Today's headlines:
- Middle schoolers in North Idaho are bringing drugs to school. Kootenai County officials can’t decide whose job it is to stop them.
- Ambulances have been giving rides to Bonner County residents who don’t have any other way to get from the hospital back to a nursing home. But the county's Emergency Medical Services says someone else needs to fill that gap.
- State support for rural Washington fire districts won’t get the ax after all. The latest legislative session restored $60 million to the Department of Natural Resources for firefighting and [prevention projects.
Plus, SPR News is launching our "Tastemakers" series—interviews with the people shaping the art and culture we consume—with a conversation between SPR's Owen Henderson and NPR's Stephen Thompson. Thompson is a regular co-host of NPR’s "Pop Culture Happy Hour," a prolific pop charts analyst, and a passionate Tiny Desk curator. Hear more of his thoughts on Spotify algorithms, his pop culture hot take, and why he thinks joy is integral to any media diet here.
TRANSCRIPT
[THEME MUSIC]
OWEN HENDERSON: From Spokane Public Radio, it’s SPR News Today.
I’m Owen Henderson. It’s Thursday, April 16, 2026.
On today’s show, Kootenai County officials agree they want to stop students from bringing drugs to school. But they’re split on who should be regulating searches.
Plus, several wildfire fighting and prevention programs have been saved from the chopping block in Washington—after lawmakers put back the money they cut last year.
And SPR is launching its Tastemakers series, where we’ll bring you conversations with the local, regional and national figures shaping the media, art and culture we consume in the Inland Northwest. Our first guest? The man who came up with Tiny Desk Concerts: Stephen Thompson.
Those stories and more, coming up on SPR News Today.
[FADE OUT THEME]
Officials in Kootenai County want to stop students from bringing drugs to school. But they can’t agree on who should make the rules.
SPR’s Eliza Billingham has more.
ELIZA BILLINGHAM: Last school year, staff in the Post Falls, Coeur d’Alene and Lakeland School Districts found middle schoolers with drugs or drug paraphernalia 17 times.
This school year, it’s up to 24 so far. In the high schools, the number of incidents range from 30-40.
One strategy to discourage students from bringing drugs to school is random K9 searches.
But Kootenai County Commissioner Bruce Mattare told his board this week that too many K9 searches aren’t really random—schools announce when the searches will happen.
BRUCE MATTARE: “If you're giving notice of the week that you're going to be bringing a dog into the school, it defeats the purpose of trying to discourage kids from bringing drugs to school except for that particular week.”
EB: The County helps fund school resource officers. Mattare wants to modify those officers’ contracts to make sure K9 searches can be truly random.
Commissioner Leslie Duncan agrees with the intent, but says the county shouldn’t get involved.
LESLIE DUNCAN: “We're the Board of County Commissioners, we are not the school boards…The school board is directly responsible to the parents. We are not. So I’d rather that the school boards make these decisions and if the school board wants it in a contract then they can let us know.”
EB: It’s now up to the sheriff to go to the school boards and resource officers to see what they want done.
I’m Eliza Billingham, reporting.
— — —
OH: Ambulances have been giving rides to Bonner County residents who don’t have any other way to get from the hospital back to a nursing home.
But County Emergency Medical Services Chief Jeff Lindsey says someone else needs to fill that gap.
JEFF LINDSEY: “We don't mind sitting at the table and trying to figure out if there's something that we can do, but we're certainly not going to give free rides to people from the hospital back to a nursing home when the nursing home is taking in dollars for these patients—should be trying to figure out how to either pay forward or transport these patients.”
OH: Most nursing homes in rural Idaho have drivers during normal business hours.
But if a patient at the hospital is released after 6 p.m. or before 8 a.m., they’re pretty much stranded.
Bonner County’s EMS advisory council says this is an issue around the country, but less rural areas typically have more “after-hours” options.
The Bonner County Ambulance District faced bankruptcy more than a year ago.
But after separating from the county this year, it’s in a stronger financial position than it has been in a long time.
So, officials say stopping the free rides would keep it that way.
— — —
Washington’s support for rural fire districts won’t get the ax after all.
The supplemental budgets passed this year saw $60 million restored to the Department of Natural Resources for projects related to firefighting and fire reduction in state forests.
Lawmakers cut that funding last year.
Lands Commissioner Dave Upthegrove says grant programs would have been severely reduced without the renewed funding.
DAVE UPTHEGROVE: “We provide a lot of support to small rural fire districts, including volunteer districts. We provide surplus engines, we provide grants for equipment, grants for training, and those were slated to be reduced by 90%.”
OH: Another effort that faced cuts was one that trains private parties to do prescribed burns to reduce fire danger.
DNR can now hold a training for that program at Spokane Falls Community College later this year.
[SHORT MUSIC BED]
Some listeners might recognize Stephen Thompson as a regular co-host of NPR’s “Pop Culture Happy Hour.”
You may also know him as one of the originators of Tiny Desk Concerts.
Or maybe you’ve just heard him report on the pop music charts.
But he’s certainly had an effect on the media diets—and tastes—of many.
That’s why SPR is launching our series “Tastemakers” through a conversation with Thompson.
We’ll be speaking with local, regional and national figures shaping the art and culture we consume.
I sat down with Thompson in the SPR studio for a wide-ranging chat, starting with his reporting on the music industry.
There must only be so many times you can go, ‘Well, Taylor Swift is at the—her album is at number one for the nth week in a row. Morgan Wallen is continuing to dominate the Billboard Top 100.’ How do you make it interesting for yourself?
STEPHEN THOMPSON: One of the benefits of covering the Billboard charts for me is that when I was a teenager, I was obsessed with Billboard magazine and obsessed with Casey Kasem's American Top 40, Rick Dees Weekly Top 40. These aired on local pop stations in central Wisconsin where I grew up. I had spiral-bound notebooks, and I would transcribe the charts. I was fascinated with the charts as this imperfect metric for capturing what people are actually listening to.
