It's Friday, March 13, 2026 and in this morning's issue we're covering: Emails show current labor department struggling to deliver on H-2A ‘one-stop shop’ promise, U.S. Senate Primaries in North Carolina Show Democratic Surge, Without a driver’s license, rebuilding after prison is harder. These clinics offer a path forward, New microschools education model growing across NC, One of Michigan’s most populous counties will post all ballots online, Boil water advisories, water main breaks stress cash-strapped New Orleans families.

Media outlets and others featured: Investigate Midwest, The Daily Yonder, North Carolina Health News, Carolina Public Press, Votebeat, Verite News.

Emails show Trump’s labor department struggling to deliver on H-2A ‘one-stop shop’ promise

by Sky Chadde, Investigate Midwest, Investigate Midwest
March 3, 2026

Key takeaways

• After it was announced, industry groups sought clarification on what the purpose of the new Office of Immigration Policy was. Officials replied that it was taking over responsibilities “already held” by an existing office — language the department backtracked in a statement to Investigate Midwest.
• A staffer questioned whether the stances of prospective hires to the new office “will be aligned with the Secretary’s?” And the longtime Labor Department veteran tapped to run the office last summer was replaced in January with someone who used to work at ICE. 
• Three departments administer the H-2A visa program, which allows farmers to bring foreign workers to the U.S. temporarily. Industry groups told the Labor Department the “real hangups” were with the other two, the State Department and Department of Homeland Security.

In June, as the Trump administration faced backlash from farmers and agriculture officials over its mass deportation effort stripping farms of employees, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer presented a solution: the new Office of Immigration Policy.

The office would slash red tape, including easing the process for farmers to access workers on temporary labor visas. Instead of jumping through hoops with three government agencies, employers would apply through a single portal, Chavez-DeRemer promised.

“We’re going to do one, dedicated ‘one-stop shop,’ as I call it,” she said. “We’re going to see that change come across fairly rapidly, because that’s the problem, and they want a solution, and they wanted it yesterday.”

But about eight months after the new office was created, the Labor Department is struggling to deliver on its stated goals, according to internal emails obtained by Investigate Midwest through a public records request.

To bring workers to the U.S. on short-term visas, employers require approval from the Department of Labor, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department. Chavez-DeRemer publicly announced a consolidation effort for the H-2A visa, which is specifically for agriculture, in late June at the Western Governors’ Association, according to The Packer. 

Several weeks later, in an email thread with the subject line “Single Electronic H-2A Visa Portal System,” a department veteran threw cold water on the idea.

“The larger issue is that DOL does not control or have legal authorities to access DHS and DOS systems/data (which are far more protected than DOL) and the DOGE team found that out pretty quickly,” the head of the new office at the time said. “So, we should be looking at joint portal development options with DHS” [underlined in original].

Chavez-DeRemer has told Congress that her department was collaborating with “other federal partners” to make visa processing “simpler and less burdensome.” But the emails show staff at the new office having little interaction with other agencies.

The status of the “one-stop shop” is unclear. The Labor Department has no press releases announcing a new process for applying for visa workers, and it did not answer when asked whether a single portal exists. 

“At the direction of the Secretary, the Department of Labor remains focused on delivering real improvements for employers, working to streamline visa processes, and expanding lawful workforce pathways,” department spokeswoman Courtney Parella said in a statement to Investigate Midwest. “The Office of Immigration Policy was created to do just that by finding ways to cut red tape and improve coordination across a complex federal system — an innovative effort that is already delivering results.”

The department pointed to rescinding a Biden-era rule providing farmworkers with workplace protections, suspending the collection of fees to process H-2A applications and revoking an Obama-era ruling that did not allow employers to stagger when it brought H-2A workers to the U.S. All three were included in a document titled “OIP WINS” that the new office’s staff had prepared for Parella and her communications colleagues on Aug. 8, according to the emails.

Since then, the department has changed how employers can pay H-2A workers. Also, the department said it collaborated with DHS to publish a final rule that allows employers to submit H-2A application paperwork to both departments simultaneously. This has reduced “processing time by weeks,” the Labor Department said. 

However, the rule states plainly that “concurrent processing” should “not be confused with ‘concurrent filing.’ ” While DHS can intake employers’ paperwork, it still needs to wait for the Labor Department to approve an application before DHS can begin processing, according to a footnote in the rule.

One industry representative who contacted the new office with questions, according to the emails, said staff have been “very responsive and helpful.” He did not answer when asked if applying for H-2A visas has gotten easier or more efficient since last summer.

“DOL staff have met directly with Farm Bureau members to answer questions and explain intricacies of guest worker programs,” said Laramie Adams, the associate director of government affairs at the Texas Farm Bureau. “That direct engagement has been beneficial for producers and is a positive step for the agricultural sector.”

Recently, the Labor Department has faced multiple controversies. In January, the New York Post reported the labor department’s inspector general was probing whether Chavez-DeRemer misused federal funds to carry on an affair. The New York Times also reported her husband was banned from the building after he allegedly groped two female staffers.

The department did not respond to a question about whether the firestorm was diverting Chavez-DeRemer’s attention away from her promise of a “one-stop shop.”

In early June, after the agriculture sector pleaded for relief from the immigration crackdown, President Trump paused immigration enforcement on farms. However, raids resumed days later.

