By Sophie Quinton
Stateline.org/TNS
Josephine Brewington has been a substitute teacher in suburban Beech Grove, Indiana, for a decade, but her job has grown in importance as her school district scrambles to supervise pupils whose teachers are sick, quarantining or caring for others.
“We’d have teachers from the high school come over and help teach fourth graders because we didn’t have enough subs,” Brewington said of how the system has handled absences this fall. “People from the offices are helping, principals are covering classrooms - it’s like everyone’s pitching in.”
President-elect Joe Biden has said he wants most schools to be reopened within the first 100 days of his administration, and many city and state policymakers also are pushing schools to offer in-person instruction. They note that the risk of COVID-19 outbreaks in schools is low, working parents rely on schools for child care and students are better able to keep up when they’re in classrooms.
She is found all by herself, frozen to death, far from the road, in an international area on the French-Swiss border, where neither country has police jurisdiction. Suspicious, wouldn t you think? That s what strikes David Rousseau, a best-selling writer of murder novels, who needs a plot for his new book. Finding himself in the snowbound hamlet of Mouthe, he settles in and begins to poke around.
Her name is Martine Langevin. She had become known as Candice Lecoeur. She was barely 20. A photographer spotted her pumping gas at the local station, shot her for a pinup calendar and launched her into a life of (limited) local fame. With her hair dyed blond and her lips bright red, she looks from some angles like Marilyn Monroe, and the photographers find those angles. Soon her portrait graces packages of the local cheese, and she s doing the weather on regional television.
sophie, i wonder, is it just scandal in the media or is it actuality? yeah, i mean i think there are good reasons out there to distrust certain institutions shall we say. i also want to bring up another point which is particularly when it comes to government, trust can be a partisan issue. if you look at trust in the executive branch right now, i think the most recent numbers from gallup show that about 43% of americans have some or a lot of confidence in the executive branch. when you break that out, democrats, about 80% of democrats are expressing confidence because there s a democrat in the white house and about 30% of republicans are not. when you look back to this point in president bush s tenure, those numbers were flipped with 80% of republicans expressing confidence and about 20% of
democrats expressing no confidence. all right. sophie quinton, thank you so much. thank you so much. greatly appreciate it. sorry you have to work with ron. you ll get past it. ron is great. do we have wes here still? yes. okay. i had three people talk at the same time. they all sort of you know, you look at these numbers, wes, they re discouraging. you look at the fact that the united states military spit upon in the late 60s and early 70s coming back from vietnam has now managed to become the one public institution that americans still trust, respect, love. it s pretty remarkable and encouraging. why do you think that is? i put it to two different reasons. 74% of americans have high confidence in the military. 7% in congress. go ahead. one, actually, i give a lot of credit to vets of wars past.
to big government. trust in institutions is at an all-time low. here with us now from washington, staff correspondent for the national journal. sophie and her colleague co-wrote an article that could have well been written this morning. how americans lost trust in our greatest institutions. two years later a recent gallup survey shows that disillusionment exists with less than 30% of americans holding high confidence in institutions like the presidency, public schools and banks. what is driving this? that s a great question, joe. first of all, hi, everyone. it s great to be here today. i think the question of what s driving this decline in trust is an interesting one and it s not quite clear what the answer is. there s definitely a sense that trust has gone down since the late 70s. that s been played out in annual gallup surveys. i think that you can make the