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24 January 22
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The Freedom to Vote: John R Lewis Act would restore key voting rights provisions and protect American democracy. We can’t give up
Arguably the most crucial measure of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was section 5’s pre-clearance requirement that states with a recent history of voter discrimination get approval from the justice department before implementing voting changes. However, the US supreme court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v Holder struck down the pre-clearance requirement claiming that voting conditions for racial minorities had improved and that its use was outdated. Since then, numerous states passed laws they had previously abandoned due to the threat of pre-clearance. Other states continued to enact laws restricting voting that were already under way before Shelby. These statutes are so restrictive they would have never seen the light of day if pre-clearance was still intact. New voter suppression laws in Texas, Georgia and Florida are the most recent examples of these efforts.
The Freedom to Vote: John R Lewis Act (FTV) – which combines two previous bills to defend voting rights and democracy more broadly – would restore the section 5 pre-clearance provisions and create protections against the most common obstacles faced by voters.
Those of us on the frontlines in the fight for voting rights know the immediate impact these bills would have on our communities. Last year in Iberia parish, a rural community on the Louisiana Gulf coast that is one-third Black, election officials closed eight polling locations – five of which were in predominantly Black neighborhoods. Voters were not properly notified of this change and, even more troubling, the closures were implemented just weeks before an election. At least 20,000 voters were affected, many of whom did not discover their polling location had changed until they arrived at the location they had been voting at for years. Under FTV, election officials would be required to publicly announce all voting changes at least 180 days before an election, allowing voters adequate time to become familiar with their new polling location, secure child or adult care, and notify their employer, if necessary.
In Texas, FTV would immediately reduce the challenges voters of colors face. Nearly all the population growth from 2010 to 2020 in Texas was from communities of color, yet the map that the state legislature enacted reduced the number of districts in which voters of color make up the majority of eligible voters. If FTV were enacted, the redrawing of districts would be the responsibility of a non-partisan redistricting commission that would prevent elected officials from choosing their own constituents. States would also not be able to enact racially discriminatory maps without first submitting them for approval to the DoJ.
Mississippi, the state with the largest percentage of Black voters, offers no opportunity for early voting and voters must get documents notarized to vote by mail. When every voter is forced to vote in-person on election day, it often leads to long lines at polling sites and heavy traffic. When voters are forced to get signatures on both the application to vote by mail and the ballot itself, it is especially difficult for elderly voters who often live alone to have their ballot counted.
In 2020, this requirement’s burden increased dramatically due to the pandemic, particularly for the elderly, whose increased vulnerability to Covid meant attaining these necessary signatures risked exposure. During the 2020 general election, elderly Mississippians were forced to risk their health to vote in person on election day, unless they met the standards for one of the limited qualifications that allowed someone to vote by mail. FTV would require all states to have at least 15 consecutive days of early in-person voting, including two weekends, giving voters in states like Mississippi another option to cast their ballot.
Without pre-clearance, states and localities will continue to suppress votes by enacting restrictive voting changes that target voters of color. While we still have section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that dilute minority voting strength, this measure is reactive, meaning advocates can only challenge a voting change after its implementation. However, section 2 was also weakened by the supreme court in 2021 by creating new and additional atextual burdens to the Voting Rights Act’s primary mechanism for challenging voting laws that have a discriminatory result. Until pre-clearance is restored, discriminatory changes will continue to be enacted – and will affect every election. The Senate must act to protect the fundamental right to vote and pass federal voting rights legislation by any means necessary – before it is too late.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. (photo: AP)
The High Court in London gave Assange permission to appeal the case to the U.K. Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court must agree to accept the case before it can move forward.
“Make no mistake, we won today in court,” Assange’s fiancee, Stella Moris, said outside the courthouse, noting that he remains in custody at Belmarsh Prison in London.
“We will fight this until Julian is free,” she added.
The Supreme Court normally takes about eight sitting weeks after an application is submitted to decide whether to accept an appeal, the court says on its website.
The decision is the latest step in Assange’s long battle to avoid a trial in the U.S. on a series of charges related to WikiLeaks’ publication of classified documents more than a decade ago.
Just over a year ago, a district court judge in London rejected a U.S. extradition request on the grounds that Assange was likely to kill himself if held under harsh U.S. prison conditions. U.S. authorities later provided assurances that the WikiLeaks founder wouldn’t face the severe treatment his lawyers said would put his physical and mental health at risk.
The High Court last month overturned the lower court’s decision, saying that the U.S. promises were enough to guarantee Assange would be treated humanely.
Those assurances were the focus of Monday’s ruling by the High Court.
Assange’s lawyers are seeking to appeal because the U.S. offered its assurances after the lower court made its ruling. But the High Court overturned the lower court ruling, saying that the judge should have given the U.S. the opportunity to offer the assurances before she made her final ruling.
The High Court gave Assange permission to appeal so the Supreme Court can decide “in what circumstances can an appellate court receive assurances from a requesting state ... in extradition proceedings.”