After the incident, Trump said he wanted to give farmers discretion over undocumented workers. His agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, “said, ‘So, we have a little problem. The farmers are losing a lot of people,’ and we figured it out, and we have some great stuff being written,” he said during a July 4 speech.

It’s unclear if he was referring to the new Office of Immigration Policy. At the time, the office was the only new government initiative announced that focused on building up the farm workforce.

As the Trump administration continues to arrest and deport immigrants en masse, farms are scrambling to find reliable labor. Government surveys show roughly 40% of America’s 2 million farmworkers are undocumented. 

Trump has touted the H-2A visa program as a farm labor solution. But H-2A visa workers can only fill agricultural jobs that are considered seasonal, i.e. not year-round. Employers engaged in many types of agricultural production, such as dairy farming, cannot use the program.

Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump’s second term, called for the elimination of the H-2A program. It also aimed to cancel the H-2B visa program, which meatpacking plants have used to fill jobs. Trump officials, such as Stephen Miller, have claimed native-born Americans would fill the dangerous, back-breaking agriculture jobs while getting paid more.

Chavez-DeRemer — who used to represent Oregon, a largely Democratic state, as a Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives — has differed with other administration officials. 

“None of the Americans I know want to do some of these jobs,” she said this past summer, according to The Packer.

The agricultural industry has clamored for the H-2A program to be expanded. In January, Rep. Glenn “GT” Thompson, the ranking Republican on the House’s agriculture committee, said he would soon introduce legislation addressing the situation, according to Politico. 

If the H-2A program is expanded, employers could still face issues largely beyond the Labor Department’s control. 

At a recent conference, agricultural employers complained that H-2A employees weren’t arriving in the U.S. on time to harvest crops, according to Agri-Pulse. The U.S. Consulate in Mexico, which the State Department oversees, had not yet approved the workers to enter the U.S.

The holdup could stem from the Trump administration’s decision, last year, to interview every H-2A worker in person at the consulate. Most interviews had been waived to ease farmers’ access to labor. At a webinar this past summer for agriculture employers, a representative for the U.S. consulate in Mexico said workers needed to disclose any “derogatory” information about themselves, including whether they had previously tried to enter the U.S. If they didn’t, that could hurt their chances of getting the visa.

The new emails show that industry groups were most concerned about how DHS and the State Department were processing visas.

“As far as streamlining the process goes,” a representative of a specialty crop trade group told the Labor Department staff this past summer, DHS and State “are where we see the real hangups.”

A State Department spokesperson said in a statement the department takes “the time necessary to ensure an applicant does not pose a risk to the safety and security of the United States.”

DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

Industry groups pursue labor department’s help with DHS, State

The emails show industry groups asking the Labor Department for assistance with DHS and the State Department.

In July, about two weeks after Chavez-DeRemer announced the new office, a Florida association contacted its staff.

“Is this office set up enough to assist with some issues at DOS/DHS?” asked Jamie Fussel, the director of labor relations at the Florida Fruit & Vegetable Association.

An association member — a farm labor contractor that farms hire to provide visa labor — had requested more than 200 H-2A workers to pick blueberries in New Jersey. But the State Department had not approved their visas and told the contractor a resolution could take months, according to the emails.

“There’s been a lot of crop loss at this point because the berries remained on the bush and went bad,” Fussel said. “With only two weeks to go, I’m not sure that it’d even be worthwhile at this point for the workers to be approved.”

“I know … that you know … our authority here is a bit limited,” replied Brian Pasternak, a longtime Labor Department employee who was appointed the head of the new office this past summer. “I have reached out to ask about this matter. If we hear something back, I will email you.”

“Completely understand the limits of your authority — ours is even less,” Fussel responded. “Just reaching out based on the new [office] and in case this is the type of issue the Secretary envisioned assisting with.”

The Florida Fruit & Vegetable Association did not respond to a request for comment. Pasternak did not respond to a request for comment to his government email. 

The State Department said the consulate processes H-2A visas in three days or less “in the majority of cases.”

Around the same time, a lobbyist for a company named BDV Solutions emailed the new office’s staff. BDV focuses on EB-3 Unskilled visas, which are for immigrants with little experience in their planned line of work. (Unlike the H-2A visa, the EB-3 Unskilled is not specific to agriculture.) 

The lobbyist, Jonathan Baselice, told Pasternak his board was “anxious” to talk about its “four constructive meetings with Secretary [Kristi] Noem’s team at DHS.” DHS is interested in “the idea of an emergency roundtable where all of the key Departments are represented and we can discuss holistic policy changes that help build efficiencies as visa petitions move from DOL to DHS to DOS,” Baselice said.

It’s unclear if an “emergency roundtable” occurred. Baselice did not respond to a request for comment. DHS did not respond to a request for comment about the email.

Questions about new office’s purpose flood in

Almost immediately after the new office was announced, stakeholders sought clarification, according to the emails.

In early July, Hayley Fernandes, a staffer at the Office of Immigration Policy, blasted out an email to industry groups.

“We’ve gotten quite a few inquiries about [the new office]!” she wrote. “We do not believe that any press on this announcement is needed from you all, but more so, we would just like to have you please share it with members — the Secretary wants farmers to know we are listening to them and working to make the H-2A process better!”

She then compared the work the new office would do to the Office of Foreign Labor Certification, which processes labor-related visas.

