NEPR News

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.

Wood Stove Blamed For Fire In Warwick That Killed 5

by: Sam Hudzik

The Massachusetts fire marshal has confirmed the cause of a fire that killed five people last weekend in the Franklin County town of Warwick.

Fire Marshal Peter Ostroskey said he’s not sure exactly how, but fire escaped from a wood stove in the kitchen and spread to what he calls “nearby combustibles.”

“I believe it was wood and some of the finishes around the wood stove,” Ostroksey said in a phone interview.

In addition to Warwick’s volunteer fire department, 16 others helped fight the fire early Saturday.

With no hydrants, trucks had to fill up at a pond 1/3 mile away and drive the water back. And because this was a narrow dirt road, the trucks then had to drive into New Hampshire to loop back to the pond. It took 45 minutes.

Still, this was a hard one from the start, according to Ostroskey.

“It’s fair to say that the house was heavily involved in fire at the time of arrival of the fire department,” he said.

Five people died: Lucinda Seago and four of her children. The father — Scott Seago — and one child escaped.

2017 Fire Deaths

The fire marshal earlier this week announced the cause of a fire early Monday in Milton that killed two elderly men, including Kenneth Guscott, the former head of the Boston NAACP. That blaze was caused by a space heater that overloaded an extension cord.

Combined, the Warwick and Milton fires left seven people dead. That puts fire deaths in 2017 well ahead of the average from recent years.

Since 2012, the state has averaged about 16 fire deaths during the first three months of the year. So far in 2017 — there have been 20 confirmed deaths, with three weeks of March still to go.

Mass. High Court Hears Arguments On Medical Marijuana Firing

Massachusetts’ highest court heard arguments Thursday on whether a worker can be fired for using medical marijuana.

Cristina Barbuto suffers from Crohn’s Disease and uses medical marijuana to help her appetite. According to legal documents, she lost her job because of a positive drug test for pot, despite assurances from her employer to the contrary before she was hired.

Her attorney, Matthew Fogelman, told the Supreme Judicial Court that his client was wrongfully terminated and discriminated against.

“If the patient has a condition, and the patient and the doctor have arrived at a course of treatment, recommended by the physician, legally prescribed by the physician, the employer should not be inserting themselves into that relationship,” Fogelman said.

Attorney Michael Clarkson, represented the employer, Advantage Sales and Marketing. He argued there’s nothing in Massachusetts’ marijuana laws protecting workers from disciplinary action, even if the pot is used for medical reasons.

“If you look, for instance, at New York, the statute finds that anyone who is entitled to a medical marijuana card shall be deemed ‘disabled’ under the New York civil rights law,” Clarkson said. “Nevada law requires that employers specifically accommodate medical marijuana. That’s not true here.”

The case arrived at the Supreme Judical Court after it was dismissed by a Superior Court judge.

Unsung Women Who Pushed The Bounds In Space

by: Martha Ackmann

The toy company LEGO recently announced it would release a new line of plastic figures immortalizing the women of NASA. The new NASA set will feature astronauts Sally Ride and Mae Jemison, as well as computer scientist Margaret Hamilton, astronomer Nancy Grace Roman — and mathematician Katherine Johnson of Hidden Figures fame. Commentator and author Martha Ackmann says, as laudable as the Lego’s move is, she’s got some advice.

Keep going. How about adding other women who pushed the bounds in space?

In the early 1960s, a group of 13 hotshot women pilots were secretly tested to become astronauts. They took the same arduous exams as John Glenn, Alan Shepard and the other Mercury men. Dr. Randy Lovelace, NASA’s head of life sciences, was not surprised when women aced the tests and he was disappointed when push-back immediately occurred. Why waste money and time testing women when men should go first, critics said. NASA agreed.

That’s when Jerrie Cobb, leader of the Mercury 13 women, spoke out. She met with Vice President Lyndon Johnson, unaware that he’d already written a letter about Cobb’s concerns to NASA. LBJ did not want the women’s program to go forward. ‘Let’s stop this now,’ he’d scrawled on the top of his typed letter.

Cobb was not finished. She pushed for a special Congressional hearing on astronaut qualifications. John Glenn was among those who testified. ‘Men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes,’ he said. ‘It’s a fact of our social order.’

It took Congress less than a day to make up its mind. All astronauts would be drawn from the ranks of military jet test pilots. Since women were barred from that job, outer space was off limits as well.

It would take the enormous social changes of the next decade before Sally Ride blasted off the launch pad in 1978.

When Eileen Collins became the first woman to command the space shuttle in 1999, she invited the Mercury 13 women to stand in witness. No one knew who they were; just a group of older women with large handbags and water bottles. I stood next to them.

As the space shuttle lifted off into a limitless sky, I turned when Wally Funk, one of the 13, began speaking quietly to herself. ‘Go, Eileen,’ she said. ‘Go for all of us.’ “

Martha Ackmann is the author of “The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight.” She lives in Leverett, Massachusetts.

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

by: Nancy Eve Cohen

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.