The inaugural Minnesota State High School League-sanctioned boys volleyball state tournament takes place this week at St. Thomas.

It’s a three-day, eight-team event that opens with Tuesday’s quarterfinals and ends Thursday with one team left standing as a history maker.

Here are three East Metro teams with a chance to stake their claim as the first state champion.

Eastview

The Lightning (27-3) are the No. 2 seed this week, and for good reason. Eastview can win this tournament. It just took top-seeded Eden Prairie to five sets in mid-May and beat the Eagles 2-0 in a tournament in Bloomington in late April.

The Lightning feature just three seniors, a scary proposition given the fact that taking a set from Eastview in matches this year was a legitimate feat. It didn’t drop a set in 24 of its 30 matches to date.

The Lightning will meet seventh-seeded Hopkins at 1 p.m.

North St. Paul

The Polars (25-2) are the No. 5 seed and will take on fourth-seeded Spring Lake Park at 3 p.m. But the seeding may undersell the Polars’ potency.

North St. Paul’s only two losses all season came at the hands of Eastview, the No. 2 seed in this week’s tournament, and it beat Spring Lake Park less than a month ago.

The Polars featured a balanced attack with a number of players through which they can run their offense and score.

St. Paul Central

The Minutemen are the de facto home team in St. Paul this week after edging Eagan in a five-set thriller in their section final.

Central (23-7) is the No. 6 seed and will square off with third-seeded Rogers at 11 a.m. Tuesday.

The Minutemen have won nine straight matches and star Josiah Walker, who touts 208 kills offensively to go with 101 digs. But the Central offense runs through Gus Walz, who has a whopping 568 assists.

The girls state lacrosse tournament opens with the quarterfinal round as a bunch of familiar names — and one fresh face — descend on Chaska High School on Tuesday.

The semifinals will be held on Thursday in Eden Prairie, which is also where the final will take place on Saturday.

Here are the three east metro teams still with a shot at a state tournament title:

Park

The Wolfpack are making their state tournament debut and showing up in style as they crash a party featuring a plethora of other perennial powers. The No. 2 seed is unbeaten heading into its 1 p.m. semifinal against Elk River/Zimmerman.

How’s this for defense? Park has held its opponent to three goals or fewer in 11 games this spring.

Madi Brinkman and Josie Leonard are each 60-plus point players, while Leonard is also a star in the draw control.

One interesting fact about the Wolfpack? They have two high-end netminders in Lauryn Ehrenstrom and Aubree Laska who split time each game between the pipes, and do so in an elite fashion.

Stillwater

The lacrosse titan that’s still in search of its first title takes another big swing at it this week, as the Ponies (13-2) are seeded third and have a first-round date with Maple Grove at 11 a.m.

Grace Young, Madylyn Richert and Rayna Malmberg all have 55-plus points for Stillwater, but the Ponies remain a defensive juggernaut.

They have surrendered more than seven goals in just one game this spring – a season-opening loss to top-seeded Prior Lake. Goalie Jacky Richert is stopping 61% of shots faced this season.

Lakeville South

The champs are back. And while the reigning title holders aren’t the favorites this time around – the Cougars (13-3) are the No. 5 seed and will face fourth-seeded Orono at 3 p.m. – they do still feature plenty of firepower up top.

Ella Mills scored 73 goals this season, tied for third most in the state. Charlotte Fannin leads Minnesota with 122 points (58 goals and 64 assists).

Mills is also a star in draw control.

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“Instead of providing proven systems of support to pregnant people experiencing homelessness, the city is choosing to delay help through an unnecessary study, failing to deliver what it already knows works.”

Department of Homeless Services’ Prevention Assistance and Temporary Housing (PATH) intake center in the Bronx (Photo by Adi Talwar).

This spring, New York City proposed a new research study on pregnant people seeking shelter that raises significant ethical and methodological concerns. The study would randomly assign pregnant people arriving at the city’s Prevention Assistance and Temporary Housing (PATH)  intake centers to one of three groups: one receiving $1,200 monthly to stay with family or friends (via the Pathway Home program), one immediately receiving CityFHEPS vouchers to move into permanent affordable housing, and a control group that would remain in a shelter awaiting their turn to receive CityFHEPS vouchers. 

The city’s stated goal is to determine which intervention helps pregnant people avoid or shorten shelter stays. While it’s important that policy be guided by research-backed evidence, this study’s design, which withholds housing support from subjects based on chance, raises considerable ethical concerns while failing to meet methodological standards.

