Latest news with #Leandro
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Leandro is a big deal so why won't the mainstream media acknowledge it?
Getty Images If you've been following this year's legislative session, you probably haven't heard anything about the biggest issue in the biggest part of the state budget. The scope of the story is massive, affecting the constitutional rights to educational opportunities for North Carolina's 1.5 million public school students. And the story is juicy, rife with mystery, lawlessness, and government corruption. The lack of coverage is strange. Newspaper readers are more likely to have read about efforts to ban cellphones from classrooms or to name 'Raise Up' as the state's official hip-hop song. If you haven't guessed yet, the big, strangely unmentionable issue is Leandro. Leandro is the 31-year-old lawsuit about the state's unwillingness to provide our public school students with the 'sound basic' education that they're guaranteed under our state constitution. Despite students' multiple victories in state courts, state leaders have yet to provide students with the quality schools and educational opportunities they are owed. From January 1 to May 1, the word 'Leandro' has shown up in just one news story that ran in the state's two largest newspapers serving Raleigh and Charlotte. The term has failed to appear in any news stories from the major newspapers serving Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Fayetteville, Wilmington, or Asheville. It's difficult to imagine an issue in state politics that is having a bigger impact on North Carolinians. There are currently 1.5 million children in our public schools who are having their constitutional rights violated. Millions more have had their rights violated since the case was originally filed in 1994. Every court that's weighed in on this question from 1997 to 2022, regardless of ideological makeup, has agreed that students' constitutional rights are being violated by the state. When the nation's leading nonpartisan education researchers completed a years' long study of North Carolina's education system in 2019, they reached the same conclusion, noting also that the state has been moving backwards. The General Assembly's strategy of pairing austerity budgets with unregulated, low-quality privatization schemes has been making things worse. Test scores have fallen, particularly for students of color and students from families with low incomes. Teacher vacancies are at record levels. The courts have tried to fix things. In 2020, they ordered the state to develop a detailed plan for the state to provide students with the types of schools promised under our state constitution. In November 2021, a Superior Court judge ordered the state to fully implement the Leandro Comprehensive Remedial Plan – a research-based blueprint for achieving constitutional compliance by the 2028 school year. The Leandro Plan makes several important steps to dramatically improve schools, including: Expanding NC Pre-K so more students from families with lower incomes can enter kindergarten ready to succeed, Investing in teacher training programs and improving teacher pay, training, and mentorships to address our record-high teacher vacancies, Staffing nurses, psychologists, counselors, and social workers at recommended levels to manage students' physical and mental health needs, and Dramatically increasing supports for disadvantaged students, students with disabilities, and English language learners. The Supreme Court reaffirmed the state's responsibility to fully fund the eight-year Plan in November 2022. That is where the story became particularly interesting. First, the mystery. Why did a Roy Cooper appointee try to kill Leandro? Per the Supreme Court's November 2022 court order, State Controller Nels Roseland was supposed to transfer money from state coffers to the schools for the first years of the Plan. He refused, citing 'unresolved' legal issues. The Supreme Court cited Roseland's motion in halting the transfer of funding and for re-hearing the case in February 2024. There's a juicy story in there for an enterprising investigative journalist. Until Roseland's appointment, Governor Cooper had seemingly been a staunch advocate for Leandro. His staff created the Leandro Plan. Each of his budgets recommended full funding of the Plan. Yet his nominee for State Controller fought against the Plan. Roseland's opposition was known prior to his nomination, having publicly indicated that he opposed Leandro and wouldn't transfer the funding owed to students. It remains a mystery why Cooper didn't pull Roseland's nomination or remove him from office for his actions harming students. While the Supreme Court halted the transfer of funds for years 1-3 of the Plan in early 2023, its order still requires the state to fund the Leandro Plan going forward. Rather than following the law and implementing the Leandro Plan, legislative leaders have simply ignored the court order. They don't dispute that students' rights are being violated. Nor have they put together an alternative plan to improve schools. They've simply said, 'you can't make us.' One would think that such wanton lawlessness would be a frequent subject of reporting from the capitol. If that's not juicy enough, there's also blatant corruption. That corruption has taken two forms. First, in early 2023, Senator Phil Berger and former Speaker of the House Tim Moore appealed to get the case back in front of the Supreme Court. Why did they want to do that? Well, that court now has a 5-2 Republican majority. One of those five justices is Senator Phil Berger's son, Phil Berger, Jr. Junior, along with four of his hyper-partisan colleagues agreed to rehear the Leandro case mere months after the November 2022 ruling. In agreeing to rehear the case just months after a decision, the high court ignored foundational legal concepts such as respect for precedent and the rule of law. The facts of the case hadn't changed. Only the partisan makeup of the court had changed, allowing Junior a second chance to rule on whether Daddy can continue to ignore students' constitutional rights. This collusive, nepotistic relationship between the judicial and legislative branches