case study on school dropout

• Corpus ID: 53711001

A case study into the causes of school dropout

• Published 2010

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Exploring the underlying factors of dropping out at secondary-level schools in khulna, bangladesh, an exploratory study of factors affecting school dropouts of pune district, factors contributing to students’ dropout in laya central school in bhutan, what it takes to keep children in school: a research review, psychological and social roots of academic exhaustion of high school students in hormozgan province: developing a model of the education sustainability.

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• Indian J Psychol Med
• v.34(4); Oct-Dec 2012

School Dropouts: Examining the Space of Reasons

Arun n. r. kishore.

Consultant Psychiatrist, Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, Sussex, United Kingdom

K. S. Shaji

1 Department of Psychiatry, Medical College, Thrissur, Kerala, India

Background:

Dropping out of school is a worldwide phenomenon with drastic mental health consequences for children, families and society.

Aim and Materials & Methods:

This study examines school dropouts in one district in Kerala with an emphasis on looking at multiple reasons for the problem.

The most common “reason” was various Physical disorders (80, 21.8%) followed by Mental Retardation (77, 20.9%). Child labour (Employment) came last (30, 8.1%) as a “reason” while financial issues constituted 50 (13.6%). Family issues accounted for 63 (17.1%) and School-related issues 68 (18.5%).

Conclusion:

This study highlights the need to examine a space of reasons for this phenomenon with active involvement and coordination of multiple agencies to examine and support getting children back to school and prevent dropouts.

INTRODUCTION

Every year, a large number of students drop out of school worldwide. A significant number of them go on to become unemployed, living in poverty, receiving public assistance, in prison, unhealthy, divorced, and single parents of children who are likely to repeat the cycle themselves.[ 1 , 2 ]

In 1993, 27 million children entered school in Class 1 in India but only 10 million (37%) of them reached Class 10 in 2003. Dropout rates peak in the transition between Class 1 and 2 and again in Classes 8, 9 and 10. Dropout rates have remained negative between Classes 4 and 5. The state of Pondicherry improved its performance with regards to school dropouts from the fourth place in 1991 to the first in 2001, displacing Kerala as the best performing state. The states of Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, and Arunachal Pradesh perform poorly in this ranking.

Government data indicate improvement in the rates of school enrolment. However, there may be problems in looking at enrolment data without attention to attendance and retention rates. Thus, the actual rates of dropout from schools may be much higher than those depicted.[ 3 ]

School dropouts in Kerala

Kerala has the unique distinction of having few school dropouts. Educational standards are reported to be high within the state. Several reasons have been quoted for Kerala's high educational achievement. Historically, social movements against the caste system, the pioneering efforts made by Christian missionaries and the educational focus of the princely states served to set a good base for education. Later, investment on education, provision of free education supported by the state, access to schools, female literacy and education, good transport facilities and remittances from abroad have added to these factors.[ 4 ]

Kerala-rates of school dropout in different classes

This graph [ Figure 1 ], based on data from the annual economic report brought out by the Government of Kerala on school dropouts,[ 5 ] shows that trends have remained the same through the years 2005 to 2009 with the overall rate remaining fairly constant. The rate in Lower Primary has hovered between 0.42% and 0.6%, Upper Primary from 0.4% to 0.52% and High School from 1.2% to 1.4%. Of late, there has been growing interest in studying and tackling the problem of school dropouts by governments.[ 6 ] There is paucity of recent published research in this area from India.

Kerala – rates of school dropout in different classes

Lack of interest in studies, poverty, poor quality of education and failure in examinations have been frequently cited as explanations for dropping out of school.[ 7 ] Child developmental factors are thought to play a role in mediating the link between dropout from school, poor scholastic performance, and poverty.[ 8 ]

Dropping out of school is a good example of an issue where a biopsychosocial perspective could be useful; where there is a confluence of biological (various neurodevelopmental issues), psychological (cognitive issues and issues connected to intelligence and learning), and social (issues of poverty, social opportunities, health provisions) factors that come into play.[ 9 , 10 ] Unfortunately, health systems have not taken this into account and have not formed partnerships with social services or Government departments.[ 2 ] School dropouts should be seen as a public health issue. There is a need for partnerships between the sectors of mental health, education, and public health to address this complex issue. This paper emphasises this by looking at the problem through different lenses.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

This study was done in Thrissur District, Kerala, as part of a programme titled “Total Primary Education” conducted by the District Administration. The aim was to identify all children who had been enrolled in government schools but failed to attend class over the past year to identify reasons for their dropout and attempt remediation. There was collaborative effort from the departments of education, revenue, health, police and a medical team. Psychiatrists from the Department of Psychiatry, Medical College Thrissur and Special educators from the NGO, ALDI (Association for Learning Disabilities, India) formed the “Medical Team.”

Stage 1: Children who had failed to attend class in the past year were identified by school teachers and Block Education units. Children above the age of 14 years were screened out, since they did not fall under the remit of the programme. Rigorous efforts were made to contact parents of those below the age of 14 years. Teachers and the parents identified a predominant “reason” for dropout (see diagram below). These “reasons” were identified from review of literature examining factors correlated with school dropout.

Stage 2: 368 children attended camps held in various panchayaths in the district with their parents or care takers. The medical team assessed children using a proforma to gather information focusing on developmental issues and assigned a diagnosis if relevant. This sometimes resulted in a reassignment of the “reason” for dropout if a medical or psychiatric disorder had been missed in the first screening by teachers. Psychosocial issues were examined in detail with the assistance of social workers.

A management and follow-up plan was outlined following discussions between the various departments. The outcome of the interventions was followed up by local Block Educational Officers.

Stage 3: Children assigned to the categories of “Physical problems,” “Mental Retardation,” “School issues,” and “Family issues” were referred to the outpatient department at the Medical College. 52 attended and were assessed and investigated in different departments within the medical college. Qualitative data were gathered from them. The flow chart for the study is given below [ Figure 2 ].

Flowchart of the study

Of the 781 school dropouts, 159 (20%) were above the age of 14 years and hence excluded from the programme. 253 (33%) children could not be traced. The rest 368 (47%) were seen in the camps in Stage 2. Of these, 246 were boys and 122 girls.

Age at dropout

The maximum number of dropouts occur between the ages of 12 and 14 years [ Figure 3 ] which is well in keeping with State and National data (Kerala State Planning Board 2005-09, NCERT 2005).

Reasons for dropout stage 2

The reasons correlated with dropouts are depicted in Figure 4 . It was difficult to categorise children under one “reason” as we often found multiple “reasons” operating at the same time. “Financial” reasons often played a role in most cases and there was overlap between “School issues” and “Family Issues.” In such cases the predominant “reason” was decided by the team and the child was then classified under that. This was done during Stage 2 when the Medical team assessed the children.

Reasons for drop out at Stage 2

The most common “reason” was various Physical disorders (80, 21.8%) followed by Mental Retardation (77, 20.9%). Child labour (Employment) came last (30, 8.1%) as a “reason” while financial issues constituted (50, 13.6%). Family issues accounted for 63 (17.1%) and School related issues 68 (18.5%).

Physical disorders leading to dropout

Several children had one form of physical disorder or another, often severe enough to prevent them from attending school [ Figure 5 ]. Disability due to cerebral palsy and post polio paralysis were the reasons in 33%. Some, who used a tricycle to get to school stopped attending when this broke down.

About 12% were mentally retarded and had physical mobility problems in addition. They had been placed in the Physical disability category in Stage 1 and were reassigned to the category of Mental Retardation in Stage 2. 21% of the children were deaf and attended special school. 10% of students were blind; some attended special schools.

Children with severe, some congenital, cardiac problems were kept at home on the recommendation of their doctors. One child who had diabetes attended the local primary care clinic for insulin injections twice a day and missed school.

4% had severe skin lesions (psoriasis), considered as contagious by the family and teachers and hence missed school.

Lack of money for treatment, poor parental literacy, and a general lack of alternatives could be cited as adding on to this “reason” for dropout.

Mental Retardation: Most had moderate or severe mental retardation with additional problems such as cardiac disorders and epilepsy. A few among these children had severe behavioural problems often repetitive behaviours such as rocking, head banging, and aggression.

Family issues

There were several strands in the narrative around family issues and dropout from school [ Figure 6 ]. Parental separation and ill heath often led to the need for girl children to work or stay back at home to care for younger siblings. Older boys dropped out to find work. Children who were orphans found foster homes with relatives. However, these were often short lived with the children being moved from home to home. Education was the loser in these cases. Alcohol abuse, dependency, and illicit brewing of alcohol by the parents were issues in some. The outcome was family bickering, quarrels, and the development of problems in children. A few children were from families who led a nomadic existence, moving from place to place seeking employment resulting in the child moving from school to school.

Issues related to school

Some families pointed out issues such as an inability to buy textbooks and a lack of transport to attend school. Several had failed a class and dropped out of school in subsequently. Some were moved to a different school and later stopped attending. There was reason to suspect academic backwardness in most of these children. All of them were given an opportunity to attend the outpatient department of the medical college for a more detailed evaluation. 14 attended and 9 of them were thought to have Specific Developmental disorders of Scholastic skills. This could not be confirmed since all of them had poor opportunities for schooling and a general deprivation making the diagnosis uncertain.

This constituted the largest group amongst reasons given for dropout at Stage 1 of screening. In Stage 2, financial issues fell to the fifth place (13.6%) as a reason for school dropout. This occurred because another, more proximal and predominant, “reason” was found for the dropout. However, it must be stated that financial issues remained significant in most cases of dropout.

This remained a significant reason for dropout accounting for 17% of the cohort. The problem was commoner in older males (girls accounted for less than 20%). Dropout occurred at a later age as compared to other groups.

Change in “reasons for dropout”

In Stage 2 of the programme, children were assessed by the Medical team. As a result, 51 (13.9%) children were reassigned other “reasons” [ Figure 7 ].

Reassignment of “reasons” for dropping out

The darker line (Stage 1) in Figure 7 shows “reasons” assigned in the first stage of the programme and the lighter grey line (Stage 2) shows reassigned “reasons” after assessment by the Medical team. The net “losers” were Financial (−36%), Family (−3%), and Physical (−5%) while the net “gainers” were Mental Retardation (+31%), Employment (+25%), and School (+17%).

A total of 341 children were readmitted to school [ Figure 8 ]. Children who were diagnosed with Mental Retardation were given a choice of admission to a special school or a local government school. The decision was based on the degree of retardation, presence of behavioural problems, and accompanying physical disability.

Children with predominant physical problems were directed to the relevant departments at the Government Medical College, Thrissur. Those with mobility issues were given assistance by the social services department.

Those who were employed were screened and readmitted to school.[ 5 , 11 , 12 ] Cases were registered against the employers under the CLP Act. Those with Financial problems were given assistance as well as advice, as deemed appropriate, by the Revenue officials. Children with problems at school and those with family-related issues were referred for further assessment to the Department of Psychiatry at the Government Medical College, Thrissur.

This study formed a part of a social programme aimed at returning children back to school by helping remediate what was perceived as the predominant reason for dropout. There was a great degree of overlap between parents' and teachers' perception on “reasons” at Stage 1. In Stage 2, 51 (13.9%) had a reassignment of these “reasons.” It would be important to unpick this. Of these 51, 25% were in employment, a fact that had been hidden from teachers at stage 1. Most parents feared reprisal and action by law enforcement agencies. Some were ashamed to admit that their children were working to supplement family income.

31% were diagnosed with Mental Retardation in the mild category in Stage 2. This had not been recognized by teachers or parents. 17% with school-related issues were children who were suspected to have some form of learning difficulty. Children in these two groups reported recurrent failures in examination though they were not retained in a class. This led to truancy and finally a refusal to go to school. Some of these children had been reenrolled in schools for mentally retarded children later. A small number of children who were in the mild category dropped out due to an inability to cope with the curriculum in mainstream schools.

Various developmental disorders have been implicated as a reason for dropout from school.[ 3 , 8 ] In the NFHS III survey (IIPS 2007),[ 13 ] “lack of interest” was cited as the most common reason for dropping out of school (36% boys and 21% girls). In an earlier NSSO survey (1998), 24.4% of respondents gave this as a reason for dropping out of school.[ 12 , 14 ] In this study, we had combined the two “reasons”—“problems at school” and “lack of motivation” of which the latter is similar to “lack of interest.” This study has shown that lack of motivation is determined by complex dynamics beyond sociodemographic factors. The role of poor academic achievement related to learning difficulties, poor physical health, exclusion due to perceived “slowness in learning,” and nutrition would need to be elucidated further.[ 15 – 17 ] The PROBE[ 18 ] survey suggests that if a child is unwilling to go to school, it is often difficult for the parents to overcome her reluctance (just as it is hard for a child to attend school against his parents' wishes). The fact that school participation is contingent on the motivation of the child is another reason why various aspects of “school quality” are likely to matter.

Physical disorders of various types accounted for the largest amongst the “reasons” for dropout and this calls for action from health departments and social service agencies. A third of children, though capable of attending, could not because of mobility issues. Children with specific disabilities of vision or hearing benefitted from special schools.

