That’s how children — all U.S. citizens — and their parents described their treatment by federal immigration agents in accounts delivered in Washington, D.C., Tuesday at a joint House and Senate hearing. 

The teens told lawmakers these encounters have left them unable to sleep, concentrate on school, plan for their future or feel safe in any setting.

“Whenever I hear sirens or I see an officer, my heart starts racing,” said Arnoldo Bazan, 16, who described a violent incident with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on Oct. 23, 2025. “I don’t even know when I’ll see my father again. This is not the America I know.”

Neither ICE nor the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the agency, replied to requests for comment. A Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said they would need more time to respond.

Bazan said he was assaulted by ICE agents on his way to school with his father last fall when they stopped at a McDonald’s to celebrate him making a varsity team. Just then, Bazan said, a car with tinted windows and flashing lights pulled them over. 

Soon, multiple unmarked vehicles approached. 

“Armed men with masks jumped out and started banging on the windows,” Bazan said. “They never identified themselves or explained why we were stopped. We didn’t know who these men were. I started recording on my phone. One of the unmarked cars rammed into our car multiple times. I even felt our car lift.”

Agents grabbed his father and Bazan ran to help. 

“One officer put me in a choke hold and told me, ‘You’re done,’” the boy said, taking short breaks to compose himself. “His grip was so tight, I wondered if I would even make it out alive. With all of my strength, I screamed that I was underage and from the United States. When the officers finally stopped, I began telling everybody who could hear me that these officers had tried to flip our car, and that I had proof of my phone.”

Federal agents confiscated his cell, he testified. 

“The officer put me and my dad in the car,” Bazan said. “They mocked us. They told me that I was gay for crying, an illegal, an illegal idiot, a border hopper, and other demeaning words.”

Bazan said the officers drove them to his house where he and his father, who was subsequently deported to Mexico, “prayed for one last time. I tried to hug him, but he couldn’t hug me back because he was handcuffed.”

He said his backpack was returned but not his phone and when he traced it, it turned up inside a kiosk that sells electronics. Bazan said local police told him they couldn’t take any action against federal officers.

Bazan, who suffered a neck injury, was taken to the hospital that day and given morphine for his pain, he said. He told the committee his body ached after the incident, that he couldn’t sleep and missed school.

He was one of three teens who spoke at the forum called by Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal, ranking member of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and U.S. Rep. Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. 

“Our efforts to document and elevate the stories of this regime’s heartless actions against children will continue, and we know that there are thousands more stories to be told,” Blumenthal said at the start, thanking the students and their parents for speaking and remarking on their bravery.  

The lawmakers released a minority staff report Tuesday entitled , saying it documents the cases of “128 children who have been injured, left unattended, or otherwise put at direct risk of harm due to operations of the Department of Homeland Security.”

Their action comes amid Democrats’ ongoing campaign to curtail federal immigration agents. They’re refusing to fund DHS, which is now in the second month of a partial government shutdown, until reforms and greater public accountability are put in place.

An 18-year-old, who used the pseudonym Fernando Hernández García, said he has been living on his own for more than a year after his parents were deported to Mexico — taking his medically fragile U.S.-born sister with them. The girl cannot access treatment there because she is not a Mexican citizen, her brother said. 

Garcia, recalling their apprehension, said it all began when the little girl woke up and said her head hurt. 

“My parents took this very seriously because the year before, she had an emergency surgery to remove a tumor,” Garcia said. “My parents and my five siblings got in the car and drove from South Texas to Houston so she could see a specialist at Texas Children’s Hospital. On the way, government officials stopped them at a checkpoint and deported everyone — even though my parents told them about my sister’s condition, even though my siblings are U.S. citizens.”

Garcia wasn’t with them, but his family had made this same trip many times before President Donald Trump took office for the second time and had no problems, he said: They’d present the girl’s proof of citizenship and a letter from the hospital explaining her medical needs and would be on their way. 

