Hundreds of migrant families are being housed in low-budget Tucson motels after being processed and released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to a report by the New York Times.

Catholic Community Services and volunteers from churches, synagogues and throughout the community have been helping provide food, clothes and medical services.

The flow of migrants fleeing violence and extreme poverty from Central American countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador is increasing, leading to a record 16,658 people in family units apprehended by Border Patrol in September.

“The reality is that conditions in countries of origin continue to push
people to migrate,” said Joanna Williams, advocacy director of the Kino
Border Initiative, which works with migrants along the Arizona border.

As families continue to migrate, President Trump continues attempts to strong arm the situation, tweeting out threats to stop financial aid to these three countries, as well as blaming Democrats for those countries' exodus. 

Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court and a legend in Arizona politics, has announced that she is suffering from dementia. SCOTUSblog has the details:

Retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to sit on the Supreme Court, announced today that she has been diagnosed with dementia, “probably Alzheimer’s disease,” and that as her “condition has progressed,” she is “no longer able to participate in public life.”

O’Connor’s announcement came one day after Jessica Gresko of the Associated Press reported that O’Connor had “stepped back from public life” and that her sons had cleared out O’Connor’s office and files at the Supreme Court. O’Connor announced in 2005 that she planned to step down from the court in no small part to spend more time with her husband, John, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. John O’Connor died in 2009.

In a letter released by the Supreme Court’s Public Information Office that was addressed to “Friends and Fellow Americans,” the 88-year-old O’Connor was characteristically straightforward. Noting that “many people have asked” about her health and activities and that she wanted “to be open about these changes,” O’Connor wrote that “[s]ome time ago” she was “diagnosed with the beginning states of dementia.”

Find more Claytoonz here.

Find more Claytoonz here.

No one has a greater stake in Arizona education than parents of school-aged children. No one. Except maybe parents of children too young to attend school who will be in kindergarten in a few short years (It'll be sooner than you can imagine!). And people who are planning to have kids, whose future children will enter school within a decade. All of you are going to gain or lose based on the results of the upcoming elections.

So, my advice to parents is, VOTE! If you have a mail-in ballot sitting around beginning to gather dust, pick it up, fill it out and mail it in. No stamp required. If not, there's early voting at the polls. And there's November 6.

Vote for your children, which means, vote education — whatever that means to you. More on that later.

I figure there are about 400,000 of you parents with school-aged children registered to vote. (I'll explain how I arrived at that ballpark figure at the end of the post.) If you vote at 35 percent, which is typical for non-presidential elections, that's 140,000 ballots cast. Some of you who normally sit on the sidelines could, and should, decide this election is important enough to make the extra effort. If the number goes to 50 percent, that's 200,000. If you double your voting rate, you'll be pushing a quarter million.

Parents are an electoral force to be reckoned with. If you split along party lines as usual, not much will change. But if you vote for candidates who are long-time supporters of public education, not candidates-come-lately who, after years of bashing "failing schools" and "failing teachers," have decided it's politically expedient to say our schools deserve a little more money and support, you can be game changers.

I know what it means to me when I say, "Vote for education," but it may mean something different to you. Here's a thumbnail guide you can use to decide what you think "Vote for education" means.

Vote Democratic if you believe our public education should be fully funded, that Arizona should no longer occupy the nation's bottom rung in per-student funding.

Vote Republican if you don't want to "throw money" at failing schools and failing teachers because more money doesn't translate to better schools.

Vote Democratic if you think charter schools need more oversight and regulation to get rid of the bad actors and profiteers.

Vote Republican if you think the current lax charter rules and regulations are just fine, that we should let the "invisible hand of the marketplace" work its magic.

Vote Democratic if you think our two backdoor private school voucher programs, Tuition Tax Credits and Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, take money away from public education and favor wealthy families who would send their children to private schools anyway.

Vote Republican if you like the idea of vouchers for everyone who wants them.

Whatever you decide, parents, VOTE!

A Number-Of-Voting-Parents Note: Maybe the numbers are out there somewhere, but I didn't find them. So here's how I got to 400,000 Arizona parents of school-aged children who are registered voters.

