WILSON, Wyo. — Another complicated day for Teton Pass commuters.

WY22 over Teton Pass is closed in both directions due to avalanche control as of 8 a.m. on Monday, Dec. 22, according to an alert issued by the Wyoming Department of Transportation (WYDOT). WYDOT’s estimated opening time for the road is between noon and 2 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 23.

WYDOT had closed the pass at 3 a.m. Monday for avalanche control. According to a post by the Bridger-Teton Avalanche Center (BTAC), a “large explosive triggered avalanche” ended up covering both lanes of the Pass.

“Early this morning, WYDOT crews brought down a large, controlled avalanche at Glory Bowl during their mitigation mission,” the agency posted to Facebook Monday morning. “Due to the extent of the clean up, estimated opening time is between noon and 2 p.m. tomorrow.”

WYDOT confirmed to Buckrail that the dense, heavy slide is being addressed by a dozer on Monday morning, and that clearing the snow will take several hours. The agency expects to share an updated opening time estimate as the cleanup unfolds.

According to BTAC’s Monday forecast, high avalanche danger exists in the Tetons.

“Heavy snowfall and strong wind has created very dangerous avalanche conditions on wind loaded middle and upper elevation terrain,” its forecast states.

This is a developing story. Buckrail will provide information as details become available.

FIRST ON FOX: A conservative, Trump-aligned legal group filed a civil rights complaint alleging that a school district in Colorado is using race as a major factor when determining disciplinary procedures and has retaliated against administrators who attempt to push back. 

America First Legal (AFL), founded by top Trump advisor Stephen Miller, filed a civil rights complaint asking the Department of Education and the Department of Justice to investigate Cherry Creek School District, alleging it is in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In its complaint, AFL cites a specific instance in which a Black student and an Asian student commit nearly identical behavior, but only the Asian student was disciplined. 

AFL also obtained undercover recordings of discussions between administrators that allegedly show them admitting that the district’s DEI chief has been interfering with disciplinary procedures on the basis of race. When an administrator tried to step in and call out this allegedly racist activity, the official was retaliated against, according to AFL. 

“If a public school district can openly run discipline and employment systems through a racial filter, then the rule of law means nothing,” said Nick Barry, senior counsel at America First Legal. “This is discrimination, plain and simple. It is the soft bigotry of low expectations and should not be tolerated. The Department must intervene and restore equal treatment for students, educators, and families.”

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT SUES PUBLIC SCHOOL DISTRICT OVER ALLEGEDLY DISCRIMINATORY POLICIES

Fox News Digital reached out to the district for comment, but it declined to comment on the matter, telling Fox News Digital it could not say anything because the district had “no knowledge of” AFL’s civil rights complaint despite Fox News Digital transmitting a copy of the complaint to the district. AFL’s complaint was filed electronically with the federal government.  

In late 2023, according to the complaint, the district’s Campus Middle School disciplined and suspended three female students after a video of them off campus over Thanksgiving break using variations of the N-word while under the influence of alcohol was submitted to the district. Two students, one White and one Hispanic, were allegedly depicted in the video using the racially charged language, while the third Asian female did not appear in the video and only recorded the encounter.

Meanwhile, a fourth Black female student at the middle school allegedly asked the Asian female student who recorded the encounter to send her the video, which the Black student then allegedly passed along to her sister, a Black student in the district’s high school, who, AFL said, subsequently posted the video on social media and tagged the White, Hispanic and Asian students’ social media accounts. The Black female student who passed the video to her Black sister also passed it to her mother, who then shared the video with the Rocky Mountain NAACP, according to the complaint.

Despite nearly identical behavior from the Asian female student and the Black female students in the district, only the Asian student was disciplined, AFL alleged. She got the same punishment as the two female students pictured in the video using inappropriate language, which included months of expulsion hearings that eventually culminated in her suspension from school, according to AFL. 

“[The Black students involved] disseminated the video to a much broader audience than [the Asian student involved],” AFL’s complaint states. “Despite both [Black female students involved] engaging in materially identical conduct as [the Asian female student involved], the District did not impose any discipline. … After [the Black female students’] identical infractions came to light, former Campus Assistant Principal Dan Hanson instructed personnel not to address the matter in electronic communications due to concerns about public records requests and adverse publicity.”

LEAKED LESSONS FROM FIRST-YEAR UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS EDUCATION COURSE SHOW EXTREME LEFT BIAS: ‘JUST SO WRONG’

According to AFL’s complaint, one of the non-disciplined Black female students continued to exhibit behavioral issues, and undercover recordings it obtained involving discussions between district administrators show Campus Middle School officials admitting the district’s Equity Department interferes with the equal application of disciplinary policies.

