Today's headlines:
- Spokane’s school district has a cell phone ban for students. Now, Washington’s governor wants a statewide ban, as he proposed recently in Spokane.
- Among the candidates on Spokane’s November ballot, the two potential replacements for the county’s top election official.
- Canada proposes to ship crude oil from Alberta to Vancouver, British Columbia. Washington state officials worry about the potential effect environmental effects on Puget Sound.
- Audrey Nelson talks with the creator of a new documentary about a 1955 civil rights event, “The Boys of Boise.” The film will be screened tomorrow night in Coeur d’Alene.
__________________________________________________________
Washington Governor Bob Ferguson is promoting his proposal to ban students from using phones during the school day. SPR’s Ember Braun has the details.
Ferguson visited the Lewis and Clark High School gym Friday, along with students, teachers and administrators. He touted his proposal to ban devices for students, like phones and smart watches, from the first bell to the last in Washington state public schools.
It’s called the “away for the day” policy.
Ferguson: “More and more we’re seeing states moving to this policy, getting phones out of classrooms, and I’m confident that in 10 years, every state in the country will have a policy like this. I don’t have any doubt about it. And Washington simply can’t wait any longer, we can’t be the last state to do this.”
Many school districts, including Spokane, are already doing this in one form or another.
If the proposal makes it through the legislature, Ferguson wants school districts to implement it by September of 2027.
I’m Ember Braun reporting.
___________________________________________________________________
Ballots will be mailed to Washington voters next week for the November election.
The candidates for Spokane County auditor each say they’re dedicated to making sure the state’s vote-by-mail system will continue. That’s despite attempts by the federal government to limit or even stop the practice. This is Republican Michael Cathcart, speaking at an NAACP forum last week in Spokane.
Michael Cathcart: “I fully believe that everybody should have the right to vote in the manner in which that is most effective for them. And so if that is mail-in, as it is for a vast majority of folks, great. We need to make sure that we are protecting that and keeping that going. If it's an in-person option that folks want, I would love to create more options for voter service centers, mobile service centers, places where you can go to get that assistance to vote in person.”
Cathcart’s opponent, Democrat Callie Gee, says she wants to bolster trust in the county’s voting system.
Callie Gee: “Letting people know that there are really great ways where you can track your ballot, make sure that it was counted. And also I think we should improve in faster ballot processing. All of those coming together with public trust, the only way that people are going to trust our county government is if they can see it. We can't just demand that they trust us.”
Gee says she would create a bipartisan committee to study voter mistrust of the election system and recommend ways to address that.
You can hear the forum featuring Cathcart and Gee on this week’s Inland Journal, Thursday at 12:30 on SPR News.
_____________________________________________________________________
The Washington attorney general’s office now has a permanent sexual assault support team. It’s a group that will help local law enforcement to investigate sexual assault and human trafficking cases.
The attorney general says it’s an extension of an initiative that gave local law enforcement help with testing sexual assault kits that were waiting for identification. The office says, at the peak, there were more than 100,000 untested kits.
A federal grant that made this possible ended last Wednesday. But the attorney general’s office received funding from the legislature in 2024 to continue this work with the new support team.
The attorney general’s office says the team will help catch perpetrators and support survivors.
________________________________________________________________________
A nonprofit that runs a statewide ICE reporting hotline recently laid off more than half its staff — citing financial woes. It comes at a time when immigration enforcement has reached new highs. KUOW’s Gustavo Sagrero reports.
The Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network is most known for its hotline and rapid response network.
They respond to ICE activity in the community with resources, and track potential constitutional rights violations. Staff say the hotline receives around a thousand calls a week.
In September, the nonprofit terminated 18 of its 32 employees. A majority of those workers had formed a union. They wanted a voice at the decision table, saying the hotline was understaffed, among other issues. They claim the staff cuts were in retaliation.
A spokesperson from WAISN’s says the group has struggled with a funding loss from government sources and private donors.
The hotline is still available, but temporarily at reduced capacity.
________________________________________________
The Spokane Regional Health District has updated its public overdose dashboard. The expansion adds information about several substances, who is affected, where overdoses occur and what drugs are used together.
There is also an updated visualization showing cases where naloxone — or Narcan — was administered before EMS arrived.
_________________________________________________
Canada is fast-tracking a major pipeline project that would bring crude oil from Alberta to a new deepwater port south of Vancouver BC.
Leaders in Washington state are worried about possible impacts on the Salish Sea. Here’s more from KNKX environment reporter Bellamy Pailthorp.
Canada’s West Coast Oil Pipeline is proposed to carry one million barrels of oil a day to a terminal in Delta, B.C.
Washington Governor Bob Ferguson and his Ecology Director Casey Sixkiller say the project is a massive expansion: they say it would double the volume of Canadian crude oil transiting through parts of the Salish Sea; it would bring supertankers that have been barred from Washington ports since the 1970s.