Start with a million K-12 students. Estimate 2.5 children per family, figuring the range from big families and those with one child. That comes to 400,000 families. Estimate 1.5 parents per family. Now we're at 600,000 parents. Estimate a third of the parents either didn't make the effort to register or aren't citizens and can't vote. That leaves 400,000 parents of school-aged children who are registered voters.

Kathy Hoffman and Frank Riggs are putting up a spirited fight to become our next Superintendent of Public Instruction. Their campaign websites are filled with educational plans and proposals, too many to list or discuss without getting so deep in the weeds, I'd never find my way out. The short version is, I like Hoffman's ideas far better than Riggs', but that doesn't tell you much.

So let's take another tack. Let's talk about hammers and nails.

No doubt you've heard the saying, "When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Even if the hammer you're holding isn't the best, or the only tool for the job in front of you, you're going to try and find a way to use it. You know that hammer. You like that hammer. It's the first tool that comes to mind when you have a situation you have to deal with before you consider other options.

It's the same with the ideas you tend to favor. They are going to be readily at hand when you're looking for solutions to problems you have to deal with. You'll call on them before you consider alternatives. Likewise with your personal and professional experience. You're going to lean on what you know to guide you.

So let's look at the hammer —actually the hammers — Hoffman and Riggs have in their tool belts which they would tend to favor if they became our next education superintendent.

Kathy Hoffman knows public schools. She knows early childhood education. She works with students with disabilities. She speaks fluent Spanish and Japanese. She understands the value of being bilingual and the importance of bilingual education.

If Hoffman becomes superintendent, her first instinct will be to seek out public school solutions to problems or opportunities she faces. She's going to think about Spanish (and other language) speakers as well as English speakers. She's going to consider students who have to overcome problems to reach educational success. She'll consider whether early childhood education should be a part of the solution.

Another national forecaster has delivering good news for Democrat Ann Kirkpatrick and bad news for Lea Marquez Peterson in Southern Arizona's Congressional District 2.

Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball is moving the race from the "Leans Democrat" column to the "Likely Democratic" column:

Democrats appear well on their way to putting away at least three of these four seats. We are upgrading the Democrats’ chances in the open AZ-2, moving it from Leans Democratic to Likely Democratic, after the National Republican Congressional Committee stopped spending there. NJ-2 is one of the safest Democratic pickups in the country, and CA-49, the seat from which Rep. Darrel Issa is retiring after a very close call in 2016, has long been the Democrats’ best bet in California.

In this week's Skinny, I run down many of the challenges facing Marquez Peterson.

Find more Claytoonz here.

Find more Claytoonz here.

Apologies to fellow teachers. (I know, I've been out of the profession for 15 years, but once a teacher, always a teacher, even after you lose your class [badum-ching!]). I know how much teachers hate being told what to do. I always did. I keep promising I won't give teachers advice, but I keep doing it anyway. My excuse is, I spent 30-plus years in the classroom, so I'm cutting myself a little slack.

My advice to teachers is, VOTE! If you have a mail-in ballot sitting around beginning to gather dust, pick it up, fill it out and mail it in. No stamp required. If not, there's early voting at the polls. And there's November 6.

Teachers, vote for education, whatever that means to you. More on that later.

Arizona has about 50,000 K-12 teachers. Roughly 40,000 of them work in school districts, and most of the remainder work in charter schools. That's a whole lot of people whose lives revolve around governmental decisions. Include an equal number of non-teaching staff, and it adds up to nearly 100,000 potential education-based voters in statewide races, 3,000 per legislative district. That's more than enough to make the difference in close races.

For some reason I've never understood, teachers aren't reliable voters. I've heard figures as low a 35 percent show up for elections, which astounds me. Anything lower than 80 percent from a group of people who dedicate themselves to serving the public interest, who perform their civic duty every working day, seems wrong. Maybe some teachers feel like they use up their quotient of public service in the classroom, then when it comes time to vote, they think, "Screw it, it's time for the rest of you to step up while I work on tomorrow's lesson plan for your kids!"

OK, so this year, don't think about voting as another civic chore to add to your physically and emotionally draining teaching schedule. This year, vote out of self interest.