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A board that investigated a 2018 explosion at the Superior oil refinery is slated for elimination under President Donald Trump's proposed 2026 budget.
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Both of Superior’s Carnegie library buildings are now for sale. The East End library, which became a private residence in 1992, is on the market for $375,000. The Central Branch, which has been vacant since 1992, is in serious disrepair.
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As of 2024, more than 1,200 people in Wisconsin were waiting for a life-saving kidney transplant. A number of Wisconsinites have chosen to donate to others while still living — even if the donors don’t know who the organ might go to.
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A body disappears from the morgue, and Patience has a connection to the case — the victim is the brother of Patience’s friend, Billy.
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National Mustard Museum, home to over 6,900 mustards! With founder Barry Levenson, Luke dives into mustard ice cream, glazed treats and cooks a juicy pork shoulder with Stormin’ Gorman mustard […]
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A new national school voucher program allocates up to $1,700 in federal tax credits for individuals who donate to organizations that provide private and religious school scholarships. (Photo by Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — A national private school voucher program is now law, though the school choice initiative comes with a huge caveat. States also choose — whether or not to participate.
It’s a setback for advocates who hoped to see the program — baked into the mega tax and spending cut bill President Donald Trump signed into law on July Fourth — mandated in all 50 states.
The permanent program, which starts in 2027, saw several versions between the House and Senate before getting to Trump’s desk as part of congressional Republicans’ massive reconciliation package.
Robert Enlow, president and CEO of EdChoice, touted aspects of the program, but said his organization would have preferred to see a 50-state program, rather than allowing states to opt in or decline.
“I think I’m really worried about that because this is seen as a sort of more partisan issue and as a result, what would make a governor in a blue state say, ‘Let me bring in school choice’?” said Enlow, whose nonprofit focuses on advancing school choice options.
Still, Enlow described the program as “just another step along the way of giving parents more choices.”
It remains to be seen which states will participate, including those with their own voucher programs already underway.
Jon Valant, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution, said he’s “not clear on how states will shake out on the question of whether or not to participate.”
“I’m sure the vast majority of, really, all red states will participate in this thing, but I don’t know what’s going to happen in blue and purple states,” said Valant, who also serves as director of the think tank’s Brown Center on Education Policy.
Despite that unknown, Valant said that states “do have some incentive to participate because if they don’t, then they’re potentially losing access to some funds that they wouldn’t otherwise get.”
The program allocates up to $1,700 in federal tax credits for individuals who donate to organizations that provide private and religious school scholarships.
There is also no cap to the cost of the program, unlike earlier versions seen in both chambers of Congress.
The scholarship funds would be available to families whose household incomes do not exceed 300 percent of their area’s median gross income.
More than 138 million people could be eligible to make use of the tax credit in 2027, according to an analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
However, Carl Davis, research director of the left-leaning think tank, notes in the analysis that “most of those people will not contribute” given the necessary paperwork and vouchers’ unpopularity with the public.
A state’s program participation will be decided by its governor or “by such other individual, agency, or entity as is designated under State law to make such elections on behalf of the State with respect to Federal tax benefits,” according to the final bill text.
The umbrella term “school choice” centers on alternative programs to one’s assigned public school.
The effort has sparked controversy, as opponents say these programs drain critical funds and resources from school districts, while school choice advocates describe the initiatives as necessary for parents dissatisfied with their local public schools.
Trump and congressional Republicans have made school choice a major part of their education agenda.
The program also reflects a sweeping bill that GOP Reps. Adrian Smith of Nebraska and Burgess Owens of Utah and Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana reintroduced in their respective chambers earlier this year.
Valant, of the Brookings Institution, expressed several concerns about the program, saying “there’s very little quality control, transparency or accountability for outcomes in this program, and it’s potentially a major use of public taxpayer funds.”
He said he doesn’t see anything in the program’s text that “protects against widespread waste, fraud and abuse and from programs and schools that aren’t providing much value at all to students from continuing to get a large amount of funding.”
The program also came as Trump and his administration continue to dramatically redefine the federal role in education.