“When I heard the news I couldn’t breathe,” the teen said. “I didn’t know what I was going to do. My mom worried about me returning to our home in South Texas alone, but I had to finish high school and I wanted to make sure I could do everything in my power to stay on top of the bills and keep the home my mom and dad had sacrificed so much for.”

Garcia had planned to attend college but instead spends all of his time working.

“I can’t think about the things my peers are doing because I honestly can’t relate,” he said. “The situation is a nightmare that I can’t wake up from.”

His family already missed his high school graduation, a milestone he thought they’d share.  

“If my parents were still here, they would have pushed me to go to college, to dream big, and they would have helped me to make it happen,” he said. 

Michelle Ramirez Sanan, 18 and from Chelsea, Massachusetts, plans to attend college in the fall, but said Tuesday that memories of her family’s ICE encounter have left her shaken and distracted. 

Sanan was restrained by federal agents after her mother and autistic 13-year-old brother, also a U.S. citizen, were dragged from their car while in their neighborhood and detained Sept. 26, 2025. 

Officers arrested Sanan’s 50-year old mother, who has legal status and has lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years. The teen, in her emotional testimony, recalled coming upon the scene. 

“My brother was crying next to my mom who was being pushed against the fence in handcuffs,” she said. “Most ICE officers were wearing masks. I could see they had guns.”

Sanan said she tried to run to them but was stopped by a federal agent. 

“My brother doesn’t speak very much because of his disability,” she said. “He doesn’t know how to explain that he’s an American citizen. I tried to protect him by yelling out, ‘My brother has autism’, but instead of helping him, the ICE officer kept blocking me and told me to shut up.”

Sanan, who has asthma, said she had trouble breathing. 

“Since that day, I have had a harder time focusing in school, taking care of myself, and managing my anxiety,” she said. “I have had trouble sleeping and headaches. I was so excited to enjoy my senior year before starting a new chapter in college. But now I spend so much of my time wondering why this happened to us.”

Educators recognize students’ pain. Zena Stenvik is the superintendent of Columbia Heights Public Schools, which serves 3,400 children just north of Minneapolis, Minnesota. 

Among her charges is 5-year-old , who galvanized national opposition to Trump’s immigration crackdown after he was photographed in a blue bunny hat, wearing a Spiderman backpack, being detained by federal agents in January with his father.  

Liam languished in Texas’s for more than a week before he was released. He and his family, who hail from Ecuador, had their asylum claims denied this month and are now on a . 

The impact of DHS’s Operation Metro Surge on her students has been profound, Stenvik said: Seven have been detained, including at Dilley, and all six who have returned came back sick — and emotionally frayed. 

“We are seeing increased separation anxiety with students struggling to be apart from their parents during the school day,” she said. “We’re seeing heightened difficulty with transitions: One student who was detained in Texas now experiences distress when leaving the classroom to go to art or gym class. He reported that separation from their trusted teacher and classroom removes a sense of safety. We’re also seeing increased stress responses, such as fight, flight, freeze among students who experienced direct or indirect trauma.”

Some of the impacted children, one parent said, are very young. Anabel Romero, a mother of four who was born and raised in Idaho, described a shocking attack on Hispanic residents in Wilder, Idaho, on . 

Romero, her stepson and her three children, ages 14, 8 and 6, were among hundreds of people watching horse races that Sunday when they spotted a helicopter in the sky. A medical worker, Romero thought someone had been injured and it was there to help. 

“But then I saw people running and screaming, terrified,” she said. “Men in military style gear stormed in with weapons at the ready. The first thing I did was call my daughter and tell her not to get out of the truck and to take care of her brother and sister. I ran and hid in one of the horse stalls.” 

Armed men grabbed and beat Romero, she said, punching her in the head and kicking her. 

“One of them threatened to blow my head off,” she testified. “I couldn’t breathe, and they zip tied me in the back. After that, they brought me up and I told them I needed to get to my children. One of them actually laughed and said they were taking better care of them than I was.”

