All states compensate citizens called to serve on civil and criminal juries. However, jurors’ daily compensation is usually far below the federal or state minimum wage. Providing adequate compensation demonstrates the value of the jury and can increase faith in the judiciary. Twenty-eight states plus the District of Columbia, use a flat rate per diem fee. Twenty-three states, including Florida, use a graduated fee system, which pays jurors a reduced flat-rate fee on the first day of service and an increased fee after being sworn as a trial juror or after a predetermined number of days of service. A clear, consistent statutory scheme subject to regular legislative review would ensure that juror compensation keeps pace with financial realities.

Small and rural jurisdictions, which make up the majority of police departments across the country, often face distinct challenges that make it difficult to implement the types of mental health training programs that larger and urban agencies can access. Given this, even when there is strong support for using best practice approaches in response, police officers in these jurisdictions often have fewer options for cross-system training and when responding to people in crisis. This brief details strategies for small and rural law enforcement agencies to develop and implement comprehensive, high-quality training that creatively addresses their unique challenges. These strategies include forging community partnerships, considering varying training methods, and seeking out federal, state, and local funding, are intended to help officers effectively respond to people who have mental health needs and connect them to necessary services.

Data from the 2020 National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) indicated that students ages 12–18 experienced 285,400 total victimizations (i.e., thefts and non-fatal violent victimizations) at or on the way to or from school and 380,900 total victimizations not in connection with school. Survey estimates are based on the number and characteristics of crimes that respondents experienced during the prior 6 months, not including the month in which they were interviewed. Additionally, based on the 2020 survey, the total victimization rate at school for students ages 12 to 18 was more than two times higher for male students (15 victimizations per 1,000 students) than for female students (7 per 1,000). However, there were no statistically significant differences in the rates of total victimization away from school between male (14 victimizations per 1,000 students) and female students (16 per 1,000).

This report is a congressionally mandated annual report from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Using the most recent data available (at the time the report was written) from NCES and other sources, the report contains key indicators on the condition of education in the United States at all levels, from prekindergarten through postsecondary, as well as labor force outcomes and international comparisons. There are core indicators that are updated every year and spotlight indicators that provide in-depth analyses on topics of interest to education systems, policymakers, researchers, and the public. The Indicator System for 2022 presents 88 indicators, including the 23 indicators on crime and safety topics, and can be accessed online. The report shows various declines in enrollment that occurred during the coronavirus pandemic, from early childhood through postsecondary education. For example, the report finds that between 2019 and 2020 – in the first year of the pandemic – the school enrollment rate for 3- to 4-year-olds fell 13 percentage points to 40%, while the enrollment rate for 5-year-olds fell 6 percentage points to 84%. At the postsecondary level, total undergraduate enrollment decreased by 9% from fall 2009 to fall 2020 (from 17.5 million to 15.9 million students).

Early childhood educators, policymakers, and researchers agree that systematically collecting assessments of children’s learning and development is one approach that pre-K programs can use to help teachers provide better instruction. When teachers have easy-to-understand information about what children know when they enter pre-K—and how those skills are changing across time—they can more effectively tailor instruction rather than teaching skills that are much too advanced or providing content that simply repeats what children already know. In the summer and fall of last year, 14 pre-K teachers primarily serving children from socioeconomically and racially marginalized groups across the country participated in conversations about assessments and instruction in early learning. Their responses indicated that assessments are useful when they help early childhood educators tailor their instruction for different children, are supported by a data-driven ecosystem, prioritize measuring social-emotional skills, and help facilitate communication between teachers and parents.

Ensuring equitable access to high-quality pre-K requires being able to measure quality, particularly at a large scale. Accurate, reliable, and timely measurement of pre-K quality can help parents make better choices when they have multiple early learning options, and can help policymakers, school administrators, and educators improve the quality of early education settings. At its core, early childhood measurement is an equity issue. Limitations have led experts to call for a new generation of quality measurement work in early childhood. The brief describes the existing landscape of widely used measures of pre-K quality, further spotlights some of the newer measurement work, and concludes with a discussion of future directions for the field, such as addressing limitations of widely used measures, leveraging technology and new collection methods, funding coordinated measurement development and testing, ensuring measurements are open access, and designing measures to monitor and promote curriculum alignment. Investing now to strengthen measures of pre-K quality is critical to building equitable early learning opportunities for children from historically marginalized groups.

In March 2021, state and local governments employed 18.8 million people, a decrease of 4.6% from the 2020 figure of 19.7 million. Of the total 18.8 million employed, 14.9 million were classified as full-time and 4.0 million as part-time. Fulltime employment by state governments decreased 1.6% to 3.9 million, while full-time employment by local governments decreased 1.2% to 11.0 million. The number of part-time state government employees decreased 11.6% p to 1.4 million, with the largest decrease in higher education. In March 2021, state and local governments paid their employees a total of $89.8 billion, an increase of 0.2%. Full-time state and local government payroll increased 0.9% to $83.4 billion. Payroll comprised 92.9% of the total state and local government payroll amount.

