Participants in Pittsburgh Pride walk through downtown in June 2016. (Antonio Licon/WESA)

A year after it was established, the Pennsylvania Commission on LGBTQ Affairs has helped local governments pass inclusive laws, establish policies for transgender students and worked to end discriminatory practices in the state. 

Gov. Tom Wolf created the commission in 2018 through an executive order and appointed 40 members from across Pennsylvania.

Jason Landau Goodman is a member of the commission, as well as the executive director of the Pennsylvania Youth Congress, an advocacy group for young LGBTQ individuals. He said he was part of a cohort pushing for the commission, which was inspired by the Governor's Council on Sexual Minorities created in 1975 by then-Gov. Milton Shapp. The council established that state employees couldn't be fired based on their gender identity or sexual orientation.

The commission's first year has involved forming subcommittees to identify how to tackle issues facing LGBTQ Pennsylvanians, says Goodman. Subcommittees include economic opportunity, education and nondiscrimination. Pennsylvania does not have statewide nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people.

"People are hurting in Pennsylvania," Goodman said. "We were just coming from a more rural part of the state where a college student was told he was being evicted last week for being gay. This is happening today."

The Wolf administration has been receptive to the commission's suggestions, Goodman said, but it's been difficult passing related legislation. In September 2018, Wolf sent a statement mourning the loss of Shantee Tucke, a black transgender woman who was murdered in Philadelphia.

"Our queer and trans communities of color deserve to be seen. Their stories deserve to be heard, valued, and trusted." The release went on to talk about the importance of nondiscrimination protections. In May, Wolf issued another statement, calling Pennsylvania "glaringly behind our neighbors on equality and protections for LGBTQ citizens." Twenty-one other states and Washington D.C. prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

"We look forward to advancing nondiscrimination over the finish line," Goodman said. "Too many people are being harmed in Pennsylvania for the legislature and not take this as a serious issue."

But other state agencies are finding ways to be more inclusive, Goodman said, such as the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, or PennDOT. Recently it began offering an X on licenses for people who don't identify as male or female. The move was significant for people who identify as non-binary, gender non-conforming or transgender. PennDOT doesn't have the official forms yet, Goodman said, but the X is available now.

"There is a special manual workaround until the forms have officially caught up later," Goodman said.

An entrance to Garden Spot High School in the East Lancaster County School District is seen on March 14, 2019. (Ed Mahon/PA Post)

(Undated) -- Fifty-one families in Lower Dauphin School District found out there is no such thing as a free lunch, especially when it comes to their children's school meal accounts.

The district turned over their names to a collection agency to go after the $15,275.36 that those families owed at the end of the school year. Some or most of those families are now on a payment plan with the agency; one family paid off their school meal debt in full, said district spokesman Jim Hazen.

This is in accordance with a district policy the school board adopted in December when its food service program faced more than $25,000 in outstanding balances in student lunch accounts.

"We had to do something," Hazen said. "When the board and administration drafted the policy, thought went into helping families whose financial circumstances have changed but also providing the district with a mechanism to recoup money owed."

As the 2019-20 school year gets underway, school districts are making an effort to alert families who qualify for free and reduced price lunches to enroll in the program. They are placing forms to enroll in the program on their websites and spreading the word through district newsletters.

But some have found students who have negative balances in their accounts often come from families of means who simply choose to ignore the debt, which carries over from one year to the next.

The office manager at G.H. Harris Associates Inc., the Dallas, Pa., collection firm Lower Dauphin hired, confirmed that going after escalating school meal debts is a growing area of its collection business.

Students pass though a stairwell at Overbrook High School. (Emily Cohen for WHYY)

Manager Paul Adamshick said the people that the agency contacts usually claim that they were unaware of the unpaid bill. But several district policies reviewed by PennLive indicate notification to parents and guardians of low and negative balances is the first step in the collection process.

Food service operations are supposed to be self-supporting enterprises but often that is not the case. That makes addressing the rise in unpaid student meal debt even more concerning to food service directors who also understand the importance of healthy meals to student learning.

Three quarters of the 812 districts responding to a national survey report having student meal debt, according to the Arlington, Va.-based School Nutrition Association's just-released 2019 School Nutrition Trends Report. That is similar to its findings from surveys going back to 2014.

But the amount of that debt is rising. The median debt owed fell in the $2,000-$2,500 range in the 2014. In 2018, the median rose to $3,400.

