Entergy is proud to support programing on LPB and greener practices that preserve Louisiana.

The goal of our environmental and sustainability initiatives really is to ensure that our kids and future generations can be left with a cleaner planet.

Additional support provided by the Fred B. and Ruth B. Ziegler Foundation and the Ziegler Art Museum located in Jennings City Hall.

The museum focuses on emerging Louisiana artists and is an historical and cultural center for Southwest Louisiana.

And the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting with support from viewers like you.

This is a bill that can reshape Louisiana in a really positive way.

Senator Bill Cassidy is fired up about the infrastructure bill.

But what about his GOP counterparts?

The physical space is not the concern.

It is the concern of how many people we have caring for patients, health care workers, overworked and understaffed.

A lot of educators are fearful and they're worried about their safety.

The debate over mask wearing in schools continues.

Hi, everybody.

I'm Kara St. Cyr and I'm on Premiere Pro.

The bad news continues as we finish off another week of increasing Covid cases.

The Department of Health reporting more than 3000 people are in hospitals now, and an increasing number of those are on ventilators.

Fifty one people lost their lives yesterday.

Fifty eight more today.

Medical staff all over the state are struggling to keep up with the influx of patients.

All nine regions have 20 percent or fewer ICU beds available.

So now doctors and nurses are facing very difficult decisions on who they can treat and who they may have to send home.

Kelly Financ with our lady of the Lake Hospital says that this is starting to take a toll on health care workers.

So the physicians are really being inundated with a lot of traumatic experiences throughout their their lives.

And part of it does come with a job, you know, trauma.

I mean, when we deal with health care, we're dealing with patients that are sick.

You know, we're not always doing with wellness issues, but I do think that we're seeing a significant increase in burden of traumatic experiences that providers are having to deal with.

Senator Bill Cassidy echoes that, and he knows because before politics, Dr. Bill Cassidy is how we knew him.

His advice about Covid.

There's two types of folks.

Have you been vaccinated?

You're protected against hospitalization and death.

If you're not vaccinated, you're going to be infected.

It's just a question of time.

And if you're infected, you have an increased risk of hospitalization and death.

Now, of course, that's tragic.

Some folks say, I don't care, I'll take my chances.

What about your spouse?

What about your kids?

What about your parents also?

Or excuse or full?

So if someone gets in a car wreck, there's not an ICU bed for them to go to every week, hearing from people who are active actors who are saying they've now gotten the vaccine.

One man yesterday, eight people in my church have died from Covid.

I was an active axr.

What can I do to help?

By the way, talk to your own doctor, your nurse practitioner, your physician's assistant.

Ask her if she's treating you for diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, heart disease, liver disease, lung disease.

You're at higher risk of death from Covid.

Please be vaccinated.

And in just a moment, Cassidy on the infrastructure bill.

But first, more headlines making news around the state.

Chaos overwhelmed a meeting of the state's top school board Wednesday.

Parents shouting no more masks packed the gathering.

They were there to challenge the governor's mask mandate for schools.

But because so few of them wore masks, the meeting was shut down with the mask mandate unchallenged.

Council for a Better Louisiana released the findings of a new study that measures school performance.

The play for Longitudinal High School Outcomes study provides the first ever set of findings that a statewide public pre-K program can help promote long term benefits for students beyond elementary and middle school grade.

LSU received a one and a quarter million dollar grant from leady economic development to help secure the state's stature in the film and television industry.

An industry currently going through rapid changes.

The money will help create content and develop talent through the university's virtual production program.

The expected in result is cultivating the next generation of media filmmakers.

The Army Corps of Engineers will begin a full environmental study.

It's of the nine point four billion dollar Formosa Plastics complex that's planned between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

Green advocates say the corps has finally heard their pleas and understands their pain.

Results of the study, though, won't come quickly.

It's expected to take years to complete.

Louisiana families who receive food stamps will see a big boost starting in October.

An average of 36 dollars more per person.

President Biden approved the permanent increase in the amount of food for needy families.

It is the largest single increase in the program's history.

