Latest news with #AlexBaumhardt
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Resignation of Crater Lake head leaves Oregon congressional delegation concerned
Crater Lake on a hazy afternoon Aug 4, 2021, caused by wildfires in southern Oregon. (Photo by Alex Baumhardt / Oregon Capital Chronicle) While Democratic members of Oregon's congressional delegation expressed alarm at the sudden resignation of the leader of the state's only national park, the Republican who has the park in his district declined to take a position Friday. Kevin Heatley, the new superintendent of Crater Lake National Park, resigned from his post May 30 over staffing concerns after just five months on the job. Heatley, who had previously worked at the Bureau of Land Management, told Oregon Public Broadcasting, KGW, The Washington Post and several other news organizations that staffing was already lean at Crater Lake, and layoffs of probationary employees President Donald Trump ordered, followed by hiring freezes, mandates to leave vacant positions unfilled and new federal incentives from the Office of Personnel Management and the office known as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to resign or retire were making it worse. Oregon's congressional delegation met the news with differing levels of concern. U.S. Rep. Maxine Dexter, representing Oregon's 3rd Congressional District, wrote Wednesday to Doug Burgum, secretary of the Department of the Interior, demanding to know if he or the agency had undertaken any analysis of what staffing levels were like there or how bad it had gotten. Dexter is also a member of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. On X, formerly known as Twitter, Oregon's U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat, said it is clear to him that Trump is 'hellbent on destroying natural treasures like Crater Lake.' U.S. Rep. Cliff Bentz, who represents Oregon's 2nd District —his district includes southern Oregon's Crater Lake — said on the phone Friday he'd 'look into it.' 'The person's (Heatley) concern may be well founded. It may not. Until I know the facts better, I'm not going to take a position on it, but now that you've raised an issue, we'll look into it,' he said. The national park in southern Oregon, famous for its vibrant and translucent volcanic lake that is among the deepest in the world, typically sees about half-a-million visitors each year. But this summer, 60 to 65 seasonal positions will need to be filled, Heatley told journalists in several reports, and just eight ranger positions have so far been filled to keep visitors in the 286-square-mile park safe. 'I mean, the train is still running on the tracks, but it's not heading in the right direction,' Heatley told OPB on June 2. 'I cannot, in good conscience, manage an operation that I know is moving in the wrong direction.' Spokespeople for Crater Lake did not respond to Capital Chronicle requests for staffing and hiring data. The federal jobs portal USA Jobs does not list any current vacancies at Crater Lake. The Kansas-based company running Crater Lake's lodging, concessions, retail and boating operations had 18 vacant positions listed on its site as of June 5. The National Parks Conservation Association, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit conservation group, called the staffing issues at the 63 National Parks a 'full-blown staffing crisis.' They report that the Department of the Interior's own workforce database shows that as of May 13, the Park Service had just over 18,000 employees across all parks, a more than 16% drop from 2023, the previous fiscal year — a decrease equal to that of the previous ten years combined. The association said the recent sharp drop was driven by Trump-incentivized buyouts, early retirements, deferred resignations and leaving vacancies unfilled. Interior Department data also shows 39% of seasonal and temporary staff at the national parks have been hired so far — about 3,300 employees. That's less than half the number of seasonal employees Park Service officials said they'd hire in a February memo. In her letter to Burgum, Dexter called Heatley's resignation a 'flashing red warning sign that something is very wrong,' in a news release Wednesday. This article was first published by the Oregon Capital Chronicle, part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Julia Shumway for questions: info@
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Resignation of Crater Lake head leaves Oregon congressional delegation concerned, clueless
Crater Lake on a hazy afternoon Aug 4, 2021, caused by wildfires in southern Oregon. (Alex Baumhardt / Oregon Capital Chronicle) While Democratic members of Oregon's congressional delegation expressed alarm at the sudden resignation of the leader of the state's only national park, the Republican who has the park in his district declined to take a position Friday. Kevin Heatley, the new superintendent of Crater Lake National Park, resigned from his post May 30 over staffing concerns after just five months on the job. Heatley, who had previously worked at the Bureau of Land Management, told Oregon Public Broadcasting, KGW, The Washington Post and several other news organizations that staffing was already lean at Crater Lake, and layoffs of probationary employees President Donald Trump ordered, followed by hiring freezes, mandates to leave vacant positions unfilled and new federal incentives from the Office