thehuffingtonpost--2020-06-27--Mississippi Takes First Step To Replace Its Confederate State Flag

The Mississippi House and Senate officially began the process of replacing the state ’ s flag , which since 1894 has featured the symbol of the Confederacy in its upper-left corner .
Legislators voted 85-35 in the House and 36-14 in the Senate to suspend the chambers ’ rules , the first step to introduce a bill on the flag .
The bill would establish a commission to come up with a new design by Sept. 14 , and voters would decide whether to accept that new design in November .
The Confederate battle emblem would not have any place @ @ @ @ @ @ @ would include the motto , “ In God We Trust.
” Saturday ’ s legislative action comes just over a week after the NCAA threatened not to hold any regional games or events of any kind in the state until the emblem is removed .
A redesign has bipartisan support in the deep red state ; all of the state House ’ s Democrats voted for the measure alongside 38 Republicans .
Just before the vote , Mississippi House Speaker Pro Tem Jason White ( R ) argued strongly in favor of choosing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ associated with the current one .
“ By changing our flag , we don ’ t abandon our founding principles , ” White said .
“ We embrace them more fully by doing what is right .
We ’ re not moving further away from our founding fathers ’ visions .
We ’ re moving closer to them .
We ’ re not destroying our heritage ; we ’ re fulfilling it.
” Mississippi Gov .
Tate Reeves , a Republican , has said he would approve a bill to replace the flag @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The argument over the 1894 flag has become as divisive as the flag itself and it ’ s time to end it , ” he wrote on Facebook .
“ For economic prosperity and for a better future for my kids and yours , we must find a way to come together .
To heal our wounds , to forgive , to resolve that the page has been turned , to trust each other .
With God ’ s help , we can , ” Reeves wrote .
“ The persistent use of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rights and racial equality throughout the twentieth century further underscores our position , as does the continued association of this symbol with various acts of terror and violence that have accompanied some of our nation ’ s most recent racial injustices , ” the group said in a statement .
“ We support retiring the current flag as a historical artifact and selecting a new flag that will unify , not divide .
”

LOADING ERROR LOADING
The Mississippi House and Senate officially began the process of replacing the state’s flag, which since 1894 has featured the symbol of the Confederacy in its upper-left corner.
Legislators voted 85-35 in the House and 36-14 in the Senate to suspend the chambers’ rules, the first step to introduce a bill on the flag. The bill would establish a commission to come up with a new design by Sept. 14, and voters would decide whether to accept that new design in November.
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The Confederate battle emblem would not have any place on the new flag, but it would include the motto, “In God We Trust.”
In 2001, about two-thirds of Mississippi voters rejected a proposal to remove the Confederate emblem.
Saturday’s legislative action comes just over a week after the NCAA threatened not to hold any regional games or events of any kind in the state until the emblem is removed.
A redesign has bipartisan support in the deep red state; all of the state House’s Democrats voted for the measure alongside 38 Republicans. Just before the vote, Mississippi House Speaker Pro Tem Jason White (R) argued strongly in favor of choosing a new design given the racial hatred associated with the current one.
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“By changing our flag, we don’t abandon our founding principles,” White said. “We embrace them more fully by doing what is right. We’re not moving further away from our founding fathers’ visions. We’re moving closer to them. We’re not destroying our heritage; we’re fulfilling it.”
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, has said he would approve a bill to replace the flag as soon as this weekend.
“The argument over the 1894 flag has become as divisive as the flag itself and it’s time to end it,” he wrote on Facebook.
BREAKING: 36-14, The Mississippi Senate approves changing the Mississippi State Flag. @WJTV pic.twitter.com/nQJ8VFOMWE — Gerald Harris (@GeraldHarrisTV) June 27, 2020
“For economic prosperity and for a better future for my kids and yours, we must find a way to come together. To heal our wounds, to forgive, to resolve that the page has been turned, to trust each other. With God’s help, we can,” Reeves wrote.
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The Mississippi Historical Society also gave a thumbs-up to the proposal.


thehuffingtonpost--2020-06-27--Homework In A McDonald’s Parking Lot: Inside One Mother’s Fight To Help Her Kids Get An Education Du

Homework In A McDonald’s Parking Lot: Inside One Mother’s Fight To Help Her Kids Get An Education During Coronavirus

Kentiona , 16 , was in the passenger seat using the car ’ s dashboard as a makeshift desk .
Her high school had recently closed in response to the coronavirus pandemic and shifted to distance learning .
Kentiona ’ s persuasive essay for her English class had brought them to the McDonald ’ s on that third Friday in March .
Her cellphone ’ s data plan — the only way she could access the internet at home — wasn ’ t up to the task .
She looked up topics on the phone , occasionally consulting the textbook @ @ @ @ @ @ @ promised her as much time as she needed , but she figured that could only last for so long with her three younger siblings — Jakayla , 12 , Quinteria , 14 , and Amareon , 10 — in the back seat .
The family bonding session was cramped and involuntary , and she didn ’ t want to prolong it .
She jotted down her notes quickly .
In the rural Deep South , Black residents born into poverty have long struggled to escape it .
Schools here are among the most @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are few and necessities like Wi-Fi , public transportation and medical insurance are often out of reach .
In Washington County , where Johnson lives , 34 % of families live below the poverty line .
More than half of children in the county between the ages of 5 to 17 live in poverty .
As the economic and health crisis caused by the coronavirus spreads across the region , advocates and scholars fear it will plunge families deeper into poverty and inflame existing racial and geographic inequities , with dire consequences for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so sensitive to any disruption , the pandemic risks producing knock-on effects for children that could continue in the months and , even , years ahead , experts say .
Yet Williams also sees resilience in the way rural schools and families are pulling together , even though , she said , they have “ operated in lack ” for so long .
Rural schools often operate as the “ community connector , ” a role that ’ s become even more outsized as the families they serve endure economic hardship , she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ small doesn ’ t mean everyone knows each other ; schools in these areas often function as a needed hub for community events where educators and families bond .
These relationships are proving crucial now in organizing and spreading word of resources that are available to families .
She ’ d created a Facebook group at the start of the school year for families of the children she taught .
Now , with schools closing , instead of posting about how much she looked forward to seeing her students after spring break , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ students needed paper packets of schoolwork delivered to their homes .
Students with the internet at home could access online learning activities offered by the district or participate in virtual classrooms , while packets were provided for children without the ability to log on .
She looked at her notes on each student and tried to address their individual strengths and weaknesses while arranging the packets .
While preparing for her second day of deliveries , Perry heard rumors that two teachers in another county had contracted the virus while making similar visits @ @ @ @ @ @ @ housing complex in town , she told herself this would be her last run .
She was wrapping up when a grandmother called out to her from the steps of the building .
Her grandson wasn ’ t in Perry ’ s class , the woman said , but he needed an instructional packet and she didn ’ t have a car to pick one up .
Perry walked up the stairs , looked at the boy from a safe distance of a few feet and told him she ’ d return the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ next few weeks were trying , but Johnson said her family managed to have good moments .
Her children surprised her with a barbecue cookout for Mother ’ s Day .
Though it meant taking a risk , a friend agreed to let Johnson ’ s kids come over one day and use her Wi-Fi .
After Johnson bought a new phone , she received a call from a local fast food chain about possible work as a cook and cashier during the summer .
Even though the district was offering summer packets @ @ @ @ @ @ @ think she could afford to spend the next few months trying to homeschool .
She felt it might be time to return to work .

