It makes intuitive sense: Smaller districts with fewer kids need fewer schools. A district with 40,000 students operates many more school buildings than a district with 20,000, which in turn runs more than a district with 10,000. With widespread enrollment declines (for example, California’s school-age population is ), many districts are now grappling with whether to close one or more schools.

What’s the forcing factor for school closure decisions? Money, of course.

District revenues, for the most part, are tied to the number of students a district serves. Enrollment has fallen in many districts, but during the last three or four years, federal pandemic dollars more than made up for the reductions in funding associated with those declines. Many districts have had plenty of cash on hand to keep running a fleet of under-enrolled schools. But federal relief dollars will dry up this fall, and it’s increasingly unlikely that the state will fill the gaps. That’s prompting shrinking districts to grapple with whether they can still afford to operate all their schools.

Mostly what a district saves when closing a school is in staffing costs. Closing three schools can save the costs of three principals, three librarians, three nurses, and so on, and even some teaching positions where students can fill empty seats elsewhere in the district.

At Edunomics Lab, our rule of thumb is that when a district has under-enrolled schools, closing 1 of every 15 schools. There may also be nominal savings in facilities, but labor is far and away the largest portion (85-95%) of the budget, and savings there will be more consequential over the long term.

But not every closure brings layoffs. Where are the savings if the district isn’t issuing pink slips?

Typically, the savings come from downsizing the district’s overall staffing counts with attrition. Often, the district can move staff from the closing school to fill vacancies emerging in other schools as staff leave on their own (thus avoiding layoffs). When a principal retires in one school, the district may move a principal from the closing school over to fill that spot. The cost reduction comes from not rehiring to fill those vacancies. If the leaders choose instead to keep all schools open, then the district has little choice but to rehire to fill each departing principal, nurse, librarian and so on to keep the larger number of schools running.

Maintaining under-enrolled schools drains funds from all the district’s schools, not just the under-enrolled ones. Each district operates on a fixed revenue pool. Spending on principals, librarians and nurses in one or more half-empty schools means spending less on something else. It’s like having a fixed amount of frosting while trying to cover too many cupcakes. In the end, all the cupcakes end up with less frosting. For schools, that means they’ll start to see cutbacks to music, electives, AP courses, athletics and other supports as the district uses its limited funds to prop up the under-enrolled campuses.

Take the Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, where the district spends an average of about $23,000 per elementary student at each of its higher-poverty schools. As the graph below shows, a few of its tiniest schools are drawing down over $34,000 per student from LAUSD’s fixed pool of funds. The higher price tag means less cash available for all the other schools in the district. (This information is available for all districts .)

Of course, closure decisions shouldn’t focus on money alone. For instance, districts may consider whether there are other nearby schools for displaced students to attend. Also relevant is whether the school is effective in its core mission. In the graphic above, some of the higher-priced under-enrolled schools are below the average performance line for higher-poverty schools. Not only are these schools expensive, but it also matters if that money isn’t delivering value for students.

It’s also important to remember that not every small school has an outsize price tag. If a small school is able to operate cost-efficiently (meaning it has the same per-pupil costs as other similar schools), then closing it won’t likely save much at all. For a small school to be cost-efficient, it probably isn’t staffed in the same way as other schools. Maybe the principal also teaches a class, or the counselor is also the Spanish teacher. Or maybe the school uses some online options for electives or it operates as a multi-age Montessori model, or something else. And if it is demonstrating higher results for kids (meaning it is in that upper left quadrant on the graph), there’s even more of a case to leave it alone. What’s relevant here is that the small school isn’t draining funds from other schools, and is providing good value for the dollar.

School closure decisions are never easy for any community, regardless of what the numbers say. But it’s the leaders’ responsibility to be good stewards of funds and ensure all students are served well. Assessing which schools are most able to leverage their money to maximize student outcomes can help leaders bring transparency to that difficult process.

This analysis originally appeared at .

The Montana Legislature may consider “minor” changes to statutes related to public charter schools during its 2025 session following a recent court order, said a legislator and chairperson of an education committee.

But 18 schools are slated to open this year, according to the Office of Public Instruction.

Rep. Dave Bedey, R-Hamilton, said Thursday he believes the bill that opened the door for more charters is clear as written.

“At the end of the day, I’m just gratified that schools across the state are going to be able to put these innovative programs into place without delay,” Bedey said.

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In the 2023 session, the legislature approved House Bill 549, which eased the way for more charter schools through the public school system. However, filed this spring alleged the Office of Public Instruction was throwing up roadblocks.

Last month, a Lewis and Clark District Court with the Office of Public Instruction’s interpretation that certain prerequisites needed to be met to get the charter schools off the ground, such as a parental petition and approval from county commissioners.

The legal dispute took place as students made plans to attend the new schools, but educators alleged the argument over how to open them meant likely delays.

Last week, the court signed off on an agreement between the plaintiffs, the Montana Quality Education Coalition, and defendants, Superintendent Elsie Arntzen and the Office of Public Instruction, that resolves some of the fight.

In the stipulation, the Montana Quality Education Coalition agreed Arntzen and the OPI had implemented processes that allow the schools to start operating by July 1, 2024, and that they were in compliance with the court’s order for a preliminary injunction last month.

The Montana Quality Education Coalition describes itself as made up of more than 100 school districts and five education organizations and one of the largest education advocacy organizations in Montana.

The agreement the judge approved acknowledges the preliminary injunction from April 17 remains in effect unless the court terminates it or the legislature amends relevant statutes. It also dismisses outstanding claims.

In an email this week, the Office of Public Instruction notes that as of May 13, it had opened 15 of 18 schools enrolling students this year.

“The OPI is working with one school to correct some of the information that was submitted and is waiting on applications from two schools,” the agency said in an email. “One of the approved public charter schools will not open until the fall of 2025.”

Rep. Bedey, chairperson of the interim budget committee on education, said Thursday he doesn’t believe amendments are needed, although small changes are possible.

Rather, he said a plain reading of HB 549 clearly indicates the approval process for schools, the authority of the Board of Public Education, and the duty of the Office of Public Instruction.

All the same, Bedey said the legislature has an opportunity to make “some minor changes” to make the intentions of the bill “crystal clear and remove any ambiguity” given some people had a “contrary reading” of it.

At a committee meeting in March, legislators voted 6-2 to send a telling her she was failing students and not meeting her Constitutional duties related to HB 549 and other educational programs legislators had supported.

The Montana Quality Education Coalition filed the lawsuit later the same month.

“It’s regrettable that this issue had to go to the courts for resolution because the meaning of the law was clear,” Bedey said. “It’s regrettable that we were unable to convince the superintendent of that when her lawyer appeared before us in a committee meeting in March.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Daily Montanan maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Darrell Ehrlick for questions: info@dailymontanan.com. Follow Daily Montanan on and .

The state won’t allow satanists to take advantage of a new law allowing religious chaplains to serve as counselors in public schools for students whose parents approve, Gov. Ron DeSantis said Thursday while signing the legislation.

The governor also predicted the state would prevail if the new law draws a legal challenge over separation of church and state concerns.

“It’s our view that if school districts want to bring in chaplains to offer voluntary services, they’re within their right to do so. But there’s been a lot of confusion about that, about what’s permitted and what’s not. This legislation clarifies that, yes, school districts and charter schools have the authority to allow volunteer chaplains to be on campus and provide additional counseling and support to students,” DeSantis said during a bill-signing ceremony at Tohopekaliga High School in Kissimmee.

Students with problems may benefit from “some soul craft,” he added.

“It’s totally voluntary for a parent or a student to participate. No one’ s being forced to do anything. But to exclude religious groups from campus, that is discrimination. You’re basically saying that God has no place. That’s wrong. That’s not what our Founding Fathers intended,” DeSantis said.

“Some have said that if you do a school chaplain program that, somehow, you’re going to have satanists running around in all our schools. We’re not playing those games in Florida. That is not a religion. That is not qualified to be able to participate in this. So, we’re going to be using common sense when it comes to this. You don’t have to worry about it.”

Representatives of the Satanic Temple that they intend to take advantage of the law. The group claims .

Counseling

The measure, , allows schools to authorize religious figures to offer counseling on campus. They would publish lists of these chaplains “to provide support, services, and programs to students as assigned by the district school board or charter school governing board,” the legislation says.

“Parents must be permitted to select a volunteer school chaplain from the list provided by the school district, which must include the chaplain’s religious affiliation, if any,” the law adds.

The legislation doesn’t outline qualifications for the volunteer chaplains other than passing a background check.

The governor also signed , which allows “” to address and recruit students with their parents’ consent. The state law refers to a list of groups designated by Congress, including the Boy Scouts of America, Girl Scouts of the United States of America, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, and the Civil Air Patrol.

DeSantis reflected on the chaplains he encountered while in the U.S. Navy, some of them on the front lines.

“I think that model of just having this available as part of the services that you’re providing like we do in the military, we should be doing the same for our students here in school.”

Veto Urged

Regarding chaplains, groups including the ACLU, Interfaith Alliance, and National Education Association on ground that the program would allow religious indoctrination. The ACLU of Florida urged DeSantis to veto the bill.

DeSantis seemed primed for a fight.

“What the ACLU is basically saying is that it’s OK to discriminate against religious organizations. They think the church should be a second-class citizen. They think you should not have the same access to come to campus that any other student organization or other types of groups would have, that it’s an inferior status,” he said Thursday.

“The First Amendment was enacted to prevent that. The First Amendment was enacted to ensure that people weren’t discriminated against on the basis of religion or the basis of their faith. So, I think it’s a bogus challenge. I do not think it’s gonna go anywhere,” he continued.

The Legislature crafted the bill, DeSantis said, so that “if this is something that you don’t want, it doesn’t affect you at all and you don’t even have to worry about it.”

The Phoenix reached out to the ACLU for comment but hasn’t heard back yet.

Christian Nationalism

The governor appeared to endorse arguments proffered by Christian nationalist writer David Barton, who said that the writers of the Constitution favored an active role for religion in government. Other scholars have , and Barton’s publisher withdrew his 2012 book, “The Jefferson Lies,” on the ground that “basic truths just were not there.”

“When education in the United States started, every school was a religious school. I mean, that was just part of it. Public schools were religious schools,” DeSantis insisted. “You know, there has been things that have been done over the years that veered away from it, that original intent. But the reality is, I think what we’re doing is really restoring the sense of purpose that our Founding Fathers wanted to see in education.”

The ACLU of Florida issued a written statement.

“Public schools are not Sunday schools and chaplains are not school counselors. Allowing chaplains to assume official positions — whether paid or voluntary — in public schools as counselors or other support staff will undermine this right by creating an environment ripe for evangelizing and religious coercion of students in violation of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” the organization said.

“Across the country, families and students practice a wide variety of faiths, and many are nonreligious. All should feel welcome in public schools. Even well-intentioned chaplain policies will undermine this fundamental premise of our public-education system and violate our longstanding First Amendment principles.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on and .

During the height of the pandemic, states received nearly $122 billion in Elementary and Secondary Schools Emergency Relief (ESSER III) funds to address student academic, social, emotional, and mental health needs. North Carolina received $3.6 billion, on top of previous federal Covid relief dollars.

Now, districts must spend those funds by Sept. 30 — a deadline coming to be known as “the funding cliff.” On Monday, officials from the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) presented a to state lawmakers at a House education reform meeting.

The toolkit seeks to help districts with “data-driven financial decision making for post-ESSER spending,” per DPI’s presentation.

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“The toolkit is built to really support leaders in public schools as they think about the end of ESSER funding,” said Dr. Michael Maher, DPI’s deputy state superintendent. “The idea is we want districts to be able to have the toolkit to have really good conversations about how they spent their money, and whether those funds were effective or not.”

States received during the pandemic. The first round — roughly $13.2 billion — largely went toward personal protective equipment and devices for students to safely reopen schools. The second and third rounds — nearly $123 billion — were a little more flexible, but were intended to support academic and mental health at schools as they recovered from Covid.

DPI’s toolkit is specifically designed to help discussions between district leaders like the superintendent (or charter school leader), chief financial officer, and administrators with budgetary responsibilities. DPI presented the toolkit to superintendents across the state last month, Maher said, and is also hosting in February.

