Employing student influencers is the latest strategy in the Detroit school district’s ongoing efforts to grow enrollment in city schools.

District officials unveiled last week to hire 23 students to share positive messages about their schools in the Detroit Public Schools Community District. The high schoolers will create and share social media content aimed at winning over prospective students and parents, as well as engaging their peers.

The initiative is one of several new ideas the district is considering to reverse a 20-year trend of .

“Our students are at the center of everything that we do,” said Sharlonda Buckman, assistant superintendent of Family and Community Engagement, during last week’s meeting. “They have real stories, real accomplishments, real growth.”

When families hear students’ stories and see possibilities for their children, their perceptions about the district may shift, Buckman added.

have already opened. One student from each of the district’s high schools will be selected to take on the task. If approved by the board, the influencers will be assigned content and events to promote each month on rotating schedules, earning $250 each month they post.

Many factors have contributed to enrollment declines, including a shrinking, lower birthrates, , and . The district also competes with , which enroll about , as well as suburban districts that heavily recruit Detroit students.

Traditional strategies to attract students – including canvassing neighborhoods, hosting Summer on the Block events, expanding prekindergarten, focusing on reenrollment rates, and putting up billboards – have produced modest results, according to the district.

The district estimates it currently has more than 49,200 students – an increase of about 400 compared to the official count at the end of last school year.

Last summer, board members asked the district to come up with innovative, cost-efficient ways to drive enrollment more rapidly.

Board member Monique Bryant said during a July committee meeting she wanted to see students tell the stories of their own schools.

“I think we have an opportunity to use our students more, and I think we get more bang for our buck than what we’re spending now,” she said.

Students and parents would be ‘brand ambassadors’ for their schools

Overall, the district’s plan to boost enrollment is to shape the public’s perception of DPSCD to be more positive, increasing awareness of its schools with targeted advertising and connecting with more families in the city.

Marketing research supports the board’s idea to center student voices to reach those goals, district officials said.

In a survey of about 300 people conducted by the district, about 30% said they wanted to see student success stories, said Deputy Executive Marketing Director Jessica Byrd.

In addition to winning over parents, students also want to see themselves in district messaging, Byrd said. By partnering with high schoolers who are gifted at reaching peers on social media, the district will reach more potential students, she added.

“They bring their audience to our platforms, and that’s essentially what we want,” Byrd said.

The influencers will participate in monthly content creation workshops with the marketing team. They will post both on the district’s social media and their own.

DPSCD also proposes hiring 10 to 15 parent and community ambassadors to “counter negative perceptions and amplify enrollment messaging.” The presentation did not include how much the ambassadors would be paid.

The ambassadors may be people who are trusted by their communities, such as church leaders, block club presidents, and parents of students in the district. They will have monthly themes for their messaging, including safety, the district’s gains in literacy achievement, and career and technical education programs.

The district has relied on volunteer in previous years, with slightly different roles. In the past, ambassadors represented the district at community and school events.

This year, the district proposes spending nearly $42,000 on both the student influencers and the community ambassadors.

In total, the marketing plan, including other new initiatives such as web content managers, would cost around $1.4 million, according to the district’s presentation.

The district will continue its traditional enrollment campaigns, including canvassing, yard signs, and events.

Board members at last week’s meeting said they were pleased with the new plans, which would be funded in the district’s budget for the next fiscal year. The board must approve a budget by June 30.

Hannah Dellinger covers Detroit schools for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at hdellinger@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

SAN MATEO, Calif. – On a cool Friday morning in April, the halls of California’s San Mateo High School were full of students chatting, running to class or trying to find their friends.

But one common sight in high schools across the country was and always is absent from the halls of San Mateo: cellphones.

“When you look at the crowd, kids are not buried in their phone,” said Yvonne Shiu, the school’s principal. “They have grown to value being in the moment.”

Students at the public high school about 20 minutes south of San Francisco have been prohibited since 2019 from using their cellphones while in school — from bell to bell. Schools nationwide, including some in Maryland, are now increasingly imposing such bans, but San Mateo was one of the earliest and largest schools in the country to implement a complete ban on cellphones during school hours.

At the start of each day, each of the 1,600 students lock their phone in a magnetically sealed pouch, created by the San Francisco-based company Yondr, that won’t be opened until the school day ends.

The decision to introduce Yondr pouches was the school’s attempt to tackle the increasingly pervasive effects of cellphone and social media overuse on its student body: cyberbullying, loss of sleep, self-esteem issues and endless distractions in class.

Teachers and administrators quickly embraced the program, saying it restored their grasp on students’ attention in class. Some even said if the school were to end the program, they’d leave.

As schools around the country implement similar cellphone bans, San Mateo offers a six-year track record of how a cellphone ban can force young people to focus and, in many cases, feel better.

“If schools can help alleviate some of those expectations and pressures about appearance and performance and embarrassment, and take away some of those elements that a lot of kids really struggle with and are confronted with, that is a benefit to them and to the school community and the school culture,” said Casey Teague, a longtime world history teacher at the school.

A slow start

The decision to implement the Yondr program at San Mateo began with observation and a trial run.

One of its faculty members, Alicia Gorgani, observed a similar cellphone ban at San Lorenzo High School, a smaller school in the area, and brought the idea to San Mateo’s teachers and administrators.

Adam Gelb, San Mateo’s assistant principal at the time, said seeing the cellphone ban in action at San Lorenzo “blew [his] mind.”

“Students were engaged with one another,” he said. “They were interacting. They were playing card games. They were playing out on the yard. They were goofing around. They were in circles, talking to each other.”

Gelb helped bring the program to San Mateo, which tested Yondr pouches in a few classrooms in spring 2019.

Teague, who’s worked at the school for more than 20 years, was one of those first instructors to pilot the program. He said he decided to try out the Yondr pouches in his class after noticing students’ smartphones were constantly bombarding them with notifications.

“By 2018, every kid had a phone. That wasn’t anything new,” Teague said. “But the distracting nature of the phone was becoming more and more obvious.”

Health education teacher Brittany Dybdahl said leading up to the ban, the school was seeing an increase in cyberbullying and drama stemming from online activities.

Embarrassing moments or conflicts among students had the risk of getting captured on video and being immortalized online.

“It basically created way more opportunities for students to be emotionally impacted throughout the school day,” Dybdahl said. “And that would, of course, affect their academics and learning.”

After the pilot program, and many discussions with students and their parents, San Mateo implemented the program schoolwide beginning in the 2019-20 academic year.

Some teachers were apprehensive about the cellphone ban, thinking it would create more work for first-period teachers to check that each student had their phones sealed away.

But those checks quickly became part of the daily routine, said physics teacher Patrick Thrasher.

And after seeing the impact the program had on their students, most faculty members got on board, Thrasher said.

“There was such a pretty clear, drastic difference in the classroom,” he said. “It was just night and day.”

San Mateo’s cellphone ban was not even a year old when the COVID-19 pandemic moved all learning online for a year starting in March 2020. But the school decided to continue the cellphone ban when students returned to the classroom in 2021.

“They do spend enough time already on screens that, you know, seven hours a day here at school [without screen time] is not going to kill them,” Shiu said.

The student reaction

Enforcement of the ban hasn’t been entirely without issues.

San Mateo faculty members said some students — albeit a small percentage — are determined to bypass the Yondr pouches and keep their phones on them. Some put calculators, hard drives or other phone-shaped objects in their Yondr pouches. Others put old, unused “burner phones” in their pouches while keeping their personal phone on them.

But many San Mateo students, like junior Lulu Bertolina, embraced the program. She said the Yondr program was one of the reasons she enrolled at San Mateo.

“Having our phones [in Yondr pouches] made it easier to make friends, because I can’t go off on my phone and not make conversation with people,” she said. “It almost forced it — in a really good way.”

For San Mateo senior Siddharth Gogi, the absence of phones made the school feel more welcoming. He said students aren’t glued to their phones playing video games at lunch or distracted on social media in class.

“Conversations move past surface level when you have that time to talk to one another,” said Gogi, San Mateo’s three-time class president who graduated this spring.

He acknowledged, though, that some students are concerned about not having quick access to their phones in case of an emergency.

In the early 2000s, many schools repealed their cellphone restrictions after the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado.

But Shiu said it’s better if students don’t have access to their phones during an emergency. The pouches prevent students and family members from sharing misinformation or flooding 911 with calls overwhelming first responders and the cellphone network.

“In any emergency, we want students to be focused on the adult giving the information,” Shiu said.

The experts

To hear the experts tell it, there’s an overriding good reason for schools to ban cellphones. Cellphone use and social media sites can both have a serious impact on young peoples’ well-being.

Extensive cellphone use during the day has a “direct correlation with a decline in mental health,” said Annette Anderson, the deputy director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Safe and Healthy Schools.

“We also know that cellphone use late into the evening has a disruptive factor in our young people getting enough sleep and then being attentive enough in the morning,” Anderson said.

Young people are grappling with the reality that the phone in their hand could be doing them harm. A Pew Research Survey released in April found almost half of U.S. teens age 13 to 17 agreed social media sites have a mostly negative impact on kids their age.

San Mateo wellness counselor Helen Citrin said a cellphone ban can provide students a much-needed break from their phones.

For students who are highly anxious or struggle managing their emotions, Citrin said, not having access to a cellphone can help as it prevents them from constantly texting their parents.

“That pouch offers a boundary,” she said.

One recent study echoed this sentiment. Independent research on school cellphone bans is limited, but a 2024 study conducted by Yondr found that students saw a 15% increase in the likelihood they received a passing grade after their school implemented Yondr pouches. The report also found a 44% decrease in behavioral referrals after implementation.

Data from San Mateo paints a mixed picture of the school’s performance since implementation of the cellphone ban. Math and English test scores declined from 2019 through 2024, but both the graduation rate and preparedness for college and careers have inched upward. Meanwhile, the suspension rate increased.

Gelb offered an explanation for the rise: “Everybody was forced to communicate in person, so you had more people talking, and there’s more chance for someone to say the wrong thing or be in the wrong place.”

But, he added, the premeditated incidents and cyberbullying disappeared from the school day.

A growing trend

Although San Mateo might have been early to the cellphone ban movement, it’s among growing company now.

State and local governments and school districts across the country are now considering — or have already passed — policies on cellphone use in school. Yondr boasts that millions of students from all 50 states are now using its pouches.

While there is no statewide ban in Maryland, more than a third of its public schools prohibit cellphone use, . Several school districts, including Howard and Baltimore counties, have passed a total ban.

About 30% of U.S. schools now have a ban on cellphone use throughout the school day, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

That percentage is likely to rise. In the nation’s largest state, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed legislation last year requiring all public and charter schools in California to create a policy to reduce or ban cellphone use during school hours by July 1, 2026, but left each school or school district to decide the specifics of their policy.

And recently, New York joined the more than two dozen other states instituting a complete ban on cellphones during school hours.

Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) said the decision comes as part of the state’s efforts to protect youth mental health.

“Our young people succeed when they’re learning and growing, not clicking and scrolling,” Hochul said in a statement in May.

A model to follow?

San Mateo faculty and staff said the school’s careful implementation of the Yondr program and the conversations it had with families and educators led to its success.

But several San Mateo faculty members said Yondr alone can’t solve youth mental health issues stemming from social media and personal devices.

The second students leave school grounds, they once again have access to their phones and can browse as much as they want. Citrin, the school’s wellness counselor, said many of the students she deals with stay up late into the night doomscrolling, or texting or video chatting with friends.

That being the case, Gelb said schools should also teach students how to develop a healthy relationship with their phone and social media.

The pouches also carry a financial impact on schools.

Each student at San Mateo receives a free Yondr pouch at the beginning of the school year, but each replacement costs $15. In total, Shiu estimated the school spends about $20,000 a year on Yondr pouches.

However, San Mateo teachers and administrators said the program’s benefits outweigh its costs.

“From a school perspective, it keeps kids off of their phone during class time,” Citrin said. “Because the main focus here is education, that’s what the purpose is, and that’s what the use is benefiting.”

Capital News Service is a student-staffed reporting service operated by the University of Maryland’s Phillip Merrill College of Journalism. Stories are available at the  and may be reprinted as long as credit is given to Capital News Service and, most importantly, to the students who produced the work.

Droplets of blood red algae dance in a bubbling beaker in a WaiÊ»anae High School classroom, as LeihƍkĆ« Elementary schoolchildren huddle around. 

Recent WaiÊ»anae graduate Hyrum Tom and teacher Tyson Arasato tell the visiting children all about the algae, limu kohu, a popular edible species native to HawaiÊ»i. The algae population is declining in the wild,  to feed the community and help the wild limu recover.

By next year, Arasato said, the school hopes to scale up from beakers to large tanks full of algae for the community to consume.