Assange’s lawyers have argued that the U.S. government’s pledge that Assange won’t be subjected to extreme conditions is meaningless because it’s conditional and could be changed at the discretion of American authorities.
The U.S. has asked British authorities to extradite Assange so he can stand trial on 17 charges of espionage and one charge of computer misuse linked to WikiLeaks’ publication of thousands of leaked military and diplomatic documents.
Assange, 50, has been held at the high-security Belmarsh Prison since 2019, when he was arrested for skipping bail during a separate legal battle. Before that, he spent seven years holed up inside Ecuador’s Embassy in London. Assange sought protection in the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual assault.
Sweden dropped the sex crimes investigations in November 2019 because so much time had elapsed.
American prosecutors say Assange unlawfully helped U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning steal classified diplomatic cables and military files that WikiLeaks later published, putting lives at risk.
Lawyers for Assange argue that their client shouldn’t have been charged because he was acting as a journalist and is protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that guarantees freedom of the press. They say the documents he published exposed U.S. military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“He should not face criminal prosecution and decades in prison for publishing truthful information of great public importance,″ said Barry Pollack, his attorney in the United States.
A sign at the memorial site known as George Floyd Square in Minneapolis. (photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
Former Minneapolis police officers J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas K. Lane and Tou Thao were at the scene with Derek Chauvin and are accused of violating Floyd’s civil rights
Former officers J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas K. Lane and Tou Thao were at the scene with Derek Chauvin during the May 2020 arrest that led to Floyd’s death and stand accused of violating the Black man’s federal civil rights. The trial is likely to test the question of what responsibility police officers have in reining in the behavior of colleagues.
It is the first of two expected trials this year for the ex-officers, who are also facing state charges of aiding and abetting murder and manslaughter in Floyd’s killing. That trial is scheduled to take place in June.
Kueng, Lane and Thao have each pleaded not guilty in both cases. All three have signaled through their attorneys that they are likely to place the blame for Floyd’s death on Chauvin, who was convicted in April on state charges of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter and sentenced to 22½ years in prison.
Chauvin pleaded guilty last month to separate federal charges that he violated Floyd’s constitutional rights when he knelt on the man’s neck and back for about 9½ minutes as Floyd begged for breath. He is awaiting sentencing in that case.
A federal grand jury indicted Chauvin, Kueng, Lane and Thao in May on charges that they violated Floyd’s constitutional rights when he was restrained and handcuffed face down on a Minneapolis street during an investigation of an alleged counterfeit $20 bill.
Kueng, Lane and Thao were charged with failing to render medical aid to Floyd. Kueng and Thao were also charged with violating Floyd’s right to be free from unreasonable seizure by not intervening as Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck and back.
The federal case is expected to be dominated by evidence that has already been introduced in the state case — including extensive footage of Floyd’s final minutes taken from bystander video and police body cameras. Many of the same witnesses who appeared in the Chauvin trial are expected to testify — including Darnella Frazier, who was 17 when she recorded the viral video of Floyd’s final minutes, and medical personnel who responded to the scene.
Kueng and Lane had been full-time officers for less than a week when they encountered Floyd as they responded to a 911 call about a counterfeit $20 bill that had been passed at Cup Foods, a local market. Body-camera video from the scene showed Lane pull a gun on Floyd within 15 seconds of encountering the man in a parked car, without announcing who he was or what he was investigating.
Chauvin arrived on the scene a few minutes later with Thao as Lane and Kueng struggled to place Floyd, who was handcuffed, inside a squad car. Body-camera video shows Floyd complaining of claustrophobia and ultimately being placed face down on a city street, with Chauvin pressing his knees into Floyd’s neck and back, Kueng atop Floyd’s back and Lane holding the man’s legs. Thao stood a few feet away, pushing back bystanders who increasingly pressed the officers to get off Floyd as he began to lose consciousness.
Video shows Floyd complained at least 25 times of not being able to breathe — cries the officers dismissed even as the man went limp.
Lawyers for Kueng and Lane have argued that their clients were following orders from Chauvin, a 19-year member of the department who had been Kueng’s field training officer and informally advised Lane during his probation period.
Lane, who was holding Floyd’s legs, twice asked Chauvin whether they should reposition Floyd — requests that his lawyer says prove that he tried to intervene with a senior officer but was rebuffed. Kueng later checked Floyd’s pulse — twice telling Chauvin that he couldn’t detect the man’s heartbeat. But Chauvin did not remove his knees from Floyd’s body until nudged by a responding paramedic.
Thao claimed in a 2020 interview with state police investigators that he was unaware of what was going on behind him because he was too focused on the growing crowd. But his body-camera video appears to show him turning to look back at the other three officers atop Floyd several times.
A major question as the trial begins is whether Chauvin will be called as a witness in the case.
In his plea agreement last month, Chauvin said he heard Kueng tell him that Floyd no longer had a pulse. Chauvin also said he heard Lane ask him whether Floyd “should be rolled onto his side.”
But Chauvin said he “did not observe” Kueng, Lane or Thao “do or say anything” to get him to lift his knees from Floyd’s body — a claim that could prove pivotal in the cases against those former officers.