“The [office] is taking on the responsibilities already held by the Office of Foreign Labor Certification,” she said. “This means that all visa programs that DOL already touches will still be covered under the office. This office will report directly to the Secretary, to streamline its ability to execute immigration related policy priorities” [emphasis in original].

Asked about this email, the Labor Department said the new office is focused on “department-wide strategy … and interagency alignment across immigration-related programs.” The foreign labor certification office “continues administering” visa programs, it said.

Matthew Penner, a staff member with the U.S. Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, also emailed with questions. He asked whether the new office would hire more staff and whether it would process the same number of visas as before.

Fernandes replied that the new office was subject to Trump’s federal hiring freeze. The second answer is redacted.

Before replying to Penner, Fernandes sent proposed answers to Jihun Han, Chavez-DeRemer’s chief of staff. Han is now on administrative leave as the inspector general probes his boss’s alleged travel fraud, according to NBC News. On Monday, he was reportedly forced out.

“Please see our drafted responses,” Fernandes told Han, “and given the sensitivities around immigration/H-2A we just wanted to flag for [the secretary’s office] before sending back. We feel comfortable that everything in writing is something we or the Secretary has said publicly.”

Penner did not respond to a request for comment. Fernandes left the labor department in December to work for U.S. Rep. Jason Smith, a Missouri Republican. She did not return a request for comment to her House email address. 

Staffer asks whether potential hires ‘align’ with Chavez-DeRemer

About a month into the office’s existence this past summer, Pasternak, the office’s head at the time, aimed to hire more staffers to the small team, according to the emails. 

He asked Fernandes what she thought of three possible candidates.

“Interesting … I am curious if their stances will be aligned with the Secretary’s?” Fernandes asked. “Third one is a bit of a curveball….” 

The full names of the candidates and their resumes are not included in the records. The emails also don’t show what stances she’s referring to or why she singled out one candidate.

It’s unclear if the jobs were political appointments or for the civil service. Career government jobs have been designed to be free from politics, but Trump has tried to change this so new hires are more politically aligned with him, according to The New York Times. 

The Labor Department did not answer when asked how many people work for the new office. Just three people regularly appear in the emails as employees: Pasternak, Fernandes and Dalton Shell, a department attorney.

Pasternak is a department veteran of more than 20 years and ran the foreign labor certification office for years. It’s unclear what his role at the new office is now that a new person, Brian Kennedy, was sworn in to lead the office in January, the department said. Kennedy previously served as policy director for the House Committee on Homeland Security and used to be a senior advisor to the director of ICE. 

Fernandes began working for Chavez-DeRemer in 2023, shortly after graduating from college in California, according to her LinkedIn.

About two weeks after the office was created, Han, the chief of staff, asked Pasternak to include Shell in developing the new office.

“It came to OSEC’s [Office of the Secretary] attention that Dalton specialized in ag labor law, grew up on a farm, and family has utilized the H-2A program,” Han said.

According to Shell’s LinkedIn, he graduated from law school in 2023 and spent a year at a law firm in Elizabethton, Tennessee. The firm focuses on real estate law, according to its website. Shell’s mother runs a self-described “family farm and bakery” that she started in 2023, according to her LinkedIn. The farm doesn’t appear in the labor department’s database of H-2A employers going back to 2023, but it could have hired H-2A workers through a farm labor contractor.

Shell did not respond to a request for comment to his government email.

This article first appeared on Investigate Midwest and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

U.S. Senate Primaries in North Carolina Show Democratic Surge

by Sarah Melotte, The Daily Yonder
March 11, 2026

From North Carolina’s small towns to its major cities, both the number and percentage of voters who participated in the Democratic primary grew compared to the 2022 season.

In the Democratic primary for United States Senate, moderate Democrat Roy Cooper, who served as governor of North Carolina from 2017 to 2025, won 92% of the total Democratic votes in his race against anti-establishment Democrat Justin Dues. In the Republican primary, Trump-endorsed candidate Michael Whatley won 65% of the total Republican votes. In North Carolina, primaries are semi-closed: registered Republicans and Democrats can only vote in their respective primaries. Unaffiliated voters, however, can vote in either primary.

The following map shows the percentage point shift towards Democratic turnout between the 2022 and 2026 primaries.

Turnout in the Democratic primary was up 33% compared to 2022. (The president’s party tends to fare worse in midterm elections – in 2022, Democrat Joe Biden was in office.)

This primary season, about 81% of North Carolina’s nonmetropolitan, or rural, counties saw increased turnout in the Democratic primary compared to 2022. During the 2022 season, about 36% of rural North Carolina voters who cast a ballot did so in the Democratic primary. This year, that number jumped to 42%, representing almost 17,000 more rural voters who showed up for the Democrats. 

Democratic turnout also increased the most in the state’s major metropolitan counties, or counties with cities that have more than one million residents. In 2022, 61% of major metro voters participated in the Democratic primary, compared to 79% of voters this season. 

The Republican primary saw a concomitant drop in participation, meanwhile. This year, 139,000 fewer voters participated in the Republican primary compared to 2022. Participation in the Republican primary dropped by 18% this year compared to 2022.

“Democrats appear to have generated disproportionate early energy, both among registered partisans and among unaffiliated voters,” political scientist Michael Bitzer told a reporter from WRAL. “The fact that more than half of unaffiliated voters chose the Democratic ballot — reversing the traditional ‘go where the action is’ pattern – is one of the cycle’s most intriguing developments.”