“Instead of them having to go out and pick it, where it’s not found as much, we’ll let it restore outside in the wild,” Arasato said. “Then we can actually supply people with the food that they need — that’s the goal of aquaculture.”

The Marine Science Learning Center is the only dedicated high school aquaculture center in the state, and it’s been expanding its operations in recent years to give students more hands-on experience cultivating and caring for species many believe could become the lifeblood of HawaiÊ»i’s food system and economy.

The state’s aquaculture industry is expected to boom from a $90 million a year industry to $600 million a year in the next decade — according to the Department of Agriculture — and researchers say it will soon face a dearth of workers, which needs to be addressed if the industry is going to reach its full potential.

But it’s something of a Catch-22: despite predictions of workforce shortages and future growth, few of the students who have gone through the Waiʻanae center have found jobs in the field.

Part of the challenge is that many of the existing jobs require college degrees, something that . A bigger issue is that jobs at any level of experience are limited at the moment.

“The big bottleneck is not that we can’t do workforce training,” said Maria Haws, an aquaculture professor at the University of Hawaiʻi Hilo. “It’s that we need to grow the industry.”

But the state has done little to invest in the industry in recent years and lawmakers have yet to heed calls from local industry leaders and researchers to encourage growth through regulatory reform or investments in infrastructure.

Now, as a major aquaculture producer shutters on the Big Island and another sues the state for crippling its business, concerns are growing over whether HawaiÊ»i can actually achieve its potential. 

Despite the uncertainty, leaders and students at the Marine Science Learning Center are continuing to build upon the center’s decades of research.

The school is now using grant funding to expand its footprint with new tanks, as part of its ultimate bid to boost Leeward Oʻahu’s food security and establish a hatchery for native fish to reestablish throughout the state. Those species include Waiʻanae’s namesake ʻanae — native mullet.

Restoring mullet’s place on the Westside is intended to help students connect with their heritage and sense of place, but also as a way to boost food self-sufficiency and address the region’s food insecurity, which is among the worst on Oʻahu.

“We need to get our fishponds functional again,” learning center coordinator Dana Hoppe said. “You want to talk about food security? That’s food security right there.”

Addressing Industry Challenges

Industry leaders have long said aquaculture is the most promising sector of agriculture for HawaiÊ»i, a claim in line with global trends that show  for farmed fish and other marine species is accelerating.

HawaiÊ»i, they said, has a key role to play in the U.S. and global aquaculture industries — but the state has to address multiple obstacles for that to happen, according to .

In addition to building a workforce pipeline, the state needs to simplify the regulatory landscape, to attract entrepreneurs and encourage more private and public investments in the sector.

, completed by an international aquaculture consultant group hired by the state, noted that the state needs to invest more in infrastructure to help foster that development, such as land and processing facilities.

But the workforce was a key issue, one nearly every aquaculture business surveyed noted. They struggled to find well-qualified candidates within the state, while also finding it difficult to attract out-of-state talent.

Without fixing the apparent workforce deficit, the report said, the state’s aquaculture outlook would only worsen.

But the state has yet to show substantial support for the aquaculture industry and workforce development, according to Sen. Glenn Wakai, a longtime proponent for aquaculture in the Legislature.

The industry’s potential to grow to $600 million a year by 2034 requires dual efforts, happening simultaneously, to ensure jobs are there for young graduates, Wakai said. One idea is to build spaces for budding aquaculture entrepreneurs and businesses, like agricultural parks, while also attracting established businesses to conduct research in the state.

But the model for such an effort — Hawaiʻi Oceanic Science and Technology Park in Kona — has run into problems with water supply and tenants are suing the state for damages related to water quality.

Without the park, or more like it, graduates and the workforce will have nowhere to go but outside Hawaiʻi, Waikai said.

“Kudos to Waiʻanae,” Wakai said. “But when the kids all want to go to college, what kind of job opportunities will be here for them?”

Teaching Rigorous Skills

Hoppe and learning center staff, including former students, recently picked up a shipment of speckled and colorful tilapia for a senior capstone project. 

The tilapia will continue to grow in their tanks as students adjust the level of salt in their water tanks, to gain a better understanding of how water salinity affects flavor. Hoppe said she’s hopeful that fish raised at the school will soon follow the path of ogo, a seaweed the school provides – about 250 pounds per month – to the community’s elderly through the ‘. 

Students learn to monitor water quality, salinity, fish health and a long list of complex tasks as part of their work. And they also pass on their knowledge to visiting school groups, Hoppe said.

“We make sure that the curriculum is rigorous science,” Hoppe said. “But the skills are universal: Trying to teach them how to think critically, trying to teach them how to be responsible, trying to teach them values.” 

Hoppe said the practical experience helps show students their own potential. 

And while students at Waiʻanae may not all make their way into the aquaculture industry, the education is not wasted, Hoppe said, nor does their final career destination matter that much.

“The skills are universal,” she said.

Waiʻanae High School’s work has found support from lawmakers and state agencies, which fund many of the center’s projects, including the upcoming expansion.

The center is poised to begin work Thursday, installing new tanks and increasing the center’s footprint on campus, which will allow for more research in coming years.

Past students have investigated everything from raising shrimp, mullet and tilapia within one system, to an upcoming project focused on how salt levels in water influence the flavor of tilapia. The school is also part of a research collaboration with Big Island biotechnology firm Symbrosia on raising limu kohu.

WaiÊ»anae High School’s center is already unique from every other school in the state, with the only secondary learning center dedicated to aquaculture, uniquely positioning the roughly two dozen students enrolled each year to learn highly technical aspects of fish and algae farming.

In addition to Waiʻanae, four other schools statewide have learning centers focused more broadly on food and agriculture.

Waipahu High School is one of those schools, with brand new facilities dedicated to natural resources and agricultural education. Aquaculture is part of that, led in part by former shrimp farmer and Waipahu teacher Jeff Garvey.

Garvey has developed a workforce program to help build interest in aquaculture, alongside the University of HawaiÊ»i Hilo, which is the only college in the state to offer a full, four-year bachelor’s degree .

But even with a new “fancy and chic”  at Waipahu High School, Garvey said, it can be difficult to attract students to the field.

For many students, attaining a college degree is out of reach, according to marine center coordinator Hoppe. So getting a job in an industry that wants certain qualifications is difficult, despite their years of experience, making jobs in the trades more attractive and attainable.

But even college graduates are suffering. Some are forced to take other work due to a lack of opportunity within the industry, according to Maria Haws, a UH aquaculture professor and director of the Pacific Aquaculture and Coastal Resources Center.

One recent college graduate has just become a firefighter, Haws said, planning on saving money to later start her own farm due to the cost of getting started in Hawaiʻi.

“If we cannot set up farms, and if families and small businesses can’t set up farms because of regulatory inhibitions, what’s the point of producing a bunch of well-trained students that will just go somewhere else and get paid a lot more?” Haws said. “There’s not enough business here to absorb them.”

And while some students end up in research roles or as educators, Haws said,  on academic funding may also compromise that pipeline, too.

Haws said she hopes more lawmakers step up to address the shortcomings in the industry, in light of climate change, movements at the federal level and for the benefit of the state in general.

“If we have to import 80% of our seafood, yet we consume almost twice as much per capita as other states,” Haws said, “what the heck are we really doing?”

“” is funded in part by grants from the Stupski Foundation, Ulupono Fund at the Hawai‘i Community Foundation and the Frost Family Foundation.

When a ransom note landed in the inboxes of high school leaders in Somerset, Massachusetts, the district hired consultants to negotiate — unsuccessfully — with the hackers. 

The district wound up paying a ransom to resolve the July 2020 cyberattack, according to documents obtained by ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ through public records requests. In the eyes of the cybersecurity company brought in to consult, the school system got a good deal. 

The hacker, who used an encrypted email service and the name Kristina D Holm, threatened to leak 50 gigabytes of data if Somerset school officials didn’t hand over 60 bitcoin which, at the time, was worth about $660,000. 

“If we don’t reach an agreement we will start leaking your private data,” the hacker wrote, noting that for bitcoin they would also offer “a list of security measures” to prevent future breaches. The note also provided documents to prove the writer had infiltrated district servers. 

that Coveware, a cybersecurity company that specializes in negotiating with hackers, got the ransom down to $200,000 after the firm made a $170,000 counteroffer. An obtained by ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ describes the ransom payment as being for “technical consultant services and remediation.”

“Typically in situations where they drop very significantly and within range of our budget, we would recommend accepting the offer as we have seen these groups take offers away if they think we are nickel and diming them on the price,” Coveware incident response director Garron Negron wrote in a July 30 email ahead of the payment. 

The district didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story. 

Records show that Beazley, the school district’s cybersecurity insurance provider, approved the ransom payment and was a key player in selecting third-party vendors like Coveware for Somerset Berkeley’s incident response.

Six days after the attack, school officials contacted lawyers with the firm BakerHostetler to assess the cyberattack’s impact and its data breach reporting obligations, but it wasn’t until November — four months later —that the firm told them a “programmatic review of the files” had been completed. 

“Baker reviewed a sample of documents for each of the largest hit counts and helped narrow the scope for manual review,” staff attorney Damon Durbin wrote, adding that the preliminary review uncovered at least two Social Security numbers. Once the district approved a statement of work, Durbin wrote, consultants would “conduct the review and produce a notification list that Baker will review with the District in order to determine notification obligations.” 

The school district reported the hack to local and federal law enforcement, records show, but not until after lawyers were on the scene. 

William Tedford, then the Somerset Police Department’s technology director, requested in a July 31 email that the district furnish the threat actor’s bitcoin address “as soon as possible,” so he could share it with a Secret Service agent who “offered to track the payment with the hopes of identifying the suspect(s).” 

“There will be no action taken by the Secret Service without express permission from the decision-makers in this matter,” Tedford wrote, adding that officials with the state police cybersecurity program had also offered to help. 

“All are aware of the sensitive nature of this matter, and information is restricted to only [the officers] directly involved,” said Tedford, who was promoted to department chief in August 2024. 

While law enforcement seemed willing to follow the school district’s lead, the incident did open Somerset Berkeley to police scrutiny. In early August, Tedford pressed school officials about sexual misconduct allegations that the threat actor claimed to have stumbled upon and attempted to use as leverage during ransom negotiations.

The hacker wrote: “I am somewhat shocked with the contents of the files because the first file I chose at random is about a predatory/pedophilia incident described by young girls in one of your schools. This is very troubling even for us. I hope you have investigated this incident and reported it to the authorities, because that is some fucked up stuff. If the other files are as good, we regret not making the price higher.”

Tedford asked if the accusation was legitimate and if the police had been notified.

“I need to cover these bases now that we have been made aware of this claim,” Tedford wrote in an Aug. 3 email. “It’s clear the attorneys don’t want law enforcement involved, and that’s fine, but this is a different issue.”

In an emailed response, district Superintendent Jeffrey Schoonover said the police department is “well aware of that situation,” which was related to an incident during an out-of-town show choir event. 

“After a thorough investigation, no charges were filed,” Shoonover wrote, adding in a later email that an officer “interviewed dozens of kids” in response to “this entire unfortunate event.” 

In August 2020, the district was working on its talking points to the public and it’s clear the consultants weren’t far away. ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ obtained a draft FAQ in which school officials were crafting their answer to the question: Why was the community not advised when this cyberattack first happened? 

They answered that they would “have preferred to notify the public earlier” but couldn’t “to ensure the privacy of student records,” that they were unsure what, if any, records may have been compromised and that they were encouraged to “wait to release any information until the investigation” was further along. In red italics next to the text are the words: Pending revisions from consultants. 

Somerset Berkley was “unable to provide any further information” about whether the district paid a ransom, the document also notes.

The until September, when Schoonover wrote in a letter that data breach victims would be contacted once its investigation was finalized — but he didn’t divulge the $200,000 ransom payment. 

The district submitted to Massachusetts regulators in December 2020 — five months after the incident — and disclosed that 85 commonwealth residents had their information exposed. Stolen records include Social Security, driver’s license and credit card numbers. 

The 5-4 vote by the Senate Education Committee came despite the Legislature’s own fiscal analysis, which said the proposed legislation “may jeopardize federal funding to the state and to local governments” and violate the federal Civil Rights Act, which specifically prohibits discrimination based on national origin in programs receiving federal dollars. Three Republicans joined the committee’s sole Democrat in voting “no.”

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Immediately after the vote was cast, shouts of “so shameful” and “that’s trash” erupted inside the hearing room. Others, including school-age children in attendance, streamed out of the room in tears.

The bill () by Sen. Bo Watson, a Hixson Republican, and House Majority Leader William Lamberth, a Portland Republican, says that local school districts and public charter schools “shall require” students to provide one of three forms of documentation: proof of U.S. citizenship, proof the student is in the process of obtaining citizenship or proof they have legal immigration status or a visa.