Last week, U.S. District Judge Paul A. Magnuson, who is overseeing the federal case, told prospective jurors to completely put aside their personal views and what they knew about Chauvin and the charges against him. “That is a completely different case,” the judge told jurors.
A panel of 12 jurors and six alternates was picked for the case Thursday — a selection that took just one day, compared to the two weeks it took to seat a jury in the Chauvin murder trial. The seated jury included seven women and five men. The six alternates included three men and three women. While the federal court did not release demographic information about the jury, pool reporters inside the courtroom said the panel appeared to be majority White.
The jury pool was picked from across Minnesota — a region that is more conservative and White compared to the state’s Hennepin County, where Chauvin’s trial was held. Most on the seated panel come from counties in and around the Twin Cities, but there are also jurors from places including Jackson County, along the state’s southwestern border with Iowa, and Olmsted County, in southeastern Minnesota.
Prosecutors are expected to take about a half-hour to deliver their opening statement. That will be followed by opening statements from the attorneys for Kueng, Lane and Thao, who each told the judge last week they planned to speak for about 20 to 30 minutes apiece.
Unlike Chauvin’s state trial, which was live-streamed, the latest proceedings won’t be televised because of a federal ban on cameras in the courtroom. The trial is being held in a seventh-floor courtroom inside a heavily fortified federal courthouse in downtown St. Paul. Layers of security fencing have been erected around the building, and surrounding roads have been closed amid concerns over protests.
Magnuson has repeatedly urged lawyers on both sides to act with speed, citing concerns about the spread of the coronavirus. Earlier this month, the judge said he hoped to finish the case in two weeks, though he later estimated a four-week trial during jury selection.
'The affinity goes both ways: just as the alt right loves the anti-choice movement, the anti-choice movement loves the alt right.' (photo: Steve Sanchez/Pacific Press/Rex/Shutterstock)
The white supremacist and anti-choice movements have always been closely linked. But more and more, they are becoming difficult to tell apart
These victories have made visible a growing cohort within the anti-choice movement: the militias and explicitly white supremacist groups of the organized far right. Like last year, this year’s March for Life featured an appearance by Patriot Front, a white nationalist group that wears a uniform of balaclavas and khakis. The group, which also marched at a Chicago March for Life demonstration earlier this month, silently handed out cards to members of the press who tried to ask them questions. “America belongs to its fathers, and it is owed to its sons,” the cards read. “The restoration of American sovereignty must follow the restoration of the American Family.”
Explicit white nationalism, and an emphasis on conscripting white women into reproduction, is not a fringe element of the anti-choice movement. Associations between white supremacist groups and anti-abortion forces are robust and longstanding. In addition to Patriot Front, groups like the white nationalist Aryan Nations and the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker party have also lent support to the anti-abortion movement. These groups see stopping abortion as part of a broader project to ensure white hegemony in addition to women’s subordination. Tim Bishop, of the Aryan Nations, noted that “Lots of our people join [anti-choice organizations] … It’s part of our Holy War for the pure Aryan race.” That the growing white nationalist movement would be focused on attacking women’s rights is maybe to be expected: research has long established that recruitment to the alt-right happens largely among men with grievances against feminism, and that misogyny is usually the first form of rightwing radicalization.
But the affinity goes both ways: just as the alt-right loves the anti-choice movement, the anti-choice movement loves the alt-right. In 2019, Kristen Hatten, a vice-president at the anti-choice group New Wave Feminists, shared racist content online and publicly identified herself as an “ethnonationalist”. In addition to sharing personnel, the groups share tactics. In 1985, the KKK began circulating “Wanted” posters featuring the photos and personal information of abortion providers. The posters were picked up by the anti-choice terrorist group Operation Rescue in the early 90s. Now, sharing names, photos and addresses of abortion providers and clinic staff is standard practice in the mainline anti-choice movement, and the stalking and doxing of providers has become routine. More recently, anti-abortion activists have escalated their violence, returning to the murderous extremism that characterized the movement in the 1990s: in Knoxville, a fire that burned down a planned parenthood clinic on New Year’s Eve was ruled an arson. Maybe the anti-choice crowd is taking tips from their friends in the alt-right.
It’s not that the anti-abortion movement’s embrace of white nationalism is totally uncomplicated. When the Traditionalist Worker party showed up at a Tennessee Right to Life march in 2018, the organizers shooed them off, and later issued a statement saying they condemned violence both from the right, and from leftwing groups like “antifa”. Hatten was fired from her anti-choice job after a public outcry. The anti-choice movement has even started trying to appropriate the language of social justice. They posit “equality” between embryos and women, try to brand abortion bans as “feminist”, incessantly compare abortion to the Holocaust, and claim that abortion is “an act rife with the potential for eugenic manipulation”, in the words of the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas. Anti-choice groups are eager to claim the moral authority of historical struggles against oppression, even as they work to further the oppression of women.
