More threats in Springfield, Ohio: ‘We need help, not hate,’ mayor says
(SPRINGFIELD, Ohio) — Two elementary schools were evacuated and a middle school was closed on Friday in the wake of a new threat sent via email in Springfield, Ohio, according to the school district and the mayor.
The elementary schools released students to their parents, officials said.
It’s unclear if the person who sent Friday’s threat is the same person who sent Thursday’s, Springfield Mayor Rob Rue told ABC News.
On Thursday morning, bomb threats were sent via email “to multiple agencies and media outlets” in the city, according to the city commission office.
Explosive-detecting K-9s helped police clear multiple facilities listed in the threat, including two elementary schools, City Hall and a few driver’s license bureaus, Springfield Police Chief Allison Elliott told reporters. The county court facilities were also cleared “out of an abundance of caution,” she said.
The FBI is working with local police to help identify the source of the threat, Elliott said.
The mayor said there’s a lot of fear in Springfield in the wake of the threats.
“This is a very concerning time for our citizens, and frankly, a lot of people are tired of just, you know, the things that have been spread about our community that are just negative and not true. We need help, not hate,” Rue told ABC News on Friday.
The mayor said he believes these threats are directly connected to the baseless rumors spread online in the wake of viral social media posts claiming Haitian migrants were abducting people’s pets in Springfield order to eat them. The rumors were amplified by right-wing politicians, including former President Donald Trump and his running mate Sen. JD Vance.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” Trump said at Tuesday night’s presidential debate. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
A spokesperson for the city of Springfield told ABC News these claims are false, and that there have been “no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals in the immigrant community.”
“Additionally, there have been no verified instances of immigrants engaging in illegal activities such as squatting or littering in front of residents’ homes,” the spokesperson said. “Furthermore, no reports have been made regarding members of the immigrant community deliberately disrupting traffic.”
The mayor added, “Your pets are safe in Springfield.”
Springfield estimates there are around 12,000 to 15,000 immigrants living in the county; migrants have been drawn to the region because of low cost of living and work opportunities, according to the city. The rapid rise in population has strained housing, health care and school resources, according to the city. City officials also said the migrants are in the country legally and that many are recipients of Temporary Protected Status.
The Haitian Bridge Alliance condemned the “baseless and inflammatory” claims about Haitian migrants, arguing they “not only perpetuate harmful stereotypes but also contribute to the dangerous stigmatization of immigrant communities, particularly Black immigrants from the Republic of Haiti.”
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who dispelled the rumors this week, said the state would send more resources to Springfield.
The mayor stressed, “Anybody on the national stage that takes a microphone, needs to understand what they could do to communities like Springfield with their words. They’re not helping. They’re hurting communities like ours with their words.”
(BRIDGETON, N.J.) — A 24-year-old woman has been charged for allegedly hopping a fence at a New Jersey zoo and “enticing” a tiger, according to police.
Zyair Dennis was charged with one count of defiant trespassing and was issued two city ordinances related to climbing fences in the zoo, Bridgeton police said in a statement Monday.
Dennis allegedly entered a restricted area at the Cohanzick Zoo on Aug. 18, according to police.
Witnesses gave authorities video and photos that showed a woman jumping over the fence, approaching the caged tiger enclosure and “reaching into the cage before quickly pulling her hand out when the animal reacted aggressively,” police said.
Police said she was almost injured when she “enticed” the tiger.
The woman was allegedly also seen on video “depicting the same scenario at the bear enclosure,” police said.
Last week, Bridgeton police released information and images from the incident in an effort to identify the suspect. Police said Monday that the footage helped them identify Dennis.
Dennis’ appearance in Bridgeton Municipal Court has not been scheduled, police said.
ABC News’ Julia Reinstein contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Four years after the coronavirus pandemic closed much of the nation’s education system, thousands of the more than 50 million U.S. public school students and teachers are returning to school this month.
In interviews with ABC News, education experts suggest the impact school closures had on the public education model could leave students with long-term developmental issues from lost learning time.
It has already exacerbated issues such as chronic absenteeism and teacher burnout, and now the persistent problems public educators face are causing leaders, experts and caregivers to sound the alarm.
One prominent educator told ABC that “public education is on life support.” Another said the greatest current education challenge is the need for it to “reset,” which the educator projected could take five to 10 years to achieve. And, polling suggests the American public also believes there could be grave consequences if nothing is done to fix public education.
Pew Research Center found about half of Americans think the public education system is going in the wrong direction. Eighty-two percent of people surveyed by Pew said it has been trending that way over the past five years — even before the pandemic hit.
“It’s needed restructuring for a while,” STEM Equity Alliance Executive Director Arthur Mitchell told ABC News. “Education as it exists is unsustainable.”
Mitchell shares the viewpoint of many educators ABC News spoke with — that the issues facing school districts predate COVID-19. However, the pandemic exposed the need for an education reboot.
“The message that the pandemic sent was that you’re not going to be successful teaching math and reading and science and social studies if kids haven’t eaten, they haven’t slept, they’re worried about their dad’s job or their grandmother’s recent death,” FutureEd Director Thomas Toch said.
‘These kids aren’t going to learn’
During his first year as Education Secretary in 2021, Miguel Cardona said the system is “missing the point” if school districts fail to restructure schools with better social and emotional support such as mental health resources.
Emphasizing the need for Social Emotional Learning (SEL) curriculums could serve as a start, according to Katie Kirby, a principal and experienced educator in Union City, New Jersey.