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Without a driver’s license, rebuilding after prison is harder. These clinics offer a path forward.

by Rachel Crumpler, North Carolina Health News
March 12, 2026

By Rachel Crumpler

Brentley, a woman incarcerated at Western Correctional Center for Women in Black Mountain, is nearing her release from prison in June 2027. She’s nervous about starting over from scratch. 

One question had been weighing on her: How would she rebuild her life with a suspended driver’s license? 

Finding housing and employment, attending health care appointments, buying groceries and meeting with probation and parole officers — nearly every essential task after release will require transportation. In western North Carolina, where Brentley — whom NC Health News is identifying by her first name — plans to stay after her release, public transportation options are limited. It’s the same in many counties across the state.

So when she saw a flyer on a bulletin board at the prison advertising the driver’s license restoration clinic, Brentley signed up. 

This week, she was one of 30 women who participated in a driver’s license restoration clinic led by Duke University School of Law Pro Bono Program and Pisgah Legal Services, a nonprofit providing free legal assistance to low-income people in western North Carolina. Law students and pro bono attorneys met one-on-one with the women to review their driver’s license records and explain the steps needed for reinstatement.

“I know my license is suspended,” Brentley said at the beginning of her meeting. “I don’t know what I need to do to get it back.” 

A shocking number of North Carolinians are in the same position — most often because of unpaid traffic fines and fees or missed court dates. Nearly 900,000 people in North Carolina had suspended licenses for one of those reasons as of January 2025, according to a report on driver’s license suspensions from the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law. That represents about one in 10 of the state’s almost 8 million licensed adult drivers.

‘You need a license’

“Let’s be real: You need a license,” Brentley said. “You need a vehicle to be productive and to get around, to get a job. If you don’t, for a certain amount of time, usually, eventually you’re going to drive. I don’t want to do that anymore.”

By the end of her meeting with Will VanRenterghem, a first-year law student at Duke, and Pisgah Legal Services staff attorney Ed Treat, Brentley knew her path forward — and her relief was visible. 

They explained that she had one suspension on her license tied to a 2019 DWI charge. After her release, they said, Brentley will need to meet with a substance use assessor — for a fee — who could require treatment before her license can be reinstated.

Treat told her that a lot of classes are now offered online, which could help her fulfill the requirement.

“I want to get out and just set a good foundation,” she said. Having a license is an important part of that.

Others served by the clinic had multiple suspensions along with an accumulation of fees — some totaling in the thousands of dollars. Each woman left with an advice letter outlining next steps to take to get their license and an annotated copy of their DMV records explaining the causes of suspensions in plain language.

Recognizing how often license suspensions complicate reentry to the community after release, the N.C. Department of Adult Correction has recently started holding driver’s license restoration clinics at prisons in partnership with North Carolina law schools and pro bono attorneys.

“You cannot do anything without a license or an ID card, and so it is literally the foundational piece to everything else that you have to do when you release from prison,” N.C. Department of Adult Correction Secretary Leslie Cooley Dismukes told NC Health News. “We’ve got to make sure that we’ve got that in place so that people can succeed in the other areas.”

A barrier to reentry

For many people leaving prison, a suspended driver’s license quickly becomes a major obstacle to rebuilding their lives. 

That was Greg Singleton’s predicament when he was released from prison in 1996.

At first, he found a job at a dry cleaner in Raleigh that was within walking distance of the transitional house where he was living. After his background check came back, he said, he was fired. The next position he lined up was miles away. 

“I drove a couple of months without a driver’s license out of survival,” Singleton said. “I was trying to get my life in order, trying to get some income coming in. 

“I prayed every tire roll that I would not get stopped by the police.” 

Now Singleton works with formerly incarcerated people frequently facing similar dilemmas. As dean of academic programs at Opportunities Industrialization Center of Rocky Mount, he helps connect people with education and job training. 

Singleton said he’s repeatedly seen how transportation access is crucial to reentry success. It’s how people connect to resources and support, such as taking courses at community colleges and seeking mental health and substance use treatment.

The miles between locations can feel and practically be insurmountable, he said. Alternatives to driving — such as public transportation — often don’t reach where people need to go and services can be unpredictable. Uber and other ride-share services get expensive, especially for people just getting back on their feet. Relying on rides from family and friends only goes so far.

He noted that trucking jobs, which require a Commercial Driver’s License, are one of the growing employment opportunities for people with criminal records. But that path isn’t available if someone doesn’t even have a regular driver’s license. 

Those connections were clear to the handful of women who participated in the driver’s license restoration clinic on March 10 and who are part of a program where they are working to earn their commercial licenses while incarcerated. 

‘Counterproductive’ policy

A driver’s license can be suspended for many reasons in North Carolina, but according to Duke’s Wilson Center, the two biggest causes of suspensions are for failure to pay fines and fees, and for failure to appear in court. 

Top reasons a driver’s license can be suspended:

• Failure to appear: If a person misses their court date, the court sends notice to the DMV 20 days after the missed court date and adds a $200 fee for the non-appearance. The person has 60 days to resolve the matter or the DMV suspends their driver’s license.
• Failure to comply: If a person does not pay their traffic fine or fee within 40 days of the due date, the court notifies the DMV. The person has 60 days to pay the amount owed or the DMV suspends their driver’s license. 

