www.youtube.com – WPDE ABC15 – 2025-07-09 09:53:50

SUMMARY: Over 170 people are missing after devastating floods hit Texas Hill Country, more than triple initial estimates, fueled by holiday weekend visitors staying off the official radar. Families like Thad Heartfield’s are personally joining search efforts, desperate to find loved ones. The Department of Homeland Security, overseeing FEMA, has granted Texas supplemental funds to support recovery, promising a new FEMA response model. Longtime resident reactions reveal the depth of loss—homes, antiques, and heirlooms destroyed in moments. Despite the shock and destruction, the community unites, with neighbors rallying to support and aid those affected amid this ongoing tragedy.

It has been five days since catastrophic flooding hit Texas on what was supposed to be a joyous Fourth of July, and at least 170 people are still missing in Kerr County as the death toll across the state rises to 111.

Rescue teams in helicopters and on horseback continue to scour through debris as officials warned that unaccounted victims could still be found.

“Know this: We will not stop until every missing person is accounted for. Know this also: There very likely could be more added to that list,” Gov. Greg Abbott said during a news conference Tuesday.

Public officials in charge of locating the victims were grilled during a news conference about their response to the Friday morning flooding, with several reporters appearing to get heated when an answer could not be provided.

Read more: https://wpde.com/news/nation-world/texas-flood-rescue-efforts-intensify-as-number-of-missing-hits-triple-digits-kerrville-kerr-county-fourth-of-july-death-toll-search-and-rescue-gov-greg-abbott-camp-mystic-emergency-response-president-trump-major-disaster#

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carolinapublicpress.org – Jane Winik Sartwell – 2025-07-09 08:19:00

by Jane Winik Sartwell, Carolina Public Press
July 9, 2025

North Carolina is the most expensive state in the nation for health care, according to a highly cited claim made by Forbes magazine, at least. But how true are those claims about costs?

Not very, according to a new analysis that challenges both the methodology and conclusions of the Forbes ranking. The reality, researchers from Ascendient Healthcare say, is much more nuanced. 

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But Forbes did get something right about health care costs — just not exactly what they set out to prove. In doing so, the publication revealed an under-researched issue in North Carolina health care policy. 

Dubious methodology to judge costs

Which state has the most expensive health care? The answer depends on how you measure “expensive.” 

That’s where things get complex. And those complexities have important implications.

The Forbes ranking relies on a weighting system devised by the authors of the study. The system puts 85% of the weight on what folks with employee-sponsored health insurance pay in premiums and deductibles each year.

Here’s one problem: less than half of North Carolinians have employee-sponsored health care. 

“Somebody made some determination about the relative importance of each of these elements to be able to spit out an overall metric,” Brad Wright, former UNC Sheps Center researcher who now works at University of South Carolina, told Carolina Public Press. 

“Without seeing a justification for how they did that, that’s concerning. If you gave me the same data set and I just changed those weight percentages, I’d get a different answer, and would be writing a different story.”

Forbes’s method addresses insurance shopping concerns rather than health care system performance, according to Dawn Carter, a North Carolina health care consultant who co-wrote the Ascendient analysis of health care costs in the state.

The methodology results in some interesting aberrations. Some of the least-expensive states for health care, according to Forbes, are Hawaii, California, and Massachusetts.

“Those cheapest states are states I don’t think of as being least expensive in anything,” State Treasurer Brad Briner told CPP. “Once you see that, you have to ask yourself the questions: What is the methodology here? What is the ulterior motive here?”

Briner’s skepticism of the Forbes costs ranking is a break from his predecessor. 

Former State Treasurer Dale Folwell, a Republican like Briner, frequently cited North Carolina’s ranking to argue against North Carolina’s Certificate of Need laws, which regulate hospital construction. 

The politicization of the Forbes data shows how powerful — and potentially arbitrary — statistics can be. 

“The issue, of course, is that every data set is filtered through whatever lens the authors choose: pro-insurance, pro-state regulations, etc.,” UNC law professor Joan Krause told CPP.

Forbes defended its approach when CPP pressed about the methodology.

Forbes Advisor Editor Michelle Megna wrote: “We felt access and outcomes were most important, so gave them the most weight in our scoring.”

Other ways to measure health care costs

Ascendient’s chosen data points paint a very different picture. 

“When I saw those headlines, I just thought: ‘Wait a minute. This is just not this is not consistent with what I know to be true,’” Carter told CPP.

“Let’s check their data and understand where this is coming from. And then let’s check back with the other data points that we are more familiar with.”

A common way of measuring health care costs, according to Carter, is to aggregate all health care spending — think hospitals, nursing homes, doctors — within the state and divide by total population.

Using this method, which accounts for people on all kinds of health care plans, North Carolina has the 10th-lowest health care costs in the nation. 