The Superdome remains on track to open at full capacity for Saints games this season, but will only allow fans who provide proof of vaccination or a current negative Covid test and who wear masks.

This week, the city of New Orleans began mandating the new Covid rules.

Sporting events at Tulane will have the same facts and testing protocol.

College students across the state are back on campuses or going there as the fall semester begins.

I talked with you system president Dr. Jim Henderson about a key piece of that FDA approval I think is going to change the game in that 30 percent of people that have indicated their vaccine hesitant have been they've been waiting for FDA approval.

So that's one major change.

The second is FDA is the gold standard.

Right.

And so when you get that approval, it allows for physicians to do things that their hands are tied under emergency use.

We think we'll see more innovation come from that.

We think that we'll see, again, an uptick in the number of vaccinated people.

And it also gives reassurance to the general public that, yes, this is a safe vaccine.

They can hear from me all day long when they hear from the FDA.

That's an imprimatur that's hard to to overlook.

Politics often lives in the gray area where there could be two or more sides to an issue.

But are there many sides to the one point two trillion dollar infrastructure bill that was recently passed in bipartisan fashion?

A champion of that bill is Senator Bill Cassidy.

He is here in our studios with us right now.

Senator, thank you for joining us.

We appreciate it.

Let me ask you, you're the only person in the Louisiana delegation other than Troy Carter who is supporting this bill, and you're vocal about it, whereas the other Louisiana delegation is not.

Why is that?

Well, what I think Garrett is officially undecided.

Undecided.

So let's say that I can't speak for them, but I can speak for why I'm for it.

OK. One hundred and ten billion dollars nationwide for roads and bridges.

Five point eight or five point nine billion coming to Louisiana.

One point two billion more than we would otherwise receive.

What does this mean for Louisiana that you say, Andre?

This means that we have a chance to catch up with our neighbors.

We speak about our children moving to Dallas and Houston.

Atlanta.

Well, they do, because they've got better infrastructure, broadband evenly distributed across their state.

This allows us to catch up with them, among other things.

It has four point five billion dollars for the Army Corps of Engineers to do coastal restoration, prioritizing states who've had natural disasters hit their coastline in the last six years.

Now, brother, it helps to be in the room.

And that doesn't have Louisiana written out.

It has Louisiana inherent.

OK, if you're on the bayou and you're on Lake Charles or you're in New Orleans and you want to be protected with coastal restoration.

This provides those dollars.

I could go on.

Senator John Kennedy says this is a green deal.

It's little infrastructure, and we have reached out to him and plan to talk to him also about this.

Your reaction to what he says is an example of a waste of Washington spending money it doesn't have.

That's what he says.

So John has said that only 23 percent of this is going for real infrastructure.

That would be two hundred and seventy six billion dollars off the top of my head.

Let me just go through a list, 110 billion for roads and bridges.

Sixty five billion to harden the grid.

Sixty five billion for universal broadband access.

And this is nationwide, nationwide.

But we can bring it down to our state if you want.

Yeah, let's do that.

But 60.

But but just to prove that it's over.

Twenty three percent.

Sixty six percent for freight rail and passenger rail.

Thirty nine billion for transit.

Fifty billion for resiliency.

I haven't even gotten started.

And we're way over 23 percent.

So so I'm not quite sure where that twenty three percent came from, but it's easily shown that that's not the case.

There's a question that people are saying this bill is not paid for.

You say it is.

I do say it is a couple of ways.

First, in fact, I'll say three things.

First, we always said that half of the pay us would be accepted by the Congressional Budget Office.

Yep.

You've got it.

Our rules allow you to accept it.

Half of it.

We've always said the CBio rules would not give us credit, but a reasonable person would say that makes sense.

For example, Congress has already appropriated money for federal unemployment, supplemental payments.

Fifty three billion of that money is not going to be used.

So we're repurposing it to this.

CBO doesn't give us credit because of their rules.

But a logical person would say, hmm, before we were paying people not to work.

And now we're going to give them jobs.

Right now.

That is a reasonable pay for second thing.

