On the freshly liberated battlefields of northeast Ukraine, a pile of smashed glass windows outside one Soviet-era block of apartments attests to the violence of six months of Russian occupation, and of Ukraine’s sweeping recent military advances.

Indoors, in cramped apartments, residents lived in the dark for weeks on end.

Now, with a hard winter looming, they marvel at the speed and urgency with which Ukrainian officials have restored another key ingredient to their survival: electric power.

“Thank God it works! Electricity is civilization – it is everything,” says Antonina Krasnokutska, a retired medical worker, looking affectionately at the lightbulb that came on the day before, and now burns again in her tiny spotless kitchen.

“Without electricity there is no TV, no news, no clothes washing, no charging the phone,” says Ms. Krasnokutska, her gray hair pulled back and a small crucifix around her neck.

“Before, it was like living in the Stone Age,” says her grown son, Serhii Krasnokutskyi, who is more than a head taller. “As soon as it got dark, everyone would go to sleep.”

He shows a picture on his phone from a few days earlier, of a tangle of phone and computer charging cables – including his – plugged in at a local shop with a generator.

“We are very grateful for the people who repaired this electricity, even with shelling continuing,” he says. “They have a very complicated job.”

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Residents pile windows damaged during six months of Russian occupation and the Kharkiv region's liberation by Ukrainian troops, in Balakliia, Ukraine, Sept. 28, 2022. As a cold winter looms, broken windows are being fixed.

Indeed, although a lack of power might have been a novel inconvenience during the warm summer season, it increasingly has become a matter of great urgency for Ukrainian citizens and officials.

Coping through Ukraine’s winter with dignity and any degree of security will require courage and perseverance, as the severity and suffering that the season can bring here are being weaponized by Russia, as it seeks to compensate for a string of battlefield losses.

In recent days, Russian attacks have specifically targeted Ukraine’s electrical and other civilian infrastructure – all with the apparent aim of making this winter as hard as possible for Ukrainians, even as Moscow employs other measures to spread the hardship across Europe.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Monday that Russian barrages across the country with missiles and Iran-supplied kamikaze drones had destroyed 30% of Ukraine’s power stations in the previous eight days. Thousands of towns have been left without electricity.

Kharkiv’s challenges

Emblematic of the national challenge is the one facing officials in the northeast Kharkiv region, where Ukraine recaptured more than 3,000 square miles in a September counteroffensive. Ukrainian forces are still making gains on that front, as well as in the south toward Kherson, where Wednesday Russia started evacuating civilians from the first major city it occupied, after launching its three-pronged invasion last February.

Across the Kharkiv region, Ukrainians are stockpiling as much wood, fuel, and food as possible while they still can, from sources as diverse as the floorboards of destroyed schools and the pine forests in Izium, which are pockmarked with abandoned Russian trenches adjacent to a mass burial site.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Ukrainian father Yevhenii and his son Radion use a crosscut saw to cut a tree in front of a destroyed building, as Ukrainians gather wood to prepare for a frigid winter in a time of war, in Izium, Ukraine, Sept. 26, 2022.

“Of course, we have this race against time,” says Serhii Mahdysyuk, the Kharkiv regional director in charge of housing, services, fuel, and energy. “Unfortunately, we probably stand in front of the biggest challenge in Ukraine.”

That is not only because of the scale of liberated territory, he says, but also because the Kharkiv region shares a long border with Russia, as well as with the Russian-controlled areas of the eastern Donbas.

“It’s a great mixture of all threats, and we are sure that shelling and bombings will continue, but we are ready for this,” says Mr. Mahdysyuk. “We know our weak spots that Russia can destroy, but we are prepared for what to do in these situations.”

Ukraine’s battlefield gains have meant a surging need to pick up the pieces after Russian occupation, to ensure habitable conditions as more and more surviving residents require services, and as others return to scenes of devastation.

Restoring electricity is the top priority, because that often restarts running water, too, says Mr. Mahdysyuk. But before that, the area beneath broken power lines must be de-mined.

Indeed, members of an electricity team reconnecting cables on the outskirts of Balakliia – one of the first towns to see power restored, at the end of September – say they lost two fellow workers in the previous two weeks. One died after stepping on an anti-personnel mine, another when his vehicle hit an anti-tank device.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Ukrainian electricity workers restore power lines damaged during six months of Russian military occupation in Balakliia, Ukraine, Sept. 29, 2022. Ukrainians in liberated territory say the restoration of the electrical grid, and with it often the water supply, is a return to civilization.

