From our state House studio in Montgomery.

I'm Todd.

Sorry.

Welcome to Capitol Journal.

Hundreds gathered in Selm over the weekend to commemorate the 61st anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the violent day in 1965, when peaceful protesters marching to secure the right to vote were attacked by state troopers while trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Visitors retraced the step of those foot soldiers honoring the movement, men and women who fought for voting rights.

The annual bridge crossing jubilee included a weekend of commemorations, speakers, community events, all celebrating the legacy of the Civil Rights movement.

We stopped when we got comfortable, and we're back in the same shape when I almost did, except, well a little bit more knowledgeable.

Most of us who are and I think at this time we're going to fight harder.

They gave us voting rights and basically everything we didn't they didn't have.

Because if they didn't walk across this bridge, no movements would have been made for us to be living free and non segregated any longer in the state of America.

This meeting is more than just a walk across bridge.

This meeting is an expression of our sincere, love for our democrac and our love for opportunities we have and our determination not to lose it.

Thank you to our partners at CBS 42 for that video footage.

Also over the weekend.

State Representative Scott Stafford Hagan of Hartsville, was elected chairma of the Alabama Republican Party.

The position came ope in January when former chairman John Wall resigned in orde to run for lieutenant governor.

STAT Hagan is a two term lawmaker who had been House majority leader here in the legislature.

But he stepped down from that position about two weeks ag in order to run for party chair.

There were two rounds of voting for the chairmanship, with Stadthagen beating out former Alabam Secretary of State John Merrill and longtime party officia and acting chair Joan Reynolds said Aiken told them more than 400 party members gathered in Hoover quote, your voice will be mine 100% all the time.

End quote, back her to the state House, where we are anticipating another busy week in the Alabama Legislature.

One issue we are watching this week is the simplified Seller's Use Tax, or Sut, better known as the Online Sales tax.

It was established back in 2015 to collect a flat 8% tax on online purchases from distributors withou a physical presence in Alabama.

Half of that revenue goes to the state, while 30% goes to cities and 20% to counties, all based on population.

But cities have complaine that they are being shortchanged on that revenue.

This week, the Senate General Fund Budget Committee is expected to take up compromised legislation.

We're not there yet.

We have some, consensus on some matters, but there's many items to this complicated issue that we have not resolved.

However, we did com to an agreement that we needed to do something in this session, if possible.

And so one of the bills is going to be dropped today as a consensus between all these parties.

That's going to, take this.

The county is based on population.

That's based on a ten year, population.

And the bill I'm going to file.

It doesn't change anything on the issue.

Te except for the counting of the population is going to reduce that to every five years.

Then we hope we have a consensus and we can move this through the proces before the end of this session.

The purpose of this is to show good faith to everybody in the stat that we're working on an issue that's controversial, that's difficult, and that we're doing something in good faith to try to, move it forward.

Also this week, the House will take its first action on the Education Trust Fund budget, with only 11 legislative days left in this session.

Time is starting to run short, and lawmakers want to dispense with the budgets as soon as possible.

The total base budget proposed by Governor Kay Ivey is $10.5 billion.

That would be anothe spending record for the state.

Also proposed is $520 million in the supplemental appropriations plan.

That's money from revenue beyond what was anticipated this current fiscal year.

And then there's another 1 billion in the Advancement and Technology Fund, which pays for computer upgrades and other capital projects.

Some items, some items that we will be looking for are the 2% pay raise for teachers that Governor Ivey proposed.

And of course, other education workers are included in that.

How much money will lawmakers allocate toward the Public Education Employee Health Insurance Plan, or Pip, which faces as much as a $300 million shortfall?

And how much money will be allocated to pay for Choose Act recipients?

The House Education Budget Committee is slated to take up the plan on Wednesday.

Alabama Public Television today announced the winners of our 202 APT Young Heroes scholarships.

This is the 25th year of APT Young Heroes Awards.

Nominees must be full tim students in 11th or 12th grade and have demonstrated academi excellence, active participation in their community, and the courage to persevere in the face of adversity.

