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Wyden meets with Phoenix High School students who get tough on topics

A man on the right stands behind a podium holding a microphone and looks to a woman with long brown hair with her back to the camera on the left.
Roman Battaglia
/
JPR News
Oregon Senator Ron Wyden responding to a Phoenix High School student's question at a town hall Thursday, October 24, 2024.

Oregon Senator Ron Wyden met with high school students in Phoenix Thursday to take their hard-pressing questions on the environment, education and more.

Wyden was originally scheduled to hold a public town hall at Phoenix High School. But leaflets were found promising a disruption, which shut down the event to the public.

Students still got their chance to ask Oregon's senior senator some questions, including Tanner Schuh, who asked about homelessness and the opioid crisis.

“They're having to pay all these fines to the government," Schuh said. "I don't think that's helping perchance. But I think that there's a lot that could help, like mental health and stuff.”

Schuh says he didn’t think Wyden’s answer really touched on the issue of homelessness, instead talking about a bill that would curb the shipment of fentanyl into the U.S.

"There's been a law in the past that allows for small packages to come into the United States without a lot of checking and oversight and stuff like that," said Wyden. "And now these drug cartels and criminals are using it to flood Oregon — and particularly the West Coast — with fentanyl."

Wyden also addressed school funding, including an effort to reauthorize a bill that stabilized federal funding for rural schools in Oregon.

"We're trying some new approaches that are going to allow us to kind of grow some interest, extra money on how we do it," Wyden said. "But if we didn't have that $4 billion in the law that I wrote, we'd have school about three days a week in a lot of rural Oregon."

Wyden is talking about the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act, which passed back in 2000. That funding program has been reauthorized a number of times, and will expire if it isn't reauthorized this fiscal year. Currently, a bill to extend the program has been sitting on the senate floor since April.

Roman Battaglia is a regional reporter for Jefferson Public Radio. After graduating from Oregon State University, Roman came to JPR as part of the Charles Snowden Program for Excellence in Journalism in 2019. He then joined Delaware Public Media as a Report For America fellow before returning to the JPR newsroom.