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The Week Ahead On Beacon Hill: Taxes, Budget And Marijuana Lobbying

Key budget leaders in the Massachusetts House have said no new “broad-based” taxes are needed for the next state budget, even though tax revenues for the current fiscal year keep coming up short.

Like most Mondays, we checked in with Matt Murphy, a reporter for the State House News Service in Boston. He explained when lawmakers say they’re not raising “broad-based” taxes, that doesn’t mean no new taxes at all.

Click the audio player above to hear Henry Epp’s conversation with Matt Murphy about the week ahead on Beacon Hill.

The Short List: The Irony Of Tragic Fires, Privacy On The Pike, High Schoolers Love Sleep

NEPR'S WEEK IN REVIEW

What made The Short List this week?

  • A fire in Warwick, Mass., last weekend killed a mother and four of her children. We discuss the complications of rural firefighting and the irony that it often takes a tragedy to get attention on fire safety.
  • A couple state lawmakers introduced legislation to restrict the release of information collected at the toll gantries on the Massachusetts Turnpike. Is this based on valid privacy concerns, paranoia or politics?
  • A new study found that high schools pushing their start times back an hour benefit from better attendance and graduation rates. But there are obstacles.

Click the audio player above to hear New England Public Radio’s Susan Kaplan explore these issues with Matt Szafranski from Western Mass Politics & Insight and Chris Collins, a columnist for the Greenfield Recorder.

Plenty Of Strategies – And Little Funding – To Address Refugee Students’ Needs

In his revised executive order, President Trump has cut the number of refugees allowed into the U.S. by more than half. But since the fall of last year, nearly 1800 refugees have already re-settled in New England, and more than a third of them are children and teens.

Source: U.S. State Department

At Philip G. Coburn Elementary School in West Springfield, Massachusetts, students come from all over the world.

“My Mom and Dad are from Sudan.”

“My Mom and Dad are from Iraq”

“Turkey.”

“Afghanistan.”

“Nepal.”

“I’m from Iraq.”

Most of the English language learners here arrive as refugees. Inside an English language learning classroom, second graders learn English along with math.

“If I have halves, I have two equal parts,” teacher Steph Duggan showed her students. “I have two parts that are the same size.”

Duggan uses words, drawings and hand signals to describe math vocabulary. The children watch, listen, repeat — and then explain the concepts to each other

Working with one student is teacher’s aide Sara Almoula, who was once a refugee student herself.

“I’m from Iraq and I came with no English,” Almoula said.

Almoula’s father worked as a translator for the American military in Mosul. But it became unsafe. The family fled to Kurdistan; then six years ago to West Springfield, where Almoula started high school.

“I felt like I couldn’t do it and it was so hard,” she recalled. ” I had no friends. I had nothing. Everything was new to me.”

Almoula, who’s now in college, said a turning point came when a history teacher wanted to know her story.

“He was like asking about our culture and asking about home and so many things that he really care about. And it made me feel like I want to learn more. ”

Inviting refugee students to share their history is a way to help them feel a part of a school.

“Make them feel happy and wanted,” said Ken Pransky, who first taught students who were refugees 30 years ago in Amherst.

“It was pretty traumatic,” he said. “Their families had just been a part of the Cambodian holocaust and they were living in refugee camps. And they were coming, like in T-shirts, shorts and sandals in the winter.”

Pransky recalled some kids were so overwhelmed by the large brick school with hundreds of students, that — at first — they hid under the tables.

“Expectations are different,” he said. “Weather’s different. Food is different. Everything is different. It’s scary.”

Joan Snowdon also learned a lot from teaching Cambodian refugees. Today she teaches English language learners at Amherst High School. She said if a student has experienced trauma, consistent and predictable teachers help them learn.

Amherst High School Teacher Joan Snowdon taught Cambodian refugees. (Nancy Eve Cohen for NEPR)

“It really helps kids to feel they are in control of their lives if there were times when they felt they were not in control of their lives, when no one was in control of the situation,” she said.

Snowdon even writes the date and the class agenda on the same place on the board every day — and makes sure they’re prepared for the bells.

“It really helps them to know that the bells ring at 7:45 a.m.” she said. “That this is what happens in this building. This is where this club always meets. So they can start to feel this is their community, this is their school, they belong here and they’re safe here.”

Some kids last attended school in refugee camps or haven’t been in months, years or ever.

“Students who have never been to school would need to understand what school is and how one behaves…and the purpose and everything we take for granted about understanding what schools are,” said Julie Sugarman, an analyst with the Migration Policy institute. “They might not have literacy skills in any language. They may need to learn to read and write while they are learning English.”

Doing this well can cost schools more money for more staff.

