Evening Wrap

We talked about schools yesterday, and we’re back in the classroom today — specifically, a (hypothetical) classroom in rural New Hampshire, where school districts are struggling to address historic shortages of educators. Teacher shortages are nothing new for the state (or the country), but the situation is particularly dire in poor and rural districts, where salaries are limited by budget constrictions that simply don’t exist in wealthier areas, the New Hampshire Bulletin reported.

Vouchers are a conundrum wrapped in an enigma cocooned in a question mark. They’re simple, but they’re also inherently confusing, based as they are on the contradiction of allocating public money to help students attend private schools. By definition, that means shifting taxpayer money to private institutions with opaque admissions policies and little to no oversight. This is all a long way of saying that vouchers don’t really make sense.

The reason modern man has been able to exist on Earth for 200,000 years is that, at some point, we figured out our chances for survival were better if we were simply decent to one another. I can’t help but wonder: What finally got through the thick skull of Ardipithecus? Did Australopithecus just get bored with clubbing his best friend over the head with a tree branch and then — poof — homo sapien takes center stage?

A new national report shows tough times ahead for the Southwest United States, reports the Nevada Current. Over the next 10 years, residents will want to buckle in as the “rapidly warming climate drives food shortages, intensifies droughts, floods, wildfires, diseases, and jeopardizes public infrastructure like roads and dams.”

Thanksgiving is the time when we gather to celebrate the bounty of nature and the richness of our agriculture. It is fitting, therefore, that we start with a stroll in the great outdoors, with stories about the food we eat and the wildlife we see (and sometimes also eat).

 We’re talking about disinformation today, which I guess means that I am bringing you a lot of information about a lot of disinformation. Confused yet? I’ll clear it up, I promise.

Environment news tends to fall in one of two buckets: Pollution or climate change. I’ve got stories from both of those troughs today, but I also have a sampling from a surprise third bucket: Body-worn cameras for wildlife officials. (Surprise!) 

Let’s start with the big news out of D.C., where President Joe Biden on Thursday signed a stopgap funding measure hours ahead of an impending government shutdown. The bill, approved by bipartisan coalitions in both the House and Senate, is an anodyne placeholder that maintains current spending levels for high-priority agencies through Jan. 19, with a Feb. 2 deadline for the rest. It does not include aid for Ukraine or Israel, or anything else that might be considered even slightly controversial, our D.C. bureau reported. 

Three months after his 18th birthday, Casey McWhorter and two of his friends hatched a plan to rob a house. The plan, McWhorter said, was to “go in, get a bunch of stuff, some guns, some weed, some drugs, and leave.”

Testimony from drug recognition experts — law enforcement officers trained to determine whether a driver is under the influence of drugs — is “reliable enough” to be used as evidence, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled Wednesday. The 5-2 decision affirms a 2022 report from a court-appointed special master but limits how the testimony can be used, creating a framework for enforcing impairment laws in a state where marijuana is legal, the New Jersey Monitor reported.

Child care is a crucial economic driver. Last year alone, gaps in care disrupted work for nearly two-thirds of parents, costing an estimated $122 billion in lost wages, productivity and tax revenue. 

Worker shortages will ebb and flow in some job markets, but for others, the problem will be chronic. For some industries, it already is. Health care workers, for example, have been in short supply for decades; a longstanding problem laid bare by the pandemic and the surging demand from all those retiring boomers. In September, there were just .29 unemployed workers for every health sector job. The disparity will likely get worse, particularly in low-wage health care jobs, where shortages could grow by as much as 3.2 million in the next five years.