This story about rural education was produced as part of the series Critical Condition: The Students the Pandemic Hit Hardest, reported by HuffPost and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
Terri Johnson willed her body not to show signs of impatience. She had been sitting in the parking lot of a McDonald’s in Greenville, Mississippi, for more than an hour, so her oldest child, Kentiona, could connect to the building’s Wi-Fi, something they didn’t have at home. Johnson didn’t want her daughter to feel rushed.
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Kentiona, 16, was in the passenger seat using the car’s dashboard as a makeshift desk. Her high school had recently closed in response to the coronavirus pandemic and shifted to distance learning. Kentiona’s persuasive essay for her English class had brought them to the McDonald’s on that third Friday in March. Her cellphone’s data plan — the only way she could access the internet at home — wasn’t up to the task. She looked up topics on the phone, occasionally consulting the textbook in her lap. Her mom had promised her as much time as she needed, but she figured that could only last for so long with her three younger siblings — Jakayla, 12, Quinteria, 14, and Amareon, 10 — in the back seat. The family bonding session was cramped and involuntary, and she didn’t want to prolong it. She jotted down her notes quickly.
Moving back to the Mississippi Delta was supposed to be a fresh start for Johnson. She had tried her luck in Houston for six years, before returning to her hometown when money grew tight. She was making ends meet by working as a cashier at a local gas station, until an injury took her off the job.
Now, the strategies she had pieced together to survive were being whittled away. Within days, the local job center that had allowed Johnson’s children to use its computers for homework assignments was open only to jobseekers with appointments. Johnson had planned to join those ranks, until she received word from a family member that because of the virus, kids wouldn’t return to school after spring break.
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Her only viable option for child care was to rely on her eldest daughter. But asking Kentiona to look after her younger siblings — and maintain her studies — seemed like too much. Johnson also didn’t want her children to go through the next two months with no educational tools beyond the worksheets she’d picked up from the Greenville Public School District and limited access to online materials through Kentiona’s phone, shared among the four of them.
Taking a new job would have helped her get back on her feet, but she decided her kids would keep up better if she was there to help homeschool them herself. Greenville schools have some of the highest school dropout rates in the state, and Johnson also viewed staying at home as necessary to defend her children’s chances of living an easier life.
“I do what I can, whenever I can, for my children,” she said.
Students and faculty at Greenville High School transitioned to remote learning in mid-March. The school is unable to assign a device to each student and many families in the Mississippi Delta town face barriers to accessing the technology needed to complete online assignments. Jacob Carroll for The Hechinger Report
Escaping Poverty
In the rural Deep South, Black residents born into poverty have long struggled to escape it. Schools here are among the most ill-resourced in the nation, well-paying jobs are few and necessities like Wi-Fi, public transportation and medical insurance are often out of reach. In Washington County, where Johnson lives, 34% of families live below the poverty line. More than half of children in the county between the ages of 5 to 17 live in poverty. As the economic and health crisis caused by the coronavirus spreads across the region, advocates and scholars fear it will plunge families deeper into poverty and inflame existing racial and geographic inequities, with dire consequences for a generation of children.
School closures have already harmed the most vulnerable. While some schools around the country have attempted instruction that approximates what kids would receive in a physical classroom, such efforts are less likely to happen in rural areas: One analysis of 477 school districts estimated that only 27% of rural school districts required direct instruction through recorded lessons, real-time teaching or similar methods. Widespread lack of broadband access complicates learning.
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Meanwhile, education is just one role schools fill. Nearly 78% of counties with the highest food insecurity rates for children are rural, with some of the most extreme outliers located in the Deep South. In Mississippi and across the region, thousands of families like Johnson’s count on free meals offered by schools. Yet even this lifeline is fragile. Some meal distribution sites have had to shut down when a staff member becomes sick.
And not everyone, of course, can get to schools to pick up meals in a region where public transport is scant. “Unlike urban communities, you can’t just walk around the corner to the school,” said Sheneka Williams, a professor at Michigan State University who studies rural education.
With families so sensitive to any disruption, the pandemic risks producing knock-on effects for children that could continue in the months and, even, years ahead, experts say. Yet Williams also sees resilience in the way rural schools and families are pulling together, even though, she said, they have “operated in lack” for so long. Rural schools often operate as the “community connector,” a role that’s become even more outsized as the families they serve endure economic hardship, she said. Just because a town is small doesn’t mean everyone knows each other; schools in these areas often function as a needed hub for community events where educators and families bond. These relationships are proving crucial now in organizing and spreading word of resources that are available to families.
But this resilience doesn’t make families invincible.
Rural Americans are often older and sicker than their urban counterparts and they live shorter lives. If there’s an emergency, rural residents already have to travel farther for care; hospital closures might greatly increase the distances they must travel. Since 2010, five rural hospitals have closed in Mississippi alone, and almost half of the state’s rural hospitals are at risk of closing. Health care may be financially unavailable for many; few Deep South states have expanded Medicaid insurance to the working poor. Black Southerners, who already suffer from some of the worst health outcomes in the country, have contracted and died from the virus at a disproportionately higher rate.
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Williams argues the true trauma of the novel coronavirus pandemic won’t lie with missed learning time, but with what has happened to children who have watched loved ones struggle to recover from the virus or succumb to it. “Without access to quality health care,” she said, “entire rural communities can be lost to this pandemic and other diseases.”
Amareon works to finish his instructional packet a few hours before the district’s deadline. He had attempted to keep up with lessons his teacher posted online, but then his family became disconnected. Courtesy of Terri Johnson
‘We Can’t Hug You’
It didn’t take much for fourth-grade teacher LeKesha Perry, who taught Johnson’s son, Amareon, to figure out when a student was struggling to write a paragraph. Gaining enough trust so students would share what was really bothering them on a tough day was another matter.
She’d created a Facebook group at the start of the school year for families of the children she taught. Now, with schools closing, instead of posting about how much she looked forward to seeing her students after spring break, she was trying to figure out which students needed paper packets of schoolwork delivered to their homes. Students with the internet at home could access online learning activities offered by the district or participate in virtual classrooms, while packets were provided for children without the ability to log on. She looked at her notes on each student and tried to address their individual strengths and weaknesses while arranging the packets.
While preparing for her second day of deliveries, Perry heard rumors that two teachers in another county had contracted the virus while making similar visits. On the way to an affordable housing complex in town, she told herself this would be her last run. She was wrapping up when a grandmother called out to her from the steps of the building. Her grandson wasn’t in Perry’s class, the woman said, but he needed an instructional packet and she didn’t have a car to pick one up. Perry walked up the stairs, looked at the boy from a safe distance of a few feet and told him she’d return the next day with a packet.
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On the way back to her car, she saw a group of her students. They started running to her — before she made them stop. Her students had been out of school for almost half a month at that point and had little certainty of when they’d go back. “We still love you, but I can’t touch you,” she told them.
Perry couldn’t shake what was going on. “If this is what I feel, what are they feeling?” she asked herself on the drive home, close to tears. “What is going to happen to our children?”
Unemployment Rate Doubles
By early April, Washington County reported two deaths from the coronavirus. Johnson tried to keep her focus on the things she could control. But her determination couldn’t overcome every problem. Sometimes, Kentiona got stuck on small details from her chemistry class. Deciphering the periodic table of elements seemed easier when her teacher explained it in person.
“The hands-on work isn’t as good as the teacher,” Kentiona said.
She admitted it would have been nice to have been able to be in her room with a laptop to do schoolwork and talk to her teacher, but seemed reluctant to complain. Without a computer at home, she’d had to write her persuasive essay by hand, and give it to her mother to drop off at her school.
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Some parts of life have remained normal, Johnson said. Kentiona, whom she calls “very bright,” still studies with earbuds plugged in, listening to music while she reads each page. Johnson was bemused by her daughter’s multitasking.
“I don’t understand, she sings and everything,” Johnson said.
Kentiona goes back and forth between wanting to be a lawyer or a child psychologist. Johnson laughs that she also wanted to work with children when she was around her daughter’s age. But life got in the way of her dreams. Johnson dropped out of high school at 17, soon after learning she was pregnant with Kentiona. She wants more for her daughter than daydreams.
“I didn’t really have anyone to push me,” she said.
She has “what-if” thoughts about what might have happened if she’d kept going.
By the end of April, before Johnson even had a chance to look for work, the county’s unemployment rate had doubled, to 15.6%. The state had increased the food stamp benefits she received for the month, which helped her stretch groceries when school meals couldn’t tide the family over. She still couldn’t imagine leaving her children during the day, but now there was a question of what jobs would be available when she was ready.
But, like her daughter, Johnson tended to keep her problems to herself. That wasn’t hard to do. Since moving back, she’d kept her social circle small and been bit of a “loner,” as she put it.
“We don’t mumble or complain,” she said.
But, she acknowledged of life lately, “It’s slow. It has been slow.”
Amareon, right, and his sister Jakayla work on assignments picked up from their local school district. Their family does not have a computer or broadband Internet at home, so the siblings have to take turns sharing their mom’s phone to access online lessons. Courtesy of Terri Johnson
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The Digital Divide
A month into the school closures, Amareon and Jakayla were sitting at the family’s dining room table concentrating on their work. Amareon was filling out a multiplication sheet, while Jakayla took her turn with the phone. Some days, the device’s download speed seemed to function at a crawl. Johnson’s kids were growing impatient waiting for a chance to use her phone. They could do a few assignments online each, but not the full curriculum. On the days they finished by lunch, Johnson would come up with multiplication and spelling games to keep them busy.
It would be another month before Mississippi lawmakers and the state superintendent of education discussed the possibility of using a federal emergency relief package to purchase digital devices and hotspots for students. As of early June, the education department was still working to secure funds for that initiative. Almost 40% of households in Washington County don’t have broadband service at home. That figure spikes to more than 60% for adults like Johnson who lack a high school degree.
North Mississippi Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley said the digital divide has hampered the ability of families to navigate the crisis. Unemployed parents have a harder time searching for work when they can’t access online listings. Their children have a harder time keeping up with their peers who can watch online tutorials of complicated math problems or easily video chat with a teacher. Their families can’t videoconference with physicians about health concerns.
“Americans and Mississippians and anyone with common sense in the year 2020 understands broadband is as important to modern life as electricity is,” Presley said.
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Perry, Amareon’s teacher, had started meeting via Zoom with some students who needed help. But she feared more than half of her students didn’t have access to reliable internet. Some would log on for as little as 10 minutes per day because that’s all their families’ mobile data plans seemed to be able to handle.
The district uses a program called SchoolStatus to post messages for families. Perry created an email address for her students’ accounts and shared instructions through the app on how parents could access them. By the second week of the school closures, she’d sent out a survey to each family asking about their internet access. No response at all was an answer in itself.
Despite his limited access to the internet, Amareon managed to log in for assignments for weeks. Perry FaceTimed him one day for almost 30 minutes, trying to keep both of their spirits up.
Then Amareon went silent.
Three weeks passed without her hearing anything at all.
Johnson was dealing with a crisis of her own. Her cellphone had broken. Almost a month passed before she could purchase a new one, effectively ending her younger children’s abilities to attempt some lessons online.
Her kids were eager to return to school. Sharing their mom’s phone was cumbersome, but they’d grown accustomed to it, and now that routine had been upended.
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The next few weeks were trying, but Johnson said her family managed to have good moments. Her children surprised her with a barbecue cookout for Mother’s Day. Though it meant taking a risk, a friend agreed to let Johnson’s kids come over one day and use her Wi-Fi. After Johnson bought a new phone, she received a call from a local fast food chain about possible work as a cook and cashier during the summer. Even though the district was offering summer packets of schoolwork, Johnson didn’t think she could afford to spend the next few months trying to homeschool. She felt it might be time to return to work.
On the morning of May 15, the patience she’d managed that day in the McDonald’s parking lot in March and the weeks that followed had naturally started to taper off. The last of her children’s learning packets had to be turned in that afternoon and the kids were still trying to complete them.