has removed a foundational element of our system of checks and balances The second form of corruption lies in how legislative leaders have spent the money that is supposed to be supporting public school students. They're spending over $920 million this year for vouchers that mostly subsidize wealthy families who have their kids in private schools. They've also passed a series of tax cuts disproportionately benefiting corporations and wealthy North Carolinians. It's no coincidence that these corporate and wealthy beneficiaries happen to be the same people who fund reelection campaigns. School children, alas, do not. Given the above, it remains baffling why the press continues to ignore Leandro. The Leandro Plan would have a far greater impact on student achievement than any of the 'big' issues being discussed this session such as cell phone bans or school calendar flexibility (which, incidentally, is part of the Leandro Plan, and was supposed to have been passed in 2021). The failure to fund the Plan is undoubtedly suppressing student achievement, particularly for historically underserved populations. Meanwhile the lawlessness and corruption mirror what we're seeing at the federal level from the Trump administration. It's a major deal that General Assembly leadership believes they can simply ignore the parts of the state constitution that they don't agree with or find inconvenient. That puts all of our basic rights as North Carolinians at risk. It's also a big deal that the Supreme Court is likely to tarnish its legitimacy and credibility to rubber stamp the legislature's absurd position. The decision from the re-heard case is expected any day now. If you're a journalist, please let me know, why aren't you covering this issue? Is it not a big deal that 1.5 million children are having their basic rights violated? Is it not a major scandal that the General Assembly has been openly violating a court order for the past 1,283 days? Are we not in the midst of a constitutional crisis when legislators argue that they can simply ignore the parts of the constitution they disagree with? If the answer to any of those questions is 'yes' then I implore you to start centering Leandro in your reporting.
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
NC lawmakers urged to fully fund Leandro plan after decades of inaction
Photo byFor the sixth year in a row, Rep. Julie von Haefen has filed a bill to fully fund the state's Leandro education plan, a landmark court-ordered initiative to provide every child in North Carolina with a sound basic education. And for the sixth year, the Democratic lawmaker says her bill has been ignored by the state's Republican legislative leadership. 'It is long, long past time for our legislature to do the right thing for North Carolina children,' von Haefen said. 'It's long past time for them to do the right thing for educators, our staff and our beloved public schools,' von Haefen told a crowd of education advocates gathered at a Wednesday Legislative Building press conference. The Leandro case dates back to 1994, when a group of five low-wealth, rural counties sued the state over insufficient school funding. The North Carolina Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that the state was violating students' constitutional right to a sound basic education, a decision that has been upheld four times since then. Yet more than three decades later, von Haefen said, 1.5 million students in the state continue to have their basic rights violated. She cited a report by the nonpartisan research group WestEd, which documented the 'continued and worsening violations' of the state constitution in North Carolina's school systems. 'Every day, I talk to families who aren't getting the services that their children need to thrive, and I talked to educators in both visiting schools and serving as a substitute teacher who don't have the resources and professional freedoms that they need to succeed,' von Haefen said. The court-ordered Leandro comprehensive remedial plan, developed by WestEd, outlines a detailed strategy to bring the state into compliance with the court's ruling. It calls for investments to provide, among other things, qualified and fairly compensated teachers, strong school leadership, adequate and equitable funding, and early childhood education. Frenchy Davis, CEO of the Foundation Builders Academy Childcare Development Center in Rocky Mount, said fully funding the Leandro plan would provide critical resources like smaller class sizes, better teacher training and modernized school facilities. 'Investing in the Leandro plan means investing in our children, our educators and our future,' Davis said. But for parents like Susan Book of Wake County, the state's failure to act has had real consequences for her son, who has autism and relies on a team of specialized educators and therapists to access his education. 'The state carries a primary responsibility to fund our schools, but has failed multiple times with each budget cycle,' said Book. 'Don't tell me not to worry about my son's future. Don't tell me everything will magically be okay. Our state sits in violation of its constitutional duty, and this General Assembly knows it. I have good reason to worry.' Jackie Perez-Albanil, a statewide organizer with Education Justice Alliance, said the state's inaction is part of a 'calculated attack on our public education' by lawmakers more interested in pursuing a partisan agenda than fulfilling their constitutional duty. 'Lawmakers have deliberately kicked the can down the road when it comes to funding our public schools,' said Perez-Albanil. 'They literally have a plan laid out for them on how to properly fund public schools, and have chosen to withhold funds so they can use the narrative that public schools are underperforming as an excuse to shut down public schools altogether.' In 2022, the state Supreme Court ordered the General Assembly to fund the Leandro plan, but it has thus far failed to do so. in 2024, the high court — by then featuring a much different composition than it had in 2022 (a 5-2 Republican majority rather than a 4-3 margin for Democrats) — heard pleas from GOP legislators to reverse the 2022 order. It has yet to issue a ruling.