The link between child labour and dropout from school has been studied from different perspectives. It is thought that children drop out of school due to a need to supplement family income through work.[ 19 ] In Kerala, children prefer less arduous work and choose ones they believe will get them some skills such as diamond polishing or gold smithy.[ 20 ] Thus, this “reason” for dropout is more complex than a direct connection between child labour and school dropout. Basu and Van argue that the issue of poverty and child labour needs to be disaggregated. Otherwise, poverty alleviation alone would be seen as a solution. Lack of finances combined with a lack of access to credit when faced with a need to buy books, uniforms, and pay school fees could lead to dropout from school. This in turn could lead to child labour. On the other hand, once a child drops out of school, poor parental motivation combined with lack of perception of the benefits of accruing literacy and numeracy, could lead to child labour. These findings imply that easier access to credit could help reduce child labour and improve school attendance.[ 21 ] Dreze and Kingdom[ 22 ] considered parental decision making and the household situation to play an influential role in sustaining school access for the child. When children do not want to attend school, parents find it difficult to make them continue. Often, there is no cost benefit analysis of the benefits of attaining cognitive skills. The best available alternative is often chosen (girl children looking after a younger child, boys earning money through employment).

In this study, financial “reasons” though seen as predominant in 13.6% of children, actually ran as a common factor in most of the other “reasons.”

Issues in families accounted for 17% in this cohort. The narrative around this points to an intimate link between issues in families, financial issues, and child employment, calling for action from health and social sectors.

Thus, one could argue that school dropout is a phenomenon or symptoms which could be explained based on a variety of “reasons,” none of which are watertight compartments. There is relatively little research into determining the reasons why so many children drop out of schools in India. This in turn leads to a tendency to highlight single causes or explanations.[ 3 , 23 – 25 ] In Kerala, attention to pedagogical factors has increased retention of children in schools and it is perhaps time to look at other approaches to reduce dropouts further.

It might be better to think of “proximal mediating risk factors” as associated with school dropouts.[ 8 ] We would advocate that in examining the causes for dropping out of school, a “space of reasons” is examined. In this “space of reasons,” we would include poverty and lack of finances being associated with childhood developmental factors (such as learning difficulties, intellectual disorders, ADHD) and school pedagogical factors (access to school, irrelevant curricula, and poor parental perception of these issues). Thus, one would need to approach the issue from different angles or through many lenses. A multipronged approach would work better.

Source of Support: Nil

Conflict of Interest: None.

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Impact of a school-based water and hygiene intervention on child health and school attendance in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: a cluster-randomised controlled trial

• Sarah Bick 1 ,
• Alem Ezezew 2 ,
• Charles Opondo 3 ,
• Baptiste Leurent 4 ,
• Wossen Argaw 5 ,
• Erin C. Hunter 6 , 7 , 8 ,
• Oliver Cumming 1 ,
• Elizabeth Allen 3 &
• Robert Dreibelbis 1  

BMC Medicine volume  22 , Article number:  348 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

Metrics details

School-based water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) may improve the health and attendance of schoolchildren, particularly post-menarcheal girls, but existing evidence is mixed. We examined the impact of an urban school-based WASH programme (Project WISE) on child health and attendance.

The WISE cluster-randomised trial, conducted in 60 public primary schools in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia over one academic year, enrolled 2–4 randomly selected classes per school (~ 100 pupils) from grades 2 to 8 (aged 7–16) in an ‘open cohort’. Schools were assigned 1:1 by stratified randomisation to receive the intervention during the 2021/2022 or the 2022/2023 academic year (waitlist control). The intervention included improvements to drinking water storage, filtration and access, handwashing stations and behaviour change promotion. Planned sanitation improvements were not realised. At four unannounced classroom visits post-intervention (March–June 2022), enumerators recorded primary outcomes of roll-call absence, and pupil-reported respiratory illness and diarrhoea in the past 7 days among pupils present. Analysis was by intention-to-treat.

Of 83 eligible schools, 60 were randomly selected and assigned. In total, 6229 eligible pupils were enrolled (median per school 101.5; IQR 94–112), 5987 enrolled at study initiation (23rd November–22nd December 2021) and the remaining 242 during follow-up. Data were available on roll-call absence for 6166 pupils (99.0%), and pupil-reported illness for 6145 pupils (98.6%). We observed a 16% relative reduction in odds of pupil-reported respiratory illness in the past 7 days during follow-up in intervention vs. control schools (aOR 0.84; 95% CI 0.71–1.00; p  = 0.046). There was no evidence of effect on pupil-reported diarrhoea in the past 7 days (aOR 1.15; 95% CI 0.84–1.59; p  = 0.39) nor roll-call absence (aOR 1.07; 95% 0.83–1.38; p  = 0.59). There was a small increase in menstrual care self-efficacy (aMD 3.32 on 0–100 scale; 95% CI 0.05–6.59), and no evidence of effects on other secondary outcomes.

Conclusions

This large-scale intervention to improve school WASH conditions city-wide had a borderline impact on pupil-reported respiratory illness but no effect on diarrhoeal disease nor pupil absence. Future research should establish relationships between WASH-related illness, absence and other educational outcomes.

Trial registration

ClinicalTrials.gov, number NCT05024890.

Peer Review reports

School-aged children in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are particularly susceptible to water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH)-related morbidities including gastrointestinal [ 1 ] and respiratory infections [ 2 ], often due to frequent social mixing [ 3 ]. In low-resource settings, these health risks are particularly associated with absence from school, lower test scores and dropout [ 4 , 5 ], with implications on downstream social, occupational and health outcomes [ 6 ]. WASH interventions in schools are often expected to have gendered impacts: while reasons for absence and dropout are varied [ 5 ], inadequate WASH conditions in schools may present barriers to attendance, including through lack of hygienic menstrual materials, disposal facilities and privacy leaving girls with limited options for menstrual hygiene management (MHM), and impacting educational progression [ 7 ]. Pupils’ academic performance may also be affected by dehydration where there is inadequate water supply [ 8 ].

Although WASH in schools interventions have been hypothesised to improve children’s health and attendance outcomes, evidence of their impact has been mixed. A systematic review of varied WASH in schools intervention studies in low-income countries, including provision of water for drinking and handwashing, water quality, sanitation, and hygiene promotion [ 9 ], found significant reductions in pupil-reported diarrhoeal disease between 29 and 50%, and reduced incidence of respiratory illness. Other studies, however, found no significant impacts or saw positive impacts for only select disease outcomes [ 10 , 11 ]. Mixed health effects are observed in other randomised trials in urban settings [ 12 , 13 , 14 ]. Impact on absence is similarly ambiguous: WASH improvements have been shown to reduce absence [ 9 , 15 ], but only one [ 10 ] randomised controlled trial reports significantly lower overall absence rates. Some studies observed specific impacts on girls’ absence alone [ 16 ], or on absence due to diarrhoea [ 17 ].

Access to safe WASH facilities in school environments is included under Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 [ 18 ] as essential in ensuring dignity and equity, and promoting women’s equality and empowerment. To achieve access to safe WASH, interventions must ensure sustained management of water and sanitation services over time [ 11 ], including consistent availability of soap and water for practising handwashing [ 19 ]. Several publications highlight that combined WASH interventions versus single interventions—such as handwashing alone—may be necessary to transform school environments to the extent that the risk of illness and absence is reduced [ 9 ]. However, there is limited robust evidence for the effectiveness of combined interventions delivered at-scale in urban settings.

The aim of this trial was to evaluate the effectiveness of a large-scale urban WASH in schools intervention, including water and sanitation infrastructure, behaviour change promotion and targeted MHM services, in schools in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. ‘Project WISE (WASH in Schools for Everyone)’, implemented by US-based NGO Splash in Addis Ababa public schools, is being delivered to pre-defined groups of schools on an annual basis. We hypothesised that the intervention would improve child health and school attendance, with greater impacts among post-menarcheal girls, and used unannounced attendance checks to avoid bias commonly associated with absence measurement [ 20 ].

Study design

The WISE evaluation was a parallel two-arm school-based cluster-randomised controlled trial, with 60 public primary schools in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia constituting the study clusters. We used a cluster-randomised design because the intervention evaluated was delivered at the school level and comprised changes to the whole school environment. Seventeen additional kindergarten schools were enrolled as part of a sub-study estimating the impact of Project WISE on kindergarten pupils, to be reported in a separate publication.

The trial was conducted over the course of one Ethiopian academic year (November 2021 to July 2022; schools were open from September to July) and followed an ‘open cohort’ design to minimise participant attrition. Between two and four sentinel classrooms of pupils were randomly selected for follow-up during the year, with pupils who joined the class late, left the class, or were absent from the first visit contributing data to analysis. Follow-up consisted of four unannounced visits to sentinel classrooms post-intervention (approximately every 4 weeks), concurrently in intervention and control arms.

Participants

The study population comprised primary school pupils aged 7–16 years attending schools due to receive the WISE intervention in either the 2021/2022 or 2022/2023 academic years. In order to have sufficient pupils in the eligible age range, we excluded schools without pupils in grades 2–8. We also excluded schools that received a WASH intervention in the 3 years prior to study activities and schools that provided education to vulnerable populations only. Sixty schools meeting these criteria were randomly selected for participation.

Within each participating school, between two and four classes were selected from grades 2–8. We obtained enrolment data (number of pupils and classes) for all grades in the school and estimated mean class size for each grade. In order to have sufficient older pupils for age-specific secondary outcome measures, we followed a stratified selection process, selecting one class each from grades 2–5 and grades 6–8, then continued alternating from younger grades and older grades until there were estimated > 100 pupils.

All eligible schools had consented to the receipt of the Project WISE intervention. Once the random allocation had been determined, formal consent for participation in the trial was sought from school principals in loco parentis, on behalf of all pupils in the school. School principals received guidance for communicating to parents, and parental information sheets and opt-out forms were distributed to all pupils in the sentinel classes at least 1 week before pupil enrolment; additional information sheets were provided in case of unexpected variation in class sizes and enrolment of additional pupils throughout the year. Pupils were excluded from data collection if their parent or guardian returned the opt-out form at any point and were required to give oral assent before each data collection activity.

Pupils were included in data collection regardless of age in order to minimise risk of social exclusion in the classroom if particular pupils were excluded, but only pupils aged 7–16 at enrolment were included in the analysis. Some data collection activities were restricted to subgroups of pupils by age and gender.

Randomisation and masking

Randomisation was conducted in July 2021, using a random number generator in Stata version 17.0 (StataCorp, College Station, TX, USA). From the list of 143 schools due to receive the intervention, we excluded ineligible schools (as described above), and then randomly selected 60 schools of 83 eligible schools for participation. Randomisation was stratified by school size (< or ≥ 1200 pupils) and presence of a kindergarten (to facilitate the kindergarten sub-study). Within strata, the schools were randomly ranked, and the first half of the schools assigned to the intervention (implementation during the 2021/2022 academic year). The remaining schools were assigned to the waitlist control arm, to receive the intervention in the 2022/2023 academic year, after study completion. Investigators performing the randomisation had no prior knowledge of any of the study schools. Due to the visible, prominent nature of the intervention, masking of school administrators, participants, or those delivering the intervention was not possible. Outcome assessors were not informed of treatment assignment, but might have inferred it, for example, from the distinctive WASH infrastructure components.

Intervention components

The Project WISE intervention combined infrastructure and behaviour change promotion activities, so that handwashing and drinking exclusively from filtered water become normative behaviours, and girls are able to manage menses at school. Intervention design was informed by the behaviour-centred design approach [ 21 ] to alter behaviour through environmental cues, along with activity-based curricula, and pupil and teacher motivators. The intervention was delivered at the school level, so all children attending school were exposed to the intervention regardless of trial participation.

Infrastructure components included correcting water storage capacity deficits through water storage tanks; water filtration systems for drinking water; and durable plastic drinking water and handwashing stations with specific features differentiating their use and installed with taps to meet sufficient tap-to-pupil ratios. Further details and images (Figs. S1–S5) are provided in Additional File 1. The intervention also includes the provision of new or rehabilitated toilet facilities to meet standards; however, this component is managed by the Addis Ababa Education Bureau on a separate timeline and was not delivered to intervention schools until after the evaluation period.

Splash staff conducted a site engagement meeting with school administration and worked with the school to organise a family ‘soap drive’ and ‘menstrual pad drive’ during school registration, whereby families of pupils are encouraged to donate hygiene products to the school to ensure availability of products throughout the year. Two ‘focal teachers’ per school were trained to promote the WASH programme and organise a 20 to 30-pupil ‘hygiene club’ at each school. The 1-day training for hygiene focal teachers covered safe water and water conservation, handwashing, personal hygiene, sanitation, and hygiene clubs and action planning. Two additional female focal teachers and one male focal teacher were trained to organise a ‘gender club’ focussed on MHM, which took place over 2 days with 20–30 girls and 20–30 boys trained on MHM. The gender club focal teachers were trained in puberty, menstrual health and discussing sensitive topics. Focal teachers then organised a parent-teacher association orientation and delivered information on MHM to parents. School janitors, maintenance staff, and food handlers also received training on hygiene and operation and maintenance of infrastructure.

Splash staff also supported focal teachers in training the hygiene club members to influence their peers through monitoring handwashing during breaks, ensuring soap availability at handwashing stations, delivering hygiene messaging during school announcements, and assisting in planning event days promoting hygiene school-wide. Members held monthly meetings to track progress and bring issues and requests to school leadership. Within the menstrual health programme, all children aged 10 years and older received an education session on puberty and menstruation, including a Q&A session and product demonstration for girls, and a puberty workshop for boys. Peer mentoring of younger girls by older girls took place over four sessions. Menstrual health event days were also organised.

