ProPublica

by Mark Olalde

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere has reached its highest level in recorded human history. Again.

In April, the level of CO2 was 27% higher than it was 50 years ago, according to the latest data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. (Methane, a gas with about 85 times the near-term warming effect of CO2, has risen more than 16% since 1984, the first full year that NOAA collected data.)

Each spring, going back decades, we have surpassed the previous year’s CO2 record, as humans continue burning hydrocarbons at breathtaking rates, releasing greenhouse gasses. That impacts temperatures, precipitation, the intensity of storms and other weather patterns.

Across the American Southwest, this has amplified record droughts and fires.

Climate change is exposing where the bodies are buried, literally. Boaters and paddle boarders discovered two corpses in early May in Lake Mead, as water levels fell to their lowest point since the reservoir was filled in the 1930s. Lake Powell has also dropped to its lowest point since being filled. The ongoing drought appears to be the worst in 1,200 years, according to research recently published in the journal Nature Climate Change. Around the region, there have been hotter temperatures, smaller snowpack and an earlier start to the fire season. Wildfires have already torched more than 300,000 acres near Santa Fe in northern New Mexico this year.

This new reality threatens the Southwest, the fastest-growing region in the U.S., and the 40 million people who rely on the Colorado River, while offering a glimpse at what climate change will bring there and elsewhere.

“This happens to be one of those years when we can look out the window and look at the future as the smoke pall floats overhead,” said David Gutzler, a professor emeritus who researches climatology and meteorology at the University of New Mexico’s Earth and Planetary Sciences department.

To better understand how climate change is and will continue to affect the Southwest, ProPublica spoke to three experts: Gutzler; Mikhail Chester, a professor in Arizona State University’s engineering school and the director of the Metis Center for Infrastructure and Sustainable Engineering; and Gregg Garfin, a climatologist at the University of Arizona and co-lead author of the Southwest chapter in the Fourth National Climate Assessment.

The conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

Wildfires are burning near Santa Fe, while the Boulder, Colorado, area is still reeling from a fire that burned a developed area in the dead of winter. What are the connections between a changing climate and wildfires?

Gutzler: We make the extremes worse. That’s a bit different than saying a wildfire is caused by climate change. As temperatures rise, hot temperature-related extreme events are likely to become more frequent and more severe, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing across the West right now.

Garfin: There are also parts of the region where there’s a link between fire severity and climate change. The way that plays out is that climate change affects the hydrology, so it leads to a shorter snow-cover season, less snow-covered area, soils that are desiccated, and then temperature also puts stress on trees that dries out the fuels.

Research also suggests the Colorado River’s flow is down about 20% this century. How might the region’s river systems be shaped by climate change?

Gutzler: We should plan for diminished flows, particularly out of snow-fed rivers. ... What snow there is melts earlier and melts faster. That’s exactly what we saw this year. In the Rio Grande Basin, snowpack was pretty close to what most people would consider average right around the time of peak snow, a month and a half ago. But it has just melted really fast in this hot weather, so the effect of that on streamflow is we get less flow in the river for the same amount of snow that fell last winter.

Garfin: We’re seeing less snow-covered area, less water content in the snowpack, early runoff in the late winter and early spring at elevations lower than around 7,000 feet, an increased fraction in the precipitation that we get coming as rain rather than snow and reduced soil moisture. All of these things combine to reduce the efficiency of runoff. ...

We’re already seeing an increasing water supply coming from treated effluent that’s primarily being used to irrigate parks or golf courses. Probably we’ll be seeing more of our potable water supply coming from treated effluent. Another thing — we saw this in Arizona in the State of the State address from Gov. (Doug) Ducey — he said let’s put billions of dollars into developing desalinated water supplies, and there have been plenty of feasibility studies. It’s expensive and it takes a lot of energy, but we could end up with some technological breakthroughs. ... Water managers throughout the Colorado River Basin have been creative in finding ways to keep more water in the reservoirs. Obviously that’s not enough, but I think there will be water marketing and trading maneuvers — because some tribes have large amounts of water — to create the legal mechanisms for the cities to buy more water from tribes.

What about the impact of climate change on living things in the region? What do we know about changes to ecosystems and biodiversity?

Gutzler: The change in the climate is happening at the same time as humans affect ecosystems in other ways that aren’t connected to climate change, just by habitat destruction and all the other things that people do to change the environment. I view climate change as an added stress to wild ecosystems that are already stressed by large numbers of people moving into the Southwest.

One way for mobile species to adapt to climate change is to move north. ... If people have built fences or, at the U.S.-Mexico border, a wall, then the combined effect of a changing climate and barriers to migration can jeopardize the health of species and ecosystems.

In addition to biodiversity, how does a changing climate interact with the Southwest’s rapid population growth?

Garfin: We’ve got a lot of people who have built their homes or expanded towns into the so-called wildland-urban interface, and that puts infrastructure at risk (to wildfires). Also, if we have severe fire, eventually there’s going to be rain — it doesn’t even have to be record rainfall — and all that stuff that has burned is going to find its way into watercourses. We end up with debris flows that can take out infrastructure, that can take out roads or that can end up in reservoirs and increasing the sediment load and decreasing water quality.

Chester: We are figuring out already how to deal with extremes in terms of heat, in terms of monsoons, in terms of drought that are beyond the forecasts of most other places in the United States. The worst of the worst in a particular place in Illinois, let’s say, is probably not close to what you get in Phoenix, so we’re already living with these extremes. ... For the most part, things aren’t breaking right now. ...

Now, you’re running into the reality that the conditions that we’re designing for are not necessarily what we will live with in the future. So, if we designed for 120 degrees Fahrenheit maximum temperatures, is that what’s going to be the max 20 years from now, 30 years from now, or is it going to be greater?

If the Phoenix metro area is doing pretty well overall, are there any examples of infrastructure that’s already nearing the breaking point?

Chester: You get a lot more blackouts and brownouts in the power system when you have these heat waves. That’s the case anywhere in the U.S., but you certainly have that here. You get inundation of the stormwater system. ... Everything breaks more frequently when you have hotter temperatures. That’s the simpler way of looking at it.

The Southwest is a very ethnically diverse region. How does that affect the calculus as society pursues solutions?

Garfin: If we don’t deal with equity in climate solutions, then we’re going to shoot ourselves in the foot. Through the impacts to vulnerable communities and less economically well-off communities, it’ll end up being more costly anyway. ... Previous failures were that housing developments in less affluent parts of our cities have typically lacked the kinds of landscaping that would reduce the heat-island effect and that would absorb more stormwater, so we know that now and we know that we haven’t done well by those communities.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published reports this year that came with a warning — we’re likely to miss the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. What does that mean for the Southwest?

Gutzler: We’re living it this year. ... You can take an extreme drought of the sort that we’re experiencing now and the way that it has impacted the environment, the water supply across the board, and say that is the direction the Southwest is headed unless we do something about climate change.

Garfin: We already have amplified heat in our cities from the urban heat-island effect, from just changing from natural vegetation to the built environment. Also, as you increase the background temperature, the effects that we see in our large cities — Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas — more people are exposed to the public health effects of extreme heat. ... In places like Tucson or Las Cruces, our future might look like Phoenix, and Phoenix’s future might look like Middle Eastern cities. ... Then, what’s projected is continued decreases in snowpack, perhaps more extreme high flows, but more days with very low flows. That leads to a much less reliable surface water supply.

Are there examples of steps being taken in the region to address climate change through mitigation or adaptation?

Garfin: If we look to some of the more progressive climate change plans like Flagstaff’s Climate Action and Adaptation Plan, they’re doing a couple things in terms of wildfire. One is insisting through their public policy that there’s more defensible space around houses and other structures that are in the wildland-urban interface. Then, they also had a bond in 2012 where city residents overwhelmingly voted to tax themselves to pay for forest treatments on public, federal lands in their watershed to reduce the risk of really severe fires.

Chester: There’s got to be a readjustment of how we utilize ecological infrastructure. ... You’re going to have a lot of small-scale failures, and at times it might make sense to allow those failures to happen.

I’m not suggesting we allow loss of life. I’m not suggesting we allow major economic damages. So, a great example here of safe-to-fail infrastructure is Indian Bend Wash in Scottsdale. We’ve basically said, when the monsoon rains come, we are going to allow a giant river to move through the wash, and it might take out the golf courses, the bike paths, the Frisbee golf, the dog park. ... The cost of replacing it is pretty low, but the benefit we get is enormous. The benefit is social in terms of all this space. The benefit is ecological; there’s a lot of green infrastructure in there. There’s also the benefit of stormwater attenuation.

With all this in mind, what does the future hold for the Southwest?

Chester: The problem — from my perspective as an engineer who studies infrastructure — is the rigidity of everything we’ve built out. ... For the past century we’ve gotten away with these design assumptions that things can be rigid, can be based on a future that is largely predictable. Here we are in the future saying that doesn’t seem to be the case. We need a lot of flexibility.

Gutzler: Ultimately, carbon energy will be replaced on purely economic grounds by renewables, so there’s hope there. But the Southwest is inevitably going to become a hotter and drier place than it is now with huge stresses on human societies and wild ecosystems. That’s what’s in store for us, so we better adapt to it as intelligently as we can.

by Molly Parker, The Southern Illinoisan

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Southern Illinoisan. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Two Southern Illinois lawmakers are calling on Gov. J.B. Pritzker to improve access to mental health and substance abuse treatment and other services to ensure that families repeatedly investigated by the state’s child welfare agency can access the help they need.

“It’s time for the governor to be a leader and figure out how to solve this problem in Southern Illinois,” said State Sen. Terri Bryant, a Murphysboro Republican who sits on a subcommittee focused on family and child welfare issues.

The calls to action come on the heels of reporting by The Southern Illinoisan and ProPublica about the large number of parents who are investigated by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services time and again for allegations of child abuse or neglect.

The reporting involved an analysis of departmental investigative case data by ProPublica and The Southern Illinoisan and found that parents and caregivers in Southern Illinois were more likely to face repeat DCFS investigations compared with those in other parts of the state. Numerous parents cycling through DCFS investigations told reporters they were having difficulty accessing the services they needed in order to keep or reunite with their children after an abuse or neglect allegation was reported to the department.

State Rep. Patrick Windhorst, a Republican from Metropolis, at the state’s southern border with Kentucky, also called on the governor and other state policymakers to take swift action to improve the lives of children and families involved with DCFS in Southern Illinois. The agency, he said, “is deeply in need of reform.”

Statewide, Illinois is experiencing escalating rates of “recurrence,” which measures the percentage of child abuse and neglect victims who are the subject of a subsequent substantiated DFCS investigation within a year of an earlier substantiated investigation. Illinois’ recurrence rate reached a 10-year high in fiscal year 2020 and was among the nation’s worst.

The analysis also found that most parents facing repeated investigations have not physically abused their children but instead face numerous allegations of neglect. Neglect is broadly defined as a failure to provide for basic needs such as food, clothing, shelter and supervision.

Bryant said that she called DCFS Director Marc Smith late last month, on the day the story was published, demanding answers about his agency’s plans for Southern Illinois families. She also expressed frustration that Smith, a Pritzker appointee, was quoted in the article blaming problems on the state’s budget woes, particularly during the administration of former Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner. Pritzker, a Democrat, ousted Rauner in the 2018 election and faces reelection this November. In recent months, Prtizker’s DCFS has faced intense scrutiny from child welfare officials and lawmakers from both parties.

Still, Bryant described her conversation with Smith as productive. He acknowledged to her the need to expand services in Southern Illinois, she said. He also told her — according to Bryant, and echoing his prior comments to reporters — that solving this issue can’t be the work of DCFS alone. The state’s other social service agencies, especially the Department of Human Services and the Department of Healthcare and Family Services, also play a role, he told her. They are responsible for ensuring that there’s a robust menu of drug treatment and mental health services available across the state, and that they’re accessible to low-income Illinoisans, including to the families involved with child welfare services. (A spokesman for DCFS confirmed that Bryant and Smith spoke about the need for a multi-agency response to these challenges.)

“The gist of it was that all three of those agencies have responsibilities when it comes to certain things for youth in care and their parents, and as he said that to me, it made sense.”

Still, Bryant questioned why the governor, who oversees all of those departments, isn’t doing more to bring them together to solve these issues. The 27 Southern Illinois counties served by DCFS’ Marion office and its satellite offices have collectively experienced a 120% spike in the number of children in foster care in a decade. “The time for DCFS, HFS and DHS to point fingers at each other is long past over,” she said.

While those agencies have acknowledged difficulties providing services in the region, officials emphasized recent efforts to solve those issues. In a statement, Alex Gough, Pritzker’s senior deputy press secretary, reiterated the administration’s claim that the service deserts and the worsening child welfare trends are attributable to Rauner’s budget policies.

“After social service programs were hollowed out over four years under the previous administration, Governor Pritzker has worked tirelessly to restore reliable services in every corner of the state,” Gough said. Numerous attempts to reach Rauner were unsuccessful.

Pritzker has “invested hundreds of millions of dollars in programs that help families build better lives,” Gough added. That has included increasing funding for mental health and substance abuse treatment, and expanding access to housing, child care and food programs for low-income families. Further, he said, the governor tapped two experienced executives in March to lead an overhaul of the state’s behavioral health support systems for adults and children, and to oversee the expansion of services into areas where they are lacking.

DHS spokesperson Patrick Laughlin said the governor has committed more resources for substance abuse prevention and recovery, as well as for family support services, “than ever before.”

Jamie Munks, spokesperson for HFS, acknowledged that accessing specialty and behavioral health services “has long proven challenging in certain parts of the state.” But in this administration, she said, the department is working under a mandate to increase equitable access to health care services. The department launched a program last year aimed at improving health care access in rural and underserved areas.

In recent years, Windhorst said the General Assembly has considered several proposals to make child welfare services more responsive locally. One proposal called for fracturing DCFS’ statewide authority and placing regional branches under the control of the chief judge of each circuit. Another proposal called for expanding court involvement for parents in substantiated cases of abuse or neglect but whose circumstances do not necessitate immediate removal of their children. But before any reform efforts can be implemented, they “require the needed services to be available,” he said.

“That has long been an issue in southernmost Illinois and will require DCFS to focus on how it uses resources that are sometimes scarce in our region and are often more readily available out of state,” Windhorst said.

by Eli Hager and Asia Fields

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Reporters at ProPublica and NBC News are conducting research on Arizona’s child protective services agency (the Department of Child Safety, or DCS) and how it investigates Black families in the Phoenix area at a higher rate than white families. We would like to hear directly from people who have been affected by this issue.

We’re especially interested in speaking with Black families who have had any interaction with DCS, which used to be called Child Protective Services, or CPS. We’d also like to hear from others who know about this topic, such as educators and community organizers.

We know this can be difficult to talk about. We appreciate you sharing your story, and we take your privacy seriously. It is important to us. We are gathering these stories for the purposes of our reporting, and we will contact you if we wish to publish any part.

Filling out the short questionnaire below will help us shine a light on the important issue of racial disparities in Arizona’s child protective services system.

by Adriana Gallardo

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The original version of this story, which was co-published with NPR, is available here. The version below contains updated links and statistics and has been condensed for clarity.

In 2017, ProPublica and NPR launched a project shedding light on maternal deaths and near-deaths in the U.S. We explored better ways to track and understand preventable deaths, and the intergenerational trauma caused by childbirth complications and chronic racial disparities in who suffers from them. We heard from more than 5,000 people who endured, or watched a loved one endure, life-threatening pregnancy and childbirth complications, often resulting in long-lasting physical and emotional effects.

These people who sent us their stories frequently told us they knew little to nothing beforehand about the potentially fatal complications that they or their loved ones faced. They wanted to help others. So we decided to publish some of their wisdom.

They told us what they wish they had known ahead of their severe complications: How do I get medical professionals to listen? When are changes in my body normal, and when are they a warning? How do I navigate the postpartum period? In the years since, other readers have told us this advice was critical.

Recent data shows maternal deaths, including deaths in the first six weeks after childbirth, rose in the first year of the pandemic. The increase puts the nation’s maternal mortality rate at 23.8 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2020, up from 20.1 deaths in 2019.

If the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade, they’ll do so in a country where pregnancy and childbirth continue to become more dangerous. We’re republishing this advice today, in a shortened and easier-to-navigate format, because self-advocacy and community knowledge are important when systems fail.

Choosing a Provider

“A lot of data on specific doctors and hospitals can be found publicly. Knowing how your physician and hospital rates as compared to others (cesarean rates, infection rates, readmission rates) can give you valuable insight into how they perform. ‘Liking’ your doctor as a person is nice, but not nearly as important as their and their facility’s culture and track record.”

— Kristen Terlizzi, survivor of a 2014 placenta accreta spectrum (a disorder in which the placenta grows into or through the uterine wall) and cofounder of the National Accreta Foundation

“Key pieces of information every woman should know before choosing a hospital are: What are their safety protocols for adverse maternal events? No one likes to think about this while pregnant, and providers will probably tell you that it’s unlikely to happen. But it does happen and it’s good to know that the hospital and providers have practiced for such scenarios and have proper protocols in place.”

— Marianne Drexler, survived a hemorrhage and emergency hysterectomy in 2014

“If a birthing center is your choice, discuss what happens in an emergency — how far away is the closest hospital with an ICU? Because a lot of hospitals don’t have them. Another thing many women don’t realize is that not every hospital has an obstetrician there 24/7. Ask your doctors: If they’re not able to be there the whole time you’re in labor, will there be another ob/gyn on site 24 hours a day if something goes wrong?”

— Miranda Klassen, survivor of amniotic fluid embolism in 2008 and founder/executive director of the Amniotic Fluid Embolism Foundation

Preparing for an Emergency

“A conversation about possible things that could go wrong is prudent to have with your doctor or in one of these childbirth classes. I don’t think that it needs to be done in a way to terrify the new parents, but as a way to provide knowledge. The pregnant woman should be taught warning signs, and know when to speak up so that she can be treated as quickly and accurately as possible.”

— Susan Lewis, survived disseminated Intravascular Coagulation (DIC) in 2016

“Always have somebody with you in a medical setting to ask the questions you might not think of and to advocate on your behalf if your ability to communicate is compromised by being in poor health. ... And get emotional support to steel you against the naysayers. It may feel really unnatural or difficult to push back [against doctors and nurses]. Online forums and Facebook groups can be helpful to ensure you’re not losing your mind.”

— Eleni Tsigas, survivor of preeclampsia in 1998 and 1999 and chief executive officer of the Preeclampsia Foundation

“In case you ever are unable to respond, someone needs to step in and be your voice! Know as much thorough medical history as possible, and let your spouse or support person know [in depth] your history as well.”

— Kristina Landrus, survived a hemorrhage in 2013

“Also be sure your spouse and your other family members, like your parents or siblings, are on the same page about your care. And if you aren’t married, who will be making the decisions on your behalf? You should put things in order, designate the person who will be the decision maker, and give that person power of attorney. Other important things to have are a medical directive or a living will — be sure to bring a copy with you to the hospital. I also recommend packing a journal to record everything that happens.”

— Miranda Klassen

“Make a list of your questions and make sure you get the full answer. I went to every appointment the second time around with a notebook. I would apologize for being ‘that patient,’ but I had been through this before and I wasn’t going to be confused again. I wanted to know everything. Honestly, it was as harmful as it was helpful. I knew what I was getting into, which made it much scarier. The first time, my ignorance was bliss. I didn’t realize I almost died until two weeks after I had left the hospital. I didn’t even start researching what had happened to me until months later. The second time I was an advocate for myself. Medical journals and support groups were a part of every single visit. And thankfully, I was in good hands.”

— Carrie Anthony, survived placenta accreta and hemorrhage in 2008 and 2015 as well as placenta previa in the second pregnancy

“Write down what each specialty says to you. ... They paraded in on a schedule, checked up on me, asked if I had any questions. I always did, but I regret not writing down what each said each time (along with names!). I got so many different answers regarding how I would be anesthetized, and on the day it all had to happen in an emergency, there were disagreements above me in the OR between the specialists. It was like children arguing on a playground and my life was in danger. Had I kept a more vigilant record of what each specialty reported to me, perhaps prior to the day I could have confronted each with the details that weren’t matching up.”

— Megan Moody, survived placenta percreta (when the placenta penetrates through the uterine wall) in 2016

“People should know that they have a right to ask for more time with the doctor or more follow-up if they feel something is not right. The OB-GYNs (at least in Pennsylvania) are so busy and sometimes appointments are quite quick and rushed. Make the doctors slow down and take the time with you.”

— Dani Leiman, survived HELLP syndrome (a particularly dangerous variant of preeclampsia) in 2011

“You have a legal right to your medical records throughout pregnancy and anytime afterwards. Get a copy of your lab results each time blood is drawn, and a copy of your prenatal and hospital reports. Ask about concerning or unclear results.”

