That moment carried more than joy. It carried years of waiting lists, missed explanations, language barriers and advocacy in systems that were never designed with her family in mind.

Sofía’s story is not unique. Across the country, Latino families navigating special education often encounter structural barriers that make access more complicated than federal law intends. Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, schools are required to provide timely evaluations and ensure meaningful parent participation. Yet the lived experiences of many multilingual families suggest that implementation is uneven.

In 2022, launched , a community-based research initiative that trains Latino parents to document and analyze the realities facing families like their own. Parents are not research subjects in this model; they are the researchers. Two years later, ISLA — working within its parent-led research model, Padres Investigadores, and supported by research consultants — trained a new team of Latino parent researchers to design and conduct a statewide study examining how families in North Carolina navigate special education.

highlight important gaps in communication and access.

For many Latino families, entering special education means navigating two unfamiliar systems at once: disability services and English. Parents in our study described four stages in their journey: recognizing developmental differences, securing evaluations and diagnoses, accessing services and navigating schools, and managing communication challenges that created delays, confusion and stress.

More than half of parents were the first to notice developmental concerns in their children, not teachers or doctors. Yet many said those concerns were initially dismissed. While IDEA establishes timelines for evaluations, over 40% of families in our study reported waiting six months or longer. Nearly half identified language as their biggest barrier to accessing quality services.

In early childhood, time matters. Delays in evaluation and intervention can shape long-term educational trajectories. When families do not fully understand what services exist, what documents they are signing or what rights they hold, special education becomes harder to access equitably.

Language access is not simply a courtesy; it is essential for meaningful participation. Families described inconsistent interpretation, incomplete translations and meetings that moved forward without ensuring comprehension. One father told us, “They talked about my child’s future in a language I couldn’t speak.”

Importantly, families were not disengaged. They attended meetings. They asked questions. They took notes. What they sought was clarity and partnership.

The parents in our study consistently named three priorities: clear multilingual information, culturally responsive communication and timely access to evaluations and services with reliable interpretation. These requests align closely with on effective special education practices.

One of the most powerful findings from this work is that when parents are included as partners in research and problem-solving, trust grows. Padres Investigadores shifts the dynamic from extraction to collaboration. Parents design questions, gather stories and interpret findings within their own communities. In doing so, they reveal insights that might otherwise remain invisible.

Natalia, who once felt overwhelmed when she heard the word “autism” connected to her son, is now one of those parent researchers. She supports other Spanish-speaking families navigating the same systems she once struggled to understand. Her leadership did not emerge from policy alone; it emerged from access to information and genuine inclusion.

Sofía’s first word through a device represents possibility. But possibility should not depend on a family’s fluency in English or familiarity with educational terminology.

Equity in special education is not only about compliance. It is about ensuring that families understand the process, feel respected in it and are able to participate meaningfully in decisions affecting their children.

When language access, cultural understanding and parent partnership are treated as foundational, not supplemental, special education systems move closer to fulfilling the promise embedded in federal law.

Listening to families like Sofía’s is not an act of charity. It is a necessary step toward building systems that work as intended — for every child.

Updated March 27, 2026: In response to this story, YouTube terminated six channels for violating the platform’s terms of service and one channel for violating its spam policy.

In a video that has been played almost 50,000 times since it was posted five months ago, two cartoon children sing along as they guide viewers through the experience of riding in a car amid a vividly colored, utopian backdrop. 

At first, the seems harmless. The song is upbeat and informative. The animation aligns with the promised subject. 

Except, hold on a second, did those lyrics just say, “Red means stop, and green means right”? And why are the characters changing in every frame — different hairstyles and colors, slightly different outfits for the girl and boy? 

Worst of all, for a video that purports to be “educational,” the visuals are sending precisely the wrong message about riding in a car. 

The video opens with the children riding, without seatbelts, in the front row of a moving vehicle. The next scene shows the girl defying physics, floating alongside a moving car, while the boy is seated in what appears to be the hood of the vehicle as it travels backward down a busy street. The third and fourth scenes show the children walking in the middle of the road with moving cars behind them. 

It’s not hard to imagine how the video could have gotten so many views. 

Maybe a parent needs to complete a task — fold some laundry, get dinner ready, hop in the shower — and is searching for an age-appropriate video on YouTube to entertain their toddler during that short time. Perhaps that toddler, increasingly independent and prone to running off, needs a better grasp of road safety. “Vroom Vroom! Car Ride Song | Educational Nursery Rhyme for Kids” presents itself as a win-win solution. 

But children’s media experts say this is AI-generated “slop,” and that it has infiltrated the internet, preying on young children and their unsuspecting caregivers. 

“We’re at the beginning of a monster problem, and we have to get hold of it quickly,” said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Temple University and senior fellow at Brookings Institution who studies child development. 

She and other researchers, including Dr. Dana Suskind, a professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago, have that AI-derived products for babies and children need to be reined in. 

“This is not neutral content,” said Suskind, author of the forthcoming book . “I think of this as toddler AI misinformation at an industrial scale. It’s very risky for the developing brain.”

It’s hard to say just how pervasive this type of content is, but it’s clear the problem is widespread and getting worse. One published by video-editing company Kapwing in November 2025 found that about 21% of YouTube’s feed consists of low-quality, AI-generated videos. 

, the creator of the “Vroom Vroom! Car Ride Song,” has posted more than 10,000 videos since its first release just seven months ago, in August 2025. That’s an average of about 50 new videos each day. , meanwhile, has published about 3,900 videos to YouTube in its entire 20 years on the platform. 

The cognitive decline associated with the consumption of AI slop — such as a shortened attention span, decreased focus and mental fog — is sometimes referred to as “brainrot.” But when the audience is children, there’s not much to rot, Suskind said. Because a child’s brain is still in its early development, still being built, what you get instead, she said, is “brain stunt.”

“Every experience is building a million new neural connections,” Suskind said of children who are still in their early years. “You will be unintentionally wiring the brain in incorrect ways.”

That comes at a cost. A child may absorb the implicit messages of something like the Vroom Vroom video and end up mimicking the “downright dangerous” behaviors they saw depicted there, said Carla Engelbrecht, who has created digital experiences for children’s media brands such as Sesame Street, PBS Kids and Highlights for Children and considers herself an AI educator and creator.

Engelbrecht is also when it comes to child-targeted AI slop. She has found countless examples of AI-generated videos that could cause real physical harm.

“The more content I find,” she said, “the more horrified I get.”

They include videos of a being chased by a T-Rex; a crawling biting into an apple that appears bloody, swallowing whole grapes (a major) and eating honey (which carries the potentially fatal risk of ); and a eating raw elderberries (which are toxic when uncooked).

But there’s another category of AI slop in kids’ media, she said, with consequences that are more difficult to capture. These videos claim to pertain to learning and development, focusing on topics like literacy and numeracy, but due to the speed with which they are produced and the lack of quality checks, they end up introducing or enforcing the wrong lessons. And sometimes, the errors don’t come until midway through the content. That means if a parent previews the first few seconds of a video, they may miss the unreliable information that appears later in the clip.

A about vowels includes visuals of consonants. It also depicts letters on screen that don’t align with the audio overlay. A promising to teach about the 50 U.S. states sings along as butchered state names appear in text at the bottom of the screen — Ribio Island, Conmecticut, Oklolodia, Louggisslia. A about the seven continents frequently shows a compass with more than four points and indecipherable symbols where the “N,” “S,” “E” and “W” should be.

These may seem like silly slips from a machine, but for a child, every “input” is part of their learning process, Engelbrecht explained. “Mixed signals means you are delaying them learning the cause and effect of a thing,” she said. “If you learn that red is blue and blue is red, that’s a delay.”

“If you’re inconsistent, it takes that much longer to learn,” she added. “Every delay they have means everything else gets pushed back. That’s taking their executive function offline to go learn nonsense.”

Amid all of this internet muck, the question of responsibility is a tricky one.

“Fundamentally, everybody has a responsibility,” Engelbrecht said, including platforms like YouTube; companies that operate large-language models, like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic; the people creating and publishing these poor-quality videos intended to reach kids; and parents. 

YouTube’s current requires creators to disclose videos that have been generated by or altered with AI when that content “seems realistic.” This does not apply to cartoons and — which seems to be the majority of what’s reaching children — because it has long been assumed to be fictional content, Engelbrecht explained. 

The platform does have stricter “” for content targeting children than it does for its general viewership, said Boot Bullwinkle, a YouTube spokesperson, in a statement. It also has a “.” (These web pages, however, do not specifically address the use of AI.)

Due to the volume of content on the platform, YouTube does not catch every video that violates its policies. (It did take action against at least seven channels on the platform in response to ����Ӱ��’s reporting, including terminating two.) 

“The trust that parents and families put in YouTube is a responsibility we take very seriously, and we’ve invested deeply in age-appropriate environments that empower parents,” Bullwinkle wrote in the statement. “YouTube Kids, for instance, offers industry-leading parental controls and rigorous designed to provide a safer experience for families.”

YouTube Kids is a distinct version of the platform with content that has been curated for children from birth to 12. Many families continue to use the main YouTube platform to view children’s content, though, which means many creators still have an audience and earning opportunities there. None of the AI-generated videos reviewed for this story were found on YouTube Kids, although recent in The New York Times found AI videos had penetrated that space as well.

Sierra Boone, executive producer of Boone Productions, a children’s media production company that makes original content for children ages 2 to 6, noted that kid-friendly competitors to YouTube, such as by Common Sense Media and , do exist. But they have struggled to break through to families. 

“Overcoming that juggernaut is extremely difficult,” Engelbrecht said of YouTube. “There’s a graveyard full of failed attempts to create a safe YouTube alternative.”

Boone suggested that some effective labeling would go a long way, not unlike the “” LinkedIn is phasing in, which aim to disclose when media has been created or edited by AI, in part or in whole. 

Engelbrecht thinks labels are a good idea, not least because they would be important for AI literacy, but she also believes they would penalize creators like her who use AI “thoughtfully” in their work. (She is , among other projects, an AI tool that detects AI slop in children’s videos on YouTube.)

As for who’s behind the videos, some of it originates overseas, but plenty is home-grown, created by Americans with access to phones or computers who are just trying to “make a quick buck,” as Boone put it. 

These people are often using AI at every step of the process — to develop themes and scripts for children’s videos, to generate the videos, and to automate the process of publishing the content regularly on “, in which the creator is anonymous and has no on-camera presence, Engelbrecht explained.

A little over a year ago, a popular content creator posted a video to YouTube in which she raves about a “huge opportunity” that would lead to “many millionaires.” The opportunity? AI-generated animated videos that inexperienced users could create with a simple prompt in just minutes. The target audience? Young children. 

That video has been viewed more than 335,000 times. 

“AI in general isn’t inherently good or bad, but it exposes people’s intentions,” said Boone, whose production studio is responsible for . 

The flood of AI-generated content, she added, reveals how many people have “no regard for children or how they’re impacted,” as long as it benefits them. 

For Boone, who works painstakingly with her team on every episode of The Naptime Show — researching, writing the script, editing the script, placing props, doing table reads, going to set, filming, editing the video, publishing and promoting the final product — creating children’s media is an “honor” that should be taken seriously. 

“The very foundation of creating children’s media is you are creating something that a child, in their core developmental years, is going to be consuming,” Boone said. “So what is the level of intention that you’re bringing to that? I think we need to be holding the people who are uploading this content more accountable.”

Ultimately, though, in the absence of more regulation or content moderation, the burden falls on parents. 

Parents are likely putting YouTube videos in front of their children in the first place because “they are already so stretched,” said Suskind, who still sees patients in her pediatric practice and interacts with families often. So it’s inherently challenging to ask them to more closely monitor the content that is coming through their children’s screens. 

Yet that is what must be done, Hirsh-Pasek said. Until a better solution emerges, the onus is on parents to separate the slop from “the good stuff.”

“We owe it to our kids to protect them,” said Hirsh-Pasek. “That’s what they look to parents for, to keep them in safe spaces. If we don’t deal with that or do anything about that, we’ve absconded [from] our responsibility.”

Created through a partnership between 50CAN and Edge Research, captures the views of more than 23,000 parents across all 50 states and Washington, D.C., building on the more than 20,000 parents surveyed in summer 2024. What we found is an education system that is being remade for the better by making available to more families the experiences traditionally reserved for the wealthiest among us. 

That starts with schooling. Historically in America, the wealthy have taken advantage of the range of choices in schools that their resources have unlocked while most families had to make do with only one option. But with the huge expansion of school choice programs over the past few years, more working- and middle-class families are getting to take control of their child’s education and it shows: the percentage of parents who say they feel like they have a choice in what school their child attends is up five points from 65% to 70%. 

In sync with this shift, we also found that the percentage of parents who say, if they had to do it over again, they would send their child to the school they go to today also rose, climbing four points from 64% to 68%. Finally, the percentage of parents reporting they are very satisfied with their child’s school rose two points, and the percentage reporting they are very satisfied with the emotional and mental health their child receives at school rose four points. 

Another point of real progress since 2024 is in high school students’ participation in career pathways. Children of the well-off have traditionally had a leg up in this area but through leadership at the state and local level, more opportunities are being made available to more children of all walks of life. 

The number of families who say their child is participating in pathway programs climbed across the board: Participation in dual enrollment courses, CTE programs and industry certifications are all up three points while internships and apprenticeships jumped six points. At the same time, we found an increase in demand for these programs, ranging from two to five points, among those who do not currently have a child enrolled, suggesting demand for future growth on the horizon. 

Tutoring represents a third area of promising growth. When the children of the wealthy fall behind, they have always known they can get their child the help they need to catch back up. Now that same resource is reaching more students regardless of income. Overall, the percentage of children who received tutoring in the past year increased five points from 19% to 24%. At the same time, the gap in tutoring between low-income children and high-income children decreased from 12 points to just eight points. 

Will these trends continue? They will if parents have anything to say about it. We found that 86% of parents favored free tutoring for any K-12 student who falls behind, 80% favored free summer camp for all K-12 students, 77% favored open enrollment so any student can transfer to the public school of their choice and 77% also favored universal ESAs, where any parent can use a government savings account to pay for everything from tutoring to textbooks to tuition. 

Now it’s up to education advocates and policymakers to look past the gloom in the daily headlines and recognize the opportunity this moment represents. We have emerged from the pandemic with a stronger sense of purpose around the ways education needs to change. We have seen those changes taking root in states around the country. And it is clear that parents of all political stripes want us to go further to make these initial steps a permanent part of the American educational landscape. 

We have an opportunity to secure the policy wins this year that will get headlines for all the right reasons by focusing less on ideological battles and more on the practical changes that will improve students’ lives.

A video illustrates a cartoon Brachiosaurus trudging along. The dinosaur has bright colors and a friendly voice carefully designed to draw the attention of a toddler. As the green leaf-eater goes to speak, a banner ad floats across the screen.

Experts caution that this experience can distract the child. “There’s advertising embedded into the video, or at the bottom of the video, or the side,” said Kaitlin Tiches, a medical librarian at Boston Children Hospital’s Digital Wellness Lab. That can be especially problematic if the ad isn’t developmentally appropriate for the viewer. 

The tough choice about whether to allow babies and children to consume content online is nothing new. Neither is that comes with it for many parents who opt to allow their little ones to access digital media, from the American Academy of Pediatrics that suggests to avoid it for babies under 18-months-old and to limit it for kids under age 5.

At a time when kids are gaining access to digital devices earlier — many of them as infants or toddlers — and cuts to public broadcasting have put an end to many of the high-quality programs American children have been raised on for generations, the decision has become more complicated.