Her eldest daughter was also thrown on the ground, zip tied and suffered bruises all along her sides. Her two youngest were taken from the truck at gunpoint, she said. 

“They were alone and terrified,” Romero said. “When my children were with me, I couldn’t comfort them. They were crying and I was still zip tied in the back with no answers for why I was being detained.”

Her oldest daughter started having a panic attack, she said. 

“I feared she might hurt herself if she fainted,” Romero said. “I asked them to zip tie her in the front. They did, but she was still having a panic attack. We waited like that zip tied and scared for three hours… They herded us like cattle and tied us up so that ICE could check everyone’s immigration status. Hundreds of people were at this family event — grandparents, infants.”

Her children are still suffering, Romero said.  

“That day completely changed our lives,” she said. “Our sense of safety and security was demolished.”

The committee heard, too, from Adreina Mejia from Arleta, California. She and her special needs 15-year-old son were separated, held at gunpoint and handcuffed by immigration agents outside of a local high school.

The agents had mistaken her boy for another child, she said. 

“The person who was with me just told my son, ‘Oh, we just confused you with somebody else, but look at the bright side, you’re gonna have an exciting story to tell your friends when you go back to school,’” she said. 

The incident has not left her son, Mejia said. 

“He will wake up crying,” his mother said. “He sees cars with tinted windows and he’s scared. He told me, ‘Mom, is it them?’” 

As Texas pushes more high schoolers to get ready for college and the workforce, new research suggests that some of the ways schools count students as ready don’t equally set them up for success after graduation.

The state rewards Texas school districts for preparing students for life after graduation, tying college and career readiness to more school funding and a higher school performance rating.

The Texas Education Agency has been increasingly strict on districts about college readiness. In the 2022-23 school year, state education officials raised the benchmark for schools to qualify for an A grade in the category of college and career readiness: Schools needed to get 88% of graduates ready for life after high school, up from 60% in prior years.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ����Ӱ�� Newsletter

Researchers from four Texas universities nearly 1 million Texas high school students across eight graduating classes from 2016-23 to see how they fared after high school, including the wages they earned as well as whether they enrolled in college and completed their degree.

While English and math college prep courses have seen a boom in enrollment, the researchers found students in those courses were 5% less likely to earn a college degree or certification within six years of high school graduation than students who were not considered college ready. They were also 18% less likely to get a degree or certification than their dual credit peers. The results of the study, , suggest college prep courses offer a false signal of preparedness.

“We could be potentially setting students up for failure because we’re saying, ‘OK, you’re college ready.’ But you actually get into college and you’re immediately taking developmental coursework,” said Jacob Kirksey, lead researcher on the study and professor at Texas Tech University. “And maybe you’ve racked up, you know, loans as a result of that process.”

Meanwhile, students who earned a credential in high school — be it an associate’s degree or a certificate — earned 15% to 20% more in wages later in life than students who were not college ready. Dual credit was also shown to predict a likelihood to enroll in and complete college.

The TEA has started a process to. To date, only a handful of English prep courses have received a . No math college prep courses have.

Kirksey has also called for Texas lawmakers and state education officials to rethink how college and career readiness is incentivized, offering public schools bigger rewards for higher-quality pathways like dual credit, and smaller rewards for lower-quality pathways like college prep classes. His previous research on the impact of teacher certification on student achievement led the state to in core classes.

“College, career and military readiness should not be treated as a black and white checkbox for students and districts,” Kirksey said. “We think by making that distinction … districts will have all the incentives they need to, again, be celebrating these better pathways.”

The rise in popularity in college prep courses were a result of schools trying to respond to the stricter standards for college readiness despite limited resources, said Gabriela Sánchez-Soto, a researcher with the Houston Education Research Consortium who studies college, career and military readiness. Prep courses were appealing because school districts were able to offer them without a massive overhaul to their curricula, Sánchez-Soto said.

