SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (Dakota News Now) – Sunday was a First Alert Weather Day. That’s in part because of the cold temperatures across the region and a snow system that moved across the Dakota News Now viewing area.

The precipitation caused some issues for drivers. With more cars on the road from post-Thanksgiving travel, there’s a greater chance of some accidents. That’s just playing the odds. On top of that was this most recent winter weather system that hit the Dakotas on one of the busiest travel days of the year.

There wasn’t much snow accumulation predicted, but like on Wednesday, it doesn’t take much to cause problems on slick roadways.

Earlier in the day, the South Dakota Department of Transportation reported scattered ice and slippery roads in areas around Mobridge, Pierre and Wagner. It would get a little bit worse surrounding Mobridge over time with scattered snow partially covering roads. As the precipitation moved east, Aberdeen and northeastern South Dakota looked like a snow globe.

Drivers in Huron, Mitchell and eventually Brookings and Sioux Falls saw similar conditions sweep in late with scattered snow or slush on roads.

The SD DOT also took to social media earlier in the day with some key winter driving reminders going into December.

“If you do have winter driving conditions we want you to slow down, don’t use cruise and give our plows plenty of room,” explained SD DOT Director of Operations Craig Smith.

Conditions can rapidly change, so being in the know is the best way to stay safe behind the wheel.

“Be prepared and plan your routes,” Smith said. “SD 511 is the best source of information. We put a lot of effort to keep that information up to date and accurate.”

Thankfully, no accident reports have been made at the hour this article was published.

As always, stick with Dakota News Now for updates on air and online on winter weather conditions.

Copyright 2024 Dakota News Now. All rights reserved.

A 2023 bill that paved the way for higher payments to counties that keep kids out of the justice system has increased the number of diversion offers from prosecutors across South Dakota.

That was among the takeaways from an annual juvenile justice report presented recently to the state’s Juvenile Justice Oversight Council.

Senate Bill 5, passed in 2023, extended the lifespan of the council, a group created in 2015 alongside a sweeping juvenile justice reform package that aimed to reduce the number of youth in secure detention. The reforms were meant to avoid the harms associated with incarceration for children and offer more fiscally responsible alternatives. Locking up children costs considerably more than probation supervision or in-community programming.

The bill also empowered the council to make adjustments to things like the amount of money paid per kid for diversion programs. The council recommended offering $750 to counties for each successful diversion, a $500 increase. The Department of Corrections (DOC) sponsored a successful bill to boost that funding during the 2024 session.

In the past nine years, counties have collected $4.2 million in incentives from the state. 

Avoiding a judge

Children are not charged with crimes in the juvenile justice system, but rather “adjudicated” for the alleged commission of a criminal act. With diversion programs, prosecutors use a report from law enforcement for criminal behavior as the starting point for a set of actions an accused child must take to avoid seeing the incident move through a formal adjudication.

A child charged with alcohol consumption, for example, might be asked to complete a substance abuse evaluation and to check in with the prosecutor’s office monthly while maintaining good behavior for a few months. If the child satisfies the diversion requirements, their case will be closed without them ever seeing a judge.

Juvenile justice report: More delinquent kids taken to court

According to the annual report presented to the oversight council on Tuesday, diversion programming increased for the most common juvenile infractions in 2024. 

The last fiscal year “saw two times as many kids getting diversion opportunities from where we started” with the reforms nearly 10 years ago, according to Kristi Bunkers, an oversight council member who leads the DOC’s juvenile justice programming.

Those opportunities translate into better long-term outcomes for troubled youth, Bunkers told the oversight group.

“The research continues to come out in support of diversion,” she said. “It’s a really promising window of opportunity for the system to get it right.” 

About 82% of the 2,439 kids offered diversion programming last year were successful, the annual report says. The year before that, there were 2,180 diversions, and just over 83% were successful.

Diversions for alcohol and drugs, crimes against property and persons, sex offenses and tobacco use increased in 2024, according to the report.

Truancy, however, saw fewer diversions than in 2023, down to 270 from 313 in 2023. There were 694 and 565 in 2021 and 2022, respectively.  

