Chalkbeat

As school begins, Queens families keep watch for ICE

2026-09-14T19:01:39+00:00

This article was originally published by Documented, an independent, non-profit newsroom dedicated to reporting with and for immigrant communities in New York City. The original article can be accessed here.

For the last few months, Margarita and her husband have been waking up at 4 a.m. most days. While their children slept, she lovingly brewed him coffee and packed him breakfast and lunch — bread, fruit and a sandwich — before sending him off to his job working construction.

But last week, that peaceful cadence changed.

On the first day of school, Margarita’s three children were up and buzzing by 7 a.m. in their rooms, putting on their first-day outfits and packing their backpacks.

With only 20 minutes left before they had to rush out the door, Margarita quick-stepped around the house and the kitchen, handing off lunch boxes — one with vegetables and one without — for her 12-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son. She also asked her daughter to help her prepare food for their spunky, white-furred dog Max.

At just before 7:30 a.m., Juan, her eldest — who is set to start college next week — emerged from his room to help.

With that, the family was out the door, spilling into the driveway and onto the street before climbing into the family’s black SUV. As she made her way to the car, Margarita waved to their neighbor, who was sitting on a nearby stoop.

“I’ll drive,” Juan, her 18-year-old, declared.

The 40-minute drive to school was largely uneventful. They battled the usual traffic as Margarita directed Juan on the fastest route to take. Meanwhile, after a missed left turn, her 14-year-old noted that his little sister may be late for class.

Margarita and her family requested that Documented only use their first names due to concerns about immigration enforcement.

As they rolled across Queens headed west, they passed many families and excited children on the street who seemed to be swallowed by enormous backpacks saddled on their shoulders.

When they finally pulled up in front of her children’s school in Long Island City, Margarita kissed her two youngest on their foreheads before sending them off into their 7th and 9th grade lines, respectively.

But when she returned to her car, Margarita took a sharp breath when a notification popped up on her phone:

“🚨ICE in Corona” it exclaimed in Spanish.

The message was shared in a group chat for women like Margarita who are members of Las Doñas, an immigrant women’s organization.

A father, running morning errands, was detained by ICE before he could get home to drive his own son to school.

“The boy was at home and called [his mom] saying that he was ready to go to school. [His mother] cried and just said she was coming,” recalled Tony Alarcón, executive director for Las Doñas, who responded to the incident and spoke with the mother.

A video of the arrest, reviewed by Documented, shows a terrified woman fast-walking a child wearing a backpack past the scene, as another woman in sweats collapsed against a car, sobbing in front of the immigration agents.

While the first day of school is a largely a happy occasion for city families, for some immigrant New Yorkers, getting to and from the school building marks an added risk.

ICE arrests peaked in New York City in July, the highest number of arrests since the beginning of the second Trump administration. Queens, which is often called the world’s borough for its heavily-immigrant neighborhoods, was particularly hard hit — with at least 2,153 people arrested since last January.

In a four-block radius of Margarita’s home, ICE sightings and arrests have been reported nearly two dozen times since January 2025, according to website ICEout.org.

While some in her community say they’ve been overwhelmed by fear — often refusing to leave their homes — Margarita told Documented that she won’t let herself become paralyzed. Instead, that afternoon, she planned to attend a rally and pass out Know Your Rights information to parents during pick up time at a school in Corona, only three blocks from the arrest.

“Don’t be afraid to drive your children to school,” she told Documented in Spanish, adding that when she feels scared, she tries to keep herself in check.

“If I live with fear I’m not going to live well. I’m going to get sick and I won’t be well for my children,” she said. “I ask God to bring me home.”

What schools have done

Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, schools across the country — including in New York City — have faced a drop in attendance due to deportation fears. Adding to immigrant families’ concerns, the Trump administration quickly dropped a Biden-era guidance treating schools as protected from immigration enforcement.

In New York City, the Department of Education does not permit school staff to allow federal agents, including ICE, to enter schools without a judicial warrant. And the state recently passed laws affirming schools as sensitive locations under state law.But danger exists for immigrants before they ever reach the school doors — it also lies on the journey to school.

Margarita’s son, Juan, a recent high school graduate, says that these days parents are asked to take one of two risks.

“If you go with the kid, there might be the chance that they might catch you, they might not, or nothing happens,” said Juan. “And then there’s the other one that we let your kid go by yourself, which has the risk of leaving the kid unattended, and who knows what will happen during that time.”

Advocates question whether schools could go further, suggesting that a walking bus and safe corridors patrolled by ICE watchers could become official policy, which would help families feel safer attending school.

“The vulnerability is when they’re out in public,” said Mabel Tso, a senior strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union, which developed model policies for New York schools to follow in order to protect immigrant students and their families.

“Having a mayor who is pro-immigrant and a chancellor who comes from an immigrant background helps, but you know we need to see … the action of going beyond these model procedures,” said Tso.

The city’s Education Department did not respond to a request for comment on protections outside school grounds, but sent a link to their guidance for immigrant families.

Protesting at a Pickup Line

Later that afternoon, a pickup line of parents speaking multiple languages stretched around the corner in front of P.S. 19, an elementary school in Queens, carrying an array of patterned umbrellas to protect against the intense sun.

As they waited to reunite with their kids, they peeked down the block as an electric speaker boomed and a small crowd gathered around local elected officials and pro-immigrant organizations. Many gave speeches denouncing ICE arrests and its impact on parents. Margarita stood among them, joining in chants of “ICE Fuera!”

Soon, the school doors swung up and kids streamed out, with some children holding their parents hands. Nearby, volunteers — including Juan — handed out information on constitutional rights, whistles, and flyers from local immigrant rights organizations.

Children wearing handmade paper headbands giggled and playfully blew whistles.

“Today is the first day of school. Instead of this being filled with joy for parents and students, it has now become a day when parents and their children feel panic and anxiety,” Amador Rivas, a local member of Make the Road New York in Corona, said in Spanish.

”A simple walk to school can lead to a family being separated or the parents and children being detained by ICE,” he continued. “This is not right. All children deserve to feel safe in their neighborhoods and in their schools, but how can a child focus on learning when their minds are worrying about ICE agents lurking outside of their schools or whether their parents will be targeted next?”

Margarita said that the arrest, which had occurred a 5-minute walk from the school where she was standing, was disheartening.

“They took someone who is likely a father, and now his family doesn’t know where he is, and his children are waiting for him to come home,” said Margarita, standing on the sidewalk as families finished filing out of the area.

Despite her efforts to remain stoic and create a sense of normalcy at home, Margarita says that her daughter is extremely attentive when her parents return home, even going so far as scolding her father any time he’s late, and reminding him to come home quickly.

Still, Margarita finds strength in taking action — and noted that her community is large and resilient.

“I’m happy because I feel like I’m helping the community, and that at least is my grain of sand so people support [us] and see that they aren’t alone.”

Sign up for Early Arrival, Documented’s newsletter, here, and get your immigration and policy news from New York, Washington, and nationwide in your inbox 3x per week.

Trump administration higher education letter: Most Colorado universities have yet to decide response

2026-08-25T16:41:43+00:00

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At least one Colorado university says it doesn’t intend to answer a Trump administration questionnaire sent to colleges and universities earlier this month that federal officials said will build trust with the American people.

Other institutions of higher education in the state, including Colorado’s two largest public university systems, said they haven’t decided if they will respond to the questions in the letter from U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon. The letter asks officials about their approach to free speech, research, admissions, campus protests, and more. McMahon also asked them to post their answers prominently on their schools’ websites by the end of the year.

The letter doesn’t include threats regarding investigations or funding, unlike the administration’s previous attempts to exert influence, and overall it strikes a relatively collaborative tone. Yet it represents the latest test for higher education leaders as Trump officials look to shape college campus policy across the country, and at a time when Americans’ confidence in higher education is low.

Many of the questions in the Aug. 3 letter address issues typically decided by individual campuses, their leaders, and faculty.

A Colorado Mesa University spokesperson said the school does not plan to formally respond to the letter.

“The public record of why and how we deliver on our mission already demonstrates our commitment,” a Colorado Mesa University spokesperson said. ”How we serve students every day is the reaffirmation.”

Neither the Colorado State University System nor the University of Colorado System said whether they would formally respond. Together, the systems represent seven universities in the state, including in Fort Collins and Boulder.

A CU System spokesperson said the school is reviewing the letter, as did a CSU System spokesperson.

“Our institutions’ commitments to rigorous teaching, impactful research, and service to Colorado and the nation are longstanding and demonstrated daily,” said Tiana Kennedy, CSU and CSU System associate vice president for communications.

Other universities, including the Colorado School of Mines and Adams State University, also said they were reviewing the letter.

Metropolitan State University of Denver didn’t say whether it was considering the letter, but a spokesperson said that the school has long focused on many of the issues highlighted by McMahon.

“We remain committed to delivering value for students and taxpayers, preparing graduates to succeed in a changing economy and contributing to the communities we serve,” said Tim Carroll, a school spokesperson.

Colorado Western University and Fort Lewis College didn’t respond to a request for comment. The Colorado Community College System didn’t return a request by deadline.

Nationwide, schools in North Carolina and Florida have decided to answer McMahon’s call. And other universities, such as in Iowa, have been pressured by lawmakers to respond. Others haven’t said what their intentions are.

McMahon’s letter was written with input from the American Association of Universities, according to an Inside Higher Ed report. The association represents 71 of the nation’s most influential research universities, including the University of Colorado Boulder. But other groups representing some of the same institutions in Colorado are questioning the letter’s approach.

The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities said land grant universities “already work every day to meet goals outlined in the Department’s letter.” The organization’s members include several Colorado universities, including CSU Fort Collins, CU Boulder, and the Colorado School of Mines.

The Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges also raised concerns, saying the responsibility of university improvements rests with governing boards and institutional leaders.

And the American Association of University Professors, a national faculty union, slammed the letter and said it asks “colleges and universities to align themselves with a far-right agenda at the expense of students’ education and the public’s well-being.”

David Baime, senior vice president for government relations at the American Association of Community Colleges, called the questionnaire confusing.

Baime, whose association says it represents 15 member colleges in Colorado, wrote that much of the letter focused on “elite research institutions” but not others, including community colleges.

Jason Gonzales is a reporter covering higher education and the Colorado legislature. Chalkbeat Colorado partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage. Contact Jason at jgonzales@chalkbeat.org.

New York loses millions in sex ed money after uptick in teen pregnancies

2026-08-14T20:30:20+00:00

This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Over the past two and a half years, 17-year-old Ana Ortega has visited dozens of high school classrooms across the South Bronx and Harlem, leading conversations about consent, healthy dating behaviors, and safe sex with students her own age.

“A lot of teenagers don’t want to talk to adults because they don’t want to be judged,” she said.

Ortega is a peer mentor with the teen pregnancy prevention initiative at Children’s Aid, which provides sexual health education to New York City youth in schools, community centers, and foster care facilities. But parts of the initiative will soon come to an end. Earlier this summer, the Trump administration launched an effort to gut and reshape an Obama-era federal program designed to prevent teen pregnancy, which Children’s Aid had relied on for over 10 years to provide sexual education in vulnerable communities.

As part of that overhaul, the federal Department of Health and Human Services notified the nonprofit that it was terminating its grant effective immediately, two years before it was set to expire. “The reason provided was that the initiative no longer aligned with HHS’s priorities,” said Rhonda Braxton, a vice president at Children’s Aid.

The organization is among three New York grantees that are losing over $4.3 million in annual federal funding to support evidence-based sexual health education for over 19,000 young people each year.

The funding cuts come at what reproductive health advocates describe as a critical time. Although the national teen birth rate remains near a historic low, teen pregnancy rates in New York state and New York City rose between 2021 and 2023 — the first increase in two decades, according to the latest available state and city data. (A vast body of research has linked teen pregnancy and birth to difficulty completing high school, pursuing higher education, and getting well-paying jobs.)

Of 67 federal Teen Pregnancy Prevention grants nationwide, all but 14 have been terminated as HHS shifts its focus to abstinence-based initiatives.

Last week, members of New York’s congressional delegation sent a letter to HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. urging him to reinstate funding to the three programs that lost it.

Braxton said Children’s Aid’s initiative relies on building trust with youth, and goes beyond pregnancy prevention to address positive body image, sexually transmitted infections, and healthy decision-making.

Now, Braxton said, “young people are losing those trusted relationships in an era of misinformation and mistrust.”

Children’s Aid is looking for more funding to make up for the loss of the $936,700 annual grant. If it can’t find it, the nonprofit will have to eliminate most of its programming, including many of its peer mentors and sex ed at the city’s Children’s Center, a temporary intake facility for children awaiting placement in foster care. (Youth in foster care experience higher rates of teen pregnancy and childbirth than their peers, research shows.)

In their letter to HHS, lawmakers wrote that Children’s Aid was the only organization providing sexual health education “to a highly vulnerable population that may be at increased risk of trafficking, sexual abuse, and unplanned teen pregnancy.”

HHS also canceled funding for NYC Teens Connection, a city program that partners with schools, foster care agencies, and juvenile justice programs to improve teens’ decision-making skills and connect them with local health clinics. Since 2010, the initiative has worked with over 400 organizations and served nearly 130,000 teenagers across the five boroughs.

It’s now set to lose $3.9 million in funding over the next two years, putting 15 staff members at risk of losing their jobs. New York City Health Department spokesperson Rachel Vick said in a statement that the initiative and others like it have helped contribute to a 79% decrease in teen pregnancies in New York City over the last three decades.

“Teenagers want truth and honesty from the adults in their lives, and programs that center the real-world experience of the young people they serve,” Vick said.

There were over 20,000 fewer teen pregnancies in New York City in 2023 than in 2000. But lawmakers and advocates say that post-pandemic increases in the city’s teen pregnancy rate underscore the need for comprehensive sex ed: Between 2022 and 2023, teen pregnancy rates increased across all boroughs other than Brooklyn. It’s unclear what exactly drove the trend, but the city’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior survey reflected an increase in the number of sexually active students not using contraception since 2021.

The cuts also eliminate $1.4 million annually for the HOPE Buffalo program, run by health care nonprofit Cicatelli Associates. The program helped drive a 36 percent decline in teen pregnancy rates across high-poverty Buffalo neighborhoods from 2015 to 2020, according to the group.

Cicatelli Associates did not respond to a request for comment.

Meredith Ouderkirk, director of public affairs for Planned Parenthood of Central and Western New York, which partnered with Cicatelli to offer the program, said that because New York is run by Democrats, people may assume that everyone has access to comprehensive sex ed. But the state’s sex ed mandate is limited and gives school districts significant discretion, she said, making a child’s access to evidence-based sex education dependent on where they live.

The state Department of Health, which does not currently receive funding through the Teen Pregnancy Prevention program, said it may be able to fill gaps left by the federal cuts through its own initiatives that fund community-based projects.

Reproductive health organizations are less optimistic.

“If this changes the ability to reach even one young person and that results in an unintended pregnancy, that can be life-changing and devastating,” Ouderkirk said.

Trump’s moves to break up Education Department generate new bipartisan resistance in Senate

2026-07-31T22:05:48+00:00

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President Donald Trump doesn’t have the votes to abolish the U.S. Department of Education, though that’s not stopping him from taking it apart.

That came into focus this week when moderate Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine joined Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia and other Democrats to advance legislation that would reverse some of the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Education Department.

Thursday’s bipartisan 13-9 vote in the Senate education committee represents the first formal effort by Congress to stop a series of interagency agreements that Education Secretary Linda McMahon has used to transfer core functions to other departments.

“This bill is straightforward. It keeps the administration of important landmark education programs at the Department of Education, where Congress specifically put them and where they belong,” Collins said during the committee hearing.

McMahon has pitched these agreements, which critics have said are illegal, as “proof of concept” that the federal government can adequately support education without a standalone department. She and her top deputies have repeatedly said they are not trying to go around Congress to abolish the agency, even as they have moved aggressively to outsource its core functions without congressional approval.

That backing has always appeared unlikely. Unless the Senate ditches the filibuster, significant legislation such as abolishing a cabinet-level agency would require 60 votes. And Republicans only hold 53 seats. No Democrats are on record supporting the effort.

Perhaps there was a time when some Democratic votes could have been found in exchange for dramatic increases in education funding, said Rick Hess, a senior fellow at the right-learning American Enterprise Institute. Those days are long gone — and the Trump administration never offered that deal anyway.

The committee vote, meanwhile, shows the administration can’t unite even Republicans behind its goals, something the president’s allies find “enormously frustrating.”

“I don’t see a path forward,” Hess said.

At the same time, if Democrats somehow convinced enough Republicans or won enough seats to pass the bill restricting Trump’s outsourcing effort, he would simply veto it, Hess said.

“Nobody has the votes to do anything,” Hess said.

The legislation advanced by the Senate committee would roll back four of the interagency agreements. These sent K-12 education and postsecondary education to the Labor Department, Indian education to the Interior Department, and most controversially, special education oversight to Health and Human Services.

The bill does not affect agreements moving career and technical education to Labor, or giving the Justice Department a larger role in civil rights enforcement in schools.

The change to special education, widely decried by advocates, appears to have been the move that prompted public resistance on Capitol Hill. Trump’s record low approval ratings also give Republican skeptics more breathing room to act independently.

Louisiana Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, the education committee chair who recently lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger, echoed the concerns of many special education advocates when he said, “I worry that many states will still struggle to meet IDEA’s requirements and need federal technical assistance, coordination, and oversight,” referring to the main federal special education law.

Though Cassidy ultimately voted against broader limits on reorganizing the Education Department, it’s notable that he allowed the vote to occur. He also introduced his own bill to prevent special education from going to HHS.

In response to the legislation, McMahon sent an open letter to Congress Thursday touting the success of the interagency agreements to date. She noted record numbers of applications for some grant programs and the successful distribution of federal funds.

“Our interagency agreements deliver on both promises by breaking up the failed federal education bureaucracy in Washington and partnering with agencies who are far better equipped to manage essential programs effectively,” she wrote.

Although the administration has promised to “return education to the states,” it has aggressively wielded federal authority in a bid to restrict liberal policies related to race and gender in school. Trump officials have also said they would preserve most existing federal education programs.

A department spokesperson said the legislation represented “an insult to American families — and downright malpractice.”

“It is entirely premature to sabotage this effort before it has the chance to eliminate bureaucratic barriers and fully deliver the results that our students, families, and educators deserve,” press secretary Savannah Newhouse said in an emailed statement.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Jeffco Public Schools sues Trump administration over Title IX-related threats to federal funding

2026-07-29T02:30:32+00:00

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Jeffco Public Schools is suing the Trump administration in an effort to prevent the U.S. Department of Education from withholding roughly $50 million in federal funding.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Colorado, is the latest step in a dispute between the state’s second largest school district and the Education Department over policies related to transgender students.

The Office for Civil Rights said the district’s policies on transgender sports participation and overnight field trip accommodations violate Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. Numerous other school districts have faced similar investigations.

Under the Trump administration, civil rights enforcement has focused on a few political priorities, including undoing protections for transgender students, while other cases have languished.

In its lawsuit, Jeffco Public Schools alleges that the Education Department changed longstanding interpretations of Title IX without going through an appropriate rule-making process, a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, and that the way the department handled the investigation reflects an “arbitrary and capricious” approach that violates the district’s rights.

The lawsuit alleges that the administration has demanded that Jeffco Public Schools violate the state’s anti-discrimination laws based on an interpretation of Title IX that hasn’t been tested in the courts. A recent Supreme Court decision found that states may pass sports policies that block transgender students from joining sports teams that match their gender identity, but it did not require that they do so. The decision explicitly left the issue up to states and school districts, at least for now.

The lawsuit further alleges that the Education Department’s demands violate the First Amendment. One of the corrective actions required by the Office for Civil Rights was that the district issue a public statement adopting the Trump administration’s definition of sex and agreeing with its interpretation of Title IX.

The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment late Tuesday.

In an open letter to the community, interim Superintendent Rob Stein acknowledged that the lawsuit comes as the district faces serious budget problems and involves contentious issues. He said the Office for Civil Rights had placed the district in an “impossible position,” and the lawsuit would provide clarity about what it means to follow the law.

“The federal funding at issue helps support important programs and services that benefit students across our district, including many of our most vulnerable learners,” he wrote. “Protecting these resources is one of our responsibilities as a school district.”

Chalkbeat reporting found that OCR’s investigation into Jeffco was based on a limited review of documents rather than on in-depth interviews, an approach that represents a departure from past practices. The Education Department accused the district of having up to 61 boys on the rosters of girls’ sports teams, while the district says those names belonged to trainers, managers, and mascots. The department also issued a letter of impasse threatening enforcement action even before a 90-day window for negotiating an agreement had expired.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Education Department investigates Denver Public Schools over teacher accused of making students kiss

2026-07-28T20:19:46+00:00

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The U.S. Department of Education is investigating Denver Public Schools over an incident in which a high school teacher was accused of making girls kiss each other as part of a class assignment.

The Education Department’s description of the allegation is consistent with a previously reported incident at Northeast Early College during the 2023-24 school year. Local news outlets CBS Colorado and the Denver Gazette reported that an independent review found that students in a French class felt pressured to kiss other students of the same sex as part of skits performed in class. The district fired the teacher in question. The school principal also referred the incident to law enforcement. No criminal charges resulted.

Federal officials said Tuesday their investigation will focus on whether the district ignored any opt-out requests from parents or students, and whether parents were notified in advance about the nature of the assignment. The Office for Civil Rights will also look at whether the district complied with Title IX requirements in its handling of the incident.

The Denver investigation comes as the Office for Civil Rights has shifted its focus to political priorities such as transgender sports participation, bathroom access policies, and antisemitism on college campuses. The Education Department previously found DPS in violation of Title IX for converting a girls restroom at East High School to a gender-neutral restroom, but it has not pursued any enforcement action.

The Education Department, which did not name the teacher or the school at the center of the allegations, said the latest investigation is part of a larger effort to protect parents’ rights and prevent schools from exposing students to content related to sexual and gender identity. In the same press release, the department announced an investigation into Bethel School District in Washington state related to a Pride Month display.

“Shocking reports from across the country indicate that our kids are being subjected to inappropriate material, surveys, and events in schools, and parents’ fundamental right to review such materials and opt their children out of these suggestive activities appear to be disregarded in the process,” said Frank Miller, director of the federal Student Privacy Policy Office, in a press release.

A spokesperson for Denver Public Schools said the district had just received the investigation notice and could not comment on the assertions Tuesday.

In an emailed statement, spokesperson Scott Pribble said the district appreciates the bravery of students who came forward and staff who acted as mandatory reporters. The district learned of student concerns in March 2025 and immediately placed the teacher on administrative leave while an investigation was conducted, the statement said.

That investigation resulted in the school board voting unanimously to fire the teacher at a May 20 board meeting.

“The safety, emotional well-being, and dignity of our students are the absolute highest priorities of DPS,” Pribble said. “Our actions to date have been wholly consistent with those priorities.”

The Education Department said it would announce more investigations this week in honor of National Parents Day, which was Sunday. These investigations will look for potential violations of Title IX and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment. Title IX prohibits sex discrimination in education. The protection of student rights law gives parents the right to review instructional materials and opt their students out of surveys and evaluations.

The Education Department has also partnered with the Justice Department to launch a series of investigations into school district policies that limit parental notification when students express a different gender identity at school.

The Trump administration says such policies violate the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which gives parents the right to review any educational records related to their own child. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said such investigations would be a priority as more oversight of civil rights in schools moves to the Justice Department.

According to previous media reports, a teacher asked students to perform skits in French class that included same-sex kissing. This allegedly occurred during the 2023-24 school year but was not reported until later. The teacher said she gave students alternatives, such as a fist bump or blowing a kiss to each other.

However, the independent review written by an administrative law judge in Colorado reported students said they felt pressured by a classroom policy that “the answer is always ‘yes.’” At least one student said she kissed a female classmate at the teacher’s direction despite feeling uncomfortable with it, and another said she received a zero when she refused to participate in the skits.

Students also told an investigator they felt uncomfortable that the teacher always selected girls and never boys to participate in these skits, according to the review.

The teacher, a veteran educator who had previously received strong performance reviews, told the investigator she felt targeted because she was open at school about being a lesbian and participated in LGBTQ advocacy.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Parental rights and student gender transitions will be civil rights priorities: top DOJ official

2026-07-13T19:26:26+00:00

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The day after the Education Department announced the Justice Department would play a larger role in civil rights enforcement in schools, the Justice Department’s top civil rights official gave a preview of what that might look like.

Speaking on conservative commentator Glenn Beck’s radio program, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said the Justice Department would use its investigative and prosecutorial powers to enforce its interpretation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

“FERPA protects children and parental rights from illegal gender ideology being forced down their throats,” Dhillon said during the June 17 show. States are “simply ignoring this law and abusing children,” she added, calling the Justice Department the “right place” to enforce the law.

Passed in 1974, FERPA gives parents access to their children’s school records and prevents schools from sharing student data with third parties without permission. The law does not mention gender.

But the Trump administration has made clear through guidance and investigations that it believes policies that make it harder for parents to find out how their child expresses their gender identity at school violate the law. The Supreme Court bolstered that legal interpretation in its Mirabelli v. Bonta decision earlier this year, though the case did not deal specifically with FERPA.

Now, new interagency agreements between the Education and Justice Departments suggest the Justice Department plans to get involved in cases at an earlier stage, allowing for more aggressive enforcement on issues that align with President Donald Trump’s political priorities.

“I would expect that far more cases will go to court because they will begin with an agency that leans towards litigation, and I would expect there to be more of a bias towards litigation, as opposed to a bias towards mediation or resolution,” said Kenneth Marcus, who worked on education-related civil rights issues in both the George W. Bush and Trump administrations.

Unlike the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which must investigate every complaint it receives, the Justice Department can “cherry pick” which cases it pursues, said Marcus, who now heads the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights under Law. Under this administration, that means prioritizing allegations of campus antisemitism, anti-DEI initiatives, and issues related to transgender students, he said.

These priority areas are not new — the Trump administration made them clear from the first days. But they do stand in contrast to the disability discrimination cases that historically have made up a large share of OCR’s case load.

OCR historically has resolved many cases through informal agreements. Many years, Marcus said, not a single one of the 20,000 or more complaints that come into OCR gets referred to the Justice Department.

Education Department officials deny doing an end run around Congress

But when cases have been referred, the Justice Department often has to redo parts of the investigation. That’s not necessarily because OCR investigators did a bad job, but because OCR’s focus is not preparing cases for trial, Marcus said.

Bringing the Justice Department in earlier could allow the federal government to put more pressure on noncompliant school districts. That may be more important now because some school districts targeted by the Trump administration disagree with how it’s interpreting the law and have not agreed to change their policies after the Education Department finds them in violation.

“What can make this new system work well is if it facilitates quicker, smoother, and more effective litigation against recalcitrant institutions, Marcus said. “What would make the process fail is if the departments are less able to address the broad range of cases involving well-meaning institutions that probably shouldn’t go to court.”

Lilian Sotolongo Dorka, a former senior counsel to the assistant secretary for civil rights, fears this new system will be harder for families to navigate. The agreements also seem to go against federal law that assigns responsibility for civil rights in schools to the Education Department, she said.

“The spin that this will be great for civil rights enforcement and education is really smoke and mirrors,” said Sotolong Dorka, who is part of a group of former OCR employees attempting to serve as a watchdog. “It’s an attempt to do illegally through this partnership agreement what they cannot do legally, which is to close down the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.”

Justice Department’s Dhillon seeks ‘maximum enforcement’ of FERPA

Education Department officials have said that many aspects of the interagency agreements with Justice — which cover both the Office for Civil Rights and the Student Privacy Protection Office, which oversees FERPA complaints — are still being worked out.

In an interview last month with Chalkbeat, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kim Richey said her office remains focused on resolving cases for families.

“There’s nothing in this agreement that changes OCR practices,” she said.

Dhillon described the agreement differently, telling Beck that “99%” of school-related civil rights work will now be handled “soup to nuts” at the Justice Department. The Education Department retains ultimate authority, though, over whether to withhold federal funding from school districts that don’t comply.

Last year, a FERPA expert told Chalkbeat the law requires that school districts share written records, such as gender support plans, if parents request them. But FERPA doesn’t appear to create a duty to proactively disclose that students are expressing a different gender at school.

Some educators and advocates fear that informing unsupportive parents could put students’ physical and emotional safety at risk. But others say that parents are entitled to information that is entwined with their children’s development and well-being.

Layoffs and other departures at both departments have limited the administration’s ability to pursue its agenda. But some cases are moving ahead.

In late June, the Education Department announced it would now partner with the Justice Department on an investigation opened last year into Kansas City, Kansas, Public Schools’ student gender transition and parental notification policies.

But that case appears to have followed a typical trajectory, with the Education Department already declaring it had reached an impasse with the district and would refer the case to the Justice Department. The school district has said its policies already conform to federal law and it “respectfully disagrees” with the administration’s findings.

Supreme Court ruling on gender identity favors parents but leaves unanswered questions for schools

However, America First Legal, a conservative legal group closely aligned with the administration, has filed at least nine complaints in recent months alleging that school districts from Chicago to Hoonah, Alaska, kept information about gender transitions from parents. That tees up opportunities for the administration to try a new approach.

In an emailed statement to Chalkbeat, Dhillon said the partnership between Education and Justice “ensures maximum enforcement” of FERPA.

“Congress spoke with a clear voice when it guaranteed parents the right to know what information schools are collecting and using regarding their minor children,” she said. “That guarantee does not bend to the convenience of school administrators.”

A Justice Department spokesperson did not respond to additional questions about how more-commonplace cases involving students with disabilities will be handled.

But any change in enforcement, Marcus said, should be seen as a “side effect” rather than the main purpose of the interagency agreements.

“This move can be seen most clearly and accurately as a step along the way towards President Trump’s clearly articulated desire to close the Education Department,” he said.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Education Department scaled back special education monitoring: report

2026-07-08T20:15:05+00:00

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Federal teams charged with making sure states are doing right by students with disabilities appear to have visited fewer than half of the states originally scheduled for review in 2025 and 2026.

That information comes from U.S. Department of Education documents compiled and analyzed by the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a group that supports students with disabilities and their families, as well as additional review by Chalkbeat of publicly available monitoring schedules.

If federal reviews of state special education systems continue at this pace, each state would be reviewed only once every 25 years, COPAA said in a report released Tuesday. That would mean many students would go their entire school careers without federal oversight of state systems.

“The new administration has quietly rolled back their state oversight,” said Chris Roe, COPAA director of state policy. “We are worried that this sends a signal to states and eventually to local schools that this is not important, and they don’t need to be concerned about it.”

Drawing on nearly a dozen state monitoring reports based on reviews that started under the Biden administration, the COPAA report also raises concerns about states’ capacity to adequately monitor school districts’ compliance with special education requirements as the Trump administration pledges to “return education to the states.”

The Trump administration has taken steps to dismantle the Education Department by assigning key duties to other federal agencies. Most recently, the department announced that special education oversight would move to the Department of Health and Human Services, a change that has drawn significant organized opposition and some bipartisan skepticism.

U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a Republican who chairs the Senate education committee, has promised Democratic colleagues a vote on that change later this month. By itself, a committee vote won’t reverse the Trump administration’s actions, but a vote against it would represent the strongest formal objection from Congress to date.

COPAA opposes having another government agency handle special education oversight. The group’s report calls on Congress to intervene.

A spokesperson for the Education Department said COPAA’s “entire premise is false,” without describing any specific errors in the findings. The department pointed to monitoring reports — the same ones that COPAA reviewed for its analysis — as evidence the department continues to keep tabs on states.

Citing previous remarks by Education Secretary Linda McMahon, the spokesperson said the partnership between Health and Human Services and Education would improve coordination and benefit families and students, and “ensure states are in compliance with federal law.”

“Students will not lose any rights, including their right to a Free Appropriate Public Education,” the unnamed spokesperson said. “No agreement can alter the rights that students with disabilities are afforded under federal law.”

But Roe said the flaws identified in the monitoring reports show that students and families might struggle more to defend their rights without federal involvement.

Meanwhile, Politico this week highlighted the large number of states flagged by the Education Department as needing assistance or intervention to meet their goals for serving students with disabilities.

“When they say let’s return education to the states, there’s an assumption that states will backfill those responsibilities,” Roe said. “The case that that is not going to happen is pretty strong.”

Federal oversight finds gaps in special education protections

The Biden administration had previously urged states to take more responsibility for ensuring school districts meet their special education obligations. But according to monitoring reports, auditors repeatedly found shortcomings.

