I was on the phone with my mother earlier this year when we each received a text – one of those vague, phishing messages you barely registered before sliding to delete. My mother did as much.
But I was curious. This bizarre texter had asked each of us if we were a relative of Bettye Flynn, my grandmother who’d been dead for more than a decade. She grew up on a ranch picking cotton in east Texas like a scene out of The Last Picture Show. But moved to California in the 1950s and married a WWII veteran who served in Hawaii. You’d think 1960s California would shock a Protestant, ranch-raised woman. But Mimi, as I called her, was the type to electrify any room and take on the most serious, burly-browed fella until he relented, “This woman’s alright.”
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5/28/2022 0 Comments '60 seconds to launch'
Holding on to a jumper cable carrying 10,000 volts of electricity, Maria Colin drags the clip across a piece of wood sparking a pattern of lightning.
It’s enough electricity to kill a person instantaneously -- in fact, it killed one of her friends -- but the crafting of these pieces of wood into art ... Read more at the link: www.sonomanews.com/article/news/finding-the-roots-of-maria-colins-art/ 4/7/2021 0 Comments Education DetainedThe coronavirus pandemic halted the only path some incarcerated individuals had to education
The end of ASU’s Inside Out prison program is usually marked with a graduation ceremony for incarcerated people, but the final in-person class in 2020 came and went before anyone knew it would be the last. The COVID-19 pandemic forced Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry officials to abruptly end in-person visits to prisons which curtailed ASU’s Prison Education Programming and the Inside-Out classroom. Since then, civil rights organizations like the ACLU and NAACP sued ADCRR — including at least three prisons involved in or seeking to be involved in ASU prison programs — for providing inadequate living conditions for inmates. PEP and the Inside-Out classroom are two ASU initiatives bringing education to incarcerated people in Arizona prisons. The PEP offers a diverse set of classes for inmates to participate without credit. The InsideOut classroom, ran through ASU's School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, allows students to attend class with inmates once a week. According to March 26 data from the COVID Prison Project, more than 1 in 4 incarcerated people have tested positive for COVID-19 out of 43,644 inmates tested. Arizona prisons have faced lawsuits from the ACLU and NAACP among other ongoing lawsuits concerning prison conditions. Inmates in a Perryville prison did not have running water for a pair of days last summer. Labor practices at a Red Rock Correctional Facility in Eloy, Ariz. were alledged to reflect those of modern-day slavery by the NAACP. Another case by the ACLU, suing on behalf of defendants with “leukemia, kidney cancer, asthma, and high blood pressure,” alleged that a private prison in Florence, Ariz. was not complying with public health guidelines to protect incarcerated people from COVID-19. But since in-person PEP ended after the spring semester, educators and former students of the class have had no contact with incarcerated people, said co-Director of PEP Naala Brewer. “The only thing I can do is pray for them because there's nothing else really I can do.” Brewer said. “You're not allowed to ever contact them again. You just have to know you did the best you could while you were there.” A shift to online interconnectivity Cody Telep is the director of the InsideOut program at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Once a week, he and students in the program would drive to Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence to attend class with inmates. “We had our final class in the prison on March 4 and we really had no sense then that the class might be impacted by COVID,” Telep wrote in an email. “By Friday of Spring Break, the Arizona Department of Corrections announced they would be restricting visitation and volunteers from coming in for at least a month.” By the following Monday, the tsunami of COVID-19 chaos continued to wash over the state, and ASU would hold on to the class through a lifeboat of virtual meetings for the rest of the semester. “Inside-Out is definitely tough to adapt to a virtual learning environment,” Telep wrote, “as so much of the class depends on the in-person interactions between inside and outside students.” Telep tried his best to continue the course by sending ADCRR printouts for class, including letters and updates from outside students, but it “definitely was not the same.” Safety concerns for students at ASU and inside the prison derailed the Inside-Out program until Spring 2022. While ASU classes will be returning to in-person instruction this fall, Telep and the Inside Out program felt it was wise to hold off relaunching the program until all students, incarcerated or otherwise were vaccinated. A dual purpose It wouldn’t be the first time that a prison program was abruptly ended, albeit for very different reasons. Corri Wells, co-director of PEP, spearheaded the Pen Project, which abruptly ended when the English department cut the program in 2018, she said. It came as “an accident” in a conversation with a graduate student during sessions of an English