thehuffingtonpost--2020-06-27--As Coronavirus Ravaged Indian Country, The Federal Government Failed Its Schools

This story about education in tribal schools was produced as part of the series Critical Condition: The Students the Pandemic Hit Hardest, reported by HuffPost and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
Samantha Honani’s son hasn’t completed a school assignment in months. After his high school on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona shut down in March, he finished about three weeks of distance learning via his family’s computer. Then, in April, he stopped hearing from his teachers. Caught up in the tumult of COVID-19 and the struggles of sharing one computer with subpar internet, academics faded to an afterthought, Honani said.
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“There was a breakdown in communication in the school and the students,” said Honani, who works as a program manager for The Hopi Foundation. “There was no follow-up.”
Initially, Honani put some blame on herself as a mother, chiding herself for failing to stay on top of her son’s teachers and deprioritizing traditional schooling during a hectic time. But while Honani was internalizing the schools’ shortcomings as her own, decisions far away in Washington, D.C., were also having an impact on her child’s education.
Honani’s son attends Hopi Junior Senior High School, which is funded and partially overseen by the Bureau of Indian Education, an agency within the Department of the Interior that manages nearly 200 tribal K-12 schools throughout the country. Implementing distance learning for schools like Hopi High would have been difficult even under the best of circumstances — the school is located on a vast reservation where families often lack access to internet and computers. But evidence suggests that some of the blame for the struggles of BIE schools during COVID-19 lies on the shoulders of the federal government, which consistently bungled its role in helping schools adapt to remote learning and ensure that kids continued to receive an education.
While Samantha Honani works full time on COVID-19 relief efforts through her job at the Hopi Foundation, her son has been planting a garden of traditional Hopi corn and beans, squash, melons and potatoes. Out of this activity comes respect for history, science, land and the weather, she said. Courtesy of Samantha Honani
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After schools started closing in mid-March, the bureau provided only limited guidance to schools on how they should handle distance learning at a time when other systems had already fully implemented detailed contingency plans. In some cases, nonessential school employees were asked to show up to school after these closures, putting them and their families at increased risk for COVID-19. And later in March, federal lawmakers awarded $200 million to help BIE and tribal schools get students connected to online lessons, but by late June, only a fraction of that cash had been distributed.
For BIE students, the costs of not getting that support are particularly high. While the vast majority of Native American and Alaska Native students attend traditional public schools — the BIE educates less than 10% of Native students — BIE students score significantly lower than their public school counterparts on standardized exams, and overall post some of the lowest scores of any student group. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic has hit some Native communities particularly hard. If the Navajo Nation were a state, it would have the highest death rate from COVID-19 in the country. The Hopi reservation has also seen a recent surge in cases.
Not all BIE schools necessarily fell short. But many scrambled to provide students with basic services.
Honani, for one, says she doesn’t know who should be held accountable for her school’s shortcomings and she is sympathetic to the hurdles they faced.
“Teachers are trying to manage the education of hundreds of children, within a setup that lacks internet access and technology access,” said Honani, a member of the school’s parent advisory committee. “If I were a teacher, would I know how to shift to teaching online?”
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The school’s superintendent also acknowledged the myriad difficulties staff faced. Many of the school’s educators had difficulty keeping in touch with students because they, like many students, lack a stable internet connection at home. Teachers were required to submit weekly lesson plans, and though distance learning “started strong … there were breakdowns,” acting Superintendent Alban Naha said in an interview. “We’re going to have to find alternative ways.”
Navajo houses without running water near the Navajo Nation town of Steamboat, Arizona, on May 24. Frequent hand-washing, as recommended by the CDC to stop the spread of COVID-19, is just not possible for an estimated 30% to 40% of this sovereign territory's 178,000 residents, who don't have access to running water or sanitation. MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images
“Not all households have phones or transportation out here,” he added. “We don’t have running water or electricity in some of the villages we service.”
Leaders of BIE, which oversees schools across 23 states, weren’t much help either, Naha said. “There was a lack of the direction we needed.”
Indeed, some say the blame for some of these issues lay squarely with the BIE. As the agency stalled, some local education officials who work on reservations say they were forced to turn to their counterparts in Arizona and New Mexico for assistance in helping students.
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“BIE has had the same amount of time as all the other education systems in the country,” said Alexis DeLaCruz, staff attorney with the Native American Disability Law Center. “We understand these are unprecedented times and school systems are literally reinventing how education is happening but the states have done it … The BIE is not doing that for its 183 schools.”
By press time, officials from the BIE had not responded to repeated requests for comment on the agency’s handling of school closures, distance learning or delays in disbursing the funds to its schools.
Schools Slow To Close
From the start of the pandemic, BIE school officials waited for guidance from leaders in Washington. About 50 BIE schools are directly operated by the BIE. The rest of the schools, including Hopi Junior Senior High School, are tribally operated, with the agency providing funding and general oversight.
On March 14, BIE started temporarily closing the schools it operates on a case-by-case basis, and by March 17, all of the agency’s schools had closed or were on spring break, according to an archived version of the agency’s website. That was after 33 states and the District of Columbia had already made the same move.
However, in at least one case, school staff were still asked to show up. In a March 16 memo, the principal of Kaibeto Boarding School in Arizona, a bureau-operated school, asked staff to report to work from March 23 to April 3 while the school was closed, according to a document reviewed by HuffPost.
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At least two other schools — including Keams Canyon Elementary on the Hopi Reservation and Rocky Ridge Boarding School on the Navajo Nation — also had students or staff report to school after March 16. Some students and staff at Rocky Ridge later reported symptoms consistent with COVID-19, according to ProPublica.
On March 30, members of the Kaibeto Boarding School’s board started raising alarm bells in an email to school and BIE leaders.
“Many community members [are] stating our school, along with other BIE schools around the Navajo Nation, are currently fully staffed. If this were to be true, I feel as if the BIE is not abiding by the Public Health Orders and Executive Orders issued by our Federal, State and Tribal Leaders,” wrote Dellard Curley, a member of the school board, in the email.
The directive contributed to the spread of COVID-19 within the community, school board members say.
“The majority of our school has the virus. It was passed around because they were having employees report,” said school board member Bahozhoi Kinsel in an interview in May.
The school’s principal did not respond to a request for comment.
The initial confusion was a harbinger of what was to come.
March 30 guidance provided by the BIE on how to implement distance learning was only two pages long and provided mostly generic, boilerplate advice.
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One bullet point item in the memo, written by Tamarah Pfieffer, the agency’s chief academic officer, reminds leaders to “teach content.” Another says to “plan for student learning.”
For some school leaders, the message the memo sent was clear: They were on their own.
Meanwhile, some of the school staff members who had continued to report to work in March were getting severely ill, and in some rare cases, dying.
A spokesperson for the BIE did not respond to questions about how many staff members had gotten sick or died. But as of April, The Navajo Times reported that two employees from separate schools died. Curley and Kinsel also said a teacher from their school had died. The Kaibeto principal did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this matter.
Kinsel says she believes the BIE was knowingly negligent in handling the situation.
Meager Guidance
As time went on, tribal leaders continued to prod the BIE for help.
However, when they reached out with specific questions, they were sometimes ignored.
In early April, Darrick Franklin, an education program manager with the Navajo Nation Department of Diné Education, noticed the Arizona and New Mexico departments of education were providing their schools with far more detailed guidance than the two pages the BIE had provided Navajo schools.
The New Mexico Public Education Department had designed a 31-page plan to hold schools accountable for providing services during the last months of school. The guide included tips for online teaching, a five-day training for school staff, clarity on rules for special education and more. That was in stark contrast to the March BIE memo and its platitudes about engaging families.
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Franklin wrote to the BIE inquiring about these differences, asking if BIE schools should plan to submit any specific plans to the agency about how they intended to serve students during the shutdown.
His questions were never directly answered. In an email response, Pfieffer, of the BIE, said only that the agency expected all students to be provided with learning opportunities.
“This is going to look different for each student, family and school,” Pfieffer wrote in the email, which Franklin shared with HuffPost/The Hechinger Report.
Because of the BIE’s meager guidance, Franklin turned instead to leaders in New Mexico and Arizona for help and resources. They’ve been far more helpful, he said.
Arizona State Superintendent Kathy Hoffman has met with tribal leaders and representatives from their education departments to get their feedback on distance learning and reopening schools, according to a department spokesperson. In late April, the New Mexico Public Education Department released guidance specifically for tribal schools struggling with internet connectivity, offering immediate solutions for the final weeks of the 2019-20 school year and long-term fixes looking to the fall and beyond.
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“It’s like pulling teeth to get [the BIE] to do something,” Franklin said.
A sign warns against the COVID-19 virus near the Navajo Nation town of Tuba City, Arizona, on May 24. Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images