These included lax fiscal oversight; limited supervision of school district practices; states allowing districts to pick which student files they wanted reviewed; states not investigating parent complaints in a timely manner; and states either not informing parents of their rights or giving them incorrect information.

Roe said this system isn’t perfect. COPAA’s reviews of federal monitoring efforts over the years have found many cases where auditors identified problems, but there was limited follow-up and the problems continued. Nonetheless, the reports provide an important tool for advocates and lawmakers to press for changes, he said.

“Without them, we definitely face more of an uphill battle to getting systems in place to support our students,” Roe said.

The Education Department spokesperson said the department is “on track” to complete monitoring visits to all states by 2028, in keeping with a schedule established in 2022.

However, the spokesperson did not provide a schedule that showed how monitoring teams would visit roughly half the states in the next two years. The schedule that’s been posted on the department website since the spring of 2025 identifies only four states, Puerto Rico, and a few Pacific island territories for monitoring during the 2025-26 cycle and none thereafter. One of those states, Georgia, was supposed to be reviewed this spring, but monitoring visits have been pushed back to the fall, the department said.

During the Biden administration, the Education Department set a goal of monitoring 10 states a year, creating a five-year cycle for regular monitoring, in addition to off-cycle visits to address specific issues. COPAA found the Education Department monitored eight states in 2023 and 10 in 2024. A monitoring schedule archived by the Wayback Machine shows the department previously had plans to monitor nine states plus the territories in the 2025-26 cycle, and another 10 the next year.

It’s not clear why states previously identified for monitoring were removed from the schedule. However, the Education Department has laid off large numbers of workers. A report from the Office of Inspector General published last month raised questions about whether the department could carry out its responsibilities at current staffing levels.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

What SCOTUS didn’t say about transgender athletes — and what the ruling means for schools and students

2026-07-01T21:41:18+00:00

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The U.S. Supreme Court’s Tuesday decision on transgender sports participation in some ways simply upheld the status quo.

States that prohibit trangender athletes from playing on teams that match their gender identity can keep doing so — there’s no constitutional problem, the court’s conservative majority found.

But states without such bans can maintain more inclusive policies. Nothing in the ruling requires that states keep transgender athletes out of women’s and girl’s sports.

But that’s just one piece of the story. Advocates on both sides expect the fight in states and the courts to continue. And the Supreme Court majority’s reasoning raises new questions about the boundaries of transgender rights and gender protections more broadly.

Fight over transgender athletes to continue in states

More than 20 states still allow transgender athletes to participate on sports teams that match their gender identity, provided they meet certain criteria, and the Supreme Court ruling doesn’t change anything in those states.

Bolstered by the Supreme Court ruling, people who don’t believe transgender athletes have a place in girl’s sports hope to change that through the legislative process. Voters in Colorado and Washington will also get to decide whether to adopt bans through ballot measures.

Beth Parlato, an attorney with the conservative Independent Women’s Law Center, said she can now reassure lawmakers and the public that any ban they adopt is legal. Parlato said she’s also fielding calls about how the ruling might affect interstate competition when states have different standards.

“As litigators, we keep making these arguments until we win,” she said.

LGBTQ advocates, meanwhile, hope they can succeed in the court of public opinion in a way they didn’t with the Supreme Court.

“We’ve never been favored by the laws, and we know that the courts are not the be-all, end-all,” said Shawn Meerkamper, managing attorney at the Transgender Law Center. “We’re on to the next fight.”

All youth need opportunities to be physically active

Soju Hokari, a transgender athlete who described sports as a vital part of her childhood and her development as a person, said those who care about trans youth must find ways for them to get the benefits of sports, even in states with bans. That might mean creating clubs outside school or officially sanctioned teams.

Hokari said everyone involved in sports has “an obligation to make sure we’re making space for trans athletes to thrive.”

Writing in the newsletter QueerED, teacher and researcher Benjamin Lebovitz pointed to data from Wisconsin that showed transgender and questioning youth were much less likely to participate in sports or be physically active than their peers. That gap grew as the political debate over transgender athletes heated up, and Lebovitz fears the Supreme Court ruling will only exacerbate that withdrawal.

Schools should make sure all students have access to physical education, open gym time, and intramural and club sports, and they should make co-ed teams when dividing students, Lebovitz wrote.

The definition of sex remains legally ambiguous

Title IX prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in education and athletics while allowing sex-separated sports teams. But it doesn’t define sex. Federal courts have said that sex discrimination includes discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex stereotypes — the idea that boys should be one way and girls another. Civil rights guidance from Democratic presidents supported this interpretation.

Conservatives disagree. They say there’s little doubt lawmakers were thinking of biological sex when they passed Title IX in 1972. (Biological sex feels intuitive to most people in most situations, but it can be a mushy concept scientifically.)

Conservatives hoped that the Supreme Court might use the Hecox v. Little and West Virginia v. B.P.J. cases that were the basis for Tuesday’s ruling to find that sex means biological sex. The justices did not go that far.

And the ruling doesn’t officially endorse the Trump administration’s interpretation of Title IX, which the Office for Civil Rights has used to justify investigations into school districts and states with inclusive sports policies.

Supporters of LGBTQ rights rally outside the Supreme Court during oral arguments in the transgender sports cases. Advocates say they'll work to maintain inclusive sports policies in states without bans.

But Justice Brett Kavanaugh did write that sex, especially in the portions of Title IX dealing with sports, “cannot plausibly be interpreted to refer to anything other than biological sex.”

Advocates and legal experts said that position could play a role in future lawsuits.

Neil Gorsuch’s balancing act confuses both sides

Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion in the 2019 case Bostock v. Clayton County, which found that Title VII’s protections against sex discrimination on the job also protected gay and transgender employees.

In a concurrence to the sports decision, Gorsuch tried to explain how he could hold that view and still vote to uphold bans on transgender athletes. Title VII bans discrimination while Title IX allows for separation of men and women in some circumstances, he noted.

“It is a mistake to assume that, just because firing someone in part because of his biological sex amounts to unlawful discrimination in violation of Title VII, sponsoring a single-sex sports team limited to biological women or girls must also amount to unlawful discrimination in violation of Title IX,” he wrote.

Gorsuch seems to have pleased no one.

Parlato of the Independent Women’s Law Center said Gorsuch tried to “thread a needle” but that his logic doesn’t hold up.

And Meerkamper of the Transgender Law Center said “there’s no principled way” to support both the Bostock decision and the court’s new sports ruling. What’s changed, he said, is the political environment for trans rights between 2019 and 2026.

Still, unlike Justice Clarence Thomas, Gorsuch didn’t call transgender identity a mental illness.

SCOTUS silent on what protections transgender students have

Race and sex are protected classes, and potentially discriminatory laws must demonstrate some significant public interest to pass legal muster.

The conservative majority’s opinion did not find that transgender people have similar protections. But it didn’t find that they did not have such protections either. In short, they evaded the issue.

For Deborah Drake, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, that leaves an opportunity to challenge transgender discrimination in the courts — though she has few illusions that the Supreme Court’s current justices will be receptive to those claims.

But Anna Kirkland, an attorney and professor of gender studies at the University of Michigan, said it’s deeply concerning that the majority gave so much deference to state laws without requiring more evidence that women and girls are harmed when transgender athletes participate in women’s sports.

Under this approach, she said, women might not have been admitted to elite military academies, for example. And it could mean other policies that only affect a small number of people who don’t conform to gender stereotypes are allowed to stand in the future.

“This ruling shows how the conservative majority is narrowing what equal protection means for everyone,” she said.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Inside two Title IX investigations in Colorado that reflect a ‘new way of doing business’ under Trump

2026-06-26T23:01:12+00:00

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An all-gender bathroom in a Denver high school was at the center of the first sex discrimination investigation of the second Trump administration. A year and a half later, the federal Office for Civil Rights has taken no enforcement action.

Neighboring Jeffco Public Schools, meanwhile, has been threatened with the loss of federal funds after investigators said they found boys’ names on girls’ sports rosters. Citing policies on locker room access and overnight field trips, the Education Department is pursuing enforcement even after the district said the names belonged to managers, trainers, and mascots.

Documents obtained through public records requests shed new light on how the Trump administration approached the two Colorado cases. Investigations that once might have involved in-depth interviews consisted of email back-and-forths. Inconsistent follow-up left districts unsure what to expect after being found in violation. And the alleged violations of Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination, were based on untested interpretations.

“More aggressive enforcement” could be on the horizon under a new partnership between the Office for Civil Rights and the Department of Justice. That could raise the stakes for school districts and students in how OCR approaches its investigations and arrives at its conclusions.

“This is a new way of doing business,” said Seth Galanter, an attorney who worked for OCR under the Obama and Biden administrations and is now a senior fellow at the Edley Center on Law and Democracy at the University of California Berkeley School of Law.

“There’s no nuance,” Galanter said. “There’s no inquiry into whether there’s a hostile environment. They say, ‘You have a policy, and the policy violated the law and yeah, you’re in trouble now.’ That is not something that prior administrations would have done.”

OCR is increasingly focused on undoing protections for transgender students through investigations it initiates itself. Amid massive staffing cuts, OCR has dismissed thousands of pending cases, according to a January U.S. Government Accountability Office report. Historically, most OCR cases stemmed from disability discrimination complaints filed by families.

The federal education department did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

But in a news release this month, the department claimed the Trump administration has made “historic progress” in enforcing Title IX.

“Under the Trump Administration, no woman or girl will have to fight alone to secure her basic protections, and we will not relent until Title IX is restored to the fullest extent of the law,” Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey said in the news release.

The Trump administration’s first investigation was in Denver

The civil rights office launched its Denver investigation several days after a local television news station aired a story in January 2025 about how the conversion of a girls’ restroom at East High School to a multi-stall all-gender one had “caused a stir.”

A district spokesperson said students requested the all-gender restroom.

“They were running out of time, being late to the next class because the one or two single stall bathrooms that they had to accommodate this just wasn’t enough for the need that was out there,” spokesperson Scott Pribble told 9News.

To investigate, OCR sent Denver Public Schools a request for 12 pieces of information, according to documents obtained by Chalkbeat through a public records request. That information included the district’s bathroom policy, a floor plan showing all of the bathrooms at East High, and any complaints the district received about the conversion.

“To our knowledge, OCR did not interview any DPS staff,” a DPS spokesperson said.

Denver provided 17 emails it had received, Pribble said. Nine expressed concern about the restroom, seven were supportive, and one asked for more information, he said.

The civil rights office also asked for the number of students who were tardy to class because of restroom availability before and after the creation of the all-gender restroom.

Denver told OCR that it doesn’t track that specific information. But the district did share data showing the total number of tardies at 2,400-student East High went down, not up, after the all-gender restroom was added, the documents show.

Seven months into the investigation, Denver did something that district officials hoped would neutralize the Trump administration’s claim that the restroom was discriminatory toward girls: It converted a boys’ restroom at East High into another all-gender restroom.

That didn’t help. Days later, OCR found that Denver had violated Title IX. In an 11-page letter to the superintendent, the federal office wrote that the all-gender restroom “had significant deleterious effects” on students and that East High had received “many complaints,” including about boys leering at a girl in the bathroom and pounding on the door of a stall. The letter references written complaints but gives no indication investigators spoke with students.

In a statement to Chalkbeat, Denver refuted that reasoning.

“They requested all emails on the topic and made their findings based solely on a handful of negative emails,” a district spokesperson wrote. “They did not include the comments from positive emails that had also been shared with them.”

OCR’s findings also appear to have been influenced by outside factors. OCR’s letter included a full page of examples from other states, including a 16-year-old in Minnesota who reported seeing a boy in the girls locker room and a 14-year-old in Wisconsin who said she was “exposed to the genitalia” of a transgender student.

OCR gave Denver 10 days to revert East High’s all-gender restrooms back to single-sex ones or “risk imminent enforcement action.” That was in August. The district hasn’t complied, nor has it heard anything further from the federal office, a district spokesperson confirmed.

The administration is threatening funding in neighboring Jeffco

Five months after launching its Denver investigation, OCR turned to neighboring Jeffco Public Schools. The district is home to a politically connected conservative parent group whose founder told local media she shared concerns about district policies with the federal department.

The Jeffco investigation also came after several families sued the district over its overnight accommodations policy. One family claimed their 11-year-old daughter was assigned to share a bed with a transgender student on an out-of-state trip. The lawsuit is ongoing.

Just like in Denver, OCR asked Jeffco for 12 pieces of information, including the names and contact information for all sports team coaches, documents obtained in a public records request show. But a district spokesperson said OCR never interviewed anyone in Jeffco, either.

OCR also asked Jeffco for girls sports team rosters, “identifying on each such roster any participants who are biologically male.” Jeffco sent OCR the rosters, “including the gender provided by students and/or their families,” the district told Chalkbeat.

In March, OCR issued a press release that said the rosters indicated “male students occupy 61 roster positions on girls’ sports teams.” Jeffco serves about 74,000 students.

A later version of the press release posted on the federal education department’s website walked back that language by adding the words “may” and “up to.” The department did not answer questions from Chalkbeat about why.

But Jeffco said recently that the 61 boys on the girls’ rosters were not athletes but “male managers, trainers, or mascots.” The district said OCR never asked to clarify any of the boys’ roles, and that Jeffco didn’t learn of “the confusion” until OCR issued its press release.

“OCR did not engage with District staff whatsoever in the eight months after receiving our data submission — contrary to the dialogue we would have expected during an investigation under OCR’s own Case Processing Manual,” Jeffco wrote in a letter to the office in early June.

Jeffco said it has “repeatedly and respectfully” asked OCR to correct the error, but the office has refused. The education department declined to comment on the matter to Chalkbeat.

The federal civil rights office also asked Jeffco for documentation of instances in which allowing boys to compete on girls sports teams adversely affected female athletes, including any injuries, forfeitures, or cases in which transgender athletes won. Jeffco said it had no such documents.

As in Denver, OCR found that Jeffco violated Title IX. And similar to Denver, OCR gave Jeffco 10 days to rescind its policies or risk imminent enforcement action. Jeffco didn’t do that. Three months later, on Friday, the education department announced it was making good on its threat.

Jeffco was anticipating it. On Wednesday, the Jeffco school board held a special meeting to authorize potential legal action, should the federal administration try to withhold funding.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Trump administration gives Jeffco 10 days to change policies or risk losing federal funding

2026-06-26T21:32:44+00:00

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The Trump administration on Friday gave Jeffco Public Schools 10 days to change its policies on transgender students’ rights or risk losing federal funding.

The federal Office for Civil Rights previously found that Jeffco’s policies on bathroom use, sports participation, and overnight accommodations violated Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination. Investigators said they found 61 boys’ names on Jeffco girls’ sports rosters. The district said the names belonged to managers, trainers, and mascots rather than athletes.

Still, the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights announced in a news release Friday that it is moving forward with enforcement, which could include referring the case to the U.S. Department of Justice.

The district had anticipated the move. On Wednesday, the Jeffco school board authorized potential legal action in case the federal government attempts to withhold funding.

In a statement Friday, the 74,000-student district said it stands to lose more than $90 million in federal funding.

“The trust of our students, families, staff, and community is one of our most important responsibilities,” the district said. “That trust requires us to speak honestly, insist on accuracy, follow the law, and stand up for the students we serve. We will continue to do so.”

Inside two Title IX investigations in Colorado that reflect a ‘new way of doing business’ under Trump

Jeffco Superintendent Tracy Dorland called on Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, Attorney General Phil Weiser, and Education Commissioner Susana Córdova to back the district, as well.

“Should this dispute wind up in the courts, we ask for your active participation as a party in defense of Colorado law,” Dorland wrote in a letter to the three state leaders.

Jeffco has maintained that its policies comply with Colorado’s anti-discrimination law, whose regulations allow transgender individuals to use restrooms, locker rooms, and dormitories that align with their gender identity.

In a news release Friday, U.S. Department of Education Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey called Jeffco’s Title IX violations “widespread and blatant.”

“Today’s action makes clear that continued noncompliance will be met with accountability and consequences,” she said.

The department also found neighboring Denver Public Schools in violation of Title IX last year but has not pursued enforcement action against that district.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Education Department officials deny doing an end run around Congress

2026-06-25T22:59:46+00:00

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Parceling out key Education Department functions to other agencies does not represent an end run around Congress, top officials said Thursday, even as they declined to say what might trigger the need for congressional approval.

In a 20-minute video interview with Chalkbeat, assistant secretaries Kirsten Baesler, Kimberly Richey, and Kelly Rogers pushed back against criticism from education advocacy groups, Democratic lawmakers, and even some Republicans.

They argued these changes will be good for students and families in tangible ways — saying that they will improve services for children with disabilities, strengthen civil rights protections, and boost academic outcomes. In a number of cases, though, they offered only limited specifics on how moving around offices would make a practical difference.

Baesler, the former North Dakota schools chief, oversees K-12 programming, which is now under the Department of Labor. Richey oversees civil rights, which will be working more closely with the Department of Justice. Rogers runs the special education arm, which has been moved to the Department of Health and Human Services.

They reiterated the idea that a series of interagency agreements will provide proof of concept that the federal government can best support education without an actual Education Department.

And they said the changes underway are responsive to parent and educator complaints about the status quo — but they could not name leaders or groups not already in the Republican camp who support specific changes, such as moving special education oversight to Health and Human Services.

Here’s what we heard from Education Department leaders:

Officials deny going around Congress

Baesler responded with an emphatic “absolutely not” when asked if the interagency agreements are a way to dismantle the department without getting congressional approval.

“We know that dismantling or the dissolution of the Department of Education will take an act of Congress,” she said. “Our whole intent is to provide evidence to our congressional members of the House and the Senate that this is actually a more efficient and effective way to yield stronger student academic outcomes. … We’re not going around but working with.”

Kirsten Baesler, Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education

Baesler compared the 14 interagency agreements that have farmed out duties the law assigns to the Education Department to six other departments to times she ran a pilot program in North Dakota before asking state lawmakers to change policy or approve new funding.

But the administration has not treated the effort as a small pilot — it has outsourced several of the largest arms of the agency. After months of limited pushback, some lawmakers are speaking out.

Last week, Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Republican chair of the Senate education committee who has stepped up his criticism of the administration since losing his primary, promised a committee vote on a measure that would prevent special education from moving to HHS.

And on Thursday, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, a Michigan Democrat who serves on the House education committee, introduced articles of impeachment that accuse McMahon of “willful intent to unilaterally dismantle and eliminate the Department of Education.”

Schools will get federal money on time this year

Baesler said federal money will go out to states and school districts on July 1, as is typical.

Last summer, the Office of Management and Budget held back some $7 billion that school leaders had been counting on to hire staff and set up programs for the upcoming school year. The money was only restored after outcry from Republican lawmakers and state chiefs.

This year, the Office of Management and Budget has used an obscure procedure to delay placing money in the necessary accounts for some federal grant programs. The affected accounts involve a smaller pot of money than last year’s withholding.

Baesler said school districts will not experience a repeat of last year’s delays.

Officials could not name parents who pushed for special education changes

Rogers laid out the case for the most contentious of recent changes: moving special education oversight to HHS. In listening sessions, Education Department officials heard from parents that their children often need services and support outside of school. She said partnering with HHS will improve services from infancy into adulthood. The ultimate goal, she said, is better long-term outcomes.

While disability advocates have stressed that students with disabilities are students first, Rogers said parents said their children are more than just students. That means Health and Human Services is a better place to meet their needs, she said.

Linda McMahon says she heard parents. Parents say special education changes show she didn’t listen.

But asked to name a disability rights group or individual who wanted special education to move to HHS, Rogers could not do so. “I don’t have that information right now on who said what, but we took in all the feedback and made the ultimate decision,” she said.

Administration touts state flexibility, even though some leaders aren’t feeling it

Similarly, Baesler said she believes the changes to K-12 education will empower states and local districts and ultimately improve student academic outcomes.

But asked to name a Democratic-appointed or aligned education leader who feels empowered by the administration’s changes, Baesler could not do so. She cited Vermont’s education chief, who was appointed by a Republican. Education leaders in Rhode Island and Washington have previously told Chalkbeat that if anything they are experiencing more federal involvement under the Trump administration.

It’s still not clear how exactly civil rights enforcement will change

The Department of Justice will take a “more active and involved role” in school civil rights complaints going forward, Richey said, while the Office for Civil Rights retains ultimate authority over civil rights enforcement.

“We’re going to continue to be laser focused on complaint investigation and resolution,” Richey said.

The Trump administration has laid off civil rights investigators, closed regional offices, and focused enforcement on high-profile cases involving political priorities such as transgender athletes and campus protests.

Many details of the agreement are still being worked out, Richey said, but the goal is “more aggressive enforcement” and bolstering civil rights in schools.

In an interview last week with conservative commentator Glenn Beck, Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department, said Justice has “cut out the middle man, which is Department of Education investigators and lawyers.”

“Ninety-nine percent of the work is going to be done here,” she said.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Linda McMahon says she heard parents. Parents say special education changes show she didn’t listen.

2026-06-17T00:23:04+00:00

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Education Secretary Linda McMahon had a message for parents of students with disabilities on Tuesday as she announced seismic shifts to federal special education oversight: “I’ve heard you.”

In listening sessions and at school visits, McMahon said thousands of parents described struggles to get their children the services to which they’re legally entitled. Moving special education oversight out of the Department of Education, she wrote in an op-ed for Fox News, will reduce red tape and open opportunities.

McMahon may have heard parents, many advocates said Tuesday, but she didn’t listen.

“It is accurate what they said today, that they spent six months talking to people, but we’ve been very consistent in our message that we didn’t want this to happen,” said Jennifer Coco, interim executive director for the Center for Learner Equity and a parent of students with disabilities.

Agency officials announced Tuesday the department will move oversight of special education to the Department of Health and Human Services and aspects of civil rights enforcement to the Department of Justice through interagency agreements without approval from Congress. The Department of Education touted holding multiple listening sessions with hundreds of parents, educators, and special education directors.

But some of those same people said the decision flies in the face of what they’ve told McMahon and agency leaders. They raised concerns about dysfunction across special education programs nationwide, but they did not want the department to fracture the system even further.

“To remove that federal oversight piece in an already fragmented system, it just feels like an extra blow to parents of kids with disabilities who are already dealing with so much,” said Jillian Benfield, whose son Anderson, 11, has Down Syndrome and attends public school in Florida.

Some conservative organizations say the steps the Trump administration has taken to dismantle the Education Department will be positive for students with disabilities, arguing too many layers of bureaucracy limit opportunities.

A senior department official said the changes would not change students’ rights and would instead lead to more effective services for students and families, with more coordination of services for young children and adults.

But many advocates said they are worried about how much is at stake in these agency agreements and what could be lost in the transition, particularly because the Office for Civil Rights — where the bulk of the case load involves complaints from students with disabilities — has also been upended.

Calling it the “next step in a lawless decimation” of an agency created by Congress, Catherine Lhamon, who ran the civil rights office in the Education Department under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, said the new structure may ensure dollars will flow from one agency to another, “but rights will not flow to anyone.”

“It’s incredibly dangerous for the rights of kids in schools to learn on an equal basis,” she said.

Parents worry federal shifts could trickle down to their children

Lanya Elsa is the parent of two children who are deafblind. She is a special educator who helps support families while they pursue school accommodations.

Program officers with the Department of Education oversee multiple state and federal programs for students who are deafblind, she said. And parents with children with those disabilities worry these programs will be the next to be cut or shifted away from the Department of Education.

“If my kids were born 40 years ago they would have been put in an institution,” she wrote in a text message. “Instead they have college degrees and are working. That’s why many of us are uneasy about moving oversight away from education.”

Benfield and other parents also are skeptical of the department’s argument that shifting responsibilities to other agencies is an efficient choice.

“There’s already so much as a parent of a kid with a disability that you have to navigate, so many different systems,” she said. “Now, where are parents going to go? You’re just making an already complex system more complicated for parents.”

Education Department dismantling continues: special ed oversight to HHS, civil rights to Justice

In addition to tangible impacts on families, disability advocates say moving the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services to the Department of Health and Human Services reinforces stigma by associating disability with an agency dealing largely in healthcare and medical issues.

Robyn Linscott, director of Education and Family Policy at the Arc of the United States said it’s notable that other K-12 functions were moved to Labor, ostensibly because the long-term goal of education is a good job, while special education was not.

“I think it can’t be overstated enough that the way we think about students with disabilities and the messages we send about the potential of students with disabilities really matters,” she said. “And the irony that we’re talking about this 50 years after IDEA is not lost on me. The idea that it’s OK to segregate students with disabilities, that they can’t learn with other students, really concerns me.”

Shifting agency duties to Health, Justice departments

Linscott said Tuesday’s announcement caught many advocates off guard, even though the idea has been discussed since the early months of the Trump administration and even earlier in Project 2025. Advocates had spoken repeatedly with senior administration officials and thought their message might be heard.

“Despite the number of families sharing the difficulty their students were having accessing services, not a single person said moving OSERS to HHS was the way to approach this,” Linscott said, describing an hours-long listening session held in January. “Not a single parent, advocate, or educator said that.”

But Coco recalled one meeting where agency officials were explicit that these functions would move out of the Education Department.

“It wasn’t a question of whether this should be done or whether it was right —- that had already been predetermined,” she said. “The question that’s been lingering is, well, where are they going to move it to?”

Asked what problems the Education Department was trying to solve and how services would improve through moving functions to other agencies, a senior department official said that McMahon “has been very clear about the final mission of the U.S. Department of Education,” referring to promises to dismantle the department entirely. Moving oversight to other agencies allows the federal government to meet its legal obligations, the official said.

While HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised in a press release to “help every child reach their full potential,” advocates worry about how a department led by him will approach special education. Kennedy has spent over a decade spreading misinformation about autism, and 13% of students served under IDEA fell under the autism category, according to federal data from the 2022-23 school year.

McMahon tried to reassure parents their children will be treated as students, not patients.

“IDEA, as an education law, ensures that a child’s disability isn’t viewed as a medical condition that needs to be treated,” she wrote.

Advocates’ concerns are compounded by moving special education and civil rights enforcement to different agencies. Having the two under the same roof meant the department had multiple ways to communicate with schools about how to best serve students, said Eric Duncan, director of P-12 policy for the progressive advocacy group The Education Trust.

“The Office for Civil Rights is not just a punitive office,” Duncan said. “It’s really to support the systemic issues that are affecting why certain students are overly disciplined or referred for certain things, why students are in settings where they’re not comfortable or aren’t able to learn because of their specific challenges.”

The Department of Justice can’t replicate the work done by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, Lhamon said. It’s a “totally different agency,” she said, whose work ranges from helping entire school communities resolve issues to answering “any mom’s question about whether civil rights have been violated.”

Lily Altavena is a national reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Lily at laltavena@chalkbeat.org.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Education Department dismantling continues: special ed oversight to HHS, civil rights to Justice

2026-06-16T17:27:13+00:00

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The U.S. Department of Justice is taking over aspects of civil rights enforcement in schools, while oversight of special education is moving to the Department of Health and Human Services, the Trump administration announced Tuesday.

The change will move some of the most essential and integrated functions provided by the federal Education Department to two separate agencies and further accelerates the dismantling of the department without congressional approval.

Senior department officials said the changes would not reduce or affect students’ rights and would instead lead to more effective services for students and families. But many details are still being worked out.

“The Trump Administration has been clear: as we scale back federal micromanagement when it hinders success, we are equally committed to bolstering the efficacy of federal oversight where it is essential,” U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a press release.

Advocates for students with disabilities have been fighting the move involving special education for more than a year. They had hoped that the overwhelming opposition voiced during listening sessions earlier this spring might sway officials.

They fear that Health and Human Services lacks not only the experience but also the appropriate perspective to support the education of students with disabilities, most of whom are educated alongside their peers in general education classrooms.

Meanwhile, complaints related to children with disabilities make up a significant portion of the work of the Office for Civil Rights. While the Department of Justice has always played a critical role in civil rights enforcement, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights historically has focused specifically on getting school districts to change their practices rather than penalizing violations. Advocates have valued that approach as a way of improving education for a larger group of students.

The law that established the Department of Education says the agency is responsible for overseeing and funding the education of children with disabilities, and for enforcing civil rights in schools. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act also places special education oversight within the Department of Education.

Recent budget laws give control of IDEA funds to the Department of Education and say that money can’t just be transferred to another agency.

Education advocates quickly condemned the move.

“These continued disruptions will create confusion for states and school districts, undermine accountability, and inject uncertainty into services that students and families depend on every day,” The Education Trust, a progressive advocacy group, said in a statement. “Without a clear plan, these shifts risk weakening implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and decades of hard-fought civil rights progress.”

The Education Department is using interagency agreements to move the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services to HHS and the Office for Civil Rights to Justice without a green light from Congress. Historically, such agreements were used to allow departments to contract with other agencies for certain services outside their core mission.

It’s the same mechanism that the department used to move career and technical education and the bulk of K-12 programming to the U.S. Department of Labor.

Members of Congress have raised questions about these moves, with Democrats even calling them illegal, but there has been no meaningful congressional oversight or other steps to block the changes.

Supporters of the changes have said it would better align educational programs with workforce needs.

Moving special education to Health and Human Services is a much bigger change, and one where the policy justifications are less clear.

Linda McMahon says she heard parents. Parents say special education changes show she didn’t listen.

Supporters of IDEA and its critics can both point to many problems with the law, including persistent underfunding and a focus on compliance rather than meeting students’ needs.

But many advocates fear moving special education to Health and Human Services will mark a return to a medical model of dealing with disability. A recent study found that students with disabilities benefit from special education services, suggesting the system is working for at least some students.

A senior department official said partnering with Health and Human Services will improve coordination of services for infants and toddlers, on one end of the spectrum, and services for adults with disabilities on the other end, with the education provided in schools.

The official said the Trump administration also plans to increase funding for special education by roughly $500 million, although it remains to be seen if Congress will agree to that.

The move follows a blueprint laid out in the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which calls for moving special education to HHS and converting funding into a small voucher for individual families. Project 2025 also calls for moving civil rights enforcement to Justice.

Lindsey Burke, the lead author of Project 2025’s education chapter, is a top official at the Education Department.

“Downsizing this agency and returning education to the states achieves a long-standing goal to empower families and local communities,” Burke said during a Chalkbeat event earlier this year. She said that the Education Department has proven to be a costly failure.

Under McMahon, the Office for Civil Rights has been cut significantly even as it’s continued to receive thousands of discrimination complaints. The office received more than 9,000 complaints of alleged discrimination between March 2024 and Sept. 2025, according to a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office report. The department resolved more than 7,000, though 90% were resolved through dismissal.

The administration previously laid off Office for Civil Rights staff before more recently moving to rehire attorneys. It also closed seven out of 12 regional offices, reassigning caseloads to the five remaining offices.

National reporter Lily Altavena and Ideas Editor Matt Barnum contributed.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Indiana wins federal education funding waiver from Trump administration

2026-06-16T15:01:14+00:00

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The Trump administration is giving Indiana new flexibility in how it spends some of its federal education funding.

But the waiver from the U.S. Department of Education is not nearly as expansive as what Indiana requested last year, when it sought a waiver from some provisions of the Every Student Succeeds Act, the main federal law governing K-12 education.

The approved waiver will merge five federal funding streams to the tune of around $50 million over the next four years, according to U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, who spoke at a news conference with Indiana Secretary of Education Katie Jenner and Indiana Gov. Mike Braun on Tuesday.

This strategy for federal education funding, often referred to as a block grant, is popular among conservatives championing fewer regulations. But others have criticized it, saying it could weaken accountability for the money and ultimately hurt certain students.

Indiana is now the third state after Iowa and Louisiana to receive a “Returning Education to the States” waiver from the Trump administration, which has also sought to close the Education Department. The flexibility the department provided to Iowa was also more modest than what the state originally sought.

McMahon and Jenner said the move will save Indiana an estimated $20 million in compliance costs over four years associated with administering the grants separately.

“As states, we have significant control over education. We set standards, choose our curriculum, and design assessments. When it comes to federal funding, our hands have always been tied, until now,” Jenner said.

The waiver will also allow the state to use its newly approved school accountability model as the sole accountability model for state and federal purposes.

At the state level, the waiver will merge the following funding streams:

Title I, Part B grants, which cover assessment.
Title II, Part A grants, which cover professional development.
Title III, Part A grants, which cover education for English learners.
Title IV, Part A grants, which cover enrichment.
Title IV, Part B grants, which cover 21st Century Learning Centers.

The federal funding for these grants will not change under the waiver.

