Republican Gov. Brian Kemp stumps for U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker in Cobb County on Saturday.
SMYRNA – Recently re-elected Republican Gov. Brian Kemp campaigned Saturday on behalf of former University of Georgia football star and U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker, who is facing a Dec. 6 runoff for Georgia’s U.S. Senate seat.
“Look, we cannot rest on our laurels here,” Kemp said to the Walker supporters gathered in a parking lot in Cobb County.
“Who do you want to fight for you in the United States Senate? Do you want a guy that represents our values like Herschel Walker or do you want a guy who’s stood with Joe Biden 96% of the time?
“This is going to be a turnout election – who’s more motivated? Is it them or us?,” Kemp said, urging Georgia Republicans to take advantage of early voting and vote as soon as possible.
“I know Herschel Walker will do like we’ve done in Georgia, be fiscally conservative,” Kemp added.
The joint appearance represents a departure from fall campaign events, when Kemp and Walker kept their distance from each other and ran separate campaigns.
Though Kemp defeated Democratic challenger Stacey Abrams for the governor’s seat, Republican Walker fell short of incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock by about 38,000 votes in the Nov. 8 general election. Because neither candidate earned more than 50% of the vote, the two face a Dec. 6 runoff.
Kemp and Walker blamed Warnock and President Joe Biden for inflation. Kemp touted steps Georgia has taken under his leadership to address economic pressures, such as temporarily lifting the gas tax.
“We need someone in Washington that’s gonna …. row the boat with Governor Kemp,” Walker told the crowd. “What [Warnock has] been doing is rowing the boat against Governor Kemp.”
“He [Warnock] voted to put men in women’s sports. Men shouldn’t be in women’s sports,” Walker said. “It’s written in my Bible and it says woman came from the rib of the man. Senator Warnock need[s] to read his Bible.”
“They want to bring wokeness in our school house,” Walker added. “Instead of teaching our kids how to read and write, they want to teach them about [critical race theory]. … That won’t happen on my watch.”
Early voting in the runoff is due to begin on Saturday, Nov. 26.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – The state plans to implement a new Medicaid expansion plan – Georgia Pathways — that includes work requirements next July after several years of legal wrangling over the controversial proposal.
“I can confirm that we are moving forward with implementing the Pathways plan,” said Andrew Isenhour, a spokesman for Republican Gov. Brian Kemp.
“No one who currently qualifies for Medicaid will be affected by the new program,” Isenhour said. “It is important to note that we are only adding people to the Medicaid rolls with this program. Georgia Pathways will expand Medicaid to otherwise ineligible Georgians who satisfy the work, job training, education, or volunteer requirements.”
Around 345,000 additional Georgians will become eligible for Medicaid under the new plan, as long as they meet other requirements, Isenhour added. Georgians whose incomes are below the federal poverty level (currently $13,590 for one person) will be eligible for the insurance.
To get the insurance, Georgians will need to work or perform other qualifying activities such as vocational training, education, job readiness programs or community service. Some enrollees will pay monthly premiums ranging from $7 to $16, depending on income and tobacco use.
Kemp has made the Pathways plan a cornerstone of his health-care policy. While 39 states have now opted for Medicaid expansion plans that allow low-income people to obtain health care, Kemp and other Georgia Republican leaders remain opposed to full Medicaid expansion, citing concerns about costs to the state and consumers.
Instead, the Republican-led General Assembly approved the more limited Medicaid expansion proposal back in 2019.
In October 2020, while Republican Donald Trump was still president, the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) approved Georgia’s Pathways plan. After Democratic President Joe Biden took office in January of last year, CMS rescinded approval for the work-requirement plans in Georgia along with 13 other states.
Although the other states, including Arkansas and Indiana, dropped their work-requirement plans, lawyers for Georgia sued in federal court. They argued the federal government, and CMS in particular, had overstepped its authority in blocking the work-requirement proposal.
In August, a U.S. District judge agreed, effectively allowing the Pathway plan to move forward. Although the federal government could have appealed to a circuit court, it has not done so, opening the door for Georgia to forge ahead with the new plan.