Interventions included behavioural ‘nudges’ [ 22 ] to subtly guide pupils towards the intended behaviours, such as mirrors and posters at handwashing stations, and brightly coloured vests for hygiene club members to wear during handwashing monitoring.

School engagement and training began in November 2021, and all infrastructure components were installed (excluding sanitation infrastructure) and core training modules delivered by January 2022 in all 30 intervention schools. School and pupil enrolment activities took place concurrent with intervention delivery (November to December 2021); therefore, outcomes assessed at enrolment were not included in the primary impact assessment.

Data collection

Between May and July 2021, data collection tools and methods for school and pupil enrolment and routine follow-up surveys were piloted in five randomly selected schools not included in the primary impact evaluation where Splash implemented the WISE intervention in 2020 / 2021. During piloting, in-country data collection partners followed full study procedures outlined below, with one minor variation: follow-up of sentinel classrooms occurred 3 weeks after enrolment and only one round of follow-up occurred. The study pilot was used to assess the logistics of field data collection, verify assumptions made in sample size calculations, and test and adapt MHM scales. Minor adjustments to class selection procedures were made as a result.

Data collection activities were completed in 1 day per school. Following school enrolment and selection of sentinel classes, a team of trained enumerators visited the classrooms and conducted a detailed enrolment survey using tablets, one-to-one with assenting pupils (approximately 15 min), including demographic information and household WASH access, self-reported number of full- and partial-days absent in the past week, causes of absence, and symptoms of infectious disease over the preceding 2 and 7 days. These surveys were used to create a digital roster of pupils in sentinel classes, which was automatically updated as new pupils were enrolled or left the class during the academic year. A pupil identification number was assigned internally to all pupils on the roster to anonymously link their data across surveys.

Between March and June 2022, enumerators conducted four unannounced follow-up visits to sentinel classes in each school. At the first three follow-ups, enumerators took attendance using the digital rosters and conducted a brief survey with each pupil present (< 5 min) collecting data only on self-reported absence, causes of absence, diarrhoea and respiratory illness in the past week. Pupils absent from the initial enrolment survey completed the enrolment survey at the first follow-up visit they were present for, and were retrospectively marked as absent from all previous visits conducted while they had been enrolled at the school. If a pupil was absent from two consecutive follow-ups, enumerators were automatically prompted to ask teachers if the pupil had dropped out of school, and, if they had, to note the date of dropout and reason for dropout if known.

At the final follow-up, attendance was taken and all outcomes were assessed, including wellbeing and menstrual health outcomes. Pupils meeting inclusion criteria for the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire [ 23 ] (aged 11 and above), and the menstrual health measures (post-menarcheal girls aged ten and above) were identified and given their pupil identification number to link their records with these self-completed paper-based questionnaires.

Age or date of birth (if known) and gender were self-reported by pupils at enrolment. At the final follow-up, age and date of birth were double-checked to ensure accuracy and updated. Age at enrolment was calculated based on the updated records.

All outcomes were measured at the individual participant level. The primary health outcomes were pupil-reported diarrhoea (defined as the occurrence of at least three loose stools in a 24-h period) and pupil-reported respiratory illness (defined as the occurrence of cough, sneezing or rhinorrhoea) in the past 7 days. Both were recorded at each follow-up visit as dichotomous variables. The primary absence outcome was roll-call absence, recorded at each follow-up as a dichotomous variable.

Secondary outcomes were pupil-reported absence (number of full days reported absent out of number of days of reporting in the past week); pupil-reported diarrhoea and pupil-reported respiratory illness in the past 2 days; Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ-25) [ 23 ] total difficulties score, a widely used measure of pupil behavioural and mental health challenges designed for use among school-aged children that has been used in a number of Sub-Saharan African countries [ 24 ], measured among children aged 11–16 at final follow-up; Self-efficacy in Addressing Menstrual Needs Scale (SAMNS-26) [ 25 ] total score, a measure of girls’ confidence in addressing their menstrual needs; and Menstrual Practice Needs Scale (MPNS-36) [ 26 ] total score, a measure of how well current menstrual practices are perceived to meet the girls’ needs, with SAMNS-26 and MPNS-36 both measured among post-menarcheal girls aged 10–16 at final follow-up.

Other outcomes were absence due to illness, diarrhoea, and respiratory illness; 7- and 2-day occurrence of earache (negative control for illness outcomes, as earache is not feasibly affected by the intervention); child subjective wellbeing assessed through a smiley faces visual analogue (1–5 scale, with 5 being the best mood possible and 1 the worst); Sanitation-related Quality of Life (SanQoL-5) applying attribute weights from a study in Ethiopia [preprint] [ 27 ]; change in gender parity in school enrolment over the academic year using the adjusted gender parity index [ 28 ]; and SAMNS-26 and MPNS-36 sub-scales.

Statistical analysis

Sample size calculations were based on estimating the mean difference between arms in pupil-level proportions of illness or absence across the follow-ups. Assuming the mean pupil-level proportions of follow-ups reporting diarrhoea in the control group was 0.08 (SD 0.05), a two-sided type I error (α) of 0.05, and intracluster correlation coefficient (ICC) of 0.15 (conservatively; ICC estimates for pupil-reported illness outcomes in our pilot study ranged from 0.07–0.10), we estimated 50 schools (25 per arm) with 100 children per school was sufficient to detect a reduction in the mean proportion of follow-ups with diarrhoea of 0.016 (standardised effect size 0.32). This standardised effect size equates to a reduction in the mean proportion of follow-ups reporting respiratory infection of 0.084 and a reduction of 0.022 in the mean proportion of follow-ups absent as assessed through roll call at each follow-up, based on SD estimates from pilot data. Schools were oversampled to account for cluster attrition; we randomised 60 schools to meet the sample size of 50 schools with 17% attrition.

The statistical analysis plan was pre-registered on 1st March 2023 [ 29 ] before allocation was revealed. Analyses were done by intention-to-treat. Characteristics of the children and schools at enrolment were summarised by the treatment arm. Statistical analyses of the outcomes were conducted at the individual level with mixed effects regression models, using logistic (for pupil-reported illness, roll-call absence and causes of absence outcomes), binomial (pupil-reported absence, i.e. number of days reported absent with offset of number of days of reporting), linear (SDQ-25, SAMNS-26, MPNS-36, SanQoL-5 and gender parity in enrolment), and ordered logistic (subjective wellbeing) regression models as appropriate. We additionally carried out a confirmatory analysis based on the mean proportion of follow-ups with an episode per pupil. Analyses included a random effect for school and analyses based on repeated measures included an additional random effect for pupil-level clustering, and assumed a constant treatment effect across time-points. Primary estimates of effectiveness were calculated using a basic model adjusting for stratification factors alone: school size and presence of kindergarten classes. Further adjustments in secondary analyses were made for school grade and gender, and a fully adjusted model was also adjusted for school location by sub-city, and time-point in analyses of repeated measures. Interaction tests were used to examine the differential effect of the intervention by gender, and across time-points on the three primary outcomes. We examined factors associated with missing outcome data (due to absence) at the final follow-up, and conducted exploratory sensitivity analyses of primary outcomes adjusting for factors associated with missingness. Sensitivity analysis including all pupils enrolled in the sentinel classes regardless of age was also performed. We used Stata version 18.0 (StataCorp, College Station, TX, USA) for all analyses.

This trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, number NCT05024890.

Of the 143 schools due to receive the intervention in 2021/2022 or 2022/2023, 83 were eligible (Fig.  1 ) for the trial. None of the 60 schools that were randomly selected and consented to participation during school enrolment (2nd to 22nd November 2021) withdrew from the study. In total, 6455 pupils were enrolled at any point in the trial, and 6,229 were later determined to be eligible by age. Of those eligible, 5987 were enrolled during pupil enrolment (23rd November to 22nd December 2021) and the remaining 242 were enrolled during follow-up, due to absence at enrolment (231) or joining the class midway through the academic year (11). Eighty-two pupils left classes (dropped out of school) during the study, most commonly due to transferring school or leaving the area. The number of pupils contributing data to outcome assessments is shown for each time-point in Fig.  1 and each analysis table; a detailed summary of observations for each outcome is found in Additional file 2: Table S1. For roll-call attendance, 6166 (99.0%) pupils were registered in the sentinel classes (whether or not they were present) during follow-up, i.e. had not dropped out before the first follow-up. For pupil-reported repeated measures, 6145 (98.6%) were present for at least one follow-up, balanced between study arms.

Trial profile

Of all eligible children enrolled, 52.6% were girls, the mean age was 12.1 years (SD 2.5), few (27%) had at least a basic sanitation service at home, but the majority (63%) reported their household having at least a basic water supply (Table  1 ). Pupils missing at the final follow-up were similar to those present, except earning money for the household was associated with missingness (data not shown). There was a slight difference in school size across arms; other characteristics were balanced. Of the girls aged ten and above at the final follow-up, 48.5% (588/1212) in control schools and 45.3% (581/1063) in intervention schools had reached menarche, with the median reported age at menarche 13 in both arms.

The mean proportion of follow-ups where pupils reported diarrhoea in the past 7 days (co-primary health outcome) was 0.073 in control schools and 0.083 in intervention schools (Table  2 ), with no significant difference between study arms in the primary analysis adjusting for clustering and stratification factors (aOR 1.15; 95% CI 0.84 to 1.59; p  = 0.39). The mean proportion of follow-ups reporting respiratory illness in the past 7 days (co-primary health outcome) was 0.278 in control schools and 0.248 in intervention schools, corresponding to a 16% relative reduction in the odds of pupil-reported respiratory illness in the past 7 days during follow-up in the primary analysis (aOR 0.84; 95% CI 0.71 to 1.00; p  = 0.046). The mean proportion of follow-ups absent from roll-call was similar between arms (0.103 in control schools vs. 0.106 in intervention schools), with no significant difference in odds of absence (aOR 1.07; 95% 0.83 to 1.38; p  = 0.59) in the primary analysis.

Models with further covariate adjustments produced similar results (Additional file 2: Table S2), as did analysis based on mean differences in pupil-level proportions (Additional file 2: Table S3).

Among the secondary outcomes, effects on pupil-reported diarrhoea and respiratory illness in the past 2 days were similar in direction to the respective 7-day outcomes but with no evidence of differences between arms (Table  2 ). Pupils reported absence at a much lower rate than roll-call absence (the mean proportion of school days reported absent was 0.056 in control schools and 0.055 in intervention schools), with no evidence of a difference between arms. We observed a small increase in SAMNS-26 total score in the intervention arm vs. control of three points on a 0–100 scale (mean difference 3.32; 95% CI 0.05 to 6.59; p  = 0.046). There was no evidence of differences in either the MPNS-36 total score or the SDQ-25 total difficulties score between arms.

We observed no evidence of effects on other outcomes, including causes of absence, pupil-reported earache (negative control for pupil-reported illness), subjective wellbeing measured through a smiley faces visual analogue scale, menstrual health sub-scales, and gender parity in enrolment (Additional file 2: Table S4), with the exception of past-week absence due to diarrhoea (aOR 0.59; 95% CI 0.37 to 0.93; p  = 0.024), which was very rarely reported (mean proportion of follow-ups of 0.008 in controls schools vs. 0.005 in intervention schools).

There was some evidence of effect modification by gender ( p  = 0.021) for pupil-reported respiratory illness in the past 7 days, with a greater intervention effect observed in boys (Fig.  2 ). Prevalence of pupil-reported respiratory illness in the past week during pupil enrolment was similar between girls and boys in both intervention (32% vs. 31%; χ 2 p  = 0.42) and control (33% vs. 32%; χ 2 p  = 0.87) arms. Findings for pupil-reported diarrhoea and roll-call absence were consistent across genders (p-value for interaction 0.96 and 0.54, respectively). There was no evidence of group-time interaction for pupil-reported respiratory illness ( p  = 0.31), diarrhoea ( p  = 0.67) or roll-call absence ( p  = 0.89).

Gender-disaggregated intervention effects on primary outcomes

Sensitivity analyses including all children in enrolled classes regardless of age, and adjusting for responsibility for household income generation (predictor of missingness at final follow-up) both produced similar findings (Additional file 2: Table S5).

In the WISE cluster-randomised trial, we found a borderline significant reduction in pupil-reported respiratory illness in the past 7 days, and no evidence of reductions in diarrhoea or absence from school. These results point to the potential success of Project WISE at interrupting the transmission of respiratory pathogens by increasing handwashing with soap, as hand hygiene interventions have been associated with reductions in risk of acute respiratory illness of 24% for school-aged children in LMICs [ 2 ]. This finding is notable in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, an active global threat during the study period (2021–2022), suggesting that school-based WASH can prevent disease amid social mixing at school, even when pupils have limited WASH access at home.

The lack of impact on pupil-reported diarrhoea may not be surprising given that schools received water and hygiene components but not intended upgraded toilet facilities within the study duration—access to clean sanitation facilities that safely remove excreta can be critical to interrupt transmission of faecal-oral pathogens [ 30 ]. Providing safe, private spaces to change may be more important than menstrual products or sanitation technology in addressing menstruation-related absence [ 31 ]—one explanation for the lack of effect on girls’ absence and the inconsistent effects on menstrual health outcomes, with only a small increase in menstrual care self-efficacy observed. School absence and wellbeing are multi-factorial; it seems feasible that the intervention (as received) may not have addressed enough factors to observe psychosocial and educational impacts.