Districts should not include any one-time expenditures in their ROI discussions, per the presentation. Interventions that might be discussed in this process include high-dosage tutoring, summer learning initiatives, and robotics programs.

“The expectation is that the district now really has to make a decision about whether or not to continue an intervention,” Maher said. “In essence, this is what we’re trying to do, is give them the best available data that we can to help them drive themselves to the right decision for their given school, for their given context.”

Here are a few strategies the presentation identified for continuing initiatives currently funded through federal relief funds:

• Apply for specific grant funding, from private or federal sources.
• Request an increase in local funding from county commissioners.
• Use an innovative approach of “braiding” or overlapping federal funds.
• Identify funding from within current budget.

You can view DPI’s full presentation , and its full toolkit . Check out DPI’s dashboard’s for ESSER spending by school district .

More on remaining funds, cliff

In March 2021, State Superintendent Catherine Truitt created the Office of Learning Recovery and Acceleration to help find and make evidence-based decisions regarding recovery from lost instructional time during the start of the pandemic — with a large focus on how to spend ESSER funds well.

The state received roughly $6 billion total in federal Covid funds for K-12 education, Maher told lawmakers. Approximately $1.3 billion of North Carolina’s ESSER III funds remained to be allocated as of Oct. 31, according to

DPI’s toolkit includes a starting point for districts of last December through the end of this month. During this time, the presentation says, districts should convene a team to focus on evaluating ESSER spending. The toolkit presentation includes the following questions:

• What is the PSU’s risk for a dramatic fiscal cliff post-ESSER?
• What initiatives/programs/expenditures will different groups of stakeholders be most interested in sustaining post-ESSER?
• What are the PSU’s top 2-3 priorities and which expenditures most support those priorities?

Districts should obligate all their funds by April or May of 2024, Maher said. This is to ensure no funds get reverted back to the federal government after the September deadline.

An  issued in March 2023 identified 15 states facing the most complex challenges with the cliff. North Carolina was one of them.

However, a recent FutureEd  found that North Carolina school districts — especially in rural regions — generally spent more of their ESSER funds on short-term staffing fixes than long-term personnel commitments. “This decision could potentially ease their fiscal pain when the funds run out,”

On Monday, , asked Maher about how DPI is approaching planning for the replacement of technologies funded in the last few years through ESSER dollars.

“The technology, after two or three years, it’s just outdated. And that’s my big concern with the direction we’re headed in right now,” Biggs said. “If we can’t keep up with our students and our parents, they’re gonna find somewhere where they can keep up.”

Last month, DPI also gave  to the education reform committee That report showed that 114 of 115 school districts currently have one device per student. This allows students to take devices home with them to help with studying and homework.

However, 89 of 115 districts have reported they do not currently have sufficient resources “to sustain their refresh cycles for student devices beyond ESSER funding.” That’s more than 77% of districts.

Maher said that “a large chunk” of ESSER funds have gone toward HVAC systems, technology hardware and infrastructure, and access to broadband. He said DPI is still discussing how districts can “replenish technology as it becomes, in essence, out of date.”

, said good data will be key to good decisions moving forward.

“We’re going into post-Covid and those monies are running out,” Torbett said. “Hopefully, we have worked procedures out to help those agencies that used that money. For one time purposes should be okay, but there were some that have used the money for recurring expenses that we’ll be probably be hearing about in the days and weeks to come.”

If you have additional questions about DPI’s toolkit, email Rachel Wright-Junio, director of the Office of Learning Recovery & Acceleration, or Dr. Andrew Smith, the assistant state superintendent of DPI’s Office of Innovation.

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

The researchers found these schools, five out of six with high numbers of students of color and those on free and reduced-price lunch, asking how to offer students multiple pathways to postsecondary success, beyond just college, without lowering academic rigor or expectations. Chosen because they had a track record of innovation, the schools were questioning whether the accommodations given to students during the throes of remote learning or right after the return to in-person instruction were still serving them well.

In doing so, they are expanding their visions of success and reimagining their purpose, a move which researchers note could mark a departure from past understandings of schooling. They titled their study “A ‘Good Life’ for Every Student.”

“We saw high schools starting to adjust the goal posts, where they were taking on more responsibility for student success in the long run,” said Chelsea Waite, senior researcher at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University.

Between April 2022 and November 2023, Waite and her partner, Maddy Sims, from Columbia University’s Center for Public Research and Leadership, did 266 interviews with current high school students, graduates, parents, teachers and school administrators. Of the six schools, including some in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, four were traditional public and two were charter schools. 

Two were alternative programs for students who are overage and undercredited, pregnant or parenting or have a history of chronic absenteeism. These students, administrators said, would have once been considered a success if they just reached graduation. Three other schools were focused on increasing access to Advanced Placement and other rigorous academic courses and to “Early College Experience” offerings.

Participating students and families identified three major priorities for post-high school futures: happiness, fulfillment and stability. For some, this included college. For others, it meant immediately entering the workforce. The concept of a “happy life” included financial security, but no one interviewed said salary was the main determinant of success.

These schools were not just trying to get students across the finish line to graduation and then directly to college, Waite said. Instead they were asking “What are students’ individualized understandings of who they want to be as adults and what they want to be in the world?” And “How can we set them up with a corresponding, individualized plan that can help them on that path to a good life?”

Each of the six schools prioritized students graduating with a “good plan” in place, but educators also acknowledged that “there really hadn’t been full alignment on what constitutes or what defines a ‘good plan’ in practice,” said Sims.

Looking to provide roadmaps for other high schools, researchers asked what success means to school communities, especially for students who have been historically marginalized; what solutions schools were exploring to help all students achieve; and what obstacles they were facing in this attempt. 

Challenges they observed across schools:

• Educators’ concerns that increasing flexibility could decrease rigor
• Desire to give students room to define their own paths to success without perpetuating historical “opportunity gaps”
• Overreliance on traditional data (such as test scores or graduation rates), despite recognizing that these are insufficient to meaningfully track success

 Examples of innovations they observed schools introducing to ensure students were academically engaged and supported:

• Shifts to interdisciplinary units and coursework. For example, in one school students were learning about marketing, social science, financial literacy and ratios in a multi-week course on the loan industry. One administrator said, “I think we can do a much better job of trapping kids in the honey of each content area. To be a writer is such a powerful thing. To be a scientist is such a powerful thing.”
• AP courses and “Early College Experience” courses, which partner with local colleges and universities
• Shift in grading towards “grading for equity” practices that focus on measuring what students know rather than how they behave
• Moving toward using the classroom as a space of exploration of identity and student-driven learning. One school allowed students to build credit-bearing “personalized learning experiences,” essentially independent studies with an advisor
• Individualized mentoring and counseling. For example, two schools used a “primary person” model, in which each student has one adult mentor who they check in with regularly 
• Alternative approaches to discipline, such as “restorative circles,” which they defined as “conversations intended to repair relationships and find mutually-agreeable solutions, after a behavioral incident or conflict”

“We did feel ourselves really compelled to illustrate how many different actions— taken by different people at different levels of the system— are necessary to support high schools systemically to be the kinds of places that set students up for a life of their own choosing,” said Waite.

While most of the schools started this transformational work before 2020, the pandemic provided a unique opportunity to study high school reform, according to the researchers. These challenging few years “strengthened educators’ dedication to achieving new designs for high school,” while increasing their focus on race, racism and equity.

Waite and Sims noticed that educators and administrators across the board were reflecting on how to provide students with flexibility and support without compromising rigor and high expectations. As teachers welcomed students back from remote learning, they needed to prioritize creating a supportive environment to see young people through a disruptive, traumatizing period. But now they’re questioning what comes next.

In discussing leniency during the pandemic, one teacher said, “We didn’t teach coping mechanisms, we just protected [students].” Teacher turnover and burnout also made it hard to hold students accountable. At two of the schools studied, the teaching staff was so new that they didn’t know what the classrooms looked like before COVID hit.

As for “college for all,” the researchers found a number of reasons some students are moving away from that mindset, including financial stress and risk, burnout, high-stakes testing and applications, and an understanding that there are an increasing number of jobs that don’t require a college degree. Schools wanted to ensure that college doesn’t become a privilege for a select group of students, while also communicating that a wider variety of options exist. 

High schools alone cannot be held wholly responsible to address all of the challenges presented in the report, the researchers said. “Instead, what we really observed is the incredible power of bridge building between high schools and the higher education sector, as well as between high schools and local employers.”

Waite acknowledged the study’s limitations, noting that these six schools don’t necessarily represent the entire country or even the Northeast. “What we do believe is that the themes and ideas and challenges that came through in the research … are really widespread and challenging issues that feel relevant to many different kinds of high schools.”

Parents are increasingly considering new schooling options for their kids, according to a survey released this month. After exploring available choices, a smaller number of families ultimately selected new schools but a majority reported wanting more information about school choice.��

Both local and out-of-district traditional public schools remained popular among school-searching families, followed by charter schools, private and religious schools and homeschooling.

The results come from that included 2,595 parents of school-aged children conducted by The National School Choice Awareness Foundation and the National School Choice Resource Center (Navigate), which run . 

They began administering this survey right after COVID hit to learn more about how the pandemic impacted parents’ views around school choice and to determine how to best support families as they navigated their options. 

“The big takeaway here is families want options for their kids,” foundation CEO Andrew Campanella said. “They’re looking at their options, but the lens through which they view choice is significantly different than the way people involved in the policy world look at it.”

Overall, about three-quarters of parents surveyed said they’d at least “considered” new schools for a child last year— a 35% increase over 2022. Ultimately, 44% of parents selected a new school. Just under two-thirds reported wanting more information about their options.

The results were released to coincide with National School Choice Week, which began Sunday and will run through Jan. 27. They also come as public schools across the nation face enrollment declines of over 1 million students, according to an , which showed lasting disengagement from public schools. 

The National School Choice Awareness Foundation defines school choice as empowering parents to select the schools and learning environments that best meet their children’s needs including traditional public schools, charter schools and private schools.

They do not identify as a policy advocacy organization and say they do not promote one schooling option over another. Campanella, the CEO, previously served in a senior-level position at the American Federation for Children, a school choice advocacy group founded by the DeVos family that heavily lobbies for directing taxpayer money toward private school options.

There are a number of reasons that parents are researching new schools, according to Inga Cotton, the founder and executive director of San Antonio Charter Moms, a non-profit advocacy group that supports parents and caregivers as they explore schooling options. 

In San Antonio, for example, she hears from parents who are frustrated that their local public schools are not offering accelerated enough curriculum to prepare their kids for college. In other cases, families of color are grappling with the consequences of redlining and discrimination. In these areas in particular, it can be harder to access advanced coursework. 

Cotton said she also supports families who have kids with disabilities whose schools might not have the resources necessary to support their needs. Finally, some families are looking for schools with values that align with their own, including progressive ideologies, classical education or religious-centered learning. 

Other advocates point to a string of Republican states adopting or expanding tax credit scholarships, education savings accounts or vouchers, which they see as siphoning funds from public schools, coupled with a wave of partisan criticism of public schools and teachers fed by volatile conflicts over remote learning, mask mandates and classroom content.

The survey results note that “traditional public schools remain popular among school searching families” with just over half of parents considering new schools reporting that they visited, asked about or researched their local public schools. Just under 30% reported the same for public schools outside of their neighborhood. The numbers were slightly lower for charter schools (28%), private or faith-based schools (24%), homeschools (20%), and full-time online schools (22%). 

“This almost fake conflict between district-managed schools and schools that are in the public sector but not managed by districts … is really just a function of a policy debate,” Campanella said. “And it’s not what families are experiencing when they go to make their choices.”

Yet broadening the school choice label to include more controversial items like vouchers, which let parents use taxpayer money to send their kids to private schools, is an intentional choice conservative advocacy organizations are making, according to Joshua Cowen, an education policy professor at Michigan State University.

He believes that while there’s strong bipartisan support for a number of school choice policies, “there’s real skepticism on the use of public funding for private education in the K-12 space,” outside of the conservative base he defined as “Trump dead-enders” or “long-standing anti-government types.”