Failures to appear can be dismissed if the prosecutor agrees. Failure-to-pay suspensions remain in place until the person pays outstanding court fines and fees or successfully petitions the court to waive them. 

Source: Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law

Laura Webb, project director of the Fair Chance Criminal Justice Project at the North Carolina Justice Center, said these types of license suspensions can trap people in a vicious cycle. She’s helped hundreds of people restore their licenses. 

“They can’t pay their tickets,” Webb said. “They might get a seat belt ticket that is out of reach for them financially. They’re not able to pay it, their license gets suspended, and then because their license is suspended, they might lose their job, and then they’re definitely not able to pay it.

“Suspending someone’s driver’s license and completely limiting their ability to get around does not help someone come to court,” Webb said. “They’re probably going to use limited resources to get to court or drive illegally, which we don’t want to see happen, and so it’s counterproductive. 

“It’s also counterproductive to suspend someone’s driver’s license who you want to see pay their debt, because often not having a driver’s license leads to you losing the job, the job that you need to get income to pay your debt,” she said. 

Whitley Carpenter, senior criminal justice counsel and policy manager at Forward Justice, said she’s seen the same thing. 

“Most people are not trying to buck the system,” Carpenter said. “What it creates is two tiers for the court system. Someone that comes in and has the resources can leave and go on about their life. They can pay the court fees and never be bothered again. Someone that has to choose between feeding their children or paying their court debt, then leaves, has a revoked license, has to figure out how to maneuver around life without a license, and then ultimately gets kind of caught in a system of driving on a revoked license because there’s not really any other alternatives. Then they incur more fees.” 

Data shows that resolving driver’s license suspensions often takes years. The statewide average time to resolve a failure to appear was 1,605 days — almost four and a half years. For failure to comply with fees, the average time to resolution was 927 days, according to Duke Wilson Center analysis, though times varied widely between counties. 

In recent years, more than half of states nationwide have passed legislation to eliminate or curb debt-based suspensions. North Carolina has not. 

Advocates have been pushing for change for years, highlighting the widespread impact of driver’s license suspensions on economic and health outcomes.

“We are in the growing minority of states that still suspend driver’s licenses for these issues that are not related to public safety,” Webb said.

House Bill 980, sponsored by Rep. Allen Chesser (R-Middlesex), includes reforms that would stop automatic notice to the DMV to suspend someone’s license when the failure to pay or failure to appear happens. The bill proposes appropriating $250,000 for a court text reminder system.

“That doesn’t mean that the failure to pay would go away or the failure to appear would go away,” said Carpenter, who supports the legislation. “It’s just not directly tied to someone’s ability to legally drive in the state. We have to figure out another way to ensure compliance without taking away something that makes it harder to comply.”

The bill hasn’t moved since it was filed in April 2025.

People without a license remain in a bind — they drive anyway, which can fuel further criminal involvement. Driving while a license is revoked is a criminal offense resulting in an added fine and up to 20 days in jail. Despite this, every year, there are about 200,000 such cases in North Carolina, according to a 2025 report from Duke’s Wilson Center.

Singleton, a reentry advocate, said a policy change would make economic sense.

“If we restore licenses to those that want it, we have an opportunity to improve the North Carolina workforce,” Singleton said. “If we improve the North Carolina workforce, we improve economic development.”

Expanding driver's license restoration clinics

State leaders say addressing license suspensions is one way to reduce barriers to reentry.

Among the many goals of the Department of Adult Correction is to make sure that all of the more than 18,000 people released from North Carolina prisons every year leave with identification in hand — whether a driver’s license or state ID card. 

Holding these driver’s license restoration clinics inside prisons is a new strategy. So far, seven clinics have been held.

Campbell University’s Blanchard Community Law Clinic partnered with the Department of Adult Correction to run the first clinic in fall 2024. Now the school works with the department to hold a clinic each semester, giving students an opportunity to work with real clients.

“The more people that we can help if there’s a way to restore their driver’s license, I think it really does benefit them and benefits their community and makes everyone safer,” said Kris Parks, a staff attorney at the Campbell clinic. 

Duke Law got involved in helping lead driver’s license restoration clinics inside prisons last fall and has now completed three, including 10 law students who spent part of their spring break helping 65 people at Western Correctional Center for Women on March 10 and Craggy Correctional Center on March 11.

Secretary Dismukes wants to keep ramping up the number of clinics held at prisons across the state. She said she hopes to partner with all of North Carolina’s law schools to make that happen.

For Treat, an attorney at Pisgah Legal Services, helping people restore their license is a crucial step toward stability and reentry success. 

“I think it’s really just sort of almost negligent for us as a society to send someone home from prison without a driver’s license,” he said. 

This article first appeared on North Carolina Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

New microschools education model growing across NC

by Kate Denning, Carolina Public Press
March 6, 2026

Alternative education models are on the rise in North Carolina. The number of the state’s private schooled and homeschooled students both reached record highs in the 2024-25 school year according to data from the Division of Non-Public Education, with the exception of the 2020-21 school year that was marked by the pandemic. Somewhere in between the two is a new alternative model, microschools.

Microschools might not boast jaw-dropping statistics so far — but that’s sort of the point. 

An estimated 40 microschools were operating across North Carolina as of last year, though educators say more are likely not being included in that count. Microschools tend to serve 22 students on average, though some around the country have grown to as many as 100 students.