An April survey from the National Indian Education Association, a nonprofit that advocates for Indigenous students, found that students in BIE schools have been given far fewer resources to complete distance learning than their public school counterparts.
Nearly 70% of public schools serving Native students were conducting digital learning, according to the survey. By comparison, only around 30% of BIE schools were doing the same.
At the same time, only 4% of public schools serving Native students closed for the academic year after the emergence of COVID-19, ending all services. That compares with more than 20% of BIE schools.
Families like Honani’s were caught up in the confusion. While the school had continued to communicate with families on Facebook and its website, it tried to avoid snail mail for fear of spreading COVID-19, the school’s superintendent, Naha, said. After Hopi Junior Senior High School closed in mid-March, Honani said she had only received one letter from the school detailing what to expect.
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Honani’s son worked on their family computer for one or two hours a day when his school rolled out distance learning in late March, completing classwork. Her family is lucky to have a computer. Many of her neighbors do not.
Hopi Junior Senior High School handed out Chromebooks and hotspots for students who needed them, but that hardly constituted a cure-all. The reservation’s infrastructure couldn’t handle so many people logging on at once, and there was a “vast slowdown,” said Naha.
“It’s been a challenge to deal with some of the things we face that [non-rural schools] don’t,” he said. “We are on an unlevel playing field. It did catch us to an extent to be unprepared.”
On the Navajo Nation, which surrounds Hopi, less than 4% of the population has access to even the most basic wireline broadband, according to federal data.
Stalled Aid
To keep kids learning, BIE and tribal schools needed more resources, fast. When Congress approved $200 million for those schools as part of the CARES Act in late March, it was a welcome development. However, schools have yet to receive most of this money.
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As states including Arizona and New Mexico rushed to distribute their share of the federal relief money for schools, the Department of the Interior in April released a two-page information sheet describing how BIE and tribal schools could use $46 million of the emergency aid. The cash could cover the cost of closing schools, transporting students home and providing technology and Wi-Fi for online learning. The department also said its “initial thinking” around how to spend the additional $154 million, which was to be funneled through the U.S. Department of Education, would be to fund the creation of “system wide online learning capabilities and local Wi-Fi connectivity.”
On April 28, the agencies co-hosted a listening session to gather tribal feedback on BIE plans to spend the relief money. But technical glitches hampered the call, frustrating tribal college and school leaders. A rescheduled session, on April 30, seemed to end abruptly, after the platform disconnected attendees.
“We all have lots to do and this attempt is burning daylight,” one school administrator wrote in the webinar’s comments section.
“This is painful,” another added.
Rose Marie McGuire, Indian education manager for Denver Public Schools and an enrolled member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, joined the second session and said the technological meltdown did not surprise her.
“It was crazy, but that seems typical for them,” she said, referring to the BIE.
By May 20 — nearly two months after President Donald Trump signed the CARES Act into law — the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians, National Congress of American Indians, National Indian Education Association and United South and Eastern Tribes, which represent tribal governments and schools, grew so frustrated that they wrote a joint letter to the secretaries of education and the interior asking why neither agency had announced how the emergency aid would be released to schools and urging immediate distribution of the funds.
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Two days later, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), chair of the House natural resources committee, issued a press release criticizing the delay.
“Tribal nations are disproportionately suffering from high rates of coronavirus and the Trump administration continues to do nothing for them,” the release reads. “BIE and the Department of Education should release the critical tribal educational funding we included in the CARES Act — yesterday.”
By late June, Hopi Junior Senior High School finally received its portion of the $46 million, but the superintendent said it was only enough for cleaning supplies and personal protective equipment, or PPE. None of it went toward instructional needs.
A Navajo Nation police officer issues a fine to a driver who ignored the 57-hour curfew imposed to try to stop the spread of the coronavirus through the Navajo Nation, in the town of Chinle, Arizona, on May 23. Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images
“It is not covering all expenses,” Naha said. “In particular our elementary schools were really hard hit, [and] it’s not even covering their PPE.”
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And it wasn’t until June 12 — almost three months since the passage of the CARES Act — that the federal departments signed an internal agreement on how to transfer the $154 million between agencies. The agreement “encouraged” the BIE to get the funding to schools by mid-September.
“It is clear that our education system will conclude the 2019-2020 school year without the emergency relief intended by Congress during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the tribal advocacy groups wrote in another letter, dated June 12. “This continued inaction exacerbates the educational disparities our communities face, in violation of federal trust and treaty obligations.”
“Our students represent the future of our Tribal Nations,” the groups added. “It is truly unconscionable to deny them the resources they need to continue their education amidst a public health crisis.”
After HuffPost/The Hechinger Report asked the BIE to explain its continued delay in funding, a spokesperson said the agency began distributing some of the $154 million to schools on June 26.
“We expect all funds to be allocated over the next week,” the spokesperson said in an email late Friday. As for the $46 million, the spokesperson said the money had been distributed to schools but the “BIE is waiting on paperwork from some schools ... before they can pull down funding for expenditure.”
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The spokesperson for the BIE did not provide an explanation for the nearly three-month delay in distributing the money. But in an email, an official with the U.S. Department of Education said its goal was for all states, and the BIE, to get CARES Act funding to schools as quickly as possible.
“However, we know that an SEA [state educational agency], including BIE, will need to put in place needed safeguards and guidance to support local decisions on how to use these funds,” the official said. “Thus, we encourage BIE — and all SEAs — to make every effort to distribute the funds within 90 days, but we know that different schools and Tribal communities may have very different needs and may require additional time to consult their stakeholders in order to maximize the use of the funds.”
Students With Disabilities
Honani, who previously taught elementary school, found it hard to focus on education amid all the chaos happening outside her window. Then, she saw an opportunity.
Her son, a ninth grader, had been educated in Western institutions his entire life. The time off gave her an opportunity to teach him about Hopi values.
“We do have issues around behavior and substance abuse and suicide rates. Those are the silent battles we’re fighting here, in our reservation communities,” said Honani. “This is a time for us to really mold and nurture and guide the kids, rather than having it being done in a school setting, a very Western, non-Hopi setting.”
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While Honani works full time on COVID-19 relief efforts through her job at the Hopi Foundation, her son has been planting a garden. He is growing traditional Hopi corn and beans, squash, melons and potatoes. Out of this activity comes respect for history, science, land and the weather, she said.
She doesn’t think about what her son has lost these past few months ― instead she tries to focus on what he can gain.
But not all children have that same opportunity. For vulnerable students, including those with disabilities, the lack of formal schooling these months could have a devastating impact.
As an attorney, Alexis DeLaCruz represents Native students with disabilities. She is currently working with clients from five different BIE schools. Her clients, who rely on an array of special services at school, are especially vulnerable to learning loss during distance learning. But their schools have all but abandoned trying to educate them, she said.
DeLaCruz said some students haven’t received hardly any services since their schools closed. When parents have called school leaders and teachers, they’ve just found full voice mailboxes, and when they’ve written, they’ve received no response, she said. Some families received early bits of communication, but follow-up faded as the months went on. She speculates that teachers are communicating with children on a case-by-case basis, without clear guidance or support from their schools.
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“That’s what we’re seeing — no consistency, no communication, no plan in place, and no learning,” she said.
DeLaCruz started prodding the BIE with questions in the context of her individual cases on April 7. Later in the month, her organization and nearly 50 other disability rights and civil rights groups wrote the agency asking it to ensure students with disabilities were provided with critical services. Her concerns grew every day that she saw her clients falling further and further behind.
To date, the BIE has not responded to DeLaCruz or her organization.
“Right now things are very dire here in our community, but that doesn’t mean families don’t want their kids to continue to have access to education,” she said. “The Bureau of Indian Education is just leagues behind their states’ counterparts and there’s no justifiable reason why.”
A spokesperson for the Bureau of Indian Education did not respond to requests for comment on this matter.
Now, as the death toll on the Hopi Reservation continues to rise, it is unclear when students will return to school.
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This week, the BIE sent a notice on its intention to consult with tribes on a school reopening plan. But once again, it already feels like too little, too late.
“A lot of states have already developed reopening plans, and we’re still holding consultation sessions,” said Naha. “We’re sometimes a step or two behind and it can be frustrating for us.”
Honani said she would support school closures extending into next year, out of concern for the safety of the community. But she has a difficult time imagining what many more months of distance learning might look like.
“With the schools not opening we’re going to have to step up as parents and families to play a role in our kids’ education,” said Honani. “I’m gonna be OK. I have the ability. I have the equipment. But I can’t speak for everybody else.”