North Carolina health care spending per capita comes out at $8,917 annually, while nationally, the average is $10,191.

Another way to rank costs is to measure hospital prices, since hospitals tend to be the most expensive option for health care. According to Ascendient, North Carolina had the 13th-lowest net price per inpatient discharge nationally.

Plus, when one looks at total insurance premiums rather than employee contributions, North Carolina drops from second to 45th-most expensive, according to Wright. 

But all this does not mean that Forbes didn’t point out something true. 

What Forbes got right

What Forbes proved is this: more than in any other state, NC employers shift higher portions of insurance costs onto employees. 

This is a real data point, proven out by Forbes. 

“There’s two different things going on here. One is ‘How much does health care cost?,’ and then the other is ‘Who pays?’” Treasurer Briner said. 

“If the question is: ‘Who pays?,’ that is a very different discussion. In North Carolina, we have made the choice to have the individual pay more than the companies. In Massachusetts, for example, they’ve had the state pay a lot more than the individual.”

Though this doesn’t necessarily equate to NC’s overall health care costs being the highest, it is a salient point.

North Carolina employees contributed $1,806 for single coverage, the 14th-highest in the nation, while employers paid $5,937, the 10th-lowest. 

If the issue is cost-shifting rather than expensive health care delivery, the potential policy solutions are different.

“If you don’t really look at what your data point is and what it’s measuring, then you’re going to look for policy solutions that don’t fix the root cause of the problem,” Carter said. “To generalize that one correct data point to make a claim about health care costs doesn’t paint a clear picture.” 

But why do North Carolina employers do this? The answer isn’t entirely clear, even to experts who study the state’s health care system.

Carter guesses it might have something to do with North Carolina’s “business-friendly” stance. 

Briner views it as a necessary balance to the low taxes and low cost-of-living North Carolina provides to its residents. 

More research is needed to understand why companies shift more insurance costs onto their employees in North Carolina than in any other state. It is likely a combination of state policy decisions, labor market dynamics and regulatory choices. 

Once that is understood, the real conversation begins. 

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

The post Costs of NC health care skewed in national rankings appeared first on carolinapublicpress.org

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Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Centrist

This content presents a balanced, fact-based analysis of health care cost rankings in North Carolina without evident partisan rhetoric. It critiques the methodology of a Forbes study while providing alternative data and viewpoints from experts and officials across the political spectrum, including both current and former state treasurers from the Republican Party. The article acknowledges complexities in health care costs and cost-shifting between employers and employees, avoiding advocacy for any particular policy or ideological agenda. Overall, it aims to inform readers by dissecting data and interpretations fairly, reflecting a centrist perspective.

carolinapublicpress.org – Kate Denning – 2025-07-08 08:14:00

by Kate Denning, Carolina Public Press
July 8, 2025

While Helene’s impact on North Carolina varied across the region, the 2024-2025 school year was anything but ordinary for most Western North Carolina school districts and created significant obstacles to student learning.

Districts like Ashe County, in the state’s northwestern corner, missed upwards of 40 days of in-person instruction, and counties across the region are preparing to make use of the legislature’s $9 million summer learning initiative, the School Extension Recovery Program.

Carolina Public Press talked with school officials in Ashe and Transylvania counties, both among the beneficiaries of a program included in the legislature’s April Helene recovery bill.

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Recipient schools receive a minimum of $20,000 to be used for intensive recovery in math and reading for grades 4 through 8 this summer.

Transylvania, on the South Carolina line, was one of the luckier Western North Carolina districts, missing just 10 days due to Helene and an additional two for teacher workdays, said Carrie Norris, Chief Academic Officer for Transylvania County Schools.

Even though the area faced challenges like loss of communication and student displacement, the district’s ability to get back to in-person learning swiftly made it so the district did not have to make significant changes to the remainder of the school year. 

“We eventually just decided that, since it was 10 days, we did not extend the school year and we just provided support for teachers as to how to make tweaks just in our curriculum pacing guide so we could continue on,” Norris told CPP.

“We did not make any major changes, because it was really kind of like just bad winter weather for us that we are pretty familiar with doing.”

Other districts were not so fortunate. Ashe lost 47 days from its typical instruction time, 24 of which were due to Helene, said Superintendent Eisa Cox.

Of the 47 days missed, 16 days were conducted virtually. While it was important to maximize instructional time, Cox said, virtual learning simply isn’t the same as being in the classroom. 

Ashe County students had just 99 days of school without virtual learning, delayed start times or early release this year.

North Carolina schools always offer summer reading programs for grades 2 and 3 as part of the state’s Read to Achieve program, and Transylvania has offered high school credit recovery opportunities in recent summers. The focus on grades 4 through 8 will be a new addition to the district’s summer learning programs, Norris said.

Cox said Ashe otherwise would not have been able to offer any summer school programs outside of the mandated Read to Achieve program due to a lack of funding prior to the Helene recovery bill.