Trump’s fiscal 2026 budget request calls for $12 billion in spending cuts to the Education Department. A summary from the department said this cut “reflects an agency that is responsibly winding down.”
The administration has also taken heat for its recent decision to put on hold $6.8 billion in federal funds for K-12 schools.
Sasha Pudelski, director of advocacy at AASA, The School Superintendents Association, said that a time when the administration is withholding billions of dollars in these funds for public schools, “the idea that we’re going to spend an unlimited amount of tax dollars to support private and religious schools is unthinkable, unimaginable — it’s horrific.”
“This is yet another handout to wealthy Americans who can already afford to send their children to private religious schools and at a cost that comes from tax dollars being deferred away from public education that serve the poorest and neediest students in America,” added Pudelski, whose organization helps to ensure every child has access to a high quality public education.
A worker walks beneath a United Airlines Boeing 737-900ER after it arrived at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) on June 5, 2019. The flight from Chicago to Los Angeles used aviation biofuel, a critical component of airlines’ goal of reaching a net-zero carbon goal by 2050. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Congress’ passage of President Donald Trump’s spending and tax cuts bill this month could help grow the market for sustainable aviation fuel, a nascent industry that could be a boon for corn-producing states as airline operators are betting on it to decarbonize the sector.
The Republican budget reconciliation law that Trump signed July 4 pared back some of the credits for sustainable energy in the law that congressional Democrats passed and President Joe Biden signed in 2022 — the Inflation Reduction Act.
But the recent law extended one energy tax credit for producing clean fuels, such as sustainable aviation fuel, an alternative to the typical jet fuel planes use. The credit initially went through 2027, but the GOP law extends it through 2029.
Advocates for sustainable aviation fuel had been pushing Congress to extend the tax credit to support production as states across the U.S. have passed or proposed their own tax credits to grow the sector and lure production within their borders. Lawmakers in Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan and New York have introduced bills enacting tax credits for sustainable aviation fuel.
For airlines, increasing availability of the fuel is essential for the sector to meet its net-zero goal for 2050, with the International Air Transport Association estimating the cleaner fuel could get the industry 65% of the way toward its target.
“We’re not yet at commercial-scale production and you need that longer lead time for these types of projects so I think the extension is really key,” said Chris Bliley, senior vice president of regulatory affairs at Growth Energy, a biofuel industry group.
While the credit’s lifetime was extended, others say the environment for sustainable aviation fuel isn’t as favorable as it was just a few years ago. The new budget reconciliation law also included provisions to lower the credit amount for sustainable aviation fuel specifically and clawed back unobligated grant funding to support the sector.
The amount of sustainable aviation fuel that producers make today is far from how much the airline industry needs to be able to use the alternative fuel regularly. U.S. production capacity over the last couple of years, however, has grown, jumping from less than 5,000 barrels per day at the start of 2024 to more than 30,000 by February of this year, according to a May report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Wisconsin state Rep. David Steffen, a Republican who sponsored a bill to incentivize sustainable aviation fuel, said he learned about a sustainable aviation fuel production company based in Madison called Virent Inc., now a subsidiary of Marathon Petroleum Corp. Virent’s fuel helped power the first domestic flight powered by 100% sustainable aviation fuel in one of its engines.
“I was intrigued that we had this company in our state and I want them and other companies of similar interest to find Wisconsin as their new home,” Steffen said. “It’s a great opportunity for not only the environmental benefits that come with it but for our farmers, dairies and timber producers to access a brand-new market for their product.”
Steffen’s bill also requires that to receive the tax credit, source materials for the fuel must be domestically sourced.
Wisconsin’s legislative session doesn’t end until next March and Steffen said he’s “very comfortable in saying (the bill) will have a clear path to the finish line.” Should it pass in its current state, the tax credit would go into effect in 2028.
Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Nebraska and Washington state all already have enacted laws to provide tax credits for sustainable aviation fuel.
Lawmakers in New York and Michigan have also proposed legislation to create their own tax credits. The New York bill barely moved in the most recent session, while legislation in Michigan has made it out of one committee and been referred to a second.