Students who lack one of the three forms of documentation could then be barred by their local school district from enrolling unless their parents paid tuition.

Watson,  the bill’s sponsor, said he brought the measure in response to the increasing cost to the state of providing English-as-a-second-language instruction.

“Remember, we are not talking about people who are here lawfully,” Watson said. “What I’m trying to discuss here is the financial burden that exists with what appears to be an increasing number of people who are not lawfully here.”

In response to a question from Sen. Raumesh Akbari of Memphis, the sole Democrat on the panel, Watson said he had received no formal request from any school official to introduce the measure.

“In an official capacity, this is one of those issues people do not talk about,” Watson said. “This is a very difficult bill to present. It is very difficult to have all these eyes on you.”

“In an unofficial capacity at numerous events, have people mentioned this problem to me? Absolutely,” Watson said.

Akbari responded: “I’m from the largest school district in the state. I have not had those conversations.”

“I am offended by this legislation,” Akbari said. “I find that it is so antithetical to the very foundation of this country
.This is saying that babies – you start school at five years old – that you do not deserve to be educated.”

The bill’s sponsors have acknowledged the measure is likely to face a legal challenge if enacted. The proposed legislation, they have said, is intended to serve as a vehicle to potentially overturn the Supreme Court’s Plyler v. Doe decision, which established a constitutional right to a public school education for all children. The 1982 decision was decided by a 5-4 vote, Watson noted.

“Many 5-4 decisions taken to the court today might have a different outcome,” Watson said.

The proposed legislation is part of an unprecedented slate of immigration-related bills introduced in the Tennessee legislature this year as Gov. Bill Lee and the General Assembly’s GOP supermajority seek to align with the Trump Administration’s immigration policies.

Lee last month signed into law legislation to create a state immigration enforcement office to liaise with the Trump administration, create distinct driver’s licenses for noncitizens and levy felony charges at local elected officials who vote in favor of sanctuary policies.

Among nearly three dozen other immigration-related bills still being considered is one to require hospitals that accept Medicaid payments to report on the immigration status of their patients. would open up charitable organizations, including churches, to lawsuits if they have provided housing services to an individual without permanent legal immigration status and that individual goes on to commit a crime.

Following Wednesday’s hearing in the Senate Education Committee, hundreds congregated in a hallway of the Legislature, chanting “education for all” and pledged to return as the bill winds through the committee process.

The bill “instills fear and hopelessness in these students,” said Ruby Aguilar, a Nashville teacher who testified against the bill during the hearing.  “Education is not merely a privilege, it is a shared human right every child should have access to.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com.

A new Illinois bill aims to add some oversight of families who homeschool their children, a response to concerns that the state does little to ensure these students receive an education and are protected from harm.

The measure, , comes after last year found that Illinois is among a small number of states that place virtually no rules on parents who homeschool their children. Parents don’t have to register with any state agency or school district, and authorities cannot compel them to track attendance, demonstrate their teaching methods or show student progress.

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Under the new bill, families would be required to tell their school districts when they decide to homeschool their children, and the parents or guardians would need to have a high school diploma or equivalent. If education authorities have concerns that children are receiving inadequate schooling, they could require parents to share evidence of teaching materials and student work.

Illinois Rep. Terra Costa Howard, a Democrat from a Chicago suburb who is sponsoring the legislation, said she began meeting with education and child welfare officials in response to the news organizations’ investigation, which detailed how some parents claimed to be removing their children from school to homeschool but then failed to educate them.

The investigation documented the case of L.J., a 9-year-old whose parents decided to homeschool him after he missed so much school that he faced the prospect of repeating third grade. He told child welfare authorities that he was beaten and denied food for several years while out of public school and that he received almost no education. In December 2022, on L.J.’s 11th birthday, the state took custody of him and his younger siblings; soon after, he was enrolled in public school.

The most recent numbers available at the time of the news organizations’ investigation showed nearly 4,500 children were recorded as withdrawn from public school for homeschooling in 2022 — a number that had doubled over a decade. But there is no way to determine the precise number of students who are homeschooled in Illinois, because the state doesn’t require parents to register.

The bill would require the state to collect data on homeschooling families. Regional Offices of Education would gather the information, and the state board would compile an annual report with details on the number, grade level and gender of homeschooled students within each region.

Homeschool families and advocates said they will fight the measure, which they argue would infringe on parental rights. Past proposals to increase oversight also have met swift resistance. The sponsor of a 2011 bill that would have required homeschool registration withdrew it after hundreds of people protested at the Illinois State Capitol. In 2019, a different lawmaker abandoned her bill after similar opposition to rules that would have required curriculum reviews and inspections by child welfare officials.

The Home School Legal Defense Association, which describes itself as a Christian organization that advocates for homeschool freedom, said it plans to host virtual meetings to educate families on the bill and ways they can lobby against it.

Kathy Wentz of the Illinois Homeschool Association, which is against homeschool regulations, said she is concerned about the provision that would allow the state to review education materials, called a “portfolio review” in the legislation. She said visits from education officials could be disruptive to teaching.

The bill would require all private schools to register with the state.

The Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica investigation found that it’s all but impossible for education officials to intervene when parents claim they are homeschooling. The state’s child welfare agency, the Department of Children and Family Services, doesn’t investigate schooling matters.

Under the proposed law, if the department has concerns about a family that says it is homeschooling, the agency could request that education officials conduct a more thorough investigation of the child’s schooling. The new law would then allow education officials to check whether the family notified its district about its decision to homeschool and compel parents to turn over homeschool materials for review.

The increased oversight also aims to help reduce truancy and protect homeschooled students who lose daily contact with teachers and others who are mandated to report abuse and neglect, Costa Howard said. Some truancy officials said that under existing law they have no recourse to compel attendance or review what students are learning at home when a family says they are homeschooling.

Jonah Stewart, research director for the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, a national organization of homeschool alumni that advocates for homeschooling regulation, said the lack of oversight in Illinois puts children at risk. “This bill is a commonsense measure and is critical not only to address educational neglect but also child safety,” Stewart said.

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

After the Providence, Rhode Island, school district fell victim to a September 2024 cyberattack by the Medusa ransomware gang, school officials said an ongoing investigation found “no evidence that any personal information for students has been impacted.” 

An investigation by ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, including a review of stolen files captured in the 217-gigabyte leak, indicates otherwise. Sexual misconduct allegations involving both students and teachers, children’s special education records and their vaccine histories were posted online after Providence Public Schools did not pay the cybercriminals’ $1 million ransom demand. 

The district’s failure to acknowledge that students’ records had been exposed — even after being informed otherwise by ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ â€” means that parents and students were likely unaware that their private affairs had entered the public domain. 

In October 2024, Providence schools notified 12,000 current and former employees that their personal information, such as their names, addresses and Social Security numbers, had been compromised. But the letter never makes mention of students’ sensitive records. 

In response to ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s findings in mid-October 2024, a district spokesperson didn’t acknowledge that students’ sensitive information was compromised. He said the district “has been able to confirm that some [of its] files” were accessed by an “unauthorized, third party,” and that “security consultants are going through a comprehensive review” to determine whether the leaked files contain personal information “for individuals beyond current and former staff members.” 

Meanwhile, in an unsolicited phone call to ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, a state education department spokesperson appeared to contradict that, saying “no one had actually gone in to see the files.” 

Included in the leak is the 2024-25 Individualized Education Program for a 4-year-old boy who pre-K educators observed had “significant difficulty sustaining attention to task” and who “wandered around the classroom setting without purpose.” Another special education plan notes a 3-year-old boy “randomly roamed the room humming the tune to ‘Wheels on the Bus,’ pushed chairs and threw objects.” 

A single spreadsheet lists the names of some 20,000 students and their demographic information, including disability status, home addresses, contact information and parents’ names. Another contains information about their race and the languages spoken at home.

A “termination list” included in the breach notes the names of more than 600 district employees who were let go between 2002 and 2024, including an art teacher who “retired in lieu” of being fired and a middle school English teacher who “resigned per agreement.” Another set of documents reveals a fifth-grade teacher’s request — and denial — for workplace accommodations for obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety and panic attacks that make her “less effective as an educator if I am not supported with the accommodations because I can not sleep at night.” 

In one leaked April 2024 email, a senior central office administrator sought a concealed handgun permit from the state attorney general, noting they “have a safe at work as well as one at home.”

Following an investigation published by ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ and in October, the district to families acknowledging that students’ personal information, such as vaccine records and special education details, were exposed in the attack.

In response to an inquiry from ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, a district spokesperson said in a November statement that educators remain “committed to transparency and the security of personal information.”

“During these types of incidents, districts typically start with limited information on what occurred and then gain more information over the course of the investigation,” the statement continues. “As we navigated the initial uncertainty of the situation, PPSD prioritized taking real-time action and communicating with all stakeholders as we gathered more information.”

A soccer ball covered in signatures from classmates. A handwritten letter telling a child of their worth. A T-shirt bearing a school emblem meant to remind a newcomer how much they were loved in a place they once called home. 

These are among the items teachers have given their multilingual learners after hearing their families planned to leave rather than risk being detained by immigration agents.

“One of my students told me last week that their family had decided to go back to Brazil because they were afraid of deportation,” said teacher Joanna Schwartz. “It was his last day here. I scrounged up a T-shirt with our school’s logo on it and a permanent marker and my student had all of his friends and teachers sign it.”

She said she taught the fifth grader for three years. 

“It’s nothing big, but it was a treasure to him to have the physical signatures of his dearest friends and teachers to take with him,” she said. 

Some immigrant students wrestling with the fear of deportation leave school with no warning. They simply stop showing up and ignore the calls and emails that follow. 

Other times, they give their teachers just a few hour’s notice, often a single afternoon, to process and accept the loss of a relationship that might have lasted for years. A tight hug, a kind word and then 
 gone.  

Such scenes are unfolding throughout the country as the Trump administration and , striking terror in the hearts of the undocumented and their advocates. 

Faced with the fallout, teachers who’ve spent their entire careers advocating for immigrant students â€” fighting battles even within their own districts to ensure they have a robust education — are left fumbling for the right words to say or gift to give a child under extreme stress. 

Schwartz, who teaches multilingual learners in Philadelphia, uses her prior training as a therapist to help kids through these toughest of moments. 

She said she often gives these children “transitional objects,” something tangible, like the signed school T-shirt, to help them feel connected to their friends in the United States as they move back to their homelands.

Schwartz wrote her departing student a letter in which she “reminded him of his many strengths and told him how much he will be missed,” she said. She added drawings, stickers and her email address. 

“I wish I could do more,” she said. 

Areli Rodriguez was devastated when, last winter, during her first year of teaching in Texas, one of her most promising and devoted young students left for another state: The boy’s family was growing wary of and headed to Oklahoma, where they hoped they’d be safer. 

“He was my first student who left for this reason,” she said of the fifth grader who had arrived in the United States from Mexico less than a year earlier. “It was so gutting. It just broke my heart.” 

The family didn’t know the Sooner State would impose some of the harshest in the nation. Those included state schools chief Ryan Walters saying he would comply with Trump’s order allowing immigration enforcement in schools and a failed edict that Oklahoma parents be required to report their own immigration status when enrolling their kids in school. That proposal was rejected by the governor this week, who said children should not be used

Rodriguez is not sure where the child is today. As a parting gift, she gave him a soccer ball signed by all his classmates.

Video: A fifth-grade student leaving Areli Rodriguez’s Texas classroom leads his classmates in a chant in Spanish about self-worth. ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ obscured the students’ faces to protect their identity and provided the English-translation captions. (Areli Rodriguez)

The boy, who was chosen as student of the week when he departed, led the class in a call-and-response chant by Rita F. Pierson just moments before he was gone from the district for good.  

I am somebody.

I was somebody when I came.

I’ll be a better somebody when I leave.

I am powerful, and I am strong.


 I have things to do, people to impress, and places to go.

And, his teacher noted, she wasn’t the only gift-giver that day: The boy left her one of his favorite toys, a Rubik’s Cube. 

In a diary entry, he wrote to Rodriguez and another beloved teacher: “To say goodbye to all of you, Ms. Rodriguez and Ms. [S], I want to tell you that you are my favorite teachers, and I’m sorry for any trouble I may have caused. Maybe I wasn’t the best student, but I am proud of myself for learning so much.”

Rodriguez didn’t need the note to remember him.

“I think about him all the time,” she said, adding that he embodies what she loves most about multilingual learners. “For him, school was a gift, an opportunity, a privilege. He just worked so hard. We had academic competitions. I coached him. He did creative writing in Spanish and he placed. His parents were so supportive — they looked at education as something they wanted to seize.”

His classmates felt the loss, too, Rodriguez said. 

“There would be times when I would sit there at recess and watch them play without him and you could tell there was an element missing,” she said. 