“For now, our biggest problem is mines,” says the team leader, who gave the name Andrii. “It’s fine within the cities, but in the fields it’s a disaster because it’s very difficult to see them. There is a lot of [them] around here – it will take years and years to get rid of.”

Yet officials only have a few weeks to execute plans to provide for hundreds of thousands of residents in this region, in their various states of need and distress. Some 50 field kitchens capable of feeding 200 to 300 people each have been ordered. Another 1,000 mobile stoves are on their way.

And authorities will provide nearly 200,000 cubic yards of firewood for those who have no access to it, and may have no other means of keeping warm – or where shelling continues to disrupt repairs, says Mr. Mahdysyuk.

“The level of opportunity and resources we have is not the same as the level of destruction,” he says. People in districts and buildings too destroyed to have services restored soon, such as in Saltivka in Kharkiv city, may be moved.

A population on the move

With population concentrations a moving target, even planning is a challenge. The partially destroyed city of Izium saw an estimated two-thirds of the prewar population depart during the Russian occupation, and now thousands have returned, many in need of support.

Likewise, the population of the Kharkiv region was 2.4 million before Russia’s invasion, with 1.5 million in Kharkiv city alone. Soon after the war began, with Russia pounding Ukraine’s second-largest city daily with rockets and artillery, the population dwindled to 300,000 to 400,000 people.

Today 800,000 people are estimated to be in the city, and 600,000 others in the rest of the region – a 40% drop from prewar levels.

“We are still counting numbers; it’s a fluid process,” says Mr. Mahdysyuk. “A lot of people came back, and a lot more want to come back.”

That process has now been complicated by Russia’s latest attacks on electricity stations, especially.

The situation is now “critical” across Ukraine “because our regions are dependent on one another,” Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of the presidential office, told Ukrainian television, according to Agence France-Presse. “It’s necessary for the whole country to prepare for electricity, water, and heating outages.”

For the Kharkiv region, that likely means further deprivation, even though Russian troops have retreated.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

A woman who gave the name Oleksandra collects floorboards from a destroyed primary school, as Ukrainians gather wood to prepare for winter, in Izium, Ukraine, Sept. 26, 2022.

“It’s horrible. The amount of problems the world saw in [Kyiv suburbs] Irpin, Bucha, and Borodianka, it’s one-fifth of what we have in Kharkiv,” says Ivan Sokil, a regional official with the Ministry of Emergency Situations, which handles tasks from firefighting to clearing rubble from wrecked schools.

“For now our main priority is to make it possible for people to come back to de-occupied territories as fast as possible, to create a normal life and return as close as possible to the point before the invasion,” he says.

Turning on the heat

Bringing retiree Raisa Kablova closer to that point is the electricity now restored to Balakliia.

“When the Russians were here, electricity disappeared. Since electricity came, I became happy,” she says of the joy she felt the day before, when both power and water returned.

“The first thing I did was turn the heater on – I will need a bigger one,” says Ms. Kablova, who wears an oversize black jacket.

“Everyone is worrying about the winter,” she says. Without electricity and central heating, “if it is below freezing outside, it is the same in the apartment. People probably won’t survive.”

Making sure Ukrainians do, no matter how cold and how long the winter – and despite continued Russian attacks – is the job of officials like Mr. Mahdysyuk.

“The main goal is to provide all these tiny happy moments of life, like electricity, heat, water, and gas supply,” he says. “Let the statistics provide the numbers; I’m here to provide comfort for people.”

Igor Ishchuk supported reporting for this article.

Julia Nikhinson/Reuters/File

Special counsel John Durham, outside the U.S. federal courthouse in Washington, May 17, 2022, brought two cases to court and lost both. The grand jury convened to hear evidence has expired, and Mr. Durham appears to be winding down his effort after three years.

In 2019, when John Durham was appointed as special counsel to investigate the origins of the FBI’s probe into contacts between Russia and former President Donald Trump, many on the right cheered. 

Mr. Trump and his supporters hoped Mr. Durham would prove the Russia probe a hoax, the product of a political conspiracy involving Hillary Clinton and other Democrats. Some posted pictures of Mr. Durham dressed as Batman or the Punisher.

“What they did was so illegal, at a level that you’ve rarely seen before,” Mr. Trump said in 2021.

But as the Durham probe nears its end, those hopes are far from realized. On Tuesday, in a case Mr. Durham prosecuted, a jury acquitted Igor Danchenko, a researcher who was a primary source for the infamous Steele dossier, of lying to the FBI.

