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Minneapolis Star Tribune. January 9, 2022.
Editorial: A unified front on the opioid crisis
State, counties, cities join forces in historic agreement.
Minnesota is now in line to receive $296 million over 18 years to deal with the state’s opioid crisis, thanks to hard work and collaboration among counties, local governments and the state attorney general’s office.
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The recent agreement will send tens of millions of dollars to communities that have suffered the brunt of opioid overdoses among their residents. That is a welcome infusion of funds that can be used to expand addiction recovery efforts, treatment, intervention, additional law enforcement, child protection, education and cover a host of other expenses from the epidemics.
It is part of a massive, $26 billion, nationwide settlement with manufacturer Johnson & Johnson, which was accused of downplaying the addictiveness of opioids, and distributors Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen and McKesson, which willingly filled orders for even the most inordinate amounts of addictive drugs from pharmacies across the country.
The final agreement in Minnesota is the result of months of collaborative work among local governments that initially were skeptical of ever seeing a share of opioid litigation. In Minnesota more than two dozen counties and seven cities had already filed their own lawsuits. The agreement requires those governments to forgo future litigation in return for a specific share of the settlement, with local governments receiving 75% of the funds and the state 25%.
That was a wise decision, because many local governments would have been hard-pressed to wage successful lawsuits against the formidable resources of the pharmaceutical industry. The agreement is a solid one that specifies funding for overdose prevention, recovery, outreach and other expenses while requiring safeguards that subject distributors to new monitoring requirements.
“This is a historic agreement,” Attorney General Keith Ellison told an editorial writer. “These are companies who went out of their way to deceive people, who were prolific in pushing these drugs along with distributors and marketers. They hid information. It was an elaborate scheme that resulted in nearly 5,000 deaths in Minnesota alone.”
One of those who suffered a personal toll was Rep. Dave Baker, R-Willmar, who lost his 25-year-old son in 2013 to a heroin overdose that started out as an addiction to legally prescribed opioids for a back injury. Baker, who now leads the state’s Opioid Response Advisory Council, was a key leader in the yearslong effort to bring pharmaceutical companies’ misdeeds to light. His advisory council will oversee dispersal of the state’s share of funds.
“I’m very proud of how the attorney general’s office, the Association of Minnesota Counties and other local officials worked together on this,” Baker said. “This is the best deal we’re going to get and the funds will do so much good.”
Ellison also praised Baker’s work. “There is one guy who I really think acted in a heroic way through all of this,” Ellison said. “Dave Baker was tireless. He never stopped. He was always willing to tell the story of his son, no matter how painful it was to him.”
That is the kind of partnership Minnesota could use more of. It brings people together. It brings results. Baker said the next step will be legislation needed to unlock the funds. That too, he said, has bipartisan support, which in the Senate will be led jointly by Sen. Julie Rosen, R-Fairmont, who leads the powerful Finance Committee, and DFL Sen. Chris Eaton of Brooklyn Center.
The legislation is needed to ensure certain guidelines are met that will prevent the opioid settlement from meeting the fate of the tobacco settlement, which an earlier Legislature tapped to get out of a general budget shortfall. “That’s not going to happen here,” Baker said. “This will be specifically for addiction and opioid-related services.”
Minnesota owes a debt to all those who worked so long and hard to produce this agreement, which will pay dividends for years to come. We urge legislators to come to a rapid agreement that will guide and preserve the funds for their intended purpose.
St. Cloud Times. January 9, 2022.
Editorial: Count to 10, omicron isn’t done with us yet
This week, the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul reinstated indoor mask mandates.
Businesses everywhere are running short-staffed, The worker shortage not only isn’t getting better, it’s deepening as the workforce makes new decisions about how to and to whom to sell its product — skills, knowledge and effort — and for what price. And then there are the short-term staffing crises as illness and infection-control isolation periods take still more workers off the job temporarily.
We are nowhere near to emerging from the pandemic’s shadow, at least not in the new-year-fresh-start paradigm we all hoped to see.