The National School Choice Awareness Foundation asserted, though, that “school choice is far from partisan, at least when it comes to parents making choices.” The evidence: parents who identified as Democrats chose new schools for their children last year at higher rates than Republican parents (56% to 40%), according to its survey.

A 2022 poll from , an opinion and research journal based out of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, found strikingly different results. ​​Support for the general concept of school choice was starkly partisan, according to their data, with 60% of Republicans and only 41% of Democrats expressing a favorable position.

This is a key example of how question phrasing can impact survey results. Particularly when surveys come from advocacy groups it is important to remain skeptical of data, not because they’re “cooking the books” but because questions can be leading, Cowen said. 

“If you ask, ‘Do you support taxpayer dollars going to church-based schools?’ you’re going to get a very different number than if you say ‘Do you think parents should get to choose within a wide variety of educational options for their kid?’” he said. “Clearly, the second one is going to sound a lot better: you’re going to get more support. And if your goal as an organization is to show numbers with more support, that’s the way you do it.”

The National School Choice Awareness Foundation did not explicitly ask about vouchers in its survey, which was delivered to Survey Monkey’s National Audience panel between Jan. 2-4. Campanella said the survey was solely focused on types of schools rather than mechanisms used to access them, such as vouchers.

He noted they used the survey results to help inform the over 27,000 events the foundation supports across the country for National School Choice Week.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation and Stand Together Trust provides financial support to The National School Choice Awareness Foundation and The 74.

In 2016, California Democratic state Assemblymember Sharon Quirk-Silva sat with then-California Gov. Jerry Brown at an event where he signed baseball-type cards featuring the image of his dog, Colusa.

But many of the recipients of the cards couldn’t read his cursive signature, Quirk-Silva recalled, much to the Democratic governor’s dismay. “The governor asked me what I did” before becoming a legislator, she remembered. “I said I was a teacher, and he said, ‘You have to bring back cursive writing.’”

After seven years of trying, she finally succeeded.

Last month, the California legislature unanimously passed and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law requiring the teaching of cursive or “joined italics” handwriting in grades one through six.

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While grandparents’ sprawling handwriting on birthday cards or treasured family recipes may spring to mind when many younger people think of cursive, some educators today think it’s a skill worth reviving even — or maybe especially — in an age when most kids spend hours every day on their smartphones. But others think students already have too many subjects to master and that their fingers belong on keyboards.

Some California teachers already were teaching cursive, but not usually in underresourced schools, Quirk-Silva said in an interview.

She argued cursive is valuable to read historical documents, increases writing speed and has become a popular way for teachers to make sure students are not using artificial intelligence to craft their written work.

Teaching cursive in public schools waned after the Common Core standards, which most states adopted, didn’t include cursive in the recommended curriculum. Critics of cursive requirements say time in the classroom could be better spent on new skills such as coding and keyboarding. And Quirk-Silva recalled that some younger lawmakers called the looping writing style “old-fashioned.”

Supporters recently have had some success in bringing it back, pointing to studies that show a link between cursive and cognitive abilities, including helping with reading and writing disabilities such as dyslexia and dysgraphia.

In May, New Hampshire Republican Gov. Chris Sununu signed a bill requiring schools to teach cursive and multiplication tables.

More than 20 states have implemented state directives to teach cursive in the past decade or so, according to Connie Slone, founder of MyCursive.com, a company that provides cursive learning materials to teachers and schools.

A few others don’t require cursive, but instead encourage it without specific mandates, according to the Zaner-Bloser company, another cursive instructional vendor.

But critics of teaching cursive remain skeptical. There’s “not much evidence that cursive matters,” said Morgan Polikoff, an associate professor of education at the University of Southern California.

“If you are going to spend time on some indication of written communication, keyboarding skills are more important,” Polikoff said. “In the scheme of educational policies, I’m not sure there’s a single topic I care less about. We’ve fallen behind during COVID, we’re dealing with chronic absenteeism, student mental health is in crisis, and we’re spending time on cursive? That’s what we’re mandating?”

The Indiana legislature and governor this year changed a bill that would have required cursive, amending it so that it now only requires a study of the use of cursive in public schools. An education department report is due Dec. 1.

Over the past few years, cursive bills have been introduced but not taken up in several states, Slone said, including Colorado, Minnesota and Washington.

The late William Klemm, a neuroscience professor at Texas A&M University, is widely cited by advocates for his article a decade ago in Psychology Today maintaining that learning cursive “is an important tool for cognitive development.” Cursive helps to train “the brain to learn ‘functional specialization’ — that is, the capacity for optimal efficiency,” he wrote.

A 2019 published by PLOS One and listed in the National Library of Medicine, found that “there is increasing evidence that mastering handwriting skills play an important role on academic achievement.”

And a 2020 from researchers in Norway made the direct connection between “writing by hand” and “synchronized activity” in a particular part of the brain “important for memory and for the encoding of new information and, therefore, provides the brain with optimal conditions for learning.” The study recommended that all forms of writing — printing, cursive and typing — be taught to strengthen “both cognitive development and learning efficiency.”

Suzanne McLeod, coordinator of educational leadership at Binghamton University, a state university of New York, said cursive developed into wide use during the quill pen-and-ink era before the 1800s. It was largely because quill pens tended to blot when they were lifted off the page, she said. That means centuries of historical documents are written in cursive, and historians have to be able to read it to do original research.

“Not to have an underpinning in basic cursive where the letters connect would mean that you would need remediation in that area,” she said. “You would find it absolutely unapproachable.”

In Michigan, Democratic state Rep. Brenda Carter this year succeeded in getting a bill through the state House that encouraged — though didn’t require — teaching cursive. There was virtually no opposition, she said. But the state Senate never took up the bill before adjourning.

Carter said she is seeking GOP backing for the measure and is encouraged because the state Department of Education supports it.

“Our young people are missing out on so much,” she said. “All of the founding documents are written in cursive. Where is our history if we can’t read this? Are we depriving future generations of our history?”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on and .

A new statewide survey shows that although most Hoosier kids attending private schools are continuing to learn cursive, far fewer Indiana public schools currently teach the writing style to younger students.

The Indiana Department of Education (IDOE) surveyed 1,770 schools across Indiana this fall. Of the 1,386 respondents, 91% of state-accredited non-public schools are teaching cursive writing, but only 52% of public schools reported teaching it.

The survey was part of an ongoing, yearslong push to bring cursive writing back to Hoosier schools, spearheaded by Republican Sen. Jean Leising. She said the new survey data indicates that many Hoosier students attending public schools are at a “clear disadvantage,” and vowed to renew her legislative efforts to require cursive instruction.

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“I have been an unwavering proponent of cursive writing in the Indiana General Assembly for more than a decade. My concerns originally centered around making sure our children could sign their names on legal documents and read historical texts, but it is now much larger than that,” Leising said in a statement Monday. “They need to have the necessary motor skills and strong cognitive ability to succeed academically and professionally, and learning cursive writing can only further support their development.”

“Opponents of cursive writing say schools should focus more on teaching typewriting skills in an evolving age of technology and online work,” she continued. “I argue, cursive is equally important, and we risk limiting development of student’s learning abilities by moving away from essential handwriting curriculum.”

Writing on the walls?

The “Cursive Writing Survey” was sent out in August and September to all schools and corporations teaching grades K-6. Local administrators had until Oct. 1 to submit their responses.

About 78% of all schools participated in the IDOE survey. Of the 1,386 schools that reported, 80.4% were traditional public schools, 16.7% were state accredited non-public schools, and 2.9% were charter schools.

Of those schools that responded to the survey, 58.4% — equal to 809 schools — reported that cursive writing instruction is taking place in their classrooms. In the majority of schools where cursive is taught, instruction is primarily administered to students in grades two through four. A majority of the instruction takes place in grade three, according to the IDOE analysis.

Cursive is more commonly taught in private schools, though.

Of the 230 non-public schools that responded to the survey, 210 reported that cursive writing instruction is taking place. To compare, 580 out of the 1,110 traditional public schools that responded to the survey reported current cursive instruction.

Still, the survey is not totally conclusive, given that 384 K-6 schools across Indiana did not respond. The public report also doesn’t indicate which schools participates — leaving it unclear how many students are represented in the study.

Leising wants cursive back

Cursive writing hasn’t been required in Indiana’s public schools since 2010 — something Leising, R-Oldenburg, has been working to change for years.

During the 2023 legislative session, her originally required traditional public and charter elementary schools to include some form of cursive writing curriculum for the state’s younger students.

Leising — who has filed similar bills in the last decade to no avail — pared down the final version of the measure to instead require schools to report to the state education department about whether cursive writing is part of the curriculum there. The IDOE was tasked with creating a report with that information.

Leising maintained during the session that many private schools in Indiana are teaching the writing style, but the majority of public schools are not.

This week, the senator again pointed to showing that writing in cursive heightens activity in certain parts of the brain tied to memory and encoding new information, which she reiterated” is integral to early childhood learning.” Other cited by Leising show children who wrote in cursive had better reading and writing skills compared to those who didn’t.

“While lawmakers look to tackle literacy during the 2024 legislative session, I plan to join this initiative by also advocating for cursive writing curriculum, since various studies show knowing how to write in cursive helps improve information retention and comprehension abilities — supporting the successful development of reading and writing skills,” Leising said. “It is clear our students need support — now more than ever — to build foundational reading, comprehension and writing skills for their future success.”

Critics of mandatory cursive instruction say students already have too many subjects to master and that they’re better off focusing on typing and coding.

Teaching cursive in public schools waned after the Common Core standards, which most states adopted, didn’t include cursive in the recommended curriculum. , pointing to studies that show a link between cursive and cognitive abilities, including helping with reading and writing disabilities such as dyslexia and dysgraphia.

Indiana isn’t the only state seeking to bring back cursive writing, however.

At least 22 states currently require cursive to be taught as part of the public school curriculum, according to the National Education Association. And the list is growing.

In October, the California legislature unanimously passed — and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed — a law requiring the teaching of cursive or “joined italics” handwriting in grades one through six.

Earlier this year, New Hampshire Republican Gov. Chris Sununu additionally signed a bill requiring schools to teach cursive and multiplication tables.

Indiana lawmakers return to the Statehouse next month for a non-budget session. Legislative leaders have not included cursive instruction in their 2024 priorities, but literacy-focused initiatives — especially those affecting grade three — are expected to top education policy efforts.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com. Follow Indiana Capital Chronicle on and .

A Franklin Circuit Court judge on Monday struck down a law allowing charter schools in Kentucky, ahead of an in next year’s legislature to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would allow public money to be spent on private schools.

Judge Phillip Shepherd declared 2022’s unconstitutional in a lawsuit filed by the , which represents 168 Kentucky school districts.

Shepherd wrote that charter schools are “private entities” that do not meet the Kentucky Constitution’s definition of  “public schools” or “common schools.”

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The “policy goals of the legislation are not at issue in this case,” wrote Shepherd. “Here, the only issue is whether the legislation runs afoul of the very specific mandates of the Kentucky Constitution governing public education and the expenditure of tax dollars.”

Shepherd concluded there “is no way to stretch the definition of ‘common schools’ so broadly that it would include such privately owned and operated schools that are exempt from the statutes and administrative regulations governing public school education.”

Common schools are supported by public taxes and all children within the district who meet age requirements of the school are allowed to attend it, the judge wrote. “The common schools must be open to every child, and operated, managed and fully accountable to the taxpaying public.”

“Under HB 9, charter schools — unlike common schools — are specifically permitted to impose enrollment caps limiting their enrollment to a number of children who will ensure ease of instruction through small class sizes,” Shepherd wrote. “Charter schools may turn away qualified children residing in the district. As set forth in the legislation, taxpayer supported charter schools are authorized to limit their enrollment, and to ‘conduct an admissions lottery if capacity is insufficient to enroll all students who wish to attend the school’.”

The ruling comes as a is seeking to become Kentucky’s first charter school. Gus LaFontaine, who owns , a pre-K to fifth-grade private school, was an intervenor in the lawsuit.

After the ruling, LaFonatine pointed out that 45 states, including those on Kentucky’s borders, offer “charter school options” and said that “we will continue to pursue judicial resolution that results in empowering all parents to participate in education freedom; even those that are not financially capable.”

Attorney General Daniel Cameron also intervened in the suit to defend the law.