— Eleni Tsigas

Getting Your Provider to Listen

“Understand the system. Ask a nurse or a trusted loved one in the ‘industry’ how it all works. I’ve found that medical professionals are more likely to listen to you if you demonstrate an understanding of their roles and the kind of questions they can/cannot answer. Know your ‘silos.’ Don’t ask an anesthesiologist how they plan on stitching up your cervix. Specialists are often incredibly impatient. You need to get the details out of them regarding their very specific roles.”

— Megan Moody

“If your provider tells you, ‘You are pregnant. What you’re experiencing is normal,’ remember — that may be true. [But it’s also true] that preeclampsia can mimic many normal symptoms of pregnancy. Ask, ‘What else could this be?’ Expect a thoughtful answer that includes consideration of ‘differential diagnoses’ — in other words, other conditions that could be causing the same symptoms.”

— Eleni Tsigas

“They only listen if the pain is a 10 or higher. Most of us don’t understand what a 10 is. I’d always imagined a 10 would feel like having a limb blown off in combat. When asked to evaluate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10, when you are in your most vulnerable moment, it is very hard to assess this logically, for you and for your partner witnessing your pain. I later saw a pain chart with pictures. A 10 was demonstrated with an illustration of a crying face. You may not actually be shedding tears, but you are most likely crying on the inside in pain, so I suggest to always say a 10. My pain from the brain hemorrhage was probably a 100, but I’m not sure if I even said 10 at the time.”

— Emily McLaughlin, survived a postpartum stroke in 2015

“So many women do speak up about the strange pain they have, and a nurse may brush it off as normal without consulting a doctor and running any tests. Be annoying if you must, this is your life. ... Thankfully, I never had to be so assertive. I owe my life to the team of doctors and nurses who acted swiftly and accurately, and I am eternally grateful.”

— Susan Lewis

“If you have a hemorrhage, don’t clean up after yourself! Make sure the doctor is fully aware of how much blood you are losing. I had a very nice nurse who was helping to keep me clean and helping to change my (rapidly filling) pads. If the doctor had seen the pools of blood himself, rather than just being told about them, he might not have been so quick to dismiss me.”

— Valerie Bradford, survived a hemorrhage in 2016

Paying Attention to Your Symptoms

“I had heard of preeclampsia but I was naïve. [I believed] that it was something women developed who didn’t watch what they ate and didn’t focus on good health prior and/or during pregnancy. I was in great health and shape prior to getting pregnant, during my pregnancy I continued to make good food choices and worked out up until 36 hours before the baby had to be taken. I gained healthy weight and kept my BMI at an optimum number. I thought due to my good health, I was not susceptible to anything and my labor would be easy. So although I had felt bad for 1 1/2 weeks, I chalked it up to the fact that I was almost 8 months into this pregnancy, so you’re not supposed to feel great. … I walked into my doctor’s office that Friday and not one hour later I was in an emergency C-section delivering a baby. I had to fully be put under due to the severity of the HELLP, so I didn’t wake up until the next day.”

— Kelli Davis, survived HELLP syndrome in 2016

“Understand that severe, sustained pain is not normal. So many people told me that the final trimester of pregnancy is sooo uncomfortable. It was my first pregnancy, I have a generally high threshold for pain, and my son was breech so I thought his head was causing bad pain under my ribs [when it was really epigastric pain from the HELLP syndrome]. I kept thinking it was normal to be in pain and I let it go until it was almost too late.”

— Dani Leiman

“Know the way your blood pressure should be taken. And ask for the results. Politely challenge the technician or nurse if it’s not being done correctly or if they suggest ‘changing positions to get a lower reading.’ Very high blood pressure (anything over 160/110) is a ‘hypertensive crisis’ and requires immediate intervention.”

— Eleni Tsigas

“Please ask for a heart monitor for yourself while in labor, not just for the baby. I think if I had one on, seconds or minutes could have been erased from reaction time by the nurses. They were alerted to an issue because the baby’s heart stopped during labor, and while the nurse was checking that machine, my husband noticed I was also non-responsive. That’s when everything happened.”

— Kristy Kummer-Pred, survived amniotic fluid embolism and cardiac arrest in 2012

After the Delivery

“My swelling in my hands and feet never went away. My uterus hadn’t shrunk. I wasn’t bleeding that bad, but there was a strange odor to it. My breasts were swollen and my milk wasn’t coming in. I was misdiagnosed with mastitis [a painful inflammation of the breast tissue that sometimes occurs when milk ducts become plugged and engorged]. The real problem was that I still had pieces of placenta inside my uterus. Know that your placenta should not come out in multiple pieces. It should come out in one piece. If it is broken apart, demand an ultrasound to ensure the doctors got it all. If you have flu-like symptoms, demand to be seen by a doctor. If you don’t like your doctor, demand another one.”

— Brandi Miller, survived placenta accreta and hemorrhage in 2015

“There is a period in the days and weeks after delivery where your blood pressure can escalate and you can have a seizure, stroke, or heart attack, even well after a healthy birth. You should take your own blood pressure at home if your doctor doesn’t tell you to. ... Unfortunately, I went home from [all my postpartum] appointments with my blood pressure so high that I started having a brain hemorrhage. Not one single person ever thought of taking my blood pressure when I was complaining about my discomfort and showing telltale warning signs of [preeclampsia].”

— Emily McLaughlin

“The postpartum period is when a lot of pregnancy-related heart problems like cardiomyopathy emerge. If there is still difficulty breathing, fluid buildup in ankles, shortness of breath and you are unable to lie flat on your back, go see a cardiologist ASAP. If you have to go to an emergency room, request to have the following tests performed: echocardiogram (echo) test, ejection fraction test, B-type natriuretic peptides (BNP), EKG test and chest X-ray test. These tests will determine if your heart is failing and will save your life.”

— Anner Porter, survivor of peripartum cardiomyopathy in 1992

“Rest as much as possible — for as long as possible. Being in too big a rush to get ‘back to normal’ can exacerbate postpartum health risks. Things that are not normal: heavy bleeding longer than 6 weeks, or bleeding that stops and starts again, not producing milk, fevers, severe pain (especially around incision sites), excessive fatigue, and anxiety/depression. If you don’t feel like yourself, get help.”

— Amy Barron Smolinski, a survivor of preeclampsia, postpartum hemorrhage and other complications in three pregnancies in 2006, 2011 and 2012 and executive director of Mom2Mom Global, a breastfeeding support group

“Know that your preexisting health conditions may be impacted by having a baby (hormone changes, sleep deprivation, stress). Record your health and your baby’s in a journal or app to track any changes. Reach out to the nurse or doctor when there are noticeable changes that you have tracked.”

— Noelle Garcia, survived placental abruption (placenta separating from the uterine wall during pregnancy) in 2007

“If your hospital discharges you on tons of Motrin or pain killers, be aware that this can mask the warning signs of headache, which is sometimes the only warning sign of preeclampsia coming on postpartum.”

— Emily McLaughlin

Grappling With the Emotional Fallout

“I wish I had known that postpartum PTSD was possible. Most people associate PTSD with the effects of war, but I was diagnosed with PTSD after my traumatic birth and near-death experience. Almost 6 years later, I still experience symptoms sporadically.”

— Meagan Raymer, survived severe preeclampsia and HELLP syndrome in 2011

“I recommend therapy with a female therapist specializing in trauma. Honestly, I avoided it for 8 months. I was then in therapy for 12 months. I still have ongoing anxiety ... but I would be in a very bad place (potentially depression and self-harm due to self-blame) were it not for therapy. It was so hard to admit [what was happening]. I started to get a suspicion when I heard an NPR story about a veteran with PTSD. I thought ... that sounds like me. And I started Googling.”

— Jessica Rae Hoffman, survived severe sepsis and other complications in 2015

“The emotional constructs our society puts around pregnancy and childbirth make the ideas of severe injury and death taboo. Childbirth is a messy, traumatic experience. ... Many women don’t seek care even when they instinctively believe something is wrong because they’re supposed to ‘be happy.’ Awareness and transparency are so important.”

— Leah Soule, survived a hemorrhage in 2015

“I wish I had understood how significant the impact was on my husband. Emotionally, the experience was much more difficult and long-lasting for him than for me, and it continued to affect his relationship with both me and our baby for quite a while, at a time when I didn’t think it was a thing at all.”

— Elizabeth Venstra, survived HELLP syndrome in 2014

“I would suggest establishing yourself ahead of time with a doula or midwife that can make postpartum visits to your home, which can promote health even if everything goes smoothly. Many communities have those services available if you can’t afford them. [A doula] wasn’t covered through our insurance, but the social worker at the hospital arranged for someone paid for by [San Diego County] to come and do several checks on me and my son, which was very reassuring to both my husband and me.”

— Miranda Klassen

Other Resources

• The Leapfrog Group provides performance data on more than 1,800 hospitals and publishes an annual Maternity Care Report.

• Consumer Reports offers C-section data from more than 1,300 hospitals by ZIP code.

• The California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative’s toolkits of protocols for treating life-threatening obstetric complications include infographics, checklists and extensive backup materials. Register on the site for free access. The Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health’s offers bundles of similar information in a condensed, downloadable form.

• The Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses (AWHONN)’s Health4Mom site has a “Save Your Life” campaign, including a one-page checklist, to help new parents recognize post-birth warning signs. The Institute for Perinatal Quality Improvement offers resources for medical professionals.

• Childbirth Connection provides evidence-based information on maternity care.

• The Preeclampsia Foundation’s “Wonder Woman” posts put the U.S. maternal mortality numbers in context and suggest more strategies for self-advocacy.

• Postpartum Support International offers many resources for people suffering from pregnancy-related depression, anxiety and mood disorders. They also have resources for dads.

• Facebook is a gathering place for thousands of people who have experienced life-threatening complications. Many groups are condition-specific or closed to nonsurvivors. One open group worth checking out: The Unexpected Project.

• Some social justice groups advocate to reduce childbirth-related deaths and near-deaths. Many focus on why Black people are disproportionately affected. Those groups include theBlack Mamas Matter Alliance, Moms Rising and the National Birth Equity Collective.

• For more context, check out “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty” by Dorothy Roberts, which was reissued a few years ago in celebration of its 20th anniversary. The new edition includes reflections on its publication and findings, and on the continued escalation of abortion bans across the country.

• For those dealing with complicated medical bills, former ProPublica reporter Marshall Allen offers advice in his book “Never Pay the First Bill: And Other Ways to Fight the Health Care System and Win.”

Help us continue reporting on pregnancy and childbirth. Have you had an experience with prenatal genetic testing? Tell us here. We want to understand more about your interactions with genetic screening providers.

by Ken Armstrong

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

When U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, in a draft opinion obtained and published this week by Politico, detailed his justifications for overturning Roe v. Wade, he invoked a surprising name given the case’s subject. In writing about abortion, a matter inextricably tied to a woman’s control over her body, Alito chose to quote from Sir Matthew Hale, a 17th-century English jurist whose writings and reasonings have caused enduring damage to women for hundreds of years.

The so-called marital rape exemption — the legal notion that a married woman cannot be raped by her husband — traces to Hale. So does a long-used instruction to jurors to be skeptical of reports of rape. So, in a way, do the infamous Salem witch trials, in which women (and some men) were hanged on or near Gallows Hill.

Hale’s influence in the United States has been on the wane since the 1970s, with one state after another abandoning his legal principles on rape. But Alito’s opinion resurrects Hale, a judge who was considered misogynistic even by his era’s notably low standards. Hale once wrote a long letter to his grandchildren, dispensing life advice, in which he veered into a screed against women, describing them as “chargeable unprofitable people” who “know the ready way to consume an estate, and to ruin a family quickly.” Hale particularly despaired of the changes he saw in young women, writing, “And now the world is altered: young gentlewomen learn to be bold” and “talk loud.”

An excerpt from Hale’s “Letter of Advice.” (Via Google Books)

Hale became Lord Chief Justice of England in 1671. In his time (Hale’s contemporaries included Oliver Cromwell and Charles II), Hale was a respected, perhaps even venerated, jurist known for piety and sober judgment. He wrote a two-volume legal treatise, “The History of the Pleas of the Crown,” that has proved influential ever since.

Alito, in his draft opinion, invokes “eminent common-law authorities,” including Hale, to show how abortion was viewed historically not as a right, but as a criminal act. “Two treatises by Sir Matthew Hale likewise described abortion of a quick child who died in the womb as a ‘great crime’ and a ‘great misprision,’” Alito wrote.

Even before “quickening” — defined by Alito as “the first felt movement of the fetus in the womb, which usually occurs between the 16th and 18th week of pregnancy” — Hale believed an abortion could qualify as homicide. “Hale wrote that if a physician gave a woman ‘with child’ a ‘potion’ to cause an abortion, and the woman died, it was ‘murder’ because the potion was given ‘unlawfully to destroy her child within her,’” Alito wrote.

Courts have long leaned on precedents established by old cases and the scholarship of legal authorities from centuries gone by. But what happens when you trace citations back to their ancient source? In Hale’s case, you sometimes find a man conceiving precepts out of thin air. Other times it was the opposite, as he clung to notions that were already becoming anachronistic in the last half of the 17th century.

Consider the marital rape exemption. In “Pleas of the Crown,” Hale wrote, “The husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband which she cannot retract.” So, according to Hale, marriage, for a woman, amounts to contractual forfeit, in which she loses legal protection or recourse should her husband sexually assault her.

Hale’s pronouncement became the accepted common law and served as foundation in the United States for immunizing a husband accused of raping his wife. And where did Hale’s pronouncement come from? What did he base it upon? Who knows? “Hale appears to have been the first to articulate what later would become an accepted legal principle, that a husband cannot be charged with raping his wife,” according to a footnote in one law review article. Another law review article, titled “The Marital Rape Exemption: Evolution to Extinction,” called Hale’s pronouncement “an unsupported, extrajudicial statement” lacking in authority.

Starting in the 1970s, states began to abandon the marital rape exemption, in whole or in part. In 1981, the Supreme Court of New Jersey wrote that it could find no support for Hale’s proposition among earlier writers. Hale’s declaration, the court found, “cannot itself be considered a definitive and binding statement of the common law, although legal commentators have often restated the rule since the time of Hale without evaluating its merits.” In 1984, the Supreme Court of Virginia wrote: “Hale's statement was not law, common or otherwise. At best it was Hale's pronouncement of what he observed to be a custom in 17th century England.” The Virginia court went on to note, “Moreover, Hale cites no authority for his view nor was it subsequently adopted, in its entirety, by the English courts.”

Like the marital rape exemption, the so-called Hale Warning to jurors caused centuries of misfortune in the American courts.

In “Pleas of the Crown,” Hale called rape a “most detestable crime.” Then, in words quoted many times since, he wrote, “It must be remembered, that it is an accusation easy to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, tho never so innocent.”

Hale evoked the fear of the false accuser — and made for that fear a legal frame, which lasted for more than 300 years. In weighing the evidence in cases of alleged rape, jurors (all men, in Hale’s time and for long after) needed to consider a series of factors, Hale wrote. Did the woman cry out? Did she try to flee? Was she of “good fame” or “evil fame”? Was she supported by others? Did she make immediate complaint afterward?

Hale’s words and formulation became a standard feature of criminal trials in the United States, with jurors instructed by judges to be especially wary of allegations of rape. The effect was predictable: Charges of rape were frequently rejected. In the United States, one early example was chronicled by historian John Wood Sweet in his soon-to-be-published book, “The Sewing Girl’s Tale.” (I was allowed to read an advance copy.)

In 1793, in New York City, an aristocrat, Henry Bedlow, was accused of raping a 17-year-old seamstress, Lanah Sawyer. Bedlow hired six lawyers, including a future U.S. Supreme Court justice, who used Hale’s framework to destroy Sawyer. Sawyer said she screamed. But, one attorney asked the jury, did she also stamp her feet? Witnesses spoke of Sawyer’s good fame, according to the trial record. But “she may have had the art to carry a fair outside, while all was foul within,” the same attorney argued. “Ultimately, the defense team’s dizzying effort to dispute and distort reality had been part of a relentless effort to transform a young woman who mattered into one who didn’t,” Sweet wrote. The jury took 15 minutes to acquit.

Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, courts in the United States began moving away from instructing juries with Hale’s admonition to be particularly skeptical of rape claims. The repudiation of Hale became so complete that when a Maryland lawmaker, in 2007, invoked Hale’s words in a state legislative hearing, it was met with “outrage,” according to the Washington Post.

Despite those legal changes, the fear of the false rape accuser still persists in the justice system, at times leading to horrendous outcomes. I began researching Hale when writing, with T. Christian Miller, “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” published by ProPublica and the Marshall Project. The story reconstructs what happened when a young woman in Lynnwood, Washington, reported being raped. We later expanded the story into a book, “Unbelievable,” in which we described Hale’s influence in rape cases at greater length. (The story also became a Netflix series.)

Then there was Hale’s role in what today is synonymous with the perversion of justice: witch trials.

In 1662, Hale presided at a jury trial in Bury St. Edmunds in which two women, Amy Denny and Rose Cullender, were accused of being witches. In a book on this case, “A Trial of Witches,” authors Ivan Bunn and Gilbert Geis wrote that by 1662, “belief in witches was in retreat in England.” Hale, however, was not part of that retreat. He believed witches were real. “Hale represented not a mainstream position but rather one rapidly becoming anachronistic,” Bunn and Geis wrote.

What’s more, Hale instructed the jurors that witches were real. A written record of the trial recounts what Hale told them: “That there were such creatures as witches he made no doubt at all; for first, the scriptures had affirmed so much. Secondly, the wisdom of all nations had provided laws against such persons, which is an argument of their confidence of such a crime.”

The jury convicted Denny and Cullender, after which Hale sentenced both women to hang. (Four years before, Hale had also sentenced to death another woman convicted of being a witch.)

Hale’s influence, once again, extended beyond the immediate case and his time. Thirty years later, his handling of the trial in Bury St. Edmunds, preserved in written record, served as a model in Salem, Massachusetts, in the infamous witch trials in 1692. “Indeed, the Salem witch-hunts might not have taken place if there had not been a trial at Bury St. Edmunds: the events at Salem notoriously imitated those at Bury,” Bunn and Geis wrote.

Hale is known mostly for his legal treatises. But his views toward women are perhaps best revealed in a letter he wrote to his grandchildren, titled “Letter of Advice.” (In a twitter thread this week I said Hale’s letter was 182 pages long. I may have understated it. I’ve since found a version online that goes on for 206 pages.)

The title page of Hale’s letter. (Via Google Books)

In this letter, Hale prescribes individualized counsel for three granddaughters.

Mary, he wrote, possessed great wit and spirit, and “if she can temper the latter, will make an excellent woman, and a great housewife; but if she cannot govern the greatness of her spirit, it will make her proud, imperious, and revengeful.”

Frances, he wrote, possessed great confidence: “If she be kept in some awe, especially in relation to lying and deceiving, she will make a good woman and a good housewife.”

Ann, he wrote, possessed a “soft nature.” “She must not see plays, read comedies, or love books or romances, nor hear nor learn ballads or idle songs, especially such as are wanton or concerning love-matters, for they will make too deep an impression upon her mind.”

Hale complained in his letter that young women “make it their business to paint or patch their faces, to curl their locks, and to find out the newest and costliest fashions.” And with that, he was just getting started. Hale followed with a 160-word sentence that is a marvel in its depth of disdain.

“If they rise in the morning before ten of the clock, the morning is spent between the comb, and the glass, and the box of patches; though they know not how to make provision for it themselves, they must have choice diet provided for them, and when they are ready, the next business is to come down, and sit in a rubbed parlour till dinner come in; and, after dinner, either to cards, or to the exchange, or to the play, or to Hyde Park, or to an impertinent visit; and after supper, either to a ball or to cards; and at this rate they spend their time, from one end of the year to the other; and at the same rate they spend their parent’s or husband’s money or estates in costly clothes, new fashions, chargeable entertainments: their home is their prison, and they are never at rest in it, unless they have gallants and splendid company to entertain.”

Some observers have been taken aback that Alito referenced Hale. But not everyone was surprised. Eileen Hunt, a Notre Dame political science professor who has written extensively about Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the path-breaking 1792 treatise “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” tweeted:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a conservative Supreme Court justice will cherry-pick an Enlightenment-era man as a timeless authority on reproductive rights but ignore #Wollstonecraft’s pivotal philosophical views on women, mothering, and the sexual double standard.”

by Rob Perez, Honolulu Star-Advertiser

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

The Hawaii Legislature on Thursday unanimously passed landmark legislation appropriating $600 million for the state’s Native Hawaiian homesteading program, a chronically underfunded initiative that has long fallen short of its promise to return Native people to their ancestral land.

The amount represents the largest one-time infusion of money in the program’s 101-year history, and it’s more than seven times the record amount that state lawmakers approved last year. The majority of the funds will go toward the development of nearly 3,000 lots, most of them residential, on Hawaii’s main islands.

Under the program, people who are at least 50% Hawaiian are entitled to lease land for $1 a year and, upon getting the lease, to buy or build a home on the parcel. The homes cost roughly half the market price because the program’s beneficiaries are not paying for the land.