But the link between the anti-choice movement and white supremacy is much older and more fundamental than this recent, superficial social justice branding effort. Before an influx of southern and eastern European immigrants to the United States in the latter half of the 19th century, abortion and contraception had only been partially and sporadically criminalized. This changed in the early 20th century, when an additional surge of migrants from Asia and Latin America calcified white American racial anxieties and led to white elites decrying the falling white birth rate as “race suicide”.
Abortion bans were quickly introduced nationwide. As the historian Leslie Raegan put it, “White male patriotism demanded that maternity be enforced among white Protestant women.” The emerging popular eugenics movement supported this campaign of forced birth for “fit” mothers, while at the same time implementing a widespread campaign of involuntary sterilization among the poor, particularly Black women and incarcerated women. Meanwhile, white women who sought out voluntary sterilization were discouraged or outright denied the procedure, a practice that is still mainstream in the medical field today.
In the current anti-choice and white supremacist alliance, the language of “race suicide” has been supplanted by a similar fear: the so-called “Great Replacement”, a racist conspiracy theory that posits that white Americans are being “replaced” by people of color. (Some antisemitic variations posit that this “replacement” is somehow being orchestrated by Jewish people.)
The way to combat this, the right says, is to force childbearing among white people, to severely restrict immigration, and to punish, via criminalization and enforced poverty, women of color. These anxieties have always animated the anti-choice movement, and they have only become more fervent among the March for Life’s rank and file as conservatives become increasingly fixated on the demographic changes that will make America a minority-white country sometime in the coming decades. The white supremacist and anti-choice movements have always been closely linked. But more and more, they are becoming difficult to tell apart.
A man checks his phone near a Google Corporate Office on April 13, 2021 in New York. (photo: John Smith/VIEWpress/Getty Images)
Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said the “attorneys general are bringing a case based on inaccurate claims and outdated assertions about our settings.”
“Google falsely led consumers to believe that changing their account and device settings would allow customers to protect their privacy and control what personal data the company could access,” Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine’s office said in a statement. “The truth is that contrary to Google’s representations it continues to systematically surveil customers and profit from customer data. Google’s bold misrepresentations are a clear violation of consumers’ privacy.”
Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson also said his office was filing a lawsuit against Google on Monday.
Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said the “attorneys general are bringing a case based on inaccurate claims and outdated assertions about our settings. We have always built privacy features into our products and provided robust controls for location data. We will vigorously defend ourselves and set the record straight.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton alleged Google misled consumers by continuing to track their location even when users sought to prevent it.
Google has a “Location History” setting and informs users if they turn it off “the places you go are no longer stored,” Texas said.
Google “continues to track users’ location through other settings and methods that it fails to adequately disclose,” Texas said.
Ferguson noted in 2020, Google made nearly $150 billion from advertising. “Location data is key to Google’s advertising business. Consequently, it has a financial incentive to dissuade users from withholding access to that data,” Ferguson’s office said in a statement Monday.
In May 2020, Arizona filed a similar lawsuit against Google over its collection of location data of users. That lawsuit is pending.
Lourdes Maldonado. (photo: YouTube)
The killing of Lourdes Maldonado in Tijuana is the second murder of a journalist in the border city in a week, and the third this year so far across Mexico.
Maldonado was the second journalist murdered in Tijuana in less than a week and the third killed in total in Mexico during an especially bloody start for the country’s beleaguered press corp this year.
Maldonado was gunned down Sunday evening inside a car, according to the Baja California state prosecutor’s office. After news of her death broke, video of her March 2019 plea for help to the president was widely shared on social media, with both national and international press expressing outrage at yet another journalist casualty during López Obrador's presidential term.
The video was filmed during López Obrador's daily morning news conference and showed Maldonado specifically call out Jaime Bonilla, a well-known businessman and politician in Baja California and a member of the president’s ruling MORENA party. Bonilla served as a Baja California state senator in 2018, and later became the state governor in November 2019—just over seven months after Maldonado denounced him at the president’s news conference. Bonilla left office in 2021 after serving a two-year governorship.
Maldonado had reportedly been involved in a nine-year-long legal dispute with a local television company owned by Bonilla after her position was unjustly terminated and she was owed back wages. She announced that she'd won the case just days before her murder.
After calling out Bonilla by name at the presidential press conference, Maldonado joined Mexico’s Journalist Protection Mechanism, according to the press freedom organization Article 19. The government protections promise to safeguard threatened journalists and human rights defenders, generally including police protection. Prominent local news magazine Zeta Tijuana—where Maldonado had previously collaborated—said that she joined the protection mechanism after receiving threats from “envoys” of Bonilla.
Bonilla, a fairly prolific tweeter who regularly posts about López Obrador and the Morena party, has not tweeted or made a public comment about Maldonado’s death. Baja California police have yet to make any arrests for her murder, or announce any suspects.
Maldonado’s killing came as Tijuana’s journalist community was already reeling from the January 17 murder of photojournalist Margarito MartÃnez, who was gunned down at his home in Tijuana. The border city regularly ranks as one of the deadliest cities in Mexico with the highest total murder count in the country.