Homeschooling concerns with truancy

David Knoff, a First Circuit judge and oversight council member, said the council’s truancy subgroup met three or four times this year to discuss the issue. Truancy is when a kid is chronically absent from school. Knoff was among the council members to note that truancy cases often suggest deeper issues in a child’s home life. 

A child has often missed weeks or months of school by the time a case lands in court, Knoff said, so the subgroup was focused on finding out ways to intervene sooner. The Department of Social Services’ Division of Behavioral Health offers programming to kids and families, serving 4,775 youth in individual or family sessions in 2024.

Cultural healing camps, equine therapy: Federal diversion grants for kids awarded across SD

“How do we make the family aware of how they can tap into those resources, or school districts, how they can get those to the families and get them tapped in to see that they can qualify and get the counseling they need to find out what kind of issues are going on within the homes,” Knoff said. 

Knoff also talked about the possibility that truancy cases have been affected by a 2021 law making it easier for parents to pull their children from school and place them in “alternative instruction” such as online schooling or homeschooling.

The law change struck down things like testing requirements and instruction time requirements, and removed a clause that allowed the state’s Department of Education to investigate situations where there’s concern a child might not be getting the instruction they’re required to under state law. 

If a child is pulled from school for in-home instruction, Knoff said, “then there is no truancy.”

Knoff said he and others on the council are concerned that some students’ attendance and participation have suffered in certain homeschooling situations.

“It’s not that homeschooling itself is the problem,” Knoff said. “It’s certain parents who maybe don’t have the ability or resources to be able to effectively homeschool, and they can just pull their kid out of school, which has a lot of long-term effects.”

Council member Tiffany Wolfgang of the DSS will leave state government, and the council, at the end of the year after nearly three decades in various social service roles. Wolfgang told the council that as valuable as state-level reports and oversight can be, local school districts and community leaders are critical to crafting the approach to things like truancy.

“Truancy really is a local, local issue in really, truly needing to get the players at the local level in a room together, communicating and talking about what resources we have,” Wolfgang said. “How do we want to address truancy in this community and who needs to talk to whom?”

PIEDMONT, S.D. (South Dakota News Watch) – Earlier this year, well before big-game hunting season began in South Dakota, Josh Clark invested time and money into expanding his wild-game processing capabilities to take advantage of high demand for the service.

As the number of commercial and self-employed meat cutters willing to process wild game in South Dakota has dwindled, Clark saw an opportunity in 2024 to profit off the trend at Cutting Edge Meat Market in Piedmont, where he is the manager.

Prior to hunting season, he added another skinning station, expanded capacity to hang and move animals and created more refrigeration space. He also did some summer advertising to let hunters know he is still taking in deer, elk and other large animal carcasses for full-service processing into steak, burgers and sausages.

“I don’t know if it’s just the lack of processors still out there, but we’re up 30% to 40% over last year in terms of animal drop-offs,” Clark told News Watch last week. “We’re slammed right now.”

Clark said he recently contacted several other West River meat shops and found that no one he spoke to is taking in whole deer or other game for processing.

Butchers who still take full deer carcasses said other processors who no longer take wild game or require it to be deboned first may be facing worker shortages, have higher expenses that cut into profitability or simply do not want the hassle of dealing with wild game processing that often occurs one customer with one animal at a time and creates a mad rush of business each fall.

The month of November – the heart of the deer hunting season in South Dakota – is always busy for butchers who process wild game, as hunters bring in tens of thousands of deer and antelope shot with rifles or bow and arrow. In 2023, South Dakota hunters killed about 49,000 deer, roughly 2,800 antelope and 114 elk, according to the state.

Clark said prior News Watch coverage of the processor shortage generated even more business for him, including from Custer State Park, where officials shipped him some buffaloes for processing after culling park animals after the annual Buffalo Roundup.

South Dakota butchers exiting wild game market

Some butcher shops have closed or shifted focus away from wild game, while others no longer take any game animals, and a few will only process wild meat that is already skinned and deboned by the customer.