"It's definitely an issue and if nothing else, it's caused us to focus on it as a priority to chase down money," said Gerry Giarratana, food service director at Palisades School District in Bucks County and spokesman for the School Nutrition Association of Pennsylvania.

It became an issue in the past couple of years after state and federal laws put a stop to districts engaging in lunch shaming - a practice of shaming students with a negative meal account balance by stamping their arm, serving them a cheese sandwich, making them do chores at school, forcing them to throw out a meal after it was served, among other forms of public humiliation.

Many districts changed their policies to require students to be served the main, or reimbursable, lunch meal even if their lunch account had a low or negative balance. This led to districts' unpaid meal debts rising in the past couple of years to the point where district officials complained to state lawmakers about lunch debts in the tens of thousands of dollars, said Senate Republican spokeswoman Jenn Kocher.

Lawmakers then relented on the lunch-shaming ban by passing a law in June that rolls back the ban to allow districts to serve alternative meals to students owing more than $50 in a school year until the unpaid balance is paid or a payment plan is established.

FILE PHOTO: In this Feb. 15, 2017, photo, Eric Hoover teaches his class of immigrant and refugee students at McCaskey High School in Lancaster, Pa. (AP Photo/Michael Rubinkam)

Collecting school meal debt

Districts that contract with a collection agency to pursue the unpaid bills first try themselves to get the families to pay the debt through repeated notifications and sharing of information about the government-subsidized free and reduced-price lunch program.

Through that program, districts are paid $2.83 for every free lunch served, and $2.43 for every reduced-price lunch with the expectation that the student will pay 40 cents. However, it prohibits districts from using those subsidies to pay off unpaid meal debt.

For some districts, though, it's those who are contributing to the problem of students' mounting meal debt garnering attention.

"What was interesting to me, the debt was not up among our economically challenged students, which was a surprise to us," Lewisburg Area School Board President Swope told the Sunbury Daily Item last spring. "The students who were not on the eligibility for free and reduced meals were the ones who had the debt. In many cases the efforts to reach out did not seem to work to help people understand. When people don't pay their bills when they are able to pay their bills, that has to come from somewhere, from programs and budget. It takes away our ability to provide programs that students really need."

Kocher said that complaint heard from district officials is what motivated the recent state law change that now allows for alternative meals to be served. "This change is designed to focus on parents who have the ability to pay and were not and in doing so [are] taking advantage of the" situation, she said.

Diane Pratt-Heavner of the School Nutrition Association said unpaid meal debt also stems from families who enroll in and qualify for the reduced-price meal program but struggle to pay the 30 cents for breakfasts and 40 cents for lunch that is required. Meanwhile, she said other families may qualify for that program but don't apply because of barriers encountered in the application process.

"The application can be confusing for some, intimidating for others, especially those who are hesitant to provide so much personal information," she said. "Stigma is also a barrier."

For Harrisburg and Steelton-Highspire school districts, unpaid meal debt isn't an issue.

All of Steel-High's more than 1,300 students qualify for free- and reduced-price lunches because of the district's high poverty rate, said Superintendent Travis Waters. The same is true for Harrisburg, where all of its 6,500 students eat free, said district spokeswoman Kirsten Keys.

Students walk to Tamaqua Area High School in Tamaqua. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

East Pennsboro Area School District ended the last school year with 92 of its nearly 2,700 students having an outstanding school lunch balance - 47 were under $45 and 45 were over $45, said district spokeswoman Morgan Horton. Its policy echoes that of several other midstate districts in notifying parents of low or negative balances and offering assistance to parents to complete the free and reduced-price lunch applications, but she said it doesn't go as far as turning them over to a collection agency.

East Pennsboro continues to serve the school food program meal to students with low or negative balances, unless their parents provide notice that they want food withheld, she said. Other districts' policies also allow for parents to request student meals be withheld.

West Shore School District reported it had about 200 students, current and former, who owed about $17,000 from the last school year. District spokeswoman Rhonda Fourhman said that dollar figure was decreasing daily as families continue to make payments and community donations are received to help cover it. She said her district does work with a collection agency to go after unpaid debt but continues to serve students meals even if they owe money.

At the nearly 9,000-student Cumberland Valley School District, unpaid meal debt at the end of last year was approximately $10,000. It was paid off with "donations made specifically for this purpose to the district and to the Eagle Foundation," said district spokeswoman Tracy Panzer.

Giarratana considers himself fortunate compared to other districts in Bucks County that have larger unpaid account balances. He said the 1,700-student Palisades' unpaid meal debt stands at $1,281.