But, as the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica have reported, the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, the agency that manages Hawaii’s 203,000-acre land trust, has failed to meet a crushing demand for housing. Today, more than 28,700 Native Hawaiians sit on an ever-growing waitlist. More than 2,000 people have died while waiting, according to the news organizations’ first-of-its-kind analysis.

In 2020, an investigation by the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica revealed a number of structural shortcomings that contributed to the problem. For example, the department has focused on building large subdivision housing, which proved too expensive for many low-income waitlisters, including those who are homeless. The analysis also showed that at the rate DHHL had been developing lots for the previous quarter century, it would need 182 more years to get everyone off the waitlist as it stood in 2020.

In response to the coverage, DHHL officials acknowledged that bold action was needed to deliver on the department’s main mission, and they pressed for more funding. In turn, legislative leaders prioritized the homesteading program this year. It was a top issue for House Speaker Scott Saiki, who cited the news organizations’ reporting as a major factor in the $600 million legislation.

“I never thought I would see the day that something like this would happen,” said Sen. Maile Shimabukuro, who heads the Senate’s Hawaiian Affairs Committee, as the bill was positioned for passage.

Rep. Patrick Branco, a Native Hawaiian lawmaker, called the legislative action great news. “When Native Hawaiians benefit, all of Hawaii benefits,” he said.

Legislators on the floor at the Capitol. (Jamm Aquino/Honolulu Star-Advertiser)

Timing also helped the push succeed. As Native Hawaiians and others have become more politically active in recent years about issues affecting Native culture, lawmakers this session faced the rare situation of deciding how to spend a huge budget surplus — about $2 billion — in a year in which all legislative seats are up for grabs in the coming election.

Given all that, the newsrooms’ revelations about the failures of the homesteading program boosted public awareness and prodded legislators to consider big initiatives, according to beneficiaries, advocates and others.

“No doubt about it,” said former Gov. John Waihee, the only Native Hawaiian to serve in the state’s top political post. “It’s like everything came to a head, and all of a sudden you’ve got money.”

The state’s flush fiscal position also paved the way for the proposed settlement of a class-action lawsuit filed in 1999 by more than 2,700 beneficiaries, mostly over the long waits for homesteads. Even though the court in 2009 found that the state breached its trust obligation and was liable for damages, the litigation has dragged on for years, and more than one-third of the original plaintiffs, many of them elderly, died without seeing a resolution. Lawmakers on Tuesday approved a separate $328 million appropriation to settle the case.

Both bills — totaling nearly $1 billion — now go to Gov. David Ige for his signature. He previously told the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica that fulfilling the state’s obligations to the Hawaiian homesteading program is a priority for his administration.

“This has been a historic legislative session for providing additional support to Native Hawaiian beneficiaries,” Ige said in a statement. “Collectively, we have appropriated more funds this session than ever in the history of the state of Hawaii to advance the ideas and priorities of the Hawaiian homesteading program.”

As the $600 million homesteading bill worked its way through the legislative process, lawmakers received hundreds of pages of written testimony, many from waitlisters who applied decades ago and still don’t have homesteads. Some lamented the missed opportunities that being homeowners would have given them and said they watched as beneficiaries left Hawaii because they couldn’t afford the high housing costs.

One who applied in 2008 and is still more than 7,000 names deep on the Oahu residential waitlist shared a common fear: “I don’t want to be like many of my relatives who died on the waitlist without being awarded a lease,” he wrote.

A high school teacher told legislators about one of her students who wrote of his family’s gratitude after getting a new home in a homestead subdivision. But the student’s grandfather, a Vietnam War veteran who had a separate entry on the waitlist, slipped in and out of homelessness and died while waiting.

The majority of the $600 million is expected to be used by DHHL for developing homestead lots and acquiring land — an effort that will be further boosted by a record $22.3 million that Congress approved earlier this year for Native Hawaiian housing. The agency is planning to tackle 17 projects totaling over 2,900 lots statewide. Eight of the developments, totaling nearly 1,700 lots, are on Oahu — the island with the greatest demand for beneficiary housing.

But, because those developments will still only help a fraction of the people on the waitlist, the bill also authorizes DHHL to spend some of the money to help waitlisters in other ways, including offering down-payment assistance to those seeking to purchase homes on the private market, off trust land. The agency could also provide mortgage or rent subsidies to waitlisters who already have housing. The rent relief is aimed at those who cannot afford to purchase their own homes. If the legislation becomes law, the department would have to develop rules and procedures for how the various forms of housing assistance would work. The measure allows DHHL to use a waitlister’s income level, among other factors, to set priorities for who gets assistance and in what amounts.

A department official said the agency was grateful for the one-time infusion but noted it would need up to $6 billion to clear the entire waitlist. Acknowledging that need, Ige, at a news conference Thursday, floated the idea of dedicating a portion of the state’s hotel tax to the homesteading program on an annual basis.

For now, though, DHHL’s plans are welcome news for beneficiaries like Mauna Kekua, a 50-year-old Oahu public school custodian who has been on the waitlist for nearly two decades. She inherited her spot in line from her mother, Sarah Hauoli Larinaga, who died in 2003 after waiting a quarter century for a homestead.

Kekua said she and her husband, a maintenance worker, have struggled to pay the $2,500 in monthly rent for a West Oahu home for their family of nine, including two sons, a son’s girlfriend and four grandchildren. But now they are hopeful they’ll land a spot in a new, 280-lot development that DHHL plans to build in Maili, a Waianae Coast town not far from where Kekua now lives. The first homes in that project are expected to be completed before the end of the decade. Kekua is No. 114 on the area waitlist — a position high enough to make her optimistic about her chances of getting a parcel.

“I’m praying on it,” she said. “I’m leaving this in God’s hands.”

by Byard Duncan

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by Jennifer Smith Richards, Chicago Tribune, and Jodi S. Cohen, photography by Armando L. Sanchez, Chicago Tribune, illustrations by Laila Milevski

Lea este artículo en español en el sitio web del Chicago Tribune.

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This story was co-published with the Chicago Tribune.

At Bloom Trail High School in Chicago’s south suburbs, the student body is diverse: About 60% of the 1,100 students are Black or multiracial. Another 27% are Latino. And 12% are white.

But when you look at the group of students who get ticketed for misbehavior at school, the diversity vanishes.

Police, in cooperation with school officials, have written 178 tickets at the school in Steger since the start of the 2018-19 school year. School district records show that six went to Latino students. Five went to white students. And 167 went to Black or multiracial students — 94% of the total.

Such racial disparities in ticketing are part of a pattern at schools across the state, an investigation by ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune has found. In the schools and districts examined, an analysis indicated that Black students were twice as likely to be ticketed as their white peers.

Reporters set out to analyze police ticketing in nearly 200 districts throughout Illinois, which together enroll most of the state’s high school students. Most local officials either did not specify race on tickets or refused to provide the information, but the news organizations obtained documentation of the race of students for about 4,000 tickets issued at schools in 68 districts.

After excluding places where ticketing was rare, schools in 42 districts remained, representing more than one-fifth of the state’s high school students. The analysis found that about 9% of those students are Black but nearly 20% of tickets went to Black students.

Analyzing tickets received by members of other racial or ethnic groups is more difficult, in part because the Tribune and ProPublica identified anomalies in the way school districts and police recorded information about white and Latino students. But students in those groups don’t appear to have been ticketed at high rates compared to their share of school enrollment.

Student ticketing in Illinois, or any other state, has never been examined on this scale. In fact, while Illinois officials have focused on whether schools are suspending or expelling Black students in unequal ways, they have not monitored police ticketing at schools. Neither has the division of the U.S. Department of Education that oversees civil rights issues.

The first installment of the Tribune-ProPublica investigation “The Price Kids Pay” detailed how student ticketing flouts a state law meant to prevent schools from using fines to discipline students. The investigation, which was based on school and municipal records from across the state, documented at least 11,800 tickets during the past three school years. It found that schools often involve police in minor incidents, resulting in harsh fines, debt for students and families and records that can follow children into adulthood. (Use our interactive database to look up how many and what kinds of tickets have been issued in an Illinois public school or district.)

In response, Illinois’ top education official told school leaders to “immediately stop and consider both the cost and the consequences of these fines,” and Gov. J.B. Pritzker said conversations already were underway with legislators “to make sure that this doesn’t happen anywhere in the state of Illinois.”

Illinois lawmakers tried in the past to pass legislation that would require school districts to collect and share student race and ethnicity data compiled by police when they intervene at schools for all types of disciplinary reasons, including such minor offenses as tobacco possession, tardiness or insubordination. But those efforts have stalled.

House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, a Democrat, said the legislature should take action if school ticketing is harming students.

“If these tickets are being issued disproportionately to people of color, we need to address that. That can create larger problems for students of color, problems that we’ve become accustomed to for far too long,” Welch said in an interview.

The U.S. Department of Education collects data nationally in alternate years about the race of students referred to and arrested by police. But it didn’t do so during the 2019-20 school year, when in-person learning was interrupted by the pandemic. In 2017-18, the most recent year data was collected, Illinois stood out for the gap between the percentage of students who are Black and the percentage of students referred to the police who are Black. No other state had a bigger disparity.

In response to similar data on expulsions and suspensions, the state last fall put a group of districts including Bloom Township High School District 206 on notice to reform how they handle discipline.

In an emailed response to reporters’ questions, district officials said they were concerned about the racial disparities in ticketing identified at Bloom Trail. The district’s response asserted that Black students and white students receive the same consequences for the same offenses and that the school has been affected by “a rise in violent crime and gang activity” in the communities the school serves.

Officials at Bloom Trail, which employs security guards to work inside the school, call Steger police when there is a fight that school officials think warrants a citation. Police bring the students’ tickets to the school, and officials give them to the students or their parents.

Greg Horak, Bloom Township’s director of climate, described the citations as a supplement to school discipline. “Dealing with the police, we hope this shows parents that this is a very serious situation,” Horak said in an interview.

Rodney and Elizabeth Posley, whose sons Josiah and Jeremiah attend Bloom Trail, didn’t realize students could get ticketed by police until it happened to their children in the fall. They said the boys were treated too harshly after they were part of a school fight that got out of hand.

The brothers were suspended and ticketed for disorderly conduct, and one was threatened with expulsion — extreme measures, Elizabeth Posley said, for teenage mistakes. The Posleys enlisted the help of a lawyer, their church and school employees to advocate for their sons, noting that neither boy had been in trouble at school before and the younger of the two receives special education services.

Josiah and Jeremiah, at left and right-center, play basketball at a church near their home with their parents, Rodney and Elizabeth Posley.

“They’re young Black men. They stereotyped them,” said Elizabeth Posley, who works as a pretrial officer at the Cook County Circuit Court. “They’re not into gangs, where they’re tough and they’re bad. We pray as a family.”

Last fall, during his freshman year at Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School, southwest of Chicago, a 14-year-old Black student named Isaiah felt like school employees were closely watching him. Then an administrator reported him to Bradley village police after catching a glimpse of another student handing Isaiah a vaping device in a bathroom.

At the high school, which is patrolled by 10 security guards and a police officer, 10% of students are Black. But Black students received 21% of the 137 tickets written there from the start of the 2018-19 school year through the end of October. White students, who make up more than 68% of enrollment, got 60% of the tickets.

In Bradley, as in many other Illinois communities, students ticketed in schools are funneled into quasi-judicial hearings designed for adults and overseen by the local municipality. At the hearing for Isaiah’s ticket at Bradley’s village hall in November, the hearing officer asked Isaiah to “admit” or “deny” that he had a vaping device at school. Isaiah’s mom encouraged him to say “deny” so the hearing officer would allow him to describe what led to the ticket.

Isaiah explained that he had immediately handed the vaping device back to his friend. He said he had been searched by administrators — including being made to remove his socks and shoes — and no device was found.

The hearing officer found Isaiah not liable for possession of an electronic vaping device — a rare vindication in a ticketing case. But the village imposes a $50 fee for attending the hearing, which Isaiah still had to pay.

Isaiah’s mother, Catherine Hilgeman, said in an interview that she was upset school officials had questioned and searched her son without contacting her. She said she told her son he had learned a lesson: “You are a young Black male. You already have something against you. You shouldn’t, but you do — it’s the color of your skin. When somebody looks at you they automatically think, ‘They’re up to no good.’”

Christian, a multiracial student ticketed in the fall, described a strikingly similar incident. Another student, who saw in a mirror that a school administrator was walking into the bathroom, quickly handed his vape pen to Christian, who put it in his pocket, the family said.

Christian, 16, was required to appear at a ticket hearing in Bradley on a January afternoon. Most of the people ordered to attend that day were high school students, and most of them, including Christian, had been ticketed for possession of vaping devices. The hearing officer ordered Christian to pay $175 — a $125 fine plus a $50 hearing fee — and then asked if he would pay that day or if he needed time.

“Take some time,” Christian said. He is paying the fine off with money he earned at his job at Little Caesars. By early May, he had paid $113, his mother said.

If students don’t pay their fines quickly, Bradley is one of many Illinois municipalities that have sent the debt to collection agencies or to a program run by the state comptroller’s office that deducts money from tax refunds or payroll checks.

At DeKalb High School, west of Chicago, nearly half the tickets issued during the past three years went to Black students, even though only about 20% of the students are Black. Between the start of the school year and mid-November, police wrote about 30 tickets to students, and Black students received 22 of them, or 73%. Most of the tickets were for fighting, followed by cannabis possession.

Tickets were also written at the two middle schools in DeKalb Community Unit School District 428, to students as young as 11, city records show. Black students make up about a quarter of the enrollment at each school, but at Huntley Middle School at least 63% of tickets went to Black students during the last three school years. At Clinton Rosette Middle School, tickets did not always specify race, but at least 40% went to Black students.

At four DeKalb hearings that reporters attended in the fall and winter, nearly all of the students were Black or Latino. All of the adults involved in the hearing process — the prosecutor, the clerk, the bailiff, the hearing officer — were white.

Records from the last three school years show that DeKalb students were most commonly cited for fighting, a violation that comes with a minimum $300 fine. The city gives students a choice: Pay within 21 days of getting the ticket, or attend a hearing. At the hearing, students can contest the ticket or plead liable, which usually results in an order to do community service. Hearings are held twice a month at 9 a.m. at the police station, and students have to miss school to be there.

If the students don’t pay and don’t show up on their hearing date, the fine increases to the maximum allowed by state law: $750, plus a $100 administrative fee. If the fines and fees are not paid, the debt can be sent to collections.

After 16-year-old Christian, center, was ticketed for possession of an electronic smoking device at school in Bradley, Illinois, he and his mother, Ashlee Dennison, far right, were called to a hearing where they faced a police lieutenant and two adjudication officials.

Terri Jackson, whose 14-year-old daughter agreed to perform 25 hours of community service after being ticketed for fighting, said she thinks the reason more tickets are written to Black children is simple: “They’re paying attention to what the Black kids do.”

At a hearing in November, a 15-year-old boy who had been caught with cannabis vape cartridges at the high school received 15 hours of community service; he would be fined $250 if he didn’t complete it. After he went before the hearing officer, he told reporters he thought white students were disciplined less harshly at his school.

“There’s differences. There are situations when they get caught and not punished like we do,” said the sophomore, who identifies as Black and Latino.

Brian Wright, principal at Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School, called his school’s ticketing disparity disturbing and perhaps a reflection of racial bias.

“We have to assume that there is a population of our white students doing the same things that our Black students are, but why are they not getting ticketed but our Black students are?” Wright asked. “It is bothersome to me, but it is good information to take back to our assistant principals to see.”

Brian Wright, principal at Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School.

Wright said the school already is concerned about disproportionate suspensions. He also said the school has been working to address racial equity and inclusivity during the past few years by diversifying the books in the curriculum and including more students of color in Advanced Placement courses.

Administrators at other schools who were interviewed for this story said the disparities in ticketing at their schools are not the result of racial bias.

“The police are just being responsive to the actions of the students,” DeKalb High School Principal James Horne said. “Where you see in the data the disproportionate numbers, the unfortunate part is there is disproportionate trauma that is affecting certain parts of the community.” He added: “We’re just being responsive to the challenge of our students.”

Horne said his high school doesn’t only respond to student misbehavior by involving police; it also uses restorative justice practices that bring students together to resolve conflicts with discussion and problem-solving. The school tries to avoid discipline that causes students to miss class time, Horne said.

Reporters sent DeKalb district officials questions about disparities at the two middle schools. They did not address those questions but wrote in a statement that they have been taking actions to better support their students and are developing a new districtwide code of conduct.

Disproportionate ticketing also occurs at schools with relatively few Black students, the analysis found. East Peoria Community High School, for example, has about 25 Black students in an average year. But Black students received 11 of the tickets police wrote during the past three school years. That’s 10% of all police tickets, even though Black students represent just 2% of the school’s enrollment. This school year, records show Black students received six of the 34 tickets police issued through mid-January, or about 18%. These totals don’t include truancy tickets, as those were issued by a school employee.

Marjorie Greuter, the East Peoria Community High School superintendent, disputed any suggestion that students are ticketed unfairly at her school.

“We’re consistent in our referral for city ordinance violations. If a kid is vaping, it doesn’t matter — male, female, white, Black, low-income, high-income — they’re going to get referred” to the school police officer, Greuter said.

“If it’s disproportionate, it’s because the offense is disproportionate or the offender is disproportionate.”

Bloom Township High School District 206 has two schools: Bloom Trail in Steger and Bloom in Chicago Heights. The Chicago Heights police department does not ticket students at Bloom, but Steger police have agreed to ticket students at Bloom Trail when contacted by school officials.

“They call us and we ticket them,” said Steger Police Chief Greg Smith, who acknowledged that when he got into a fight at school as a teenager in the mid-1980s, his dean and football coach took care of it.

“I think the world has changed. What happened in the past, it wouldn’t be unheard of for a dean to smack a kid upside the head — that, they just don’t do anymore.”

Now, he said, “it is the police officer’s problem, and it’s unfortunate, but everything has come down to ‘We need the police.’ We are handling a lot more issues than police used to.”

In Chicago Heights, Deputy Police Chief Mikal Elamin said officers will arrest a student if necessary — if the school or a victim signs a complaint — but the department doesn’t think ticketing is appropriate. Police have not ticketed students at Bloom High School in at least the last three years, records show.

“I can’t tell you that we have never ticketed, but I can say that it is not our policy to target or focus on our high school students. We wouldn’t do that,” Elamin said. He said issuing tickets would be “punishing the parent” because students typically aren’t capable of paying.

Christian is using part of his paychecks from a job at Little Caesars to pay off a ticket he received at school.

In an emailed response to reporters’ questions, Bloom Township district officials said administrators call the police when someone is injured or at risk of physical harm, when there is “severe and potentially dangerous” school disruption or when a student’s behavior has “willfully interrupted the learning process” beyond what school workers can handle.

“Overall, we work to communicate that the school is not the place to handle your disagreements physically,” according to the email. “We are intentional about addressing these situations fairly and equitably, regardless of students’ race or gender.”

After reviewing the district’s own data and in response to the findings of the Tribune-ProPublica investigation, the Bloom Township superintendent scheduled a meeting with the Steger police chief to revisit their approach to police involvement in discipline.

“We want to be on the right side of things and do what is best for children,” said Latunja Williams, the district’s assistant superintendent for human resources.

Decades of research on school discipline has shown that when a judgment call is involved — such as whether to ticket someone for disorderly conduct for being disruptive or profane — students of color are disciplined more severely.

The Tribune and ProPublica were able to analyze both the race of students and the alleged violations for about 3,000 tickets that police wrote in 34 districts. While Black students made up about 11% of the enrollment in schools in these districts, they received nearly 29% of the tickets related to student behavior, including disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, insubordination, “activity constituting a public nuisance” and “prohibited conduct on school property.” White students represented about 45% of enrollment and 44% of the tickets related to student behavior. Black students also were disproportionately ticketed for fighting, assault and other offenses related to physical aggression.

Other types of violations, such as possession of drug paraphernalia, were more in proportion to Black students’ enrollment. For several other racial groups, including Asian students and Native American students, there were too few tickets to draw meaningful conclusions.

Russ Skiba, a professor emeritus at Indiana University and a leading researcher on educational inequity, said U.S. schools began suspending Black students disproportionately for behavioral offenses in the 1970s, after districts were forced to fully desegregate. In the 1990s, he added, police became a more common presence in schools, exacerbating inequalities in discipline.

“There is an abundance of research that shows that Black students are not engaging in more severe behavior, that they receive punishments that are harsher for the same behavior,” Skiba said. “Black and brown kids understand, and it doesn’t go unnoticed, that they are being punished more often, suspended more often and, in your case, ticketed more often.”

Few studies have examined ticketing of students, including how race may play a role. But an analysis published this year by the American Civil Liberties Union found police cited Black students in the Erie City School District in Pennsylvania for minor infractions at four times the rate of white students.

