University administration has dozens of unauthorized flyers removed
by Leslie Layton | Posted May 6, 2025
The flyer that appeared on classroom doors last week
This story was updated at 4 p.m. today to include the university’s response.
Three hundred flyers suddenly appeared on campus doors at Chico State University last week, warning that law enforcement officers – a reference to immigration agents — would only be allowed in classrooms and other “private spaces” if they possessed judicial warrants.
“CAUTION CAUTION CAUTION” warns a flyer banner highlighted in yelllow. The flyer then notes that a classroom is a “private space” with entry restricted to faculty, staff and enrolled students. “Law enforcement may only enter with a valid judicial warrant … Everyone in the United States, regardless of immigration status, has the right to remain silent,” it continues.read more
Community members who spoke hold out hope for people who seem challenging to help
by Yucheng Tang | Posted May 3, 2025
photo by Yucheng Tang
Behavioral Health Director Scott Kennelly speaks at the first meeting of the City’s ad hoc committee on homelessness.
At the first meeting of the City’s ad hoc committee on homelessness, the discussion touched on the overlap between homelessness, substance abuse and mental health. It also raised two related questions: how to address the problem of shelter-resistant homeless individuals, and whether compelled treatment is sometimes necessary.
Scott Kennelly, the director of Butte County Behavioral Health, said homeless outreach teams have worked to convince unhoused people to take advantage of services and have tried to connect them with services, but there are always people who say, “Leave me the hell alone.”read more
Senior citizens worry about losing democracy, Constitutional rights & benefits
by Leslie Layton | Posted May 1, 2025
photo by Leslie Layton
Kathy Hume
About a month ago, Kathy Hume was one of only three people standing outside the Social Security offices in Chico protesting the Trump Administration. But today she was one of several hundred protesting cuts to Social Security infrastructure, as well as the expansion of executive power.
“He’s just a tyrant,” Hume said. “We got rid of mad King George and now it’s mad King Donald. There’s nothing he does that’s not ludicrous.” Adding that she thinks Trump is a poor speaker, Hume said, “Bigly wasn’t a word before he became president.”
Some 350 protesters lined up with anti-Trump signs today on Lassen Avenue and Cohasset Road near the north Chico offices of Social Security as thousands of people poured into the streets nationwide for anti-Trump demonstrations that had been planned for May Day, also celebrated as International Workers Day.read more
Changemaker: Under Sue Barlow's leadership, the nonprofit grows
by Yucheng Tang | Posted April 28, 2025
photo by Yucheng Tang
Butte County Special Olympics Area Director Sue Barlow
This is ChicoSol’s fourth monthly profile in our Changemaker series.
Reneé Anchordoguy was just 10 when her older sister, Sue Barlow, took her to the state-level Special Olympics at University of California, Los Angeles.
During a race, Anchordoguy was running alongside a friend who began to slow and fall behind. Instead of pushing ahead, Anchordoguy also slowed down, reached out, took her friend’s hand — and together, they crossed the finish line.
“That’s my biggest memory of that one thing,” Barlow said, “about all the friendship they have.” Barlow remembered that after attending the Special Olympics, her introverted little sister with Down syndrome became more outgoing and confident.
That incident also changed Barlow’s life, perhaps no less than it changed Anchordoguy’s.
Barlow is now the area director of Special Olympics Butte County, a nonprofit organization working to help athletes with special needs build community, friendships and healthy lives. Under her direction, the organization has increased the number of athletes served by more than 30 percent in the past few years.
Barlow likes to give credit to her dedicated parent-volunteers and co-workers, but they say Barlow has provided the organizational attention that Special Olympics Butte County needed to survive, grow and become more inclusive.
In view of funding cuts underway to services for disabled students, the Special Olympics advocacy voice will become increasingly important, said Debbie Roth, a former area director who founded the Butte County organization’s swim team.
In the years following the UCLA games, Barlow, who was 18 years older, accompanied Anchordoguy to many Special Olympics events, even after Anchordoguy turned 20 and moved to Arizona. Barlow flew to Arizona now and then to take her sister to events. “I’ve always been very involved with whatever Reneé wanted and needed. I loved her dearly,” Barlow said of her late sister.