Tom Shelton, executive secretary of the Council for Better Education, said “CBE appreciates the ruling from Judge Shepherd supporting our opinion that HB 9 violated our Kentucky Constitution. The constitution specifically prohibits the privatization of public funds. Public funds are for public purposes.”

Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, who has frequently voiced opposition to charter schools, vetoed House Bill 9 but the Republican-led General Assembly overrode it. Beshear was recently reelected to a second term.

The filed its lawsuit against Kentucky education officials in January seeking the law be ruled unconstitutional.

In December 2022, the Kentucky Supreme Court a Kentucky law creating a generous tax credit to help families pay for tuition at private schools. The which upheld a circuit court ruling by Shepherd, cited a long line of precedent reinforcing the Kentucky Constitution’s ban on the state financially supporting private schools.

did not advance in this year’s session but is expected to have much more support in 2024, when constitutional amendments will be on the November ballot.

After yesterday’s ruling, the Kentucky House Democratic caucus leaders issued a statement applauding the decision: The Kentucky Constitution is abundantly clear: The General Assembly can only authorize and fund public education. We said that in 2017, when charter schools were first approved; we said that again in 2022, when the law rejected today was passed; and we’ll say it once more in 2024, when there will be yet another attempt to route public tax dollars into private schools. Our belief is simple: Follow the constitution and give public education our undivided support.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com. Follow Kentucky Lantern on and .

These choices manifest themselves in a variety of ways, including how much money states provide for their public schools, how many people work in those schools and in what types of roles, and how teachers are recruited and trained. Here are five big differences: 

1. Per-pupil spending 

At the national level, public schools an average of $15,810 per pupil in 2019-20, not including debt or construction costs. But that figure hides tremendous variation across the country. Idaho and Utah schools, for instance, spent less than $10,000 per pupil, whereas Vermont; Washington, D.C., and New York schools spent upward of $25,000 per student. 

In real, inflation-adjusted terms, school spending nationally is 6% higher than it was a decade ago, and it’s up 28% over the last two decades. The gap between states is also growing over time. Over the last 20 years, the 10 lowest-spending states have increased their school funding by 16%, while the top-spending states have boosted theirs by 48%. 

These figures are not adjusted for cost-of-living differences, and it is clearly cheaper to live in Boise than in New York City. But other decisions are driving these spending differences as well. 

2. Student-to-teacher ratios 

According to the most recent , Vermont has the lowest student-to-teacher ratio in the country, at 10.5 students for every teacher. Maine, D.C., New Hampshire, New Jersey and New York were all under 12 to 1. The data are in terms of full-time equivalent employees, or FTEs, which account for the number of hours an employee actually works.  

In contrast, states in the South and West tend to have far more students per teacher. Oregon, Idaho, Louisiana, Florida, Alaska and Washington are all clustered together at just under 18 to 1. Alabama comes next, at 19 to 1, followed by California, Arizona and Utah at over 22 students per teacher. 

To put it another way, in per-student terms, Vermont public schools employ more than twice as many teachers as California, Arizona or Utah schools do. 

3. Total staffing levels 

Nationally, teachers make up just under half of all public school employees. But that ranges from 31% in Ohio up to 60% in Idaho. That is, Idaho’s investments in education are more likely to go to teachers, whereas Ohio’s are more likely to go to other types of staff. 

As with teachers, Vermont has the lowest student-to-staff ratio, with just 4.5 students for every full-time equivalent staff member. Maine, Connecticut, D.C., Ohio and New Hampshire are all below 5.5 students per school employee. Some of these states are among the most expensive places to live, but their staffing choices also make their schools more expensive.

On the other end, some states operate with much leaner staffing models. For example, public schools in Alabama, Arizona, Idaho and Washington schools all have 10 to 12 students per staff member. In other words, the typical public school in some states employs about half the staff as is common in other states.

4. Teacher preparation programs 

States also get their teachers through very different pathways. According to the 2020-21 , about 30% of educators in their first three years in the classroom came through an alternative certification program. 

Midwestern and Northeastern states tend to rely less on alternative routes and more heavily on traditional training. Among states with reliable data, Illinois, Massachusetts, Oregon, Michigan, Connecticut and Kansas all have less than 20% of their new teachers coming through alternative programs. 

On the higher end, more than half of all new teachers enter through nontraditional routes in Florida and Texas. New Mexico topped the list, with nearly two-thirds of all new teachers entering teaching in this way. These states may be making pragmatic decisions about local supply and demand, but relying more heavily on alternative programs also improves teacher and likely lowers for teachers, while it may come at the cost of .  

5. Teacher credentials 

Teachers are very well educated, and more than 60% have earned a master’s degree or higher by their third year in the profession ( of all American adults). 

But those national trends mask wide variation across the states. Only 30% to 40% of teachers in Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana and South Dakota have earned a master’s, versus 87% in Massachusetts, 91% in Connecticut and 96% in New York. 

In other words, the teaching profession looks very different depending on which state you happen to live in. What might appear weird to people in New York or Massachusetts may be standard practice for teachers, educators and schools in Florida or Arizona. As schools across the country work to re-engage students and get them back on track academically, it’s worth learning from these differences and understanding what can be ignored versus might be worth replicating.  

The , released in August by and research firm surveyed 900 Missouri voters about politics, schools and LGBTQ topics in education. Nearly a third of voters (29%) rated Missouri public schools as poor, markedly more than the 17% who did in June 2020.

Gary Ritter, dean of the university’s school of education, said the fact that Missouri voters are losing confidence in their schools isn’t a surprise — it’s also a finding that is reflected  

Ritter said like others across the U.S., Missouri voters saw their faith in education erode through the pandemic, as districts have struggled with remote learning and academic loss.

“We’ve had a peek into what goes on in crisis-mode school, when you’re trying to figure out how to deal with a pandemic,” Ritter told The 74. “So folks are slightly less confident in school performance and school quality, just as I think any of us would have guessed. Missouri looks like the country in that way.”

The poll, which began in 2020, is conducted online about every six months with U.S. residents who have registered to participate in YouGov web surveys. It has a plus or minus margin of error of 4 percentage points. Most questions are similar each time and are about issues that are top priorities to Missourians.

The latest poll included more questions about teachers in general, said Ashley Burle, chief of operations and research fellow at Saint Louis University. 

“One thing that I tried to connect is some of the issues related to teachers and more broadly connecting it to the teacher pipeline issues,” Burle said. “We know that there are issues that need to be addressed. There are things that need to be done to help the teacher pipeline get back on track, so I’d love to see us kind of make that more clear connection between a lot of those points in the future polls.”

Just over half (51%) of voters said they have “a great deal” or “a good amount” of trust and confidence in Missouri’s public school teachers. Less than one-third (28%) of voters said they had some trust while the remaining voters either said no or weren’t sure.

About 54% of voters viewed the K-12 teacher shortage as a problem in their community and a strong percentage of respondents (81%) think teacher salaries should increase. 

But only 35% said they would advise a young adult to become a teacher, while 45% said they wouldn’t and 20% weren’t sure.

The poll also conveys a slight openness to charter schools with 55% of respondents saying they believe charter schools should operate in all areas of the state and 52% saying they want them to operate in their own district. 

Ritter said currently most charter schools operate in the Kansas City or St. Louis metropolitan areas because of that controls where the schools, which are publicly funded but independently run, can be located.

Burle said she was surprised about the results regarding more controversial topics in the classroom, such as gender identity and sexual orientation.

More than half (56%) of voters said they approve of the discussion of sexual orientation in high school compared to 18% in elementary school. These results were similar for the discussion of gender identity. Roughly half of voters also opposed the banning of books that feature LGBTQ youth.

Missouri grappled with of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill during this year’s legislative session. The bill would have banned the discussion of gender identity or sexual orientation in schools, but it failed to pass.

“It was interesting to see the gradation in responses. We kind of think this is an all-or- nothing issue — either we teach these things in all the schools or we don’t teach them in any of the schools,” Burle said. “In fact, voters think, ‘Hey, actually, for older kids, in high schools in particular, we actually think it’s OK.’ I think it just shows you there’s a little bit of an area of gray.”

Ritter said he hopes policymakers will use the results to inform themselves about what Missouri voters find important. While Saint Louis University researchers are still analyzing the latest poll results, people can on the university website.

“We’re going to be digging in to say, what question should we double down on in the next poll? What do we want to learn?” Ritter said. “So we’ll be trying to figure out again how we can find interesting trends.”

State Republicans’ failure to reach agreement on the budget is “inexcusable” and “irresponsible” and will negatively impact North Carolina’s school children and educators, a group of Durham Democratic lawmakers said on Monday.

Durham’s legislative delegation took part in a series of statewide press conferences held to highlight the state of public schools as most students who attend traditional calendar schools prepare to return to classrooms. Thousands of year-round students are already in school.

The state budget is 45 days late and House Speaker Tim Moore has said lawmakers won’t likely have a budget in place until sometime after Labor Day, said Rep. Marcia Morey, a Durham Democrat.

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“Week after week this summer, we [Democrats] have been ready to go in and to do the work and to vote, but the Republican leadership has decided that their far away vacations and conferences are more important,” Morey said “This has got to stop.”

Without a state budget, Morey said educators can’t budget personal finances. Gov. Roy Cooper’s budget proposal and House and Senate spending plans all contain teacher pay raises.

“How do educators plan their own finances when they don’t know what their salaries will be?” Morey said.

Durham’s legislative delegation was joined by several local school board members and educators during their morning press conference in downtown Durham. Similar events were scheduled throughout the state.

Rep. Zack Hawkins, a Duham Democrat, said that underfunded schools impact academic outcomes. Teachers must be paid well and given adequate resources to educate children, Hawkins said.

“They [teachers] can’t bring to life science and math and all the things that they’re [children] are expected to learn, they can’t bring those things to life if they don’t have what they need,” said Hawkins, a former teacher.

Sen. Mike Woodard, a Durham Democrat, said that the state’s Republican leadership continues to disinvest in public education.

“This General Assembly has continued now a dozen years of disinvestment in our public education system, whether it’s through vouchers, whether it’s through failing to invest in our capital needs or whether its failure to invest in our most important infrastructure in our schools, which is our people,” said Woodard, who recently announced plans to run for Durham mayor.

Woodard said that expanding the school voucher program to allow access to the state’s wealthiest families will take more funding from public schools to hand over to largely unregulated private schools.

“They [Republicans] forget to tell you when the talk about choice with their voucher program is how many tens of millions of dollars go unused,” Woodard said. “Families aren’t using these things because what they realize is that vouchers sound good until you qualify for it and take it to a private school and find out that it only pays a small portion of the school’s tuition.”

A family can receive up to nearly $7,000 to send a child to a private school under the income-based Opportunity Scholarship program.

Woodard criticized Republican leaders for their failure to adequately fund school capital needs, particularly in rural counties that lack the tax base to pay for building needs with local money.

“Children cannot learn when their rooms are hot, cold, leaky or dirty,” Woodard said.

The press conference comes two days before lawmakers return to Raleigh to take up several key pieces of controversial��Republican-backed education legislation vetoed by Gov. Roy Cooper.

Rep. Vernetta Alston, a Durham Democrat, said local teachers worry that they can’t afford to stay in the profession.

“They say they simply can’t afford to stay in the career that they love and that staying requires them to take on more work and administrative roles than they were hired or trained to do in order to get the raises that they have already more than earned,” Alston said.

Minnie Forte-Brown, a former Durham school board chairwoman, said that it’s clear that educating children is no longer a priority for North Carolina.

“We need to do something that shows people that if you don’t care about our children, we’re going to show you that you need to,” Forte-Brown said. “Teachers in North Carolina have been at the bottom for so long that it doesn’t make sense.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. NC Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Rob Schofield for questions: info@ncnewsline.com. Follow NC Newsline on and .

In 2021, when Dade County Schools Superintendent Josh Ingle was in his first year on the job, his facilities manager came to him with an idea that seemed like a no-brainer: a program that would use federal funds to test his schools’ water fixtures for lead.

Previously, the district had paid a third-party business to test for lead, but Ingle decided to enroll all four of his district’s schools into the Clean Water for Georgia Kids program, which launched in 2021 and is available for free to schools and child care centers. The district received training videos and equipment on testing all of its sinks and water fountains.