And in Texas, the Texas Appleseed advocacy group uncovered disparities in police ticketing in multiple school districts, leading state lawmakers to pass legislation in 2013 that prohibits officers from issuing tickets for disrupting class and other misbehavior at school. In the state’s Bryan Independent School District, police had issued 53% of tickets for “disruption of class” to Black students during the 2011-2012 school year, even though that group made up about 21% of the district’s enrollment. U.S. Department of Education investigators looking into the Bryan district found at least 10 incidents where Black students received harsher punishment than white students for similar conduct.

Federal data tracks how often schools involve police in a school incident, which is called a police referral, and whether an arrest was made, as well as the race of the students involved. The data does not track ticketing or other possible outcomes. In Illinois, Black students accounted for about 17% of enrollment but 42% of the students referred to police in the 2017-18 school year, according to the federal data.

The gap is similar with suspensions and expulsions. State data shows that in the 2019-20 school year about 44% of the students suspended or expelled from Illinois public schools were Black.

Citing the federal and state data, Illinois state education and justice officials in March urged schools to evaluate their punitive discipline policies, including suspensions and expulsions, and the impact of police in their schools. They said the expanding role of police officers at school raises concerns about a disparate impact on students of color, particularly Black students.

It was the first guidance the state has issued to school districts with the intent of ensuring that disciplinary practices do not violate civil rights law. Illinois State Board of Education spokesperson Jackie Matthews said punishing students for behaviors perceived as defiance or misconduct does nothing to address the reasons the students are behaving that way.

“These tactics disproportionately impact students of color and increase the odds of students dropping out and experiencing involvement with the criminal justice system,” Matthews wrote in an email.

The recent state guidance did not mention tickets, which the Tribune-ProPublica investigation found to be the most common outcome when police get involved in school incidents.

Amy Meek, chief of the Civil Rights Bureau in the Illinois attorney general’s office, said schools can be in violation of civil rights laws if their policies and practices have a disparate impact on certain groups of people — even if it is not intentional.

Ticketing students “falls within the umbrella of concerns” related to disparate impact and is “something that we definitely look forward to looking at in more depth,” Meek said.

“School districts have an ongoing obligation to annually revisit their discipline policies,” she said. “This is a prime opportunity for them to look at their data and take a look at practices that they may be employing that impose an unjustified disparate impact because of race.”

Harold Jordan, nationwide education equity coordinator at the ACLU, said the U.S. Department of Education should be specifically tracking police ticketing at schools as part of its Civil Rights Data Collection, which is used to monitor whether schools provide equal opportunities to all students. The education department did not respond to a request for comment.

“I think it’s significant because it’s an indicator of the extent to which there’s a growing amount of collaboration between schools and police that’s outright harmful,” Jordan said.

He said that while some incidents at school are serious, most discipline is for minor infractions. “Two kids can do essentially the same thing and be treated quite differently in how they are disciplined, and especially whether police are involved,” Jordan said. “Too often, race and ethnicity are factors.”

Bloom Township High School District 206 is on an Illinois State Board of Education list of districts that, for three consecutive years, suspended or expelled students of color disproportionately. In the 2019-20 school year, 88.5% of students suspended at Bloom Trail High School were Black, though Black students make up only about 54% of the student body.

Concerned about those numbers, district officials have focused this year on alternative ways to correct student behavior, they wrote in an email. The district is one of six in the state participating in training sessions focused on improving equity in student discipline, funded by the Illinois State Board of Education with pandemic relief funds.

Bloom Township school administrators are working with Loyola University Chicago school discipline experts to get certified in restorative justice practices. In February, all school employees were trained on positive behavior interventions. The district also has partnered with the University of Illinois at Springfield to learn about “empathetic instruction,” a way of handling student misbehavior in less punitive ways.

“Our ultimate goal is to ensure a safe learning environment for all students and the school community, while proactively addressing the challenging behaviors of some of our neediest students,” district officials wrote in an emailed response.

But ticketing remains a central part of Bloom Trail’s disciplinary process, and by mid-April of this school year, all but six of the 54 tickets police wrote at the school went to Black students. No white students were ticketed.

Two of the tickets written to Black students went to the Posleys’ sons, Josiah and Jeremiah, who were 16 and 14 at the time.

Josiah, right, shows his brother Jeremiah a photo he took while they shopped for outfits for prom.

Josiah said he made a bad decision to meet another student in the bathroom after a disagreement. Once there, he said, he got jumped by several boys and defended himself. “I didn’t instigate it. I didn’t cause it,” said Josiah, who excels in algebra and literature and wants to be an engineer. “I’m not like that.”

Jeremiah said he followed Josiah into the bathroom out of concern for his brother. He didn’t hit anyone, he said, but one of the boys punched him in the face. At least five boys were involved in the fight, and a security guard who tried to break it up needed four stitches after a student — not one of the brothers — pushed him into a window, according to the district.

After the fight, school officials suspended the brothers and threatened to expel Josiah, a junior, for “mob action.” A meeting also was called to review the special education plan for Jeremiah, a freshman who has autism, and his parents feared the school would try to transfer him.

The family was shocked by the severity of the punishment for two boys who had not had previous discipline issues and were good students. They decided to find a lawyer and challenge the school’s actions. Bloom Trail later withdrew the threat of expulsion and told both boys to come back to school.

But by then, the school had already asked Steger police to write tickets. Both boys, as well as three other students who were in the bathroom, were cited for disorderly conduct.

The Posleys said involving police added a layer of unnecessary punishment and worry for the family. The police department sent letters to their home notifying the boys that they had to appear at a hearing in November at the police station.

Jackie Ross, an attorney at Loyola University Chicago’s ChildLaw Clinic who specializes in school discipline and special education, said she took on Josiah and Jeremiah’s case because she felt the boys were being treated unfairly. The same goes for many others, she said.

“There is this gross secret practice going on of fining families of color who are largely unrepresented and making a lot of money from it,” Ross said.

The school district said officials couldn’t talk about the discipline of individual students.

As the brothers’ November hearing date neared, Elizabeth Posley worried that Josiah’s longer hair wouldn’t be considered “presentable.” Her husband agreed, even though Josiah thought it was unfair that he would have to change the way he looked to avoid being stereotyped.

“In my mind, because you look a certain way as an African American child, you’re going to be judged a certain way,” Elizabeth Posley said. Rodney Posley used his clippers to cut Josiah’s hair.

Both boys wore suits to the hearing, Jeremiah’s from his eighth-grade graduation. The family lined up several character references, including one from a church leader. Three Bloom Trail employees — a guidance counselor, a social worker and a teacher — signed a letter praising Jeremiah and his parents for their positive involvement in school.

“Jeremiah is a hard worker, compassionate and respectful of others,” they wrote.

Josiah said he expected the hearing would be in a courtroom, like the one on the TV show “Judge Mathis.” Instead, it took place in a Steger police conference room with rows of stackable chairs.

According to a recording of the hearing, Ross told the hearing officer that Illinois law specifically prohibits schools from fining students for disciplinary reasons. She said Jeremiah has difficulty reading social cues because of his autism and went into the bathroom not knowing he was walking into a fight. Jeremiah has protections under federal disabilities law, she argued, and the consequences he faced for his actions, including the ticket, were inappropriate.

The family said at the hearing that school officials had scaled back some of the school-based punishment and that the family expected the ticket would be thrown out, too.

“It doesn’t matter if the school disciplined the children or didn’t discipline them,” hearing officer Brian Driscoll said in response. At the hearing, he said, “it is just different rules.”

Under Steger’s municipal code, the hearing officer has discretion in setting the amount of a fine or can decide to give a warning instead.

Driscoll found both boys liable and said he would fine Josiah $75 and Jeremiah $25. A third boy involved in the fight also received a $75 fine. Two others didn’t show up for the hearing and were fined $150 each.

The five boys ticketed for the Bloom Trail fight, all students of color, collectively owed the village $475.

“I didn’t find what he did helpful,” Elizabeth Posley said of the hearing officer. “He didn’t tell the kids to apologize or make up. He just fined them and kicked them out. He fined kids all night. Every kid who got in there got a fine.”

The Posleys didn’t pay the fines that night. They thought about appealing. But a few days later, concerned that they had a short window before the village could impose further financial consequences, Rodney Posley went to the police station to pay.

When he got there, he found out Steger accepts only cash or checks for ticket payments, and he didn’t have $100 on him. He drove to a nearby Jewel-Osco supermarket and bought a Snickers bar with his debit card so he could get cash back, then drove back and handed over the money.

Josiah’s suspension prevented him from playing drums at the high school’s homecoming concert in the fall. Now that it’s prom season, he’s glad he can participate in school activities again. Wanting his younger brother to experience a typical high school rite of passage, Josiah decided to take Jeremiah to the prom with him.

On Friday, surrounded by 20 family members, the brothers slipped on sunglasses and posed in the driveway by an arch of red and black balloons to match their red and black suits. As the boys left for the dance, the whole family cheered.

Elizabeth and Rodney Posley, center, pose for a family photo with sons Jeremiah, left, and Josiah outside their Sauk Village home before the brothers leave for their school’s prom.

How We Reported the Story

Neither the state of Illinois nor the federal government tracks how often police give tickets to students in public schools for violations of municipal ordinances.

To understand more about police ticketing of students, including the race of students who had been ticketed, reporters from the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica filed more than 500 requests for public records with schools and law enforcement agencies under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.

The requests were sent to 199 school districts: high-school-only districts and large K-12 districts. Those districts encompass roughly 86% of the state’s high school students. The requests sought records that would show how many times police were involved in student incidents during the school years that ended in 2019, 2020 and 2021; how often students were arrested; and how often tickets were issued in those incidents. Reporters also asked for the race of students who had been referred to police.

Some school districts said they did not track whether police issued tickets to students, so reporters then filed requests with the hundreds of law enforcement agencies that have jurisdiction over high schools in those districts. The requests sought information on where each ticket was issued, the age of the ticketed person or an indication whether they were a juvenile, the race of the person ticketed, the alleged violation and the amount of the fine.

From those records, reporters built a database documenting more than 11,800 tickets issued by police in 141 school districts during the three school years examined. For records obtained from police, the database included tickets issued at a school address to persons younger than 18, while excluding tickets issued for traffic, parking or curfew violations. Records obtained from school officials may have included tickets issued to students 18 or older.

Reporters also collected information about ticketing in the ongoing 2021-22 school year in select districts, but this data was not included in statewide analyses or in our interactive database. This story includes information about more recent tickets issued at Bloom Trail High School, DeKalb schools, East Peoria Community High School and Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School.

If a school district or police department provided the race of the young people who were ticketed, that information was documented in a separate database. In all, reporters were able to compile racial data for tickets issued at schools in 68 districts.

Reporters then excluded from the analysis schools where tickets were rare — those where fewer than 20 citations had been issued over the three school years — and schools where race information was missing for more than 25% of tickets. That left about 4,000 tickets that had been issued at schools in 42 districts. In total, those schools enroll more than one-fifth of Illinois’ high-school students. For districts and some individual schools, reporters estimated total enrollment and enrollment by race by averaging the actual enrollment figures reported to the Illinois State Board of Education for the three school years being examined.

To identify potential racial disparities in ticketing, reporters first calculated the total enrollment for the schools in the database, as well as the total enrollment for various racial groups. They then calculated how many tickets were issued for each racial group and compared those rates to those groups’ share of total enrollment. In a few cases, race information was omitted from the ticket or marked as unknown. These cases were included in the ticket totals to ensure that the resulting racial disparity calculations were conservative.

In some cases, the race of the student ticketed was indicated but the ethnicity was not, meaning that it wasn’t possible to tell the true number of Hispanic or Latino students ticketed. For example, some police departments indicated clearly if a person ticketed was Black or white but left blank the part of the record that indicates whether someone is Hispanic or Latino. That incomplete documentation meant some Latino students who received tickets likely were classified only as white.

Some police departments and school districts provided detailed records for each ticket, including the reason the ticket was written and the race of the student. That allowed reporters to check whether racial disparities differed by type of violation, based on a set of roughly 3,000 tickets issued to students in 33 districts across the state.

To conduct that analysis, reporters standardized the ways different police departments and schools had documented students’ race, then placed each ticket into a category based on the alleged violation. For example, tickets involving disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, “activity constituting a public nuisance” and “prohibited conduct on school property” were labeled as conduct-related tickets. Tickets involving tobacco, drugs or paraphernalia were labeled as substance-related tickets.

Reporters calculated how many tickets in each category went to students in different racial groups, then compared those rates to the groups’ share of overall enrollment.

To understand how tickets are handled after they’re issued, reporters attended more than 50 hearings across Illinois, observing hundreds of cases. They spoke with dozens of families affected by the process; with school, police and municipal officials; with attorneys and hearing officers; and with juvenile advocates. Reporters consulted with families about how to identify family members in the story and, as a result, did not include full names of all of the young people.

Help ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune Report on Police Issuing Tickets at Schools

To continue with this important reporting, we need to hear from people who have been affected by tickets handed out at school. Are you a parent, school worker, researcher or attorney? Please fill out this brief survey.

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Editing by Kaarin Tisue, George Papajohn and Steve Mills; additional data analysis by Ruth Talbot and Agnel Philip; additional research by Alex Mierjeski; visual presentation by Laila Milevski, Alex Bandoni, Ellen Przepasniak, Maya Eliahou, Steve Rosenberg, Todd Panagopoulos and Raquel Zaldivar; engagement reporting by Adriana Gallardo and Ariana Tobin; copy editing by Neil deMause and Jeff Carlson.

Jennifer Smith Richards has been a reporter at the Chicago Tribune since 2015. Jennifer’s data-driven investigative work often focuses on schools and disability. She is a member of the ProPublica Distinguished Fellows program.

Armando L. Sanchez joined the Chicago Tribune as a photojournalist in 2014. He was born and raised in Austin, Texas, and graduated from Western Kentucky University in 2012.

by Marek Mazurek, South Bend Tribune

This article was produced by the South Bend Tribune, a former member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

A man who spent more than eight years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of an armed robbery in Elkhart, Indiana, will receive $7.5 million in a settlement with the city and with former police officers involved in the investigation, his attorney has announced.

The city’s settlement with Keith Cooper is the largest amount paid to a plaintiff in a wrongful conviction lawsuit in Indiana, according to the University of Michigan’s Exoneration Registry, and marks the end of his legal saga, which was chronicled by the South Bend Tribune and ProPublica.

Cooper, now 54, was pardoned in 2017 by Gov. Eric Holcomb.

The record-breaking settlement follows a series of other wrongful conviction proceedings and lawsuits in Elkhart.

Cooper’s co-defendant in the 1996 robbery, Christopher Parish, was exonerated and awarded nearly $5 million in a 2014 settlement. In March, Andrew Royer filed a lawsuit saying police and prosecutors coerced him into a false confession. A handful of other cases against the Elkhart Police Department are pending.

“It’s been a long uphill battle. I’ve been waiting 14 years for this day and now it’s here,” Cooper said during a press conference Wednesday afternoon in Chicago. “There’s no amount of money that can get me back the time I lost. But it helps build a better tomorrow for me and my family.”

Photos of Cooper and his wife. Cooper is the first Indiana man to win a pardon based on actual innocence. (Robert Franklin/South Bend Tribune)

In a separate press conference, Elkhart city spokesperson Corinne Straight read a prepared statement in which the city apologized for its handling of Cooper’s case.

“We hope this settlement brings to a conclusion the obvious injustice that has been rendered to Mr. Cooper,” the statement read in part. “The current administration and current leadership in the Elkhart Police Department have set upon a path of accountability in the hopes that this kind of case will never happen again.

“To Mr. Cooper and his family, we regret the suffering you experienced.”

Elliot Slosar, an attorney who represented Cooper throughout the civil litigation, said he appreciates the city’s apology, but he called on Elkhart’s mayor to bring in a special prosecutor to review every case investigated by the officers named in Cooper’s lawsuit.

(Christian Sheckler, the Tribune reporter who worked with ProPublica’s Ken Armstrong on a series of stories published in 2018 and 2019 about the criminal justice system in Elkhart, began working this year as an investigator for the Notre Dame Law School Exoneration Justice Clinic. Slosar is also affiliated with the clinic.)

The Case

On Oct. 29, 1996, police were called to a housing project in Elkhart where 17-year-old Michael Kershner had been shot and nearly killed. Friends and family of Kershner’s said two Black men — one short and one tall — had forced their way into his apartment, and the tall suspect shot the teenager during a struggle.

Cooper and Parish were charged in the crime after witnesses identified them as the suspects from photo arrays. Cooper was identified as the taller of the suspects and the alleged shooter. Both men were convicted: Cooper in 1997, of robbery, and Parish in 1998, of robbery and attempted murder. Cooper was sentenced to 40 years, Parish to 30.

(Nadia Sussman/ProPublica)

Cooper’s suit claimed that Elkhart police officials, including detective Steve Rezutko, framed the men through false witness statements and unduly suggestive photo lineups.

Eyewitnesses who testified at Cooper’s trial later recanted and said they had been manipulated by Rezutko into implicating Cooper.

Additionally, an investigation done in the years after Cooper’s trial concluded that DNA obtained from the shooter’s hat matched a man who had been convicted of a 2002 murder in Benton Harbor, Michigan, and then sent to prison.

In 2005, a state appeals court threw out Parish’s conviction. Afterward, a judge offered Cooper a choice. The judge could overturn Cooper’s conviction, allowing for a possible retrial, or modify Cooper’s sentence, allowing Cooper to be released immediately. Cooper chose the sentence modification and was freed in April 2006.

Though he was no longer in prison, Cooper was not exonerated of the robbery. So, in 2009, he filed a petition for a pardon. In 2014, the Indiana Parole Board voted unanimously in Cooper’s favor and forwarded its recommendation to then-Gov. Mike Pence. But for nearly three years, Pence allowed the recommendation to sit, taking no action. Pence’s successor, Holcomb, issued the pardon in 2017, one month after taking office.

Cooper is the first Indiana man to win a pardon based on actual innocence.

Through the discovery process in the case, Cooper and his attorneys also learned that Rezutko had been forced to resign from the Elkhart Police Department in 2001 because of sexual misconduct with an informant.

The department did not disclose until January 2019 that the detective had been accused of paying an informant for oral sex.

Rezutko died by suicide a month after those records were disclosed.

by Justin Elliott

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Millions of Americans will receive money from Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, as part of a $141 million settlement between the Silicon Valley company and all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The company will send up to $90 apiece to more than 4 million people who paid for TurboTax software even though they were eligible to receive it for free.

The investigation by state attorneys general, led by Letitia James of New York, was sparked by ProPublica stories in 2019 that revealed how Intuit had systematically tricked millions of people into paying for tax prep.

“For years, Intuit misled the most vulnerable among us to make a profit,” James said in a statement. “Today, every state in the nation is holding Intuit accountable for scamming millions of taxpayers, and we’re putting millions of dollars back into the pockets of impacted Americans.”

The company, which has long defended its marketing practices, did not admit wrongdoing. In a statement, Intuit said it “agreed to pay $141 million to put this matter behind it.”

The deal covers those who paid to file with TurboTax for the tax years 2016 to 2018, even though they were eligible for a no-fee version of the software offered through the Free File program, launched by the industry in partnership with the IRS in 2003. Filers making below a certain threshold — $34,000 for the 2018 tax year — were eligible for TurboTax’s product offered through the program, as were those eligible for the federal Earned Income Tax Credit, as well as active duty military service members with low incomes.

The vast majority of the settlement will go directly to victims. For each year a person paid Intuit even though they were eligible to file for free, the company will send them approximately $30. The company is not facing any fines in addition to the restitution to be paid to TurboTax users.

The settlement follows three years of investigation and negotiations with Intuit involving attorneys for New York, Tennessee, Pennsylvania and other states.

Intuit’s deceptive practices predate 2016. ProPublica reported that they go back more than a decade. A person familiar with the state officials’ investigation said that the settlement did not cover tax years before 2016 because of some states’ statutes of limitations. TurboTax is a major profit driver for the company. Intuit generated around $3 billion in net income over the 2016 to 2018 time period.

The details of when and how the payments will be made are not immediately clear. The process will be overseen by a third party that will handle the logistics of distributing the money, according to the settlement, which says payments will be made by check or electronic services such as PayPal and Venmo. In Texas alone, more than 465,000 consumers are expected to receive restitution payments from Intuit, according to the settlement. More than 371,000 purchasers in California and more than 176,000 in New York are also expected to receive payments.

Under the terms of the settlement, Intuit will also have to take several steps to improve disclosure in its products and cease marketing TurboTax under its yearslong “free free free” ad campaign. The company said in its statement that it “already adheres to most of these advertising practices and expects minimal impact to its business from implementing the remaining changes going forward.”

ProPublica’s stories in recent years reported on how Intuit routinely charged Americans who were eligible to file their taxes for free, sometimes luring them in with deceptive marketing. ProPublica reported that Intuit had even added code to its website to hide its free tax filing program from search engines such as Google. The company later removed the code.