It’s frustrating on a personal, family, community and global level, because if the pandemic is about two years old, pandemic fatigue has been building for at least 18 of those 24 months. That’s about when store-aisle confrontations over masks starting going viral, followed by an explosion of violent incidents on airplanes, followed by a rise in I-want-to-speak-to-the-manager behavior documented coast to coast.
We’re not only saddened by the pandemic, angered by others’ responses to it and frustrated by it, we’re collectively worn out with it, even if good days outnumber bad ones in any individual life. We’re all over having to cope with the pandemic .
Omicron’s surge is clearly going to shift the landscape for all of us again in the short term (see: Twin Cities’ mask mandates). Businesses locally and regionally are reducing hours to manage staff fatigue and shortages. Schools are adjusting their calendars, too. Everyone organizing an event on the social or business calendar is reassessing daily whether the show will go on.
We are simply not in control of the biological imp that is causing all of the chaos. Being “so over it” doesn’t change that.
But we can be in control of getting through this next phase as a community. It takes some old-fashioned attention to what our grandmas would call good manners.
Is there a sign on the store window say masks are encouraged? Put one on or exercise your freedom to choose another store — much like visiting someone’s home, it’s their place, their rules. But has the management declined to post that sign? Then let the bare-faced go about their business without your opinion, or choose another store.
Did it take longer than usual to get your dinner order? Take a look around before escalating — there’s a big difference between a server who’s hustling hard to keep up and one who’s leaning in a corner texting a friend.
The chaos of the past two years isn’t done with us yet. There are more frustrations, changes of plans and debates about what to do about it ahead in the coming weeks. How we handle those frustrations will make the situation either better… or worse.
When in doubt, we can choose to act with grace. We can decide to not make the day worse. We can choose to support businesses and organizations whose values align with our own and we can choose to simply avoid those that don’t — without centering those opinions loudly in every encounter.
We can, and should, do our best to keep our cool, make good decisions, show patience in the face of frustrations and assume everyone is doing their best until proven otherwise.
Count to 10. It’s not over yet.
Mankato Free Press. January 9, 2022.
Editorial: Education: Diverse teacher recruitment pays
Investor-taxpayers in Mankato Area Public Schools should welcome a strategy that serves the customer-families with teachers who have broad experience to provide the most comprehensive education possible in an increasingly diverse world.
The recent approval of a policy to provide incentive pay to hire diverse teachers will go a long way toward that goal and help create a welcoming learning environment for the district’s growing diverse enrollment. It’s also a way to improve racial equity in education and, importantly, provide the white student population something that is currently in short supply: the perspective of indigenous people and people of color in daily lessons.
The Mankato school board approved a policy at the Dec. 5 meeting that was based on a Minnesota law recently passed by the Republican Senate and the Democratic House that called for schools to put in place plans to recruit teachers who are indigenous or people of color. Schools can provide incentive pay for such teachers and mentors but are not required to do so.
Schools can also apply for state grants to implement these recruitment policies. Those grant dollars come with reasonable requirements, including implementing strategies to retain teachers of color and indigenous teachers and that may involve paying them extra to stay for five years. School boards would likely have to vote on seeking or approving funding for the programs.
Groups that don’t see taxpayer value in a diverse workforce for a diverse constituency have framed the issue as one where teachers of color or indigenous teachers would be paid more than white teachers simply because of the color of their skin. Some elected leaders have even twisted this description into one Martin Luther King Jr. would support.
That’s a convoluted and disingenous interpretation of King’s philosophies. When King spoke eloquently about judging people by the “content of their character,” he likely was not speaking about discrimination against white people.
Others, who may not be versed in systemic discrimination or consider how family history impacts learning, believe all races should be treated “the same” in schools. That sounds good on the surface, but becomes a flawed analysis when one looks deeper at the established history of racial discrimination in American schools, business, justice, politics and society in general.
We encourage the Mankato Area Public Schools and other schools with disproportionate ratios of minority teachers to students to apply for grants and recruit teachers of color and indigenous teachers. Mankato schools have 27% minority students, but only 2% minority teachers.
Improving that ratio would go a long way to improving outcomes for minority students and offer a broader, real world education for all. That is the goal of public education.
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