After retiring, Barlow moved to Arizona from the Bay Area to provide full-time care for Anchordoguy. There, Barlow and her husband started bocce ball, basketball and other sports for a local Special Olympics organization. Anchordoguy developed a strong interest in bocce ball and went all the way to the national games.
When their mother passed away 11 years ago, they moved back to California where there were more relatives who could help take care of Anchordoguy. But Barlow couldn’t find a place for Anchordoguy to play professional bocce ball — Anchordoguy’s greatest source of joy.
So Barlow founded bocce ball teams for Special Olympics Butte County, ensuring her sister could play again.
Special Olympics Butte County is part of Special Olympics Northern California, a non-profit that provides free year-round training and programs for children and adults with disabilities. Butte offers training and competitions in seven sports for athletes, including basketball, bocce ball, swimming, golf and more.
The youngest athlete in the Butte County organization is 6 years old and the oldest is 72.
On a recent Sunday morning, some 20 athletes gathered on the track and field at Chico High School, playing bocce ball and running.
Barlow, who will turn 80 next month, wearing sunglasses and a green uniform, walked around checking on every detail. She remembered every parent’s and every athlete’s name. “Have you figured out the transportation for the regional competitions?” she asked the mother of an athlete.
“If you feel uncomfortable while running, just stop and let us know,” she told a new athlete whom she thought might not be fit enough for a long run.
“They feel like they are important, people respect them, people admire them …” – Diane White
One of the parents on the field was 80-year-old Diane White. She was there for her daughter Thea Beckett, who was slow to develop when she was younger.
“Sue works very hard for everyone, for all the athletes. That’s where her heart is,” White said, adding that Barlow is the backbone of the organization.
White said the Special Olympics means everything to her daughter and other athletes. “They feel like they are important, they have a purpose, people respect them, people admire them, people look up to them,” she said. “They didn’t have that much without the Special Olympics.”
Back in high school, Thea was always picked on and made fun of, White said.
Tina Collins, a parent and volunteer coach, told ChicoSol that since Barlow became the area director, the organization has become more inclusive.
“Athletes that don’t have a disability but cannot do regular sports are also welcome here,” Collins said. “My kid can’t do regular sports because she has a heart issue and a foot issue. And she can’t run very long. So this allows her to feel normal and play normal sports.
“They used to be more for people who had obvious disabilities, but now it includes any kind of physical, mental, emotional disability.”
Collins said Barlow is “very organized and cares a lot about her Special Olympics families.”
“We are also a health organization … it’s not only about the sport” — Sue Barlow
Barlow worked as a senior director of worldwide operations for a disc drive company before retirement, and she needed to schedule the operations of five factories in different time zones. She believes that work trained her to be good at juggling, coordinating and focusing on detail, which helps her lead Special Olympics Butte County.
Barlow listed a couple of things on her plate: She needs to have a facility set up, have the insurance for the facilities, prepare the budgets, ensure that the athletes are eligible and the volunteers cleared, and order uniforms for the competitions.
Marvin Pratt, head coach of bocce ball, thinks of Barlow as a miracle.
“She dedicates so much time and hard work to this,” Pratt said. “Since she took over, she has worked really hard to rebuild the formal relationship with Northern California Special Olympics, to build the established routine for all of us to be able to volunteer, get the schedules out early, get the coaches lined up, make sure the equipment is ready to go.
“She made Butte County’s program really blossom.”
When Barlow first mentioned her idea to start bocce ball for the organization, Pratt, who was a basketball coach at the time, asked: “What’s bocce ball?”
But now, Pratt works as the head coach for the bocce teams and advocates for the sport. He discovered that bocce ball is a good sport for disabled people because the athletes don’t need to be the fastest or strongest. “It’s all about finesse. It’s all about strategy and collaboration,” Pratt noted.
Since Barlow took over the organization, the number of athletes has increased to around 150 from 110. But Barlow wants to attract more people with special needs to join the organization. She plans to set up booths at Chico High and other schools to promote the organization.
“We are also a health organization,” Barlow said. “We try to get a lot of these athletes out to exercise regularly and eat right. It’s not only about the sport, but also about exercise and health.”
