Now, with the start of the next financial aid season less than three months away, the U.S. Department of Education won’t promise it can avoid a repeat.

The department is “working toward” opening the Free Application for Federal Student Aid on time and ensuring “a smooth experience,” a spokesperson told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, but dismissed last week’s bipartisan vote by the House education committee to legally enforce an Oct. 1 start as an unhelpful “political stunt.”

comes as financial aid officials are dealing with another delay hindering some students from receiving final aid packages for the fall. The complications have also deterred others from even applying for assistance. Completion rates remain below last year’s rate, suggesting enrollment will stay down this fall.

“Are we going to close the gap? It would be a really herculean effort,” said Bill DeBaun, senior director for data and strategic initiatives at the National College Attainment Network, an organization of college access organizations. Summer, he said, isn’t typically FAFSA season. But even increasing the rate by 3 or 4 percentage points would mean “tens of thousands of additional” students receiving funds for college. 

Members of Congress say forcing the department to release next year’s FAFSA on Oct. 1 will avoid the confusion and chaos that families and colleges endured this year. “Establishing a hard deadline … will provide students, families and schools with much needed clarity and stability,” Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, who chairs the House education committee, said before the July 10 vote.

Six Democrats on the committee who voted against the bill argued that Congress didn’t provide to help the department make the switch and predicted it could lead to even more errors. 

“I want FAFSA to work; we all want FAFSA to work,” said Virginia Rep. Bobby Scott, the ranking Democrat on the committee. “What we don’t want is for the department to rush to meet arbitrary deadlines and push out a FAFSA form once again that has the same technical problems.”

‘A lot of anxiety’

Schools that predominantly serve students whose parents are not U.S. citizens — the population most harmed by the FAFSA overhaul — have been especially stressed.

“It’s been a rollercoaster,” said Ingrid Fragoso, a counselor at KIPP Austin Collegiate in Texas. Only about 10% of the charter school’s students have parents with social security numbers. The redesign first blocked them from completing the form and then required  to submit it. “In the beginning, there was a lot of anxiety around how to help our students.”

At the peak of the chaos, in February and March, the counseling team phoned the department daily to troubleshoot issues for families. While waiting on hold, the counselors used a detailed grid of each senior’s schedule to quickly grab students from class when a department staffer came on the line. For parents with limited English skills, they held practice sessions prior to calls. Now, all 91 students going to four-year schools have received aid packages.

Some counselors and higher education officials say they’re beginning to see the streamlined FAFSA’s potential.

“I feel a lot better about where we’re at than I did a few weeks ago,” said Karen Krause, the executive director of financial aid at the University of Texas at Arlington. The FAFSA completion rate is up 4% compared to last year, bucking and national trends, and the staff was able to begin distributing aid offers in April — ahead of many other . “I do think it’s going to be a better process for students and families.”

When FAFSA works, it works quickly — sometimes in less than 10 minutes. Students and parents who have submitted the forms, she said, keep asking, “Is that all?” The education department also kept to conduct fewer reviews of students’ forms. At UT Arlington, that number dropped dramatically, from over 5,300 last year to under 200, Krause said. 

At the same time, her staff is grappling with a new setback — a backlog of corrections the department . Those revisions ultimately affect how much money colleges can offer students, especially those whose financial circumstances changed since they first applied.

“Say a family member loses a job or there are medical expenses,” explained Jill Desjean, director of policy analysis at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. In those cases, schools might issue a new offer to make tuition more affordable, but those figures won’t be official until the education department approves them. 

Currently, colleges can only one at a time.

“It’s manual and it’s way more work,” Desjean said. 

But they can’t submit them in bulk until next month, a time when students are usually preparing to register for classes and move into dorms. 

‘Answers for kids’ 

If higher education officials feel any sense of relief after such a stormy season, it’s partly because of their own work to ensure families don’t pay the price for FAFSA’s botched implementation. UT Arlington, for one, has waived late fees for students still waiting on federal aid and isn’t dropping them from summer classes if they can’t make tuition payments, Krause said.

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice declared a state of emergency over FAFSA, allowing students to apply for state aid without completing the federal form. The move made 17,000 students eligible for merit- or need-based aid, according to a state higher education commission.

And at the University of Florida, Mary Parker, vice president for enrollment management, created a special that offers low-income students up to $15,000 to tide them over until their federal aid comes through. If they end up qualifying for less federal aid than the scholarship covers, they won’t have to make up the difference.

That short-term fix impressed one university official who understands the strain on families with first-time college students.

