 This program is brought to you by Cable Franchise V's and generous donations from viewers like you. Welcome to the Amherst Weekly Report from Amherst Media on March 19th, 2021. I'm Claire Healy and these are the stories from Amherst, Massachusetts this past week. Over the first weekend of March, a large social gathering occurred involving around 200 UMass Amherst students. According to UMass Amherst Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs and Campus Life, Brandy Hefner Le Bonk, in an email to the campus community. The Amherst Police Department was called to the party to disperse the crowd, which was violating not only university policies, but also expectations of the town and mandates by the state public health officials. The social gathering corresponded with an annual student-led St. Patrick's Day theme tradition at the university called Blarney Blowout. Hefner Le Bonk said students identified as being involved, either hosting or attending, will be issued an interim suspension. On-campus students found to be in violation will be issued interim housing restrictions, forcing them out of their residence halls. Later on in the week, Jeffrey Hescock, Executive Director of Environmental Health and Safety at UMass, and Anne Becker, UMass's public health director, said that while the university is still at an elevated risk posture, case numbers have gradually improved. Last week, 59 new cases emerged from last Monday through Wednesday, compared to 117 new cases in the same timeframe the week prior. This change also represents the lowest seven-day positivity rate since the start of UMass's spring semester at 0.51%. On Wednesday, Governor Charlie Baker unveiled the eligibility of all remaining groups for COVID-19 vaccinations in the state. Starting April 19, all individuals aged 16 and over, regardless of occupation or health, will be eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine. Before that, anyone ages 16 up become eligible beginning on Monday, March 22. Eligibility based on age will be expanded to ages 55 and up starting April 5. Additionally, those with one co-morbidity will also become eligible on April 5. Among those eligible for vaccines starting March 22 will be a host of frontline and COVID-facing workers. These include anyone whose line of work involves retail, food service, transit, sanitation, and the court system. Meanwhile, a recent joint UMass Amherst WCVB poll of 800 residents of Massachusetts between March 5 and 9 indicated a divide in public opinion on the governor's vaccine rollout. 44% of respondents said Baker had handled the vaccine rollout well, and another 44% said he had handled the rollout poorly. In the same poll, only 23% of respondents indicated that they had already received the vaccine, and 55% said they would definitely get the shot. Another 21% indicated they will either most likely not, or probably will not, get the vaccine if made available to them. Black Lives Matter protests between 2014 and 2019 led to a 15-20% decrease in police homicides, according to UMass Amherst economist Travis Campbell. Campbell's research findings, which he published in a paper titled Black Lives Matters Effect on Police Lethal Use of Force, shows that cities with widespread protests saw this significant decrease in lethal force used by police officers as compared to other cities who did not see the same expansive protesting. He said that this decrease in lethal force by police resulted in an approximate 300 less people killed by police over this five-year period, approximately one less person for every 4,000 participants. To reach this conclusion, he used a stacked difference and difference design comparing both different locations and different time periods. This is a way that economists mimic a randomized control trial without having experimental data, so just using data based off of what we're observing happening in real life. So the idea is that you split cities, in this case, into a treated group and a control group. The treated group would be places that have protests and the control group is places that don't have protests. And so that's the first difference. The second difference is you look at two different time periods. You look at the time period before the protests start and the time period after protests start. And when you compare those two groups, if you assume that the control group would be on the same trend in lethal use of force as the treated group had the protests never happened, you can estimate the impact of protests. After the start of protests, the trend doesn't change for places that don't have protests. Every year, a couple more people are killed by the police, but there's a sharp decline in the trend in places with protests. So that's the idea behind the difference and difference method, is that change in the trend I'm attributing to the protests since that's the common thing that's happening in those places. I find evidence of three drivers behind the reduction. So the first is the protests do seem to be changing the local police agencies institutionally. So specifically, local police agencies will be more likely to use body cameras and also expand some community policing initiatives. So that's one way that the protests could be directly reducing the lethal use of force by the police. The other two stories are a little more bleak. So if you look at the crime data from the Uniform Crime Reporting Database, after the protests, there's an increase in non-police homicides, which is generally thought of as the best overall measure of crime because it's less susceptible to the people's willingness to report crimes to the police and also the willingness of police to follow up on crimes and a variety of other reasons. So there is evidence of an overall increase in crime in communities after the protests. Now at the same time, there's a reduction in property crimes being reported to the police. So this is consistent with the idea that the protests may make the community less willing to report crimes to the police, at least the level crimes, which could result in less interactions between people in the police and drive the reduction in lethal use of force. The third explanation is the share of so using the same data, the share of property crimes reported to the police that are cleared by arrest. So that's like how often are the police actually going to go and follow up on these lower level crimes? That does fall also after the protests. So that's a consistent with an idea of what's called like a Ferguson effect. So that the protests are increasing public scrutiny of the police. The police respond with lower morale or effort and do less policing. And then that results in a rising overall crime and also less interactions between the community and police, which could drive the reduction in lethal use of force. When asked what he hopes to see more of going forward in the conversation around changes in policing, he said there needs to be more data on police use of lethal force, such as a federal database of that information and more clear guidelines on when police can use force. The State Department of Elementary and Secondary Education or DESI announced last week that Massachusetts elementary and middle schools will be required to return to full time in person learning. During a board meeting, DESI Commissioner Jeffrey Riley said that K-5 students are expected to be back in classrooms starting on April 5th, with students in grades six to eight will return on April 28th. The Amherst School Committee held a meeting on Tuesday to discuss the implications of the DESI mandate and how the new requirements will play out for pre-K through sixth grade students in the Amherst Regional Public Schools. Students in kindergarten through second grade are expected to return to in-person learning on April 5th in compliance with the regulations. Third through sixth grade students will return to school on April 12th as granted by a DESI waiver that was requested in order to stagger the return in hopes of making the transition less overwhelming to the students and staff. Due to the DESI requirements schools will now start 20 minutes earlier than usual and follow in 9.30 a.m. through 3.10 p.m. schedule. Finalized classroom placements will be sent out to families on March 23rd and a staff training session on in-person safety protocols will take place the following day. As the district gears up to support five days of in-person learning for students, parents can still choose to keep their children remote. However, either decision will be binding for the rest of the 2020-2021 school year. Superintendent Dr. Michael Morris stated that the Amherst Public Schools have no plans to change their current schedule for students who choose to continue with remote learning. The DESI announcement previously noted that all synchronous classes would end beginning on April 5th and that students who choose the remote learning option would be partaking asynchronously. While preschools were not discussed as part of the DESI mandate, Crocker Farm preschool is planning to reopen its in-person option to all families of children with IEPs via survey that will be sent home to families on March 19th. 18 students are currently attending the preschool in person with four classrooms operating in the morning and one in the afternoon. The reopening will extend morning hours, increasing overall in-person time by four hours per week and allowing teachers to continue afternoon remote classes. Preschool program coordinator Elizabeth Burns said during the school committee meeting that the school hopes to bring back all preschool staff unless they have a remote accommodation and expects to reopen on Monday April 26th. The Amherst Pellum Regional School Committee are examining plans to welcome back sixth through eighth grade students at their meeting on March 23rd. No return date for high school students has been set, but it will likely be discussed in the upcoming weeks. Thank you for joining us. This is the Amherst Weekly Report from Amherst Media. I'm Claire Healy. We look forward to seeing you again at the same time next week.