4 Days of School, After the Fire, Timber Poaching

Schools Move Towards a Four Day Class Week (0:32) Guest: Paul T. Hill is Founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education and Research Professor at the University of Washington Bothell School districts across America are strapped for cash. One solution that’s been gaining popularity over the last decade is to shorten the school week: four slightly longer days in class, followed by a three-day weekend. More than 500 school districts in 25 states have gone that route, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. How’s it working out? For Better Wildfire Prevention, Look at What Happens to Land That’s Already Burned (17:22) Guest: Pat Shea, Attorney, Director of the Bureau of Land Management 1997-1999 and Deputy Assistant of Secretary of Interior for Lands and Minerals 1999-2000. The amount of money the federal government is spending to fight wildfires each year is roughly seven times what it was 20 years ago. More than $3 billion is the typical annual price tag to beat back blazes on forest service and BLM land. As a result, there’s been less and less money dedicated to rehabilitating the scorched land after the flames are out. But that has the perverse consequence of feeding the fire cycle.  How to Catch a Tree Thief: Timber Poaching in the Pacific Northwest (36:37) Guest: Anne Minden, Retired Special Agent with the US Forest Service, President of Minden and Associates, LLC Animal poaching is a problem you’re familiar with. But did you know that people also poach trees? Timber thieves will take chainsaws onto forest service land, bring down a Douglas fir or a big leaf maple and make hundreds of dollars selling the wood to a sawmill or a furniture manufacturer. Anne Minden is one of the handful of people who track down tree-robbers. When School Districts Splinter, Segregation Rises (51:08) Guest: Erica Frankenberg, PhD, professor of Education and Demography, Pennsylvania State University Sixty-five years ago, the US Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. Board of Education that public schoo