New York state Sen. Rachel May, a Democrat, plans to re-introduce the legislation next year. She said she wants to amend her bill to offer a larger tax credit for companies making sustainable aviation fuel specifically by mimicking photosynthesis so it doesn’t incentivize diverting feedstock like corn from being used for food, she said.
Her concern is moving the agriculture industry “away from both food production and maybe what might be the best uses of the land,” she added.
Corn ethanol, a common ingredient in automotive fuel, can be used to make sustainable aviation fuel.
While the extension of the federal clean fuels tax credit could be beneficial to the sustainable aviation fuel industry, the new law also lowers the amount of the tax credit for the fuel. It’s now the equivalent to what other biofuel producers qualify for, giving sustainable aviation fuel production less of a competitive advantage.
One version of the budget reconciliation bill also called for extending the tax credit by four years instead of two, but that got scaled back in the version of the bill ultimately signed into law.
The new law also took away any funding not yet obligated as part of a grant program for sustainable aviation fuel and makes fuels derived from feedstocks that come from outside the U.S., Canada or Mexico ineligible for the tax credit.
Despite any limitations, some analysts expect the law will still boost sustainable aviation fuel.
“The Trump administration has yet to outline its approach to SAF, but we expect the fuel to benefit from the administration’s focus on supporting biofuel-producing states,” analysts for Capstone DC, a firm that advises business clients on policy issues, said in a note in late June.
But changes to the federal tax credit could also make states more interested in adopting their own credit to support sustainable aviation fuel, Capstone added.
Tariffs, meanwhile, could also make U.S. feedstocks for producing the fuel more competitive, Paul Greenough, a vice president on Capstone’s energy team.
But Greenough cautioned that sentiment around sustainable aviation fuel still isn’t as rosy as it used to be.
“Momentum still exists for SAF but it’s not nearly as strong as it was under the Biden administration,” he said.
Some climate groups have also expressed concern over changing the clean fuels tax credit at the federal level. The Clean Air Task Force, ahead of the bill becoming law, said extending the credit will largely service other fuels that aren’t sustainable aviation fuel, which will in turn be costlier for the government.
“This purported attempt to incentivize ‘clean fuels’ is little more than a giveaway to the conventional biofuels industry,” the organization said in a post on its website.
A protester holds a photo of Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia as demonstrators gather to protest against the deportation of immigrants to El Salvador outside the Permanent Mission of El Salvador to the United Nations in New York City on April 24, 2025. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
GREENBELT, Maryland — U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis seemed inclined during a Friday hearing to grant a temporary restraining order to block the Trump administration from deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia if he is released from pretrial detention next week.
Xinis said if she granted a temporary restraining order, it would be narrow and would prevent immigration officers from deporting Abrego Garcia from the U.S. It would also keep the longtime Maryland resident at a detention center near Maryland as the immigration lawsuit about the conditions of his deportation under a final order of removal proceeds.
She also upbraided Justice Department attorneys for claiming immigration officials had a detainer on Abrego Garcia, but not producing the document.
The attorneys for Abrego Garcia’s case in Maryland, which was brought after the longtime resident was unlawfully arrested by immigration officials and mistakenly deported to El Salvador in March, are asking Xinis for a 72-hour restraining order if he is released from pretrial detention Wednesday.
Abrego Garcia awaits federal trial in Tennessee on criminal charges lodged while he was mistakenly removed to El Salvador.
The restraining order, if granted, would prevent the Trump administration from removing Abrego Garcia to a third country without proper notice and an opportunity to challenge his removal.
“The concern that we have here is that he’ll be gone in a blink and never to be heard from again,” Andrew Rossman, one of Abrego Garcia’s attorneys, said.
Abrego Garcia detailed psychological and physical torture he experienced at the notorious Salvadoran prison CECOT. The U.S. is paying El Salvador up to $15 million to detain roughly 300 men at the prison.
As soon as Wednesday, Abrego Garcia could be released from pretrial detention on charges that accuse him of human smuggling that stem from a 2019 traffic stop. A hearing is scheduled for Wednesday in Tennessee federal court on an order pausing Abrego Garcia’s release, at his lawyers’ request over concerns the administration could deport him if he is released from jail.