“I mean, it’s a free opportunity to have your water tested, you know, and we deal with kids each and every day,” Ingle said. “My kids go to Dade County Schools. As a parent, I would want to know.”

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Doctors say no amount of lead exposure is safe, and children are especially vulnerable to lead poisoning, as even small amounts can accumulate in the body and cause problems with brain development, leading to decreased intelligence and behavior problems.

Lead in water is not detectable by taste or smell, and unlike other contaminants, it should be tested for at the tap rather than the water source or treatment plant. That’s because lead can enter the water through corroding pipes once it has already been treated.

When the results came back for Dade County, it was mostly good news. Most of the drinking fountains had no detectable lead, though some had slightly elevated levels. A few kitchen sinks and faucets in employee break rooms had higher levels, with one Davis Elementary kitchen hand-washing sink standing out at 13.47 parts per billion. Results for all participating schools and child care centers are available .

None of Dade County’s samples reached the 15 parts per billion threshold that requires immediate action.

Statewide, 6.1% of fixtures tested were above 15 parts per billion, while 18% met the best possible result of less than .1 parts per billion. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that lead in water not exceed 1 part per billion, and 59.5% of fixtures in Georgia schools and daycares meet this goal.

Ingle said he followed recommendations for fixtures with higher levels, which include installing new filters and flushing faucets each morning, which can remove any lead that may have built up overnight.

His only gripe with the program is that the district is on the hook for about $600 for optional retesting of the fixtures with elevated levels, which he says is not a big deal in the long run. The federal grant funds do not cover retesting for samples with less than 15 parts per billion.

“We didn’t realize that we were going to have to pay for this retesting, which, I don’t care, I guess we assumed it would be free, but because we did not have any over that 15 parts per billion, then we had to pay, which is very minimal in the grand scheme of things,” Ingle said.

Participation

Ingle said he’s glad to have a handle on the issue and to be able to show parents that the schools are taking lead safety seriously, but Dade County is in the minority.

Of the more than 2,200 Georgia public schools, only 91 have signed up since August of 2021. Only 118 of approximately 3,100 child care centers and 1,500 family child care learning homes have signed up.

Those participation rates are especially low when compared to North Carolina, where the program that became the model for Georgia’s launched in 2020. In that state, the program is required for daycare facilities, and nearly all of the state’s approximately 4,500 centers have signed up. In North Carolina, about 75% of fixtures returned less than 1 part per billion, and 2.3% were greater than 15 parts per billion.

Georgia’s Department of Early Care and Learning, or DECAL, set a goal of 500 facilities in the testing program’s first year.

“We had hoped for more, but it is on a voluntary basis,” said chief DECAL spokesman Reg Griffin. “We are continuing our outreach efforts to encourage programs to enroll.”

“We have continued our outreach efforts by emailing our programs and discussing the Lead Project in our Child Care Services newsletter sent to more than 4,400 licensed programs across the state,” he added. “We have also had a strong social media push and featured on our weekly podcast, DECAL Download.”

RTI Laboratories, the group partnering with the government to test the water samples, is also working to get the word out, says Jennifer Hoponick Redmon, an environmental health scientist and director of environmental health and water quality at RTI.

“We want to show facilities that this is something that can be done pretty easily at the individual facility level, and there’s really no better time than now to take advantage of this,” she said. “So we would love to hear from facilities that are on the fence about whether or not to sign up to see if there’s any additional support we can help to provide them to complete the testing. We are amenable to individual concerns and needs.”

Schools and daycare centers can enroll year-round at .

Some providers may incorrectly believe that they don’t need to test because their facility is newly built or because their water provider tests, she said.

Another concern may be that facilities will be stuck with a public record of elevated lead levels but no money to mitigate it. Redmon said some facilities may hesitate “because they want to make sure that they’re not joining something that’s voluntary, that they don’t need to do, that’s translating into more headaches for each facility.”

But she said most recommended fixes are free or low-cost, such as installing filters or flushing faucets every morning, and facilities could access funds for bigger fixes from the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed in 2021, she added.

On Monday, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Assistant Administrator for Water Radhika Fox announced $58 million in grant funding from the bill to pay for activities that remove sources of lead in drinking water.

“And what we’ve really found in North Carolina is that by providing information about participation and participating in the program and things being available online, that transparency has removed a lot of what would otherwise be perceived as hiding problems that are found at a school,” Redmon added.

Fixes

A February report from Environment America gave Georgia, along with most other states, for protecting drinking water in schools. The highest grade, a B+, went to Washington D.C.

The researchers note that Georgia does participate in Clean Water for Georgia Kids, but finds that only a small portion of programs take part, and adds that the state has no laws or regulations to address lead in school drinking water.

Last year, Gov. Brian Kemp signed aimed at protecting kids from lead by lowering the threshold of lead in a child’s blood that would trigger state action, including testing and required fixes.

That’s a good measure, but even better would be to prevent kids from getting lead poisoning, Redmon said.

“Ideally, it’s best to stop exposure before it starts,” she said. “Blood lead testing is a reactive way to identify children that have already gotten lead exposure, and our goal is to stop that at the source so that there is less of a need to identify children that have blood lead poisoning and then the need to identify where that source is coming from.”

Schools that do not participate may be testing on their own or hiring out, Ingle said, but the Legislature requiring facilities to test could boost participation in the free program.

“Well, the gray area is, it’s not a requirement. It’s optional,” he said. “And some districts may not know that much about it. I know about it because our facilities director did a great job of pushing out the communications.”

“If the legislature pushed this, made it mandatory, obviously, it would definitely increase participation,” he added.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com. Follow Georgia Recorder on and .

Just shy of a year ago, CNBC North Carolina as No. 1 on its list of America’s Top States for Business. For North Carolinians, especially those who have lived their entire lives here as I have, this was no surprise. For years, state leaders have been intentional about making investments and building an infrastructure that positions North Carolina as a key destination for businesses across the globe.

In contrast, we have not done the same for public education.

As superintendent of Guilford County Schools,��a place I have called home since kindergarten, I am often asked about what I have seen change in public education. My answer is always the same: not that much. Most notably, our teachers continue to be undervalued for their hard work and have seen few changes in compensation over the years, which is far behind the national average.

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Do you see the problem here? Though business is booming, and our state is growing, our communities remain fragile because of how little we have invested in our public schools –��which are often the top employers in communities across the state. Flourishing business in North Carolina brings us one step forward, but meager teacher compensation takes us two steps back. Burnout is intensifying, teachers are leaving, undergraduate teaching programs are enrolling fewer students – and all of this is happening in the wake of pandemic learning loss when our kids need high-performing and committed teachers most.

Our dollars speak volumes about our indifference.

I say this not with bullheaded partisanship or false alarm but with desperation for our state’s citizens to understand the realities we are facing and the dangerous trajectory we are on. Being the top state in business and the last in teacher pay is a future we cannot afford. It is a future where millions of kids lacking high-performing teachers are robbed of the opportunity that could have been theirs –��and where our communities, once filled with promise, become fragile. I believe our kids deserve better – that we all deserve better. Our communities can only be as strong as our public schools, which is why we must invest in them with competitive compensation in order to attract and retain the best teachers.

Consider what our hard-working teachers have been able to accomplish despite decades of underfunding and inadequate pay. I think, for example, about the broad range of choice programs Guilford County Schools offers families that have been developed in partnership with businesses and aligned to workforce needs –��including STEM, aviation, artificial intelligence, global logistics, biotechnology research and advanced manufacturing. We also have early and middle colleges, language immersion schools, top art programs and four public separate schools for students with severe and profound disabilities. These choice programs are completely unmatched in the private and charter school sector – and they are offered for free in order to transform life outcomes for all students regardless of zip code. Imagine, then, what our public schools might do with competitive teacher salaries and adequate funding. We would be able to attract the best teachers in the nation, giving our own students a competitive advantage to lead in a global economy.

What is special about public schools is that public schools belong to all of us, regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, or ability to pay. We take all students. That is not the case for private schools. If the bill to expand private school vouchers passes, however, even more resources will be taken away from our already underfunded schools.

I do not oppose families having the opportunity to choose the best school possible for their children, but that should not come at the expense of public education. If we want to remain a state that attracts global employers, we must invest in our young people at scale.

This is a pivotal moment for the state, and our kids and our communities are waiting on us to show up for them. Will we embrace the opportunity to train our workforce and strengthen our communities? Or will we give up on the schools and teachers that have shown remarkable resilience crisis after crisis? The choice is ours. I hope we can stand united on behalf of our youngest North Carolinians for their future and the future of North Carolina.

Dr. Whitney Oakley is the superintendent of Guilford County Schools (GCS), serving more than 68,000 PK-12 students and 10,000 employees at 126 schools. As the district’s first homegrown superintendent, Oakley is a long-time educator and school administrator with a proven track record of improving student learning outcomes.

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

TOPEKA — Kansas teachers of the year rallied at the Statehouse to push for a clean K-12 education funding bill, joined by Gov. Laura Kelly in an attempt to sway lawmakers before the veto override session begins.

Kelly, who showed up to support the teachers during their Tuesday gathering, said the school funding debate had been longstanding, but she was confident a fully funded school bill would arrive at her desk by session’s end.

“Right now, the issue is fully funding our schools and not diverting public funds to private schools,” Kelly said.

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The 13 teachers present for the gathering asked for a school funding bill that fully funds Kansas public schools and special education, as well as one that doesn’t send tax dollars to private schools not held to the same standards as public schools.

During the regular legislative session, neither chamber attempted to take up the proposed K-12 education funding bill.

was criticized because it was a massive piece of legislation that blended state funding for K-12 education with provisions from about nine other bills, including funding for mental health needs in schools, a form of parental rights legislation, and an extension of the statewide mill school finance levy.

Some form of a K-12 education funding bill is expected to be discussed and voted upon in the next few days.

Throughout the legislative session, public education has been criticized by some lawmakers, who say Kansas students are graduating without the ability to read or write.

Some legislators have also supported “parental rights,” the idea that parents need to be granted additional oversight of classrooms to prevent their children from being taught radical ideas.

Shannon Ralph, 2015 teacher of the year, said teachers were being treated unfairly by those holding such assumptions.

“I think it’s fair to say that teachers are generally feeling attacked, and it’s confusing to me because you will not find more genuine, giving, loving people. Teachers are there for kids. It’s just very confusing to me,” Ralph said.

Tracy Taylor Callard, 2002 teacher of the year, echoed Ralph’s sentiment.

“I think we all know public schools are under attack,” Callard said. “If you watch television, if you are on social media, you see that we’ve been demonized.”

Another piece of legislation, a much-debated voucher program that would allow unregulated private schools to receive state dollars and put federal COVID-19 relief funds toward special education, was canned by the Legislature. It might return in the coming days.

On Monday, Kelly vetoed a form of ��that��would allow parents to withdraw their children from courses or lessons they find objectionable.

Kelly said all of her vetoes, which include more than 20 bills and budget line items, were made after careful consideration.

“It’s�� a record I’m proud to hold,” Kelly said. “I have looked very carefully at the legislation, I’ve signed those that I thought were in the best interest of the state, and I vetoed those that I didn’t think were in the best interest of the state.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on and .

Now, three organizations are working with students in LAUSD high schools to increase the district’s college enrollment, with strategies such as helping students write college essays, hear from professionals, and be mentored through high school into college. 

Despite a 2.5% increase between the  and  school years, LAUSD had just a  in students attending four-year colleges between the 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 academic year.

LAUSD college counselors are faced with a daunting task – letting students know about their post-graduate options and helping them get there. An obstacle they face, said college counselor Tricia Bryan, is ensuring students are aware of how to reach their goals.

“I would like to see a little bit more support in the alignment between career and college so that students have a better understanding of what their pathways can possibly be,” said Bryan, the only counselor at John Marshall High School. 

“Usually students will say, I want to go to a good college or get a good job, but they don’t really know what the pathways are for that.”

College Path LA brings in volunteers to assist Bryan to help with applying to college. Roughly half of John Marshall High School students attend a four-year college while the other half attend junior college, she said. 