The waiver does not grant all Indiana districts similar flexibility to spend the money they receive from the state, as the state originally requested in its waiver application. Instead, it allows the state to create a pilot program for up to 15% of local education agencies that will allow them to merge Title II, Part A and Title IV, Part A funds.

The waiver also does not address Indiana’s request to redirect School Improvement Grant funding away from schools identified as low-performing. That request would have potentially diverted $25 million in annual federal funding to other schools, like charter schools and microschools.

Education advocates had expressed concern that this move would have hurt students who have to stay at the schools identified as low-performing.

Similarly, critics have also said that merging dedicated federal funding streams for specific student needs into block grants risks losing the guardrails that ensure the funding reaches those students.

Denise Forte, president and CEO of The Education Trust, an advocacy group that tracks the status of state waiver requests, said in a Tuesday statement that the Trump administration “has abandoned” commitments to supporting students and schools and to publicly reporting important education data.

“Instead, the Department of Education will allow Indiana to rewrite its accountability system in a way that will mask student performance and move millions of dollars in dedicated funding away from students who need it most,” Forte said.

Indiana officials on Tuesday rejected such arguments.

“Our funding formulas … direct a certain number of dollars per student to every school. That money will continue to flow,” Jenner said. “Now the money will be able to be deployed exactly how they need it in a timely manner.”

Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. Contact her at aappleton@chalkbeat.org.

District says 61 boys the Trump administration found on girls’ sports rosters were mascots, managers

2026-06-12T22:12:54+00:00

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When the federal education department announced in March that Jeffco Public Schools had in its view run afoul of anti-discrimination law, it cited one key piece of evidence: rosters indicating 61 boys were on girls’ sports teams.

In a letter to the community this week, Colorado’s second largest school district said no boys were competing on those teams — and offered an explanation.

“Some teams had male managers, trainers, or mascots — not athletes,” the letter said.

“Because the [U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights] never asked us to clarify the role of any individual listed on those rosters, we did not learn of this confusion until the OCR issued a press release. Since that moment, we have repeatedly and respectfully asked the OCR to address this factual error. They have declined to do so.”

The U.S. Department of Education declined to comment for this story.

The federal Office for Civil Rights is meant to ensure equal access to education by enforcing laws that prohibit discrimination. But under President Donald Trump, the office has used the federal Title IX law to target school district policies that protect transgender students.

Jeffco has been in a back-and-forth with the federal office for a year.

Last June, the office launched an investigation into Jeffco’s policy on sleeping arrangements for transgender students on overnight school trips. The policy says transgender students should share rooms with peers who match their gender identity. A family had sued the district after their 11-year-old daughter was assigned to share a bed with a transgender student.

The federal office eventually found that several of Jeffco’s policies — including those on overnight accommodations, bathroom use, and sports participation — violated Title IX.

At first, the office said Jeffco athletic rosters indicated “that male students occupy 61 roster positions on girls’ sports teams.” A later version of the press release posted on the federal education department’s website walked back that language by adding the words “may” and “up to.”

The department has not answered questions from Chalkbeat about the change. Nor has it answered questions about how it made the determination about the 61 boys.

Last week, the federal office issued a warning letter to Jeffco threatening to pull the 74,000-student district’s federal funding if it doesn’t change its policies, saying the two sides are at an impasse.

In a statement, Jeffco disagreed about the impasse, noting that the district is still within the 90-day window that the office allows for good faith negotiations.

Jeffco has said from the start that it is following Colorado’s anti-discrimination law, which “directly contradicts” the Trump administration’s interpretation of Title IX, the district said.

“This places school districts in an impossible position,” the district wrote in its letter to the community, which was posted to its website Thursday. “We must navigate conflicting requirements with clear state law on one side and non-binding federal guidance on the other.”

Despite receiving an impasse letter, Jeffco said it has “not given up on dialogue” with federal officials to come to a resolution.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Treasury Department preview of tax credit scholarship rules suggests limited role for states

2026-06-11T23:51:45+00:00

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States most likely will not be able to place additional requirements or guardrails on scholarship groups funded through the new federal tax credit, according to a preview of the rules provided by the U.S. Treasury Department this week.

This position contradicts comments Education Secretary Linda McMahon made to Congress last month and at a Michigan school choice event in March in which she said states would be able to shape their own programs.

The U.S. Department of Education has declined to clarify those remarks, but it is ultimately the Treasury Department that will set the rules for the program.

And in remarks made Tuesday at a closed-door meeting and later released by the Treasury Department, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy Kevin Salinger said that states may not impose “substantive” rules on scholarship groups that are more restrictive than federal law.

That’s welcome news for school choice groups who want more flexibility and limited rules for scholarship groups.

It may present a dilemma for Democratic governors who have said they are waiting to see these rules before deciding whether to opt in.

One of the key questions for this group has been whether they’ll be able to shape the program by putting additional rules on scholarship groups, requiring, for example, that they serve low-income families and students with disabilities or meet certain academic standards. Some Democrats have indicated they want the money only to go to public schools.

“I am never going to leave money on the table when it comes to supporting our kids in public schools,” Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said last week at the Education Writers Association conference in Baltimore when asked about the tax credit. But Moore said he was waiting on the regulations to decide whether to participate. “I do not believe that we should be taking public dollars and putting them towards private education.”

Salinger’s remarks indicate states will not be able to shape the program as they see fit, contradicting the administration’s promise to “return education to the states.”

Set to launch in 2027, the federal tax credit scholarship allows individuals to donate up to $1,700 to eligible nonprofits and get fully reimbursed through a federal income tax credit. The scholarship groups can provide vouchers to families earning up to 300% of the area median income to spend on educational expenses. Those expenses could be private school tuition, tutoring for a public school student, or specialized equipment or therapies.

Governors can decide whether their states participate, and those who do must submit lists of eligible scholarship organizations each year. Federal law imposes only minimal requirements, for example that scholarship groups operate as federally recognized nonprofits and provide money to students who attend more than one school.

The closed-door event at which Salinger spoke included a panel on ways public school students could also benefit.

Speaking at a separate Chalkbeat Ideas event Thursday, Rhode Island Education Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green said Democratic states should be open to possibilities, such as scholarships funding afterschool tutoring through approved vendors.

“This is not money that we would have,” she said. “This is money that, instead of going to the federal government, could come to our state.”

Another question has been whether homeschool families can benefit. That’s likely to be determined by whether state law considers a home school to be a school in a legal sense.

Sailnger laid out other aspects of the rules that school choice groups have been watching carefully, clarifying that they can operate in multiple states and that caps on administrative costs won’t apply to their entire budgets, only to money they raise for scholarships.

The rules will be finalized by the end of September, Salinger said.

Large national scholarship groups hoped for this flexibility so they can expand and serve more families.

“We have gotten our clearest signs from Treasury yet that this tax credit is going to benefit all students across all sectors,” said Ashling Preston, director of federal affairs for the American Federation for Children. “Every governor has the information they need to opt in right now. There are hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars at stake in every state.”

But Augustus Mays, vice president for partnerships and engagement at the progressive advocacy group EdTrust, said the preview of the rules only reinforces his belief that Democratic governors should opt out.

“If you’re a governor and you think you’ll be able to have the authority to shape this program to align to your public school priorities,” he said, “the answer is no, you’re not going to have that authority.”

Ideas Editor Matt Barnum contributed.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Superintendents defend policies about transgender students, parent rights on Capitol Hill

2026-06-10T22:19:04+00:00

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Three progressive superintendents defended their policies for parental involvement and transgender inclusion during a congressional hearing Wednesday in which Republican lawmakers called them “pathetic” and said they should find other jobs.

House Education and Workforce Chairman Tim Walberg convened the hearing with the title “Breaking Trust.” Much of the questioning centered on policies intended to protect the rights of transgender students or create more inclusive school environments. But lawmakers also brought up abortion, the role of teachers in promoting political protest, and eighth grade algebra access.

Called to testify were San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Maria Su, Loudoun County Superintendent Aaron Spence in Virginia, and Chicago Public Schools CEO Macquline King, who had to be subpoenaed.

Each of these superintendents is a relatively new leader in a district that has been at the center of intense controversy over race, gender, and other topics that are often referred to as part of culture war fights. Chicago and Loudoun County, in particular, have been the targets of repeated investigations by the Trump administration, which has also threatened to withhold funding.

Two days before the hearing, the conservative advocacy group America First Legal, founded by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, filed formal complaints accusing all three districts of violating parental rights and federal law with policies that give students a say in whether parents are notified that that child wants to change their gender presentation.

Walberg, a Michigan Republican, said in his opening remarks that Congress has a responsibility to ask questions of school districts, including when “parents are excluded from major decisions involving their children” and “when classrooms become vehicles for political or ideological agendas.”

“Across the country, school districts are losing sight of their core mission: educating students,” Walberg said.

The superintendents, in turn, said they respect parents as partners, develop policies with input from local communities, and want to create school environments where students can show up as themselves.

“We’re in education because we care about students, and part of that means ensuring an environment where all students can reach their full potential,” Spence said.

Lawmakers and superintendents spar over abortion, transgender students

Asked repeatedly if parents can opt out of lessons related to sexual health or LGBTQ topics, superintendents said yes or that they comply with state and “binding” federal law.

Rep. Joe Wilson, a South Carolina Republican, asked King about Chicago Public Schools making information about abortion available to students. He also pressed her about “which form of abortion” she preferred after offering graphic descriptions of the procedure.

“I’m very disturbed by that question,” King said after a pause. “I want to say that Chicago Public Schools’ sexual education curriculum is in compliance with Illinois state law.”

CPS CEO Macquline King testified before Congress. Here are 3 key takeaways.

Rep. Rick Allen, a Georgia Republican, cited a recent malpractice lawsuit in which a New York jury awarded $2 million to a woman who felt disfigured by a mastectomy she had as a teenager when she identified as male. He compared that to school districts having policies that require addressing students by their preferred names and pronouns.

“You’re going to be held responsible legally for what you’re perpetrating on young people,” Allen said.

Democrats for their part used their time to highlight cuts to the Office for Civil Rights, the value of diversity, and Republican efforts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. They emphasized that the superintendents were accountable to local elected school boards and that policies reflected community preferences.

“This committee talks all the time about ‘decisions should be made at the local level,’ but I guess that’s only if they like the decisions that you make at the local level,” said Rep. Jahana Hayes, a Connecticut Democrat and former national teacher of the year.

Supreme Court ruling on gender identity favors parents but leaves unanswered questions for schools

And Democratic Rep. Summer Lee of Pennsylvania urged the superintendents not to “change your values or your positions, because you know who you work for, and it is the parents and the students in your community.”

Spence came in for some of the most intense questioning. The Virginia district has been at the epicenter of political battles over COVID restrictions, parental rights and policies related to transgender students and racial equity. Most recently, the district refused to bend to pressure to exclude some immigrant students from federally funded career education.

Virginia sits under the jurisdiction of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled in the 2020 Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board decision that students cannot be prevented from using restrooms that align with their gender identity. Loudoun County officials have said they are bound by that ruling until the 4th Circuit or the Supreme Court decides otherwise.

The Trump administration, in contrast, says Title IX, the federal law that bars sex discrimination in education, actually requires that transgender students be excluded from restrooms that align with their gender. It has threatened Loudoun County with the loss of federal funding.

“Yes or no, should biological men be allowed in locker rooms with biological women or girls?” asked Rep. Robert Onder Jr., a Missouri Republican.

“Transgender women should be allowed in women’s spaces,” Spence responded.

“That’s a yes,” Onder said. “So biological men should be able to go into locker rooms and shower rooms with biological girls?”

“Federal law requires it,” Spence said.

“No it doesn’t,” Onder said.

“Yes, it does,” Spence said.

“No,” Onder said. “Title IX is, in fact, quite the opposite. Title IX requires you to protect women and girls.”

Loudoun County has also been investigated over an incident in which a transgender boy was accused of filming other boys in a locker room. The U.S. Department of Education said the school district violated Title IX in its handling of the incident.

Several representatives interrogated Spence over the incident and why the students who complained about being filmed allegedly received longer suspensions than the transgender student.

Spence said he could not discuss specifics due to student privacy laws but said that the incident had not been described accurately in public reports. He also said the district applies discipline “appropriately” and in accordance with its policies, including policies against bullying.

The hearing did have moments of comity. California Rep. Kevin Kiley, who recently switched from Republican to independent, said he’d long been a critic of San Francisco Unified but praised Su, giving her a platform to talk about changes she’s made.

Su said the district has brought back eighth grade algebra, revised its ethnic studies curriculum, and implemented literacy approaches consistent with the science of reading, among other changes.

“When I came on as superintendent 18 months ago, I listened to families, listened to parents and our educators, and we moved quickly,” Su said.

Kiley said he probably disagrees with many things the district is doing.

“But these are really good, important steps, so thank you for your leadership,” he said.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Trump education department investigates Cherry Creek district over alleged racial discrimination

2026-06-08T23:40:57+00:00

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The U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights announced Monday that it is investigating the Cherry Creek district over allegations that the district considers race in a variety of programs in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

In a press release announcing the investigation, the department alleged that the district sponsors clubs that exclude students based on race and that the district requires teachers to consider race when assigning students to classes or deciding what level of academic support to provide. The release gave no examples of student clubs that exclude members based on race or of incidents where teachers used race in making class assignments or academic support decisions.

The investigation into Cherry Creek, a 52,000-student district in the Denver suburbs, is part of a broader Trump administration effort to root out policies that support students of color or LGBTQ students. Many of these investigations have focused on school districts in blue cities, including New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago. Over the past 18 months, the administration also investigated the Denver district for converting a girls restroom into an all-gender restroom and the Jeffco district for policies on sleeping arrangements for transgender students on overnight field trips.

A Cherry Creek district spokesperson said by email Monday, “We strongly disagree with the characterization of District programming. The District has not yet received a copy of the complaint. Without the complaint, we are not in a position to respond further.”

When asked for more information about the complaints that prompted the investigation, U.S. Department of Education officials said they don’t comment on open investigations.

But Kimberly Richey, assistant secretary for education, did comment in the press release.

“Federal law prohibits racial discrimination, which means that race cannot be a factor in how the school educates its students or trains its teachers. Despite this, the District seems to be basing decisions about how to support students, teachers and parents solely on race,” she said.

In addition to alleging race-based discrimination in student clubs and class assignments, the Office of Civil Rights press release said the department is also investigating a district committee and a multi-day training for educators.

The district’s Voices of Color Committee “reportedly grants preferential access and participation based solely on race,” the release said. The district’s website describes the committee’s goal as fostering an “inclusive and safe environment to support the success of students of color.“ It says the committee is composed of parents, district staff, and community members and links to a registration form for people who want to join the committee’s contact list. The form doesn’t ask for the potential participant’s race or ethnicity.

About 56% of Cherry Creek students are students of color.

The press release said the district promotes a training called “Transformational Equity Experience: To Be Seen. To Belong. To Be Whole,” which teaches that the United States was founded on “white supremacy” and categorizes individuals as “oppressors” and “oppressed.”

A webpage from a 2024 Cherry Creek conference with that name features a list of sessions offered over four days, including “School Leadership — Approaching All Systems with Equity,” “All Are Welcome: Creating LGBTQ+ Affirming Spaces in our Schools,” and “What Happened to Denver’s Chinatown & How to Incorporate Local History to Teach ‘Ethnic Studies’ in the Classroom.”

The three emcees of the event were a current Cherry Creek student and two recent graduates.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Linda McMahon suggests states could set their own rules for federal tax-credit scholarships

2026-05-14T21:52:25+00:00

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Education Secretary Linda McMahon said states will be able to put conditions on scholarship organizations as part of the federal tax-credit scholarship program, weighing in on one of the biggest questions for governors considering whether to opt into the program.

The Treasury Department, not the Education Department, ultimately is responsible for setting the rules that will govern the federal tax credit, and those have not been finalized. It was not clear whether McMahon’s comments reflect the Trump administration’s position. The Education and Treasury Departments did not immediately respond to requests for clarification.

Allowing states to pick and choose which scholarship groups are included in the program would be at odds with how many conservative school choice advocates believe the program will work. But it would align with the Trump administration’s pledge to return education to the states.

McMahon’s comments came during an exchange with Rep. John Mannion, a New York Democrat and former classroom teacher, at a House Education and Workforce Committee hearing on Thursday.

Just last week, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said she intends for her state to participate in the program, which allows taxpayers to donate up to $1,700 to eligible scholarship organizations and get a refund or credit on their federal taxes for the full amount. However, Hochul said through a spokesperson that she’s waiting to see the rules and will review them carefully for any “poison pills.”

“You had mentioned that we need to return education to the states,” Mannion said. “Will the states have the ability to set rules around these scholarship-granting organizations? And some of the questions might be assuring that there will be scholarships for low income families or minority families or public institutions. Will the school boards or the boards of regents or the governors have control over that at the state level?”

“Yes, that’ll be done at the state,” McMahon responded. “Of course, the 501(c)(3) status is granted through the federal government, but those decisions would be made at the state.”

Mannion sought additional clarity: “Gotcha. So they will be able to set rules around scholarship-granting organizations and the scholarships themselves?”

“That is my understanding,” McMahon said.

The federal law that established the tax credits lays out bare-bones requirements for scholarship-granting organizations. They must be federally recognized nonprofits and serve students from more than one school, and scholarships must go to educational expenses. Governors can decide whether their states participate, and those that do must submit lists of eligible scholarship organizations each year.

Some education advocates have called for the Treasury Department to allow governors to set criteria for scholarship groups in their state. Those could include requiring these groups to serve students from low-income families, requiring that schools that receive scholarship students meet certain standards, or perhaps most significantly, that scholarship groups and participating schools abide by non-discrimination rules.

That could pose a problem for some religious schools and scholarship groups. In Colorado, Democratic Gov. Jared Polis warded off an attempt by lawmakers of his own party to place just such requirements on scholarship groups. He said Colorado risked losing out on money and not being able to participate if it imposed non-discrimination requirements.

Many Democratic governors have said they are waiting to see Treasury rules before making a final decision.

In a statement to Chalkbeat, Mannion said he hopes McMahon’s answers to his questions show up in official policy.

“Secretary McMahon is now on the record saying that state governments will be able to set their own rules around scholarship granting organizations,” he said. “She should make that clear to the Treasury Department, and I fully expect to see it reflected in the upcoming guidelines.”

For their part, conservative education choice advocates have insisted the only requirements for scholarship groups should be those already in the law. Governors, however, would be free to use their bully pulpit to promote their preferred causes.

Leslie Hiner, vice president of legal policy for EdChoice, a school choice advocacy organization, said her organization expects initial rules from the Treasury Department in July. Hiner said the federal law appears to limit governors’ role in the program. EdChoice would oppose governors attempting to place any kind of restrictions on the program that the group would view as motivated by politics, she said.

“Yes, we oppose that and we’ll oppose that all day long,” Hiner said. “The ultimate beneficiary is that child who needs some help and that parent who needs some help in taking care of that child.”

National reporter Lily Altavena contributed.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

CPS CEO King subpoenaed to appear at congressional hearing on parental rights, ‘legal abuses’

2026-05-13T23:16:14+00:00

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A U.S. House committee has subpoenaed Chicago Public Schools’ CEO Macquline King to appear at a hearing focused on “attacks on parental rights, inappropriate content, and legal abuses” in American schools.

Rep. Tim Walberg, a Michigan Republican and the chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, notified King about the subpoena in a Wednesday letter. It comes about three weeks after the committee first invited King to testify at a hearing titled, “Breaking Trust: Attacks on Parental Rights, Inappropriate Content, and Legal Abuses in America’s Schools,” according to the letter.

Citing scheduling conflicts and an ongoing Office for Civil Rights investigation, King originally declined the committee’s invitation. That hearing was originally scheduled for June 3, but King is now being subpoenaed to appear on June 10.

During the second Trump administration, the district has been under federal scrutiny for compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX, as well as student privacy laws.

Chicago Public Schools did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

King’s appearance before Congress would thrust Chicago Public Schools into a national spotlight at a time of intense scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Education. The department pulled funding last year from CPS, claiming the district had violated civil rights and sex-based discrimination laws with its plan to boost outcomes for Black students and its policies supporting bathroom and locker room access for transgender students.

Superintendents from San Francisco and Loudon County, Virginia are also expected to appear at the hearing. Both districts have been under scrutiny for progressive policies.

Similar hearings have provided a platform for Republican lawmakers to grill leaders from more liberal communities and institutions. Last year, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and other Democratic mayors forcefully defended their sanctuary policies before a congressional committee. University presidents were called by Congress to testify about antisemitism on campus in 2023.

U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon criticized Chicago about two weeks ago after the Chicago Teachers Union and the district agreed to let students take pre-approved field trips and learn about labor history or civics on May Day.

Walberg’s committee first reached out to King April 16, one week after news that the Chicago Teachers Union and CPS were at odds over closing schools on May 1 — something King opposed.

King responded April 20, declining the invite because of a scheduling conflict and that her testimony would be limited because of the federal government’s civil rights and Title IX investigations into CPS.

The committee then offered six other dates in June, according to Walberg’s Wednesday letter. But CPS General Counsel Elizabeth Barton again cited the ongoing investigations as a reason why King “would not be able to discuss CPS’s policies in detail or share any substantive insight into the process of creating or adopting those policies.”

“We do not believe it would be helpful or informative to the Committee for Dr. King to participate in this hearing given those constraints,” Barton wrote, per the committee’s correspondence Wednesday. “For that reason, she must respectfully decline the Committee’s invitation to testify.”

Neither reason “warrants (King) not participating in the hearing,” Walberg wrote in Wednesday’s letter.

In a separate statement, Walberg said this is the first subpoena during his one-and-a-half-year tenure as chair and does “not take this action lightly.”

“However, the constant refusal to provide testimony blocks the Committee from doing its job of conducting oversight and further deepens mistrust in our education system,” Walberg said.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Gov. Polis says federal tax-credit program won’t violate Colorado anti-discrimination laws

2026-05-09T01:10:42+00:00

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Gov. Jared Polis said Friday that Colorado’s participation in a new federal tax-credit scholarship program won’t run afoul of state anti-discrimination laws because the program relies on private donations rather than public funding.

The federal program provides $1,700 in annual tax credits for donations made to scholarship-granting organizations for various educational services, such as private school tuition, tutoring, and after-school programs. Last week, several Democratic Colorado lawmakers decided to shelve a bill that would have required organizations to abide by state anti-discrimination laws.

The bill concerned Polis, whose office said the governor didn’t want to hamstring the state from bringing in money for education.

On Friday, Polis also said the state shouldn’t determine which organizations are “worthy” of receiving money from the program.

“When you give $100 to any charity, it can be a church, it can be something that discriminates. It can be pro-gay or anti-gay,” said Polis, who is the first openly gay man to be elected governor in the country. ”It doesn’t matter.”

Invest in Education Foundation, which supports the federal tax credit, hosted the event at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, drawing about 150 kids, educators, and parents. Attendees included representatives from Parents Challenge, a Denver-based nonprofit that supports school choice, and Seeds of Hope, a Catholic private school advocacy organization.

Invest in Education invited Polis to talk about his decision to opt Colorado into the federal program, which was approved last year as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act backed by Republicans. For states to benefit from the program, governors must opt in.

Speaking to reporters after the event, Polis tried to draw a line between his support for the federal tax credit and his stance that Colorado’s universal preschool programs cannot discriminate against students. The major difference between the two, he said, is the preschool programs use state dollars, not donations.

The state is currently involved in a U.S. Supreme Court case brought by two Catholic preschools that wanted to participate in the state’s universal preschool program but didn’t want to have to admit LGBTQ children or children from LGBTQ families.

More than two dozen states have opted into the federal tax-credit program, with most led by Republican governors, according to Ballotpedia. Polis, the first Democratic governor to opt in, said during the event that he doesn’t want Colorado to leave money on the table that could benefit all kids in the state.

If other states don’t opt into the program, he added, then Colorado should “go after their donors.”

Most Democratic governors have taken a wait-and-see approach to understand the program’s rules, which haven’t been finalized, before making a decision.

Democratic governors in New York and North Carolina have said they intend to opt into the program. Meanwhile, Kansas and Kentucky legislators have opted their states into the program, despite their Democratic governors trying to block participation.

“I’m personally excited that Colorado is one of the leading states in helping to build awareness around this exciting opportunity to boost charitable giving to help our kids,” Polis said.

Peter Murphy, who is the vice president of policy at Invest in Education, said the foundation hosted the event to raise awareness about what the law can do for private and public school families, as well as those who home-school.

“Every non-wealthy child in this country is the potential beneficiary,” Murphy said. “And what this law also does is it puts more control of a child’s education in the hands of their parents, including public school parents.”

While Polis has opted Colorado into the program, his term ends in January. The next governor could decide to opt the state out of the program when they take office.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul intends to opt into federal tax-credit scholarship

2026-05-08T15:01:12+00:00

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New York Gov. Kathy Hochul intends to opt the state into the federal tax-credit scholarship.

The announcement represents a major win for supporters of private school choice who have been lobbying Democratic governors to participate in the program. However, Hochul’s office said she intends to review the details before making the decision official.

The American Federation for Children, a national school choice advocacy group, said Thursday night that Hochul first made the announcement at a private gathering. The meeting was with Agudath Israel, an organization that supports Jewish religious education, according to an Agudath spokesperson.

Emma Wallner, a spokesperson for the governor, confirmed Hochul’s plans to opt in to the tax credit.

“Governor Hochul is supportive of the federal tax credit scholarship and its potential to help New York students and schools,” Wallner wrote in a statement. “Our office awaits information from the federal government on the program and will thoroughly review the details of the policy for poison pills that could harm New York’s education system.”

The Treasury Department is still in the process of developing guidelines for the program, which will clarify, for example, how donated money might benefit public school students or whether states can prevent scholarship-granting organizations from discriminating against certain students.

The tax credit was approved last year as part of the Republican-backed One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It allows taxpayers to get a dollar-for-dollar credit up to $1,700 on their federal taxes if they donate money to an eligible scholarship-granting organization. These organizations could give students money for private school tuition, tutoring, and other educational expenses.

Governors, however, have to opt into the program for students in their state to benefit.

“Finally, school choice is coming to New York, thanks to the courage of Governor Hochul and the tremendous advocacy of countless families, educators, and supporters who have worked for generations to advance options for kids who need them,” American Federation for Children CEO Tommy Schultz said in a press release.

Some New York Democrats, and the city’s teachers union, criticized Hochul’s decision.

“While this tax credit may appear enticing, there will undoubtedly be long-term damage to the ability of states to provide public education,” said state Sen. John Liu, who chairs the New York City Education Committee. “Many governors and legislatures around the country have recognized this tax credit for the Faustian bargain it is and have already opted out, and I sincerely hope that New York will opt out as well.”

According to a tracker maintained by Ballotpedia, 29 states, nearly all of them led by Republicans, have opted into the tax credit. That list does not include New York.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis is the only Democratic governor to have officially opted in. Under pressure from Republican lawmakers, North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein said last year that he intends to do so after the rules are released.

Some Democratic governors have been strongly opposed. In Wisconsin, which launched one of the nation’s earliest voucher programs, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers vetoed Republican-backed legislation that would have opted that state in. In a veto statement, he cited the lack of any accountability measures in the federal program.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear also vetoed opt-in legislation, as did Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, but Republican-controlled legislatures overrode vetoes in both states.

Other Democratic governors are taking a wait-and-see approach. Democratic backers of expanding school choice argue that families want more options and that states that don’t opt in risk their own taxpayers donating to scholarship groups in other states. Opponents say the program undermines public education and threatens funding, even if indirectly.

Nationally and in New York, supporters of religious education have lobbied for the tax credit as a way to ease the tuition burden for families.

“This is extraordinary news for Jewish families and for every community across our state,” said Sydney Altfield, the CEO of Teach NYS, an organization that lobbies for public funding for Jewish schools. “Blue states across the country will now be watching closely.”

Hochul has courted the Orthodox Jewish community, an influential voting bloc, as she faces reelection in November. Along with state legislative leaders, she previously pushed to weaken oversight of private schools, a measure that would largely benefit certain yeshivas that do not always provide a basic secular education. The state’s education commissioner, Betty Rosa, called the move a “travesty.”

Hochul has backed other efforts to expand school choice since taking office nearly five years ago, drawing pushback from other New York Democrats. In 2023, she proposed to significantly expand the number of charter schools in New York City, even as the publicly funded yet privately managed schools have fallen out of favor among many left-leaning elected officials. State lawmakers rejected Hochul’s sweeping proposal but ultimately approved a more modest expansion.

Hochul has also touted her commitment to funding traditional public schools and has presided over increases in state spending. State officials indicated Thursday that schools should expect at least a 2% bump in the state’s forthcoming budget, which is more than a month overdue and has yet to be finalized.

“I’m proud of the resources we have put into education,” she told reporters Thursday.

This story has been updated with additional details about the private meeting where Hochul announced her support for the tax credit, as well as additional background about Hochul’s approach to private school oversight.

Correction: This story has been updated to accurately reflect how many states have opted into the tax-credit program.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Alex Zimmerman is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Colorado lawmakers won’t pursue bill to place state limits on Trump-backed education tax credit program

2026-05-01T00:15:06+00:00

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Facing concerns from Gov. Jared Polis’ office, lawmakers indefinitely postponed a bill requiring Colorado to place nondiscrimination rules on its use of a federal education tax credit program.

The move during Thursday’s House Education Committee effectively ended the hopes of bill sponsors to place limits on the state’s use of the President Donald Trump-backed tax credit this year.

Governors are required to opt into the President Donald Trump-backed program, with widespread support from Republican governors nationwide. Polis was one of the first Democrats to announce he would support it. However, Colorado’s next governor will get a say next year on whether the state stays opted into the tax credit program.

The federal program would allow up to $1,700 in annual tax credits for donations made to scholarship-granting organizations. Those organizations could distribute the money for various education-related expenses, including private school tuition, tutoring, or after-school programs.

State Rep. Lori Goldstein, a Westminster Democrat, and other sponsors filed House Bill 1292 to place what they called state “guardrails” that would protect students from disability, race, or gender expression discrimination by organizations accepting the scholarship funds. The bill’s passage might have prevented some religious private schools from participating.

Colorado’s nondiscrimination laws safeguard against discrimination in places of public accommodation based on an individual’s characteristics such as disability, race, or gender expression.

Polis has said he doesn’t want to leave federal money on the table.

A Polis spokesperson had said the governor believed House Bill 1292 “would hamstring the state’s ability to bring new funding for much-needed services” like after-school programs.

Goldstein said after the hearing that the bill faced criticism from private school groups and on social media. But she added the federal government hasn’t released rules that would govern the program and believes there’s an opportunity to revive the bill next session.

“I look forward to continuing this conversation to ensure that these public dollars are truly benefiting public schools and the students that they serve,” she said.

Colorado Democratic governor candidates have diverged on the use of the tax credit.

U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet has taken a similar approach to Polis. Meanwhile, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser has said he opposes the tax credit.

A Bennet spokesperson said the senator doesn’t support private school vouchers or public funds going to private or religious schools. The spokesperson also said Bennet believes rejecting the program before final guidance is issued “could be short sighted and put millions of dollars that could help kids in Colorado at risk.”

Wesier has said he would opt the state out of the program if elected, because he believes it represents a plan to take money away from public education.

“The next governor will have the authority to decide,” he said in a recent forum. “I will fight it as fiercely as I can.”

Trump administration push to change program’s focus from college to workforce meets bipartisan resistance

2026-04-24T10:00:01+00:00

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The Trump administration should abandon its push to dramatically revise a program that helps students from marginalized communities attend college, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators has told federal officials.

At the center of their request are the federal government’s Talent Search grants, which typically go to hundreds of colleges and community organizations focused on higher education. Talent Search falls under the umbrella of the federal TRIO programs, a $1.2 billion network. The Trump administration has cut TRIO grants as part of its anti-DEI purge and proposed eliminating the program entirely.

But the most recent grant applications posted by the Department of Labor, on behalf of the Department of Education, instead prioritize programs that focus on workforce development, including those that promote apprenticeships and job credential programs.

The change in grant priorities comes amid a larger debate about the value of higher education and how much help students should have in accessing and completing college. The Trump administration has emphasized preparation for the workforce as the primary purpose of education.

The 12 senators sent a letter to Education Secretary Linda McMahon on April 9, calling for the department to rescind the application and work with Congress to “protect the integrity of the Federal TRIO programs.”

In a statement, the Education Department showed no indication it plans to change its approach.

