♪ john: tonight on "pbs news weekend," the debate over using school voucher programs to pay tuition at religious schools with taxpayer dollars. then, the effect on students of gun violence just outside school walls. >> we found 9000 shootings near

schools that were in small towns and thousands of shootings even in rural areas. there's kind of nowhere you can go to avoid this phenomenon. john: and how climate change is changing family planning and reproductive health in bangladesh. ♪ >> major funding for pbs news week and has been provided by -- ♪ and as the ongoing support of these individuals and institutions. ♪ and friends of the newshour.

this program was made possible by the corporation for public broadcasting and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. ♪ john: good evening. i'm john yang. voters in iran will head back to the polls for a second time next week. in friday's lloting to choose a successor to president ebrahim raisi, who was killed last month in a helicopter crash, three candidates split the hard-liners votes, allowing a reform candidate to take first place, but short of the majority needed to win. many voters said they're dissatisfied with their choices, but still said it's important to cast a ballot. >> the young generation has requests on economic, cultural, and social issues. implementing these requests isn't difficult, but there is a lack of attention towards them, particularly towards the youth. >> i realized i can defend my

country by voting so i chose to vote. john friday's voter turnout was the lowest in the country's history. the runoff election is set for next friday. ten ukrainian civilians are returning home tonight, thanks in part to the vatican. russia held them in annexed portions of the country for years, some since before the full-scale invasion two years ago. president volodymyr zelenskyy said mediation by the vatican led to the release of the prisoners, who include two catholic priests. today pope francis gave thanks but said he's filled with sorrow for those still in captivity. elsewhere in the country, at least 12 people were killed by an airstrike as russia targets villages along the front line. this as rescue efforts continue in the city of dnipro where a strike destroyed an apartment building. one man is dead and another suspect on the run after an officer guarding the israeli embassy in serbia was shot with an arrow. local media say the man approachedhe officer asking for directions before pulling

out a crossbow. the officer shot and killed the attacker before being rushed to the hospital for surgery. serbian and israeli officials are calling the incident an act of terror. this morning, an asteroid th size of a skyscraper passed between earth and the moon. it came within 180,000 miles of earth. that's about three-quarters the distance to the moon. scientists say there's no chance it would hit the earth. if you missed it, there's still a chance to spot it after sunset. still to come on "pbs news weekend," the life changing effect of gun violence just beyond school grounds. and how climate change is altering family planning in bangladesh. ♪ >> this is "pbs news weekend," from weta studios in washington, home of the pbs newshour, weeknights on pbs. john: this week, the debate over religion and publicly supported

schools has played out in oklahoma. the state school superintendent mandated public schools to teach the bible and ten commandments. days before, the state supreme court blocked what would have been the nation's first religious charter school. while the supreme court has been opening the door wider for public money to flow to religious schools, a lot is already going through school voucher programs. "a washington post" analysis concluded that nationwide “the vast majority” of school voucher money is going to religious schools. we get two perspectives on this. robert enlow is president and ceo of edchoice, a nonprofit school voucher advocacy group. and richard katskee is the director of duke university's appellate litigation clinic and the former vice president of americans united for separation of church and state. richard, let me start with you. should money from public school voucher programs go to religious schools? richard: there are all sorts of problems with money going to private schools. one of the big ones is when

money goes to private religious schools, though schools, and all private schools that take vouchers, can pick and choose which students [13.5s] they will -- which students they will allow to attend. they won't serve kids with disabilities because they're more expensive to go there they won't serve kids of different faiths. they'll make the kids and the families sign statements of faith and agree to live according to them. if you have an lgbtq student, or a student whose parents are a same sex couple, the schools can say, we don't want your kind here. we will not let you do that. it is really about schools making choices, not about parents making choices. john: robert enlow, schools making choices rather than parents making choices. what do you say to that? robert: what we know in history right now around america, is that the courts have said that no dollar crosses the rubicon of a private school without the truly private choice of a family. so it is families who are choosing these options. and here are the options they're choosing. in indiana in the school voucher program, more than half the kids who are attending catholic

