KVPR News Podcast

Since 1938, employers in California have been able to apply for a certificate that allows them to pay employees with disabilities less than minimum wage - in some cases as little as $2 an hour. Some say the program, called 14(c), creates opportunities for people who otherwise could not find employment. Others say it is exploitative, and a state bill has been introduced to end the practice. To learn more, Valley Edition host Kathleen Schock spoke with Wesley Witherspoon, chair of the State

California’s 2020 wildfire season was indisputably historic: Fires burned a record-high 4.3 million acres in the state, and five of the blazes went down among the 10 largest in our recorded history. Many were touched off by widespread lightning sieges, which hadn’t occurred at such a high rate since 2008. Likewise, this confluence of events led to unusually high levels of acrid smoke blowing into the Valley, at times from all directions. Throughout the region, the air quality index (AQI) in

Pete Oliver likes to say that his small green Army jeep is older than he is, and he’s 76. But it still runs well after a few starts, and he uses it to drive around his small farm west of downtown Fresno. On this day, he takes the jeep out to where his watermelons are fading in the heat. “See that little light area in the middle of the melons there,” he says pointing to white spots on the leaves that have been baked by the sun. Oliver has farmed for most of his life. His parents bought a farm in

In 2020, the Creek Fire and other blazes throughout California billowed so much smoke into the San Joaquin Valley that, at times, the sky turned brown and ashes accumulated on cars and sidewalks like snowflakes. We know long-term air pollution is bad for our health, but what can we expect from these short-term bursts of wildfire smoke? In this interview, FM89’s Kerry Klein sat down with Kevin Hamilton, executive director of the Central California Asthma Collaborative, to discuss the air quality

When the one working well serving the unincorporated community of Teviston in Tulare County stopped working last month, the roughly 1,000 people who live there were left without running water in the middle of a drought. As the community waits for bureaucracy to clear the way for the well to be repaired, State Senator Melissa Hurtado has been pushing for a legislative fix to the Valley’s water infrastructure. Valley Edition Host Kathleen Schock spoke with her about the status of the bill she

Vaccine rollout is proving far more challenging in rural communities, creating what are called vaccine deserts. And according to the Documenting COVID-19 project, a national effort to make pandemic related data more transparent, vaccine deserts are springing up across the San Joaquin Valley, causing concern among public health professionals. Valley Edition Host Kathleen Schock spoke with the project’s lead, Derek Kravitz, who works at Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation.

Last year, 30 patients died at Coalinga State Hospital, a psychiatric facility in western Fresno County. That's more than 2 percent of the population--a death rate that's almost twice the average of California’s entire state hospital system, and almost seven times higher than the rate within the state prison system. Recently, we investigated why, and whether any of those deaths could have been prevented . In this interview, reporter Kerry Klein pulls back the curtain on how she investigated this

Earlier this year, Jeff Gambord realized he couldn’t remember the last time he had a physical exam. So he requested his medical record from Coalinga State Hospital, the psychiatric facility where he’s been a patient since 2006. Gambord learned it’d been more than a year, and he was curious if this was common—so he encouraged others to request their records, too. “When we went back and looked up a couple other patients on this unit, some go back as far as two or three years as not having received

In the 1950s, a new style of country music, influenced by rock-n-roll, emerged from Bakersfield’s honky-tonk bars. Pioneered by music legends like Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, the Bakersfield Sound became one of country music’s most influential sub-genres. And now it is being celebrated with an exhibit that runs through the end of August at the Bakersfield Museum of Art. To find out more, Valley Edition Host Kathleen Schock spoke with the museum’s curator of collections and exhibits, Rachel

On July 4th, 1776, the United States declared its independence from Britain, a monumental move that many at the time thought was a bad idea. The new book, “Resisting Independence” by Fresno State history professor Brad Jones, explores the reasons why British loyalism deepened for some following the War of Independence. Jones spoke with Valley Edition Host Kathleen Schock about the popularity of loyalism in the revolutionary British Atlantic.