Some advocates are concerned the new plan will make it harder to get health care and argue Georgia should fully expand Medicaid instead.
“The Governor’s Pathways program makes it unnecessarily difficult for low-income people to gain health coverage. The program requires workers and students to repeatedly prove they are working or studying, rather than making it simpler for them to go to the doctor and fill prescriptions,” said Laura Colbert, executive director of Georgians for a Healthy Future, an advocacy group.
“Because of the program’s complications, only a fraction of low-income uninsured adults will get health insurance. Medicaid expansion would be a simpler and more cost-effective solution for Georgia and uninsured Georgians,” Colbert said.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
Georgia school superintendents Mary Elizabeth Davis (Henry County), Michael Duncan (Pike County) and Keith Simmons (Griffin-Spalding County Schools) discuss how their districts used federal COVID relief funds.
ATLANTA – A new report looks at how Georgia’s schools are using the influx of nearly $6 billion in federal COVID relief funds that have flowed to districts across the state since 2020.
While 10% of the funds were earmarked for the state Department of Education, the other 90% went directly to school districts. The federal funding did not come with the usual regulatory restrictions, providing districts with flexibility to use the money to address local needs.
A new report released by the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education (GPEE) Thursday finds districts across the state are now using the funds to address longer-term needs after initially focusing on immediate needs like boosting technological capacity and ensuring students’ access to food when the pandemic first hit.
“We … see sort of a trend where the local districts are really moving from crisis management mode,” said GPEE President Dana Rickman said. “Now, they’re really moving more into implementing plans to help students recover from lost learning.”
Despite the shared experience of the pandemic, districts’ responses were marked by “the diversity of adversity,” added Keith Simmons, superintendent of Griffin-Spalding County Schools.
Each Georgia district faced unique needs and has come up with its own approach to using the funds.
Most districts have used the money to try to boost students’ academic performance. Around 87% of districts have used the funds to hire additional staff to help address student learning loss via one-on-one or small group tutoring. Many districts also used the money to boost summer learning programs.
Rural Pike County School District faced longstanding challenges with a shortfall of instructional resources prior to the pandemic, Superintendent Michael Duncan said. The relief funds allowed his district to focus on improving elementary literacy. It hired staff members who could help with one-on-one or small group tutoring.
More than three-quarters of the districts indicated they also used the funds to increase mental health support staff. The pandemic took a toll on student well-being as students lost access to regular routines and the social supports schools can provide.
For example, in Henry County, the district decided to use the money to establish a mental health and wellness coordinator at every school, said Superintendent Mary Elizabeth Davis. The coordinator, though not a clinician, is responsible for coordinating a wide variety of social and medical supports for students who need help.
The pandemic reinforced and amplified what most educators already knew, Davis said.
“It was an absolute dire necessity that the schoolhouse was playing that role as a comprehensive social service provider,” she said.
Just over half of Georgia districts have used the funds to increase student access to “wraparound services” such as food and housing assistance, according to the report.
Many districts face staffing shortages, especially for teachers in math, science, and special education, the report found. And nearly half of Georgia districts are using the federal funds to pay for additional substitute teachers, who are in high demand due to the need to quarantine if a teacher contracts COVID.
Pike County faces both substitute teacher and bus driver shortages, Duncan said.
The federal funding boost also presents some challenges. One is the looming September 2024 deadline by which all of the funds must be spent. That means that even if districts have developed effective programs to help their students, the funding for them will end in two years.
“We’ve seen that students meet goals, but now going into this next budget, now that the extra money is running out, am I going to be able to afford to continue to have this small group interventionalist in place?” Duncan asked. “Currently, I would say that’s probably not going to be able to happen.”
In recent months, rising costs driven by inflation have forced about half of the school districts to scale back their plans for the funds, Rickman said.
Statewide, 31% of districts reported using the federal funds to pay for fuel for their school buses. When the spending deadline hits in 2024, districts will have to come up with another source of funds for those costs.