A third journalist, José Luis Gamboa, was stabbed to death in the eastern state of Veracruz on January 10, while a fourth journalist named Jaime Vargas barely survived an assassination attempt in the city of southeast city of Merida last week.
Although Mexico is widely considered one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists, López Obrador has largely downplayed the issue and blamed it on the failed policies of his predecessors since entering office in December 2018. The journalists who are targeted are mostly local Mexican journalists, many of them working in violent states outside the capital.
During his morning news conference Monday, López Obrador expressed his condolences to Maldonado's family, before acknowledging the previous allegations made by the journalist against Bonilla.
“It’s not possible to automatically link a labor-type lawsuit to a crime, it is not responsible to advance any trial,” said López Obrador, asking the media not to immediately pass judgement on Bonilla.
“A thorough investigation has to be carried out, this investigation is being carried out, like all others.”
Environmental hazards, including polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs, were repeatedly found at Sky Valley Education Center's campus in Monroe, Washington. The school is still open. (photo: Steve Ringman/The Seattle Times)
The EPA and others warned about potential contamination as far back as 2014. But Washington state law does not require schools or health departments to act on those findings.
Some students and staff at Sky Valley Education Center, an alternative public school in Monroe, also had strange symptoms: cognitive problems, skin cysts, girls as young as 6 suddenly hitting puberty.
Leahy, like others, eventually became too sick to return to campus. She developed uterine cancer as her other symptoms escalated.
“Who would ever think that the job that you love was making you sick?” Leahy, 62, said.
She didn’t know it then, about seven years ago, but her classroom contained some of the highest levels of toxic chemicals found at Sky Valley. Inspections and environmental testing across campus found an amalgam of harmful environmental conditions, including very high levels of carbon dioxide, poor air ventilation and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, a banned, synthetic chemical that the Environmental Protection Agency has linked to some cancers and other illnesses.
School administrators, however, knew.
Health inspectors flagged problems on campus as early as 2014, a year before Leahy’s health began to fail. But even as parents complained, again and again, about suspected environmental hazards there, school officials offered reassurances that cleanup efforts at Sky Valley were successful.
Records obtained by The Seattle Times in a public disclosure request show that Monroe School District officials responded slowly, at times asserting, even in official reports to the EPA, they had cleared the campus of toxic material, though in fact it still lingered in buildings.
To this day, federal officials still are pressing Monroe schools to clear the campus of PCB-laden material and address other environmental hazards. And to this day, Sky Valley remains open.
Ultimately more than 200 teachers, parents and students would claim that exposure at Sky Valley made them severely sick with illnesses that have been linked to PCB exposure. The saga at Sky Valley unfolded in a remarkable lawsuit against the manufacturers of PCBs, producing some of the largest-ever jury awards for individuals exposed to the chemical.
The litigation revealed a startling gap in Washington state law — readily acknowledged by government officials in court documents — that allows environmental hazards to fester in schools and may have implications for older schools across the state.
State law requires health districts to inspect schools for environmental hazards and propose actions — but they are not required to enforce their findings. Although school districts are broadly required to maintain a healthy environment, they don’t have to act on all health recommendations.
And if inspections find certain toxic chemicals, including PCBs, state law doesn’t require administrators to notify parents, students or staff of the results.
As a result of those gaps, the Monroe School District and the health agency for the county, the Snohomish Health District, haven’t faced any penalties from regulators relating to Sky Valley.
It’s unclear if Sky Valley is an outlier or a bellwether among the roughly 9,000 school buildings in Washington because the state has not done a comprehensive survey of the environmental health of schools.
But seven years ago, state environment officials said they were “especially concerned” about schools’ potential to expose people to PCBs, which were banned by the EPA in 1979 but still remain in some structures built before then.
State Rep. Gerry Pollet, D-Seattle, said Washington’s state law is exceptionally weak when it comes to environmental health in schools, which he learned last year when he helped pass a law requiring testing for lead in school drinking water.
School districts have resisted mandatory testing and cleanup laws because they do not want to be held financially responsible for expensive remediation when it is demanded, Pollet said.
“If you have a contaminated gas station, we clean it up for the health of the community,” he said. “But if you have the same contamination inside the school building, we act like it’s exempt from our standards of toxic exposure and cleanup. And that is a really sad and serious failing of state policy.”
The Monroe School District did not respond to questions about conditions at Sky Valley and declined to make officials available for interviews, including its superintendent. School board members did not respond to requests for comment. Instead, the district directed The Seattle Times to a lawyer and a 456-page consultant’s report that defends the district’s handling of Sky Valley.
The report defends the district’s communication with parents and teachers about the unfolding problem and says officials addressed PCBs appropriately. It notes that, although Washington mandates that schools maintain safe conditions, “none of these requirements are specific to PCBs in building materials.”
Leahy eventually transferred out of Sky Valley to another school, as did several other teachers, before retiring to Spokane, where she now lives.
One memory is particularly haunting for her: setting up an inflatable planetarium once a week to teach immersive astronomy lessons to some of the brightest STEM students, about 20 at a time.