thehuffingtonpost--2020-06-27--‘It’s Really Hard To Parent From Behind Bars'

The four of them would grab food at a nearby chicken restaurant , then catch up .
Conversation sometimes turned to how the girls were doing in school .
Victoria had trouble reading ; she said her letters moved around .
She was getting more individual attention from teachers since Christine had relocated the family from Oklahoma City to suburban Tuttle and its better schools , but social life could be difficult : Kids at school insisted Victoria didn ’ t have a mom .
She begged Brittany to join her for lunch at school once she was released .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ schools closed , and Christine , 64 , was reluctantly cast not just as their primary caregiver , but also as their homeschool teacher .
Brittany was put on lockdown at the women ’ s correctional center , without her job or family visits .
Since entering prison this time , she ’ d signed up for every class , every volunteer and work opportunity , every chance to reroute her life and prove she was ready to be a mother .
But with the coronavirus throwing the world into chaos , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; she worried that Christine wasn ’ t staying on Victoria about her schoolwork and grew more distraught that she wasn ’ t there to help .
More than 5 million U.S. children have , or have had , a parent in prison or jail , according to one estimate .
Oklahoma , despite recent steps toward criminal-justice reform , imprisons more women per capita than any other U.S. state .
For children of incarcerated parents , the toll can be significant .
They are more likely to fall behind academically , drop @ @ @ @ @ @ @ themselves .
With instability at home , concentrating on coursework can be challenging , and kids sometimes face stigma at school .
Having a parent behind bars can also affect a child ’ s self-esteem .
Ekwerekwu was 16 and a top student when she learned that her father was incarcerated .
He and her mother , who raised her , had decided to wait until that age to tell her ; she ’ d grown up believing he was in his home country of Nigeria .
“ I don ’ t know @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be an Advanced Placement student had I known where my father was , ” she said .
“ When I did find out , it made me question whether I was deserving to be sitting with those kids in my AP classes.
” “ I want to be as hands-on as possible and give them as much strength and support and encouragement as possible , ” she said .
“ I want them to go all the way through school , through high school .
I want them to have friends , I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the things I never got to experience .
”