The mixed effects of the WISE intervention on illness and absence are consistent with the existing literature [ 9 ], including multiple rigorous randomised trials [ 19 , 32 , 33 , 34 ]. Impacts of WASH in schools are often context-specific and affected by factors such as local water access or underlying disease prevalence in the population [ 9 ]. The high rates of past-week respiratory illness in this population (mean proportion of follow-ups with the outcome in the control arm 0.276) compared to other primary outcomes (0.073 and 0.103 for diarrhoea and absence, respectively) may have contributed to observing an effect for this outcome alone. We were unable to distinguish COVID-19 from other respiratory infections; it is unknown whether this high prevalence would persist in subsequent years.

Strengths of the study include the ‘open-cohort’ design that allowed minimal participant attrition, and absence triangulated through multiple measurement approaches—we provide evidence that pupil-reported absence is under-reported compared to roll-call absence. The use of pupil-reported measures for health outcomes is a limitation; using more ‘objective’ measures, such as stool-based pathogen detection versus self-reported diarrhoea [ 35 ], would help to minimise reporting bias, and enable differentiation of COVID-19 versus other respiratory infections. Concerns around bias in measuring illness among attendees are mitigated by the lack of differential absence rates between study arms; however, it is possible some illnesses were missed by not following absentees. Follow-up was limited to one academic year for logistical reasons, so we are unable to evaluate the long-term impacts, or the additional effect of the sanitation component once received. However, we note that cluster-randomised trials with multi-year follow-up periods have also reported limited impacts on health outcomes [ 19 , 32 , 36 ]. With one borderline significant effect among three primary outcomes (without correction for multiple comparisons), we were unable to obtain strong evidence for the effectiveness of the intervention. For practical reasons we were limited in the number of schools that could be randomised; it is possible that the intervention had smaller effects only detectable with a larger cluster-randomised trial. We are unable to explain the greater impact of the intervention on respiratory illness among boys; there was no overall difference in odds of respiratory illness by gender at pupil enrolment (mid-intervention) nor during follow-up. More gender-disaggregated data on the impact of school-based programmes are needed to further explore this issue.

This study provides evidence that a school-based water and hygiene intervention implemented on a large scale across a city can impact respiratory illness among schoolchildren and demonstrated the utility of unannounced visits for absence tracking. However, the greater impact observed among boys remains unexplained, and future evaluations should include methods to differentiate pandemic and seasonal infection. Further research is warranted to establish the relationships between WASH-related illness and downstream educational outcomes—including illness-related and overall absence, educational progression, and gender parity in education—and strengthen understanding of the expected impacts of WASH in schools across multiple domains.

Availability of data and materials

Deidentified participant data, a data dictionary defining each field in the set, and code to reproduce analyses using Stata are available in the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine’s Data Repository ( https://doi.org/10.17037/DATA.00004333 ).

Abbreviations

Intracluster correlation coefficient

Low- and middle-income countries

Menstrual hygiene management

Menstrual Practice Needs Scale

Self-efficacy in Addressing Menstrual Needs Scale

Sanitation-related quality of life

Sustainable Development Goals

Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire

Water, sanitation and hygiene

WASH in schools for everyone

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the teachers, parents and pupils of the 60 schools in Addis Ababa who participated in the study and gave generously of their class time for this research. We also thank the Splash teams in Addis Ababa and Seattle for their assistance in the conduct of the study and coordination with schools. Lastly, we thank the survey staff from Holster International Research and Development Consultancy for their considerable efforts in data collection.

This study was funded by the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, grant number 1907–03868. The funder of the study had no role in study design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, or writing of the report. The corresponding author had full access to all the data in the study and had final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication.

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Department of Disease Control, Faculty of Infectious and Tropical Diseases, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK

Sarah Bick, Oliver Cumming & Robert Dreibelbis

Holster International Research and Development Consultancy, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Alem Ezezew

Department of Medical Statistics, Faculty of Epidemiology and Population Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK

Charles Opondo & Elizabeth Allen

Department of Statistical Science, Faculty of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, University College London, London, UK

Baptiste Leurent

Independent Consultant, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Wossen Argaw

Department of Public Health Sciences, College of Behavioral, Social and Health Sciences, Clemson University, Clemson, USA

Erin C. Hunter

Department of International Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, USA

Sydney School of Public Health, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

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SB contributed to methodology, formal analysis, accessed and verified underlying data, writing – original draft, writing – review & editing, decision to submit. AE contributed to project administration, methodology, writing – review & editing. CO, WA, EH and EA contributed to methodology, writing – review & editing. BL contributed to methodology, accessed and verified underlying data, writing – review & editing. OC contributed to conceptualisation, methodology, writing – review & editing. RD contributed to conceptualisation, methodology, supervision, writing – review & editing, decision to submit. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Twitter handles: @SarahTBick (Sarah Bick); @ErinHunterPH (Erin C Hunter).

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Correspondence to Robert Dreibelbis .

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The study protocol was approved by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Research Ethics Committee (reference 17761), and the National Research Ethics Review Committee of Ethiopia (reference A/A/H/10H02/227) prior to commencement of study activities. Under the direction of the study investigators, Holster International Research and Development Consultancy was responsible for data collection. School principals provided written informed consent on behalf of all pupils in the school in loco parentis. Opt-out forms were distributed to all parents/guardians of pupils in the selected classes. Pupils were excluded from data collection if their parent or guardian returned the opt-out form at any point and were required to give oral assent before each data collection activity.

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Supplementary Information

12916_2024_3558_moesm1_esm.pdf.

Additional file 1: Project WISE infrastructure and delivery, text accompanying Figures S1–S5. FigS1–Water storage tanks (left) and water filtration system (right) installed in study schools. FigS2–Drinking water stations installed in study schools. FigS3–Handwashing stations installed in study schools. FigS4–Posters and signage at drinking water stations (left and centre) and handwashing stations (right) installed in study schools. FigS5–Approximate locations of 30 intervention (blue) and 30 control (orange) schools enrolled in the WISE trial across Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

12916_2024_3558_MOESM2_ESM.pdf

Additional file 2. Tables S1–S5. Table S1–Number of participants and observations included in assessment of each outcome at each time-point. Table S2–Intervention effects on primary and secondary outcomes across three models with various adjustments. Table S3–Analysis of mean differences for primary and secondary repeated binary outcomes aggregated at the pupil level. Table S4–Intervention effects on other outcomes. Table S5–Sensitivity analyses.

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Bick, S., Ezezew, A., Opondo, C. et al. Impact of a school-based water and hygiene intervention on child health and school attendance in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: a cluster-randomised controlled trial. BMC Med 22 , 348 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-024-03558-x

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University of Idaho murders 1 year later: Where the case stands

Four students were killed in an off-campus house on Nov. 13, 2022.

Monday marks one year since four University of Idaho students were stabbed to death in a gruesome home invasion that garnered intrigue from people across the nation.

In the early hours of Nov. 13, 2022, roommates Kaylee Goncalves , Madison Mogen and Xana Kernodle, and Kernodle's boyfriend Ethan Chapin , were killed inside the girls' off-campus house in Moscow, Idaho. Two other roommates survived.

MORE: Idaho college murders: The complete timeline of events

After an intensive six-week search for a suspect, 28-year-old Bryan Kohberger, a criminology Ph.D. student at nearby Washington State University, was arrested on Dec. 30 at his family's Pennsylvania home.

Here's what you need to know as the case against Kohberger moves forward :

The shocking crime

One of the surviving roommates said she woke up around 4 a.m. on Nov. 13, 2022, from what sounded like Goncalves playing with her dog in one of the third-floor bedrooms, according to court documents.

"A short time" after, the roommate said "she heard who she thought was Goncalves say something to the effect of 'there's someone here,'" the documents said. But that could have been Kernodle on her phone because records showed she was on TikTok at about 4:12 a.m., the affidavit said.

MORE: Lawyer for Idaho college killings suspect Bryan Kohberger says he was driving alone night of murders

The roommate said "she looked out of her bedroom but did not see anything when she heard the comment about someone being in the house," the documents said. "She opened her door a second time when she heard what she thought was crying coming from Kernodle's room."

The roommate "then said she heard a male voice say something to the effect of 'it's ok, I'm going to help you,'" according to the documents.

The roommate said she opened her door again after she heard the crying -- and then saw a "figure clad in black clothing and a mask that covered the person's mouth and nose walking towards her," who she described as "5'10" or taller, male, not very muscular, but athletically built with bushy eyebrows," and who "walked past" her "towards the back sliding glass door" as the roommate stood in "frozen shock," according to a police affidavit.

Who were the victims?

Kaylee Goncalves, 21, and Madison Mogen, 21, were lifelong best friends and inseparable. Goncalves was set to graduate in December 2022 and move to Texas.

Goncalves' sister, Alivea Goncalves, considered Mogen a sister, too. She said she was comforted by the fact that the best friends were in the same bed together in their final moments.

"If I couldn't have been there to hold their hands and to take that pain from them, at least they had each other," she told ABC News.

The two other victims were 20-year-old Xana Kernodle, and her boyfriend, 20-year-old Ethan Chapin.

Chapin was a triplet. His brother and sister also attend the University of Idaho.

Chapin and Kernodle were the "perfect pair" who had an "unstoppable, loving relationship," a surviving roommate said in a statement in December.

"They both would look at each other with so much love," she said.

Pieces of evidence

After the victims were discovered, authorities reviewed surveillance video from the area and saw the suspect's white Hyundai Elantra go by the victims' house three times, before entering the area for a fourth time at 4:04 a.m, according to the affidavit.

Police said they traced the car's travel that night back to nearby Pullman, Washington, where the suspect lived while attending Washington State.

Kohberger's phone was tracked heading to Moscow before the attack and as the driver of the white Elantra returned to Pullman. However, the phone was off from 2:47 a.m. to 4:48 a.m., which "is consistent with Kohberger attempting to conceal his location during the quadruple homicide," the document said.

MORE: Idaho authorities probe Amazon 'click activity' for knives possibly connected to college killings

His phone was near the victims' house at least 12 times before the murders, at least as far back as August, the document said.

DNA from the suspect was also recovered on a knife sheath left on Mogen's bed, according to the documents.

Where does the case stand?

Kohberger is charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of burglary. He could face the death penalty if convicted.

The former Ph.D. student declined to offer a plea at his arraignment in May, so the judge entered a not guilty plea on his behalf.

MORE: Trial for Idaho college killings suspect Bryan Kohberger delayed indefinitely

Kohberger's lawyers have said their client wasn't in the home where the homicides occurred and was driving around alone that night.

In August, Kohberger waived his right to a speedy trial, indefinitely delaying what was supposed to be an Oct. 2 start date.

A new trial date has not been set.

What possible hurdles are ahead during trial?

The DNA discovered on the button snap of the knife sheath that was found near Mogen's body is a critical linchpin for the prosecution in what is a largely circumstantial case.

That DNA, authorities argued, undeniably links Kohberger to the crime scene, saying that DNA "showed a statistical match" with a cheek swab taken directly from Kohberger after his arrest.

Kohberger's attorneys have attempted to cast doubt on the strength of investigators' evidence and whether it pointed irrefutably to just their client, including the DNA. The defense has repeatedly asked for more information on the genealogical analyses used to zero in on Kohberger, and have pushed back on investigators' analysis that the DNA is a statistical match.

Kohberger's attorneys also highlight what they called a "total lack of DNA evidence" from the victims in Kohberger's home or car.

"There are so many layers that make this an extraordinary case -- and the defense is going to attack any aspect of it that they see as vulnerable," David Calviello, a former New Jersey prosecutor who is now a criminal defense attorney, told ABC News in August. "It makes sense for them to take shots at how certain evidence was presented to the grand jury -- whether there were missed steps, cut corners, chain of custody problems, contamination -- or not. "

The knife used in the murders has not been recovered.

A series of now-unsealed search warrant documents show investigators have sought records of Amazon purchases and click history data for an Amazon customer including "all detailed customer click activity pertaining to knives and accessories," as well as a long list of information that could flesh out the customer's full shopping movements and interests on the site, like items that were wish-listed or saved for later. If prosecutors can link Kohberger to the purchase of a knife that could have been used in the killings, experts say that could help bolster their case.

What will happen to the house?

The University of Idaho announced in February that the house where the four students were killed would be torn down, with university President Scott Green calling it "a healing step."

In June, a university spokesperson said the school planned to demolish the house before students returned to campus in the fall.

In July, the university announced a sudden halt to the demolition plans as they removed asbestos and lead from the home -- and amid objections from some of the victims' families who expressed concern that demolishing the house before Kohberger's trial could cause unanticipated problems for prosecutors as they try to secure a guilty verdict.

About two weeks after Kohberger waived his speedy right to a trial in August, university officials decided they would hold off on tearing down the home until at least the end of the fall semester, which ends in mid-December.

With no new trial date set, prosecutors asked the University of Idaho for access to the house.

The university said FBI agents would be at the house on Oct. 31 and Nov. 1 "to get documentation to construct visual and audio exhibits and a physical model of the home."

"While the university still intends to demolish the home, it will not be done this semester," the university said on Oct. 31.

The families

Ethan Chapin, who was a triplet, had been planning his 21st birthday with his siblings "forever," his parents said. Last month, his brother, Hunter, and sister, Maizie, turned 21 without him.

As the Chapins face one year without Ethan, they said they plan on acknowledging Nov. 13 with a private fundraiser for their foundation, Ethan's Smile Foundation, to help provide scholarships to post-high school students so that they can follow their dreams. The Chapins said they can't think of a better way to honor their son than to support education.

