A local Florida reporter is being hailed a hero after he rescued a woman Thursday from rising flood waters in Orlando as she tried to drive through them.

WESH News’ Tony Atkins was reporting live at an intersection when an unidentified nurse who was trying to get to work called out for help. Atkins wasted no time and spring into action and was captured carrying the woman on his back through the waist-high water.

Dramatic video footage shows Atkins pulling the nurse out of her car and hoisting her over his back as he rescued the nurse.

The woman’s daughter, whose identity remains anonymous, posted online that her mom would have been fired had she not made it to work, Atkins posted to Twitter.

“Lord I can’t thank you enough! My mom … a nurse … essential worker trying to get to work or else she would be terminated … I have so many emotions right now but the main one is gratefulness.”

The daughter then sent Atkins a private message saying they are “so grateful” for Atkins.

“A true hero.”

Opponents of Arizona’s school choice program, which provides state funds to students to attend schools outside of the public school system, failed to collect enough signatures to place the issue on the general election ballot, according to a Friday statement by Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs.

Save Our Schools Arizona, an organization that advocates for public schools, was unable to collect the required 118,823 signatures needed to put the state’s new school-choice program on the 2024 ballot, according to Hobbs. The school-choice program was signed into law in July, offering students the opportunity to receive funding for private and charter schools.

“The Secretary of State’s office has reviewed the petitions our campaign turned in and has determined we fell short of the minimum signature threshold required to stop universal voucher expansion,” Save Our Schools said in a statement. “Though our estimated signature count was much higher, the discrepancy was influenced by several factors, including the incredibly high volume of returns of petitions in the final week, days and hours of the campaign.”

Despite turning in more than 140,000 signatures, the effort by Save Our Schools failed because there were not enough legal and completed signatures, Hobb’s statement said.

Arizona’s new school choice program is the widest in the nation, as 1.1 million students are now eligible for vouchers to attend any private and charter school of their choosing. Approximately 100,000 students being homeschooled or attending private institutions can apply to receive vouchers of $7,000 to put towards their education.

Due to the high volume of applicants for the school vouchers, the deadline to apply has been extended to Oct. 15, according to the Arizona Department of Education’s website.

“This is a monumental moment for all of Arizona’s students. Our kids will no longer be locked in under-performing schools. Today, we’re unlocking a whole new world of opportunity for them and their parents,” Arizona Republican Gov. Doug Ducey said in a July press release. “With this legislation, Arizona cements itself as the top state for school choice and as the first state in the nation to offer all families the option to choose the school setting that works best for them.”

The Arizona Department of Education and Save Our Schools did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Democratic politicians singling out Republican states for their crime issues fail to adequately address the pertinent and increasing issue in their own cities, according to experts.

Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently questioned why Democrats do not push back on Republican crime messaging when Republican states accounted for 8 of the 10 highest murder rates. Democratic Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner argued Wednesday there was no correlation between “being progressive or traditional” and the crime rate, saying the homicide rate in “MAGA states” is 40% higher than in “Biden states.”

Legal and criminal justice experts contended such arguments left out important context about where crime is happening within states and who governs those areas.

“Newsom’s figure is true enough, but is a pure statistical artifact,” Kentucky State University assistant professor Dr. Wilfred Reilly told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Historically, African Americans and indeed ‘redneck’ whites have had a high murder rate, so the highest MR states tend to be Southern places like Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, etc. In contrast, the lowest murder rates are found in North-Eastern purple states like Vermont and Maine.

“However, it’s just silly to pretend most murderers in the Deep South are Republicans,” he added. “Murder, there and pretty much everywhere else, is concentrated in larger cities with Democratic leaders.”

Out of 50 U.S. cities with the highest number of violent crimes per 100,000 people in 2019, according to data listed by CBS News, only one of the top 10 — Stockton, California — has a Republican mayor.

Rising crime in major cities has disproportionately harmed black people, the DCNF reported. They were victims of increasingly disproportionate numbers of murders across several major cities during the first half of 2021, based on data the outlet highlighted.

Heritage Foundation legal fellow Zack Smith said that he thought points like those touted by Newsom and Krasner were being pushed to obscure policies of officials in left-wing cities leading to a massive violent crime increase.

“If you look at many of the states that are in this higher murder rate bracket, it’s because the crime is concentrated, by and large, in a few very large cities,” Smith told the DCNF. He mentioned Missouri, which had the eighth highest violent crime rate nationwide in 2018, according to FBI data organized by 24/7 Wall St.

“St. Louis is in Missouri, and St. Louis has one of the worst violent crime rates in the country right now, unfortunately. They also have been kind of ground zero in a lot of ways for the defund the police movement,” Smith argued. “This idea that the policies being implemented by those on the Left, the policies to defund the police, the policies to demoralize the police, the policies not to prosecute certain crimes, not to seek due sentencing penalties, not hold the individual without bail pending trial, the idea that those policies don’t have any consequences, that’s just nonsense.”

Manhattan Institute fellow Charles Lehman told the DCNF that crime is happening on a local level, rather than a state level. He found it “hard to imagine” an argument like the one Democrats have posed “being persuasive for anybody but somebody who already wanted to believe it.”