Economy

Schools, schmools. Who needs ’em, anyway?

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Jack and Jill went up the hill. Jack got robbed. Jill got jobbed.

Shortchanged J & J
Shortchanged

It isn’t the classic nursery rhyme but it is what students may learn this year as school budgets across the country are gutted.

From Oshkosh, Wis. to Puyallup, Wash., schools will suffer the axe this year as districts and states continue to grapple with big budget holes due to the recession.

The Oshkosh School District, for example, is debating the closure of middle and elementary schools, larger classes and culling around 35 positions, according to WLUK-TV in Green Bay.

Oshkosh’s problems arose after Wisconsin ended the fiscal year with a $2.71 budget gap. Varying by state and district, schools are usually funded by a combination of local, state and federal money.

Thousands of miles away, the Puyallup School District faces a 21 percent budget cut that could result in layoffs, larger classes and a possible school closing, according The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash.

Environment

Hey Ho, Coho! A prodigal fish returns

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The California coho salmon, a magnificent fish that was all but wiped out during the 1990s, have begun to trickle back to the rain-swollen Russian River and its tributaries.

It feels like a miracle.

“When it starts to rain, it somehow clicks in them that it’s time — that they can get through to their spawning waters,” says Harry Morse, communications official of the California Department of Fish and Game.

The Russian River coho salmon population faced near-extinction in 2000, he said, for reasons that are still debated. In their heyday, the size of the coho fishery off the Sonoma Coast was 200,000 to 500,000 fish in the 1940s. By 2000 the number of salmon shrank to one percent of that, and the fish was listed as a threatened species.

“Why they disappeared is the $64,000 question,” Morse said in a telephone interview.

He acknowledged that in some coastal fisheries, habitat damage caused by logging operations may have affected the fish, which depend on cool, clear, sustained flows and stable, structural elements of streams in old-growth forests.

But there are a host of other factors that may have contributed to the near-total wipeout along the Northern California coast, Morse says.

Newsdesk News

Newsdesk hires veteran journalist George Shirk

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With support from the Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation, Newsdesk.org has hired print- and online-news veteran George Shirk as its first paid editor. Shirk will oversee content and network building for the site, and in particular for News You Might Have Missed (NYMHM)—Newsdesk’s signature news service covering important but overlooked news and underserved communities.

Newsdesk News

Your Local Newsdesk presentation

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Newsdesk.org has received $25K from Ethics & Excellence in Journalism to develop a revenue-earning syndicated service providing public-interest journalism to underbudgeted commercial newsrooms. Content would be developed by a national network of independent but affiliated YOUR LOCAL NEWSDESK bureaus and fellowships. The bureaus will focus on important but overlooked news; fund themselves through earned income as well as individual donors and philanthropy; and develop extremely cost-efficient, peer-run newsrooms that are linked in a cross-promotional affiliate network.

World

Pakistan’s Schools in Terrorist Crosshairs

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Schools in Pakistan are increasingly targeted by terrorists, prompting widespread closures, and frustrating the dreams of students in a nation fraught with civil strife and illiteracy. After a pair of October 20 suicide bombings at one of Pakistan’s largest universities killed eight people and injured dozens more, officials shut down schools around the country. They were the latest in a series of attacks that have targeted or destroyed more than 600 Pakistani schools since 2007, reported Inter Press Service. Yet some students decried the most recent closures. One first-grader complained that she was “bored at home,” while a fourth grader told IPS that the closures were interfering with her goal of becoming a doctor to “take care of my fellow women.”