The Durham team has brought two cases to court on narrow charges and lost both. The grand jury Mr. Durham convened to hear evidence has expired and he appears to be winding down his effort after three years. His last task is likely to be writing a final report to submit to Attorney General Merrick Garland.

“Donald Trump promised that John Durham would expose the ‘crime of the century.’ Instead, he mostly produced over-charged cases against unknown names that resulted in acquittals,” says Barbara McQuade, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and former U.S. attorney, in an email.

What happened in the Danchenko case?

Federal prosecutors are not used to losing cases. Their conviction rate for cases brought to trial is over 80%, according to Pew Research data.

But Mr. Durham’s federal case against Mr. Danchenko seemed to struggle from the start. The prosecutor pressed forward despite indications that the case was far from a slam-dunk for the government.

Mr. Danchenko was a key source for the Steele dossier, the compendium of unproven assertions and rumors about Mr. Trump’s dealings with Russia that was made public when BuzzFeed published it in 2017. He is a Russian citizen who lives in suburban Washington, D.C., and works as a Eurasian political and economic analyst for American think tanks and other employers.

The FBI was one of those other employers. At trial, an agent described him as an “uncommonly valuable” human source who helped the bureau with dozens of investigations and intelligence reports over the years. 

Mr. Danchenko, however, was swept up in the Durham team’s investigation of the Steele dossier’s origins. In 2021 he was charged with five counts of lying during FBI interrogation.

Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP/File

Igor Danchenko, a think-tank analyst accused of lying to the FBI, was acquitted on all counts by a jury on Oct. 18, 2022.

Prosecutors charged Mr. Danchenko with lying about two things. One was denying that he had “talked” to Charles Dolan, a Democratic lobbyist, about things that later appeared in the dossier.

An FBI agent testified that Mr. Danchenko was telling the truth, since the information in question, if it had indeed come from Mr. Dolan, had been discussed via email, not physical speech. The judge in Mr. Danchenko’s trial agreed with a defense request that this count be dismissed before the case went to the jury.

The second alleged lie dealt with a mysterious phone call Mr. Danchenko said he received in July 2016 from a man who did not identify himself. Mr. Danchenko said that at the time he thought the caller was Sergei Millian, former president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce.

The caller never appeared for an agreed-upon meeting.

Prosecutors charged that Mr. Danchenko never received the call, or if he did, whether he really thought Mr. Millian was the person on the other end of the line. They presented phone records showing no call between those two at the purported time.

But Mr. Danchenko’s defense pointed out that both men had phones with various communications apps, such as WhatsApp, which could have been the means of speaking. The jury was unconvinced by the prosecution argument and after nine hours of deliberation over two days cleared Mr. Danchenko of the remaining charges.

Juror Joel Greene told The Washington Post that jurors were “pretty unanimous” in how they viewed the case from the start of deliberations.

Why all the focus on the Steele dossier? 

Mr. Durham made investigation of the Steele dossier a central aspect of his overall probe. The dossier was political from its origins: a law firm that represented Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee hired the research firm Fusion GPS to compile information on Mr. Trump’s possible connections to Russia.

Fusion GPS in turn hired former British spy Christopher Steele to do the actual work.

The dossier contained some salacious charges about Mr. Trump’s personal behavior that seemed dubious from the start. Since then much of it has been shown to be exaggerated, or even Russian disinformation. At the Danchenko trial, FBI agents said they were unable to corroborate it.

But the dossier was not the starting point of the Trump-Russia investigation. In 2019, a Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General report concluded that the officials who opened the case did not know at the time about Mr. Steele’s work. In part the investigation was sparked by information from a foreign government that a Trump campaign worker, George Papadopoulos, said Russia had information damaging to Mrs. Clinton, and might release it.

The FBI did use parts of the dossier in applications for wiretaps on a former foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign, according to the inspector general report, which harshly criticized the bureau for relying on such a flawed document for investigatory purposes.

What, if anything, comes next? 

In Mr. Durham’s other court loss, a Washington federal court jury in March found cybersecurity lawyer Michael Sussmann not guilty of lying to the FBI concerning his relationship to the Clinton campaign.

In 2020 a former FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, was sentenced to a year of probation under a plea deal with Mr. Durham in which he admitted that he had altered an email used in an eavesdropping application.

Some Trump supporters have expressed frustration with Mr. Durham’s lack of success in court. GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida on Wednesday complained that “Durham has been on this investigation for years, and here we are 0-2.”