“You can’t blame the players for playing the game,”  Sánchez-Soto said. “But we need to always assess how well whatever thing we’re asking students to do is actually accomplishing. … If a requirement is not fulfilling its promise, we need to do something about it.”

This first appeared on .

Students in the Bronx high school that Dylan Lopez Contreras attended before he was arrested by immigration agents last month have sent hundreds of letters in recent weeks to the Western Pennsylvania detention center where he is being held.

Written in a third-period elective class set aside for this purpose, staff made sure to send the missives individually, rather than in a single pile, hoping Contreras would enjoy their support over time . 

Contreras, 20, didn’t always have time for school — working to help support his family would often pull him away, one of his teachers told ����Ӱ�� — but he left his mark on the ELLIS Prep campus. He was the one who introduced a fun new tradition, one that continues in his absence, maybe even in his honor: He got the kids to play Uno in their downtime. 

His teacher could hear their laughter over the game in the hallway. So when it came time to send Contreras a supportive note, telling him to stay strong during a dark time, one of them slipped an Uno card inside the envelope. 

“I’m going to give him a +4,” the student told his teacher, referring to a card used to delay or prevent an opponent’s victory. “That would make him laugh.”

Contreras’ May 21 arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents — and that of a Massachusetts high school junior who was picked up by ICE 10 days later — have intensified anxiety among educators who serve immigrant students. They say their early fears about President Trump’s return to power are now playing out. 

an 11th grader at Grover Cleveland High School in Queens, was detained June 4 after a routine immigration hearing, Public Schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles Ramos confirmed Saturday. The teen’s name has not been released.

“They are in incredible pain right now,” Queens state Assemblywoman Claire Valdez told about the family. “They are terrified for their son. They are terrified for the rest of their family. I don’t think that you have to be a parent to put yourself in their shoes and to imagine someone that you love more than life itself being taken away in this incredibly, incredibly cruel way.”

And while these students engage in separate legal battles, CNN reported last week that some 500 children who arrived in the United States as unaccompanied minors have been taken into federal custody by agents following “welfare checks” that many advocates say are wreaking havoc. Families say the children have been increasingly difficult to find and extract from government “care.”  

The efforts targeting children — some — may be the result of increased pressure from a reportedly furious White House deputy chief of staff to boost the number of immigration-related arrests to 3,000 per day. 

Adam Strom, executive director of Re-Imagining Migration, said some school districts have been preparing for this escalation — creating rapid response teams and family support networks that activate when immigration enforcement occurs — but others are shocked at what they’re witnessing.

“For other communities, this is a wake-up call … the unimaginable is happening in communities like their own, to students not so different from the kids in their own classrooms,” Strom said. 

After much protest, 18-year-old Massachusetts teen Marcelo Gomes da Silva was granted bond and from custody Thursday. He said he had , had crackers for lunch and dinner, slept on a concrete floor with a metallic blanket and had to use the bathroom in front of 40 other men. 

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey said he should never have been taken into custody by ICE agents, who later admitted they were looking for his father.

“While ICE officers never intended to apprehend Gomes-DaSilva, he was found to be in the United States illegally and subject to removal proceedings, so officers made the arrest,” homeland security officials said in a . 

The New York and Massachusetts cases come amid others. An 18-year-old student from Colombia living in Detroit, was as he was driving friends to join their high school field trip. Federal officials said he already had a removal order from a judge. 

In another case, a was held in an ICE detention facility for weeks after she was arrested by local police in early May on traffic charges that were later dismissed. 

As the cop told Ximena Arias Cristobal he was taking her to jail, she replied shakily that she couldn’t go because she had finals the next week and her family “really depends on this.” Released on bond May 22, the young woman is now facing deportation to Mexico, a country she left when she was 4.

Far younger children — including toddlers — have been defending themselves in immigration court for years. And the many organizations that have helped them through the system are now under attack. Some have been issued — Trump ceased funding for their legal representation — leaving them in further jeopardy. 

