A8 The BulleTin • Tuesday, april 6, 2021
EDITORIALS & OPINIONS
AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER
Heidi Wright
Gerry O’Brien
Richard Coe
Publisher
Editor
Editorial Page Editor
Some hope in
improving child
welfare in Oregon
T
he reports from the Department of Human Services
Critical Incident Review Team are some of the most
heartbreaking things that the state of Oregon produces.
The team reviews child fatali-
ties when there is a connection to
the state’s child welfare department
within a year of the death. The CIRT
reports aim to understand what
happened and consider what, if any-
thing, can be learned.
A CIRT report from 2020 looked
into what may have been a suicide or
accidental overdose by a 16-year-old
in December.
Rewind back to 2016. DHS re-
ceived a report about the child. The
child was then 12 and struggling
with mental health and self harm.
That investigation was closed be-
cause no evidence was found of pa-
rental abuse or neglect.
Then in December 2019, DHS re-
ceived a report when the child was
15. The allegation: The child was
struggling with suicide and it was
not being adequately addressed by
the parents. There was also infor-
mation that the parents let the child
drink at home.
The parents initially denied the
caseworker access to the home.
Later, the caseworker was able to
meet with the parents and learned
they were aware of the child’s prob-
lems. The mother told the case-
worker that the school had con-
tacted her with concern about a so-
cial media post from the child in De-
cember 2019. The mother said she
stayed home with the child to ensure
the child’s safety.
The family had no health in-
surance. They did have resources
through the child’s school to access
counseling. The caseworker inter-
viewed multiple other people in-
cluding school staff, family mem-
bers and the child’s therapist. They
did not report concerns. Based on
the investigation, the allegations
of neglect were ruled unfounded.
The parents seemed to be taking
appropriate action. A year later the
child was dead of suicide or acciden-
tal overdose.
In child abuse and neglect, there
are often missed chances to inter-
vene or help. It’s hard to point fin-
gers and know for certain what more
could and should have been done in
this case, at least from the detail in
the report. It doesn’t really answer
that.
Some, perhaps most, child abuse
is preventable. What can make a dif-
ference is giving families in need the
support — economic, mental health
and more — they need to stay to-
gether and prevent children from
being harmed.
A twinkle of hope comes from
the Family First Prevention Ser-
vices Act. Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden,
a Democrat, worked on and got it
passed in 2018. Child welfare ad-
vocates had long complained that
the federal government was getting
child welfare funding wrong. Fed-
eral money was available, though the
majority of it was only available once
a child was removed from a family.
Shouldn’t the government put more
effort into giving families what they
need to succeed? The Act enabled
Oregon and other states to get reim-
bursed for services outside of foster
care.
The state of Oregon just received
permission from the federal govern-
ment to move ahead with its version.
That is very welcome news. Oregon’s
plan includes offering families pro-
grams for mental health, addiction
and recovery, resources for pregnant
and parenting teens and residen-
tial treatment requirements. Will it
prevent more child abuse? We don’t
know. We hope so. There is more
work to be done by Oregon’s DHS
to ensure it succeeds and that fewer
CIRT reports must be written.
Bend moving forward
on body cameras
D
on’t celebrate just yet, but
the Bend Police Depart-
ment should be another
step closer this week to equipping
its officers with body cameras.
The Bend City Council is sched-
uled to vote this week on a $1 mil-
lion, 5-year agreement with Axon
Enterprise, Inc. for body cameras,
training and storage.
Redmond Police have already
been using body cameras for about
five years, so Bend is more of a
follower than a leader. We’re just
happy it is getting it done.
In all the disagreement and de-
bate about how law enforcement
should operate, body cameras is
a topic where people agree. Cam-
eras create transparency for the
police and the public. They don’t
show everything, though they can
be a critical tool in evaluating and
monitoring law enforcement per-
formance and the people they in-
teract with.
We can’t wait to see them imple-
mented in Bend.
Editorials reflect the views of The Bulletin’s editorial board, Publisher Heidi Wright, Editor
Gerry O’Brien and Editorial Page Editor Richard Coe. They are written by Richard Coe.
How vaccines meant for a poor neighborhood
might have ended up at Chicago’s Trump Tower
BY MICHELINE MAYNARD
Special to The Washington Post
T
oronzo Cannon’s 2016 song
about playing the blues (“I
broke some rules / Paid some
dues”) is called “The Chicago Way.”
