InvestigateWest

Children in Oregon’s rural counties are more likely to spend at least one day in the foster care system than those living in urban areas, according to an InvestigateWest analysis of public data from the state’s child welfare agency. Since at least 2020, rural counties have consistently accounted for the highest rates of foster care involvement in Oregon, with some southeastern communities seeing rates three times higher than Multnomah County, the state’s most populous county.

Citing state law, the Edmonds school board on Tuesday voted to keep former Meadowdale Elementary School principal Dan Davis on the payroll through at least June 2027, despite community pressure to fire him and other administrators for their handling of a former special education teacher’s alleged sexual misconduct. In August 2025, a girl reported to police that she had been raped two years earlier by her former special education teacher, David Sibley.

In May, a southwestern Idaho probation officer emailed immigration authorities about a man she would meet the next day for his regular check-in. “His meeting has not changed and he is expected to be here tomorrow morning at 7:30 am,” Norma Naranjo, a senior probation officer for Canyon County’s misdemeanor probation department, wrote in a May 13 email to six Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

A federal judge dismissed an Idaho nonprofit’s lawsuit claiming that a state agency violated the First Amendment by revoking funding in retaliation for speaking to reporters. The Idaho Anti-Trafficking Coalition’s October 2024 lawsuit centers on then-Executive Director Jennifer Zielinski’s communication with InvestigateWest journalists regarding another nonprofit called Community Outreach Behavioral Services, or COBS.

In 2021, Washington lawmakers expanded the state's power to strip cops of their certification. In an effort to keep officers fired for certain types of misconduct out of law enforcement, they passed a law requiring police agencies across the state to quickly report officer separations and misconduct to the state’s Criminal Justice Training Commission and strengthened the agency’s ability to investigate and revoke certifications.

On July 31, as she waited for an Oregon judge to decide her prison sentence for the death of her baby, Deborah Albin opened up for the first time in court about her partner’s violence. She told the Benton County judge that she had been choked and threatened by her daughter’s father, including one night when she fled and hid from him in a ditch with mud and blood on her body.

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Before she was incarcerated in Oregon, Angela Kim had grown accustomed to not being in charge of her own life. Her husband of 15 years controlled the money, when she went to sleep and woke up, even how much toilet paper she was allowed to use. He enforced the rules through beatings, choking, locking her in the closet, and threatening to take their children.

Washington’s K-12 education oversight agency is proposing a series of policy changes to improve the state’s handling of teacher misconduct allegations. In a letter sent to the state’s Professional Educator Standards Board on July 13, Chris Reykdal, the superintendent of the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, wrote that current policies limit the ability of his agency to provide adequate oversight of K-12 school districts across the state.

Shortly after Kalispel Tribal Police Detective Phineas Haglin arrested a woman at the Northern Quest Resort and Casino outside Spokane, Washington, he found a hotel security guard and asked if video surveillance captured the encounter. The guard said no, mistakenly. Haglin, believing there was no video, then gave a false account in his sworn statement, investigators found.