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USA Today
4 hours ago
- Sport
- USA Today
First look at Cooper Kupp in a Seahawks uniform
First look at Cooper Kupp in a Seahawks uniform As a graduate of Eastern Washington University who got to see Cooper Kupp play college football at the same time I was a student in Cheney, I will fully admit my bias is on display when I say Kupp is arguably the most exciting acquisition the Seattle Seahawks made in free agency. However, I do not believe I am alone when it comes to this level of excitement. It does not matter if you're an Eagle, a Husky, a Cougar or Wildcat, seeing one of the greatest football players the state of Washington return "home" to play for Seattle is something 12's across the Pacific Northwest can truly rejoice with. Week 1 of the regular season is still several months away, but fans got their first glimpse of Kupp in a Seahawks uniform during Seattle's media day. I must say, I agree with the team's official Twitter account by stating the College Navy and Action Green of the Seahawks' home uniform looks great on the MVP of Super Bowl LVI. Kupp signed a three-year deal this offseason worth up to $45 million dollars. Health and durability have become considerable concerns for the former receiving Triple Crown winner, but when he's on the field he is still as productive as ever. In 12 games for the Rams in 2024, Kupp still managed to haul in 67 receptions for 710 yards and six touchdowns. If he can find a way to replicating that kind of output in 2025 it will be a tremendous success for Seattle. The Seahawks will begin the 2025 campaign at home against the San Francisco 49ers in Seattle.
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Despite federal government targeting DEI programs, cultural graduations continue to empower, honor Spokane grads
May 19—Tere Graham attended the African American Graduation Ceremony more than a decade ago after graduating from Eastern Washington University. Although she previously lived in Spokane and attended Lewis and Clark High School, it was during this ceremony that she first felt connected to the Spokane community. "I just saw a sea of folks who look like my aunts and uncles, and I said, 'This is pretty cool.' I never experienced that before," said Graham, program manager for the Unity Multicultural Education Center at Gonzaga University and volunteer for the African American Graduation. For decades, cultural and identity-based groups — including African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Latinos and the LGBTQ+ community — have hosted graduation celebrations honoring students at all levels, from middle school to college. Despite ongoing political threats to diversity, equity and inclusion programs organizers of these events in Spokane emphasize that the ceremonies are not about politics; they're about fostering a sense of belonging and worth for young people. "When I crossed that stage as a college graduate, they were there and they're still here. So, I love to offer that to our generation," Graham said. Diversity, equity and inclusion DEI initiatives can be traced back to the Civil Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination in employment. Shortly after, in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson established an equal opportunity policy, mandating affirmative action for federal contractors. However, when President Donald Trump returned to office earlier this year, he rescinded DEI-related policies during his first week. "We have ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government, and, indeed, the private sector and our military," Trump said during a joint session of Congress earlier this year. "And our country will be woke no longer." In February, a letter from the U.S. Department of Education referenced "segregation by race in graduation ceremonies" would warrant withholding federal funds to schools if schools continue to offer them, though a federal court in April prevented the department from acting on the contents in the letter. Sarah Wixson, an attorney with Stokes Lawrence in Yakima, said one problem with the current wave of attacks on DEI is that the term means different things to different people. Under Trump's presidency, she said, many began to see it as discriminatory rather than inclusive. "People view DEI as being discrimination, and I don't think that's a correct way of looking at it, but that's where we are now and where we weren't two years ago," Wixson said. She said she works with various employers who have since abandoned their DEI programs out of fear of being targeted or defunded. Still, she admires the organizations that continue to hold space for students to celebrate their culture and identity. "I think everybody else's culture is just as important. It's a huge point of celebration," Wixson said. "Not everybody celebrates the same way." Frances Mortel, the cultural programs manager for Asians for Collective Liberation Spokane, also said within the past few years that