^{Black mold has spread through a school in Sleetmute, Alaska. Photos by Emily Schwing, KYUK}

Nearly two dozen children in the tiny village of Sleetmute, Alaska, arrive for school each morning to a small brown building that is on the verge of collapse.

Every year for the past 19 years, the local school district has asked the state for money to help repair a leaky roof. But again and again, the state said no.

ProPublica Local Reporting Network partner Emily Schwing at KYUK has investigated the increasingly dire conditions at Sleetmute and other schools in rural Alaska, finding extensive black mold, broken pipes, bat infestations and crumbling foundations. Many of these structural issues developed after Alaska’s Legislature spent years denying funding for smaller fixes. 

Among her findings:

"If everything is confidential, there’s no way to really be able to trust what comes out of it."

— Elizabeth Dawes, director of maternal and reproductive health at the Century Foundation, a public-policy nonprofit, reacts to Georgia’s refusal to name the current members of the state’s recently relaunched maternal mortality review committee.

Georgia dismissed all 32 of the committee's members last year after ProPublica obtained internal reports in which the committee detailed the “preventable” deaths of two women who were unable to obtain legal abortions or timely care after the state banned abortion. The state says releasing the identities of the committee’s members would violate the law.

All 50 states, as well as other localities, have maternal mortality review committees. They examine the deaths of pregnant women and new mothers to identify gaps in care and provide recommendations to improve treatment. Recently, some states have come under fire for allegedly politicizing the work of these committees.