This year's winners are Caden Bland of Billingsley, Grayson Gay of Cullman and Courtney Pride of the Alabama School for Fine Arts in Birmingham.

These young people will be honored at the Young Heroes Luncheon and Ceremony on April 14th, and we hope to share more of their stories here on Capital Journal.

Congratulations to you all.

We'll take a quick brea and be back with Public Health Officer Doctor Scott Harris.

Stay with us.

Alabama Public Television is your place for quality educational services.

Free professional development for educators and childcare providers with access to free, curriculum aligned videos, lesson plans and instructional resources with PBS Learning Media and all the PBS kids programs, parents know and trust.

Learn something new every da with Alabama Public Television.

Visit us at AP tv.org/education to learn more.

Amelia Boynton Robinson was a leading civil rights activist who played a key role in the efforts that led to passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and was the first African-American woma in Alabama to run for Congress in 1933.

Robinson and Reverend Frederick Reese founded the Dallas County Voters League in 1964.

They invited Martin Luther King, Jr to Selma to help secure the right to vote for African-Americans.

The following year, Robinson helped plan and lead the failed march from Selma to Montgomery that came to be known as Bloody Sunday.

On March 7th, 1965, she and approximately 600 marchers were met by police in Alabama state troopers with tear gas and Billy clubs at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

When the voting Rights Act was signed into law, August 6th, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson invited Robinso to attend as a guest of honor.

In 1990, Robinso received the Martin Luther King Jr Freedom Medal in honor of her life's work for the advancement of human rights.

Getting my hands dirty is the best part of my job.

My name is Hannah Rogers and I am an app mechanic, which is an airframe and powerplant mechanic.

I can work on anything fro general aviation to helicopters.

I was a young mother.

I was 18 when I became pregnant.

I never thought that I could finish school, work and raise my son.

But with the government's assistance with food stamps section, a child care.

All of those programs have helped me achieve this goal.

To where I don't hav to live off assistance anymore.

I was able to graduate debt free by the Pell Grant, the pilot program, and also the scholarship.

I actually had friend tell me about the program, the pilot program.

And so then also spoke with the SST, an instructor at our school, and she told me to contact the cruise center, and I was able to set up an appointmen and fill out their location and all the prereqs for that, with the following program providing for my scholarship to school along with the Pilgrim.

That all gave me opportunities that I wouldn't have been able to reach my goals and be where I am today without these programs.

You don't just have to stay in povert because you was born in poverty.

You can move up in life.

Just because you don't have the money doesn't mean that you can't get there.

There's a lot of opportunities out there.

There's scholarships, there's programs, there's people.

You just have to show that you're willing to do the hard work.

I was determined.

I refused to allow anything to stop me.

Welcome back to Capitol Journal.

Joining me next is Doctor Scott Harris, public health officer for the state of Alabama.

Doc, thanks for coming o the show.

Thanks for having me.

It's good to be here.

Absolutely.

I understand you and your wif welcome a new grandchild here.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Regulation.

Thank you.

And we have a new granddaughter born to our youngest.

Who lives in Birmingham.

And we're, got to visit this week and this weekend.

They were really excited to welcome her.

That's great.

What a what a blessing.

Look, I got a lot I want to talk to you about.

Right at the top of the lis is I saw your column this month about, March being colorectal cancer.

Cancer awareness month.

And I got to tell you, reading through some of these stats, it was pretty alarmin just how dangerous this cancer has become.

Talk about what your message was.

You know, as the public health officer this month, we want people to be aware of colon cancer because it's so preventable.

Colon cancer is unique among cancers in that we have good screening test that you can do regularly and safely and pretty easily.

And you can stop colon cancer in most cases from even happening, and you can stop it years before it would have happened.

And what I'm referring to, of course, are colonoscopies.

Now, they're not fun.

You know, I've I've had had a few in my time.

Nobody enjoys them.

But when you find colon polyps which are, which are non-cancerous lesions and you're doctor removes those, you just don't get colon cancer in most cases.

So you can just about preventive in every case.

Whenever we see a case of colon cancer, many, many times, it represents a failure, to get someone screened appropriately because that cancer could have been eliminated before it ever even occurred.