“We must break the cycle that assumes every student needs a four-year degree to succeed, and instead promote additional postsecondary alternatives that provide students and families with more choices,” spokesperson Ellen Keast said by email. “The Department is confident in our approach to this year’s competitions and encourages eligible entities to apply.”

The Labor Department posted the revised applications on March 17, giving programs less than two months to apply for these grants — not enough time to remake such a big program, policy advocates said. Existing Talent Search programs now risk losing their funding if they don’t align with the application’s new priorities.

In Talent Search programs, middle and high school students from low-income families attend college tours and receive tutoring and other counseling, part of the broader effort to encourage their journey to higher education.

Supporters of the changes to Talent Search argue that it’s time to widen TRIO’s net, and that the revisions are well within the Higher Education Act, the federal law that authorizes Talent Search. Backers of the new application raise a common refrain: Not every kid needs to go to college.

But others say that approach runs counter to TRIO’s core mission, which is to provide students with options they might otherwise not realize they have.

“We’re very concerned, very troubled, that the administration would take one of the foremost vehicles for helping low-income Americans move into higher education and to alter that mission,” said Kimberly Jones, president of the Council for Opportunity in Education, a TRIO advocacy center.

New priorities raise questions about Talent Search’s mission

Integrating workforce programs into TRIO’s program can help broaden and improve TRIO’s scope by helping more students, said Adam Kissel, a fellow in education policy at the right-leaning Heritage Foundation.

“The argument that TRIO is only for college-going students has a certain inequity built into that argument, whereas, if TRIO is helping people do any post-secondary ed … it’s a better way to help all students who may be qualified,” said Kissel, who worked at the Education Department on higher education programs during the first Trump administration.

But there’s some doubt that workforce development programs are the right path for the students Talent Search serves, said Wesley Whistle, student success project director for New America, a left-leaning think tank.

A 2025 report from the University of Chicago found students from low-income families attaining a bachelor’s degree or higher tended to earn the most among their demographics.

About 51% of students from low-income families go to college, according to the Brookings Institution, far below the rate for their wealthier peers. But 68.5% of Talent Search participants enrolled in a postsecondary education program immediately after high school in the 2022-2023 school year, according to an Education Department report.

“By narrowing TRIO’s focus to just workforce outcomes and programs, you are effectively closing doors rather than opening them,” Whistle said.

Still, a GAO report published in 2020 found the department needed to do more to assess if TRIO programs work.

The new application also prioritizes proposals from state agencies, intensifying fears from some TRIO supporters that hundreds of programs funded by Talent Search could be at risk.

The Higher Education Act says Talent Search should “identify qualified youths with potential for education at the postsecondary level and to encourage such youths to complete secondary school and to undertake a program of postsecondary education.”

It’s still unclear whether the revised applications will change Talent Search to the dramatic extent that advocates are fearing.

Curtis Blackwell founded Sound Mind Sound Body Foundation in Detroit, a community organization that runs a program funded with a Talent Search grant. The program includes mentoring, skills workshops, and college application help. Blackwell said he hopes broadening his program’s mission will reach more students.

Blackwell said they’re looking into partnering with a local vocational center to meet the new priorities.

“Sometimes I feel like we don’t do a good enough job of expanding, of exposing them to other options,” he said. “For me, our number one goal within our program is to meet students where they’re at. … So if they’re at vocational school, that’s great.”

Still, TRIO’s supporters worry that a new direction for Talent Search could portend bigger changes for the eight programs under the TRIO umbrella.

Matt Meyers is president of the Pennsylvania Institute of Technology, a private junior college attended by roughly 600 students. His college has a TRIO grant of $379,377 for student support services.

Meyers said these changes show the administration doesn’t understand TRIO. At his college, TRIO programs help get students from low-income backgrounds into the workforce. Sometimes that means taking them to a nice dinner so they can learn how to conduct a business lunch.

“It sounds silly, but giving them those experiences are the things that that expose them to to also want more and have more experiences, more positive experiences, and grow,” Meyers said.

The senators asking McMahon to rescind the application also requested that the department ensure there’s no lapse in Talent Search funding, which is set to expire at the end of August.

Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat who co-chairs the Congressional TRIO Caucus with Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, wrote in a statement to Chalkbeat that he believes the changes to Talent Search would “disenfranchise the exact students TRIO was created to uplift.” (Both Collins and Warnock signed the April 9 letter to McMahon.)

“The summers I spent on campus at Savannah State as a young man enrolled in Federal TRIO programs exposed me to new worlds and helped me see myself on a college campus as a real college student,” he wrote.

Lily Altavena is a national reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Lily at laltavena@chalkbeat.org.

Denver school board approves policy to protect students from immigration enforcement

2026-04-24T03:39:09+00:00

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The Denver school board unanimously adopted a policy Thursday that aims to protect students from immigration enforcement at public schools and school-sponsored events.

The policy says Denver Public Schools’ superintendent should:

Not give any federal immigration enforcement agency access to property, records, or videos without a valid judicial warrant.
Not allow any student to be questioned, detained, or removed from school custody by federal immigration enforcement agents without a valid judicial warrant and prior approval from DPS’ attorney.
Safeguard the rights of students to have a parent or guardian present if they are searched, interviewed, or interrogated by federal immigration enforcement agents.
Not collect or disclose information about the immigration status of students or families unless it is required by a court order or by state or federal law.
Not allow school resource officers, who are Denver police officers assigned to schools, “to consult, communicate, or share student or family information” with federal immigration enforcement agents.
Provide “appropriate resources” to students and families who may be navigating potential immigration threats.
Ensure employees are trained to fulfill their responsibilities under the policy.
Ensure the policy is prominently posted for staff, students, and families to see.

The policy underwent several revisions from when it was proposed by board President Xóchitl Gaytán in February. The idea came from Latino community groups who were feeling a sense of urgency as immigration enforcement actions ramped up around the country.

“Immigrant students, and students who are related to immigrants, are scared and not coming to school,” North High School student Lidia Lopez told the board last month.

Board members on Thursday thanked the community groups for their advocacy, especially students involved with a longtime Denver group called Movimiento Poder.

“You need to stay on us, because this is how change gets done,” board member DJ Torres said.

The first draft of the policy contained several prohibitions that were already on the district’s books. Some board members thought other proposed prohibitions went too far.

Through several rounds of revisions, board members removed a controversial clause that would have prohibited school resource officers from ticketing or arresting a student if doing so would put that student at risk of deportation.

The school board doesn’t supervise school resource officers, and the officers likely wouldn’t know a student’s immigration status, district officials said. DPS already has a written agreement with the Denver Police Department that prohibits school resource officers from getting involved in routine school discipline matters, and board policy says the officers should avoid ticketing or arresting students unless there are no alternatives.

The board also removed from the proposed policy a clause that would have protected students from immigration enforcement action at school bus stops. DPS has many bus stops all over the city, and district officials said enforcing such a protection would have been near impossible.

The board also removed a clause that would have prohibited DPS from collecting information about its employees’ immigration status. Officials said the district is required to collect that information about employees who are in the United States on work visas.

The policy is meant to apply to both district-run and charter schools. Charter schools are independently run by nonprofit organizations that contract with DPS to run schools in the district.

DPS has long been vocal in its support of immigrant students. The district sued the Trump administration last year to try to reinstate a policy that treated schools as sensitive locations that were generally off limits to immigration enforcement. DPS dropped its lawsuit after a judge found there was little practical difference between that policy and Trump administration guidance for agents to use discretion “and a healthy dose of common sense.”

The policy approved Thursday is an amendment to an existing student conduct policy called Executive Limitation 10. Executive limitations are rules for the superintendent.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Hochul moves to protect undocumented students’ right to public schooling as national challenges mount

2026-04-17T20:23:24+00:00

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New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on Thursday put forward a proposal to protect undocumented students’ right to attend public school for free, as efforts pick up in other parts of the country to chip away at that longstanding legal precedent.

Hochul’s proposal, part of a larger package of policies meant to shore up protections for immigrant New Yorkers, would enshrine in state law the rights guaranteed in Plyler v. Doe, the seminal 1982 Supreme Court case, which established undocumented students’ right to attend K-12 public schools at no cost.

The conservative Heritage Foundation, the group behind the Project 2025 blueprint, has pushed for a legal showdown over Plyler in the conservative-majority Supreme Court. States, including Tennessee, have introduced legislation that would empower school districts to collect information on students’ immigration status and charge undocumented students tuition. And the U.S. House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee held a hearing last month on the “adverse effects of Plyler v. Doe.”

Hochul’s proposal would put New York in a small group of states that have enshrined Plyler in state law.

The group of proposals Hochul announced Thursday would also prohibit public school employees from letting federal law enforcement officers into school buildings without a judicial warrant. New York schools would not be allowed to ask students about their immigration status under the proposals. (New York City’s Education Department has long enforced the policy that schools do not ask students for immigration status.)

They also bar local law enforcement from cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents on civil immigration enforcement, though some advocates and lawmakers have pushed Hochul to go further by banning cooperation in criminal cases as well.

Some education advocates praised the proposals, saying they’ll provide reassurance to New York students and families.

“These measures preserve the rights of all students, regardless of immigration status, and protect those rights from shifts in federal law or Supreme Court precedent,” the group Ed-Trust New York said in a statement.

Hochul’s proposals, if adopted, would show up in the final state budget, which is currently under negotiation between Hochul and the state legislature.

The budget was due April 1, but lawmakers are still hashing out the details and agreed to extend the budget through April 20.

Correction: April 20, 2026: This story has been updated to reflect that the Heritage Foundation has pushed to overturn Plyler v. Doe, but did not include that goal in its Project 2025 blueprint.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org

Education Department dissolving federal office serving English learners

2026-04-15T17:12:25+00:00

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The Education Department plans to dissolve the office that supports the country’s 5 million English learners.

The move comes as the Trump administration has called to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education and to stop funding English language acquisition programs in the federal budget. The country’s English learner student population includes U.S. citizen children of immigrant parents as well as authorized and undocumented immigrant children, communities that are reeling from the effects of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

The Office of English Language Acquisition already was decimated in early rounds of layoffs. Last August, the Department quietly rescinded guidance that many states and school districts rely on to protect the rights of immigrant students.

Education Department officials said dissolving the office and assigning its work to offices doing related work would be better for English learners.

In an emailed statement, Assistant Education Secretary Kirsten Baesler said the changes would align work across teams within the department, reduce administrative burden, and “empower states to design integrated supports.”

“English Learners should never be treated as a siloed program, set aside as an afterthought,” Baesler said. “When English language acquisition is embedded across core priorities like literacy, academic content, educator preparation, and accountability, it receives the seriousness and sustained focus it deserves.”

The Education Department informed Congress of the changes in a February letter. Education Week first reported on the moves and the letter Tuesday.

According to the letter, distribution of federal Title III money that helps states educate English learners will be handled by the same office that distributes other large federal programs such as Title I.

Trump’s proposed budget calls for eliminating Title III funding as a separate program, even as he also signed an executive order designating English as the official language of the United States. Congress last year disregarded a similar budget proposal and maintained Title III funding.

Training programs for teachers who work with English learners will move to the Office of Effective Educator Development Programs, the letter said. Language programs for Native American and Alaska Native children will move to the Office of Indian Education.

Trump pressured states to limit undocumented high school students’ access to career education programs

The changes do not affect the rights of English learner students under federal law. However, many advocates and educators said the office played a critical role in ensuring federal funds were spent appropriately and in sharing best practices and new research.

More of that responsibility now falls to states and school districts. While the Education Department says that shift is appropriate, many school districts historically have failed to meet the needs of English learners, leading to lawsuits.

The Education Department is in the process of moving the entire Office of Elementary and Secondary Education to the Department of Labor, while programs related to educating Native American students are moving to the Department of the Interior.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Trump termination of civil rights agreements could chill student complaints and confuse schools

2026-04-14T10:52:00+00:00

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When the Delaware Valley School District board voted unanimously last month to reverse policies protecting transgender students that they’d adopted a decade ago, some in the audience cried, “Shame!” Others said the board didn’t go far enough.

The district had adopted those policies in the first place under pressure from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in response to a complaint from a transgender student. An agreement between the district and the federal government during the Obama administration called for more training for staff and more support for students changing their gender presentation.

Now that same agency had told the district the agreement was terminated. Officials had 30 days to remove gender from the district’s anti-discrimination policies or face consequences.

The board voted at its March meeting to require transgender students to use locker rooms and bathrooms that match their sex assigned at birth. The superintendent said social workers would meet with the affected students to go over the changes.

This whiplash is one potential outcome of the Trump administration’s decision to terminate civil rights agreements drawn up under previous Democratic administrations. The Education Department announced in early April that it was ending such agreements related to violations of Title IX — the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education — in five school districts in four states, as well as for a California community college.

In other communities, little may change because local officials are more supportive of transgender rights. Nevertheless, multiple legal experts and former employees of the Office for Civil Rights told Chalkbeat that tearing up agreements reached after lengthy investigations and negotiations sends a dangerous message to all students: If you file a complaint, the resolution might last only as long as the next presidential election cycle.

“How far will it go?” asked Beth Gellman-Beer, an attorney who spent 18 years with OCR under Republican and Democratic administrations. “Once you open that door to something that is unprecedented, where does it end? If we have another administration that is Democratic, what will they do? What will be the point for anyone to bring a case to OCR, if they can’t trust whatever decision that comes out of that complaint will remain the decision?”

Revoking civil rights agreements is just one piece of a much larger transformation of the Office for Civil Rights, where a reduced staff focuses on cases that align with the president’s political priorities. And federal officials are blunt about how much the government’s approach has changed between the Obama and Biden administrations and Trump’s second term.

“Prior Administrations regularly misinterpreted Title IX to pander to political ideology and police ‘misgendering’ despite not having sound legal grounds,” Education Department spokeswoman Amelia Joy wrote in an email. By terminating past agreements, Joy wrote, “the Trump Administration is upholding the law and righting years of wrongs.”

Given what’s happened over the last few presidential administrations, canceling civil rights agreements was perhaps inevitable, said R. Shep Melnick, a Boston College political scientist who has studied civil rights enforcement extensively.

“The combination of presidential influence and partisan polarization means you have administrations that have very different understandings of how to interpret civil rights law,” Melnick said. “It’s not surprising, once the regulations flip back and forth, that agreements based on previous understanding of statute would be subject to change.”

Ending OCR agreements part of new enforcement approach

The Office for Civil Rights under Trump has made keeping transgender students out of bathrooms and off sports teams that match their gender identity one of its top priorities. Ending the six agreements, which treated discrimination based on gender identity and sex stereotypes as Title IX violations, fits into that broader enforcement approach.

Conservatives hailed the decision as reversing a misinterpretation of Title IX.

“These particular agreements were changing the definitions of sex such that boys could self-identify into locker rooms, bathrooms, and showers,” said Beth Parlato, senior legal counsel at the conservative Independent’s Women’s Forum. “The Trump administration is sending a strong message that Title IX is about protecting women and girls.”

In Delaware Valley, a 4,200-student district in northeast Pennsylvania, most transgender students weren’t using shared restrooms even under the OCR agreement, said Taylor James, executive director of TriVersity Pride Center, an LGBTQ community group and resource center based in Milford.

Fearful of backlash, he said, most students either used the restroom in the nurse’s office or just waited until they got home. But telling students they can’t use a restroom they feel comfortable in sends a message that there’s something wrong with them, James said.

Without the OCR agreement in place, James fears there won’t be any repercussions when teachers deliberately misgender students or when students face bullying because they don’t conform.

He’s working with legal aid groups on potential next steps, but his top priority is making sure students feel valued and cared for.

James said his biggest piece of advice to those students is to “just make it to adulthood, because you will be celebrated for the things you’ve been taught to hate about yourself.”

Many states still have laws protecting transgender students

Not all of the documents related to the affected districts are available in OCR’s public case search. The Education Department declined to make all the previous settlement agreements available or answer questions about which provisions would no longer be enforced.

But in the La Mesa-Spring Valley school district near San Diego, the revoked agreement involved allegations that a nonbinary student was bullied for continuing to use the restroom that matched their sex at birth — the very practice that the Trump administration wants to require.

And in the Sacramento Unified School District, the complaint didn’t relate to restrooms at all, according to local news reports. Federal investigators found that district officials responded promptly in 2022 after teachers didn’t use a transgender student’s preferred name and pronouns but failed to inform the student of their right to file a complaint.

Kayleigh Baker, a consultant with TNG Consulting and a member of advisory board of the Association of Title IX Administrators, said she’d recommend that institutions “wait just a second” if they’re considering policy changes based on the fact that the agreements have been rescinded.

Supreme Court ruling on gender identity favors parents but leaves unanswered questions for schools

Many states, including California, Delaware, and Washington, where the Education Department rescinded agreements, have state laws protecting transgender students’ rights. Some school districts have had early court wins after pushing back against funding cuts related to Title IX.

“We shouldn’t rush to anticipatory complying with what we think the administration may do, because we have state law, we have all of these open questions,” she said. “And at the end of the day, we have very real students and employees who are trying to access their education, access their work environments, free from discrimination, and we don’t want to rush to take away rights that they have.”

Kristina Moon, senior attorney with Education Law Center-Pennsylvania, stressed that federal laws and legal rulings, not OCR agreements, ultimately spell out what districts’ obligations are to LGBTQ students.

Some affected school districts, for example, are also under the jurisdiction of federal appeals courts that require schools to protect transgender students’ bathroom access.

“A fundamental concern is that our school boards and our school leaders are not understanding this distinction and feeling significant threats from the federal government, by design,” Moon said.

Parlato acknowledged that rescinding agreements is unusual and that courts haven’t yet consistently interpreted Title IX the way the Trump administration does. But she’s optimistic that will change in the next few years.

“Sex is an immutable characteristic, it can’t be changed, and once we can get that codified in law, we won’t have this issue,” she said.

Terminating agreements could undermine OCR’s credibility

The Education Department has also rescinded agreements that have nothing to do with transgender students.

Last year the Education Department withdrew a 2023 settlement in Forsyth, Georgia, in which the Office for Civil Rights had determined that book-ban discussions created a hostile environment for some students. The department also ended an agreement in Rapid City, South Dakota, that addressed mistreatment of Native American students.

Rescinding agreements tells students not to bother filing complaints, said Gellman-Beer, who led the OCR’s now-closed Philadelphia office before resigning last year. She also fears it will give school districts few incentives to work cooperatively with OCR or comply with ongoing monitoring.

“It’s going to make it a thousand times more difficult to negotiate with a school district when they think they can just renegotiate with the next administration,” she said.

Throwing out agreements is “clearly going to reduce the credibility and authority of OCR,” Melnick said. At the same time, the more overtly politicized enforcement becomes, the more questions it raises about the validity of agreements. Melnick highlighted how the Trump administration threatened to withhold billions in federal research dollars to pressure universities to sign sweeping settlements of antisemitism claims.

“One administration should not be able to lock in a policy for the indefinite future regardless,” Melnick said.

Students bring complaints because they want their negative experience to lead to a meaningful change in their community, Baker said. Even students who agree with the current administration’s policies might wonder, “who’s to stop that meaningful change from being undone the second there’s a change in power?”

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Lily Altavena is a national reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Lily at laltavena@chalkbeat.org.

MAHA and school nutrition experts have a message for Trump: Don’t put kids on the carnivore diet

2026-04-13T15:33:01+00:00

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The Trump administration loves red meat, and could soon change what students eat in schools. But an unlikely collection of groups that includes key constituents for the president agree on one message: Don’t put kids on the carnivore diet.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a big, vocal believer in the power of beef, lamb, pork, and similar foods. And red meat has a starring role in a new food pyramid unveiled by the federal government in January that says Americans should prioritize foods rich in protein.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is expected to eventually align school meal nutrition standards to that new food pyramid. The agency’s proposal isn’t out yet. But those who believe fiber and not protein is a bigger priority — for Americans in general and kids in particular — are already expressing anxiety about it.

In March, a group of over 900 school districts and school nutrition professionals signed a letter to Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins urging her department to maintain existing meat requirements. They warned that increasing that requirement might crowd out fiber-rich foods, which the group wrote is “under-consumed” by students.

That argument from the nutrition professionals has backing from groups supportive of the Make America Healthy Again — or MAHA — movement. These groups generally believe that better nutrition will help fight chronic illness and have backed aspects of the president’s agenda. A coalition of these organizations, including Moms Across America, also urged the USDA to maintain the previous meat requirement, with fiber the “more urgent public health priority.”

The National School Lunch Program is a consistent source of nutrition for children from low-income families. And the federally subsidized program operates on a large scale: It serves about 4.8 billion meals annually, according to a School Nutrition Association analysis of recent federal data. But it’s also run by the Agriculture Department, an agency whose primary stakeholders are food producers. That means over the decades, school lunch nutrition standards have been in constant flux and reflected contemporary health trends.

Standards have been tweaked, overhauled and recalibrated over many administrations, from the infamous “pizza as a vegetable” controversy that pitted Congress against the Obama administration’s quest for healthier lunches to a more recent decree from the Biden administration for schools to gradually scale back added sugar. A week after his administration unveiled the new food pyramid, President Donald Trump signed a law reversing an Obama-era rule that outlawed whole milk in school lunches.

The current scramble for supremacy between fiber and protein is on display on grocery shelves, which feature fiber-rich probiotic sodas and Pop Tarts touting added protein. Nutrition experts say most kids are getting adequate levels of protein. Fiber is “the nutrient that tends to get neglected,” said Annette Schille, a clinical nutrition specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital.

“Kids having access to school meals, it can be really one of the most powerful tools that we have to improve children’s nutrition,” Schille said.

Fiber in the spotlight in school lunch debate

Current federal school meal standards regulate added sugar, fat, sodium and calories, but don’t set a specific fiber requirement. They do require lunches to include certain amounts of fruits and vegetables, including fiber-rich beans, peas and lentils. But generally, it can be difficult to get kids to go for those options, and upping a meat requirement could risk “crowding out” the fiber that does make it onto the plate, the group of school nutrition professionals argued.

Those who oversee school nutrition on a daily basis are under a lot of pressure, those experts say, to balance the requirements of making nutritionally balanced meals with the reality that students usually have a short window of time to eat lunch. And cafeterias are on a tight budget of roughly $4.60 a meal.

Liz Campbell, vice president of government affairs and media relations for the School Nutrition Association, said that economic realities look different from cafeteria to cafeteria. Some schools in North Dakota are running programs without adequate resources like functioning kitchens, while the Austin Independent School District in Texas — Kennedy Jr. recently visited to scope out school meals — has a dietitian on staff.

“We have to think about standards that are operationally feasible for everyone and so that folks can be financially solvent,” she said.

But food quality should be prioritized even under economic pressure, said Carrie Balkcom, executive director of the American Grassfed Association, a farm and ranching advocacy organization and one of the organizations that signed the letter from the MAHA-aligned coalition.

The letter argues that while meat requirements don’t need to go up, existing protein sources used in schools are often highly processed.

There’s not enough incentive for local, grassfed meat products to make it to a student’s lunch tray, Balkcom said. The administration last year cut several grant programs supporting local farm-to-school efforts. But Balkcom would like to see more collaboration.

“There are producers out there who are ready, willing and able to work with the school lunch program,” she said.

Michelle Saletan was a pastry chef in Charleston, South Carolina, before she moved over to managing school cafeterias. Meeting USDA requirements felt like a real challenge after working in the private sector for so long.

School kitchens have to be creative to include adequate nutrient levels in lunches that will appeal to children. For example, lunch periods tend to be short, so while oranges could be a source of fiber, students probably aren’t going to spend lunch peeling one.

Saletan now works as institutional support manager with Balanced.org, a nonprofit based in Kansas City that works with schools to help improve nutrition content — and especially fiber content — in their meals.

It’s disappointing to her that existing federal school lunch standards don’t include a fiber requirement. And the process for the USDA to finalize new standards, which includes taking public comment on proposed new federal rules, will likely take several months.

But schools don’t have to wait for them to incorporate more fiber, Saletan said. They also don’t have to wait for a budget increase, she said: It’s a misconception that plant proteins like black-bean burgers or plant-based nuggets are more expensive.

“It’s about how to serve them,” she said. “Take your existing spaghetti sauce and just put lentils in. Even if you’re doing 50% beef and 50% lentils, you’re increasing the fiber naturally, increasing the protein, and you’re cutting your cost.”

Lily Altavena is a national reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Lily at laltavena@chalkbeat.org.

Trump administration improperly canceled $36 million in school grants over trans policies, judge rules

2026-04-09T22:05:23+00:00

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The Trump administration improperly cut off tens of millions in grant funding from New York City’s public schools, a judge found this week, money that was yanked because of city policies protecting transgender students.

Manhattan federal Judge Arun Subramanian ruled that federal officials sidestepped required procedures that apply when cutting off funding under Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination at educational entities that receive federal funding.

The case is notable because it is the first known attempt by the Trump administration to cancel funding for New York City’s public schools under its contested interpretation of civil rights laws. It also represents a setback in the administration’s efforts to control school policies across the country on major culture war issues, including trans rights. Grants for school districts in Chicago and Fairfax, Virginia, were also discontinued.

The Trump administration held up funding to New York City through the U.S. Department of Education’s Magnet School Assistance Program, citing Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination at educational institutions receiving federal funding. Officials argued city policies that allow transgender students to participate in sports and use bathrooms and other school facilities in line with their gender identity violate those civil rights protections.

“When recipients of Federal funding require schools to treat ‘trans-identifying’ males as if they were ‘females,’ including in intimate traditionally sex-separate facilities, they defeat the very purpose of Title IX: to ensure equal opportunities for women while not jeopardizing their privacy, safety, or other rights,” Trump administration officials wrote to the city’s Education Department in September.

To keep the grant funding, federal officials pressured the city to overhaul their policies on transgender students. The city Education Department sued in October, arguing that revoking the magnet grant funding put “politics before public schools” and had no “valid substantive basis.” At stake is about $36 million in multi-year grants across 19 local public schools.

But in response to the city’s lawsuit, federal officials argued that they have discretion to withhold the funding and were not relying on Title IX. Officials must typically hold a hearing and file written reports with Congress, among other requirements, before withholding money under Title IX.

“It is undisputed both that defendants did not follow these statutory procedures, and that the procedures would apply if they non-continued the grants because of Title IX violations,” Subramanian wrote. The argument that the Trump administration was not relying on Title IX to withhold the money “flies in the face of the record.”

Subramanian’s decision did not address whether New York City’s policies violate Title IX — and it will likely not be the last word in this case. He ordered the Trump administration to make a new determination within 10 days about whether to continue the grants. If federal officials want to rely on Title IX, they must follow the correct procedures, he wrote.

Representatives of the federal Education Department did not respond to a request for comment.

The multi-year magnet grant funding is designed to help spur racial integration on several campuses by launching a range of new programs, including in journalism, math, science, performing arts, and civic activism, according to the city’s lawsuit.

Some legal observers said the favorable ruling for the city could embolden other school districts to push back against federal demands.

“We’ve seen the Trump administration take an ‘act first, ask for forgiveness’ approach, and that’s come back to hurt them,” including with universities, said Christopher Thomas, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Florida.

He noted that aggressive legal action from the Trump administration can create a chilling effect among districts who may be wary of taking on the federal government.

“Hopefully decisions like this can thaw that chill,” he said.

The litigation included a related dispute about whether the Trump administration could claw back unspent magnet grant money from prior years. Federal officials ultimately agreed to allow the city to spend about $11 million in carryover funding, leaving about $36 million in doubt.

New York City Education Department General Counsel Liz Vladeck cheered Subramanian’s ruling.

“As NYCPS has said all along, arbitrarily cutting off critical funding for excellent school programming without providing the required process cannot stand, especially when that cut off is accompanied by an attack on the rights of our transgender and gender non-conforming students,” she wrote in a statement.

Vladeck added that the city “will continue to pursue all legal options” if federal officials decide to keep withholding funds.

The Trump administration has also pursued other avenues to pressure New York City to rethink its policies on transgender students. It launched a civil rights investigation in January into whether the city’s policies on transgender students’ access to sports violates Title IX. (Seventeen other educational institutions with similar policies were also under investigation.)

Federal officials did not respond to questions about the status of that investigation.

While the New York decision does not directly restore funding, it’s significant because Subramanian rejected the administration’s argument that the district court didn’t have jurisdiction and that the case belonged in a separate federal claims court that typically resolves contract disputes.

Following a Supreme Court decision last year involving National Institutes of Health grants, the administration has argued and some judges have agreed that lawsuits related to canceled grants should go through the claims court.

A similar legal argument is playing out in the 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals after the Trump administration withheld money from five northern Virginia school districts that had transgender inclusion policies similar to New York City’s.

“What is happening in these school districts is not a contract question,” said Mary Rohmiller, an attorney and Title IX specialist who previously worked for the federal Education Department. “They are not asking the court to make the Department of Education give them money. They are asking the court to stop the Department of Education from imposing its unlawful interpretation of Title IX on them. And that is a question for a federal court to answer.”

The administration could still try to withhold money from New York City, but they would need to show a plausible reason for not continuing the grants that is not arbitrary and capricious, Rohmiller said.

This story has been updated with a response from the city’s Education Department, which was provided after this story first published.

National editor Erica Meltzer contributed.

Alex Zimmerman is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Child care aid for low-income Colorado families to last through June at least, state officials say

2026-03-31T23:21:49+00:00

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Low-income families in Colorado’s child care subsidy program will get financial assistance at least through June 30 as a lawsuit challenging a Trump administration effort to withhold $10 billion in funding from five states unfolds.

The Colorado Department of Early Childhood announced the funding extension on Friday after a recent disbursement of child care dollars from the federal government.

Colorado’s program helps cover the cost of child care for more than 27,000 children so parents can work or take classes. It’s mostly funded by the federal government with smaller contributions from states and counties. In January, the federal government threatened to cut off funding to Colorado, California, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York, suggesting without evidence that the states were providing benefits to “illegal aliens.”

The five states quickly sued to prevent funding disruptions. Now, even after orders from a federal judge to release the funding as scheduled, there is a sense of uncertainty about the fate of the targeted programs.

In early January, when federal officials first threatened to restrict funding, Colorado officials estimated they had only enough money to offer child care aid through the end of January. Since then, they have sent regular alerts to child care providers and the public with updates on the freeze lawsuit and the latest estimate of how long funding will last.

In February, federal District Judge Vernon Broderick granted a preliminary injunction requiring the federal government to continue providing the child care and social services funding to the five states that sued.

In early February, Colorado estimated the child care assistance money would last through May. Friday’s announcement extended that by a month.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Dylan’s return: NYC’s first public school student detained by ICE returns to school after 10 months

2026-03-31T20:03:00+00:00

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Dylan Lopez Contreras sat waiting for a copy of his class schedule in a sunny fourth-floor room of his Bronx high school as his counselor walked in wearing a “Free Dylan” button attached to the strap of his messenger bag.

Dylan stood, and Hedin Bernard lifted Dylan’s more-than-6-foot frame off the floor in a tight bear hug.

It had been more than 10 months since Dylan set foot in ELLIS Preparatory Academy, a high school geared toward older, newly arrived immigrant students. The last time the two had seen each other, Dylan’s hair was dyed purple and just covered his ears. Now, it fell below the 21-year-old’s shoulders and the purple dye had faded to yellow.

Dylan Lopez Contreras, center, listens as school counselor Janeen Padilla, left, goes over his new schedule in her office on his first day of school after spending close to 10 months in immigration custody.

Last May, federal immigration officials arrested Dylan in a Manhattan courthouse after his asylum hearing, making him the first known New York City public school student detained during President Donald Trump’s second term. The Venezuelan native became the public face of an aggressive new phase of the government’s mass deportation campaign, remaining in custody until his release last week.

After Dylan’s arrest, his mom Raiza’s first call was to Bernard. Ever since then, Bernard has, along with ELLIS founding Principal Norma Vega, led the school’s efforts to rally behind Dylan, which included helping to put Raiza in touch with lawyers and advocates, organizing a student letter-writing campaign, and supporting a fundraiser for the family. With Dylan’s return to ELLIS, they hope he can focus on “what will happen, not what did happen,” Vega said.

But the jubilation of Dylan’s return has been mixed with frequent reminders of the looming threat of immigration enforcement facing him and other ELLIS students.

Dylan catches up with school counselor, Hedin Bernard, left, in the halls of ELLIS on his first day back at school.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, released Dylan while he awaits a decision on an appeal in his asylum case. An immigration judge rejected his claim last year, and the appeals process could take years, according to his lawyers from the New York Legal Assistance Group. But ICE has the ability to take him back into custody at any time and requires regular check-ins, his lawyers said.