"Ethan stood for love, kindness, laughter and loyalty," his mother, Stacy Chapin, told ABC News. "He was the very best."

Kaylee Goncalves' dad, Steve Goncalves, said Kaylee's younger siblings are now grappling with their own birthdays. He said "they don't want to be older than their sister."

To Steve Goncalves, Nov. 13 is not an anniversary.

"This is more like a memorial -- some type of an event that you have to look at and think about, but it's not something that you ever look forward to," he told ABC News.

"My daughter has allowed me to meet people across the world through her life and memory and her beauty. And I'll thank her one day when I see her," Steve Goncalves said. "I'll tell her how much she impacted the world and how proud of her I am."

FOLLOW THE PODCAST: " The King Road Killings: An Idaho Murder Mystery " from ABC News, available on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Amazon Music , or your preferred podcast player.

ABC News' Kayna Whitworth, Nick Cirone and Timmy Truong contributed to this report.

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The horrifying revelations of the Idaho student murders

What the Idaho student murder investigation tells us about how criminal justice should work.

by Aja Romano

What made their deaths all the more terrifying was how elusive their killer seemed — until a sudden arrest made everything even scarier.

Sometime after midnight on November 13, four University of Idaho students — Xana Kernodle, Ethan Chapin, Madison Mogen, and Kaylee Goncalves — were all viciously attacked while sleeping in an off-campus townhouse. They were each, as eventual criminal charges would reflect , “stabbed and murdered with premeditation with malice and forethought.”

Throughout the seven tense weeks that followed, the case now known as the Idaho student murders rocked the small town of Moscow, Idaho, became a riveting true crime obsession, and sparked a global media frenzy.

But although everything that happened after their deaths would become international news, the lead-up to the quadruple homicide was completely uneventful. And so, nothing seemed to stick: There were no suspicious actions, changes, or alarming behaviors prior to the murders, and no immediate suspects, no big compelling clues, no key witnesses in the aftermath. An unknown intruder or intruders had simply entered the house, stabbed to death four of the six sleeping students inside, and then quietly slipped into the night.

Still, as the University of Idaho community struggled to come to terms with the killings and cope with their fear of the perpetrator, local and federal investigators were hard at work. By late December, despite the massive amount of resources devoted to the investigation, along with a stream of steady case updates , the case appeared to be on the verge of going cold. But on December 30, Moscow police announced they’d made an arrest in the case.

Bryan Kohberger, 28, had no apparent connection to any of the victims. Instead, he was a graduate student at a neighboring university, with an unsettling history and an obsession with true crime. The abrupt identification of the alleged killer, and the excavation of his personal background, meant that one of the most senseless, shocking crimes in recent memory became even more tragic.

Had four devoted friends — two of whom were dating, two of whom were lifelong best friends — lost their lives to a would-be serial killer?

The probable cause affidavit for the arrest , as well as the wealth of information that has since trickled out about the case and the alleged perpetrator, sheds new light on an extraordinarily horrific crime and the equally extraordinary criminal investigation that followed it. What finally led to Kohberger’s arrest was simply excellent investigative work: a mix of well-organized policing, groundbreaking forensics using genetic genealogy, and old-fashioned detective work. As Kohberger heads to trial this fall, the secrets of the criminal they caught are still being unearthed.

The murders

Xana Kernodle, Ethan Chapin, Madison Mogen, and Kaylee Goncalves were all University of Idaho undergraduates , all involved in the campus Greek system, and all fast friends. Kernodle, 20, was a bubbly junior majoring in marketing; she was dating Chapin, 20, a triplet and a fun-loving sports management major. Mogen and Goncalves, both 21, had been inseparable since the sixth grade. They did everything together: lived together, went to school together, and, ultimately, died side by side .

On the night of Saturday, November 12, 2022, everything seemed normal. Kernodle and Chapin went to a party at the Sigma Chi fraternity; Mogen and Goncalves went out to a bar, then hung out at a food truck for a bit. By 2 am Sunday, according to the probable cause affidavit, everyone had gathered at the house on King Road where Mogen, Goncalves, and Kernodle lived with two other roommates. Goncalves, as reported in January by Dateline, had recently moved out of the townhouse as she prepared to graduate early and take a job in Austin, Texas, but she’d returned for the weekend to hang out with Mogen. Months later, this news would fuel public speculation that whoever was watching the house saw her return — and saw it as an opportunity.

The three-story house was accessible primarily by a secure door with a coded entry on the bottom floor, as well as by a sliding glass door on the main level (second floor) of the house. The lower entry was locked, but the sliding glass door might have been more easily accessible.

At 4 am, Kernodle ordered Jack-in-the-Box; at 4:12 am, she was on her phone, surfing TikTok. Sometime in the next few minutes, the attack began. She tried to fight off her attacker — but by 4:25 am, she and her boyfriend would both be dead.

Note: the following section contains disturbing details of the crime.

The killer attacked on the second and third floors of the house, entering each of the victims’ rooms for separate attacks — but he left the roommates on the main and lowest floors alive. He used a large Ka-Bar knife of the style used by the US Marine Corps.

Nearby surveillance footage captured audio of the attacks around 4:17 am, including distressed sounds and barking from Goncalves’s dog. As revealed in the affidavit, one roommate told police she heard noises and crying, but didn’t understand what she was hearing. Although she opened her door repeatedly to see what was happening, she saw nothing alarming — though she did report hearing Goncalves say, “There’s someone here.” Some time later, over sounds of crying coming from Kernodle’s room, she heard a male voice saying, “It’s okay, I’m going to help you.”

The third time she opened her door, it was to the sight of a man clad all in black and wearing a mask, walking toward her. As she stood in “frozen shock,” the killer walked by her room; it’s unclear whether or not he saw her. With his face mostly covered, the roommate noted the only thing she could see clearly: the suspect’s “bushy eyebrows.” That detail would later prove accurate.

Still stunned, the roommate returned to her room and locked her door, while the killer exited through the sliding glass door on the apartment’s main floor.

Then he vanished.

The aftermath: A media frenzy and public speculation run amok

On Sunday, at 11:58 am, 911 received a phone call from a roommate’s phone, during which multiple people at the scene spoke to the dispatcher.

This 911 call has not been released, but there’s been considerable confusion due to reports of “ an unconscious person ” at the scene. Police clarified that “the surviving roommates summoned friends to the residence because they believed one of the second-floor victims had passed out and was not waking up”; this statement, however, led to widespread bafflement from the public about how a bloody crime scene involving multiple fatalities could have been so misunderstood and misreported.

The murders immediately made national headlines and left the community in disbelief. Despite police initially stating there was no “ongoing community risk,” the panic was real. Once news of the deaths broke, so many students on the 11,000-member University of Idaho campus fled the school that the university decided to allow students an optional early Thanksgiving break. Concerned calls to 911 spiked , and residents expressed fear of a Ted Bundy-like predator stalking and choosing their victims randomly. Early police statements didn’t help clear this up; after initially releasing contradictory statements about whether the attack had been personal or random, police settled on the inclusive conclusion that it was “an isolated, targeted attack,” but that they had “not concluded if the target was the residence or its occupants.”

Online sleuths immediately latched onto the murders, with speculation running rampant both locally and online. Police released bodycam footage taken the night of the murders, from unrelated nearby interactions. It’s unclear if the footage led to tips that proved useful in Kohberger’s eventual arrest, but it did lead to a flurry of rumors and speculation that brief, blurry motion in the background of the video might be a group of people running from the crime scene.

On the hunt for clues, people pored over the four victims’ social media, accusing everyone from their friends to random people who showed up in the background of Instagram photos. The food truck, which ran a Twitch livestream, became a huge source of public speculation, with people examining footage of Goncalves and Mogen hanging out by the truck, looking for any clues that someone may have been stalking the two women.

Police had to issue statements formally clearing multiple people (and one animal ) of suspicion, including the surviving roommates, an ex-boyfriend of one of the victims who she had repeatedly called the night of the attack, a random man who was at the food truck, and, most bizarrely , a University of Idaho professor who was fingered for the crime by the “ inner spirit ” of a tarot reader on TikTok. (The tarot reader continues to insist the professor ordered Kohberger to carry out the murders.)

That bonkers sidebar in this morbid case lends an idea of how chaotic things looked from the sidelines: a heinous crime, with an apparent lack of witnesses, no significant leads, and a lack of serious suspects — but plenty of distracting, obfuscating, unhelpful social media noise. When, on December 7, police asked the public for help locating a white Hyundai Elantra that had allegedly been spotted at the crime scene, it seemed to many people to be less like a real, promising lead and more like busywork: After all, a generic white car? What could be more of a needle in a haystack?

But as improbable as it seemed, police focus on that generic white car was exactly right.

Five days after the murders, a criminology doctoral student at Washington State University changed the title on his white 2015 Hyundai Elantra, before driving it cross-country from Idaho to his parents’ home in Pennsylvania. His attempts to prevent authorities from tracing the car, however, overlooked one thing:

Police had his DNA.

The investigation and arrest of Bryan Kohberger

What’s striking about the investigation into Kohberger, as the affidavit makes clear, is both how quickly police homed in on him as a person of interest, and how seamlessly multiple law enforcement agencies worked together to apprehend him — collaborating across multiple states, jurisdictions, and even the country.

The first big lead in the case came from nearby surveillance footage, which captured a “white sedan” repeatedly circling the neighborhood between 3:20 am and 4:20 am.

Police tracked the car to Pullman, Washington, about 10 miles away, home to the Washington State University campus. Meanwhile, an FBI expert identified the make and model, and even narrowed down the year range of the car: a 2014-2016 Hyundai Elantra.

With that detail in hand, WSU campus police officers quickly tracked down a Hyundai Elantra owner who attended the school and lived near the last place the car had been seen on surveillance the night of November 13: Kohberger.

By November 29, just over two weeks after the murders, the Moscow Police Department had a copy of Kohberger’s driver’s license photo, complete with his “bushy eyebrows.”

Cell phone records showed Kohberger’s phone traveling from Pullman in the direction of Moscow the night of the murders, before it was shut off completely between 2:47 am and 4:48 am — “consistent with Kohberger attempting to conceal his location during the quadruple homicide,” according to the affidavit. They also showed Kohberger apparently returning to the scene of the crime in Moscow at approximately 9 am that day — still several hours before authorities would be alerted to the scene — and then immediately returning to his house in Pullman.

But while authorities had strong circumstantial evidence tying Kohberger and his white car to the crime, the smoking gun in this case had been recovered from the crime scene on the first day of the investigation: an empty knife sheath with a trace of DNA from an unknown male.

Armed with this clue, authorities turned to the groundbreaking technique that’s led to arrests in many cases since the 2018 arrest of the Golden State Killer : genetic DNA matching. In this process, investigators upload DNA to genealogy websites and then build out a potential family tree for a suspect (or, in many cases, an unidentified missing person). Then, using context clues and other practical detective work, they follow the family tree and trace which member is most likely to be a match.

The use of genetic genealogy is controversial. Currently, only two genealogy websites, GEDmatch and Family Tree DNA, allow law enforcement to use DNA from their users. Both are opt-in, meaning the user has to give explicit consent for the use, though GEDmatch encourages users to opt in and boasts that its genetic DNA matching has assisted in closing over 500 cold cases. That number seems accurate given how regularly genetic DNA matching is now used to solve crimes — and it may soon be even higher thanks to a recently developed predictive algorithm that could allow police to more quickly zoom in on the correct branch of a DNA family tree.

Police were able to match the DNA on the knife sheath with DNA from Kohberger’s father, gathered from trash at Kohberger’s parents’ home. And that match was definitive, excluding 99.99 percent of the population from being the father of the suspect.

Meanwhile, Kohberger and his dad embarked on a multi-day road trip from Washington to Pennsylvania. License plate readers across the country mapped them traveling from state to state: Colorado, Indiana, Pennsylvania. On December 15, they were stopped twice by Indiana patrol officers in a very short timespan for tailgating. A law enforcement source later told Fox News that a task force which had Kohberger under surveillance requested that the Indiana troopers pull him over specifically so that they could get a glimpse of his hands to see if there were any cuts or other injuries. (In bodycam footage of one of the two stops, Kohberger and his father appear only briefly on camera.) The FBI, allegedly part of the task force, later denied to Fox that it had given any orders to waylay Kohberger; it’s unclear if the task force was acting independently, or if the two stops were a complete coincidence.

On December 30, after surveilling Kohberger for several days, the Pennsylvania State Police executed a raid on the home of his parents in the largely rural Chestnuthill Township, complete with smashed windows and broken doors. After being extradited back to Idaho, all the while under constant media scrutiny , Kohberger appeared in the Latah County District Court in Moscow on Thursday, January 5, and documents related to his arrest were unsealed by the court.

That was the first time the world had heard of Bryan Kohberger. But internet sleuths quickly got to work uncovering his strange and ominous background.

The fallout: Kohberger, his background — and what’s next

Kohberger was a Pennsylvania native who grew up in the suburbs. His high school classmates described him as “analytical,” interested in human behaviors — but one friend described a physically and emotionally abusive friendship to the New York Times that “got so, so bad that I just shut down when I was around him.”

Kohberger graduated from Northampton Community College in 2018 with an associate degree in psychology; two years later, he graduated from DeSales University, then went on to study criminology there as a grad student. While there, he took classes under legendary forensic profiler Katherine Ramsland, a household name in the world of true crime thanks to her long career and dozens of books covering famous cases. He also participated in a research study into criminal behavior, for which he recruited on Reddit using a retroactively chilling descriptor : “This study seeks to understand the story behind your most recent criminal offense, with an emphasis on your thoughts and feelings throughout your experience.” After getting his master’s degree in 2022, he began studying at Washington State as a criminology and criminal justice doctoral student.