Well, how do we get that process going?

Look, it's probably about my time.

I'm 42 years old, haven't had a collapse yet so it's probably about my time.

How do I get started?

I go through my primary doc.

What do I star with?

A with a cancer screening.

Yeah.

So?

So talk to your primary care provider, whoever that is.

In most cases, as we recommend screening for colon cancer starting at about age 45, that's actually new.

And that's just changed in the past several months, it's generally been age 50 and up.

But because we are seein some increased numbers of cancer and even younger people, and it's not quite clear why that is, the screening recommendations have now dropped to age 45.

If you, or a person with normal risk without any unusual risk factors and you get a screening done at age 45, then it can be many years, maybe ten years, but 7 to 10 years befor you need to be screened again, depending on what your doctor tells you.

And not everybody even needs a colonoscopy.

There are also, at home tests that you can do to check for blood or abnormal, cancer DNA.

I've seen these advertised.

Right, right.

And they and they are useful for some people.

Again, that's a question for your doctor.

Of course, if you have an abnormal one of those tests, you are going to end up getting a colonoscopy.

That would be the next step.

So so talk to your primary care provider just like you get, tested or screened for any other thing when you go back for routine visits.

Colon cancer screening should be part of what you ordinarily do.

What about some of those risk factors you mentioned?

Because, you know, reading out ther about increased alcohol use and, you know, amongst, I guess you'd say, like my generation, not as healthy of eating habits, none of fibrous diets, fruits, vegetables, that kind of thing.

Talk about some of the risk factors that people need to look out for.

Yeah, there's a lot of, people looking very closely at those risk factors trying to make the determination.

But the best guidance we have suggests that it's really protective.

If you have, lots of fresh fruits and vegetables if you have a high fiber diet, probably, using too much alcohol, probably having, carrying too much weight around, probably also contributes, all of those or risk factors.

And really none of those, should be surprising in a way.

I mean, those are all just normal, healthy advice we would give to anybody for just about anything.

The main other thing to, remind people is, is just be aware if you notice a change of somehow that you might want to talk to your doctor about.

So if you, suddenly have a real abnormal change in your bowel habits, if you see bloo when you use the bathroom, then you know, that would be alarming to most people.

So don't, don't forget to call your primary care provider and talk to them about that.

Absolutely.

Well thanks for reminding us of that.

And and yeah, the James Vanderbeek death, you know, Dawson from Dawson's Creek.

And you talk about that younger generation.

We don't think we're old enough to be a part of this.

But but it's a good reminder.

And as sad as that was a good reminder, this is a very serious disease worth taking seriously.

Yeah.

And you know, colon cancer is about.

But the fourth most common cancer we see in the US, you know, which isn't isn't great.

It's still very common, but it's the second most common cause of cancer death.

Unfortunately, even though it doesn't occur as commonly as some other things, like, for example, prostate cancer, and the reason that more people die disproportionately from colon cancer is just because it doesn't show up until it's too late, because they weren't screened early enough.

Well thank you for for that reminder.

Kind of relatedly, also this month is, National Nutrition Month.

I gues it kind of along the same lines.

We need to be reminded sometimes to eat healthier.

We're getting into the spring.

We need to be exercising more.

Give us a reminder.

Because, look, some of us out there aren't.

They don't always eat the best you know, the most fruits, the most vegetables and things like that I'm thinking of during the legislative session, my diet becomes pretty bad.

But, talk about nutrition and what you're trying to remind people about the importance of nutrition.

Yeah, that's true for all of us.

When we get busy, it's so easy to eat things that aren't, that aren't healthy.

And listen, I have a lot of sympathy for people that are, you know trying to balance a food budget.

You know, healthy food in a lot of cases is actually more expensive than the sort of processed foo factory food that you can buy.

And, you know, any, any store anywhere.

So I certainly understand that sometimes people are just doing the best they can with their, generally speaking, though, in spite of all this new you hear about the food pyramid and how people are restructuring things, the same old advice still applies.

Eat real food as opposed to processed food or manufactured food.