conference, she said. The student mentioned a professor named Joe Lockard who had just received a message from a woman in the Penitentiary of New Mexico in Sante Fe, Wells said. “I was talking about wanting to be more involved in something that would filter out into real communities,” Wells said. Wells founded the Pen Project at ASU in 2011; otherwise known as English 484. Interns in the project did not write to incarcerated individuals – “it’s not pen pals at all” – rather, they would go by pseudonyms and provide literary critique to inmates who wrote essays, poems and other pieces of writing for the class. The Pen Project exploded. PEP at the time when Wells was facilitating the Pen Project, had 8 classes in two prisons. When Wells became the director of PEP that rose to seven prisons and more than 30 different classes per semester. But ASU’s education programs do more than just provide a learning environment for inmates. “I think it gives them pride, but I think having contact with a responsible adult they may have never had that in their lifetime, who's consistent with them... that gives them something they can't get there,” Brewer said. “The only thing I can do is pray for them, because there's nothing else really I can do.” — Naala Brewer Brewer noted the “tense” relationship that often exists between inmates and prison guards. But in the classroom, inmates have a chance to expand their intellectual curiosity. One inmate wrote a 300-page manuscript on investing. “We allowed him to take the first hour of the class one semester to teach – I actually learned something from his investing class,” Brewer said. Some students say the program helped them form a more compassionate view of incarcerated people and a more informed perspective on the prison system. “I have a cousin. He’s been to jail. He’s a distant cousin,” wrote Samantha, a former participant of the class on the syllabus of the Spring 2019 course. “He is distant because we don’t really associate with that part of the family. Until now. Thanks to you.” Without a goodbye The English department ended the program in late 2018. Wells recalled the end of the Pen Project as the “greatest sadness of my time at ASU.” The fate of the Pen Project became a preview for the other prison program initiatives at ASU when a once-in-a-generation pandemic spread through the United States in March 2020. PEP has continued through the pandemic but program coordinators had to adapt. “The Arizona Department of Corrections really didn't want to start a new mail service,” Brewer said. “They didn't want to deliver our course materials and switch them back and forth.” Lantern, “a watered-down version” of Canvas, available on tablets would allow ASU to continue its variety of courses. But Brewer is still in talks to establish this as an opportunity for incarcerated individuals. Learning to adapt through Lantern has given Brewer hope for greater access to education for inmates in the future, she said. Even though in-person classes will be hampered for the foreseeable future and through the fall. “We’re very hopeful that things will be more back to normal by then,” Telep said. “We plan to open up applications for the Spring class early in the Fall 2021 semester.” A pestilential environment Inmates are at the will of prison guards and the warden. And throughout the pandemic, prisons have been an epicenter for COVID-19 across the country, worsening the mistreatment of incarcerated people. "For months, public health officials and corrections experts have warned that under current circumstances, prisons and jails will become especially potent vectors for the rapid spread of COVID-19 inside the facilities and in the surrounding communities," said Emma Andersson in a press release, senior staff attorney with the ACLU's Criminal Law Reform Project. Some prisons in Arizona have seen more than half their populations test positive for COVID-19. At the correctional facility in Florence, 12 inmates have been confirmed to have died from COVID-19 complications, according to March 18 statistics from the COVID Prison Project. And in the Red Rock Correctional Center in Eloy, the NAACP sued ADCRR and private prison firms GEO Group, CoreCivic Inc. and Management and Training Corp for allegedly engaging in conduct amounting to slavery. This court case was dismissed by the U.S. District judge. The ACLU sued Central Arizona Florence Correctional Complex for not complying to public health guidelines last May, including a lack of proper care for a 39-year-old woman with leukemia and 50-year-old woman with kidney cancer who were denied access to treatment for their conditions, according to the lawsuit. ASU is working with both the prisons and third party education platforms to help inmates earn college credit through ASU classes while serving time. President Michael Crow has supported the effort, Brewer said, and they hope this can be an opportunity for inmates in the future. “Part of doing prison education is you kind of have to detach and wear other people like a loose garment,” Brewer said, “because they're going to come and go and you have no control over it.” 3/25/2021 0 Comments The best recruiterElizabeth Baer wanted to become a wind musician in an orchestra, her family thought she might attend fashion school and for a long time, she wanted to be an anesthesiologist. But at 17, she joined the military and learned to build bombs.