But when considering that figure has jumped from $221 four years ago, he said he can see how this could become a more costly issue for larger districts. Bethlehem Area School District, a 13,600-student district in Northampton County, saw its debt jump 50 percent in the year before the lunch shaming ban was enacted, to $154,590 after it took effect.

Some districts have considered or resorted to taking drastic measures to get families' attention, such as restricting a student's participation in extra-curricular activities or holding back a diploma until the graduating students' debt is cleared.

One northeastern Pennsylvania gained widespread attention with its method of trying to coax parents to settle their debts.

Faced with an overdue lunch bill of $22,000, the Wyoming Valley West School District threatened parents with placing their child in foster care if they didn't pay up. The school board there later backed down after accepting an offer by Todd Carmichael, CEO of Philadelphia-based La Colombe Coffee, to cover that debt.

Harrisburg High School is seen in this April 24, 2019 photo. (Sean Simmers/PennLive)

No alternative meals

While the new state law allows for alternative meals to be served to those with unpaid meal debts above $50, officials from East Pennsboro, West Shore, Cumberland Valley, and Lower Dauphin say their districts have no immediate plans of doing that.

"We recognize the educational and health benefits of receiving a school breakfast and/or lunch and will provide a reimbursable school lunch to students regardless of their ability to pay or any balance they may have from last school year," said West Shore's Fourhman.

Lower Dauphin's Hazen said, "We never have nor would we at least at this point consider doing alternative lunches that would single out a kid because a student doesn't have any control over whether their family sends in money for lunches."

Instead, he said that 3,700-student district will continue to serve students the main lunch option, excluding a la carte items, while relying on the approach spelled out in its policy to go after meal debt.

Lower Dauphin's policy states that once a meal debt tops $25, the school principal sends a letter to the student's parents notifying them about the outstanding balance. If the debt goes unpaid and it reaches more than $75, the superintendent sends a letter to the parents advising them they have 14 days to make a payment arrangement before the debt is turned over to the collection agency. Families also are alerted that the collection agency's fees will be added to the debt.

By the end of the last school year, Hazen said that collection strategy resulted in the district collecting $18,000 of what its food service operation was owed.

"It definitely put a dent in that number," he said.

(Pennsylvania Legislative Correspondents' Association intern Alyssa Biederman contributed to this story.) PennLive and The Patriot-News are partners with PA Post.

Firefighters respond to a fire at a day care in Erie the early morning of Aug. 10, 2019. (Scooter Blakely/Erie Fire Department via Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/erie.firefighters/photos/pcb.2512785918997566/2512785762330915)

(Erie) -- Authorities have collected electrical cords and other items from the scorched scene of an Erie day care center fire that killed five children.

The Erie Times-News reports that an electrical engineer, an Erie Bureau of Fire inspector, Erie police detectives and agents from the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives investigated the scene Friday.

Authorities say the fire on Aug. 11 killed five children ranging in age from 8 months to 7 years. The owner of the Erie day care was hospitalized but has been released.

Erie Fire Chief Guy Santone told the newspaper that authorities revisited the scene after speaking with the owner.

Santone says authorities collected items from the residence in an effort to pinpoint the cause.

The items will be examined at an ATF laboratory.

Dia, a Labrador retriever, gets some elevation to try and smell Scotch broom, an invasive species, in Harriman State Park in Tuxedo, N.Y., Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2019. The nonprofit New York-New Jersey Trail Conference has trained Dia to find Scotch broom plants in two state parks 50 miles north of New York City. The invasive shrub is widespread in the Pacific Northwest but new to New York, and land managers hope to eradicate it before it gets established. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

(Tuxedo) -- In brushy terrain where a botanical interloper evades detection by the human eye, count on Dia to sniff it out.

Dia is a spunky Labrador retriever trained to track down a yellow-flowered shrub that's taking root in New York state parks. She's one of a new breed of detection dog assisting conservationists in the fight against invasive species.

With her handler, Joshua Beese, of the nonprofit New York-New Jersey Trail Conference, Dia began last fall to hunt for Scotch broom in Bear Mountain and Harriman state parks about 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of New York City.

The shrub, which displaces native plants with thickets impenetrable to wildlife, is a widespread noxious weed in the Pacific Northwest but is fairly new to New York. Land managers hope to eradicate it before it becomes widespread.

"If we had to find all these plants ourselves, combing the grass for every tiny plant, it would take so much longer -- and we'd still miss a lot," Beese said on a recent morning after Dia showed him hundreds of Scotch broom shoots hidden in a field of tall grass and sweetfern.