A key element of College Path LA is essay writing. Mentors help students with their essays while also providing guidance beyond the college process, often checking in on students as they attend college. 

Because John Marshall High School is located in the heart of Los Angeles, a city full of writers, lawyers, and other professions, College Path LA utilizes these people as a source for students. 

 conducted by UCLA and Claremont Graduate Institute found only 25% of those LAUSD students graduated within six years.

LAUSD A-G Intervention and Support provides resources for the college application process, focusing on those who need additional intervention to complete the A-G requirements, which allow students to apply to California State Universities and UC schools. More than half of the students in the program reported learning about college majors, academic requirements for college admission, and financial information. 

UCLA EAOP, “expands postsecondary education opportunities for California’s educationally disadvantaged students,” working to take students beyond the minimum requirements for college admission, with 72% enrolling in 4-year institutions. 

But UCLA EAOP officials say there is still value in attaining a community college degree. 

“What many families still don’t know is that their son or daughter can attend a community college for free for two years after graduation,” said Hugo Cristales, a first-generation college graduate and associate director of UCLA EAOP.

The organizations –��,��, and����– differ in their methodologies and missions, but have the shared goal of ensuring LAUSD high school students are ready to apply to college and get the assistance they need.��

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

In the 2021-2022 school year, of students in Board District 2 (BD2) were chronically absent, according to the LAUSD Open Data portal. It was the highest among LAUSD’s seven local districts, higher than the 45.2% of all LA Unified students that were chronically absent that same year. 

At a press conference earlier this year, Carvalho said chronic absenteeism has decreased by this academic year. 

Schools in BD2 are located in the neighborhoods of East Los Angeles, Boyle Heights, Downtown Los Angeles, El Sereno, and Lincoln Heights, with a predominantly Latino population and low-income families, which community advocates say have been hit harder by the pandemic. 

The neighborhoods BD2 serves are still areas with the COVID-19 cases per 10,000 residents in Los Angeles County. 

“The data shows that district 2 is in a crisis,” said Maria Brenes, a senior advisor to InnerCity Struggle, an advocacy organization based in East Los Angeles. “I would compel the district to develop an adequate response, to call for a state of emergency.”

Brenes said the lack of affordability in L.A., income inequality, and the housing crisis are ongoing issues that impact these communities. With COVID, shutdowns resulted in the displacement of many families, and some still experience its repercussions.  

“Loss of income, loss of loved ones, distance learning, all together directly impacts attendance and engagement,” Brenes said. “Many families feel like they’re on their own, depending on what school their child attends, there’s different levels of support and relationships.”

Many district 2 schools are experiencing staffing shortages and struggling to address the needs of many families.

By comparison, 35.3% of students attending schools in Board District 3, which covers the communities of , largely Latino and white populations, were chronically absent last school year. 

“We have working class communities, we have foster youth, we have unhoused communities,” said LAUSD Board District 2 member Dr. Rocio Rivas. “The pandemic really allowed the district to really see the vulnerable areas in our communities and how that affects education.”

Rivas and community advocates said that chronic absenteeism is a repercussion of the difficult circumstances surrounding these communities, exacerbated by the pandemic.

“The district has really implemented structures and procedures and tool kits for principals,” Rivas said. “They’re really reaching out and trying to understand the resources and services that communities need.” 

Despite ongoing efforts, other factors have also prevented students from attending school. Community advocates have noticed a common pattern among families. 

“Some of the biggest challenges we’re hearing from families are around transportation,” said Icela Santiago, the Senior Director of Operations and Strategy at the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, an in-district partner with LAUSD. 

She said that in many instances, when there is just one car in a family, it’s used to go to work, leaving children without access to transportation. Santiago also said that when walking to school doesn’t feel safe, it deters students from attending classes. 

Santiago also attributed fear of COVID and general illnesses, especially among elementary students, that have made many parents more inclined to keep their children home. After recovering from an illness, families are also unsure when they should send their children back to school. 

iAttend, launched by Superintendent Carvalho in August, is a district-wide effort to address chronic absenteeism across LAUSD. Carvalho said that three iAttend events have been conducted since it began, in which over were knocked, and thousands of students were brought back to school. 

Asked the number of households visited in District 2, an LAUSD spokesperson could not provide the information.

To address the challenges of attending school, community engagement is a priority for Rivas, and organizations like InnerCity Struggle and the Partnership LA.

“Although it’s gone down… we need to re-engage them, so that these students who are engaged, don’t leave once again,” Rivas said. 

Since she joined the school board, Rivas said her staff have been researching chronic absenteeism policies and other support systems, and providing information to schools, especially to parents who are unfamiliar with district policies.  

Earlier this month, she and her staff visited schools to speak with principals and community representatives, an effort to understand the issues specific to each school 

“I’m really looking at community-based partnerships,” she said. “We have a lot of providers… that are connected to families and know more of the circumstances that a lot of the families are facing.” 

“If families are not well, then that means their city is not well,” Rivas said, “and that means we have a lot more work to do.”  

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Student learning took a big hit during the COVID-19 pandemic. Just how much is only becoming clear nearly three years after the World Health Organization declared the pandemic and nearly all U.S. public schools pivoted to online instruction for at least several months in March 2020.

However, the data guiding the nation’s efforts to help kids catch up does not generally include the students who experienced the most dramatic learning disruptions.

Nationwide testing results released in the fall of 2022 revealed that the and performance on standardized tests of students who were in fourth and eighth grades in the U.S. in the 2021-2022 school year declined by .

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This dramatic evidence of learning loss has . The federal government has allocated $122 billion to support state and local efforts to help students “.”

Public school districts are using these resources to fund and . And the effects of these investments on standardized test scores.

However, these efforts do little to identify or target support to the children whose learning environments were most disrupted by the pandemic. This is especially so for the youngest students, who aren’t yet old enough for most standardized testing.

Enrollment decline and the ‘streetlight effect’

During the pandemic, public school enrollment in grades K through 12 fell by students. These declines were concentrated among and in schools that .

Similarly dramatic enrollment losses among even younger learners in boosting preschool education enrollment.

These declines indicate that the pandemic caused students to miss instructional time or undertake disruptive school switches, often in their developmentally critical early years.

However, list early-childhood programs among the least popular use of available federal funds and provide no indication of targeted academic-recovery efforts for younger or truant students.

This is an example of what scholars call the “,” in which people focus their attention on easily visible evidence – such as the test scores available for older, currently enrolled students – rather than other relevant data that are more obscured and harder to identify.

And long lags in national data reporting mean little is yet known about the learning environments of the disproportionately young children whose families avoided public schools during the pandemic. Currently, official federal statistics do not even provide basic data on or enrollment beyond 2019.

Where the kids went

My , done collaboratively with and data journalists at Stanford University’s , addresses this issue.

For our analysis, we gathered on public, private and home-school enrollment for the school years from 2019-20 through 2021-22. We also used U.S. Census Bureau estimates to identify the school-age population in each state over this time period. These combined data provide insights into where the students who avoided public schools went and what it means for the nation’s academic-recovery efforts.

Complete data aren’t available in every state, but we have good data on more than half of the school-age population in the U.S. at the onset of the pandemic. These states also experienced public school enrollment declines that are representative of the national trend.

Some students, particularly the youngest, clearly turned to private schools during the pandemic. In the 34 jurisdictions with available data, private school enrollment grew by over 140,000 students between the 2019-20 and 2021-22 school years. However, this increase only explains a modest amount – roughly 14% – of the corresponding decline in public school enrollment.

A more surprising finding is the robust growth of home-schooling during this period. An reported that home-schooling increased soon after the pandemic began. Our data show this initial increase endured into the 2021-22 school year when most public schools returned to in-person instruction.

In the 22 jurisdictions with data, home-school enrollment increased by over 184,000 students between the 2019-20 and 2021-22 school years – a 30% increase. For every additional student enrolled in private school over this period, nearly two entered home-schooling. This sustained growth in home-schooling explains 26% of the corresponding losses in public school enrollment.

Roughly a quarter of the public school enrollment loss simply reflects the pandemic decline in the number of school-age children in the U.S. However, means this demographic impact varied considerably by state. In states like California and New York, which saw their overall , the percentage declines in public school enrollment were at least six times those in states like Texas and Florida, where populations grew.

New questions for academic recovery

These findings raise several new questions about what help American students will need to get their education back on track. For instance, researchers know little about the learning opportunities available to children who switched to home-schooling, or the effects of this choice on families.

Our data is also unable to locate more than one-third of the students who left public schools. That could mean that some children are not going to school at all – or that even more families started home-schooling but did so without notifying their state.

A third possibility is that the pandemic led more families to have their kids skip kindergarten. Our data indirectly supports this conjecture. The unexplained declines in public school enrollment are concentrated in , like California and Colorado.

What we do know is the pandemic’s learning disruptions occurred disproportionately among the nation’s youngest learners.

Our work to understand and respond to this situation is just beginning. One possible response is to refocus some federal funding on the broad use of early screening tools to reliably identify – and address – learning setbacks years before students are old enough to take the current battery of standardized tests, which often begins in the third grade. Policymakers can also do more to locate students who are missing and to understand the educational needs of those outside the light of conventional data systems.

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

Kangro, unsure if LAUSD would reopen schools, made the move despite having a particular love for the local LA Unified schools in her quaint Mar Vista neighborhood.

“We love the specific teachers at our LAUSD school, but no one was standing up for our kids. So we went to a charter school and it’s nice because they don’t have to deal with all of this,” Kangro told The 74 referring to .

More than one in four California parents have switched their child’s school during the pandemic with most transferring from traditional public to charter schools, according to the .

The poll found a higher percentage of school switches among Democrats, white parents, families with English as a primary language and households earning more than $150,000 per year.

The annual poll, conducted by Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) and the University of Southern California (USC) Rossier School of Education, surveyed 2,000 registered California voters, including 500 parents, on their opinions and priorities for public education.��

The poll’s analysis on school switches attempts to understand what contributed to the historic 4.6% student enrollment decline – or more than 270,000 students statewide.

Among parents surveyed that switched their child’s school, the 52% that originally attended traditional public schools dropped to 41% – an 11 percentage point decline. In contrast, the 15% that attended charter schools grew to 23% – an 8 percentage point increase.

This comes as 71% of parents surveyed supported charter schools – a 15 percentage point increase from 2020 to 2022.

“The public school system needs to figure out what’s driving these decisions because without enrollment there’s no money and that’s a problem,” said Morgan Polikoff, associate professor of education at the University of Southern California and co-author of the poll.

38% of parents decided to switch schools because they wanted a different educational experience for their children. The poll also found 31% of parents dissatisfied with COVID-related safety measures at their childrens’ school and 30% dissatisfied with mental health support or one-on-one learning help.

“In this current era where there are other school options, what we’re seeing is parents exercising their frustration by making these choices,” Polikoff told The 74. 

Here are stories from four parents why they changed their child’s school during the pandemic:

Carrie Kangro

As Kangro’s son graduated from Beethoven Street Elementary School in the spring of 2021, she wasn’t convinced LA Unified schools would open up in time for his transition to middle school.

Kangro now drives her son to WISH Charter Middle School a few miles away from their Mar Vista neighborhood.

“I would have gone to our local school happily had this all not happened,” Kangro said.

Despite supporting traditional public schools, Kangro lost confidence in LAUSD due to the demands and the political turmoil with United Teachers Los Angeles.

“UTLA was keeping schools closed as bargaining chips to get other things they wanted,” Kangro said. “Granted, teachers do need better pay, smaller classes and the whole laundry list of things they’ve been fighting for and I’m behind them on that. But it was just the wrong time and they sacrificed our kids’ mental health.” A UTLA spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment. 

Despite all the chaos, Kangro plans to re-enroll her son back to an LA Unified school.

“My kids have grown up walking to their preschool and elementary school,” Kangro said. “Even though I love WISH [Charter Middle School], being in our community is even more important than all the gripes I have about LAUSD.”

Tanisha Hall

Like Kangro, Tanisha Hall switched her oldest daughter’s school from a traditional public school to a charter school.

Hall, a foster parent in South LA, moved Cassandra, now 18, out of George Washington Preparatory High School after challenges with teachers and administrators during the pandemic in 2020.