"I never pictured myself joining," Baer said. But financial hardships at home prevented her from pursuing college and the military appeared as the best detour to higher education. Almost 10 years after Baer opted out of a traditional path to higher education, another economic crisis derailed more than 16 million Americans' plans to go to college. Meanwhile, recruiters for some branches of the military are meeting recruitment goals after a pair of years where goals were missed or significantly lowered, according to Department of Defense statistics. Beth Asch, a senior economist at the RAND Corporation, released multiple books outlining how military recruitment changed over the latter half of the 20th century to the modern day. "A lot of people don't have money for college," Asch said. "So the military offers an opportunity to get money for college, which you earn by completing a service obligation." Recovering from the Great Recession was difficult for Baer's father. He regularly found himself "on the chopping block" at new jobs. And the businesses continued downsizing, Baer said. As her father sought new jobs to support his family, he brought the Baers on a nomadic search for jobs over the course of four years to Pennsylvania, Illinois, Florida and eventually Australia. Baer's mother worked for Pennsylvania's State System of Higher Education, which provides dependents of their employees 100% free tuition at any state university. But her mother was forced to leave her Pennsylvania government job to be with her husband in Florida. Baer suddenly realized she didn't "have free school anymore." The price of college has shot up exponentially in the past 40 years, rising more than 500% since 1982, according to College Choice; more than double the rate of inflation during the same time period. In 2020, U.S. student loan debt reached more than $1.7 trillion. The debt collectively owed by Americans to college is now the second largest form of debt behind housing, according to Experian, a consumer credit reporting company. Volunteer forced"When there's a downturn in the economy, people are not just more likely to join the military, they're also more likely to go to college," Asch said. "There's a certain element of that, where the military is competing with colleges for qualified people." Nearly 5 million more people are unemployed now than in February last year despite the stock market hitting record highs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And 30 to 40 million Americans are at risk of eviction according to an analysis by the Aspen Institute. "Where the military comes in, is it's offering me a job — although, of course that's the case — but it's also offering me a future when the future seems uncertain in the civilian world," Asch said. An April report from the Senate Joint Economic Committee — when there were only 50,000 COVID-19 deaths — stated, "When the pandemic subsides to a degree that Americans can return to some version of their former lives, it likely will leave in its wake even greater inequality." A significant number of students are choosing to put off college until the storm passes. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found a 21.7% decline in high school students entering college during the Fall 2020 semester. Yet ASU defied that trend by maintaining its on-campus student population and growing its online student population by 19% since last January. Matt Lopez, the associate vice president of enrollment services cited a familiar reason for defying this trend. "ASU's innovation mindset allowed the University to leverage existing strengths, but also rapidly create new ones to ensure that students have learning options available so their education could continue with minimal disruption," Lopez said. But going to college was not an option for Baer — at least without a major deviance to her educational path. As she contemplated entering the civilian workforce, Baer's father gave what he describes as "tough love": She had to figure out her own way to go to college by herself. "That was a turning point where I just kind of thought to myself, 'How am I going to do this?'" Baer said. Got you by the bootstrapsIn order to achieve her goal of going to college, Baer joined the military at 17 with parental consent. Through the military, she found "a pathway to college" and the job security her father struggled to find while she was a teenager. But like many young adults today, Baer was dismayed at the idea of going to college without the opportunity to experience the full scope of college life. "I had this jaded facade of what college would really be like. I imagined myself with my little 'Fjallraven Kanken' bag with my books in my hand," Baer said. Baer only spent one day on campus due to the pandemic. This lack of a social aspect to the learning and college environments caused some college students to drop out and join the force, said Capt. Jose Narcia of the Arizona National Guard. Narcia leads the recruitment and retention battalion where he coordinates National Guard recruiting of young men and women in Arizona. "There's some students that have left college because they didn't really like to remotely go to college," Narcia said. "The second piece is that you see a lot of people who realize how fragile the world can be, and