Will Craft

One year after the first regulatory reform in 15 years, one lawmaker says the state’s tools are still not strong enough. “There are certain violations that absolutely merit a facility being shut down.”

Inappropriate contact between children and staff members has happened with some frequency in Utah’s teen treatment programs. Between November 2018 and July 2021, state regulators investigated at least 20 reports of staff pushing the boundaries with children, sometimes amounting to sexual abuse. State records show that 13 people resigned or were fired from youth treatment facilities after allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior during that time, according to a data analysis from Sent Away journalists.

“Secure transport services,” a shadowy corner of the teen-treatment industry, are almost entirely unregulated. Parent-hired transporters can pull kids from their beds, handcuff them, hold them down or blindfold them. In Utah, a legislator who recently sponsored a bill that brought regulatory reform to the state’s booming teen-treatment industry said he wants to take a closer look at how kids from all over the country are getting to the state for treatment.

We’ve spent decades trying to alleviate teacher shortages. Our attempts have dramatically changed the teacher workforce, but the shortages remain.

Texas Teachers of Tomorrow has become the largest teacher training program in the nation, offering a low-cost online program. While it’s lowered barriers and helped diversify the workforce, this approach to training hasn’t solved chronic teacher shortages.

A four-part podcast series by APM Reports.

Up until 2019, the agency regulating Utah’s massive youth treatment industry rarely cited facilities for violating rules — even after cases of abuse. After a 2016 incident left a teenager with a concussion, state regulators listened to his mom’s complaint — and then did nothing about it.

Over the course of hundreds of inspections, regulators marked the programs as “compliant” 98 percent of the time. And in recent years, the state noted even fewer violations than before.

Following abuse reports, the company has now shuttered a dozen youth treatment centers in the past two years, including its flagship academy.

Faced with angry, violent protesters after George Floyd’s death, Minneapolis city leaders made the unprecedented decision to abandon a police station. It marked not only the further erosion of the department’s relationship with the community, but perhaps the beginning of a shift in American policing.

Current and former EPA scientists say the Trump administration is pushing rule changes that could leave Americans exposed to lead in drinking water.

Millions of people still get water through lead pipes. For decades, lax EPA rules missed hazardous lead levels and allowed some utilities to remain indifferent. Today the Trump administration is rushing to finalize a plan that might make things worse.

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas becomes an intriguing puzzle piece of the pandemic's spread after new Bay Area Covid-19 deaths indicate the virus' presence in the United States earlier than thought.

In a brief to the Supreme Court, the Mississippi Attorney General's office offers a misleading argument.

An APM Reports analysis finds prosecutors asked African-Americans three times more questions than whites in jury selection.

Inside the 2010 jury selection at the heart of the Supreme Court case.

It was a long, slow hunt for data with variables aplenty: gallons, cubic feet, billing and meter sizes.

Americans are struggling to afford their rising water bills, and thousands of poor families have had their service shut off. This growing crisis has a dark irony: It's especially acute in a region where water is most abundant — the Great Lakes.

We gathered data on juries in central Mississippi going back 26 years. Analyzing hundreds of trials, we found that prosecutors were more than four times more likely to exclude Black jurors.

In 2010, a jury of 11 whites and one African-American convicted Flowers and sentenced him to death. Defense attorneys would later claim the trial essentially had been decided in jury selection. Here's how it went down.

When is a strike legal? Take our quiz below and try to spot an unconstitutional strike, using potential jurors from trials in the Fifth Circuit Court District, where Doug Evans is district attorney, and the reasons given for striking them.

Rural America, which supported Trump in the election, could be left out of water and road building investment as states and the president leverage private investment. Trump's plan offers little detail on federal spending and timing. Adding to the uncertainty, a presidential adviser has indicated that states should help themselves.

Minnesota's Department of Corrections tracks reports about the 60-plus juvenile residential treatment centers it licenses. But it does little to disseminate that information. APM Reports obtained the data about what the department calls incidents and complaints for 2009 to March 2016 and sorted it in this searchable table.