“[T]heir first instinct is implicit bias. So if, for example, [Redacted] is not responding appropriately to [the Black female student’s] concerns, it’s because [Redacted] has implicit bias towards a Black young lady, and that she does not know how to navigate the cultural identity of a Black young lady and that [Black female student involved] is talking to her like [she] talks to anybody,” Campus Middle School Principal Lissa Staal can allegedly be heard saying during a meeting with school leaders.

“This is just how [the Black female student involved] communicates. And that is culturally appropriate for [the Black female student involved] to communicate that way because that’s what is culturally appropriate,” Staal continued. “And that’s what is happening is that the Whiteness that is present in our building is looking at that in a punitive way … that we are attributing negative connotations to what is essentially, exactly, we’re calling her disrespectful or disruptive or defiant when she is just communicating in a culturally appropriate way.”

According to AFL’s complaint, school personnel said they had “no ability to enforce anything” against the Black female student who was continuing to act out because they would “lose every time,” since their “hands were tied” by the district’s DEI department. 

The district also allegedly retaliated against former Dean of Students Pat Hogarty when he voiced disagreement with the district’s DEI priorities, according to AFL’s complaint.

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“In January 2024, Mr. Hogarty took part in the Courageous Conversations training. When faced with the topics of ‘What does it mean to be White?’ ‘What experiences define Whiteness?’ and ‘How do you identify?’ Mr. Hogarty stated that ‘he identifies as an American, that he loves his country, and that he believes it is the greatest country ever founded,’” AFL’s complaint states. 

“Shortly after the training, Principal Staal informed Mr. Hogarty that the Equity Department’s Executive Director, Mr. Garcia y Ortiz, took issue with Mr. Hogarty’s failure to ‘acknowledge what people of color go through’ and refusal to ‘admit that America is systemically racist.’ Mr. Hogarty later learned that Garcia y Ortiz had referred to Mr.Hogarty’s comments in the training as having ‘racist undertones.’ Approximately a month later, Mr. Hogarty was informed that his position had been eliminated due to ‘budgetary reasons.’”

Due to the Cherry Creek School District receiving federal funds, it is subject to discrimination guidelines under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. AFL has requested that the Education and Justice departments investigate the matter further and implement any necessary remedial action or referrals to enforce federal civil rights law.

We’ll hang things up for the year on Dec. 24 and pick things back up on Jan. 5. 

Happy holidays. (Yippee-Ki-Yay.) —AN

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What happened when Waymo robotaxis met a San Francisco blackout

An extraordinary experiment happened over the weekend in San Francisco.

What would a fleet of autonomous vehicles do when a widespread power outage knocked out traffic lights across one-third of the city? 

We quickly found out—and the results were plastered all over social media. 

On Saturday afternoon, Waymo vehicles throughout SF opted to stop where they were or pull over and throw on their hazard lights—“blocking intersections” and “compounding gridlock,” observed the San Francisco Standard—leading the Alphabet-owned robotaxi operator to suspend service throughout the city. (It resumed Sunday evening.)

In a statement, Waymo said that its vehicles are “designed to treat non-functional signals as four-way stops” but “the sheer scale of the outage led to instances where vehicles remained stationary longer than usual.” 

As locals worked through the outage, a moderate debate about the robotaxi fleet continued online. Was it so wrong to expect Waymo’s vehicles to play it safe when infrastructure stopped working? After all, aren’t human drivers predictably chaotic when things go sideways? What exactly should robotaxis optimize for: traffic flow or citizen safety? 

And: Just how safe is stopping if you prompt traffic to go around you?

Waymo resumed service Sunday evening, no doubt grappling with these questions (and what city officials might have to say about them). “We are already learning and improving from this event,” it said. —AN

More tech

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—SoftBank cashes out to back OpenAI. The Japanese conglomerate is looking under every rock to fulfill its “all in” OpenAI funding promise.

—Chaos at CISA. A failed, unsanctioned polygraph by its acting director has the U.S. cybersecurity agency in disarray.

—PE firms acquire Clearwater Analytics for $8.4 billion. Permira and Warburg Pincus lead the investor group seeking to buy the fintech firm.

—Uber goes to London. A robotaxi trial in partnership with Baidu will begin in the first half of next year.

—Data center deals reach $61 billion worldwide in 2025, according to S&P Global.

—Chatbots’ uncanny valley. Making AI agents more human-like creates cognitive dissonance and trust issues, researchers say.

—Daylight between David Sacks and tech lobbyists. Tech reps say the AI czar’s push to use Trump’s executive order to suppress state AI regulation is the right idea, wrong execution.