year in review
A look back at my first six months reporting on criminal justice and corrections in North Carolina
I’ve gone to a lot of committee hearings over the course of my career. They’re mostly insider baseball, in-the-weeds conversations between policy wonks and department heads. One time, I watched a virtual committee hearing live on YouTube that had one other viewer.
Medicaid and Moore v. Harper: two issues that dominated North Carolina politics in 2022
This year in North Carolina was notable for something that didn’t happen – Medicaid expansion. Republican legislative leaders had largely dismissed the idea of expanding Medicaid until this year. Then Senate Leader Phil Berger, once a staunch and vocal opponent, said he’d changed his mind. After that blockbuster announcement, a Medicaid expansion bill passed the Senate, but soon thereafter, momentum slowed and the measure stalled.
Year in review: Critical Race Theory, mask mandates and Leandro funding made for a tumultuous 2021 in education
Critical Race Theory and face mask mandates dominated the state’s education headlines in 2021, even as students and teachers struggled to recover from a year of remote learning that saw standardized test scores fall to new lows. Racial and economic inequities in education, exposed by the pandemic, were quickly shoved to the background by a loud minority of irate parents who complained...