the term "DEI" has become twisted. The Asian American Graduation Ceremony was a reminder to her that DEI isn't a specific brand. "As part of Asian American Heritage Month, we had guest speaker Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and really inspiring activist," Mortel said. "It was really inspiring being reminded after both of those talks that our work is actually beyond just what DEI has become." The fourth annual Asian American Graduation, held in May, was organized by ACL Spokane in partnership with the Empire Health Foundation. She said they had about 40 grads attend the celebration. Fernanda Mazcot, executive director of Nuestras Raíces Centro Comunitario, said that, with increasing attacks on DEI and the Latino community, they had to rethink safety plans for this year's 30th annual Latino Graduation Ceremony. Canceling, however, never crossed their minds. "We know this is a very significant event for young scholars and graduates, especially first-generation college students, to share this event with their families, but we did partner with the Peace and Justice Action League here in Spokane," Mazcot said. "They are just kind of walking around campus, just making sure everything's good, and folks are feeling safe." For Graham, the main question around the African American graduation wasn't a matter of "if" there would be a ceremony but "when." "When we see these students walk across this stage, we're one inch closer to not having to talk about diversity, equity and inclusion, not having to talk about who's feeling micro aggressions in their classrooms," Graham said. During the ceremony, Graham said they gave out an African kente stole, a symbolism of interconnectedness to their heritage and its history that is deeply connected to Africa's rich weaving traditions, which dates as long ago as 3000 B.C. The more than 30 graduates at the 16th annual Lavender Graduation hosted by Eastern Washington University's Eagle Pride Center were similarly adorned with rainbow stoles to represent their identity or ally-ship with the LGBTQ+ community. At the intimate ceremony on EWU's campus, many knew each other from their time at the school and in their pride center, where EWU graduate Zoe Swenson worked for about four years as a peer adviser. Even for those outside EWU reveled in the sense of "found family," like North Central High School graduate Anabell Sweet. "We have people who come into the Pride Center or to even these events, and it's because their families don't support them, so they're looking for kind of a family within the community," Swenson said. Sweet is bound for Washington State University to study early childhood education. For her, the graduation was just as much a time to feel celebrated as it was to see others who walked in her shoes earn their degrees — those who can relate to being called slurs or not being accepted by parts of their family. "I'm excited to see and celebrate all these other people who have gone through the same struggles, more struggles than I have," Sweet said. "To just have that space to be like, 'You did it. Despite everything, you did the dang thing.' " Organizers of the annual Spokane Native American Community Graduation sang a similar tune of its importance. Evanlene Melting Tallow has sat on the graduation's committee for 24 of the 29 years it has existed, working at EWU as a project coordinator and recruiter. Not only is the event significant to honor and adorn graduates with a Pendleton stole, but encourage the young minds watching. "We definitely need to be able to show you know that these graduates look like them who are in the audience," Melting Tallow said. "These are the people who eventually are going to be doctors, who are going to be engineers or teachers or welders." It's a real point of pride for her to drape the traditional Pendleton stole over the shoulders of a student she once saw in the audience. Creating a cycle of prosperity for her community is personal to her, the first in her family to graduate college. "I always said, 'I will not be the last,' " she said, supporting her point by rattling off numerous academically decorated family members, including her two kids who walked in the Spokane Native American Community Graduation. "When you start a movement, and we are starting a movement, it always has rippling effects," she said. The ceremony, hosted at Gonzaga, has several cultural elements otherwise absent from traditional school-based affairs, including an Indigenous drum group. This year, the committee also decided to honor a late teenager who would have walked with her class but died this year in a car accident. Her family received a Pendleton sash and a friend held a photo of her as she walked across the stage to recognize her efforts towards graduating. That personal touch is part of the significance of these ceremonies to supplement whole-school graduations, said Melting Tallow, a citizen of both the Blackfeet Nation of Montana and Blood Tribe of Canada. "Our people have gone