“It will not be perfect, but [Parker] had enough in her budget to eat the cost of the margin of error. It was more important to prioritize first-generation students,” said Penny Schwinn, the former Tennessee education commissioner who now serves as vice president for the university’s “pre-K to pre-bachelors” initiatives. “K-12 and states are wrestling with this, and it was a really proud moment to see my colleague find innovative and immediate answers for kids.”

But colleges are taking risks when they use their own funds to lower tuition costs for students, said Desjean, with the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.

“Not all schools can afford to front their own money while waiting for the federal dollars,” she said. “But it’s great to see that those who are able are doing what they can to minimize harm to students.”

“You better grow eyes in the back of your head,” she said one person wrote in an email. “You’re going down,” wrote another.

Toy-Dragoni said the vitriol began to intensify after the pandemic shuttered classes at the Pennsbury School District in Bucks County. What began as anger over school closures and mask mandates quickly turned — amid national pushback to critical race theory — to outrage over the district’s diversity and equity efforts. A barrage of hateful and violent emails left Toy-Dragoni, the school board president, feeling harassed and threatened, including by people who lived in other states.

“It’s unnerving because someone is saying they want nothing but harm to come to you and they’re emailing you 30 times about it,” she told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. “You start to think ‘Well, how long are they going to wait for this harm to come to me?’”

As public education leaders from across the country come forward with stories about receiving death threats amid political strife over the pandemic and classroom lessons on systemic racism, a partisan feud has coalesced around the free-speech rights of infuriated parents. In a recent letter, the National School Boards Association warned of an “immediate threat” against school leaders and called on the Biden administration to clamp down on what it referred to as “domestic terrorism.” In a follow-up memo, Attorney General Merrick Garland instructed federal law enforcement to create a plan to combat a “disturbing spike” in threats against school board members. Republican lawmakers and conservative advocacy groups, meanwhile, have accused the Biden administration of stifling frustrated parents in violation of the First Amendment. 

The issue has highlighted a tension between ensuring school board members are safe while protecting the free-speech rights of aggrieved citizens.

Because of the Justice Department memo, parents are afraid to speak up at school board meetings due to a “poisonous chilling effect,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said during a Senate hearing Wednesday. And while the national school boards group has since used in its letter, Garland didn’t back down on efforts to investigate what he called an increase in violent threats against educators and other public servants. 

As the Senate hearing was underway, activists held a rally outside the national school board group’s headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia.

A spokesperson for the national school boards group declined to comment. Several state school boards groups, including the one in Pennsylvania, over the issue.

“It’s a rising tide of threats of violence against judges, against prosecutors, against secretaries of state, against election administrators, against doctors, against protesters, against news reporters,” Garland said. “That’s the reason we responded as quickly as we did.”

A ‘true threat?’

The Constitution doesn’t guarantee “a dialectical free-for-all,” and the Supreme Court has long held that true threats of violence are not constitutionally protected speech, said Clay Calvert, the director of the Marion B. Brechner First Amendment Project at the University of Florida. But the issue at hand, he said, isn’t “black and white.”

“There’s a difference between how we colloquially think of a threat versus the legal standards for what really is a threat, which are going to be much higher,” he said. 

Parents have a First Amendment right to criticize government employees through offensive speech, he said, and officials must analyze on a case-by-case basis whether someone’s speech goes beyond protected dialogue.

“A true threat is a statement that would place a person in fear of imminent bodily harm or death,” he said, but does not include “political hyperbole.” In a 1969 case, the Supreme Court who was arrested after he said that if he were drafted into the Vietnam War and forced to carry a rifle, “the first man I want to get in my sights” is then-President Lyndon B. Johnson. The statement was crude political hyperbole rather than a true threat, the court ruled. The line between true threats and hyperbole, Calvert said, are not always clear and the Supreme Court has yet to offer a concrete definition. He said that police often err on the side of silencing speakers in the interest of public safety and debating the issue in court later.

Meanwhile, police departments are “always walking the tightrope” when investigating whether someone’s statements go beyond those permitted by the Constitution, said attorney John Driscoll, a former New York City police officer who served 11 years as head of the NYPD Captains Endowment Association. Officers are in charge of preventing immediate threats and most departments employ legal experts who determine whether someone broke the law, he said.

“You can voice your opinion, even if you’re the only one who thinks that way, but you don’t have the right to physically threaten and intimidate people,” said Driscoll, who taught constitutional law at NYC’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He said the tense political environment has made it more difficult for officers to do their jobs. “Because of social media, the schism in the country has gotten a lot more extreme on both sides. There doesn’t seem to be too much moderation and police, as usual, are stuck in the middle trying to navigate this and protect people at the same time.”