There are striking parallels between Kohberger and the Golden State Killer , Joseph DeAngelo Jr. Both men gravitated to law enforcement: DeAngelo was a police officer; Kohberger worked as a security guard for a local school district and had recently applied for an internship with his local police department, claiming he wanted to aid rural law enforcement with data collection and analysis. Both had glowing newspaper write-ups for small acts of valor they had performed.

Both men also cased their crime scenes extensively: phone records showed Kohberger returning to the area of the King Road house again and again — “on at least 12 occasions” per the affidavit — beginning in June 2022, the earliest date that police could obtain records. That might be significant for multiple reasons. One of the rumors police downplayed about the case was that Kaylee Goncalves had expressed fear of a “ stalker ” in the weeks prior to the murders. This led to heated speculation that Goncalves was the focus of the attack, but authorities have never confirmed this. The evidence, instead, might point toward Kohberger being fixated, as authorities originally suggested, on the house itself.

Kaylee’s father, Steve Goncalves, who’d been critical of police during the many weeks of scant updates, had nothing but praise for the investigation after the arrest, stating in a January 5 interview that “all is forgiven.”

“People think Idaho is so old-fashioned and outback, but these guys — they hit a home run, man,” he said. “That affidavit is impressive.”

“Impressive” might be an understatement: The swiftness with which police managed to identify, carefully build a strong case against Kohberger, track him across the country, and arrest him, all while working with multiple agencies and somehow managing to keep his identity from leaking to the public, is extremely rare. It’s even more extraordinary given how many victims were involved, how unusual the crime was, how many agencies were involved, and how intense the public and media scrutiny was.

The triumph of the investigation, however, is tempered by the realization that Kohberger seems to have been working the criminal justice system in order to become a better criminal. Each half of the resolution to this case is a cold counter to the other: On the one hand, a picture of what we all, desperately, want policing to look like; on the other, a picture of what the criminal justice system too often becomes: exploitable.

Still, it’s easy to imagine this investigation becoming a major case study for what effective policing can and should look like: law enforcement working with the community and with each other, and building the case methodically, based solely on the evidence.

Perhaps most unusual of all is just how strong the case against Kohberger appears from the outset. Eyewitness? Check. Video surveillance of his car? Check. DNA match? Check. Implicating cell phone records? Loads. As of May, the prosecution has produced roughly 10,000 pages of documents and over 10,000 photos, along with massive amounts of video and audio data in the case. Even without the added circumstantial evidence of Kohberger’s own obsession with criminal psychology, this would be a hard defense to mount.

In May, apparently in order to avoid a preliminary hearing, the prosecution impaneled a secret grand jury which indicted Kohberger on May 16. Kohberger was indicted on four felony charges of first-degree murder and one charge of burglary.

At his subsequent arraignment on May 22, Kohberger chose to “stand silent” when asked to plead to the charges; the court entered a plea of “not guilty” on his behalf. His trial is tentatively scheduled to begin on October 2, 2023.

For now, apart from the probable cause affidavit, the details of the case against Kohberger are still limited. The case is currently under a restrictive gag order that’s led to repeated courtroom challenges from both victims’ families and media outlets. At a May 22 hearing on the gag order, Latah County Judge John C. Judge commented on the “irreparable harm” the media had done to the case, without going into specifics. The judge worried the case’s high-profile media coverage would make it impossible for Kohberger to receive a fair trial, and told the Associated Press, one of the litigants requesting the gag order to be lifted, to “tone it down.”

Despite the gag order, new information continues to trickle out about Kohberger himself. In January, the New York Times reported that Kohberger had long struggled with mental health issues and drug addiction, as well as, allegedly, a rare neurological condition called visual snow . In February, the Times further reported that Kohberger’s university had investigated him for various complaints including following one student to her car, and getting into repeated altercations with his supervising professor. That ultimately resulted in his termination shortly after the murders.

News Nation also reported allegations that Kohberger received complaints for condescending behavior and harsher grading toward female students. During that same period, Kohberger allegedly broke into the home of a woman and then offered to install security cameras on her behalf.

And perhaps most damningly, after he went home for the holidays, according to Dateline , Kohberger acted suspiciously and constantly wore latex gloves around the house, alarming his family members so much that at one point, his disturbed relatives searched his car , looking for evidence of his involvement in the Idaho murders.

Even as media coverage inevitably shifts away from the four deceased victims and their surviving roommates to focus on Kohberger, it’s important not to let his story supersede theirs. They leave us a legacy of living life to the fullest, of unabashed joy and camaraderie that shines throughout the wide digital footprint of the students’ social media. In a now-famous Instagram post , made on the day of the murders, Goncalves snapped several photos of her roommates, including Kernodle, Mogen, and Chapin. “One lucky girl to be surrounded by these ppl everyday,” she wrote.

Update, May 23, 3:50 pm: This story was originally published on January 7 and has been updated several times to include new details about the case.

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Four slain students, a weeks-long manhunt but no motive - Everything we know about the Idaho murders

As bryan kohberger prepares to face trial, andrea blanco , rachel sharp and sheila flynn report on the case in small town idaho that shocked america.

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T he murder of four college students rocked the quiet town of Moscow, Idaho, and led to the arrest of prime suspect Bryan Kohberger .

Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin – all students at the University of Idaho – were ambushed in their rooms and stabbed to death with a military-style knife that has yet to be found. Police were called to the gruesome scene at the off-campus residence almost eight hours after the vicious attack.

For weeks, only scant details about the carnage were revealed as the community reeled from the tragedy and grappled with fears of a murderer on the loose. That changed with the December 2022 arrest of Washington State University student Mr Kohberger, whose apartment, office and family home were raided and searched for evidence.

While more information has become public through the release of search warrants and arrest records in recent months, a gag order in the case remains in place and most aspects of the probe and its findings are still a mystery.

A grand jury indicted Mr Kohberger on four counts of first-degree murder and one burglary charge, effectively rerouting the case directly to the state’s felony court level and allowing prosecutors to skip the preliminary hearing process.

A trial was initially set for October 2023 but was postponed indefinitely when Mr Kohberger waived his right to a speedy trial. Then in late December 2023, prosecutors submitted a request for the high-profile murder trial to begin in the summer of 2024.

On 28 February 2024, a hearing is set to take place where a trial date could finally be set.

Here, The Independent takes a deep dive into the developments in the complex case:

How did the stabbings unfold?

Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin were stabbed to death in the young women’s rental home on King Road in Moscow on 13 November 2022. Chapin, Kernodle’s boyfriend, was staying at the residence, which is just a few minutes walk from campus, on the night of the murders.

According to an affidavit for Mr Kohberger’s arrest, the killings are believed to have taken place around 4am.

Among the revelations in the 18-page document is that Mr Kohberger’s DNA was found on a knife sheath that the killer left behind at the crime scene. The tan leather Kabar sheath, which featured the United States Marine Corps symbol, was discovered on Mogen’s bed next to her butchered body.

At the time of the quadruple homicide, the two other roommates, Bethany Funke and Dylan Mortenson, were inside the home, but were left unharmed by the killer. The police report reveals that Ms Mortenson came face to face with the masked killer.

According to Ms Mortenson’s terrifying account, she had gone to sleep in her bedroom on the second floor of the three-floor home and was woken by what sounded like Goncalves playing with her dog in one of the third-floor bedrooms.

She told investigators she was in her bedroom on the second floor of the home – the same floor where Kernodle and Chapin were killed – and was standing in the doorway as the killer walked right past her. A short time later, Ms Mortenson said that she heard someone believed to be either Goncalves or Kernodle saying, “There’s someone here”.

Minutes later, Ms Morterson. said that she looked out of her bedroom for the first time but did not see anything. She then opened her door for a second time when she heard what she thought was crying coming from Kernodle’s room, the documents state.

At that point, she said she heard a man’s voice saying, “It’s ok, I’m going to help you.”

When she opened her door for a third time minutes later, she said she saw “a figure clad in black clothing and a mask that covered the person’s mouth and nose walking towards her”. As she stood in a “frozen shock phase,” she said the man – who she did not recognise – walked past her and headed toward the back sliding glass door of the home. She then locked herself in her room.

Despite the close encounter, a 911 call wasn’t made until 11.58am – eight hours later. The call, made from one of the surviving roommates’ cellphones – reported an “unconscious individual”. It is unclear if the killer saw her or whether she simply had a lucky escape because he didn’t notice her inside the dark home.

This raises the question around whether or not he planned to kill all four victims or whether some of the victims were treated as collateral damage in the horrific attack. Goncalves and Mogen’s bodies were found in a bedroom on the third floor, while Kernodle and Chapin were found on the second floor of the home.

The affidavit reveals no details about what connection – if any – Mr Kohberger had to his alleged victims.

Mr Kohberger, a criminal justice PhD student at Washington State University, lived just 15 minutes from the victims over the Idaho-Washington border in Pullman, having moved there to begin the academic programme in August 2022.

Who are the victims?

Goncalves and Mogen, both 21, were seniors at the University of Idaho and were expected to graduate this year.

At a vigil weeks after the murders, Goncalves’ father Mr Goncalves told how the two “absolutely beautiful” young women first met in sixth grade and became inseparable.

“They just found each other and every day they did homework together, they came to our house together, they shared everything,” he said at the time. “Then they started looking at colleges, they came here together. They eventually get into the same apartment together.

“And in the end, they died together, in the same room, in the same bed.”

Kernodle and Chapin were juniors at the college and had begun dating months before their deaths. The couple of 20-year-olds is believed to have been awake at the time the stabbings were carried out.

Six months after the stabbings, the families of the slain students accepted posthumous awards for their achievements.

Mogen and Goncalves’ relatives walked across the stage for their degrees in an emotional ceremony on 13 May. Kernodle’s family also accepted her certificate in marketing at a separate ceremony while Chapin’s award in sports, recreation and management was mailed to his parents.

Kernodle’s family accepted her certificate in marketing at a private ceremony last week while Chapin’s award in sports, recreation and management will be mailed to his parents this week.

Who is Bryan Kohberger?

At the time of the murders, Mr Kohberger was studying for his PhD and working as a teaching assistant in criminal justice at WSU.

Prior to this, Mr Kohberger studied criminology at DeSales University first as an undergraduate and then finishing his graduate studies in June 2022.

According to online school records, Mr Kohberger received an associate arts degree in 2018 from Northampton Community College in Albrightsville and received a masters degree in criminal justice this year from DeSales University.

While studying at DeSales, he studied under renowned forensic psychologist Katherine Ramsland who interviewed the BTK serial killer and co-wrote the book Confession of a Serial Killer: The Untold Story of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer with him.

He was working part-time as a security guard until August 2021 at Pleasant Valley School District, where his mother was listed as a paraprofessional.

The alleged murderer carried out a research project “to understand how emotions and psychological traits influence decision-making when committing a crime”.

Mr Kohberger reached out to potential participants on Reddit, with the chilling survey resurfacing after his arrest.

“In particular, this study seeks to understand the story behind your most recent criminal offense, with an emphasis on your thoughts and feelings throughout your experience,” the post said.

His fascination appears to have continued around the time of the murders when he applied for an internship with the local police department.

The affidavit revealed that he applied for an internship in the fall of 2022 with the Pullman Police Department and wrote in an essay how he had an interest “in assisting rural law enforcement agencies with how to better collect and analyze technological data in public safety operations”.

What the unsealed records reveal

After weeks of no updates on the investigation, law enforcement in Idaho and Pennsylvania announced Mr Kohberger’s arrest on 30 December 2022. A search warrant was executed at Mr Kohberger’s apartment in Pullman, Washington, the same day he was arrested at his parents’ home in Pennsylvania.

A record of evidence recovered during the apartment search revealed the seizure of 15 items including hairs, receipts, a computer tower, a disposable glove and items with peculiar stains.

In the search warrant record, investigators list several items with stains, including cuttings of a mattress cover, a “reddish/brown” stain on an uncovered pillow and a “collection of dark red spot”. Dr Monte Miller, a former crime scene investigator and forensic expert, and former FBI agent Jennifer Coffindaffer told The Independent back in January that investigators most likely believed those items had blood stains.

“A reddish or brown stain is a euphemism for, ‘We found something that looks like blood,’” Dr Miller said at the time. “It might be blood from the victims, might be his blood. They don’t know until they test it, but they’ll be able to get DNA if it is blood. We don’t know what the stains in the cover sheets look like, but again they’re looking for any kind of DNA, evidence that might have come from the crime scene.”

Ms Coffindaffer added: “They don’t call it blood, but it’s definitely inferred that it was blood.”

Court documents, released by Washington authorities on 4 May showed that multiple items taken from Mr Kohberger’s apartment in Pullman had been tested for the presence of blood. While most items came back negative, two unspecified items were positive.

Another item included on the list of seizures was a “possible animal hair strand”. While Mr Kohberger is not believed to have a pet, one of the victims he is accused of killing, Goncalves, had a dog that was at home at the time of the murders and was later found by police responding to the scene.

“The possible animal hair they’ll try to connect that to the dog left at the scene,” according to Dr Miller. “If there’s a root on that, if there is any skin on that hair, they could do a DNA test with that dog. If it’s just a hair that’s been shed and there is no skin, they would still be able to do a microscopical comparison and exclude most dogs but they wouldn’t be able to connect it necessarily to that dog.”