The Department of Homeland Security is urging undocumented people to This isn’t the first time they’ve felt such pressure: Former President in a single term, double that of Trump’s first four years in office. But many of those he turned away were newly arrived at the border. Unlike Trump, Biden shied away from . 

The current president is targeting this population in other ways, too. Trump signed an executive order Feb. 19 aimed at . It’s unclear how this might impact education: Schools receive federal money, particularly to help support low-income children, but they also cannot turn away students based on their immigration status, according to the 1982 Supreme Court decision . 

That landmark ruling, however, , most recently in Tennessee where lawmakers this month introduced a bill saying schools can deny enrollment to undocumented students. The sponsors say it’s their intention to challenge Plyler.

‘We hugged long and hard’

In addition to the T-shirts, cards and other mementos, educators are preparing something else for withdrawing students, a far more practical gift meant to help them resume their education elsewhere — and quickly. 

Genoveva Winkler, regional migrant education program coordinator housed in Idaho’s Nampa School District, said she’s given more than 100 families copies of their students’ transcripts in English and Spanish. 

“This school year, we are preparing ‘packets’ for the families with all that information,” Winkler wrote in a Facebook message, adding her district also gave them textbooks supplied by the Mexican Consulate that parents can use to prepare their children academically and bolster their Spanish. “The students are not 100% bilingual. Parents are taking all steps necessary to make the transition easier for their children.”

Indianapolis teacher Amy Halsall said four children from the same family, ranging in age from 7 to 12, left her school system right after Inauguration Day, headed back to Mexico. 

“They didn’t specifically say that it was immigration related but I would guess it was,” Halsall said. “This is a family that we have had in our school since their sixth grader was in first grade. The kids were really upset that they had to leave.”

The youngest and the eldest told Halsall they want to be ESL teachers when they grow up, she said. The two middle children hope to be mechanics and one day open their own shop. Halsall gave them a notebook full of letters written by fellow students and pictures of their classmates.

“I told the kids that they had learned a lot and always did their best,” she said. “I told them that they worked hard and were on their way to being bilingual. We hugged long and hard. I told them if they ever came back to Indianapolis that they should call us or visit.

I told them if I was ever in Mexico, I would call them. I tried hard to keep things positive but it was hard for all of us. Everyone had tears in their eyes.”

The anxiety continues, Halsall said. Just last week, another child, age 8, told her he worried that “La Migra” — ICE agents — would take his mother away while he was out. 

“I told him that he was safe at school and if he got home and no one was there to call me,” she said. 

Another teacher, in Virginia, said she had two such students leave school so far this academic year. One hailed from Guatemala and the other from Mexico. Both were in their mid-teens and had impeccable attendance, she said.

The boy from Guatemala, a solid student who wanted to accelerate his path toward graduation, would often say how perplexing it was that some of his peers didn’t show the same dedication to their studies that he did. 

Both teens expressed concern to fellow students about possible immigration raids shortly before leaving school for good. Their teacher did not have a chance to say goodbye in either case. Their departure, she said, left her feeling “completely empty.”

“I’ve loved watching them integrate in our school and seeing how they realized they can have this pathway if they choose,” she said. “Watching that choice ripped away by fear is devastating.”

The nation’s second-largest school district now enrolls 408,083 students, according to . In the 2023-24 school year, LAUSD enrolled 419,749 kids; the year before that, 429,349.

“I’m kind of fearing talking about it, because people are just going to go berserk,” said LA Unified Board President Scott Schmerelson of decisions to close schools. 

Schmerelson also insisted he has not given up on finding ways to increase district enrollment with programs that would attract new families to LAUSD schools. 

But, he said, enrollment has fallen so low that many of the district’s schools can’t provide the services students require.

To preserve the quality of instruction, Schmerelson said, some of the district’s 785 public schools may soon need to be combined or closed. 

“We’re just getting worse and worse as far as enrollment goes, and average daily attendance,” said Schmerelson. “Every time a kid comes to school, we’re paid for that day. And when they don’t show up, we’re not paid for that day.”  

LAUSD has been losing students since it peaked in size at 746,831 in 2002. District officials have talked about tackling the enrollment drop for almost as long. Losses accelerated during the pandemic and then slowed, but have since gone up again.  

LAUSD has made a number of efforts to attract new students, mainly based around the idea of offering attractive schooling choices to local families, a district spokesman said. The enrollment declines this year were smaller than expected, according to the spokesman. 

But shrinking schools are bad for students. 

Like many U.S. public school districts, LA Unified is funded on a per-pupil basis. So when the district loses students, it loses income.

Schools with too few students don’t receive the funding to offer extracurricular activities and a variety of enriching classes. They retain fixed staffing and facilities costs, so operations become more expensive on a per-pupil basis, as enrollment shrinks.

Schmerelson, a veteran LAUSD educator and administrator who of the district’s school board last year, believes the district’s enrollment crisis is its most pressing problem and has vowed to tackle the issue in his last term.

He said he expects the board to soon begin discussing the sticky issue of closing or combining under-enrolled schools. Those that become too small, he said, with fewer than 100 students, aren’t viable from a cost or programming standpoint.

In a statement, a Los Angeles Unified spokesman said that there are three schools in the district with fewer than 100 students. The spokesman said the district will not be combining or closing schools this year.

Decisions to close schools are often controversial with the families they serve and the staff they employ. Closing a school is seen as a last resort in many districts, not only because it represents the loss of an asset, but also a loss to the community.   

Enrollment decline is a nationwide problem. School closures in response to such declines have recently prompted pushback in and San Antonio.

In Inglewood, an independent school district in Los Angeles County, plans to close schools have .   

But in Los Angeles, where enrollment has been declining for more than 20 years, many fear closing schools is inevitable.

Conditions such as falling birth rates and rising housing prices have forced LA’s enrollments down for years, and those forces can’t be stopped without seismic changes to economy and demography, said Pedro Noguera, dean of USC’s Rossier School of Education. In addition, independently operated charter schools have enrolled thousands of LA students.  

In other words, get used to it. And it’s not just in LA. Enrollments are falling in districts around the country, thanks to the same forces that are driving down enrollment in LASUD, Noguera said.

“This is the future,” said Noguera. “Declining birth rates, plus families with children who can’t afford to live in the city.”

LAUSD has no choice but to figure out how to consolidate schools, said Noguera. But, if officials are strategic, he said, they should see it “not simply as a loss of a school, but as an opportunity to create schools that are better equipped to serve the community.”

Any changes to schools in LAUSD would be considered by the board with Superintendent Aberto Carvalho, who in the last school year was possible.

Schmerelson said he expects the board will soon discuss combining schools due to falling enrollments, while also working on new solutions to attract new students.   

Former , who consults with districts and labor groups on policy and operations, said the LA Unified’s focus on attendance in the years since the pandemic has been laudable, but now it needs to shift its attention to enrollment.  

Tokofsky said LAUSD needs to be fighting enrollment declines with more aggressive plans to attract families, and maximize resources in shrinking schools.

Decisions to close schools are fraught with hazards, he warned.

“This requires urban planners and big thinkers,” said Tokofsky. “Otherwise, the whole school board will get recalled.”

The school district in Louisiana’s St. Landry Parish waited five months to notify people that their Social Security numbers and other sensitive information were made public after it fell victim to a July 2023 ransomware attack — long after state law mandates and only after a newspaper investigation prompted an inquiry from the Louisiana attorney general’s office. 

A December 2023 investigation by ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ and The Acadiana Advocate contradicted school district assertions that no sensitive information about students, employees or business owners had been exposed online after the attack. 

Stolen files, the investigation found, include thousands of health insurance records with the Social Security numbers of at least 13,500 people, some 100,000 sales tax records for local and out-of-state companies and several thousand student records, including home addresses and special education status.

Four months after the attack, more than a dozen breach victims told reporters they were unaware their information was readily available online. 

“They want to brush everything under the rug,” said Heather Vidrine, a former St. Landry teacher whose information was exposed in the breach. “The districts don’t want bad publicity.”

Threat actors with the Medusa ransomware gang claimed a cyberattack on the St. Landry school system in July 2023, and the district reported it to the local press and police within days. Cybercriminals published reams of stolen files after the district did not pay its $1 million ransom demand, yet district leaders denied the breach affected sensitive records even after reporters presented them with extensive evidence to the contrary. 

After notifying state police about the attack, district officials were never told about the nature of the data that was stolen or if anything was stolen at all, Tricia Fontenot, the district’s supervisor of instructional technology, said. In the face of cyberattacks, districts routinely hire cybersecurity consultants and attorneys to review the extent to which any sensitive information was exposed and to comply with state data breach notification laws. 

“We never received reports of the actual information that was obtained,” she said in November 2023. “All of that is under investigation. We have not received anything in regards to that investigation.” 

Just hours after the newspaper investigation revealed the data breach, a consumer protection lawyer with the state attorney general’s office was on the  phone with the district, questioning them “directly in response to the article” and informing them of their data breach notification obligations under state law, emails obtained by The Advocate reveal. 

Under Louisiana’s breach notification law, schools and other entities are required to notify affected individuals “without unreasonable delay,” and no later than 60 days after a breach is discovered. Entities that fail to alert the state attorney general’s office within 10 days of notifying affected individuals can face fines up to $4,000 for each day past the 60-day mark.

School board attorney Courtney Joiner responded a day later to the attorney general’s office, saying they were working “to address the notice issue without further delay.”

In a Dec. 21, 2023, letter, Superintendent Milton Batiste III acknowledged to an undisclosed number of victims that their “sensitive information may have been obtained by an unknown malicious third-party,” records show. Officials didn’t send a formal notice to the AG’s office until Jan. 10, 2024.

Math teacher Donna Sarver was among the district educators who received the data breach notification. She blasted school leaders for sending the letter “well after the fact” she and her colleagues had been victimized. 

“I really thought it was too little, too late,” she told reporters. “This should have happened much earlier.” 

School officials couldn’t be reached for comment for this story.

This story was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

returns to Austin, Texas, running March 3-6. As always, it’ll offer a huge number of panels, discussions, film screenings, musical performances and workshops exploring education, innovation and the future of schooling.

Keynote speakers this year include neuroscientist , founder of Ness Labs, an online educational platform for knowledge workers; astronaut, author and TV host , and , CEO of Search for Common Ground, an international non-profit. Idriss will speak about what it means to be strong in the face of opposition — and how to turn conflict into cooperation. Also featured: indy musical artist Jill Sobule, from her musical F*ck 7th Grade.

As in 2024, artificial intelligence remains a major focus, with dozens of sessions exploring AI’s potential and pitfalls. But other topics are on tap as well, including sessions on playful learning, book bans and the benefits of prison journalism. 

To help guide the way, we’ve scoured the to highlight 25 of the most significant presenters, topics and panels: 

Monday, March 3:

A new independent film features a Seattle school counselor who builds a world-class Ultimate Frisbee team with a group of immigrant children at Hazel Wolf K-8 School. 

Generative AI is accelerating the adoption of a skills-based economy, but many are skeptical about its value, impact and the pace of growth. Will AI spark meaningful change and a new economic order, or is it just another overhyped trend? Meena Naik of Jobs for the Future leads a discussion with Colorado Community College System Associate Vice Chancellor Michael Macklin, Nick Moore, an education advisor to Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, and Best Buy’s Ryan Hanson.

The Clayton Christensen Institute’s Julia Freeland Fisher headlines a panel that looks at how generative AI can help students access 24/7 help in navigating pathways to college. As new models take root, the panel will explore what entrepreneurs are learning about what students want from these systems. Will AI level the playing field or perpetuate inequality? 

New research shows students who are engaged in schoolwork not only do better in school but are happier and more confident in life. And educators say they’d be happier at work and less likely to leave the profession if students engaged more deeply. In this session, LEGO Education’s Bo Stjerne Thomsen will explore the science behind playful learning and how it can get students and teachers excited again.

Mike Yates of The Reinvention Lab at Teach for America leads an interactive session offering participants the chance to build their own AI tools to solve real problems they face at work, school or home. The session is for AI novices as well as those simply curious about how the technology works. Participants will get free access to .

Join Charlotte West of Open Campus, Lawrence Bartley of The Marshall Project and Yukari Kane of the Prison Journalism Project to explore real-life stories from behind bars. Journalism training is transforming the lives of a few of the more than 1.9 million people incarcerated in the U.S., teaching skills from time management to communication and allowing inmates to feel connected to society while building job skills. 

Tuesday, March 4:

Amid the hand-wringing about what AI means for the future of education, there’s been little conversation about how a few smart educators are already employing it to shift possibilities for student engagement and classroom instruction. In this workshop, attendees will learn how to leverage promising practices emerging from research with real educators using AI in writing, creating their own chatbots and differentiating support plans. 

