Now, thanks to one of the tightest labor markets in decades, they have even more sway, with an array of jobs to choose from at ever higher wages.

To ease the labor crunch, some states are moving to roll back restrictions to let teens work more hours and, in some cases, more hazardous jobs much to the chagrin of labor rights groups, who see it as a troubling trend.

Economists say there are other ways to expand the workforce without putting more of a burden on kids, including by allowing more legal immigration.

Seeking teen workers

At Funtown Splashtown USA, an amusement park in southern Maine, teens play a critical role in keeping the attractions open, which isnt as easy as it used to be.

General Manager Cory Hutchinson anticipates hiring about 350 workers this summer, including many local high schoolers, compared with more than 500 in past summers.

We literally do not have enough people to staff the place seven days a week and into the evenings, he said. This summer, Funtown Splashtown will only be open six days a week, and will close at 6 p.m., instead of 9 p.m.

In April, nearly 34% of Americans aged 16 to 19 had jobs, according to government data. That compares with 30% four years ago, the last pre-pandemic summer.

More jobs are available for those who want them: There are roughly 1.6 jobs open for every person that is unemployed, according to the Labor Department. In normal times, that ratio is about 1:1.

At RideAway Adventures on Cape Cod, which offers kayak, bike and paddleboard rentals and tours, finding enough teen workers hasnt been a challenge. Owner Mike Morrison chalks it up to the fact that RideAway is a desirable place to work compared with other options.

Theyre not washing dishes and they get to be outside and active, Morrison said.

Plus, while he typically starts off new teen hires at $15 an hour, the states minimum wage, he will bump up the pay of hard workers by as much as 50 cents per hour toward the end of July to help keep them through the end of summer.

Choosier teens

Maxen Lucas, a graduating senior at Lincoln Academy in Maine, had his first job at 15 as a summer camp dishwasher, followed by a stint as a grocery bagger before getting into landscaping. He said young workers can be choosier now.

After COVID settled down, everyone was being paid more, said the 18-year-old from Nobleboro wholl head off to Maine Maritime Academy this fall.

Indeed, hourly pay jumped about 5% in April from a year ago at restaurants, retailers and amusement parks, the industries likely to employ teens. Before the pandemic, pay in these industries typically rose no more than 3% annually.

Addison Beer, 17, will work this summer at the Virginia G. Piper branch of the Boys & Girls Club in Scottsdale, Arizona, where she feels a strong connection with colleagues and the kids she helps out.

Because of a scheduling conflict, she temporarily took a job at Zinburger, a restaurant that was desperate for workers. They just asked me a few questions and were like, Oh, youre hired! she said.

For many teens, the point of a summer job doesnt have to be about finding the highest pay available.

Having a job is just so I can sustain myself, be more independent, not rely on my parents too much, said Christopher Au, 19, who has been dishing out ice cream at a J.P. Licks in Boston for the past few months.

Jack Gervais, 18, of Cumberland, Maine, lined up an internship shooting photography at an arts venue and will earn roughly the minimum wage of $13.80 an hour while gaining skills that relate to his career goals. But he said many kids he knows are seeking and commanding higher paying jobs.

Nobody I know would work for minimum wage, unless there were major tips involved, he said.

Expanding teen hours

New Jersey passed a law in 2022 allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to work up to 50 hours per week during the summer, when the states shore economy swells with tourists. The previous limit was 40 hours per week.

The measure has earned praise from parents.

Sally Rutherford, 56, of North Wildwood, New Jersey, said her 17-year-old son, Billy, was excited about the change. With the money he earns working as a game operator at a Jersey Shore amusement park, hell be able to help pay for a car.

It makes him a much more independent and responsible, she said.

Other states are considering a variety of proposals to expand teens role in the workplace.

In Wisconsin, lawmakers are backing a proposal to allow 14-year-olds to serve alcohol in bars and restaurants. In Iowa, the governor signed a bill into law Friday that will allow 16- and 17-year-olds to serve alcohol in restaurants, and to expand the hours minors can work.

Child welfare advocates worry the measures represent a coordinated push to scale back hard-won protections for minors.

Immigration is a factor

Economists say allowing more legal immigration is a key solution to workforce shortages, noting that it has been central to the countrys ability to grow for years in the face of an aging population.

Many resort towns rely on immigrants with summer visas to staff businesses such as restaurants, hotels, and tourist sites. But immigration fell sharply during the COVID outbreak as the federal government tightened restrictions. In 2022, nearly 285,000 of the summer visas were issued, down from about 350,000 before the pandemic.

The Federal Reserve in March estimated that the overall drop in immigration has cost the United States nearly one million workers, compared with pre-pandemic trends. Immigration is rebounding to pre-COVID levels, but the effects are still being felt.

