2 former Alabama school superintendents among 6 indicted
Two former north Alabama school superintendents are among six people facing charges including conspiracy, fraud and identity theft in an alleged scheme to illegally boost school funding, court documents unsealed Tuesday show. Former Athens school Superintendent Trey Holladay and former Limestone County Superintendent Tom Sisk were indicted by a federal grand jury in Montgomery, court records showed. So was Holladay’s wife, retired Athens teacher Deborah Irby Holladay. The other three who were charged include former Athens High principal William Richard Carter Jr., who also oversaw virtual learning programs for the system; former Marengo Academy football coach David Webb Tutt; and Gregory Earl “Greg” Corkren, a retired teacher. Both Tutt and Corkren were identified as longtime friends of Holladay. In a statement released by defense attorneys, Trey and Deborah Holladay called the charges “unfounded” and promised a vigorous defense. “There is absolutely no way that we would do anything detrimental to the school system,” they said. None of the other defendants answered the charges in court, and documents available online did not include the names of defense lawyers. The six were accused of a complicated scheme to boost public school funding by offering online classes through private schools in south Alabama. Private school students were wrongly counted as being enrolled in online classes through public schools to boost attendance by hundreds and obtain additional state funding, the indictment said. Thousands of dollars changed hands through cash payments and fund transfers, the indictment said. Holladay left his job last fall amid an investigation after the Athens school board agreed to pay him $250,000 to buy out his contract. Sisk was forced out of a superintendent’s job in Tennessee a year ago amid questions about his qualifications after departing the Limestone County system in 2019. The indictment includes 90 counts of wire fraud and 34 counts of identity theft involving students who were allegedly falsely enrolled on the rolls of public schools. Republished with the permission of the Associated Press.
In Texas, attention turns to storm repairs, political peril
The seam that split in a pipe under Nora Espinoza’s sink during the frigid cold that gripped Texas was narrower than the edge of a dime. Her kitchen appeared mostly undamaged, but the plumber that cut into Espinoza’s wall found water had been pouring in underneath the floor. She expects the repairs to cost $15,000. Espinoza, a 56-year-old Dallas resident, is among those still getting a sense of the wreckage left by the icy blast that hit Texas and much of the Deep South last week, knocking out power to millions and contributing to nearly 80 deaths. Soaked drywall and carpet is being pulled back to give a fuller view of the destruction, and the political peril for elected leaders and energy officials who were unable to keep the heat on in places unaccustomed to freezing cold. Snow and ice melted across Texas over the weekend, but plumbers are still racing from home to home to patch uncounted stretches of burst pipe. Many residents are unsure when they’ll be able to make permanent repairs, what they’ll have to pay out of pocket or even when they’ll be able to go home. Roberto Valerio, a plumber in North Texas, said the broken pipes and other problems caused by the storm had led to “big chaos.” “We can’t find what we need easily,” he said. “There’s a great shortage of supplies.” In the Houston area, officials on Monday announced they have set up a relief fund to help cover the cost of repairs and temporary housing for vulnerable families. Gov. Greg Abbott has indicated his fiercely independent state needs help. His office encouraged out-of-state plumbers to come fix Texas pipes. For Espinoza, who said her home dropped to 38 degrees Fahrenheit (3.33 degrees Celsius) before the power was restored and the pipe burst Friday, it’s far too little, far too late “Your job is to protect us. That’s why we voted you in,” Espinoza said of Abbott as she fought tears while waiting for a plumber. “My pipes would have never burst, never, if I had power.” A rushing sound could be heard in Espinoza’s kitchen Saturday night, when Valerio turned the water back on. He made temporary repairs, but it’ll be weeks before he can come back to do more work and determine whether the floor needs to be replaced. Espinoza fears the spread of mold may do more damage in that time and is unsure what her insurance will cover. But she is nonetheless grateful: She can take hot showers and her small dogs have emerged from the pile of blankets where they spent last week’s days of frigid cold. “I do consider myself to be very lucky,” she said Monday. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has delivered more than 1 million meals to Texas, the Defense Department has delivered more than 4 million liters of water and it continues to deliver water in bulk to multiple locations in the state, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday. The federal government also delivered dozens of emergency generators and more than 120,000 blankets to Texans over the weekend. President Joe Biden hopes to visit Texas as early as this week, Psaki said. Tens of thousands of people in Mississippi and Louisiana also still lacked water or had very low water pressure Monday, even with weather warming up days after a winter storm. Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said about $2.25 million has so far been raised to help pay for repairs and housing for Houston-area families who lack insurance or who don’t qualify for federal assistance. That includes a $1 million donation from the foundation of CenterPoint Energy, the utility that provides electricity for the Houston area, she said. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner asked area residents with the means to donate to the fund. “Many families through no fault of their own have homes that are uninhabitable because their pipes froze during the arctic blast,” said Turner. Republished with the permission of the Associated Press.