AI-enabled tools can be helpful for students conducting research, outlining written work, or proofing and editing submissions. But there’s a fine line between using AI appropriately and taking advantage of it, leaving many students wondering, “How much AI is too much?” This session, led by Turnitin’s Annie Chechitelli, will discuss the rise of GenAI, its intersection with academia and academic integrity, and how to determine appropriate usage.  

Explore the real-world impact of AI in education during this interactive session hosted by Zhuo Chen, a text analysis instructor at the nonprofit education startup Constellate, and Dylan Ruediger of the research and consulting group Ithaka S+R. Chen and Ruediger will share successes and challenges in using AI to advance student learning, engagement and skills. 

In 2025, authors face unprecedented challenges. This session, which features Scholastic editor and young adult novelist David Levithan, as well as Emily Kirkpatrick, executive director of the National Council of Teachers of English, will explore the battle for freedom of expression and the importance of defending reading in the face of censorship attempts and book bans.

Kate Arend and Kim Lessing, the co-presidents of Amy Poehler’s production company Paper Kite Productions, will be live to record their workplace and career advice podcast “Million Dollar Advice.” The pair will tackle topics such as setting and maintaining boundaries, learning from Gen Z, dealing with complicated work dynamics, and more. They will also take live audience questions.

With rising recognition of neurodivergent students, advocates say AI can revolutionize how schools support them by streamlining tasks, optimizing resources and enhancing personalized learning. In the process, schools can overcome challenges in mainstreaming students with learning differences. This panel features educators and advocates as well as Alex Kotran, co-founder and CEO of The AI Education Project.

Assessments are often disruptive, cumbersome or disconnected from classroom learning. But a few advocates and developers say AI-powered assessment tools offer an easier, more streamlined way for students to demonstrate learning — and for educators to adapt instruction to meet their needs. This session, moderated by ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s Greg Toppo, features Khan Academy’s Kristen DiCerbo, Curriculum Associates’ Kristen Huff and Akisha Osei Sarfo, director of research at the Council of the Great City Schools.

Wednesday, March 5:

Gun violence is now the leading cause of death for American children and teens, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, yet coverage of gun violence’s impact on youth is usually reported by adults. Run, Hide, Fight: Growing Up Under the Gun is a 30-minute documentary by student journalists about how gun violence affects young Americans. Produced by PBS News Student Reporting Labs in collaboration with 14 student journalists in five cities, it centers the perspectives of young people who live their lives in the shadow of this threat. 

Educators are at the forefront of testing, using artificial intelligence and teaching their communities about it. In this interactive session, participants will hear from educators and ed tech specialists on the ground working to support the use of AI to improve learning. The session includes Stacie Johnson, director of professional learning at Khan Academy, and Dina Neyman, Khan Academy’s director of district success. 

As AI becomes increasingly present in the classroom, educators are understandably concerned about how it might disrupt their teaching. An expert panel featuring Jake Baskin, executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association andKarim Meghji of Code.org, will look at how teaching will change in an age of AI, exploring frameworks for teaching AI skills and sharing best practices for integrating AI literacy across disciplines.

Generation Alpha is the first to experience generative artificial intelligence from the start of their educational journeys. To thrive in a world featuring AI requires educators helping them tap into their natural creativity, navigating unique opportunities and challenges. In this session, a cross-industry panel of experts discuss strategies to integrate AI into learning, allowing critical thinking and curiosity to flourish while enabling early learners to become architects of AI, not just users.

Join a panel of educators, tech leaders and nonprofit officials as they discuss AI’s ethical complexities and its impact on the education of Black children. This panel will address historical disparities, biases in technology, and the critical need for ethical AI in education. It will also offer unique perspectives into the benefits and challenges of AI in Black children’s education, sharing best practices to promote the safe, ethical and legal use of AI in classrooms.

Is teacher morale shaped by where teachers work? Find out as Education Week releases its annual State of Teaching survey. States and school districts drive how teachers are prepared, paid and promoted, and the findings will raise new questions about what leaders and policymakers should consider as they work to support an essential profession. The session features Holly Kurtz, director of EdWeek Research Center, Stephen Sawchuk, EdWeek assistant managing editor, and assistant editor Sarah D. Sparks.

While most students in U.S. public schools are now young people of color, more than 80% of their teachers are white. How do white educators understand and address these dynamics? Join a live recording of a podcast that brings together white educators with Christopher Emdin and sam seidel, co-editors of From White Folks Who Teach in the Hood: Reflections on Race, Culture, and Identity (Beacon, 2024).

Schools are locked in a battle with students over fears they’re using generative artificial intelligence to plagiarize existing work. In this session, join Elliott Hedman, a “customer obsession engineer” with mPath, who with colleagues and students co-designed a GenAI writing tool to reframe AI use. Hedman will share three strategies that not only prevent plagiarism but also teach students how to use GenAI more productively.  

Thursday, March 6:

Join futurists Sinead Bovell and Natalie Monbiot for a fireside discussion about how we prepare kids for a future we cannot yet see but know will be radically transformed by technology. Bovell and Monbiot will discuss the impact of artificial intelligence on our world and the workforce, as well as its implications for education. 

Young children spend 80% of their time outside of school, but too many lack access to experiences that encourage learning through hands-on activities and play. While these opportunities exist in middle-class and upper-income neighborhoods, they’re often inaccessible to families in low-income communities. In this session, a panel of designers and educators featuring Sarah Lytle, who leads the Playful Learning Landscapes Action Network, will look at how communities are transforming overlooked spaces such as sidewalks, shelters and even jails into nurturing learning environments accessible to all kids.

In this session, participants will build an AI chatbot alongside designers and engineers from Stanford University and Stanford’s d.school, getting to the core of how AI works. Participants will conceptualize, outline and create conversation flows for their own AI assistant and explore methods that technical teams use to infuse warmth and adaptability into interactions and develop reliable chatbots.  

In this session, participants will learn how educators, technologists and policymakers work to develop AI responsibly. Panelists include Isabelle Hau of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, Amelia Kelly, chief technology officer of the Irish AI startup SoapBox Labs, and Merlyn Mind CEO Levi Belnap. They’ll talk about how policymakers and educators can work with developers to ensure transparency and accuracy of AI tools. 

Four days after an attack by a notorious ransomware gang disrupted the Minneapolis, Minnesota, school district’s computer network, accessing reams of students’ and educators’ sensitive information, officials contacted the FBI and laid out what happened. 

The district “immediately initiated an investigation” after its Feb. 17, 2023, discovery that school system files had been encrypted by ransomware, officials told the federal law enforcement agency. A day later, Minneapolis schools hired a third-party forensics investigation firm to negotiate the hacker’s demand for $4.5 million in bitcoin. 

Yet when school officials notified students and parents, they vaguely described what happened as an “encryption event” and offered a drastically different story than the one in their Feb. 21 report to the FBI. According to records obtained by ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ through public records requests, the district told families in a Feb. 24 email that its investigation “has found no evidence that personal information was compromised.” 

The statement was sent after cybersecurity experts advised district communications staff that “sharing the least amount of information” as possible was “in the best interest” of district security. 

Threat actors with the ransomware gang Medusa — known for encrypting and stealing sensitive records from cyberattack victims and then threatening to publish them in what’s known as a “double-extortion” scheme — took credit for the attack. Medusa ultimately published a trove of sensitive school district files online. The leaked documents detail campus sexual misconduct cases, child abuse inquiries, student mental health crises and suspension reports. 

Minneapolis school leaders didn’t acknowledge for nearly two weeks after the attack that sensitive records may have been compromised — and waited months to notify breach victims directly by letter. 

The district didn’t respond to requests for comment.

As Minneapolis recovered from the attack, records show, it turned first to its insurance provider and cybersecurity lawyers, who were paid as much as $370 an hour to negotiate with the hackers, investigate the breach and keep information about the incident outside of public view. 

An insurance company, which held a $1 million liability policy on the district with a $100,000 deductible, was the first point of contact in the event of a cyberattack, according to a school system incident response plan obtained by ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.  The cyber insurance provider will “facilitate breach counsel and forensic investigation teams,” the plan notes, and deploy “experienced negotiators” to communicate directly with the hackers. The policy also states it would cover the district’s liability for bad press, fines and “regulatory proceedings” related to a cyberattack. 

“The insurer will typically have an approved panel vendor list for breach counsel, computer forensics and incident response teams,” the plan notes.  

Attorneys with the leading cybersecurity and data privacy law firm Mullen Coughlin were hired to carry out a “privileged investigation,” according to its report to the FBI, with the firm relaying that information about the attack should not be released publicly. 

“Per [Minneapolis Public Schools’] request, all questions, communications and requests in connection with this notification should be directed to Mullen Coughlin,” according to the notification to the FBI, which was signed by an associate attorney with the third-party law firm. Mullen Coughlin didn’t respond to ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s request for comment.

Forensic investigation work was conducted by the cybersecurity incident response company Tracepoint, a subsidiary of the government and military contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, which Bloomberg News has dubbed “the world’s most profitable spy organization.” The researchers prepared “a report detailing the forensic analysis process and analysis” at Mullen Coughlin’s direction, records show. On March 14, 2023, the researchers held a meeting with district administrators where they went “through the list of what TA [the threat actor] might’ve accessed,” and answered questions. 

The data leak had a direct, detrimental impact on breach victims, records show. In an email to the district in March, one educator reported that someone withdrew more than $26,000 from their bank account. Another person got a direct Twitter message from the “Medusa contact team,” urging the person to respond to the threat actors immediately or else “we will ensure your popularity.” 

In March, Medusa ransomware actors posted the district’s stolen files online after the school system did not pay what the cybercriminals said on a leak site was a $1 million ransom — a markedly lower figure than the $4.5 million the district reported to the FBI. The breached files, according to an analysis by ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, include confidential and highly sensitive records about individual students and teachers. 

It wasn’t until September 2023 — seven months after the attack — that 105,617 people were notified the “hacking” incident exposed their sensitive information, according to a data breach notice sent to the Maine attorney general’s office. The notice states that the process to identify that information had been completed in July — a month and a half before officials notified victims.

“Although it has been difficult to not share more information with you sooner,” the letter to victims notes, “the accuracy and the integrity of the review were essential.”

As of Dec. 1, 2024, all schools in Minnesota are now to the state but that information will be anonymous and not shared with the public.

This story was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Philadelphia students could head back to classes before Labor Day for the next two years, according to proposed academic calendars the district released Tuesday.

The pre-Labor Day start for the 2025-26 and 2026-27 calendars will allow for longer spring and winter recesses as well as additional cultural and religious holidays throughout the year, district officials said this week.

Superintendent Tony Watlington also confirmed Tuesday that district schools and offices will be closed on Friday for the Philadelphia Eagles celebratory Super Bowl parade.

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“We look forward to celebrating the Eagles’ victory as a community, and we hope that our students, staff and families will do so safely and responsibly,” Watlington said in a statement.

The question of whether to start before or after Labor Day has rankled families and district leaders , in part because many Philly schools do not have adequate air conditioning. That has forced some buildings to close or dismiss students early due to excessive heat .

This school year, the first day back landed before Labor Day, and 63 schools without air conditioning dismissed students early, during the first week of classes. However, school started , and heat closures still impacted students’ learning time that first week.

Watlington said at his this year that over the past three school years, the number of schools without air conditioning has shrunk from 118 to 57 thanks in part to a

Shakeera Warthen-Canty, assistant superintendent of school operations and management at the district, said their academic calendar recommendations this year are built off of a survey and several in-person feedback sessions.

The majority of parents and caregivers who responded preferred a post-Labor Day start, the survey found. But students, teachers, school staff, and community members reported they overwhelmingly preferred starting the school year before Labor Day.

Some 16,400 parents, students, school staff, principals, and community members responded to the survey the district sent out last September, Warthen-Canty said.

Respondents also said they wanted more frequent breaks for longer durations to accommodate family vacations, as well as time to rest, support mental health, and prevent staff burnout.

State law says districts must have a minimum of 180 student days, or a minimum of 900 instructional hours for elementary school students and 990 hours for middle and high school students. The district’s collective bargaining agreement with the teachers union also requires 188 teacher work days, as well as a minimum of 28 professional development hours.

The district officials’ calendar recommendations will for a vote before they are enacted.

If approved, winter recess would be seven days in 2025-26 and eight days in 2026-27, while spring break would be five days both years.

In addition to the five state and national holidays (Memorial Day, Independence Day, Christmas, Thanksgiving, and New Year’s Day), Philadelphia school district school holidays in 2025-26 and 2026-27 would include:

• Labor Day
• Rosh Hashanah
• Yom Kippur
• Indigenous Peoples Day
• Veterans Day
• Martin Luther King Jr. Day
• Presidents Day
• Lunar New Year
• Eid al-Fitr
• Good Friday
• Eid al-Adha
• Juneteenth

This school year, both Indigenous Peoples Day and Veterans Day were school days.