Wharton School of Business did an analysis and in their analysis, they looked at this project over 30 years.

It takes time to build infrastructure, but the benefit is over decades.

So they say in 2050, our GDP will be higher and our debt will be lower because of this bill.

Last thing, Andre, let me ask, is it cheaper to do coastal restoration now or is it cheaper to do it in the future when we've lost more coastline?

Is it cheaper to fix a bridge now or is it cheaper to wait until the bridge is even in worse condition?

Common sense tells you that common sense is cheaper to fix it now.

As anyone who's stuck in Baton Rouge Bridge Bridge traffic can tell you.

Yeah.

In some of these bridges are not going to be passable at some point.

I think Lake Charles is one that we point to is really having problems.

Let me ask you about the increase of inflation with this.

A lot of people say that's another reason to say no.

Economist on the left and the right say that this bill will not cause inflation.

The reason they say that is because is because the spending won't be next month.

The spending won't be as some spending in six months.

Most of the spending will be three, four and five and even a.

Few years more.

That's how long it takes to get everything lined up, to actually begin the grains panel to plan things that you're going to build.

So the spending, the bulk of the spending is in the out years.

And that is not contributing to the current raging inflation that this administration's policies have created.

So so the economists left and right, in fact, they say this may help inflation because it improves productivity, you improve productivity, and people can charge less for their services.

It can actually decrease long term.

On your website emblazon, is this bill.

Information about it?

I've talked to the public service commissioner many, many times, and he's a champion of this.

Also, broadband in Louisiana, as was exposed by Covid, is a huge problem as people can't reach the Internet, basic things that everyone does.

There are portions of our state whose economies are shrinking, and often they are rural and often they have even literally no access to broadband Internet.

So you're a business thinking of locating in one of these parishes.

First thing you say is do they have broadband?

Because I want to be able to sell outside my parish.

If you don't scratch off the list, if you're a mom and you want your daughter to be able to have access to telehealth, tell tell a mental health on to online education.

You're not going to locate there.

And so if we want economic development for our state, we can't be in the digital stone age.

Exactly.

This money, the goal, the stated goal of this money is that every American has access to broadband, just like every American has access to electricity.

One more question is this infrastructure bill which has passed in a bipartisan fashion, reaching across the aisle.

Is it tied to the three point five trillion dollar bill that is being proposed by Democrats that doesn't have full Democrat support, but they're proposing to link them together?

Are they?

It is not tied.

The very fact that Pelosi threatens to tie means that she doesn't have the votes for the three point five trillion social spending.

People sometimes confuse these two, by the way.

No, this is hard infrastructure, and that is a three point five wish list from a Republican standpoint, a Democratic wish list with taxing and spending that, et cetera.

The one point two is unlinked there are nine moderate Democrats who said they won't vote for the three point five if she attempts to link it.

I will say the more Republicans join those moderate Democrats, the more likely it passes as a standalone.

The fewer Republicans that join them, the more likely it's linked.

We need Republicans to join because if they join, it makes it less likely the three point five passes more likely.

We get broadband and all the jobs that go along with this package.

It's clear that you, a huge promoter of this, you championed it, you're behind it, a thousand percent.

Will it happen, do you think?

We don't know.

It is not a guarantee.

We don't know if there will be money for everybody in Louisiana to have access to broadband.

We don't know if it's going to pass.

That's why I'm out there asking people, members of Congress, vote for it.

If you have problems with it, contact me.

Look on our Web site, Kassidy dot Senate dot gov.

Let's go through those issues, because this is a bill that can reshape Louisiana in a really positive way.

And if we don't, it is an opportunity of a lifetime that we will miss.

Now, we reached out to all of Louisiana's delegation several times, wanted to get their input.

Only Garret Graves gave us a statement.

He is undecided on the vote.

Troy Carter supports it, along with Cassidy.

The rest of the group is opposed.

Hospital staff are overrun with COVID cases that the majority of Louisiana hospitals, but health care workers aren't worried about the amount of space needed to house the patients so much as the amount of staff available to take care of them.