Fundraising is always challenging. The most difficult part, in Barlow’s opinion, is “to find long-term donors who can donate a certain amount of money consistently.”
“There’s a lot of things that are going on in this small town,” Barlow observed. “There are a lot of organizations that do fundraising. We’re always in the bucket, always in line for the money, with all the other organizations (competing with us).”
Meanwhile, the operating costs increase. For example, renting the pool for swim training costs $1,200 this year and is set to rise to $1,500 next year. Transportation is another major expense, as they must regularly secure vehicles to take athletes to regional competitions.
They started the annual bocce ball fundraiser that provides an opportunity to sponsor teams. All registration fees go to the organization. The organization raised $11,000 in 2024, but Barlow said they need at least $18,000 for the annual budget.
Last year, Anchordoguy passed away following the collapse of her health. Barlow “struggled” after her sister’s death, feeling like she “lost the best friend” in her life.
When Anchordoguy was alive, Barlow said she felt happy every day knowing that “Reneé will take me somewhere and have some fun today.”
Anchordoguy liked to say “Hi” to everyone she met. “She couldn’t pronounce her family name, so she would just say ‘Hi I am Reneé A,’” Barlow recalled. “She had tons of friends,” Barlow added. “Everywhere we went, people would say, ‘Hey, Reneé,’ and I’d just stand there. I was only Reneé’s sister.”
Barlow remembered there was an athlete who could not bend over to lift up the bocce ball. As her partner, Anchordoguy patiently lifted the ball and handed it to her so that she could make a successfull play.
“She was just so sweet,” Barlow said. “She taught me the love of life.”
To honor her sister, Barlow sponsored a bocce team for the fundraiser, bringing together four of Anchordoguy’s friends to form a team called “Reneé Buddies.”
Barlow’s work keeps her sister’s spirit alive. When Barlow watches the athletes practice on the track and field, she thinks of Anchordoguy and says she feels her sister’s presence.
Tax deductible donations can be made to Special Olympics Butte County (77 Talon Drive, Chico, CA 95973).
ChicoSol’s Changemaker series features people whose work benefits or brings together the community. Read our March profile here. Suggestions for people who could be profiled can be submitted to chicosolnews@gmail.com
Yucheng Tang is a California Local News fellow reporting for ChicoSol.
At City Plaza, information on everything environmental
by Yucheng Tang | Posted April 26, 2025
The 46th annual Endangered Species Faire was celebrated today with a downtown parade that featured axolotls, giraffes, owls and salmon puppets — and served as a call to action on climate change and species preservation.
“Animals cannot speak up for themselves, so we speak up for them,” a host on the plaza stage told about 250 attendees after the parade. The fair was organized by the Butte Environmental Council (BEC) and began at 10 a.m., with around 20 booths representing a wide range of organizations, including nonprofits, for-profits and government agencies.
A parade participant who identified herself as Amanda — she asked that her last name not be used for personal reasons — joined the event with her daughter. With a few other participants, she carried a puppet that represented the river ecosystem, and her daughter carried a Monarch butterfly puppet they had constructed. Amanda said she was from Santa Cruz, where there used to be many Monarchs, but their numbers have declined significantly.
Erik Lopez represented the Butte Fire Safe Council at a fair booth.
“We want people to use us as a resource in fire resilience, like fire defensible space efforts,” Lopez said. “We provide resources for homeowners and landowners. We do grazing programs as well, where we contract with grazers around Butte County and systematically put goats on the ground to graze the land and mitigate any fuels mitigation.
“Wildfire in any situation is a scary situation. People are, in that scenario, panicked and maybe unprepared,” Lopez added. “I’m glad people are coming up to the booth and willing to learn about what we do and how they can stay safe against wildfires.”
Fair booths provided information on waste reduction, composting, energy and water conservation, disaster preparedness and more.
“We hold this event to let people know we really have to take care of our environment, we really have to be serious about climate change, we really need to take care of our creatures,” said Susan Tchudi, a BEC board member and the fair coordinator. “One of the things that we’re emphasizing is we need to be involved in climate action, in doing things to protect ourselves, to be resilient, to try to do whatever we can to slow the change in the climate.”
Yucheng Tang is a California Local News fellow reporting for ChicoSol.