schools are non-catholic. in florida, the way they have their program with 700 new private schools has started since the beginning of the program, if you are jewish, if you're catholic, if you're progressive, if you want to go to the albert einstein academy, which is specifically for children with lgbtq backgrounds, or if you're special needs, they have special needs schools that are starting up. the vast majority of the programs in voucher programs right now, about 15 of them are specifically set up for special needs families. and so what we're finding with choice programs in america is that pluralism is actually working. families are getting to choose options that are working for them, and that's the schools that they are choosing. it's not school choice by the schools. it's school choice by the parents. the last thing i would add is, you know, our traditional schools right now, they pick and choose by a situation called economic segregation. if you can afford a house, then you can choose. and we also know that there are tons of magnet schools. so the concept of choice in which schools choose is much more complex, but we know from school choice programs right now that families are choosing in over a million them, a million of them are doing so right now. john: people talk about school vouchers, money, going to

religious schools as public money going to to religious schools. do you see it as public money or do you see it once it gets in the parents hands as their money? robert: i think as taxpayers, we have decided that we want to fund the education of the public. i think for too long we said we're going to fund the education of public, but only through a government run school system. what's happening now across america is we say we believe in the public funding of education, but letting parents choose where they spend those dollars. so that is what's happening. that's why it's growing so much. that's why it's gone from 500,000 in 2019 to 1 million now. that's why ere's 75 programs operating in 33 states, and it is why out of the 52 legal cases for school choice at the state level, 47 have been ruled in favor of school choice. so the fact is, is we're wanting to say the public funds, the taxpayer funds should go to families tmake truly private choices, much like they do in higher ed and much like they do for a host of other government programs. john: richard, do you have any first amendment establishment clause concerns about this, about voucher funds going to private religious schools?

richard: sure. so, look, the supreme court has said that if you have a system of true private choice that, where there are actually real options for people, then the money going to the parents and turning around and using it, at a, at a private religious school doesn't cause a federal constitutional problem, might well cause state constitutional problems, but it's also the case that the supreme court premised that idea on there being real options for everybody. my family is jewish. if i live in a community where there are not any jewish schools, yeah, sure, robert is right that i could send my kids to a catholic school to get a catholic education or a baptist school to get a baptist education, but that's not really a reasonable choice for most people. it's also a funny thing to talk about the way that, that the public is hungry for these programs when school vouchers have been on ballot initiatives

going all the way back to about 1972, and not a single time has the public ever voted in favor of a voucher program. right now in in nebraska, they put in a tuition tax credit program last year, the legislature, so the people, the public actuay, rose up and got the signatures to put a ballot measure on the state election to ask the question, should we get rid of that program? the legislature, which gets a ton of money from billionaires pushing voucher agendas, turned around and made little niggling changes to the statute so that they could say, oh, now it's not the same statute, so you can't challenge it. you can't bring it up in a ballot initiative. this isn't about the public. this is about billionaires financing an agenda that includes defunding and deconstructing, taking apart the public schools and pushing a particular religious agenda that st doesn't include most americans. john: robert, respond to that, not about the public.

it's about, other agendas. robert: so in arizona, when the esa program, the education savings account program passed, and everyone is then free to choose, the opponents of school choice try to put it on the ballot to get rid of it. they failed in their attempt to do so, and the program has grown dramatically. what i think is most important about the potential for school choice and what we're seeing in places like florida and arizona, is you could start new schools. this incredible growth of micro schools, for example, is happening and it's mostly non-religious. right. so what we're finding is, is in school choice states that are mature, like indiana, like arizona, like ohio and other places, you're beginning to see new schools start. and that's the point. families having more options and more freedom to choose. and that's what we're seeing across the country. and we'll find out in the fall if nebraska and kentucky actually show that the public can pass a referendum. john: robert, let me ask you, the after the supreme court ruled that the maine tuition program could not exclude, religious schools.

as i understand it, maine started using their human rights law that all schools have certain nondiscrimination levels and that if you do discriminate, you can't participate, which did knock out some of the religious, private schools. what do you think about that? robert: so most school choice programs already follow the title, title of the nondiscrimination title of the u.s. supreme court. so if you look at the laws that are created around the country, you'll see nondiscrimination clauses in them across the board. and so most private schools are already required to follow federal jurisprudence. and they do. and if they don't, then they generally don't participate in the program. and what i think it's important to remember here is it's state legislators who are who are, it is state legislators who are voted in by the public that are making these determinations. and this is where the public is supporting it, because they're supporting it by hiring their state legislator to do these bills. john: robert, richard, i'm afraid we're out of time. we're going to leave it there. thank you both very much. richard: thank you. robert: thanks for having me.