Dozens of hospitals in the state have asked that additional doctors and nurses be directed to their campuses to combat the surge.

E. Coli runI, with a Louisiana State Nurses Association, explains why the shortage of nurses is the bulk of the problem.

That's just one virus that's taking up a full one third of our hospital beds right now.

We've heard the statement a lot.

Hospitals are out of beds and they can't treat people unless they're seriously ill.

Some hospitals are saying they've had to turn people away because of the lack of resources.

It's consuming all of the energy that that remains in our health care workers.

And this is the fourth time we've done this.

But what does this actually mean?

Are they really out of beds finding ourselves in a situation where we have more patients than beds and not beds as far as physical beds meet in beds that are staffed by people?

You know, so the physical space is not the concern is the concern of how many people we have caring for patients.

Equally, runI is the president of the Louisiana State Nurses Association, where they look after and support nurses in all capacities.

Lately, Rooney has been seeing nurses stressed and even sad about the influx of patients, especially because there aren't many people to take care of them.

But this isn't exactly a surprise.

The shortage of nurses was something experts expected around 2009.

Nursing board started noticing a shift in how many nurses they had and how many nurses were coming into the field.

The numbers were not looking good.

Well, I remember hearing that, you know, that because of the demographic of our nursing community, people are retiring.

And this is you know, we were seeing people entering the profession at a slower pace than people would be leaving the profession.

So that that has been a concern in a lot of initiatives were implemented to shore up the.

Have nursing numbers, but that never really happened before the pandemic.

The Louisiana State Nursing Board predicted that the nursing shortage would jump from 1800 unfilled are in jobs in 2019 to 7200 unfilled Aaryn jobs in 2025.

Louisiana's Workforce Commission found that Louisiana had more than 13000 nursing positions open each year when the pandemic did hit.

We were only in the beginning of seeing that decline.

Now, in 2021, it's getting worse.

But the shortage is not what you think.

It's not that no one is going to nursing school.

We actually have a lot of students in nursing programs.

It's a type of nursing.

People aren't specializing in as much.

So just bedside nurses, nurses, staff, nurses.

We're you know, we need more staff nurses, people who are able to work at the bedside and provide care.

And it's, you know, nursing has changed a great deal over the past 20 years, I would say, where there are more and more opportunities for nurses to advance to other positions, which is phenomenal.

That creates the opportunity then to say, so then who?

How do we continue having enough people working at the bedside?

These other positions are usually travel nurse slots, which usually pay more.

A lot of nurses that are working the jobs we desperately need right now are older, close to retirement age, which is in line with what the lsnd predicted some years ago.

Rooney says nearly 20 percent are ages 50 and up.

But now that Delta is here, the stakes are so much higher.

Dozens of hospitals have requested help from the state when it comes to finding doctors and nurses.

Without those jobs fill, health care workers have to make difficult decisions.

You don't have enough people to take care of all the people flooding the system.

Then you really have to prioritize.

And I I'm hearing more and more heartbreaking stories where, you know, maybe there aren't enough ICU beds and you have several patients who could qualify for one of those beds.

And, you know, it's it's essentially someone's going to get that ICU bed and a higher level of care.

But, you know, people have died in all levels of care.

And that is important for you to understand.

It's very unusual.

The amount of people that are succumbing to Covid drawing people back into this profession is hard, especially right now when every state is overwhelmed with the virus.

Rooney says self care and support for medical staff struggling is a way to keep people from having breakdowns while they fight the virus.

So being like a peaceful presence, a common presence and really taking care of yourself is is the only way that we are all going to get through this.

This isn't just a Louisiana issue.

There's a nursing shortage happening nationwide.

Rooney says that she isn't sure exactly how to fix it, but creating more opportunity for registered nurses is a start.

As kids go back to school, some parents are worried that the guidelines from the CDC and the governor aren't enough.

While others argue that the new measures are too much.

I spoke with an elementary school teacher in Baton Rouge.

She says she doesn't feel completely safe with the new guidelines because her kids aren't old enough to get the shots.

