News and Features

House that meth broke

The young family expected a fixer-upper when they moved moved into a foreclosed house. But work stopped when they began suffering from nose bleeds and headaches. A neighbor told them "you bought the meth house, huh?"

With no legal recourse and no warning, the Hankins family found themselves trapped with a house they couldn't call home.

Councilman quits

A first-term city council member and one-time hopeful for the Oregon House of Representatives resigned amid allegations that he sexually abused a young relative.

Greg Taylor was supsended from his job as a community college instructor. He wrote to his family to tell them he was "seeking ministers."

Opting out

When the mother of a fifth-grader petitioned the Eugene School District to remove her child from state-required tests in 2013, she was among just a handful of parents objecting to hours of annual exams.

By the spring of 2017, fewer than two-thirds of the 380 students at Edison Elementary School were taking the tests in math, reading and writing. Across the district, test participation is under a required 95 percent while some parents and teachers reject state testing as a waste of time.