of Personnel Management and the office known as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to resign or retire were making it worse. Oregon's congressional delegation met the news with differing levels of concern. U.S. Rep. Maxine Dexter, representing Oregon's 3rd Congressional District, wrote Wednesday to Doug Burgum, secretary of the Department of the Interior, demanding to know if he or the agency had undertaken any analysis of what staffing levels were like there or how bad it had gotten. Dexter is also a member of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. On X, formerly known as Twitter, Oregon's U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat, said it is clear to him that Trump is 'hellbent on destroying natural treasures like Crater Lake.' U.S. Rep. Cliff Bentz, who represents Oregon's 2nd District —his district includes southern Oregon's Crater Lake — said on the phone Friday he'd 'look into it.' 'The person's (Heatley) concern may be well founded. It may not. Until I know the facts better, I'm not going to take a position on it, but now that you've raised an issue, we'll look into it,' he said. The national park in southern Oregon, famous for its vibrant and translucent volcanic lake that is among the deepest in the world, typically sees about half-a-million visitors each year. But this summer, 60 to 65 seasonal positions will need to be filled, Heatley told journalists in several reports, and just eight ranger positions have so far been filled to keep visitors in the 286-square-mile park safe. 'I mean, the train is still running on the tracks, but it's not heading in the right direction,' Heatley told OPB on June 2. 'I cannot, in good conscience, manage an operation that I know is moving in the wrong direction.' Spokespeople for Crater Lake did not respond to Capital Chronicle requests for staffing and hiring data. The federal jobs portal USA Jobs does not list any current vacancies at Crater Lake. The Kansas-based company running Crater Lake's lodging, concessions, retail and boating operations had 18 vacant positions listed on its site as of June 5. The National Parks Conservation Association, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit conservation group, called the staffing issues at the 63 National Parks a 'full-blown staffing crisis.' They report that the Department of the Interior's own workforce database shows that as of May 13, the Park Service had just over 18,000 employees across all parks, a more than 16% drop from 2023, the previous fiscal year — a decrease equal to that of the previous ten years combined. The association said the recent sharp drop was driven by Trump-incentivized buyouts, early retirements, deferred resignations and leaving vacancies unfilled. Interior Department data also shows 39% of seasonal and temporary staff at the national parks have been hired so far — about 3,300 employees. That's less than half the number of seasonal employees Park Service officials said they'd hire in a February memo. In her letter to Burgum, Dexter called Heatley's resignation a 'flashing red warning sign that something is very wrong,' in a news release Wednesday. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Oregon workers could soon claim strike payments under bill passed by House
Hundreds of educators, parents and students joined a rally Nov. 1. 2023 at Roosevelt High School in north Portland. A new bill would extend unemployment benefits to them during work stoppages. (Alex Baumhardt/Oregon Capital Chronicle) Oregon could soon become the first state in the nation to extend unemployment benefits to striking workers. House lawmakers passed Senate Bill 916 Wednesday in a 33-23 vote along party lines with one dissenting Democrat, a decision that followed an hours-long debate about the bill's impact on schools, health care, and private businesses. The bill already cleared the Senate in May in a 16-12 vote, but will need to go back to that chamber before the month's end for a re-vote to clear further amendments. The legislation would allow striking workers — including most public employees — to collect unemployment benefits after their first two weeks of striking and up until the eight week of a strike, pending the financial stability of the state's unemployment fund. Several other states, including Washington, New Jersey, and New York, extend unemployment benefits and payments to striking private sector workers, but not to public employees. If unemployment funding is available, striking workers could collect benefits for up to 26 weeks. Payments range from $196 to a maximum of $836 weekly, according to a 2024 policy from the Oregon Employment Department. After the House voted down a scaled-back proposal by Republicans Wednesday morning, lawmakers debated the extent to which Senate Bill 916 would lengthen or shorten strikes, and the potential strain it could impose on schools and private business. 'SB 916 won't encourage strikes — it will shorten them,' state Rep. Travis Nelson, D-Portland, wrote in an emailed statement Wednesday. 'It will bring employers to the table faster, and let workers stand up without having to worry that their families will starve should they choose to exercise their right to strike. Fundamentally, this legislation is about dignity and fairness for workers.' Republicans, led by state Rep. Lucetta Elmer, R-McMinnville, sought to derail the proposal with their own measure that also would've capped benefits to six weeks of payments after the first two weeks of a strike. 