Shortly after Bernard reunited with Dylan Tuesday morning, as Dylan scarfed down a donut and drank coffee poured from Bernard’s thermos, the counselor invited him to join a college trip that week.

ELLIS staffers believe that preparing immigrant students for college is the surest path out of poverty. The trip would visit three colleges in upstate New York.

Dylan glanced down at his leg, where a black ankle monitor had been attached as a condition of his release. With his travel restrictions, Dylan knew he likely couldn’t attend.

But that didn’t slow down the ELLIS staffers for long. Later that morning, Bernard asked a colleague to invite college representatives to ELLIS, so Dylan wouldn’t have to leave school to meet them.

Left, a pin dedicated to Dylan Lopez Contreras hangs on a bag belonging to counselor Hedin Bernard at his office. And right, Dylan Lopez Contreras now wears an ankle monitor after his release from ICE detention.

Dylan’s detention still lingers

The swiftness of the changes over the past two weeks has been hard for Dylan to comprehend.

Dylan, center, sits for a portrait in the cafeteria at ELLIS.

After months in Moshannon Valley Processing Center, a Western Pennsylvania detention facility, Dylan had stood at a crowded press conference, flanked by Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani, thanking his supporters in Spanish from under the blue brim of a New York Knicks hat.

He had been sleeping on a thin cot in a cell with more than 70 men. Now he was in his own bed, cuddled with his younger siblings, ages 8 and 10, who had asked to sleep next to him. And after losing about 30 pounds in detention because he often couldn’t stomach the food, Dylan had a phalanx of adults at ELLIS showering him with food, free school supplies, and affection.

“It’s a big contrast, to go through so much mistreatment, and then come back to people who love and support you,” he said in Spanish.

Still, his thoughts drift back to a friend in detention nicknamed “El Mayor,” or the elder, who has already called Dylan to let him know how happy he was to hear about his release and to ask if he could use his public profile to advocate for the release of others. (Dylan did exactly that at his press conference.) As long as those men remain in detention, Moshannon Valley is “not going to feel very far away,” he said.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson denied that there were any problems with the conditions at Moshannon. “All detainees are provided with proper meals, water, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers,” the spokesperson said. “In fact, ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens.”

ELLIS staffers said reintegrating Dylan into school will mean helping him catch up on all he missed over the past 10 months while also processing the ongoing trauma of his detention.

While Dylan was incarcerated, his classmates had gone to Washington, D.C., prepared for or taken Regents exams they needed for graduation, and kept up with the guitar lessons Dylan enjoyed before his arrest.

Letters from his classmates helped sustain him as his detention stretched from days to months, and his optimism for a quick release faded. He watched new detainees — including grandparents and young kids — come and go while he remained locked up.

Dylan had no formal education in detention. But he was determined to do what he could to keep up with his English.

Dylan Lopez Contreras, 21, center, walks with Norma Vega, founding principal at ELLIS, left, to his counselor's office to prepare a class schedule on his first day of school after having spent close to 10 months in immigration custody.

He practiced speaking with cellmates from places like China and the United Kingdom and to advocate for better treatment from the guards.

He devoured manga and Marvel comics donated by the advocacy group ROCC NYC, which played a critical role in supporting his family and keeping public attention on his case. He scoured an English dictionary from the facility’s library to learn new vocabulary but had no one to check his pronunciation. And he tried to read some classics, such as Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez.

When he returned to ELLIS last week, Vega stopped him in the hallway to hand him a gift from a staffer in her district office: a copy of Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” another classic Dylan had asked to read but couldn’t get a copy of.

Dylan, who had fled Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro’s repressive regime, had been kidnapped by a Mexican cartel on his journey to the U.S., and spent 10 months in ICE custody, had said he wanted to understand Dante’s nine circles of hell.

ELLIS gears up to help Dylan adjust

Staffers at ELLIS are accustomed to helping students navigate all kinds of trauma, but they’d never had a student return from long-term incarceration, Bernard said.

Dylan’s counselors at ELLIS plan to refer him to a Spanish-speaking therapist through a mental health clinic located on the first floor of ELLIS’ building, Bernard said. And staffers will watch for any signs that he is struggling.

Dylan, left, goes over notes during a biology class with Hugo Ortega at ELLIS Prep in the Bronx.

They’re also hoping to give Dylan chances to enjoy himself outside academic courses, though his ankle monitor is complicating those plans. His counselor enrolled Dylan in a swim class, but Dylan worried about getting the device wet.

Schools in New York are required to continue enrolling students through age 21, but state law doesn’t stop them from staying longer if the school agrees, Vega said.

ELLIS staffers don’t want to keep Dylan in high school longer than necessary but are encouraging him to stay for two years, so he can master English before applying to college.

In the meantime, he is eager to earn money to help his mom and siblings with rent. He hopes to take a bartending course so he can work at night without interfering with his school schedule.

Dylan worked long hours as a delivery driver before his arrest, and Bernard remains concerned about how long he’ll want to stay in school.

Staffers at ELLIS are working on finding him an internship that allows him to make money while learning new skills and burnishing his college resume.

Dylan said he’s willing to stay at ELLIS “as long as it takes.”

Dylan, center, arrives in the cafeteria at ELLIS to hugs and jubilation on his first day back at school after his release from immigration detention.

Dylan and ELLIS face an uncertain future

Dylan’s arrest, and the aggressive escalation in immigration enforcement it represented, cast a long shadow over ELLIS over the past 10 months, reaching into every aspect of its work.

Students had begun to talk more openly about self-deportation. Pressure to abandon school for work grew as students confronted their diminished prospects for building a future in the U.S. And ELLIS’ enrollment, like that at immigrant-heavy schools across the city, has declined as border crossings slowed to a trickle.

Many of the ELLIS students who greeted Dylan Tuesday with tearful hugs and exclamations like “bienvenidos, loco!” (welcome back, crazy!) had endured their own brushes with immigration enforcement.

Dylan saw a friend whose mother was deported while he was in detention, leaving her without a way to pay rent or look after her toddler during school hours. Dylan’s friend Bridget is considering returning to Ecuador in part because of the fear of ICE. Another student saw Dylan’s ankle monitor and asked a staff member what the device did, adding that her dad had one too, Bernard said.

Dylan eats lunch with friends in the cafeteria at ELLIS.

And when Dylan greeted two fellow Venezuelan students, one asked if he’d had to sleep on the floor — noting that’s where he’d slept after being detained while crossing the border. “I know the floor,” Dylan responded with a wry smile.

During lunch time, Dylan settled into a booth with friends and munched on mozzarella sticks. He had a newfound appreciation for school cafeteria food.

His friendships were what Dylan missed most about ELLIS, and there was lots to catch up on. The conversation soon turned to an ordinary high school concern: Dylan had to figure out what color to dye his hair next.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org

Trump pressured states to limit undocumented high school students’ access to career education programs

2026-03-27T15:51:45+00:00

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At least three states have taken steps to restrict undocumented high school students’ access to dual enrollment and career-technical education programs, according to documents reviewed by Chalkbeat. In one state, the policy was reversed following Chalkbeat inquiries.

These moves come as efforts to limit educational funding for undocumented immigrants ramp up nationwide. They build on controversial guidance from the Trump administration that restricted federally funded preschool and adult education programs to citizens and legal residents.

But these state actions are particularly striking because they chip away at protections based on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Plyler v. Doe decision, which requires public schools to serve all students, including those who lack legal permission to be in the country. They suggest the Trump administration has made more progress than previously reported in eroding the protections enshrined in the ruling, long a conservative target.

In Virginia, nearly every school district quietly agreed to exclude undocumented students from participating in certain federally funded career-and-technical education programs, according to records obtained by Chalkbeat.

It is not clear how many undocumented students actually lost access to programming. But at least one school district in Virginia was denied $150,000 in federal funding because it didn’t agree to exclude those students.

On Thursday, after repeated Chalkbeat questions, the state education department said it was abandoning the policy. School districts will no longer be required to restrict undocumented students’ access. The original policy came under the state’s previous Republican administration. The department is now led by a Democratic appointee.

Other Republican-led states have maintained similar policies. The Iowa Department of Education said it expects schools not to offer college-credit courses to undocumented students with federal funds. Georgia recently announced new restrictions on undocumented students’ access to dual enrollment courses paid for with state money.

It is not clear how many other states have taken similar actions. In response to an ongoing lawsuit, a federal judge blocked Trump’s legal guidance in 20 states with Democratic attorneys general.

A U.S. Education Department spokesperson told Chalkbeat this week that the department is not focused on “patchwork enforcement” while litigation is ongoing. But the initial notice has already had a significant effect on state policy.

Conservative activists have argued that undocumented immigrant students use resources that by right should go to Americans.

The presence of large numbers of English learners “impacts the entire school and American citizens who are losing out on resources,” Mandy Drogin of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, told a U.S. House Judiciary subcommittee during a recent hearing devoted to criticizing the Plyler decision. “The taxpayers are left holding the bag for it.”

Immigrant and civil rights advocates have strongly defended the value of educating undocumented students. Not doing so, they say, would carry far greater social costs.

“Denial is not just a denial of equal access,” said Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “Denial is an injury to the whole community because you are then taking away the investment in kids who could make very strong contributions.”

Districts agreed to exclude undocumented students despite concerns

In July of last year, the Trump administration issued new interpretations of a 1996 federal law that restricted certain immigrants’ access to welfare programs. Trump’s changes sought to go further, by blocking undocumented immigrants from enrolling in Head Start, adult education, and postsecondary education programs.

In its legal notice, the administration also said it believes Plyler does not protect programming that goes “beyond providing a basic public education,” suggesting that undocumented students might not have access to the full slate of services offered in many public schools. The change targeted career-technical education programs that often involve partnerships between school districts and community colleges, sometimes blurring the lines between higher ed and K-12.

The next month, an email from Virginia’s then-Superintendent of Public Instruction Emily Anne Gullickson, arrived in the inboxes of school leaders across the commonwealth. It was labeled “URGENT READ.”

To continue to receive federal career-and-technical education funding, known as Perkins, school districts would have to promptly sign an “attestation” that “non-qualified aliens” are “not provided or receiving services funded by the program.” Virginia was allocated $32.5 million in Perkins funding this school year.

Some district leaders were wary of signing. Scott Worner, the superintendent of Mecklenburg County Public Schools in southern Virginia, wrote in an email obtained by Chalkbeat that he had “big concerns.” In Virginia Beach, school board member Melinda Rogers told local media that “it has always been the right of all students to have access to education.”

The Virginia school superintendents association quickly provided legal guidance in a webinar, which warned schools they could lose funding if they didn’t sign, according to a copy of the presentation obtained by Chalkbeat. Scott Braband, the group’s executive director, said during the meeting that there was some legal argument against signing but recommended that districts do so, according to meeting notes obtained by Chalkbeat. He emphasized the funding that was at stake.

In an interview, Braband suggested that districts were unlikely to actually exclude students based on their immigration status. “We don’t have knowledge that we have undocumented kids because we don’t check,” he said. ”It’s a compliance exercise.” He declined to speak about his comments from the legal webinar.

Ultimately, over 120 school districts, including Mecklenburg County and Virginia Beach, signed the attestation form, according to information obtained through a public records request. Most school districts signed the document months ago, but their decision to do so has not been previously reported.

Chalkbeat sought comment from every school district in the state. Virtually all declined to comment or did not respond.

Rogers, the Virginia Beach board member, said she was not aware that her district signed. “It is a concern,” she said. “I would ask why the federal government would impose that kind of restriction on a child when it is not our responsibility to get involved.”

Only seven Virginia school districts did not sign, according to state records and Chalkbeat reporting. “We can’t attest to that because we don’t collect that information,” Loudoun County Superintendent Aaron Spence said in an interview, referring to students’ immigration status.

In January of this year, the district was denied $150,000 in Perkins funding, including for a program promoting entrepreneurship to students. An email to Loudoun from the Virginia Department of Education, obtained by Chalkbeat, said funding requests would be rejected for school systems that had not signed. The district’s loss of funding was initially reported by local news outlet Loudoun Now.

Gullickson, who served as state superintendent during Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration, wrote in a statement to Chalkbeat, “Schools should only spend taxpayer money on students as intended.” She added, “Virginia was unwilling to put federal funds at risk.”

This week, Holly Coy, chief of staff at the Virginia Department of Education, said the agency “has determined that submitting the attestation is no longer a necessary requirement.” She said the state was still determining the logistics for releasing money to districts that had not signed.

The chain of events in Virginia shows the compromises school districts were willing to make to keep federal money flowing, as well as the ways in which student rights are dependent on states’ partisan make-up.

The U.S. Education Department did not explicitly require states to get assurances from districts, but warned it “may conduct a review” to ensure federal funding doesn’t go to “serve illegal aliens.” The department acknowledged that “this guidance is not binding.”

Organizations that represent career education and community colleges sent a letter to the department in August with urgent questions about how to comply, since Perkins funds often go to program costs that benefit large groups of students. They have not received a response, according to two groups who signed the letter.

Meanwhile, the Iowa Department of Education told districts that they cannot use Perkins dollars to pay for undocumented high school students to take college-credit classes “even if the course occurs at the high school.” Although schools are not required to report students’ immigration status, districts “should be prepared to demonstrate that ineligible students are not being served using Perkins funds,” the agency said.

A spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Education did not offer comment.

In Georgia, the state announced that beginning this summer, high school students participating in a state-funded dual college enrollment program must prove that they are citizens or legal residents. The state did not provide a public rationale for this move. According to a memo obtained by Chalkbeat, the Georgia Department of Law cited the recent Trump administration guidance as reason to exclude undocumented students.

A spokesperson for the Georgia Student Finance Commission, which administers the dual enrollment program, did not respond to a request for comment.

One high school in the Atlanta area noted that undocumented students may still participate, but now “must self-pay for courses.”

National Editor Erica Meltzer contributed reporting.

Matt Barnum is Chalkbeat’s ideas editor. Reach him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Lily Altavena is a national reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Lily at laltavena@chalkbeat.org.

Dylan Lopez Contreras, first NYC student detained by ICE in Trump’s second term, released after 10 months

2026-03-18T17:18:28+00:00

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Dylan Lopez Contreras, the first New York City public school student detained by federal immigration officials during President Donald Trump’s second term, was released Tuesday night after spending 10 months in federal custody, according to his mother and his legal team.

Dylan, now 21, was a student at ELLIS Preparatory Academy, a Bronx school geared toward older, newly arrived immigrant students, and his arrest was one of the highest-profile early examples of an unprecedented tactical shift in immigration enforcement last year in which officers arrested immigrants in the hallways of federal court following their legal hearings. Chalkbeat first reported Dylan’s arrest.

Kristin Kepplinger, a spokesperson from the New York Legal Assistance Group, which had been representing Dylan in his immigration court case and federal habeas corpus lawsuit, said the reason for his release wasn’t yet clear, as they had yet to review his release documents.

His legal team was thankful to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration and to the office of U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer who’d been advocating for his release, Kepplinger added.

Dylan’s federal habeas corpus petition was denied. An immigration judge also denied his asylum claim, but his lawyers appealed.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to a request for comment on Dylan’s release.

A native of Venezuela, Dylan first entered the country in 2024 through a program under former President Joe Biden that allowed migrants to make appointments to cross the border and seek asylum.

Dylan’s arrest quickly earned local and national attention, prompting former Mayor Eric Adams’ administration to file an amicus brief seeking his release, along with rallies and calls from national elected officials. Last month, Dylan’s mother, Raiza Contreras, attended the State of the Union with Sen. Chuck Schumer.

““[I’m] emotional,” Raiza told Chalkbeat in a brief interview Wednesday in Spanish. “I’m grateful to God first and foremost and to all the people who were present in this case.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul said on X Wednesday that she mentioned Dylan’s name in a recent meeting with Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan.

Mamdani said the city was “overjoyed” by Dylan’s release.

“Throughout this injustice, Dylan has shown remarkable strength, resilience, and courage,” the mayor said in a statement.

Even as federal immigration enforcement swept up other city students — some of whom subsequently won quick releases — Dylan remained in custody in Western Pennsylvania for nearly a year. In a September interview with Chalkbeat from detention, he described the frustration and depression of having his life put on hold.

Norma Vega, the principal of ELLIS, where staffers rallied behind Dylan and helped coordinate legal and other forms of support for the family, said she believes the sustained public campaign for Dylan’s release paid off.

“It confirmed for me we did the right thing,” she said. “Keeping him in the public eye, he became the face of every immigrant youth across the country.”

She added: “It was about this kid who they [the federal government] inaccurately thought was alone … and how important it was for us to let them know he’s not alone.”

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org

Gwynne Hogan covers immigration and homelessness for THE CITY.

Trump administration finds Jeffco bathroom, sports policies for transgender students violate Title IX

2026-03-17T23:15:19+00:00

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The federal education department has found that Jeffco Public Schools’ policies on sports participation, bathroom use, and overnight trip accommodations violate a federal law the Trump administration has used to challenge transgender students’ rights.

The department’s Office for Civil Rights said it received Jeffco athletic rosters “indicating that male students occupy 61 roster positions on girls’ sports teams,” according to a Friday press release. Jeffco Public Schools is Colorado’s second-largest district, with about 74,000 students.

It’s not clear from the press release how investigators reached the conclusion about the 61 athletes. The education department did not respond to questions.

Jeffco Public Schools pushed back against the department’s finding, saying in a statement that the “interpretation has no basis in the Title IX regulations and is not supported by any binding court decision.”

The Colorado High School Activities Association, which governs high school sports, said in a statement that it doesn’t maintain data on the number of transgender student athletes.

The Office for Civil Rights investigated Jeffco for violating Title IX, which prohibits discrimination based on sex. President Donald Trump has made targeting protections for transgender students a key part of his second term, and his administration’s interpretation of Title IX is contested. The civil rights office previously found that Colorado’s largest district, Denver Public Schools, violated Title IX by converting a girls’ restroom into an all-gender restroom.

The Jeffco investigation came after several families sued the district over its policy for overnight accommodations for trangender students. One family claimed their daughter, then 11 years old, was assigned to share a bed with a transgender student on an out-of-state trip.

In court documents, Jeffco Public Schools argued that the district “does not typically know the sex assigned at birth of any of its students” because parents can legally change the sex designation on their child’s birth certificate before enrolling the child in school.

In the case of the 11-year-old, trip organizers “quickly and discreetly” moved her to a different room when she expressed discomfort, Jeffco wrote in court documents.

A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in August. The families appealed that ruling in September, and the case is set for an appeals hearing in May, court records show.

Jeffco Public Schools’ policy says that in most cases, transgender students “should be assigned to share overnight accommodations with other students that share the student’s gender identity,” though it notes that determinations will be made on a case-by-case basis. The policy is the same when it comes to transgender students’ access to locker rooms.

The policy says students should have access to a restroom that aligns with their gender identity. As for sports participation, Jeffco’s policy points to the bylaws of the Colorado High School Activities Association, or CHSAA, which say the transgender student’s school should meet with the student “to determine the gender assignment for the prospective student-athlete.”

The bylaws say CHSAA will review those decisions according to its policies and appeals procedures. But in its statement Friday, CHSAA said it has “no history” of doing so. School districts don’t share that information with CHSAA due to student privacy laws, it said.

The Office for Civil Rights has given Jeffco 10 days to agree to a proposed resolution “or risk imminent enforcement action,” the press release says.

The proposal would require Jeffco to rescind or revise its policies about bathroom access, overnight accommodations, and sports; adopt “biology-based definitions of the words ‘male’ and female;’” issue a statement saying that Title IX applies regardless of state law; and post that statement “in a prominent location” on its main website and girls’ sports websites.

Jeffco has said that its policies are grounded in Colorado’s anti-discrimination law, the regulations for which say transgender individuals should be allowed to use restrooms, locker rooms, and dormitories that are consistent with their gender identity.

In its statement, the district said it will continue “to maintain its compliance with the law” and provide “exemplary, equitable educational opportunities for all students."

Eight conservative-leaning Colorado school districts and charter schools are suing the state, arguing that the anti-discrimination law violates students’ rights by allowing transgender youth to play on sports teams that match their gender identity. Jeffco is not involved in that lawsuit.

This story has been updated with information from the Colorado High School Activities Association and a statement from Jeffco Public Schools.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Families turn to states for civil rights support as Trump dismantles the Education Department

2026-03-10T16:57:58+00:00

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WASHINGTON (AP) — In their mostly white school district, Black students routinely heard racial slurs. White classmates hurled insults like “slave,” “monkey,” or worse. It often went unpunished.

Parents made those claims in a 2024 complaint asking the U.S. Department of Education to investigate racial bullying at the Pennridge School District in Pennsylvania. They thought their complaint had the power to make things better. Instead, it became one of thousands sitting in a federal office with little hope of gaining attention after layoffs by the Trump administration.

Families say they’ve had nowhere else to turn.

“There was an expectation that something was going to happen,” said Adrienne King, who has two daughters in the district and is president of the NAACP Bucks County chapter. When nothing did, “it’s a very hollow, empty feeling.”

One of the Education Department’s biggest jobs is to police discrimination in America’s schools. But amid mass firings and shifting priorities, that role has waned. In its place, there’s an emerging push for states to step up.

In Pennsylvania, a lawmaker is proposing a new state agency that would investigate schools and uphold students’ civil rights — traditionally the role of the federal government. At the same time, advocates there and in other Democrat-led states are pressing existing state agencies to intervene when students face discrimination based on race, disability, or sex.

The idea carries risk. Pushing the work to the states could create a patchwork of systems with uneven protections. Some worry it will embolden the Trump administration to retreat further on civil rights.

Lawmakers propose more muscular state agencies

Pennsylvania state Sen. Lindsey Williams offered a blunt message last fall when she proposed a new state civil rights office to be modeled after its federal counterpart. “If the federal government won’t stand up for our most vulnerable students, I will,” said Williams, a Democrat.

Her bill, to be introduced this spring, faces long odds in the state’s Republican-controlled Senate. Yet even if it fails there, Williams believes it has potential to become a national model. She’s already heard interest from lawmakers in other states, and similar proposals have been put forward in Maryland and Illinois.

Colorado lawmakers want to help parents who feel ‘ghosted’ by the federal Office for Civil Rights

More immediately, advocates in Pennsylvania are calling for heavier investment in an existing but often overlooked agency. The Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission already has the power to investigate schools and enforce students’ rights, but it’s rarely used for that end. It’s better known for handling employment disputes, with just 5% of its recent cases involving education.

Kristina Moon, a lawyer at the Education Law Center in Pennsylvania, has started encouraging families to take discrimination complaints to the commission instead of the federal government. She sees it as the next best option for families left in limbo amid federal turmoil.

“It’s incredibly important for students and families to be aware of any other option available to them,” said Moon, who represents families in the Pennridge complaint.

The commission is welcoming complaints that have stalled at the federal level. Yet officials are also realistic about their limitations. The agency has about 100 staff — down from more than 200 in the past — and some question its ability to handle a sharp increase in complaints.

New banners of Benjamin Franklin, Martin Luther King Jr., and Anne Sullivan hang from the U.S. Department of Education building on March 1, 2026. The department has brought back some laid-off civil rights staff but still faces a backlog of complaints.

The federal Education Department had more than 300 open investigations in Pennsylvania as of January 2025, according to the most recent federal data. Each is a possible candidate to be shifted to the state.

“It would be tough, I’ll be totally honest,” said Desireé Chang, the commission’s education director. “A stark influx would definitely put some weight on our agency. But we would do it because that is what we are charged with doing.”

Civil rights work has slowed under Trump administration

Before President Donald Trump took office last year, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights was already struggling under a heavy caseload. Work has slowed further after sweeping layoffs, which closed entire offices in Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, and elsewhere. Some remaining staff say time-consuming investigations have become rare as they focus on the quickest complaints.

At the same time, Trump officials have used the office to go after schools that make accommodations for transgender students and athletes, arguing that it discriminates against girls and women.

Trump officials blame the previous administration for leaving a backlog of complaints. Trump officials have brought back some fired employees to help clear cases.

The fallout is being felt across the country. In Maryland, a recently proposed bill would give the state’s Commission on Civil Rights new power to investigate discrimination in schools. The office has long handled discrimination cases in areas like housing and employment, but students don’t have a comparable option to file complaints.

At a hearing last week, officials at the commission supported the bill and said they can no longer rely on the federal government to defend students’ rights.

“Offices have been closed, people have been fired, cases are piling up or not even moving — that’s why we sought to step in that gap and provide Maryland students an option,” said Glendora Hughes, general counsel for the commission.

In Massachusetts, advocates are turning attention to an existing office in the state’s education department. State officials say anyone can file a complaint with the Problem Resolution System to address violations of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or other laws protecting students from discrimination.

“It is imperative that the Office for Civil Rights perform its congressionally mandated duties, rather than leaving states on their own to protect the rights of their students to learn in environments free from discrimination,” the Massachusetts Executive Office of Education said in a statement.

Some legal aid groups are also filling in gaps. The Southern Poverty Law Center is suing a Louisiana school district on behalf of a 10-year-old boy with autism. The suit says the St. Tammany Parish School District illegally cut the boy’s classroom time to just two hours a day starting in 2024, down from a full day. The nonprofit said it’s the kind of case that would have been handled by the federal government in the past.

One of the U.S. Education Department’s most powerful tools is the ability to pull federal funding from schools that violate civil rights laws. Facing that threat, schools usually have agreed to make changes when pressed by the agency.

Proposals at the state level have varying enforcement powers. Some would allow states to mediate disputes between families and schools and to issue legal orders. By contrast, a newly created Office of Civil Rights in California primarily aims to provide anti-discrimination guidance and training to local schools.

In Pennridge, families are weighing their next steps. King said she has little hope in the federal complaint, and the bullying hasn’t stopped. Her daughters still hear racial slurs at school, and students make insensitive comments about their hair. She wonders how it will all shape her daughters’ lives.

“I feel as though my girls have normalized a lot of this, but for the sake of survival — middle school is hard,” she said. “You just want to be like everybody else.”

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Supreme Court ruling on gender identity favors parents but leaves unanswered questions for schools

2026-03-07T00:27:11+00:00

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The U.S. Supreme Court’s Mirabelli v. Bonta ruling casts doubt on the legality of school district policies that aim to protect transgender students’ privacy.

But even though the majority of justices sided with California parents who said those policies led schools to withhold important information about their children’s gender identity, the practical impact of their ruling is less straightforward amid a shifting legal landscape for trans rights.

In Mirabelli v. Bonta, teachers and parents challenged a California law that required schools to use students’ preferred names and pronouns and to not disclose students’ transgender identity — including to parents — without the student’s consent.

A U.S. District Court judge sided with the parents and teachers and ordered California to revise its guidance to school districts. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit put that decision on hold, leaving California’s law in place while the lawsuit played out. The Supreme Court intervened before the appeals court could more closely consider the case, with the conservative majority finding that the parents were likely to succeed on the merits.

As an emergency ruling on the so-called shadow docket, Mirabelli doesn’t create binding precedent but gives a strong indication of how judges view the issue.

Conservatives hailed the 6-3 decision as a victory for parental rights that puts school districts on notice. A database maintained by the conservative parent group Defending Education identified more than 1,000 school districts nationwide with policies that limit parental notification about children and their gender identity.

“If you have been socially transitioning children at school without their parents’ knowledge, the Supreme Court of the United States has now told you in no uncertain terms: that is unconstitutional,” Paul Jonna, special counsel at the Thomas More Society, a conservative religious public interest law firm representing the California parents and teachers, said in a statement. “Get your policies into compliance immediately.”

But while the decision seems to say clearly that schools can’t withhold information from parents, the ruling doesn’t clarify under what exact circumstances they have to reach out, said University of South Carolina law professor Derek Black.

A narrow reading of the ruling could be that schools need to respond honestly to parent questions, but don’t have an obligation “to get on the phone and say, ‘Hey, did you know that Jane is going by John now?’” Black said. “That would be kind of absurd actually because the parents may very well know.”

Advocates for transgender youth, meanwhile, worry that some students will lose their only safe haven.

President Donald Trump has asserted through executive orders that there are only two sexes and that people cannot change their gender. His administration has investigated school districts over inclusive policies and threatened to withhold funds from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to minors.

Mo Turner, director of policy and advocacy for Glisten, a group that focuses on making education safe for LGBTQ youth, sees “a steady march towards trying to create a U.S. where trans folk don’t exist.”

“We are creating a harmful environment when we see school districts asked to forcibly out students, when we ask folks to chip away at the little pieces of independence that our youth are getting, as they try to figure out who they are,” Turner said.

When must schools notify parents about gender identity changes?

Last year’s Supreme Court decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor gave parents the right to opt their children out of lessons that violate their religious beliefs. But even before that, legal precedent going back to Pierce v. Society of Sisters and Wisconsin v. Yoder generally supported parents’ rights, Black said.

Those constitutional issues are distinct from political questions or policy preferences, he said, even if the outcome presents a “tough pill to swallow” for some.

“Parents have a fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their children,” he said. “I’m not saying every parent is going to get it right, but if you have to choose between the state, the school, and the parent, it’s going to be the parent every time.”

One exception, Black noted, was the 2024 U.S. v. Skrmetti decision, which upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors and disregarded the rights of parents who supported their children’s transitions.

Indiana, Tennessee, and four other states have laws that require schools to notify parents when a student wants to go by a different name or change their gender presentation at school, according to the Movement Advancement Project.

But on the ground, school district policies can be inconsistent, Chalkbeat reporting found.

And the Supreme Court did not address what actions should prompt schools to proactively inform parents. Does that obligation kick in when a student informs adults at school about a new name or pronouns? Or if teachers notice that a student’s friends address them differently?

“The implications for enforcement are so complex and almost impossible to comprehend in terms of how it will be operationalized on a day-to-day basis,” said Shelby Chestnut, executive director of the Transgender Law Center.

Asked if the state would be issuing new guidance for school districts, the California Department of Education said only that it does not comment on pending litigation.

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for California Attorney General Rob Bonta said his office is “disappointed” in the ruling but declined to say whether they would continue to defend California’s law in court.

“We remain committed to ensuring a safe, welcoming school environment for all students while respecting the crucial role parents play in students’ lives,” the statement said.

Where do parental rights begin and end?

Social conservatives and the Trump administration have accused schools for years of facilitating children’s gender transitions. Most often, this refers to schools using children’s preferred names and pronouns as part of a process of social transition.

Such accusations touch on highly sensitive and disputed questions of parental rights and the role of schools and educators in children’s lives. Sometimes children or teens ask to go by a different name or gender identity at school and ask trusted teachers not to tell their parents because they fear their parents will respond negatively. Schools might continue to use a student’s legal name and gender in communications with parents.

These decisions can have high stakes for everyone involved. One set of parents in Mirabelli said they did not know their child identified as a different gender until they were hospitalized for a suicide attempt. At the same time, between 20% and 40% of homeless youth identify as LGBTQ, with many reporting that parental rejection and abuse contributed to them leaving home.

Black said policies that treat parental involvement as the default and carve out clearly defined safety exemptions might withstand legal scrutiny better than those that tightly limit disclosure.

Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote in a blog post that the decision was “a quiet victory for public schools and teachers.”

“Teachers do their best work when aligned with families, not forced to participate in secrecy regimes that invite suspicion,” he wrote.

Absent from Mirabelli was any consideration of students’ rights or agency. In an unrelated Colorado case, a U.S. District Court judge rejected the parents’ claim that district policies limiting disclosure had harmed them. “The District is not the decision maker at issue: the student is,” the judge wrote.

These and other legal questions could get more consideration if the Supreme Court takes up any of the several dozen cases working their way up through the lower courts.

Like Mahmoud before it, Mirabelli raises other questions about where parental rights begin and end, and whether it matters if parents’ claims are grounded in religious belief. Many states allow teenagers younger than 18 to consent to mental health treatment, medical care, working during school hours, sex, and even marriage without parental permission.

Writing in Vox, Ian Millhiser said the decision’s description of parental rights was so broad that it could require schools to report students to their parents if they dated a classmate, ate non-kosher food, or removed their hijab after arriving on school grounds.

The Education Department, meanwhile, has ongoing investigations into California and Maine based on accusations they violated the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which lays out students’ privacy rights in school and also gives parents access to students’ educational records, by withholding information. Conservative advocacy groups have filed civil rights complaints that make similar claims.

FERPA requires schools to share written records, such as a formal gender support plan, with parents, but experts question whether it requires proactive disclosure. The administration could draw on Mirabelli to bolster its pursuit of these claims, but on its own, the decision doesn’t change the law.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Denver schools policy already aims to shield students from ICE. Latino advocates say more is needed.