, which comes with its own unique blend of allure for parents and children has become a staple in many homes. The streaming site is seeing a surge in popularity, especially among families with children under 2, even though child development experts have expressed about the use of the platform for young children.

According to a recent published by Pew Research Center, 62% of toddlers ages 2 and under watch YouTube, a significant spike from the 45% reported in 2020. There was also an uptick in toddlers who watched YouTube daily, rising from 24% in 2020 to 35% in 2025. 

“I think it’s a very striking rise,” said Colleen McClain, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center. “It’s a great example of a theme from our report, which is that tech starts young.” 

What to Know Before Letting Kids Hit Play on YouTube

The YouTube boost arrives as concerns continue to swirl about the site. Tiches warned of unfettered advertising and the company’s focus on profit over education. She pointed out that traditional children’s media has clear parameters around advertising  — the episode plays, then cuts to commercial break. But on YouTube, prevalent banner ads appear throughout the screen, with other ads interjecting in the middle of an episode. That children’s learning. 

“I think because YouTube creators are monetized, there’s a lot of pressure to successfully create videos, and with the young children on these platforms, it’s a big market,” Tiches said. “Ads might be very long and again, if parents are not watching with their children, then the children might not know how to skip them. Then, it’s minutes of an ad that may not be appropriate for very young children.”

While creators can mark whether their video is child-friendly, the ads — and videos themselves — may not be developmentally appropriate. A found that only 19% of the videos infants and toddlers watched on YouTube were age appropriate. That report was based on data about young kids and YouTube by Common Sense Media, which revealed that roughly one-fifth of advertisements contained age-inappropriate content including violence, drugs and sexual content. About one-quarter of ads were child-appropriate, with most (74%) deemed “neutral,” for companies like Volvo, State Farm Insurance and Casper Sleep Inc.��

But even those can influence children on consumerism, which may not be the intended point of watching content. 

Curation and quality control are important, experts said. Shortly after the Common Sense report came out, its lead author, Jenny Radesky, a developmental behavioral pediatrician at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Michigan , “YouTube is kids’ favorite playground right now.” She added: “We have to ask whether it’s being maintained in the right ways, if the equipment is safe and giving kids freedom to explore and have positive experiences? Or are they being steered towards experiences that benefit marketers and brands, but don’t support their developmental growth?”

Many entities, such as PBS, have their for children’s programming, thanks to the , a law that requires broadcast television to air a dedicated amount of educational content and limited advertising during children’s programs. Streaming services like YouTube do not have to adhere to those rules. YouTube’s asks publishing for a primary audience of children to mark their content as “Made for Kids” and to ensure they’re “complying with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and other applicable laws.” 

“The content I’m viewing on Netflix or Disney has been selected by that company; if they say it’s child-focused, depending on the company, I can have a little more reasonable awareness or trust,” said Kate Blocker, director of research and programs at Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development. 

“I could post a video and say it’s educational, but what does it mean?” Tiches added. “There’s not necessarily a lot of oversight into what is considered truly educational, or [ensuring] the value of it is rooted in early education practices.” 

Blocker said some parents, while well aware of issues on social media sites, may view YouTube as a separate entity akin to watching traditional television or a streaming service. But Blocker points out the platform more closely mimics the former, with the ability to comment on videos, have an auto-play feature and deliver suggested content driven by algorithms. 

“There’s a lot of national dialogue and awareness building around social media and its particular harms, but generally speaking I don’t think people connect that thought to YouTube,” she said. “They’re thinking of Instagram and TikToks and teens  — [but] not making the same connection to the content on YouTube.” 

Some parents are somewhat cognizant of limiting their children’s screen time, at the very least. According to the Pew report, roughly one-quarter of parents said that they believe they can “do more” to limit their toddler’s screen time access. As the child gets older, that share becomes almost half: 47% of parents believe they can do better limiting their 8- to 12-year-old’s screen time. 

“I have a 3-year-old, and we don’t let her use a phone or tablet or anything,” one parent said in a focus group conducted by Pew in March. The parent added that they let their 3 year old use a laptop for a week’s subscription to an educational platform. “It got me thinking there probably are opportunities to use technology as an educational tool … but I’m so scared about the consequences … that I’m probably hesitant to use it at all.”

The Pew report highlighted that children found YouTube content educational and entertaining, but the research did not delve into why parents turn toward the platform. The screen time, Pew’s McClain said, could be driven, in part, by parents simply battling with high stress levels. 

“From qualitative research, we’re hearing more and more that it’s really hard; parents are struggling,” Blocker said. “Sometimes you need something to keep your little one still, to do the dishes or help your older one with homework.” 

Some may turn toward YouTube because of its easy accessibility across various devices. Others may be drawn to its free model at a time when the cost of cable subscriptions and streaming service continue to rise. And with funding for public media — most notably PBS — in recent months, families are left with less reliable options for high-quality children’s programming.  

“Regardless of the platform, it can feel overwhelming,” Tiches said. But families might  have an easier time figuring out whether programs on a more traditional network, like PBS, have had input from educational or developmental experts, versus on YouTube, where parents have to search for information about the creator, Tiches added.

How Parents Can Help Kids Stream Smarter

Experts acknowledge that it is not feasible to expect parents to avoid screen time entirely. from The American Academy of Pediatrics discourages use of screens for babies under 18 months old and recommends that parents who want to introduce digital media to their 18- to 24-months old toddlers do so by co-viewing high-quality programs. According to the Pew report, most of them are: 74% of parents of kids age 12 and under watch YouTube with their children, and more than 90% of parents of kids 5 and under do. 

“I think it speaks to the way parents are navigating all this technology for their kids,” McClain said. “Parents are really navigating these decisions on a daily basis, dealing with a lot of emotions around them and trying to do the best for their kids.” 

If watching together is not possible, Blocker suggests that having the content on a large screen — not a small screen plugged in with headphones — is preferred, so the parent is still able to hear the content. 

Tiches added that parents can look into who is making the content their children are consuming, and at the very least, should look at the type of content that it is. If a video is fast-paced, consider finding something more calming, especially for kids under 2.  

“You can tell sometimes from the title if there are shapes, colors, numbers, letters … that’s going to be a lot of information, but probably not as beneficially educational,” she said. “Versus really focusing on circles, for example, or words that start with the letter ‘A.’”

Beyond what parents can do though, there is a push for more legislation from both the federal government and technology companies. 

“Parents don’t want to do this alone,” McClain said. “One of the things that stand out in our work is [that] parents are people: they work, they struggle with their own screen time. And that, combined with [the fact that] they want technology companies to do more, really paints a picture.”

In the 21st century, the scope and complexity of issues have piled up, constituting what Ariella Cook-Shonkoff refers to as a “polycrisis” — which she defines as a “a confluence of overlapping existential stressors” in her recent book, Raising Anti-Doomers: How to Bring Up Resilient Kids through Climate Change and Tumultuous Times.

The book guides parents and caregivers through navigating difficult conversations about  topics like climate change, racism, pandemics, gun violence and political polarization. 

A “doomer mindset,” as Cook-Shonkoff describes it, is a psychological barrier that “deflates your energy, and squashes your sense of purpose and meaning in life. It can feel like a quick knee-jerk emotional response that overcomes you, or it can gradually eclipse you until one day you wake up under a blanket of depression.” The antidote, in a word, is hope.

Cook-Shonkoff draws from her experiences as a marriage and family therapist and as a former member of the executive committee of the , which promotes climate-aware therapy. Here, she shares parenting insights from her book and emphasizes the importance of maintaining a clear-eyed view of what’s at stake for children, families and the planet.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Many of the parents you quote in the book said they feel isolated and ill-equipped for the challenges they’re faced with. How did we get to this point?

What we see again and again is a failure of adults in charge — whether in government or private sectors — to protect kids’ best interests and consider their healthy development and safety. Be it common-sense gun safety laws, digital-free school environments, restrictions on social media accounts, and so on. Wherever there was bipartisan compromise or regulatory bodies in the past to protect children’s health, it’s nonexistent now. So unfortunately the onus — and immense burden of raising kids — has shifted fully onto parents.

What made you want to make this more than just a book about climate change?

The book really was born out of some of my personal experience in grappling with raising kids while the wildfires were starting to intensify in Northern California. It was originally going to be a climate-focused book, and then my publisher and I decided to expand that. 

It’s hard to separate climate from all the other layers of existential stress. For example, I’ve worked with undocumented families, and for children, there can be real fear in leaving behind their parents and going to school. They hold that anxiety, and it manifests, often as a stomachache or a headache.The book also addresses gun violence and school shootings. It’s absolutely traumatic to be in school, a place of learning and curiosity, and to have to do active shooter drills again and again. 

How young is too young to talk about these topics?

People want an easy formula for this, but it comes through trial and error. I don’t think you necessarily need to introduce the tough subjects at a really young age. There’s a protected time when you’re filtering out a lot of the realities and letting your kid grow up into the world and make connections. As they get older and more curious, kids are asking questions and hearing things at school, and you have less control over what they’re exposed to. That’s when it becomes important to think about how to bring up a subject that is not maybe the most pleasant. There’s an expression, “No fear before fourth grade,” which means not introducing really scary stuff before they’re able to get support and think through issues in a slightly more sophisticated way. 

Sometimes, the subjects come up before fourth grade.

Parents don’t always have a choice, depending on different factors, about when they have difficult conversations with their kids. But I think how you talk is what makes the difference. If you speak in a gentle voice, and you’re calmer, and your own nervous system is regulated, that’s very different from if you’re on edge, sad, depressed. Do you have a lot of unprocessed emotions yourself? Those can transfer onto your kids. 

Beyond acknowledging the polycrisis, it sounds like taking care of yourself is one thing you want parents and caregivers to come away with. What are some other words of wisdom parents need right now?

Yes, taking care of ourselves and just continuing to regulate our nervous systems because we have to remember that it filters down to the kids. That’s really critical. I think that “the parent club” [a tool Cook-Shonkoff uses in her book to describe a community including parents, guardian, caregivers, foster parents, involved family or community members] is a way that parents can support each other. Parent groups have enormous potential for developing community and resilience in the face of toxic politics and culture.

How do parents move from self-care to social change? 

We do have to do emotional processing, or, as I call it, emotional metabolizing, and we can’t squash or deny and keep pretending life is a certain way. We have to just be real about it. And from there, we can raise healthier families and take action and have some society-level impacts. If you develop those capacities early in a child, by the time they’re in high school, they’re ready to be advocates for themsleves and to be part of their communities. 

What else have you seen that works?

My book explores spending time in the more-than-human world [a phrase coined by ecologist and geophilosopher David Abram]. We can see our place in the world or just understand things differently when we’re out in the natural world. Spending time in communities, creating these little intentional communities, making music, writing lyrics, writing poems, creating art, making a mural — all that stuff is more powerful than people realize. 

Who or what gives you hope?

Two women who influenced my work recently passed. One of them was Jane Goodall. Meeting her in my hometown when I was 17 years old was pivotal for me. She started a youth program in our town, and I was a president of the environmental club in the high school and was on this panel with her. Her steady advocacy around animal welfare, the environment and human rights countered my frustration with the adult world. It showed me that some adults did care. There was both a gentleness and firmness to her demeanor, and I could tell that she was a quiet force to be reckoned with. Joanna Macy, an eco-Buddhist philosopher-activist, also meant a lot to me. When I first came across her work, as a mom with my own eco-anxiety, it felt relieving to have my intense feelings of hope and grief so well articulated. And that she had a clear program — and a literal path forward through all of my pain and fear — was a lifeline for which I remain grateful for today.

Texas public school administrators, parents and education experts worry that a new law to replace the state’s standardized test could potentially increase student stress and the amount of time they spend taking tests, instead of reducing it.

The new law comes amid criticism that the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, creates too much stress for students and devotes too much instructional time to the test. The updated system aims to ease the pressure of a single exam by replacing STAAR with three shorter tests, which will be administered at the beginning, middle and end of the year. It will also ban practice tests, which Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath has said can take up weeks of instruction time and aren’t proven to help students do better on the standardized test. But some parents and teachers worry the changes won’t go far enough and that three tests will triple the pressure.

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The law also calls for the TEA to study how to reduce the weight testing carries on the state’s annual school accountability ratings — which STAAR critics say is one reason why the test is so stressful and absorbs so much learning time — and create a way for the results of the three new tests to be factored into the ratings.

That report is not due until the 2029-30 school year, and the TEA is not required to implement those findings. Some worry the new law will mean schools’ ratings will continue to heavily depend on the results from the end-of-year test, while requiring students to start taking three exams. In other words: same pressure, more testing.

Cementing ‘what school districts are already doing’

The Texas Legislature passed during the second overtime lawmaking session this year to scrap the STAAR test.

Many of the reforms are meant to better monitor students’ academic growth throughout the school year.

For the early and mid-year exams, schools will be able to choose from a menu of nationally recognized assessments approved by the TEA. The agency will create the third test. Under the law, the three new tests will use percentile ranks comparing students to their peers in Texas; the third will also assess a student’s grasp of the curriculum.

In addition, scores will be required to be released about two days after students take the exam, so teachers can better tailor their lessons to student needs.

State Sen. , R-Houston, one of the architects behind the push to revamp the state’s standardized test, said he would like the first two tests to “become part of learning” so they can help students prepare for the end-of-year exam.

But despite the changes, the new testing system will likely resemble the current one when it launches in the 2027-28 school year, education policy experts say.

“It’s gonna take a couple of years before parents realize, to be honest, that you know, did they actually eliminate STAAR?” said Bob Popinski with Raise Your Hand Texas, an education advocacy nonprofit.

Since many schools already conduct multiple exams throughout the year, the law will “basically codify what school districts are already doing,” Popinski said.

Lawmakers instructed TEA to develop a way to measure student progress based on the results from the three tests. But that metric won’t be ready when the new testing system launches in the 2027-28 school year. That means results from the standardized tests, and their weight in the state’s school accountability ratings system, will remain similar to what they are now.

Every Texas school district and campus receives an A-F rating based on graduation benchmarks and how students perform on state tests, their improvement in those areas, and how well they educate disadvantaged students. The best score out of the first two categories accounts for most of their overall rating. The rest is based on their score in the last category.

The accountability ratings are high stakes for school districts, which can face state sanctions for failing grades — from being forced to close school campuses to the ousting of their democratically elected school boards.

Supporters of the state’s accountability system say it is vital to assess whether schools are doing a good job at educating Texas children.

“The last test is part of the accountability rating, and that’s not going to change,” Bettencourt said.

Critics say the current ratings system fails to take into account a lot of the work schools are doing to help children succeed outside of preparing them for standardized tests.

“Our school districts are doing a lot of interesting, great things out there for our kids,” Popinski said. “Academics and extracurricular activities and co-curricular activities, and those just aren’t being incorporated into the accountability report at all.”

In response to calls to evaluate student success beyond testing, HB 8 also instructs the TEA to track student participation in pre-K, extracurriculars and workforce training in middle schools. But none of those metrics will be factored into schools’ ratings.

“There is some other interest in looking at other factors for accountability ratings, but it’s not mandated. It’s just going to be reviewed and surveyed,” Bettencourt said.

Student stress worries

Even though many schools already conduct testing throughout the year, Popinski said the new system created by HB 8 could potentially boost test-related stress among students.

State Rep. , R-Salado, who sponsored the testing overhaul in the Texas House, wrote in a statement that “TEA will determine testing protocols through their normal process.” This means it will be up to TEA to decide the rules that it currently uses for the STAAR test. Those include that schools dedicate three to four hours to the exam and that administrators create seating charts, spread out desks and manage restroom breaks.