Half a million dead in U.S., confirming virus’s tragic reach
For weeks after Cindy Pollock began planting tiny flags across her yard — one for each of the more than 1,800 Idahoans killed by COVID-19 — the toll was mostly a number. Until two women she had never met rang her doorbell in tears, seeking a place to mourn the husband and father they had just lost. Then Pollock knew her tribute, however heartfelt, would never begin to convey the grief of a pandemic that has now claimed 500,000 lives in the U.S. and counting. “I just wanted to hug them,” she said. “Because that was all I could do.” Cindy Pollock poses for a portrait. (AP Photo/Otto Kitsinger) After a year that has darkened doorways across the U.S., the pandemic surpassed a milestone Monday that once seemed unimaginable, a stark confirmation of the virus’s reach into all corners of the country and communities of every size and makeup. “It’s very hard for me to imagine an American who doesn’t know someone who has died or have a family member who has died,” said Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics at the University of Washington in Seattle. “We haven’t really fully understood how bad it is, how devastating it is, for all of us.” Experts warn that about 90,000 more deaths are likely in the next few months, despite a massive campaign to vaccinate people. Meanwhile, the nation’s trauma continues to accrue in a way unparalleled in recent American life, said Donna Schuurman of the Dougy Center for Grieving Children & Families in Portland, Oregon. At other moments of epic loss, like the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Americans have pulled together to confront crisis and console survivors. But this time, the nation is deeply divided. Staggering numbers of families are dealing with death, serious illness, and financial hardship. And many are left to cope in isolation, unable even to hold funerals. “In a way, we’re all grieving,” said Schuurman, who has counseled the families of those killed in terrorist attacks, natural disasters, and school shootings. In recent weeks, virus deaths have fallen from more than 4,000 reported on some days in January to an average of fewer than 1,900 per day. Still, at half a million, the toll recorded by Johns Hopkins University is already greater than the population of Miami or Kansas City, Missouri. It is roughly equal to the number of Americans killed in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. It is akin to a 9/11 every day for nearly six months. “The people we lost were extraordinary,” President Joe Biden said Monday, urging Americans to remember the individual lives claimed by the virus, rather than be numbed by the enormity of the toll. “Just like that,” he said, “so many of them took their final breath alone in America.” The toll, accounting for 1 in 5 deaths reported worldwide, has far exceeded early projections, which assumed that federal and state governments would marshal a comprehensive and sustained response and individual Americans would heed warnings. Instead, a push to reopen the economy last spring and the refusal by many to maintain social distancing and wear face masks fueled the spread. The figures alone do not come close to capturing the heartbreak. “I never once doubted that he was not going to make it. … I so believed in him and my faith,” said Nancy Espinoza, whose husband, Antonio, was hospitalized with COVID-19 last month. The couple from Riverside County, California, had been together since high school. They pursued parallel nursing careers and started a family. Then, on Jan. 25, Nancy was called to Antonio’s bedside just before his heartbeat its last. He was 36 and left behind a 3-year-old son. “Today it’s us. And tomorrow it could be anybody,” Nancy Espinoza said. By late last fall, 54 percent of Americans reported knowing someone who had died of COVID-19 or had been hospitalized with it, according to a Pew Research Center poll. The grieving was even more widespread among Black Americans, Hispanics and other minorities. Deaths have nearly doubled since then, with the scourge spreading far beyond the Northeast and Northwest metropolitan areas slammed by the virus last spring and the Sun Belt cities hit hard last summer. In some places, the seriousness of the threat was slow