through a lot, but we're resilient. We will continue to have this celebration every year, because we want to show that we have students who are very productive in our communities, from different degrees and graduating from high school," Melting Tallow said. "We are here, we are resilient, and we are going to keep moving forward." The thought that cultural graduations have been targeted in the Trump administration's efforts against DEI shocked Kitara Johnson Jones, who owns and operates a DEI consulting agency and attended dozens of cultural graduations in her former role as multicultural director for Spokane Community College. "There's a rite of passage thing to happen, that's a cultural thing that you aren't going to be able to erase ... especially in communities where it doesn't often happen, it takes a whole village to get them there," Jones said. Jones is confident cultural graduations will persist in some fashion with or without the federal government's approval. The government hasn't historically been the provider of Indigenous powwows or celebrations at Black churches, she said, these came straight from the communities themselves. "You can't erase people and you can't erase history or heritage or a culture; you just can't," Jones said. 'Proving your worth' During the Hispanic/Latino Graduation Ceremony organized by Nuestras Raíces Centro Comunitario, Edmundo Aguilar, an assistant teaching professor at the University of Washington, said that graduating and being proud of their culture is important for students to move forward. "Today, you all are pushing back. You all are fighting back by proving your worth, despite all the barriers that you are facing and all that is happening," Aguilar said. Hispanic and Latino students from middle school all the way to college were honored with a serape stole, a brightly colored, woven stole used to represent Mexican cultural pride, heritage and identity. Among them was Angel Maldonado, a recent graduate of Gonzaga University. Maldonado said he majored in elementary education, following in his mom's footsteps to become a teacher. "My mom is the only one of her siblings to ever go to college. She's also the youngest and she's also a teacher, so I think it's really special for me, to not only to get an education, but to also become a teacher, kind of following in her footsteps," said Maldonado, who's from Brewster, Washington. "It just feels really nice and rewarding." For him, attending the Latino ceremony was a way to show that he and others aren't backing down, despite attacks on DEI and on the Latino community, especially under Trump's administration. "I mean, many cultures, but us as Mexican Americans, I think these kinds of fights fall onto our shoulders, and I think just being a part of this ceremony really shows we know what we're really about," Maldonado said. "Just keep looking forward. Follow your dreams." Elena Perry's work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.
Yahoo
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Third annual powwow held at Flett Middle School Saturday, open to the public
May 2—Flett Middle School will host the third annual Pauline Flett Powwow Saturday, a free public event hosted by the students and celebrating the culture and history of the region's native peoples. "We call it a learning powwow, in that we're trying to help our students learn how to put it on, market it, put it up and run it," said school Principal Matthew Henshaw. "Our overall purpose is allowing our Native students to see representation in the school of their own culture being celebrated, and helping our kids learn about Pauline's vision and her legacy." The middle school, opened in 2022, is named after the late Spokane tribal elder Pauline Flett, who co-wrote the first Spokane-English dictionary and is credited with playing an instrumental role in preserving the Spokane Tribe of Indians' Salish dialect. School leadership, wanting to honor the legacy of their namesake, started guiding their new students to host the event the first year it opened. "It gives our Native youth pride in who they are and where they come from," said Margo Hill, a Spokane tribal member and urban planning professor at Eastern Washington University who was among the community leaders who worked with Henshaw to launch the 2022 powwow. "It's just a beautiful opportunity to see what tribal communities are doing and that the kids can celebrate their culture," Hill added. The powwow will be held in the school gymnasium at 5020 West Wellesley Ave. and is open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. The event will consist of two repeating sessions, with grand entries at noon and 5 p.m. and a number of contests, including hand drum, red dress special, and a golden age category for dancers who are 50 years of age or older. Dinner will be held around 5 p.m. Henshaw estimated there were about 30 vendors this year that the middle schoolers would be helping set up their stands, selling custom artwork and jewelry, and more.
