In the April edition of The Maine Monitor Radio Hour, editor Kate Cough spoke to housing reporter Caitlin Andrews, education reporter Kristian Moravec and rural government reporter Daniel O’Connor about some of their recent reporting.
This episode covered recent Maine Monitor reporting on a fund that would help towns convert empty schools into housing, a new approach to teaching reading and a police department that is using AI to draft reports.
Andrews reported on a proposal to create a $5 million fund that could be used to help towns turn vacant school buildings into housing, Andrews reported. (The bill was passed and placed on the appropriations table this week.)
The Maine Redevelopment Land Bank Authority, which works with towns to help revitalize old buildings, has so far identified 27 former schools across the state that could fit the bill.
The viability of these buildings varies. Some are in locations where housing is a hot commodity and will be scooped up quickly by the private sector, said Tuck O’Brien, executive director of Maine Redevelopment. Others need to be torn down due to poor conditions. The ones in the middle are the most difficult, either because they have structural problems such as poor insulation or do not score well on traditional tax credit programs geared toward rehabilitation.
Moravec, meanwhile, talked about her story on a pilot program authored by Kirsten Chansky, an instructional coach for Regional School Unit 14. The new curriculum teaches young children how to break down words by their sounds and then put them back together, also known as phonemic awareness.
Before this program, Chansky and others in her district said they had no readily available curriculum that featured lesson plans, intervention techniques and assessments focused on phonemic awareness. The program has been used in multiple classrooms at RSU 14 for a year, and Chansky said that it is also being piloted in five other districts in Maine.
O’Connor, a Report for America corps member that jointly reports for The Monitor and Bangor Daily News, discussed how Wilton’s police department was among the first in the country to begin using Code Four, software that generates police reports based on audio and video recorded by officers’ body cameras.
You can listen to the episode here. Tune in to listen live the first Thursday of every month at 4 p.m. on WERU 89.9 FM.