DOJ attorneys have said that the Trump administration intends to deport Abrego Garcia before his trial in Tennessee is complete.
Abrego Garcia has pleaded not guilty to the federal charges. His attorneys have accused President Donald Trump’s administration of using the indictment to save face in light of court orders finding Abrego Garcia’s deportation unlawful and the Supreme Court’s order for the federal government to facilitate his return.
Abrego Garcia has had deportation protections in place since 2019, barring his removal to his native El Salvador due to concerns he would experience gang violence there.
The Trump administration has labeled Abrego Garcia a leader of the gang MS-13, but has not produced any evidence of those allegations in court.
Xinis also raised the concern that Abrego Garcia could face harm in a third country because the Trump administration has labeled him a gang leader.
She raised the possibility that if Abrego Garcia is deported to a third country, that country could then take him to El Salvador.
The Trump administration has placed a detainer on Abrego Garcia upon his potential release, meaning U.S. Marshals would hold him until immigration agents can arrest him and take him into custody.
Xinis has repeatedly asked DOJ lawyers for a copy of the detainer to determine what statue Abrego Garcia is being detained on.
DOJ attorneys said they were still working on it and Xinis slammed them for not producing it and said she wouldn’t take the DOJ’s word that the detainer even existed.
“You have taken the presumption of regularity and you’ve destroyed it, in my view,” Xinis said.
Halfway through the hearing, DOJ attorney Sarmad M. Khojasteh produced the detainer and gave a copy to Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, who have also been asking for a copy of the form.
Rossman said the detainer “has a massive hole in it.”
He said that according to the detainer, the reason for holding Abrego Garcia is a final order of removal.
However, a top Immigration and Customs Enforcement official testified Thursday that because Abrego Garcia is not in removal proceedings yet, the federal government cannot detail what actions it will take in removing him.
“We have an obvious chicken-and-egg problem,” Rossman said.
Thomas Giles, ICE’s assistant director for enforcement and removal operations who testified Thursday, could not detail which track the Trump administration planned to take for Abrego Garcia. The agency is likely to try either deporting him to a third country or challenge the bar on removal to El Salvador.
Xinis also expressed doubt that the Trump administration has not had conversations on what to do about Abrego Garcia, given the high-profile nature of the case.
Khojasteh said that an immigration officer would determine next steps for Abrego Garcia.
“It defies reality that this is going to be left to a desk officer,” Xinis said.
Xinis said she’ll make a decision before Wednesday on a temporary restraining order.
Federal immigration authorities face off against protesters during an ICE raid at Ambiance Apparel in Downtown Los Angeles on June 6, 2025. (Photo by J.W. Hendricks for CalMatters)
This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
Carlos was pulled out of a deep sleep by a series of frantic phone calls one Friday morning in June. By the time he arrived at a downtown Los Angeles garment factory sometime after 10 a.m., his brother was in chains.
Agents from a constellation of federal agencies descended on the Ambiance Apparel factory and storefront on June 6, detaining dozens of people. It was the first salvo of the Trump administration’s prolonged engagement in Southern California, where masked federal agents are filmed daily pulling people off the street as part of what the president has promised will be the largest deportation program in American history.
Carlos’ brother, Jose, 35, was shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles. Carlos watched as agents in Immigration and Customs Enforcement vests led Jose and 13 other garment workers into a waiting white Sprinter van. Carlos hasn’t seen his brother since, though he did confirm that Jose is being held at an immigration detention center in Adelanto.
“We had just lost our other brother, he died,” said Carlos, whom CalMatters is only identifying by his first name because of his own fears of deportation. “Then, for our family, losing Jose, it was like someone died again.”
Worksite raids like the one at Ambiance are an attention-grabbing component of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, one that it remains committed to despite a brief reversal in mid-June. They’re unfolding across California, from Los Angeles’s Fashion District to farm fields in the San Joaquin Valley and a restaurant in San Diego.