Yahoo
31-01-2025
- Yahoo
Family to bury Phoenix man in Navajo Nation after hit-and-run death, investigation continues
The walk to a convenience store on the evening of Jan. 23 would be like every other time Leandro Antonio picked up his favorite beverage, Dr. Pepper, to take back to his north Phoenix home. But this time, a vehicle struck the disabled 43-year-old in the area of West Dunlap Avenue near North 19th Avenue and just a few houses from the home he shared with his older brother, Franklin Antonio, 48. After the vehicle fled without stopping to help an injured Leandro, who would die at the scene, his family is grappling with his loss. They are seeking answers in a case where there are seemingly few clues, along with the little means they have to return his remains to their Navajo homeland in New Mexico. "He wasn't just some stranger out in the streets. He had a loving family that loved him and they cared for him," Franklin Antonio told The Arizona Republic, adding the person who took Leandro's life must have felt the impact when the vehicle hit him. More than 20 years ago, Leandro Antonio was shot on the right side of his head when an armed assailant was robbing him. As a result, he could walk but had limited use of his limbs. His injuries led to seizures, which he took prescription drugs to prevent. The incident left him living off disability benefits that kept him without a car. Despite the challenges he faced, Leandro Antonio strived to contribute to his brother's home by completing housekeeping chores. Addressed as "Dro" by his family, he was a stalwart presence for Franklin's homeschooled 18-year-old son. "Heartbroken," Franklin Antonio said about his son's reaction to the loss of his uncle. The entire family has been left shaken, including his parents, six other siblings and several other nephews and nieces. The family's 69-year-old matriarch is overwhelmed with grief. Mother and son would keep each other company by regularly dining at Cracker Barrel. "It's hard to see your mom cry," Franklin Antonio said. Before the shooting, Leandro Antonio had been an avid basketball player and would still hit the court with Franklin at Encanto Park. That same yearning for independence is why Leandro Antonio would choose not to rely on anyone to pick up snacks or refreshments, just as he was doing when he fell victim to a hit and run. To stretch his legs and enjoy some daily physical activity, Leandro took walks to the nearby convenience store. Around 6:12 p.m. the day he was killed, Franklin Antonio received a text message from Leandro telling him, "I'm at the store. I'll be back." As Franklin approached his home, he saw police sirens and a cluster of people. After parking his truck and walking up to the scene, he noticed the victim had the same ankle brace as Leandro. An anguished Franklin broke into sobs. Police told him Leandro had already died. A Jan. 25 police press release stated Leandro Antonio was hit by an "unknown vehicle" around 6:47 p.m. Franklin said police told the family on the day Leandro was killed that there was surveillance video they would be looking into. The bereaved brother said he saw a vehicle bumper at the scene of the crash. A week later, Leandro Antonio's family had yet to hear from police about the case despite Franklin and the family's eldest child, their sister, reaching out for updates. "Right now, we're just sitting in the dark," Franklin Antonio said. "Each day that goes by, it gets further away, the chances of them catching who hit my brother." In response to a request for comment, Phoenix police told The Republic via email Thursday evening that the case remains under investigation. As the family waits for a semblance of justice for Leandro, they are trying to honor him and their heritage. A GoFundMe page was created to raise money that will help arrange for the transportation of Leandro's remains to Counselor, a community in the Navajo Nation in northern New Mexico. The family hopes to bury him where their roots lie, as is customary among the Navajo. "The dirt that brought him out, we're gonna bury him in it," Franklin Antonio said. This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Phoenix man killed in hit-and-run. GoFundMe available to assist burial
