Rural Colorado school administrators investigated sexting between students. Now they’re charged in a child porn case."  Here's an excerpt:   

The case began in April, when [31-year-old assistant principal Bradley] Bass and secondary schools director Scott Hodgson were investigating sexual images that had been consensually shared between students at Brush High School. They took photos of the images as evidence, transferring them from a work cellphone to a cloud-based school server. No one has accused the administrators of keeping the photos for sexual gratification. They thought it was the correct way to document the case, supporters of the administrators say.

But under state statute, knowingly possessing any explicit images of kids is child pornography, no matter the intent. Law enforcement officers investigating are one of the few exceptions to the rule. Even parents could be charged.

Experts in higher education and law say Bass’ case demonstrates a rare but career-ruining risk for school administrators who may lack the training on how to deal with sexting, image exchanges that have become increasingly common among students today and were not contemplated when child pornography laws were drafted.

It’s uncommon for prosecutors to pursue charges in cases where there is no ill intent, experts say.  (emphasis mine)

Jennifer Rubin on how Democratic legislative wins play in an increasingly rural and exurban congressional district

Rubin's column in the Washington Post is titled, "Democrats are on a legislative roll. That’s great news for this congresswoman."  Here's an excerpt:  

That’s great news for Rep. Kim Schrier, the Democrat representing Washington’s 8th Congressional District. Her district, which is rated as a toss-up, was redrawn to include more rural and exurban areas and leave out more urban parts of the district.

One might think that would pose new challenges for a Democrat, but during a phone interview, Schrier told me that many of the concerns of her voters haven’t changed. “They worried about inflation, gas prices, health care and the cost of prescription drugs,” she said. They’re also worried about climate change, especially the firefighters in her state battling catastrophic wildfires and farmers affected by extreme weather. “These are people on the ground,” Schrier said.

This quote suggests that folks in rural and exurban places aren't so different from their urban counterparts--especially when it comes to kitchen table issues.  

On John Fetterman's rural strategy in the Pennsylvania Senate race

I published this opinion piece today in Politico Magazine, "John Fetterman is Running a Test that Democrats Need to Watch."  

Here's an excerpt: 

As a scholar who studies rural people and places, I’ve noticed one Democratic candidate who defies th[e] trend [of failing to vie for rural voters]. While consultants and organizers talk about the need for rural talking points and investments in rural newspaper and radio buys, this politician has deployed the most obvious strategy for making inroads with rural voters: He showed up in every county in his state.

Then, he did something really remarkable: He showed up again.

That candidate is John Fetterman, who secured the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania’s May primary with a robust 59 percent of the vote and currently holds the lead in general election polling.

Fetterman lived up to his “Every County, Every Vote” slogan. On a single Saturday in early May, for example, he visited five counties in north-central Pennsylvania, part of the state’s “rural T” — the vast area which form a big “T” on the map between the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh metro areas and north to the New York state line.

* * * 

The attention a high-profile candidate like Fetterman has paid to rural areas of his state may begin to ease the rural inferiority complex that’s been festering for decades, as rural economies have stagnated, small towns have lost population and country folks have become the butt of jokes. 

* * *

Whatever happens in the general election, Fetterman’s rural success in the primary raises the question: Why aren’t more Democratic candidates pursuing rural voters like Fetterman has?

Don't miss the rest of the analysis.

Postscript:  I discussed the Politico piece a few days later on Salt Lake City talk radio, Inside Sources with Boyd Matheson.  

New book talks boundary-to-boundary poverty in rural Oregon

Michelle Wilde Anderson's new book, The Fight to Save the Town, features the stories of three municipalities and one county, the latter local government entity being Josephine County, Oregon.  I've written about Josephine County in prior posts, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.  Now, I'm sharing just a short excerpt about "JoCo" from Anderson's book.  

As many locals say with both pride and shame, rural Josephine is a “rough and tumble” place. 

* * *  

So it was that Josephine managed a radical experiment in local government downsizing. In recent decades, budget cuts eliminated most local public functions other than law enforcement, then leveled law enforcement, too. For years, the county ran by principles of independence: if you want a library, volunteer to fundraise private dollars to support one. If you want to reduce break-ins, volunteer to patrol your streets at night. If you want emergency law enforcement, sign up to take your neighbors’ calls on your cell phone and dispatch with your own gun. 

