This is a web edition of GBH Daily, a weekday newsletter bringing you local stories you can trust so you can stay informed without feeling overwhelmed.
🌧️Wintery mix and freezing rain, with highs in the 30s. Today is Mardi Gras, the start of Lunar New Year, and the first day of Ramadan. Sunset is at 5:19 p.m.
A person killed two adults and injured three more people at a youth hockey game in Pawtucket, Rhode Island yesterday, then died by suicide. Pawtucket Police Chief Tina Goncalves said a bystander tried to stop the shooter, “and that’s probably what led to a swift end of this tragic event earlier today,” Goncalves said. She said the shooting appeared to be a family dispute.
Police did not release the names of the two people killed because they had not yet notified their families. Goncalves also did not name the bystander.
The Rhode Island Interscholastic League is suspending all games today. Pawtucket Mayor Don Grebien said the hockey game was between the Blackstone Valley Schools co-operative boys hockey team, which has students from St. Raphael Academy, Providence Country Day and public high schools in North Providence and North Smithfield, playing a co-operative team from Coventry/Johnston. “These are high school kids. They were doing an event, they were playing with their families watching, a fun time, and it turned into this,” Grebien said.
Four Things to Know
1. The Trump administration is taking Harvard to court again, this time saying the university is not providing data to prove it has stopped using race as a criterion in admissions. “If Harvard has stopped discriminating, it should happily share the data necessary to prove it,” said Harmeet Dhillon of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.
“The University will continue to defend itself against these retaliatory actions which have been initiated simply because Harvard refused to surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights in response to unlawful government overreach,” university officials said in a statement.
2. Researchers are starting to study whether the now-defunct Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth is impacting the health of people who live nearby. The plant went offline in 2019, and its owner, Holtec International, has had workers releasing treated water into Cape Cod Bay. Treating the water doesn’t remove all the nuclear particles in it, and some neighbors have for years voiced concerns that radioactive particles in the water are evaporating from the bay and into the air they breathe.
A group called Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility will coordinate with researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston College and the Massachusetts Medical Society. They have $700,000 in federal money to study the issue. They’ll place air monitors near the plant and eventually seek out neighbors willing to donate blood or urine so researchers can compare the radioactivity in their bodies with that in people who live farther away.
3. Martha’s Vineyard has six different towns with six different police departments, fire departments and town governments. Now locals are considering what would happen if they joined forces, in part because housing has become so expensive and in part because the state now requires its police officers to get more training.
In Aquinnah, Chief of Police Randhi Belain was the only full-time officer in the department for a while last year after three others left. The town had to pay the local sheriff’s office $90 an hour to cover overnight shifts. They’ve since hired another officer, but Belain is talking about retiring and hoping that drives a conversation about creating a regional police force for the island. “It makes sense to have these conversations when a chief retires. That’s one less command position that you have to fill. So with me staying here, I feel like I’m in the way of regionalization happening,” he said.
4. Gov. Maura Healey announced last week that all employees in the state’s executive branch, almost 40,000 people, will soon be able to use ChatGPT at work. The technology is far from foolproof — Kade Crockford of the ACLU of Massachusetts encouraged the Legislature to pass regulations on how government workers can use it.
“We have a lot of concerns about the use of artificial intelligence and large language models in the law enforcement and criminal legal context, for example, where people’s rights are particularly important because you could go to prison if a system like this gets it wrong, or if the police inappropriately use this type of technology,” Crockford told GBH’s Craig LeMoult.
Colleges are reconnecting with students who left before earning their degrees
There are more than 43 million Americans who have gone to some college but not earned a degree — up from 36 million in 2019.
GBH’s Kirk Carapezza reports that they stopped attending for myriad reasons: financial stress, family obligations, health troubles, educational struggles and more. Now some colleges are trying to get them back — in part to fulfil their educational missions (“If we can’t skill up our people, we will fall behind,” said Jonathan Gowin, the alliance engagement director for the Northeast region at Complete College America) and in part for financial ones. The number of college students has fallen by about 2 million in the last decade, and the percentage of high schoolers enrolling in college right after graduation has gone from about 70% to around 50%.
“If institutions don’t get this right — re-engaging the some-college-no-degree population — then we will lose our institutions,” Gowin told Carapezza.
Seven public colleges in Massachusetts are working with an organization called ReUp Education, which connects with former students and coaches them through re-enrolling and getting their degrees. UMass Boston has re-enrolled about 260 students, roughly 50 of whom have since graduated. The other schools working with the organization are Bunker Hill Community College, Cape Cod Community College, Greenfield Community College, MassBay Community College, Fitchburg State University and UMass Dartmouth.
Meredith Ruland, a ReUp student at Ramapo College of New Jersey, described herself as a “Longtime, part-time student.” She’s had to work full-time to pay tuition and bills and has taken time off to manage a connective tissue disorder. She got a call from ReUp and at first thought it was a solicitor. But after a few conversations, she decided to re-enroll. She’s on track to finish her bachelor’s degree in environmental studies and graduate this spring.
“We always discuss school scheduling, including my personal and work schedule,” Ruland told Carapezza. “The number one thing I really struggled with throughout the last ten years was actually finding somebody who really supported and cared about my education.”
Read (and hear) Carapezza’s full story here.
Dig deeper:
-Facing public scrutiny, colleges are trying to enroll more veterans
-Brandeis bets big on rebuilding the liberal arts around real-world skills
-Will Mass. politicians’ pushback against Trump’s immigration, education and voting agenda work?