unpredictable at this time." More than 208,000 Arizonans are unemployed, the most since July 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor. And according to a 2020 Feeding America study, close to 1 in 5 children in Arizona are struggling with food insecurity. Yet Narcia described that his best National Guard recruiter had told him that of "every single person" he signed up, that "none of them were unemployed." "What the recruiters typically do is try and figure out whether the Guard are going to be able to help them in their careers, whether it's going to supplement it or complement their career," Narcia said. The desperation that has gripped millions throughout the country from the COVID-19 and its impact has likely given new resonance to the military's message of economic security, said Baer. "COVID-19 has given the military one of the largest bargaining chips of the decade," Baer said. "They could definitely say, 'Hey, you're experiencing economic hardship right now? We will feed you, clothe you, and house you.'" Attempting to sign a person up for the military by pressuring students with all of the benefits or joining the force is called "dumpster loading," Narcia said. "That's not how a recruiter is going to talk to you," Narcia said. "Normally, when somebody talks about somebody being interested, it's more of, 'Have you ever thought about serving in the military?'" People are feeling a sense of duty in the past year to join the National Guard and aid in the distribution of COVID-19 tests, food and vaccinations, Narcia said. But the serving in the military is not without its downsides. Pediatricians and other researchers found that military recruiter's tactics, including who they target, are "disturbingly similar to predatory grooming." According to a 2011 study in the National Center for Biotechnology Information studying recruitment tactics compared to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The guidelines of the convention bar military recruiters from subjecting minors to military recruitment. But of all U.N. member countries, only the United States and Somalia have not ratified the convention, the study said. "Although adults in the active military service are reported to experience increased mental health risk, including stress, substance abuse, and suicide, the youngest soldiers consistently show the worst health effects," the study said. Rates of alcohol abuse, anxiety disorders, depression, and self-harm were found to be higher in younger soldiers aged 17-24 than older soldiers, according to the study. The difficulties young veterans face is partly why Baer decided to work at the Pat Tillman Veterans Center to help veterans transition back to civilian life. And though the military has set up programs to aid in the civilian transition, Baer said, "no matter what they say, you'll never be prepared for that transition." "That's actually why I applied to help be a part of the veteran's center, because I wanted to help other students get a grasp on what it's like to transition fully to be a civilian," Bear said. The earringBaer said her experience is emblematic of common military service pitches: Travel the world, gain valuable work experience, serve your country. She traveled throughout Europe, embarked on a tour in South Korea, and picked up languages along the way. She excelled as a young woman in the Air Force, ascending through the ranks to sergeant — which gave her the duty of commanding men sometimes a decade her senior. Going overseas didn't just mean she had to leave her family behind, it also meant that she would have to have her personal life in an ice chest to come back to. "The guy that I broke up with in high school and now has two kids," Baer said. "And I have four cats." She reconciles her missed time building a life at home with the "surreal and almost unfathomable" opportunities she's had visiting Morocco in Northern Africa, Petra in Jordan, and seeing the Eiffel Tower at night in Paris, France. But the surreality of living abroad ended when she returned to the U.S., realizing she would be graduating at 30 years old in May 2022. "I put seven years aside so that I could serve," Baer said. "At times I felt stagnant in my education and that my life was on hold." But leaving the military and becoming a citizen again doesn't work like a switch. One person she met in a tax class spent a quarter-century in the military. "He doesn't know anything else," Baer said. Baer realized the military mentality had ingrained itself in her when she was looking for houses. She began to panic when she realized she would be 5 minutes late to a realtor's appointment because "if you're not 15 minutes early, you're late" by military standards. She had to get used to waking up later than 4:30 a.m. But it took a second ear piercing banned by military standards to get it through her head that she was a civilian again. Wearing a pair of teardrop earrings from her mother and another pair of a sun within a moonstone, she said, "When I got out of the military I got a second piercing. And I thought I was such a rebel." 3/3/2021 0 Comments Wall to WallIn ASU’s downtown library, senior library information specialist Jackie Young helps students get information: taking students’ inquiries, researching topics and managing a never-ending shuffle of books.