But others have said that information Mr. Durham has unearthed and attempted to use in court arguments could be more important than convictions. He has compiled a record of FBI malfeasance that, if Republicans win control of the House in November, could lead to an inquiry similar to the 1975-76 Church Committee, a Senate panel that investigated abuses in the CIA, said Kash Patel, a former Trump National Security Council official, on Wednesday.

Mr. Durham is required to produce a concluding report on his activities. However, whether it is publicly released will be up to Attorney General Garland.

When Josef Schuetz was convicted this summer of being an accessory to murder at the Sachsenhausen Nazi concentration camp, it made headlines worldwide. But just as important to generating interest in Nazi war crimes was Mr. Schuetz’s age at conviction: 101 years old.

The judgment against Mr. Schuetz was made possible by legal changes that happened only in the last decade. Those changes similarly resulted in sentences against Nazi extermination camp guard John Demjanjuk at age 91 in 2011 and Oskar Gröning, the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” at 93 in 2015.

But the fact that these prosecutions and convictions are only occurring now, roughly seven decades after the Holocaust ended, raises some basic questions: What took so long? And is there justice to be had in prosecuting nonagenarians and centenarians for crimes committed generations ago?

“It’s ridiculously late, and most of the perpetrators are dead,” says Katrin Stoll, historian and Holocaust researcher at the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena institute in Jena, Germany. “It was the entire German state and the entire German society which participated in the crime. Why did the judicial system take so long to realize that everybody who participated was basically guilty, that genocide cannot be carried out by only a few people?”

Yet, say legal experts, the clear value in prosecuting Holocaust criminals comes embedded with a variety of philosophical reasons. Such criminal trials, even decades later, resurface atrocities that shouldn’t be forgotten. And they also serve up reminders of the dangers of authoritarian power, with the latter particularly resonant at a time when the world’s democracies and authoritarian regimes are again squaring off.

“Trials of this sort are not simply about one person and his position relative to the state,” says Stephan Landsman, emeritus law professor at DePaul University and a Holocaust scholar. “They’re about events that are terrible and soul-shaking and are a tremendous challenge to the rule of law and decent societies.

“Force should not be allowed to win. It’s important to say to the world that there are consequences which sometimes take a long time to be realized. That the law will answer this – rather than force – is a very powerful message.”

“There is no limit”

The playing field has completely changed in Holocaust war crimes prosecution, though the German judicial system didn’t morph overnight. It took decades.

After World War II ended, Nazis simply forged on with their careers and integrated into society. “There was no societal outrage,” says Dr. Stoll, the Holocaust researcher in Germany. “There was this ambivalence, this need to protect one’s own group, a secret solidarity with the Nazi criminals. They were respected citizens of German society.”

AP/File

Hermann Goering stands in the prisoners' dock as he enters a plea of not guilty at the Nuremberg war crimes trial in Germany, Nov. 21, 1945.

The Nuremberg trials of the 1940s captured a handful of top Nazi officials, but concerns about the Cold War overshadowed the effort to bring others to justice. In the 1960s, the Auschwitz trials brought greater public awareness of the Holocaust, but the legal standard required to convict a Nazi war criminal was nearly insurmountable. Courts had to “prove that defendants directly participated in the killing of Jews and, in the case of participation in deportations, that they had known at the time that those deported were murdered in the Nazi death camps,” says Dr. Stoll.

That was very difficult to show. It took nearly seven decades for the German judicial system to change those standards, during the 2009-2011 Munich trial of Mr. Demjanjuk. The judges ultimately convicted Mr. Demjanjuk on the legal basis that someone could be an accessory to murder if they were “present in a place where they knew that murder was taking place,” says Robert Rozett, senior historian at Yad Vashem, the International Institute for Holocaust Research. “And that was enough.”

In the 2022 case, prosecutors only needed to show that Mr. Schuetz was a guard in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, by linking his birth certificate with information about a guard who worked there from 1942 to 1945.

That change reflects a generational shift in how Europeans have come to understand the events of the Holocaust, says Dr. Rozett. Before, there was a feeling that only a small minority of people were Nazi perpetrators. In reality, individuals had a much more significant role in the persecution of Jews.

Five cases have been submitted to prosecutors for consideration, and a sixth case involving a 97-year-old woman is currently at trial, according to Thomas Will, head of the German federal office responsible for investigating National Socialist crimes. Yet many other individuals currently being investigated will likely never go to trial given the passage of time, says Mr. Will, for reasons such as defendants being unfit to stand trial or the number of eyewitnesses diminishing.

“Thousands” more cases might have been investigated over the decades, according to Mr. Will, if today’s legal interpretation had always been applied.