But with little air circulation inside the chamber, Leahy now believes her immersive lessons unwittingly intensified children’s exposure to harmful chemicals in the air and carpet. Many of her students became ill around this time.
“I had no idea,” she said, dissolving into tears. “I was poisoning my students.”
“And It Is Safe”
Monroe, a small city nestled near the Cascade foothills northeast of Seattle, is home to one of the largest public parental co-op programs in the state: Sky Valley Education Center. Launched in 1998, it offers K-12 students individual learning plans that include hands-on environmental science courses and self-directed Montessori instruction.
The popular, 700-student program once occupied a vacant warehouse. In 2011, it moved to an aging campus when the district consolidated middle schools, giving the program bigger classrooms, a gymnasium and outdoor space.
The toxicants that would creep into classrooms and hallways predated Sky Valley’s move. The lights and caulking were infused with PCBs, an effective preservative popular in school construction before research revealed its toxicity in the 1970s.
Within three years of moving, decades-old fluorescent lights at Sky Valley started to fail, district records show. The fixtures smoked, caught fire and dripped sticky yellow oil.
Teachers began raising concerns. One teacher pieced together staff and student symptoms and raised suspicions about PCBs. In April 2014, Sky Valley Principal Karen Rosencrans emailed staff the first of many reassurances that the district had the problem under control.
“Our building is quirky and old and sometimes a challenge. But it is ours. And it is safe,” Rosencrans wrote, assuring parents that the district would remove and replace faulty lights. Rosencrans directed questions to the school district, which declined to comment on the contamination.
Two weeks later, a school district consultant carried out the first of at least half a dozen inspections conducted over the next seven years. It found elevated concentrations of PCBs in a science prep area near classrooms.
While the EPA does not set standards for indoor PCB concentrations, it offers “recommended” thresholds in schools that increase by age, aimed at reducing potential for harm. “They should not be interpreted nor applied as ‘bright line’ or ‘not-to-exceed’ criteria, but may be used to guide thoughtful evaluation of indoor air quality in schools,” the agency says of its recommended limits. In Sky Valley, the PCB levels exceeded the threshold for infants and toddlers.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has linked PCB exposure to impaired memory and learning ability, skin conditions, liver problems and other illnesses. Animal studies connect the chemical to thyroid and hormone problems, neurological damage and some cancers, depending on the number, length and dose of the exposures.
It’s difficult to tell exactly what levels of PCB exposures pose immediate harms, but growing research on the toxicity of the chemical has shown stronger ties to illnesses, said Keri Hornbuckle, director of the University of Iowa’s Superfund Research Program, an academic leader in studying airborne PCBs. “It only gets worse year after year.”
Some states enforce limits on indoor PCB concentrations, including Vermont and Massachusetts. Washington does not.
Later that year, the school district’s consultant, Seattle-based EHSI, returned to Sky Valley, this time looking for other hazards. It said complaints of headaches, sinus issues and sneezing among teachers and students were likely due to ventilation problems, which led to a buildup of pollutants. The inspection wasn’t focused on PCBs, but it found high carbon dioxide levels and some mold on campus, and the consultant recommended improving ventilation and removing carpets that can absorb toxic substances.
Over the course of a year, the school district removed 67 light fixtures suspected to contain PCBs, cleaned more than 100 other lights and removed some carpets from classrooms, district reports said. It later estimated it spent at least $1.6 million cleaning up Sky Valley, including money for testing, new lights and custodial services.
Rosencrans and Monroe schools’ operations director, John Mannix, sent a letter to teachers and parents in late 2015 assuring them that all areas were cleaned and treated according to EPA guidelines. Mannix, who now works at Mukilteo schools, did not respond to an interview request.
But that wasn’t the opinion of the Snohomish Health District, which raised red flags just two weeks later.
“Our concern is that PCB ballasts might have been missed when this issue was addressed last year,” wrote Snohomish health inspector Amanda Zych, according to records obtained by the Times. Among her observations: One classroom carpet suspected to have absorbed PCB oil was duct-taped down instead of taken out.
The district removed the duct-taped carpet and commissioned more air samples. This time the PCB concentrations were higher than in earlier tests, district records show.
Parents flooded the Snohomish Health District with dozens of complaints, records show. Kids reported headaches, breathing problems and thyroid and hormonal issues. Parents, students and teachers say they developed cysts and mouth sores; their skin cracked, peeled and changed pigment.
As the health crisis at Sky Valley was playing out, the EPA’s regional office found “several cities in Washington that we think would be a good place to look for PCBs in school lighting ballasts,” including Monroe, an official wrote in an email relating to a planned program to proactively examine schools for PCBs.
It’s likely the chemical is seeping into old campuses across the country without public knowledge, Hornbuckle said. “It’s not whether [PCBs] are there or whether they are toxic. We know they’re there and we know they’re harmful. The question is what do we do to address it.”
But without a requirement to test for PCBs in schools — and no requirement to disclose results if tests are performed — there’s no way to know how many campuses might have harmful PCBs in the air.