This story about children of incarcerated parents was produced as part of the series Critical Condition: The Students the Pandemic Hit Hardest, reported by HuffPost and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
This winter, before the pandemic changed everything, Brittany Jefferson spent weekdays at a call center, putting in hours through a work release program as she neared the end of a four-year stint in prison. About once a week, after Brittany finished work, Christine Zuniga, her kids’ grandmother, would be waiting outside with Victoria, 13, and Alejandra, 6.
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The four of them would grab food at a nearby chicken restaurant, then catch up. Conversation sometimes turned to how the girls were doing in school. Victoria had trouble reading; she said her letters moved around. She was getting more individual attention from teachers since Christine had relocated the family from Oklahoma City to suburban Tuttle and its better schools, but social life could be difficult: Kids at school insisted Victoria didn’t have a mom. She begged Brittany to join her for lunch at school once she was released.
Then the pandemic hit. The girls’ schools closed, and Christine, 64, was reluctantly cast not just as their primary caregiver, but also as their homeschool teacher. Brittany was put on lockdown at the women’s correctional center, without her job or family visits. Since entering prison this time, she’d signed up for every class, every volunteer and work opportunity, every chance to reroute her life and prove she was ready to be a mother. But with the coronavirus throwing the world into chaos, it didn’t feel like enough; she worried that Christine wasn’t staying on Victoria about her schoolwork and grew more distraught that she wasn’t there to help.
“I am so ready to go home and be the super mom,” said Brittany, 32. “But it doesn’t work that way.”
More than 5 million U.S. children have, or have had, a parent in prison or jail, according to one estimate. Oklahoma, despite recent steps toward criminal-justice reform, imprisons more women per capita than any other U.S. state. For children of incarcerated parents, the toll can be significant. They are more likely to fall behind academically, drop out of school and go to prison themselves. With instability at home, concentrating on coursework can be challenging, and kids sometimes face stigma at school.
Now, with the coronavirus pandemic, these family separations have deepened. When the virus began to spread, prisons closed to visitors, and the facilities became epicenters of the disease. Those raising the kids of incarcerated parents — foster parents, grandparents, extended family — are often older, and, like Christine, worried about their health. Adding nonstop child care and homeschooling to the mix has been difficult, and in some cases devastating.
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“I am old, I don’t have the patience it takes to homeschool,” said Christine one April afternoon. “I love them,” she said of her grandchildren. “I want to make them happy. But [Victoria] needs her mother and her father. And they are not there right now.”
Brittany grew up in Texas and had her first child when she was 16. She left school, started abusing drugs, and cycled through rehab, prison and jail. Her oldest daughter, Lela, was a few years old when Brittany met Christine’s son Alex, and they had two girls together. Christine took in Victoria when she was two, and she’s been raising Alejandra from birth.
Christine recognized parts of herself in her daughter-in-law. Growing up in Texas decades earlier, she struggled too. She married at 14, had five children, endured abusive relationships and spent a few years in prison on drug charges. She worked physically demanding jobs until 2003 when she was injured, went back to school for office administration and found a job working for an attorney.
“I used to talk to her all the time and tell her, ‘In order to love somebody else you have to love yourself,’ ” Christine said of Brittany. “I myself went through a lot of counseling to find out why I was the way I was.”
Christine welcomed the chance to raise the girls differently than she’d raised her own children. But she also saw how much her grandchildren needed their parents. Alex, 40, is incarcerated in Oklahoma, too, and like Brittany, he is expected to be released this year. But because of the coronavirus, the girls haven’t seen him in months.
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When Brittany went to prison this time, it felt different than previous stints. “I was just so ready, I was just so tired,” she said. “God didn’t destine me to be a prostitute, a drug dealer, any of that. He destined me to be a woman of virtue. I had to get clean in my mind of everything.”
Brittany Jefferson with her three daughters: Lela, Victoria and Alejandra. Jefferson is awaiting release from prison this year and says she cannot wait to be “the super mom.” Courtesy Christine Zuniga
While in prison in McLoud outside of Oklahoma City, she took classes, volunteered as a mentor to at-risk youth and worked for a brokerage firm, where she rose to an information technology administrator position. She’d received her GED years earlier while incarcerated in Texas. When she got her own life more under control, she finally had space to focus on her kids.
What she learned was worrisome. Victoria was struggling in school. When they lived in Oklahoma City, Christine had given her practice spelling tests and Victoria would add extra letters to the words. “I would get really frustrated,” said Christine. “I didn’t understand.” Then her oldest son Mark told her he’d struggled in the same ways, that his letters moved around too. “Back then it wasn’t labeled dyslexia though,” Christine recalled. “You were labeled as being lazy.”
Some of Christine’s family is from Mexico and she grew up speaking Spanish. Victoria can understand the language, but she doesn’t speak it. Christine started to worry that the teachers were overlooking the girl’s poor reading skills because she’s Latina, and they thought she was new to English. She decided to move the family to a house in Tuttle, 30 miles from downtown Oklahoma City.
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Alejandra began attending an early childhood education center, and Victoria started getting the extra support she needs through an individualized education plan for students with disabilities, Christine says. But reading remains a challenge.
Brittany wanted to help. “I try to stay on [Victoria] that you only get one education, so you really need to be focusing hard if you want to do something successful in life,” she said, but her words could only carry her children so far.
“It’s really hard to parent from behind bars,” she said, “because I’m not there and I can’t say, ‘You need to sit down and do your homework.’ They will say, ‘Mom, you’re not even here.’ ”
When she did see her kids, they called their grandmother “Mom,” she said, not her. She tried not to feel hurt.
When the coronavirus ended in-person education in March, Alejandra’s school sent home games and simple exercises Christine could help with. But guiding Victoria on her assignments was far more challenging. She bought the girl a few books to help her stay fresh on her skills. But on days when Christine’s bones ached from past surgeries, it all felt insurmountable.
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Still, she is grateful for their four-bedroom house near the highway on the outskirts of Tuttle. It has a porch and a front yard where the girls can play with her tiny Chihuahua. The park, and the water parks and much of the world beyond that yard have been off-limits.
Momentum for criminal-justice reform has grown in recent years, in part because of the harms that come to children from locking up their parents. This past November, Oklahoma commuted the sentences of 527 low-level drug and nonviolent offenders. The state holds roughly 26,000 people in its prisons, however, and advocates say the legislature is falling short on promises to deliver real change.
Children of incarcerated parents say their families’ involvement with the justice system can complicate education in a variety of ways. Steven Montoya, who is 27 and grew up in Queens, New York, recalls how much he struggled in classes because of anger over his mother’s incarceration. Few of his teachers knew how to handle his behavior, he says. Once, his mother’s parole officer dropped by his school, which set off rounds of bullying.
Francie Ekwerekwu, an attorney with the nonprofit TEEM (The Education and Employment Ministry), in Oklahoma City, said teachers sometimes get frustrated with the behavioral issues of children of incarcerated parents and suspend them, contributing to the school-to-prison pipeline.
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Having a parent behind bars can also affect a child’s self-esteem. Ekwerekwu was 16 and a top student when she learned that her father was incarcerated. He and her mother, who raised her, had decided to wait until that age to tell her; she’d grown up believing he was in his home country of Nigeria. “I don’t know if I would have been able to be an Advanced Placement student had I known where my father was,” she said. “When I did find out, it made me question whether I was deserving to be sitting with those kids in my AP classes.”
Christine Zuniga is raising her granddaughters Victoria and Alejandra while their parents are incarcerated. When the coronavirus hit, she became the girls’ homeschool teacher in addition to their primary caregiver. Courtesy Christine Zuniga
Parental incarceration can also harm a child’s literacy, since parents aren’t present to read to their kids. To help, some organizations have started programs to film incarcerated parents reading and deliver the videos to their children.
Alexis Mansfield, a senior adviser of children and families with the nonprofit group Women’s Justice Institute, said that schools need to do more to involve incarcerated parents. In a forthcoming report, her organization recommends that teachers hold conferences via video with incarcerated parents when possible and send parents copies of their children’s progress reports.
“We have to stop acting like the incarcerated parent does not exist,” Mansfield said.
Another challenge, she said, is that children of incarcerated parents are more likely to move homes and schools, and school officials may be reluctant to enroll them midyear either because they are unaware of their obligations under federal law or prefer not to enroll a student they see as potentially troublesome.
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This spring, Brittany submitted paperwork that would allow her to be released under GPS monitoring. If the paperwork wasn’t approved, she would remain incarcerated until December.
Brittany said the correctional center had been doing a good job of keeping people safe from the virus, but the situation was unnerving. “Everyone is ready to get off the block, move around,” she said. “But the whole country is in lockdown.”
Once she is released, she plans to move in with Christine. Her own mother intends to relocate from Texas to Oklahoma with Brittany’s oldest daughter so they can all be together.
At first, Brittany hopes to get a job in IT. It’s what she’s been trained in, and she’s talented at it. Longer term, her goal is to work as a resource support specialist for vulnerable women and youth. That way she can turn her experience overcoming prison and drugs into an asset, she said, instead of having it “just go down in the void.”
But the coronavirus pandemic has complicated reentry from prison. TEEM has had to pause its resume-writing and interview-prep classes for people leaving prison (Brittany participated in one such class last year). And the pandemic has darkened the outlook for people searching for work. That’s a particularly troubling scenario in Oklahoma, where people often leave prison saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in debt from court fines and fees, said Kris Steele, TEEM’s executive director.
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“Even in the best of circumstances it’s so difficult and challenging,” he said. “I fear that we are setting up people to fail.”
By early June, months into the lockdown, Brittany started to worry she’d be stuck inside forever. She was typically fastidious, tidying her cell multiple times a day. But now she could barely bring herself to get out of bed.
“I just wasn’t hearing news of when I’d be able to go back to work or be released,” she said. “I felt so unattached from everything.”
For three days, she barely ate, in hopes that fasting would help her reset. That next morning, her case manager called her into the office. Brittany’s employer at the call center was bringing people back to work and she’d been cleared to return. Brittany asked the case manager about her paperwork for GPS monitoring. She’d been approved for that too. She could be released as soon as June 30.
“Hearing my name was approved for the GPS has changed everything for me,” she said. “I’ve been able to put some plans into motion instead of just daydreaming.”
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She’d spent years imagining what kind of mom she would be.
“I want to be as hands-on as possible and give them as much strength and support and encouragement as possible,” she said. “I want them to go all the way through school, through high school. I want them to have friends, I want them to go to sports, the things I never got to experience.”


thehuffingtonpost--2020-06-27--Russia Offered Afghan Militants Bounties To Kill U.S. Troops: Reports

WASHINGTON ( Reuters ) - U.S. intelligence has concluded that the Russian military offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants in Afghanistan to kill American troops and other coalition forces , the New York Times reported on Friday , citing officials briefed on the matter .
A Russian military intelligence unit linked to assassination attempts in Europe had offered rewards for successful attacks last year , according to the newspaper .
It said Islamist militants , or armed criminal elements closely associated with them , are believed to have collected some bounty money .
“ This primitive informational dump clearly demonstrates low @ @ @ @ @ @ @ American intelligence service , ” Russia ’ s foreign ministry said in a statement cited by the RIA news agency .
The White House , the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined requests from Reuters for comment on the newspaper report .
President Donald Trump has been briefed on the intelligence finding , the Times said .
The White House has yet to authorize any steps against Russia in response to the bounties , it added .
Of the 20 Americans killed in combat in 2019 , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which deaths were under suspicion .
After nearly 20 years of fighting the Taliban , the U.S. is looking for a way to extricate itself from Afghanistan and to achieve peace between the U.S.-backed government and the militant group , which controls swathes of the country .
On Feb. 29 , the U.S. and the Taliban struck a deal that called for a phased withdrawal of American troops .
U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan is down to nearly 8,600 , well ahead of a schedule agreed with the Taliban , in part because @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , U.S. and NATO officials said in late May .

LOADING ERROR LOADING
UPDATE: In April 2021, 10 months after The New York Times, Associated Press and Washington Post reported on U.S. intelligence that Russia had offered secret bounties to the Taliban for the deaths of Americans, the Biden administration said that CIA analysts only have “low to moderate confidence” that the bounty program ever existed.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. intelligence has concluded that the Russian military offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants in Afghanistan to kill American troops and other coalition forces, the New York Times reported on Friday, citing officials briefed on the matter.
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A Russian military intelligence unit linked to assassination attempts in Europe had offered rewards for successful attacks last year, according to the newspaper. It said Islamist militants, or armed criminal elements closely associated with them, are believed to have collected some bounty money.
“This primitive informational dump clearly demonstrates low intellectual abilities of the propagandists at the American intelligence service,” Russia’s foreign ministry said in a statement cited by the RIA news agency.
The White House, the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined requests from Reuters for comment on the newspaper report.
President Donald Trump has been briefed on the intelligence finding, the Times said. The White House has yet to authorize any steps against Russia in response to the bounties, it added.
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Of the 20 Americans killed in combat in 2019, the Times said, it was not clear which deaths were under suspicion.
After nearly 20 years of fighting the Taliban, the U.S. is looking for a way to extricate itself from Afghanistan and to achieve peace between the U.S.-backed government and the militant group, which controls swathes of the country.
On Feb. 29, the U.S. and the Taliban struck a deal that called for a phased withdrawal of American troops.
U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan is down to nearly 8,600, well ahead of a schedule agreed with the Taliban, in part because of concerns about the spread of coronavirus, U.S. and NATO officials said in late May.


thehuffingtonpost--2020-06-27--First Professional Sporting Event Since Coronavirus Opened With Players Kneeling For Black Lives

