Female inmate firefighters build character but often can’t use fire skills after release PHOENIX – May Tiwamangkala remembers mornings at Perryville Prison west of Phoenix, when the Wildland Fire Crew members began chanting and stomping their feet on concrete to let the rest of the prison know it was 5 a.m. On their training runs, she recalls, one veteran on the all-women crew would shout, “Who are we?” “Fire crew!” “Or be forgotten!” The Perryville crew is one of 12 17-person crews of incarcerated firefighters in Arizona, and the only crew of all women. But once crew members leave prison, they often face difficulty getting hired as firefighters, typically because they lack documentation of their work or can’t get the required certification as emergency medical technicians because of their criminal records.
Advertisement: The death toll among COVID continued to rise with 46 deaths over the weekend, bringing the total since Jan. 1 to 172.
TUSD employees will have limited access to COVID-19 vaccines Teachers included in the next phase of Pima County’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout will have less access to vaccine doses than originally expected, Tucson Unified School District Superintendent Dr. Gabriel Trujillo said at a governing board meeting Tuesday. At a press conference on Jan. 8, Trujillo announced a registration website will go live Friday where TUSD employees can make an appointment to receive a vaccine at one of Pima County’s vaccination sites and schedule a follow up for a second dose 28 days later.
Cherokee Trail of Tears just one of many forced removals of Eastern tribes to Oklahoma WASHINGTON – The Trail of Tears, the forced removal of the Cherokee Nation to Oklahoma, was one of the most inhumane policies in American history – but it wasn’t an isolated incident. In 1831, nearly 16,000 members of the Cherokee Nation were forced under armed guard to leave their native lands in the southeastern United States to trek more than 1,000 miles to what eventually would become the state of Oklahoma. Almost 4,000 Cherokees died along the way, never making it to the land designated by the U.S. government as Indian Territory.