Editorial Roundup: Minnesota
Minneapolis Star Tribune. September 29, 2023.
Editorial: All hands needed to get students back in school
Attendance has plunged since before the pandemic, which means kids aren’t learning.
It only stands to reason: When students don’t go to school and attend class — neither in person nor remotely — they don’t learn.
That’s why disturbingly low attendance rates the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) recently reported across the state demand intensive, immediate attention. School staff must use extra efforts to get students back in the classrooms. And families and communities must also get involved in keeping track of kids and seeing that they attend class.
MDE says only 70% of students attended class at least 90% of the time during the 2021-2022 school year. That’s a significant decrease from pre-pandemic times, when 85% of students were regularly showing up for school.
Last year in Anoka-Hennepin, the state’s largest district, 1 in 4 students were chronically absent, missing more than 10% of the school year. That’s nearly twice the rate that prevailed before the pandemic. In pre-pandemic Minneapolis, 79% of kids were in school regularly, while in 2022 the percentage dropped to 46%.
Like many worrisome education trends, attendance decreases have had particularly severe impacts on lower-income kids and students of color. In 2019, the consistent attendance rate was 71% for Minneapolis’ Black students and 44% for Native American students; those numbers dropped below one-third of Black students and under a quarter of Native American students in 2022.
Research demonstrates that dropping and stagnant test scores can be tied to irregular attendance. University of Chicago studies show that students with strong attendance records are much more likely to stay on track, do well throughout their years in school and go on to higher education. And the data indicate that being present in school is more strongly correlated with student success than other characteristics including race, gender and poverty levels.
To combat the nonattendance trend in Minneapolis, teams of school staff members are reaching out to kids through its We Want You Back program. They text, call, use social media and canvass communities to find out if groups of teenagers are gathering outside of school during the day.
In St. Paul, the School Attendance Matters (SAM) effort helps individual schools with attendance improvement strategies.
Though individual schools and districts should tailor efforts to their needs, researchers say that several general strategies can help improve attendance.
Among them: Keep accurate attendance data, share it with staff and quickly intervene. Build stronger, supportive relationships between adults and students to improve student interest in school, the sense of belonging and the desire to be present. Provide engaging, relevant instruction; students are more motivated to attend class if coursework is interesting to them. Create a team approach, emphasizing collective responsibility for student attendance throughout the school. And, if possible, offer additional mental health resources to students who are missing school because they need help.
An MDE spokesperson told an editorial writer that that there are several state programs — such as the Minnesota Multi-Tiered System of Supports and the Collaborative Minnesota Partnerships to Advance Student Success — that can offer schools guidance on identifying and addressing barriers to consistent student attendance.
We’d add the essential role that parents, guardians, relatives and communities play in student attendance. Those all-important influencers on kids’ lives outside school should step up and take personal responsibility for making sure young people get to class — where they belong.
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Mankato Free Press. September 29, 2023.
Editorial: Gun violence New gun law is working to stop “bad guys”
The NRA opposed a law that is now taking thousands of guns off the streets and arresting hundreds of criminals who are going to jail and not coming out for a long time.
The NRA opposed it. Think about that.
In essence, contrary to NRA tropes, new gun laws are taking bad guys off the streets without the help of “good guys with guns,” the term the NRA often uses as its solution to gun violence.
Since implementation of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in 2022, the FBI, ATF and U.S. attorneys across the country have unleashed a firestorm of enforcement activity to confiscating ghost guns and machine gun converters and catching hundreds of dangerous people trying to buy guns illegally.
Just two weeks ago, ATF officials in Minnesota arrested three suspects selling ghost guns and machine gun converters on their Snapchat page. An undercover officer purchased as many as six converters or switches during a four-month period. The men are awaiting trial.
That was just the tip of the iceberg.
A justice department report shows the new law also provided resources to increase the emphasis on tracking and seizing ghost guns, often homemade with the help of 3D printers. In 2022, the department seized 25,785 ghost guns. By June of 2023, the department has already recovered 10,000 more ghost guns. The seizures were possible due to new gun law rules that changed the definition of firearms to make clear ghost guns do not fall under the legal definition.
The new law added more criminal offenses for trafficking in firearms and straw buying and so far, 100 individuals have been charged with those more serious crimes. Prosecutions of businesses dealing in firearms without a license are up 52% and 90 licenses have been revoked.
The bipartisan law expanded background checks to those under 21 with mental health and criminal records. As a result, 100,000 additional background checks were made and 1,000 guns were kept out of the hands of prohibited and dangerous people, including 200 that were stopped from purchasing the firearm based solely on the new expanded background check.
The new federal law is also helping state and local law enforcement trace guns used in crimes.
Some 10,000 agencies have now been granted easier access to eTrace, a federal resource where local departments can submit evidence to ATF for tracing. Tracing was up 10% in 2022 and ATF is expected to expand this help to trace more than 675,000 guns this year. In the last year the system has provided 200,000 criminal leads to law enforcement across the country.
The bipartisan law also called for including a new “dating relationship” definition into its background check system to close the so called “boyfriend loophole” that allow domestic abusers to obtain weapons illegally and escape background checks.
The NRA opposed all of this. In the Senate, 15 Republicans voted with Democrats to pass the bill, and in the House, 14 Republicans voted with Democrats to pass the measure. Minnesota’s 1st District seat was vacant after the death of Rep. Jim Hagedorn. Rep. Michelle Fischbach, R-7th Dist., voted against the bill. Rep. Angie Craig, D-2nd Dist., was a yes vote.
These law enforcement results show that common sense gun laws reduce violent gun crime. There’s no doubt about it, and there’s no way a “good guy with a gun” could accomplish the same.
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