As for how the new calendar may interact with Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker’s commitment to : Deputy Superintendent Jermaine Dawson said this week the district has ensured any expansion of that program will work “alongside our calendar of school days.”

This story was originally published at Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

The Los Angeles Unified School District was ensnared by three high-profile cyberattacks in the last few years, each of which exposed reams of sensitive information online. 

Three subsequent class-action lawsuits from parents accused the nation’s second-largest district of taking inadequate steps to protect their children’s personal records — and failing to tell them that sensitive information had been leaked. The district has since taken multiple actions to shield details about the incidents from public view. 

The trio of events encompass a September 2022 ransomware attack that exposed students’ highly sensitive psychological evaluations among other records; a January 2022 cyberattack on education technology company Illuminate Education, which compromised sensitive information in Los Angeles and districts nationwide; and a massive June 2024 cyberattack on the cloud computing company Snowflake, a third-party vendor used by the district to store certain records. 

Threat actors with the Vice Society cybergang took credit for the September 2022 ransomware attack on L.A. schools, posting the records to its dark web leak site after education officials did not pay its extortion demand. In the aftermath of the attack, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho sought to downplay its effect on students. An told the local press that students’ psychological evaluations were included in the leak, a revelation Carvalho refuted as “absolutely incorrect.” 

“We have seen no evidence that psychiatric evaluation information or health records, based on what we’ve seen thus far, has been made available publicly,” said Carvalho, who acknowledged the hackers had “touched” the district’s massive student information system but said the “vast majority” of exposed student records involved their names, academic records and home addresses. 

An investigation by ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ into the leak uncovered that the breach had, in fact, exposed student psychological evaluations, which contain a startling degree of personally identifiable information about students receiving special education services, including their detailed medical histories, academic performance and disciplinary records. Just hours after our story published, the district acknowledged in a statement that “approximately 2,000” student psychological evaluations — including those of 60 current students — had been uploaded to the dark web. 

In a statement to ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, a district spokesperson said its cybersecurity response protocol “follows a clear, structured process that prioritizes swift internal assessment and adherence to all applicable state and federal data privacy regulations.” The process, the district said, is “designed with transparency, compliance and community trust in mind.”

Due to the sensitive nature of the information, students may have to “deal with this breach for the rest of their lives,” attorney Ryan Clarkson told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. Clarkson represents students and parents in a class-action lawsuit alleging LAUSD failed to act on known cybersecurity vulnerabilities and provided families insufficient notice that students’ personal records had been compromised.  

“It’s hard to bury it, it’s hard to get away from it, it’s kind of part of who we are,” Clarkson said in an interview. “Your psychology as a child is always going to be your psychology as a child.”

While the parents of special education students had been left in the dark about the breach, so too were members of the district’s special education committee. Carvalho acknowledged at a September 2022 that L.A. Unified was a “district under siege” and sought to “dispel rumors” about the incident, including one that multiple attacks had occurred. He didn’t make any statements regarding the impact on sensitive special education records. 

Carl Petersen, who served on the committee at the time, told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ that Carvalho left the committee members without information about the attack’s ramifications on children with disabilities. 

“At that point it was, ‘Oh, this was a very minor thing. We caught them in the system immediately and we shut it down,” said Petersen, who described Carvalho’s comments as part of a larger district effort to obfuscate. 

In January 2023 — four months after the attack — L.A. school officials acknowledged in that sensitive records had been exposed but only listed Social Security numbers included in payroll records and third-party contractor files swept up in the breach. It wasn’t until March 2023 that they disclosed to state regulators the leak had also compromised . 

The letter submitted to the California AG’s office doesn’t make clear the types of student records that were affected but urges individuals to “keep a copy of this notice for your records in case of future issues with your child’s medical records.” 

ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ submitted a public records request for information related to the ransomware attack, including complaints submitted to a hotline LAUSD created in its wake, insurance claims, Carvalho’s communications with the FBI and the types of student records that were subject to disclosure. The district denied the requests, stating it could not locate any “non-privileged responsive records,” meaning that they didn’t have to provide any of the records that were responsive because they were legally protected from disclosure. 

A week after it was discovered, the school board to grant Carvalho emergency spending powers to recover from the 2022 Labor Day weekend attack, allowing the schools chief a year to “enter into any and all contracts” to address the incident “without advertising or inviting bids and for any dollar amount necessary.” 

‘Shared with the world’

In August 2023, nearly a year after the attack, Carvalho made a high-profile appearance at the White House, where then-First Lady Jill Biden warned about the growing threat of cyberattacks on students and a need to do more to protect their sensitive data.

“If we want to safeguard our children’s futures, we must protect their personal data,” she said at the first-ever K-12 cybersecurity summit. “Every student deserves the opportunity to see a school counselor when they’re struggling and not worry that these conversations will be shared with the world.”

Carvalho said quick reaction time by the Los Angeles district and federal law enforcement officials set into motion a response plan that mitigated the attack, limited the number of files breached and avoided class cancellations. His remarks in the East Room didn’t touch on the leak of students’ mental health records but said the number of stolen files “could have been much worse” had officials not acted quickly to prevent the cybercriminals from encrypting additional district systems. One action they had no intention of doing, he said, was paying the undisclosed ransom demand because “we don’t negotiate with terrorists.”  

Los Angeles parent Ariel Harman-Holmes, whose three children are in special education, said she’s worried that fallout from the data breach could divert money from the services her children with disabilities need.

“I would rather have those funds go back into the schools and special education rather than spending a ton on litigation or settlements about privacy issues,” said Harman-Holmes, while acknowledging it “would be very disturbing” if her own child’s psychological evaluations were leaked online. 

As L.A. Unified’s response to the attack was being lauded by federal officials at the White House summit, its lawyers were in court with parents who alleged the district’s mitigation efforts weren’t just inadequate — they violated the law. Three separate lawsuits filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court charge the district had insufficient safeguards in place to secure students’ sensitive records and failed to provide enough notice to victims once that information was stolen. 

An inspector general’s office audit highlighted cybersecurity vulnerabilities yet, the complaints allege, LAUSD failed to take the necessary steps to prevent the attack. Parents also charge the district failed to comply with state data breach notice requirements after it learned that students’ psychological records and other files were published online. 

The most recent complaint was filed in September 2024 against the district and the company InfoSys, which built and manages the My Integrated Student Information System — the district’s primary student data portal. The district “has stated under oath in discovery responses” that InfoSys managed the student information system that was compromised, according to court records filed by the plaintiffs.

Insufficient cybersecurity protocols allowed the intrusion to go unnoticed for more than two months, the lawsuit alleges, and, once it was discovered, L.A. school leaders failed to provide “prompt and accurate notice of the data breach.” 

The breached portal “is currently the largest student data system in the United States,” the 162-page complaint notes, yet district officials “prioritized a race to incorporate technology in classrooms, with no regard for the risks of harboring troves of student data in online databases subject to cyberattacks.” 

One district, three breaches

Months before the Vice Society ransomware attack began, Los Angeles student records were exposed in a cyberattack on ed tech vendor Illuminate Education, which affected districts nationwide. LAUSD submitted a breach notice to the California attorney general’s office in May 2022, some unfolded. The report doesn’t disclose the types of information that were exposed or the number of students who had been affected. 

Then, in June 2024, a threat actor who goes by the name “the Satanic Cloud” posted a listing on a notorious dark web marketplace, seeking $1,000 in exchange for what they claimed was a trove of more than 24 million L.A. school district records. A second threat actor, known as “Sp1d3r” similarly posted a listing for records reportedly stolen from the district with a $150,000 price tag. 

The district said school data maintained by a third-party vendor was caught up in a cyberattack on the cloud computing company Snowflake, but officials didn’t disclose the name of the vendor or the types of records that may have been compromised. 

The district denied a public records request by ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ seeking information related to the incident, saying that certain files were protected by attorney-client privilege. 

The incident doesn’t appear in a California attorney general’s office database of data breaches.

This story was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

All Alaska students could be provided free breakfast and lunch at school, under a new bill in the Alaska Legislature.

Democratic Rep. Maxine Dibert of Fairbanks prefiled the legislation, , ahead of the legislative session that began on Tuesday. The bill would direct the state to provide sufficient funding to all districts to have breakfast and lunch for any student who requests it, free of cost.

“I’ve seen the effects of feeding our kids, and especially during COVID, when all kids got lunches and breakfast at no cost,” said Dibert, who has been a teacher. “So it was just very enlightening, and I would love to see that again for our families and for our students and for our school staff.”

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, federal relief funding allowed schools to provide free meals due to federal waivers. But those funds sunsetted in 2022, resulting in some

, over half of Alaska’s students — 51% — were eligible for free or reduced price meals. An estimated 46%, or roughly 48,000 students, were enrolled to receive free school meals.

As an elementary school teacher in Fairbanks for 22 years, Dibert said she herself sometimes paid for her students to eat, rather than see them go hungry.

“Over the years, if a student didn’t have enough money, or their bill wasn’t paid, oftentimes I would even pay with my account,” she said. “I don’t know entirely how big those bills got, because I was on the classroom side of it. But I did really not like seeing kids come into the classroom sad that they couldn’t get breakfast or lunch.”

Dibert, who is Koyukon Athabascan, also cited the current Yukon River salmon crash leaving communities and families who subsisted and shared fish going without.

“My grandparents lived out on the Yukon River, and as a child, they would always send us salmon from the Yukon River. And we always would have food on our table, lots of salmon,” she said. “So with no salmon on the Yukon, I know that’s a hardship to feed families, and it’s costly to families. So in that aspect, this bill could be very beneficial to ease the pain there, to help feed kids.”

Education and health researchers point to universal free meals having for students, including improved academic performance, attendance and student health outcomes.

Dibert said the bill is in the beginning stages of the legislative process, so details will be worked out, but she hopes the program would also promote local foods on school menus, like salmon or moose. “It would be working district by district, for sure,” she said. “I don’t want it to be canned, you know, protein, like, one grain, one fruit.”

The allocations to school districts would also vary by region and food prices, she said, accommodating notoriously higher grocery prices in Alaska’s rural areas.

She said funding the proposal could include some federal or municipal contributions as well.

“It’s not that much to have the opportunity to feed our kids,” she said.

Last year, the Legislature axed funding for making reduced-priced lunches free for low-income students, The estimated $480,000 in funding was to be taken from the Department of Corrections, but lawmakers voted against it.

Once the bill has been formally introduced during a House floor session, it will next be assigned to relevant committees for discussion and debate in the coming weeks.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com.

Chicago Public Schools launched new school profiles on its website — a milestone in to change how it portrays the quality of its campuses.

The new school accountability dashboards replace the district’s controversial number ratings for schools, which CPS put on hold and . Those ratings had drawn the ire of educators and some community members, who said they unfairly stigmatized campuses that serve students with high needs. The old level ratings had also factored into high-stakes decisions about school closures and staff overhauls.

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Some parents who’ve provided feedback on the shift said families welcome having a one-stop repository of information on school performance again. But they said they’d like to see simpler, more accessible language in information about the metrics the district included to put the numbers into context. And they noted that a busy parent must click repeatedly to get to each metric — only to find out in many cases that these numbers aren’t available yet.

Bogdana Chkoumbova, the district’s chief education officer, said the new system aimed to strike a balance.

“We didn’t want this to be just another state report card; we are embracing the complexity of the data,” she said. “If it looked like a one-pager in red and green, that just brings in the trauma.”

The new profiles went up in mid-December, the day after the window to apply to the district’s selective and magnet programs closed. Chkoumbova said the timing was not intentional. After all, families could find most of the information available on the dashboards so far on schools’ Illinois Report Card profiles.

For now, the profiles include only a portion of the data they’ll eventually feature — mostly traditional metrics such as test scores, chronic absenteeism, and graduation rates. Later this year, the district is gearing up to add long-anticipated information that gets at students’ experience and well-being — metrics that in some cases officials are still weighing how to best capture.

Still, CPS leaders say the launch of the new dashboards is an important start. They can be a handy tool as the members of a new, partly elected school board learn about the district and its schools. District officials plan to show off the profiles at the board’s monthly meeting on Thursday.

“We are transitioning to a completely new way of how we view student success and the district’s role in supporting schools,” said Chkoumbova.

The dashboards are by scrolling to the bottom and looking up a school.

The new profiles are five years in the making

Chicago first set out to overhaul how it measures and publicly communicates about school quality in 2019. At that time, school board members called on district officials to do away with the School Quality Rating System, or SQRP, policy, which many considered too focused on metrics that are affected by poverty levels and other demographics of the student body. The district formally in 2023.

With input from academics, parents, and others, the district tried to design a more holistic approach, bringing in a wider array of metrics, including some that got at the experience students have on campus — and at whether the district is providing schools the resources they need to improve that experience.