4-Year-Old Immigrant and Other Young Kids Go to Court Alone

Nancy Duchesneau, a senior pre-K-to-12 research manager at the advocacy organization EdTrust, said it’s too early to tell if the country’s most recent immigration enforcement campaign — manifested in raids and surprise detentions after court appearances — has led to a drop in school attendance .

Duchesneau noted that ICE’s aggressive tactics disrupt learning and cause harm to a wide swath of students, not just immigrants or those with foreign-born parents.  

“When we see trauma happen to other kids, or to other people, we still have emotional impacts from that,” she said. “Seeing your friends taken away — kids that you know — even if you are an American citizen, we don’t know what else could happen.”

Like Strom, she said schools should make sure there are clear policies in place for when ICE agents visit campus and that both students and staff know their rights.

Eric Marquez, one of Dylan’s teachers at ELLIS Preparatory Academy, said he taught Contreras for weeks last fall before the young man, who worked , started regularly missing school. 

“If he had a chance to work, he worked,” Marquez said. 

His teachers understand that struggle. ELLIS Prep is a small specialized school that serves older newcomer students with limited English, nearly all of whom had arrived in the country just weeks or months before their admission. Many are behind on their credits and some have massive gaps in their education. Despite these challenges, Marquez said many go on to college. 

����Ӱ�� published a 16-month-long undercover investigation last year into how schools respond to enrollment requests from students like Contreras. The fictional teen in ����Ӱ��’s Unwelcome to America project, “Hector Guerrero,” was also Venezuelan. But unlike Contreras, Hector, 19, was refused admission to more than 200 high schools across the U.S. where he had a legal right to attend based on his age.

At the time of our reporting, Donald Trump, then a leading presidential contender, was once again vilifying immigrants on the campaign trail, a winning tactic for a man who rode a similar wave of xenophobia into office in 2016. 

Worry was beginning to build over how far he might go as president to deport undocumented children and families. 

Now five months into Trump’s second term, Marquez remembers the moment he learned his student had been arrested and was living out that fear.

“For me, it was soul-crushing,” the teacher said. “It hit everyone. It was symbolic in a way. He was that over-age, under-credited student with a limited, interrupted formal education. But he was super smart. He totally can go to college. He really can.”

This story was originally published by . for their newsletters.

Students tap on their keyboards as a professor lectures at the front of the room. It looks like any other college course, except that it’s taking place at a high school. This year, more than 150,000 California teens are earning college credit in dual enrollment courses.

Dual enrollment offers high schoolers the chance to attend community college, typically for free, often without having to leave their campuses. By helping students tackle the college academic experience, the programs increase the likelihood that students attend college after graduating high school.

About 80% of California’s dual enrolled high school students go on to a community college or university, compared to 66% of California 12th grade students in general, the More than a third of California’s dual enrolled students go on to attend the same community college they attended while in high school after they graduate, according to the

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ����Ӱ�� Newsletter

Many college and high school administrators have pushed to increase students’ college attainment rates, and the state has invested in dual enrollment, leading to a significant expansion. The number of students in these courses tripled between spring 2015 and spring 2024, according to state data. The Public Policy Institute of California found that about 30% of California’s high school graduating class of 2024 took at least one dual enrollment course.

The growth of high schoolers is a bright spot in overall student totals at the state’s community colleges, which have after enrollment tanked during the pandemic. However, some community college faculty have pushed back against widespread dual enrollment due to concerns about academic rigor and working conditions for educators.

Furthermore, data shows that some of California’s rural students, as well as males and students of color, don’t enroll in and complete these courses at the same rate as others. Some experts and administrators say they’re not just missing out on a couple of college credits, they’re not getting the same opportunities to envision themselves as future college students.

“When high schoolers complete these courses, they are able to fulfill requirements that help them access associate degrees and bachelor’s degrees,” said Daniel Payares-Montoya, a PPIC research associate. “The students benefit, but so do the community colleges, because it helps them enroll more students.”