And so when NPR started covering the pop charts, my colleague Anastasia Tsioulcas was doing a weekly column and kind of starting to do newscast spots about the Billboard charts. I was very jealous, but it's like, I'm not going to try to take it from Anastasia, who's a genius and an extremely kind and generous colleague. But then Anastasia took a fellowship and took some time off. And one of my editors came to me and was like, ‘How would you feel about doing this Billboard column?’ And I was like, ‘I would almost do that for free.’
I'm fascinated by the way the charts are manipulated. And that sounds really cynical, but like manipulation of pop charts is a huge part of how the music industry operates and the way that we are experiencing music as phenomena and the way we are kind of told what is popular and what is successful is often dictated by these unseen market forces or by market forces that are happening off in a corner of the universe that you don't occupy. And so sometimes a new Billboard chart will drop and I'll be like, ‘Oh, I wonder what's number one. Is it Taylor Swift or Morgan Wallen?’ And then you find out that Travis Scott released 200,000 copies of his—some mixtape on vinyl that he shipped through his web store. But because he shipped them on a certain day within this chart window, all of a sudden, the number one album in the country is this Travis Scott mixtape that you only have a passing familiarity that it exists.
That to me is really interesting because I don't want as a music fan, as a music snob, as somebody who listens to tons and tons of music for my job and does it as a passion and as a deep, deep fan of a broad range of music, I want to know what people are actually listening to. I want to know what people actually like. If a friend comes to me and says, ‘I like artist XYZ,’ I not only want to know what they're talking about, but I want to be able to say, like, ‘Oh, you like XYZ, you should try ABC.’
And so to me, covering the charts is just a big part of being a well-rounded music fan. And so I stay interested in it. It sounds like a—was it a tautology? It's like, I'm able to stay interested in it because I find it fascinating.
OH: If a young person came to you and said, “This is kind of the only world I know of music—is Spotify. But I'm interested in building a music taste for myself. How do I do that in the age of streaming when maybe using the Spotify app results in you just hearing things that you've already heard in the app already knows that you like?’ What advice would you have?
ST: The advice that I would give is to find human curators that you trust and listen to them, follow them on social media. There are still working music journalists and kind of working music curators. Make sure that you're kind of paying attention to what those folks are writing. And like anything in this algorithmically driven marketplace, it's just so important for human beings to have friends and to talk to their friends about what they're enjoying and share the music and art that they love. Go to concerts, go to gallery openings, go to book signings, go to every cultural event that you can possibly find and share those experiences with your friends and with your family as much as humanly possible.
And, you know, if I may be incredibly self-serving for a moment, watch Tiny Desk Concerts. Tiny Desk Concerts are extremely thoughtfully curated. I can tell you that that process is byzantine and complicated and involves a lot of people who care deeply and passionately about music, who are not consulting with algorithms for anything that they're doing in relation to music. Everybody who is booked at the Tiny Desk is beloved by somebody who is involved in making Tiny Desk Concerts. And that's such a big part of it. And this doesn't just have to be Tiny Desk Concerts.
Find passionately curated music spaces, support those spaces, not only with your money, but with your time. That's a really good way to not only put yourself outside of the reach of those algorithms, but to dictate what those algorithms themselves are pulling from.
OH: This is a moment where a lot of people feel the need to be plugged in all the time to the very serious and very real myriad of issues happening in their state, in their city, in their country, around the world. And I know, speaking with some of my friends, sometimes people feel guilty for spending time consuming content that is about pop culture, about music that is meant to be satirical. And given your time at The Onion and given the role you are in right now, I wanted to ask you to make a case for the creation and pursuit of parodic and fluffier topics in the media.
ST: Yeah, I think that any well-rounded cultural diet and any well-rounded media diet has to include things that bring you joy. I truly believe that there is no shame in joy. You should not feel guilty for experiencing joy. Life is about balance. Life is about understanding that you are going to experience joy. You are going to experience grief. You are going to experience sadness. You are going to experience anger. You're going to experience resignation and depression and wonder. And all of those things are swirled up as part of the human experience. And why should culture be any different?
I'm not somebody who's out there saying life should only be joy, right? But I don't really vibe with people who, and they're very often behind keyboards. They're very often on Bluesky and telling you, ‘What is this dross? You know, you should only be listening to…’ you know. It's like any diet, right? Like ‘You should only be eating unflavored bran.’ Okay, no, I don't wanna. Each one of us gets one wild and precious life. We should experience the full panoply of emotions available to us. We should experience the whole panoply of media available to us. Why should I be limited by what someone else thinks I should consume? So to me, I don't feel guilty about it.
I certainly understand that the world is a very serious place. But George Bernard Shaw has a quote—and I'm gonna butcher it for you right now. It's basically, ‘Life does not cease to be funny when people are sad any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.’ Understanding that all of those things are constantly coming in and out of balance is just part of being a human in the world. And so it's fine to laugh when things are hard. It's fine to cry when things are going well. We're all just regulating that as best we can.
OH: Stephen Thompson, thank you so much for coming to the studio. It's been a real pleasure.
ST: Oh my gosh, thank you. This has been a joy.
OH: You can find more of this conversation—like Thompson’s pop culture hot takes, what he thinks makes for a good Tiny Desk concert and more—on our website: Spokane Public Radio dot org.
[SHORT MUSIC BED]
SPR News Today is a production of Spokane Public Radio.
Reporting today was contributed by Eliza Billingham, Steve Jackson and me, Owen Henderson.
I’m also your host and producer. Eliza Billingham provides digital support.
Thanks for listening.
It’s SPR.