But Toy-Dragoni, the Pennsylvania school board president, said the statements she’s faced reached the bar of being considered death threats and were clearly designed to incite intimidation. Among the messages, she was warned to “sleep with one eye open,” and that “we will never stop until you are done.”

“It’s a level of hate, it sets you on edge,” she said. “But did they straight up say ‘Next week I’m going to kill you?’ No. But I’ve never heard of anyone saying that to anyone ever, even when they do get killed by that person.”

Threats reported nationwide

The messages delivered to Toy-Dragoni are part of a national trend. School board members have reported receiving threatening letters, being followed and screamed at in board meetings. 

After Las Vegas school district employees were mandated to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, the school board president saying she should be hanged or shot. In New Jersey, two board members in the mail with their photos in the crosshairs of a gun.

Sami Al-Abdrabbuh, chair of the Corvallis Board of Education in Oregon, also highlighted several incidents this year that he perceived as death threats. On the same day his campaign sign was discovered at a local shooting range with bullet holes, he said a man showed up outside his friend’s house and asked “Where is Sami? I want to kill him and I’m going to kill you if you don’t tell me where he is.”

Local police were notified of the incident but have not arrested a suspect, Al-Abdrabbuh told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, and a friend who served in the Navy helped him develop a safety plan.

“Make sure, before you leave the house, look from the window and make sure you can go to your car,” he said. “Before I enter my house I have a way to make sure nothing has been tampered.”

Protests in other communities have grown so raucous that they prevented school boards from conducting official business. That energy and activism is being harnessed by conservatives and Republicans, particularly Virginia gubernatorial candidate Glen Youngkin, who has with Democrat Terry McAuliffe in next week’s election.

In , Calvert of the University of Florida called public comments at government functions like school board meetings “perhaps the purest form of citizen political expression” â€” the precise speech the First Amendment sought to protect. The Constitution doesn’t enshrine a public platform before school boards and other public bodies and they can impose certain rules so long as they’re “content neutral” and apply to all speakers evenly. For example, “time, place and manner” restrictions can limit how long speakers occupy the podium and can prohibit people from restricting government bodies from carrying out business. 

“Interrupting does nobody any good,” Calvert said. “It’s the heckler’s veto notion that the audience should not have the ability to heckle or drown out the speaker.”

During Wednesday’s Senate hearing, Republican lawmakers repeatedly noted a concern that the Justice Department memo could have a chilling effect on parents’ free-speech rights and that federal intervention was unnecessary. Those concerns mirrored a letter from 17 state attorneys general earlier this month, accusing the Biden administration of “seeking to criminalize lawful dissent and intimidate parents into silence” in violation of the First Amendment.

Garland maintained that his memo only focused on threats and violence and drew a clear distinction between such messages and constitutionally protected speech. 

“It makes absolutely clear in the first paragraph that spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution,” he told lawmakers. “That includes debate by parents criticizing school boards.” 

Education activist Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, said it’s important for parents to remain engaged and they must not shy away from making themselves heard at school board meetings. In just the last six weeks, Rodrigues has attended a dozen school board meetings across the country where parents didn’t focus on mask mandates or critical race theory. Instead, she said they were concerned about unreliable school transportation and food shortages in cafeterias. Yet those voices, she said, are being drowned out by “people who are behaving badly and who are exercising their anger in ways that are really unproductive.” 

“Parents have really deep, serious concerns about what is happening right now with our kids that have nothing to do with the culture war,” she said. “Parents are showing up to have that conversation but it’s sexier to show white parents that are losing their minds at a microphone. It’s heartbreaking because we have real, serious and sober work to do to help our kids recover from this pandemic.”

For Toy-Dragoni, parent outrage during the pandemic forced her to reconsider her place in education policy. She said she sought her seat on the school board because she’s a mother who wanted to create additional afterschool activities in her community but will no longer serve on the board after this year. She decided not to run for reelection after the pandemic prompted parental uproar in her community. But now, after the situation has gotten even worse, she said she regrets the decision to step aside. 

“Having gone through all of this, I would have run again so that they wouldn’t feel like they ran me out of town,” she said. “This is 100 percent part of a national agenda to get decent people out of local office by making it absolutely miserable for them.”

The National Teacher of the Year program is a unique fixture in America’s education landscape — an annual, highly publicized recognition of excellence in the art of teaching, complete with a national tour and a trip to the Rose Garden. One day you’re leading a tenth-grade biology seminar; the next, you’re a combination Kennedy Center honoree and a World Series winner.

The selection process continues in 2021 even in the middle of an utterly atypical school year, Nevada, North Carolina, Utah, and Washington, D.C., awaiting a final decision from the Council of Chief State School Officers, which has conferred the award since 1952. The winner will be granted access to leadership training, influential policy networks, and a platform to discuss the issues and students they care about for the next 12 months.