While random assignment through a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) can help identify results of scientific intervention, denying housing support to a group of pregnant people does not meet critical scientific and ethical standards. We already know that housing insecurity during pregnancy is associated with increased pregnancy complications and adverse birth outcomes–risks that cannot be justified in the name of scientific inquiry.

The Belmont Report, issued by the federal government in 1979 in response to egregious research practices like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, lays out three foundational principles for ethical research involving human subjects: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. This proposed study violates all three. 

It undermines respect for persons by involving a highly vulnerable population – pregnant people experiencing homelessness – under circumstances that might challenge the validity of informed consent. While the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) has stated that the program is voluntary, the potential of immediate access to life-altering benefits like CityFHEPS or Pathway Home, may make consent feel less like a choice and more like a necessity. 

The study violates beneficence by exposing participants in the control group to prolonged housing instability, rather than minimizing risk and maximizing possible benefits. Additionally, it randomly assigns some to Pathway Home even if they lack eligible hosts, depriving pregnant people of meaningful support. Furthermore, Pathway Home fails to assess whether the host home may pose a risk of interpersonal violence.

Finally, the study also violates justice by placing the burden of research on a marginalized group while withholding proven housing benefits. Under the proposal, only those assigned to CityFHEPS would get immediate access without typical requirements, leaving the control group unfairly denied quick access to stability based solely on chance–a proposal that likely would not pass ethical review from any Institutional Review Board (IRB), a type of oversight body meant to protect vulnerable patients and ensure studies meet basic ethical standards. Unfortunately, the city has decided to move forward with the study without seeking approval from an IRB. 

Even setting aside serious ethical concerns, the study fails on scientific grounds. RCTs require comparable groups and equal access to interventions, but this study fails on both counts. Pathway Home requires a willing host, yet participants are assigned before verifying eligibility, meaning that some are placed in groups they cannot benefit from. 

If someone placed in the Pathway Home group has no family or friends to stay with, they are structurally excluded. Treating these people as if they had access to the program skews data and distorts conclusions drawn from the data. 

Beyond ethics and design flaws, the study’s research goals are vague. The city claims its goal is, “to track the three groups over time, measuring factors such as days in shelter and housing placements,” but these metrics are poorly defined. 

The city regularly touts the success of the CityFHEPS program in helping people move from shelter to permanent housing. Yet instead of providing proven systems of support to pregnant people experiencing homelessness, the city is choosing to delay help through an unnecessary study, failing to deliver what it already knows works.

Alison Wilkey is director of government affairs and strategic campaigns for Coalition for the Homeless. Rachel Swaner is vice president of policy, research, and advocacy at the Community Service Society.

The post Opinion: City Study on Pregnant People in Shelter Raises Serious Concerns appeared first on City Limits.

By REBECCA BOONE

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge said Monday that the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement must reconsider the cases of some migrant children who have been stuck in government custody since the Trump administration changed the identification requirements for would-be family sponsors.

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The opinion from U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich in Washington, D.C., found that the Trump administration’s more stringent regulations caused undue delays for the children and the parents and adult siblings who were hoping to bring the kids into their homes.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“The ruling sends a clear and necessary message: the government cannot trap children in detention simply because their families lack specific documents or legal status,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, a legal advocacy firm representing some of the migrant children. “The court’s decision is not only a step toward reuniting families — it pushes back against a broader effort to erode long-standing legal protections for children.”

Under the Trump rules, migrant children have stayed in shelters for an average of 217 days before being released to family members, according to data from the Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. During the Biden administration, migrant children spent an average of 35 days in shelters before being released to sponsors.

The Trump administration says adult sponsors who took in migrant children were not always properly vetted, placing some of the children at risk of abuse or exploitation. The new regulations include DNA testing and income verification. They also prohibit sponsor applicants from using foreign passports and documents from other countries to prove identity.

Friedrich said there’s a compelling reason for the rule changes — an ORR report in 2023 found multiple instances of fraud, including 10 occasions where children were released to sponsors with falsified documents.

Still, the judge wrote, there wasn’t any advance notice given of the changes, and many of the children in government custody arrived in the United States with the expectation that they had family members and friends who could sponsor them. If they had been aware of the changes, they might not have entered the U.S., the judge wrote.

One child who had already been released to live with his sister for two years under the old requirements was taken back into custody after driving without a license. Now, under the new rules, he is stuck in government custody without a potential sponsor, the judge noted.

It’s likely that the Office of Refugee Resettlement “acted arbitrarily and capriciously by not providing adequate justification for its new sponsor documentation requirements,” Friedrich wrote. He said the agency wasn’t obligated to approve any particular sponsor or to release any individual child, but it cannot create a new blanket policy without explaining how it weighed the disrupted interests of the families and children against other valid concerns.