And that Washington’s existing resources would be insufficient in the face of potential oil spills.
They are asking the Canadian government to help safeguard the shared waters, if the project proceeds.
Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a statement that fast-tracking the pipeline represents a " once-in-a-generation opportunity to become a global energy superpower.”
I’m Bellamy Pailthorp reporting.
________________________________________________________
Seth Randal is the documentarian behind “The Fall of ’55. It’s about a moral panic that’s known as “The Boys of Boise.”
“The Fall of ’55” was first released in 2006. Tomorrow [TUES] night, it’s coming to North Idaho for a twentieth-anniversary screening in Coeur d’Alene.
SPR’s Audrey Nelson called Randal to learn more about the film.
AUDREY NELSON: So 'The Fall of ’55' is about this moral panic incident that’s known as the Boys of Boise. And the film’s website actually calls it, quote, one of the most significant, yet least known civil rights episodes in American history. Tell me what happened during this moral panic.
ANNOUNCER OUT: That was filmmaker Seth Randal, speaking with S-P-R’s Audrey Nelson.
Randal’s documentary, “The Fall of ’55,” returns to Coeur d’Alene tomorrow [TUES] night. It’s part of the North Idaho Pride Alliance’s Movie Night series.
AUDREY NELSON: So “The Fall of ’55” is about this moral panic incident that's known as the Boys of Boise. And the film's website actually calls it “one of the most significant, yet least known civil rights episodes in American history.” Tell me what happened during this moral panic.
SETH RANDAL: Well, it initially started with allegations of a sex ring, of grown men preying on teenage boys. The allegations caused a lot of hysteria within the community. And as a result of that, the investigation ended up turning its focus to consenting adults, to gay men having relations with each other.
I spoke with a man who had been a former Idaho State Supreme Court justice. He was a high school student — a high school senior in the class of 1955. He knew some of the people who had been involved. And he was off at Harvard when this originally started happening, but word had spread through the news. His Harvard classmates were making fun of him for being from Boise, where the boys are.
And what he ended up saying is that the mood when he returned for Christmas vacation was almost like people were looking under their own beds. You had neighbors turning on each other if there was a single man living by himself. That could be suspect. Or two men living together could be suspect. And there were actually people at the time, according to the newspaper reports, who wanted to create a jail just to put all the gay men in.
In the end, 16 men ended up being prosecuted. And the city was around 50,000 people at the time, and the reaction that the community had ended up being something that had long-lasting implications.
AN: How did the story first pique your interest?
SR: One thing that caught my attention was when the Idaho Statesman newspaper did a 40th anniversary article, in 1995, that looked at some of the lives that had been impacted by it, the consequences for some of these people. And that was what I wanted to know more about. How did these events shape the community of Boise, and how did it impact the lives of the people who were connected to these cases?
I actually partnered with Alan Virta, who at the time was the head of the archives and special collections at Boise State University. He knew more about doing in-depth, archival research than I did. So I partnered with him.
A lot of it was sending letters to people in the mail saying, “Hey, would you be willing to talk about this?” And sometimes I had to keep the letters kind of vague. Some of the men who were prosecuted ended up getting married after this happened. In some cases, some of them were married and stayed married. And over time, we were able to get some people to talk.
Now, there was still a lot of resistance at that time. We had people saying, “Why are you dredging this up again?” And that was challenging because when I first started working on this, I knew that it had been a very controversial issue that had scarred a lot of people in the community. And my goal was not to scar them again, but rather to understand what happened.
AN: “The Fall of ’55” came out in 2006. Back then, what did you hope people would take away from the film?
SR: A sense that we need to ask questions. We need to approach problems from a level-headed point of view instead of getting caught up in hysteria. I still hope that that's the case.
AN: I think my last question is: You'll be giving a virtual Q&A after the film is screened in Coeur d'Alene. You've obviously got roots in North Idaho. You attended North Idaho College. How did you decide to bring the film back on this 20th anniversary?
SR: Well, it's a story that I think still continues to have resonance. And like you said, I used to live in Coeur d'Alene. I also used to live in Spokane. And it seemed like a natural to bring the film back to the Inland Northwest to let people know that our history still matters.
That was filmmaker Seth Randal, speaking with SPR’s Audrey Nelson. Randal’s documentary, “The Fall of ’55,” returns to Coeur d’Alene tomorrow [TUES] night. It’s part of the North Idaho Pride Alliance’s Movie Night series.
_________________________________________________
SPR News Today is a production of Spokane Public Radio. Reporting today was contributed by Ember Braun, Gustavo Sagrero, Bellamy Pailthorp and Doug Nadvornick, today’s host and producer. Web support is provided by Anna Gyure Havlek.