“You could say we’re in a race against time, but you could say this already for decades,” says Mr. Will. “Some suspects were born in 1880. ... This generation is long gone. We’ve been losing time since the war ended. Yet murder and homicide have no statute of limitations in Germany. The moment we have found offenders, including accomplices to murder, we have to act. Often we hear the criticism that it doesn’t make any sense anymore, or why still bother? There is no limit: We have to pursue it.”

Trials as educational tools

And pursuing a 101-year-old man is “newsworthy anywhere,” says Dr. Rozett. For him, that gets straight to the heart of a handful of reasons that these prosecutions are important.

Certainly, from the point of view of victims and their heirs, there’s an element of the serving of justice. “I mean, people whose family members were killed in Sachsenhausen, I would assume that this gives them some sort of feeling of closure,” says Dr. Rozett, of the 2022 conviction of Mr. Schuetz.

Christian Charisius/DPA/AP/File

The 96-year-old defendant Irmgard F. sits in an ambulance chair behind a plexiglass screen in a courtroom in Itzehoe, Germany, Oct. 19, 2021. The woman was charged with more than 11,000 counts of accessory to murder as part of a Nazi camp staff more than 75 years ago.

Yet the theories of punishment generally recognized for criminal prosecutions – deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, retribution, and restitution – largely have to do with preventing future crimes. Those fade away when a perpetrator is 90 or 100 years old.

And no matter what happens, two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population was extinguished. “The trials are a gesture, but it’s also just that – a gesture,” says Lorie Quint, a museum educator whose family members were murdered in the Holocaust. “Six million Jews are dead. The actual victims are no longer alive to speak for themselves – and their descendants cannot adequately represent them, even if any had been in the courtroom watching these trials.”

The German criminal trials perhaps show greater value in their public signaling.

“When a trial like this gets into the press, it has a public educational aspect to it,” says Dr. Rozett. “Trials are important venues for the presentation of history, even though a trial is not a history book, and a trial is not an archive. But it still presents a part of what happened, and it uses documentation and sometimes brings new testimony or new documents to light.”

There’s also a criminal trial’s ability to reflect and affirm societal values at hand. “Remember, prosecutors are part of the political framework of a government, and they are not independent actors,” says Dr. Landsman, the law professor. “They act as agencies and have political responsibilities and are under some political control.”

For Josef Schuster, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, it’s a clear question of not only justice, but also the educational value in showing “once again where antisemitism can lead in extreme cases. They’re important for educating the population.”

Rebecca Griesbach/AL.com

Kathy Alfaro, an English language teacher at Russellville Elementary School, works with a student in Russellville, Alabama, Aug. 9, 2022. The district is adding more aides and teachers to help with a growing population of students who do not speak English as their first language.

A Jenga tower wobbles as a third grader pulls out a wooden block, eagerly turning it to read a question written on one side.

It is the first day of school at Russellville Elementary. Kathy Alfaro, a new English language teacher, uses the exercise to help her small class to bond – and to help them learn English. More than a third, or about 200, of the school’s students grew up in homes that didn’t regularly speak English, and Ms. Alfaro works with small groups of them throughout the day.

“Where,” the boy reads, then slowly sounds out the other words: “Where would you like to visit?”

“Disneyland,” one student says. “Space,” another classmate chimes in. “Guatemala,” says a girl with a bright blue bow. 

Ms. Alfaro exchanges a few words with the girl in Spanish and then turns to the group. 

“Do y’all know what she said?” Ms. Alfaro asks the class. “She said she has a lot of family in Guatemala because she was born there. And I told her that I was born here, but I also have a lot of family in Guatemala.”

Franklin County, in north Alabama, is home to one of the state’s largest populations of Mexican and Central American immigrants. Many of them migrated in the early 1990s and now make up about a fifth of Russellville’s population. 

More than half of the 2,500 students in the small Russellville city school district now identify as Hispanic or Latino, and about a quarter are English language learners, or EL students.

But the district at times has struggled to find the people and funding necessary to help EL students achieve. It typically takes five years of intensive, small-group instruction, on top of regular classes, to help a student learn English and perform well in a regular classroom.

Russellville leaders now are using a historic amount of COVID-19 relief money to fund a bold experiment. They’re using the temporary funds to hire and certify more local, Spanish-speaking staff, like Ms. Alfaro. She was previously a Spanish teacher, but took a new role as an EL teacher. 

In addition to helping more local students succeed, Russellville aims to be a model for the rest of the state. As Alabama grapples with teacher shortages, especially in support-staff areas, local leaders are hopeful that their results can convince the legislature to support broader efforts to fund and certify more EL staff.