ASSOCIATED PRESS Players for the Portland Thorns , left , and the North Carolina Courage kneel during the national anthem before the start of their NWSL Challenge Cup soccer match at Zions Bank Stadium Saturday in Herriman , Utah .
( AP Photo/Rick Bowmer ) Players for the Portland Thorns and the North Carolina Courage knelt during the national anthem Saturday when the National Women ’ s Soccer League opened the Challenge Cup tournament in Utah .
The players and coaches wore Black Lives Matter T-shirts in warmups before the game , which was nationally televised on CBS .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ silence before kickoff .
“ We took a knee today to protest racial injustice , police brutality and systemic racism against Black people and people of color in America .
We love our country and we have taken this opportunity to hold it to a higher standard .
It is our duty to demand that the liberties and freedoms this nation was founded upon are extended to everyone , ” the Thorns and Courage said in a joint statement released before the game .
The league said Friday that it would play the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and that it would support the players in whatever they chose to do .
The NWSL is the first professional team sport in the United States to return amid the coronavirus outbreak .
The monthlong Challenge Cup opened Saturday with a pair of games played without fans at Zions Bank Stadium in Herriman , Utah .
“ Today , hopefully , it was a powerful statement , ” Courage midfielder Sam Mewis said .
“ It was an emotional time and I hope that both teams ’ message comes through clearly.
” Thorns @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( players ’ association ) has been about collaborating with teams on what we can do to maintain and sustain the conversation around racial injustice in this country .
“ We made a strong statement and we wanted to kind of maintain that momentum that has been happening and to show official commitment to the cause , ” she added .
Megan Rapinoe , who plays for OL Reign but opted out of the Challenge Cup , was criticized when she knelt at an NWSL game and a pair of U.S. national team @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wanted to express solidarity with former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick , who took a knee during the anthem to bring attention to racial inequality .
In response , U.S. Soccer adopted a rule that required players to stand .
But that rule was repealed earlier this month amid nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd and racial inequity .
Rapinoe voiced her support for the NWSL players Saturday on social media : “ You love to see these women using their voice , demanding better for America , and for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ I think we want to keep this momentum and keep the attention on the Black Lives Matter movement throughout this tournament , ” she said .

Players for the Portland Thorns, left, and the North Carolina Courage kneel during the national anthem before the start of their NWSL Challenge Cup soccer match at Zions Bank Stadium Saturday in Herriman, Utah. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer) ASSOCIATED PRESS
Players for the Portland Thorns and the North Carolina Courage knelt during the national anthem Saturday when the National Women’s Soccer League opened the Challenge Cup tournament in Utah.
The players and coaches wore Black Lives Matter T-shirts in warmups before the game, which was nationally televised on CBS. The players also knelt during a moment of silence before kickoff.
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“We took a knee today to protest racial injustice, police brutality and systemic racism against Black people and people of color in America. We love our country and we have taken this opportunity to hold it to a higher standard. It is our duty to demand that the liberties and freedoms this nation was founded upon are extended to everyone,” the Thorns and Courage said in a joint statement released before the game.
The league said Friday that it would play the national anthem before the Challenge Cup games and that it would support the players in whatever they chose to do.
The NWSL is the first professional team sport in the United States to return amid the coronavirus outbreak. The monthlong Challenge Cup opened Saturday with a pair of games played without fans at Zions Bank Stadium in Herriman, Utah.
The Courage defeated the Thorns 2-1 in Saturday’s opening match. The Chicago Red Stars play the Washington Spirit in the late game.
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“Today, hopefully, it was a powerful statement,” Courage midfielder Sam Mewis said. “It was an emotional time and I hope that both teams’ message comes through clearly.”
Thorns defender Becky Sauerbrunn said: ``The (players’ association) has been about collaborating with teams on what we can do to maintain and sustain the conversation around racial injustice in this country.
“We made a strong statement and we wanted to kind of maintain that momentum that has been happening and to show official commitment to the cause,” she added.
Megan Rapinoe, who plays for OL Reign but opted out of the Challenge Cup, was criticized when she knelt at an NWSL game and a pair of U.S. national team games in 2016. She said she wanted to express solidarity with former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who took a knee during the anthem to bring attention to racial inequality.
In response, U.S. Soccer adopted a rule that required players to stand. But that rule was repealed earlier this month amid nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd and racial inequity.
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Rapinoe voiced her support for the NWSL players Saturday on social media: “You love to see these women using their voice, demanding better for America, and for black people and people of color.”
Mewis said the teams plan to keep calling attention to racial injustice.
“I think we want to keep this momentum and keep the attention on the Black Lives Matter movement throughout this tournament,” she said.
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thehuffingtonpost--2020-06-27--Princeton To Drop Woodrow Wilson's Name From Public Policy School

June 27 ( Reuters ) - Princeton University is renaming its public policy school and Wilson College after concluding that U.S. President Woodrow Wilson ’ s racist thinking and policies “ make him an inappropriate namesake.
” Announcing the move on Saturday , Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber said it related to the deaths of George Floyd , Breonna Taylor , Ahmaud Arbery and Rayshard Brooks , Black Americans who died at the hands of police in recent months .
The board ’ s Friday vote to rename the School of Public andInternational Affairs and Wilson College follows a wave @ @ @ @ @ @ @ around the world against racial injustice that were prompted by the deaths .
It contrasted with a 2016 decision to keep the schools ’ names intact after considering a change following student protests in November 2015 .
Eisgruber said Wilson ’ s “ racism was significant and consequential even by the standards of his own time , ” citing his segregation of the federal civil service after it had been racially integrated for decades .
Wilson was the university ’ s president before becoming governor of New Jersey , and then president of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
His policies make him an “ especially inappropriate namesake for a public policy school , ” as it suggests he is a model for students at the school , which “ must stand firmly against racism in all its forms , ” Eisgruber said .
Wilson College will instead be known as First College , accelerating the retirement of the name by two years .
Princeton had already planned to close the college and drop its name when it opens two new residential colleges that are being built .
However , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ -The Woodrow Wilson Award - will keep its name as it was the result of a gift , which gives the university a legal obligation to name the prize for Wilson , Princeton ’ s board said .

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June 27 (Reuters) - Princeton University is renaming its public policy school and Wilson College after concluding that U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s racist thinking and policies “make him an inappropriate namesake.”
Announcing the move on Saturday, Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber said it related to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and Rayshard Brooks, Black Americans who died at the hands of police in recent months.
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The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in Princeton, N.J. AP Photo/Mel Evans
The board’s Friday vote to rename the School of Public andInternational Affairs and Wilson College follows a wave of protests in the United States and around the world against racial injustice that were prompted by the deaths.
It contrasted with a 2016 decision to keep the schools’ names intact after considering a change following student protests in November 2015.
Eisgruber said Wilson’s “racism was significant and consequential even by the standards of his own time,” citing his segregation of the federal civil service after it had been racially integrated for decades.
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Woodrow Wilson, the 28th president of the United States. ASSOCIATED PRESS
The policy school will be renamed The Princeton School ofPublic and International Affairs.
Wilson was the university’s president before becoming governor of New Jersey, and then president of the United States from 1913 to 1921.
His policies make him an “especially inappropriate namesake for a public policy school,” as it suggests he is a model for students at the school, which “must stand firmly against racism in all its forms,” Eisgruber said.
Wilson College will instead be known as First College, accelerating the retirement of the name by two years. Princeton had already planned to close the college and drop its name when it opens two new residential colleges that are being built.


thehuffingtonpost--2020-06-27--Milton Glaser, Designer Of 'I Love NY' Logo, Dies At 91

