After 15 years working in western oil patches, Antonio Magana finally struck out on his own, starting a small oil and gas well servicing company.

Then the pandemic hit.

Demand tanked and production ground nearly to a halt here in Wyoming's Jonah Field. Magana and his skeleton staff are down to working just three days a week.

"Right now, not much going on, you know, we've been working little hours," Magana says. "A lot of people lost their jobs a month ago, a lot of people."

When Darieli got to the U.S. three years ago, she had to grow up fast. The 19-year-old immigrant lives in Virginia, where she's going to high school and works a part-time job, while also helping to raise her three younger sisters.

That's because their mother was deported to Honduras in 2018, after the girls were separated from her by U.S. immigration officials. So if her sisters need advice they can't talk to their father about, Darieli says they turn to her.

Poetry can help us become more human. We saw it on display as 22-year-old inaugural poet Amanda Gorman read her stirring poem "The Hill We Climb" last week. It felt joyous and truthful, necessary and hopeful, and there was power in both her and her words.

Late last month, before President Biden took office and proposed his new pandemic relief plan, Congress passed a nearly 5,600-page legislative package that provided some pandemic relief along with its more general allocations to fund the government in 2021.

While the pandemic funding got most of the attention, some even bigger changes for health care were buried in the other parts of that huge December package of laws.

District 87 could remove Columbus Day from its school calendar, in a symbolic gesture to demonstrate its opposition to the state’s legal holiday.  

On Wednesday, the board heard the proposal that calls for the 2021-22 school calendar to stop labeling the second Monday in October as “Columbus Day--No School.” Instead, that day simply would be grouped as one of 19 “non-attendance” days on the calendar.

The board is expected to vote on the change at its Feb. 10 meeting.

The following is a commentary from Dr. Robert Smith, Dean of the College of Public Affairs and Administration at the University of Illinois Springfield.  

A Chillicothe man was found dead at Hamm's Holiday Harbor near the Illinois River.

Kent Hamm, 57, was last seen Jan. 20 at the Shell gas station on N. Knox in Chillicothe.

Peoria County Sheriff's Deputies found Hamm dead on his property in the 17000 block of N. Holiday Harbor Dr. this afternoon.