♪ john: this week the surgeon general declared gun violence a public health crisis, citing the estimated 50,000 americans who die every year in gun-related incidents. according to the gun violence archive, there've been more than 8200 gun deaths so far this year, nearly 700 of them children and teens. with school shootings on the rise over the past two decades, children and parents are increasingly worried about safety inside the classroom. but, as william brangham tells us, a new analysis finds that more and more incidents of gun violence are happening just beyond school walls. will: from 2014 to 2023, communities across the country saw more than 188,000 shootings within 500 yards of a school. that is an average of 57 shootings per day.

this comes from a new analysis done by the trace, which is a nonprofit news organization that covers gun violence, analyzing data from almost 150,000 public and private schools. the trace found that just last year, 6 million kids had a shooting occur near their school. olga pierce is one of the journalists who did this analysis olga, thank you so much for being here and sharing this really tremendous piece of reporting with us. you know, when we thk about school shootings, i think most people think of the the massacres that happened, newtown, uvalde, the columbine, etc. but you guys chose to broaden the lens and look at shootings outside of schools. why that focus? olga: obviously, school shootings inside the school building are a traumatic and dramatic event, and they deserve our attention.

but those are very rare compared to the frequency of shootings we found around schools. and something we had heard anecdotally from teachers in our reporting was, you know, i wish that we could take somof this attention and these resources we're taking to prepare for shootings in the school and devote them to protecting kids outside of the school building. will: i mean, i mentioned some of your findings that that how millions of kids go to schools where a shooting happened nearby in just one year. i mean, two of my own kids fall into that same exact category. what else did you find in your reporting? olga: we were interested in, kind of like the geographic distribution of the schools. and the first thing we found is that the schools that experienced this the most are in the places you would expect. so places like chicago and philadelphia that have well-documented gun violence problems. a thing that really surprised us was how frequent these shootings are outside the places you would expect.

so we found about 40,000 shootings that were adjacent to suburban schools. we found 9000 shootings in schools, near schools that were in small towns and thousands of shootings even in rural areas. so really, there's kind of nowhere you can go to avoid this phenomenon. will: separate from this really horrifying data that you guys are digging up. what were some of the personal stories that you heard from these communities? olga: one of the saddest stories we heard was from a middle schooler in philadelphia, who said that she is afraid to sit next to the window in her classroom because e has so frequently heard gunshots outside the building and heard screaming. and imagine trying to learn if that's your reality. if you're just a middle schooler. will: i mean, tell us a little bit more about that. what does the research indicate about -- even though you're not directly involved in the shooting, you're not the

perpetrator or the victim or even necessarily know the victims -- what does this pervasive violence in the community do to kids? olga: we know, first of all, that it harms learning outcomes. so kids who are exposed to violence, even things like memorials on the street that we see, tend to have lower test scores, for example. so it's just hard to focus and hard for a brain to develop normally when there is exposure to this. on top of that, you know, people told us that what often gets interpreted as behavioral issues is actually just a really normal response to seeing violence all around you, all the time. will: as you were reporting this and talking with parents, did -- were parents aware of this? i mean, was this something that they were cognizant that was going on in their communities? did they feel that their children were safe at school? olga: so in some communities, there have been really high profile incidents, like students getting shot, leaving the school

building, for example. and and i think those parents are in general aware. but one thing we did find in our reporting is that schools often are not great about communicating to parents when there is an incident. so i would recommend any parent who doesn't know to maybe initiate a conversation. and actually in our story, if you go to our website, there's a tool where you can look up any school, which could help with that conversation. will: and what kind of response did you hear from local officials and school officials? i mean, again, these are things happening outside of the school walls, but our school officials are aware of this and trying to take measures to help protect kids. olga: yeah. so we went to a school in philadelphia that was one of the most affected schools, and they had done things like put bulletproof blankets and the windows. no adult was allowed in the school. not even parents. kids had to be brought outside. so obviously there are things

the school can do, but the real long term solution is to reduce the frequency of gun violence everywhere. will: all right. that is olga pierce, reporter for the trace. thank you so much for sharing your reporting with us. olga: thanks so much. ♪ john: few places in the world are suffering more from the effects of climate change than bangladesh. most of the country, which is slightly smaller than iowa, is a flat plain, no higher than 50 feet above sea level. that makes it vulnerable to the sort of severe flooding that's now affecting more than 2 million people after weeks of monsoon rains. and there's another effect, women are changing the way they think about having children. sally dijkerman is a senior researcher for ipas, a reproductive justice organization.