In posters , logos , advertisements and book covers , Glaser ’ s ideas captured the spirit of the 1960s with a few simple colors and shapes .
He was the designer on the team that founded New York magazine with Clay Felker in the late ’ 60s .
“ Around our office , of course , he will forever be one of the small team of men and women that , in the late sixties , yanked New York out of the newspaper morgue and turned it into a great American magazine , ” the magazine ’ s obituary @ @ @ @ @ @ @ everywhere were sprouting and aping its simple , witty design style .
When publishing titan Rupert Murdoch forced Felker and Glaser out of New York magazine in a hostile takeover in 1977 , the staff walked out in solidarity with their departing editors , leaving an incomplete issue three days before it was due on newsstands .
His pictorial sense was so profound , and his designs so influential , that his works in later years were preserved by collectors and studied as fine art .
“ What I ’ m suggesting is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ everything work , ” Glaser said in an Associated Press interview in 2000 , when the Philadelphia Museum of Art hosted an exhibit on his career .
“ When it ’ s really extraordinary and moves it in a certain way , we call it great work .
We call it good when it accomplishes a task , and we call it bad when it misses a target.
” The bold “ I ( HEART ) NY ” logo — cleverly using typewriter-style letters as the typeface — was dreamed up as part @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to boost the state ’ s image when crime and budget troubles dominated the headlines .
Glaser did the design free of charge .
“ I woke up Wednesday morning and said , ‘ God , I have to do something to respond to this , ’ ” he told The New York Times .
“ When you have a heart attack , part of your heart dies .
When you recover , part of your heart is gone , but the people in your life become much more important , and there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of things.
” His 1966 illustration of Dylan , his face a simple black silhouette but his hair sprouting in a riot of colors in curvilinear fashion , put in graphic form the 1960s philosophy that letting your hair fly free was a way to free your mind .
( For him , though , it wasn ’ t a drug-inspired image : He said he borrowed from Marcel Duchamp and Islamic art . )
“ It was a new use of the poster — a giveaway that was supposed to encourage people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ told The New York Times in 2001 .
“ Then it took on a life of its own , showing up in films , magazines , whatever .
It did not die , as such forms of ephemera usually do.
” Among Glaser ’ s other noteworthy projects were cover illustrations Signet paperback editions of Shakespeare ; type designs such as Baby Teeth , first used on the Dylan poster , and Glaser Stencil ; and a poster for the Mostly Mozart Festival featuring a colorful Mozart sneezing .
His designs also inspired @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Angels in America ”

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NEW YORK (AP) — Milton Glaser, the groundbreaking graphic designer who adorned Bob Dylan’s silhouette with psychedelic hair and summed up the feelings for his native New York with “I (HEART) NY,” died Friday, his 91st birthday.
The cause was a stroke and Glaser had also had renal failure, his wife, Shirley Glaser, told The New York Times.
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Milton Glaser attends the IFPDA Fine Art Print Fair Opening Preview at The Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in 2017 in New York City. Paul Bruinooge via Getty Images
In posters, logos, advertisements and book covers, Glaser’s ideas captured the spirit of the 1960s with a few simple colors and shapes. He was the designer on the team that founded New York magazine with Clay Felker in the late ’60s.
“Around our office, of course, he will forever be one of the small team of men and women that, in the late sixties, yanked New York out of the newspaper morgue and turned it into a great American magazine,” the magazine’s obituary of Glaser said.
Soon city magazines everywhere were sprouting and aping its simple, witty design style. When publishing titan Rupert Murdoch forced Felker and Glaser out of New York magazine in a hostile takeover in 1977, the staff walked out in solidarity with their departing editors, leaving an incomplete issue three days before it was due on newsstands.
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“We have brought about — however small — a change in the visual habits of people,” he told The Washington Post in 1969. “Television conditions people to demand imagination.”
But he said he had to work to keep his style fresh.
“There’s an enormous pressure to repeat past successes. That’s a sure death.” Referring to a beloved ’60s design motif, he added that he couldn’t do another rainbow “if my life depended on it.”
His pictorial sense was so profound, and his designs so influential, that his works in later years were preserved by collectors and studied as fine art.
But he preferred not to use the term “art” at all.
“What I’m suggesting is we eliminate the term art and call everything work,” Glaser said in an Associated Press interview in 2000, when the Philadelphia Museum of Art hosted an exhibit on his career. “When it’s really extraordinary and moves it in a certain way, we call it great work. We call it good when it accomplishes a task, and we call it bad when it misses a target.”
The bold “I (HEART) NY” logo — cleverly using typewriter-style letters as the typeface — was dreamed up as part of an ad campaign begun in 1977 to boost the state’s image when crime and budget troubles dominated the headlines. Glaser did the design free of charge.
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Mugs with the "I ❤ NY" logo on sale at a souvenir shop. hristina Horsten/picture alliance via Getty Images
Nearly a quarter-century later, just days after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, he revised it, adding a dark scar to the red heart and “more than ever” to the message.
“I woke up Wednesday morning and said, ‘God, I have to do something to respond to this,’” he told The New York Times. “When you have a heart attack, part of your heart dies. When you recover, part of your heart is gone, but the people in your life become much more important, and there is a greater awareness of the value of things.”
Glaser actually had done design work for the restaurants at the destroyed World Trade Center complex.
His 1966 illustration of Dylan, his face a simple black silhouette but his hair sprouting in a riot of colors in curvilinear fashion, put in graphic form the 1960s philosophy that letting your hair fly free was a way to free your mind. (For him, though, it wasn’t a drug-inspired image: He said he borrowed from Marcel Duchamp and Islamic art.)
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The poster was inserted in Dylan’s “Greatest Hits” album, so it made its way into the hands of millions of fans.
“It was a new use of the poster — a giveaway that was supposed to encourage people to buy the album,” Glaser told The New York Times in 2001. “Then it took on a life of its own, showing up in films, magazines, whatever. It did not die, as such forms of ephemera usually do.”
President Barack Obama presents a 2009 National Medal of Arts to Milton Glaser, in the East Room of the White House in Washington. AP Photo/Charles Dharapak
Among Glaser’s other noteworthy projects were cover illustrations Signet paperback editions of Shakespeare; type designs such as Baby Teeth, first used on the Dylan poster, and Glaser Stencil; and a poster for the Mostly Mozart Festival featuring a colorful Mozart sneezing. His designs also inspired the playbill for Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America”
Glaser was born in 1929 in the Bronx and studied at New York’s Cooper Union art school and in Italy.
In 1954, he co-founded the innovative graphic design firm Push Pin Studios with Seymour Chwast and others. He stayed with it 20 years before founding his own firm.
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The Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum awarded him a lifetime achievement award in 2004. In 2009, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
“I just like to do everything, and I was always interested in seeing how far I could go in stretching the boundaries,” he said.
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thehuffingtonpost--2020-06-27--Stevie Wonder Slams Trump, Racism: 'Sad' When 'I Can See Better Than Your 20/20 Vision'

Stevie Wonder is leaving no doubt about what he thinks of Donald Trump ’ s racist rhetoric .
The music icon recalled just some of the president ’ s past offensive statements — from calling anti-racism protesters “ thugs ” to describing Haiti and African nations as “ shithole ” countries — in a powerful five-minute monologue , titled “ The Universe Is Watching Us , ” that he shared online Tuesday .
Wonder , who did not utter Trump ’ s name in the video , then warned : “ One day , you will show that you ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than words , and the appalling silence by some is deafening.
” Elsewhere in the video , Wonder , 70 , denounced systemic racism , police brutality and “ economic repression of Black and brown people , ” and urged people to “ move more than your mouth ― move your feet to the polls and use your hands to vote.
” “ Black lives do matter , and this is not another digital , viral trend , moment or hashtag , ” he added in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement @ @ @ @ @ @ @ beginning of an end of all this bull-tish .
It is our lives , literally .
Yes , all lives do matter .
But they only matter when Black lives matter too.
” “ You know , it ’ s a sad day when I can see better than your 20/20 vision , ’ ” said Wonder , who has been blind since infancy .
Ahead of the 2016 election , the musician said that voting for Trump to lead the country would be like asking him , Wonder , to drive a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ us , ” Wonder concluded in Tuesday ’ s video .
“ Forget about a hundred , a thousand years from now .
What will we have done by this time next year ?
I ’ m talking about you .
I ’ m talking about me .
I ’ m talking about every-single-body .
Let ’ s do something .
Let ’ s make a difference .
”

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Stevie Wonder is leaving no doubt about what he thinks of Donald Trump’s racist rhetoric.
The music icon recalled just some of the president’s past offensive statements — from calling anti-racism protesters “thugs” to describing Haiti and African nations as “shithole” countries — in a powerful five-minute monologue, titled “The Universe Is Watching Us,” that he shared online Tuesday.
Wonder, who did not utter Trump’s name in the video, then warned: “One day, you will show that you’re sorry. Because action speaks louder than words, and the appalling silence by some is deafening.”
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Elsewhere in the video, Wonder, 70, denounced systemic racism, police brutality and “economic repression of Black and brown people,” and urged people to “move more than your mouth ― move your feet to the polls and use your hands to vote.”
“Black lives do matter, and this is not another digital, viral trend, moment or hashtag,” he added in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. “It has to be the beginning of an end of all this bull-tish. It is our lives, literally. Yes, all lives do matter. But they only matter when Black lives matter too.”
“You know, it’s a sad day when I can see better than your 20/20 vision,’” said Wonder, who has been blind since infancy. Ahead of the 2016 election, the musician said that voting for Trump to lead the country would be like asking him, Wonder, to drive a car.
“The universe is watching us,” Wonder concluded in Tuesday’s video. “Forget about a hundred, a thousand years from now. What will we have done by this time next year? I’m talking about you. I’m talking about me. I’m talking about every-single-body. Let’s do something. Let’s make a difference.”
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Check out the full video here: