Dwight Roston stole cars as a teenager. He dropped out of school and spent his adolescence trying to avoid the police. The only reason he stepped into his neighborhood church on the east side of Detroit back in 2013 was to complete court-mandated community service – a condition of his second probation.

As his life was sliding downward, so was his city. Detroit careened into the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history, unable to pay liabilities of some $20 billion.

Most people wrote off Mr. Roston back then – just as they did his city. “He was an awful kid,” says the Rev. Barry Randolph, head of the Church of the Messiah Detroit, a congregation that welcomed the teen.

Why We Wrote This

President Donald Trump has deployed the National Guard to major U.S. cities to address urban crime. But as Detroit's crime rate continues to fall, residents say what has worked is community connection and accountability.

This pastor was not most people, though. Pastor Randolph, who goes by Pastor Barry, or “PB,” had started a “Silence the Violence” march a few years earlier. He offered young Black men like Mr. Roston guidance and provided an alternative to the crime, violence, and drugs that helped make Detroit one of the most notorious cities in America.

The young men arrived at the church in Detroit’s Islandview neighborhood for skills workshops and other lessons to apply to their lives. Mr. Roston liked Pastor Barry because he didn’t drive a car or wear a suit. He wore a baseball cap and worked just as hard as anyone. He spearheaded a church-run “Grow Town,” that used urban gardens that teach farming techniques. He has also helped neighbors launch small businesses.

So, after his probation ended, Mr. Roston decided to stick around.

City leaders were often in the pastor’s office, he noticed. This both impressed and bewildered him.

“On paper, [these leaders] have all of this power and prestige, but they would come here and they would have meetings with Pastor Barry and ask him how to figure stuff out,” he says. “And to me, I’m just like, ‘Y’all get paid for this, and y’all can’t figure it out, and he don’t get paid, and he helping y’all figure it out.’”

Then one day, Pastor Barry invited the teenager to attend a meeting with city planners. They were talking about investing millions in new bike lanes. But Mr. Roston spoke up. He told the planners what the neighborhood really needed was improved public parks, including fencing and new nets for basketball hoops.

About a month and a half later, while Mr. Roston was riding around the neighborhood on his bike, he saw that a local park had been newly manicured, just as he’d suggested.

“It was just a powerful feeling,” he says. “And it was good to realize that a lot of the things we complain about, if you are invited to the meetings, or if the meetings are open, those things that you have to say can actually impact the community.”

That’s how he came to trust Pastor Barry, who was leading him and so many of his friends out of trouble and into the pews of this community-building church.

At the same time, it turned out, the city of Detroit was crawling back from its own brink.

The specter of the National Guard

The safety of the American city has become a critical question as President Donald Trump deploys National Guard troops around the country. His administration’s stated aim is to battle urban crime.

“We’re going to save all of our cities, and we’re going to make them essentially crime-free,” Mr. Trump said from the Oval Office on Oct. 15. “This is an amazing thing. And we’re just at the start. We’re going to go into other cities that we’re not talking about purposely. We’re getting ready to go in.”

So far, the president has authorized deployments of troops to fight crime or temper what he says are violent protests in Portland, Oregon; Chicago; and Washington, D.C. – though each city has sued. In September, Vice President JD Vance offered to send the National Guard to Detroit, too.

Later in October, as leaders in Portland and Chicago pushed back against the president’s deployments to their cities, leaders in Detroit gathered for a news conference at police headquarters to underscore how much Detroit has been improving in recent years, especially when it comes to crime.

Back in 2013, the violent crime rate in Detroit was the highest among large U.S. cities, more than five times the national average. There were 333 criminal homicides that year, also marking the highest homicide rate in large cities: 48 per 100,000. (That year, the homicide rate in New York City was 4.)

Over the past few years, however, the homicide rate has dropped dramatically. In 2024, there were 203 murders in the city – a 39% decline from 2013 and the lowest number recorded since 1965.

Detroit property values also increased significantly in 2024, even after nine straight years of appreciation. Last year, the city’s total property values surpassed $10 billion for the first time since 2008. And according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent estimates, the city saw an increase in population in both 2023 and 2024.

At their news conference, city leaders said homicides were down 15% in the first nine months of 2025 compared with last year. Nonfatal shootings, too, dropped by 22%.

The Monitor asked Mayor Mike Duggan, a political independent first elected in 2013, whether the National Guard would be needed to continue these reductions in crime.

“I am a great believer that the way you reduce crime in the long term is, you change to a culture of accountability,” he said, flanked by a group of leaders that included police Chief Todd Bettison, City Council members, circuit court judges, and crime intervention groups. “You change an individual’s decision-making so that they don’t pack the gun in the first place.”

Crime is falling for a number of reasons. But the leaders here at police headquarters attribute Detroit’s recent successes to a commitment to working together from the bottom up.

Political leaders, police, and judges have cooperated with grassroots community organizers and faith leaders, creating a more unified effort to seek both swift justice and community healing in Detroit’s most troubled neighborhoods. That has built greater trust, they say, between them and the people they serve.

For many Detroiters, the city’s “comeback” is not an act of force, but a collection of choices made by those who refused to give up on their city – and refused to leave.

“This is how we rebuild our communities,” Pastor Barry says. “You turn the people around by providing opportunity, bringing out their humanity, meeting them where they are, and helping them get where they need to be.”

The success of “community violence intervention”

The basement of the Church of the Messiah is dubbed the “War Room.”

The neon-lit room has a dry-erase board packed with the month’s planned activities. It is here that Pastor Barry and community members plan strategies to battle the problems in their neighborhood. He doesn’t care who arrives or where they come from. He doesn’t care if they come to church, or if they even believe in religion.

Mr. Roston first learned about video production here. It helped him land a gig working for PBS. (He also got noticed during his adult baptism at the church, and a visitor that day helped land him another gig as a model during Detroit’s fashion week.)

It’s here where community members incubate ideas for microenterprises, where they meet with city and state officials to share ideas about safe community spaces, and where leaders have organized their annual Silence the Violence march each June to honor victims of shootings. And it’s here that Pastor Barry says FORCE Detroit, one of the city’s most successful community violence intervention groups, was born from what had been ad hoc, grassroots organizing. (FORCE stands for Faithfully Organizing Resources for Community Empowerment.)

It is one of six original groups organized to work in the most violent pockets of Detroit. (A seventh was added this year.) Each received municipal grants from the city’s federally funded ShotStoppers program. In 2024, FORCE Detroit earned an additional performance grant of $175,000 after it helped achieve a 72% reduction in homicides and nonfatal shootings in its area from April to June. Overall, homicides fell by 45% in the 22 square miles Detroit’s Community Violence Intervention (CVI) groups served.

Across town from the Church of the Messiah, FORCE Detroit is at work in its neighborhood on a recent school day at Frank Cody High School. Staff members comb through the cafeteria to get sign-ups for a pickup basketball game during lunch.

With the gym doors locked by a security guard behind her, Taylor Lockridge, a trained violence interrupter known as “Coach Tee,” blows her whistle and asks the two dozen boys to get playing.

But her real coaching happens in the bleachers, as she inches next to a young boy with a mop of hair and a swollen eye. He is 13 years old, just out of middle school.

“What’s the beef right now?” Coach Tee asks him, trying to get a pulse on the kinds of rivalries that might spiral into violence. He mumbles an answer, trying to avoid her questions, until she tells him she knows his gang name. He finally perks up.

“He just said it out his mouth that he’s looking for rank, which for them means moving up on the chart,” Coach Tee says. “And the only way to do that is by killing somebody, beating somebody up, stealing, jumping someone – terrible things,” she later explains, after the bell for class rings. “I said, ‘Let’s change that there, please.’”

Mike Peterson, the head of CVI programs for the city, says messengers like Coach Tee carry out the work critical for change. “Credible messengers are really trying to change that idea, and that narrative, around, ‘Oh, it’s just Detroit. Violence is OK.’ No, it’s not, and those are the sort of things that our groups are able to [communicate].”

Coach Tee, whose group with FORCE Detroit works with residents of the Warrendale and Cody Rouge neighborhoods, near where she grew up. She asks the ninth grader with the swollen eye to come back next week. “You gotta change that mindset and that narrative,” she says before her next group of players arrives.

The federal funding FORCE Detroit and other CVI groups have been getting, however, is about to dry up. As part of its efforts to slash funding for a host of overseas and domestic programs, the Trump administration is bringing to an end the Biden-era support for such violence intervention efforts.

In April, the Department of Justice notified FORCE Detroit it would no longer receive its federal grant funding. In May, the organization joined four other nonprofit groups to sue the U.S. government for not following federal protocols. The case was dismissed but is on appeal.

In July, the Trump administration ended the $158 million in grants allocated for gun violence prevention programs around the nation. Detroit’s ShotStoppers program had received $10 million previously. In October, the Michigan legislature approved some $95 million in public safety for cities with the highest crime rates, and Detroit’s leadership has said it will use that money to expand its CVI programs.

“If you don’t have great cities, you won’t have great nations.”

Beginning in the late 1960s, Detroit experienced one of the most prominent examples of “white flight,” or the out-migration of white residents from urban America. Its population was nearly 2 million in 1950, falling about 68% over the decades. In 1950, white people made up 84% of Detroit’s residents. Today, they make up 11%.

As residents and businesses fled, thousands of houses were abandoned, and home values plummeted. Black communities, already marginalized by the redlining that excluded them from federal home loan guarantees dating to before World War II, were left in neighborhoods without a solid tax base – and with less city support for the most basic public services.

As Detroit descended toward bankruptcy in 2013, police Chief Bettison was a police commander, and he remembers streetlights that hardly worked. Some 45,000 homes were abandoned. There were few parks, just vacant lots with grass so high no one could play in them, he says. It took on average an hour for police to show up for emergencies.

Standing as an emblem for American urban decay was the city’s former train station, Michigan Central Station. Its broken windows haunted the city.

“It was painful,” says Chief Bettison. “It was embarrassing.”

The strategies for Detroit’s emergence from bankruptcy, known as the “Grand Bargain,” were hammered out in 2014. They included an unprecedented show of philanthropy.

“If you don’t have great cities, you won’t have great nations,” Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, famously said. “Detroit is a metaphor for America, for America’s challenges and America’s opportunities.”

In 2018, Ford Motor Co. purchased Michigan Central Station for $90 million with plans to redevelop it into a technology hub. The company has spent nearly $1 billion to restore the old station, which officially reopened in 2024.

Real estate billionaire and mortgage lender Dan Gilbert, founder of Rocket Cos., has been the biggest player in the revitalization of downtown Detroit, says Glenn Stevens Jr., chief automotive and innovation officer at the Detroit Regional Chamber. Mr. Gilbert’s venture group was behind the construction of a new mixed-use skyscraper, Hudson’s Detroit, the first built in the city since the 1980s. General Motors is planning to relocate its global headquarters here this year.

“So it’s very emblematic,” says Mr. Stevens, as America’s automakers help revive the once industrially powerful Motor City.

A comeback? These proud Detroiters never left.

The billion-dollar developments in the 7.2 square miles that comprise Detroit’s bustling downtown, Midtown, and Corktown are usually the main focus of stories people tell about the city’s dramatic turnaround.

But Detroit sprawls across 139 square miles. And the “comeback story” has an inherent tension in it: Tens of thousands of people never left the city in the first place.

Long before Detroit started building glittery skyscrapers again, Olayami Dabls was building his own gleaming buildings.

In 2002, Mr. Dabls opened the MBAD African Bead Museum, filling an expanse of open fields and abandoned buildings with public art. Plastered to the installations’ buildings are shards of mirrors that glint in the afternoon sunlight, reflecting not only Detroiters but also the city around them.

Mr. Dabls is among a generation of artists who flourished here in the 2000s and 2010s. As housing costs cratered, new talent flocked to the city from around the country, and many Detroit-based artists, like Mr. Dabls, stayed. “Only the people who truly loved Detroit stayed around,” he says.

Those people are the subject of a new documentary, “Resurgo Detroit,” directed by Stephen McGee, who moved here in the early 2000s after buying a home for $1. Detroiters who remained here, weathering a bankruptcy that left them without many city services and with a national narrative that maligned their city as a failure, have rejected the idea that Detroit has “come back.”

Detroit’s poet laureate, jessica Care moore, who produced “Resurgo Detroit,” says that is important for newcomers to remember. It’s a theme she returns to often in her work. “We may have abandoned homes but we / are not an abandoned people. / I hear outsiders talking about a new Detroit but I / remember the beauty of old Detroit,” she once wrote in a poem titled “You May Not Know My Detroit.”

“I ain’t mad at [newcomers] as long as you come with respect and don’t forget about the people who were here,” Ms. Care moore adds.

Sheree Walton, the president of the Church of the Messiah’s first housing project to buy and restore a burned-out building next to the church, looks out of a window and recalls Islandview’s abandoned lots with “grass that was higher than we were.” She has helped revitalize this neighborhood for decades.

“I hate the word ‘comeback,” says Ms. Walton. As a graduate of urban planning, she has mixed feelings about Detroit’s downtown development. “This revitalization cannot be successful without everyone having

equitable and affordable housing, because a lot of societal ills start with a lack of safe and affordable housing.”

As property values here have ballooned, it has created both opportunities and squeezes. Mr. Roston says he bought his home for $25,000 in the 2010s, and its value has increased tenfold.

Still, about a third of renters in Detroit spend between 31% and 50% of their income on housing – a benchmark making them “cost-burdened” under federal definitions. The median household income in Detroit proper stood at $36,500 a year in 2022, compared to $67,000 in the state. Homeownership remains out of reach for many.

Today, new units owned by the church’s housing development program have sprouted throughout Islandview, and the church has become the largest economic developer in the neighborhood. It has rehabilitated 214 apartment units and owns 49 vacant lots.

Stately Victorian mansions once owned by auto barons in this portion of Detroit’s east side were left abandoned with boarded-up doors and broken windows. Today, newcomers are purchasing and rehabilitating them. Developers keep calling about the land it owns, says Pastor Barry.

Mr. Roston and his friends see the rise of Detroit reflected in their own lives. “We came with problems, and then we started coming up with ideas,” he says.

Lounging in Pastor Barry’s office at the church on an October morning, a group of young men echoes this sentiment. Paul Jones says that, at age 15, he looked in the mirror and told his reflection that he didn’t think he would live another year. “I see myself very much in the city of Detroit – being down, being battered, beat up, talked down on,” Mr. Jones says.

But it was at that moment he first felt God calling him to the faith he holds today. During his senior year of high school, after his mother died, his middle school best friend, Giovanni Jackson, who used to deal drugs, had been embraced by Pastor Barry. He encouraged Mr. Jones to come to church.

Both are now successful. Mr. Jones works in real estate development and serves on the board of the church’s housing development corporation. Mr. Jackson turned a passion for cooking into a small business, Giovanni’s Seasoning.

Markuis Cartwright, sitting quietly among the group this morning, works at Amazon and at a local youth nonprofit. But he aspires, one day, to be mayor of Detroit. So Pastor Barry put him behind the podium at the annual Silence the Violence march.

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“Tap into their warrior spirit,” Pastor Barry says. “Take activism and spirituality, and make that your purpose and your vision.”

“You don’t need the National Guard to go into cities and do these things,” he adds. “We did this.”

The women on stage line up and bow to applause, celebrating a moment of triumph. These dancers from Westside School of Ballet have completed their summer showcase, eight months after dozens of families at the school lost their homes in the Los Angeles wildfires.

Connie Bell glides out to center stage with the rest of her cohort, beaming with joy and relief. She stands with perfect posture, her hair pulled into a neat bun, wearing a forest green leotard and matching mesh skirt that floats when she moves.

Ms. Bell has been dancing her way through heartache. In December, her husband died after a long illness. A month later, the Palisades fire incinerated their Malibu home. She and Ed had been together for 45 years and raised a family in that little house at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

Why We Wrote This

The LA wildfires forced thousands into sometimes overwhelming decisions on how to rebuild their lives. For 10 months, Connie Bell has shared her journey with us. Widowed a month before fire destroyed her home, she is embracing possibilities both exhilarating and daunting.

Now, as she puts it, she is back where she was as a young adult. That was the last time she was on her own, with no place she called home, no family or career to drive her decisions, with limited resources and unlimited choices.

The stakes are high, financially and emotionally. The loss of the house comes with deep sadness; rebuilding may be out of reach.

Thousands of people, like Ms. Bell, have been confronting the same decisions: sell or build; forge a new life or try to reclaim the old. The Pasadena and Altadena wildfires caused unprecedented loss in the Los Angeles area: more than 16,000 structures destroyed, three-fourths of which were homes.

Recovery is slowly getting underway across the county. Of about 4,500 applications, fewer than 1,500 building permits for fire-gutted sites have been issued by LA County and cities impacted by the fires: Los Angeles, Malibu, and Pasadena.

The labyrinth of housing, permits, government benefits, and insurance payouts is daunting. But for some, the destruction has also created a clearing – an opportunity to reevaluate and reset. Ms. Bell is taking it.

She has discovered that heartbreak and joy can coexist. Even when a person is grieving, she says, “there also are times to laugh and be alive and have joy. Those things don’t go away.”

January: “Just Connie”

On January 7, with hurricane-force winds driving fire toward the coast and smoke blacking out the sky, Ms. Bell grabbed just a few things: Sirus the family parrot, enough clothing for an overnight stay, and her ballet slippers.

She had lived most of her life in the small oceanside city, where wildfires and evacuations come with the landscape. “I didn’t really feel like I was in any danger, but I just felt like staying wasn’t the right thing for me to do,” she says.

Nearly 250,000 people were under evacuation orders that night, including Ms. Bell, who took refuge with her daughter and son-in-law in LA. By morning, everything was gone: clothes, furniture, photos, mementos – all the evidence of her family's life together perched on the edge of the sea.

With everything upended, she found structure and purpose in the ballet studio. Two days into the fires, Ms. Bell was back in class.

Ballet, she says, “sort of saved me.”

She has been dancing since childhood, through college, then professionally and as a ballet teacher. Today, she takes adult classes at Westside, in Santa Monica.

“In that room, she is just Connie,” says Charlie Hodges, her instructor. Being happy and complete in the studio, he adds, showed her that she could be those things elsewhere.

February: Home for now

A few weeks after the fires were contained, Ms. Bell has moved into a condominium that her daughter owns in Santa Monica. She is staying there with Sirus and a bulldog named Otis who made his way into Ms. Bell’s care after his owner died unexpectedly. She and the dog relate to each other, she says.

What she lacks in stability, she makes up for with resolve. Ms. Bell is ready to embrace a new chapter and sell her property. She is not alone. In the first six months after the fires, a surge of lots hit the market: more than 170 were sold in Altadena, compared with six in the first half of 2024. In the Palisades, it was 94; one the year before.

Ms. Bell’s reasons for selling are mostly financial. In this part of California, where property values and cost of living are among the highest in the country, she could make enough from the empty lot to retire in modest comfort.

And the thought of rebuilding without Ed feels like too much. Of the house, she says, “I just don’t have any more room for that.”

The days are stacked with checklists, phone calls, and paperwork. Her lot needs to be cleared of debris, and there are codes and filing deadlines to piece together. The trust for her estate burned, so she needs to track that down.

Amid those tasks, there is also delight: Allegra, her daughter, is having a child soon – Ms. Bell’s first grandchild.

She is creating her plan by focusing on what she loves. “I’m refreshing myself,” she says, “and I hope that I can be happy. I want to be happy.”

March: Sunshine and rainbows and realism

In late March, Ms. Bell is still waiting for a sofa to be delivered – the missing piece in a living area that’s starting to feel like home with a fluffy white rug, round metal coffee table, and Otis sprawled on the floor. Sirus squawks from his large cage.

She is balancing familiar habits – like ballet – with the newness of recovery. Her resources are limited, but not her persistence.

“There’s confidence that whatever she gets hit with, she’s gonna have the strength and the intelligence, the creativity to prevail,” says Beth Friedman, a longtime friend.

Built in 1946 on an iconic stretch of California waterfront, the house she shared with her husband was a far cry from the celebrity mansions that Malibu is known for today. The income she made as an Airbnb superhost helped pay the costs that come with waking up to ocean waves and dolphins.

Ed and Connie bought the house in 2002, when their two children were not yet teenagers. For a time, the four of them shared its one bedroom, their beds lined up side-by-side like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, says son Colborn.

The close quarters inside were offset by an expanse of sun and ocean outside. The house hovered over sand on support beams lapped by the ocean tide. It was, Colborn says, “a perfect place.”

Protecting it was a priority. Ms. Bell is properly insured, unlike thousands of homeowners who have been caught in the state’s insurance crisis. Between 40% and 80% of homes lost in the wildfires are underinsured, according to a state agency. The largest insurers have been pulling out of California for the last few years due to increasing environmental risks and the rising costs of rebuilding. Many homeowners have been forced onto the state’s FAIR plan, a syndicate of companies required to offer fire policies to homeowners left behind by the traditional marketplace. Those policies are more expensive and offer limited coverage.

Ms. Bell’s insurance covers three years’ worth of living expenses, plus a payout for the 800-square-foot house. Selling the lot comes with security and retirement. Rebuilding – which could net her more if she sold later – would take everything she has plus some. It would also take years of managing building codes and construction details.

Yet selling comes with unknowns. What will the glut of lots do to the value of her land? The longer it sits, the more her imagination fills in the property, edging out the financial realities of rebuilding.

Before the ruins are cleared, she returns to the place that framed her life and loves for 23 years.

Ms. Bell finds poetry in the wreckage, pointing out the warped roofing panels that look like handkerchiefs and the mangled antique iron bed frame draped like a piece of lace.

Tragedy has not corrupted her view – a mix of New York realism learned from her parents, says her son, and the 1960s California hippie culture she grew up in.

“Things go on and things must continue,” says Colborn. But also, for her, “everything is kind of sunshine and rainbows. She has a multiplicity to her that is in contrast, but at the same time I think is useful.”

April and May: A new vision

By mid-May, her cream-colored couch is finally in place, along with end tables and a lamp. A TV hangs on the wall. Ms. Bell, Otis, and Sirus are starting to have a routine.

When grief creeps in, she focuses on what was not lost: “My husband feels like love now,” she says. “And my family and my community. Those things no one will ever take from you.”

Spring has brought some setbacks: Her neighbors’ properties have been cleared by the Army Corps of Engineers. She hired a private contractor, but the person disappeared. Worse than the $1,000 she lost is the hit to her confidence. She appealed to the county but missed the deadline to sign back up for the Corps. She didn’t know who to trust, she says, and she didn’t trust herself.

Despite that, she doesn’t languish in distress. “It’s not like I don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s just been a little bit harder getting there than it should have been,” she says.

That churning fuels more what-ifs: Late-night musings are giving shape to a new vision.

In place of an empty lot, Ms. Bell imagines building a jewel box on the water’s edge. She is in touch with an architect who specializes in buildings made of glass. The lot is too small for a family home, she says, so she’ll make it a work of art – maybe to sell, maybe not.

Her children do not agree about her change of heart. Allegra thinks she should “sell the lot as soon as possible, invest the money, and live my life,” says Ms. Bell.

Colborn, on the other hand, has pushed for a rebuild. Not only would the house create a legacy for their family, he says, but he believes the project would help his mom “realize a new lease on life.”

It already has. Ms. Bell is exploring plans and permits, which she believes will add to the property’s value. It is a business decision as well as a creative one, she says, even if she is not quite sure how she’ll pay for it. Art, in step with logic.

August and everything after: Joy in the art of it

In early August, Ms. Bell sits quietly in the garden at a Santa Monica bakery.

She and her fellow dancers wrapped their ballet showcase two days earlier. The weeks of practice deepened their camaraderie, she says, just as she had hoped. Now, she feels “wonderfully and creatively liberated.”

Her teacher, Mr. Hodges, sees someone recovering with grace and grit. “She’s not trying to recreate the life she had, but she’s trying to respond to that and build a life that’s next.”

What’s next, now, is rebuilding. Geologists and structural engineers will help Ms. Bell and some neighbors build foundations on the beach. Architects will deliver plans for her new home.

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There is joy in the art of it, and an expectation that whatever she chooses will be right for her and for the property, “and so that’s all a beautiful thing.”

“I feel like there’s so many wonderful things to live and be and do,” she says.

To get U.S. students back in class, educators have tried everything. They’ve visited homes, improved bus routes, increased mentoring, and even dangled cash rewards.

Enter the Nintendo Switch. Eports classes are an example of another tactic schools are deploying in a bid to reduce chronic absenteeism. They’re offering unique courses or programs that engage students.

“The way to get kids to show up isn’t going to be through social studies,” says Robert Fusato, who teaches esports and ukulele classes at Maui Waena Intermediate School in Hawaii. “If we can hook them through things they’re interested in – and they can build confidence and become skilled at something – they’ll hang around for the other things.”

Why We Wrote This

As schools combat chronic absenteeism, one solution gaining traction is offering elective courses that are too interesting to skip. The result is a better attitude toward school – and toward the rest of the subjects in it.

For the past few years, educators across the nation have been searching for ways to boost student attendance. Chronic absenteeism – generally defined as a student missing 10% or more of the school year – surged during the pandemic. Nearly 1 in 3 students fit that description. Since then, the percentage of chronically absent students has gradually fallen in most places after intentional reduction strategies. But the work is unfinished, and tapping into students’ interest appears to help.

Experts say doing so can breed motivation and provide a greater sense of belonging, both of which make school a place students want to be.

“One of the things [schools] can definitely do is simply attend to their core functions,” says Thomas Dee, a professor in Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, who has studied chronic absenteeism. “Offering high-quality, engaging courses encourages students to show up – gives them a reason to post up in the classroom.”

That’s exactly how the esports class came to be at Maui Waena Intermediate School. A boy in the popular esports club quipped that he was only showing up to school because of afternoon matches. That student’s offhand remark correlated with his attendance record, Mr. Fusato says. That sparked the idea of upgrading the club to an elective course several years ago. Since then, school leaders say it has provided academic dividends that extend beyond students’ competitive gaming skills.

The 1,030-student school has seen attendance trending in a positive direction since the 2020-2021 academic year, when 32% of students were chronically absent. Last year, that rate fell to 22%. Are the unique elective courses helping? Principal Jacquelyn McCandless believes so.

“Even if it’s just for a fraction of kids, they all make a difference in my book,” she says.

Several thousand miles away, student-made models representing different architectural styles line a table in a North Las Vegas high school. There’s a Victorian home, a contemporary Sydney Opera House, and a White House replica showcasing federal design.

The project keeps students like Jair Alba, a junior at Northeast Career and Technical Academy, locked in on school. The teen says he rarely misses a day at his magnet school.

“Learning things like scaling, like CAD [computer-aided design], building hands-on models — all those things interest me,” he says during a Design Drafting II class.

Denise Burton, who teaches the course, says students attend class and even come again after school to work on their projects. She suspects their motivation stems from them forming a school-to-career connection, which is at the very core of what Northeast Career and Technical Academy is trying to do.

“They bought in,” she says. “They are here for a purpose.”

That’s the type of atmosphere Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, would like more schools to embrace. Interesting electives – whether it be a themed English class or a specialty art course — can help with engagement, but she urges educators to take a deeper look at why students are snubbing school.

A Voices of Gen Z study, conducted by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation, found stronger student engagement across all measures this year compared with 2023. Despite the gains, large shares of students continue to report dismal engagement. Four in 10 students say school doesn’t challenge them in a good way, while another third say they don’t feel like they have learned anything interesting in the prior seven days.

“They’re sending a message,” says Ms. Lake. “They’re saying school is not relevant to them.”

So what’s the key to relevancy?

At Northeast Career and Technical Academy, Principal Ryan Cordia believes the answer lies in giving students a why and a how. The why is a career pathway, chosen by the student, that blends their passions and abilities. The how is a mastery-based learning model that allows students to move at their own pace and build confidence and work ethic along the way. The high schoolers also receive emotional intelligence instruction and career coaching.

As of early October, the magnet school – located in a minority-majority city outside of Las Vegas – had a roughly 6% chronic absenteeism rate, down from 11% at the same time last year, Dr. Cordia says.

“When they have a why, they never stop working,” he says of this generation. “They crowdsource and they work relentlessly toward whatever their passion is.”

Ozzie Patton, a junior and aspiring youth minister, describes engagement as a two-way street.

“The school motivates me a lot, and I feel like I need to give back to my school,” he says, explaining his desire to attend class. “It gives me a lot of, like, opportunity.”

Dr. Dee has also seen relevancy play out in his research related to ethnic studies classes offered in San Francisco public schools. At the select high school piloting the program more than a decade ago, the ninth graders who took the ethnic studies class showed improved grade point averages and attendance, which Dr. Dee suspects may be a result of the “intellectually stimulating and psychologically warm” course environment.

California went on to pass an ethnic studies mandate for high school graduation. But without state funding, it has not gone into effect. And Dr. Dee cautions against a rapid scale-up without building teacher capacity for such a course.

“You’re asking teachers to go in the classroom and discuss some of the most difficult and painful aspects of U.S. history and contemporary society,” he says. “If a teacher is not well prepared to do that, you can easily see it go sideways.”

Better engagement can also help build social bonds. Hedy Chang, executive director of the nonprofit Attendance Works, points to emerging research from the UChicago Consortium, which shows middle school students’ absenteeism rates are strongly influenced by peer relationships and school connectedness in the wake of the pandemic. In other words, friendships matter now more than ever.

In Hawaii, Mr. Fusato has seen this firsthand in his esports classes. Some of his students struggled socially and were not musically or athletically inclined. Esports gives them another option, he says, and the class is more than just playing video games.

The curriculum combines gaming strategy with career exploration and soft skills such as teamwork and communication. One day students might be learning about coding in relation to video games, he says. The next day, they could be organizing an esports tournament.

“Esports is a lot of communication and working together,” Mr. Fusato says. “That’s going to build their friend network a little bit.”

With two Trump-Vance campaign signs planted in their front yard, James Ash and his wife, Sara, might not seem like a welcoming audience for liberal activists handing out flyers. 

But Mr. Ash says that when he heard the state had tested the water supply of Three Rivers, Michigan, and found lead, he knew he had to take action. 

It didn’t matter whether he was on the same political team as the person handing out the flyers. In fact, he offered to take campaign flyers to the union hall at his workplace – a local auto parts manufacturer. Then he spread the word about the possible lead contamination through his fellow United Auto Worker members. 

Why We Wrote This

Democrats and Republicans are at odds nationally, as the continued government shutdown shows. But in Three Rivers, Michigan, local leaders are setting aside differences for the common goal of real problem-solving.

“Water is the life force; without water, we all die,” says Mr. Ash. As he talks, sitting on his front porch, Sara Ash fills a mason jar from the tap. It’s clear fluid, but that doesn’t bring any comfort. “They tell us our pipes are fine,” he says. “I know the state is taking frequent tests of the water. That’s a start, but it’s not helping the water.”  

Mr. Ash says water isn’t a partisan issue. In fact, he has found common ground with Three Rivers residents whose views span the political spectrum. When it comes to water, he says, “We are joined together.”  

The residents’ cooperation has mostly involved spreading the word and showing up together at City Council meetings, trying to speed up what they say is the city’s slow response to a problem that the mayor says affects an estimated 10% of the 3,500 homes here, where water is at the heart of the community’s very identity. 

Three Rivers, located at the confluence of the St. Joseph, Rocky, and Portage rivers, is committing money to try to fix the problem – partly due to pressure from this politically diverse group of local residents. Mandated by the state to fix the problem in 20 years, Three Rivers came up with a plan to meet that requirement. 

In the context of a federal government shutdown now in its third week, the Three Rivers clean water campaign offers a glimmer of hope. Unlike in the nation’s capital, where Democrats and Republicans refuse to speak to each other, people in Three Rivers are finding common ground on clean water. 

What’s happening here is a hallmark of Michigan politics, says David Takitaki, professor of political science at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. He describes a “kitchen-table pragmatism” that thrives in a state with cities that lean Democratic, and rural areas “permeated with blue-collar working class unionism.” 

“Local politics rarely gets as hyperbolic as it does at the state and federal level,” Professor Takitaki says. “The main interest is about running your community. Nobody is tying things to the abortion issue. Nobody is trying to make you hate others. It’s more collegial and communal.” 

The downside of local politics is that it is often ignored, he says, even by voters. The upside is that flying under the radar “keeps it from being a blood sport,’’ he adds, “if we are able to get back to [the idea of] government as problem-solving and have discussions instead of tearing each other apart.”

Urgency to fix the problem

It was just over two years ago that the state discovered the source of the lead contamination was in the lateral pipes that supplied water to each house. 

People of all political stripes wanted the city to replace those pipes at once. The estimated cost: $4.2 million.

Mayor Tom Lowry is seasoned enough to be considered an elder statesman, having served 13 two-year terms as mayor. By now, he says, he has a feel for what the public wants, what the public can afford, and what they would be willing to pay for. He concludes: They would not be willing to pay higher taxes to replace the lead pipes in Three Rivers, and many couldn’t afford it. 

“We have a higher than average number of people who are two paychecks away from financial disaster,” Mayor Lowry says. “We lost two companies over the last five years that employed 100 people each. As a result, we have a lot of people on the edge of poverty.”

To Mr. Lowry, it’s clear that the most affordable solution to the lead problem is to repurpose an existing $2.7 million bond meant for street and wastewater system repairs, a measure that voters supported in recent elections. But Mr. Lowry keeps hearing complaints that City Hall is taking too long to resolve the issue. 

“At public meetings, I keep repeating the truth,” the mayor says. “It can be ugly and nasty, but through repetition of the facts, some start out angry, but most come around to a working relationship.” Even when clean water activists did picket and attend City Council meetings, he says, they were largely cordial and mainly came to listen, not shout.

The plan is that when streets are being redone, the city will test water lines and replace those that have lead. In addition, the city has begun to add a chemical called Aquadene to the water supply, which coats the pipes and reduces the leaching of lead into the water. Mr. Lowry says that tests show the lead levels are coming down. 

For Casey Tobias, the lead problem isn’t being solved fast enough. 

Ms. Tobias is a fireball of a woman with a tendency to pull people into her orbit. She attends the Trinity Episcopal Church, sells dried herbs at the farmer’s market, and runs a donations shop that benefits the poor and the unhoused in Three Rivers. She learned about the city’s lead contamination by word of mouth. Someone donating clothes was complaining about being unable to find water filters. Ms. Tobias asked, “Filters for what?” 

By the end of the conversation, Ms. Tobias was a determined activist. In a short time, she was walking the streets alongside others, knocking on doors, and handing out informational flyers. 

“I think the entire city is Republican,” says Ms. Tobias, who considers herself liberal, but says that she can work with anybody. “I don’t care about any of that. We all agree on water.”

Soon, she and other activists organized brainstorming sessions to help concerned citizens understand the scope of the problem and possible solutions. At one event, the organizers seated participants in a circle of chairs, allowing them to see each other and feel a sense of connection. A local bakery provided cupcakes. A guitarist played mood music. 

Ms. Tobias says the organizers had to add another ring of chairs, and then another, as participants filed in. 

“They may have been Democrats, more likely Republicans, but they all felt like they were contributing to something,” Ms. Tobias says. “Many of them said, ‘It’s just not working the way it should.’ Look, we have to be in this together. If we can’t get together over water, then God help us.” (In the 2024 presidential vote, St. Joseph County – which includes Three Rivers – leaned heavily Republican, with 66% voting for the GOP, and 32% voting for Democrats.)

Ms. Tobias said people told her that joining forces on the water issue was pivotal for the community. “All of us felt there was a light at the end of the tunnel,” she says. “It was proof that we could come together across political boundaries.”

Coming together

John Byler has lived in Three Rivers for more than 30 years. Just behind his house are three of the city’s wells, and the St. Joseph River behind them. Alongside his job at the local farm supply store, his volunteer work with the Methodist church, his small cattle operation, and his duties as a clan chief within the Shawnee Nation United Remnant Band, Mr. Byler found time to join Tobias and others on the clean water campaign.  

Mr. Byler says people didn’t talk about lead in the water until it was discovered in Flint, Michigan, in 2015, and then the state warned that this problem could be much more widespread. Now the most heated arguments occur on Facebook, but in public meetings, people just want to find solutions. “It’s just a matter of getting them to adjust the 20-year plan and to expedite some of those houses that are in greater need.” 

Among those pulled into Ms. Tobias’s orbit was Angel Johnston, who became so energized by the clean water campaign that she decided to run for mayor against Lowry on the water issue. Election Day is Nov. 4, and Ms. Johnston has been busy knocking on doors and promising to accelerate the lead pipe removal. 

“Everyone is concerned about the water,” says Ms. Johnston, who works for a smart-home integration company. “They ask, ‘Why is our water bill so high? Why can’t we drink the water?’ Everyone says, ‘What are you going to do about it?’” 

Mayor Lowry would note that under his leadership, the city has a plan in place. But Ms. Johnston is finding support, too – including from James Ash, the auto worker. He has placed her sign “Angel for Mayor” in his front yard, next to his Trump-Vance signs. 

“I don’t consider myself from any party,” Mr. Ash says. “I go with what feels right and I stick with my views.”  

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He acknowledges the city is taking action to provide clean water. “Now the city is taking baby steps. They are doing something, but not at the rate I’d want them to go.”

Baby steps or not, he says, it’s a path of progress.

With two Trump-Vance campaign signs planted in their front yard, James Ash and his wife, Sara, might not seem like a welcoming audience for liberal activists handing out flyers. 

But Mr. Ash says that when he heard the state had tested the water supply of Three Rivers, Michigan, and found lead, he knew he had to take action. 

It didn’t matter whether he was on the same political team as the person handing out the flyers. In fact, he offered to take campaign flyers to the union hall at his workplace – a local auto parts manufacturer. Then he spread the word about the possible lead contamination through his fellow United Auto Worker members. 

Why We Wrote This

Democrats and Republicans are at odds nationally, as the continued government shutdown shows. But in Three Rivers, Michigan, local leaders are setting aside differences for the common goal of real problem-solving.

“Water is the life force; without water, we all die,” says Mr. Ash. As he talks, sitting on his front porch, Sara Ash fills a mason jar from the tap. It’s clear fluid, but that doesn’t bring any comfort. “They tell us our pipes are fine,” he says. “I know the state is taking frequent tests of the water. That’s a start, but it’s not helping the water.”  

Mr. Ash says water isn’t a partisan issue. In fact, he has found common ground with Three Rivers residents whose views span the political spectrum. When it comes to water, he says, “We are joined together.”  

The residents’ cooperation has mostly involved spreading the word and showing up together at City Council meetings, trying to speed up what they say is the city’s slow response to a problem that the mayor says affects an estimated 10% of the 3,500 homes here, where water is at the heart of the community’s very identity. 

Three Rivers, located at the confluence of the St. Joseph, Rocky, and Portage rivers, is committing money to try to fix the problem – partly due to pressure from this politically diverse group of local residents. Mandated by the state to fix the problem in 20 years, Three Rivers came up with a plan to meet that requirement. 

In the context of a federal government shutdown now in its third week, the Three Rivers clean water campaign offers a glimmer of hope. Unlike in the nation’s capital, where Democrats and Republicans refuse to speak to each other, people in Three Rivers are finding common ground on clean water. 

What’s happening here is a hallmark of Michigan politics, says David Takitaki, professor of political science at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. He describes a “kitchen-table pragmatism” that thrives in a state with cities that lean Democratic, and rural areas “permeated with blue-collar working class unionism.” 

“Local politics rarely gets as hyperbolic as it does at the state and federal level,” Professor Takitaki says. “The main interest is about running your community. Nobody is tying things to the abortion issue. Nobody is trying to make you hate others. It’s more collegial and communal.” 

The downside of local politics is that it is often ignored, he says, even by voters. The upside is that flying under the radar “keeps it from being a blood sport,’’ he adds, “if we are able to get back to [the idea of] government as problem-solving and have discussions instead of tearing each other apart.”

Urgency to fix the problem

It was just over two years ago that the state discovered the source of the lead contamination was in the lateral pipes that supplied water to each house. 

People of all political stripes wanted the city to replace those pipes at once. The estimated cost: $4.2 million.

Mayor Tom Lowry is seasoned enough to be considered an elder statesman, having served 13 two-year terms as mayor. By now, he says, he has a feel for what the public wants, what the public can afford, and what they would be willing to pay for. He concludes: They would not be willing to pay higher taxes to replace the lead pipes in Three Rivers, and many couldn’t afford it. 

“We have a higher than average number of people who are two paychecks away from financial disaster,” Mayor Lowry says. “We lost two companies over the last five years that employed 100 people each. As a result, we have a lot of people on the edge of poverty.”

To Mr. Lowry, it’s clear that the most affordable solution to the lead problem is to repurpose an existing $2.7 million bond meant for street and wastewater system repairs, a measure that voters supported in recent elections. But Mr. Lowry keeps hearing complaints that City Hall is taking too long to resolve the issue. 

“At public meetings, I keep repeating the truth,” the mayor says. “It can be ugly and nasty, but through repetition of the facts, some start out angry, but most come around to a working relationship.” Even when clean water activists did picket and attend City Council meetings, he says, they were largely cordial and mainly came to listen, not shout.

The plan is that when streets are being redone, the city will test water lines and replace those that have lead. In addition, the city has begun to add a chemical called Aquadene to the water supply, which coats the pipes and reduces the leaching of lead into the water. Mr. Lowry says that tests show the lead levels are coming down. 

For Casey Tobias, the lead problem isn’t being solved fast enough. 

Ms. Tobias is a fireball of a woman with a tendency to pull people into her orbit. She attends the Trinity Episcopal Church, sells dried herbs at the farmer’s market, and runs a donations shop that benefits the poor and the unhoused in Three Rivers. She learned about the city’s lead contamination by word of mouth. Someone donating clothes was complaining about being unable to find water filters. Ms. Tobias asked, “Filters for what?” 

By the end of the conversation, Ms. Tobias was a determined activist. In a short time, she was walking the streets alongside others, knocking on doors, and handing out informational flyers. 

“I think the entire city is Republican,” says Ms. Tobias, who considers herself liberal, but says that she can work with anybody. “I don’t care about any of that. We all agree on water.”

Soon, she and other activists organized brainstorming sessions to help concerned citizens understand the scope of the problem and possible solutions. At one event, the organizers seated participants in a circle of chairs, allowing them to see each other and feel a sense of connection. A local bakery provided cupcakes. A guitarist played mood music. 

Ms. Tobias says the organizers had to add another ring of chairs, and then another, as participants filed in. 

“They may have been Democrats, more likely Republicans, but they all felt like they were contributing to something,” Ms. Tobias says. “Many of them said, ‘It’s just not working the way it should.’ Look, we have to be in this together. If we can’t get together over water, then God help us.” (In the 2024 presidential vote, St. Joseph County – which includes Three Rivers – leaned heavily Republican, with 66% voting for the GOP, and 32% voting for Democrats.)

Ms. Tobias said people told her that joining forces on the water issue was pivotal for the community. “All of us felt there was a light at the end of the tunnel,” she says. “It was proof that we could come together across political boundaries.”

Coming together

John Byler has lived in Three Rivers for more than 30 years. Just behind his house are three of the city’s wells, and the St. Joseph River behind them. Alongside his job at the local farm supply store, his volunteer work with the Methodist church, his small cattle operation, and his duties as a clan chief within the Shawnee Nation United Remnant Band, Mr. Byler found time to join Tobias and others on the clean water campaign.  

Mr. Byler says people didn’t talk about lead in the water until it was discovered in Flint, Michigan, in 2015, and then the state warned that this problem could be much more widespread. Now the most heated arguments occur on Facebook, but in public meetings, people just want to find solutions. “It’s just a matter of getting them to adjust the 20-year plan and to expedite some of those houses that are in greater need.” 

Among those pulled into Ms. Tobias’s orbit was Angel Johnston, who became so energized by the clean water campaign that she decided to run for mayor against Lowry on the water issue. Election Day is Nov. 4, and Ms. Johnston has been busy knocking on doors and promising to accelerate the lead pipe removal. 

“Everyone is concerned about the water,” says Ms. Johnston, who works for a smart-home integration company. “They ask, ‘Why is our water bill so high? Why can’t we drink the water?’ Everyone says, ‘What are you going to do about it?’” 

Mayor Lowry would note that under his leadership, the city has a plan in place. But Ms. Johnston is finding support, too – including from James Ash, the auto worker. He has placed her sign “Angel for Mayor” in his front yard, next to his Trump-Vance signs. 

“I don’t consider myself from any party,” Mr. Ash says. “I go with what feels right and I stick with my views.”  

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with Monitor Highlights.

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He acknowledges the city is taking action to provide clean water. “Now the city is taking baby steps. They are doing something, but not at the rate I’d want them to go.”

Baby steps or not, he says, it’s a path of progress.

Washington is entering the fourth week of a federal government shutdown with no tangible signs it will end anytime soon.

Senate Democrats are dug in, insisting that any government funding bill include an extension of expiring tax credits to offset fast-rising health insurance costs. Republicans are still refusing to negotiate while the government remains shut. President Donald Trump and his administration have sought to maximize the sting for Democratic lawmakers.

“We’re in a total holding pattern,” says West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a member of the Senate GOP leadership.

Why We Wrote This

Republicans and Democrats aren’t negotiating to end the weekslong government shutdown, as its effects are felt more widely. Some pressure points for each side are looming, however.

Monday marks Day 20 of the shutdown. The second-longest in U.S history lasted 21 days.

The longest-ever stretched 35 days in late 2018 and early 2019, triggered by President Trump’s demands to include money in a funding bill to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are openly speculating that this shutdown might last even longer than that.

Mr. Trump agreed to reopen the government in 2019 amid tumbling poll numbers. Republicans gave up on their 2013 attempt to force an Affordable Care Act repeal through a shutdown after 16 days for similar reasons. The mid-1990s House GOP shutdown, which is about to be eclipsed in length by this one, also ended when public sentiment turned against Republicans.

But right now, neither side feels like it’s losing this political fight. A recent Associated Press-NORC poll found that 58% of Americans blame President Trump and congressional Republicans for the shutdown, and 54% blame Democrats.

There has also been almost no movement on the question of which party voters plan to support in next year’s midterm elections. On Oct. 1, the first day of the shutdown, Democrats led by 3 percentage points in an average of polls asking people which party they plan to vote for. They hold the same lead today.

Democrats felt far more pressure from their base to do something, anything, to stand up to the Trump administration heading into this shutdown. That hasn’t changed.

Previous federal shutdowns dominated headlines. But this one has been pushed aside by other major news, including President Trump’s immigration crackdown, his attempt to deploy National Guard members to some U.S. cities, and the fragile Israel-Hamas ceasefire in Gaza.

With both sides dug in and this shutdown driving less press coverage than previous ones, it’s an open question what real-life events can break through and force one side or the other to the negotiating table.

The longer shutdowns drag on, the more painful they become for everyone, as parts of the government that had been able to shift around money run out of backup resources. Senator Capito says that may soon happen with programs including Head Start, which offers services to low-income children and families.

Open enrollment to sign up for private health insurance begins Nov. 1, and letters to Americans informing them of premium increases are rolling out now. Democrats say that as more people receive notices that their health care premiums will skyrocket next year, that will force the issue.

“The pressure is going to be very acute on this place once open enrollment starts, and people come to terms with the fact that they may go bankrupt over these insurance increases,” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut tells the Monitor.

If subsidies that were enacted during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic are not extended, average individual premium payments will more than double from $888 to $1,904 annually, according to nonpartisan KFF. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that 4 million people will lose health insurance if those subsidies aren’t extended.

Results from statewide elections in Virginia and New Jersey in early November are another moment when the politics of the shutdown could force one party or the other to reconsider its stances. Those states’ gubernatorial elections are key off-year bellwethers, and if one side does much worse than expected, that could shift its thinking.

Barring that, problems with staffing at airports are leading to longer and longer delays, making the Thanksgiving holiday – one of the busiest travel periods of the year – another potential inflection point.

The Trump administration seems intent on maximizing the damage of the shutdown for Democratic voters – and lawmakers – and on minimizing it for Republicans.

“The Democrats are getting killed on the shutdown because we’re closing up programs that are Democrat programs that we were opposed to ... and they’re never going to come back in many cases,” Mr. Trump said last week.

The administration has already halted infrastructure projects in Democratic districts and states, while pledging to fire as many as 10,000 federal workers whom it views as Democratic-leaning. A federal judge last week ordered a temporary halt to at least some of the layoffs.

On Friday, in the latest round of cuts, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought announced that the Army Corps of Engineers will be “immediately pausing over $11 billion in lower-priority projects & considering them for cancellation, including projects in New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Baltimore” – all heavily Democratic cities. That same day, the National Nuclear Security Administration – the agency that helps the Pentagon with the maintenance and security of the U.S. nuclear arsenal – announced that it would furlough nearly 80% of its 1,800 staff members and contractors starting this week.

Active-duty U.S. military appear to have been spared, however, at least for now. The Trump administration sees them as natural allies. After public criticism from service members and their families over likely missed paychecks, President Trump unilaterally declared they would be paid on time on Oct. 15, even as other federal workers go without their salaries. That decision has drawn questions about its legality from across the aisle.

But those moves haven’t shifted the Groundhog Day feeling on Capitol Hill.

The House hasn’t been in session since Sept. 19, when Republicans passed a bill to keep the government open at current levels through mid-November and then left town for a month. With Republican Speaker Mike Johnson keeping the House in recess again this week, he has now canceled more than a quarter of the days the House was scheduled to be in session this year, since GOP leaders released their planned calendar.

A small bipartisan group of House lawmakers has been pushing for a one-year extension of the current health care subsidies, but congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle have dismissed the proposal.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune publicly floated guaranteeing Democrats a vote on a bill to extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies if they first relented and reopened the government.

“I will not negotiate under hostage conditions, nor will I pay a ransom,” he posted to the social platform X on Friday.

But Democrats have rejected what they describe as a show vote that would go nowhere in the House, where GOP leaders have refused to promise a vote even if an extension of the Affordable Care Act subsidies were to pass the Senate.

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“We want a deal that actually produces health care for American people,” says Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, blaming the shutdown’s length on Republicans who “won’t come to the table to negotiate.”

Senator Capito blames what she describes as a “misery march” on Democrats who see “political advantage” in the shutdown – and want to “do whatever they can to take the president down.”

Washington is entering the fourth week of a federal government shutdown with no tangible signs it will end anytime soon.

Senate Democrats are dug in, insisting that any government funding bill include an extension of expiring tax credits to offset fast-rising health insurance costs. Republicans are still refusing to negotiate while the government remains shut. President Donald Trump and his administration have sought to maximize the sting for Democratic lawmakers.

“We’re in a total holding pattern,” says West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a member of the Senate GOP leadership.

Why We Wrote This

Republicans and Democrats aren’t negotiating to end the weekslong government shutdown, as its effects are felt more widely. Some pressure points for each side are looming, however.

Monday marks Day 20 of the shutdown. The second-longest in U.S history lasted 21 days.

The longest-ever stretched 35 days in late 2018 and early 2019, triggered by President Trump’s demands to include money in a funding bill to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are openly speculating that this shutdown might last even longer than that.

Mr. Trump agreed to reopen the government in 2019 amid tumbling poll numbers. Republicans gave up on their 2013 attempt to force an Affordable Care Act repeal through a shutdown after 16 days for similar reasons. The mid-1990s House GOP shutdown, which is about to be eclipsed in length by this one, also ended when public sentiment turned against Republicans.

But right now, neither side feels like it’s losing this political fight. A recent Associated Press-NORC poll found that 58% of Americans blame President Trump and congressional Republicans for the shutdown, and 54% blame Democrats.

There has also been almost no movement on the question of which party voters plan to support in next year’s midterm elections. On Oct. 1, the first day of the shutdown, Democrats led by 3 percentage points in an average of polls asking people which party they plan to vote for. They hold the same lead today.

Democrats felt far more pressure from their base to do something, anything, to stand up to the Trump administration heading into this shutdown. That hasn’t changed.

Previous federal shutdowns dominated headlines. But this one has been pushed aside by other major news, including President Trump’s immigration crackdown, his attempt to deploy National Guard members to some U.S. cities, and the fragile Israel-Hamas ceasefire in Gaza.

With both sides dug in and this shutdown driving less press coverage than previous ones, it’s an open question what real-life events can break through and force one side or the other to the negotiating table.

The longer shutdowns drag on, the more painful they become for everyone, as parts of the government that had been able to shift around money run out of backup resources. Senator Capito says that may soon happen with programs including Head Start, which offers services to low-income children and families.

Open enrollment to sign up for private health insurance begins Nov. 1, and letters to Americans informing them of premium increases are rolling out now. Democrats say that as more people receive notices that their health care premiums will skyrocket next year, that will force the issue.

“The pressure is going to be very acute on this place once open enrollment starts, and people come to terms with the fact that they may go bankrupt over these insurance increases,” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut tells the Monitor.

If subsidies that were enacted during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic are not extended, average individual premium payments will more than double from $888 to $1,904 annually, according to nonpartisan KFF. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that 4 million people will lose health insurance if those subsidies aren’t extended.

Results from statewide elections in Virginia and New Jersey in early November are another moment when the politics of the shutdown could force one party or the other to reconsider its stances. Those states’ gubernatorial elections are key off-year bellwethers, and if one side does much worse than expected, that could shift its thinking.

Barring that, problems with staffing at airports are leading to longer and longer delays, making the Thanksgiving holiday – one of the busiest travel periods of the year – another potential inflection point.

The Trump administration seems intent on maximizing the damage of the shutdown for Democratic voters – and lawmakers – and on minimizing it for Republicans.

“The Democrats are getting killed on the shutdown because we’re closing up programs that are Democrat programs that we were opposed to ... and they’re never going to come back in many cases,” Mr. Trump said last week.

The administration has already halted infrastructure projects in Democratic districts and states, while pledging to fire as many as 10,000 federal workers whom it views as Democratic-leaning. A federal judge last week ordered a temporary halt to at least some of the layoffs.

On Friday, in the latest round of cuts, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought announced that the Army Corps of Engineers will be “immediately pausing over $11 billion in lower-priority projects & considering them for cancellation, including projects in New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Baltimore” – all heavily Democratic cities. That same day, the National Nuclear Security Administration – the agency that helps the Pentagon with the maintenance and security of the U.S. nuclear arsenal – announced that it would furlough nearly 80% of its 1,800 staff members and contractors starting this week.

Active-duty U.S. military appear to have been spared, however, at least for now. The Trump administration sees them as natural allies. After public criticism from service members and their families over likely missed paychecks, President Trump unilaterally declared they would be paid on time on Oct. 15, even as other federal workers go without their salaries. That decision has drawn questions about its legality from across the aisle.

But those moves haven’t shifted the Groundhog Day feeling on Capitol Hill.

The House hasn’t been in session since Sept. 19, when Republicans passed a bill to keep the government open at current levels through mid-November and then left town for a month. With Republican Speaker Mike Johnson keeping the House in recess again this week, he has now canceled more than a quarter of the days the House was scheduled to be in session this year, since GOP leaders released their planned calendar.

A small bipartisan group of House lawmakers has been pushing for a one-year extension of the current health care subsidies, but congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle have dismissed the proposal.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune publicly floated guaranteeing Democrats a vote on a bill to extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies if they first relented and reopened the government.

“I will not negotiate under hostage conditions, nor will I pay a ransom,” he posted to the social platform X on Friday.

But Democrats have rejected what they describe as a show vote that would go nowhere in the House, where GOP leaders have refused to promise a vote even if an extension of the Affordable Care Act subsidies were to pass the Senate.

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“We want a deal that actually produces health care for American people,” says Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, blaming the shutdown’s length on Republicans who “won’t come to the table to negotiate.”

Senator Capito blames what she describes as a “misery march” on Democrats who see “political advantage” in the shutdown – and want to “do whatever they can to take the president down.”

The United States is bolstering its military forces in the Caribbean, particularly in Puerto Rico. More than 10% of the U.S. Navy’s ships and other resources are now located in the region in what defense analysts are calling a “seismic reordering” of Pentagon assets.

The volume of hardware involved suggests an escalation of the Trump administration’s military campaign against Venezuela and President Nicolás Maduro. To date, this offensive has publicly involved killing at least 28 people in six known strikes, including one on Thursday, against small boats in the Caribbean Sea. Two of those wounded in the latest strike, so far the first to survive the U.S. assaults, are reportedly being held on a Navy ship.

Speaking to reporters on Friday, President Trump again claimed that the targeted vessels are carrying drugs that Venezuelan cartels are trafficking – at Mr. Maduro’s behest – to harm the U.S. The strikes are meant to send a clear message to Venezuela's president that the U.S. is serious, Mr. Trump said, using a crass expletive. He added that a submarine was the target of the administration’s latest strike.

Why We Wrote This

The volume of U.S. military hardware headed to Puerto Rico suggests an escalation of the Trump administration’s military campaign against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The president says land strikes might follow.

Some analysts posit that the president's arguments are a pretext for a larger campaign aimed at toppling Mr. Maduro.

The Venezuelan leader has denied being involved in narco-trafficking – referring to the allegations as “fake news, propagated through various media channels” – and offered to engage in “a direct and frank conversation” with a U.S. special envoy.

The White House has not provided proof or intelligence data confirming that the people killed were criminals.

Still, President Trump on Wednesday acknowledged that he has authorized the CIA to begin planning covert operations, which could involve strikes within Venezuelan territorial waters or even on land. It was an unusual admission of what normally would be considered a sensitive state secret.

“We are certainly looking at land now, because we’ve got the sea very well under control,” Mr. Trump said.

Reuters, U.S. Naval Institute News, Task & Purpose

What exactly is the Pentagon sending to the Caribbean?

U.S. forces began flowing into the region in earnest in August. The Pentagon has placed, among other assets, three Navy destroyers, several amphibious assault vessels, and an attack submarine in the region, according to Reuters and USNI News, a Naval Institute news service.

The Pentagon has also sent F-35 fighter jets and B-52 bombers, as well as a ship equipped with a helicopter landing deck.

Notably, two AC-130 gunships have been deployed to the region, according to Henry Ziemer, associate fellow in the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington, D.C. “This is very interesting because, of course, the AC-130 is for low-intensity conflicts,” he says.

“Low-intensity conflict” is Pentagon parlance for combat that falls short of a conventional war between two countries. It is rather a military effort to achieve U.S. political aims through, say, counterinsurgency or counterterrorism operations.

The AC-130s have been workhorses during these sorts of U.S. conflicts in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, lending “low and slow” close-air support to U.S. troops doing everything from running convoys to conducting urban operations.

Some analysts predict that a U.S. aircraft carrier might soon be dispatched to the region.

Why does Puerto Rico figure prominently in the buildup?

The U.S. has a limited number of bases within U.S. Southern Command — the Pentagon’s name for this area of military operations, which includes Central and South America, as well as the Caribbean. This makes sense, since the U.S. mainland is relatively nearby. But in the event of prolonged operations, more forward-operating forces will be necessary, notes a CSIS report co-written by Mr. Ziemer.

For this reason, Puerto Rico has emerged as a highly strategic jumping-off point for the continued U.S. presence in the region, which “is in need of airfields to fly its planes and ports to dock and resupply its ships,” the report notes. “Puerto Rico has thus far been providing the lion’s share of the infrastructure.”

Navy reconnaissance planes, such as the P-8A Poseidon, are flying out of National Guard facilities based at Luis Muñoz Marin International Airport in San Juan, and the Port of Ponce, one of southern Puerto Rico’s major shipping hubs, is hosting several warships.

The pressure to find more bases for U.S. forces in the region has also prompted the U.S. to reactivate the former Roosevelt Roads Naval Station near Ceiba, Puerto Rico, which had been shuttered for more than two decades.

What’s the purpose of the buildup?

That this is all laying the groundwork for Mr. Maduro’s ouster has been the most-discussed possibility among analysts this week.

The U.S. military presence in the region, reportedly at 10,000 troops, “is far too large, in my opinion, to be a counternarcotics force,” Mr. Ziemer says. At the same time, he adds, “I think it’s too small to be a genuine invasion and regime-change force.”

In 1989, during its invasion of Panama, the U.S. sent roughly 27,000 troops to depose dictator Manuel Noriega. In 1983, it sent just 7,300 service members to occupy Grenada.

But Venezuela is far larger, with greater complexities.

The announcement on Thursday that Adm. Alvin Holsey, the head of U.S. Southern Command, will be retiring one year into a three-year term injects a measure of uncertainty into American plans.

So, too, does news this week that the Trump administration has given the go-ahead for the CIA to start planning for covert operations in Venezuela. That development, first reported by the New York Times, could be an effort to pressure Mr. Maduro – who, in addition to alleged human rights abuses, dismantling of democratic institutions, and drug trafficking, has long enjoyed the support of U.S. rivals Russia and China – to step down, analysts say.

While it is unclear what those covert military operations might involve, targets within Venezuela are well within range of Tomahawk missiles, even though the ships that carry them are docked in Puerto Rico.

The Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the authority to declare war. But last week, the Senate voted down a resolution that would have blocked President Trump’s Caribbean boat strikes. A bipartisan group of senators on Thursday began trying again to bring a vote to block the president from authorizing military action “within or against” Venezuela without congressional authorization.

The White House has declared the U.S. in “armed conflict” with the drug cartels it says are controlling these vessels and has labeled several cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.

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“One thing does seem pretty certain, which is that the U.S. is probably considering going from strikes right now that have all been in international waters to strikes inside Venezuelan territory,” Mr. Ziemer says.

Whether that is within Venezuelan territorial waters or “actually on land,” he adds, is likely yet to be determined.

When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visits the White House Friday, he’ll be greeted by a U.S. president who just weeks ago appeared to have washed his hands of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“I wish both Countries well,” Donald Trump said in a social media post on Sept. 23, signaling what was widely interpreted as the end of his efforts to bring peace to a conflict he once famously claimed he could solve in 24 hours.

But now, with the heady victory of the Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal under his belt, Mr. Trump has put ending the war in Ukraine back in his sights – though with a twist.

Why We Wrote This

President Donald Trump appears to have drawn a lesson from the Hamas-Israel ceasefire deal: To achieve peace, you have to lean heavily on the combatants. Now, he’s applying that approach to Russia, to force an end to its invasion of Ukraine.

Analysts say the president believes his tough-guy stance and the exercise of American power played a crucial role in bringing both Hamas and Israel to “yes” on a deal. Now, he is considering a similar approach to end the war in Ukraine.

If a “peace through war” approach worked in the Middle East – exhibit A being how U.S. participation in Israel’s 12-day war against Iran convinced a weakened Iranian state to pressure its client Hamas to go with a deal – why not try it in the Ukraine war?

Over the past week, Mr. Trump has been signaling that he might change course and provide Ukraine with long-range Tomahawk missiles that would put Moscow in the Ukrainian military’s range. “I might say [to Russia], look, if the war is not going to be settled, I’m going to sell [the Ukrainians] Tomahawks,” he told reporters traveling with him to the Middle East on Sunday.

Leaks out of the administration over recent days suggest the White House is considering other offensive (and defensive) systems for Ukraine, as well as the technical assistance for targeting with any new weapons. And publicly, administration officials including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have adopted increasingly aggressive rhetoric toward Russia, especially since the president’s triumphal Middle East trip.

Everything from Mr. Zelenskyy’s visit to floating the Tomahawks and the administration’s new aggressive tone is messaging to Russian President Vladimir Putin that Mr. Trump wants an end to the war, some analysts say – and that he is now willing to resort to force to achieve it.

“The Tomahawks are more of a political message than a military message,” says Mark Montgomery, a retired admiral and now senior director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’ Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation in Washington. ”But what’s on the table is a ‘Tomahawks and ...’ that could get to Ukraine some offensive weapons that could start making a difference on the ground now.”

He says that in the mix of what’s being discussed are low-cost, laser-guided rockets that could be mounted on F-16s and used to take out Russian attack drones wreaking havoc on Ukraine.

Moreover, he adds that Mr. Zelenskyy’s visit alone is a message to Mr. Putin. “For Zelenskyy, this is the third visit in a year,” he notes, “that’s Netanyahu-like.”

Still, Admiral Montgomery says he is doubtful that what he describes as an effort to “smoke out” Mr. Putin will work – and others agree.

“None of this is going to change the calculus,” says Jennifer Kavanagh, senior fellow and director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank promoting restraint in U.S. foreign policy. “Putin has shown that he has been willing to bear these costs,” she adds, “and I see no reason to think that has changed.”

Underpinning the argument that the talk of Tomahawks is largely political messaging is the reality that even if Mr. Trump announces Friday that he’s selling the long-range missiles to Ukraine, the weapons system couldn’t be operational in the war for months at least.

The Tomahawks would require a launching system that isn’t off-the-shelf available, experts note.

“As it is right now, there’s no way for Ukraine to launch the Tomahawks even if we provided them,” Dr. Kavanagh says, “so, really, it’s nothing that would be helpful today.”

On the other hand, she says just a decision to provide Tomahawks could be escalatory and place the United States on a slippery slope toward deeper involvement in the war. She notes that Russia is already rattling the nuclear saber, pointing out that Tomahawks are capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

Others contend that providing Tomahawks capable of striking Moscow would level the playing field with an aggressor who regularly pummels Kyiv and other cities deep inside Ukraine.

For some foreign policy analysts, a key takeaway of this moment is what it says about President Trump’s evolution in his thinking on the war in Ukraine – and on the parties to it.

In August, Mr. Trump appeared to have shifted to Mr. Putin’s perspective on the war as he received the Russian leader at a summit in Alaska. Subsequently, Mr. Zelenskyy visited the White House flanked by European leaders who feared Mr. Trump could browbeat their Ukrainian colleague – as he had during a February White House visit – from a pro-Russia stance.

But more recently, the president has expressed his disappointment in Mr. Putin, acknowledging in comments to French President Emmanuel Macron that “unfortunately that relationship [with Mr. Putin] didn’t mean anything.”

Suggesting he hasn’t given up yet on his relationship, Mr. Trump reported on Thursday that he spoke at length with the Russian president and the two leaders agreed to meet in the future in Budapest, Hungary.

In the meantime, Mr. Zelenskyy has worked to stay in Mr. Trump’s good graces and to convince the president that a strong and deepening relationship with Ukraine is not charity, but beneficial to the U.S., some analysts say.

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“The Zelenskyy visiting the White House Friday no longer needs to come in desperation,” says Admiral Montgomery.

The admiral notes that a phalanx of Ukrainian officials preceded Mr. Zelenskyy’s visit with a kind of full-court press across Washington, touting everything from joint drone production to energy cooperation. “Zelenskyy is doing a good job of showing Trump the enduring value of Ukraine to the U.S. outside the wartime alliance,” Admiral Montogomery says.

When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visits the White House Friday, he’ll be greeted by a U.S. president who just weeks ago appeared to have washed his hands of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“I wish both Countries well,” Donald Trump said in a social media post on Sept. 23, signaling what was widely interpreted as the end of his efforts to bring peace to a conflict he once famously claimed he could solve in 24 hours.

But now, with the heady victory of the Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal under his belt, Mr. Trump has put ending the war in Ukraine back in his sights – though with a twist.

Why We Wrote This

President Donald Trump appears to have drawn a lesson from the Hamas-Israel ceasefire deal: To achieve peace, you have to lean heavily on the combatants. Now, he’s applying that approach to Russia, to force an end to its invasion of Ukraine.

Analysts say the president believes his tough-guy stance and the exercise of American power played a crucial role in bringing both Hamas and Israel to “yes” on a deal. Now, he is considering a similar approach to end the war in Ukraine.

If a “peace through war” approach worked in the Middle East – exhibit A being how U.S. participation in Israel’s 12-day war against Iran convinced a weakened Iranian state to pressure its client Hamas to go with a deal – why not try it in the Ukraine war?

Over the past week, Mr. Trump has been signaling that he might change course and provide Ukraine with long-range Tomahawk missiles that would put Moscow in the Ukrainian military’s range. “I might say [to Russia], look, if the war is not going to be settled, I’m going to sell [the Ukrainians] Tomahawks,” he told reporters traveling with him to the Middle East on Sunday.

Leaks out of the administration over recent days suggest the White House is considering other offensive (and defensive) systems for Ukraine, as well as the technical assistance for targeting with any new weapons. And publicly, administration officials including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have adopted increasingly aggressive rhetoric toward Russia, especially since the president’s triumphal Middle East trip.

Everything from Mr. Zelenskyy’s visit to floating the Tomahawks and the administration’s new aggressive tone is messaging to Russian President Vladimir Putin that Mr. Trump wants an end to the war, some analysts say – and that he is now willing to resort to force to achieve it.

“The Tomahawks are more of a political message than a military message,” says Mark Montgomery, a retired admiral and now senior director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’ Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation in Washington. ”But what’s on the table is a ‘Tomahawks and ...’ that could get to Ukraine some offensive weapons that could start making a difference on the ground now.”

He says that in the mix of what’s being discussed are low-cost, laser-guided rockets that could be mounted on F-16s and used to take out Russian attack drones wreaking havoc on Ukraine.

Moreover, he adds that Mr. Zelenskyy’s visit alone is a message to Mr. Putin. “For Zelenskyy, this is the third visit in a year,” he notes, “that’s Netanyahu-like.”

Still, Admiral Montgomery says he is doubtful that what he describes as an effort to “smoke out” Mr. Putin will work – and others agree.

“None of this is going to change the calculus,” says Jennifer Kavanagh, senior fellow and director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank promoting restraint in U.S. foreign policy. “Putin has shown that he has been willing to bear these costs,” she adds, “and I see no reason to think that has changed.”

Underpinning the argument that the talk of Tomahawks is largely political messaging is the reality that even if Mr. Trump announces Friday that he’s selling the long-range missiles to Ukraine, the weapons system couldn’t be operational in the war for months at least.

The Tomahawks would require a launching system that isn’t off-the-shelf available, experts note.

“As it is right now, there’s no way for Ukraine to launch the Tomahawks even if we provided them,” Dr. Kavanagh says, “so, really, it’s nothing that would be helpful today.”

On the other hand, she says just a decision to provide Tomahawks could be escalatory and place the United States on a slippery slope toward deeper involvement in the war. She notes that Russia is already rattling the nuclear saber, pointing out that Tomahawks are capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

Others contend that providing Tomahawks capable of striking Moscow would level the playing field with an aggressor who regularly pummels Kyiv and other cities deep inside Ukraine.

For some foreign policy analysts, a key takeaway of this moment is what it says about President Trump’s evolution in his thinking on the war in Ukraine – and on the parties to it.

In August, Mr. Trump appeared to have shifted to Mr. Putin’s perspective on the war as he received the Russian leader at a summit in Alaska. Subsequently, Mr. Zelenskyy visited the White House flanked by European leaders who feared Mr. Trump could browbeat their Ukrainian colleague – as he had during a February White House visit – from a pro-Russia stance.

But more recently, the president has expressed his disappointment in Mr. Putin, acknowledging in comments to French President Emmanuel Macron that “unfortunately that relationship [with Mr. Putin] didn’t mean anything.”

Suggesting he hasn’t given up yet on his relationship, Mr. Trump reported on Thursday that he spoke at length with the Russian president and the two leaders agreed to meet in the future in Budapest, Hungary.

In the meantime, Mr. Zelenskyy has worked to stay in Mr. Trump’s good graces and to convince the president that a strong and deepening relationship with Ukraine is not charity, but beneficial to the U.S., some analysts say.

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“The Zelenskyy visiting the White House Friday no longer needs to come in desperation,” says Admiral Montgomery.

The admiral notes that a phalanx of Ukrainian officials preceded Mr. Zelenskyy’s visit with a kind of full-court press across Washington, touting everything from joint drone production to energy cooperation. “Zelenskyy is doing a good job of showing Trump the enduring value of Ukraine to the U.S. outside the wartime alliance,” Admiral Montogomery says.

The natural beauty of the Blue Ridge Parkway is such that, for decades, this long ridge road that winds for hundreds of miles from Rockfish Gap, Virginia, to Cherokee, North Carolina, was called simply “The Scenic.” As its wide shoulders give way to mountain views, travelers can glimpse apple orchards, bounding deer, and palomino horses munching clover behind log fences.

But for Timothy Silver, a local fly fisherman, the 90-year-old road has been more than a path to majestic vistas. It is how he reaches his best fishing holes. It is by far the most direct route for his family to get to church in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. And it is often the safest way for neighbors to access a grocery store or gas station, commute to work, or check on each other during the far-too-common power outages.

“The parkway is the glue that holds this whole region together,” says Shannon Odom, executive director of the McDowell County Tourism Development Authority. “Thousands of businesses depend on it.”

Why We Wrote This

The Blue Ridge Parkway, which runs through America’s most-visited national park, is slowly recovering after mudslides from Hurricane Helene closed it last year. Locals have now joined in the hazardous work of reconnecting their Appalachian communities.

The road, along with life here, was torn to pieces last year. Flooding from Hurricane Helene closed over half of the parkway and left countless mountain towns uninhabitable. But it would be the road – this scenic, winding 469-mile parkway, which took half a century to carve out of the Appalachian Mountains – that folks would focus on. Not just as access for emergency vehicles, but as the common thread weaving in and out of the area’s cultural and economic identity.

Chain saws, bulldozers, and backfill

Stitching these mountains back together – a herculean task that requires locals’ help with chain saws, bulldozers, and backfill – has been both dangerous and complicated. Snarled by delayed disaster aid and other logistics, recovery has been painstakingly slow.

But now, at the height of tourist season, this regional economy is showing it has been knocked down, but not out, by disaster.

While a significant portion of the parkway – over 40 miles – remains closed as crews continue to clear out debris and rebuild mountainsides, the rest of it is now open, just in time for tourist season, the economic lifeblood of the region.

National Park Service

By dint of chain saws and log skidders, the National Park Service, aided by American taxpayers, has clawed back control of the route. Last month, a major part of the parkway from Asheville to Mount Mitchell opened, reestablishing access to places like Craggy Gardens.

Still, recovery work can be precarious: These mountains are primarily composed of sedimentary rock, such as sandstone, shale, and limestone, which can crumble beneath the weight of heavy equipment.

And the terrain hasn’t been the only challenge. The federal government’s shutdown – which has resulted in furloughing workers and delaying government services and responses – has also slowed recovery work.

As a result, it has fallen to neighbors and nonprofits to scramble to keep the area’s roads and amenities open, not just for residents, but also for the thousands of annual leaf-peeping tourists who, in the coming weeks, will provide vital income for these mountain towns. Visitors to the parkway bring 16 million people a year and over $1 billion into the region each year, part of why towns like Black Mountain are pushing to attract visitors back to their cafés and bike shops.

Ask residents about the recovery work, and responses resonate with pride, though they are still mixed with deep sadness and a lingering sense of loss.

“Losing the parkway and access to some of these places has been for me almost like losing someone in the family,” says Mr. Silver, who has lived in the mountains for 40 years. “The parkway is linked to Appalachian identity in real ways. It’s a chunk of life that has been taken away.”

Mr. Silver is hardly alone in mourning the parkway’s broken contiguity.

Hurricane Helene, in addition to destroying tens of thousands of homes, created a parkway “calamity,” says Duke University historian Anne Mitchell Whisnant.

During the storm, the parkway experienced over 50 major landslides, resulting in destruction spanning approximately 200 miles. The Linville Falls Visitor Center was a total loss. Some 16,000 acres saw severe damage from winds alone.

Early wins, but long way to go

Cobbling the region back together is not just a matter of emotion; it is one of economic survival.

As of mid-September, following calls by Gov. Josh Stein for help from Washington, North Carolina had received roughly 9% of the federal funding it had requested to help cover Hurricane Helene’s estimated $60 billion in damages. So far, the project has been allocated $2 billion in supplemental disaster funding, plus an additional $25 million from the Federal Highway Administration’s emergency relief fund.

But the federal government shutdown that began Oct. 1 now means that work is slowing, and long stretches of road are blocked off – just as peak leaf season approaches. It’s a time when local businesses earn as much as 75% of their annual income.

“We’re on the eve of leaf season when the parkway gets very busy, and we’ve only got a couple of folks from our district coming in a few hours a day,” parkway maintenance worker James Jones, who has been furloughed, told ABC News on Oct. 6. “If I’m not there to maintain that park, then they’re not going to get the visitor experience that they should get.”

Meanwhile, the remaining stretch of parkway from Mount Mitchell, the East’s highest peak, to Little Switzerland – closed as a result of Hurricane Helene’s landslides – is still being rebuilt, meaning a beloved Black Mountain campground remains closed. Contracted crews have to work sequentially to rebuild the road using complex backfill techniques. One slide requires rebuilding 120 feet of mountainside before heavy equipment can be moved to the next slide.

Despite “early wins,” parkway Superintendent Tracy Swartout recently told a press conference that a full parkway reopening will not occur for at least another year, while full recovery could take “the better part of a decade.”

“My fish swim”

Even where the road has been fixed, some places are struggling to reopen. In response, the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation, a nonprofit based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, has stepped in to fund operations to keep some amenities going.

The Parkway Visitor Center at parkway Milepost 384 in Asheville, the Museum of North Carolina Minerals at Milepost 331 near Little Switzerland, and the Blue Ridge Music Center at Milepost 213 in Galax, Virginia, will be open the next two weekends with the help of the foundation.

That sense of communal responsibility amid government failures is key to the region’s stubborn strength, says Dustin Coffey, a fly-fishing guide in Boone, North Carolina.

Just as the fish move between streams, locals and businesses have had to adjust to the reshaped landscape using survival instincts, he says.

“Yes, you have to relearn, but you should relearn every day you step up to the stream,” says Mr. Coffey. “People ask me, ‘Did the fish blow out [from the floods]?’ No, my fish swim.”

In the end, Mr. Coffey and others say the parkway’s real value – both in its essence and in its rebuilding – may be about patience. For drivers, the top legal speed is 45 miles per hour, with other sections as low as 25 mph. Just fast enough, as they say, to slow down.

The irony of using a massive amount of mechanical resources to rebuild a mountain parkway that offers spectacular views of nature is not lost on Mr. Silver, the fisherman and a retired environmental historian at Appalachian State University in Boone.

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He is eager for the recovery to be complete, so life in the mountains can settle back down.

“The sooner,” he adds, “the better.”

The Supreme Court sounded sympathetic during oral arguments on Wednesday to significantly constraining a crucial provision of the Voting Rights Act – a move that could dramatically strengthen Republicans’ hopes of winning the U.S. House of Representatives in future elections and significantly decrease the number of Black and Hispanic officeholders in the country.

Justices heard arguments in Louisiana v. Callais, a case centered around a congressional map for the state of Louisiana which had created two majority Black districts. The Trump administration and the state of Louisiana argued that using race to draw congressional districts as a remedy for discrimination was in itself a violation of the Constitution. If a majority of the court agrees, that would render toothless the 60-year-old-law, which has paved the way for increased minority representation in the U.S. since the Civil Rights era. It would essentially undo the Voting Rights Act’s last enforcement mechanism and would open the door to allow Republicans to eliminate a slew of majority-minority congressional seats in states that they control.

A ruling in favor of Louisiana could potentially cement Republican control of the House for years to come and upend election maps from Congress down to city council and school district lines. During oral arguments, NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorney Janai Nelson warned that if the court struck down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the portion of the law still intact after an earlier Supreme Court ruling weakened another portion of the law, “the results would be pretty catastrophic” for minority representation.

Why We Wrote This

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on a case asking whether using race as a factor in congressional maps violates the Constitution. If the justices decide it is, the decision could open the door for Republican politicians to redraw maps to eliminate a number of Black and Hispanic districts.

Hashim Mooppan from the Department of Justice, arguing for the plaintiffs, suggested that there’s “no reason to assume that because there’s a large Democratic population in Louisiana that doesn’t have a district, that that’s a racial reason, rather than a partisan reason.”

Conservatives hold a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, and following oral arguments, many scholars predict it will severely limit the law’s application.

“I think it’s very unlikely that the Voting Rights Act will escape unscathed from this court. I think they’re very likely to strike down portions of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act,” says Harvard University Professor Maya Sen, who researches law and politics.

Should the Voting Rights Act continue on?

The Supreme Court knocked down a different key component of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. In that ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion that de facto ended the federal government’s previous ability to block maps it deemed racial gerrymanders in states that had histories of discrimination. Justice Roberts has long been skeptical of the law – as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration, he unsuccessfully worked to oppose expansion of the Voting Rights Act. That left Section 2 as the law’s main remaining enforcement mechanism.

Ed Blum, a conservative legal activist who led the charge in the case that led to the 2013 decision, predicts the court will chip away further at the law.

“It is unlikely that the Court will rule that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional,” he tells the Monitor. “However, it appears that Section 2 will be narrowed in a way that would make race-based gerrymandering for allegedly remedial purposes illegal.”

This court has surprised observers before on voting rights issues. Two years ago, the conservative-majority court ruled 5-4 to uphold an injunction against an Alabama map that lower courts had ruled discriminated against Black voters under Section 2, with Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joining the court’s three liberals in the majority.

But on Wednesday, Justice Kavanaugh sounded much more sympathetic to arguments presented by the Trump administration and Louisiana, raising questions about whether the VRA’s application should continue on indefinitely. Chief Justice Roberts was fairly quiet during the oral arguments. If just one of those two justices sides with their fellow conservatives, what remains of the Voting Rights Act could be dramatically weakened.

Josh Blackman, a conservative legal scholar and law professor at the South Texas College of Law, believes “there are almost certainly six votes” to rule for Louisiana in the case.

“Justice Kavanaugh came to the argument extremely well-prepared, and seems to have mapped out all of the contours of an opinion. It seemed like he was reading from notes, and articulating different standards that could apply,” he says. “I think he is generally comfortable with the government’s framing of the case.”

Political ramifications

The political ramifications of such a ruling would be profound, likely allowing red-state Republicans to eliminate a number of Democratic-held Black and Hispanic districts in the South and all but locking in their control of the House.

Republicans, at President Donald Trump’s behest, are already undertaking mid-decade redistricting in states including Texas, Ohio, Missouri, North Carolina, Kansas, and possibly Indiana to eliminate Democratic-held seats and shore up their House majority (California Democrats are responding with an attempt to redistrict their state). But that effort pales in comparison to what they’d be able to do without the constraints of the Voting Rights Act.

Republicans could eliminate as many as 19 minority-majority, Democratic-held congressional seats and all but guarantee their House majority in future elections, according to a recent report by the Democratic voting rights groups Black Voters Matter and Fair Fight Action. A New York Times analysis estimates that if the Supreme Court gives Republicans free rein to eliminate these seats, Democrats would need to win the national House popular vote by roughly 5 percentage points in the next election in order to retake control of the chamber, up from just 1.4 points assuming GOP states complete their current gerrymandering efforts.

In an unusual move, the Supreme Court heard this case last year – and sent it back for another round of oral arguments, asking lawyers on both sides to focus specifically on whether the Voting Rights Act violates the 14th and 15th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. The 14th Amendment offers equal protection under the law, while the 15th Amendment bars governments from denying or abridging citizens’ right to vote “on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.” Voting rights advocates saw the court’s request itself as ominous, setting up a broader challenge of the law.

David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, says it was “a very troubling question that the Supreme Court asked.”

Conservatives argued in the case that Louisiana’s congressional map was drawn with the intent to maximize Republican representation rather than minimize Black voting strength, and that considering race in gerrymandering defies the 14th and 15th Amendments. Louisiana v. Callais originated after Louisiana redrew its congressional map in 2022 with one majority-Black district out of the state’s six districts. About one-third of the state’s population is Black. A federal judge ruled that map likely violated the Voting Rights Act and ordered the state to draw new maps. In 2024, the state created two majority-Black districts. A group of “non-African American” plaintiffs challenged the newest version and a federal district court upheld their view, leading to an appeal to the Supreme Court.

“Race-based redistricting is fundamentally contrary to our Constitution. It requires striking enough members of the majority race to sufficiently diminish their voting strength, and it requires drawing in enough members of a minority race to sufficiently augment their voting strength,” Louisiana Solicitor General Benjamin Aguiñaga argued during the hearing.

The Trump administration’s Justice Department took a slightly different position that Section 2 doesn’t need to be struck down, just restricted.

Ms. Nelson, in her rebuttal, argued that restricting the Voting Rights Act would lead to a resurgence in racially discriminatory gerrymandering.

The court would need to issue a quick ruling in this case if it’s going to matter for the 2026 midterm elections, and it’s unclear how fast a decision might come. Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry asked the court to rule this winter in order to be able to have a new map in place before the state’s April primaries, a request reiterated by attorneys during Wednesday’s oral arguments.

The Supreme Court usually issues its major rulings in June or July. That wouldn’t leave enough time for most states to redraw their maps in time for their states’ primary election filing deadlines. But it is unclear whether that will be the case this time around, or whether they might issue a faster ruling in time to upend the 2026 midterms and help President Trump’s party keep unified control of Washington.

Staff writer Victoria Hoffmann contributed reporting to this story.

Wanting to do good for others led to something good happening to Amanda Leiter – right on time.

Ms. Leiter was a law professor at American University in Washington, D.C., for 12 years before taking a job in the office of the general counsel of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Joe Biden. She knew she wouldn’t be able to transition into the current administration. She also kept up with friends working in government and read the headlines about massive layoffs that the Trump administration started once in power.

“I was actually doing some volunteer work as I came out of the Biden administration, as soon as we saw that the Trump administration was letting a lot of people go, a group of us got together, and we were trying to pull resources together to help people who had been let go,” Ms. Leiter says.

Why We Wrote This

With former federal employees looking for jobs, Maryland saw an opportunity to support its schools. A new program is offering them three months of teacher training – and the opportunity to make a difference in the classroom.

She compiled a list of job banks and résumé review programs.

“And one of the things that I found was this really inspiring video by Governor [Wes] Moore saying, essentially, if the federal government doesn’t want our dedicated public servants, we in Maryland can put you to use.”

Mr. Moore made the video and seized the moment to fill jobs in his state with laid-off federal employees. His state had a gaping hole of teacher vacancies in Maryland, which numbered more than 1,600 as of March. The initiative, Feds to Eds, started in June and is part of a $1 million grant given to 11 colleges in Maryland to help train new teachers and place them in classrooms. This approach is specific to federal employees, but ultimately is a continuation of the state’s Alternative Certification for Effective Teachers (ACET) program. Under ACET, trainees can get licensed to teach, but not degrees.

Schools in the Feds to Eds program include Montgomery College, the University of Maryland's College Park and Baltimore County campuses, Morgan State University, and Bowie State University.

“Maryland is mobilizing. We refuse to stand idly by while the new federal administration fires public servants without cause, and [we] are doing everything in our power to put Marylanders first,” Governor Moore said when Feds to Eds was announced.

By the end of September, the Trump administration had either let go or given buyouts to some 300,000 federal employees. Last Friday, more layoff notices went out.

Maryland’s approach to funneling those in search of jobs to teaching positions is finding support.

“I love the idea. I think we always want professionals from other fields to consider education, and sometimes we can get them, and sometimes we can’t,” says Paul Lemle, president of the Maryland State Education Association, which represents 76,000 teachers and school employees.

Mr. Lemle, a teacher himself, says that if a biologist or a computer scientist wants to try working with students and sharing their expertise with them, Maryland would love to have them. He notes that teaching salaries start at $60,000 and average more than $90,000 a year. That doesn’t match the salaries that some federal workers make, he says, but he knows that there are thousands in the state looking for work.

“Everybody benefits when we find a great teacher: that teacher, the kids, and our society,” he adds.

Montgomery College received $100,000 from the grant and used it to put together two cohorts. It and Bowie State University were the only two schools to offer a summer cohort, which finished in August. Sixteen of the 18 students from that first group are teaching in classrooms now, says Glenda Hernandez Tittle, who heads the program. When the second cohort, which is in training now, heads to the classroom, they will do so with full pay and benefits – and on-the-job assistance when needed. For the Feds to Eds program, Montgomery College boiled what normally takes six to nine months down to three months.

Of the Montgomery College recruits, all of them have college diplomas, and 60% to 65% have advanced degrees, Dr. Hernandez Tittle says. Of the advanced degrees, 70% are Ph.D.s; some have gone to colleges and universities such as Harvard or Stanford.

Ms. Leiter, who will be teaching high school biology in Montgomery County, Maryland, just outside of Washington, is in the second cohort of the program at Montgomery College.

“This just felt like an important point in time to be really making a commitment to the next generation,” says Ms. Leiter, who was enthusiastic about seeing whether she could apply her law school teaching to a different setting. ”I’ve really been enjoying learning from [the instructors]. In fact, I sort of wish I knew some of what they’re teaching me when I was teaching law school.”

She is one of 18 members of her cohort, who meet two to three evenings a week at the Rockville campus of Montgomery College. Sometimes, they meet online. Trainees are taught by teachers from Montgomery County schools. They will be assigned mostly to middle schools. If there are critical shortage areas, such as science, technology, engineering, and math, some could be assigned to high schools.

At the beginning of the program, instructors stress how vastly different teaching in public schools will be for professionals who thrived in other places, says Dr. Hernandez Tittle. They also get plenty of feedback on what they do right and wrong, because teaching isn’t for the weak.

“It’s hard for them. Imagine you’re changing careers after being somewhere 15, 20, 25 years, and you’re learning something completely new. Where you go from getting all these accolades to, you know, good job with this,” to criticism of how to do things better. But it’s necessary, she says.

Teacher shortages in Baltimore are a reality that the state has to address, says Joe Manko, the education program officer for the Abell Foundation, a private, Baltimore-based group that focuses on health, economics, and education.

He notes that Feds to Eds is analogous to initiatives such as Teach for America and the Baltimore City Teaching Residency program. They have track records of success, which he thinks bodes well. What has to happen for the program to thrive, he says, is for mentoring to continue once the new educators are in schools. The new recruits will need time to learn and flourish.

“You have individuals where teaching is a second career, and they have become very successful educators because they are using their previous work experience and they are able to parlay that into strong instructional benefits for their kids.”