“The refugee funding specifically is a tiny amount,” Sugarman said. “The only funding that I know of that is specifically dedicated to refugees is the refugee school impact grant and that’s about $14.6 million for the whole country.”

The New England states received about $1.4 million dollars — with the lion’s share going to Massachusetts, which has the most refugees in the region.

“That money is meant for additional English as a second language, for after school programs, maybe for interpretation or working with parents,” she said. “But it’s really very, very limited and only goes to a few school districts in a state, so most refugees are served through the same kind of funding as other English learners.”

And, in fact, schools are supposed to treat refugees the same way as any other student — not according to their immigration status, but according to their educational needs.

Colleen Marcus, the director of English Language Learning in West Springfield, Mass., where many of the English learners arrive as refugees. (Nancy Eve Cohen for NEPR)

Colleen Marcus, the director of English language learning in West Springfield, said her district gets creative when it comes to funding.

For example, Marcus said, when hiring teacher’s aides, the district looks “for someone who speaks a second language, a language that’s going to help our students and teachers and families is just smart.”

West Springfield even has a janitor who speaks Nepali. He taught in a school in a refugee camp.

When asked about the challenges of educating children who are refugees, Colleen Marcus insists there are only benefits.

“What we learn from these children and these families about life and love and family and perseverance,” Marcus said, “is a gift to all of us.”

This report is part of a series called “Facing Change.” It comes from the New England News Collaborative, eight public media companies coming together to tell the story of a changing region, with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Young Man Walks Across America to Listen, Reflect, Understand

Five years ago, at 23, Andrew Forsthoefel decided to walk 4,000 miles across America with a handmade sign that said “Walking to Listen.” Along the way, he recorded dozens of stories from the people he met.

Now settled in Western Massachusetts, Forsthoefel has a new book about his journey.

Andrew Forsthoefel lives above a beer supply shop on a busy commercial strip in Northampton, so we walked to a bike path, where we had a few quiet miles to chat.

This is familiar terrain for Forsthoefel — walking and talking. It’s how he spent 11 months wandering from Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania — where he waved goodbye to his worried mother and set off on the railroad tracks — all the way to Half Moon Bay, California.

Andrew Forsthoefel on the first day of his cross-country hike – in a photo by his mother, Therese Jornlin.

“Before I walked across the country, walking was something I had done in sort of fits and starts, little hiking trips,” he said. “And then when I committed to a long-distance through-hike, walking became both my lover and my enemy. It became my teacher. It became a meditation, and it was miserable too! I don’t want to romanticize how miserable the experience was.”

When he started, Forsthoefel was a recent graduate of Middlebury College in Vermont, still grieving his parents’ divorce and looking for wisdom to guide him into adulthood.

He’d hoped to travel to a small village in Africa, but he lost a well-paying job and needed a cheaper adventure. That’s when he decided to fill a backpack with outdoor gear, a flip-phone, a mandolin and three books of poetry.

With $4,000 in savings, he planned to camp when necessary, accept a free couch when offered and record people’s stories.

“What sort of began to happen was that the walking primed me for connection with people,” he said. “All the hours I spent alone walking, sort of put me in this state of — well, basically — loneliness. I was just damn lonely out there, you know. To meet someone at the end of a day was just a miraculous thing to experience. Because there was no guarantee that I’d be with anyone that night. Maybe I was going to be under a bridge alone again.”

Forsthoefel followed a few self-imposed rules. He wouldn’t accept any ride that would shorten the trip. He would use only paper maps — no internet or GPS. And he wouldn’t listen to recorded music or podcasts.

“I wanted to be approachable. I wanted people to feel they wouldn’t be interrupting me, if they stopped and said something,” he said. “So I chose not to wear ear buds.”

That also helped him focus on self-reflection and random observations.

“I’d be walking along and I’d see a little strand of spider silk floating by, and just be mesmerized,” he said. “I would hear sounds I wouldn’t have heard otherwise. I’d feel things in my body I wouldn’t have felt otherwise. So it all became a pretty entertaining spectacle.”

He kept mostly to a southern route. Halfway through the trip, he bought a used babystroller to help haul his stuff, which must have been quite an image, he conceded, especially during the occasional bout of crying along the lonely highway.

He ate deep fried squirrel, got lost in the desert, and sang Amazing Grace with an old woman in Alabama.

He met many people outside the bubble of his middle-class youth: a trucker, prison guard, astrologer, Christian missionary, ceremonial dancer, retired bounty hunter, among others. He said they were often colorful, generous and contradictory.

“There was one woman and her husband who took me in to their home, took me out to dinner at Applebee’s or something. We had a great interview that night, cooked me breakfast in the morning,” he recalled. “And just as I’m heading out, she said, ‘You should think twice about walking through this town coming up ahead. All the whites left and the help stayed, and the Southern black is a whole different animal than the Northern black.'”

