New England Public Radio

Eagleton School Property To Be Auctioned Off

Property that was once home to the Eagleton School in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, is scheduled to be auctioned off this week.

The facility for boys and young men with emotional disabilities was shuttered last year by the state.

The bank holding a $4.5 million mortgage on the more than 30 acres is foreclosing on the land. The listed owners of the property are the Eagleton School and a limited liability company also bearing the Eagleton name.

While Eagleton closed in April, the campus is now being used by a Springfield-based group which operates programs for students with special needs.

Meanwhile, many of the 19 former Eagleton staffers who have been charged with their roles in alleged student abuse are due back in court in June.

A Superior Court judge has said trials could start this summer.

The Short List: Congressional Grades, Casino Crystal-Balling, Play-Doh Pivots

What made The Short List this week?

  • All 11 members of Massachusetts’ congressional delegation are saying “no” to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. More specifically, they’re all calling for his resignation. This followed the Washington Post story that Sessions, despite his testimony to congress during his confirmation hearings, did speak with Russia’s ambassador.
  • The plot has thickened in the casino story. A new player, so to speak, could be coming to East Windsor. The Mashantucket Pequots and Mohegan tribes hope to run it, but that decision’s still pending. It wouldn’t be a full casino, as is planned for Springfield, but it would be more than a slots parlor.
  • Guess who’s coming back to town? Hasbro announced it’s going to start manufacturing some made-in-America Play-Doh again, in East Longmeadow.

Click the audio player above to hear New England Public Radio’s Susan Kaplan explore these issues with Natalia Munoz from WHMP’s Vaya Con                     Munoz and Mike Dobbs of the Reminder newspapers.

Officials: Mother And Four Children Killed In Warwick Fire

A mother and four children were killed when flames swept through their home in the small Franklin County town of Warwick.

Officials said the fire broke out in the single-family home early Saturday morning.

Warwick Fire Chief Ron Gates became emotional as he said the house was fully engulfed in flames when firefighters arrived, and there was little they could do to prevent the tragedy.

“We’re a very tight bunch, and obviously this is tough on all of us,” Gates said at a Saturday afternoon news conference, according to WWLP.

According to published reports, two other members of the household — a father and child — escaped with minor injuries.

The state fire marshal said the blaze appears to be accidental, and may have originated at a wood stove in the kitchen.

A statement from the Massachusetts Department of Fire Services said the number of fire-related deaths statewide in 2017 is now 18. That includes three victims from a fatal Holyoke fire in January.

Last September, a fire in Greenfield killed four, including a four-year-old boy.

The Associated Press and the NEPR newsroom contributed to this report.

Democracy’s Doubters

Commentator and law professor Austin Sarat is nervous. He says federal judges’ rulings to block president trump’s executive order on immigration were stirring victories for the rule of law. But he says no one should be resting on their laurels.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the federal judiciary retains the authority to challenge executive action. Its decision echoes one made by the Supreme Court more than 40 years ago, when it ordered President Richard Nixon to turn over evidence in the Watergate case.

Back then, there was a widespread consensus on the virtues of the rule of law and the superiority of democracy as a form of government. Both were powerful symbols of American identity — so powerful that one hardly needed to discuss them.

That’s no longer so. Polls have shown that there’s been an erosion of faith in the foundations of our political system. Among Americans born in the 1930s, approximately 75 percent believed that democracy was essential. Among those born in the 1980s, however, only about 25 percent held a similar view.

President Trump is appealing to a remarkably receptive audience in his attempts to rule by decree.

Other studies found only half of the American people can name all three branches of the government or know that the power to declare war belongs to Congress.

I see this decline first-hand on the college campus where I teach. My students have come of age in an era of partisan gridlock and growing social inequality. Doubt about the effectiveness of democratic government is now the norm.

I grew up in a time when civics was a regular part of the public school curriculum. My junior high civics class, while by no means a galvanizing experience, at least offered a rudimentary overview of the foundations of our political life. Civics education plays an essential role in equipping Americans for democratic citizenship. Though not necessarily in the form I experienced, it should be revived.