School administrators said the worst-case scenario would be if all three of the new tests had to follow lockdown protocols like the ones that currently come with STAAR. Holly Ferguson, superintendent of Prosper ISD, said the high-pressure environment associated with the state’s standardized test makes some of her students ill.

“It shouldn’t be that we have kids sick and anxiety is going through the roof because they know the next test is coming,” Ferguson said.

The TEA did not respond to a request for comment.

HB 8 also seeks to limit the time teachers spend preparing students for state assessments, partly by banning benchmark tests for 3-8 grades. Bettencourt told the Tribune the new system is expected to save per student.

Buckley said the new law “will reduce the overall number of tests a student takes as well as the time they spend on state assessments throughout the school year, dramatically relieving the pressure and stress caused by over-testing.”

But some critics worry that any time saved by banning practice tests will be lost by testing three times a year. In 2022, Florida changed its testing system from a single exam to three tests at the beginning, middle and end of the year. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said the new system would , but the number of minutes students spent taking exams almost the year the new system went into effect.

Popinski added that much of the stress the test induces comes from the heavy weight the end-of-year assessment holds on a school’s accountability rating. The pressure to perform that the current system places on school district administrators transfers to teachers and students, critics have said.

“The pressures are going to be almost exactly the same,” Popinski said.

What parents, educators want for the new test

Retired Fort Worth teacher Jim Ekrut said he worries about the ban on practice tests, because in his experience, test preparations helped reduce his students’ anxiety.

Ekrut said teachers’ experience assessing students is one reason why educators should be involved in creating the new end-of-year exam.

“The better decisions are going to be made with input from people right on that firing line,” Ekrut said.

HB 8 requires that a committee of educators appointed by the commissioner reviews the new test that TEA will create. Some, like Ferguson and David Vinson, former superintendent of Wylie ISD who started at Conroe this week, said they hope the menu of possible assessments districts can pick for the first two tests includes a national program they already use called , or MAP.

The Prosper and Wylie districts are some that administer MAP exams at the beginning, middle and end of the year. More than 4,500 school districts nationwide use these online tests, which change the difficulty of the questions as students log their answers to better assess their skill level and growth. A conducted by the organization that runs MAP found that the test is a strong indicator of how students perform on the end-of-year standardized test.

Criteria-based tests like STAAR measure a student’s grasp on grade-level skills, whereas norm-based exams like MAP measure a student’s growth over the course of instruction. Vinson described this program as a “checkup,” while STAAR is an “autopsy.”

Rachel Spires, whose children take MAP tests at Sunnyvale ISD, said MAP testing doesn’t put as much pressure on students as STAAR does.

Spires said her children’s schedules are rearranged for the month of April, when Sunnyvale administers the STAAR test, and parents are barred from coming to campus for lunch. MAP tests, on the other hand, typically take less time to complete, and the school has fewer rules for how they are administered.

“When the MAP tests come around, they don’t do the modified schedules, and they don’t do the review packets and prep testing or anything like that,” Spires said. “It’s just like, ‘Okay, tomorrow you’re gonna do a MAP test,’ and it’s over in like an hour.”

For Ferguson, the Prosper ISD superintendent, a relaxed environment around testing is key to achieving the new law’s goal of reducing student stress.

“If it’s just another day at school, I’m all in,” Ferguson said. “But if we lock it down, and we create a very compliance-driven system that’s very archaic and anxiety- and worry-inducing to the point that it starts having potential harmful effects on our kids … our teachers and our parents, I’m not okay with that.”

This article originally appeared in at . The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

The superintendent waits for her turn to step to the mic. She’s here to explain the district’s new artificial intelligence pilot: a tool teachers say will give them back an hour per day for one-on-one time with their students. She’s just two minutes into her explanation of how the tool will work, when the first parent stands up and approaches the mic. She’s followed by others, who form an increasingly long line. The first parent calls the tool “surveillance.” The second warns of “robots grading our kids,” and a third questions “what are we paying teachers for.” By the time the vote happens, the pilot is tabled. The tool hasn’t failed. The story has.

We’ve seen this movie before. In the 2000s, No Child Left Behind brought nationwide accountability; in the 2010s, Race to the Top accelerated standards and testing. But then Common Core arrived and, in too many places, the fight wasn’t about better learning but about who was in charge. A student data platform launched into a vacuum of trust. District tools that could lighten teacher workload get framed as replacements for teachers. In each case, a new idea walked into an old narrative, and the old narrative won.

This isn’t a communications problem at the end of the process. It’s a design problem at the beginning.

The education sector spends billions designing programs, products and policies but spends almost nothing designing the story that helps people understand what they are and what they do. When narrative is an afterthought, the public makes meaning on its own, using their most familiar, vivid and available shortcuts.

Those shortcuts are powerful:

• Top-down control: When reforms arrive without local authors, communities read them as done to them, not with them.
• Data equals danger: Years of breaches and sloppy practice have built a trust deficit with families.
• Tech replaces people: In schools, the default story about technology as substitution — a zero-sum trade against human connection and judgment.

The result is predictable: Good ideas stall not because they’re bad ideas, but because their stories arrive late, or not at all.

A Better Way to Build: Frame → Test → Iterate → Scale

Narratives can be built with the same rigor brought to product development. As researchers who’ve spent over two decades framing research across issues from health to early childhood, we’ve learned that meaning-making is designable — and testable — if we treat it like R&D. The key steps include:

Frame. Start by clarifying the story you want people to understand. That means articulating the core ideas — what you want people to know, feel connected to, use, and ask for — and mapping how your audiences currently make sense of the topic: their mental shortcuts, blind spots and sticking points.

Test. Turn those insights into values, metaphors and explanations that close gaps and avoid unproductive defaults. Pressure-test them: on-the-street interviews, small-group conversations, then survey studies that quantify “frame effects” on understanding, support and willingness to act.

Iterate. Use what you learn to refine and improve. Co-design with the people who will use the strategy — teachers, principals, parents, students — and embed short-cycle tests in real communications.

Scale. Package the strategy so others can pick it up: make-and-use toolkits, visuals, model language, and training sessions. Keep support alive with checklists, refreshers and coaching.

Done well, this cycle doesn’t just produce better talking points. It builds a shared narrative that prepares the ground so good ideas can take root.

A district hoping to reboot its approach to standards and testing, for instance, could map local mindsets and realize they were up against a consistent pattern of thinking: that standards are being read as a scoreboard for punishment, not a roadmap for instruction. 

The team could reframe the work around “clear signposts for students’ future success” and swap abstract promises for concrete examples: student work samples, teacher-led walkthroughs, and community nights where families tried out classroom tasks. Instead of a press release about new assessments, the launch could lead with a values statement: “We need to give every student a fair shot and clear feedback.” The debate wouldn’t disappear, but it would move forward. People would begin to argue about how to do the work well, not whether to do it at all.

The same approach could work for a district introducing an AI pilot. Before getting started, district leaders could put four words on the whiteboard: Frame. Test. Iterate. Scale. Early on-the-street interviews would reveal the dominant default understanding: AI will watch our kids and sideline our teachers. So the team could test a different narrative: AI as a teaching assistant that handles routine tasks and frees teachers to do what only humans can do: build relationships, diagnose misconceptions and motivate. 

What Works — and What Backfires

Through our work, we’ve distilled some key insights for education leaders trying to implement new approaches:

• Lead with widely shared values — like every student needs a fair shot and schools should equip young people to thrive. Start with why before what.
• Give the public a picture in their heads. Tested metaphors like “co-pilot,” “teaching assistant,” or “signposts” help people picture how a tool or policy works and what it changes.
• Explain the mechanism. Don’t just claim impact; show the steps from cause to effect (e.g., AI drafts feedback → teachers spend more time in 1:1 interactions → students revise more often).
• Show the humans. Center teachers and students explicitly; make technology the helper, not the hero.
• Name and neutralize risks. Address privacy, bias and misuse plainly and show your guardrails.
• Avoid traps. “Silver bullet,” “crisis-only” and “us vs. them” framing activates skepticism, scarcity and blame. They shrink your coalition and make backlash easier to trigger.

Public reaction to today’s ideas is shaped by yesterday’s scars. Communities remember when reforms felt like they arrived from far away, when data was used on them rather than for them, and when vendors treated schools like markets instead of partners. If we ignore that history, our messages will land as spin and we’ll just add to skepticism and doubt.

Trust is rebuilt through design choices: who authors the narrative, whose voices lead, what benefits arrive first and for whom, and how transparently we report what we learn. When communities that have shouldered the most underinvestment see themselves in the story — and see safeguards and benefits by design — support grows and sticks.

Innovation doesn’t lack for ideas. It lacks the narrative infrastructure that makes them legible, trustworthy and adoptable. The fix is straightforward: put narrative prototyping on the critical path. Fund it. Time-box it. Test it. Ship it alongside the product or policy.

If we do, school board nights will sound different. Less rumor, more reasoning. Fewer boogeymen, more “show me how.” More time on what matters most — students learning well, with adults they trust.

Let’s build the stories that give great ideas a chance to work.

was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana of . 

In America, diapers have long been treated as a luxury good rather than a necessity. 

struggle to afford all the diapers they need. A quarter of families miss work as a result, often because they don’t have enough diapers to send with their children to child care. 

It’s a largely invisible issue with enormous consequences for the health of parents and children. Studies have found that diaper need is a greater contributor than food insecurity and housing instability. And when parents don’t have enough diapers, they make do with sanitary pads, rags or other materials. Some report having to leave their children in soiled diapers for extended periods, raising the risk for urinary tract infections and diaper rash. 

So Amy Kadens, who has worked in the diaper space for nearly 15 years, wondered: What if diapers were free for the parents who need them most? For decades, the United States has not had a good answer. So she came up with her own. 

Diaper banks started popping up across the nation in 2011, collecting donations and dispersing diapers to families through a . They are one of the few lifelines for parents. 

Kadens, who co-founded a nonprofit that provides diapers called Share our Spare in 2011, knew that diaper banks often operate with limited staff and resources, and operationally can only address a small percentage of a massive need. Without more government support, they can only get at a slice of the problem. 

Federal assistance programs that help low-income families, such as food stamps and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), have never allowed families to use those funds to purchase diapers. 

“Diaper banks are doing heroic work with very little. I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel,” Kadens said. But, “I wanted to continue to sink my teeth into this.”

So Kadens started to work on a solution that could give people the funds to get whatever diapers they needed, without the warehouses to store donations or the teams to get those donations out. 

That solution was Diaper Dollars, a $40 e-card that users get in their email every month. The virtual card comes with a barcode they can scan at checkout at most major retailers, including Walmart, CVS and Walgreens, that will cover the cost of diapers. So far, users in Illinois and Ohio can access the program.

The idea, Kadens said, was to make it as simple as possible, while also giving parents the ability to choose what brands they preferred. 

 “Families have brand loyalty,” Kadens said. “I wanted to keep dignity and choice at the forefront of everything we did.”

The Diaper Dollars team went through months of market research to refine the tech to work well for participants. They didn’t want coupons because there was too much in the system, and gift cards meant users could be limited on where to shop. 

Instead, they landed on a system that allowed them to build out a catalog of diapers at 6,200 retail locations in the country. The bar code on the digital card recognizes the diapers when it’s scanned and deducts the price from the total purchase. That catalog of diapers is monitored daily and updated in case brands come out with new box sizes or products. It also works for online purchases. 

The system does have some limitations. It’s not valid in Amazon or Target, two retailers that don’t yet accept that form of payment. And it also likely only covers a portion of the need: The average family spends about $100 on diapers a month, but families earning a median income can only afford to cover about $65, according to an . It’s also more expensive — parents are paying retail prices plus sales tax (, including Illinois). By contrast, products at diaper banks are donated or sold to the banks from the manufacturer at deeply discounted rates. 

To find participants, Diaper Dollars partners with organizations such as WIC clinics and local hospitals to refer people to the program, which is funded from a mix of philanthropy and financial support from those same partners. Partners establish the eligibility criteria, how long participants can be a part of the program, and whether the stipend will be higher for those with multiple babies.

A pilot program launched in 2023 with 100 people, then in 2024 the Illinois Department of Human Services dedicated $1 million to run its own pilot at a larger scale. Nearly 8,000 people have been served so far, with 10,000 projected by 2026. 

Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton told The 19th that she had been looking for solutions that could support people in the postpartum period, when is high, . Diaper need, specifically, is linked to and considered a potential risk factor for moderate to high maternal depressive symptoms.  According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2023, the maternal mortality rate for Black women was 50.3 deaths per 100,000 live births. For White women it was 14.5 deaths. 

So when Illinois launched a birth equity initiative to address the needs of postpartum parents, from a home visiting program to better diaper access, it chose to partner with Diaper Dollars. 

“Giving someone a card where they can go to the store of their choice, decide what’s best, that is what’s part of dignity,” Stratton said. “Every woman deserves to bring life into this world safely and with dignity.” 

Brendan Kitt, Diaper Dollars’ program director, said the program was able to offer an operational solution to a problem the state wanted to address but didn’t have a mechanism for. The system works similarly to a universal basic income, where people in need are given a cash stipend, but it’s more targeted. 

“Both for funders and supporters, it’s always a question when you talk to people about where the money goes,” he said. “The fact that we can limit the transactions to the specific needs that we’re trying to serve, I think, is one of the biggest things that legitimized our operation over just giving basic cash assistance.” 

Parents who benefited from Diaper Dollars told the organization in testimonials that they’ve had to turn to using underwear or old T-shirts when they didn’t have the money for diapers, often making decisions between paying for rent or diapers. 

After going through the program, parents reported that the funds gave them the wiggle room to buy their children other essentials or to make them better meals. 

About 90 percent of those who went through the program reported being able to better afford essentials like food, rent and other bills. Some 95 percent felt less stressed about not having enough diapers. 

Joanne Samuel Goldblum, the CEO of the National Diaper Bank Network, which has more than 240 partners nationwide, said a model like Diaper Dollars can address unmet needs, particularly in rural areas where it’s harder for diaper banks to distribute products. 

“The need is really so big, and it’s not going to be addressed through just one sort of answer or one type of program,” Samuel Goldblum said. “It’s really important to have ways to reach people in all sorts of different communities.” 

The Diaper Dollars program has raised about $2 million so far — 45 percent from the state of Illinois, 35 percent from philanthropic donors and 20 percent from grants from community partners. It is now also running in Ohio and expected to expand to Washington soon. 

Kadens’ dream is to take the program to every state. Since Roe v. Wade was overturned and some red states instituted abortion bans, conservative lawmakers have been looking for ways to support postpartum parents. 

In Tennessee, for example, where abortion was banned in 2022, the state in 2024 that allowed families enrolled in Tennessee’s Medicaid program to receive up to a month for the first two years of life. 

Samuel Goldblum said the National Diaper Bank Network has seen more bipartisan support for addressing diaper needs this year “than we’ve ever seen before.”

It should be that simple, Kadens said: “It doesn’t matter if you’re blue or red. Babies need diapers.”

This was originally published on .

The child care needs of U.S. military families are often utterly distinct from those of civilians. That has led to the creation of a child care system that is often held up as one of the nation’s exemplars — . With more funding, thoughtful systems-building and innovations to address its gaps, the military has taken major steps in recent decades to increase access to high-quality child care options. That said, the landscape of military child care is not well understood, especially by outsiders. Having a better grasp of the contours of military child care programs could help policymakers apply lessons to the broader U.S. child care system. 

The military provides a diverse range of options including on- and off-base. A 2021 report found that nearly 50,000 children were enrolled in the Department of Defense’s on-base child development centers; nearly 25,000 children were enrolled in DOD’s school-age care programs; and 2,700 children were receiving care in DOD family child care homes. The families of another roughly 26,000 children were receiving fee assistance to acquire care from community providers near their base. 

