Spokane

It’s easy to spot homeless people on the street. It’s not so easy to spot them in schools. And yet as Jody Lawrence-Turner of the Spokesman–Review reports, there are more homeless students than ever in Eastern Washington and Idaho.

School districts there are “well on their way to surpassing the number of homeless students enrolled last year by at least 20 percent,” she writes. The trend mirrors a nationwide rise in the number of students who have had to leave homes that were foreclosed on, who are living in shelters, or who are hopping from couch to couch.

The Spokesman-Review also put together a sortable database of homeless students by school district.

Washington ranks 12^th-highest in the country for number of homeless children. Lack of stability for those kids can disrupt their learning, and their future.

U.S. Sens. Patty Murray, and Al Franken have each introduced bills that would provide more funding for transportation and outreach to help homeless kids.

 -- Carol Smith

How much of a problem is swine flu shaping up to be? Don't blame me if my head is spinning. Seems like I've been advised to be very worried -- like when the White House council of science advisers warned it could kill  30,000 to 90,000 Americans -- and then, maybe not so much. Symptoms are mild. Runs its course in three to five days. Wash your hands and you won't get it anyway. Like that.

This week the flu is filling emergency rooms in Spokane in Washington state, while around the West, parents and others seeking the vaccine line up, often futilely, waiting for a vaccine that is in extremely short supply.

The vaccine simply isn’t being produced in sufficient quantities due to production problems, reports the Associated Press. Only 13 million doses have been delivered, compared to the 12o million doses originally promised. Okay, I'm a little worried.

"As nervous Americans clamor for the vaccine, production is running several weeks behind schedule, and health officials blame the pressure on pharmaceutical companies to crank it out along with the ordinary flu vaccine, and a slow and antiquated process that relies on millions of chicken eggs.

In Spokane, where officials expected to have about 58,000 doses of swine flu vaccine by now, just 12,700 doses have been delivered.

The Spokane River is so badly polluted that it will take $500 million and a decade to get a handle on the pollution problem. That's the upshot of a new plan released by the Washington Department of Ecology.

 Nine years in the making, the plan envisions trading of pollution credits, much like the cap-and-trade legislation being considered in Congress to slow global warming. The public has until Oct. 15 to comment on the new plan. 

According to a story in the Spokane Spokesman-Review by Becky Kramer, enviros and government types are happy about the plan. The most memorable writing about the Spokane River's pollution problems in recent memory came from Kim Murphy of the Los Angeles Times:

By day, Patti Marcotte is a working mom -- dealing with the balancing act created by a 5-year-old daughter, a demanding job, a split-level house and a willful boxer puppy.

Come the post-dinner hour, however, Marcotte begins operating in the shadowy world of smuggled soap.

Local officials, you see, banned detergents containing phosphorus, the element that is leading to rapid growth of algae that ultimately robs the water of oxygen.

But most detergents still contain phosphorus. When residents of Spokane couldn't get their dishes clean enough using the reformulated soaps, they went across the state line to buy the good stuff. Good for them and their dishes, anyway -- but not so good for the Spokane River.

 -- Robert McClure