After years of largely behind-the-scenes work, the new dashboards went live quietly in December, giving principals and other educators a chance to weigh in.

Claiborne Wade, the father of four CPS students, served on a district committee that provided input on the new accountability system. He said he is a big believer in the district’s efforts to take a more holistic look at school performance.

“It’s more than test scores and attendance rates and graduation rates,” he said. “Those are important, but so is making sure we have funds for extracurricular activities and parents have a seat at the table.”

Last week, Wade presented the new dashboards to a group of 10 parents actively involved at DePriest Elementary on the West Side, where he works as a family coordinator as part of the Sustainable Community Schools program. Some liked that the new dashboards offer information about each metric and how to interpret it. But many felt these explanations were too heavy on education jargon and terms such as “alternate assessments.”

Jaqueline Vargas, the mother of two CPS students and two district graduates, said the site asks parents to do too much navigating — especially given that many metrics are not landing on the dashboard until later this year.

“You have to click a lot, but when you finally get there, the information isn’t there,” said Vargas, who also served on the district’s Transparency Committee.

She said she would love to see more information on parent leadership groups and parent engagement more generally, photos of principals, and readily accessible listings of the specialized programs and support services a campus offers. One of her CPS graduates was really interested in cooking while in high school, but the family had no idea that even though their neighborhood high school did not offer a culinary program, two nearby campuses did.

Hal Woods, chief of policy with the parent advocacy group Kids First Chicago, said the dashboards are clearly a work in progress. The layout can be more user-friendly. The metrics available so far are largely what SQRP offered, though the recently released dashboards do include some new information, such as whether a school has quality curriculums.

Parents are eager to see the full set of metrics later this year, Woods said — including those that show how schools are providing social and emotional support to students, a task that recent research has shown greatly affects outcomes such as high school graduation.

The district aims to better measure the student experience

Like districts across the country, CPS is still grappling with how to measure the student experience on campus more fully, said Elaine Allensworth of the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research. For the past two years, the district has given students a survey called Cultivate, which was developed by Allenworth’s team at the university. But she says the survey was designed to give teachers information about students’ experiences in their classrooms — not as an accountability tool for families and others.

“There’s a concern that if the survey becomes public, teachers would feel under pressure to make their schools look good and won’t feel as comfortable using it for their own development,” she said.

The district also explored how to best present another key piece of the student experience: extracurricular activities. The district could likely do more than simply listing the activities a school offers, Allensworth said. The new dashboards show the portion of students who participate in any activities. But are these activities high-quality? Are outside partners chipping in?

Chkoumbova said the district will continue to work on improving the platform. In late February, it will include new data on the growth toward math and reading proficiency on state tests that students make — a metric that Ellensworth said is much more telling about how well a school is doing than the portion of students who meet state standards on these tests.

Chkoumbova feels CPS is on the right track.

“We are trailblazers,” she said. “There are very few systems that have taken such an innovative and different approach.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

With at least seven school buildings reduced to rubble, Los Angeles Unified School District is scrambling to relocate displaced students.

The work of photojournalists who braved the fires and their aftermath captures haunting images of what was left behind — the charred frame of a school bus, precious preschoolers’ artwork — and what has been lost forever. 

If so, your sensitive data — like Social Security numbers and medical records — . Their target was education technology behemoth PowerSchool, which provides a centralized system for reams of student data to damn near every school in America.

Given the cyberattack’s high stakes and its potential to harm millions of current and former students, I teamed up Wednesday with Doug Levin of the  to moderate a timely webinar about what happened, who was affected — and the steps school districts must take to keep their communities safe.

Concern about the PowerSchool breach is clearly high: Some 600 people tuned into the live event at one point and pummeled Levin and panelists Wesley Lombardo, technology director at Tennessee’s Maryville City Schools; Mark Racine, co-founder of RootED Solutions; and Amelia Vance, president of the Public Interest Privacy Center, with questions. 

PowerSchool declined our invitation to participate but sent a statement, saying it is “working to complete our investigation of the incident and [is] coordinating with districts and schools to provide more information and resources (including credit monitoring or identity protection services if applicable) as it becomes available.”

The individual or group who hacked the ed tech giant has yet to be publicly identified.

Asked and answered: Why has the company’s security safeguards faced widespread scrutiny? What steps should parents take to keep their kids’ data secure? Will anyone be held accountable?

In the news

Oklahoma schools Superintendent Ryan Walters, who says undocumented immigrants have placed “severe financial and operational strain” on schools in his state, proposed rules requiring parents to show proof of citizenship or legal immigration status when enrolling their kids — a proposal that not only violates federal law, but is likely to keep some parents from sending their children to school. | 

• Not playing along: Leaders of the state’s two largest school districts — Oklahoma City and Tulsa — rebuked the proposal and said they would not collect students’ immigration information. Educators nationwide fear the incoming Trump administration could carry out arrests on campuses. | 
   
• Walters filed a $474 million federal lawsuit this week alleging immigration enforcement officials mismanaged the U.S.-Mexico border, leading to “skyrocketing costs” for Oklahoma schools required “to accommodate an influx of non-citizen students.” | 
   
• Timely resource guide: With ramped-up immigration enforcement on the horizon — and with many schools already sharing student information with ICE — here are the steps school administrators must take to comply with longstanding privacy and civil rights laws. | 

A federal judge in Kentucky struck down the Biden administration’s Title IX rules that enshrined civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ students in schools, siding with several conservative state attorneys general who argued that harassment of transgender students based on their gender identity doesn’t constitute sex discrimination. 

Fires throw L.A. schools into chaos: As fatal wildfires rage in California, the students and families of America’s second-largest school district have had their lives thrown into disarray. Schools serving thousands of students were badly damaged or destroyed. Many children have lost their homes. Hundreds of kids whose schools burned down returned to makeshift classrooms Wednesday after losing “their whole lifestyle in a matter of hours.” |  

• At least seven public schools in Los Angeles that were destroyed, damaged or threatened by flames will remain closed, along with campuses in other districts. | 

Has TikTok’s time run out? With a national ban looming for the popular social media app, many teens say they’re ready to move on (and have already flocked to a replacement). | 

Instagram and Facebook parent company Meta restricted LGBTQ+-related content from teens’ accounts for months under its so-called sensitive content policy until the effort was exposed by journalist Taylor Lorenz. | 

The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday announced the participants in a $200 million pilot program to help schools and libraries bolster their cybersecurity defenses. They include 645 schools and districts and 50 libraries. | 

Scholastic falls to “furry” hackers: The education and publishing giant that brought us Harry Potter has fallen victim to a cyberattacker, who reportedly stole the records of some 8 million people. In an added twist, the culprit gave a shout-out to “the puppygirl hacker polycule,” an apparent reference to a hacker dating group interested in human-like animal characters. | 

• Dig deeper: Here’s how AI is being used by cybercriminals to rob schools. |  

Not just in New Jersey: In a new survey, nearly a quarter of teachers said their schools are patrolled by drones and a third said their schools have surveillance cameras with facial recognition capabilities. | 

The number of teens abstaining from drugs, alcohol and tobacco use has hit record highs, with experts calling the latest data unprecedented and unexpected. | 

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New pup just dropped.

Meet Woodford, who, at just 9 weeks, has already aged like a fine bourbon. I’m told that Woody — and the duck, obviously — have come under the good care of 74 reporter Linda Jacobson’s daughter.

Much has been written about the of getting rid of the Department of Education, one of .

Little of the discussion that we’ve seen has focused on the impact on rural schools, which than urban ones on federal funding.

In fact, rural education often to policymakers and scholars, who aimed at urban and suburban areas, even though students are educated in rural schools.

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This lack of rural research and focus has about rural education that overlook the strengths and opportunities for students who attend rural schools.

As , we compiled a list of three facts about rural education accompanied by the myths that would help policymakers better design programs to support rural students.

1. Rural communities are becoming more diverse

There’s a myth that . While it’s true that most rural counties are majority white, .

The share of people of color in rural communities , according to U.S. Census data. In addition, people of color .

This is because while white people are leaving, people of color are moving in. From 2010 to 2020, over 2 million white people left rural communities, while . The number of rural people who identified as multiracial doubled to nearly 4 million over the same period, and all rural communities except those in .

While the Black population in rural America shrank somewhat during the 2010s, it remains the case that the . In fact, 81% of Black people who don’t live in cities live in the South, a legacy of slavery and how generations of Africans were forcefully taken to work the land as free labor.

Without truly understanding who resides in these communities, educators and policymakers cannot adequately address students’ needs. Failure to do so , particularly those who reside in the South.

2. Rural educators know how to succeed

Another myth is that rural communities or resources to .

As such, policymakers to include rural communities’ cultural capital when they develop textbooks, teacher training plans and education policies. By , we mean the knowledge, skills, education and advantages that people inherit and use to achieve success in society.

One glaring example is that rural communities in teaching materials and curricula, which frequently ignore their local knowledge, traditions and values. This creates a gap in students’ ability to see themselves in jobs and positions outside of their personal contexts. And it hampers teachers’ ability to leverage student strengths when teachers are unprepared to connect with their backgrounds.

is another example of rural students’ cultural capital being overlooked. Too often, funding policies penalize rural schools for their smaller sizes by supporting the closure and consolidation of schools and overlooking their need for more money to account for lower revenue from local and property taxes. This results in a disruption of rural communities’ strong social cohesion and abandoned buildings that reduce economic opportunities.

Community initiatives and local programs provide important resources that larger urban districts might take for granted.

A new grant initiative at Michigan State University that all three of us are involved with aims to help change this. Focused on helping teachers better engage high school physics and chemistry students, the in the rural South to provide rural students with access to more advanced science courses. By working with Alabama A&M University and Winston-Salem State University, it helps ensure local communities’ cultural capital are part of the program. It also seeks to pull together community partnerships to advance science access and learning in the South.

By redesigning policies to take advantage of rural cultural capital, communities and policymakers could unlock untapped potential within rural schools and enhance educational outcomes for all students regardless of where they live. We believe such policies could foster stronger connections between rural K-12 public schools and their surrounding communities, creating more relevant and engaging learning experiences for students.

3. Rural students are high achievers

A third myth is that . As a result, their academic success is too often overlooked by researchers and educators.

In reality, students in rural areas meet the same measures of success as in urban ones – especially in the early years. For example, in rural than nonrural schools before the third grade, according to the Center for School and Student Progress. After that, the higher scores begin to fade due to summer learning loss. After schools close over the summer, rural students are generally left with , compared with those in more urban areas. There is a strong need for more state and federal money to increase access to summer learning opportunities.

Despite this widespread learning loss, graduation rates among rural students than those of nonrural students.

But once again, policymakers fail these students, who have than in urban areas.

factors contributing to this trend include limited , the distance between students’ hometowns and colleges and universities, and lower awareness of financial aid opportunities. In addition, students in the rural South to advanced science courses like physics and chemistry, which can block postsecondary opportunities.

We believe debunking these and other myths and recognizing the diverse strengths of rural communities would help ensure that all students across the nation, including those in rural areas, can attain long-term educational and economic success.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

For the first time on Monday, some New York City families and educators commuting to school by car faced a $9 toll upon entering a swath of Manhattan.

The toll — a result of the congestion pricing program — charges drivers who enter Manhattan at or below 60th Street in order to help finance public transit improvements. (Most drivers must pay the $9 toll during “peak” hours — between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m. on weekdays, as well as between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. on weekends — and a reduced $2.25 during all other hours).

That program, which has been in the works for years, went into effect on Sunday.

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For decades, environmental and transit advocates have sought to enact a congestion pricing program, looking to it as a means of reducing gridlock and pollution while raising revenue for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

But the program has also sparked concerns from some, including the city’s teachers union.

Last year, the union against the plan in partnership with the Staten Island borough president, seeking to halt its implementation. Some pro-congestion pricing teachers bristled at the legal action, but on Monday, union officials noted the lawsuit remained ongoing.

“Our lawsuit continues because the congestion pricing plan that is now in effect puts the financial and environmental burden on communities least able to pay, and the last to see improved air quality or less congestion,” said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, in a statement.

Josh Millis, a parent at The Neighborhood School in Manhattan, said he supports public transportation and the broader aims of the congestion pricing plan, but takes issue with the lack of exemption for public school parents. Millis, who lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, about a mile from the nearest subway station, said it’s not always feasible to take his three kids to school on public transit.

“I don’t mind walking a mile,” he said. “But my kindergartner is not going to do that in December, at 6:30 in the morning, when it’s 13 degrees out. That’s just an impossibility.”

Some school districts fear long-term effects of congestion pricing

Robert Murtfeld, a member of the Community Education Council for District 1 in Manhattan, said about 25% of families in his district commute from upper Manhattan or another borough. He worries that congestion pricing could threaten the district’s ability to retain teachers, with educators who currently drive to school potentially looking to transfer. Meanwhile, families who live in public transportation “deserts” outside of the district could be burdened by the high cost of the tolls, he said.