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Barnett Berry, a senior research fellow at the Learning Policy Institute and education professor at the University of South Carolina, attributes the beginnings of the microschool movement to the COVID pandemic. 

While learning virtually, schools and families found themselves having to get creative with education in the midst of something unprecedented. The pandemic allowed, or even required, parents and educators to think differently, Berry said. But once kids went back to school, much of that excitement dwindled in traditional school settings.

“Some of us were hoping that the pandemic would have served as a catalyst for this, but let me tell you what happened,” Berry said.

“Immediately, the government came back in at the state level, and they were pulling their hair out over what they called academic learning loss, and they started pouring all this money into just trying to catch kids up. Don’t get me wrong, kids need loss of ground, but there was incredible innovation going on.”

The microschool movement, not necessarily traditional schools, capitalized on that pandemic-era innovation.

Microschools are at their best when educators, parents and students co-design the learning experience, Berry said. They are miniature hubs of what schools could be — deeper and more personalized lessons, project-based learning, a focus on what gets students excited and curious.

That idea is what propelled Margo Harper out of her position teaching agriculture at a Lenoir County public school and into opening the SELAH Institute, an agriculture-focused microschool outside of Kinston with just 12 seats to go around once it opens to its first class this fall. She plans to have more teachers for several classes in the future, but the school will always maintain a 12:1 ratio, she said.

Agriculture classes in K-12 often require time spent outside the classroom, whether it be working outdoors or traveling to Future Farmers of America events. Those field trips are essential to getting a well-rounded agriculture education, Harper said, but it can also result in lots of missed assignments and time in core classes.

She found experiential learning to be the most impactful on her students and on her as an educator and imagined a school in which “extracurriculars” like agriculture didn’t take away from core classes but added to them.

SELAH will operate on a hybrid model, so students will spend time at agricultural internships or part-time jobs Monday and Friday doing “work-based learning” and in-person instruction Tuesday through Thursday. At the end of the semester, students will have a portfolio of work they completed and what they learned.

“That could be working on a watermelon farm, volunteering at an animal shelter, anything related to agriculture to get some experience,” she said. 

“So for our students, it looks different than homeschool because instead of that Monday and Friday being home work days where they’re largely spending their time continuing to learn about the things that we’re doing in class, they’re going to be spending eight hours each of those days on a work experience. That’s either them logging eight hours of practice on how to weld, or they might be working in their home garden and they eventually want to can strawberries and sell strawberry jam.”

Harper could easily handle more than 12 students if she chose thanks to her public school background, but she finds microschools more conducive to mentoring and simply getting to know her students.

“If 12 was enough for Jesus, 12 is enough for me,” she said.

The hybrid schedule is similar to what homeschool advocates say makes homeschooling beneficial and unique, as many choose a mix of meeting weekly in homeschooling co-op groups, learning individually at home, taking classes at community college and working part-time. So what distinguishes microschools from the myriad of homeschool options?

At Harmony Homeschool Academy in Cary, cofounders Laura Greene, a licensed psychologist with a background in school psychology, and Angela Ruth, a former federal employee turned educator, blend the two by bringing together homeschooled students for in-person instruction up to three days a week. 

In-person group learning for homeschooled students isn’t revolutionary, but Ruth said the primary difference between the typical homeschool co-op and their microschool is the background of the instructor. While homeschool co-ops can certainly be academically rigorous in their own right, Ruth said, Harmony employs either certified educators or subject matter experts to teach classes, which are capped at 15 students. 

Harmony’s approach as a microschool is that a child’s education be a dual effort between the educators and the parents. Harmony’s classes tend to act as supplemental where parents can’t fully meet their student’s needs.

“Every single material given to the student is actually put in the classroom, and many of the parents take that material and build upon it at home,” Ruth said. “Because we’re hybrid, a lot of the work has to be done at home, and that’s where the parents come in, but we’re giving them the tools and the resources to be able to do that.”

Harmony also places an emphasis on Social Emotional Learning and easing the anxiety many of their students have around school. The smaller class sizes make it easier to offer accommodations for learning disabilities and mental health that traditional private schools often don’t. 

That comes in the form of pass/fail homework grades, options to use talk-to-text technology and extensions on assignments when requested by the student. When it comes to accommodations, Harmony recognizes the value in students knowing how to ask for what they need.

“Self advocacy plays a critical role here,” Ruth said. 

“We encourage the students to go to the teacher and say, ‘Hey, I have this soccer tournament,’ which is a real world, even adult-related kind of example. ‘Can I please turn in my work a little bit later without penalty?’ And the answer is always ‘Yes, you are advocating for yourself.’ That's actually an adulting skill that a lot of us don’t take to heart very often.”

The Opportunity Scholarship, or private school vouchers, will be crucial to SELAH’s success and ability for families to afford the $10,000 yearly tuition, Harper said. SELAH was approved as an official private school in February, meaning it can now apply to receive Opportunity Scholarship funds from families. 

Because SELAH’s hybrid microschool model will have students working several days a week, Harper also plans to encourage parents to talk with their children about investing in their own education by paying for a portion of their tuition with funds made at their agriculture-focused job.

Harmony, on the other hand, isn’t eligible to receive vouchers because its students are enrolled homeschoolers, but many of its families do pay with funds from Education Savings Accounts.

