News from rural America.

Montanans may vote on a ballot initiative this November adding abortion protections to the state constitution, an Indiana school district is heralded for its gold-standard multilingual education program and folks in Alaska's coastal communities are cutting carbon and saving money.

TRANSCRIPT

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For the Daily Yonder and Public News Service, this is the news from rural America.

Montana activists are gathering signatures to let voters decide this fall if the right to abortion belongs in the state constitution.

Kalispell native Lillian Thomas is a volunteer with Montana and supporting reproductive rights.

Having made that decision at the age of 16 for myself and get that healthcare, I can't imagine being in a position of not being able to make that decision.

Professor Nicholas Jacobs with Maine's Colby College says rural voters are not the hyper conservatives most people think.

Polls show rural majorities in 10 battleground states, including Montana, think abortion should be between a woman and her doctor, not the government.

Far from the radical enraged extremists that they're often portrayed to be rural Americans that's rarely within the mainstream of American politics on a whole bunch of issues.

To get abortion access on the November ballot, organizers need 60,000 signatures by June 21st.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, residents of six states have voted in favor of access to reproductive healthcare, including abortion.

The federal government requires that all students who don't speak native English get specialized instruction, but in rural schools, less than two thirds do.

Olivia Weeks reports on one small Indiana town's gold standard multilingual education program.

At Southwest Du Bois County schools, one group of elementary students learns to read and write in two languages.

Rosina Sandoval with the district says half are native English speakers and half speak Spanish.

They spend their day all together, half of the day in English and half of the day in Spanish, so they are learning from peers and from teachers their language.

She says 50/50 instruction is the most effective method for English and Spanish speaking students alike.

We want the best for our kids, so the best we can do is to educate the community on this is the best method to develop multilingualism.

I'm Olivia Weeks.

In Southeast Alaska, locals are working to reduce the amount of carbon being emitted in coastal communities.

Alaska Heat Smart and other nonprofits help install home heat pumps to replace smoky fuels, saving families hundreds on their heating bills and eliminating air pollution and carbon emissions.

Executive Director Andy Romanoff says heat pumps are clean, fish friendly and powered by cheap hydroelectricity from mountain waterways.

If we can convert that rain energy into heat energy and have that in our homes, it's a total no brainer.

Romanoff says residents can qualify for a free heat pump, an environmentally friendly tool that is faster and more reliable than other carbon offset methods.

For the Daily Yonder and Public News Service, I'm Roz Brown.

For more rural stories, visit dailyyonder.com.