'We can have the conversation about making sure that employees are paid well and they are protected and their voices heard,' Elmer said. 'This bill isn't the way — this is too much and too far.' Prior to the vote, opposition to the measure was piling up in testimony from school board leaders and business groups concerned the bill could allow strikes to drag on and put a wrench in day-to-day operations. Leaders of teacher unions and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, a statewide coalition of unions that represents over 300,000 workers, have testified in support of the bill, as have nurses, teachers and state workers. 'Regardless of income level or industry, Oregon workers all want the same things — to work hard, support themselves, and build a better life,' the Oregon AFL-CIO said in a social media post prior to the vote. 'Senate Bill 916 is an opportunity for our state to support working class Oregonians by strengthening their right to strike through expanding unemployment benefit access.' The Oregon Employment Department told the Legislature in April that the bill wouldn't result in any changes to unemployment taxes paid by employers. The bill was amended in the House Committee on Labor and Workplace Standards in May to allow school districts to deduct the cost of benefits from backpay some teachers receive after a strike has ended, under union contracts. Multiple Democrats reiterated their argument following the vote that the bill would not raise costs for businesses and schools. 'I also firmly believe that this policy will help our businesses, education and healthcare communities by bringing these strikes to a close sooner and with greater certainty,' said state Rep. Dacia Grayber, D-Portland, in closing the discussion on the House floor. If the bill clears its revote in the Senate, it will head to Gov. Tina Kotek's desk for final consideration. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Yahoo
6 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Oregon Capital Chronicle wins three awards in multi-state northwest journalism contest
Senior reporter Alex Baumhardt smiles Monday, June 2, in front of some of her past awards. Baumhardt will soon be able to add more hardware to her office space after winning three awards in the annual five-state Northwest Excellence in Journalism contest. (Julia Shumway/Oregon Capital Chronicle) Oregon Capital Chronicle senior reporter Alex Baumhardt swept the investigative category of the 2024 Northwest Excellence in Journalism contest. The Capital Chronicle and Baumhardt won three total awards in the contest, which covered the best journalism of 2024 in Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, Montana and Washington. The Greater Oregon chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, which co-runs the contest with the Western Washington chapter, announced winners Tuesday. Baumhardt took first place in investigative reporting for small newsrooms with her January 2024 report 'Timber industry tied to proposal shifting wildfire protection costs from landowners to public.' For that article, Baumhardt drew on public records and interviews to detail the extensive role timber companies played in an ultimately unsuccessful proposal from then-state Sen. Elizabeth Steiner, now Oregon's treasurer, that would have shifted costs for fighting fires from the timber industry to all Oregon property owners. She took second place in the investigative reporting category with 'Behind schedule, over budget, state-backed rail projects costing $70 million sit idle,' also published in January 2024. In that article, she spelled out how lawmakers spent tens of millions on two rail shipping centers that were intended to reduce truck emissions Baumhardt also placed second in the feature (hard news) category for her February 2024 article 'Oregon homeowners face soaring premiums, few property insurance options over wildfires.' She chronicled how homeowners in central, southern and eastern Oregon have seen their home insurance costs skyrocket or be canceled altogether since the 2020 Labor Day fires. The judge for that category praised the article as 'a very solid, timely look at the cost of securing homeowners insurance in a world beset by fires, risks and ever-higher premiums. It explores a cautionary tale for people in and beyond Oregon.' Kelcie Moseley-Morris, a national States Newsroom reproductive rights reporter whose work often appears in the Capital Chronicle, also placed second in health reporting for her series of articles on Idaho's emergency abortion care lawsuits. The judge for that category wrote that Moseley-Morris took 'a legally complex situation and explains the critical consequences for panicked pregnant patients and their doctors juggling medical and legal mandates,' bringing a national debate home to the Northwest. The Capital Chronicle has won awards in the highly competitive multi-state contest every year since launching in October 2021. Find all of our past awards here. The Capital Chronicle depends entirely on donations. If you appreciate this kind of award-winning work that shows how policies impact people's lives, please consider making a donation. Note: Capital Chronicle editor Julia Shumway serves as treasurer of the Oregon SPJ board. The board trades award entries with other states, and no Oregon journalists were involved in judging this contest.