While one stated purpose of worksite raids is to remove illegal competition from the labor marketplace, the reality is far messier: Studies have found that immigration raids don’t do much to raise wages — and actually deflate them. Even after a raid, employers are no more likely to use federal immigration verification tools like E-Verify during hiring.
Nevertheless, on the campaign trail, President Donald Trump focused on the threat of illegal competition as the political and emotional lynchpin of his deportation plans.
“They’re taking your jobs, they’re taking your jobs,” Trump told a crowd in Wilmington, N.C., on Sept. 21. “ Every job produced in this country over the last two years has gone to illegal aliens, every job, think of it.
“We’re going to save you. We’re going to save you. We’re going to save you.”
Every new job between 2022-2024 was not, in fact, filled by undocumented immigrants. Studies show actually deporting workers en masse from industries that rely on undocumented labor does little for U.S. workers. Giovanni Peri, a UC Davis economist who has studied the economic impacts of deportations in the 1930s and during the Obama administration, has found doing so actually reduces job opportunities for American-born workers.
That’s in part because many American workers, even those outside of immigrant-heavy industries, rely on the services generated by low-wage, undocumented labor — the costs of which would rise with mass deportations.
“Losing some of these workers and jobs that Americans are moving out of, it shrinks the local economy and there’s a reduction in jobs for Americans,” he said.
There is no evidence, Peri said, that in the face of mass deportations, immigrant-heavy industries would raise their wages to hire American workers instead.
“If there is such a world, it has not been the reality in the U.S. in a long time,” he said.
What does tend to happen, according to a study last year by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, is that raids lead to more job turnover while showing little net change in the employment rate.
“Actions that target employers — audits, investigations, fines, and criminal charges — have larger effects than raids, which target workers,” the study authors wrote.
The impact to the families can be long-term and devastating. Absences, suspensions, expulsions and rates of substance abuse and self-harm increased among Latino students in a Tennessee town that was raided, even among students whose families were not directly impacted. Property crime dropped but violent crime increased in a small northeast Iowa meatpacking town after a massive 2008 raid. Infants born to Hispanic mothers in that same Iowa town had a 24% risk of low birth weight compared to the same population one year before the raid.
“Our mom is devastated, and she’s scared for herself, too,” Carlos said. “A lot of us are from the same (Zapotec Indigenous) community in Mexico, a lot of people kidnapped in the raid, so it’s like a whole bunch of families had a death.”
In his first term, Trump’s worksite raids focused on the South and the Midwest, when more than 1,800 people were detained, mostly at manufacturing plants and meat and poultry processing facilities. That’s a tiny segment of the estimated 1.5 million people deported under Trump from 2017 to 2021, but it played a significant role in another of the administration’s goals: To create enough fear and mistrust among undocumented immigrants that they self-deport.
But this time, Trump’s focus is on California.
Employees at Ambiance Apparel told each other that immigration enforcement was likely coming to their garment factory. Employees who did not want to be identified told CalMatters that people in Department of Homeland Security jackets were on site at least twice this year, most recently in April. Those workers say they were told by the company not to worry about a raid.
Ambiance Apparel, through an attorney, denied that the company had any advance warning or involvement with the raid and the company declined to comment further.
The garment industry is a logical target for immigration enforcement because so much of the workforce is undocumented. The same is true of agriculture. Estimates vary, but anywhere from one third to more than one half of California farmworkers are undocumented immigrants.
William Lopez, a University of Michigan public health professor who has written a book on the impact of immigration raids on mixed-status families, said he learned in interviews of people present at six immigration raids in the Midwest and South in 2018 that people “haven’t developed the language” to capture the impact of large-scale immigration raids on a community.
After a raid, “people don’t drive, there’s no money because everyone’s paying bond, no one’s going to school anymore,” Lopez said.
He continued, “the comparisons were, there was hurricanes, there was tornadoes, there was war, some people compared it to a public execution. Some people described it like the death of a grandchild.”
Congress made it illegal to knowingly hire workers who don’t have authorization in 1986, as part of an overhaul of the nation’s immigration system. The overhaul also legalized about 2.7 million undocumented immigrants.