“We were trying to teach an increasing number of EL students with predominantly white teachers that speak English,” says Superintendent Heath Grimes. “And I’m like, ‘Why are we not using resources that we have in our community?’”

Rebecca Griesbach/AL.com

Lety Vargas coaches a group of students who need additional help with English language skills at Russellville Elementary School in Russellville, Alabama, Aug. 9, 2022. Ms. Vargas, a former translator, is becoming certified as a teacher.

Increases in language proficiency

As a group, English language learners performed lower on language proficiency tests during the pandemic. Experts say that may be because many students lacked access to virtual resources at home, or because schools struggled to transfer in-person EL help to remote environments.

But Russellville appears to be bucking that trend. 

Districtwide, the percentage of students who met their language proficiency goals increased from 46% in 2019 to 61% in 2022. At the two elementary schools, proficiency jumped by nearly 30 percentage points.

“We’ve never seen a number like that before,” says Superintendent Grimes, who credits new EL teachers in the district, as well as seven new EL aides at West Elementary, for the boost.

COVID-19 relief money allows Russellville Elementary School to support Ms. Alfaro’s position. She is now one of three EL staffers. Previously, state funding would only have supported one English language teacher, says Russellville Elementary’s Principal Tiffany Warhurst.

Together, they join about 20 other EL educators, aides, and translators in the district – nearly half of whom are funded with COVID-19 money. 

At West Elementary across the street, Elizabeth Alonzo is settling into her second year as an EL aide. It’s a role that she says she didn’t expect to be in – mostly because there were few bilingual teachers in her school growing up, but also because she didn’t think she had the qualifications to help teach.

Like a few other staff members, Ms. Alonzo is currently finishing coursework through a teacher training program offered by Reach University, which is contracting with an increasing number of Alabama districts to help certify more local staff. 

The school now assigns aides to just a couple of teachers throughout the school year, so that they have time to build relationships with students. Ms. Alonzo typically spends that time working with small groups of students or translating assignments.

“Whenever I started kindergarten, I didn’t know a word of English, so I struggled a lot,” she says, noting that an older cousin would often have to come to her class to translate what her teacher was saying. “That was one of the reasons why I wanted to do this, because I want to help those students.”

A statewide need, and response

State funding for English language programs is limited, but growing. The state legislature approved an initial $2.9 million for schools with large EL populations in 2018, and that amount grew to $16 million last year. 

Leaders at the Alabama State Department of Education say they’re supportive of the increase, and now are asking for more room in this year’s budget for EL specialists and regional coordinators, who can help connect schools with more resources. 

“We want to make sure that if students come to this country, if they’re not able to read, that they learn to read quickly and in English,” says State Superintendent Eric Mackey. “We’re going to continue to invest in that, because it’s our belief that every child deserves a high quality education.”

While the state funding formula attempts to account for the money needed to adequately educate EL students, advocates say funding still often falls short, especially in rural districts that struggle to fund schools. 

“It takes a lot more money to educate a child that does not speak your language,” says Alabama state Rep. Jamie Kiel, a Republican who represents Russellville and who has been working with district leaders to put more money toward EL students in the state budget. 

Some of the nation’s largest districts, according to the Education Trust, used pandemic relief money to hire bilingual staff. But as schools prepare for post-pandemic budget cuts, experts and advocates warn against reducing support for EL programs and other interventions.

“Our overreliance on federal funds and temporary funds potentially demonstrates that we’re not doing enough as a state already,” says Carlos Alemán, chief executive officer of the Hispanic Interest Coalition of Alabama. “As we see those dollars wind down, then the state should really reflect and review what it can do to make sure that these programs can remain in place.”

Next steps

State leaders have cautioned school districts against using federal COVID-19 money for long-term expenses, like salaries. But Russellville leaders are holding out, hopeful that their effort to invest in EL staff will lead to statewide change.

“I don’t think it was a risk. I think it was a test,” Representative Kiel says. “There is an appetite in the legislature to put more bodies in the classroom. If we’re going to fund something, I think we’ve proven that it’s not just about people that can’t speak the language. It’s about all students perform better if there are warm bodies in the classroom.”

Dr. Grimes, the superintendent, is working on ways to sustain those roles. But in the meantime, he’s preparing for lots of change.

The district will only be able to keep three or four aides, he says – maybe two each at the elementary schools. And he would lose them in the middle and high school. They’d keep the EL coach, even though she may have to go into another role. And they would also lose one or two EL teachers.