to sink in. When a beloved professor at a community college in Petoskey, Michigan, died last spring, residents mourned, but many remained doubtful of the threat’s severity, Mayor John Murphy said. That changed over the summer after a local family hosted a party in a barn. Of the 50 who attended, 33 became infected. Three died, he said. “I think at a distance people felt ‘This isn’t going to get me,‘” Murphy said. “But over time, the attitude has totally changed from ‘Not me. Not our area. I’m not old enough,’ to where it became the real deal.” For Anthony Hernandez, whose Emmerson-Bartlett Memorial Chapel in Redlands, California, has been overwhelmed handling burial of COVID-19 victims, the most difficult conversations have been the ones without answers, as he sought to comfort mothers, fathers and children who lost loved ones. His chapel, which arranges 25 to 30 services in an ordinary month, handled 80 in January. He had to explain to some families that they would need to wait weeks for a burial. Pallbearers, who were among only 10 allowed mourners, walk the casket for internment at the funeral for Larry Hammond, who died from the coronavirus, at Mount Olivet Cemetery in New Orleans. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) “At one point, we had every gurney, every dressing table, every embalming table had somebody on it,” he said. In Boise, Idaho, Pollock started the memorial in her yard last fall to counter what she saw as widespread denial of the threat. When deaths spiked in December, she was planting 25 to 30 new flags at a time. But her frustration has been eased somewhat by those who slow or stop to pay respect or to mourn. “I think that is part of what I was wanting,
Kay Ivey welcomes review of Space Command’s proposed home
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey on Monday said she welcomes a federal review of the decision to move the Space Command headquarters from Colorado to Huntsville, saying she believes it will confirm the decision to move it to her state. The U.S. Department of Defense’s inspector general announced Friday that it was reviewing the Donald Trump administration’s last-minute decision to relocate U.S. Space Command from Colorado to Alabama. “Our state was chosen based on merit, and an independent review of a decision of this magnitude will confirm this. We remain confident that just as the Air Force discovered, Huntsville’s Redstone Region will provide our warfighters with the greatest space capability at the best value to the taxpayers,” Ivey said in a statement. The U.S. Air Force announced last month that the new U.S. Space Command headquarters will be in Huntsville, Alabama. The state was selected over five others competing for the project, including Colorado, where Space Command is provisionally located. The role of Space Command is to conduct operations such as enabling satellite-based navigation and troop communication and providing warning of missile launches. That is different from the Space Force, which is a distinct military service like the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast Guard. Huntsville is home to the Army’s Redstone Arsenal and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. The city’s nickname is Rocket City, after Wernher von Braun and his team of fellow German-born rocketeers who settled there in the 1950s. “Deep Space Exploration is part of our DNA in Alabama, from building the rockets to first take man to the moon, to producing the Atlas V rocket that took the Perseverance Rover to Mars just last week,” Ivey said. The decision to locate in Alabama was announced in the final days of the Trump administration, and Colorado officials raised concerns that the process was flawed. On Friday, the inspector general’s office announced it was investigating whether the relocation complied with Air Force and Pentagon policy and was based on proper evaluations of competing locations. Colorado officials welcomed the review. “It is imperative that we thoroughly review what I believe will prove to be a fundamentally flawed process that focused on bean-counting rather than American space dominance,” Rep. Doug Lamborn, a Republican whose district includes Space Command, said previously. Republished with the permission of the Associated Press.