The state Department of Education wants Congress to extend the deadline for spending education funds beyond 2024, said Matt Jones, chief of staff at the DOE. “We have a divided Congress, but that’s something we’re going to continue to press our congressional delegation to see through.”
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – Only about two-thirds of Georgia’s high schoolers have mastered core subjects at a level that would allow them to move on to the next grade, new data released this week by the Georgia Department of Education (DOE) shows.
The latest College and Career Ready Performance Index reports provide overviews of how students are performing across the state. The content mastery score covers English, math, social studies, and science. This year’s high school score of 64.7 is down from 2019’s score of 70, when the last full set of data was collected.
But in “readiness,” which includes topics like literacy and computer science, things have remained stable. This year’s high school students earned 73.2, down just a little over a point from 2019’s score of 74.5. The new data also includes information on elementary and middle school performance.
The results from 2019 are not directly comparable to this year’s results because of pandemic-related changes to the reporting process.
States must collect this data under federal education law so schools can be evaluated and held accountable. Georgia also uses the data to determine which schools need special attention and support. Data for each school and district are on the College and Career Ready Performance Index website.
This year, the DOE applied for and received federal permission for exceptions in how it reports the data because of the COVID pandemic. As a result of the reporting modifications, the DOE did not assign overall letter or number grades to each school and district as it usually does.
Going forward, DOE will use 2022 data as a baseline for evaluating school improvement.
State School Superintendent Richard Woods, a Republican who was re-elected to his third term in the office last week, acknowledged the pandemic has taken a toll on Georgia’s students.
“Georgia will continue to remain laser-focused on academic recovery,” Woods said. “We know the pandemic had an undeniable impact on student learning – it’s our role, responsibility, and privilege moving forward to ensure districts and schools have the resources they need to continue investing in students and combating the effects of lost learning opportunities.”
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
ATLANTA – An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Georgia allowed an off-site doctor to perform unwanted gynecological procedures on detained women in a failure of human rights, the bipartisan U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has found.
“Female detainees in Georgia were subjected by a [Department of Homeland Security]-contracted doctor to excessive, invasive, and often unnecessary gynecological surgeries and procedures, with repeated failures to obtain informed medical consent,” Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., the panel’s chairman, said during a hearing Tuesday. He also called the detainees’ treatment “nightmarish” and a “disgrace.”
Ossoff and Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., the subcommittee’s ranking minority member, released a lengthy report on the abuses.
“[This] in my view … represents a catastrophic failure by the federal government to respect basic human rights,” Ossoff added.
The problem initially came to light through a September 2020 whistleblower complaint.
One doctor – Dr. Mahendra Amin– was behind the abuses at the Ocilla facility between 2017 and 2020, Ossoff said.
Though Amin performed only 6.5% of total OB/GYN visits among the nationwide population of ICE detainees, Amin performed more than 90% of all Depo-Provera (a contraceptive) injections and other invasive gynecological procedures nationwide, Ossoff said. The patients were often unaware of or unwilling to receive the unnecessary treatments, the senator said.
Amin was subpoenaed by the subcommittee, Ossoff said, but invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to testify.
The federal government failed to thoroughly vet Amin before hiring him, even though he had faced lawsuits for performing unnecessary medical procedures, racked up medical malpractice complaints and was not board-certified in obstetrics and gynecology, Ossoff said.
LaSalle Corrections, a Louisiana company, runs the South Georgia ICE detention facility. Dr. Pamela Hearn, medical director for the company, said LaSalle’s management team had not been able to oversee Amin’s medical treatment and had not been given an opportunity to vet him.
Karina Cisneros Preciado was forced to receive an unwanted contraceptive shot from Amin while detained at the facility in 2020 and 2021. Amin told her she might need an additional surgery later, she testified before the committee.
“Dr. Amin’s abuse has caused ongoing damage to my physical and mental health,” Cisneros Preciado said. “I was only saved from the surgery because news about Dr. Amin’s abuse came out. Why was he allowed to harm me and so many other women?
“To this day, I am extremely scared to go to any doctor, for myself and my kids. … I don’t want this to happen any other women or any other person in general.”
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