Mr Kohberger was also linked to the crime through cellphone records and his white Hyundai Elantra, a similar model of the car seen near the murder home around the time of the murders. Mr Kohberger changed the license plates on his Hyundai Elantra just days after the murders.

The suspect’s car had Pennsylvania plates when it was pulled over by police in Moscow, in August 2022, according to a citation from the Latah County Sheriff’s Office. A review of documents on CarFax by Newsweek showed that Mr Kohberger changed the registration from Pennsylvania to Washington on 18 November, five days after four students were found stabbed to death in a Moscow home.

What we don’t know

No murder weapon has been found, police said before the gag order was issued following Mr Kohberger’s arrest.

It is not known if the killer personally knew one or more of the victims and whether the attack was carried out in a fit of jealousy or rage. No motive is known.

Authorities have refused to reveal who made the 911 call and will not release the audio. It is unclear what the roommates and “other friends” discussed in the call and what led them to describe a victim as merely “unconscious”.

Investigators have not revealed whether they believed the killer entered the house before the victims arrived home and hid before striking in their sleep or whether he entered the house after the students returned.

Kohberger indicted by grand jury

A preliminary hearing, where prosecutors had to show a judge that there is enough evidence to justify moving forward with charges of burglary and four counts of murder, was previously scheduled for 26 June.

However, on 16 May, a grand jury indicted Mr Kohberger on the same charges, effectively rerouting the case directly to the state’s felony court level and allowing prosecutors to skip the preliminary hearing process, the Associated Press reported.

According to the indictment, Mr Kohberger is charged with four counts of murder in the first degree and one count of burglary.

Each murder count states that he “did wilfully, unlawfully, deliberately, with premeditation and with malice aforethought, kill and murder” each of the victims by stabbing.

On 22 May, Mr Kohberger refused to enter a plea in Latah County District Court, with his attorney saying that he was “standing silent” on the charges.

The response prompted the judge to enter a “not guilty” plea on Mr Kohberger’s behalf, setting the stage for a trial in which he could potentially face the death penalty.

Kohberger’s parents asked to testify in Pennsylvania death case

It has also emerged that Mr Kohberger’s parents have been ordered to testify before a grand jury in the family’s home state of Pennsylvania in the case of a woman found dead almost a year after her sudden disappearance.

CNN first reported the news on Wednesday (24 May), citing a source who said that the accused killer’s mother has already given evidence to the grand jury while his father will appear to testify on Thursday (25 May). The information can then be shared with Idaho prosecutors.

The investigation is said to be about the disappearance and death of a 45-year-old woman Dana Smithers, reported Eyewitness News.

Smithers vanished without a trace in May 2022 from Monroe County, Pennsylvania – where Mr Kohberger was living at the time. Her remains were found last month in a wooded area.

What comes next?

Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty in the case, citing five “aggravating circumstances” that could warrant the maximum sentence of capital punishment.

The judge had set Mr Kohberger’s trial date for 2 October 2023 following requests by Kohberger’s attorney and the state. But, in a shock move, Mr Kohberger waived his right to a speedy trial, causing the trial to be delayed.

Mr Kohberger then attempted to have cameras banned in court – but Judge John C Judge indicated that would not happen.

In late December 2023, prosecutors then filed a motion requesting that the trial take place in the summer of 2024, arguing that the defence has had enough time to review the evidence in the case.

The state noted that the procedures should preferably unfold while high schools and universities in the area are not in the midst of the academic calendar, given the large media presence expected. In the filing, the state is also asking the judge to set deadlines for the prosecution and the defence to turn over all discovery in the case, to disclose any expert witnesses who will be called to testify at trial, and to file any pretrial motions including motions about the death penalty.

Deadlines for jury questionnaire proposals, jury instructions, proposed witnesses and any other matters are also being sought.

“The State proposes that the Court schedule trial for the summer of 2024, and that the trial dates avoid times when Moscow High School and our area universities are in session,” the filing states.

“As the Court is aware, Moscow High School is directly adjacent to the courthouse premises and already the significantly increased amount of media and other vehicles related to this case has strained available parking as well as safety and convenience for pedestrians, including students.”

No specific date was recommended in the court filing. However, the University of Idaho’s spring commencement – which closes out the semester – is scheduled for 11 May 2024 and Moscow High School’s classes end in the first week of June.

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Marketing, AI, and What Students Need to Know

• Marketing professionals use data insights to tell compelling stories, so students must learn how to process data, create visual representations of their findings, and communicate information.
• Students need to know how to convey core messages clearly and succinctly, because today’s marketers have just seconds to capture the attention of their audiences.
• Students can practice applying newfound technical skills by completing hands-on projects, debating AI’s implications, and participating in competitions where they use AI to develop marketing strategies.

  No longer a futuristic concept, artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming how companies around the globe do business. In particular, AI has become a critical component of today’s marketing landscape. Professionals are using it to draw insights from unique datasets and translating those insights into compelling narratives for audiences that range from company executives to boards of directors to customers.

At the Villanova School of Business (VSB) in Pennsylvania, we are building AI into all of our analytics courses, and we are emphasizing AI skills for students who are co-majoring in marketing and analytics. We’re teaching them to use AI to make better decisions, gain confidence in applying new technology, stay ahead in the constantly evolving marketing field, and contribute to society in meaningful and positive ways.

AI in the Classroom

Because we believe hands-on learning is just as essential as theoretical knowledge, we engage students with AI tools through in-class exercises, homework assignments, project work, case discussions, and even competitions. As students learn to filter, pre-process, analyze, and visualize data, they gain an understanding of the entire lifecycle of data, from collection to interpretation to storytelling.

We find it particularly impactful when student learning includes these components:

Project work. In our advanced analytics courses, we ask students to find projects that align with their majors and the university’s mission of building community and being of service to others. As part of this semesterlong assignment, students must find a publicly available dataset that includes words—not just numbers—and start by cleaning up the data using Tableau Prep. Next, they use Tableau to create a visual representation of the data, and they employ a generative AI platform such as ChatGPT to help them decipher their findings.

Students find the initial step of cleaning the data to be the most challenging because of the sheer quantity of information available. In addition, the fields used in multiple datasets often don’t match up, so they must be separated and standardized. This time-consuming task might not be glamorous, but it’s a necessary skill for our students to learn. In fact, research indicates that up to 80 percent of the analysis process is devoted to just prepping the data.

Case studies. Across the analytics curriculum, students undertake case studies involving real companies so they can see the impact and potential of technology. Students are required to choose companies with raw datasets that require significant pre-processing, then use AI tools to analyze issues these companies are facing and develop potential solutions. In the past, students have studied companies such as a popular coffee chain, a streaming service, and a hotel chain.

We remind students that what’s out there today often didn’t exist five years ago—and may not exist five years from now. We emphasize that while the software might change, the process doesn’t.

For instance, one group of students analyzed a Netflix dataset from Kaggle.com that contained a wealth of information about the company’s shows, including genre, IMDb score, runtime, and release year. Students determined what factors influenced show popularity and how the content on Netflix differed from that on other streaming platforms such as HBO, Hulu, and Amazon Prime TV. To achieve this, they performed a segmentation analysis that clustered Netflix shows based on both quantitative and qualitative ratings.

Students were able to identify the factors that influenced the popularity of Netflix shows, but they had to collect additional data from the company’s competitors to explore how Netflix’s content differed from that of other streaming platforms. Ultimately, students determined that, despite its massive subscriber base, Netflix wasn’t sufficiently differentiating its content quality for subscribers.

A focus on the future. Our professors meet regularly to share information gleaned from industry professionals about how we should update our AI tools and our classwork every year. We want to ensure that our graduates can keep up with the pace of change in a world where platforms and techniques are constantly shifting.

At the same time, we remind students that what’s out there today often didn’t exist five years ago—and may not exist five years from now. Programs like Tableau weren’t available when we were in college, and the tools they’re using now are likely to change after graduation. What we emphasize is that while the software might change, the process doesn’t. There might be a new Amazon algorithm when they wake up tomorrow, but a skill such as market basket analysis—an understanding of what groups of items customers most frequently purchase together—will be valuable for years to come.

Three Key Focus Areas

To ensure that our students will be able to adapt to future developments in the field of marketing, we focus on three critical aspects of AI: data analysis, storytelling, and ethics.

Data analysis. Students who co-major in marketing and analytics first get a grounding in technical knowledge. We want them to understand the basics of statistical analysis, become familiar with tools such as SPSS and Tableau, and know how to build and validate AI models. Once they’ve gained some technical proficiency, they learn about machine learning, data mining, and neural networks .

Storytelling. Students must do more than derive insights from data; they must be able to communicate what they’ve learned. We tell them, “Your knowledge is only as good as your ability to share it. You must be able to craft a compelling story to capture the attention of your target audience.”

If students can’t summarize their story in one line, they need to rethink their narratives. This skill is essential, because the two-minute elevator pitch is now a relic of the past.

In case studies and projects, our students create persuasive data narratives about specific companies. First, they analyze empirical datasets to isolate a problem or identify a trend, then they support their conclusions with charts, graphs, and other visuals. Finally, they translate their findings into stories that highlight the strengths and weaknesses of their chosen businesses.

We emphasize that students shouldn’t get so lost in the details that they miss the bigger picture. When they’re communicating their findings, they should focus on conveying the core message succinctly. If they can’t summarize their story in one line, they need to rethink their narratives—an aspect of storytelling that many students find most challenging. But this skill is essential, because the two-minute elevator pitch is now a relic of the past. Today, marketers have just seconds to capture someone’s attention and get their messages across.

Ethics. We ensure that our students are fully aware of the potential biases and errors inherent in AI. For instance, large language models can “ hallucinate ,” or perceive patterns that do not exist. In addition, generative AI tools can insert or perpetuate biases by using real-world datasets that contain prejudices related to race, gender, age, and other factors.

To prepare students to handle the moral complexities they will inevitably face, each week we debate news articles and engage in open discussions about the implications of technology. In one class, we covered actress Scarlett Johansson’s potential lawsuit against OpenAI, which allegedly created an AI chatbot whose voice sounded much like Johansson’s in the movie “ Her .” On another occasion, we talked about Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder of Bumble, who recently revealed that the dating app will use AI to enhance the user experience.

These discussions aim to raise awareness of evolving trends and their potential impact on students and their future environments.

Competitive Skills

At VSB, we emphasize practical applications that allow students to use their AI knowledge in real-world scenarios. As part of this approach, we encourage students to participate in marketing competitions where they can develop AI-driven strategies that showcase their skills and creativity. When students incorporate AI into their pitches, they set themselves apart with both their technical skills and their ability to think strategically.

Last fall, a team of VSB students participated in the Digital Marketing Competition hosted by the Purdue University Northwest College of Business in Hammond, Indiana. Held every semester, the competition challenges students to develop comprehensive marketing strategies and present them in eight-minute video submissions that are evaluated by a panel of industry professionals.

We encourage students to participate in marketing competitions where they can develop AI-driven strategies that showcase their skills and creativity.

VSB’s team, known as Wildcat Consulting, prepared marketing for Sole Search, a company that produces wearable GPS tracking devices that attach to kids’ shoes and helps prevent child abductions. Wildcat Consulting relied on extensive research to show how AI tools could create engaging video content and personalized email marketing campaigns, saving the company time and money.

As part of their entry, students proposed that the company use machine learning to provide route monitoring and AI-generated daily notifications to keep parents up to date. For example, five days a week, a child might get off the bus and walk by the corner house to go home. If the child veers off the predicted path, Sole Search sends a notification to the parents’ phones.

In addition, the students sought ways to help Sole Search reach potential clients looking for ways to ensure the safety of their children. Specifically, students recommended that the company implement an automated bidding strategy for Google searches. This is a digital marketing tactic in which business owners don’t tell Google how much they’re willing to pay each time a user clicks on their ad; instead, Google adjusts bids depending on how likely it is the ad will attract and convert customers.

The team complemented these tech-based approaches with traditional marketing techniques such as a new brand, a new logo, enhanced keywords, and paid social media advertising. Wildcat Consulting’s entry included an all-encompassing marketing strategy that featured an AI-generated video—and earned them a spot as finalists in the competition.

Prepared for the Future

At VSB, we want our marketing students to develop a blend of technical, analytical, and storytelling skills so they will be ready to adapt to new technologies and leverage AI to drive marketing success. Even so, we emphasize that the tools they will use throughout their careers will consistently change, but their objective as marketing professionals will remain the same: to derive insights from data.

When our students learn to harness the power of AI to transform marketing, they will become valuable additions to any company because they will know how to use data to tell effective stories. As AI continues to evolve, these graduates will be prepared to evolve—and excel—along with it.

• artificial intelligence
• career prep
• data analytics
• future of work
• learner success
• marketing and communications

The University of Chicago The Law School

Abrams environmental law clinic—significant achievements for 2023-24, protecting our great lakes, rivers, and shorelines.