explain how these effects of climate change are affecting women's health in bangladesh, especially women's reproductive health. sally: yeah, thank you for that question. so what we found in our research along the bay of bengal in these communities that have been really hit hard by cyclones is that the climate crisis is impacting everyone. but certain groups, especially women and girls are feel feeling those impacts disproportionately, and that includes direct impacts on their sexual and reproductive health outcomes. for instance, experiencing increased miscarriage, pregnancy complications and premature labor during these intense storms and flooding. a lot of women have to go to these cyclone centers where they shelter during the storms. and there's not nurses and doctors, medical supplies or even sanitation materials for those women who do go into labor, which is quite common. and so they have to give birth in these unsanitary conditions

without without a health care, health care professional present. john: and how is this affecting their decisions to have children? sally: yeah, so women are facing, you know the the difficulty of having to evacuate and, um, putting their families before their own health and well being. so, for instance, women traditionally are the caregivers in this context, so they have to make sure that their children and elderly people and people with disabilities in their community evacuate first. which means sometimes they, um, are the last ones to be thinking about their own safety. and so what they see is that other pregnant women are going -- are experiencing prematurity, pregnancy complications, stillbirth and miscarriage during these cyclones, and it's scary for them, and so they think, well, you know, i'm not ready to have a child when there's so much instability and these extreme weather events happening. but th there's also the other

side of that, where one woman even talked in our research, even talked about how she wanted to have more children to protect against potential childlessness, um, in the case of her child being killed during one of these storms, because children are also very vulnerable during evacuation. john: has there been a marked difference in child moality. -- mortality? sally: so child mortality linked directly to these storms is something that's still being researched. you know, the point here really is that women and girls, including youth, um, are feeling those impacts disproportionately to other people in the community, and so it really is causing them to reconsider when they have children, and how many they how many children they have. john: what other effects are there of these, uh, these effects of climate change how they're affecting life in bangladesh? sally: so in bangladesh, and in all nine countries where we've done this research, we're finding direct links between the conditions caused by the climate crisis and increases in chd marriage.

so when the climate change undermines the economic sectors like agriculture, there's increased economic instability and crisis in these families. and so women told me that child marriage, marrying off one's daughters, is being used as a coping mechani both to receive additional money from dowry. and also to have one less mouth to feed. john: and is there also a connection or an effect with the with violence against women? sally: yeah, so violence is increasing for two reasons. first, this economic instability causes so much stress in the family and that leads to more intimate partner violence. but also women and especially young girls talked about how in cyclone centers in bangladesh where they are sheltering from storms, there is ally poor security, poor lighting and the lack of separate spaces and toilets for men and women. and so these toilets and these spaces are a hotbed for sexual harassment. and violence.

and so young girls told us that they hold their urine for hours on end because they're afraid of using the bathroom at these cyclone centers, and that leads to a lot of problems and pain. john: are bangladeshi women responding in some way, are they organizing making, uh, demands or calling for changes? sally: yeah, so in our research, women talked about a few things that they want, and they are getting involved in helping their communities adapt to the climate crisis and helping them, for instance, be part of these disaster risk management committees, so they can feel prepared and ready to evacuate in a safe and timely manner. but women are asking for decent work opportunities, access to sexual and reproductive health services in these cyclone centers and outside of them, um and these are just two things women are demanding. john: as the globe warms as the the temperatures around the world are rising, do you think

this situation we're going to see replicated in in more and more places around the world? sally: yes, absolutely. i mean, extreme heat is extremely dangerous. exposure to extreme heat is very dangerous for pregnant women. and that is something that we're seeing across the globe. whether you're in bangladesh, mozambique, indonesia or in texas, um, this exposure to extreme heat for pregnant women has been linked to miscarriage. stillbirth, low birth weight. prematurity. john: sally, thank you so much. sally: thank you. ♪ john: now on "the newshour" instagram page, how residents of the ukrainian capital city of kyiv live day to day with limited electricity. all that and more is on the newshour instagram page.

and that is "pbs news weekend" for this saturday. i'm john yang. for all of my colleagues, thanks for joining us. see you tomorrow. >> major funding for pbs news weekend has been provided by - >> consumer cellular, how may i help you? this is a pocket dial? well, thought i would let you know that with consumer cellular, you get nationwide coverage with no contract. that is kind of our thing. have a nice day. ♪ >> and with the ongoing support of these individuals and institutions. ♪ this program was made possible by the corporation for public broadcasting and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. ♪

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