She's asking that the school board members reconsider going virtual.

This was the scene inside a Bessey meeting on Wednesday.

The parents gathered in support or in opposition of their kids wearing masks.

The meeting was unsuccessful for both sides of the spectrum because of the screaming.

No one was able to really get a word in.

It was adjourned with no resolution reached.

But the controversy is unsettling for some people, especially Valencia Johnson, an elementary school teacher in Baton Rouge.

A lot of educators are fearful and they're worried about their safety.

But we as educators always have to do what we have to do.

When the first pandemic first hit, we were in the trenches trying to make sure children learn.

But the biggest issue for Johnson is that most children can't be vaccinated.

Anyone under the age of 12 has to stick to the CDC guidelines of wearing masks and social distancing to be safe, which would be fine if it weren't for the Delta variant.

This latest form of the virus is way more contagious and kids aren't immune.

Like many people thought last year, they're getting sick and some of them are dying as young as eight months old.

So far, a little over 2000 elementary and secondary school kids have reported having Covid.

This number is significantly higher than last year's 7500 reports.

And this is terrifying to Johnson, because not only are her kids in danger, but so is she by teaching them in person.

And when you think about kids facing in the classroom, we're back to regular capacity.

Regular capacity with three to six feet of spacing is not possible.

So the children are closer together than the guidelines say that they are supposed to be, and they are not wearing their mask properly, which is one of the things that they said that we had to make sure that they were wearing their mask properly and that they were social distance.

And those two things right now are not happening.

The controversy surrounding masks is putting that stress at an all time high.

Some parents are against the mask mandate that the governor reinstated.

Some of them argue that their kids can't breathe properly.

Others think that they won't be able to make good connections with other students.

The list is endless, but even with the mandate in place, Johnson still has concerns.

Kids are kids, and they may not wear their face coverings properly.

Johnson says it's also hard to separate them from each other.

If the viral load wasn't as high in the community and it was in a controllable state, I don't I don't think the return of school would be as bad.

But to return back to school in person with the viral load so high in the community, I think is is a major problem for not only educators, but for parents and and for the students, because we have to provide a safe environment, not for not only for the children, but also for the adults as well.

The safest environment for Johnson is back at home.

She's vaccinated, but the idea of becoming a breakthrough case is scary.

She thinks going virtual is another alternative.

People are afraid to consider it was a grind trying to teach children over the computer.

But Johnson thinks it's worth it to guarantee that everyone is safe.

She says that there is a way to teach children well without being in person.

It all comes down to a balance.

We have to reimagine what virtual learning is.

And virtual virtual learning can't be the same amount of time or the same functionality of the regular school day because it's virtual, it's different.

So I think we need to also keep in mind the amount of time that a child is on the screen.

I think that they shouldn't be as long because we're going to lose the children.

They get tired, they get bored, and we have to we have to change it up.

Only time will tell if virtual schooling becomes an option again.

But for Johnson, safety is her biggest priority.

She hopes that something changes to better keep everyone out of harm's way.

These boundaries pay our school system announced yesterday that all its employees are to be vaccinated and if they opt out of the vaccine, they'll have to provide a negative Covid test weekly.

That's everyone.

That's our show for this week.

Remember, you can watch anything lpe any time, wherever you are with our LPB app.

The download is free from the App Store.

You can catch LPB News and public affairs shows, as well as other Louisiana programs you've come to enjoy over the years.

And please like us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

For everyone here at Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

I'm Andre Moora and I'm Kara St. Cyr.

Thanks for watching.

Until next time.

That's the state where.

Entergy is proud to support programing on LP and greener practices that preserve Louisiana.

The goal of our environmental and sustainability initiatives really is to ensure that our kids and future generations can be left with a cleaner planet.

Additional support provided by the Fred B. and Ruth B. Ziegler Foundation and the Ziegler Art Museum located in Jennings City Hall.

The museum focuses on emerging Louisiana artists and is an historical and cultural center for Southwest Louisiana.

And the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting with support from viewers like you.