In addition, the military offers , facilities where providers care for children in a home-like setting during traditional and nontraditional hours; these centers are designed to meet the needs of workers with rotating schedules or nontraditional hours, such as nights and weekends.

Backed by around a year in public funding and receiving bipartisan support because of implications for recruitment, retention and troop performance, DOD child care options tend to be of solid quality. As the GAO chart below shows, different settings have varied quality-related requirements, but all of the on-base programs include multiple annual unannounced inspections.

While care is not free for servicemembers, it is : An active duty family making between $55,000 and $65,000 pays a standard fee of $74 a week, or slightly under $4,000 a year. By comparison, civilian child care slots frequently cost a year. 

For all its strengths, the U.S. military child care system still struggles with many of the challenges that plague its civilian counterpart — challenges undergirded by inadequate public funding such as insufficient slots and high levels of staff churn. That says something about the true price tag of a good child care system, given how much is put into military child care. With the substantial percentage of military families that opt to use off-base child care due either to a lack of on-base capacity or having special needs, the weakness and scarcity that mark the country’s civilian child care system also impacts the military. In 2024, the top enlisted officer in the Air Force that DOD needed to decide whether child care was a “requirement or a nice to have.”

All told, military child care slots can be hard to secure and do not always match family needs: As of 2023, , around 12,000 children were on waitlists for child care. That’s problematic, especially given that around one-third of military spouses who wish to work outside the home . 

Recruiting and retaining qualified staff is a constant challenge — the range from 35 to 50%, but there’s a unique twist:  Many military child care employees are the spouses of servicemembers and thus highly transient. The turnover rates are also driven by familiar factors that plague the sector broadly: low compensation, stressful work environments and limited opportunities for career progress. These challenges were exacerbated by a temporary hiring freeze put in place earlier this year by the Trump administration. 

Recently, the nonprofit military news organization War Horse the military child care system is “delicately balanced on a wobbling foundation, made shakier by the frequent moves of its primary pool of employees — military spouses. But suddenly, the was upended by staffing shortages that rippled from base to base after a DOD-wide hiring freeze announced in late February prevented centers from filling vacancies. Even though child care providers were exempted from the freeze three weeks after it was announced, the damage has persisted for months.”

Despite these obstacles, there are innovators within military child care trying to forge new paths. HomeFront Help, for example, an initiative of the nonprofit , provides free training and screenings to individuals who want to become what are known as Helpers. These Helpers then set a reasonable rate and provide one-off, part-time, and/or emergency child care for military families, who can access them through local databases. By facilitating the connections of trained and reliable Helpers to families who need them, the philanthropically funded initiative fills in gaps and needs in ways a Child Development Center cannot.

During a pilot of the program at Elgin Air Force Base in Florida, Helpers supported over 150 families with more than 550 days of care.

In a different vein, an app specifically developed for military families and their unpredictable schedules to other military families while they’re traveling or on leave. Typically, parents have to cover the cost of care even when their family is away, but this app allows them to support another military family by providing a child care slot, and in return, they receive a credit they can apply to their child’s care. As of April 2025, more than 12,000 spots had temporarily changed hands, according to Air Force officials.

The DOD is also with community providers, essentially creating off-base child care programs, as with a new facility in Norfolk, Virginia, operated by a local YMCA. This strategy allows the DOD to expand its child care capacity far faster than relying only on building and staffing additional on-base facilities.

If one squints, there are emerging principles from the military child care system of the mid-2020s that are broadly applicable: Substantial public funding that enables deep fee cuts compared to a market-based system. Supply-side expansion efforts backed by those public dollars. An emphasis on flexibility and a population’s diverse set of needs and preferences. A balance between accountability and autonomy. Engagement of both licensed professionals and community members.

The U.S. military child care system is far from perfect. Given, however, that it is one area where the country has gotten past first-order fights about whether the government should even be involved in child care, it’s worth continuing to keep a close eye on — and holding up as a continued source of hope for those who believe a better approach to American child care is possible.

State residents were guaranteed of leave to care for a newborn, a sick relative or to recover from their own illness or disability, and the pay they received was only 55% of their income, even for low-wage workers. It didn’t come with the assurance that they would be able to return to their jobs after leave. Many workers who were eligible didn’t make use of it; in of California employers and workers, one-third of workers said they didn’t apply for paid leave because the benefits were too low and taking it could adversely impact their jobs.

Today, a total of have enacted paid family leave programs, and over time they’ve become more robust. Newer programs have guaranteed additional weeks off and job protection while offering higher wage replacement. Some have created more expansive definitions of family. Meanwhile, older programs like California’s have been expanded to become more generous. 

These changes have allowed more workers to actually take advantage of the benefits they’ve paid into and are owed, according to new data, leading to more equality in who takes leave.

In a published by the National Partnership for Women & Families, Jessica Mason, senior policy analyst for economic justice at the organization, examined programs in Connecticut and Washington State, which were in 2019 and 2017, respectively, and offer 12 weeks of leave with nearly full wage replacement for the lowest-wage workers. They also allow people to take leave for chosen family members as well as more traditional ones. 

Those programs belong to the group that have a “newer, 2.0 model,” she said. She also looked at Rhode Island, which became the third state in the country to enact paid family leave in 2008. The state started by offering four weeks of leave and is now up to six weeks at a flat 60% wage replacement rate, and with a stricter definition of family. That program is “the original 1.0 model of paid leave,” Mason said.

What she found is that, in the two states with more expansive benefits, “there are some real equity benefits,” she said. 

In the first three states to enact paid family leave — California, New Jersey and Rhode Island — the share of parental leave claims filed by men was very low in the first year, ranging from 12% in New Jersey to 32% in Rhode Island. But the states that have more recent policies have seen a very different trend. In Washington, roughly half of parental leave claims were filed by men, and in Connecticut it’s a bit over 45%. That means these programs are “starting off in a more equitable place,” Mason said. 

Thanks to sliding scales for wage replacement, which offer lower-paid workers much more of their typical pay while on leave, women have a smaller gap in how much money they receive while on paid leave compared to men in both Washington and Connecticut. So while women still make less than men in these states, they’re getting more equal benefits, which “helps mitigate the wage gap,” Mason said.

There is also some evidence that higher wage replacement rates in these states are helping lower-paid workers. While workers earning in the very lowest quintile are still underrepresented among people taking medical leave for their own health issues — the most common reason for leave — low- and middle-income workers in Washington, for example, take leaves at higher rates than their share of the labor force. The higher rates could also be due to job protection for taking leave and a lot of outreach efforts to make sure residents know about the newer programs, Mason said. 

Change hasn’t just come to new states creating new programs. The original states that enacted more stringent programs have updated and expanded them, and they’ve also seen promising results. At the start of this year, California increased its wage replacement such that the lowest-paid workers now get of their pay. It, too, is now seeing more equitable outcomes. More state residents overall are taking leave, and the rate surged 17% for people who earn $60,000 or less who can expect 90% of their wages. The gap between how much leave men and women take, meanwhile, has narrowed. 

The overall trend among states establishing leave is to expand and make programs more generous over time. “We have not seen a single program go back and cut benefits,” Mason noted. Meanwhile, other states have been able to learn from the lessons and mistakes of the earlier pioneers, and when new programs are developed, they tend to offer longer periods of leave, higher pay, more inclusive definitions of family and job protection, she said. These data show that these efforts can create real change in who is able to take leave.

It’s a matter of “fairness” to enact these expansions that allow more people to take leave, Mason said. All of these programs are set up as social insurance, with workers and employers paying into them. They should, then, be able to make use of the benefits when they need them.

It’s a lesson that policymakers in Congress could stand to learn, Mason said. While Democrats’ version of paid family leave legislation, the FAMILY Act, has been to have a higher wage replacement rate for lower-wage workers and a more expansive definition of family, the House bipartisan Paid Family Leave Working Group a policy framework last year that seemed like they were trying to “reinvent the wheel,” Mason said, and start from scratch.

“We don’t have to come up with a new policy here,” she said. “We already know what works.”

was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana of . .

Ah, a new school year. Crisp backpacks, gleaming sneakers, pressed uniforms and, of course, the collective rage of parents and teachers over school supply lists. How long they are. What’s on them. And who should foot the bill for pencils and paper, but also Clorox wipes and Kleenex. 

This year, though, those conversations, which typically clog up social media feeds as summer rolls to a close, have a new dimension. At a time when prices are creeping back up and public education is witnessing some of the steepest funding cuts in American history, the school supplies debate is a window into how families and workers are faring. 

“It’s not our job to supply all other students’ school supplies,” one mom on TikTok. “We pay taxes for that. The school should be funded to supply pencils and erasers and construction paper.” The video was then stitched together by another creator who added flashing headlines over the mom’s words: “Trump signs executive order to begin dismantling Education Department, raising questions for students and parents.” 

“I don’t have money to help Sally, John, Lucy,” . “Baby, my money, what I spend on for my kids is just for my kids. We don’t have the money to be trying to help other households…I feel like people who are in a position to help, I’m pretty sure they don’t mind helping, but it’s a lot of us that can only do for our kids.”

Teachers have spent the past couple of weeks countering. A middle school teacher in Memphis has for her response to frustrated parents: “Just so we’re clear, I’m expected to take a bullet for little Johnny and his classmates, but little Johnny’s mother does not see it fit to provide for the community with some Clorox wipes, some tissues, maybe an extra pack of pencils — that’s what we’re going with right now? I have to make the ultimate sacrifice for the community — the school — but little Johnny’s mother does not think that she has to make any sacrifices for the community.” 

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said the debate is “exhibit A of the defunding of public schools and as a result the creation of a divisiveness that shouldn’t be there.” 

Of course parents are upset, she said. “They pay taxes, they’re like, ‘Why doesn’t the funding cover it?’” Meanwhile for teachers, the pressure is on them to fill in the gaps. “What other employee is told to basically fund their own job?” Weingarten said.

President Donald Trump has made it a priority to dismantle the Department of Education, a move Republicans as far back as Ronald Reagan have been calling for as part of an effort to remove the federal government from education, leaving curriculum and funding decisions to states and local school districts. 

Already, the Education Department’s role isn’t to dictate what is taught in schools but to dole out financial aid to college students, conduct research on education, enforce anti-discrimination laws and fund Title I K-12 schools in communities with the most need. Cutting the department will have direct consequences on discretionary funding at those Title I schools. How much schools spend on school supplies varies by district, but some . 

Since the start of the year, the Trump administration has at the Education Department. Then in June, it announced it would for the upcoming school year, money that had already been allocated by Congress to go out July 1 for summer and after-school programs, as well as reading and math support and other assistance for migrant students. Then, at the end of July, following significant pressure from numerous groups, the administration reversed its decision and released the funds. 

The political ping-pong forced school districts to take money from their discretionary spending budgets to ensure summer school stayed open. That meant dipping into funding for supplies, Weingarten said. 

Meanwhile, teachers, particularly at Title I schools, are going into the year with less support, facing potentially larger class sizes, limited counseling support for students and other challenges. About of teachers already use their own money to cover school supplies and other classroom needs — and those expenses are only going up. 

“Think about those educators who are taking money out of their own pockets, trying to stretch their own family’s budget, and at the same time how they’re feeling about the reality that their students are coming back to school and the schools have fewer resources,” said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers’ union. 

It’s an “affordability crisis,” Weingarten added — and that’s what’s playing out on social media. 

Inflation has started to pick back up and Trump’s tariffs of 10 percent or more on nearly all countries went into effect on August 1, raising the cost of everyday goods, particularly electronics and clothing. In July, a key measure that looks at inflation without volatile food and energy costs , indicating companies are starting to pass tariff increases on to consumers. have indicated they will start to raise prices, and economists are warning that larger increases are on the horizon. 

All of it is affecting how parents approach back-to-school shopping this year. 

Data from found that families planned to shrink their back-to-school budgets to an average of about $858 from $874 last year. About half of shoppers were starting their shopping earlier this year, specifically to avoid markups from tariffs. During Amazon’s Prime Day event July 8 to 11, sales of school supplies (backpacks, lunchboxes, binders, calculators and kids’ apparel) were up over last year, according to Adobe Analytics. One U.S. News survey from late July found of parents are concerned about rising back-to-school prices due to tariffs. 

“A lot of these more or less low-cost, mass-produced items are just simply not made in the U.S. so there are necessarily going to be price hikes on things like pencils and crayons and backpacks and things we just don’t make here anymore,” said Alex Jacquez, the chief of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, a left-leaning think tank. “We are not going to move pencil factories back to the United States.”

The debate over school supplies is not all happening in a vacuum, either. passed by Congress will reshape family budgets and require families to put more money into health care and groceries — and away from things like school supplies.

“When all of us are feeling squeezed at the grocery store, at the bank, at day care — it’s no wonder that frustrations are boiling over,” said Sondra Goldschein, the executive director of the Campaign for a Family Friendly Economy, in a statement to The 19th. “With school starting in the fall, can you blame teachers and parents — neither of whom should be on the hook for such expensive school supplies — for looking at each other and wondering who can possibly afford another hit to their family’s budget?”

Low-income families, predominantly families of color, will feel the squeeze the most both in their own budgets and cuts to school budgets. for the poorest families and Black workers, who have faced the brunt of cuts to government jobs, including many diversity, equity and inclusion positions, have seen in the past four months. 

Ailen Arreaza, the executive director of ParentsTogether, a national nonprofit that works to engage parents politically, said all of it is leading to a sense of uncertainty and instability among parents as the school year begins. 

This, Arreaza said, is what shouldn’t get lost in the discourse: “What we hear from parents time and time again is that they love their teachers. The issue here is not teachers versus parents. The real problem is the slashing of education budgets and the rising costs.” 

This year, many parents are also recognizing that. Now, alongside the angry videos are dozens others like this one that a mother posted on TikTok at the end of July:

“As a parent of an upcoming third grader, nothing has pissed me off more recently than watching all of these parents have to make videos about these mile-long school lists: five boxes of Kleenex, three bottles of hand sanitizers, two the three-bottle Clorox wipes. Y’all want loose leaf paper, pens, pencils, markers, crayons, construction paper, and then have the nerve to say, ‘Don’t put your kid’s name on none of the supplies,’” . 

“But what really takes my anger over the edge is the fact that you did not ask for nothing for yourself, baby. What do you want? As a teacher that is about to have my children from August to May for seven, eight hours a day you can have whatever you like. I’m [the rapper] T.I. You can have whatever you like.”

This gap is a of decision-making. People plan to save for retirement or stick to diets, but often fall short of their goals. In parenting, the stakes are higher: Not reading a bedtime story or skipping a day of preschool may seem momentarily insignificant, but small gaps in learning time , making it increasingly . 

Why do well-intentioned parents sometimes struggle to follow through with engaging their children, and how can behavioral science help parents close the intention-action gap?

The field of offers insights into what creates intention-action gaps and identifies practical ways to bridge the gap. Many of these approaches rely on the concept of “” — subtle changes in how choices or information are presented that make the desired action easier or more likely to occur. In parenting, nudges often come in the form of reminders, feedback, or other simple tools sent through digital technology. These nudges acknowledge that busy parents aren’t failing to engage their children in learning activities that are key to the child’s future because they lack love, knowledge, or good intentions; rather, daily life is full of friction and temptations.

has shown that “present bias,” a manifestation of the intention-action gap, is central to parenting choices. Parents, like everyone, often prioritize immediate rewards over future benefits. Raising a child requires long-term effort; while considerable research shows that reading books to a toddler boosts their language skills in the future, the benefits of today’s actions can be long delayed. Meanwhile, daily distractions and fatigue demand immediate attention.