Whereas commercial livestock producers schedule delivery of animals to be slaughtered and butchered during normal work hours and with several animals at once, big game hunters usually arrive at butcher shops with one or two animals at whatever time of day they happen to make a kill.

Paul Sorum, co-owner of Renner Corner Meats, about 10 miles north of Sioux Falls, said his shop usually processes about 1,000 deer and other big-game carcasses a year. Sorum said he feels a strong commitment to helping hunters have a place to take full carcasses. But he also wants to continue taking whole animals as a way to maintain the South Dakota hunting economy and to uphold conservation goals.

“If it weren’t for the hunters, we’d have an overabundance of deer that are not easy on crops, not to mention the damage they do to vehicles (when struck),” he said.

The shortage of wild-game processors has been a boon to Sorum’s bottom line in the fall. He’s now taking in a lot of deer from western Minnesota and has had elk, moose, caribou, bear and antelope shipped in from other states for processing in Renner.

One concern is that if hunters who lack the skills or equipment to skin, quarter and debone carcasses on their own can’t find a processor willing to take a whole carcass, the animals could be dumped in the garbage or left to rot in the field. Some hunters may choose to give up hunting if they know in advance they won’t be able to get a full animal carcass processed.

“The deer hunters, they need a place to take their animals to be processed correctly and to know they’re going to get a great product, so we still provide that service because there’s not that many of us out there,” Sorum said. “It’s a busy time, and it’s difficult work, but I have a great staff and we get through it.”

Hunters can donate animals to charity

Hunters who want to donate the meat from a deer or antelope to charitable food pantries across the state can work with South Dakota Sportsmen Against Hunger. Under the program, hunters with animals can contact one of roughly two dozen butchers in South Dakota and drop off an animal carcass or deboned meat for full processing. In most cases, the participating butcher shops assume the cost of processing female animals, while donating a buck typically results in the hunter paying the processing fee.

Some of the butchers enrolled in the program require that the animal be skinned and deboned before being dropped off for processing, and the program does nothing to help hunters who want to eat the wild game meat from animals they have killed.

The wild game processing industry is not overseen or regulated by the state Game, Fish & Parks Department, which manages state hunting seasons, though butcher shops are subject to regular inspection by state and federal regulators. GFP spokesman Nick Harrington sent an email to News Watch in 2023 saying the department “is currently not seeing a lack of game processors acting as a barrier to hunters participating in the sport.”

“Conversely, applications for many big game seasons including deer and elk are either holding steady or gradually rising each year,” Harrington wrote. “There are some big-game hunters who utilize processors, while others process themselves. This is each individual hunter’s choice and personal preference.”

Home-based butchers help fill the need

The commercial butcher shops that handle wild game have long been bolstered by a network of small, home-based meat processors who take animals killed in the fall. However, those processors are also dropping out of the industry or slowing down due to age, increasing volumes or burnout.

But some home-based butchers continue to provide the service of processing wild game from carcass to usable meat portions wrapped in butcher paper, though they often can only be found through word-of-mouth connections.

Rex Roseland and his wife, Cheryl, have processed wild game at their home north of Rapid City for decades, but they’ve seen demand for processing rise in recent years.

“When you get swamped, it just takes time to get caught up,” Rex Roseland told News Watch in 2023. “We get a lot of people from previous years, and they keep coming back. But every year it seems like we pick up more people.”

Cheryl Roseland said they enjoy the work and want to help hunters out, but it’s getting harder to handle the increasing flow of animals being brought in.

“We’ve heard from people who are saying, ‘Help us because we can’t find anyplace that will take it,’” she said. “But the thing is, while we can do it, do we have room to add another animal? We will take overflow when we can, but we’re overflowing ourselves out here.”

This story was produced by South Dakota News Watch, an independent, nonprofit news organization. Read more in-depth stories at sdnewswatch.org and sign up for an email every few days to get stories as soon as they’re published. Contact Bart Pfankuch at bart.pfankuch@sdnewswatch.org.

Copyright 2024 Dakota News Now. All rights reserved.