But where are these professional exemplars coming from? A new study examines the characteristics of Teachers of the Year over the last three decades, finding that winners disproportionately teach in schools with lower-than-average numbers of low-income kids. Both at the state and national levels, underrepresented teachers include those working with special-needs students, those who teach in elementary and middle schools, and those employed by charter schools.

Lead author Christopher Redding, a professor of educational leadership at the University of Florida, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ in an interview that little previous research focused on the selection process for Teacher of the Year. Given the rarity of education policies and institutions that place educators in leadership roles, he noted, that made it a ripe area for investigation.

“We structured the study to treat the program as something that deserves attention in and of itself,” Redding said. “You want to have a large role for teachers to be able to advocate for the profession, and at least as the program is designed now, it’s really trying to be a vehicle to accomplish that aim. So it seems like we should be asking who is going to have the opportunity to speak on behalf of the teaching profession.”

Redding and co-author Ted Myers used publicly available information to identify over 1,600 state and national Teachers of the Year — each year, the CCSSO picks finalists and an ultimate national winner from the ranks of state Teachers of the Year, who are themselves selected by their districts and state education agencies — between 1988 and 2019. Matching each winner to their respective schools, they used data from a pair of ongoing, nationwide school surveys to compare the Teachers of the Year against the wider population of American educators.

The results show that the winners, and the places they work, are disproportionately drawn from a few categories. Thirty percent of recent National Teachers of the Year have been English instructors, while 23 percent have taught social studies; those percentages are, respectively, three and four times greater than the share of those teachers in the American teaching ranks. No National Teachers of the Year have taught health, foreign languages, or career and technical education, and just one (Tabatha Rosproy, ) has been an early childhood educator.

The authors specifically cite special education staff as being overlooked; while 10 percent of teachers in their nationally representative sample worked with special-needs students, only 3 percent of state-level Teachers of the Year did. Given the pronounced differences in training, credentialing, and work responsibilities between those working in the field versus their peers in general education classrooms, the authors argue, it is reasonable to ask whether their professional concerns will find a voice in the program’s advocacy efforts.

Schools where winners worked tended to be much bigger than other schools in their state, enrolling 415 more students on average. That’s explained somewhat by the fact that Teachers of the Year are generally more likely to come from high schools — some 46 percent of all winners, compared with 20 percent of teachers nationwide. And while charter schools were underrepresented by about three percentage points among those producing Teachers of the Year, magnet schools were slightly overrepresented.

Most strikingly, schools where Teachers of the Year were selected also enrolled 8.4 percent fewer low-income students (those eligible for free and reduced-price lunch) than other schools in their state and award year. In 26 years out of 32 studied, award recipients also worked in schools with smaller shares of minority students than the state average, though the disparity in that instance was narrower (1.7 percentage points).

It’s unclear what factors might explain the trends in selection. The weight of research evidence indicates that top-performing teachers are in comparatively affluent schools and districts, while schools that disproportionately enroll more low-income and non-white students tend to hire younger staff with much less classroom experience. Whatever the cause, in Redding’s view, that demographic mismatch raises the question of whether the Teacher of the Year program — one of only a few elevating the voices of school employees, and by far the most prominent — can fully represent the views of most teachers.

“What stands out the most is that it does really seem like teachers from high-poverty schools are less likely to be selected,” he noted. “If that shapes the issues that are being [raised], it underrepresents the ones that might be of most concern to teachers working in high-poverty schools.”

Over the last few years, National Teachers of the Year have increasingly found themselves either willing or reluctant participants in the national conversation around education politics. When Boston charter school teacher Sydney Chaffee received the award in 2017, members of the Massachusetts Teachers Association voted down a motion to offer her congratulations even though she was the state’s first national winner. More recently, 2019 National Teacher of the Year Rodney Robinson Donald Trump after the president declined to attend his award ceremony in person. He has for tweeting out a joke calling for violence against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConell.

But the most famous example is that of 2016 winner Jahana Hayes, who used her year of notoriety to begin a political career that has now taken her to Congress.

Sarah Brown Wessling, the interim director of the National Teacher of the Year program (and herself the 2010 National Teacher of the Year), told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ via email that the Council of Chief State School Officers was “constantly striving to improve the program and our supports to teachers.”

“CCSSO is proud of state efforts to diversify the selection of State Teachers of the Year, and of the national Selection Committee’s attention to selecting finalists and National Teachers of the Year who can represent teachers and students across the country. Recent National Teachers of the Year have taught in a variety of settings representative of America’s schools and students, from preschoolers in a small town to immigrant and refugee high school students in larger cities.”