Yahoo
02-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
ACLU, Decoding Dyslexia join calls for state literacy grants to target highest needs schools
A student in the North Powder School District gets tutored in reading Feb. 20, 2023. (Alex Baumhardt/Oregon Capital Chronicle) Literacy and civil rights advocates are calling on Oregon legislators to add targeted investment and accountability targets to Gov. Tina Kotek's bedrock literacy initiative or risk wasting it. House Bill 3040 would re-up funding for the Early Literacy Success Initiative first passed in 2023, providing schools with an additional $100 million to spend on improving reading and writing outcomes through 2027. It's currently in the Joint Ways and Means Committee, where legislators will negotiate funding and rules attached to the bill. The Oregon ACLU, the Oregon chapter of the national nonprofit Decoding Dyslexia, the nonprofit advocacy group Oregon Kids Read and several other groups in late May requested the co-chairs of the Joint Committee on Ways and Means require at least $17 million of that go toward 42 of the state's 'most neglected' schools. In the first two years of the Early Literacy Success Initiative, more than 250 schools received a literacy grant. 'Oregon risks spending $90 million or more without meaningful progress on closing the literacy achievement gap,' group officials wrote in a news release. The 42 schools advocates want to receive targeted funding have the highest percentage of third through fifth graders not reading at grade level since at least 2018. They include César Chávez K-8 School in Portland and Washington Elementary School in Salem, which also have a higher than average percentage of students who are Black, Hispanic or Latino, Indigenous, rural or experiencing poverty. The groups also asked that of the $17 million to be set aside, legislators should require that $4 million is spent on training more than 400 teachers at those 42 schools in the 'science of reading,' and that the remaining $13 million go toward tutoring more than 5,000 of the highest needs students in those schools. The term 'science of reading' is used to describe the large body of cognitive and neurological science showing how the brain learns to read. Since the 1960s, hundreds of studies have been conducted to find the most effective ways to teach kids to read. Evidence shows that the human brain does not learn to read or write naturally but relies on explicit instruction in a specific set of skills. Over the past 25 years, nearly two in five Oregon fourth graders and one in five eighth graders have scored 'below basic' on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the nation's report card. That means they struggle to read and understand simple words. The nearly 10,000 elementary school teachers in Oregon learned different methods for teaching reading depending on where they went to college. Many colleges are failing to prepare teachers to teach reading, according to a recent analysis by the National Council on Teacher Quality. Research has found that teacher quality is the most important, in-school factor when it comes to student achievement. Reporting from the Oregon Capital Chronicle found most elementary teachers-in-training at colleges and universities in the state take only one or two courses on reading instruction, and are more immersed in theory than in linguistics and the rules of written language. Some even learned flawed methods as part of an approach to teaching reading called 'balanced literacy,' which can include teaching students to guess at unknown words, to memorize words and to use pictures to decode a word. House Bill 3040 as written offers a few updates to the Early Literacy Success Initiative, including language that will allow schools to spend the grants on training classroom assistants, not just teachers and administrators. It also would add the requirement that any grant money spent on K-5 reading curriculum has to be spent on curriculum that has been approved by the State Board of Education and create a regional network of literacy experts housed in the Oregon Department of Education to support school and district literacy specialists and help with coaching. In their request to the Joint Ways and Means Committee, the literacy and civil rights advocates asked that language in the bill currently prioritizing grant money to 'schools that have literacy proficiency rates that have not recovered to pre-pandemic levels,' be changed to, 'schools with the lowest rates of proficiency in literacy.' They also want the bill to mandate the Oregon Department of Education collect and report more data on what schools are doing with the grant money, including how many hours of tutoring students are offered, and details about the type and number of hours of professional development in reading instruction that teachers take, and who all is participating in the professional development. They've also asked that the Legislature require the Oregon Department of Education to monitor the efficacy of the Early Success Initiative by tracking and reporting regularly to legislators progress among 3rd graders at schools with the bottom 20% of reading proficiency scores. The latest request to the Joint Ways and Means committee follows an open letter Oregon Kids Read and more than 100 educators sent to the Legislature in March, asking that lawmakers require a portion of every literacy grant to go towards teacher training in the science of reading, ensuring all K-3 teachers and administrators in the state have received training by the fall of 2027. 'Literacy is a civil right,' Angela Uherbelau, founder of Oregon Kids Read, said in a news release. 'Families are calling on Ways and Means to use its funding oversight to prioritize students and schools that struggle the most.' SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
