Author: Christopher J. Valentino
Dr. Nathan Chomilo is the medical director for the Minnesota’s version of Medicaid. Courtesy photo. As a kid, Nathan Chomilo watched his parents — a nurse and pharmacist who immigrated from Cameroon to Minnesota — give health advice to people while out at community events. “They were always wearing their pharmacist or nurse hat,” said Chomilo. “I really respected that and looked for my own way to help folks and also be part of the community.” Today, Chomilo is a pediatrician at HealthPartners Park Nicollet and the medical director for Minnesota’s Medicaid program — known as Medical Assistance — a role he assumed…
Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., said the Senate could approve the measure as soon as next week: “If people are committed to working on this, and spending a lot of hours — I’m not talking eight hours a day — I think there’s time.” Photo by Meg Potter/Cronkite News. WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden took a preliminary victory lap Thursday to celebrate Democrats striking a surprise deal on a sweeping legislative package that renewed hopes of historic action on the party’s health care, tax and climate goals. But just down Pennsylvania Avenue, Senate Democrats said they needed to read through the…
Getty Images.Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said on Thursday that he will not appeal a judge’s ruling that expanded abortion access in the state, effectively strengthening rights for people to receive the procedure in Minnesota with fewer restrictions. A district court judge earlier this month struck down laws related to parental notification, hospitalization, mandated physician care and informed consent, ruling the laws infringed on the fundamental right to abortion granted by the state Supreme Court in a 1995 ruling. The 2019 case, Doe v. Minnesota, was brought by abortion rights groups that argued certain laws that established requirements to receive…
Hundreds of nurses at the Mayo Clinic’s Mankato hospital will vote on July 25 on whether to keep their union or dissolve it. Photo by Max Nesterak/minnesotadigest.com. Nurses at the Mayo Clinic’s Mankato hospital voted 213 to 181 to decertify their union on Monday in a significant blow to Minnesota’s powerful nurses’ union, and a victory for anti-union activists who have focused their efforts on health care workers. The decision to sever ties with the Minnesota Nurses Association, which represents about 22,000 nurses, comes more than seven decades after nurses first unionized the Mankato hospital, long before it was taken…
Hundreds of nurses at the Mayo Clinic’s Mankato hospital will vote on July 25 on whether to keep their union or dissolve it. Photo by Max Nesterak/minnesotadigest.com. MANKATO — Five-hundred nurses at the Mayo Clinic’s Mankato hospital will decide on Monday whether or not to get rid of their union after more than seven decades. If the nurses vote to dissolve the union, they would deliver one of the most significant blows in recent memory to the powerful Minnesota Nurses Association and a victory for anti-union activists amid a surge in labor organizing across the country. The effort is being…
More than 400 workers at Planned Parenthood North Central States unionized with SEIU Healthcare Minnesota and Iowa after a successful vote announced on July 21, 2022. Photo by Dylan Miettinen/minnesotadigest.com.Frontline health care workers at Planned Parenthood North Central States voted overwhelmingly to unionize, they announced Thursday, with 90% of ballots cast in favor of a union. “This victory is a huge turning point for us and reproductive health care workers everywhere. Because it’s us who actually makes these clinics run,” said Sage Shemroske, a health care worker in Minneapolis. The newly unionized group covers approximately 435 workers, including nurses, pharmacists,…
A screenshot of the Becker School District’s meeting on Monday, Aug. 1. The board ultimately delayed discussion and voting on the policy.The Becker School Board on Monday delayed voting on a policy that would ban district staff from teaching “inherently divisive concepts,” which many say will have a dampening effect on free speech and could restrict education about racism and anything LGBT-related. The school board in Becker, Minnesota, a city of more than 4,800 people about an hour drive northwest of St. Paul, decided the language needed legal review before it could vote on it. Despite the delay, community members…
Photo illustration by Getty Images. The Minneapolis school district has announced plans to end its relationship with Gaggle, a controversial digital surveillance tool that monitored students’ online behaviors during pandemic-induced remote learning. The announcement, which follows extensive reporting by The 74 about how the tool subjected the city’s youth to pervasive round-the-clock digital surveillance, was outlined last week at the bottom of a newsletter alerting families to changes at the district. Gaggle, which uses artificial intelligence and human content moderators to track students’ online activities and notify district officials of “inappropriate behaviors or potential threats to self or others,” will no longer be…
Detroit Public Schools Community District students and teacher at Ronald Brown Academy (Photo: Ken Coleman/Michigan Advance)When Rachel Berger’s son was diagnosed with dyslexia in kindergarten, she thought she found the “golden key” to getting him the right support in school. Instead, the school district said they didn’t have any services for her son. Berger, who is also dyslexic, was furious. Over the next 10 years, Berger launched Decoding Dyslexia MN and successfully advocated for a slate of laws to improve services and outcomes for children with dyslexia, whose brains process language differently. Now, Berger is spearheading an effort to get…
Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” was among more than two dozen books removed last month from a school library at Goddard, Kansas, following a challenge by a parent. The books have since been returned to the shelves. Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector. Instructors in one Pennsylvania school district were not allowed to teach a biography of the first Black President, Barack Obama.* In some Tennessee classrooms, a nonfiction comic book about the atrocities of the Holocaust is banned. And one school district in Wisconsin banned from libraries a picture book about a gay rights activist who was assassinated. In the…