Intuit still faces several other legal fights stemming from its “free” marketing.

The Federal Trade Commission is still pursuing legal action against Intuit over similar issues after suing the company in March under the federal law that prohibits unfair or deceptive business practices.

The agency’s suit asked the court to issue an emergency order forcing Intuit to stop its marketing of its products as “free” before the tax filing deadline on April 18. The judge ruled for Intuit in the lawsuit. But an internal FTC proceeding over the issues is continuing, with a hearing set for September.

Intuit said in its statement today that it believes “this settlement with the state attorneys general and the District of Columbia also addresses the issues at the core of the FTC litigation, making that lawsuit entirely unnecessary. Nevertheless, we are fully prepared to litigate with the FTC to prove the merits of our case.”

As ProPublica previously reported, more than 150,000 individual arbitration claims were also filed against the company by people seeking money back after they paid for software that, they said, should have been free. In a recent securities filing, Intuit said that on Feb. 23 it entered into a settlement agreement with consumers to resolve “a majority” of the pending arbitration claims without any admission of wrongdoing. The company hasn’t disclosed the terms of the settlement.

by Robin Fields and Adriana Gallardo

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If the U.S. Supreme Court does as its leaked draft opinion says and strikes down Roe v. Wade, researchers expect that in the following year, roughly 75,000 people who want, but can’t get, abortions will give birth instead.

They’ll do so in a country where pregnancy and childbirth continue to become more dangerous.

Government data released this year shows that U.S. maternal deaths increased significantly in the first year of the pandemic, going from 754 in 2019 to 861 in 2020, a 14% jump. The death rate for Black women was almost three times higher than that for white women.

The stats for 2020 were no surprise. As ProPublica detailed in 2017, the U.S. has fallen behind other wealthy nations and many less affluent ones where deaths linked to pregnancy and childbirth have plummeted over the past two decades. Deaths are only one yardstick for measuring maternal health. For every U.S. woman who dies as a result of pregnancy or childbirth, up to 70 suffer dangerous and sometimes life-threatening complications.

The landscape for maternal health post-Roe would change swiftly, and not for the better, many public health officials and experts say. Some 25 states would likely move to ban abortion, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights. A brief submitted in the case on which the court is ruling, signed by about 550 public-health and reproductive-health researchers, draws a straight line between lack of abortion access and increased risk of maternal death.

“Put simply,” the brief says, “women living in states with the most restrictive abortion policies — and thus the least abortion access — were found to be more likely to die while pregnant or shortly thereafter than women living in states with less restrictive abortion policies, regardless of state-to-state differences in poverty, race/ethnicity, and education.”

Middlebury College economics professor Caitlin Knowles Myers, whose work focuses the effects of limits on abortion access, said her research shows that in the year after the ruling, about 100,000 women seeking abortions won’t be able to get them from providers. Some may be able to obtain pills for self-managed abortions, but about three-quarters will give birth.

Those women are likely to be disproportionately poor, young, of color and concentrated in the Deep South, parts of the Midwest and some Western states, often in places where social safety nets are weakest, she said. “Overwhelmingly, it is the poorest and most vulnerable women who are the most affected.”

Dr. Katy Kozhimannil, a health policy professor who directs the University of Minnesota’s Rural Health Research Center, said the loss of abortion access will be a compounding factor in rural communities where contraceptives are hard to get and hospitals have closed or no longer have obstetrics departments.

“I think we’re going to see a lot more emergency obstetric needs in rural communities that are not at all equipped to handle them,” she said.

Many of the states with trigger laws that will outlaw abortion once the Supreme Court has ruled have larger rural populations and a higher percentage of Black and Indigenous residents in those areas, Kozhimannil added.

by Brittany Freeman, Rocky Mountain PBS

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Rocky Mountain PBS. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Colorado lawmakers passed a bill Monday aimed at protecting residents in disputes with their homeowners associations.

House Bill 22-1137 limits HOAs from seeking foreclosure against homeowners who accumulate fines for violating community rules known as covenants. The bill also stops HOAs from assessing those penalties on a daily basis and limits them to $500. The legislation now heads to Gov. Jared Polis, whose office said he plans to sign it into law.

“As it currently stands, Coloradans have little recourse and almost no protections when facing down the endless resources held by associations and the lawyers they may hire,” bill cosponsor Sen. James Coleman, D-Denver, told his colleagues at a committee hearing Friday.

The bill went through numerous changes after its first House committee hearing. Supporters said lawmakers removed a provision that would have limited the amount of legal fees that HOAs can charge residents in court cases, but added provisions that specifically prohibited foreclosure on liens that only contain fines or the costs of collecting them.

Coleman said the changes were driven by hours of meetings with representatives of HOAs and their advocates. “We really took our time,” he said, “so that we ultimately make it so that our communities continue to be safe and beautiful, but at the same time folks aren’t losing their homes because they had weeds in their grass.”

Coleman represents Green Valley Ranch, a community that has become the subject of months of publicity after one of the HOAs there filed dozens of foreclosure cases against residents in the past year. Rep. Naquetta Ricks, D-Aurora, was the bill’s initial sponsor.

An analysis of court case data by Rocky Mountain PBS and ProPublica found that Colorado HOAs have filed at least 2,400 foreclosure cases against residents since 2018. HOAs in the state have the legal right to seek foreclosure against homeowners who are at the equivalent of six months behind on their routine dues, but that total can also include fees, fines and collection costs, such as legal fees.

Many homeowners who faced foreclosure have told Rocky Mountain PBS and ProPublica that they ultimately ended up paying thousands of dollars more than their original debts to save their homes because the HOA billed them legal fees after they fell behind. Residents of one HOA community in Aurora, the Timbers Homeowners Association I, told the news organizations that they were surprised to learn their HOA has filed 41 foreclosure cases since 2018.

The newly passed legislation contains several measures that supporters said would give homeowners due process before delinquencies end up in court. It requires several notifications to residents about delinquencies and fines, requires those notices to be provided in the native language designated by homeowners and allows them the opportunity to seek longer payment plans of 18 months to repay debts to the HOA.

Representatives from the HOA industry told lawmakers they opposed the legislation. They said it would make it harder to enforce their rules, especially when homeowners are defiant, and would push more costs onto others who are compliant.

“This bill is going to harm the people who keep their promises and cause expenses for those people. It’s been through so many different amendments and variations, and it’s still so messy,” testified Lindsay Smith, an HOA attorney who heads Colorado’s legislative action committee for the Community Associations Institute.

The bill’s supporters said a provision that opens up small claims court as a venue for disputes could also make a big difference for homeowners who cannot afford to hire an attorney to fight their HOA.

“The disputes that are creating all of the heat within HOAs finally have a place to go,” said Andrew Mowery, an HOA homeowner advocate whose group helped craft the original legislation.

by Alexandra Zayas

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As all eyes were on the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday after a leaked draft majority opinion indicated it is planning to overturn Roe v. Wade, ProPublica spoke with journalist Joshua Prager, who spent 11 years dissecting the landmark case that guaranteed abortion rights for women across the country. For his acclaimed book “The Family Roe: An American Story,” Prager interviewed upwards of 500 people including key figures on both sides of the case, most notably its plaintiff, Norma McCorvey, who was better known as Jane Roe. In delving into the untold story behind her life, those of the children she gave birth to and the monumental case, Prager unfurled the decadeslong history of the American war over abortion.

Prager said indicators of the justices’ leanings were clear while observing arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case challenging a 2018 Mississippi law prohibiting most abortions after 15 weeks’ gestational age, which is the subject of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion. Though the Court confirmed the authenticity of the document published this week by Politico, the final vote and decision are still pending. Prager discussed why he believed the road to this week’s revelation was paved, in part, by decades of mistakes and missed opportunities made by the pro-choice movement. (In his book, Prager refers to those who support the right to abortion the way they refer to themselves, “pro-choice,” and those opposing abortion the way they refer to themselves, “pro-life.” We adhered to these conventions during our interview. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.)

Did you expect this day would come?

I absolutely did. Anyone who was a close follower of the issue could see that this was happening when we listened to the oral arguments in Dobbs. We knew where all of the justices stood pretty much, but there were two who we thought might go either way, Justice (Amy Coney) Barrett, Justice (Brett) Kavanaugh — two of Trump’s three appointments. And to listen to them speak and question during oral arguments in Dobbs, we could see where they were going.

Kavanaugh, over and again, was speaking about precedents that the Supreme Court had previously overturned. Justice Barrett, meantime, was speaking about the fact that adoption is, as she put it, a viable alternative to abortion.

What was so fascinating about this and tragic, if you’re a person who believes that Roe ought not to be overturned, was that the Supreme Court did not need Justice (John) Roberts, the chief justice anymore; the conservative bloc now doesn’t need him. They have the votes that they need 5 to 4 without him. He is an incrementalist. He is a person who respects precedent. He really cares about the image of the court, does not want it to be seen as simply a political body. And he was desperate to not actually have the headline that we had last night. He wanted to see Roe maintained, but sort of gutted. But he lost.

So this was not a surprise. If you step back further, when Roe was ruled upon in 1973, it galvanized those opposed to it. And it gave (the pro-life movement) a very simple, clear target, a new raison d’etre: We want to overturn Roe. This is the culmination of 49 1/2 years of efforts and different approaches, novel approaches. And unfortunately, again, if you are a person who believes in reproductive choice, the pro-choice did not take a lot of that seriously for many years, and they are as much to, sort of, blame for this day as the pro-life will (take) credit for.

Tell me a little more about the blame the pro-choice movement shares.

(The pro-choice movement) did not foresee a war here. NARAL’s executive director in 1973, when Roe was ruled upon, told her board after the ruling, “The court has spoken and the case is closed.” They saw this as, basically: It’s over. We’ve won.

The very, very opposite is true of the pro-life, who said: OK, now we have to think about this strategically, how will we go about overturning Roe? As a result of that imbalance, the pro-choice were playing catch up really for 49 1/2 years, as the pro-life (movement has) over and over again come up with many different ways to chip away at Roe and has been remarkably successful. Just to give you a few examples:

• 1976, the Hyde Amendment, which said that you can no longer pay for abortion with Medicaid.
• 1989, the case of Webster, that was a ruling against the use of public resources for abortion.
• 2007, Gonzales v. Carhart banned a specific type of abortion procedure.
• And then of course, just this year in Texas with SB-8, it was a very novel approach coming up with a way to have an end run around the enforcement of abortion by deputizing private citizens to sue anyone who was helping someone have an abortion in any way.

The pro-life also used technology in a way that had never been used before by showing fetal photography. They used language that had never been used before, for example, coining the phrase “partial-birth abortion.”

They also used pseudoscience in a remarkable way. They came up with this very novel approach called “post-abortion syndrome,” saying that if a woman had an abortion, an enormous percentage of the time, she would suffer psychologically as a result of that. That’s not true. In fact, the opposite is true. The majority of women who have abortions express relief as opposed to regret. If there is something that causes women grief, the studies show, it is relinquishing their child to adoption. These were all pro-life weapons in attacking Roe, and over and over again, you had the pro-choice movement outfoxed.

In the early 2000s, one of the attacks on Roe was led by lawyer Allan Parker, who had represented Norma for a time. (The suit) said that Roe needed to become null and void because conditions had changed in the years since it had been filed. And the only way to file this suit was to have the original plaintiff file it. So he came to represent Norma and he filed this suit.

What ended up happening was that the pro-choice basically ignored the suit. They said that it was a sad publicity stunt, and they did not file a single brief defending Roe in this case. And it ended up introducing into the judicial system these affidavits filed by women who said that abortion harmed them. And that idea ended up going right up to the Supreme Court. Justice (Anthony) Kennedy ended up citing them in 2007 in Gonzales v. Carhart. It was evident that Parker’s lawsuit had been incredibly effective and powerful.

It shows all of the different ways in which the pro-choice have failed to meet the pro-life, have failed to repel their arguments and their strategies. And it speaks to a simple human reality that it’s much easier to try to knock something down than to defend it. What we’re going to see now is the very same problem that the pro-choice had, the pro-life now are going to have, because now you are going to see that this is going to galvanize the tens of millions of people who are horrified about what’s happening now. They now will have as simple a marching order as the pro-life used to have to reinstate Roe or to come up with another way to ensure that abortion will be legal for women across the country.

Roe was 1 day old in 1973 when Bella Abzug, who was a House representative from New York, urged Congress to codify Roe. She basically foresaw exactly where we are today, that there was the potential legislation to erode Roe. She introduced an act: The Abortion Rights Act, H.R. 254, to bar states from creating new (laws) on abortion. Congress ignored her bill, and anyway, it was doomed to failure because Roe allowed for future legislation. It gave states the right to oppose regulations from the second trimester onward, but here we are now and people want to go back and do exactly what Bella Abzug was saying that we ought to do.

Is there any more evidence that pro-choice leaders made mistakes that allowed this to happen? Where does the pro-choice movement go from here?

It’s not only true, but something that, case in point, was embodied by Justice (Ruth Bader) Ginsburg’s decision to not step down from the court in her 80s, during Obama’s presidency. We would not be here had she done that. That is a simple fact. And that is a very painful fact, for she’s obviously the greatest hero over the course of 50 years to the pro-choice movement, but whether it was hubris or it was an inability to see that Trump might be elected or just a very human, understandable desire to hold onto a job she loved, it was nonetheless a mistake with catastrophic consequences. And that, you can say, was the final nail in the coffin for Roe, but it was also the latest in a long line of missteps by the pro-choice of failing to properly address the situation in which they found themselves.

And here we are, but again, it’s now going to flip. If you’re a person who cares about choice, that is the silver lining of this very dark, dark cloud that it is now going to galvanize in a way we have not seen in our lifetimes, those who believe in a right to choose.

by Jeremy Schwartz and Perla Trevizo

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This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Brian Kolfage arrived in Texas three years ago pledging to help fulfill President Donald Trump’s promise of a “big, beautiful” wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. After pleading guilty to federal fraud charges last month, Kolfage leaves behind two small stretches of fencing that are mired in legal, environmental and permitting fights.

Kolfage, a 40-year-old Air Force veteran, faces more than five years in prison after pleading guilty to defrauding donors of hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to the wall effort. Despite the resolution of the criminal case, Kolfage and his We Build the Wall group still face a defamation suit brought by the National Butterfly Center, a nonprofit nature preserve in the Rio Grande Valley that he accused of promoting sex and human trafficking without evidence. In addition, the federal government has filed suit regarding one of his wall projects, alleging it was built in potential violation of an international treaty between the U.S. and Mexico.

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune reported in 2020 on severe erosion at the base of the 3-mile fence outside of Mission, Texas — the subject of a federal lawsuit — that experts said could result in the structure toppling into the Rio Grande if not fixed. The outlets also reported on Kolfage’s long history of online harassment and intimidation, which escalated with his border wall projects.

Controversy continues to surround the two physical legacies of Kolfage’s We Build the Wall effort: the bollard fence on the shore of the Rio Grande and a half-mile stretch of fence outside of El Paso.

The federal government has confirmed in court filings that the Rio Grande barrier remains at risk of falling and that it could potentially shift the international boundary. Government lawyers are negotiating a settlement in a lawsuit filed against the project. Based on court hearings, it could require wall builders to modify the barriers, such as adding gates to help prevent flooding, but appears unlikely to result in the removal of the fence that opponents seek.

An attorney for the construction company, Fisher Industries, denied the government’s allegations in his response to the complaint, according to court documents, and did not respond to a request for comment.

Separately, three years after construction of the fence outside of El Paso, Kolfage’s group has failed to fulfill federal requirements, including providing an operation and maintenance plan and evidence of financial responsibility for damage or injuries that can be caused by the structure.

According to the indictment in the fraud case, Kolfage repeatedly claimed that he would “not take a penny in salary or compensation” and that 100% of the funds raised would be used to execute the group’s mission. That’s not what happened, federal prosecutors alleged. The government accused Kolfage of using fake invoices and sham vendor arrangements to siphon more than $350,000 for personal expenses, including home renovations, a boat and a luxury SUV.

In addition to pleading guilty to one count of wire fraud conspiracy, Kolfage also pleaded guilty to tax crimes for failing to report that income. “I knew what I was doing was wrong and a crime,” Kolfage told the judge, according to news accounts of the hearing. He is due to be sentenced in September.

We Build the Wall board member and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon was accused of receiving more than $1 million through the scheme, according to the indictment. Trump pardoned Bannon during his final hours at the White House, meaning the federal criminal case against him could not proceed.

As part of his plea, Kolfage agreed to forfeit $17 million from the nonprofit. We Build the Wall is also required to give up more than $1 million in donations in a bank account, according to the plea agreement. Kolfage’s attorney in the federal fraud case, César de Castro, declined to comment. An attorney listed for We Build the Wall did not respond to a request for comment.

In a 2020 interview with ProPublica and the Tribune, Kolfage denied the possibility of wrongdoing. “How is there corruption?” Kolfage said. “It’s privatized. It’s not federal money.”

We Build the Wall was an influential conservative nonprofit that grew out of a GoFundMe campaign started by Kolfage in 2018. The group pivoted to soliciting donations to build private barriers after learning it couldn’t donate directly to the federal government to help Trump build a wall along the southern border. By mid-2020, it had raised more than $25 million.

According to court filings, Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state and general counsel for We Build the Wall, said in 2019 that the group was only a “passive” investor in the Mission fence, having provided about 5% of the total cost, and wasn’t involved in the planning or design. It was dropped from the lawsuit. Still, We Build the Wall continued to promote the project on its website as one of two completed projects supporters could even tour, at least as of Dec. 31, 2021.

“This project goes to show you how We Build The Wall’s movement to unite Americans who share a common belief in border security has grown into a larger movement of privatized wall builders,” it posted on its website next to pictures and a description of the project.

After ProPublica and the Tribune exposed erosion issues at the site, Trump tried to distance himself from the private effort, speculating on Twitter that it was built to make him look bad. Yet just a few months earlier his son Donald Trump Jr. had endorsed We Build the Wall, calling it “private enterprise at its finest.” Kolfage himself had bragged of having a direct connection to the White House through Bannon and Kobach.

Born in Michigan and raised in Hawaii, Kolfage joined the Air Force. In 2004, two weeks into his second deployment to Iraq, a rocket exploded a few feet from him, severing both of his legs and his right hand.

The Purple Heart recipient recovered after undergoing 16 surgeries in six months, and he often spoke publicly about his experience, becoming the face of resilience and perseverance.

He soon began running a number of right-wing websites and Facebook pages that he claimed earned him as much as $200,000 per month, according to text messages reviewed by ProPublica and the Tribune. The sites included sensationalized, photoshopped and in some cases fabricated content, and several were shut down by Facebook for “inauthentic activity” in 2018. Kolfage was accused of online bullying and personal attacks, and he formally apologized to a perceived online critic as part of a court settlement.

Upon his arrival in Texas, he targeted local opponents in the Rio Grande Valley, including a prominent Catholic priest and the National Butterfly Center. Both had previously opposed the federal government’s plan to build fencing through their property. On social media, Kolfage declared that the center “openly supports illegal immigration and sex trafficking of women and children.” Social media messages calling staffers “pigs,” “pathetic filth” and “traitors” poured in. “You will be made to pay,” one Facebook follower declared in a message.

The butterfly center filed a defamation lawsuit against Kolfage and We Build the Wall in 2019, as well as Fisher Industries and the property owner who provided land for the fence, claiming that their supporters had “begun to engage in targeted harassment.”

Kolfage, who has not been served with the suit, has not responded to the allegations. An attorney for Fisher Industries has denied the allegations in court filings.

Kolfage’s arrest in 2020 did little to quell the harassment, said the butterfly center’s executive director, Marianna Treviño-Wright, as the site became a rallying point for border wall supporters, including out-of-state political candidates.

In late January, a right-wing congressional candidate from Virginia, Kimberly Lowe, visited the nature preserve. Treviño-Wright said Lowe demanded the center give her and another woman access to the river “to see all the illegals crossing on the raft.” Treviño-Wright said Lowe or her companion tackled her when she asked Lowe to leave the premises, a physical altercation captured on audio. Treviño-Wright said she filed a complaint against Lowe with the Mission Police Department, which did not return calls for comment.

Lowe accused Treviño-Wright of filing a false police report and pushing a “false news story” and claimed she, not Treviño-Wright, was the one assaulted during the altercation in a statement to ProPublica and the Tribune.

Citing safety concerns, the center shuttered its doors for three months. It reopened last week after spending nearly $30,000 in security upgrades.

“I think we will all be on guard for a long time,” Treviño-Wright said. “I don’t know that it’s possible to experience what we have and not, you know, be changed by that.”