2026-03-05T01:33:49+00:00

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Many of the prohibitions in a proposed policy meant to protect Denver students from immigration enforcement are already on the school district’s books, scattered across a handful of rules put in place by the superintendent.

But backers of the proposal say it’s important for the school board to adopt the policy, even if it is duplicative. Doing so would send a clear message of support to immigrant families at a time when the Trump administration has ramped up arrests across the country, they said.

“Our biggest concern is that children are afraid, and parents are afraid to send their children to school, and we need the board to come out and tell them, ‘We’re creating the safest learning environment we can for you and this is what we’re putting in place,’” said Milo Marquez, chair of the Latino Education Coalition, a local advocacy group.

The school board is set to discuss the proposed policy at a meeting Thursday. The proposal would designate all school buildings, buses, and bus stops as “safe zones” and bar staff from cooperating with federal immigration agents without a judicial warrant, among other provisions.

But some proposed provisions go further than the current rules and may test the limits of the school district’s authority. At a meeting last month, several board members pushed for a legal review.

“I don’t want to give any false hope or false protection,” said board member Marlene De La Rosa, “because that is also very, very harmful for our students and our families when they believe something and it’s not possible to have it.”

The proposed policy was written by advocacy groups including the Latino Education Coalition and Movimiento Poder. The latter group has for years raised concerns about how students getting ticketed or arrested at school could lead to their deportation.

“We want to be proactive and ensure that doesn’t happen,” said Berenice Aguirre, the organization’s interim executive director.

DPS has consistently backed immigrant students

Denver Public Schools has long been supportive of immigrant students, even suing the Trump administration to try to reinstate a federal policy that previously treated schools as generally off limits to immigration enforcement. DPS dropped that lawsuit in June after a judge found there was little practical difference between that policy and the Trump administration’s guidance.

After the school district experienced an influx of immigrant students from Venezuela and other South American countries in 2023 and 2024, Superintendent Alex Marrero put in place a new administrative policy detailing how staff should respond to federal immigration officials.

The policy, known as Administrative Policy KLG, complemented prior administrative policies that barred U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from district property unless they had a search warrant, for example.

The policy also prohibits the district from collecting information about a student’s place of birth or citizenship status. It says the district won’t share student records unless required by law. And if an ICE agent shows up at a school, the policy directs staff to collect the agent’s name, badge number, and copies of any warrants and subpoenas, and then contact the district’s lawyer.

All of those provisions are also in the policy being considered by the school board. But advocates and district staff said there’s a key difference between the superintendent’s policies and policies passed by the board. The latter, they said, are harder to change.

Whereas a superintendent has the sole authority to write and rewrite administrative policies whenever they want, changing a board policy requires a public discussion and a majority vote by board members, who must ultimately answer to Denver voters.

“In this sense, redundancy is not necessarily a bad thing,” DPS General Counsel Aaron Thompson wrote in an email to Chalkbeat. “It can be an intentional governance decision.”

Marquez, of the Latino Education Coalition, also said the policies should be in place regardless of who the superintendent is.

“If the superintendent has these policies, that’s great,” Marquez said. “If the superintendent leaves tomorrow and a new superintendent comes in, then those policies could be gone. But if the board puts them into place, then they’re protected.”

He pointed to an executive order from Denver Mayor Mike Johnston last week that declared schools “protected spaces” from ICE as an example of a high-profile move that signaled support for the immigrant community, even if not all of the provisions were new.

Proposal could require DPS to renegotiate deal with police

The proposal would be an addition to an existing school board policy called Executive Limitation 10. Executive limitations are rules for the superintendent, who answers to the school board.

But as written by the advocacy groups, the proposal says school-based police officers and independent charter schools would have to follow the rules too. That could require the superintendent to revise the district’s contracts and agreements with the Denver Police Department and each charter school, Thompson said.

For instance, the proposed policy says the superintendent should not allow school resource officers, who are Denver police officers assigned to work in DPS schools, to arrest or ticket a student if doing so would put them at risk of deportation.

It also says the superintendent should not allow school resource officers to share student information with ICE agents or “any law enforcement officers not assigned to the school.”

The school board doesn’t supervise school resource officers, Thompson said, and “cannot direct (Denver Police Department) arrest decisions in real time through board policy.” But the board can direct the superintendent to negotiate and enforce expectations for the officers through the district’s written agreement with the police department. That agreement already says officers should not get involved in routine school discipline.

The board can also ban school resource officers altogether, as it did in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd and concerns about racist policing before reinstating them in 2023.

A spokesperson for the Denver Police Department said its officers do not help enforce civil federal immigration law but declined to answer specific questions about the proposed policy. Thompson said DPS school resource officers “generally will not know a student’s immigration status, and DPS does not want an SRO attempting to determine it.”

Aguirre, of Movimiento Poder, said the board’s 2020 decision to remove school resource officers shows it has authority over the officers’ presence and scope. She said her organization believes officers should only get involved in situations involving weapons or violence.

“We don’t think we’re asking for anything radical or that hasn’t been done before,” Aguirre said.

The proposed policy also seeks to add a new provision prohibiting DPS from cooperating or complying with ICE detainer requests. Such requests are usually made by ICE to jails to hold someone who has been arrested so that ICE may take custody of them. Thompson said that to his knowledge, DPS has never received an ICE detainer request.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Some Colorado lawmakers want state ‘guardrails’ on Trump-backed education tax-credit program

2026-03-04T22:30:21+00:00

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Several Democratic state lawmakers have filed a bill that says private schools in Colorado that participate in a federal tax-credit scholarship program would need to abide by nondiscrimination laws that protect LGBTQ+ students and others.

Already, the bill filed last week has drawn concerns from Gov. Jared Polis, who has opted Colorado into the program that would allow an annual tax credit of up to $1,700 for donations made to scholarship-granting organizations. These organizations would then distribute scholarships to help families pay for private school tuition, tutoring, or after-school programs.

Governors across the country are required to opt into the program backed by President Donald Trump, and Polis was one of the first Democrats to announce he would do so. But opponents worry the program would effectively bring school vouchers to Colorado, an idea that voters have rejected in the past. Polis has said he doesn’t support school vouchers — which provide public dollars to families to pay for private school tuition — and doesn’t believe the tax-credit program is a voucher.

Concerned that Polis could veto an attempt to stop Colorado from participating in the federal program, the lawmakers behind House Bill 1292 said they decided to go this route instead.

“We can’t stop the governor from opting into this,” said Sen. Cathy Kipp, a Fort Collins Democrat and sponsor of the bill. “We can do the best we can to put some guardrails around its use so that these programs don’t discriminate against students.”

Colorado’s nondiscrimination laws safeguard against discrimination in places of public accommodation based on an individual’s characteristics such as disability, race, or gender expression.

The bill’s passage could prevent some religious private schools from participating. The state is already embroiled in a legal dispute about whether these schools can deny certain students entry to publicly funded preschool programs.

In a statement, Polis spokesperson Eric Maruyama said the governor sees the tax credits as a way to increase charitable giving that supports students, the majority of whom attend public schools. Polis is not interested in leaving money on the table, he said.

“Governor Polis is concerned that HB26-1292 would hamstring the state’s ability to bring new funding for much-needed services like afterschool programming and tutoring for all students across the state,” Murayama said.

Lawmakers are postponing a hearing on the bill until the federal government finalizes rules that would govern the program, said Democratic state Rep. Lori Goldstein, who represents Westminster and Northglenn. She also wants more time to talk with those affected by the bill and ensure the best version gets heard by lawmakers. It’s unclear when final federal rules will be released.

Goldstein said that she hopes her idea will encourage Coloradans to donate to organizations that serve all students and “public entities that they’re familiar with,” such as public education foundations.

The bill would require the state to list all eligible scholarship-granting organizations, including private schools. Those organizations would need to comply with nondiscrimination laws, including any related to students with disabilities.

The bill says that religious schools would still maintain their mission, hiring decisions, and the ability to offer religious instruction and worship.

Sen. Janice Marchman, a Loveland Democrat, said lawmakers plan to file amendments that would allow the state to vet the scholarship-granting organizations.

The bill is opposed by the Colorado Association of Private Schools and Christian Home Educators of Colorado. Neither organization responded to a request for comment for this story.

Several school districts and the Colorado Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, have offered their support for the bill.

The education tax-credit program will begin in 2027 and was established by last year’s “big beautiful bill.” Families earning up to 300% of area median income would qualify for the program. The program has the potential to generate billions of dollars nationwide for private school tuition and other educational expenses at no cost to the states.

Although Polis wants Colorado to participate, the decision might hinge on the state’s next governor. Polis is term limited, and the next governor could decide to reverse his decision when they take office in 2027.

U.S. Department of Education releases vision for reshaping federal research after DOGE cuts

2026-02-27T23:20:56+00:00

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A much-anticipated report on the future of federal education research makes a strong case for the value of the Institute of Education Sciences and calls for significant changes to make research more useful for educators and policymakers.

The report released Friday by the U.S. Department of Education praises IES for significantly improving the rigor of education research and contributing to a strong body of evidence about what works in schools. But it also says too much previous work by IES hasn’t been put to practical use, has failed to address high-priority issues, or is redundant.

Although the department shared the recommendations, the Trump administration has not committed to adopting them. The administration wants to dismantle the Department of Education and has been parceling out key functions to other agencies in pursuit of that goal. The Institute of Education Sciences was devastated during the early months of the Trump administration, when the U.S. DOGE Service cost-cutting initiative abruptly canceled contracts and eliminated more than 100 positions.

Education research is one of the Education Department functions required by law and is widely considered one of the most important roles played by the federal government. Many researchers and advocates fear states would not make their own investments in education research and that research would not be as widely disseminated without federal involvement. IES directors are appointed for six-year terms that, like those of Federal Reserve chairs, are intended to straddle administrations and insulate the agency from partisan pressures.

The Department of Education hired Amber Northern, senior vice president for research at the center-right Thomas B. Fordham Institute, to look at the work IES had been doing and talk to researchers, state schools chiefs, and others about the best path forward.

“These are not nips and tucks, as IES is struggling in multiple ways to remain relevant and responsive,” Northern wrote in “Reimagining the Institute of Education Sciences.”

But the report also offers a vigorous defense of the value of a strong federal role in education research, and argues that research must remain independent from political influence.

“It is not an exaggeration to say that IES’s dogged commitment to high-quality empirical studies has transformed the field of education research, shifting it away from less to more rigorous methods and practices,” the report says.

As the administration seeks to dismantle the Department of Education, the report argues that a reinvigorated IES would support larger goals of giving states and parents the tools to improve how schools serve students.

IES is an “entity worth redemption and revitalization, precisely because its work has the potential to empower those who deliver education to the American people, meaning state and local leaders, school leaders, teachers, and the broader public, including parents,” the report says.

The report lists out research projects that have helped educators support struggling readers, improve students’ math skills, and steer high school students to higher education. Practice guides related to literacy and math instruction are downloaded tens of thousands of times each year. The basic data sets that the National Center for Education Statistics, or NCES, maintains on student demographics, school finance, and more provide a foundation for public and private research.

And the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as NAEP or the nation’s report card, provides essential information about student learning across states and over time.

But too often, research doesn’t make it into the classroom or answer the most urgent questions in education, the report said. And some data collection projects are duplicative or unwieldy and cost too much for the value of data produced.

The report includes numerous recommendations focused on making research easier for schools to use. For example, it says researchers should produce one-page summaries, infographics, and short videos as a condition for funding.

The report also emphasizes funding research that can quickly drive change at the classroom level. There is often tension, however, between speed and determining whether an intervention makes a difference for students years later.

The report’s recommendations include:

Focusing on fewer problems in education and addressing those problems from multiple angles and across the offices within IES.
Streamlining data collection and focusing on core functions.
Prioritizing multi-state projects over requests from individual states and jurisdictions.
Directing research toward “practicality, innovation, and relevance.”
Narrowing the scope of the What Works Clearinghouse to practice guides and other tools educators are likely to use.

In its press release, the Education Department thanked Northern for her work and noted the IES “too often delivered research that is slow, siloed, and disconnected from classroom realities.” It did not commit to adopting the recommendations.

In a blog post, acting IES Director Matthew Soldner wrote: “The challenge that lies ahead is operationalizing elements of Reimagining while ensuring that IES’s unique role in the education sciences isn’t just continued, but elevated."

Report on reshaping IES gets outside support

In an interview, Northern said one of her first questions when the department approached her about the job was how serious officials were about reinvigorating IES. She said she was impressed with how many people inside and outside the administration wanted to engage on the future of IES.

“Too much research was suited to what researchers wanted to know rather than what the field needs to know,” said Northern, who is continuing in an advisory role through June. “We had no real strategy.”

Mark Schneider, who served as director of IES from 2018 to 2024, said the cuts made by DOGE have opened up an “amazing opportunity” to rebuild the agency. Schneider has described being frustrated in making big changes during his tenure by entrenched interests.

Schneider said he supports the report’s focus on addressing urgent education problems and changing how NCES collects long-term data.

“The statistical data collections were old, creaky,” he said. “They weren’t using modern techniques. They didn’t care enough about timeliness.”

Rachel Dinkes, president of the Knowledge Alliance, a national education research coalition, said the report represents a “positive step forward” overall because it promotes the idea that IES is important to federal infrastructure.

“There is a real critical mass of people that feel that IES is a really important agency,” she said.

The report includes valuable recommendations on connecting research and practice, said Cara Jackson, research manager at the Center for Outcomes Based Contracting and past president of the Association of Education Finance and Policy. But Jackson worries that too much focus on speed could lead to more correlational studies and less rigor around causality.

Jackson, who participated in one of the working groups that contributed to the report, said she doesn’t want to open the door to vendors making misleading claims about their products.

She also wonders who will turn the recommendations into policy change.

“They’ve let so many people go,” she said. “I’m worried we’ve done tremendous damage to our ability to recruit people into government work.”

Read the full report here.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor covering education policy and politics. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Lily Altavena is a national reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Lily at laltavena@chalkbeat.org.

How often do kids bring guns to school? Here’s what we know.

2026-02-27T20:45:22+00:00

This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.

Earlier this month, a 7-year-old boy accidentally shot himself with a firearm he brought to his second grade classroom in Maryland.

During a single week last month, three separate K-12 students at different New York City schools were caught with a firearm on campus.

Over the past decade, fear of school shootings has grown among American teachers, parents, and students. Nearly 75% of U.S. teenagers worry about school gun violence, according to a national survey administered by public health researchers at Indiana University.

Despite mounting anxiety about school shootings, the task of tracking the number of guns in U.S. public schools is about to get even harder. Shortly after returning to office last year, President Donald Trump’s administration gutted the Department of Education office responsible for collecting and analyzing most school-related data. The National Center for Education Statistics was reduced to just five employees as of March 2025. Those cuts now jeopardize the future of already shaky statistics about the number of K-12 students caught with firearms on campus.

In lieu of accurate, timely federal data, The Trace used past NCES reports, Gun Violence Archive data, and public health research to try to understand how guns end up in American schools. We learned that students are more likely to bring guns to school when they are exposed to violence and have easy access to firearms. We also found fewer U.S. public schools had armed law enforcement officers during the 2021–22 school year compared to previous years, signaling a possible shift away from armed guards as a school safety measure. Mostly, we learned that public health researchers cannot effectively study school safety without robust federal data on guns in schools.

Fear often drives students to bring guns to school

Despite the lack of quality information, available data and research offer clues about why some students bring guns to school, and why school officials have struggled to respond.

For many students, carrying a gun is seen as a necessary form of self-defense in a violent world. A 2022 study of high schoolers by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that youth who are exposed to violence are more likely to carry a gun.

“If kids are exposed to forms of violence in their neighborhoods or homes, they become more fearful,” said Joshua Rosenbaum, a criminal justice researcher at the University of Mississippi. “Fearful individuals, including kids, often feel like they need to protect themselves by keeping a firearm on them.”

The NCES data shows the nationwide rate of children bringing firearms to school spiked during the 2021-22 school year, the most recent year for which data is available. During that time, the U.S. gun violence epidemic hit a crescendo: Gun deaths reached near-record highs as communities across the country struggled to address gun homicides and suicides amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

A Trace analysis of Gun Violence Archive data found that the rate of kids caught with firearms in school returned to pre-pandemic levels as overall U.S. gun violence decreased in 2024 and 2025.

Rosenbaum also told The Trace that children who have easy access to a firearm at home are significantly more likely to carry “a gun to school compared to their classmates who did not have guns available to them.”

In 2019, the U.S. Secret Service published an analysis of 41 school violence incidents that took place between 2008 and 2017. The agency found that most of the young “attackers” used a gun that was accessible to “from the home of their parents or another close relative.”

NCES data suggests that school officials’ strategy for dealing with campus gun violence may have evolved in recent years. After the Columbine High School shooting in 1990, the Department of Justice established a grant program to expand the hiring and training of “school resource officers” — law enforcement officials stationed on public school campuses. For decades, the presence of these armed officers was viewed as a possible deterrent for school shooters.

But armed school security may not be as popular as it was in the past. During the 2021-22 school year, just one quarter of U.S. public schools were staffed with a law enforcement officer that routinely carried a firearm on school grounds, down 26% from the previous school year. This shift in school officials’ approach to gun safety coincided with a growing body of public health research finding limited evidence that armed guards can prevent school gun violence.

It’s important to remember the limitations of NCES reporting. The agency’s data on armed school personnel relies on the School Survey on Crime and Safety. Participation in the survey is voluntary, meaning the results likely depict an incomplete picture of public schools’ use of armed guards. And in more recent years, some school districts have brought back armed officers after violent incidents.

Researchers trying to patch a fragmented data landscape

Research on guns in schools relies heavily on the National Center for Education Statistics, the data wing of the Department of Education. Under the Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994, schools must submit statistics about firearms on campus to their state education officials, who then share that information with the NCES.

The data collection system is deeply flawed. A 2018 Stateline investigation found that school and state officials routinely failed to track deadly school shootings in Arizona and Colorado. Journalists from Stateline, part of the national nonprofit news outlet States Newsroom, found that state education officials who collect firearm statistics from districts “don’t enforce the reporting requirements,” leading to undercounting.

NCES data also suffers from significant time lags, a common problem with federal datasets. The agency’s latest report was published in 2024, but even then the most recent school year included was 2021-22.

The data landscape worsened in 2025, when the Trump administration fired most of the NCES staff, part of a broader dismantling of the Department of Education.

Data from Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks gun violence incidents using open source research, offers a potential solution. The GVA tracker includes flags for incidents at schools, but unless the event is logged by local media or law enforcement — the organization’s primary sources — it likely won’t be included. Rural areas are especially susceptible to this undercounting.

Because of these limitations, researchers have turned elsewhere. Public health scholars like the University of Michigan’s Rebeccah Sokol have been forced to build their own data tools to track the incidence of guns in K-12 schools. In 2017, Sokol and her colleagues established the FACTS National Survey, a nationally representative study that asks teenagers directly about firearm access, carrying, and exposure to violence.

The approach has built-in drawbacks: It relies on teens’ self-reported behavior and is conducted in onetime survey waves, meaning it can miss rapid changes and cannot provide real-time, local detail. Still, tools like the FACTS survey offer a stopgap in a research landscape where the federal government has largely failed to systematically track how and why guns end up in the hands of children.

“If we received timely, accurate data on where and when students are bringing firearms to school,” Sokol told The Trace, “we could use that data to develop better strategies to prevent dangerous situations from happening.”

Schools should be ‘protected spaces’ from ICE activity, Denver mayor says in new executive order

2026-02-27T01:50:35+00:00

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As part of a wide-ranging executive order Thursday aimed at shielding Denver from a federal immigration enforcement surge, Mayor Mike Johnston emphasized that public schools should be “protected spaces” alongside churches, libraries, courthouses, and other public buildings.

“We’ve seen communities terrorized, we’ve seen schoolchildren taken, we’ve seen Americans like Renee Good and Alex Pretti killed for peacefully raising their voices,” Johnston said at a news conference, referencing two people shot in Minnesota by federal agents. “And Denverites ask me every day, ‘What will we do if that chaos comes to Denver?’”

Denver Public Schools Superintendent Alex Marrero and school board member Marlene De La Rosa stood behind Johnston at the news conference. A district spokesperson declined to comment on the executive order. So did school board President Xóchitl Gaytán.

De La Rosa said she attended to hear what Johnston had to say because the school board is considering adopting its own policy that would bar federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from school property without a valid warrant, among other actions. The board is set to discuss the policy at its March 5 meeting.

“We want to take a deeper look into what this executive order is and how it impacts our schools and our students,” De La Rosa said.

Denver Public Schools has long been vocal in its support of immigrant students. DPS already directs its employees to forward any requests from ICE to the district’s attorney. A policy put in place by the superintendent says the attorney won’t allow ICE on district property “unless required by law” and “will do everything in the District’s lawful power” to protect students’ rights.

The policy under consideration by the board would strengthen that commitment.

“The desire is to possibly codify it in policy in a public way so we can take an official stance,” Marrero said at a board meeting last week.

The district sued the Trump administration a year ago to try to reinstate a federal policy that treated schools as sensitive locations that were generally off limits to immigration enforcement. It dropped the lawsuit in June after a judge found there was little practical difference between that policy and Trump administration guidance for ICE agents to use discretion.

Schools were only briefly mentioned in Johnston’s executive order. The order directs Denver police to protect peaceful protestors, use their body-worn cameras to document the activity of federal immigration agents, and provide aid to anyone harmed by them.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Dylan’s mom goes to Washington: Mother of detained Bronx student joins Schumer at State of Union

2026-02-23T23:02:01+00:00

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As President Donald Trump touts his accomplishments in Tuesday’s State of the Union address, one woman in the audience is meant to serve as a reminder of how his immigration policies have taken a toll on families and school communities.

Raiza Contreras, the Bronx mother whose son was the first known New York City public school student detained by immigration agents, is expected to attend the Washington, D.C. event as the guest of Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, of New York.

Raiza has fought to bring her son, Dylan Lopez Contreras, home since his arrest nearly nine months ago at his routine immigration court hearing in Manhattan. Schumer’s invitation to Dylan’s mom comes as Democrats remain in a protracted standoff with Republicans and the Trump administration about placing limits on immigration enforcement tactics.

At the time of his arrest, Dylan was a student at Ellis Preparatory Academy in the Bronx, a school serving recent immigrants that rallied to his defense. ELLIS has continued to support him however they can, as well as their other students, many of whom are grappling with their own immigration cases. Dylan was also working part time as a delivery driver to help his mother care for his two younger siblings, enabling them to move out of a city-run shelter and into their own apartment.

Dylan was trying to do everything right and follow the rules: He turned himself in at the U.S. border in April 2024 after a trek from his native Venezuela, eventually making his way to New York. He requested asylum and was permitted to enter the country under a Biden-era program revoked by Trump that was meant to formalize and streamline the process of entering the country. He legally obtained a work permit and applied for Special Immigration Juvenile Status, a type of legal protection for youth.

He was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, in May at a routine court date and has spent most of the time since at Pennsylvania’s Moshannon Valley Processing Center, the largest detention facility in the Northeast. In September, he lost his asylum case after facing a judge with a 95.8% denial rate, his lawyers said. After his lawyers appealed, Dylan remained detained at Moshannon Valley.

As his appeal remains pending, his lawyers from the New York Legal Assistance Group are also litigating a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the Western District of Pennsylvania, where Dylan is being held. His lawyers claim Dylans’ detention is unconstitutional and violates immigration laws.

“He has been detained for 8.5 months and is being held in Pennsylvania, far from everyone who loves him,” Raiza, his mother, said in a statement. “All he wants is the chance to study and build a future. I am simply asking for fairness and for my son to be brought home.”

Schumer said his guest showed how ICE was “hurting families and terrorizing communities” across the country. “When someone complies with the law and appears before a judge, they should not leave in handcuffs,” he said in a statement.

Schumer and his colleagues have been calling for urgent reforms of ICE enforcement, including prohibiting agents at sensitive locations like schools and courts, banning the use of masks during enforcement, and strengthening oversight and coordination with state and local authorities. Federal immigration agents need guardrails and accountability measures to stop them from causing chaos in communities, he and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, of New York, recently wrote in a letter to Republican leadership. Republicans are mixed on supporting the changes outlined, with most opposing getting rid of masks, according to reports.

Dylan’s legal team from the New York Legal Assistance Group hasn’t given up on trying to return him to his family in the Bronx.

“NYLAG is working tirelessly to get Dylan home to his mom, his siblings, and his school, but unfortunately, the federal government is fighting tooth and nail to prevent him from even having a modicum of due process,” said Kate Fetrow, associate supervising attorney in the group’s immigration protection unit.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Community schools oversight, emergency response grants moving from Education Department to HHS

2026-02-23T22:06:42+00:00

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The U.S. Department of Education is moving oversight of several programs to the Department of Health and Human Services, as the agency continues to offload responsibilities to fulfill the president’s vow to dismantle the federal education department.

The move announced Monday includes transferring management of grants schools receive after traumatic events — such as school shootings, natural disasters or major bus accidents — disrupt learning. It also shifts oversight of major grant programs meant to foster more community and wraparound services in schools in vulnerable neighborhoods.

The Education Department still has not made any announcements about whether special education oversight will move to Health and Human Services. Disability advocates are nearly unanimous in opposing that change.

The department already announced in November that it would move administration of major K-12 and higher education programs to the Department of Labor, including management of both the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Office of Postsecondary Education. And before that, the department moved career and technical education to Labor.

Education advocates and others criticized these moves for sidestepping Congress. While the Trump administration wants to eliminate the agency entirely, only Congress can shutter the department.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon repeated the administration’s promise to “return education to the states” in a news release sent Monday announcing the latest interagency agreements. She said the change would represent “a practical step toward greater efficiency, stronger coordination, and meaningful improvement” and should not disrupt any programs.

Programs moved over the federal health department include:

School Emergency Response to Violence: Known as Project SERV grants, these emergency funds go to schools where students have experienced traumatic and tragic events, including school shootings.
Ready to Learn Programming: Promotes creation of educational content, including television and digital media. Public broadcasting companies have received this grant funding. For instance, Twin Cities PBS used the funding to create an animated series focused on skill-building for the workforce.
Full Service Community Schools and Promise Neighborhoods programming: Helps schools and other institutions provide comprehensive resources (such as mental health, nutritional health, and other supports for students) to low-income communities.
Statewide Family Engagement Centers: This funding goes to education institutions for training and development of programs to stoke family engagement in schools.

The Education Department also announced that the State Department will monitor foreign donations to universities through a separate interagency agreement.

The administration has framed the use of interagency agreements to parcel out functions to other departments as a continuation of longstanding practice. Advocates have raised questions about the legality of these agreements.

Democrats pushed unsuccessfully in the most recent spending bills to limit the Education Department’s ability to move programs to other agencies without congressional approval.

U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat and vice chair of the Appropriations Committee, called the latest agreements illegal in a press release and lamented that her Republican colleagues won’t constrain the Trump administration’s actions.

“These illegal agreements aren’t just creating pointless new bureaucracy that burdens our already-overworked teachers and schools,” Murray said in a Monday statement. “They are actively jeopardizing resources and support that students and families count on and are entitled to under the law.”

National Editor Erica Meltzer contributed reporting.

Lily Altavena is a national reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Lily at laltavena@chalkbeat.org.

State superintendent says Trump’s Michigan schools investigations are based on false info

2026-02-20T00:23:56+00:00

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Michigan’s superintendent is firing back at the U.S. Justice Department by saying the Trump administration’s Title IX investigations into three districts are based on false information about the state’s health education guidelines.

U.S. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon sent notices of compliance reviews to superintendents of the Detroit Public Schools Community District, Lansing School District, and Godfrey-Lee Public Schools on Wednesday. The department said it is investigating whether the districts have included “sexual orientation or gender ideology content” in any classroom and if parents were notified of their rights to opt their children out of such instruction. It will also determine if transgender students are allowed to use bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity.

The letters cited the Michigan State Board of Education’s November revision of its “Michigan Health Education Standards Guidelines” that recommended students be taught about gender identity and sexual orientation. The correspondence said “health is a required class for graduation in the state of Michigan, with no opportunity for parents to opt their children out of receiving instruction.”

In a statement Thursday, State Superintendent Glenn Maleyko said the premise of the investigations are a “mischaracterization.”

“Local school boards set health curriculum with input from local sex education advisory boards,” he said. “Local control remains in place. Parents retain the right to decide whether their children should participate in sex education instruction.”

The current health education guidelines noted that under existing state law, parents must be notified ahead of sex education classes, have a right to review curriculum, and can opt their children out of all or some of it without penalty.

Michigan districts decide their own curriculums and are not required to comply with suggestions in the state board’s guidelines.

When the state’s current health education guidelines were proposed last year, many conservative and religious parents and community members spoke out against the changes. They claimed their rights to protect their children’s religious upbringing were stripped away.

Maleyko also reaffirmed the state’s commitment to ensuring all students feel safe and included.

“The much-needed updates to health education guidelines—which the Department of Justice falsely said are state requirements—help local districts make decisions on how they can support student health,” he said.

The Justice Department is asking the districts to hand over numerous documents, including library books with mentions of LGBTQ+ matters, curriculum texts, and presentations.

The letters threaten terminating federal funding if the districts do not comply.

All three districts receive high percentages of their funding from federal grants, said Peter Spadafore, executive director of the Michigan Alliance for Student Opportunity, an organization that works to help students in districts with the greatest needs by creating educational equity.

Advocates worry the investigations will hurt youth

Erin Knott, executive director of the LGBTQ+ advocacy organization Equality Michigan, said in a statement that the group is disappointed about the investigations.

“LGBTQ+ youth are among the most vulnerable young people in our state,” she said. “They face higher rates of bullying, harassment, and mental health challenges. Inclusive education policies are not ‘ideology,’ they are evidence-based efforts to ensure that every student feels safe, respected, and seen in their own school community.”

Jay Kaplan, a staff attorney for the ACLU of Michigan, said while the investigations may not have legal bearing, they could cause a chilling effect that results in districts rolling back protections for LGBTQ+ students.

“This is an attempt to harass and bully districts into discriminating against trans kids and into erasing the existence of LGBTQ people,” he said.

Taryn Gal, executive director of the Michigan Organization on Adolescent Sexual Health, a nonprofit advocacy group, said the political pressure on districts puts schools in an impossible situation.

“Do they comply and risk violating state law, implementing policies and practices they know harm students and the entire school environment?” She said. “Or do they risk federal funding and do what’s right to ensure every student, regardless of their identity, can succeed in school?”

Many Michigan LGBTQ+ youth say they fear the ripple effects of political rhetoric in President Donald Trump’s second term. A 2024 survey by the nonprofit advocacy group the Trevor Project found 89% of Michigan LGBTQ+ students said recent politics negatively impacted their sense of well-being.

Affirming policies are potentially life-saving, other surveys suggest.

Why the DOJ opened the investigation

The Department of Justice said in the letter that the revised standards could violate Title IX or a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, Mahmoud v. Taylor, which requires districts to allow parents to opt their children out from classes with LGBTQ+ themes.

Spokespeople from the Department of Justice did not immediately respond to questions about why the three districts are the target of the investigations.

Kaplan said it appears districts with large populations of Latino and Black students in communities experiencing high rates of poverty were targeted. He said investigations are unusual because they don’t appear to be prompted by parent complaints. He added the letters are “constitutionally flawed,” and that current law does not allow the executive branch to dictate what local schools teach.

Gal said the letters also appear to “misunderstand the timeline and the standards it references.”

“The Supreme Court’s decision in Mahmoud was issued in June 2025, and Michigan’s updated health standards were finalized later in 2025, yet the investigation is requesting materials and communications going back to 2023,” she said. “That kind of mismatch creates confusion and fear for school districts about what is actually expected of them.”

Arnetta Thompson, superintendent of Godfrey-Lee Public Schools, said in an email the district will provide all information the Department of Justice requested.

“At this time, this is a standard review process. “The District is not facing any charges or findings of wrongdoing. We remain committed to complying with all applicable federal, state, and local laws and have consistently operated in accordance with those laws.”

Spokespeople for the Detroit Public Schools Community District and the Lansing School District declined to comment.

Monique Bryant, a member of the DPSCD board, said as a parent she has never had a concern about classroom material.

“Sometimes you can have students and parents go too far left with something, and we have to be thoughtful and mindful of everyone,” she added.

Lansing school board President Guillermo Lopez said he had not heard complaints from any parents about not being able to opt out.