Labor crunch beginning to ease

Another factor straining the labor market is Baby Boomers reaching retirement age. The Federal Reserve calculates that rising retirements has left the economy with about 2 million fewer workers.

Yet despite the significant challenges employers face this summer, labor shortages are much less of a problem than they were in 2021, when the pandemic made many people reluctant to return to consumer-facing jobs. Higher inflation has also incentivized many people to seek work to help their families cover food and rent.

In just the past six months, 2 million Americans who had been out of the workforce have taken jobs or started looking for one. The share of Americans aged 25 through 54 who are working or job-hunting is now above pre-pandemic levels.

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Associated Press writers Chris Rugaber in Washington, David Sharp in Portland, Maine, and Alina Hartounian in Scottsdale, Arizona, contributed to this report.

Randy Lankford, owner of Lankford Funeral Home and Family Center in Jeffersonville, faces a proposed sentence of 12 years: four years in prison and eight years of home incarceration, Clark County Circuit Court Judge N. Lisa Glickfield said.

Lankford was charged with theft for failing to complete the funeral services he was paid for, and must also pay restitution to 53 families totaling $46,000.

Lankford was released to home incarceration following the hearing. A formal sentencing hearing is planned for June 23.

Jeffersonville Police began investigating the funeral home early last July after the county coroners office reported a strong odor emanating from the building. The unrefrigerated bodies were found in various states of decomposition, and some had been at the funeral home since March.

Clark County Prosecutor Jeremy Mull said the many charges against Lankford and existing court backups from the COVID-19 pandemic complicated the process. He said he felt the states move to eliminate about half of the counts will grant the most immediate form of relief.

We wanted to get justice for these families, he said.

Derrick Kessinger attended Fridays court hearing. He said he trusted Lankford while the remains of three loved ones sat inside the funeral home.

Its been tough, but I do forgive him for what he did, Kessinger said. I hope he can find forgiveness.

Kessinger eventually received the cremains.

Judge Nina Y. Wang wrote that wearing a sash during a graduation ceremony falls under school-sponsored speech, not the students private speech. Therefor, the School District is permitted to restrict that speech as it sees fit in the interest of the kind of graduation it would like to hold, Wang wrote.

The ruling was over the students request for a temporary restraining order, which would have allowed her to wear the sash on Saturday for graduation because the case wouldnt have resolved in time. Wang found that the student and her attorneys failed to sufficiently show they were likely to succeed, but a final ruling is still to come.

Its the latest dispute in the U.S. about what kind of cultural graduation attire is allowed at commencement ceremonies, with many focusing on tribal regalia.

Attorneys for Naomi Peña Villasano argued in a hearing Friday in Denver that the school district decision violates her free speech rights. They also said that its inconsistent for the district to allow Native American attire but not Peña Villasanos sash representing her heritage. The sash has the Mexican flag on one side and the United States flag on the other.

Im a 200 percenter 100% American and 100% Mexican, she said at a recent school board meeting in Colorados rural Western Slope.

The district is discriminating against the expression of different cultural heritages, said her attorney Kenneth Parreno, from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, at Fridays hearing.

An attorney representing the Garfield County School District 16 countered that Native American regalia is required to be allowed in Colorado and is categorically different from wearing a countrys flags. Permitting Peña Villasano to sport the U.S. and Mexican flags as a sash, said Holly Ortiz, could open the door to offensive material.

Ortiz further stated that the district doesnt want to prevent Peña Villasano from expressing herself and that the graduate could adorn her cap with the flags or wear the sash before or after the ceremony.

But she doesnt have a right to express it in any way that she wants, Ortiz said.

Wang sided with the district, finding that the School District could freely permit one sash and prohibit another.

Similar disputes have played out across the U.S. this graduation season.

A transgender girl lodged a lawsuit against a Mississippi school district for banning her from wearing a dress to graduation. In Oklahoma, a Native American former student brought legal action against a school district for removing a feather, a sacred religious object, from her cap before the graduation ceremony in 2022.

What qualifies as proper graduation attire has been a source of conflict for Native American students around the country. Both Nevada and Oklahoma on Thursday passed laws allowing Native American students to wear religious and cultural regalia at graduation ceremonies.

This year, Colorado passed a law making it illegal to keep Native American students from donning such regalia. Nearly a dozen states have similar laws.

The legal arguments often come down to whether the First Amendment protects personal expression, in this case the sash, or if it would be considered school sponsored speech, and could be limited for educational purposes.

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Bedayn is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

The 11-year sentence represents a comeuppance for the wide-eyed woman who broke through tech bro culture to become one of Silicon Valleys most celebrated entrepreneurs, only to be exposed as a fraud. Along the way, Holmes became a symbol of the shameless hyperbole that often saturates startup culture.

But questions still linger about her true intentions so many that even the federal judge who presided over her trial seemed mystified. And Holmes defenders continue to ask whether the punishment fits the crime.