The remaining local officials, however, still had to govern. The words “Man in the Arena” float around as the screensaver message on Josephine County Sheriff Dave Daniel’s desktop. He keeps it as a reminder of Teddy Roosevelt’s speech celebrating the man who is not just a critic, but “who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.” The sheriff has to be like that—a man who fights from within government, trying to hold on to at least a “night-watchman state” as politics and funding tighten around him. “We’re driving an eighteen wheeler, and we’ve got ten wheels on right now, maybe nine,” Daniel said in 2016. 

Back then, Sheriff Daniel was bracing for even further cuts. The federal government had been sending special funding to Josephine and other “timber counties” in Oregon for more than twenty years, but those payments were sure to end. Federal funding dated back to an infamously polarizing environmental conflict: the battle over logging the old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, where the endangered northern spotted owl nests in one of the world’s most complex ecosystems. Recompense for the lost local jobs and public revenues could not go on forever, but neither could Josephine easily replace federal dollars. A 1990s tax revolt in Oregon cinched Josephine in a legal straitjacket by locking local taxes into an unsustainably low rate and requiring voting majority approval of any increases. 

Given those tax laws, it wasn’t enough that Sheriff Daniel and other government officials believed that the cuts to services had gone too far. To do something about it, they had to build a grassroots movement in favor of new taxes in one of the most anti-government places in America. You can still make your own damn coffee, they argued, but a local government needs a few jail cells and some trained patrol officers to dispatch for 911 calls. It needs the kind of investigators who can coax witnesses and family members out of the shadows in cases like Caitlyn Strauser’s murder. Josephine has become a pioneer county once again. Its residents have been called upon to restore the public law enforcement that their Gold Rush forefathers built 150 years ago. Or to let it go. (pp. 84-85)

Not long after this passage, you learn about how the tax cuts in Josephine County caused a deputy based in Wolf Creek to have to move back to the county's urban core, and the deleterious impacts of that move on the well-being of Wolf Creek's residents. 

Bloomberg feature on closure of maternity wards, hospitals in rural America

Claire Suddath reports for Bloomberg under the headline, "A Very Dangerous Place to Be Pregnant Is Getting Even Scarier."  The subhead is, "Texas leads the US in maternity ward closures, and nowhere is this more of an issue than in the western part of the state."  Suddath's story features Dr. Adrian Billings of Alpine, home of Big Bend Regional Medical Center. But the physician serves patients who live much farther afield from Alpine, and like those in Alpine, they face tough decisions when pregnant.  

[F]or more than a year, Big Bend’s labor and delivery unit has closed routinely, sometimes with little notice. Some months it’s been open only three days a week.

Big Bend is the only hospital in a 12,000-square-mile area that delivers babies. If Billings’s patient goes into labor when the maternity ward is closed, she’ll have to make a difficult choice. She can drive to the next nearest hospital, in Fort Stockton, yet another hour away. Or, if her labor is too far along and she’s unlikely to make it, she can deliver in Big Bend’s emergency room. But the ER doesn’t have a fetal heart monitor or nurses who know how to use one. It also doesn’t keep patients overnight.

Big Bend doesn’t really have a choice. In the past two years, almost all its labor and delivery nurses quit. The hospital has tried to replace them, but the national nursing shortage caused by the pandemic has made that impossible. When Big Bend is too short-staffed to deliver a baby safely, its labor and delivery unit has to close.

Since 2020, dozens of hospitals have closed or suspended their maternity services.

A 2017 post about the crisis in rural labor and delivery units is here, from when this issue last attracted widespread media coverage.  A Washington Post story by Eli Saslow about the rural physician/hospital shortage in West Texas is here.  A Kaiser Health News story about the maternal health crisis in the catchment area of Big Bend Medical Center is here.  Recent Axios analysis of rural hospital closures is here.  Here's a July Kaiser Health News story about the work of nurse midwives in rural areas.  And this is a story about an innovative health care center serving farmworkers with wraparound services in western North Carolina. 