“The Smoking Gun”
By 2016, two years into the unfolding crisis at Sky Valley, administrators were giving regular updates to families reassuring them that the campus was safe.
Behind the scenes, emails show apparent dysfunction among school, health and environmental officials about how to tackle the problem. The Snohomish Health District looped in the state health and ecology departments, eventually triggering direct EPA involvement.
That February, an official from the state health department told other agencies that she didn’t think further air sampling at Sky Valley was necessary, records show. She suggested “a thorough wipe down of hard surfaces with warm soapy water and a thorough vacuum.”
A state toxicologist forwarded the email to an EPA official in charge of PCB remediation in the Pacific Northwest, writing, “Have you been looped into this? I’m not sure soapy water is the answer.”
It is not, according to EPA rules, which outline specific solvents needed to clean PCBs. The agency also recommends, but doesn’t require, removing all PCB-containing fixtures.
It’s unclear what it would cost to remove contaminated light fixtures from Washington’s public schools because the state doesn’t know the extent of the problem, a 2015 state Department of Ecology report says. In New York City, officials estimated a decade ago that it would cost about $708 million to clear PCB-laden lights from 772 schools built before 1979.
After the interagency email exchange, the EPA’s regional office stepped in to direct Sky Valley’s cleanup effort. “We’re anxious to understand the state of PCBs in the school,” Michelle Mullin, who oversees the EPA’s regional PCB program, wrote in late February 2016.
The EPA soon inspected the school, finding PCBs in several light fixtures, according to federal environmental records.
On April 21, 2016, the EPA talked with Monroe School District officials about its findings, recommending additional cleanup steps, records show.
Just hours later, as day faded into evening, nearly 100 parents filed into rows of folding chairs that lined the gymnasium at Frank Wagner Elementary School, a newer campus down the street from Sky Valley.
Speaking to the crowd, school officials emphasized that PCB levels weren’t high enough to exceed the EPA’s guidelines, according to The Monroe Monitor. Rosencrans, the Sky Valley principal, noted that some teachers had gotten so sick that they couldn’t return to campus, but others were in good health.
Deep cleaning was underway to address the campus’s environmental problems, school officials told the parents.
But parents — who confronted officials for the next three and a half hours — feared that regulatory standards weren’t enough to keep children safe.
“I just want to assert the fact that there might not be the science behind combining slightly elevated PCB levels, slightly elevated asbestos levels, slightly elevated radon levels, but when you combine all of those, we are the smoking gun,” said Shelby Keyser, whose children experienced some symptoms. “My kids are the smoking gun.”
She turned to other parents and asked them to raise a hand if their children, too, were a “smoking gun” example, The Monroe Monitor reported. The majority of the parents in the room raised their hands.
Still Not Cleaned
Six weeks after the tense town hall, the EPA found that PCB levels rose after cleanup, reaching the highest concentrations yet, according to an agency memo. These levels put anyone up to age 19 at risk, based on recommended thresholds.
Parents grew more desperate. Their complaints were not prompting aggressive action, so they turned to social media, forming a Healthy Sky Valley Advocacy Group on Facebook, with daily or weekly posts encouraging parents to report illnesses and sharing articles about PCB exposure.
A Change.org petition calling for the school district to relocate Sky Valley students was signed by 568 people and listed names of friends and family who had fallen ill at Sky Valley.
Some parents reluctantly pulled their children from the program. Teachers quit or sought reassignments or filed workers’ compensation claims, although the district would not say how many staffers left Sky Valley during this time frame.
“We really tried everything,” one mother told The Seattle Times. She withdrew her children from the school after they experienced severe health complications, including cognitive problems and early puberty. She requested anonymity for her children’s privacy. “We tried to get the school district to listen. We tried to get the health district to listen. We did all of this stuff and still nobody would listen.”
In fall 2017, the EPA delivered a clean bill of health to Sky Valley after district officials certified in writing that all PCB-containing light fixtures had been removed and that a litany of problems had been resolved, completing a multipoint plan the district had penned at the EPA’s request.
But that wasn’t the case.
Contrary to what Monroe School District reported to the EPA — and to parents — federal inspectors in October 2019 found PCBs in “multiple” light fixtures and in an air filter, discovered that classroom carpet that had been previously flagged hadn’t been fully removed, and raised concerns about PCB-laden caulk in the walls, EPA documents show.
They raised the same problems a year later.
“We are very concerned that PCB contaminated fixtures continue to be found, six years into the process of inspecting and taking inventory, cleaning and removing and disposing of light fixtures,” the EPA wrote in November 2020. “The EPA recommends [Sky Valley] address these concerns with more urgency than has yet been demonstrated.”
The EPA can penalize the district and school, the letter reads. That would be a rare step for the agency, and Bill Dunbar, a regional EPA spokesperson, would not comment on whether it plans to fine the district.
Last year, Monroe School officials again committed to addressing lingering problems, submitting a plan to the EPA. That plan still “did not fully meet our expectations,” so the EPA offered guidance, Dunbar said.