Families and educators who choose to drive into Manhattan would pay more than $1,600 in tolls across the 180 school days in each academic year, Murtfeld said.

The District 1 CEC has called on state officials to carve out exemptions or reduced tolls for students traveling to and from schools within the congestion pricing zone, as well as teachers and other school staff commuting into the district.

“We don’t make a commentary on whether congestion pricing is good or bad,” Murtfeld said. “We’re just saying, if this thing gets implemented — which is a fact, as of midnight [on Sunday] — we will be affected.”

Millis, the parent at The Neighborhood School, said his family has been looking into other options to cut down on costs, like carpooling with others at the school, as well as reconsidering at what age his children can start taking public transit on their own. But in the meantime, he’ll keep driving them to school, he said.

“That $9 a day is a big hit,” Millis said. “To make an exemption for our families for the purpose of public school education is not even pennies in the couch of the MTA. It would not even be missed. But it makes all the difference to us. All the difference.”

Toll’s impact on Manhattan school commutes remains unclear

MTA officials estimate the toll will result in entering the zone every day. And though fewer drivers on the road could in theory help some school buses — which are exempt from the toll — arrive earlier, the broader effects of congestion pricing on school commutes for now remain unclear.

Sara Catalinotto, founder of Parents to Improve School Transportation, said the possibility of shorter bus routes “would be a welcome positive side effect,” but added that the Monday snowfall made it difficult to gauge the immediate impact of congestion pricing on school commutes.

To Catalinotto, the longer-term impacts on students with disabilities could be complicated. Though many students with disabilities rely on school bus services, parents and advocates have for years issued complaints about delayed, overcrowded, or missing buses.

Individuals with disabilities can from the congestion pricing toll, but Catalinotto worries families could still face financial hardships.

“When the school bus or paraprofessional is out for the day or longer, and families of students with specialized busing have to use the so-called ‘rideshare alternative’ to get the student to school in a car which is not exempt, tolls will be charged,” she said.

In some cases, the city offers families prepaid rideshare vouchers when school buses aren’t available — including when specialized staff aren’t available to accompany a student with a disability who requires them. But Catalinotto noted not all families are registered for such services, and others will be “compelled to pay for a cab out of pocket or use their own vehicle, at higher cost if in the congestion relief zone.”

And though parents can seek reimbursement for transportation costs when school buses fail to arrive, , leaving families shouldering the cost in the meantime.

“There are varying views in the disability community on the Congestion Relief issue but I think everyone agrees that the MTA has to become fully accessible by some means,” Catalinotto said. “Perhaps taxing the billionaires or Wall Street transactions to achieve that would have been less stressful than this.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

The California Department of Education is partnering with  Disaster Relief Fund to provide assistance for students, teachers, and school staff impacted by the devastating fires blazing through Southern California. 

The wildfires, which have burned nearly 27,000 acres, killed five people and destroyed at least a thousand structures, have also closed 335 schools in Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Riverside, Ventura and San Diego counties and impacted at least 211,000 students, according to the CDE. 

Three schools in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood in Los Angeles have had significant damage, according to CNN Weather.

“Our school communities desperately need our assistance as these horrific wildfires rage across Southern California,” said State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond. “In times of crisis, Californians consistently demonstrate their resilience and generosity as we continue to deal with the effects of climate change. Let’s continue to unite and support those in need as they work to stay safe and rebuild.”

The California Department of Education will work with the disaster-relief fund to distribute resources to school communities impacted by the wildfires, according to a press release from the department. Donations are tax-deductible. 

School leaders at schools that had to close because of wildfires can submit J to the CDE that will allow them to continue to collect attendance-based funding. 

The CDE released  last year to help school district and charter school leaders navigate decisions about whether to close schools or remain open. The department also has additional resources for emergencies on its .  

Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, who came to the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant from Portugal, said this week the nation’s second largest district is preparing for the incoming administration’s planned mass deportations.

The district has begun mandatory training for staff in how to respond if federal immigration officers appear at or nearby schools, Carvalho said, and has produced ‘know your rights’ cards to be distributed to students, with directions on how to behave if approached by immigration agents.

But LAUSD can only do so much to combat the fear and anxiety felt by the district’s immigrant families, the superintendent said Monday at a press conference to discuss the measures.

“No child of any age should face that awful, disturbing condition,” said Carvalho. “That is why we’ve created safe spaces in our schools for our students to come together.”

Since 2017 LAUSD has had a policy to not voluntarily cooperate with immigration enforcement actions by federal agencies and in November school board members to reaffirm LA Unified’s status as a sanctuary district.

School officials do not collect or share information about the immigration status of students and their families, Carvalho said, and federal agents will be denied access to schools unless they possess proper judicial warrants.

President-elect Trump, who takes office on Jan. 20, has promised to begin his second administration with widespread federal enforcement action to remove undocumented people from US cities, possibly with help from the military.

LAUSD officials do not keep records of students’ immigration status. About 15% of the district’s students are English language learners, and about 13% of students speak Spanish as their primary language.

According to the Migration Policy Institute, about students enrolled in California public schools are undocumented. Nearly in California have at least one undocumented parent, according to the National Center for Children in Poverty.

The Department of Homeland Security designates schools as where immigration enforcement should be avoided. Federal enforcement action at schools was limited in the first Trump administration.

But the president-elect has vowed to step up enforcement in his second term.

Evelyn Aleman, founder of Our Voice, a parents’ group which advocates for LA Unified’s low-income and Spanish-speaking families, said immigrant families in LA are living in fear of what may come when Trump takes office.

Even those here legally are concerned their immigration status could be rescinded, Aleman said.

“Right now, there’s a lot of anxiety and fear in our communities,” said Aleman. “We don’t really know what’s going to happen, and it’s that uncertainty that makes everyone so nervous.”

Aleman said even the threat or presence of immigration enforcement near schools is enough to discourage students from attending classes.

When federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in 2017 after he dropped his daughter at school, Aleman said, immigrant families in the area stopped sending their kids to class.  

Immigrant families use text messaging and social media to warn each other of the presence of ICE agents in their neighborhoods, said Aleman.

For weeks, she said, immigrant families in Los Angeles have been meeting via Zoom, over the phone and in person to discuss what to do if enforcement ramps up when the president-elect takes office.

Meanwhile, state officials in California are also preparing protections for immigrant families.

State Attorney General Rob Bonta in December issued for how districts can comply with state law limiting state and local participation in federal immigration enforcement. he also published in case of contact with federal agents.

California lawmakers are also preparing new statutes. introduced in the state assembly last month would inhibit federal immigration agents’ access to schools. Another in the state senate would establish a “safe zone” of one mile around campuses.

Ana Mendoza, a senior staff attorney at American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and director of the organization’s , said that such efforts can offer real protections to immigrant students.

“Even though immigration enforcement happens in California, the federal government can’t come in and ignore the guardrails, violate due process and do what it wants,” said Mendoza. “The state can protect its citizens from federal government abuse, and individuals can also protect their rights.”

Having pledged to get rid of the U.S. Department of Education and get “woke” out of public schools, Donald Trump is returning to office. The coming year could start to reveal what these promises mean for American schools that face significant challenges, including looming building closures, stagnant student learning, and big questions about the very purpose of education.

Here are some of the education stories we’re watching in 2025.

What a Trump presidency means for schools

President-elect Donald Trump had some strong words for American schools on the campaign trail. He and “send education back to the states.” He also , an endeavor that presumably would require some bureaucracy to oversee American schools.

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With Trump returning to the White House, the big questions are whether he’ll follow through on campaign pledges — and whether American students will feel the difference in their classrooms.

Most observers think actually abolishing the U.S. Department of Education is unlikely. It would require an act of Congress, and there’s probably not enough votes. But the idea does seem to have more traction than in the past, and a bill that would — as envisioned in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — was recently filed by a GOP senator.

The Trump administration could also cut funding for or eliminate certain programs, and replace career bureaucrats with political appointees, all without getting rid of the department. Civil rights enforcement could also look very different.

Some Republican state leaders have associated with federal compliance. They envision but with fewer requirements around how to spend it.

Trump has also promised to roll back new Title IX regulations that treat discrimination against transgender studnets as a form of sex discrimination. Conservative parent groups and Republican attorneys general have already sued to block the new rules, which LGBTQ advocates saw as . Some conservatives want these cases to still go to the Supreme Court in hopes the court finds gender identity is not protected under laws barring sex discrimination.

Increased immigration enforcement also is . Reports indicate that limited immigration enforcement in schools, hospitals, and churches. . School leaders and advocates are trying to balance the reality that they may not be able to protect all students with the .

School closures are increasing, but not everywhere

Faced with declining student populations, higher staffing costs, and the end of federal pandemic relief money, districts around the country are closing schools — or doing serious fiscal gymnastics to avoid it.

The from 2023 shows school enrollment holding nearly steady from the year before, but still down 2.5% from pre-pandemic levels. Notably, while high school enrollment has stabilized, elementary enrollment is down, suggesting there’s no big rebound on the horizon. The ratings agency for 2025 due to falling enrollment and lower revenues.

Declining birth rates, gentrification, high housing prices, and more families opting for private school and home schooling have all played a role. In many cases, these trends were evident before the pandemic, but school districts used federal COVID relief dollars to shore up budget holes. In some cases they also added staff and raised teacher pay, exacerbating the fiscal crunch to come.

Already, leaders in , , and have voted to close schools. and are making plans to do the same.

The case of P.S. 25 in Brooklyn, New York, . New York City spends $45,420 per child to keep the 52-student school open, yet it struggles to afford art, music, or after-school programming.

But these decisions are often wrenching and . Citing lack of community support, Boston . So did San Francisco — and the . The Chicago school board put a , even as .

With school closures come questions of equity and fairness. In many cities, the schools with the lowest enrollment serve mostly students of color. But keeping those schools open might mean students don’t have the same resources as their peers in other neighborhoods. Some advocates have to give students a shot at a better education. That approach harkens back to education reform policies that have largely fallen out of favor.

Many school districts are also trying to limit layoffs, which could reduce the savings they see from school closures. Districts are also trying to find ways to maintain tutoring and counseling programs they started during the pandemic.

NAEP could add to discouraging post-pandemic scores

Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, are expected in early 2025. The tests were given in spring 2024 and will provide insight into the state of student learning four years after COVID school closures.

The results are much anticipated after a series of tests, studies, and analyses have painted a conflicting but often discouraging picture of student recovery. Most recently, a major international test showed that , with the declines concentrated among lower performing students. This widening gap between high- and low-performing students was .

Similarly, state and local test results show gaps based on income, race, and ethnicity. A found that students on average had recovered to close to pre-pandemic levels, a surprising outcome, but that analysis also found that academic inequality was growing.

Meanwhile, are showing delays, as are .

The big question going forward is: What are we going to do about the state of student learning?

Statewide efforts to improve math and reading instruction continue to gather steam, but for better or for worse, schools with low test scores don’t face many consequences. The research on aggressive school turnaround efforts is decidedly mixed. Democrats have largely backed away from test-based accountability, and Republicans are more focused on expanding school choice.

How states and Congress could expand school choice

Private school choice has exploded in recent years, with a dozen states now running universal or near-universal voucher or education savings accounts programs that give parents money to send their children to private school or educate them at home.

Trump’s election could give these efforts a boost. He’s promised to expand school choice, and Republicans in Congress are making another push on a federal tax-credit scholarship proposal championed by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos that could make billions available, including in Democratic states that have been hostile to vouchers and education savings accounts.

At the state level, many anti-voucher Republicans who had teamed up with Democrats to block private school choice lost their primaries as outside money poured into obscure legislative races. Now pro-school choice governors and lawmakers are making new pushes in , , , and elsewhere.

These coalitions could still fracture. A major voucher expansion seemed inevitable in Tennessee this year until disagreements over testing requirements and funding sank the deal. Now to expand them.

The meaning of high school is changing

Education advocates for years focused on getting more students to and through college. We still haven’t solved that problem, but a lot of the shine has come off “college for all.” Student debt concerns loom large, and there are widespread labor shortages in the trades. for , which is also being touted as a way to fight disengagement.

At the same time, states are ditching exit exams. This year Massachusetts voters overturned a requirement that students pass a standardized test to graduate high school, and starting in the 2027-28 school year. New Jersey — one of just six states to still have an exit exam — .

All of this is fueling a conversation about the meaning of high school, one that’s resurfaced periodically since the high school movement in the first half of the 20th century .

That played out in Indiana this year with the . An initial proposal called for to reflect that fewer Indiana students are attending college. To satisfy critics who said work requirements would make it , the state ultimately settled on a diploma that offers multiple pathways.

Other states, such as Colorado, are developing programs that alongside classroom learning.

But .

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.