This bias can cause parents to focus on the “now” rather than the “later,” even when they value activities like reading. In our study, we tackled present bias by sending parents text-message prompts and goal-setting reminders to read to their children from a digital library that we provided to parents. These reminders were intended to “bring the future to the present.” Parents who received these reminders read to their child over twice as much over six weeks compared to parents who received the digital library with no reminders.

Notably, the parents who gained the most were those who exhibited present-biased preferences in assessments given before the experiment began. In other words, the parents most prone to procrastinate on reading were the ones who saw the greatest improvements when we helped them overcome present bias. Parents without present bias already read regularly, so the extra reminders had little impact for them.

Tools to Help Parents Follow Through

Another successful example of narrowing the intention-action gap from our research lab is the “” study, a randomized controlled trial we conducted to increase attendance in Chicago’s publicly funded preschool programs. Our intervention sent personalized text messages to parents over 18 weeks, indicating the number of days their child had been absent and highlighting the learning opportunities they missed while not in school. The messages reminded parents of their commitment to adopt good attendance habits and their goals to help their child develop kindergarten readiness skills.

For children whose parents received these messages, preschool attendance increased by about 2.5 school days, and chronic absenteeism — a measure of missing 10% or more of the school days in a school year — decreased by 20% compared to the children of parents who did not receive the messages. The helped align parents’ actions with their long-term goals. This type of light-touch program is inexpensive and easy to scale, making it a for education policymakers aiming to reduce early absenteeism.

Technology offers a promising solution to close the intention-action gap. Our recent study provided families with a tablet preloaded with a digital library of over 200 high-quality children’s books. The tablet had no apps or internet access beyond the library to reduce distractions. The goal was to remove the obstacle of finding new books and to make shared reading as easy and engaging as possible. 

The impact on children’s language skills was notable. Over an 11-month trial, low-income children whose families received access to the digital library showed approximately 0.3 standard deviations more progress in language skills (equivalent to three months of language learning on the test we gave to children) than those who did not, moving from roughly the 41st to the 50th percentile nationally. Notably, the treatment impact was significantly larger – 0.50 standard deviation, equivalent to approximately five months of language learning on the test we gave to children – for parents who exhibited present-biased preferences in assessments administered before the experiment began (as in the PACT study). Sometimes the best way to narrow the intention-action gap is to reduce barriers to the intended action. 

From Research Insights to Early Childhood Policy

These go beyond academics: They offer a for early childhood policy. Traditional parenting programs often assume that if parents are informed about the benefits of their decisions or provided with free resources, they will naturally act accordingly. However, information and resources alone don’t always lead to behavior change, especially when cognitive biases interfere. 

Relatively low-cost, behaviorally informed interventions can directly address the intention-action gap. For example, text-message programs can be through school districts, pediatric clinics, or social service agencies to encourage behaviors like daily reading, conversations, or preschool attendance. , such as the library tablet in the CAPER study, could be integrated into public early education programs or library initiatives to ensure families have access to books and find them easy and enjoyable to use. 

Such approaches can promote equity by focusing on parents who face more cognitive biases or for whom these biases cause the most harm. Behavioral tools can help before children reach kindergarten, which research shows is the most effective and cost-efficient time to empower parents as active partners in their children’s development.

A recent report from the University of Virginia— — confirms what many of us know instinctively but rarely see, or avoid altogether, in education debates: The presence and engagement of a child’s father has a powerful effect on their academic and emotional well-being. It’s the kind of data that should stop us in our tracks — and redirect our attention away from educational fads and toward the foundational structures that shape student success long before a child ever sets foot in a classroom.

The research — led by my AEI colleague Brad Wilcox and co-authored by a diverse team that includes another AEI colleague, Ian Rowe — finds that children in Virginia with actively involved fathers are more likely to earn good grades, less likely to have behavior problems in school, and dramatically less likely to suffer from depression. Specifically, children with disengaged fathers are 68% less likely to get mostly good grades and nearly four times more likely to be diagnosed with depression. These are not trivial effects. They are seismic.

Most striking is the report’s finding that there is no meaningful difference in school grades among demographically diverse children raised in intact families. Black and white students living with their fathers get mostly As at roughly equal rates — more than 85% — and are equally unlikely to experience school behavior problems. The achievement gap, in other words, appears to be less about race and more about the structure and stability of the family.

This may be a surprising finding to some, but not to William Jeynes, a professor of education at California State University, Long Beach, whose have previously demonstrated the outsized academic impact of family structure and religious faith. (The new UVA report does not study the role of church-going). 

As I wrote in , Jeynes’ work highlights how two-parent households and religious engagement produce measurable benefits in educational achievement. “When two parents are present, this maximizes the frequency and quality of parental involvement. There are many dedicated single parents,” Jeynes . However, the reality is that when one parent must take on the roles and functions of two, it is simply more difficult than when two parents are present.” Jeynes’ most stunning finding, and his most consistent, is that if a Black or Hispanic student is raised in a religious home with two biological parents the achievement gap totally disappears—even when adjusting for socioeconomic status.

My colleague Ian Rowe has been a tireless advocate for recognizing and responding to these patterns. He has that NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card, should disaggregate student achievement data by family composition, not just by race and income. That simple step would yield a more honest accounting of the challenges schools are facing — and help avoid both unfair blame and unearned credit.

Yet this conversation remains a third rail in education. Many teachers and administrators are understandably wary of saying too much about family structure for fear of stigmatizing children from single-parent households, particularly in settings where single-parent households are dominant. Rowe has also faced resistance to his efforts to valorize the “,” the empirical finding that graduating high school, getting a full-time job and marrying before having children dramatically increases one’s odds of avoiding poverty. But being cautious is not the same as being silent, and it’s not compassionate to pretend these dynamics don’t matter when the data so clearly shows that they do.

None of this absolves educators of their duty to reach and teach every child. But it does suggest we should be clear-eyed in how we interpret data and set expectations. Teachers, particularly those in low-income communities, often shoulder the full weight of student outcomes while lacking the ability to influence some of the most powerful predictors of those outcomes. That’s frustrating — and understandably so.

Citing compelling evidence on fatherhood and family formation is not a call for resignation or excuse-making. It’s a call for awareness and intelligent action. While schools can’t influence or re-engineer family structure, teachers can respond in ways that affirm the role of fathers and strengthen the school-home connection. They can make fathers feel welcome and expected in school life — not merely tolerated. They can design family engagement activities that include dads as co-participants, not afterthoughts. They can build classroom cultures that offer structure and mentoring, especially to students who may lack it at home. 

And maybe — just maybe — the field can overcome its reluctance to share with students what research so clearly shows will benefit them and the children they will have in the future. Rowe takes pains to note his initiative to teach the Success Sequence is intended to help students make decisions about the families they will form, not the ones they’re from. “It’s not about telling them what to do,” he says, “it’s about giving them the data and letting them decide for themselves.”

This leads to a final point, and for some an uncomfortable one: If we truly care about student outcomes, perhaps we should be willing to support the institutions that reliably foster them. And that includes religious schools.

Religious schools — particularly those rooted in faith traditions that emphasize marriage, family life and moral formation — often create environments where the presence of fathers and the reinforcement of shared values are not incidental but central. A by Patrick J. Wolf of the University of Arkansas, published in the Journal of Catholic Education, found that adults who attended religious schools are significantly more likely to marry, stay married, and avoid nonmarital births compared to public‑school peers. The effects are most pronounced among individuals from lower‑income backgrounds.

In states with Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) and other school choice mechanisms, we have an opportunity — perhaps an obligation — to expand access to these institutions. That’s not merely a question of parental rights or religious liberty. It’s a matter of public interest. If these schools produce better education and social outcomes by encouraging family formation and reinforcing the value of fatherhood, the public benefits — even if instruction is delivered in a faith-based context. Said simply: The goal of educational policy and practice is not to save the system. It’s to help students flourish.

So yes, let’s fund fatherhood initiatives. Let’s run PSAs about the importance of dads. But let’s also get serious about expanding access to the kinds of schools — whether secular or religious in nature — that support the kind of family culture where children are most likely to thrive. Because if we follow the evidence where it leads, we must conclude that the biggest intervention in education is not another literacy coach or SEL curriculum. It’s dad.

A trained doctor, he spent 26 years working in pediatric infectious disease and studying the rotaviruses before ultimately creating the strain that became the RotaTeq vaccine. That breakthrough saves 165,000 lives globally each year, he said, and has essentially eliminated the 70,000 annual U.S. hospitalizations caused by the contagious diarrhoeal virus common in young kids.

Now the director of the and an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Offit also serves as a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s . And about 20 years ago, he spent half a decade on the committee responsible for making recommendations on the safety, efficacy and clinical need for vaccines to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That committee, also known as the , or ACIP, experienced an unprecedented upheaval earlier this month when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired all 17 advisory members via a Wall Street Journal — after promising he would leave the committee’s recommendations intact.

“The committee has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine,” wrote Kennedy, the head of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services and a longtime vaccine skeptic.

In a statement released by HHS, Kennedy said he was “prioritizing the restoration of public trust above any specific pro- or anti-vaccine agenda,” and later promised via that none of the replacement members would be “ideological anti-vaxxers.” Public health experts are now disputing that claim in light of his eight recent appointments.

“This is a slate that lacks a balanced viewpoint,” said Richard Hughes, a George Washington University law professor and leading vaccine law expert. “And it’s deeply concerning that many of them are outright anti-vaccine and have their own very concerning conflicts of interest, despite the fact that the secretary claims that he’s trying to avoid conflicts of interest on the committee.”

This could be particularly dangerous for children, some warn, as the committee’s recommendations often dictate which vaccines are covered by insurance and which are mandated for school-aged kids. Programs that provide free vaccines for kids could also see their funding cut.

����Ӱ��’s Amanda Geduld recently spoke with Offit to better understand the implications of the mass firing, what kids and their families can expect moving forward and how future administrations might work to rebuild trust in the public health vaccine system. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

����Ӱ��: Are you in touch with any of the folks who were fired from ACIP? If so, how did they receive that news and what was the mood among the members?

Offit: Well, they found out about it, typically, from reading the newspaper and learning that they had been fired from that position. The mood was one of sadness, because obviously there was no good reason to do it. 

The reason given by Robert F Kennedy Jr. was that all the members were horribly conflicted with pharmaceutical companies [and] that their financial ties to pharmaceutical companies made it such that they couldn’t give advice that would be beneficial to the American public, and that wasn’t true.

I mean, they have very strict conflict of interest rules at the ACIP whereby you have to make it very clear that you have no association with the pharmaceutical industry and no association with the government, which then allows you to be an independent advisor. And should there be a conflict … then you can’t vote on that company’s product, and you can’t vote on any product that that company makes. That’s very clear. That’s been clear ever since I was on the committee back 25 years ago.

So it sounds like there was confusion, disappointment and a feeling that the reasons given for the firing weren’t based in reality? 

They were angry. They were angry that they felt that they’d been dismissed for no good reason and that their willingness to serve the American public had been set aside. I mean, it’s not like you’re paid to do this. It’s just a voluntary position for the most part.

In your knowledge, has anything like this ever happened before?

No, but we’ve never had a secretary of Health and Human Services that was an anti-vaccine activist, science denialist and conspiracy theorist before.

Zooming out a little bit, what’s the significance of these firings? And what impacts can we anticipate?

I think we can anticipate that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will put people on that committee who are like minded to him. We’re already seeing evidence of that with the first eight people that he picked. 

So I think what’s going to happen is that there are going to be groups that look elsewhere from the ACIP to try and get information that they think is reliable and up to date and informative. 

What I imagine is that, for example, the American Academy of Pediatrics has its so-called Red Book committee, or . I would imagine that that committee will start to speak with insurance companies to make sure that their recommendations would then have kind of the force of law … Because I can’t imagine the insurance companies are going to be looking to ACIP, given its current members.

My understanding is, up until this point, insurance companies and states — when they’re trying to determine school vaccination policies — have looked to ACIP for guidance. You’re saying that maybe insurance companies will look elsewhere for that information, but is there any concern that this will just mean vaccines are no longer covered by insurance, or that school-age vaccine policies are undermined altogether?

Yes, there’s concern, but it is to the financial advantage of insurance companies to pay for vaccines. I mean, you’d much rather pay for an HPV vaccine than to pay for the care of a woman who has cervical cancer. You’d much rather pay for a measles-containing vaccine than to pay for measles hospitalization.

So there isn’t necessarily concern here that suddenly these vaccines won’t be accessible to families from lower-income backgrounds?

I don’t know. I mean, I think it’s a frantic, chaotic time, and it’s really hard to know. Everything that you sort of counted on to make sense doesn’t make sense anymore. 

It used to be that solid, good science was how we made decisions, and that’s not true anymore with the ACIP. You can tell when Robert F Kennedy Jr. says we want gold standard science, that’s not what he means. What he really means is he wants quote, unquote scientific studies that support his fixed, immutable belief that vaccines cause more harm than good.

In a post on recently Kennedy wrote, “The most outrageous example of ACIP’s malevolent malpractice has been its stubborn unwillingness to demand adequate safety trials before recommending new vaccines for our children.” Has there been an unwillingness to demand adequate safety trials for new vaccines for children in America?

The opposite is true. I had the fortune of working with a team that created the rotavirus vaccine. Before that vaccine was put on the infant immunization schedule, it was tested in a prospective, placebo-controlled trial of more than 70,000 infants. It was done over four years in 11 countries to prove that that vaccine was safe and effective. That was a 70,000- person prospective, placebo-controlled trial that probably cost $350 million. 

I don’t know what he’s talking about. Name the vaccine. Name a new vaccine that hasn’t been tested in a large, prospective, placebo-controlled trial. They all are. 

The problem is that when they’re shown to work and they’re safe, he doesn’t believe it, because he’s a science denialist. That’s what he really means.

Are there any other ways this could impact school-aged kids in particular?

Now what worries me is, I think if RFK Jr. really wants to bring down vaccines, he can do it through the What he could do is he could hold up a paper and say, “Look, aluminum adjuvants cause autism or multiple sclerosis or diabetes or asthma, and now I’m going to add that to the list of compensable injuries.”

So anybody with asthma who’s gotten a vaccine that contains an — and there are seven different vaccines that contain aluminum adjuvants [an ingredient that helps create a stronger immune response] — is now on the list of compensable injuries. 

Or [he could say] “I’m going to take these vaccines out of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and then just subject them to civil litigation.” That would really disrupt vaccines in this country. I think companies would then do what they did in the 1980s … They’d leave the market. We had 18 companies that made vaccines in 1980. By the end of the decade, we only had four. 

So does that mean that while this ACIP move might introduce anger and distrust there are no real trickle-down effects that you think we’ll see yet in terms of what vaccines are available or what vaccines are covered?

I think you’ll know a lot when you watch the June [advisory committee] meeting, to hear that discussion, and to hear how pharmaceutical companies react to that discussion and how insurers react to that discussion. I think you’ll learn a lot in the next couple of weeks.

Can you tell me a little bit about the folks who replaced the 17 members? Eight people have been announced so far.

They’re who you would most fear. 

You have people like Robert Malone, in front of Marjorie Taylor Green’s committees … that the mRNA vaccines cause cancer and heart disease and autoimmune disease. Robert Malone has been an expert witness on behalf of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a lawsuit against the mumps component of the MMR vaccine. 

You have somebody like Martin Kulldorff who has represented — for — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a lawsuit against Merck’s Gardasil [HPV] vaccine. 