“She’s an IEP student and was not receiving any of the services or additional support she was supposed to receive from her teachers,” Hall said.

Hall also felt the teachers weren’t providing a supportive learning experience for her daughter.

“The teachers there had an attitude. Even if the kids have an attitude too, it’s your job to defuse that and still educate that child,” Hall said. “Especially being a foster parent, you don’t know what my children are dealing with and their emotional issues.”

As a result, Hall transferred her daughter to iLEAD Online Public Charter School midway through the academic year in the spring of 2021. 

“I’m a huge champion for public schools, but most of the homeowners in this area don’t send their kids there and that’s why they have low enrollment and low funding,” Hall said. “You also have people who work in these schools that aren’t getting paid a living wage, so I’m not blaming the teachers for their attitudes. However, the problems they face have an effect on how they address the kids.”

Erica Meyrich-Pinciss

Erica Meyrich-Pinciss also transferred her son out of LAUSD and moved to Hermosa Beach, a beachside city in Los Angeles County with its own public school district.

Prior to their move, Meyrich-Pinciss said Barrett, now 6, diagnosed with Sotos syndrome, which causes developmental delays, had difficulty getting the services and one-on-one support her son needed when he attended kindergarten at Grand View Boulevard Elementary School.

“Being around other kids even though they had different abilities is good for my son so distance learning was not what he needed,” she said.

At Grand View Boulevard Elementary School, Meyrich-Pinciss found her son placed in the wrong class setting.

“He was in a multiple disability program where he wouldn’t be around typical children,” Meyrich-Pinciss said. “I was just really angry because he understands things and it was clear that he needed to be on an academic track, but they didn’t want to give him an aid so they shoved him in there.”

Meyrich-Pinciss’ son now attends Hermosa View Elementary School.

“You had to fight tooth and nail to get anything out of [LAUSD],” Meyrich-Pinciss said. “But at Hermosa [View Elementary School], they want to see him thrive. It’s important to them and they actually care about the children.”

Lauren Phillips

Like Meyrich-Pinciss, Lauren Phillips transferred her daughter out of LAUSD and moved to El Segundo, another beachside city in Los Angeles County with their own public school district.

When Lola, now 7, attended kindergarten at Kentwood Elementary School in the spring of 2020, Phillips balanced work obligations during the pandemic while overseeing her daughter’s online learning — a huge strain.

“We were really excited about starting school but obviously it was Zoom from home,” Phillips said. “It got tiresome just because I wasn’t working from home, I was going into the office. So for me, I was ready to send my daughter back.”

However, LAUSD’s COVID-19 reopening strategy later in the academic year did not provide Phillips and her daughter the sufficient in-person learning experience they were hoping for.

“In April [2021], my daughter got to go back to school but they didn’t tell us until the day before that our teacher wouldn’t return and that she’d Zoom from home,” Phillips said. “I was already in a situation where I was worried about how to get my daughter there and how to pick her up for just three hours a day. So I was disappointed that she was going to still be doing Zoom but in the classroom.”

Because of this, Phillips asked Kentwood Elementary School if her daughter could return to fully remote learning but was met with an inadequate response.

“The principal at the time said that they couldn’t accommodate us on Zoom and that I needed to wait two weeks,” Phillips said. “I didn’t understand why we had to wait when there’s ample room online. It’s not like we were doing the reverse where the school had to physically fit a kid in a classroom. So I decided at that time we were going to pull her out of LAUSD and we never went back.”

Phillips’ daughter now attends Center Street Elementary School.

“[LAUSD] is too big of a school district and there’s too many children with too many different needs,” Phillips said. “We wanted to feel like we weren’t just a number in a system.”

A spokesperson for LAUSD said the district: “is continuing to focus on the long-term sustainability…through budgetary, programmatic and human resources strategies…Based on current year enrollment, we are seeing improvements, demonstrating that students are returning to in-person learning because families are recognizing all of our efforts to ensure students are provided safe learning environments and quality in-person instruction.”

Each weekday, more than half of the K-12 students in the U.S. – – ride a school bus. Until very recently, nearly all of these ran on diesel fuel.

Nationwide, diesel-powered school buses produce of carbon dioxide emissions. They also generate that are harmful to children’s health – especially . Studies show that exposure to diesel tailpipe emissions and can lead to increased hospital admissions and emergency room visits.

Shifting to cleaner buses is especially important for low-income students. Across the U.S., ride the school bus, compared with 45% of other students. School buses often while they are loading or unloading, which exposes children directly to exhaust fumes.

I study issues at the intersection of , including sustainability and equity in transportation. While electrifying school bus fleets requires big investments, I believe the evidence makes clear that it will more than pay off over the long term in health and economic benefits, and I am encouraged to see public and private investments moving in that direction.

Early movers

Decisions about switching from diesel to electric school buses typically lie with cities and school districts, although state governments are getting involved. As of , 415 school districts or contracted fleet operators had committed to deploy 12,275 electric school buses in a wide range of settings, from large cities to rural counties, across 38 states and lands of two Native American tribes.

California, a in clean vehicle policy, acquired its first electric school buses in 2014. Now the state is spending nearly US$70 million to to advance its climate and air-quality goals.

Another notable case is Montgomery County, the largest school district in Maryland, which is and building five charging depots. The district serves a diverse population of .

In Virginia, the utility company Dominion Energy that it would provide 50 electric buses for 16 school districts across the state as one of its initiatives to reduce pollution and promote sustainability. Dominion is paying for infrastructure costs and absorbing the cost difference between a diesel and an electric bus.

The biggest obstacles: Funding and space

As Dominion’s gesture suggests, converting bus fleets isn’t an easy step for many school districts. An electric school bus , of a diesel bus.

But electric buses have , so they save districts an estimated $4,000 to $11,000 per bus per year compared with diesel versions. That can make the costs of electric buses comparable over their lifetimes.

Electric bus motors have about 20 parts, compared with 2,000 in a diesel engine, and require far fewer maintenance steps such as regular fluid changes. And because many of their mechanical systems, such as braking and steering, are similar to those in diesel buses, electric buses are relatively easy to service, especially in districts where both bus types operate.

Charging stations also require money and space, especially in areas where bus routes are long and battery range is a constraint. Most buses now on the market have ranges of about to (160-190 kilometers) on a single charge.

In a 2013 study, analysts at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory reviewed school bus drive cycles in Colorado, New York and Washington and found that the average school bus was typically in operation for . Driving distance averaged about 32 miles, (50 kilometers), with some buses traveling over 127 miles (200 kilomaters) daily.

School districts need places to charge buses easily and efficiently, especially between morning and afternoon routes. Building this infrastructure, especially as diesel buses continue to operate concurrently with growing electric fleets, can pose a challenge in school districts where .

Buses as power sources

At the same time, charging infrastructure can make school bus fueling and management more efficient. Today’s allows districts to plug in a bus whenever it is parked at the depot but have the bus charge only when needed. Chargers can be programmed to function at times of day when energy demand is lowest and power is less expensive.

Manufacturers are introducing buses equipped with that can send stored electricity back to the grid when they are not in service. During summer months, when many school buses are not in use and power usage often peaks, utilities soon may be able to call on school districts to make charged buses available to help ease demand load. These buses can also during power outages and emergencies.

In a 2022 study, researchers at the University of North Carolina analyzed how the state’s utilities could use school buses with vehicle-to-grid charging to manage peak power demand while taking the buses’ schedules into account. They estimated that a fleet of 14,000 buses could on an average winter weekend day in North Carolina, reducing utilities’ dependence on natural gas and avoiding up to 1,130 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per day.

Cleaner air is likely to pay off in improved student performance. In a , researchers found that 2,656 diesel buses in Georgia – adding new components to reduce the buses’ emissions – was associated with positive effects on students’ respiratory health, and that districts with retrofitted diesel buses experienced test score gains in English and math. Since even modernized diesel vehicles still generate air pollutants, shifting to electric buses would likely produce even larger increases.

Spreading the benefits

Federal and state agencies are moving to speed up the transition to electric school buses. The American Rescue Plan, enacted in 2021 to provide economic relief during the COVID-19 pandemic, included for school districts in underserved communities, Tribal schools and private fleets serving schools that purchase electric buses.

In March 2022 the Environmental Protection Agency for 23 electric school bus replacement programs and associated charging infrastructure in 11 states. And New York state’s includes a nation-leading requirement that all new school bus purchases must be electric starting in July 2027, and that all school buses in service must be zero-emission by 2035. The budget allocates $500 million in potential state funding for school bus electrification as part of a larger environmental bond act, which will be on the ballot in November 2022.

Riding the iconic yellow school bus is a formative experience for millions of kids across the U.S. If more districts make the shift away from diesel, I believe it will become a greener and healthier trip and a step toward the zero-emissions future our nation’s children deserve.

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

But as much as Arthur is concerned about the heightened amount of time students spend in the digital world since the start of the pandemic, he knows screen time is here to stay.

“It’s an unusual problem because we can’t take it away from them,” said Arthur, who teaches sixth grade at Meadowlark Elementary School in Salt Lake City. “The world just doesn’t work like that anymore. They have to use technology.”

Arthur isn’t the only one who sees it this way. Researchers, parents and teachers are finding that even as youth screen time has shot up as a result of the pandemic, it’s time to reframe how we think about it.

Teachers like Arthur are finding ways to deliberately and innovatively embrace technology in their lessons, knowing students will find it more engaging.

Arthur said that he utilizes simulations on Minecraft, a popular video game for youth, as a way for students to learn about ancient civilizations. But he also emphasizes balance and makes sure all math instruction is on paper. That way, children can have a tactile learning experience, as well as a break from screens, he said.

Managing screen time should be guided by whether technology is displacing time that should be spent in other areas, such as exercising, play dates with friends or sleeping, said Dr. Dave Anderson, a clinical psychologist at the Child Mind Institute in New York City.

“Making technology into some sort of boogeyman” should be left in 2018, Anderson said. The focus now should be on helping children and adolescents healthily engage with technology.

“This idea that it’s hard for kids to get off screens, it’s true of the entire human population,” he said. “What we try to do is put in the same behavioral safeguards with children as we do with adults.”

He suggested rewarding children who are able to get off of screens quickly, and putting time limits on technology that include warnings when time is almost up.

Prior to the pandemic, children were more comfortable in traditional classroom settings with pencils and paper, teacher Arthur said, adding that now, there’s a noticeable ease that falls on the room when children are able to use devices in lessons.

There’s a “chill familiarity,” he said, where they sit back, loosen up, and have an easier time talking to each other. Not only do they comfortably utilize chat functions, he said, but they also seem more free to make in-person conversations because holding the device puts them at ease.

“When they had to leave school, school became a more foreign place and even in some ways a scary place because it was synonymous with sickness and risk, so they understand ‘I’m not 100% safe in this place, but I’m super comfortable on this device because I’ve been using it nonstop,’” Arthur said. “It’s familiar. It’s the one thing that transcended through the pandemic. It brought the whole world to them when they were stuck at home.”

With children exhibiting so much more comfort in digital spaces, and skyrocketing screen time (one study found kids and adolescents doubled their recreational screen time during the pandemic), experts have also been raising the alarm on how this might impact child development, especially when it comes to in-person socialization skills, such as facial expression control, polite conversation and active listening.

But there’s another side, said Anderson.

“To act as if kids are not developing social skills online is fallacy because what we all know is that email voice, text voice, the ability to interact effectively over Zoom or chat are integral to the modern workplace,” Anderson said. “You need both.”

Anderson said some behavioral issues, such as shorter attention spans, are not an irreversible side effect of too much screen time—the screen itself has not inherently decreased attention spans.

“It’s because the screen itself is so interesting and vibrant in the stimuli that it’s presenting. It can be difficult for kids who are spending a lot of time on screens to then have the practice of being in the real world, paying attention to stimuli that are much less fast paced,” Anderson said.

Arthur knows the problem of demonizing screens, instead of working with them, all too well.

When classes were online, he had a student who didn’t log on for two days. When he called the student’s parents to check in, he discovered the student had his laptop taken away as a punishment.

Taking the laptop away may have solved one problem, but it created another, forcing the student to miss out on essential learning.