It has a nonchalance about sticking
to protocols that would resonate with
just about anyone in the Windy City.
As Sean Connery’s character de-
clared in “The Untouchables,” “He
pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends
one of yours to the hospital, you send
one of his to the morgue. That’s the
Chicago way.”
In COVID-19 times, there’s a new
manifestation of the Chicago Way:
vaccines as patronage.
Over the past few weeks, readers of
Block Club Chicago, a scrappy news
website, have been riveted by its re-
porting on Loretto Hospital, a 122-
bed facility on the city’s West Side.
Tiny by big-city standards, Loretto
serves a mostly Black and poor neigh-
borhood.
You never hear much about Loretto,
compared with Chicago’s gleaming
downtown medical facilities or Cook
County Health, the sprawling public
center where my mother worked in
the country’s first blood bank.
But it only makes sense, given its
location, that Loretto’s supply of coro-
navirus vaccines should have been
distributed to West Side residents,
who are among those hit hard by the
virus and who have struggled to find
shots.
Instead, to quote the song, Loretto
broke some rules, and its neighbors
were left singing the blues. More than
once, I’ve gasped while reading Block
Club’s tales of the audacity at Loretto,
later confirmed by fallout from the
revelations.
On March 10, employees at Chica-
go’s Trump Tower, miles east of Lo-
retto, and in another economic strata,
got vaccinated with shots from Lo-
retto, long before many of the recipi-
ents would have been eligible.
Then, it turned out that Cook
County judges and their spouses also
received some of Loretto’s vaccines.
So did staff at a luxury jewelry store
and a steakhouse in the Gold Coast,
one of the city’s ritziest neighbor-
hoods, as well as members of a sub-
urban church and the family of a Lo-
retto doctor.
How did this all happen? It’s the ul-
timate illustration of another Chicago
saying: “I know a guy who knows a
guy.”
All these places and people had
connections to Loretto. The hospi-
tal’s chief operating officer, physician
Anosh Ahmed, lived in a Trump
Tower condo. According to Block
Club, he shopped at the jeweler and
ate at the steak house.
Apparently, he decided that he’d
take care of his friends, neighborhood
needs aside.
Meanwhile, a doctor whose health
system has ties to the hospital al-
legedly gave out shots to 10 relatives
in January, when there were strict
limits on who could receive vaccines.
Now, the collective game has been
found out, and the consequences are
being felt. Ahmed has resigned, and
the chief executive at Loretto, George
Miller, will be put on a two-week, un-
paid suspension as soon as a replace-
ment for Ahmed is found.
Residents on the West Side want
Miller out. Chicago’s mayor, Lori
Lightfoot, has cut off fresh vaccine
supplies to Loretto, meaning neigh-
bors have to visit other sites to get
their shots.
Lightfoot is calling for an indepen-
dent investigation to figure out who
got Loretto’s shots.
Said the mayor, “They need to
come clean about every instance in
which vaccine has been committed
to people that don’t fit into that West
Side footprint.”
For Lightfoot, the Loretto scandal is
one more headache in what has been
a terrible year in a city that’s notori-
ously difficult to run.
Along with every economic and
social dilemma that big-city mayors
have faced in the pandemic, Chi-
cago has been awash in a carjacking
crime wave, and looting last summer
forced the temporary shutdown of big
swaths of downtown and even closed
Lake Shore Drive.
To cut her a little break, Chicago
isn’t the only place where there’s been
COVID-19-related patronage. New
York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D, re-
portedly steered coronavirus tests to
friends and family when swabbing
was scarce. Wealthy Floridians who
supported Gov. Ron DeSantis, R, sup-
posedly received vaccines that should
have gone to others.
But fighting for city residents is
Lightfoot’s responsibility, one that Lo-
retto’s higher-ups apparently felt they
didn’t share. That arrogance is the
kind of thinking that the mayor has
to stop, whether it’s embedded in the
“Chicago way” culture or not.
On Tuesday, Vice President Kamala
Harris is visiting Chicago to focus on
“vaccine equity” and to see a program
the city says has helped boost vacci-
nation rates from 18% to 50% among
Black and Latino residents.
Along with touting the good news,
the mayor needs to be open with
Harris about the Loretto scandal as
an example of the pitfalls that can
hamper vaccination programs. Light-
foot can’t simply lock it away like vac-
cine stored in a freezer. Otherwise,
Loretto-style patronage is bound to
be a temptation not just in Chicago,
but elsewhere.
e e
Micheline Maynard is a journalist and author.