One more piece (for now) on the Kansas abortion vote, this one on how it defies rural and red-state stereotypes

Author Sarah Smarsh published in the New York Times a few days ago an essay titled, "Why the Defense of Abortion in Kansas is so Powerful."  She's a Kansan and the author of Heartland:  On Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth.   Here are the excerpts most salient to rural folks and the stereotypes about them:  

Despite red-and-blue maps suggesting that the political fault line of our era runs between urban and rural areas, much of the countryside joined cities like Wichita and Kansas City in voting down the amendment. Fourteen Kansas counties that went for Mr. Trump in the 2020 presidential election, as well as all five that went for Joe Biden, saw majority votes against the amendment. Even in counties where most voted yes, sizable numbers voted no.

* * *

One dismal aspect of our political climate is the ease with which many liberals and progressives dismiss and disdain whole states and regions — as though every Kentucky flood victim voted for Mitch McConnell, as though ideology should be a litmus test for assistance amid acute suffering, as though such places are undeserving charity cases rather than rural landscapes from which resources are extracted to make possible the lives of urban dwellers who sit in judgment.  (emphasis mine) 

Prior posts on the Kansas abortion vote are here and here.   

Big NYT feature acknowledges how government and corporate forces left Kentucky vulnerable to flooding

"How Coal Mining and Years of Neglect Left Kentucky Towns at the Mercy of Flooding" is the headline for a big story out of eastern Kentucky, crediting past exploitation of the region for its current vulnerability.  Here's an excerpt:  

For much of the last century, the country was powered by the labor of coal miners underneath the hills and mountains of southeastern Kentucky. But the landscape that was built to serve this work was fragile, leaving the people here extraordinarily vulnerable, especially after the coal industry shuttered so many of the mines and moved on. What remained were modest, unprotected homes and decaying infrastructure, and a land that itself, in many places, had been shorn of its natural defenses.

* * *

“When you have a century of billions of dollars and resources leaving, very little of it staying to create the infrastructure necessary for people to live lives, and it’s neglected as long as it has been,” said Wes Addington, a lawyer in nearby Whitesburg, whose law office is now a flooded wreck, “when that’s combined with a really insane flood, it’s a catastrophe.”

More on the rural vote in relation to the failed Kansas abortion amendment

New York Times map

Here's how the New York Times explained the abortion rights referendum in Kansas: 

The ballot referendum was rooted in a 2019 ruling by the Kansas Supreme Court that found that the right to an abortion was guaranteed by the State Constitution. Abortion in Kansas is legal up to 22 weeks but requires a waiting period and parental consent for minors.

* * * 

Abortion rights supporters used conservative-sounding language about government mandates and personal freedom in their pitch to voters, and made a point of reaching out to independents, Libertarians and moderate Republicans.

* * *

The abortion rights victory included overwhelming margins on Kansas’ few patches of left-leaning political turf: 81 percent to 19 in the county that includes the college town of Lawrence; 74 percent to 26 in the county that includes Kansas City; and 68 percent to 32 in populous Johnson County, a suburban area that was once reliably Republican but that has trended rapidly toward Democrats since Mr. Trump’s entrance into national politics.

But the abortion rights side also won convincingly in the county that includes Wichita, a more conservative place with a long, sometimes violent, history at the center of America’s abortion debate. Abortion rights supporters won in Topeka, the politically mixed state capital, and in Republican-leaning areas around military bases. Perhaps most surprising, they carried several rural and exurban counties where Republican candidates routinely trounce Democrats.  (emphasis added)

Here's a paragraph from a different New York Times story (the one featuring the map above) also from yesterday:

And in some rural areas that overwhelmingly supported Mr. Trump, Kansans’ margins in favor of amending the Constitution to remove abortion protections were much less decisive than their presidential votes. In Hamilton County, which voted 81 percent for Mr. Trump in 2020, less than 56 percent chose the anti-abortion position on Tuesday. In Greeley County, which voted more than 85 percent for Mr. Trump, only about 60 percent chose the anti-abortion position. (Around 90 percent of the votes have been counted in each county.). (emphasis added)

This tack of comparing a county's vote on an issue to how that county responded to Trump's candidacy is something we increasingly see in political analysis, making Trump's support in 2020 a baseline for how conservative (or extreme) a county is.  We also saw this analytical frame here.

Fun fact about the history of college campuses--and their relation to rurality

From a New York Times essay about why universities are out of touch.  Nick Burns, editor of the American Quarterly, writes in "Elite Universities Are Out of Touch:  Blame the Campus."  