Rural schools and colleges face dual enrollment hurdles 

In Siskiyou County, at the northern tip of California, the only community college serves a sprawling region that covers mountains, forests and rural towns. Although the county has a population of just 43,000, it is the fifth largest county in California by area, meaning that often the hardest part of supporting dual enrolled students isn’t the actual teaching — it’s having the right technology and transportation to reach them in the first place.

“The personal interaction is a challenge, because we have high schools that are two hours away,” said Kim Peacemaker, a counselor and dual enrollment coordinator at College of the Siskiyous. The college currently has about 230 dual enrolled high school students and about 2,390 students total, based on state data.

Peacemaker said the college has worked to make dual enrollment accessible by allowing professors to meet virtually with students in their high school classrooms. However, she added that some students don’t have reliable internet access at home for homework or tutoring. In Siskiyou County, don’t have broadband internet.

California’s rural colleges generally lag behind urban colleges in dual enrollment. Kern Community College District in the southern Central Valley and the Compton Community College District near Los Angeles had the two highest percentages of high school students in 2024, at 41%  and 36%  respectively, based on state data. In comparison, 9.7% of students at College of the Siskiyous are dual enrolled high schoolers, and this drops to about 5% in some other parts of the state.

Sonya Christian, the chancellor of the California Community College system, previously led the Kern Community College District, spearheading its expansion of dual enrollment. Now, dual enrollment in the district is “one of the most successful models in the state,” Christian said in an emailed statement to CalMatters.

“I prioritized dual enrollment because I saw it as a potential pathway to increase college-going rates, accelerate degree completion and provide students — especially those in rural and low-income communities — with early exposure to college-level coursework,” Christian said in the statement.

For many high school students in the small city of Blythe, which sits along California’s border with Arizona, the only people they know with bachelor’s degrees are their teachers. That’s why Clint Cowden, the vice president of instruction and student services at Palo Verde College, said the exposure to college that dual enrollment provides these students can be transformative.

“It’s really a win-win for the community,” Cowden said.

A recent alumnus of Palo Verde College’s dual enrollment program, Manuel Milke earned his high school diploma and his associate degree simultaneously, while juggling varsity soccer and football. Now Milke, who is 19, is set to graduate in the fall from San Diego State with a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology. Milke said he chose to attend San Diego State to stay close to his family in Blythe, and aspires to work as a physical therapist somewhere nearby.

“Everyone should do dual enrollment,” said Milke. “It saved me time, it saved me money and it made me feel more prepared for college.”

Student gaps remain in dual enrollment

As a Latino male, Milke is in the minority for dual enrollment. Based on state data, Black and Latino students are both underrepresented in dual enrollment courses. In the spring 2024 semester, 41% of dual enrollment students were male, while 56% were female. According to Payares-Montoya, these gaps in access to dual enrollment can make it so Black, Latino and male students are less likely to see higher education as an option, compared to their dual enrolled peers.

For Jesse Medrano, an 18-year-old senior at Daniel Pearl Magnet High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District, dual enrollment has provided “a good outline of what college is like.” His high school first placed him in dual enrollment in ninth grade, and since then he has taken five classes, covering topics including economics and political science.

“I didn’t have the drive to seek these courses out, so the fact that they put me in them set this standard for me, and now I’m meeting it,” said Medrano, who is Latino and plans to study accounting at Cal State Northridge. “I didn’t have the motivation, but now I do, and I’m able to succeed.”

At Compton College more than a third of the current students are still in high school, according to state data. Latino and Black students comprise 75% and 9% of dual enrollees, respectively, which are significantly higher than state averages. Keith Curry, the college’s president, said that when students of color complete dual enrollment courses, this gets them comfortable with college academics and leads to better representation at colleges and universities.