Kolfage’s guilty plea did not end his defiant social media posture on the right-wing microblogging site Gettr, where he has a verified account after having been banned from Facebook and deactivating his Twitter account. On the day after he entered his plea, he posted a screenshot of a Gateway Pundit story crediting him with building more border wall than Presidents Barack Obama or Joe Biden. His pinned post reads “They Michael Flynn’d me,” an apparent reference to the former Trump national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI over contacts with Russian officials. Flynn was subsequently pardoned by Trump.

In the comments section, supporters told Kolfage he deserved a “medal” and thanked him for “everything you’ve done.”

by Jennifer Smith Richards, Chicago Tribune, and Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica

This story was co-published with the Chicago Tribune.

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Illinois’ top education official urged schools to stop working with police to ticket students for misbehavior, hours after an investigation by ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune revealed that schools across the state were evading laws designed to prohibit the fining of students.

In a strongly worded plea sent to officials across the state, Illinois ​​State Superintendent of Education Carmen Ayala said the costly fines associated with the tickets can be immensely harmful to families, and there’s no evidence they improve students’ behavior. School officials who refer students to police for ticketing have “abdicated their responsibility for student discipline to local law enforcement,” she wrote Thursday, the same day the investigation “The Price Kids Pay” was published.

“If your district/schools are engaging in this practice, I implore you to immediately stop and consider both the cost and the consequences of these fines,” Ayala wrote. She highlighted that sentence in bold type in an 800-word email to superintendents and principals.

The Illinois State Board of Education intends to survey school districts to learn more about their disciplinary practices, Ayala wrote. She also warned that the state board will investigate “noncompliance with state law, where appropriate, and work with lawmakers to close loopholes in state law.”

On Friday, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said the Tribune-ProPublica report was “something we immediately jumped on” and conversations with legislators were already underway.

“We want to see what exactly is going to be required in order to make sure that this doesn’t happen anywhere in the state of Illinois,” Pritzker said. “I would bet that you’re going to see legislation about this.”

In “The Price Kids Pay,” ProPublica and the Tribune reported that local police are issuing thousands of tickets a year to students for violations of municipal laws, often for misconduct as minor as littering or vaping. Each ticket can come with hundreds of dollars in fines or fees, forcing many families into burdensome payment plans that can eat up paychecks. (Use our interactive database to look up how many and what kinds of tickets have been issued in an Illinois public school or district.)

Failure to pay can have lasting and severe implications. Some communities send debt from school tickets to collection agencies and warn of wage garnishment, liens and loss of driving privileges if the debt is not paid. Other municipalities have used a program available through the state comptroller’s office to deduct money from individuals’ tax refunds and payroll checks.

“The only consequences of the tickets are to impose a financial burden on already struggling families and to make students feel even less cared for, less welcome, and less included at school, which in turn leads to more antisocial and defiant behavior,” Ayala wrote in her letter.

An Illinois law passed in 2015 prohibits schools from using fines to discipline students. Instead, the investigation found, schools have been referring students to police, who then write costly tickets — taking advantage of what Ayala referred to as a “loophole” in the law. Students received more than 11,800 tickets for school misbehavior in the last three school years, reporters found.

Another law, dating to 2019, directly bans schools from reporting truant students to authorities so the students can be ticketed. But the investigation identified about 40 schools or districts that have been referring students to police for truancy.

The investigation found that students were issued tickets most frequently for possession of vaping devices or cannabis, disorderly conduct, fighting and truancy. But police also wrote tickets for such offenses as littering, being disruptive and property damage — for breaking a soap dish in a school bathroom, for example. The investigation focused on high schools but found that children 12 and under also had been ticketed in some K-12 districts.

The investigation examined 199 school districts and identified ticketing of students in 141 of them. To understand the frequency and impact of ticketing in schools, reporters filed 500 Freedom of Information Act requests to districts and police departments and attended more than 50 hearing dates in courts and municipalities across the state.

So many students get ticketed in some cities and towns that students make up the majority of people attending their municipal hearings for ordinance violations. The hearings are usually held during the day, forcing students to miss school. Ayala noted that ticketing students for truancy “may actually worsen student attendance.”

In her letter, Ayala wrote that while some people who did not grow up poor may not understand the impact of a $250 fine, it can force people to choose between paying for groceries, buying gas to get to work or paying the heating bill.

“For the more than 50 percent of our students and families in Illinois who qualify as low-income, paying $250 for a fine means the lights in the house will literally shut off, mom and dad will have no fuel to get to work, or there will be no hot meals on the table,” she wrote. “Even a $40 fine has a tangible impact on the safety, security and wellbeing of an entire family.”

Pritzker said “issuing fines to students who are in our K-12 system is not helpful,” adding, “It doesn’t help, it doesn’t change the behavior, and it just puts families at risk.”

An excerpt from Ayala’s letter.

In guidance issued last month, the state board of education and Attorney General Kwame Raoul urged schools to reevaluate punitive disciplinary policies such as suspensions; the guidance did not address police citations.

The state board also has been working with educators in about a half-dozen school districts this year on more positive behavioral interventions for students. Through the board’s Partnership for Disciplinary Equity in conjunction with several universities, funded with $2 million in federal pandemic relief funds, K-12 educators are learning about restorative justice practices and other techniques that emphasize resolving conflicts with discussion and problem-solving.

​​The legislators behind the 2015 law prohibiting schools from fining students have said they were troubled to learn from the Tribune and ProPublica that police were issuing costly tickets to children at school. The current House speaker, Emanuel “Chris” Welch, who was a sponsor of the legislation, said the General Assembly should revisit the law in light of the investigation’s findings.

Update, April 29, 2022: This story was updated to include statements from Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

Dan Petrella, Chicago Tribune, contributed reporting.

Jennifer Smith Richards has been a reporter at the Chicago Tribune since 2015. Jennifer’s data-driven investigative work often focuses on schools and disability. Most recently, she uncovered the misuse of seclusion and restraint in Illinois public schools and investigated sexual abuse and assault in Chicago schools. She previously wrote about education for more than a decade at newspapers in Huntington, West Virginia; Utica, New York; Savannah, Georgia; and Columbus, Ohio. She is a member of the ProPublica Distinguished Fellows program.

by Hannah Dreyfus

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The federal Department of Education has begun investigating Liberty University’s handling of student reports of sexual assault. In a statement to ProPublica, the school pledged its “full cooperation” with the investigation.

Last October, ProPublica revealed how the school, which was founded by evangelist Jerry Falwell, had discouraged students who tried to report being sexually assaulted. Some students who came forward were encouraged to sign forms acknowledging they might have broken Liberty’s moral code of conduct, “The Liberty Way.” Others described being encouraged to pray instead of reporting their cases.

Federal law requires that universities receiving federal funds properly handle claims of sexual assault. Liberty students receive hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid. Following our story, senators urged the U.S. Department of Education to investigate.

Liberty students told ProPublica that federal agents have been at the school’s campus in Lynchburg, Virginia, this week. In an email viewed by ProPublica, a Department of Education official reached out to student advocates to arrange meeting times. An agency spokesperson declined to comment, citing a policy not to discuss ongoing investigations.

“Liberty University welcomes the U.S. Department of Education’s review of our Clery Act compliance program,” the university said in its statement to ProPublica. The federal Clery Act requires schools to inform students who report sexual assaults about the option of going to law enforcement and to assist in that reporting if necessary.

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., one of the senators who had called for the investigation, praised the government’s move. “I’m glad the Department of Education is investigating Liberty’s handling of sexual assault,” he said in a statement to ProPublica. “I hope the Department looks into it thoroughly.”

In another development, an unnamed former Liberty University student filed a federal lawsuit against the school on Wednesday, claiming the university failed to properly investigate after she reported a rape to school authorities a year ago. The plaintiff also alleged that when she reported being sexually assaulted, she was penalized by the school for violating The Liberty Way, because she had been at a party where alcohol was consumed.

A spokesperson for Liberty declined to comment on the suit.

In November, two weeks after ProPublica’s investigation, Liberty pledged to launch an “independent and comprehensive review” of the school office tasked with handling discrimination and abuse. The school has not responded to ProPublica’s request for an update on the status of that review.

by Annie Waldman, ProPublica, Beth Schwartzapfel, The Marshall Project, and Erin Einhorn, NBC News

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system and NBC News. Sign up for The Marshall Project’s newsletters, and follow them on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

A bill that would place strict limits on the use of solitary confinement for youth in Louisiana unexpectedly advanced out of a legislative committee on Wednesday after legislators heard testimony from people who had been held in isolation as children.

Testimony during the hearing also included descriptions of conditions in a facility that was the subject of a recent investigation by ProPublica, NBC News and The Marshall Project. Teens at the Acadiana Center for Youth at St. Martinville were locked behind solid steel doors around the clock for weeks at a time, alone and frequently in the dark, and were handcuffed and shackled when they were allowed out to shower or make phone calls. Conditions were so punitive that one expert described them as child abuse.

“The bottom line is that this is a terrible way to rehabilitate children,” testified Rachel Gassert, policy director at the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights. She cited the findings of the investigation as “a great illustration of why this bill is necessary.”

The state’s Office of Juvenile Justice said that the facility was meant to provide additional support and security to its most troubled teens, but internal documents showed the harsh measures instead led to violence, property destruction and escapes.

After months of defending the treatment of teenagers at St. Martinville, the head of the juvenile justice office, Bill Sommers, publicly acknowledged to lawmakers for the first time that he was not satisfied with how the facility was being run. He also expressed support for the proposed legislation to limit the use of isolation in his facilities.

“The longer an individual is in solitary, the more they’re likely to act out,” he said. “I do believe in that correlation.”

In Louisiana, current state policy allows a maximum of 12 hours of isolation in most cases, and seven days for “highly disruptive” behavior. Those policies are nonbinding and don’t have the force of law, and even those limits stop short of what experts recommend. Most experts suggest that isolation should be used only until a young person calms down and is not a physical threat to themselves or others.

The new bill, which was introduced last month by State Rep. Royce Duplessis, a New Orleans Democrat, would make it illegal for the agency to use solitary confinement for young people for more than eight hours at a time. The bill would also require the state’s juvenile justice agency to better track the use of isolation in its facilities and to notify parents when their children are placed in solitary.

“We’re trying to keep the guards safe, we’re trying to keep the juveniles safe,” Duplessis told lawmakers on Wednesday, adding that the bill “puts some guardrails in place, which currently there are none.”

Both the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association have decried solitary confinement as a harmful, punitive practice, leading to depression and even psychosis. Research has found that more than half the kids in juvenile facilities who die by suicide are, or recently were, in isolation. Citing the harm the practice can cause, the federal government has banned the use of solitary confinement at its juvenile facilities, and at least 24 states have placed strict limits on its use.

“It turned me into an antisocial person,” said Therrin Dew, 21, who said he did numerous stints in solitary confinement — one as long as six months — during the five and a half years he spent in facilities including Louisiana’s Swanson Center for Youth. “I was energetic and a free spirit once, but being in a cell that long, it kind of turned you against people.”

The conditions were unsanitary, he said, noting that he was once isolated in a cell that had someone else’s feces smeared on the wall.

“If you’re in solitary confinement, you can’t learn nothing but the way the bricks look around you.”

Some lawmakers came into the hearing skeptical about the bill, Duplessis said. “There’s a big push in the Legislature right now to make it safer,” he said in an interview Thursday, referring to violence in the facilities. “By making it safer, in some people’s eyes, that means increasing punishment.”

State Rep. Debbie Villio, a Republican and former prosecutor from the New Orleans suburbs, raised concerns early in the hearing about a binding eight-hour limit, saying that juvenile behavior should be handled on a case-by-case basis. But later in the hearing, after testimony from Dew and others, she announced her support for advancing the bill.

“I can’t ignore what we’ve heard,” she said. “It sounds to me like there’s some serious issues that need to be addressed immediately.”

Among those issues is a debilitating staff shortage. Sommers testified that about a third of his agency’s positions are currently unfilled.

The bill ultimately won unanimous support from the House’s criminal justice committee and will now go to the full House.

Last year, legislators ordered an audit of the use of solitary confinement at youth lockups, after two teens died by suicide in isolation in the same week in 2019. That audit, released this week, found that the Office of Juvenile Justice routinely ignored its own policies on isolation, with 40% of confinements in 2019 and 2020 exceeding the maximum duration allowed at the time. The average duration of confinement was about six days, more than 14 times the national average as of October 2020. In one instance, a child was held in solitary confinement for three months straight.

“It’s unforgivable,” said Gina Womack, executive director of Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, which advocates for youth in detention. “A lot of our young people already have some mental health issues, and solitary just really exacerbates that.”

The audit also showed that Black youth were disproportionately held in isolation in state facilities, accounting for 94% of placements in solitary confinement, greater than the 82% of the children in state-run lockups who were Black.

St. Martinville was not included in the legislative auditor’s report because it opened in 2021. But the investigation from ProPublica, NBC News and The Marshall Project found that the conditions there were even more extreme than what the auditor found at other secure care facilities across the state. Youth in the facility were in solitary for weeks on end and weren’t provided education or other legally required services, such as substance abuse counseling.

Witnesses at the hearing told the committee that any time in solitary can be life-altering.

“I lost part of who I was as a human being,” Ronald Marshall, who was held in isolation for seven months as a young person in Louisiana decades ago, told the committee. “My need to feel safe. My need to feel loved. My need to feel in control of my life. It destroyed all of that.”

by Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica, and Jennifer Smith Richards, Chicago Tribune, photography by Armando L. Sanchez, Chicago Tribune, illustrations by Laila Milevski, ProPublica

Update, April 29, 2022: Hours after the publication of this investigation on April 28, Illinois State Board of Education Superintendent Carmen Ayala urged school administrators across the state to stop working with police to ticket students, saying fines associated with the tickets hurt families and there’s no evidence they change students’ behavior. Read more here.

Lea este artículo en español en el sitio web del Chicago Tribune.

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This story was co-published with the Chicago Tribune.

The courthouse lobby echoed like a crowded school cafeteria. Teenagers in sweatshirts and sneakers gossiped and scrolled on their phones as they clutched the yellow tickets that police had issued them at school.

Abigail, a 16-year-old facing a $200 penalty for truancy, missed school again while she waited hours for a prosecutor to call her name. Sophia, a 14-year-old looking at $175 in fines and fees after school security caught her with a vape pen, sat on her mother’s lap.

A boy named Kameron, who had shoved his friend over a Lipton peach iced tea in the school cafeteria, had been cited for violating East Peoria’s municipal code forbidding “assault, battery, and affray.” He didn’t know what that phrase meant; he was 12 years old.

“He was wrong for what he did, but this is a bit extreme for the first time being in trouble. He isn’t even a teenager yet,” Shannon Poole said as her son signed a plea agreement that came with $250 in fines and fees. They spent three hours at the courthouse as Kameron missed math, social studies and science.

The nearly 30 students summoned to the Tazewell County Courthouse that January morning were not facing criminal charges; they’d received tickets for violating a municipal ordinance while at school. Each was presented with a choice: agree to pay a fine or challenge the ticket at a later hearing. Failing to pay, they were told, could bring adult consequences, from losing their driving privileges to harming their future credit scores.

Across Illinois, police are ticketing thousands of students a year for in-school adolescent behavior once handled only by the principal’s office — for littering, for making loud noises, for using offensive words or gestures, for breaking a soap dish in the bathroom.

Ticketing students violates the intent of an Illinois law that prohibits schools from fining students as a form of discipline. Instead of issuing fines directly, school officials refer students to police, who then ticket them for municipal ordinance violations, an investigation by the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica has found. (Use our interactive database to look up how many and what kinds of tickets have been issued in an Illinois public school or district.)

Another state law prohibits schools from notifying police when students are truant so officers can ticket them. But the investigation found dozens of school districts routinely fail to follow this law.

“Basically schools are using this as a way to have municipalities do their dirty work,” said Jackie Ross, an attorney at Loyola University Chicago’s ChildLaw Clinic who specializes in school discipline. “It’s the next iteration of the school-to-prison pipeline. Schools might be patting themselves on the back and saying it’s just the school-to-municipality pipeline, but it’s the same philosophy.”

At the assembly-line hearings where many of these cases are handled, students have no right to legal representation and little chance to defend themselves against charges that can have long-term consequences. Ticket fines can be hundreds of dollars, presenting an impossible burden for some families, and administrative or court fees of up to $150 are often tacked on.

The principal is listed as the complainant on this ticket written to a girl at Orland Junior High School for possessing “tobacco or an alternative nicotine product.” (Redactions and highlighting added by ProPublica.)

Unpaid fines are sometimes sent to collections or deducted from parents’ tax refunds. And, unlike records from juvenile court, these cases can’t be expunged under state law.

No government entity tracks student ticketing, either in Illinois or nationally. Though a handful of communities in other states have sought to limit the practice, Illinois has not tried to monitor it, even after lawmakers attempted several years ago to stop schools from fining students as discipline. The Tribune and ProPublica quantified school tickets through more than 500 Freedom of Information Act requests to school districts and police departments, focusing on nearly 200 high-school-only districts and large K-12 districts.

In all, the investigation documented more than 11,800 tickets issued during the last three school years, even though the COVID-19 pandemic kept students out of school for much of that period and even though records show no students were ticketed in the state’s biggest district, the Chicago Public Schools.

The analysis of 199 districts, which together encompass more than 86% of the state’s high school students, found that ticketing occurred in at least 141. In some K-12 districts, tickets were issued to children as young as 8.

Though school officials and police say ticketing keeps students from facing more serious criminal charges, the process routinely draws them into a legal system for infractions that would never be considered sufficiently serious to be heard in juvenile court. Many parents noted angrily that their children already had been suspended, given detentions or otherwise disciplined at school for their behavior.

Joe Nepras, left, accompanied his son Nathan, 16, to a hearing after the student got a ticket related to a fight on a school bus.

The quasi-judicial hearings for these tickets often take place at police stations or village halls, and they’re presided over by lawyers who are not judges. Even when tickets are handled at a courthouse, as in central Illinois’ Tazewell County, local prosecutors resolve most cases informally before getting a perfunctory signoff from a judge.

Tribune and ProPublica reporters attended more than 50 hearing dates, observing hundreds of cases around the state. Some communities hold as many as three sessions a month, with students making up the vast majority of cases.

The revenue from the student tickets goes to the municipalities, not the schools, and essentially funds the ticketing system, including the employees who manage the hearings, lawyers who prosecute the cases and hearing officers who rule on them.

Coming Soon

Part two of this series: racial disparities in student ticketing

With few watchful eyes on the school ticketing system and few rules to govern it, inequities have gone undetected. The investigation examined the race of students ticketed in dozens of school districts and found that police had issued tickets disproportionately to Black students. Even in predominantly white schools, Black students sometimes received most of the tickets. In some communities, Latino students also were ticketed at disproportionate rates.

The fines and punishments, which are set by local governments, vary widely. That means the penalty for disorderly conduct violations might be $450 in one town, $50 in another and community service in a third. Towns also have different policies about whether and when they pursue unpaid ticket debt.

Some police departments choose not to ticket students at school; they say it’s not an effective way to change behavior or help young people. Some schools have police officers on campus but direct them to stay out of minor disciplinary matters.

At schools where police routinely ticket students, officials argued that some young people need consequences beyond school discipline. They said students returning to school after pandemic closures have shown an increase in troubling behavior that has been difficult to manage.

That’s reflected in recent patterns of police ticketing.

At Pekin Community High School near Peoria, police issued 62 tickets totaling more than $10,000 before Halloween. Officers wrote 13 tickets for truancy on a single November day at Dundee-Crown High School in suburban Carpentersville. At McHenry Community High School this fall, police issued dozens of tickets for disorderly conduct, property damage, or possession of e-cigarettes or cannabis.

One woman kept track of students’ fines and hearing fees in a notebook while accompanying her 15-year-old daughter to a packed December hearing in the McHenry City Council chambers. The total came to more than $5,000, including her daughter’s $450 ticket for disorderly conduct.

“Merry Christmas,” the hearing officer said sarcastically as he handed down the punishments.

“Instead of counseling these children, they are giving them tickets,” said the mother. “When they are handing out citations in this volume, you have to stop and say, ‘What’s going on here?’”

Joliet Municipal Building 9 a.m., Nov. 9

“Morning, your honor,” Angelique Adams said, holding the ticket her 16-year-old daughter had received at Joliet Central High School.

The ticket, for disorderly conduct, was issued after a school worker had spotted pepper spray dangling from the teen’s backpack, next to hand sanitizer.

“The spray caused alarm to the school environment,” the ticket states. (A district spokesperson would not comment on the case, citing student confidentiality, but said school employees contact police when a chemical spray is discovered.)

“Ms. Adams, what would you like to tell me?” asked Michael Knick, a lawyer hired by the city to hear such cases.

Adams said she’d given her daughter the pepper spray to keep the girl safe while walking to school.

“She doesn’t have the pepper spray to attack another student. She was walking. I’m not sure how she alarmed or put the school in a deadly environment,” Adams told Knick. “Instead of telling her, ‘You can’t have it, you’re not supposed to have it,’ instead you hit her with a $150 fine? I don’t have $150. I can barely pay her school fees.”

