By Jeff Beach | Deputy Editor
“I think the legislators had good intentions when they developed that anti-lunch shaming bill. But then there's like no funding to help support it.” - Michelle Wagner, legislative chair for the North Dakota School Nutrition Association, on how schools handle meal debt.
Students eat lunch at Carl Ben Eielson Middle School in Fargo on Jan. 22, 2025. School districts statewide reported student meal debt of about $2 million at the end of the 2025-26 school year, according to the Department of Public Instruction. (Photo by Dan Koeck/For the North Dakota Monitor)
By Jacob Orledge
Every K-12 student has the legal right to receive a lunch at school in North Dakota without any stigma or shaming. But students and families who can’t afford to pay can still have long-term consequences, and some students may choose to go hungry to avoid them.
There are more than two dozen school districts that reported referring parents to debt collection agencies for unpaid lunch debt, according to a state survey. At least one district withholds transcripts from students who haven’t paid off their account balance.
Both types of policies are legal in North Dakota.
State law requires school districts to provide a meal to any student who requests one even if they lack the funds to pay for it. Legislation passed in 2023 known as the anti-lunch shaming bill prohibits schools from identifying or stigmatizing students for unpaid meal debts, and bans certain consequences such as limiting participating in graduation or other school activities.
Vicki Wanamaker, left, and Cathy Mager, right, talked in Wanamaker’s Springdale, Pennsylvania, home on Oct. 19, 2026, about their opposition to a proposed hyperscale data center roughly a quarter mile away. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)
By Ashley Murray
Residents in a small southwestern Pennsylvania town are facing the prospect of a 47-acre data center facility on their doorstep.
“Right here behind this fence is where they want to put up the data center, and as you can see, there’s houses right across the street, roughly 100 feet,” said lifelong Springdale borough resident Cathy Mager,
“We don’t want it,” she told States Newsroom on Oct. 19
The scenario is playing out around the United States. Both Democratic and Republican candidates during the heated midterm election cycle have had to navigate deep voter resentment of the massive advanced computer server farm developments that will power artificial intelligence.
Sarah Simmons, a midwife and co-owner of Maple Street Birth Center in rural Okanogan County, Wash., holds a newborn. Washington state has among the highest number of birth centers in the country, but a new report identifies 10 states that have none amid a spate of closures over the past three years and reported difficulties with state regulations and costs. (Photo courtesy of Sarah Simmons)
By Kelcie Moseley-Morris
Birth centers are an option for those with low-risk pregnancies and are correlated with more positive health outcomes, but 10 states, including North Dakota, do not have any birth centers at all, and more could be built with certain state policy solutions and different models of care, a new report suggests.
Birth centers can be an attractive option for pregnant patients seeking fewer medical interventions and a more “home-like” childbirth experience that is still attended by professionals. Centers are often chosen by Black, Indigenous and Hispanic patients, who experience negative maternal and infant health outcomes at disproportionately higher rates than white patients, research shows.
EARLIER ND MONITOR NEWS AND COMMENTARY
FROM STATES NEWSROOM
Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan addresses voters at a Senate campaign event on the White Earth reservation on Oct. 17, 2026. (Photo by Max Nesterak/Minnesota Reformer)
By Max Nesterak
NAYTAHWAUSH, Minn. — Peggy Flanagan took the microphone and began, as she always does, in Ojibwe.
“Boozhoo,” she said, giving her name, her Tribe and her clan before switching to English. “Thank you for welcoming me home.”
Flanagan, Minnesota’s lieutenant governor and Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, had traveled hours across prairie, wetland, forest and farmland to reach this town of 504 on the White Earth reservation, where she is an enrolled Tribal member.
As with former U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola, an Alaska Native and Alaska’s Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, Flanagan’s victory would be historic. Just four enrolled Tribal members have served in the Senate in its 237-year history, all men.
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