Our founders admonished us that, ‘Government must be able to control the governed. But,’ they said, ‘we must also oblige it to control itself.‘

The freedoms that Americans traditionally have prized depend on the rule of law and a functioning democracy. We need to rehabilitate both before this alarming crisis of faith worsens.”

Austin Sarat teaches law at Amherst College.

When Tornado Destroys Band’s Equipment, ‘Sound Guy’ Steps Up

No one was seriously injured last Saturday night, after a tornado touched down in the rural Western Massachusetts towns of Goshen and Conway. But buildings and personal belongings were destroyed. Friends — and strangers — have jumped in to help out.

At one fundraiser this week, someone anonymously dropped a cashier’s check for $50,000 into a collection can. Another notable donation was made, just by chance. It started with a phone call to a reporter.

“Hi Jill! This is John ‘Klondike’ Koehler, calling from Greenfield. I heard your report this morning about the band in Conway,” and he said he wanted to help. He had some equipment he could give them.

Koehler, who has spent a lifetime in the wings, running sound systems for clients like the New Orleans Jazz Festival and A Prairie Home Companion, has a history of helping out musicians.

When he heard the band Carinae couldn’t live in their house, that their studio and some gear was crushed, he said, “The story really reached me in a place that brought me back to 2005.”

In response to so much loss after Hurricane Katrina, Koehler and a few friends started the Katrina Piano Fund and raised enough money to get instruments to hundreds of musicians.

This week, he said, it was an easy decision to reach out to a band in Western Massachusetts, his own neck of the woods.

On Tuesday night, Mardi Gras, Koehler and five band members stood in a dark lot of an industrial park, talking about what they would need to get on the road for their scheduled tour.

Gabe Camarano, who lost his drum set, said he was home during the tornado, when a tree fell on the house. His mom was visiting from Mississippi.

“I was in the room, maybe a minute prior, and I got a really strange feeling,” he said.

Camarano said he grabbed his mother’s hand and they ran downstairs.

The studio, which doubled as Camarano ‘s bedroom, was demolished. Other instruments were also smashed and gear was water-logged from the storm. The house is unsafe to live in, for now.

Nina Kent, who plays bass, said it’s been a rough few days.

“Saturday night I kind of felt like, ‘Oh, wow. This one room, where we can all come together and make something happen, is destroyed,'” Kent said. But every day since, the situation seems to be getting better. “Today,” she said, “I’m like, ‘Oh, it is not all lost.'”

Koehler himself is a veteran of equipment mishaps, even with his own band. He described how one of the members dropped a mixer off the edge of a dock, and how once it was retrieved, they took it apart and brought it back to life. Using a blow-dryer.

He stood at the back of a storage trailer, next to a pair of giant speakers and a mix board — circa 1980s, Koehler said. He described its capabilities in detail, using the language of hardcore electronics expert. The decades-younger, digitally-raised musicians were impressed. And grateful.

Then Koehler offered to “fire up” the speakers. “Singasong,” the 1970s hit from Earth, Wind & Fire, blared into the night.

The band members lit up, spun off like tops and laughed into the darkness, coming back as Koehler brought down the fader.

He said he has one condition with these gifts. If possible, he told the band, as they packed up the car and got ready to leave (the tour to Maine, then Georgia was possible after all) they should eventually re-gift the equipment. And, he added, make sure to use it well.

“Remember — there’s a fine line between touring musicians and musical tourists,” Koehler said. “Keep working. Keep playing. Don’t just hang out all the time!”

They quickly agreed, and then they left, shouting goodbyes out the window, as if they had known Koehler for more than just an hour.

As More Asylum-Seekers Flee To Canada, Taxi Rides To The Border Raise Red Flags

As high volumes of migrants flee the United States to apply for asylum in Canada, one popular route into Quebec is just west of Lake Champlain. To get to the snowy illegal crossing, many are calling a cab.

But there’s a catch: Some of those cabbies are coordinating with U.S. Border Patrol, and that practice has some civil liberties advocates concerned.