Knick wasn’t swayed. He waived the $50 in hearing costs but handed down a fine of $150. The student would owe $350 if the fine wasn’t paid by the end of the year.

“Y’all is crazy,” Adams told him before walking away.

Schools aren’t allowed to fine students for misbehaving in Illinois. When legislators passed a broad overhaul of school discipline in 2015, they specifically banned fines as a “disciplinary consequence.” That change was inspired by a Chicago charter school that had been fining students for issues like tardiness and uniform infractions.

But the law, still known to educators as Senate Bill 100, doesn’t apply to police. Some school officials argue they are following the rules as long as police officers write the tickets and municipalities issue the fines.

“We’re not the issuer of the ticket,” said Marjorie Greuter, superintendent of East Peoria Community High School District 309. One of the deans there pointed out that the high school also does not make money from the tickets.

But families and advocates for children see little distinction — they just know there’s a financial consequence for misbehavior at school.

“If the school is involving police, the school is issuing the ticket. There really is no difference between the officer and the school,” said Jessica Gingold, an attorney who encountered the ticketing system while representing a child through Equip for Equality, the federally appointed watchdog for people with disabilities in Illinois.

In an emailed statement, the Illinois State Board of Education’s spokesperson said it is unfortunate that state law doesn’t clearly prohibit using police to ticket students at school, adding that the board is committed to helping lawmakers “eliminate ineffective and harmful practices that have no place in our schools.”

The lawmakers who wanted to put an end to school fines said they were troubled to learn that police were issuing tickets to students.

Senate Majority Leader Kimberly A. Lightford, a Democrat who was a chief sponsor of the legislation, said it’s “totally shocking” that schools are still creating financial penalties for children and families. “Unfortunately we have school districts and systems that, no matter what, will not follow the law, will find that loophole to get around being responsive to the law,” she said.

The chief sponsor of the discipline legislation in the House, Democratic Rep. William Davis, called school-related ticketing “in opposition” to the law. Current House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, also a sponsor, agreed and said legislators should revisit the law.

“The whole point of Senate Bill 100 was about keeping kids in school, keeping kids on track to graduate, on a path for success by not creating a pipeline of discipline that creates these records that will follow kids for the rest of their lives. That’s not the goal,” Welch said in an interview.

“Certainly double punishment was not intended by the law either,” Welch said of adding a ticket to suspension or detention.

The Tribune-ProPublica investigation found that school employees and police often work hand in hand to discipline students. In many cases a police officer, called a school resource officer, is already stationed in the building.

At Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School, 10 school security workers patrol the hallways and stand guard outside the bathrooms. If they spot vaping devices, fights or other trouble, they alert school administrators, who decide whether to share the information with the school resource officer.

On the school police officer’s desk is a book of blank tickets.

At Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School students walking between classes are watched by a member of the security staff, left, and by the school resource officer, right.

“We will do our discipline, but it is up to the officer to ticket,” said Principal Brian Wright. For disorderly conduct tickets, a school official signs as the complaining witness. Wright said he thinks the school is obligated to report students to police if they may be breaking a village ordinance. He also said he thinks the practice doesn’t conflict with state law as long as the school isn’t writing the ticket and has a separate process for imposing its own discipline.

“The bottom line is correcting behavior,” Wright said. But he also acknowledged: “I don’t know how effective this is.” He noted that the village’s relatively new ordinance on vaping hasn’t deterred students from bringing the devices to school.

Greuter and other school officials say that while the tickets can be costly, young people need consequences. “It’s a product of their decisions — poor decisions,” she said. “While it might be expensive in the short term, the consequences of not stopping that behavior in the long term has much more serious consequences.”

That kind of thinking goes against research that has found that involving law enforcement in school incidents is harmful and counterproductive. Illinois officials just last month urged schools to reevaluate punitive disciplinary policies; the guidance did not address police citations.

Kip Heinle, a spokesperson for the Illinois School Resource Officers Association, said he thinks ticketing is uncommon and used as a “last resort.”

At the high school where he works in Madison County, Heinle said he’s probably written 10 tickets in 16 years. The other school resource officers he knows across the state have the same philosophy, he said: “Let the school handle as much as they can. … We don’t want to hem up a kid with a court date and fines and stuff like that.”

But the news organizations’ investigation found that ticketing was the most likely outcome when school officials involved police in student incidents. In the roughly 200 Illinois districts examined for the investigation, police were involved about 17,800 times in the last three school years, records show. Sometimes police arrested students; sometimes they took no action. In more than half the incidents, they issued a ticket.

In 66 of those districts, police ticketed students at least 50 times in three years, the Tribune-ProPublica investigation found. Police issued at least 100 citations to students in 36 districts.

Jennifer Fee and Blake in the kitchen of their Groveland home with their dogs

Across the state, police ticketed students most frequently — about 3,300 times — for possessing tobacco, e-cigarettes or other vaping materials. Many towns have passed new vaping ordinances in response to concerns about underage use. Students were ticketed for possession of drugs or drug paraphernalia — almost always related to cannabis — about 1,900 times.

Fights among students led to more than 700 tickets, and police issued more than 1,200 tickets to students for disorderly conduct, which could include anything from using profanity to slapping someone.

The investigation also found that police had issued more than 1,800 tickets for truancy across at least 40 municipalities. More than 1,000 of those tickets were issued after Jan. 1, 2019, when a state law went into effect that prohibited schools from notifying authorities about truant students so police can ticket them.

Carpentersville police issued 649 truancy tickets to students at Dundee-Crown High School between January 2019 and December 2021, the most truancy tickets issued in any district the reporters examined. The fines totaled nearly $50,000.

Police and school officials in the city of Harvard, near the Wisconsin border, have worked together to issue 105 truancy tickets since the law went into effect.

“It’s all on what the school wants to do,” said Harvard Deputy Chief Tyson Bauman. “The school official has to be the person who says, ‘Yes, issue a ticket.’”

Sixteen truancy tickets were issued to Harvard high school students on March 1 alone.

Administrators at the Harvard school district and at Dundee-Crown did not respond to requests for comment.

Bradley-Bourbonnais Principal Brian Wright said he thinks that when students may be breaking a village ordinance, the school is obligated to report them to the police.

“It is illegal and it shouldn’t be happening,” said Eve Rips, a former Loyola University ChildLaw Clinic fellow who has studied Illinois’ 2018 truancy law. “Schools should be following the law here, and it is a serious concern if they aren’t. Parents should be able to get these tickets dropped if they’re getting improperly ticketed.”

Superintendent Tony Sanders of School District U-46 in Elgin, the second-largest district in the state, said he was upset to learn from reporters that dozens of students in his district, including some at a middle school and two high schools, had been ticketed for truancy after the state ban took effect. He said principals and school resource officers have now been told to stop.

“It was clearly done against state law,” Sanders said.

For years in East Peoria, students were ticketed for truancy by the school’s truancy officer, who is not a police officer but had been given a book of police tickets. The high school handbook says students are considered truant if they repeatedly arrive more than five minutes late to school and warns tickets could be issued if phone calls, letters and home visits aren’t effective.

The tickets ordered students to the Tazewell County Courthouse, where they faced fines and court fees of $200.

After the Tribune and ProPublica questioned school officials in February about why the employee was writing truancy tickets in violation of state law, attorney Katherine Swise said in March that schools had stopped issuing the tickets. She declined to comment further, citing attorney-client privilege.

“We had been proceeding under this practice for a long time,” said Swise, whose law firm represents both the city and its schools. “Tickets are no longer being written.”

Tazewell County Courthouse 1 p.m., Sept. 27

Jennifer Fee leaned against the payment counter. Her 16-year-old, Blake, owed $350 for being found with a vaping device — considered drug paraphernalia by police — at Morton High School near Peoria.

“You know how much money this is? This is how much money I make for the week,” said Fee, who was working as a school janitor.

Fee initially was going to sign an agreement to pay off the ticket gradually. Then she decided to put the full amount on a credit card.

The court clerk told her it would be an additional $9.62 to process the credit card payment.

“Imagine how much money they’re making off of kids,” Fee said.

Confronted with hundreds of dollars in fines, parents often plead for extra time to pay or ask whether their children can do community service instead. They say the fines would eat up their entire paychecks and point out their children have no income.

But in most cases, families have only two choices: admit wrongdoing and agree to pay the amount offered by a prosecutor, or fight the ticket and risk paying a much higher penalty.

In the Tazewell County Courthouse last spring, Morton village prosecutor Pat McGrath sat at a long table at one end of the lobby telling a teenage girl that she could resolve a ticket for an e-cigarette for $25, plus $100 in court costs: “$125 out the door,” McGrath said.

Students in Tazewell County typically sign agreements setting up a payment plan for the fines and fees that come with their tickets, including a document that warns of the penalties for nonpayment. (Redaction added by ProPublica.)

They could fight back by hiring a lawyer or they could go to trial without one. The family chose to pay.

“She doesn’t have another option. She can’t hire an attorney,” the girl’s aunt told McGrath.

At the opposite end of the lobby, East Peoria prosecutor Austin Nichols told each family “I would be willing to offer you …” and then named a fine: $75 for tobacco, $250 for disorderly conduct, $100 for truancy. Plus $100 court costs in each case.

Susan McCoy’s son took one of Nichols’ deals to pay $350.50 in fines and fees for consumption of alcohol. The 17-year-old later said school workers had questioned him after he threw up at the bus stop, and he admitted that he’d drunk whiskey at home during the night.

“That’s a lot of money to certain people. It is a lot to me,” said McCoy, who worked at a shoe store at the time. The family couldn’t pay it all that day, so they agreed to a plan to pay $60 a month. Nearly a year later, McCoy had paid only about $100. “I hate to say I have more important bills that have to be paid, but I do.”

The Tazewell County Courthouse

When several families asked Nichols for community service instead of a fine, he told them the city doesn’t offer that option.

“He is 14. He can’t even get a job,” one boy’s guardian said to Nichols, frustrated with the $175 the freshman was charged for vaping at school. “I’m not paying it. I already lost $160 today losing work.”

Many municipalities add as much as $150 in administrative costs, mimicking court fees, to each fine. Some have made the hearings mandatory, making it impossible for students to avoid the fees.

Other communities don’t require students to enter a plea in person, allowing them to admit liability and pay the ticket cost ahead of a hearing date. But municipalities often penalize families who don’t pay promptly, and in some communities, the amount they owe can quickly grow.

The ticket issued to Amanda Piker’s son for tobacco possession lists an initial fine of $100 that would rise rapidly if not paid within 48 hours. (Redactions and highlighting added by ProPublica.)

That’s the case in Manteno, where Amanda Piker learned her son’s $100 ticket for tobacco possession would double if not paid within 48 hours. After two weeks, the penalty could increase to $750 plus a $50 fee.

Piker’s sixth-grade son was ticketed in 2019 after a friend gave him a vaping device and he put it in his backpack. School officials found the device after they searched his bag while he was in physical education class, she said.

“We were just absolutely shocked, but you had no choice. You have to pay,” said Piker. “People don’t believe me when I say Manteno does this.”

The financial harm can trail students after they leave school, the Tribune-ProPublica investigation found.

Kathryn Patterson’s son Chris was 16 when he was ticketed for possession of tobacco and drug paraphernalia at Hoffman Estates High School. She said she told village officials the family didn’t have $200 to pay for the tickets and asked that Chris be allowed to do community service instead. That wasn’t an option, she learned.

About three years later, her son got a letter from a collections agency. The amount due had grown to $270. “They waited until he was 18 and threw him into collections as he was trying to start his own life,” Patterson said. He has yet to pay, she said.

The cost of tickets issued to students at the village’s two high schools from August 2018 through September 2021 totaled nearly $37,000, records show. About $13,000 was unpaid.

At least 38 municipalities try to collect on juvenile debt, either through parents or from the students themselves once they turn 18, the Tribune and ProPublica found. Some use private collections companies. Others employ the state’s Local Debt Recovery Program, which allows the comptroller’s office to deduct money for unpaid debts from individuals’ tax refunds and payroll checks.

The village of Bradley has tried to collect unpaid fines from about 40 tickets issued to high school students from 2018 through 2020, totalling about $10,000. The village uses both a private collections company and the state comptroller’s program; Bradley has collected about $1,800 in student debt through the state program, records show.

Samantha Corzine and her daughters were living in a motel when the girls were ticketed at Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School for truancy and possession of cannabis. She said she told Bradley officials she didn’t have the money to pay the fines.

“They told me you have to figure out something because if they go to collections, they automatically get garnished from your wages and your tax forms,” she said.

And they were. Just as Corzine was trying to move into a home, she learned that $800 would be deducted from her tax refund in 2020, interfering with her plans to put that money toward a down payment. The family had to spend several additional months in the motel.

“I was devastated,” she said. “I could finally get my kids out of the motel situation and into an actual home, and it was down the drain because they took what I was expecting to get.”

McHenry Municipal Building 1:30 p.m., Dec. 9

Nathan, 16, stood with his father _at a lectern, ready to defend himself against a disorderly conduct ticket related to a fight on a school bus. This was his second appearance; Nathan had already entered a “not liable” plea in October and had been told to return for a hearing.

When his father, Joe Nepras, started to explain why Nathan shouldn’t have been ticketed, hearing officer Harry H. Semrow Jr. interrupted and noted Nepras wasn’t Nathan’s attorney. “I’m his father and that’s the next best thing,” Nepras said.

“Is it?” Semrow shot back.

“Do you know what an opening statement is?” Semrow asked. Nepras said no. “You don’t?”

Semrow told Nathan to raise his right hand but got distracted and never swore him in, leaving the student with his hand in the air.

Joe Nepras asked to share a letter a school dean wrote for the hearing that said Nathan had never been disrespectful to anyone at school and he “in no way initiated the fight on the bus.” The city prosecutor said the letter was hearsay and he would want the dean to testify.

Semrow decided to continue the case until another day so both sides could call witnesses. Nathan would have to come back yet again.

Hearings for municipal ordinance violations in Illinois were created to deal with parking tickets, then were expanded in the late 1990s to handle any violation of local laws: excessive noise, jaywalking, lawns overgrown with weeds.

Barack Obama, then a state senator, sponsored the legislation that empowered Illinois municipalities to broaden the use of the hearings, with a goal of easing the strain on the circuit courts. The law also allowed cities and towns to keep the fines and fees that tickets generate.

Around the same time, the mass shooting at Columbine High School prompted schools to start bringing in police to keep students safe, putting many more young people in contact with law enforcement.

These seemingly unrelated changes had an unanticipated outcome: students being ticketed by police and then funneled into systems designed for adults, not children.

At the hearings, students have little or no opportunity to explain the circumstances surrounding a school incident. There’s often no counseling or other help offered to kids who may need it, only punishment. And cases are decided by lawyers who are not trained to work with young people.

In fact, there are few requirements for the lawyers who oversee hearings. They must have been a lawyer in Illinois for at least three years and must complete “a formal training program” that includes studying the hearing rules and municipal code, observing other hearings and taking part in hypothetical cases. But there’s no certification process to ensure the training takes place.

Few cases are decided in students’ favor. The hearings use a lower standard of proof than criminal cases. Students can be found liable if the allegation is more likely to have occurred than not, and a ticket is itself considered evidence.

In hundreds of cases the Tribune and ProPublica observed, it was exceedingly rare that a student was not found to be at fault. Data obtained from suburban Crystal Lake showed that of the 1,888 ordinance violation cases on the city’s docket from May 2018 through December 2021 — which includes both adults and minors — only seven people were found not liable.

Students are frequently confused by the process. Hearing officers are not courtroom judges, yet they are often called “judge” or “your honor.” The hearing rooms often have a bailiff, and students sometimes are sworn in at a lectern.

Hearing officers like Harry H. Semrow Jr. are not courtroom judges, yet they are often called “judge” or “your honor.”

“Is this a courtroom?” a McHenry High School freshman asked as he walked into the city council chambers where his hearing was held. That afternoon, Semrow presided over a full docket in which nearly every case involved a student. He told the crowd they could be there for a while.

“I don’t care,” Semrow said. “I get paid by the hour.”

Records show he gets paid $150 an hour.

Students have the right to appeal the hearing officers’ decisions to a circuit court, but they are not always told about that option. At all but one of the four McHenry hearing dates reporters attended, Semrow did not inform students they could appeal.

Even though the city code calls for it, McHenry also no longer records the proceedings, having abruptly stopped in December soon after reporters began attending. McHenry Deputy Police Chief Thomas Walsh said state law does not require a recording, and he and the police chief decided it “created an unnecessary record.”

Contacted by reporters, Semrow declined to discuss the hearing process or the investigation’s findings. The principal at McHenry High School, Jeff Prickett, defended the use of municipal tickets for school incidents, saying it is a way “to restore justice.” Walsh said the ticketing process keeps young people out of criminal court while still providing consequences. But he said he and the police chief are evaluating the cost of the fines, including the $400 fine set by the city council for disorderly conduct.

Other local officials also say young people should be glad their misbehavior is being handled with a ticket instead of through the criminal justice system.

“I could refer it to juvenile court. You could face charges there,” John Grotto, a hearing officer in DeKalb, told a student with a ticket for cannabis possession. “Do you understand the seriousness of this?”

But it’s unlikely that a state’s attorney would prosecute a scuffle in the school hallway or underage possession of a tiny amount of marijuana. When matters are serious — if a weapon is involved, for example — police can and do arrest students.

“For the most part, these are not going to be prosecuted in juvenile court for truancy or tobacco. If they’re receiving a ticket, that’s in every case a net widening, not a diversion” from the legal system, said Stephanie Kollmann, policy director of the Children and Family Justice Center at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.

Blake, center, gets a hug from a friend as he and his mother, Jennifer Fee, at right, wait to attend a hearing with Blake’s aunt Becky Fee, second from right, and his cousin Anna, left, who had also received a ticket at school.

The local hearings do not provide young people with legal protections that are common in juvenile court. Children do not have a right to an attorney or an interpreter, for example.

“It is especially troubling that in the United States of America, where we see young people as a vulnerable population that deserves protection, that they are going toe-to-toe with a prosecutor with no help from someone who understands the law,” said Mae Quinn, director of the Youth Justice Clinic at the University of the District of Columbia law school who has studied the impact of municipal courts on juveniles.

The records created by the ticketing process also can follow a child. Reporters found details of some students’ violations in online case dockets and municipal records, including the offenses they were accused of, how much they were fined and even information about debt collection efforts.

While Illinois allows juvenile arrest and court records to be expunged — meaning they are erased from a person’s record — state law considers ordinance violations to be “adult offenses” that are ineligible for expungement.

“These records are visible to a lot of people,” said Hannah Berkowitz, a staff attorney with Legal Aid Chicago who has tried to find ways to get children’s citations expunged. “They can be seen. They can be used to make decisions that would hurt kids.”

Kameron, 12, and his 14-year-old brother, Phoenix, hang out on the steps of their East Peoria home. In January, Kameron received a ticket for “assault, battery, and affray” after shoving another seventh grader over a bottle of iced tea.

The process overall is at odds with the goals of the juvenile justice system, which seeks not to punish students but to help them get on a better path. It also is out of step with a national trend toward eliminating juvenile justice fines and other costs.

For many students pushed into this system, the closest thing to help that’s available to them is the well-worn advice of hearing officers.

“Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future,” Grotto, in DeKalb, likes to say.

“You run with the crows, you fly with the crows, you get shot with the crows,” Semrow told one McHenry student. “Think about that.”

Bolingbrook police station 9 a.m., Oct. 20

Middle school student Malachi bounced his leg and cracked his knuckles as he waited for his case to be heard in the Bolingbrook police station. The 12-year-old wore a button-down shirt he had picked out that morning.

Police had written him a ticket for battery after he got in a fight before school. He also was suspended for three days and had to enroll in a community program designed to “help keep the cuffs off kids.”

Malachi arrived at the police station, which serves as a branch of the county court, with his mother, his grandmother and his aunt, who is his guardian.

His grandmother gave the boy a hug and rubbed his back. “Take a deep breath,” she told him.

Malachi later said he was terrified. “I didn’t know at my age stuff could happen like that for doing what I did at school,” he said. “I felt like I was living an adult life and I didn’t want to be in that moment.”

Police gave Malachi, 12, a ticket for battery after he got in a fight. “I didn’t know at my age stuff could happen like that for doing what I did at school,” he said.

About 3,700 students attend Evanston Township High School. But in at least the last three years, the two school resource officers have not written a single ticket, records show.

The school, one of the largest in the state, offers a reminder: Police have discretion. They don’t have to ticket young people.

“There are times when staff or administration has said, ‘Can you arrest this student? Can you cite this student?’ The question isn’t can we, but is it best? It is not,” said Officer Loyce Spells, who has been stationed at the school for five years.

It’s not that students aren’t vaping or fighting. But when they do, school workers decide the consequences: detention, suspension, mandatory counseling.

“We cannot enforce our way out of these situations,” Spells said. “That does not foster and build stronger or positive relationships.”