The campus is a uniquely American invention. (The term originated in the late 1700s to describe Princeton.) Efforts to create separate environments for scholars came about at a time when elite American opinion was convinced that cities were hotbeds of moral corruption. Keeping students in rural areas and on self-contained campuses, it was thought, would protect their virtue.

This reminds me of how we saw Trump sometimes use the rural-urban divide--and Sarah Palin before him--with the rural representing virtue and the urban representing vice.  I find it outdated and simplistic. 

Big headline from today's primaries: Rural Kansas doesn't quite come through for "pro-lifers"

A referendum on the (state-based) constitutional right to an abortion in Kansas came down on the pro-choice side tonight (59-41%), and folks everywhere seem surprised.  After all, Thomas Frank's book, What's the Matter with Kansas?, suggested that, well, something is the matter with Kansas--at least from the perspective of progressives.    

Tonight, however, many progressives are re-thinking that assumption.  Here is an excerpt from the Washington Post's coverage: 

In a major victory for abortion rights, Kansas voters on Tuesday rejected an effort to strip away their state’s abortion protections, sending a decisive message about the issue’s popularity in the first political test since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.

The overwhelming support for abortion rights in a traditionally conservative state bolsters Democrats’ hopes that the historic Supreme Court ruling will animate their voters in an otherwise difficult election year for their party. The Kansas vote signals that abortion is an energizing issue that could affect turnout in the November midterms.

The question presented to voters here was whether abortion protections should be stripped from the state constitution. A “yes” vote would allow Kansas’s Republican-led legislature to pass future limits on abortion — or ban it altogether — in its coming session in January. A “no” vote would leave those protections in place.

While Kansas is thought of as a rural state, you can see quite a rural-urban contrast in the vote here--or, if you like, a western (rural) Kansas-eastern (urban) Kansas divide.  

A few select Tweets about this outcome, which mostly play on Kansas stereotypes, follow: 

Nate Cohn for the New York Times wrote, "In rural Kansas counties, there's bad news for 'yes' to ending abortion rights in Kansas.  In heavily Republican areas, 'yes' is running well behind the level of support the anti-abortion measures have received in conservative parts of other states." 

 

Bryan Lowry is a journalist with the Kansas City Star-Tribune

On the corporate causes of inequality across the rural-urban divide in northwest Arkansas

Olivia Paschal writes for The American Prospect from my neck of the woods, "The Modern Day Company Towns of Arkansas."  I'm going to excerpt some parts here that highlight the inequalities Walmart and Tyson Foods are driving, as those inequalities play out across the rural-urban divide.  

Tyson and the rest of the poultry industry have shaped Springdale’s economy and population, as well as the rural economy in the surrounding hills, over the last eight decades. Feed mills and processing plants line the highway; workers cluster in neighborhoods near the plants. The names of the poultry industry’s local entrepreneurs—Tyson, George, Parsons, and more—are attached to streets, parks, and facilities around the city, from John Tyson Elementary to Parsons Stadium, where the rodeo is held. Springdale is an industry town through and through.

One reason the poultry industry’s monopolization of Springdale flies under the radar as much as it does is because of another, flashier “company town” less than half an hour north. Bentonville, Arkansas, is home to the corporate headquarters of Walmart, and to several members of the company’s founding family, one of the richest families in the world.

* * * 

But the flip side is apparent in the region, too: workers stuck in cycles of poverty because of the companies’ low pay and lack of benefits, a culture of silence around criticisms or dissatisfaction with the corporations because of how much power they wield, the emptying out and pricing up of the rural hinterlands in service of regional urbanization driven by corporate investment. The infrastructure and development initiatives cater largely to upper-middle-class lifestyles, not to those working in factories, in warehouses, or on the retail floor. These contradictions are fundamental to company towns—amenities on the one hand, exploitation and undemocratic institutions on the other.

* * *

The incalculable wealth of these two companies and their founding families has been extracted from other places, including their own rural hinterlands. It’s been well documented how the arrival of a Walmart impacts small businesses and the local economy in a given town, lowering wages and driving competitors out of business.

 * * * 

Tyson’s business model, especially in rural markets where it can exert near-monopsony control over chicken farmers, is similarly exploitative: The company traps chicken farmers in contracts over which they have very little say, a practice for which it has come under scrutiny for years.

Another post that makes some similar points about the region is here.