House Speaker Matt Hall, a Republican from Richland Township, said at his regular news conference on Feb. 19 he supports the investigations because he doesn’t think most parents want their children receiving that type of instruction.

If it is happening, officials should “put a stop to it,” Hall said.“I would welcome more investigations.”

State Board of Education member Tom McMillan, a Republican from Oakland Township, said he was pleased to learn of the Department of Justice investigation: “This is one of the things the federal government can do to make kids safe.”

Even though state law says that parents have a right to opt out their children from sex education lessons, McMillan said there are no consequences for districts that do not follow the opt-out law.

“I think there should be serious consequences, removal of funds, maybe jail time, prison, for districts that don’t follow the law,” he said. “If they are harming kids, allowing boys to go into girls’ locker rooms, showers, that’s perversion and should be met with some kind of serious consequences.”

Pamela Pugh, president of the State Board of Education and a Democrat from Saginaw, said the investigation is a “politically motivated fishing expedition” and “a misuse of federal resources” that will burden local schools.

Trump threatens funding over transgender student protections, DEI

As promised during his campaign, Trump has targeted transgender communities and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in multiple executive orders.

Since last year, the Michigan Department of Education has pushed back on those executive orders, saying its efforts to incorporate curriculum that reflects diverse experiences won’t change.

The Trump administration has also targeted districts across the country with investigations and funding threats.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights announced an investigation into New York City’s education department for a policy that allows transgender students to play on sports teams in line with their gender identity.

Denver Public Schools was investigated last year by the Department of Education for converting a girls’ restroom into an all-gender restroom.

Chicago is facing a loss of millions in federal funding for magnet schools due to a dispute with the Department of Education over how the district serves transgender and Black students.

Another Title IX probe began in Maine in April. The Department of Justice sued Minneapolis Public Schools over its layoff protections for teachers of color in December.

Hannah Dellinger covers K-12 education and state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at hdellinger@chalkbeat.org.

Georgea Kovanis is a reporter covering LGBTQ+ issues for the Detroit Free Press. You can reach her at gkovanis@freepress.com.

Paul Egan contributed to this report.

Why these Minnesota superintendents are suing to keep ICE away from schools

2026-02-11T19:18:43+00:00

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When the Department of Homeland Security did away with the longstanding practice of avoiding immigration enforcement at schools, a memo to agents instructed them to use “common sense.”

But common sense is not what Superintendent Brenda Lewis says she sees playing out daily in Fridley Public Schools, the 2,800-student district she leads in a diverse inner-ring suburb of Minneapolis.

A lawsuit filed earlier this month in U.S. District Court in Minnesota alleges DHS agents followed Lewis and school board members and staged operations from at least two Fridley school parking lots. In an interview, Lewis said ICE agents repeatedly circled a roundabout near a school one morning, refusing to stop for crossing guards or allow children to cross.

Attendance is down dramatically, and under state law, the district loses money when students miss more than 15 days of school. About 400 students now are enrolled in virtual options.

Fridley Public Schools is taking the lead in the latest effort to use the courts to keep ICE agents away from schools. Along with Duluth Public Schools and Education Minnesota, the state teachers union, the district is suing the Department of Homeland Security and Secretary Kristi Noem to restore protections for sensitive locations such as schools, churches, and hospitals.

Denver Public Schools filed a similar lawsuit in February 2025, but later abandoned it after U.S. District Court Judge Daniel D. Domenico, a Trump appointee, found that Denver had failed to show serious enough effects to justify a preliminary injunction.

Whatever the reasoning in the Denver case, Lewis said the impacts in Fridley and in Minnesota more broadly are “very well documented.”

“We can show that through attendance data,” she said. “We can show that through students enrolling in virtual learning. We can show that in students and family members being detained, which then takes away from the educational environment, when they’re legally in this country. And I think we can show the mental health impacts that are happening with our children now, unfortunately, normalizing ICE agents near their school district buildings and interfering with the school.”

The lawsuit comes amid a backlash to aggressive immigration enforcement tactics after agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minnesota. A viral image of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos drew attention to the rising number of children in detention.

Democrats in Congress have laid out 10 conditions for agreeing to fund the Department of Homeland Security. One of them is restoring sensitive locations protections for schools, churches, and hospitals.

That’s a priority for many education advocacy groups, but it’s not clear how much of a priority it is for lawmakers. Most of the public debate has focused on whether immigration agents should operate more like other law enforcement officers, forgoing masks and obtaining judicial warrants to enter private property.

Congress has until Friday to reach a deal, and so far the two sides remain far apart. Funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement will continue regardless.

The lawsuit describes school vans and buses stopped by immigration agents, parents arrested while waiting at school bus stops, and preschool teachers arrested in the parking lots of child care centers, including one who was tricked into coming outside by agents who told her someone hit her car. The lawsuit alleges that the decision last year to withdraw protections from schools was arbitrary and capricious and violates the Administrative Procedures Act.

The Department of Homeland Security and Immigrations and Custom Enforcement did not respond to a request for comment on the specific allegations in the lawsuit or to questions about how the restoration of sensitive locations protections would affect their operations.

“ICE is not conducting enforcement operations at, or ‘raiding,’ schools. ICE is not going to schools to make arrests of children,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement released last year. “Criminals are no longer able to hide in America’s schools to avoid arrest. The Trump Administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement and instead trusts them to use common sense.”

Duluth Public Schools, the other school district suing DHS, isn’t experiencing the same kind of direct effects as Fridley. Immigrant families make up a relatively small share of the district’s 9,100 students, and ICE hasn’t ramped up enforcement activity in this northern city.

But Duluth Superintendent John Magas estimates that 30%-50% of his staff’s administrative time is now being spent on preparations and communications and support for families. Staff members of color are carrying their passports. Parents stopped showing up for adult English classes.

Magas said he was frustrated that letters and public appeals didn’t seem to be getting the attention of people in power. He also felt like he was in a position to stick his neck out on behalf of districts that are more heavily affected and fear retribution. He had the unanimous support of his school board in joining the lawsuit.

“We believe in Minnesota in being good neighbors. and we want to stand up and be a good neighbor to the North and stand up for our communities that are being impacted,” he said.

Lewis said she hopes the lawsuit results in more protections for schools in Minnesota and ideally nationwide. But if Congress wants to act, that would be even better.

“Whatever is the quickest — and not able to be undone — method, we’ll take it,” she said.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor covering education policy and politics. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

How schools in Marion County responded to anti-ICE student protests

2026-02-11T13:00:00+00:00

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As they left their fourth period classes last week for an anti-ICE walkout, several Southport High School students said they noticed a school employee near the front door. The students decided to go through a side door instead, where they climbed over a bank of snow to reach the parking lot.

“I wanted to say something about what I believe is injustice in the country right now,” said junior Derek Stanley. “But I was nervous. I didn’t know how it was going to work out, what door we were going through, if anyone would stop us, if we would get repercussions.”

Southport High School students leave school on Feb. 2 for an anti-ICE walkout.

The group of more than 100 students walked to Madison Avenue holding signs and chanting, “no justice, no peace.” Some students brought signs or carried flags from their home countries. A police officer from the school also trailed the group in a car for safety.

Across Marion County and central Indiana, thousands of students walked out of school last week to speak out against heightened presence of federal immigration agents across the country, including agents who killed two people in Minneapolis last month.

The walkouts left schools to strike a balance between allowing for student expression and maintaining safety, both in and out of the classroom. Some districts sent preemptive emails to families and worked with students to ensure the walkouts would be safe. Districts also referred to student handbooks for attendance policies, stopping short of saying the specific repercussions. But in at least one case, at Southport, that meant suspensions.

While the district declined to say how students were disciplined at Southport, the student handbook does say students can be suspended for causing disruptions to learning.

“One of the greatest things about America is we have a right to speak out and protest. I wanted to take a stand for what I believed in, ” said Ava Miller, a Southport junior who was suspended for the walkout. “Seeing what the world is like right now, I want to act on behalf of everyone being silenced.”

Shortridge High School students protest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement efforts during a walkout Feb. 6, 2026, at the school in Indianapolis.

Protests can’t cause ‘substantial disruption’

The landmark 1969 Supreme Court case Tinker v. Des Moines established that public school students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Students have the right to express their opinions as long as it doesn’t cause a “substantial disruption” to the educational environment, according to the ACLU.

However, student walkouts are not protected under the First Amendment, and schools must be consistent in discipline and not punish a student more harshly based on the specific message of their protest.

Students walk out of class on Fri., Jan 30, 2026 in protest of ICE detentions across the US in Denver, Colorado.

Generally, student protests against immigration enforcement have been tolerated more in blue states. In Denver, roughly 400 students walked out of a suburban district and didn’t face consequences. Yet in Texas, the state education agency warned school districts they might face state takeovers if they “encourage” student protests. And Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton launched an investigation into student walkouts in Austin. Students also face discipline in Florida and Arizona.

Here in Indiana, the department of education sent an email to school superintendents early last week acknowledging that students were walking out “in political protest.” The department said it didn’t support student walkouts, and stressed that districts should enforce student conduct, attendance, and discipline policies, including having parent permission to leave the school building.

“Above all, student safety and parental authority must remain paramount,” the department wrote to school leaders.

Schools work with student organizers, prioritize safety

Several Marion County districts also sent messages ahead of student protests to share expectations around attendance and the schools’ response. And while some districts stressed it would be business as usual and school employees would remain neutral, other schools reached out to student planners to ensure safety.

Warren Central High School principal Masimba Taylor said her staff caught wind of the planned protest earlier in the week when students started sharing ideas on social media.

She said the team talked to students about why they wanted to walk out and worked with them on suggesting a safer route to take in a march near their school. On the day of the walkout, Taylor said it was all hands on deck for administrators to be present and provide supervision so educators could continue teaching inside the high school.

Students from North Central High School protest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement efforts during a walkout on Feb. 2, 2026, at the intersection of East 86th Street and Westfield Boulevard in Indianapolis.

The school also informed parents in advance of the walkout, and some attended to offer an additional layer of help. Justin Beattey was one of those parents and said he saw staff and administrators present, taking a neutral tone and focusing on keeping kids safe.

“I thought they did a really good job of maintaining objectivity and just making sure no one was hurt,” Beattey said.

Similarly, students at Shortridge High School said they went through rounds of negotiations with administration about their demonstration last week — originally planned as a 2-mile walk down Meridian Street to Herron High School.

Student organizers later changed their plan to protest on school grounds after talking to administration about concerns for student safety. They were not worried about potential disciplinary actions stemming from the protest.

At Crispus Attucks High School, an email to students and families encouraged students to advocate for their beliefs without leaving school grounds.

“While we respect our students’ desire to engage with the world around them and to make their voices heard, we are also responsible for their safety during school hours,” the email said.

Shortridge High School students protest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement efforts during a walkout Feb. 6, 2026, at the school in Indianapolis.

Southport students face one-day suspensions

Per student handbooks and attendance policies, students who participated in walkouts could face a range of discipline. For example, at Lawrence Central and North high schools, the district said any disciplinary action against students is due to an unexcused absence — not for the student protest.

That discipline could include an attendance agreement, parental notification, or detention depending on the student’s overall attendance, the district said.

At Southport, students said they received emails from the principal on the night of the protest saying the walkout had created an unsafe environment.

“Beyond school discipline, these actions shook the sense of safety for many of your peers and their families. For many, Southport is a sanctuary, and that sanctuary was disrupted,” the email said.

The Southport handbook does not specify disciplinary action for protesting, but says students may face suspension or expulsion for a list of behavior incidents, such as “disruptions to the educational process or to the orderly atmosphere for learning.”

Southport students said that when they returned to school Tuesday, counselors and administrators began to call them down to dole out one-day out-of-school suspensions.

For Stanley, the junior, he said the prospect of his first-ever suspension from school initially made him nervous, but he was ultimately fine with the result.

“I’ve seen both in person and online people saying how scared they are. I wanted to speak about it,” Stanley said. “I’m glad I prioritized speaking out what I believe is right over three hours of school. Looking back, I would’ve regretted not doing it.”

Miller’s mom, Kelly, said the unexcused absence was a fair consequence. But the school could have warned students in advance about what other discipline they could face, especially when it became clear that students across the state were holding walkouts. Ultimately, she said her daughter had their support to walk out.

“She’s living out her values and principles … We trust her and her instincts and we want to support her,” she said. “What more could we do than hope to develop that heart for social justice and the courage to stand up for what she believes in?”

Reporters Amelia Pak-Harvey, Erica Meltzer, and MJ Slaby of Chalkbeat and Zak Cassel of WFYI contributed to this article.

Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. Contact her at aappleton@chalkbeat.org.

Mirror Indy reporter Carley Lanich covers early childhood and K-12 education. Contact her at carley.lanich@mirrorindy.org or follow her on X @carleylanich.

Several Illinois counties will vote on Trump tax-credit scholarship program in bid to sway Pritzker

2026-02-10T20:35:53+00:00

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A libertarian-leaning advocacy group has persuaded more than two dozen Illinois counties and townships to place a nonbinding question on next month’s primary ballot supporting a new federal tax-credit scholarship program championed by the Trump administration.

One of the campaign’s architects said in a public meeting that the overriding goal is to “send a signal” to Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, who must opt the state into the program.

The draft ballot question circulated by the Illinois Policy Institute’s advocacy arm asks voters to support using privately-donated funds for tutoring, test preparation, and other academic needs – omitting that donors receive federal tax credits for donating to the program.

The ballot measures are an unusual tactic for swaying public opinion and decisionmakers in a strongly Democratic state, but it comes as advocates on the left and right lobby Pritzker on the scholarship program created as part of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.

The program would provide dollar-for-dollar tax credits to donors who give up to $1,700 scholarship-granting nonprofits, and those funds can go toward certain expenses for private, public or homeschooled kids whose families make up to 300% of the local median income.

In Chicago — where the advisory measure is not on the March 17 ballot — that would mean a family making roughly $233,000 or less.

As of Tuesday, the measure or a version of it will be on ballots in at least 24 counties and five townships across the state, according to the Illinois State Board of Elections website.

But voters — and the public at large — likely won’t have a full picture of how the program will actually work by the primary election because federal officials haven’t clarified many aspects of the program. It’s unclear, for example, whether the money could be used for tutoring provided by public schools or be restricted to outside tutoring groups.

Dick Simpson, professor emeritus of political science at University of Illinois Chicago and a former Chicago alderman, said the question “seems valid” to gauge whether the public supports the program. But he said it would more accurately capture public opinion if it included wording about the tax credit.

Still, whether lawmakers will pay attention to the results depends on where the question is being asked, he said. Most counties with the advisory question are suburban or rural areas that Trump won in last year’s presidential election.

“If they’re all suburban, rural Republican or MAGA-leaning counties, then Pritzker is not going to pay much attention,” Simpson said.

While the program would not directly cost the state of Illinois money, it would mean a decrease in federal tax revenue at a time when the Trump administration has already cut social service programs or withheld other funding for local governments.

Nearly half of U.S. states, most run by Republican governors, have opted in. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis is the only Democratic governor to officially do so, while North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein has indicated he plans to.

In remarks to the Grundy County board in November, Illinois Policy assistant editor Dylan Sharkey said that “asking voters to weigh in would send a signal to other counties, to state lawmakers, and, most importantly, Gov. Pritzker that Illinois families deserve these funds.”

In an emailed statement, Pritzker spokesperson Jillian Kaehler did not address whether the governor would be swayed by the results of the local ballot measures.

She said Pritzker will “evaluate the issue through a lens focused on affordability for working families and what best supports Illinois students, families, and public schools.” She did not provide a timeframe for when he would make the decision.

Libertarian-leaning group wants voters to weigh in

The measure was created by Illinois Policy, which describes itself as a nonpartisan advocacy arm for Illinois Policy Institute. The group frequently criticizes left-leaning policies, as well as Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union, which opposes the program.

In a statement, the group told Chalkbeat that it asked more than 100 counties and townships — the state has 102 counties — to include the advisory question. The group estimated that about 30 jurisdictions will have a question about the scholarship program on the ballot.

Most ballots will include the following question: “Should Illinois opt into a federal program that would provide public K-12, private school, and homeschool students with privately-donated funds for academic needs, such as tutoring and test preparation, educational therapies for students with disabilities, tuition, books, exam fees or for other specified academic needs?”

In its statement, the group said its suggested ballot language did not mention that donors will be incentivized by tax credits because those are federal and the question about opting into the program is up to states.

Ballots in at least two Illinois counties will have differently worded questions, including an inaccurate one in Grundy County. There, the question reads, “That the County of Grundy adopts the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit to allow the privately donated funds be given to Illinois students.” In fact, counties can’t choose to opt into the program; Pritzker must opt the state in.

Drew Muffler, chairman of the Grundy County board, referred Chalkbeat to the Grundy County State’s Attorney’s office on the wording of the question, saying that office drafted the question. The state’s attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Muffler said the board invited Illinois Policy to speak at a board meeting in November after the group called him about possibly adding the ballot question.

Sharkey, from Illinois Policy, told board members at the November meeting that the funds can be used for things like AP exam fees or ACT prep. The Treasury Department is still drafting rules for the program, however, so that’s unclear.

The law says that donated funds can be used on expenses allowed under Coverdell education savings accounts. That’s a type of trust that can be used to pay for things like tutoring, uniforms, transportation, tuition and services for someone with special needs.

“It makes sense if people are looking for alternative school programs,” Muffler, who is a nonvoting member of the board, said in an interview with Chalkbeat.

Muffler said his son attends a local public school, where his wife also works.

“I have no issues whatsoever with the public school system around here,” but not everyone feels that way about their districts, he said.

Cassie Creswell, president and executive director of Illinois For Public School Families, argues public schools could suffer because of this program at a time many districts are facing tight budgets. Chicago Public Schools, for example, is projecting a more than half-billion-dollar deficit next fiscal year.

The state’s main education funding formula provides more dollars to districts with more needs and is based, in part, on the number of students. Losing students doesn’t necessarily mean schools can easily adjust their budgets, she said, noting that districts have certain fixed costs they must pay for even if they lose students.

Creswell, whose organization has asked Pritzker not to opt in, is also skeptical of arguments that the program will benefit needy families. In states with universal education savings accounts or vouchers programs, a large share of participating students are from affluent families. Many already attended private school before the voucher program was launched.

Groups supporting school choice say this program would give families more agency over their kids’ education. Last week, during a visit to religious private school Chicago Hope Academy, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said she’s “not quite sure why every governor wouldn’t jump in and opt in for this particular program because it will really benefit children.”

Illinois had a tax credit program from 2017 to 2023. The Invest in Kids scholarship program allowed individuals or corporations to donate to scholarship granting organizations, which would grant aid for tuition to low-income, private school students.

Donors would get a tax credit worth 75 cents for every dollar donated, up to $1 million. The state had capped donations at $100 million, but those limits were never reached, Chalkbeat previously found. State lawmakers allowed the program to sunset in 2023.

Ike Muzikowski, principal of the school McMahon visited, said nearly half of his students lost scholarships after Invest In Kids ended, and his school raised additional funds to help close that gap, he said.

He wants Pritzker to sign onto the new federal program

“Tax credit scholarships are what can sustain a school like Hope in perpetuity,” he said. “God is the only reason our school is still open.”

Reema Amin is a reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Why this Chicago principal welcomed Education Secretary Linda McMahon despite community pushback

2026-02-06T00:43:03+00:00

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The reaction was decidedly mixed when Ike Muzikowski told students and staff last week that Education Secretary Linda McMahon might visit their Christian private school bordering Chicago’s West Side.

A religious private school like Chicago Hope Academy seems like an obvious choice for McMahon, whose administration has shown strong support of school choice and has criticized the city’s public schools.

But as word spread, Muzikowski received six emails from parents who were opposed to her visit. He also heard from parents who were “pumped” and wanted photos of their kids at the event.

Muzikowski, Hope’s principal, knew that a Connecticut public school had just canceled McMahon’s visit in response to outcry from parents.

After he received confirmation of her visit, he opened the floor to students at a town hall attended by more than a third of the school’s students. They talked about the visit for so long that dozens of them missed their next class. The days leading up to the visit were “filled with discussions, sometimes arguments” about how the Trump administration’s policies have been harmful to many in their school community, which is predominantly Black and Hispanic.

“While that challenge exists, can we host people from different political backgrounds, with different political interests, with different political agendas?” Muzikowski wondered.

He decided yes.

Ike Muzikowski, principal of Chicago Hope Academy, speaks during a visit by U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon at Chicago Hope Academy, a private school.

And so McMahon visited the school Thursday morning as part of her 50-state “History Rocks!” tour, timed for the nation’s upcoming 250th birthday. The Education Department is coordinating the tour with the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, which includes conservative groups like Turning Point USA and Moms for Liberty. About half of the school’s students participated in the optional event, Muzikowski said.

Two sophomores led McMahon on a tour of the school and to a U.S. History class. A large photo of Booker T. Washington, a prominent Black educator and leader from the late 1800s to early 1900s, hangs at the top of a stairwell. A religious poem, painted in both English and Spanish, adorns another wall. In a hallway, outside of Muzikowski’s office, hang bulletin boards including one that shows how the three branches of government coexist and another featuring prominent Black Americans. College banners line the wall above the bulletin boards.

The girls told McMahon about their future business ideas, summer travel plans, and why the school celebrates Black History Month, Muzikowski said.

A wall hanging at Chicago Hope Academy, a private school, on Thursday, February 5, 2026 in Chicago, Illinois.

Later, in the school’s chapel, McMahon spoke for a few minutes about her time as a presidential delegate for the U.S. Special Olympics, Muzikowski said. Then the group played general audience and team trivia games about U.S. and Illinois history.

McMahon told reporters after the event, which the press was not invited to out of concerns about students’ privacy, that it was “totally nonpartisan” and “absolutely about civics.”

“It’s kids having fun, competing,” she said. “It’s really making history fun, and you can see the enthusiasm that was in the audience.”

McMahon also spoke briefly about Illinois state history, highlighting the state’s importance in helping the Union win the Civil War, Muzikowski said. She didn’t wade into current politics or name prominent Illinois leaders, such as Abraham Lincoln or Barack Obama, who has also visited the school, he said.

McMahon complimented the family feel of the school, which was founded by Muzikowski’s parents in 1995.

“We understand, hey, that the approach to education from her office might be different than our execution of education in this building,” Muzikowski, dressed in a backwards baseball cap and tie with the word “HOPE,” told reporters after the visit.

It’s not a surprise the visit caused a stir, even at the type of school that is likely to draw praise from the Trump administration.

On top of the criticism McMahon has faced from Democratic lawmakers amid the Trump administration’s plans to eliminate the Education Department, Chicago is a fraught place for a Trump cabinet member to visit right now.

The federal government’s immigration raids last fall left many of Chicago’s Hispanic communities feeling scarred and fearful of federal officials. And the Trump administration has pulled $23 million in federal grants for the city’s magnet schools, claiming that Chicago Public Schools’ Black Student Success Plan, which is meant to improve academic outcomes and school climate for Black students, as well as its policies for transgender students, are violations of civil rights laws.

Muzikowski said he wished he had more time to make a decision about McMahon’s visit “as a community.” Still, he said he came away proud of his students.

While he didn’t get “100% co-sign on the event” from students, “I am very glad that we did it and that our students are able to learn from someone who may think differently.”

After the event, a student walked through the hallway holding a paper American flag from the trivia game.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Immigration enforcement gets closer and closer to schools. The effects are wide-reaching.

2026-02-03T20:07:55+00:00

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Penny Chavez has been watching immigration enforcement activity in Minneapolis with increasing panic, seeing public school students like her two grandchildren being detained.

Rumors are swirling that her town, Springfield, Ohio, could be the next target for a surge of activity from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, in part because of its Haitian community. Chavez and her two grandchildren, ages 5 and 4, are U.S. citizens, but she’s still fearful that they will be detained at or near their schools because they are Hispanic.

Chavez has pressed Springfield’s school district for answers around how school leaders would react if agents were to enter a district school, but she hasn’t been reassured by their answers. For parents without legal status whose kids are enrolled in the district, a lack of clarity makes them reluctant to send their children to school, she said.

“They have the right to know whether or not it’s safe to pick the kids up or drop them off,” she said.

A year after the Department of Homeland Security rescinded a policy limiting operations in and around schools, agents are not raiding schools, but immigration enforcement has nearly arrived at the schoolhouse door. There are reports of parents getting detained at bus stops and images of agents tackling people on school grounds.

Some of those places adjacent to schools would have been off-limits under the previous policy, raising questions about where the federal government will draw the line and putting pressure on school leaders to reassure families like Chavez’s.

Legal experts say the Fourth Amendment hasn’t changed: It still limits agents from charging inside a school without the right paperwork. But the overall approach by agents has been unpredictable, creating highly charged circumstances around schools.

Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, and others have called for a reinstatement of the federal policy, with some organizations pressuring Democrats in Congress to withhold funding for the Department of Homeland Security until it is restored. Recent incidents show that ICE is getting closer to going inside schools, she said.

“They’re not physically inside the buildings yet, but they’re literally at the school yard gate,” she said.

A tracker launched by K-12 Dive, an education industry news site, identifies at least nine instances in which immigration agents came onto the grounds of a K-12 school or preschool. In Chula Vista, California, last week, ICE agents arrested both parents of a 12-year-old and 4-year-old after school drop-off, according to a local news report. According to a GoFundMe for the family, the children finished their school day without knowing their parents wouldn’t be the ones to pick them up.

The Department of Homeland Security has denied some of the reports, like a recent claim that agents targeted parents in Michigan at a bus stop during student drop-off time. And a department spokesperson said they ended up on school grounds at Roosevelt High in Minneapolis, with agents tackling someone, due to a car chase involving a citizen they claimed impeded enforcement activities, the Sahan Journal reported.

School leaders don’t always have clear answers for families and are limited in what they can do, said David Law, superintendent of Minnetonka Public Schools in a suburb of the Twin Cities and president of the School Superintendents’ Association.

“They’re mad at us, like, ‘Why can’t you stop this?’ Well, we didn’t start it,” he said.

The effect on students, particularly in Minnesota, has been sweeping: more absences from school, an increase in remote learning, and grief from seeing classmates vanish. About 1 in 4 St. Paul Public School students were learning virtually amid the enforcement surge, the superintendent told reporters in January.

“Not only are they being subjected to the presence of ICE at their bus stop or at their school, but it’s this force that is lacking the control and composure that you would expect from law enforcement, and that has to be extremely traumatic for these students,” said Sarah Pierce, the director of social policy at Third Way, a center-left national think tank.

A looming question: Will ICE try to enter schools without a judicial warrant?

For decades, the sensitive locations policy limited immigration arrests at or near schools. The policy made an exception for circumstances that posed an imminent threat.

That change means spaces considered public, such as a front lawn or near the parking lot, could be subject to ICE activity, said Keith Armstrong, an immigration attorney with the ACLU of Pennsylvania.

But, in internal memos reported by the Associated Press and the New York Times, ICE has asserted broad powers to enter homes without a warrant signed by a judge, known as a judicial warrant, and to arrest people in public without any warrant. That has raised questions about how the agency might treat sensitive locations, such as schools.

Legal experts and advocates point to the Fourth Amendment, which bars agents from entering schools without a judicial warrant. A “long line” of case law also supports the notion that agents need the signed warrant, Armstrong said. If ICE is targeting families in actions on school premises, “that is something we definitely want to know about and see if we can develop a case about.”

The recent incident where agents went on the grounds of Minneapolis’ Roosevelt High signals an “attitude shift” in what agents consider OK, Armstrong said.

“It seems like there is a change in attitude where previously it would have been sort of unthinkable for ICE to, even with the rescission of the sensitive locations memo, it would have been pretty unthinkable for ICE to really try to do something that brazen,” he said.

Ken Cuccinelli, former deputy secretary for DHS during the first Trump administration, told Chalkbeat immediately after the policy was rescinded that he believed agents would tend to avoid enforcement at schools, and he did not expect them to target school drop-off or pick-up to “round up a bunch of people in transit.”

But he said in late January that limiting operations within 1,000 feet of a school would also put a “good chunk” of the country off-limits.

Still, while ICE has been more aggressive in Trump’s second term, “they haven’t had to go in a bunch of schools,” he said.

Democrats, who are facing pressure to withhold DHS funding until the sensitive locations policy is restored, are considering a variety of measures to curb ICE activity.

A tentative budget deal reached Friday did not include longterm Department of Homeland Security funding to give policymakers more time to haggle.

Sen. Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado, said restoring the sensitive locations policy is a priority, but it’s one item in a list of competing priorities including preventing agents from wearing masks or ensuring they’re using warrants appropriately.

Bennet, who led Denver Public Schools from 2005 to 2009, said parents and children are separated during the school day and have the reasonable expectation that they’ll be reunited when school ends. ICE’s recent actions are upending that assumption for vulnerable families.

“There is a ripple of fear that is running through our communities,” he said. “Traditionally, schools and hospitals and churches have been sanctuaries and places where kids shouldn’t have had to worry about immigration enforcement.”

ICE unpredictability leads to school unpredictability

In Springfield, Ohio, Chavez said people of color in the community, including citizens, are making contingency plans for child care in case families are separated during the school day — much like families have done in other cities, at times with the support of public schools.

Chavez also wants assurances that Springfield City School District would develop a procedure or standards in the event that ICE agents asked to enter schools, including whether school officials would grant them access to a student without a signed warrant.

After multiple phone calls with school officials, the grandmother still feels like her questions haven’t been sufficiently answered. A spokesperson for the district did not answer Chalkbeat’s request for comment. The superintendent has told staff members in an email message to remain calm and supportive in the event of a surge in ICE activity and to not engage in any political activity, according to WOSU, a local NPR station.

School superintendents are in a tough spot, said Law, the president of the School Superintendents’ Association. He estimated that due to recent events, 80% of the job for some Minneapolis-area superintendents encompasses managing immigration uncertainty and responding to ICE activity.

The lack of cooperation or communication between local law enforcement and federal agents is unusual, he said.

“We have two police officers stationed at our high school,” he said. “Yet, when something is happening with immigration a block from school they don’t know what’s going on … Even our elected officials are trying to figure out, you know, what has caused all these changes?”

He said parents should know that schools have “longstanding practices to discourage enforcement from happening at school.” Bus drivers are trained to drive away from situations that appear chaotic and to call parents instead of dropping kids where circumstances appear questionable. When law enforcement has come in with a judicial warrant, he said administrators can sometimes reason with police officers to carry out the warrant somewhere else.

“We would much rather be a safe haven, because no student wants to see an armed person tackling their classmate or their teacher,” he said. “Those are traumatic experiences. But we have practices in place.”

For Chavez, the lack of reassurance has led her children to take her grandchildren out of school until “the school is able to assure the community they won’t allow access to the kids at a minimum,” she wrote in a text message to a Chalkbeat reporter.

They are paying for online school instead.

Lily Altavena is a national reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Lily at laltavena@chalkbeat.org.

‘People shouldn’t live in fear’: Denver students and teachers protest Trump immigration actions

2026-01-31T00:26:10+00:00

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As hundreds of Denver students and teachers marched around the Colorado Capitol Friday in a crowd the length of several city blocks, two words dominated the protest. They were written in marker on signs, printed on T-shirts and flags, and shouted through bullhorns.

“F--- ICE!”

A construction worker in a neon vest stood in the back of a flatbed truck on Denver’s 16th Street Mall, filming on his phone. When the chant died down, he hollered, “Don’t get quiet now!”

“F--- ICE!” the students shouted again with renewed vigor, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Some Denver Public Schools students and 1,136 of the district’s approximately 5,000 teachers didn’t go to school Friday, a district spokesperson said, on a day of nationwide protests against the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement actions. The “National Shutdown” was sparked by an immigration crackdown in Minnesota, where federal agents have made thousands of arrests and shot and killed two people.

More than 1,000 Denver teachers called out of work on Friday, with some joining students to protest recent actions by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

Two metro area school districts — Aurora Public Schools and the Commerce City-based Adams 14 — canceled school Friday due to staff absences. Denver schools were open, but the start of classes was delayed by two hours at a half-dozen schools. The district also canceled preschool classes and center-based programs for students with disabilities.

Jay Morin, a math teacher at East High School, didn’t go to work Friday. But his wife did. She teaches at an elementary school that serves a lot of immigrant students, he said.

“Her job, and what she can do, is to be a comfort for those kids and for their families,” Morin said, marching alongside his teenage son. “All of our teachers care about our kids, especially our most vulnerable families, and we’re all going to show up in our own ways. But make no mistake about it — we’re all going to show up.”