Historian Michele Shover’s effort to tell a more nuanced story of John Bidwell, considered the founder of Chico, began in 1989 when a footnote in a book caught her by surprise.
“I found it diametrically opposed to what people thought about Bidwell,” Shover said of the passage containing the footnote.
Shover, now 83, is retired from Chico State where she served as chair of the Department of Political Science. Her research on John Bidwell and Northern California Indian-settler conflicts of the 1850s has often been cited; she published articles based on primary research on Butte County history during more than four decades.
Over 20 years, Shover gathered all the historical data that she could find about Native Americans from this area from various sources, “whether it was newspapers, academic studies, correspondence, diaries,” she said.
At the beginning, she found it difficult to understand the reports written by local Indians, even though these had been recorded in English, “because they had a different sense of narrative. They have a different sense of time.”
She described her research as comparable to putting together a puzzle and refrained from reliance on work by present-day writers. Shover to this day is proud of this approach: “In my experience, some of the modern writers had tapped into a few of these sources, but no one I found had done as broad and deep a search as mine.”
After years of research, Shover published a book, “California Standoff: Miners, Indians and Farmers at War,” in 2017.
One of the nuanced stories Shover tells is about the treaty that was known as the U.S. Treaty of 1851. People often think that Bidwell, who helped organize a treaty meeting in 1851, played an important role in advancing the contract that reserved a 227-square-mile tract for the tribes.
But Shover found a different story through her research. She said Bidwell wrote a letter to California Congressman Joseph McCorkle and U.S. Sen. William Gwin after the meeting, recommending they not ratify the treaty. “He wrote it from a perspective as if he was protecting the Indians, but he was really protecting his control (of his Indian labor force),” Shover said.
“Should the Mechoopdas move to a reservation, he would lose a great asset — his substantial, cheap, available and usually stable Indian workforce,” Shover wrote in her 2017 book.
The Mechoopda Indian Tribe website explains that the U.S. Senate secretly rejected treaties signed during the 1851-52 period.
In a 2011 speech at Chico State, Shover shared a heart-wrenching detail about the labor exploitation on Bidwell’s ranch.
During the wheat harvest on the ranch, the wheat was spread in a huge circle and was separated from the chaff by having massive herds of horses racing around on top of the wheat. “The way they stopped the horses was, they sent the Indians out in front of them,” Shover said, pausing for a few seconds with a solemn expression after sharing detail of this dangerous work.
“He did things that I really regret,” Shover told ChicoSol on an early spring afternoon in the study of her Chapmantown home where, when this reporter arrived, she had been watching television news. However, Shover also thinks it’s important to recognize the good things Bidwell did and said she considers his “larger impact more positive than negative.”
Shover agrees with many community residents who note that the Mechoopda people were not well represented in the previous Bidwell Mansion State Historic Park, and would also like to see two new memorial structures on the park property. (Read our story on the Bidwell Mansion rebuild here.)
According to her, Bidwell moved the indigenous valley village “sort of more behind” the headquarters of the ranch to protect its residents from attack by the mountain Maidu, another subgroup of local Native Americans; on one occasion he brought a doctor from Sacramento to save the life of a Mechoopda tribal member, who had been shot by mountain Maidu.
“He taught them skills. He never demanded that they stay. They could have left. But most of them stayed,” Shover noted. “When I started this (research), I was pretty skeptical about John Bidwell. The more I did it, the more I saw the complexity of the situation.”
When Shover was growing up, there was a common belief in white culture that Indians were bad and settlers were good, and when the counterculture emerged decades later, the settlers became evil and the Indians became “good,” she said.
But Shover tried to sidestep such simplifications in her work, and in her book, shows the complexity of the interplay between groups.
Her efforts were rewarded when she says she was thanked on two occasions by local Native people. In one case, a young man came up to her when she was shopping in a store downtown. The man said he was a member of the mountain Maidu group, and told Shover, “I want to thank you. You were so fair in writing this book.”
This is the third story in a three-part series on the fire that destroyed Bidwell Mansion and the role the Mansion played in our community. Read the first story here and the second here.
Yucheng Tang is a California Local News Fellow reporting for ChicoSol.