“When that goes away after two years, that’s what our fear is,” says Ms. Warhurst, the elementary principal. “That all that will be lost.”

AL.com writer Trisha Powell Crain contributed to this story.

This story was produced by AL.com as part of a national collaboration between Education Labs and journalists at The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News in Texas, The Fresno Bee in California, The Hechinger Report, The Seattle Times, and The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina. Find more stories in the series here.

The Alabama Education Lab team at AL.com is supported through a partnership with Report for America, a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

Graceful geysers, grizzly bears – there’s no shortage of adventure in Yellowstone National Park, which turned 150 this year.

The story of this first U.S. national park, which spans 2.2 million acres (in three states), extends beyond 1872, of course; several Native American tribes hold older ties to the land. Beyond the brim of his ranger hat, Rich Jehle sees future chapters, too.

Yellowstone belongs “to my kids, and their kids,” Mr. Jehle tells the Monitor one October morning in the park, rocky ridges reflected in his L.L. Bean shades. A bison lumbers in the distance. 

The West District interpretive ranger has worked here for over three decades. Yellowstone is also where the mustachioed naturalist met and married his wife and where they raised two daughters. In an outdoor interview near Madison Junction at the base of National Park Mountain, he discussed the responsibility of long-term stewardship and a lesson in renewal from the fires of 1988.

Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed. 

What does a typical day look like for you – if there is such a thing as typical? 

The thing I like about my job is it’s never dull. My duties have changed a lot over the years. When I first started working here, I was doing a lot of the front line, interacting with visitors a lot, working the park entrance stations. … Over time I got into the division of interpretation. … Right now, I think my main goal is supervising a staff and sort of helping younger folks that are working for me learn about the park, learn about how to share the park’s resources and values with the visitors, and providing the best visitor service we can so people learn to love their national parks – and hopefully get inspired to preserve them and pass them on to the next generation. 

What are important attributes for rangers to have?

You need to be flexible. You need to be willing to work hard. There’s sort of this romantic image of what it’s like to be a park ranger, which in a lot of ways is true. But there’s also, just like any other job, there’s a lot of stuff that’s just hard work. It’s hard work to greet millions of visitors coming to Yellowstone and keep a smile on your face, and treat everyone with respect, and like you’ve never heard the question before that you get asked.

For instance, I have staff that work under me, that work at Old Faithful visitor center – one of the most visited spots in the entire national park system and one of the most iconic places in America. Of course, the first question that everybody hears is: “When is Old Faithful going to go off?” … You have to be able to answer that question the same for the 5,000th person that you’ve talked to this week, or the 100,000th person you’ve talked to this year, with the same enthusiasm that you did with the first one.

Have you had a favorite moment with a visitor over your three decades here?

I think the favorite moments a lot of times are the simplest ones. It’s when you get that “aha” moment from a visitor, when you are talking to them about Yellowstone, and maybe it’s how Old Faithful erupts – just something as simple as that. How does it work? It’s not a clock. It’s not something that we schedule. It’s a natural feature that is variable. We are able to predict how it erupts one eruption at a time. … Or when you talk to visitors about: Why are grizzly bears important? Why can’t I go get too close to a bison? When the visitors make that connection that this is a wild animal living in a wild place, and that we need to respect their space in order to be safe and allow them to survive. … The mission of this agency is to preserve Yellowstone, preserve the national parks, “unimpaired” for future generations. That’s the language from the Organic Act, from when the National Park Service was established in 1916. I really take that to heart.

Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor

The eruption of Old Faithful Geyser draws a crowd in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, Oct. 5, 2022.

Have you had a favorite moment with a four-legged creature?

In 1988, actually, when I lived right across the street from where we’re sitting right now … I was in my apartment cooking a hamburger, and I heard a knock at the door. … It took me a second for it to click in what I was looking at, but there was a bear leaning against the glass [door]. A black bear, leaning against the glass. I was literally six inches face-to-face with this bear. … I ran over [to a ranger station], got on the phone, called up our dispatcher, and told them what’s going on. It’s like, there’s a bear roaming around the housing area here, and it was just trying to get in my apartment. 

At least he was kind enough to knock.

Correct. … We kept the trap out there for at least a week, and the bear never got in the trap. It was very smart. Then we kind of all forgot about it. A few weeks later … I was doing laundry, and I’m walking back to my back door of my apartment in the dark one night. … All of a sudden, I hear this sound, like, woof! And it’s the bear. I’m sure it was the same bear. It was on my back porch. … I managed to back away, slowly, walk all the way around the front, get in my apartment, and just close the door. Never saw the bear again, and it never got trapped. That was one of the most memorable encounters I’ve had with wildlife in the park.