In the Rochester school district near Springfield, school and police officials have agreed that the officer working at the high school shouldn’t be involved in routine discipline.

“That’s not the environment we want. That’s not what we want for kids,” said Rochester Superintendent Dan Cox. “We’re trying to create a better person. They need consequences, but we’ve got to have … teachable moments. I’m not being soft here. There’s discipline.”

Cox said that if there’s a fight at school, for example, “the principal is going to be the disciplinarian.”

In Chicago, the school district and police say they believe officers should not play a role in everyday disciplinary issues. A spokesperson for Chicago Public Schools said the district’s student code of conduct advises school administrators “against contacting police in non-emergency incidents.”

If there is criminal activity at school, such as a fight that involves a weapon or leads to an injury, “that is where we get involved” and maybe arrest a student, said Director Glen Brooks of the Chicago Police Department’s Office of Community Policing.

“If it is a disciplinary issue or behavior or noncriminal offense, it is really the school’s purview to handle those kinds of incidents,” Brooks said. “The idea here is not to fine children. We don’t go around trying to collect money from children.”

In California, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s police department said in 2014 that it would stop ticketing students at school for fighting, possession of tobacco or small amounts of marijuana, and other minor offenses, instead referring them to school administrators, counseling or other programs.

In Texas, citing concerns that police were ticketing students too often for misbehavior, lawmakers passed legislation in 2013 that prohibits ticketing for some offenses at school.

Police in some Illinois municipalities continue to write tickets, but young people are required to do community service or participate in counseling or an educational program rather than pay a fine.

Nathan and his mother, Michele Nepras, talk with a McHenry city prosecutor and a hearing officer, Semrow. Nathan tried to fight his disorderly conduct ticket, and the process wound up dragging on for months.

Students at New Trier Township High School in Winnetka aren’t fined because village officials decided options such as community service and apology letters are more beneficial to everyone involved. Nonetheless, the village still requires students to pay a $40 administrative fee. Round Lake, Glenview and Roselle, among other places, also offer community service in lieu of fines.

Police in Elgin recently began offering counseling with a social worker instead of imposing fines for tickets, part of the police department’s rethinking of how to best help younger residents.

From 2017 through 2020, Elgin imposed fines for disciplinary matters at the city’s three high schools in 78 cases, city records show; the penalties ranged from $50 to $1,000. In 2021, the city issued no fines for school tickets but ordered counseling in 14 cases, including for an Elgin High School student cited for disorderly conduct for pulling a fire alarm. She completed the counseling. Young people can still be fined if they don’t show up on their hearing date.

“When I took over, it was ‘fine, fine, fine,’” said Jeff Adam, a retired police lieutenant who began overseeing the city’s administrative hearings a decade ago. Gradually, he began to doubt that the fines helped children.

“When you slap a fine on a family trying to get by, you are not helping them,” he said. “The whole thing is to get these kids to come around. The fine doesn’t do that. Especially when kids can’t work. There had to be a better way.”

The Aftermath

In Joliet, the hearing officer who fined a girl for carrying pepper spray on her backpack said he overturned his decision hours later, after questions from a reporter prompted him to research the law.

“It doesn’t matter,” the mother said. “I wasn’t paying it anyway.”

In Pekin, Blake, who’d previously been ticketed for having a vaping device, was back at the Tazewell County Courthouse in March, this time for tobacco possession at school. He took the prosecutor’s plea offer to pay a $50 fine, plus $100 in court costs, and waited while his mother swiped her credit card for a total of $154.12.

Blake is paying off the ticket debt with paychecks from his new fast-food job.

In McHenry, Nathan finally got a resolution in late March for his ticket related to a school bus skirmish in September.

He had to leave school early again and headed to the city hall, this time without his dad, who was traveling for work. The day before, the family had decided to stop fighting the ticket; Nathan’s mother, Michele, said she was too fearful to speak in public, particularly in front of Semrow. The pair stood nervously in front of the hearing officer and agreed to plead liable and pay the $450.

Semrow didn’t remember the case right away and asked if the fight happened at school.

“On the bus,” Nathan said quietly.

“Close enough,” Semrow said.

Nathan was glad to be done. It was his fourth trip to city hall for the ticket. He was sick of missing school.

How We Reported the Story

Neither the state of Illinois nor the federal government tracks how often police give tickets to students in public schools for violations of municipal ordinances.

To understand how frequently and for what reasons police cited students, reporters from the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica filed more than 500 requests for public records with schools and law enforcement agencies under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.

The requests were sent to 199 school districts: high-school-only districts and large K-12 districts. The requests sought records that would show how many times police were involved in student incidents during the school years that ended in 2019, 2020 and 2021; how often students were arrested; and how often tickets were issued in those incidents. Reporters also asked for the race of students who had been referred to police.

Some school districts said they did not track whether police issued tickets to students, so reporters then filed requests with the hundreds of law enforcement agencies that have jurisdiction over high schools in those districts. The requests sought information on where each ticket was issued, the age of the ticketed person or an indication whether they were a juvenile, the race of the person ticketed, the offense and the amount of the fine.

From those records, reporters built a database documenting more than 11,800 tickets issued by police in 141 school districts during the three school years examined. The database included police tickets issued at a school address to a person younger than 18, while excluding tickets issued for traffic or parking violations or for curfew violations.

Reporters also collected information about ticketing in the 2021-22 school year in select districts, but this data was not included in the database.

In addition to logging the number of tickets issued by each police department at each school examined, reporters documented the reasons tickets had been issued, how the tickets are adjudicated in each community, what the possible fines and fees are, and whether the community attempts to collect unpaid juvenile debts.

If a school district or police department provided the race of the young people ticketed, that information was documented in a separate database used to analyze the rates at which students of color were ticketed in their schools.

Because the forms used to document tickets varied between districts and police departments, reporters made informed judgments to group tickets into broader categories. For example, reporters classified tickets for possession of drug paraphernalia and tickets for cannabis use into one category for drug-related tickets.

A separate team then took a selection of records and spot-checked them to ensure that data had been entered consistently and to look for systemic flaws in the data entry. No widespread problems were found; any small errors that were identified were fixed.

To understand how tickets are handled after they’re issued, reporters attended more than 50 hearings across Illinois, observing hundreds of cases. They spoke with dozens of families affected by the process; with school, police and municipal officials; with attorneys and hearing officers; and with juvenile advocates. Reporters consulted with families about how to identify young people in the story and, as a result, did not include full names in most cases.

Nine districts contacted by the Tribune and ProPublica did not provide records on police interactions at their schools: Belleville Township High School District 201, O’Fallon Township High School District 203, Streator Township High School District 40, Vienna High School District 133, Bethalto Community Unit School District 8, Collinsville Community Unit School District 10, Harlem School District 122, Indian Prairie Community Unit School District 204 and Community Unit School District 200 in Wheaton.

Twenty-three police departments either did not provide records or excluded information in ways that prevented reporters from determining whether tickets were issued to students at a school in their jurisdiction: Belvidere, Cahokia Heights, Calumet City, Channahon, Crete, Dolton, Fox Lake, Grayslake, Harvey, Kankakee, LaSalle, Lemont, Mount Prospect, North Chicago, Northbrook, Pinckneyville, Richmond, Rockton, Rolling Meadows, Streamwood, Summit, Waukegan and Wood Dale.

Help ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune Report on Police Issuing Tickets at Schools

Police are ticketing students at schools across Illinois for behavior such as vaping, littering and disorderly conduct. Many students are forced to appear at hearings, which means missing school time, and the cases almost always result in judgments against the students, which carry fines as high as $750. We have found students as young as 10 are being ticketed, and Black students are disproportionately impacted.

To continue with this important reporting, we need to hear from people who have been affected by tickets handed out at school. Are you a parent, school worker, researcher or attorney? Please fill out this brief survey.

We take your privacy seriously. We are gathering these stories for the purposes of our reporting and will not publish your name or information without your consent.

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Editing by Steve Mills, Kaarin Tisue and George Papajohn; additional data analysis by Ruth Talbot and Agnel Philip; additional research by Alex Mierjeski; visual presentation by Laila Milevski, Michelle Williams, Maya Eliahou, Steve Rosenberg, Todd Panagopoulos and Raquel Zaldivar; engagement reporting by Adriana Gallardo and Ariana Tobin; copy editing by Colleen Barry and Jeff Carlson.

Jennifer Smith Richards has been a reporter at the Chicago Tribune since 2015. Jennifer’s data-driven investigative work often focuses on schools and disability. Most recently, she uncovered the misuse of seclusion and restraint in Illinois public schools and investigated sexual abuse and assault in Chicago schools. She previously wrote about education for more than a decade at newspapers in Huntington, West Virginia; Utica, New York; Savannah, Georgia; and Columbus, Ohio. She is a member of the ProPublica Distinguished Fellows program.

Armando L. Sanchez joined the Chicago Tribune as a photojournalist in 2014. He was born and raised in Austin, Texas, and graduated from Western Kentucky University in 2012.

by Ruth Talbot, ProPublica, Jennifer Smith Richards, Chicago Tribune, and Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica

Illinois law prohibits schools from fining students for disciplinary reasons, but an analysis by the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica found that school officials have been referring students to the police, who then issue tickets for violating local ordinances. Search our interactive database, for a public school or district to see if reporters identified ticketing there.

by Perla Trevizo and Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, Kengo Tsutsumi, ProPublica, and Andrew Rodriguez Calderón, The Marshall Project

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Border Updates to be notified when we publish stories about immigration and the U.S. border.

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans, and with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for newsletters from The Texas Tribune and The Marshall Project.

Earlier this month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ratcheted up pressure on President Joe Biden’s administration by expanding the state’s sweeping border crackdown, announcing that he would bus immigrants to Washington, D.C., after they were apprehended for illegally crossing the border, as well as search commercial trucks entering Texas from Mexico.

During an April 6 press conference launching the additional efforts, Abbott did not explain that the busing is voluntary for immigrants. Texas cities and counties where migrants seeking to stay in the country are dropped off by the federal government must also request such a transport out of state before it occurs.

Then, about a week after his directive for vehicle safety inspections drew criticism for hampering border commerce, Abbott rescinded it, saying he’d reached agreements with four Mexican governors to strengthen security south of the border. The agreements mostly included measures already in place, but the governor claimed on social media last week that they demonstrated Texas had accomplished more to secure the border in two days than Biden had done during his time in office.

The measures are the latest examples of how Abbott and other state officials have used incomplete and sometimes misleading statements when promoting the purpose and effectiveness of Operation Lone Star. Abbott launched the initiative in March 2021, stating that it would help stop drug and migrant smuggling. In the past year, the governor has deployed more than 10,000 National Guard members, along with state Department of Public Safety troopers, to patrol the border, build barriers and arrest some migrant men on state criminal trespassing charges for crossing into the U.S. through private land.

The result has been a multibillion-dollar operation that has counted arrests for crimes with no connection to the border and included tallies of drugs captured across the state in communities that received no additional resources from the initiative, ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and The Marshall Project found. The news organizations’ investigation showed that while Abbott initially said the operation would focus on targeting Mexican cartel members and smugglers, misdemeanor trespassing charges soon accounted for the largest share of arrests.

The governor’s office has hailed the operation as a success, repeatedly saying that it has captured criminals and deadly drugs.

As part of the investigation, reporters identified instances in which Abbott and DPS officials pointed to goals and accomplishments that lacked important context or did not match reality. Here’s some of what we found:

Trespassing Charges Against Immigrants

Last May 31, Abbott signed a border disaster declaration, giving him expansive power similar to what he would have after a natural disaster. Among other things, the declaration of a disaster automatically increased penalties for trespassing to up to a year in jail. Three days later, the governor promoted the effort on Fox News during an interview with host Sean Hannity.

Statement: “I follow the law, and the law that I’m going to use will be legal ways in which Texas is going to start arresting everybody coming across the border. Not just arresting them, but because this is now going to be aggravated trespass, they’re going to be spending a half a year in jail, if not a year in jail.” — Abbott, Fox News, June 3, 2021

What Happened: Texas did not, in fact, arrest everyone coming across the border. Since Abbott announced the effort, more than 2,900 people have been arrested by state police for allegedly crossing into Texas via private property. Most of the arrests occurred primarily in two rural counties in the southwest part of the state, according to DPS data. Leaders of the state’s biggest border counties have declined to participate, saying in interviews that they urged comprehensive solutions, rather than the criminalization of immigrants. The news organizations found that misdemeanor trespassing charges made up about 40% of Operation Lone Star’s arrests from July through February. Hundreds of immigrants have since had their trespassing charges dismissed or rejected. Prosecutors and judges deemed certain arrests questionable after some immigrants said DPS troopers marched them through private property. State police and Border Patrol officials have denied the allegations. Body camera footage confirmed at least one of those accounts. Other charges were dismissed because people sought asylum. Democratic elected officials and attorneys have questioned the legality of the trespassing arrests and asked the Justice Department to investigate alleged human rights violations related to Operation Lone Star. The governor’s office has maintained the arrests are “fully constitutional.”

700 Gang Members

DPS officials and Abbott have often insisted on social media and during interviews on Fox News that the operation targets cartels and violent gangs such as MS-13.

Statement: “The Texas Department of Public Safety, during #OperationLoneStar have encountered over 700 criminal gang members.” — Texas DPS Facebook page, Sept. 7, 2021

What Happened: DPS officials have not provided any proof of the department’s citation of hundreds of gang arrests. The department denied a public records request from ProPublica, the Tribune and The Marshall Project, saying gang affiliation is not a metric that is tracked. The agency said that in some instances those people arrested have “active warrants, previous records, etc. that indicate certain gang affiliations.” The news organizations found multiple examples in arrest data and drug seizure information that raised questions about claims that the operation focused on dangerous cartels and smugglers. Among those examples were arrests with no links to the border.

Haitian Immigrants

In September, up to 15,000 Haitian immigrants camped under the international bridge in Del Rio, a small border city about 150 miles west of San Antonio, to ask for asylum. Their arrival followed the assassination of Haiti’s president, an earthquake that killed thousands and economic instability in Latin American countries where some Haitians had previously migrated after a previous earthquake struck Haiti in 2010. DPS troopers and Texas National Guard members lined up vehicles along the bank of the Rio Grande and formed what officials called a “steel barrier” to stop immigrants from crossing.

Statement: “[Border Patrol agents] said the surge of migrants across the border was stopped only when the Texas Department of Public Safety and the National Guard showed up to provide a steel barrier to prevent the migrants from coming across. As soon as the National Guard and the Texas Department of Public Safety showed up, literally with hundreds, if not thousands, of vehicles, that is when the illegal migration stopped. That is exactly what the Biden administration could do if they wanted to.” — Abbott, Fox News, Sept. 26, 2021

Texas is securing the border.Biden’s own Border Patrol agents said it was the Texas Dept. of Public Safety & Texas National Guard that stopped the migrant surge in Del Rio.As Biden fails, Texas will continue stepping up. pic.twitter.com/NrBb2zfcxQ

— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) September 26, 2021

What Happened: Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement expelled or deported thousands of Haitian immigrants, clearing the bridge within a week. Mexican officials blocked others before they reached the border. The role of DPS and the National Guard in stopping the Haitian migrants is unknown. Neither Texas agency made arrests. It’s unclear how many people the agencies referred to federal officials for deportation during that period. Neither DPS or CBP responded to questions.

Spending on Border Security

Last year, Texas lawmakers tripled the amount the state spends on border security, with the bulk of the budget going to Operation Lone Star. The governor’s office received the largest share. The state later shifted nearly $500 million away from other agencies, including the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, to help pay for the National Guard deployment after costs exceeded what the Legislature had approved.

Statement: “Texas as a state is deploying more resources to the border than the United States of America as a country. Texas taxpayers alone, in just the next two years, we are spending $3 billion to secure a border. I think that’s far more than what the federal government is spending here in Texas, or here in the United States.” — Abbott, Fox News, Jan. 28, 2022

Because the federal government refuses to do its job, Texas will continue to respond in full force to protect our communities. pic.twitter.com/LytGiChL0p

— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) January 28, 2022

What Happened: CBP’s annual budget for fiscal year 2022 is more than $16 billion, compared with the more than $3 billion Texas budgeted for border security over a two-year period. The federal agency declined to provide a specific breakdown for its expenditures in Texas. As of January, CBP had more than 8,000 Border Patrol agents in Texas. The figure does not include the number of customs officers stationed at international ports of entry in the state, which CBP did not provide.

Fentanyl Seized

Marijuana made up more than three-quarters of illegal drugs captured under Operation Lone Star from March 2021 to January, but Abbott has focused on fentanyl seizures while touting the initiative’s success. At a February event in Austin that featured his Democratic opponent Beto O’Rourke, staff for Abbott’s reelection campaign handed out prescription bottles with fliers stuffed inside that claimed the effectiveness of the operation in capturing fentanyl.

Statement: “Amount of fentanyl caught from Operation Lone Star: 887 lbs” — flyers stuffed into pill bottles labeled “fentanyl” and handed out by Texans for Greg Abbott at a Beto O’Rourke speaking event in Austin in February

Here’s what’s inside: pic.twitter.com/O4PTXLkBcf

— Madlin Mekelburg (@madlinbmek) February 10, 2022

What Happened: Abbott and his reelection campaign are citing figures that reflect fentanyl seizures across the state, including those that would have occurred without the operation. Of the 887 pounds of fentanyl that Abbott credited to Operation Lone Star in February, only about 160 pounds were seized in the 63 counties that the state included as part of the initiative. El Paso County accounted for all but 12 pounds of the fentanyl captured as part of Operation Lone Star. The county was among several that declined to sign on to the governor’s border disaster declaration and, as of November, when most of the fentanyl was seized, had not received extra resources as part of the program.

Immigrant Apprehensions

A year into Operation Lone Star, Abbott touted a reduction in immigrant apprehensions during an interview with the conservative news site Breitbart. He said the decrease showed that the operation was working.

Statement: “Working collaboratively with local law enforcement, we have now been able to cut in half the number of apprehensions of people coming across the border illegally in the Rio Grande Valley Sector. … The bottom line is the cartels have realized it’s a money-losing proposition for them to try to cross the border in Texas.” — Abbott, Breitbart, March 17, 2022

What Happened: Abbott correctly stated that the number of immigrants caught entering the Rio Grande Valley sector, which includes 19 counties in South Texas, fell by about 46% after the start of the operation. In March 2021, Border Patrol apprehended 62,685 immigrants. A year later, the apprehension numbers in that region had dropped to 44,073. But Abbott’s statement failed to acknowledge that the number of immigrants Border Patrol agents took into custody across the state remained at its highest levels in at least two decades, averaging about 110,381 a month since the operation launched. DPS has claimed reductions in immigrant apprehensions as a sign of the operation’s success and also, at times, said such decreases were something over which the state’s efforts had little control. In November, agency officials told the news organizations that DPS defined success as fewer migrants coming across the border. They later said a decline in apprehensions is not considered a measure of success because many factors can come into play, including policy decisions in Washington or an increase in the number of immigrants seeking to surrender to Border Patrol.

Busing Immigrants to Washington

Early this month, the Biden administration announced that it would discontinue Title 42, a Trump-era pandemic health order through which federal authorities turned away most immigrants at the border, even those seeking asylum. After the decision, Abbott announced a plan to bus immigrants to Washington, D.C.

Statement: “BREAKING: Governor Greg Abbott JUST ANNOUNCED that Texas is going to use charter buses to DROP OFF BIDEN’S ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS in Washington, DC. We want to MAKE SURE that Biden knows JUST HOW REAL this crisis is.” — Abbott’s campaign fundraising appeal on April 6, 2022

What Happened: The busing program is optional for immigrants, and Texas cities and counties where the federal government drops off migrants seeking to stay in the country must also request the transport. The program pays for buses and chartered flights for immigrants who have been released by the federal government and want to leave the state for Washington, D.C. In a statement, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Chris Magnus said Abbott is making CBP officials’ jobs more difficult by transporting migrants far from their immigration proceedings and not coordinating those moves with the federal government.

Our Investigation Into Operation Lone Star Also Found:

• The operation is nabbing not only immigrants, but also U.S. citizens and others with authorized status across a broad region of 63 counties, at times charging them for crimes with no connection to the border.
• After questions from the news organizations, DPS removed from its accounting more than 2,000 charges, including violent crimes as defined by the FBI, that the agency said did not reflect the operation’s mission. DPS officials said the agency is continuously improving how it collects and reports arrest data to “better reflect the mission” of securing the border.
• Texas spends more money on border security than any other state. Operation Lone Star is by far the most expensive of the state’s border operations, at a cost to taxpayers of more than $2.5 million a week and an additional estimated expense of $2 billion a year for the National Guard deployment.
• The amount of state funding legislators approved for border security grew from $110 million in 2008-09 to nearly $3 billion for the 2022-23 budget cycle. That doesn’t include nearly half a billion dollars the governor transferred from other agencies after last year’s legislative sessions.

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