Beese later uprooted them. The plants had been overlooked by volunteers with the conference's Invasives Strike Force who had previously pulled 2,500 plants from the search area.

Detection dogs have long been used to sniff out drugs, explosives, cadavers and disaster survivors. In the mid '90s, handlers started training them for conservation tasks such as sniffing out scat from endangered species and detecting trafficked ivory. Now, the olfactory prowess of detection dogs is becoming an important tool in the fight against invasive plants and insects.

"Our field in the last 15 years has just exploded," said Pete Coppolillo, executive director of the nonprofit Working Dogs for Conservation in Bozeman, Montana. The organization partners with government agencies, researchers and nonprofits on five continents to provide trained dogs and handlers for conservation projects. One of its handlers mentored Beese on training Dia.

Working Dogs for Conservation has trained dogs to find spotted knapweed in Montana, Chinese bush clover in Iowa, yellow star thistle in Colorado, rosy wolf snails in Hawaii and brown tree snakes in Guam.

It's doing a feasibility study in Minnesota on using detection dogs to identify trees invaded by emerald ash borers. In five Western states, dogs have been employed to detect invasive zebra and quagga mussels on boats.

"We've trained over 200 dog and handler teams to help in global wildlife trafficking, and now we're doing a lot of invasive species work," Coppolillo said. "It's really exciting. As ecologists we've always talked of invasives as something we manage, but now we may actually be able to eradicate them in some places."

Dyer's woad, a knee-high weed from Russia that lights up roadsides with golden blossoms across the West, is a case study of how dogs can eradicate invasives that elude human crews.

Weed-pulling teams had tried for years to get rid of the weed at Mount Sentinel in Missoula, Montana, without making much headway. A border collie and a golden retriever from Working Dogs for Conservation were brought in to focus the teams' efforts. Within a few years the plants were almost gone.

The key is that the dogs can sniff out plants hidden among other species, and they don't need flowers to identify them like people do.

"That's a game-changer," Coppolillo said. "Each plant can set up to 15,000 seeds a year, and seeds can live seven years in the soil. Dogs find plants before they flower and reproduce."

Working Dogs for Conservation trains shelter dogs for detection work, screening 1,000 dogs for every one they put to work. To make the cut, the dogs have to be not only good sniffers and high-energy, but also seriously obsessed with toys so they'll stay motivated to work for a reward: the chance to chomp a ball.

In New York, Beese got Dia from a Wisconsin breeder specializing in field competition dogs.

He taught her to hunt Scotch broom last fall and trained her on an invasive nonnative grass called slender false brome this summer.

He plans to train his Belgian malinois, a certified search-and-rescue dog, to sniff out spotted lanternfly, a destructive forest and agricultural pest discovered in Pennsylvania in 2014.

In the field, Dia takes off sniffing the air when Beese says "Go find!"

She follows a targeted scent to its source and shows Beese each plant by touching it with her nose before sitting for a reward -- a game of tug and fetch with her ball on a rope.

Beyond field work, Dia is bringing awareness to the trail conference's 8-year-old Invasives Strike Force program.

"The great thing about dogs is that they're charismatic and people love them," said Arden Blumenthal, a conservation intern working with Beese. "It's a great way to draw attention to the invasives issue. Let's face it, plants aren't all that sexy."

FILE - In this Nov. 30, 2018 file photo, Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, nominated by President Bill Clinton, sits with fellow Supreme Court justices for a group portrait at the Supreme Court Building in Washington, Friday. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

(Washington) -- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has completed radiation therapy for a cancerous tumor on her pancreas and there is no evidence of the disease remaining, the Supreme Court said Friday.

The court said in a statement that a biopsy performed July 31 confirmed a localized malignant tumor. Ginsburg, 86, underwent a three-week course of radiation therapy and as part of her treatment had a bile duct stent placed, it said. The court said Ginsburg "tolerated treatment well" and does not need any additional treatment but will continue to have periodic blood tests and scans.

The tumor was "treated definitively and there is no evidence of disease elsewhere in the body," the court said.

The court said Ginsburg canceled an annual summer visit to Santa Fe but otherwise has maintained an active schedule during treatment.

Ginsburg underwent lung cancer surgery in December and has had two previous bouts with cancer. She had colorectal cancer in 1999 and pancreatic cancer in 2009. While recovering from surgery she missed arguments at the court in January, her first illness-related absence in more than 25 years as a justice.