At 39, she seems most likely to be remembered as Silicon Valleys Icarus a high-flying entrepreneur burning with reckless ambition whose odyssey culminated in convictions for fraud and conspiracy.

Her motives are still somewhat mysterious, and some supporters say federal prosecutors targeted her unfairly in their zeal to bring down one of the most prominent practitioners of fake-it-til-you-make-it the tech sectors brand of self-promotion that sometimes veers into exaggeration and blatant lies to raise money.

Holmes will begin to pay the price for her deceit on May 30 when she is scheduled begin the sentence that will separate her from her two children a son whose July 2021 birth delayed the start of her trial and a 3-month-old daughter conceived after her conviction.

She is expected to be incarcerated in Bryan, Texas, about 100 miles (160 km) northwest of her hometown of Houston. The prison was recommended by the judge who sentenced Holmes, but authorities have not publicly disclosed where she will be held.

Her many detractors contend she deserves to be in prison for peddling a technology that she repeatedly boasted would quickly scan for hundreds of diseases and other health problems with a few drops of blood taken with a finger prick.

The technology never worked as promised. Instead, Theranos tests produced wildly unreliable results that could have endangered patients lives one of the most frequently cited reasons why she deserved to be prosecuted.

Before those lies were uncovered in a series of explosive articles in The Wall Street Journal beginning in October 2015, Holmes raised nearly $1 billion from a list of savvy investors including Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and media mogul Rupert Murdoch. It was the duping of those investors that led to her prison sentence and a $452 million restitution bill.

Holmes stake in Theranos at one point catapulted her paper wealth to $4.5 billion. She never sold any of her stock in the company, though trial evidence left no doubt she reveled in the trappings of fame and fortune so much so that she and the father of her children, William Billy Evans, lived on a palatial Silicon Valley estate during the trial.

The theory that Holmes was running an elaborate scam was buttressed by trial evidence documenting her efforts to prevent the Journals investigation from being published. That campaign compelled John Carreyrou the reporter responsible for those bombshell stories to attend court and position himself in Holmes line of vision when she took the witness stand.

Holmes also signed off on surveillance aimed at intimidating Theranos employees who helped uncover the flaws with the blood-testing technology. The whistleblowers included Tyler Shultz, the grandson of former Secretary of State George Shultz, whom Holmes befriended and persuaded to join the Theranos board.

Tyler Shultz became so unnerved by Holmes efforts to shut him up that he began sleeping with a knife under his pillow, according to a wrenching statement delivered by his father, Alex, at her sentencing.

Holmes supporters still contend she always had good intentions and was unfairly scapegoated by the Justice Department. They insist she simply deployed the same over-the-top promotion tactics as many other tech executives, including Elon Musk, who has repeatedly made misleading statements about the capabilities of Teslas self-driving cars.

According to those supporters, Holmes was singled out because she was a woman who briefly eclipsed the men who customarily bask in Silicon Valleys spotlight, and the trial turned her into a latter-day version of Hester Prynne the protagonist in the 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter.

Holmes steadfastly maintained her innocence during seven often-riveting days of testimony in her own defense a spectacle that caused people to line up shortly after midnight to secure one of the few dozen seats available in the San Jose courtroom.

On one memorable day, Holmes recounted how she had never gotten over the trauma of being raped while enrolled at Stanford University. She then described being subjected to a long-running pattern of emotional and sexual abuse by her former lover and Theranos conspirator, Ramesh Sunny Balwani, and suggested his stifling control blurred her thinking.

Balwanis lawyer, Jeffrey Coopersmith, denied those allegations during the trial. In Balwanis subsequent trial, Coopersmith unsuccessfully tried to depict his client as Holmes pawn.

Balwani, 57, is now serving a nearly 13-year prison sentence for fraud and conspiracy.

When it came time to sentence the then-pregnant Holmes in November, U.S. District Judge Edward Davila seemed as puzzled as anyone about why she did what she did.

This is a fraud case where an exciting venture went forward with great expectations and hope, only to be dashed by untruth, misrepresentations, hubris and plain lies, Davila lamented while Holmes stood before him. I suppose we step back and we look at this, and we think what is the pathology of fraud?

The judge also hearkened back to the days that Silicon Valley consisted mostly of orchards farmed by immigrants. That was before the land was ceded to the tech boom beginning in 1939 when William Hewlett and David Packard founded a company bearing their surnames in a one-car garage in Palo Alto the same city where Theranos was based.

Youll recall the wonderful innovation of those two individuals in that small garage, Davila reminded everyone in the rapt courtroom. No exotic automobiles or lavish lifestyle, just a desire to create for societys benefit through honest hard work. And that, I would hope, would be the continuing story, the legacy and practice of Silicon Valley.