You were witness to the 1988 fire. You’ve also seen the park weather this most recent flooding event over the past year. You’ve seen this park bounce back.

It’s interesting. … I learned pretty early on that it’s all about perspective, as far as when you start talking about the fires of ’88. For many, it was the end of the world as we know it: “Yellowstone’s never going to be the same.” I felt the same way. … Charred stumps and acres, thousands of acres, of just charcoal and black. 

The lodgepole pines are an interesting tree in that they depend on fire to regenerate. … They have two different types of cones. They have an annual cone that opens … and spreads seeds. They are supremely adapted to this particular environment – really poor volcanic soils at this elevation in this sort of climate. They grow like weeds. But they also have a second type of cone. Some trees have almost all this type of cone, some trees have none, some have a mix. They’re called serotinous cones … and they will only open when the temperature gets to 113 degrees, which never happens here except when there’s a fire.

Are you saying that the lodgepole pines that we’re looking at here – their growth is due to the fire in ’88? 

A lot of them. … One of the things that we are trying to do in the national parks and the guiding management philosophy since the 1960s, since the Leopold Report, … is to allow natural events to play their course as much as possible. Now that was hard in 1988, because it had never been tested on this scale to allow fires to burn. … You can look at fires as a disaster, or you can look in the setting of a national park like this. You can look at the ecology of the park, which tells us that fires are just another part of the natural ecosystem – just like running water, just like wind, just like rain.

Last year was Yellowstone’s busiest on record with nearly 5 million recreation visits. How have you seen the park evolve as it becomes ever more popular?

This year was kind of a weird exception, because after the big flood event back in June, we had two out of the five park entrances … closed [though one reopened this month]. … I suspect we’re going to rebound back up and be very, very busy again. So that has changed: There’s a lot more people in the road corridors now than there were when I first started working here. 

How has this job transformed your own life?

I think the way it’s transformed me is that I feel proud about my work. … I can talk to people or help solve problems on a day-to-day basis. … I am very proud to have lived here and raised a family here that also values wide open space, and clean air, and clean water, and the value of public lands.

One thing that I always come back to is this place – I’m a steward of this place. I don’t own Yellowstone. I’m lucky, because I’ve been able to work here and make a career out of someplace so spectacular, and hopefully do more good than harm in the long run. But ultimately, this place doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to the future, to my kids, and their kids, and the rest of the American public, and the rest of the world.

Reuters

U.S. Attorney Breon Peace speaks in New York Oct. 18 about French cement maker Lafarge pleading guilty to a charge of making payments to terrorist groups, including Islamic State.

In a New York courtroom on Tuesday, the United States presented a cautionary tale for companies tempted to do business with mass abusers of civilians. It was able to force a French company, Lafarge, to plead guilty to paying two terrorist groups, Islamic State and Nusra Front, to keep its cement operations running nearly a decade ago when those groups occupied parts of Syria.

The criminal plea agreement, which came with a $778 million fine, was the first time a corporation faced a charge of aiding a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization. According to emails sent by Lafarge executives, the company, now owned by a Swiss parent company, was paying the terrorist groups in hopes of gaining a competitive advantage once the war in Syria ended.

The case, along with parallel legal proceedings in France, sets an important precedent for the use of law to reinforce global norms aimed at protecting the innocence of people living in conflict zones or under the harsh rule of a dictatorship. More international corporations may now take better heed to honor human-rights laws as part of their daily business.

Such laws are increasing as a tool to address humanitarian concerns about people being abused in other countries. The U.S., for example, has begun to enforce a 2021 law aimed at preventing American companies from buying goods from China, such as cotton, made by forced labor in regions where Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities live.

In Germany, a law taking effect in 2023 will require companies to ensure that their supply chains are clean of forced labor, child labor, and discrimination. Many Western companies have left Russia since February after its invasion of Ukraine in order to avoid sanctions set against Russia.

A decade has passed since the United Nations adopted a set of “guiding principles” on business compliance with human rights laws. Since then, notes Ekaterina Aristova, a postdoctoral fellow at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at Oxford University, there has been “growing momentum worldwide, especially in Europe, towards improving corporate human rights performance.” But that diligence remains more mandatory than voluntary, she wrote in an Oxford blog.

The legal victory against Lafarge’s complicity with terrorist groups sends a needed message about the universal nature of humanitarian laws, especially those aimed at protecting civilians. From legislatures to corporate boardrooms, honoring the innocent is a global responsibility.