“They said ‘we don’t know how to keep him on just the school stuff because he keeps going on the other stuff, so our only answer is to take the whole thing away,” Arthur said. “And that’s our dilemma. We have to understand the technology enough as adults to figure out how to let in the good and keep out the bad.”

“There was a lot of disruption in actually providing quality instruction to students whether it is access to a teacher, a live teacher, or the mode of learning was chaotic and vacillating, and it ,” said Commissioner Peggy Carr of the National Center for Education Statistics, an arm of the institute. “This is an important way to understand the impact of the pandemic on our country.” 

The School Pulse Panel is a series of surveys from January 2022 through May 2022 measuring COVID-19’s impact on public education. The surveys were sent to 800-850 public schools, with principals, administrators, superintendents, and staff responding. Here are some takeaways from IES’s School Pulse Panel:

1. COVID-19 negatively affected student’s development

A May 2022 survey found more than 80% of public schools reported “stunted behavioral and socioemotional development” in their students because of the COVID-19 pandemic,” a 56% increase in “classroom disruptions from student misconduct,” and a 49% increase in “rowdiness outside of the classroom.” All schools surveyed reported a 55% increase in “student tardiness.” The use of cell phones, computers, or other electronics when not permitted for all schools increased by 42%.

2. Chronic teacher and student absenteeism has increased

Student and teacher absenteeism in the 2021-2022 school year increased in comparison to school years before the COVID-19 pandemic. In the 2021-2022 school year 61% of public schools also reported��it is “much more difficult” to find substitute teachers; and that

• 74% reported having “administrators cover classes.” 
• 71% reported having “non-teaching staff cover classes.” 
• 68% reported having “other teachers cover classes during their prep periods.”
• 51% reported “separate sections and classes… combined into one room.”

Carr said she had heard from colleagues in Boston and Florida school districts that because of staffing shortages, superintendents had to return to classrooms to teach “because it was so bad. I had heard that, but to see it in a nationally representative sample of schools that prevalent, is sobering.”

Carr also said COVID quarantines are a factor in student absenteeism. “It is normal to have students out because of quarantine, so when we talk about student absenteeism, it’s not all just because a student is just out, sometimes it is that they’ve been quarantined because of COVID,” she said. “That’s part of the new normal.”

3. There is a greater need for mental health services among students and staff.

70% of public schools reported that “the percentage of students who have sought mental health services increased since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic;” and that 34% of public school students seeking out mental health services more than others were “economically disadvantaged students.” The second highest percentage (25%) of public schools who sought out mental health services more than others were special needs students (25%).

“The teachers are having a rough time…too, is what these data are showing,” Carr said. 29% of public schools reported that the “degree to which staff have sought mental health services from the school since the start of COVID-19” has increased. “They are overworked, they don’t have the staff there to help them, teachers are quitting. They are having to teach courses they have not taught before. All of these things culminate into an unhealthy work environment for the teachers,” she said.

4. Public schools face barriers to getting students the mental health services they need.

Most public schools (61%) said a limitation was “insufficient mental health professional staff coverage to manage caseload,” 57% of the schools said it was “inadequate access to licensed mental health professionals,” and 48% said “inadequate funding.”

“A licensed professional is expensive,” Carr said. “Too few professionals are available in these schools to actually provide those services and inadequate access to licensed professionals that can really provide the level of quality of services that they need.”

5. Schools changed their calendars to support students and staff

Nearly one third of the schools — 28% — surveyed reported making changes to their “daily or yearly academic calendar to mitigate potential mental health issues for students and staff.” In early July, went into effect to make high school and middle classes start no earlier than 8:30am. , New York, and Massachusetts lawmakers have had similar discussions about making school start times later.

6. Most schools are in-person 

By May 2022, most schools — 99% — were offering full-time in-person instruction, a slight increase from January when it was 97%, the survey found. In January, 40% of all public schools also offered a full-time remote option, which decreased to 34% in February, 33% in March, April, and May, the survey found.

7. School Breakfast and Meal Programs faced challenges.

Nearly 40% of the schools that operate USDA school and breakfast meal programs, “reported challenges obtaining enough food, beverages, and/or meal service supplies.” The top three most reported reasons for these challenges were “limited product availability,” “shipment delays,” “orders arriving with missing items, reduced quantities, or product substitutions.”

“I think we are continuing to be surprised by the range of experiences that schools are having to deal with as a result of COVID. It hasn’t subsided,” Carr said. “It is not over yet is what I believe these data are saying.”

Scan the constitutions of most states, and you won’t find any clause guaranteeing every child the right to a quality public education. They promise a free public education, but not a great one. 

It is no wonder states across the nation have failed to deliver a quality public education for so many students, particularly children of color and those who are economically disadvantaged. Even before the pandemic, just 35 percent of American fourth graders were reading at grade level, along with only 22 percent of Latino and 15 percent of African-American eighth graders, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

These outcomes are not inevitable. They are the result, in many cases, of policies formulated by a system that was never designed and is not incentivized to put the needs of all students first. Convinced that a quality public education — not just a free one — should be a civil right for all American children, President Obama and I advocated for parent empowerment and a student-centered agenda with better educational opportunities for millions of young people across the nation.

But so much more work must be done to meet this moment for the children and parents of America. At the state level, countless policies perpetuate educational injustice. In most states, these have so far been nearly impossible to change because kids can’t vote, parents don’t have lobbyists and the right to a quality public education is not enshrined in the constitution.

A growing movement of parents, educators and community leaders across multiple states have begun to advocate for change in their state constitutions. Last year, bills were introduced in the , and legislatures to enshrine a right to a quality education in their constitutions. These movements have continued to accelerate recently in to establish a long-overdue seat at the table for public school parents to advocate for the interests of all students. 

The Page Amendment campaign in Minnesota is leading this national movement. It is driven by a broad coalition that includes youth, parents, education and community leaders, businesses, sovereign tribal nations and, notably, Neel Kashkari, president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, and Alan Page, former Minnesota Supreme Court justice and iconic former Minnesota Viking. Their initiative would amend the state’s constitution to add: “All children have a fundamental right to a quality public education that fully prepares them with the skills necessary for participation in the economy, our democracy, and society.”      

The campaign has built a broad bipartisan legislative coalition, with the goal of a historic education civil rights public referendum this November.  

Throughout two decades of working to improve American public education, as superintendent of Chicago Public Schools then as Obama’s education secretary, I have learned that it takes bold action to transform struggling schools and entrenched bureaucracies. When politicians and special interests defend the status quo, it takes parent power to compel the public school system to meet the needs of students. 

Establishing a constitutional right to a quality public education would empower parents with the right to challenge policies that harm students and double down on longstanding injustices. Such a tool would be particularly valuable for communities of color, where the education bureaucracy has failed generations of children and ignored generations of parents. 

In the wake of pandemic-related school closures that denied in-person learning to millions of children for up to 18 months, parents in Virginia, San Francisco and elsewhere have voted against Democrats who were perceived to embrace the status quo at the expense of children. Especially in this unique moment, relegating parents to the sidelines and telling them to leave the education of their children to the so-called experts has proven to be a losing political strategy.

Politicians have talked about education as a civil right for generations, but too often only as a metaphor. Empowering parents to advocate for the interests of all students would make public education more public. It would reorient education policymaking around the student learning because all children deserve the opportunity to reach their full potential regardless of race, ethnicity, disability, geography or socioeconomic status. 

This is our moment. Now is the time for Minnesota to chart a path forward for the nation by translating “kids first” from a soundbite into a civil right for all public school students. 

 Arne Duncan is managing partner at the Emerson Collective, a former secretary of education and Chicago superintendent of schools, and author of “How Schools Work.”

“We think that schools are the best place to reach the most children to talk about personal body safety,” said Altschiller, a Stratham Democrat. “And that is their right. They have the right to be safe.”��

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This year, Altschiller and a group of Democratic lawmakers say it’s time for public school classrooms to take it on: sexual assault education and prevention. House Democrats are advancing a bill that would require consent to be taught in New Hampshire public schools as part of a school’s health education curriculum.��

“The precedent for preventing harm and promoting well-being through education is clearly established,” said Rep. Amanda Elizabeth Toll, the Keene Democrat spearheading the bill.��

would require that schools include “age-appropriate instruction on the meaning of consent, respect for personal boundaries, and sexual violence prevention” in the basic curriculum for all students.��

At a hearing Tuesday, supporters of the bill said that the instruction would be valuable to head off incidents of violence and violation of personal space — both in adolescence and later in life.��

“We see the importance of smoking prevention education because of the damaging health effects: it’s important enough to be part of health curriculums,” said Emily Murphy, a prevention program specialist at HAVEN New Hampshire, a violence prevention center.��“The negative health impacts of child sexual abuse and other forms of sexual violence are staggering.”

Alberto Soto, currently the director of counseling at Middlebury College in Vermont, said he had treated young adults on both sides of the equation: those who have caused harm and those who have experienced it. The trauma caused by a violation of consent can follow students for years, Soto said.

“The only way that we can help prevent harm is through education and through preventative measures,” Soto said.��

For Renee Monteil, consent lessons were already built into her parenting approach for her two young daughters. When one toddler would bite another, Monteil would teach them not to, framing it around consent. But when it comes to sexual health, Montiel said, the lessons are some that all students should receive.��

“Teaching consent is teaching life skills,” Monteil, of Keene, told lawmakers. “Teaching consent is also about giving all of our children the tools they need to navigate society safely. With confidence.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Hampshire Bulletin maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Dana Wormald for questions: info@newhampshirebulletin.com. Follow New Hampshire Bulletin on and .

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona doesn’t expect to see more enrollment loss in public schools this fall, but said educators must “work twice as hard” to rebuild the trust of some families after a year of remote learning and reopening delays.

“I am confident that everyone wants to return back to school and that schools are doing their best to get students back in. I know in some places it wasn’t quick enough for some families,” the secretary said last week in a brief conversation with The 74. “What we have to ensure is that we’re following the guidelines to make sure that our schools are safe and that we’re engaging our students and families in ways that we haven’t in the past.”

Cardona said he recognized the challenges districts are facing in trying to make up for lost instruction. While he’s encouraged by what he’s seen during his recent visits to summer learning programs, he added that some districts will need to work harder to strengthen connections with other organizations so students can get the “accelerated support” they need to overcome the pandemic’s impact.

“I’ve seen examples of it already — where schools are really stepping up to give students a good opportunity to engage socially and academically,” he said. “I’m expecting with full, in-person options for students that the sense of community and the sense of family that our students and families are longing for, that they’re going to get it.”

Schools, Cardona said, also need to be specific with parents about what safety precautions they’ll be taking this fall.

“I know some schools had major issues they had to address in terms of ventilation systems or ensuring that the environment was safe,” he said. “At the end of the day, this is a health pandemic. We want to make sure that schools are safe for our students and our staff.”

And they should be clear about the opportunities they’re offering to help students make up for instruction they missed last school year, he added.

But the pandemic and learning loss aren’t the only reasons some parents have grown dissatisfied with schools over the summer. some parents want to see different learning options for their children when school starts this fall. And others are outraged over how districts are addressing issues of race and equity in the classroom, with debates dominating school board meetings from coast to coast.

Reiterating what he’s told House members during recent budget hearings, the secretary said the topic has become politicized. But he sympathized with administrators facing pressure over the issue and said he wants to shift attention to the resources schools now have to make school improvements.

Superintendents, “have shown tremendous leadership reopening schools during a pandemic,” he said. “They did their best to make sure that our students got the support that they needed. I don’t just mean a laptop and broadband access, which is in itself a challenge, but making sure our students were fed, making sure that they had the social and emotional support. We owe it to our education community to stand behind them.”

In recent weeks, the secretary has visited summer learning programs in Los Angeles, New Jersey and Oregon, and said even though some districts to find enough staff to work over the summer, he said he’s seen strong examples of schools and nonprofit organizations sharing the responsibility for summer learning.

At the virtual reopening summit Cardona held in March, he said he “jokingly” warned educators that he didn’t want to see students doing any “ditto” sheets this summer and that he hoped for engaging programs that interest students while shoring up some of the academic skills they’ve missed over the past year.

While he said he saw some students writing words on a whiteboard in a classroom in Portland, he said he was happy to report, “I have not seen any worksheets.”