The Abrams Clinic represents Friends of the Chicago River and the Sierra Club in their efforts to hold Trump Tower in downtown Chicago accountable for withdrawing water illegally from the Chicago River. To cool the building, Trump Tower draws water at high volumes, similar to industrial factories or power plants, but Trump Tower operated for more than a decade without ever conducting the legally required studies to determine the impact of those operations on aquatic life or without installing sufficient equipment to protect aquatic life consistent with federal regulations. After the Clinic sent a notice of intent to sue Trump Tower, the State of Illinois filed its own case in the summer of 2018, and the Clinic moved successfully to intervene in that case. In 2023-24, motions practice and discovery continued. Working with co-counsel at Northwestern University’s Pritzker Law School’s Environmental Advocacy Center, the Clinic moved to amend its complaint to include Trump Tower’s systematic underreporting each month of the volume of water that it intakes from and discharges to the Chicago River. The Clinic and co-counsel addressed Trump Tower’s motion to dismiss some of our clients’ claims, and we filed a motion for summary judgment on our claim that Trump Tower has committed a public nuisance. We also worked closely with our expert, Dr. Peter Henderson, on a supplemental disclosure and on defending an additional deposition of him. In summer 2024, the Clinic is defending its motion for summary judgment and challenging Trump Tower’s own motion for summary judgment. The Clinic is also preparing for trial, which could take place as early as fall 2024.

Since 2016, the Abrams Clinic has worked with the Chicago chapter of the Surfrider Foundation to protect water quality along the Lake Michigan shoreline in northwest Indiana, where its members surf. In April 2017, the U. S. Steel plant in Portage, Indiana, spilled approximately 300 pounds of hexavalent chromium into Lake Michigan. In January 2018, the Abrams Clinic filed a suit on behalf of Surfrider against U. S. Steel, alleging multiple violations of U. S. Steel’s discharge permits; the City of Chicago filed suit shortly after. When the US government and the State of Indiana filed their own, separate case, the Clinic filed extensive comments on the proposed consent decree. In August 2021, the court entered a revised consent decree which included provisions advocated for by Surfrider and the City of Chicago, namely a water sampling project that alerts beachgoers as to Lake Michigan’s water quality conditions, better notifications in case of future spills, and improvements to U. S. Steel’s operations and maintenance plans. In the 2023-24 academic year, the Clinic successfully litigated its claims for attorneys’ fees as a substantially prevailing party. Significantly, the court’s order adopted the “Fitzpatrick matrix,” used by the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia to determine appropriate hourly rates for civil litigants, endorsed Chicago legal market rates as the appropriate rates for complex environmental litigation in Northwest Indiana, and allowed for partially reconstructed time records. The Clinic’s work, which has received significant media attention, helped to spawn other litigation to address pollution by other industrial facilities in Northwest Indiana and other enforcement against U. S. Steel by the State of Indiana.

In Winter Quarter 2024, Clinic students worked closely with Dr. John Ikerd, an agricultural economist and emeritus professor at the University of Missouri, to file an amicus brief in Food & Water Watch v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency . In that case pending before the Ninth Circuit, Food & Water Watch argues that US EPA is illegally allowing Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, more commonly known as factory farms, to pollute waterways significantly more than is allowable under the Clean Water Act. In the brief for Dr. Ikerd and co-amici Austin Frerick, Crawford Stewardship Project, Family Farm Defenders, Farm Aid, Missouri Rural Crisis Center, National Family Farm Coalition, National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, and Western Organization of Resource Councils, we argued that EPA’s refusal to regulate CAFOs effectively is an unwarranted application of “agricultural exceptionalism” to industrial agriculture and that EPA effectively distorts the animal production market by allowing CAFOs to externalize their pollution costs and diminishing the ability of family farms to compete. Attorneys for the litigants will argue the case in September 2024.

Energy and Climate

Energy justice.

The Abrams Clinic supported grassroots organizations advocating for energy justice in low-income communities and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities in Michigan. With the Clinic’s representation, these organizations intervened in cases before the Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC), which regulates investor-owned utilities. Students conducted discovery, drafted written testimony, cross-examined utility executives, participated in settlement discussions, and filed briefs for these projects. The Clinic’s representation has elevated the concerns of these community organizations and forced both the utilities and regulators to consider issues of equity to an unprecedented degree. This year, on behalf of Soulardarity (Highland Park, MI), We Want Green, Too (Detroit, MI), and Urban Core Collective (Grand Rapids, MI), Clinic students engaged in eight contested cases before the MPSC against DTE Electric, DTE Gas, and Consumers Energy, as well as provided support for our clients’ advocacy in other non-contested MPSC proceedings.

The Clinic started this past fall with wins in three cases. First, the Clinic’s clients settled with DTE Electric in its Integrated Resource Plan case. The settlement included an agreement to close the second dirtiest coal power plant in Michigan three years early, $30 million from DTE’s shareholders to assist low-income customers in paying their bills, and $8 million from DTE’s shareholders toward a community fund that assists low-income customers with installing energy efficiency improvements, renewable energy, and battery technology. Second, in DTE Electric’s 2023 request for a rate hike (a “rate case”), the Commission required DTE Electric to develop a more robust environmental justice analysis and rejected the Company’s second attempt to waive consumer protections through a proposed electric utility prepayment program with a questionable history of success during its pilot run. The final Commission order and the administrative law judge’s proposal for final decision cited the Clinic’s testimony and briefs. Third, in Consumers Electric’s 2023 rate case, the Commission rejected the Company’s request for a higher ratepayer-funded return on its investments and required the Company to create a process that will enable intervenors to obtain accurate GIS data. The Clinic intends to use this data to map the disparate impact of infrastructure investment in low-income and BIPOC communities.

In the winter, the Clinic filed public comments regarding DTE Electric and Consumers Energy’s “distribution grid plans” (DGP) as well as supported interventions in two additional cases: Consumers Energy’s voluntary green pricing (VGP) case and the Clinic’s first case against the gas utility DTE Gas. Beginning with the DGP comments, the Clinic first addressed Consumers’s 2023 Electric Distribution Infrastructure Investment Plan (EDIIP), which detailed current distribution system health and the utility’s approximately $7 billion capital project planning ($2 billion of which went unaccounted for in the EDIIP) over 2023–2028. The Clinic then commented on DTE Electric’s 2023 DGP, which outlined the utility’s opaque project prioritization and planned more than $9 billion in capital investments and associated maintenance over 2024–2028. The comments targeted four areas of deficiencies in both the EDIIP and DGP: (1) inadequate consideration of distributed energy resources (DERs) as providing grid reliability, resiliency, and energy transition benefits; (2) flawed environmental justice analysis, particularly with respect to the collection of performance metrics and the narrow implementation of the Michigan Environmental Justice Screen Tool; (3) inequitable investment patterns across census tracts, with emphasis on DTE Electric’s skewed prioritization for retaining its old circuits rather than upgrading those circuits; and (4) failing to engage with community feedback.

For the VGP case against Consumers, the Clinic supported the filing of both an initial brief and reply brief requesting that the Commission reject the Company’s flawed proposal for a “community solar” program. In a prior case, the Clinic advocated for the development of a community solar program that would provide low-income, BIPOC communities with access to clean energy. As a result of our efforts, the Commission approved a settlement agreement requiring the Company “to evaluate and provide a strawman recommendation on community solar in its Voluntary Green Pricing Program.” However, the Company’s subsequent proposal in its VGP case violated the Commission’s order because it (1) was not consistent with the applicable law, MCL 460.1061; (2) was not a true community solar program; (3) lacked essential details; (4) failed to compensate subscribers sufficiently; (5) included overpriced and inflexible subscriptions; (6) excessively limited capacity; and (7) failed to provide a clear pathway for certain participants to transition into other VGP programs. For these reasons, the Clinic argued that the Commission should reject the Company’s proposal.

In DTE Gas’s current rate case, the Clinic worked with four witnesses to develop testimony that would rebut DTE Gas’s request for a rate hike on its customers. The testimony advocated for a pathway to a just energy transition that avoids dumping the costs of stranded gas assets on the low-income and BIPOC communities that are likely to be the last to electrify. Instead, the testimony proposed that the gas and electric utilities undertake integrated planning that would prioritize electric infrastructure over gas infrastructure investment to ensure that DTE Gas does not over-invest in gas infrastructure that will be rendered obsolete in the coming decades. The Clinic also worked with one expert witness to develop an analysis of DTE Gas’s unaffordable bills and inequitable shutoff, deposit, and collections practices. Lastly, the Clinic offered testimony on behalf of and from community members who would be directly impacted by the Company’s rate hike and lack of affordable and quality service. Clinic students have spent the summer drafting an approximately one-hundred-page brief making these arguments formally. We expect the Commission’s decision this fall.

Finally, both DTE Electric and Consumers Energy have filed additional requests for rate increases after the conclusion of their respective rate cases filed in 2023. On behalf of our Clients, the Clinic has intervened in these cases, and clinic students have already reviewed thousands of pages of documents and started to develop arguments and strategies to protect low-income and BIPOC communities from the utility’s ceaseless efforts to increase the cost of energy.

Corporate Climate Greenwashing

The Abrams Environmental Law Clinic worked with a leading international nonprofit dedicated to using the law to protect the environment to research corporate climate greenwashing, focusing on consumer protection, green financing, and securities liability. Clinic students spent the year examining an innovative state law, drafted a fifty-page guide to the statute and relevant cases, and examined how the law would apply to a variety of potential cases. Students then presented their findings in a case study and oral presentation to members of ClientEarth, including the organization’s North American head and members of its European team. The project helped identify the strengths and weaknesses of potential new strategies for increasing corporate accountability in the fight against climate change.

Land Contamination, Lead, and Hazardous Waste

The Abrams Clinic continues to represent East Chicago, Indiana, residents who live or lived on or adjacent to the USS Lead Superfund site. This year, the Clinic worked closely with the East Chicago/Calumet Coalition Community Advisory Group (CAG) to advance the CAG’s advocacy beyond the Superfund site and the adjacent Dupont RCRA site. Through multiple forms of advocacy, the clinics challenged the poor performance and permit modification and renewal attempts of Tradebe Treatment and Recycling, LLC (Tradebe), a hazardous waste storage and recycling facility in the community. Clinic students sent letters to US EPA and Indiana Department of Environmental Management officials about how IDEM has failed to assess meaningful penalties against Tradebe for repeated violations of the law and how IDEM has allowed Tradebe to continue to threaten public and worker health and safety by not improving its operations. Students also drafted substantial comments for the CAG on the US EPA’s Lead and Copper Rule improvements, the Suppliers’ Park proposed cleanup, and Sims Metal’s proposed air permit revisions. The Clinic has also continued working with the CAG, environmental experts, and regulators since US EPA awarded $200,000 to the CAG for community air monitoring. The Clinic and its clients also joined comments drafted by other environmental organizations about poor operations and loose regulatory oversight of several industrial facilities in the area.

Endangered Species

The Abrams Clinic represented the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Hoosier Environmental Council (HEC) in litigation regarding the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s (Service) failure to list the Kirtland’s snake as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act. The Kirtland’s snake is a small, secretive, non-venomous snake historically located across the Midwest and the Ohio River Valley. Development and climate change have undermined large portions of the snake’s habitat, and populations are declining. Accordingly, the Clinic sued the Service in the US District Court for the District of Columbia last summer over the Service’s denial of CBD’s request to have the Kirtland’s snake protected. This spring, the Clinic was able to reach a settlement with the Service that requires the Service to reconsider its listing decision for the Kirtland’s snake and to pay attorney fees.

The Clinic also represented CBD in preparation for litigation regarding the Service’s failure to list another species as threatened or endangered. Threats from land development and climate change have devastated this species as well, and the species has already been extirpated from two of the sixteen US states in its range. As such, the Clinic worked this winter and spring to prepare a notice of intent (NOI) to sue the Service. The Team poured over hundreds of FOIA documents and dug into the Service’s supporting documentation to create strong arguments against the Service in the imminent litigation. The Clinic will send the NOI and file a complaint in the next few months.

Students and Faculty

Twenty-four law school students from the classes of 2024 and 2025 participated in the Clinic, performing complex legal research, reviewing documents obtained through discovery, drafting legal research memos and briefs, conferring with clients, conducting cross-examination, participating in settlement conferences, and arguing motions. Students secured nine clerkships, five were heading to private practice after graduation, and two are pursuing public interest work. Sam Heppell joined the Clinic from civil rights private practice, bringing the Clinic to its full complement of three attorneys.

• Convocation 2024
• Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

Najam Publishes Article in Nature on ICJ Climate Change Ruling

Professor Adil Najam, President of WWF-International and Dean Emeritus at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies, has authored an article in Nature calling for the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to take a strong position on climate change and nature protection.

In “The time to act is now: the world’s highest court must weigh in strongly on climate and nature,” published on August 8, 2024, Najam urges governments to provide the ICJ with evidence and arguments for protecting nature and the climate. The court is formulating an advisory opinion on states’ obligations to mitigate climate change.

Najam writes, “We cannot afford to keep failing this wondrous planet of ours.” He argues that a strong ICJ opinion could reinforce international climate policy and reduce legal ambiguity around states’ obligations.

The article comes as the deadline for submitting statements to the ICJ approaches on August 15. Najam notes that the court received a record 91 statements in April, leading to an extension of the deadline.

Najam’s piece has generated discussion on social media and research platforms. He hopes it will contribute to the ongoing debate about climate change mitigation and nature conservation.

The full article is available on Nature’s website: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02583-3

Adil Najam is Dean Emeritus and Professor at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and also serves as the President of WWF-International. He served as the Inaugural Dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies from 2014-2022. He is also a former Vice-Chancellor of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). His research focuses on issues of global public policy, especially those related to global climate change, South Asia, Muslim countries, environment and development, and human development. Read more about Najam on his Pardee School faculty profile.

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