Removing PCB-laden light fixtures is a “no-brainer,” said Hornbuckle, the director of Iowa’s Superfund Research Program. While it wouldn’t completely clear the campus of PCBs, it would likely mitigate one of the highest exposure risks.
“Removing those PCB ballasts is something the state should be doing,” she said, adding that replacing outdated fixtures with energy-efficient lights has saved other schools money.
For some Sky Valley families, the consequences of the delayed action were devastating.
“This Stuff Is Everywhere”
In a King County courtroom last summer, Sky Valley teachers described their deteriorating health to a jury. Experts testified about the scientific links between PCBs and brain damage.
Convinced of the connection, a jury awarded three teachers, including Leahy, $185 million for exposure to PCBs at Sky Valley. Four months later, eight parents, teachers and students won a collective $62 million jury award against Monsanto, the chemical manufacturer of PCBs.
The litigation has resulted in one of the largest awards nationwide for individual PCB exposures. The Sky Valley verdicts include punitive damages, which are allowed under state law in Missouri, where Monsanto was headquartered.
In all, more than 200 parents and teachers have sued, claiming brain damage from exposure to PCBs. At least 17 other lawsuits are awaiting trial.
The complaints catalog many illnesses, but the lawsuits focus on linking cognitive problems to PCB exposure. It’s difficult to link illnesses to specific chemical exposures without more scientific research into their effects.
Bayer Pharmaceuticals, which in 2018 acquired chemical giant Monsanto, denied the allegations both in the lawsuit and in a statement. The company plans to appeal the jury verdicts.
Many parents, teachers and students with pending lawsuits declined to speak to The Seattle Times.
Leahy, now retired, said she doesn’t expect to collect her share of the $185 million jury award. “But it was never about the money. It was the only way to get the public to listen.”
The PCB exposure impaired Leahy’s memory and brain function. She couldn’t stand in a Sky Valley classroom without having headaches, dizziness and breathing problems, she said.
Others testified in court that their children developed depression and suicidal tendencies.
Cheryl Tye Pritchett, a mother who joined her children on campus multiple times a week until late 2016, testified in court that she developed a persistent cough, stomachaches and eventually fogginess and memory issues.
“I’m afraid to find out how severely damaged I am,” Tye Pritchett told a jury. Her children also got sick, she said.
Leahy’s attorney, Rick Friedman, whose firm represents all the Sky Valley plaintiffs, said the lawsuits point to a larger problem, which may be unfolding in schools across the state and nation.
“It’s kind of like lead paint in schools from a decade ago,” Friedman said. “How long until we realize that this stuff is everywhere?”
Pollet, the state lawmaker, said after learning about the Sky Valley saga from The Times that he intends to raise PCB concerns with fellow lawmakers this legislative session.
But he expects school districts to argue, as with lead testing, that remediation of PCBs would be financially devastating.
In 2020, Washington became the first state to successfully sue Monsanto over PCBs, in a lawsuit focused on the chemical in waterways. The chemical giant settled for $95 million, nearly $60 million of which went to the state’s general fund, where the Legislature can direct it to remediation of waterways — or other exposure points, including schools.
“Not Enforceable by Law”
The Sky Valley litigation originally took aim at the Monroe School District and Snohomish Health District, accusing the agencies of negligence for the slowly unfolding crisis at Sky Valley.
But King County Superior Court Judge Theresa Doyle dismissed the health district from the lawsuit after the district argued that loosely written state laws do not require enforcement or action when health inspectors find hazards at schools.
Heather Thomas, a spokesperson for the Snohomish Health District, said in an email that “a general duty by a public agency to inspect schools is just that — a duty to the general public only, and it does not result in a specific duty to enforce in this instance.”
Monroe School District also pointed to an absence in state and federal law of any requirement to remove PCB-laden material. It argued in court documents that it complied with EPA guidelines, and PCB light removal can take “5-10 years.” State and federal environmental agencies recommend removing lights before they leak, but these “recommendations are not enforceable by law,” reads the district’s report defending its actions at Sky Valley.
The school district, in declining interview requests, cited a sealed settlement proposal with Sky Valley teachers, parents and students that has not yet been finalized.
The district told the Times in July — after the first jury award — that the school has been cleared of PCB material.
But an EPA spokesperson said the agency is waiting on Monroe School District to submit a cleanup plan before it can make a “formal decision,” which could include another inspection, giving the school an all-clear, or issuing fines.
Meanwhile, at the state level, environmental officials, who flagged PCBs in schools as a research priority as early as 2015, are just now building a database of potential PCB hot spots after being delayed by a legislative appropriation.
The department only started surveying school districts last summer, beginning in Eastern Washington. The results of the survey should help the state know whether Sky Valley is an outlier or a bellwether.
“How many kids are sitting in classrooms exposed to PCBs and they don’t even know it,” Leahy said. “How could they know? It doesn’t hit you immediately. It’s like a slow death. You just get sicker and sicker and sicker until it’s too late.”
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