You have people who have published papers claiming that the mRNA vaccines caused heart attacks and sudden death in healthy, young people. You have Vicky Pebsworth, who is a member of the , which is an anti-vaccine group that has lobbied against state vaccine mandates for years. 

This is exactly the cavalcade of stars that you would expect RFK Jr. to feel comfortable with: people who are — like him — anti-vaccine activists, who are science denialists. 

It’s the worst of all worlds. It’s like a bad Saturday Night Live skit.

During Kennedy’s HHS confirmation hearings back in January, Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy — a former physician — expressed a lot of trepidation around the nomination, but ultimately voted to confirm, citing various commitments he had received from the administration. One of those promises, Cassidy was that “if confirmed [Kennedy] will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommendations without changes.”’

Critics have since argued that Kennedy’s move to fire all members amounts to a broken promise, a claim Cassidy himself has since disputed. Is this a broken promise?

He’s been breaking promises right from the beginning. I think Cassidy put out a list of 10 or so things [Kennedy] promised he wouldn’t do. And he proceeded to do it.

I’m reading: He has committed that he would work within current vaccine approval on safety monitoring systems. That he hasn’t done. 

He’ll maintain the CDC Advisory Committee Immunization Practices recommendation without changes, and he hasn’t done that either. 

He’s already, for example, changed the recommendation on pregnancy, changed the routine recommendation for young children to get COVID vaccines. And now Cassidy also put out saying that for those of you who think [Kennedy] may just put vaccine skeptics on [the committee], he’s not gonna do that. Then he proceeds to do that. 

What Cassidy does is he draws a line. He says, “Don’t cross this line.” Then Kennedy crosses the line, and he doesn’t do anything — just draws another line. I think he is weak and ineffectual. And I think his legacy will be the harm that’s caused to children and adults in this country because of this massive disruption of the public health vaccine system. I think that will be Sen. Cassidy’s legacy.

Have you spoken to Sen. Cassidy? If you could speak to him today, what would you say to him?

I spoke to him four times before that second confirmation hearing, and once afterwards. I said to him exactly what you would think I would say to him, which is, “Don’t hire this guy. She knows. She told you exactly who he is.”

It’s really frustrating. I was sure [Cassidy] was a “no” vote. He clearly had problems with him. But in the end, politics trump science. I think when you mix politics and science, you always get politics.

My last question is around this idea of trust. Kennedy has said that he removed all these members and is replacing them in response to a “crisis of public trust.” On the other side, there are folks who do not at all trust Kennedy. Looking forward, what will it take to rebuild trust in these systems?

I think there was a tremendous loss of trust in the first two years of the pandemic … I think people saw [many COVID-era policies as] a real impingement on their freedom, and that’s what you’re seeing now. 

I think that RFK Jr. represents the disdain that people ended up having for the CDC and for Dr. Fauci, unfortunately. I think that’s what happened …To the point that there were states that were trying to ban mRNA vaccines. The term “mRNA vaccines” has become a dirty word, even though it probably saved 3 million lives and probably cost more than 250,000 people their lives when they chose not to get the vaccine. But somehow that all got linked with sort of stepping on our medical freedom, and that’s what you’re seeing now. 

So what’s it going to take to get that back? I think slowly, we’re just going to have to make sure that we — as scientists and clinicians and academicians and public health people — explain in careful detail why we do everything.

But public health is also about the public. I mean, you have to care about your neighbor in order to have public health. I think right now, we’re sort of at a point where people go, “Don’t tell me what to do. If I want to catch and transmit a potentially fatal infection, that’s my right.” And I don’t think we used to be like that.

Is there anything else I haven’t asked you that you want readers to understand, specifically through an education- and child-centered lens?

What’s that line from Bette Davis in All About Eve? “Buckle up. It’s going to be a bumpy night” — although everybody says bumpy ride.  …

I think it is going to be a bumpy ride for a while, and then we’ll just see. I believe that the forces of good will prevail. I do. 

I think that there’s a basic feeling among virtually everyone that vaccines are a good thing, and that as people see them erode or maybe become less available or less affordable or more feared that people will rally on behalf of children. I do.

Krystal Emerson never imagined her son would spend his days at school being forcibly moved against his will by school staff and shut in an empty room.

But during the 2023-24 school year at Ellsworth Elementary-Middle School, that’s what happened — at least 18 times, according to Emerson and school district incident reports reviewed by the Maine Morning Star. Staff members put the 7-year-old boy in holds, forced him into empty rooms and did not let him out until he calmed down or his parents picked him up.

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“It broke him, and it broke me,” Emerson said.

The trauma became so severe that her son, now a third grader, no longer attends school in person, she said.

What happened to Emerson’s son is not an isolated case. Across Maine, schools use restraint and seclusion on students more than 10,000 times each year, according to Maine Department of Education data — with some districts resorting to the emergency tactics regularly while others have changed policies and taken other steps so that such interventions are only used as a last resort.

​In recent years, Maine as a whole has made an effort to reduce restraint and seclusion in schools, particularly for students with disabilities, with the U.S. Department of Education citing staff and for students as the reasons to curtail their use. The department has also condemned and discouraged these practices for years under multiple presidential administrations. Rare cases have resulted in serious injuries to students and even death.

A 2021 state law limits restraint and seclusion to emergencies. But as Maine educators in the years since pandemic school closures, there have been calls to allow school staff to restrain and seclude children more often. A would broaden the circumstances under which school staff could restrain or seclude students, among educators, parents and lawmakers about how to manage student behavior without inflicting harm.

The Maine Education Association and the Maine School Management Association, representing teachers and administrators statewide, both support the proposal, citing increased reports of disruptive and violent student behavior — something educators nationwide have also reported in recent years.

The Gardiner-area school system, Maine School Administrative District (MSAD) 11, has led the push for that proposal. Victoria Duguay, principal of River View Community School in Gardiner, and MSAD 11 Superintendent Patricia Hopkins shared stories with lawmakers of students who hit and spit at adults, scream in hallways, throw chairs and destroy other students’ schoolwork.

Under the 2021 state law, school staff can only restrain students (immobilize them and move them against their will) or seclude them (isolate them in a room that they can’t leave) if their behavior “poses an imminent danger of serious physical injury” — requiring medical intervention beyond first aid, according to the Maine Department of Education regulations that govern restraint and seclusion.

“Staff are being hit, they’re being bit, but it doesn’t meet the threshold of serious imminent danger, because a 5-year-old isn’t going to [cause] an injury that requires medical care,” Hopkins said during an April 23 public hearing.

This extreme behavior, when it happens in a public place at school, traumatizes other students who witness it, Duguay said. The school sometimes has to close off access to common spaces — the gym or cafeteria — if a student acts out in a hallway through which students would need to pass.

Under the legislation MSAD 11 is supporting, staff would be able to move students against their will to a seclusion room or another quiet space without it counting as a restraint, which districts have to record, document, and report to the state.

But some educators who have pursued alternative training don’t agree that loosening restraint and seclusion requirements is the answer.

“The consequences of passing this bill will only inflict more trauma on students,” said Audrey Bartholomew, associate professor and coordinator of special education programs at the University of New England, who trains special education teachers. “Additionally, the behavior will keep happening, because restraint and seclusion is not an appropriate response to challenging behavior, and it will in no way help students remediate their behavior. These should not be referred to as strategies, treatments or solutions.”

Inside the three-hour restraint and seclusion of a 7-year-old

In October 2023, Emerson’s son started a behavior plan to help with concentration and self-regulation. The plan, which Emerson shared with the Maine Morning Star, highlighted the mother’s concerns about her son’s anger, dysregulation, anxiety and ADHD, and noted Emerson’s finding that occupational therapy had helped her son better regulate.

One week after the plan was put into place, the boy arrived at Ellsworth Elementary-Middle School already agitated, hit another student with a Pete the Cat stuffed animal and tried to leave the classroom, setting off a series of escalating interventions in which staff physically restrained him, relocated him against his will, and ultimately placed him in a small room where he stayed until his father arrived, according to incident reports shared with the Maine Morning Star.

The reports, which staff or administrators are required to write, offer an inside look at the behavior leading up to the restraint, how the situation escalated as staff restrained and secluded the boy, and how it continued for three hours, ending when Seth Emerson picked his son up from a seclusion room.

When the second grader initially tried to leave his classroom, two educators cornered the boy in a hallway nook, according to the report written by the school’s assistant principal. When he tried to push past them, they placed a mat between themselves and the child to block him from hitting them, and initiated the first of several physical holds. Each time he was released, he briefly calmed down but didn’t follow directions to sit still or stay in a designated spot, prompting a cycle: he would attempt to flee, staff would block him, the boy would resist, and staff would restrain him again, the report says.

About an hour in, while hiding in a locker, he asked to go home. A staff member moved him to a classroom, where he hid under a desk, retrieved rocks from his backpack, and threw them at staff, the report said. While the report described the projectiles as rocks, Emerson said her son had pebbles in his backpack.

Two hours in, staff called his parents. Even after he calmed down, they placed him in a seclusion room — referred to as a “quiet room” in the report — where they continued telling him to sit in a specific spot. When his father arrived, the boy walked out on his own, calm and cooperative.

Incidents like that continued for several more months for reasons that Emerson said did not warrant these measures: After he pulled books off shelves, punched a door, or refused to accompany staff to a quiet room, staff would put him in a physical hold or placed him in a room alone, according to a complaint Emerson filed with the district.

“I never condoned any of the behavior, whether he was throwing a book or whether he was yelling or running out of the classroom,” she said. “But he was not getting any education whatsoever last year. He was literally just going to school and being restrained and secluded.”

Frequent seclusions push an educator to quit

It’s not only students and their families who feel the trauma from restraints and seclusion. The educators who are told to put their hands on children feel it, too, several current and former teachers and education technicians told the Maine Morning Star.

Ashley Rose took a job as an ed tech at SeDoMoCha Elementary School in Dover-Foxcroft in August while working toward a degree in special education. But after months of witnessing staff placing students in empty rooms as they screamed and cried to be let out, she changed course.

In March, Rose switched her major, deciding she no longer wanted to become a teacher. On April 28, she resigned, writing to Superintendent Stacy Shorey that she had repeatedly raised concerns with supervisors about the school’s frequent use of seclusion, the lack of staff training on student behavior, and the absence of alternatives — without seeing meaningful change.

SeDoMoCha Elementary School has “quiet rooms” located within special education classrooms — which Rose described as 10-by-6-foot rooms with no windows. Some have benches and one light, while others are entirely empty, she said. All the doors have windows in them so staff can monitor students.

In her 10 years of working in special education, she has never seen such frequent use of quiet rooms, Rose said.

In December, Rose found herself participating in her first seclusion. The student she was working with wasn’t physically aggressive, just loud, and Rose’s plan had been to escort her into the special education classroom — not the quiet room — to help her calm down.

The student went with her voluntarily but was crying, she said. When they got to the classroom, another staff member who had worked at the school longer said it was part of that student’s behavior plan to go to the quiet room.

“That wasn’t my plan,” Rose said. “That room scares me just looking at it as an adult.”

As the student became more agitated, Rose said her own anxiety rose. If the student didn’t calm down, the other employee told Rose she had to shut the door. Rose complied, and then her colleague told her to hold the door shut with her foot to keep the student inside, she said.

Inside the room, the student began having what appeared to be an anxiety attack and threatened to break the window. She calmed down after about 20 minutes, and Rose let her out. Rose said she was not directed to file an incident report, nor was she told if someone else in the district did, despite the requirement in state law that districts document every seclusion.

Over the holiday break that followed, Rose said she had trouble sleeping. “All I can think about is the student I put in that room,” she said. “School should be their safe place, and these students were not feeling safe.”

Shorey, the superintendent, said staff members are required to report every incident, but she did not know about the particular incident Rose described. Special Education Director Sue Terrill said it’s possible that a staff member other than Rose wrote a report, but the district was unable to locate any documentation of that event.

The district trains employees in safety care — crisis management and prevention practices — Terrill said. It is open to other trainings, too, she said, including one that Rose brought to Terrill’s attention in February offered by the Maine nonprofit Lives in the Balance, which other districts have used to dramatically reduce their reliance on restraint and seclusion.

Quiet rooms present a gray area

Rose said she saw staff members keep students in seclusion rooms even when they were calm, using those same rooms for a variety of reasons beyond seclusion, which is banned or strictly regulated in at least seven states, according to the MOST Policy Initiative, a Missouri nonprofit. Maine came close to banning the rooms in 2021, but the final version of the law was amended to allow their use in emergencies.

Rose said she saw staff place students in quiet rooms to calm down after acting out, and then not allow them to exit for 20 minutes after they calmed down. If the seclusion happened at the end of the school day, sometimes the student would be expected to return to the quiet room the next day, she said.

Terrill recalled Rose raising this as an issue but denied keeping students in the rooms after they calmed down and no longer met the legal threshold for confinement.

But the district does use these rooms as timeout spaces, either by student choice or by staff direction, Terrill confirmed. Often, Terrill said, staff members are positioned outside the rooms, as they would be in a seclusion incident, but the student is typically free to leave the room, which is not the case in a seclusion.

Sometimes, the door is open, or a student can choose to shut the door with a staff member standing outside, she said.

“It can be the same room used if the student was in seclusion,” she said. “But if they’re taking a break because of something that happened, and that’s being used as a break space, the student might continue to work in there until they’re ready to go back to the classroom.”

Like RSU 68 in Dover-Foxcroft, districts across Maine also use seclusion rooms as quiet spaces, according to Ben Jones, a former Disability Rights Maine attorney who now works for Lives in the Balance.

“I think it’s actually more the rare case that the school is like, ‘We’re going to build this room and we’re going to call it the seclusion room, and it’s going to be used just for seclusion,’” he said.

If a student has voluntarily shut themselves in the seclusion room with a staff member outside and is free to go at any time, it would not count as seclusion under Maine law, he said. But if staff members ask students to stay in there to complete their work, as Rose described, whether it would count as a seclusion that districts are required to report to the state is “open to interpretation,” Jones said.

“The overall thing is, the kid is not learning, not in the classroom, in something that could easily turn into seclusion,” he said. “It’s inappropriate at best and potentially illegal if it’s an unrecorded seclusion.”

When are students and staff in “imminent danger”?

Education technicians like Rose — aides who often work with students one-on-one or in small groups — are often the ones handling student outbursts or potential violence, said Greg Kavanaugh, who spent 13 years working as an ed tech and special education teacher in Biddeford, Portland, and Yarmouth.

Ed techs are among the lowest-paid professionals in education, and — including on behavior management techniques.

“They’re having to make good decisions about when to restrain, when to seclude, and their judgment is going to be really hard because they’re so stressed, overwhelmed, underpaid,” Kavanaugh said. “That just leads to more mistakes, more lapses in judgment.”

In his experience, Kavanaugh said, restraint and seclusion were consistently treated as last-resort measures — used only in extreme situations.

Staff received training on managing student behavior, they debriefed after restraints and seclusions, and they held regular conversations with parents, he said, which disability rights advocates recommend as best practices.

But working in a functional life skills program with students with moderate to severe disabilities, Kavanaugh said, deciding whether to restrain or seclude a child was never easy despite clear protocols in place. Even when a student threw a laptop across the room or hit him, he had to determine whether the behavior posed an imminent danger of serious injury that would require medical intervention beyond first aid — the standard in Maine law — and only intervene physically if it did. He also had to keep calm if students hit him, he said, because that still did not meet the legal standard.

Every time he did restrain or seclude a child, it stayed with him long after. He said he often questioned whether it had been the right call, thought about how families would respond, and considered the lasting effects the practice might have on the student — and on himself.

