Policy Watch Investigates

Service gaps, lack of central control over regional offices, COVID-19 pandemic contribute to "mission drift" North Carolina had eight years under a 2012 court order to move 2,000 people with mental illnesses out of adult care homes and into houses or apartments. A few years ago, the state received an extension to this July. It won’t make that deadline, either.

Plaintiffs claim they were not given their medicines, staff ignored calls for assistance A new class-action lawsuit brought against the Citadel Salisbury nursing home claims that chronic understaffing endangered the health and safety of its residents. The Citadel Salisbury was the site of the largest COVID-19 outbreak in a North Carolina congregant care facility early in the pandemic.

An obscure provision of the state Senate tax package that would cap the excise tax on cigars has a supporter in Sen. Todd Johnson, a member of the chamber’s Finance Committee and a cigar store owner.

The total number of vaccinations dropped by 23% over one week in April, an indication that North Carolina still faces challenges in achieving its vaccination goals. Now the state Department of Health and Human Services wants to direct vaccination efforts toward neighborhoods where few people have gotten shots.

Ciera Baker, a pre-Kindergarten teacher in Raleigh, wanted to stay home for a few months with her newborn baby, but her job doesn’t provide paid maternity leave and she knew she couldn’t get by just on her savings.   Baker's mother had told her about Equity Before Birth, a nonprofit that helps Black women in the Triangle connect with doulas and lactation consultants, and provides financial support.

When Tal Blevins first heard about the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, he hoped it would be the sort of help that he and his fellow restaurant owners had been anticipating for more than a year.

But it didn’t take Blevins long to realize someone hadn’t accounted for the real costs of opening a restaurant. When he analyzed the conditions of the revitalization fund, which was within the larger $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, it quickly became apparent it wouldn’t significantly help his Greensboro restaurant, Machete.

April has been a cruel month for North Carolina’s transgender community.

As the General Assembly debates bills that would exclude them from sports teams, bar them from health care and protect discrimination against them by doctors, the community is also mourning the murder of two young, black trans women in Charlotte.

The state has a list of agencies and pharmacies who will vaccinate people in their homes for COVID-19, but the list has some holes It’s become easier and easier for most people to find available COVID-19 vaccine appointments but getting vaccinated poses a particular challenge for homebound seniors.

Julie Katz came to Raleigh Wednesday to speak directly to the lawmakers who want to exclude her from women’s sports. A 16-year-old transgender girl from Greensboro, Katz has been a gynmast, played tennis and volleyball -- all, so far, without incident. But House Bill 358 would bar transgender women from playing women’s intramural, public school, university sports in North Carolina.

Doctors who treat people with opioid addictions often hear of former patients who have to restart their treatment after leaving jail or prison. Or worse, their former patients die of drug overdoses soon after their release.

Last month Republicans in North Carolina joined a nationwide conservative push to file legislation targeting transgender youth. GOP lawmakers in the state House and Senate filed bills to bar transgender women from competing against other women at schools and universities, target transgender health care, force teachers and counselors to report children who exhibit “gender nonconformity,” and legally protect scientifically debunked “conversion therapy” that seeks to "cure" LGBTQ people.

Politics and ideology, not facts, drive claim that transgender women have an unfair athletic advantage When Republican lawmakers filed a bill last month to bar transgender women from competing against other women at schools and universities in North Carolina, LGBTQ advocates called it part of a new national wave of anti-transgender bills.

As strategy shifts from election lawsuits to laws, voting rights advocates warn of Tennessee As Republican-led legislatures continue a systematic push to pass laws they say are aimed at ratcheting up election security, voting rights advocates in Tennessee worry the entire nation could soon look a lot like the Volunteer State where voter turnout and voter registration figures are among the lowest in the country.

Decades after the enactment of civil rights laws, people of color remain largely excluded from the county's political power structure To go to Alamance County is to step back in time, to the days of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.   More than a half-century later, law enforcement officers pepper-sprayed and arrested anti-racist protesters.

A new bill introduced this week in the N.C. House would ban transgender women from competing on women’s athletic teams at public schools and universities, superseding policies that have existed in major sports organizations for at least a decade.