Still, false Social Security numbers have been fairly easy to obtain, and employers are largely able to duck liability with only a cursory review of the documents workers present when they’re hired.
Employers have had little incentive to get stricter, even after the high-profile raids of meat and food processing plants during the second term of the George W. Bush administration. Demand for labor has remained high, fines for those caught have been lax and the use of contractors and subcontractors has proliferated, spreading out the risks of hiring..
“The number of employers who have been fined or imprisoned under the statute is very low compared to the number of employees who have been rounded up as a result of these (workplace) raids,” said Leticia Saucedo, a professor at the UC Davis School of Law. “The idea behind all of these was, yes, to target the employers, but employees were collateral damage.”
Saucedo said workplace raids and the deportation of workers highlight tensions between two wings of the Republican Party. Nativist groups want to curb immigration because they believe it displaces American workers, while business interests want access to a stable, legal pool of immigrant workers.
California farmers are especially sensitive to potential immigration raids. The Border Patrol conducted a sweep in Kern County just before Trump took office in January that previewed its approach in the new administration. In June, agents swept through farms in Ventura County, conducting immigration raids. iIndustry groups implored the administration to reconsider such tactics.
“To ensure stability for our farm families and their communities, we must act with both common sense and compassion,” Bryan Little, policy director at the California Farm Bureau, said in a statement. “The focus of immigration enforcement should be on the removal of bad actors or lawbreakers, not our valuable and essential farm employees.”
In an interview, Little said he hasn’t seen evidence of widespread enforcement at farms. But reports of any ICE sightings or arrests in agricultural areas have spread on social media, spreading fear among the workforce.
“The way this is all being handled, it’s interfering with food production,” he said.
In Ventura County, federal agents ultimately arrested more than 30 immigrants in June, said Hazel Davalos, director of the local farmworker advocacy group CAUSE.
Lisa Tate manages three of her family’s eight ranches in the county, where they grow citrus, avocados and coffee. Depending on the day, anywhere from five to 100 directly hired and contracted workers plant, trim or harvest on the land.
They were not among the farms visited by immigration agents, but Tate said she held a meeting with her workers to communicate a longstanding company policy: if agents ever show up, “nobody’s to be on our farm without proper authorization.”
Tate said the raids have put employers like her in a tough position. She said she has never knowingly hired any undocumented workers. She said she reviews the employment documents her workers present, fills out the I-9 form and follows the rules.
Still, she called it a “well-known secret” that many in the industry don’t have valid work permits.
She’s tried to use the guest worker visa program before, but it comes with costly requirements to provide housing and transportation, and to guarantee the guest workers have enough paid hours for the months they’re here. That was hard to budget for on a smaller farm like hers, she said, so she prefers hiring contracted workers locally as needed.
“We need an immigration program that allows for longer-term workers,” she said. “Until we have a solution in place, we shouldn’t take action because the whole system is built on what it is. And if you start picking it apart, there’s all kinds of fallout.”
This story was updated to clarify that President Trump has promised in his campaign to carry out the largest deportation program in American history. The largest mass deportation event took place during the Eisenhower administration in 1954 and 1955.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. To republish, go to the original and consult the CalMatters republishing guidelines.
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Milwaukee is at the center of what the federal government calls an "Area of Concern." A place where so much toxic water pollution and environmental degradation have happened over the course of more than a century, that it needs special attention and funding to get cleaned up.
But how do you confront and begin to heal the collective harms of legacy pollution? Of decades of injustice that is still happening? Amy talks with Shalina S. Ali about how that process can start with art, with creativity, with channeling the mixture of emotions—the joy and pain—that comes with working toward change.
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RENO, Nev. — The second day at STN EXPO West saw the return of the four-and-a-half-hour seminar “So, You Want to be a Transportation Supervisor?”, presented by transportation professionals and industry veterans Alexandra Robinson, Rosalyn Vann-Jackson, Timothy Purvis and Pamela McDonald.