“Anytime there was a hold, a restraint or a seclusion, you’re taking that home, and you’re thinking about that kid when you’re at home, trying to move on with your day,” he said. “I’m a pretty strong-willed person, but there are plenty of times I would quietly be in tears, or going home and having an extra glass of wine, because I’m just not processing it well in the aftermath.”

Other students in the classroom witnessing these incidents are also traumatized, Kavanaugh said.

“You see the terror on their classmates’ faces, and you feel bad for the kid in a certain way because this is going to hurt their relationships,” he said.

But talking to parents afterward would always make him feel better, Kavanaugh said, because parents of students with disabilities are often dealing with similar behavior challenges at home.

District response to a parental complaint

Emerson, the parent in Ellsworth, complained to the school board, Superintendent Amy Boles, and the Maine Department of Education in August 2024, alleging that staff members had not met the legal threshold for using restraint and seclusion so often on her son.

Boles wrote back in October, saying in cases where Emerson’s son was hitting, scratching, and kicking staff, “it is my conclusion that active behavior like this toward another person does create an ‘imminent danger’ that the other person could be sufficiently injured that he or she may need more than ‘routine first aid.’”

“The incident may not in fact have caused an injury requiring that level of care, but a reasonable and prudent person could reasonably conclude that this could occur,” Boles wrote in her letter, reviewed by Maine Morning Star.

But the investigation the district launched in response to Emerson’s complaint found that staff had improperly restrained and secluded her son in at least five of the 18 incidents to which his mother objected. Some incident reports were also vaguely written, Boles wrote, which was the case for the three-hour incident in October 2023 — making it difficult to determine whether restraints and seclusion were warranted.

Nonetheless, Boles concluded in her letter to Emerson that all staff need training on the proper use of restraint and seclusion, and she agreed the district should rely on the practice less often.

Boles declined to comment on the investigation or specific incidents, but said district staff have undergone an initial training with Lives in the Balance, and followup trainings are planned.

“Behavior is an issue across the board. I mean, it’s skyrocketing everywhere. It’s not just Ellsworth,” she said. “But we’re working really hard to try to be preventative before it gets to that extreme state, trying to teach staff day-to-day strategies to prevent the behavior before it escalates.”

Emerson said her son is still visibly shaken every time he passes by the school, or even when someone mentions the word “school” around him.

On April 23, she restraint and seclusion in public schools must stop. The day before, her son had said he was still afraid to go to school in person.

“His world has become so small since these events, he rarely leaves our home,” she said. “Everyone continues about their day, and yet I’m left to pick up the pieces.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maine Morning Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lauren McCauley for questions: info@mainemorningstar.com.

Nearly half of 1,471 education leaders who responded to the analytics company’s December query reported that the task was “very challenging” and far worse than finding strong English language or social studies applicants.

“The pool of certified math teachers is small, and the demand is high, particularly for candidates who are ready to support student learning from day one,” said Nicole Paxton, assistant principal and athletic director of Mountain Vista Community School in Colorado Springs. “In our district, we’ve experienced a growing number of math openings with only a handful of candidates to consider — many of whom are international applicants requiring sponsorship or visas.”

Another lends insight into a possible reason why: Only 1 in 8 elementary teacher preparation programs nationwide devote adequate time to teaching fundamental math content topics, including numbers and operations, algebraic thinking, geometry and measurement — plus data analysis and probability. 

The National Council on Teacher Quality, which released the teacher preparation study April 8, found ​​the average undergraduate program dedicates 85 hours of instructional time to foundational math content knowledge — 20 hours short of what the organization recommends. 

Graduate programs devote even less time to the topic — 14 hours total — with only 5% meeting or approaching the minimum recommendation of 150 hours. The council said 22% of undergraduate programs earned an “F” for their performance in this area: More than 80% of graduate level programs also earned this failing grade. 

“Teachers need to know how to do more than just follow the steps in math to get the right answer,” Heather Peske, the organization’s president, said in a statement. “They need to know why those steps work. It’s like the difference between a basketball player and a coach. The player can learn their role and follow directions, but the coach needs to understand the bigger picture, the why behind every move.”

Michael Rubin, principal of Uxbridge High School in Massachusetts, roughly 60 miles southwest of Boston, said finding high-quality teachers of any subject is difficult, particularly in math and science.  

“When we deal with even more advanced levels of mathematics, with highly specialized content, the number of educators is even more limited,” he said. “My father was a math teacher for 39 years, and not a year has gone by since he retired nine years ago where a principal has not reached out and asked him if he is willing or able to come in to teach, tutor or substitute.”

Indeed, Gallup poll responders said the problem was even more acute in later grades where the math curriculum gets harder: 64% of principals said this was “very challenging” at the high school level versus 56% at the middle school and 23% at the elementary level.

The struggle can also be seen in lower-income and rural communities, like Sheridan County School District #3 in Clearmont, Wyoming, which enrolls just 83 students K-12. Chase Christensen, who serves as both superintendent and district principal, said staff are frequently asked to take on other roles.

Next fall, he said, a physical education teacher will lead advanced mathematics classes — they will focus on pre-algebra, geometry, statistics and probability — at the middle school level while he works toward earning his certification in that subject. Christensen said he’s grateful for his staff’s’ flexibility. 

“When we all sit down and take a hard look at what the needs of the school are, people just step up and we figure out how it is going to work,” he said.  

Stephanie Marken, a senior partner at Gallup leading its U.S. custom research division, said schools’ trouble finding quality math instructors is particularly concerning because these teachers play a pivotal role in making this often tough subject palatable.  

“If you have a highly engaged teacher who’s really committed and qualified in that subject area, we know that it brings math education to life in a way that you just can’t do otherwise,” Marken said. 

Math anxiety, the fear that students — — share about this subject further harms their opportunity and ability to succeed in it. 

“We know that a lot of students have negative emotions surrounding math and that there’s a lot of pressure that math places upon students,” Marken said. “We know that the teacher makes a big difference in breaking down math and making it feel really relevant and achievable.”

Paxton, of Colorado Springs, said her district employs several strategies to manage the problem. It supports teachers on visas and those coming from alternative certification pathways through monthly meetings that focus on best practices, classroom management and cultural assimilation. 

It also works with which has, for three decades, recruited college graduates to teach in high-need schools for two years. Plus, it’s built a solid relationship with its local university’s teacher training program and has launched a “grow your own” pipeline to support teacher aides in earning their bachelor’s degrees, completing internships in the district and ultimately becoming licensed teachers there.

“These layered supports and creative recruitment efforts are our response to a national challenge,” Paxton said. 

Gallup’s Math Matters Study went beyond schools’ issues with hiring to families’ experience on campus: While roughly a third of the 808 parents who responded said their children receive some math tutoring, only 13% received such help more than weekly. Gallup notes that prior research shows  high-quality math tutoring can improve achievement by an additional three to 15 months of learning, “but the most impactful tutoring programs must include frequent sessions — three times a week or more.”

Roughly a third of parents said they would enroll their child in tutoring if it was available or more accessible.

Parents also reported a lack of communication about the subject on the part of educators: One in six said they “never” hear from their child’s school about the goals for their child’s math learning or what their student is learning in math class. 

The survey showed, too, a lack of understanding — and consensus — among educators about what constitutes high-quality instructional materials, curriculum aligned to college- and career-ready standards: 37% of all education leaders said they were “not at all familiar” with or “not very familiar with” the concept. 

Sixty-eight percent of school superintendents and 46% of school principals said their building or district had no official definition of the term. But when supplied with a definition by Gallup, which identified high-quality instructional materials as those “which are standards-aligned and use evidence-based practices for the content area,” 69% said most or all of their math curriculum qualified. 

Professional development proved an added challenge. Thirty-nine percent of educators surveyed rated their own school’s math-related professional development as “fair” or “poor.” This statistic was worse at the high school level where 6% said it was poor and 39% said it was fair. 

The Gates Foundation sponsored the Math Matters Study and provides financial support to ����Ӱ��.

Homeschooling in recent years, . But researchers are still exploring why parents choose to homeschool their children.

Mary Koslap-Petraco, a pediatric nurse practitioner who exclusively treats underserved children, said when she heard the news Thursday morning she was immediately filled with “absolute dread.”

“I have been following him for years,” she told ����Ӱ��. “I’ve read what he has written. I’ve heard what he has said. I know he has made a fortune with his anti-vax stance.”

She is primarily concerned that his rhetoric might “scare the daylights out of people so that they don’t want to vaccinate their children.” She also fears he could move to defund a program under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that provides vaccines to kids who lack health insurance or otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford them. While the program is federally mandated by Congress, moves to drain its funding could essentially render it useless.

Koslap-Petraco’s practice in Massapequa Park, New York relies heavily on the program to vaccinate pediatric patients, she said. If it were to disappear, she asked, “How am I supposed to take care of poor children? Are they supposed to just die or get sick because their parents don’t have the funds to get the vaccines for them?” 

And, if the government-run program were to stop paying for vaccines, she said she’s terrified private insurance companies might follow suit. 

Vaccines for Children is “the backbone of pediatric vaccine infrastructure in the country,” said Richard Hughes IV, former vice president of public policy at Moderna and a George Washington University law professor who teaches a course on vaccine law.

Kennedy will also have immense power over Medicaid, which covers low-income populations and provides billions of dollars to schools annually for physical, mental and behavioral health services for eligible students.

If Kennedy moves to weaken programs at HHS, which experts expect him to do, through across-the-board cuts in public health funding that trickle down to immunization programs or more targeted attacks, low-income and minority school-aged kids will be disproportionately impacted, Hughes said. 

“I just absolutely, fundamentally, confidently believe that we will see deaths,” he added.

Anticipating chaos and instability

Following a contentious seven hours of grilling across two confirmation hearings, Democratic senators Kennedy’s confirmation on the floor late into the night Wednesday. The following morning, all 45 Democrats and both Independents voted in opposition and all but one Republican — childhood polio survivor Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — lined up behind President Donald Trump’s pick.

James Hodge, a public health law expert at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, said that while it was good to see senators across the political spectrum asking tough questions and Kennedy offering up some concessions on vaccine-related policies and initiatives, he’s skeptical these will stick.

“Whatever you’ve seen him do for the last 25 to 30 years is a much, much greater predictor than what you saw him do during two or three days of Senate confirmation proceedings,” Hodge said. “Ergo, be concerned significantly about the future of vaccines, vaccine exemptions, [and] how we’re going to fund these things.”

Hodge also said he doesn’t trust how Kennedy will respond to the consequences of a dropoff in childhood vaccines, pointing to the current in West Texas schools.

“The simple reality is he may plant misinformation or mis-messaging,” he said.

During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy tried to distance himself from his past anti-vaccination sentiments stating, “News reports have claimed that I am anti-vaccine or anti-industry. I am neither. I am pro-safety … I believe that vaccines played a critical role in health care. All of my kids are vaccinated.”

He was confirmed as Linda McMahon, Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Education, was sitting down for her first day of hearings. At one point that morning, McMahon signaled to possibly shifting enforcement to HHS of the — a federal law dating back to 1975 that mandates a free, appropriate public education for the with disabilities — if Trump were to succeed in shutting down the education department.

This would effectively put IDEA’s under Kennedy’s purview, further linking the education and public health care systems.

In a post on the social media site BlueSky, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, she is “concerned that anyone is willing to move IDEA services for kids with disabilities into HHS, under a secretary who questions science.”

Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union and a parent of a child with ADHD and autism, told ����Ӱ�� the idea was “absolutely absurd” and would cause chaos and instability. 

Kennedy’s history of falsely asserting a link between childhood vaccines and autism — a disability included under IDEA coverage — is particularly concerning to experts in this light.

“You obviously have a contingent of kids who are beneficiaries of IDEA that are navigating autism spectrum disorder,” said Hughes, “Could [we] potentially see some sort of policy activity and rhetoric around that? Potentially.”

Vaccines — and therefore HHS — are inextricably linked to schools. Currently, all 50 states have vaccine requirements for children entering child care and schools. But Kennedy, who now has control of an agency with a $1.7 trillion budget and 90,000 employees spread across 13 agencies, could pull multiple levers to roll back requirements, enforcements and funding, according to ����Ӱ��’s previous reporting. And Trump has signaled an interest in that mandate vaccines.

“There’s a certain percentage of the population that is focused on removing school entry requirements,” said Northe Saunders, executive director of the pro-vaccine SAFE Communities Coalition. “They are loud, and they are organized and they are well funded by groups just like RFK Jr.’s .”

Kennedy will also have the ability to influence the makeup of the committees that approve vaccines and add them to the federal vaccine schedule, which state legislators rely on to determine their school policies. Hodge said one of these committees is already being “re-organized and re-thought as we speak.”

“With him now in place, just expect that committee to start really changing its members, its tone, the demeanor, the forcefulness of which it’s suggesting vaccines,” he added.

Hughes, the law professor, said he is preparing for mass staffing changes throughout the agency, mirroring what’s already happened across in Trump’s first weeks in office. He predicts this will include Kennedy possibly asking for the resignations “of all scientific leaders with HHS.” 

Kennedy appeared to confirm that he was eyeing staffing cuts Thursday night during on Fox News’s “The Ingraham Angle.”

“I have a list in my head … if you’ve been involved in good science, you have got nothing to worry about,” Kennedy said.

PPI Senior Advisor Bruno Manno is set to interview Governor Jared Polis, Chair of the National Governors Association, about his year-long “Let’s Get Ready: Educating All Americans for Success” initiative, which emphasizes work-based learning, dual and concurrent enrollment, skills-based education and non-degree credentials. Alison Griffin will then moderate a special panel conversation, featuring such local experts as Colorado Succeeds President Scott Laband and Michael Macklin, Associate Vice Chancellor for Workforce Solutions at the Colorado Community College System.

Sign up for the Zoom or tune in to this page Wednesday at 2 p.m. ET to stream the event.

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But new data suggests that’s changing. 

In a recent of 20,000 parents, respondents said they trust communication from their children’s teachers more than any other source of information to judge whether their kids are on track. That was the case regardless of whether parents thought their children performed on grade level. 

The finding came as a surprise to Bibb Hubbard, president of Learning Heroes, a nonprofit that helps parents understand student achievement data. In , including surveys her own organization has conducted since , parents have listed grades as the primary indicator of student performance. 

“For the first time, grades are not the number one factor,” she said. “Teachers really are on the front lines in terms of communicating to families about where their kids are.”

As one who urges schools to level with families about student progress, Hubbard zeroed in on that point among the trove of data that 50CAN, a national education advocacy organization, released in October. 

One reason for the shift, she said, is the falling importance of grades as a dependable measure of learning. Long before COVID, and news reports pointed to examples of : While grade-point averages have steadily increased, objective measures of performance like remained flat. States and districts further relaxed grading standards during the pandemic, and parents took notice. The growth of online communication apps that allow teachers to update parents throughout the year on children’s progress have also lessened report cards’ influence, Hubbard said.

“Just putting the grade in the portal is not going to be sufficient for any parent right now,” she added. “They want that connection. They want that relationship.”

At Kickapoo High School in Springfield, Missouri, Algebra teacher Cicely Woodard said she tries to be as specific as possible when grading assignments by labeling tests with the skills students are learning — like exponents — so parents don’t have to guess. But she also leans on parents to understand why students might be struggling.

“I’ll say, ‘This is what I’m observing.’ Then I’ll be quiet and listen,” she said “I can learn so much from parents who know their children really well.”

Almost 30% of parents in the 50CAN survey said they rely on that type of communication from teachers more than any other source of information. Report card grades were second, with 20%. 