When her elderly father tested positive for COVID-19, Young knew she must have been the source. She empties the book drop-off most days. Library administrators who established the quarantine period for books at ASU failed to follow guidance from the CDC who recommended a 7-day quarantine period. “My administrators were only quarantining the books for three days,” Young said. Administrators thought of eliminating the 3-day quarantine, too, Young said, because of complaints from students worried about being fined for books in quarantine. Young is frustrated with this sort of top-down decision-making. Many other ASU workers are frustrated too. So when workers at the University of Arizona formed their union, ASU workers eagerly joined. Ken Jacobs, the chair of the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley, said the share of instruction by adjunct professors – who have little job security – at colleges and universities has “grown dramatically.” A 2018 report by the American Association of University Professors found that only 27 % of instructional positions were tenured in 2016. Young noted that during the Great Recession, the University made changes to its new-hire process to create a separate designation with less job-protection for workers. Hiring more adjunct instructors gave the University more “flexibility” to lay off staff for budget belt-tightening, but Young said the University made this change without workers in mind. “I've seen other instances of that during the COVID-19 pandemic with employees voicing concerns about safety and the University just going forward with in-person classes regardless,” she said. A union, Young and others theorize, will make for a seat at the table. Not just one for professors and full-time employees, but for student workers, too. And though the union is barred from collective bargaining by Arizona Board of Regents’ policy, speaking collectively has power, said Richard Newhauser, a professor of English and leading figure for ASU's members of the union. The new challenge is finding more union members. ASU’s administration did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this article. Origin of unionization It’s hard to imagine that just a year ago, tens of thousands of students flooded the campuses of ASU each day. And in March and April last year, it was hard to imagine returning to campus with the outside world so dormant. But it was also unimaginable there would be momentum to form a union a year ago. When ASU announced it would be creating plans to host in-person classes, Newhauser – a tenured professor who took a sabbatical year to avoid risk of COVID-19 – said staff members were “unhappy and suffering and afraid. Afraid of getting COVID, afraid of losing their lives.” In the month before students would return to campus, Arizona was coming off its worst month in the pandemic as a global hotspot for new infections. The state’s 7-day average never fell below 2,000 new cases of COVID-19 per day, according to the New York Times database. A new group called the Community of Care Coalition formed in August and called for ASU to “slow the fork down,” in reference to the University holding in-person classes that fall. While the Community of Care Coalition is not part of the union, their work aided in the union's attempts to organize. “The state of Arizona is #slowingthespread and the rate of transmission has dropped. But @ASU is returning to in-person instruction too soon,” the Community of Care Coalition said in their first post on Twitter on Aug. 9. Later that day, the coalition posted a petition urging the University to re-examine its opening practices and the following recommendations before reopening: 1. Establish public, scientifically determined metrics, informed by rigorous testing of all students, faculty and staff, that create a transparent standard for resuming in-person instruction. 2. Grant accommodations for all faculty, staff, and graduate students who have requested them regardless of reason. 3. Create a formal and transparent process whereby a committee representing all stakeholders (including track and contingent faculty, staff, and students) in the ASU community can advise the executive leadership team on questions pertaining to COVID policy. “And out of that beginning, first at the University of Arizona and then later at ASU, people realized that a kind of loose coalition was a good start, but more organization was needed,” Newhauser said. In September 2020, the United Campus Workers of Arizona formed against the “austerity measures” implemented at the University of Arizona and the lack of COVID-19 regulations to keep on-campus workers safe. UCW Arizona joined the national Communication Workers of America union and other higher education unions at the University of Colorado and the University of Tennessee. By joining