For most people looking to apply for asylum in Canada, it’s not as simple as showing up at a checkpoint. That’s because an agreement between the two countries says if an asylum-seeker is already in the United States, he or she cannot then apply for asylum in Canada.

So many are walking across the border illegally between checkpoints.

Plattsburgh, New York, is about 25 miles south of the border. It’s the last Greyhound stop before the border checkpoint. It’s also the last place to grab a cab.

But if you do call a cab, someone else could be alerted, too:

“When the call comes in, we contact Border Patrol; we say, ‘Hey, we got a call, it’s going to this location, here’s our ETA to that location,'” one Plattsburgh cab company owner explains. He has asked to remain anonymous because he doesn’t want any trouble with authorities.

Word-of-mouth protocol

He says he bought into the taxi business in October, and the first time he dropped someone off at a rural road that dead ends at the Canadian border “then immediately, we got a call from Border Patrol say, ‘Hey, this is protocol,’ and from that point on we’ve always followed protocol.”

But Michael Estrella with U.S. Border Patrol says, “there’s no requirement for a cab company to check-in with Border Patrol as to their activities.”

Yet Dylan, a driver with Northern Taxi, also said it was his company’s policy to call U.S. Border Patrol when they get a request for drop-off at a known illegal border crossing location.

“We usually call Border Patrol, U.S. Customs, on our side … and they usually meet me there to check them out,” he says.

Estrella wouldn’t comment further on how taxi companies might be under the impression that this protocol is required or encouraged.

All he would say is that U.S. Border Patrol does “get help from the community in various ways,” but wouldn’t say whether taxi companies are among those community members who call-in.

“I’m not going to get into a specific persons or person who is contacting us,” Estrella says. “They’re doing it as a service to themselves and the rest of their community.”

Profiling by destination

James Lyall, the director of the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, says the practice of taxi drivers alerting authorities could have real civil rights implications.

“It’s not the job of the cabbie to interrogate people, or assume anything about those people,” says Lyall. “It’s certainly not their job to do the job of the Border Patrol for them. And they can’t be required to do the job of the Border Patrol by the Border Patrol.”

Lyall says that if asylum-seekers learn that requesting a cab ride to a certain location may result in being detained, “people are very likely to take greater risks, put themselves in greater danger to avoid the Border Patrol just as they do crossing the southwest border.”

Within 100 miles of the border, U.S. Border Patrol can stop people who they have reasonable suspicion are in violation of immigration status. But Lyall says he isn’t clear that driving to the border would count as reasonable suspicion.

“An awful lot of vehicles go to the border. And courts have said that you can’t base reasonable suspicion on a characteristics that would apply to large number of valid or lawful actions,” says Lyall.

The cab drivers we talked to are taking people to a known illegal crossing location in the middle of the woods. But going to the border itself is not an illegal act. It’s only once a person walks across the border outside of an official checkpoint that a person can be arrested.

To be clear, if U.S. Border Patrol stops a taxi and the passengers have paperwork showing they are in the U.S. legally — say they have a tourist visa, or perhaps they are in the process of seeking asylum status here — then U.S. Border Patrol cannot detain them. That’s even if they are about to walk illegally into Canada.

Desperate to reach Canadian soil

But some asylum-seekers don’t have legal status in the United States – and they can be arrested by U.S. Border Patrol before they reach Canadian soil.

The Plattsburgh cab company who asked to remain anonymous says he witnessed such an arrest last week, and it changed his mind about the so-called protocol of alerting authorities.

He says he was dropping off a woman from Haiti. Years ago, she had fled to the U.S. seeking political asylum and now has a young son who was born here.

Her visa had expired, and before the taxi reached the Canada border, she was arrested by U.S. Border Patrol.

The cab driver says the Border Patrol agent said she would likely be deported back to Haiti, and her son would likely be put into foster care in the United States.

The cab owner says after witnessing this, he changed his company’s protocol. Now, the dispatch alerts Canadian authorities when they get a border run request.

Then, he said, the passengers can be arrested in Canada, where they have a shot at applying for asylum.

This report 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.