“These kids aren’t going to learn,” Kirby told ABC News, adding, “All they’re thinking about [is] the trauma that happened in their house. Or, even during COVID, just being isolated is a trauma.”
“I feel like more could be done to address the mental health issues and social emotional things around, you know, not just the students but the teachers also,” Kirby said about post-COVID schooling.
The New Jersey elementary school principal said more mental health practitioners and teachers will energize school communities.
Experts told ABC that innovative models, such as communities in schools, have worked with local agencies to provide positive SEL results over the years.
Toch said these communities in schools structure is a solution to the typical public education framework because it is a “difficult” time to grow up in America.
“We need to recognize that students need a range of supports in order to be successful academically,” he said.
Due to the complexity of American children, Toch said the community is responsible for helping raise students.
“These models, at best, they are partnerships where other agencies are contributing resources to the partnership so that schools don’t have to shoulder the entire burden, financial burden, of a more comprehensive model on behalf of the whole child,” he said.
Jonte Lee, a science teacher in the nation’s capital, also said a reboot is enhanced by community partnerships.
“We need parental support as well and we need other entities in the community to support [teachers],” he said. “It’s like we support you, you support us — we need to come together as a community and a culture.”
Lee said a public education overhaul isn’t necessary though. The system only needs minor “tweaks” such as hiring and paying more teachers, according to Lee.
“Hasn’t the model been recreated multiple times?” Lee told ABC News, adding, “When we say recreate the public school education model, it has already been recreated multiple times, which is why I believe in school choice, because ‘this model may not work for me.'”
Injecting “choice” into education refers to a largely conservative movement that supports charter schools. Public charter schools are taxpayer funded and state-run, but the schools have the ability to turn students away, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Their curriculums are agreed upon or chartered by local or state government, which gives the school more freedom than a traditional public school.
In contrast, tuition-free public education is schooling provided under the public’s supervision or direction, according to the Cornell Law School.
‘Education is always about the economy’
With several school districts back in full swing this summer, experts told ABC News that challenges stretch beyond academic and social emotional learning.
“Education is always about the economy,” Mitchell said. “We just don’t discuss those two things together.”
In the wake of an educator shortage, Mitchell described school vacancies as an economic issue since workforce trends have outpaced the public education sector. Therefore, leaders such as Cardona and Harvard Center for Education Policy Research Executive Director Dr. Christina Grant stress the need to make public high school a pathway to careers for students. Research supports these proposals. After graduation, adults are a “direct reflection” of the preparation given to them by the school system, according to Mitchell.
For the most part, experts said they believe some reconfiguring of the education system should occur. Christina Grant, who was Washington, D.C.’s state superintendent during the pandemic, said she fully supports large-scale adjustments such as adding high-impact tutoring for all, utilizing federal investments and resources, and rethinking the high school structure.
Meanwhile, many conservative policymakers are pushing to defund the U.S. Department of Education as a whole. They argue that the word “education” doesn’t appear in the Constitution, so the individual states have to work through issues on a case-by-case basis.
At CEPR, Grant is researching evidence-based solutions for students across the country. She said intentional revisions are required for improving public education.
“The data is telling us that we have work to do,” she told ABC News. “Do I think that that means we need a whole system overhaul? I don’t think that you can eat a whole elephant at one time. I think you have to be laser-like focused on which chunks you would attack in which ways.”
Toch warns changes, whether sweeping or incremental, could take up to a decade on a widespread scale.
He and Grant agree the roughly $190 billion in elementary and secondary school emergency relief from the federal government during COVID has been helpful in tackling these concerns — particularly student recovery — over the last three years. But the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan (ARP) money expires on Sept. 30.
With that deadline looming, Grant hopes more investments will move the needle.
“I do think that the federal government still has to make seismic commitments in public education because we are far from out of this,” she said.
(LOS ANGELES) — As hundreds of firefighters battled a raging wildfire on Thursday in the steep mountains north of Los Angeles, cooler weather sweeping into Southern California aided their fight, fire officials said.
The so-called Bridge Fire, which is burning in the Sheep Mountain Wilderness in the Angeles National Forest, saw “minimal” growth on Thursday as winds died down and humidity increased, officials said in their most recent update, posted at about 4 p.m. Thursday.
But the fire’s containment was still at zero percent as of that update, fire officials said. The blaze by then had spread to about 51,580 acres that straddled Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties.
“Firefighters made great progress on the ground, aided by aircraft to attack the fire aggressively 24 hours per day,” the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said.
About 480 firefighting personnel were working to contain the fire, which was ignited Sunday and was the largest of several active blazes in Southern California.
The three largest blazes burning on Thursday covered a total of more than 110,000 acres and threatened tens of thousands of structures, according to fire officials.
The Line Fire in San Bernardino County was spread over about 37,207 acres with 21% containment, Cal Fire said. That fire had destroyed or damaged by early Friday at least four structures, with some 65,000 others threatened, officials said.
And the Airport Fire in Orange and Riverside counties covered about 23,453 acres with about 5% containment, Cal Fire said.
Officials with San Bernardino County announced further evacuations for the Bridge Fire late on Thursday, broadening their order near The Baldy Village to including several additional neighborhoods from San Antonio Heights to Wrightwood and east to Cucamonga Peak.
The temperature in Los Angeles was expected to peak on Friday and Saturday at about 78 degrees Fahrenheit, before further cooling next week, according to the National Weather Service.
ABC News’ Marilyn Heck, David Brennan and Bill Hutchinson contributed to this report.