Parents who believe their children are performing below grade level value that interaction with teachers even more than those who think their kids are at or above grade level, the data shows — 36 to 28%. During the 2023-24 school year, parents who thought their children weren’t meeting expectations were more likely than others to communicate with teachers outside of parent-teacher conferences, talk to their school’s principal and consult with their child’s guidance counselor.

They also want their kids to get additional instruction. If they had the time or money, parents who think their children are below grade level would choose tutoring over organized sports and art, dance or music lessons, the survey showed. But a higher percentage of those parents also said tutoring was too expensive or wasn’t available in their community.

“They are engaged. They care about their kids, and they are not getting the support that they necessarily need,” Hubbard said.

Melony Watson, a mom of six in Fort Worth, Texas, said she’s barely looked at report cards in two years. She felt misled when one of her daughters kept making the honor roll even though she couldn’t read. 

“I’m a proud parent, sitting there clapping and jumping up and down because my baby’s walking across the stage, getting certificate after certificate,” Watson said. But by third grade, she told her daughter’s teacher that she saw signs of a learning disability. Her daughter wrote letters and numbers backwards and out of order. “They’re like, ‘No, no, she’s just a COVID baby. She’s going to be a little behind.’ ”

Watson ultimately quit her job as a substitute teacher and homeschooled her daughter for a year before enrolling her in a different school. Now, with her children in third through 12th grade, she is in frequent contact with their teachers, especially in eighth grade algebra and ninth grade social studies. 

“I get weekly updates to know what test my child has failed,” she said. “I have made myself known. If those teachers think that you don’t care, they’re not going to go the extra mile.”

‘Tipping point’

Parents aren’t the only ones who think grades provide a less-reliable predictor of success than standardized tests. Several universities, mostly Ivy league institutions, have reinstated for admissions after dropping them during the pandemic. 

“I do think that it is possible that we are nearing a tipping point with regard to grade inflation,” said Adam Tyner, who wrote about the issue in a for the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, where he is national research director. “Maybe parents are also starting to see teacher-assigned grades as a less valuable signal.”

To Hubbard, the results suggest that teachers need better training on discussing test scores with parents. Surveys of teachers conducted by show educators often fear either that parents won’t believe their children are behind or that administrators will overrule their grading decisions.

“It needs to be an expectation for teachers to have ongoing communications with families — which takes time, training and support,” she said. “Otherwise, families will continue to be sidelined in being able to most effectively support their children’s learning and development.”

In 12 days, it will be three years since the deadly Oxford High School shooting robbed Michigan of the lives of four students. Parents of the victims of the shooting gathered Monday in Oxford for a news conference to call on the state to open an independent investigation into the events that led to the shooting.

The gunman, who was a student at the school when he opened fired on students and educators on Nov. 30, 2021, was at the end of 2023 for the deaths of four students. The shooter’s parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, were also held legally responsible for the shooting in a landmark criminal prosecution for their role in making it possible for their 15-year-old son to commit a mass shooting. The parents were sentenced earlier this year to 10 to 15 years in prison for involuntary manslaughter.

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But as other families prepare for Thanksgiving and start early Christmas shopping, parents of the shooting victims are imploring the state to investigate other entities — namely the school’s leadership — into what their role was in not preventing the tragedy.

“We are not going anywhere. We will do whatever it takes to drive change, because it’s not a matter of if a school shooting happens again, but when,” said Steve St. Juliana, father of Hana St. Julianna, a student who was killed in the Oxford shooting at age 14.

It’s not enough that the shooter and his parents have been held criminally responsible. The parents of the victims said much more needs to be done to understand what happened at Oxford and how other families can be spared the pain of another school shooting in the future.

had the school responded appropriately to the shooter as a potential threat as he gave several warning signs, asserted one investigation by Guidepost Solutions which concluded in 2023. Nearly half of the individuals investigators requested to talk to did not speak with investigators. Lawyers for Oxford Community Schools, as well as the teachers union discouraged school employees from cooperating in the investigation, the report said.

To implement real change, not simply gun safety legislation as the Michigan Legislature has enacted, the state must find out exactly what happened that permitted a 15-year-old student to open fire on his classmates and teachers at school where the community should be safe, said Buck Myre, father of Tate Myre who was killed in the shooting at age 16.

“This has always been about change — period — nothing else. It’s time for our state government to investigate this. Stop hiding; stop making excuses. A Michigan public school was the scene of the shooting. Kids’ lives were lost. Kids were shot. A teacher was shot. Every kid in school that day has a shooting badge, a shooting badge that they will heavily carry on their chest for the rest of their lives,” Myre said. “Don’t we want to learn from this?”

There is an epidemic of school shootings that are killing children, St. Juliana said. And if the state doesn’t want more carnage, state agencies need to work together, stop pointing fingers, and get to work on a revelatory investigation.

“We should not have to be sitting up here repeatedly saying, ‘Do a damn investigation.’ I’ll paraphrase the governor of Michigan ‘fix the damn system,’” St. Juliana said, referring to Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s signature call to “fix the damn roads.”

“Forget about the roads. Keep our kids safe,” St. Juliana said.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel responded to the parents’ requests for a state investigation, pointing out that her office has offered several times to perform an investigation and the Oxford School Board, Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office and Oakland County Sheriff’s Office have rejected her requests.

The parents of Tate Myre, Hana St. Juliana, Justin Shilling and Madisyn Baldwin are not simply calling for further prosecutions, but for the state to examine the systems that could prevent a future shooting. Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said in an emailed statement after the press conference Monday that a comprehensive, state-led investigation has the potential to provide that.

“We are not aware of any mechanism for our office to refer a matter to the Attorney General’s office when it has not been presented to our office,” McDonald said. “And what the families are asking for is much broader. We are not aware of any action needed by my office to activate the Attorney General’s authority, but we will do everything possible to enable such an investigation. And my office will fully cooperate with any such investigation.”

Nessel said the protocol for her office to perform an investigation is to respect local authority, not use her jurisdiction to supersede local or county level criminal investigations. She added that the Attorney General Department will only join or take on leadership of a criminal investigation or prosecution after local authorities have referred the case to her office.

Both McDonald and Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard have her personal phone number, Nessel said, but neither have requested the attorney general’s involvement, although she is still willing to investigate

“We share in the families’ fatigue over the constant finger-pointing and scapegoating in these investigations and wish our offers to participate at any level had been accepted years ago for my office to conduct an investigation,” Nessel said. “At this point, nearly three years after the tragedy [it] will definitely be more difficult than if it had been allowed to begin when our earliest or repeated offers were initially made.”

McDonald sent a letter and legal opinion on Oct. 9 to St. Juliana in response to his and other families asking for criminal charges against Oxford District members. In the documents, which were provided to the Michigan Advance by St. Juliana, McDonald says Nessel has the authority to perform an investigation without an invitation.

“The Attorney General’s Office holds a wide range of powers, which include the investigatory powers that were held at common law. In addition to the investigatory powers, the Attorney General’s office is equipped with its own Criminal Investigations Division — meaning it not only has the authority, but also the resources to investigate potential violations of Michigan law,” McDonald wrote to St. Juliana.

Parents on Monday talked about the Attorney General’s Office’s ability to subpoena some of the individuals within Oxford Schools who did not talk with Guidepost Solutions’ investigation. Nessel addressed what she called confusion over what her office is allowed to do. She said her subpoena power can only be triggered when there is to believe criminal acts were committed.

In McDonald’s letter to St. Juliana, she says although parents have requested charges be filed against individuals at Oxford Schools, she has “not seen evidence that would allow me to bring charges against any of those individuals.”

“… neither my office nor Guidepost can conduct a criminal investigation,” McDonald said in the letter to St. Juliana. “I can only make decisions based on the information provided to me by law enforcement, and Guidepost must rely on the cooperation of individuals who have information to share that information.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Susan J. Demas for questions: info@michiganadvance.com. Follow Michigan Advance on and .

More than 150 people submitted opponent testimony against a bill that would require school districts to allow students to be released from school for religious instruction.

Opponents argued religious release time programs disrupt the school day, create a divide between students who participate and those that don’t, and interfere with religious freedom.

“My concern with religious release time programs during the school day is the rights of the children who do not participate in those programs,” said Rev. Vicki Zust, rector of Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church in Upper Arlington.

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Three opponents were able to give their testimony during last week’s Ohio House Primary and Secondary Education Committee meeting and committee chair Gayle Manning, R-North Ridgeville, had to remind those in attendance to be quiet during testimony.

“We are not applauding. … We remain silent,” Manning said.

The three opponents specifically spoke about experiences they have seen with , a Hilliard-based religious instruction program that enrolls . LifeWise, a non-denominational Christian program that teaches the Bible, is in .

“During proponent testimony in June, it became clear this bill is not about religious pluralism,” said Christina Collins, executive director of Honesty for Ohio Education. “It is about one, very well-funded program wanting to push its brand of Christian nationalist beliefs on a captive audience during the school day.”

Nearly 120 people submitted proponent testimony in June.

Ohio law currently permits school district boards of education to make a policy to let students go to a course in religious instruction, so these bills would strengthen the law by requiring a policy. A set of companion bills would require school districts to create a religious release time policy and change the wording of the existing law in the Ohio Revised Code from “may” to “shall.”

 was introduced earlier this year by state Rep. Gary Click, R-Vickery, and Al Cutrona, R-Canfield, who is now a state senator. Sen. Michele Reynolds, R-Canal Winchester, introduced this summer.

“To be honest with you guys, I think this might be the easiest piece of legislation before you this General Assembly,” Cutrona said during a recent Senate Education Committee meeting. “Why? Because there’s only one word change in this bill, and so we’re just moving it from may to shall. … The intent of this bill is to leave the decision to participate in religious release time programs up to the parents, not the school boards.”

“Despite the fact that it’s only one word, it’s a huge word,” said State Sen. Catherine D. Ingram, D-Cincinnati.

The United States Supreme Court upheld released time laws during the 1952 case, which allowed a school district to have students leave school for part of the day to receive religious instruction.

“While LifeWise claims that the process of leaving and returning to school is smooth, anyone who has ever tried to organize first graders for a field trip knows it is far from seamless,” said Jaclyn Fraley, the mom of a first-grader in Westerville Schools.

Westerville City Schools Board of Education recently that allowed LifeWise Academy to take public school students off-campus for Bible classes during school hours.

“One parent in my group (Westerville Parents United) shared that her daughter was told in class that she and her mothers were “going to hell” because they belong to an LGBTQIA family,” Fraley said. “Another parent described how their child was told they didn’t ‘really believe in God’ because they are not Christian.”

Elementary school students who do not attend LifeWise in Defiance Schools in Northwest Ohio are sent to study hall and are called “LifeWise leftovers,” Fraley said.

Zust said parents in her congregation who choose not to allow their children to participate in the program are mocked and threatened.

“This creates a hostile environment for the children of my congregation as well as children of other denominations and faiths,” Zust said. “That is a violation of their First Amendment and educational rights.”

Opponents argued there are other ways students can learn about religion outside of school time.

“We didn’t have these programs,” Fraley said. “Our parents took us to church. Our parents took us to temple. Our parents took us to mosque. Our parents took us to the places where we went to learn those religious beliefs.”

State Rep. Jodi Whitted, D-Madeira, asked how these programs accommodate students with Individualized Education Programs, but Collins explained there can’t be an exchange of information with programs like LifeWise since IEPs remain within the district.

“We’re talking about students with special needs who are being sent off campus to people that are ill-equipped to work with them, with no built-in caveats for necessitating being able to meet those needs,” Collins said.

State Rep. Beryl Brown Piccolantonio, D-Gahanna, asked how districts accommodate students with fixed prayer times.

“They simply leave, do their prayers and come back,” Collins said. “It’s not a leaving the campus, coming back with stickers and candy kind of event.”

State Rep. Joe Miller, D-Amherst, said his office has received nearly 200 emails against H.B. 445 and less than 20 in support of it.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on and .

Join ����Ӱ�� and the Progressive Policy Institute for a special conversation about the ways in which community service programs and school curriculum and practices can help strengthen social cohesion among students of different backgrounds. “Teaching Common Democratic Values in a Divided America” will stream Wednesday at 2 p.m.

Joining moderator Tressa Pankovits from PPI will be American Exchange Project Co-Founder and CEO David McCullough III, Maryland Secretary of Service and Civic Innovation Paul Monteiro, American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Robert Pondiscio and Richard Kahlenberg, director of PPI’s American Identity Project. 

Sign up for the Zoom or tune in to this page at 2 p.m. ET to stream the event.

Explore more civics education topics from ����Ӱ��: 

• It’s Time for a Ceasefire in the Civics Wars

• Opinion: Teachers in All Subjects Must Help Prepare the Next Generation of Voters

• 5 Lessons From Civics in How to Achieve Agreement Across the Political Divide

• There is Agreement on Civics Education — If You Know Where to Look

• How Texas Lawmakers Gutted Civics

This was produced by  a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet focused on education.

Over the past few years, it’s become clear that states need more money to support kids.  is long gone, but effects from  still linger, evident in persistent child care shortages and ongoing child behavioral and mental health concerns. Now, states are increasingly trying to generate new sources of money to support young children, although in at least one state, a ballot measure was designed to pull back on just these kinds of efforts.

At least a dozen measures were on ballots across the country Tuesday, proposing tax increases or new revenue streams to pay for child care and other child-focused services. Voters overwhelmingly chose to maintain or increase spending on these initiatives — though there were some holdouts.

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Here’s a look at how early childhood fared this election: ()

Child care:

 Washington state:  aimed to repeal a capital gains tax that passed in 2021 and has since provided child care subsidies and money for select child care programs. By failing, the tax and funding stream for child care will remain in place. 

 Travis County, Texas:  called for a property tax increase to raise more than $75 million to create affordable child care spots and mitigate the loss of federal pandemic funds for local child care programs. 

 St. Paul, Minnesota: The 2024 Early Care and Learning Proposal is a property tax levy aimed at providing public funding to child care. The city would raise $2 million the first year and add an additional $2 million each year until year 10, with this money going into a special early care and education fund that would . (The city’s mayor, Melvin Carter, said he was  if it passed). 

Sonoma County, California:  asked voters to approve a quarter-cent countywide sales tax to create a local revenue stream that would help pay for child care and children’s health programs, with a special emphasis on children who experience homelessness. The initiative gained over 20,000 signatures from registered voters to qualify for the November ballot. 

 La Plata County, Colorado:  will redirect up to 70 percent of revenue from a lodger’s tax toward child care and affordable housing. 

 Grand County, Colorado: Ballot Measure 1A will increase the county’s lodging tax from 1.8 percent to 2 percent, with the revenue paying for tourism, housing and child care. 

 Montrose, Colorado:  will increase the city’s hotel tax and put 17 percent of the revenue toward local child care. 

Early childhood health, education and well-being:

 Platte County, Missouri:  measure calls for a quarter cent sales tax increase to create a revenue stream for mental health programs, including early childhood screening. 

Pomona County, California:  aims to reallocate at least 10 percent of funds in an existing city general fund to create a Department of Children and Youth. The funds would also be used to pay for youth programs, child care and support for parents. 

Santa Cruz, California:  proposed a $0.02 per ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages to raise funds that can be used for youth mental health and programs for children. 

 Colorado:  aims to establish a $39 million fund by imposing a 6.5 percent excise tax on guns and ammunition. While most of the money is directed at crime victim and veterans mental health services, $3 million will fund behavioral health services for children. 

 Missouri:  would have established a new gambling boat license, with the estimated $14 million in revenue funding public school early childhood literacy programs. 

 Nevada:  on the ballot this year gave voters the chance to exempt diapers from sales tax, starting on January 1, 2025.