Her books include “The End of Detroit: How the
Big Three Lost Their Grip on the American Car
Market.”
With ‘bleisure’ time — mix of business and leisure — work moves to the beach
BY CONOR SEN
Bloomberg
T
he future of business travel is
shaping up to be one of the big
unanswered questions of the
economic reopening. At the same
time, many people are eagerly plan-
ning their first big post-pandemic fam-
ily vacation — or vacations. And that’s
where “bleisure” comes in.
It may still be awhile before business
travelers are packing convention halls
in Manhattan and Chicago again. But
our growing comfort with remote and
flexible work arrangements may open
up an even bigger category of travel
that combines both business and lei-
sure. Bleisure is one way we can take
advantage of some of the new experi-
ence we’ve acquired over the past year
in how to live and work.
Rather than a wholesale return
to five days a week in the office, or a
fully remote workplace, companies
are more likely to settle on hybrid
models — though what constitutes
hybrid will be different from com-
pany to company. Moving to Florida
to work remotely for a New York or
California-based company might be
a solution for some but not for others.
There’s still value in being close to the
office and co-workers, even if it’s not
necessarily every weekday.
Summer might be the time we see
bigger changes in work-life balance,
when schools are out and the office
often moves at a slower pace as work-
ers take vacations with their families.
Rather than having to take time off
to go to the beach or visit relatives, a
greater acceptance of remote work
makes a different type of summer
travel possible.
Working outside the office for two
or three weeks from a scenic destina-
tion on the water or in the mountains
might be the post-pandemic normal
for some white-collar professionals.
It’s the kind of extended visit or vaca-
tion that’s traditionally been difficult to
manage for office workers when they
have only a limited number of paid
days off.
United Airlines announced Thurs-
day that they were expanding service
to multiple destinations on the water
in the eastern part of the U.S., antici-
pating that those types of places are go-
ing to see increased demand this year.
The destinations — Charleston, Hil-
ton Head and Myrtle Beach in South
Carolina, plus Pensacola, Florida, and
Portland, Maine — all will get direct
routes from cities in the Midwest.
Thanks to our always-on-duty cul-
ture of smartphones and laptops, how
to better manage the blending of work
life and home life has been a topic of
increasing concern in recent years. All
the downsides that come when work
encroaches on home and family time
were even more apparent during the
pandemic.
A shift to bleisure — working while
on vacation — might in some ways be
a continuation of that always-on dy-
namic, but at least it’s one that would
benefit workers for a change. If you’re
expected to always respond promptly
to emails and phone calls, having
the opportunity to do that from the
Hamptons or Puerto Vallarta, Mexico,
on a Tuesday in July or August beats
having to do it after commuting home
from the office.
It’s also a great opportunity to give
retired grandparents more time with
the grandkids while they help out their
own children with babysitting during
those Zoom calls and project dead-
lines.
And this means our idea of what
constitutes business travel may change.
No longer would it just be all about
hotel points and frequently flier miles.
Hotels will need internet connections
fast enough to handle videoconferenc-
ing and large monitors that their guests
can plug their laptops into.
Different kinds of accommoda-
tions will be needed for longer stays
with multigenerational families. Beach
towns may need their own co-working
spaces — why not a WeWork in Hilton
Head, South Carolina, or Key West,
Florida? Rather than kids going to
summer camps near their homes, there
will be growing demand for camps in
vacation spots as families move both
their leisure and professional routines
to communities that were previously
focused entirely on recreation.
This type of experience won’t be for
everyone — renting accommodations
for two or three weeks at a leisure des-
tination isn’t cheap — but for well-paid
white-collar professionals it’s going to
be much more common than it was
pre-pandemic.
The rise of extended working va-
cations, enabled by technology and
employers who are more comfort-
able with remote work, will be an
enormous development opportunity
for these communities. The Millen-
nial generation is beginning to turn
40 and is ready to embrace this new
way of spending time with their fami-
lies. Many of the coastal districts now
known for leisure and family vacations
took off during the mid-20th century
baby boom: Hilton Head’s develop-
ment as a tourist destination began in
the 1950s, and Walt Disney announced
plans to build Disney World in Or-
lando in the 1960s.
These communities weren’t built
overnight, and they won’t become op-
timized for bleisure travel overnight.
But it’s something to watch as we try
out new ways to work and live in a
post-pandemic world.
e e
Conor Sen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and
the founder of Peachtree Creek Investments.