In wake of pandemic, experts suggest reform; Chapman employs community model
By Natalie Hanson | Posted March 23, 2022
photo by Leslie Layton
Principal Mike Allen at Chapman Elementary just before opening bell.
As the pandemic disrupted Chico’s Chapman neighborhood, Chapman Elementary School Principal Mike Allen was one of several local school leaders known to knock on students’ doors and check on them, often with food in hand.
The schools were closed by state mandate with only online learning from March through August 2020, meaning that children missed seven months of in-person education. In October 2020, Chico Unified adopted a hybrid model. In August 2021, campuses fully opened to in-person learning.
Two years later, with his school’s campus reopened, Allen says students are facing great obstacles. Some are missing classes after losing momentum during online classes. Many are struggling with social and economic pressures exacerbated by the pandemic. read more
ChicoSol contributor Dave Waddell was honored today – on Freedom of Information Day – as a “transparency champion” for work that accessed public records related to three killings involving the Chico Police Department.
Waddell received the Freedom of Information Award in the small Print and Digital division for ChicoSol stories on the killings of Desmond Phillips, Tyler Rushing and Stephen Vest. The 37th annual James Madison Freedom of Information competition awards were presented today by the Society of Professional Journalists Northern California (SPJ) chapter.
SPJ noted that Waddell used records and police body-cam recordings “that he fought for under California public records law, to investigate the official accounts of the circumstances around all three deaths.read more
Justices asked to nix trial over Tyler Rushing's Tasing
By Dave Waddell | Posted March 11, 2022
The City of Chico has escalated its increasingly expensive legal fight with the family of Tyler Rushing by petitioning the highest court in the land.
A Southern California law firm last week filed a motion on behalf of the City with the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to overturn an appellate court ruling that ordered part of the Rushing family’s wrongful death lawsuit against the City to proceed to trial.
Seth Stoughton, a top expert on police use of force and a professor of law at the University of South Carolina, said in an email reply to questions that the City’s so-called petition for writ of certiorari has a “snowball-in-hell chance” of being granted by the high court.read more