As wildfires increase in scale and intensity across the western U.S., various stakeholders now have new incentives to participate and address the wildfire crisis together. This report is based on a convened workshop that brought together leading experts to discuss how innovative financing structures and private capital might be used to increase investments in resilience, and therefore reduce the negative wildfire impacts that are threatening more and more areas, especially in the western U.S. The workshop highlighted effective models such as environmental impact bonds, partnerships with utilities, and new insurance products as solutions to build resilience. Summarized in the report are the lessons learned from these models, future policy changes at federal and state levels that could scale efforts and contribute to the paradigm shift necessary for the country to adapt to climate change driven wildfire increases, and other key points of conversation.

The 2010s was a decade of population decline or stagnation for many parts of the country as national population growth reached historic lows and the legal immigration pipeline slowed to a trickle. New county-level data shows that beneath these well-documented national trends, a more complex narrative emerges. Large urban counties that since 2016 have seen dwindling numbers of international migrants, a crucial ingredient for their economic success, experienced unprecedented losses of domestic migrants in 2021 as the pull of suburban and exurban counties intensified. Large urban counties experienced a net loss of 863,000 residents in 2021, the first time this group has experienced negative growth in the aggregate in the past 50 years. Meanwhile, the majority of the fastest growing counties in 2021 were suburban or exurban. Over three-quarters, 81%, of exurban counties gained population in 2021, outperforming any other group.

Federal law requires states to provide safe and stable out-of-home care for children in foster care until they are safely returned home, placed permanently with adoptive families, or placed in other planned, permanent living arrangements. Concerns regarding states' lack of knowledge regarding the whereabouts of children who go missing from foster care (missing children) have garnered national media attention. There were 110,446 missing children episodes during the audit period ranging across states from 0% to 7%; the average number of days that the children were missing ranged from 7 to 96 days; the number of children who were still missing as of December 31, 2020, was 6,619; the average number of times children went missing ranged from 1 to 7 times; and the majority (65%) of missing children were between 15 and 17 years old. The data also showed that among the missing children, 51% were females, 48% were males, and 1% were reported without gender data, or reported as transgender or undecided. All 50 state agencies said that they had implemented policies and procedures regarding measures to report and locate missing children, with some reporting enhanced procedures when a high-risk child went missing, or created special units or had specifically designated staff to help locate missing children. The report also identified several barriers in state agencies' policies and procedures. These barriers included limitations in state agencies' data systems, lack of oversight to ensure timeliness when reporting missing children, and issues involving the collaboration and exchange of information with federal agencies and law enforcement. The most frequently identified challenges were: locating children who repeatedly go missing from foster care; obtaining cooperation from missing children's families and friends and from law enforcement; finding correct placements for children to prevent them from running away; and a lack of awareness of the support and technical assistance that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families provides.

An analysis of 2021 preliminary data presents nationally representative weighted estimates for the top five drugs in drug-related emergency department visits, the assessment of monthly trends and drugs involved in polysubstance emergency department visits in a subset of sentinel hospitals, and the identification of drugs new to Drug Abuse Warning Network’s (DAWN) Drug Reference Vocabulary. Key findings include that the top five drugs involved in drug-related emergency department visits in 2021 were alcohol, opioids, methamphetamine, marijuana, and cocaine, that monthly trend analysis revealed decreasing trends of alcohol, methamphetamine, marijuana, and heroin-related emergency department visits, increasing trends of fentanyl and unspecified narcotic analgesics, and that an in-depth analysis of 2021 data identified 38 substances related to emergency department visits that were new to DAWN’s Drug Reference Vocabulary.

Antibiotics are ineffective treatment for viral syndromes, including COVID-19. The authors characterized antibiotic prescribing in older adults with outpatient COVID-19 visits to identify opportunities to improve prescribing practices. The authors used 100% Medicare carrier claims and Part D event files to identify beneficiaries with a COVID-19 outpatient visit and associated antibiotic prescriptions. The authors included beneficiaries aged 65 years and older who had fee-for-service plus Part D Medicare coverage, which is the part of Medicare that covers most outpatient prescription drugs, and who had a visit during April 2020 to April 2021. During April 2020 to April 2021, 346,204 (29.6%) of 1,169,120 COVID-19 outpatient visits were associated with an antibiotic prescription, which varied by month, with higher rates of antibiotic prescribing occurring during a wave of COVID-19 cases during the winter of 2020-2021 (range, 17.5% in May 2020 to 33.3% in October 2020). Differences were observed by age, sex, and location with Non-Hispanic White beneficiaries receiving antibiotics for COVID-19 more frequently (30.6%) than other racial and ethnic groups. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, 30% of outpatient visits for COVID-19 among Medicare beneficiaries were linked to an antibiotic prescription, 50.7% of which were for azithromycin. Randomized clinical trials demonstrated no benefit of azithromycin in treating COVID-19 and its use for the disease has been linked to antimicrobial resistance. These observations reinforce the importance of improving appropriate antibiotic prescribing in outpatient settings and avoiding unnecessary antibiotic use for viral infections such as COVID-19 in older adult populations.