The $9 million provided for the School Extension Recovery Program are nonrecurring funds beyond 2025. Lance Fusarelli, distinguished professor of educational leadership and policy at North Carolina State University, said summer interventions are going to be critical and the initiative should continue through the summer of 2027 at least.

“You’re looking at up to two months of schooling where they were not in school five days a week, and you can’t just make that up in the course of a year,” Fusarelli said.

“I think the effects will be felt for several years, and it’ll take some serious efforts and some serious interventions to help those kids get caught up.”

It’s too early to know the impact Helene will have on test scores across the state, but Norris said Transylvania is seeing three of its four elementary schools outperform last year’s scores, which she credits to teachers making every minute count once school was back in session.

The biggest change to testing in Ashe was being unable to regularly test students throughout the year, Cox said. End-of-grade testing ultimately took place in both counties as scheduled despite the irregular term. 

“When we normally would have had those checkpoints throughout the year, we didn’t have them necessarily at the same time, so this year was just very different than in the past,” Cox said.

“I think it’s important to realize that no child should be measured by a single test score, and that at the end of the day, we do have some time to catch kids up, and hopefully we have the grace in which to do that.”

Despite missing relatively few days due to Helene, Transylvania also had a challenging year due to a number of tragedies that resulted in the deaths of five students in the district.

Norris said those events coupled with Helene’s impact on older students’ ability to communicate with each other indicated a need for more emphasis on mental health care.

“For this coming school year, we have added a crisis care counselor at the high school level to support students more with small groups,” Norris said. 

“And then we have also purchased two programs for the coming year. One is based on teaching students to identify their own behaviors and how to problem solve, and then another program that we’re implementing is a bullying program.”

Ashe is taking a similar interest in mental health care and its effect on learning in its schools. The loss of instruction time and additional traumas students experienced due to Helene has brought on an increase in behavioral issues, Cox said. The district recently received a grant to hire behavioral specialists to help teachers tackle behavioral issues in the classroom.

“Trauma hits different children differently,” Cox said. 

“So it’s a matter of making sure that we are aware of what’s going on, what that looks like in each child, and ‘How can we put the right supports in place so that all children are successful?’ So we’ve been looking at meeting the immediate needs of families, the needs of the students while they’re in school — not just academic, but for the whole child.”

The storm’s impact on learning didn’t start or end with school closures, after all. Fusarelli pointed out the unique challenges Western North Carolina faced even before Helene, including poverty and housing and food insecurity, that became exacerbated. Many students likely experienced the loss of their homes, their family businesses or their loved ones.

“It’s one thing to have schools close for a period of time, but for most people, when something hits, they might have disruption, but they might not lose their entire livelihood,” Fusarelli said. 

“Well, when these towns were wiped out, you have a lot of family owned businesses that were wiped out. And so what do you do when you don’t know where your next paycheck is gonna come from? All of those stressors — no matter how much parents try to shield their kids from stuff like this, you just can’t.”

But kids are resilient, and school districts and the legislature alike are doing their part to help them recover, he said.

Drawing comparisons between Helene and COVID-19’s impact on learning isn’t difficult. Students in Western North Carolina who were school-aged during the onset of COVID-19 and for Helene experienced a “perfect storm” of significant disruptions, Fusarelli said. 

Helene reignited conversations amongst administrators about how such disruptions to learning impact students and how best to support them through those changes.

“We’ve talked a lot about that here at the end of the year, honestly, since COVID we are still struggling with student stamina and working through the hard things to get to the next part,” Norris said. 

“There’s been a lot of years where we, and rightly so, have focused more on the mental supports. But we also have to give them the tools to persevere past the hard things that come along. So building up that stamina, staying true to what our goal is, pushing them in an appropriate way — those are all things that we’re going to talk about.”

Cox learned from COVID-19 how to deliver meaningful instruction even during situations that are far from ideal.

“When COVID happened and we shut down, we really had to make sure that we had purposeful learning for students, because if not, what’s the point of school?” Cox said. 

“So our kids have a driving purpose, and we want to make sure that education met those needs. So we learned from COVID, which I think helped us to plan better for this time of crisis, even though nobody would have ever imagined we would have a hurricane in the mountains of North Carolina.”

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

The post Learning loss after Helene in Western NC school districts appeared first on carolinapublicpress.org

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Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Centrist

The content provides a factual and balanced overview of the impact of Hurricane Helene on Western North Carolina school districts, focusing on educational challenges and recovery efforts. It presents perspectives from various educators and officials without partisan framing or ideological language. The emphasis is on practical responses to natural disaster-related disruptions, funding for recovery programs, and student wellbeing. The article avoids polarizing topics and sticks to community and educational issues, resulting in a neutral, informative tone characteristic of centrist reporting.