So, fruits, vegetables, you know, healthy proteins, minimize, alcohol, you know, don't use tobacco.

Those are the normal, health things that we all lumped together in diet.

That ought to appl to just about every situation.

The biggest problem that we have in this country, you know, with Americans, is that we eat not just processed foods, but we eat a lot of, high sugar content foods and high fat foods.

And most diet are probably potentially healthy if you don't overeat in terms of calories.

But we have, you know, really big portion sizes in this country.

It's kind of how we grow up.

You know, we're sort of used to cleaning your plate.

You know, people tell you to do that.

And in some cases in Alabama, you know, we're, eating the same kind of meals that people eat 100 years ago when they were working 12 hour outdoors in the sunshine all day and probably needed meals of that size, you know, and for people like me that just sit at a desk all the time, you know, I probably don't need those same sized meals.

It's a good point.

I never thought about it like that.

And of course, when you're growing up, you could eat, you know, three helpings of lasagna.

I mean, it'd be fine.

Next time I got really curious to ask you about this for months.

And that is measles.

Yeah.

We've seen these measles outbreaks here in the state, really all over the country, but especially here in the state that so much the fact that the department has sent advisories out.

What's going on?

Is this I mean, is that what we think?

And that's kids not getting vaccinated?

Yeah, primarily that's what it is.

We've had, a big measles outbreak that's been more or less continuous for over a year now.

The first big outbreak occurred last year, starting in February or so in West Texas and in, eastern New Mexico.

That single outbreak was over a thousand kids.

But then we had other outbreaks that were connected to that and popped u in other parts of the country.

In Ohio in, Oklahoma, in the northeast.

It has sort of continue rocketing along, unfortunately.

And we've had cases i most of the states that surround us, although not, not any in 2026 here in Alabama.

We had a single case last year in Alabama, and it was from an international traveler, which is used to be the only one we ever saw.

But since January 1st, that is this year in 2026, we've had, almost 1300 cases in the United States again, thankfully none that we know of in Alabama, but that's over half the entire number we saw all of last year just in the first two months of the year.

So this is going to be one of the biggest years for measles that I've seen in my lifetime, in my career as an infectious disease specialist.

One again, totally preventable.

I was reading back, I mean, the United States had essentially declared that diseas eradicated back in 2000, right?

So over 25 years ago, and because of these these vaccination skeptics, I suppose now we have to this is somethin we have to worry about.

Again.

Yeah, I it absolutely is something we have to worry about.

So generally speaking, about one out of 1000 kids who gets a measles will die from measles.

But even though most children don't die, somewhere around 10 to 15% of them will end up in the hospital with measles.

And measles is not only the sort of rash and fever illness that you might imagine, but it also causes long term damage to a child's immune system for reason that we don't quite understand.

But even though kids may catch measles and get over measles for many months, they're susceptible to a lot of other types of infections including bacterial infections that cause pneumonia, for example.

And so measles can really, really be a problem for quite a long time.

Yeah.

And, and I was asking you earlier, I don't have much of a frame of mind, frame of reference for measles because just growing up, nobody got it.

I just remembe there was a Brady Bunch episode about measles.

Maybe that was a cautionary tale, but, yeah, we thought this was gone.

Well, when you say vaccine skepticism when I say vaccine skepticism, what are they mainly pointing to?

Is it, you know, cookery out there?

Is it is there is there a case out there that as a doctor, how do you respond to a paren who has read something online?

It says, no I'm really concerned about this.

I think my ki will be better off without it.

Yeah, sure.

It's first of all, it's the right question for parents to ask, right?

Parents ought to be concerned about what their kids get or don't get.

They ought to be involved in those decisions.

So we completely respect that.

I will say of all the vaccine skepticism there is, measles vaccine shouldn't be one of those vaccines were skeptical about the measles vaccine has been around for a long time, since before I was born.

It's known to be safe.

It's known to be effective.

The things that you read about autism have been disproven completely is not related to that.

And so the measles vaccine shouldn't be one that the parents are concerned about.

But, you know, don't take my word for it.