Some faculty push back against expansion

Some community college faculty have raised concerns about the process by which dual enrollment partnerships are established, the level of readiness of high school students for college courses, and who teaches these classes. In many districts across the state, some dual enrollment courses are not taught by community college faculty, but by existing high school teachers who hold the credentials required to teach at a college level. In the Kern Community College District, about 60% of dual enrollment courses held on high school campuses are taught by high school teachers who meet the college qualifications, according to district spokesperson Norma Rojas.

Tim Maxwell, an English professor at College of San Mateo, is a “conscientious objector” to California’s expansion of dual enrollment. Maxwell said he is concerned about what he sees as a focus to get as many students to graduate and earn college credits as quickly as possible, sacrificing college-level rigor and evaluation.

“Completion is important, but our primary responsibility is for students to learn something along the way,” said Maxwell, who has taught community college courses for about 30 years.

Maxwell has taught creative writing courses on his college campus with several dual enrolled students, one as young as 15 years old, and he said these students are “phenomenal.” But, he added, there’s a difference between a handful of proactive high schoolers going to a community college campus and a high school classroom that “switches to a college class during fifth period.” He said he is concerned about poor working conditions for professors, primarily adjunct faculty, who have to travel to high schools and teach without the proper background or support.

“We need to resist this, and we need lawmakers who understand something about education and not just spreadsheets,” Maxwell said.

Wendy Brill-Wynkoop, the president of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges, said dual enrollment is beneficial for students, but that she has “heard grumblings” about a need for faculty to have a more active role in setting standards and policies for dual enrollment.

While in high school in Blythe, Milke said his dual enrollment courses were generally easier than the courses he takes at San Diego State. But they still challenged him and prepared him for a college-level workload, he said.

Lawmakers work to continue growth

Several state laws have been enacted in the past decade to expand dual enrollment in California. In 2015, established the College and Career Access Pathways program, allowing community colleges and high schools to enter into dual enrollment partnerships. These institutions bring the courses to students, as opposed to those students having to seek them out. The state streamlined the pathways program with the passage of in 2019, allowing students to submit fewer forms to enroll. , which is currently in committee, would, among other changes, increase the number of units that students in the program can take.

Based on PPIC research, students in the College and Career Access Pathways program now account for about 37% of dual enrollees. This program has a higher percentage of underrepresented students compared to other dual enrollment programs, in part because it eliminates some of the restrictions that can make it hard for schools to offer broad and barrier-free dual enrollment.

As dual enrollment continues to expand, it increases costs to California beyond the more than $700 million that the state has already invested. That’s because both community colleges and high school districts are typically both able to receive state funding for dual enrolled students, according to the

According to the statement from Christian, state leaders are working to increase dual enrollment access by expanding partnerships between high schools and colleges.

“My vision is to make dual enrollment a standard opportunity for all California students, not just an option for a select few, increasing equitable access to higher education and workforce-aligned learning,” Christian said in the statement.

Alana Althaus-Cressman, who runs the dual enrollment program at Golden Eagle Charter School, a K-12 school in Siskiyou County, markets the program to all students, not just those who already have a record of high achievement. She studied dual enrollment access for rural students for her graduate school dissertation at Sacramento State University, and started the early college high school program at Golden Eagle Charter in 2024. Students in the program take dual enrollment courses for part of the school day, and high school courses for the rest.

Althaus-Cressman said that because dual enrollment offers students a glimpse of college, it’s important that the classes aren’t only filled with students who already plan to attend college. Some high schools require minimum grade point averages or have other barriers to entry for dual enrollment, which Althaus-Cressman said can perpetuate inequalities.

The early college high school program enrolls about a third of Golden Eagle Charter’s ninth graders. Althaus-Cressman attributes this level of participation to extensive outreach, which included working with school staff to call the families of every incoming high school student to invite them to a dual enrollment orientation.

“We don’t want students to think that they aren’t the type of student for this program,” Althaus-Cressman said. “It’s for everybody.”

This article was and was republished under the license.