Forsthoefel said that kind of bigotry tended to shock him into silence, and he regrets not engaging people more in a discussion of their beliefs, and his. He said that’s one reason he wrote the book — to link the different perspectives he came across.

“I wished so many times that people I’d been with just the day before, who were warning me about people in the next town over, I wished they could be with me that night when I went to that town and got to meet some of these people and actually listen to them,” he said.

He emphasized that not only Southern conservatives could use a wider lens on the world, which is why he hopes his own example inspires future extreme-walkers.

“It would humble the most bleeding-heart liberal,” he said. “It would have the potential to complicate things for them in a way that’s very important, I think. Sort of erase the notion that anything is black and white. — including a Trump supporter. A Trump supporter is more than a Trump supporter. What else are they?”

Today, at 28, Forsthoefel is a full-time writer and public speaker. After a spiritual awakening on his big hike, he studies Buddhism and meditates.

If he were to take another cross-country listening walk, he said, he’d do it with other people.

Andrew Forsthoefel dedicated his book, “Walking To Listen,” to his mother.

Note: Thanks to Transom.org for interview clips from Forsthoefel’s journey, used in the broadcast version of this story. You can listen to Forsthoefel’s 2013 audio documentary about his trip.

The Week Ahead On Beacon Hill

This week, a state commission in Massachusetts will meet to set the official health care cost benchmark. This system was put into place a number of years ago to keep a close watch on rising health care costs. For more, we checked in with State House News Service reporter Matt Murphy, as we do most Mondays.

Also this week:

  • The legislature’s transportation committee takes up road construction funds.
  • Governor Charlie Baker’s $40.5 billion state budget proposal gets its first public hearing on Thursday.

Click the audio player above to hear Carrie Healy’s conversation with Matt Murphy about the week ahead on Beacon Hill.

Small Town Comes Together After House Fire Kills Mother And Four Children

The exact cause of an early Saturday morning fire that nearly wiped out an entire family in rural western Massachusetts is not yet confirmed. Investigators said the blaze in a single family home on a dirt road deep in Warwick could have started at a wood stove in the kitchen. It appears to be accidental.

On Sunday, residents turned out to mourn the loss of a mother who was active in town activities, and her four children.

While authorities have not identified the victims of the fire by name, everyone in this small town knows whose house burned down, and many know the family personally. The father — Scott Seago — survived the blaze, along with one child.

They were among the crowd at the elementary school in Warwick Sunday afternoon, along with at least 100 others — a large portion of this town of just 800 residents.

State Senate President Stan Rosenberg from Amherst was here, as was state Representative Susannah Whipps, who lives in nearby Athol. On her way out, Whipps said most of the towns in her district are small, like Warwick. And people really look out for each other.

“You have to when you live out here,” Whipps said. “I mean, we’re in a community with virtually no broadband service, [a] small school. It’s a beautiful place to live. It’s a quiet place to live. It’s a true village.”

Warwick is right at the New Hampshire border, one of several sparsely populated towns with a lot of land in what’s called the North Quabbin region. Fire departments from all around show up to help out, as they did Saturday. But the blaze had consumed the house by the time they arrived.

Whipps said a woman who was inside the school sold the Seagos their home a few years ago. She lives nearby, and she brought pictures over. This family has lost everything, Whipps said.

“Everybody comes together, and everybody’s hurting,” she said.

One Warwick resident who came out of the school said he worked with Scott Seago on the town’s broadband committee. Another was a substitute teacher at the elementary school, and knew the kids. But almost no one wanted to speak with the media.

David Young, the town coordinator in Warwick, would talk — a little. Standing outside the school, after almost everyone left, he said the event was helpful. For him, uplifting.

“A lot of people from the community turned out. We’re trying to figure out what to do next. I know the school is pretty well prepared for helping the kids through this [Monday],” Young said.

But Young on Sunday didn’t mention the family by name. He said he can’t, until the district attorney releases that information. But as an official, he said, he knew the family well. He described the mother, Lucinda Seago, whose name is on the town website, as business-like.

“Very much on top of things. Competent and smart, and a member of our Board of Health,” he said. And she had recently completed her degree to become a registered nurse.

Like their parents, Young said, the kids are incredibly bright. He said he he thinks they range from ages 6 to 15.

“I felt terrible for the surviving child who was here, in our midst,” Young said. “She held up well by all appearances, but I can’t imagine…I can’t imagine…” he trailed off.

Inside the school, after the politicians spoke, Young said people sat around talking to each other. A couple of residents who worked on the broadband committee left early to buy Scott Seago a new cellphone.

Where the house stood is now a mound of burned debris, with nearby cars licked by flames. There are no hydrants in Warwick, Young said. There are “fire ponds.” That’s part of rural life, he said.