Critics of vouchers often say private schools shouldn’t receive public funds because they lack oversight and measurements for student success. Harper is tackling that by requiring every SELAH student take the SAT or ACT each year to track their progress. 

At Harmony, students receive grades from teachers and encourage parents to honor them, but ultimately it’s up to the parent whether they want to recognize the grade or assign one themselves. Older students tend to dual-enroll at a community college, which of course assigns grades and creates a traditional transcript to send to colleges. Most of Harmony’s students are college-bound, Ruth said.

Frederick Taylor, an 18th-century engineer and the father of scientific management, is often invoked by critics of traditional education who say his ideas on factory work were also used in the design and structure of modern-day “factory model schools,” though there are attempts to debunk the connection. 

The constant changing of classes and swapping of teachers Taylor’s model has resulted in today might lead to an efficient education but not a personalized one, Berry said. 

“That’s a system not designed for personalization, for every kid to be known, for kids to find passion in their learning as they develop the foundational skills, as well as now the age of AI having them prepared for jobs that haven’t been created yet,” Berry said. 

“But with that said everything that I’ve described right there, you can find in public school systems right now. The question is can microschools help us all get there?”

This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

One of Michigan’s most populous counties will post all ballots online

Hayley Harding, Votebeat

Mar 6, 2026 at 10:51am EST

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

Macomb County has begun to post online an image of every ballot cast in the pivotal swing county.

The county, Michigan’s third most populous, is using a program called “Ballot Verifier” to upload scans of every ballot cast for anyone to see. More than 80,000 ballots from the November 2025 election are already online, as is the “cast vote record,” which shows how tabulators read each ballot.

Images of cast ballots — which do not include a voter’s name, address, party affiliation, or other identifying information — are already public record and can be requested through local officials. Putting them online simply improves transparency, Macomb County Clerk Anthony Forlini said.

“We all wonder, when we put our ballot in, ‘did it score it the right way?’” Forlini told Votebeat. “This takes a little bit of the mystery out of it and adds a little bit of accountability for all of us.”

The premise is simple: Let voters see the ballots, and they can judge the results for themselves. Since Michigan votes on paper ballots, that means anyone can see the sometimes wacky ways people fill in bubbles by hand — an X where a bubble should be, a rant scrawled next to a candidate’s name — right alongside write-in candidates, undervotes, and all the other markings that show the full range of voter intent.

Macomb County plans to post images going back through the November 2024 election and will include future elections in the program as well, Forlini said. He is running for secretary of state as a Republican.

Ballot Verifier caught his attention about a year ago, he said, after he saw how it worked. It’s been used in a few counties around the country in the past few years. In Ada County, Idaho, which adopted it about two years ago, elections director Saul Seyler said the program “has helped build public confidence.”

The program helped address election distrust at the roots, Seyler said. Ada County — Idaho’s most populous county and home to Boise — has worked to improve trust for years, including offering constant livestreams of the facilities where ballots are handled and adding more windows when remodeling their offices.

Ballot Verifier, he said, offered the chance for voters to ensure that the machines had counted their ballots correctly. Officials brought out some of the department’s “harshest critics” to provide feedback on the tool, Seyler said, and even they found it useful.

“Realistically, probably 95% of the public won’t ever use the tool, but there is something to the fact that it’s available,” he said. “There’s a confidence that gets built just by knowing it’s there.”

It has required some minor tweaks to protocol to ensure voters don’t accidentally violate their own right to a secret ballot. The county changed their ballot language, for instance, to make clear that ballots are public records and that voters shouldn’t leave identifying marks.

Voter privacy is one of the greatest concerns about such programs. Michigan voters have a right to a secret ballot. Maintaining that is key, said Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, because ballot secrecy laws exist to protect voters from coercion or vote buying. Stray marks or seemingly random write-in choices can still tie a ballot directly to a voter, he said.

He pointed to the 2008 Minnesota Senate election recount, where a ballot that included several write-in spaces marked with “Lizard People” was not counted because canvassers agreed with a challenge characterizing it as an identifying mark, which goes against Minnesota’s laws.

Election officials need to find a “transparent way” to reject the ballots images that are “most blatantly potentially identifiable,” Lindeman said, which can look different depending on the ballot and an election’s circumstances.

In Ada County, officials tried to address the potential issue by working with Civera, the company that produces Ballot Verifier, to ensure that voters are “masked” if something about their ballot would identify them, meaning it won’t be made publicly available. It’s not unheard of for only a single voter in a precinct to get a specific combination of taxing districts on their ballot, for example, and officials wanted to make sure that ballot would still remain private.

That and other workflow changes can add yet another step to “an already kind of chaotic time,” Seyler said, but he believes the change has already saved Ada County money: he said the published ballot images and cast vote records have prevented at least two recounts by allowing potential challengers to review records without having to file for one.

“This can not only be a resource to help build trust, but it can also just help you operationally,” he said.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

Boil water advisories, water main breaks stress cash-strapped New Orleans families

by Robert Stewart, Verite News New Orleans
March 10, 2026

A water main ruptured on Carrollton Avenue and Panola Street on Monday (March 9) morning, leaving much of New Orleans’ East Bank under a boil water advisory, according to the Sewage and Water Board of New Orleans. The advisory was lifted on Tuesday morning.