One day, students at Hillside High School were greeted in Shianyisimi Ogede’s economics and personal finance class with the question: “What percentage of students get financial aid?” With this year’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) opening in , financing education after high school is one of the many topics she covers with her 10th and 12th grade students.

In early December, the Center for Financial Literacy at Champlain College in Vermont released a , grading each state on its delivery of personal finance education in high school. According to the report, these courses are increasingly being offered in schools across the country after the pandemic highlighted the extent of income inequality. More concern about students learning about loans for college and filling out the FAFSA has also been an influence.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ����Ӱ�� Newsletter

The report says that high school financial instruction improves credit scores, lowers loan delinquency rates, and reduces the use of risky services such as payday lending.

Seven states earned an “A” grade based on how well they guaranteed and executed access to a course focused on personal finance for students that graduated from high school in the spring of 2023. The center projects that in five years, 23 states will meet the same standard — with North Carolina being one of them. Now, along with 41% of other states, North Carolina sits at a “B.”

Preparation for these courses has been aided by the increase of free online curricular courses offered by state departments of education and other organizations. The report projects that there will be a need for 30,000 highly trained personal finance educators in the states that earned an A or B grade by 2028.

The North Carolina legislature in 2019 requiring financial literacy discussions in schools as a graduation requirement.

During summer 2020, the offered virtual professional development for the new course. This 40-hour professional development included presentations from NCCEE, , The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, and . The five-day training consisted of a pretest, group activities, and a post test, as well as access to free resources to help them teach the course.

Sandy Wheat, executive director of the NCCEE, said that teachers gained more confidence about their own financial well-being after the training.

“We have teachers who report that they’re going to pay down unsecured debt because they didn’t really understand how the compound interest was working against them. And at the same time, they’re learning how compound interest works for them when they’re investing,” Wheat said.

The number of financial decisions that students have to make increases during and especially after high school. Meanwhile, the report found most parents do not feel financially savvy enough to discuss financial matters with their children at home, leaving schools to foot the education bill.

The report found large disparities in financial capability among different groups in the United States. According to the report, without state requirements for a standalone course, schools with higher fractions of students of color are less likely to have access to a required personal finance courses or content.

Along with covering student loans and financial aid, Ogede said her students learn the importance of investing and managing their credit. They complete an extra credit project with students from Duke University by way of the program, where they decide how to split $100 between stocks, bonds, and companies that they have a personal interest in. At the end of the course, they get the $100 transferred to their personal name.

“In America, wealth is connected with your credit score, because if they don’t have a good credit score, you’re going to get a higher interest rate,” Ogede said. “You’ll find that most of the time, there are parents that passed knowledge back to them, you know, there are grandparents who invested, and they and the parents invested, and they taught the children. Now, when you come to the Brown and Black population, it was not their history, because they didn’t grow up in that, it wasn’t passed down to them that way.”

Wheat said that the financial landscape has become more complex, causing more concerns for students.

“You know, it wasn’t too long ago that people would go to work for a company and work 25 or 30 years and retire with a pension and live happily ever after. With the reduction in corporate benefits, people are more and more responsible for their own financial futures,” Wheat said.

“People can’t do the right thing if they don’t know what the right thing is.”

Wheat said she believes that offering a personal finance course is another way for teachers to focus on what their communities need the most.

“I mean, think about if you’re navigating a ship with a compass, and you alter it by one degree, you’re going to wind up somewhere completely different than you intended to go or then you were bound for,” Wheat said. “So if you can take students that are thinking of dropping out of school, and you can convince them that their earning power is going to increase if they’ll just stay in school, then that’s a win. If you’ve gotten them to graduate, but then you have students who they’re going to graduate, but then what? This course gives them the opportunity to explore what’s next after school.”

Teachers who went through the training with NCCEE gave positive feedback. Wheat said students never ask teachers, “How will I use this in real life?”

To learn more about financial literacy requirements in the state of North Carolina, read the education standards

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.