this group of unions, Newhauser said, the UCW Arizona union has been able to set up Zoom calls with leaders in other states and pursue what he calls a “wall-to-wall” union. A wall-to-wall union seeks to unite all workers – from tenured professors and fulltime staff to graduate students and undergraduate laborers – to create the most robust solidarity possible. All union members are required to pay dues, but with a progressive due structure, Newhauser said, the lowest-paid workers at ASU would pay as little as $8 per month for union membership. “But even that can be worked out with the union,” Newhauser said. Solidarity Young grew up near Detroit, a historically strong union city that arose in the 1930s with the automobile industry and the “Big Three” manufacturers Ford, General Motors and Chrysler. “Unions made for higher wages,” Young said. “They made for better working conditions and they helped historically establish the 40-hour workweek, the minimum wage. They helped end child labor.” But when she moved to Arizona, Young found that unions had a bad reputation. Arizona is one of 28 states with right-towork laws. She hopes that the pandemic, as terrible as it has been for working-class families, can also be a moment to change unions’ reputation in the state. Right-to-work laws weaken the power of unions by eliminating compulsory union membership for new employees, Jacobs said. Without a robust union, the ability to collectively bargain with an employer is greatly reduced. Newhauser, who used his tenured status to take a sabbatical this year and avoid risking infection on campus, said “it's incumbent on everybody who has job security to show solidarity with those who are in positions where that's not granted.” Since forming last month, the union gained more than 150 members at ASU and another 500 members at the University of Arizona, Young said, noting that the union “grows stronger every day.” But there’s a long way to forming a wall-to-wall union with more than 17,700 staff members on five separate campuses. “That's the biggest challenge,” Young said about getting members to understand what a union can do for them, and make a financial commitment. “But you have to put your money where your mouth is. I'm paying $22 a month now for the union because I believe in it.” “We want true shared governance, in other words, what we're talking about is power-sharing at the University.” — Richard Newhauser The union bug The union voted in February for members of its steering committee. It’s the first step in setting goals for the union and strategizing the ways to go about achieving those goals. Newhauser outlined a few goals the union hopes to accomplish: create campaigns addressing rising health care costs and lower health care benefits, make sure all workers are paid a living wage and that payment is adjusted with the cost of living, and protect workers from being fired without just cause. “We want employees to have a voice where they've often been unheard,” Newhauser said. “We want true shared governance. In other words, what we're talking about is power-sharing at the University.” Young was able to successfully lobby the ASU administration to review its rules on the quarantining of books — outside of her union work, she said. But being part of the union emboldened her to address her concerns and advocate for herself. The unionization effort inside of Arizona’s higher education institutions follows closely behind the effort in Arizona’s K-12 institutions with the Red For Ed movement. Through organizing and protest, Red For Ed was able to gain attention from the public and lobby lawmakers. And in 2018, Gov. Doug Ducey signed the 20x2020 Plan which would bring a 20% raise to public school teachers over three years. “Those teachers, by coming together and acting together,” Jacobs said, "were able to utilize their collective power in such a way that they were able to win, in many cases, greater funding for schools and pay increases for teachers who are woefully underpaid.” The unionization bug that Arizona’s public school teachers caught a few years ago seems to have mutated to infect the workers at the state’s colleges, Jacobs said. Public opinion has been moving in favor of unions over the past decade, he said, and workers are “newly organizing right in the throes of the pandemic.” The union’s work is cut out for them. But with a couple of semesters of Zoom classes under their belt, Young, Newhauser and the rest of the union have adapted to creating solidarity digitally, working to change the system of decision-making itself. “We're working to ensure that the universities operate in a more democratic fashion and listen to the little people like me and student workers,” Young said. “And that we have a voice in how the system is run.” |
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