You know, you should talk to your primary care provider, talk to your child's doctor or nurse practitioner or pediatrician, ask them what's right for your child and have them explain that.

I don't think most people in Alabama or what you would call anti-vaxxers.

I don't think they're kooky o believe in a lot of crazy stuff.

I think they're just confused because they see a lot of conflicting information.

And, you know, we all get our informatio in our own information bubbles.

You know, we go back to the sam places to get our information.

And depending on where you get it, you can see a lot of information that doesn't agree with other places that you might see it.

So, talk to the people tha know you and your family best.

Talk to your child's doctor about it.

Understood.

Before I let you go, you know, it used to be that you came in here.

Even before my time during Covid, but once a week, sometimes more than once a week, to talk to us and shar with our audience about Covid.

Thankfully, those days are over.

But I still want to ask you about it, because I've, I just about every week I hear about somebody, hey, they're out sick, they've got Covid.

So clearly this is still around.

What what should we be thinking about this.

Is this something that's going to be around in the same way that flu is?

This is something that every year you have to look out for i and maybe get treated if you get if you get caught it.

Yeah.

I think so.

I mean, again, you know, six years ago we'd never heard of this disease.

You know, it didn't exist as far as we knew.

So it's hard to predict what it's going to look like, but, yeah, we think it's probably going to always be here.

It certainly has mutated and changed and doesn't represent the same ris to young, healthy people anyway that we thought when it first came out.

But for people with the immune system, issues with older adults, especially, but even with the very youngest, it's still, still can cause really serious illness.

So, again, talk to your doctor about what's right for you.

You know, nobody wants to hear about Covid vaccines.

But for many people, they're a really good idea.

And your doctor can help you make that decision.

Well, I'll be your poster child for flu vaccine because I forgot to get my flu shot this last year.

And I got sic pretty bad like over Christmas.

So I'll be your poster poster boy for tha because I really regretted it.

But that's a good reminder.

Yeah.

And flu is still with us.

There have been about 90, deaths of childre in this country this flu season.

Most of whom were unvaccinated.

We were investigating three of them in Alabama.

But about 90 around the country.

So flu still out there.

Still a big problem.

Awful.

Well, doc, thanks so much for your time.

Hope to have you back on soon.

Hey, look forward to it.

Thanks.

Time.

All right.

We'll be right back.

Since 1997, Alabam Public Television has provided programs, services, and resources to childcare professionals, teachers and parents.

Visit AP tv.org/education to learn more.

The 375,000 acres that make up the three Ranger districts of Talladega National Forest were purchased by the federal government in 1936 as part of an effor to restore clearcut timberlands and farmlands no longer capable of producing crops.

The beautiful reserve includes the 102 mile, pin holding National Trail System and Alabama's highest and second highest points Mount Chia and Duggar Mountain.

My son's name is Nathan.

Nathan is a welder.

He enjoys it.

Loves it.

So my plan is that he would graduate from private high schoo and go on to Auburn University, which is where everyon on his dad's side of the family goes to college.

It was very obvious now tha I have the ability to step back.

He does much better hands on learning.

Nathan had taken a tour at a local career technical school and was very interested in the welding program.

My initial reactio about a career technical school was probably the farthest from the truth.

You know, I was projecting my thoughts onto him and my expectations onto him, and it really took a lot of mom maturity to step back and just step up and be there for him.

After high school, Nathan found a welding job very quickly.

I would say within three weeks of graduation, he was working for a local contractor.

I remember having a conversation with my own mother and she said, is there really any money in welding?

What exactly do welders do?

So as an 18 year old, he's making $47 an hour, right?

So I thought I was raising a CEO.

And as it turned out, I was raising a welder.

Who knew?

Nathan knew?

You can watch past episodes of Capital Journal online any time at Alabama Public Television's website.

aptv.. org.

Click on the online video tab on the main page.

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That's our show for tonight.

Thanks for watching.

We'll be back tomorrow night at our normal time.

With more coverage of the Alabama Legislature here on for our Capital Journal team.

I'm Todd Stacy.

We'll see you next time.