It’s the third water main break that has resulted in a broad boil water advisory in a little over a month. The frequent advisories have left a number of residents feeling concerned about the persistent need to buy potable water for cooking, drinking and basic hygiene, all while they see the cost of living in the city going up. 

Central City resident Charles Brown, 70, and his childhood friend, Lanard Turner, 76, both said that they rely on social security and have limited incomes. Now, they feel like they have to choose between two drinking water options that neither feel is particularly safe — tap or bottled water because of the plastic. The two men were sitting with friends outside of the Lafayette Cemetery No. 2 Monday afternoon after the boil water advisory had gone into effect. 

“When the water comes back on you got rust in it, you got lead in it and all that, you know? You prefer to drink bottled water,” Turner said.

Despite the additional costs, both men have opted to use bottled water for years. But this choice has gotten harder as it becomes more expensive to live in the city. But they think bottled water is a more reliable option than a water system that is plagued by repeated ruptures. 

Turner said he usually needs five or six cases of water a month because he has a big family. 

Brown, who said he buys four cases of water every month, agreed that buying bottled water was better than tap, but he’s worried about contamination and pollution from the plastic bottles. 

“The chemicals that they make the bottles with, that they make the plastic with, [online] it says it's hurting you and hurting the environment too,” he said. 

According to neighborhood data analyzed by The Data Center, a New Orleans-based research nonprofit, Central City has a lower median household income compared to Orleans Parish overall. 

Along with many of the other neighborhoods in Uptown, Central City was under a boil water advisory starting on Feb. 23, after a water main burst on South Claiborne Avenue and Toledano Street. 

Less than two weeks later, on March 4, another water main ruptured on Magnolia Street and Jackson Avenue, though no boil water advisory was issued. The water, which neighbors say stinks in the morning, was still gushing from this break as late as 2 p.m on March 9. The Sewage and Waterboard (S&WB) of New Orleans has not been able to isolate the break on the 30-inch water main because S&WB requires special equipment, according to Kaitlin Tymrak, the S&WB’s interim superintendent. The Magnolia Street water main is almost 100 years old.

At a Public Works, Sanitation, and Environment Committee meeting on Tuesday (March 10), city council members grilled Tymrak and S&WB Executive Director Randy Hayman.  The council members demanded a plan to deal with the recurring ruptures. Tymrak said S&WB is currently evaluating a timeline for the March 4 Magnolia and Jackson break. 

On Magnolia Street, just off of Jackson Avenue, water gushed from a gaping hole in the road and poured into the storm drains. Rhondel Jones, 47, spoke with Verite News while sitting on a neighbor’s patio chatting with some residents and overlooking what he described as a pool with “enough water for children to swim in.”

Jones, who lives in Central City, said that he saw a work crew during the first two days of the Magnolia break but has not seen any since. 

“It’s getting ridiculous,” Jones said. 

Jones said the unfixed, leaking water main disrupts life in his neighborhood. Neighbors can’t park where they normally would. School kids, he said, had to move their bus stop. And residents have had their water pressure impacted by the broken pipe. 

But for Jones and other Central City residents, the water rupture is not the main problem. 

It’s the financial burden residents accrue through constantly purchasing bottled water due to their concern that the tap water isn’t clean or reliable. Central City residents reported using bottled water to drink, clean their teeth and to cook. Some said they distrusted the tap water so much that they don’t even give it to their pets. 

“I know they're dogs, but at the end of the day, I got to look out for them too,” said Chris Minor, 43 who said he has two dogs to whom he gives bottled water. The smaller of the two gazed out the window while Minor spoke to Verite. But Minor added that he was happy that at least he was not in other parts of Louisiana where the water comes out brown.  

During Tuesday’s Public Works Committee meeting, Hayman said that the city’s water distribution system, which consists of 1,600 miles of water lines and transmission mains, is facing a crisis. Hayman said S&WB is auditing its system to determine the best way forward but could not say when the audit would be ready. Tymrak said S&WB is focusing first on dealing with the roughly 34 miles of transmission mains, which are over 100 years old. 

Debra Smith, 58, and her daughter, Claudette Smith, 36, were chatting on their front porch on the day this boil water advisory was issued. Debra Smith said that she has been cooking with bottled water since Hurricane Katrina to avoid another hazard: lead leaching from pipes into the tap water. She said she remembers hearing concerns about the city’s pipes since she was a kid. Although she’s used to using bottled water for her family — she said she even buys and brings water to her elderly mother — she still thinks people shouldn’t have to use bottled water to feel safe bathing and brushing their teeth. 

“Sometimes they tell us we can't shower. We don't know what the water will do to us and to our bodies. You can’t brush your teeth and all that stuff,” Debra Smith said.  

Claudette Smith said every time a boil water advisory happens it creates extra stress for her and her family. She said that she knows the city is capable of doing more, because she sees it operating efficiently during Mardi Gras. 

“The government period. They need to do better,” Claudette Smith said. “They need to do better.”

Update at 3:12 p.m. on March 11: The New Orleans Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness said that it is providing limited service and assistance through its community partners to residents whose homes were impacted by Carrollton Avenue and Panola Street water main break. Assistance includes: damage assessments, “muck and guck support,” clean up buckets and gift cards. Assistance can be requested by phone at: 504-250-9824 or by email at: ready@nola.gov.

This article first appeared on Verite News New Orleans and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.