The seminar began Saturday with introductions from the attendees, during which they shared how many years they have worked in transportation and the variety of roles they have held within the industry. This year, the most experienced sat in the room, representing a total of 1,400 years in the industry, across 72 participants.
“It’s about passion, purpose and connection,” said Vann-Jackson, chief support services officer for Broken Arrow Public Schools in Oklahoma, as she highlighted the importance of building relationships within teams.
Attendees at the session were encouraged to build a vision and lead with relationships. One suggestion provided by Vann-Jackson was to get to know employees. “People don’t want to be pulled along; they want to follow. You have to be a leader, and you achieve this by building relationships,” said Vann-Jackson.
She emphasized that one small change can make a big difference. Instead of calling employees into the office, meet them where they are, such as in the break room. Informal settings create comfort and encourage honest conversations. Asking about their lives, and what makes them happy. What do they enjoy outside of work? These types of conversations can create a sense of trust and loyalty.
On the other hand, McDonald, a retired transportation director for Orange Unified School District in Southern California with over 34 years of experience, addressed the importance of promoting and building relationships.
McDonald emphasizes that relationship building shouldn’t stop at the bus yard but rather expand to build connections across other district departments, visiting other school sites, or introducing oneself to board members. Whether it’s recognizing the school nurses on Nurses’ Day with a proclamation or sending retirement or birthday cards, small gestures can go a long way in strengthening interdepartmental relationships.
Nashawn Craig, assistant director of transportation for Taylor Schools in Michigan, started driving a school bus five years ago when he was 19. He slowly moved up from there, becoming a dispatcher and now an assistant director. However, he said, he was very close to his school bus driver when he was younger.
“I’ve always just had a love of school buses,” he shared with STN during the session. “It’s just been a thing for me. And my bus drivers when I was younger, they cared about me more than anybody. And that kind of stuck with me. So, I wanted to be that person for other people within the industry.”
Craig, a first-time STN attendee, said he attended the session to hear more about others’ stories, what people have done in similar situations and recommendations they have.
“I’ve only been the assistant director since July 1, so I’m looking to see what other people have gone through, hear their stories, what resources that they use,” he shared. “So that way, when I eventually move up into a director position, that I have things and people to talk to and relate to and resources.”
During the seminar, Purvis, owner and principal consultant for Pupil Transportation Information, dove into the transformative role of data-driven decision making, encouraging district leaders to leverage data as a strategic asset rather than just a compliance measure.
Purvis emphasized that key performance indicators (KPIs), which are the backbone of data-driven management, are essential tools that public and private sectors alike are embracing to boost efficiency.
The seminar concluded with former executive director of transportation in New York City and in San Diego, California, and current industry consultant Alex Robinson addressing a fundamental question: What does a healthy organization feel like?
“If you hesitate when asked whether a child is safe riding a particular school bus with a specific driver, then that driver shouldn’t be behind the wheel,” said Robinson. She challenged attendees to reflect on their own feelings about their workplaces.
Ultimately, Robinson emphasized that the strength of any organization lies in its people and their shared commitment to growth and excellence. Recognizing the symptoms of dysfunction, embracing hard truths, and fostering leadership development are all part of the journey toward building a healthier workplace.
Three attendees from Sweetwater County School District #1 in Rock Springs, Wyoming, also attended the session, looking to absorb as much information as possible.
Josh Henderson has been in the district for six years, starting as a driver, transitioning to a trainer and CDL third-party tester, before becoming a route coordinator. He shared that last school year the district director resigned, and Henderson threw his name in the hat, along with another internal employee, who received the position. He said the class provided him with a lot of knowledge about what goes into being a director and what the future would hold in terms of that position.
He said he’s a people person and really connected with the stories relating to fostering department culture and engaging with staff. First-time attendee Amanda Vincent who started at Sweetwater County School District #1 as a school bus aide 19 years ago, then transitioned to a driver, then a dispatcher, and now she does over the road and in town field trips and specialize in specials transportation routes, shared that she came to the session to learn how to have that open communication between staff members.
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The post Leading with Purpose: Insights from STN EXPO West’s Transportation Supervisor Seminar appeared first on School Transportation News.
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