Yahoo
03-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
EWU graduates first class of nursing program
May 2—The first cohort of a new nursing program at Eastern Washington University flipped their tassels from the right to the left during a commencement ceremony Friday morning. The crowd in the Reese Court arena on the Cheney campus cheered and stomped the bleachers. "You are now an Eagle for life," Kelsey Hatch-Brecek, director of the alumni association, told the new graduates of the College of Health Science and Public Health. "Our alumni community is filled with entrepreneurs, innovators, leaders, artists, scientists, athletes and changemakers. And today, we get to add nurses to that list." The School of Nursing, which began in fall 2023, graduated 40 students with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree. Of those students, 37 are from in-state, most are from Eastern Washington and most have jobs lined up at local hospitals. Donna Bachand, nursing program administrator and department chair, believes the program will help address the state's nursing shortage. Washington ranks high among states facing a severe nursing shortage, according to the federal Health Resources and Services Administration, with an estimated shortfall of more than 13,000 registered nurses. The program based at EWU's Spokane campus is about a decade in the making. Bachand took the helm seven years ago and spent much of that working through regulations to build the program until it received funding from the Legislature in 2022. "The pandemic really highlighted the deep need the region has for nurses," Bachand said. The first class had 132 applications, including 80 EWU students who had done prerequisite coursework. "I don't know how to describe what it's like sitting in a room by yourself for years before hiring faculty and seeing your first student, but today is the culminating event," Bachand said. "My heart was beating on the front row, thinking please don't cry at the microphone. It's very emotional. It's just gratifying." Alexana Bueno is a first-generation college student from the Tri-Cities who will return there to work as an oncology nurse working with cancer patients at Kadlec Regional Medical Center, where she interned. Her path to graduation hasn't been easy. She moved from Washington to Mexico when she was only a few years old and returned when she was 17, speaking little English. She picked up the language during her last two years of high school. Compassion that nurses showed her when members of her family were dying inspired her to work in health care. Her father died when she was a child in Mexico. She couldn't see him when he was in the hospital, but the nurses talked to her about how he was doing. Then, after she returned to the United States, her brother had a stroke. "Again, nurses were there for me," Bueno said. "They took excellent care of him. He passed, but they were always there for me and my family." Bueno said support from EWU's College Assistance Migrant Program helped her navigate college life, especially as she commuted two-hours each way from the Tri-Cities until she found housing. "They helped me so much because my English was limited, they explained everything to me," Bueno said. The nursing program also was challenging because she had to learn medical terms in English, but her teachers and classmates supporter her through it. "I know it is going to be an adjustment, but I'm really excited to go back to my community and serve as a nurse there," Bueno said. She wrote "Borderless Dreams" in cursive on her graduation cap. "I'm very proud of all of our grads," Bachand said. "I'm very proud of the work my faculty have done to help them reach this milestone in their career paths. I can't wait to see what they do." EWU's nursing school will compliment other nursing programs in the area. Gonzaga University is graduating 76 bachelor of science in nursing graduates this spring along with 107 masters of science in nursing and 12 doctors of nursing practice, according to spokesman Dan Nailen. Washington State University is graduating about 245 undergraduate nurses and another 67 with advanced degrees across the Spokane, Tri-Cities, Yakima and Vancouver campuses, spokeswoman Gina Raebel said. James Hanlon's reporting for The Spokesman-Review is funded in part by Report for America and by members of the Spokane community. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.
Wall Street Journal
26-04-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
Trump's Campus Crackdown Reaches Far Beyond Ivy League Schools
President Trump's high-profile fights with universities have so far centered on the Ivy League. But the wider conservative effort to reshape America's campuses, largely under the banner of fighting antisemitism, extends to colleges from coast to coast and ones that aren't household names. At least 60 universities across the country, some of them state schools like Eastern Washington University and Ohio State, are under investigation by the Education Department for alleged antisemitism. The task force that's taken on Harvard and Columbia has publicly named eight other targets. And additional schools are being singled out by Republicans aligned with White House priorities.