Isa, a senior at East High, said he was protesting because his family is from Central America. Chalkbeat is not using students’ last names to protect their privacy.

“I felt so affected seeing my own people being taken away,” Isa said. He said his family’s struggles and hard work allowed him to stay in school, and he felt called “to use my privilege to speak out for the people that can’t speak out.”

Enzo and Haleakala, eighth graders from DSST: Montview middle school, marched while wearing matching anti-ICE T-shirts that Haleakala’s mother made.

“Recently, they’ve been taking … Native people, and it’s technically our land,” said Haleakala, who is Taos Pueblo and Lakota. “America was built off of immigrants. And also it’s very unfair how they’re killing everybody even though they’re U.S. citizens. In all reality, ICE agents don’t need to take this violence to our streets, to our homes. People shouldn’t live in fear.”

Friday's protest featured hand-lettered signs and chants of "This is what democracy looks like!"

Students and teachers held handmade signs with slogans including, “Your Borders Don’t Trump Human Rights,” “Colorado (heart) Minnesota,” and “Deport Melania Trump.” A dog wore a sandwich board-style poster that read, “Better Trained Than Most ICE Agents.”

Office workers whizzed by on downtown Denver’s ubiquitous electric scooters and shouted their encouragement. Police officers blocked the route. When a few of the students gave two motorcycle officers a friendly wave, the officers nodded back.

Kristen Hodel marched with her son Noah, a sophomore at George Washington High.

“I’m just 54 and on board and crying my heart out,” Hodel said as the high schoolers all around her chanted, “This is what democracy looks like!”

“I’m here because I love my school,” Noah said. “GW is my home. And we have a huge immigrant population. … I’m here because immigrants make America great.”

An East High chemistry teacher in a red Denver Classroom Teachers Association T-shirt walked with a colleague toward the back of the protest. The teacher said they didn’t want to give their name because of how East High has already been targeted by the Trump administration, which investigated the school’s all-gender restroom and concluded that it violates federal law.

Just as the teacher began to talk about why they called out of work, a man sitting near a bus stop yelled, “F--- all the immigrants! Get them out of here!”

“That,” the teacher’s colleague said. “That is why we’re out here.”

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Metro area school districts cancel classes due to high staff absences on day of planned ICE protests

2026-01-30T14:31:38+00:00

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Two Denver metro area school districts that serve large immigrant populations are canceling school Friday after a high number of teachers called out of work on a day of planned nationwide protests against the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement actions.

Aurora Public Schools will be closed Friday due to staff absences, the 38,000-student school district announced Thursday night. The diverse suburb was the target of intense immigration raids last year after President Donald Trump claimed the city was a “war zone” overrun by Venezuelan gangs.

A planned staff-only work day scheduled for Feb. 6 will now be a regular school day for students in exchange, the district said in a press release.

Students in the 5,000-student Adams 14 school district in Commerce City won’t have school tomorrow for the same reason, according to a letter from Superintendent Karla Loría that was posted to several Adams 14 schools’ social media pages Thursday night.

“This decision has been made to ensure the safety, supervision, and quality of instruction for our students,” Loría wrote. “We understand that schedule changes can be inconvenient, and we sincerely apologize for any disruption this may cause to your plans.”

In a statement, the district said it respects “the many ways individuals choose to engage in civic action and make their voices heard. Civic engagement is a cornerstone of our democracy, and our staff and families represent a wide range of perspectives and beliefs.”

Denver Public Schools, the state’s largest school district with 90,000 students, did not cancel school district-wide but announced a two-hour delayed start Friday at a half-dozen campuses: George Washington High School, North High School, South High School, East High School, Joe Shoemaker Elementary, and McMeen Elementary.

The district did cancel all preschool classes and classes at center-based programs for students with disabilities.

Jeffco Public Schools had not announced closures late Thursday, though schools in the 74,000-student district were expecting staff shortages.

Activists are organizing a “National Shutdown” on Friday in response to a federal immigration crackdown in Minnesota, where agents have made thousands of arrests and shot and killed at least two people. “No Work. No School. No Shopping. Stop Funding ICE,” the event website says.

An email from Denver Public Schools to families Thursday said schools would be open and students would be served free breakfast and lunch as usual. In schools where lots of teachers are absent, the district will use substitute teachers and central office staff “to provide a safe educational environment for our students,” the email said.

In a video message to staff Thursday, Superintendent Alex Marrero said “what’s happening across the nation is deplorable.”

“I want to acknowledge that many of you want to show your advocacy tomorrow, and I commend you for that,” Marrero said in the video, which was filmed inside a classroom.

“However, I want to make sure that everyone understands that as long as students are in here, because of the actions we’ve taken, this remains the safest place for our scholars,” he said. “So please take that into consideration as you make your decision.”

DPS sued the Trump administration last year in an effort to keep immigration enforcement actions away from schools in Denver and nationwide. The district dropped the lawsuit after a federal judge found that there was little practical difference between a previous policy that treated schools as protected places and changes put in place by the Trump administration.

Denver Classroom Teachers Association President Rob Gould said in an email to union members Thursday that teachers “should make the choice that they feel is best” with regard to the Friday protest.

“Many members feel strongly that being in schools with our students is where they believe they can make the biggest impact, while others feel just as strongly that taking the day to participate in collective action is the best way to stand up for our students, families and communities,” Gould wrote.

Gould listed a series of actions teachers could take instead of calling out of work, including wearing blue in solidarity with teachers in Minnesota, organizing a school walk-in, or contacting Congress to advocate for barring immigration enforcement in and around schools.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Growing number of education groups criticize impact of ICE operations on students

2026-01-29T01:04:47+00:00

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Tear gas fired outside preschools. Parents and children detained on their way to and from school. Federal agents circling schools or parked near bus stops. Parents keeping their children home as absences and learning loss mount.

A growing number of education advocacy groups say aggressive immigration enforcement tactics are having a devastating impact on students’ access to education. They are calling on Congress to make funding for the Department of Homeland Security conditional on a less-disruptive approach to enforcement than what agents from Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have used.

Keri Rodrigues of the National Parents Union, who visited Minneapolis this week, said Congress should condition further DHS funding on the restoration of the sensitive locations policy, which for decades limited immigration enforcement near schools, child care centers, churches, and hospitals.

“You can see ICE circling around elementary schools so they may not actually be physically in the building, but it’s quite clear and it’s sending a very strong message to parents and families that it’s not safe to take your kids to school,” she said.

The Council of the Great City Schools, which represents urban superintendents, said immigration enforcement is being carried out in ways that destabilize entire communities and interfere with schools’ ability to serve students.

“The Council of the Great City Schools calls on federal leaders—including the Trump Administration, Congress, and the courts—to immediately halt actions that endanger children, disrupt schooling, and erode trust in public institutions,” the group said in a statement Wednesday. “Our nation has a responsibility to ensure that policies are carried out in a manner that upholds human rights and dignity, protects children, and preserves schools as places of safety, stability, and opportunity.”

In an interview, executive director Ray Hart said that restoring the sensitive locations policy is important, but city superintendents are also concerned about the widespread fear of arrest that is leading families to keep their children home. He also noted that Congress has previously considered but failed to pass legislation in the past to codify the policy.

Some say the issue is critical enough that it’s worth shutting down the government if that’s what it takes to use the appropriations process to put guardrails around immigration enforcement.

The Senate this week had been expected to approve a bipartisan package of spending bills, including an education spending bill that avoided cuts proposed by the Trump administration. The package already has been approved by the House, which is in recess this week. The spending bills must be approved by midnight Friday to avoid another government shutdown.

But in the aftermath of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Democrats have said they want to separate the Department of Homeland Security funding measure from the other funding bills to require more oversight.

“People are living in fear, which means that many children are not going to school, and children who are going to school are worrying that when they come home something will have happened to their families,” said Amy Loyd, CEO of the advocacy group All4Ed. “Children are going to school and wondering what happened to their classmates. All the things we want kids to be able to do in school to learn and grow are being impacted.”

Having previously served as an Education Department official in the Biden administration, Loyd said she doesn’t take the prospect of a shutdown lightly. But if the current approach to immigration enforcement continues, she said, it endangers all the work to close achievement gaps, raise graduation rates, and ensure students are prepared for life and the workforce.

“All4Ed is taking a stand that if we cannot unbundle the DHS funding, we are in support of a partial shutdown until Congress can best figure out how to address the impacts on our children.”

And First Focus on Children, which advocates for issues related to children’s welfare, called on Congress to protect schools and other sensitive locations and end child detention and separate the DHS funding bill to avoid a shutdown.

Many of the groups weighing in are on the progressive side of the political spectrum, but more often focus their advocacy on parents’ rights, student achievement, and school choice.

The national teachers unions took slightly different tacks. National Education Association President Becky Pringle called for freezing DHS funding. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said in an emailed statement that immigration enforcement needs reform “immediately,” including more protections for schools, and urged lawmakers to work together to avoid a shutdown.

The conservative parents’ rights group Defending Education, meanwhile, accused teachers of indoctrinating students to join anti-ICE protests and publicized a list of districts that had adopted sanctuary policies related to protecting immigrant students.

“The materials we uncovered show that students are being offered walkout guides, ‘day of action’ strategies, and training on how to respond to federal agents on school property,” President Nicole Neily said in an email to supporters.

Democrats’ demands, released Wednesday afternoon, include that ICE and Border Patrol agents not wear masks, display identification, and follow more conventional law enforcement practices around use of force, including cooperating with independent investigations.

The provisions as reported by multiple news outlets do not specifically address sensitive locations or enforcement near schools. But they do call for an end to “roving patrols” that have spread fear among legal immigrants, naturalized citizens, and communities of color more broadly.

While some Republicans have also been critical of federal agents’ actions, they still broadly support the president’s immigration crackdown.

Any changes to the spending bills would require that the House vote again, and conservative Republicans closely allied with the president could balk at restrictions on enforcement.

Updated: This story has been updated with comments from the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.

Chalkbeat national reporter Lily Altavena contributed reporting.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor covering education policy and politics. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Education Department approves funding flexibility for Iowa, setting stage for more state waivers

2026-01-08T00:02:14+00:00

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Iowa will have more flexibility in how it uses federal funds after the U.S. Department of Education signed off Wednesday on a first-of-its-kind waiver request that could be a blueprint for other states.

Offering states relief from red tape has been a key component of the Trump administration’s promise to “return education to the states” and one that state schools chiefs from Republican-led states in particular have called for.

But it’s been unclear exactly what that might look like. States already control most aspects of education. Federal funding makes up about 10% of overall education spending, and those dollars do come with restrictions and reporting requirements that aim to ensure money is spent appropriately.

Supporters of the idea say states deserve more flexibility and can use it effectively, but critics worry that broad waivers might leave vulnerable students with fewer resources. While Iowa’s approved waiver request ended up being relatively narrow, a pending waiver request from Indiana could demonstrate just how much new authority the Trump administration is willing to give some states at the expense of federal rules and oversight.

The waiver allows Iowa to consolidate multiple federal funding streams used at the state level into a single block grant. State officials estimated this will free up an additional $8 million in reduced compliance costs over a four-year period. Iowa spends about $7 billion annually on education.

Iowa plans to use the block grant to continue teacher training in effective literacy instruction and launch a new training program that aims to help teachers better support English learners. Iowa’s English learner population has increased 40% over the last decade, state officials said.

Flanked by Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, state Education Department Director McKenzie Snow, and attentive students, Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced the approval of the state’s request at Broadway Elementary School in Denison. McMahon praised the school’s bilingual programming and improvements in reading scores as examples of innovation that the administration wants to support.

Iowa can now reduce paperwork and “invest in proven strategies to build a world class teacher pipeline, close achievement gaps, and open post secondary opportunities to prepare for a great career,” McMahon said.

Iowa’s waiver doesn’t allow districts to consolidate most of their federal funding, which would have represented a much larger pot of money. But it does allow Iowa school districts to take advantage of a 1999 federal provision called Ed-Flex to roll over more money year over year to make it easier to invest in big-ticket items and longer-term strategies like new curriculum or ongoing teacher training.

Districts will also have more flexibility in how they spend federal funds intended for enrichment, technology, and school safety.

The approved waiver request, submitted in September, was significantly more modest than an earlier request Iowa submitted in March.

Anne Hyslop, director of policy development for the advocacy group All4Ed, said it was a good sign that federal officials told Iowa to scale back its request and appropriate that Iowa then did so.

“The things that Iowa was asking for originally, the secretary has no authority to waive,” she said. “They had gone so far beyond the realm of what the secretary had the authority to do.”

Now the state to watch, she said, is Indiana. That state’s waiver request includes state- and district-level consolidation of federal funding streams and changes to the accountability system.

The initial waivers approved by the Education Department likely will shape what other states request.

McMahon invited states to apply for waivers to certain federal requirements back in July. A proposal in Kansas seeks to pause federal school accountability requirements but does not ask for funding flexibility, while Oklahoma’s waiver request is on hold after leadership turnover there. Other states are expected to follow.

Iowa education officials said funding flexibility will allow more money to support teacher training and student achievement, and the public should see results in higher test scores, higher graduation rates, and reduced absenteeism.

Hyslop said there could be some benefits to more flexibility. More leeway for districts could allow schools to invest in, for example, an arts program or a new technology initiative.

But the Education Department still needs to ensure money is being appropriately spent, which is more challenging after massive layoffs.

“I do worry that the US Department of Education right now lacks the capacity to do meaningful oversight of how this program is being implemented or the waiver process in general,” Hyslop said.

Progressive education advocates also fear that money that federal lawmakers intended to support specific student groups won’t reach them.

“I think of red tape equaling protections for students,” said Nicholas Munyan-Penney, assistant director for P-12 policy at The Education Trust. “We want to make sure that students have access to the protections and resources they need to be successful.”

Advocates are particularly concerned that Iowa’s new block grant consolidates Title III funds that are required to go to English learners with other funding streams. The Trump administration laid off most of the staff at the Education Department who support those students, and rescinded a guidance document considered to be the “bible” in that field.

Iowa officials said the teacher training they are planning will benefit more students than the limited programs supported by state Title III dollars.

Iowa officials still will have to tell the federal government how they spent the money, along with estimates of how much time and money they saved compared with the previous system.

In her approval letter, McMahon said the Education Department is open to further streamlining data reporting requirements as well, but that will be an ongoing conversation with Iowa and other states.

But so far, Hyslop said, the administration’s rhetoric on giving states more authority “doesn’t match the impact.”

“The things that would be the most transformative still require congressional approval,” she said.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor covering education policy and politics. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

A wave of immigration buoyed dozens of NYC schools. Now, their enrollment is plummeting.

2025-11-26T00:12:42+00:00

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New York City’s public schools enrolled tens of thousands of new students during a wave of historic migration starting in 2022.

The surge transformed some campuses as educators adapted to meet the needs of children coming with limited English, trauma from their journeys, and little access to basics like food, clothing, and housing.

ATLAS, formerly known as Newcomers High School, in Long Island City, Queens, took in perhaps the largest number of new arrivals. Enrollment more than doubled in just three years, swelling to a high of 1,428 in the 2023-24 school year, compared to 676 in 2020-21, according to city data.

At P.S. 111, which sits amid a cluster of emergency homeless shelters blocks away from ATLAS, enrollment ballooned from under 300 to 564 in four years. After a 3,500-person migrant shelter opened in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, enrollment at nearby P.S./I.S. 157 leapt from 250 to nearly 400 in a matter of months.

But over the last year, the boom came to an abrupt halt, a Chalkbeat analysis of preliminary enrollment data found. Citywide, enrollment fell 2%, the largest drop since the pandemic, with steeper declines at those schools that enrolled the most migrant students. Chalkbeat identified 60 schools that likely took in the largest shares of migrant students between 2022 and 2024. Combined, they lost 11% of their enrollment this year, nearly wiping out all the gains from the previous three years, the analysis found.

Chalkbeat’s analysis is the first attempt to systematically understand how migration has reshaped enrollment in the nation’s largest school district in recent years.

Like other cities across the country, New York City lost students as President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign drove some families to leave for fear of immigration enforcement — and dramatically slowed the pace of new arrivals. Compared to 2023, encounters at the U.S. southern border have plummeted by 77%, while the number of newcomers entering city shelters shrunk from a high of 4,000 a week to around 100.

Amid that slowdown, the number of new students registering in city schools this summer has fallen significantly: down 7% compared to the same period last year, Education Department officials said.

Federal enforcement efforts are not the only change that has contributed to the sudden shift in enrollment patterns. As Mayor Eric Adams attempted to deal with the surge, his administration enacted policies that made it difficult for migrant families to find stable housing, forcing many to switch schools or leave the city, educators and advocates said.

The enrollment reversal isn’t just a problem for individual schools, who may lose staffers and programs because school budgets are tied to student numbers. If the decline persists, as the city’s own projections predict, the Education Department will have to confront thorny questions about closing or merging underenrolled schools.

“That’s going to mean a big cut to the city’s federal funding, and that’s going to mean tough decisions for the NYC schools system as a whole, and that will trickle down to individual schools,” said Loredana Valtierra, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and former official at the U.S. Department of Education.

At several of the schools that took in the most migrant students during the influx, enrollment has fallen just as dramatically as it rose.

The student headcount at ATLAS fell from over 1,400 to just 829 as of this fall, a 42% drop over two years. At P.S./I.S. 157 in Clinton Hill, enrollment cratered after the city closed the nearby migrant center in June — from nearly 400 last school year to 278 this fall, a 29% drop.

Though schools with big losses got a temporary reprieve from budget cuts this year if they fell short of enrollment projections, it’s not clear how long that support will last.

Lara Evangelista, the executive director of the Internationals Network, a nonprofit that supports city public schools geared toward newly arrived immigrants, said that schools were grateful to avoid midyear budget cuts, but she noted that principals will have to plan for the future. “What do you need to put in place this year to prepare for lower budgets going forward?”

Schools opened their doors to a historic influx of immigrant students

New York City enrolled an estimated 48,000 migrant students in a two-year period, officials have said, with many hailing from Latin America and West Africa.

City schools do not ask families for their immigration status or national origin, making it difficult to track enrollment of migrant students. But because many of the new arrivals took up residence in the city’s homeless shelters, Education Department officials used the number of homeless students newly enrolling in city schools as a proxy for migrant students.

To identify which schools took in the largest shares of migrant students, Chalkbeat compiled a list of schools with the biggest increases in both homeless students and English language learners, relative to their overall size, starting in 2022. Several education data experts said the approach was a reasonable way to approximate the number of new migrant students.

Migrant students often enrolled in schools near emergency shelters. Many of those were in midtown Manhattan and Long Island City in Queens, where officials converted hotels into shelters.

But enrollment patterns also depended on which schools had the space — along with the expertise and willingness — to take migrant students.

In East Harlem’s District 4, school and district leaders were “strategic” about opening their doors to newcomer families living in nearby Manhattan shelters, said Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, a parent in the district and president of its Community Education Council. The district had both space, after years of declining enrollment, and a large number of dual-language programs to offer.

The district’s share of English learners doubled from 9% to 18% between the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years — the largest percentage jump in the city — leading to District 4’s first overall enrollment gain in at least a decade, according to city data.

Central Park East II, a K-8 school in East Harlem, took in roughly 100 newcomers, said Principal Naomi Smith. The school worked with district officials and partner organizations to connect families to free food and clothing, along with MetroCards and legal and emotional support, Smith said.

“I am proud of our school, our district, the [Education Department] in general for supporting our families,” she said. “I’m proud of what we do.”

NYC’s shelter policies threaten migrant enrollment

Some principals at schools with large migrant influxes anticipated the enrollment numbers would eventually level off as families left the shelter system, settling in different neighborhoods or leaving the city.

That accelerated in early 2024 when Adams — who said the pace of migration could “destroy the city” — began limiting stays in migrant shelters to 60 days to relieve an overburdened shelter system. Advocates and educators said the move made it difficult for families to remain in their schools and pushed some out of the city altogether as they struggled to find affordable housing.

“The piling on of one inconvenience after another made it impossible for people to stay at first in their school and then in the city,” said Naveed Hasan, a Panel for Educational Policy member who has supported schools with large numbers of new arrivals.

When Trump began his second term in January, his Justice Department pushed prosecutors to drop federal corruption charges against Adams, in part, so the mayor could aid the new administration’s immigration crackdown.

As the number of migrants in city shelters fell rapidly, city officials shuttered dozens of migrant shelters starting in early 2025. At some schools, the effect of the shelter closures was immediate.

P.S. 46 in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, which was several blocks away from a 3,500-person mega-shelter that opened in summer 2023, took in dozens of migrant students in the 2023-24 school year.

After the shelter closed earlier this year, “many families and friends were separated and isolated,” said Carolina Zafra, a teacher at the school. Over the past year, enrollment has fallen by 16%, according to city figures.

At Central Park East II, some families have moved to schools closer to their new accommodations, or left the city for states like Texas and Florida, Smith said. Enrollment at the school is down about 40 students, or 10%, this year.

Across District 4, schools have seen a similar pattern, Salas-Ramirez said. Seven of District 4’s 29 schools saw enrollment drops of 15% or greater from last year to this one, according to Chalkbeat’s analysis. Districtwide, enrollment is down nearly 6%, the second-largest drop in the city.

In August, when city officials closed The Row hotel in midtown Manhattan, the last remaining large family migrant shelter, 138 families in East Harlem schools were displaced, she said.

“It’s been hard to track the families,” she said. “A lot of our principals and assistant principals have spent a lot of effort … just trying to figure out where they are.”

Trump’s immigration crackdown exacerbates enrollment losses

Attendance dipped among many immigrant families as Trump took office. Then, as immigration enforcement intensified in the spring, educators and advocates said they saw more families go into hiding or leave the country voluntarily to avoid being detained.

At least five city students have been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, though several have been released. Dylan Lopez Contreras, the first known city student detained by ICE during Trump’s second term, remains in detention in Western Pennsylvania six months after he was arrested during a routine court hearing. A judge denied Dylan’s asylum claim in September, and his lawyers have filed an appeal.

Schools across the city have also seen ICE sweep up students’ parents.

“People are leaving, or they’re staying in hiding,” said Power Malu, the co-founder of an aid group called ROCCNYC that has been helping connect migrant families with services since the beginning of the influx.

John Sullivan, the superintendent overseeing transfer schools for older students who have struggled in traditional high schools, said at a recent City Council hearing that his district has also seen a growing number of English learners leaving school for jobs. English learners have long dropped out of high school at higher rates than their peers, and some educators worry the pressure to earn money has increased as students worry they may have limited time in the U.S.

Despite the challenges, many educators are doing all they can to keep their newcomers.

Across schools in the Internationals Network, enrollment has largely stayed flat — a pattern Evangelista attributed in part to her schools’ strong relationships with families and ability to connect them to services, such as housing.

At East Harlem’s Central Park East II and Brooklyn’s P.S. 46, while some families displaced from their shelters have left, others still crisscross the city each day so they can stay enrolled, educators said.

Educators said the loss of a single student can reverberate across the entire school.

“Students are still really struggling,” said Valtierra, the Century Foundation fellow. “Having their friends and classmates not showing up … having to explain where those kids are going, that’s tough.”

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org

Colorado faculty councils call on university leaders to oppose Trump on higher education

2025-11-21T02:19:37+00:00

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A growing number of Colorado university faculty bodies have adopted resolutions asking school leaders to consider pooling resources to oppose the Trump administration’s unprecedented push to reshape colleges nationwide.

On Thursday, the University of Colorado System Faculty Council became the latest in Colorado to pass such a resolution, known as a “mutual academic defense compact.” Sixty-one percent of faculty voted in favor.

The defense compacts, which are also being considered by other faculty assemblies nationally and have been modified slightly by each school, urge Colorado university leaders to work together to defend against what they say are Trump administration attacks on academic freedom, free speech, independent governance, and research in higher education. Any compact would likely need to be approved by university leaders and boards.

American Association of University Professors Colorado Conference co-president Aaron Schneider said although the resolutions are mostly symbolic, they bring together faculty voices to hopefully “provide some backbone to our administrations.”

“It’s a call for solidarity,” he said. “It’s based on the idea that universities understand each other, that we share a mission of knowledge, of teaching, of creating an autonomous civic space for debate and democracy, and that that needs to be preserved.”

In response to the Trump administration’s actions, some Colorado university leaders have changed website wording, revised free speech policies, and dismantled campus initiatives, such as diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

Universities have lost research grants under administration changes. The Trump administration also asked universities to sign a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that would commit schools to align with its agenda. Trump’s compact outlines provisions schools must agree to, including changes to campus free speech policies, transgender student and athlete policies, and admissions requirements.

University of Colorado System President Todd Saliman said in a Thursday statement after the faculty passed the resolution that university leadership at every level are committed to academic freedom as a foundational tenets.

A university spokesperson said CU is already part of a collective of 23 public institutions in Colorado who are represented by the Colorado Attorney General Office. CU provides funding as part of the collaboration.

“To protect academic freedom and our ability to carry out our mission, we have been laser focused on engaging in ways that are the most effective in advancing our mission,” Saliman said. “That emphasis will continue.”

The defense compact resolutions originated in March at New Jersey’s Rutgers University, where faculty encouraged Big Ten Conference school leaders to present a united front against the Trump administration.

Along with the CU System, faculty bodies approving such a resolution or something similar include Fort Lewis College; Colorado State University Fort Collins; the University of Denver; Western Colorado University; and the University of Colorado Boulder, Schneider said.

Faculty at Front Range Community College, the University of Northern Colorado, and the University of Colorado Colorado Springs also could consider a resolution, he said.

Colorado State University professor and faculty council member Mary Van Buren, whose council was one of the first to pass the resolution in May, said she understands school leaders are trying to preserve the institution amid threats against federal financial support.

“But where do you draw the line if you’re constantly being encroached on?” Van Buren said. “If you’re constantly making small capitulations to the administration, at what point are you just hollowing out the very core of university values?”

A Western Colorado spokesperson said the school “will not waver in upholding our commitment to academic freedom, integrity of research, and freedom of inquiry, with or without a declared compact.” A University of Denver spokesperson said “the administration is reviewing the resolution and determining the appropriate next steps.” Fort Lewis and CSU Fort Collins representatives had not issued a statement by deadline Thursday.

Faculty want universities to ‘fight against’ Trump policies

University of Colorado Boulder education school professor Deb Palmer, a Boulder Faculty Assembly member and Boulder AAUP co-president, said it’s important that university presidents know how faculty members feel about changes they’ve seen on campus in reaction to the Trump administration’s guidelines. Some are small, like a change to CU Boulder signage from all-gender restrooms to just toilets, she said.

“The main message here is that faculty would like to see the universities fight against the White House’s push to destroy our institutions, rather than just negotiate with the attackers,” she said.

Other changes have been much bigger, such as at the University of Denver. University officials ended policies aimed at helping students of color, as well as LGBTQ and low-income students, after a U.S. Department of Justice memo in July. University leaders feared that the private school could lose federal funding.

“I hope it [the resolution] communicates our deep concern for and resistance to federal interference with the autonomy of higher education institutions, and our continued investment in effective support for all students, staff, and faculty, particularly those who are most impacted by the current federal and sociopolitical landscape” said psychology professor Sarah Enos Watamura, DU’s Faculty Senate president.

These resolutions ask school leaders to go further than past statements and actions. Faculty have also said they want school leaders to not rely solely on the state Attorney General Phil Weiser to defend Colorado higher education.

In April, several Colorado school leaders signed on to an American Association of Colleges & Universities letter calling for constructive engagement with the administration. The AAC&U is a membership organization dedicated to advancing the democratic purposes of higher education.

The letter — which gained almost 500 school leaders’ signatures — said administrators are open to constructive reform from the administration, but “must oppose undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses.”

School leaders that signed the letter include officials at DU, MSU Denver, CSU Fort Collins, and Colorado College.

A similar group of Colorado school leaders also signed onto an AAC&U letter against the Trump compact. The letter said the Trump administration’s compact represents coercion, not constructive engagement.

Van Buren said she’s seen school leadership be more receptive to the concerns of students and faculty since the faculty passed the defense compact in May. However, students and faculty have still needed to resist changes enacted by leaders in response to Trump, she said.

In August, CSU leaders revised free speech policies on campus and limited chalking, or writing messages in chalk on sidewalks. After student and faculty pushback, the administration rescinded the policy revisions, she said.

“I think that faculty councils, AAUP chapters, and student organizations across the state are going to continue to act in concert to communicate and oppose these changes,” Van Buren said. “But it’s up to the [university] administrations to really make this effective.”

Why Trump’s effort to dismantle the Education Department matters very little and also quite a lot

2025-11-20T12:01:46+00:00

Chalkbeat Ideas is a new section featuring reported columns on the big ideas and debates shaping American schools. Sign up for the Ideas newsletter to follow our work.

The Trump administration’s latest actions to dismantle the Department of Education can be hard to make sense of.

On the one hand, this is a milestone moment in conservatives’ long-running campaign to gut the agency. On the other hand, the administration has promised that most of the underlying programs will be protected.

There is very little reason to think that moving various programs to other agencies will matter much for schools. Running the same programs, just out of a different department, is unlikely to affect the typical student.

Click here to read the rest of this story.

K-12 moving to Labor as Trump administration accelerates bid to dismantle Education Department

2025-11-19T00:16:29+00:00

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The U.S. Education Department is moving management of K-12 and higher education to the Department of Labor and parceling out other job duties to other federal agencies in the most sweeping effort so far to dismantle the agency.

The Education Department announced the changes Tuesday, describing them as fulfilling President Donald Trump’s promise to “return education to the states.”

Management of both the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Office of Postsecondary Education will be moved to the Department of Labor, which oversees workforce development programs and protects workers’ rights, among other responsibilities.

The Office of Elementary and Secondary Education oversees major federal funding streams such as Title I, which provides $18 billion a year for high-poverty schools, as well as teacher training programs, support for English learners, and competitive grants for charter schools, arts education, civics, and more.

“If we consider K-12 education as really preparation for adult life, preparation to enter the workforce, nowhere is it better housed than at the Department of Labor that thinks about this night and day,” a senior department official said. “We’re really confident that this will end up being something that provides better services, more streamlined services, reduces bureaucracy.”

These changes involve “necessarily narrowing the size and scope of this federal agency,” the official said. Once implemented, they could serve as “proof points” for further downsizing the department.

The moves accelerate a decades-long push by conservatives to eliminate the department that gained traction when Trump signed an executive order in March to start that process. The decisions also make clear the administration’s willingness to use legal workarounds to avoid seeking approval from Congress.

“This is significantly further than I thought they would be able to go without congressional action,” said Rick Hess, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “I am surprised and impressed, as someone who has always been skeptical of the department’s role. I am open to the idea that it’s good to reduce the department’s footprint. I also think we’re a nation of laws, and it’s important to recognize congressional authority.”

Education advocacy groups widely condemned the changes. Denise Forte, president and CEO of the advocacy group EdTrust, said the administration was “selling the Department of Education for parts.”

“It’s about implementing a business model that transforms students into widgets instead of human beings who need support,” she said in a statement calling on Congress to act.

Karen Hawley Miles, whose father helped create the Education Department in 1979 under President Jimmy Carter, said the entire goal was to take functions that were spread across multiple departments and place them in one nimble agency that could prioritize education above all else.

“We’re going back to breaking these things all out,” said Miles, who is the CEO of Education Resource Strategies, which works on school improvement efforts. “The work that we do with school systems and states, when you silo programs and fragment them, you get fragmented results.”

Hess, for his part, predicted the changes would be “neither good nor bad” for students but said they represented an important symbolic step that will be difficult for future administrations to reverse.

Education Department restructuring sidesteps Congress

The restructuring comes on the heels of a lengthy government shutdown. The administration already has eliminated most of the office that supported English learners and slashed staff in the Office for Civil Rights. But workers who were laid off during the shutdown are back on the job for now.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon argued in an op-ed Sunday in USA Today that the shutdown showed “how unnecessary the federal education bureaucracy is.”

“Students kept going to class. Teachers continued to get paid. There were no disruptions in sports seasons or bus routes,” McMahon wrote. “The shutdown proved an argument that conservatives have been making for 45 years: The U.S. Department of Education is mostly a pass-through for funds that are best managed by the states.”

Only Congress can get rid of a federal department it created. McMahon repeatedly promised to work with Congress on any changes to the structure or duties of the Education Department. These changes were done administratively.

Senior officials said the Economy Act gives the Education Department the authority to contract with other federal departments for goods and services.

Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the Trump administration, called for dispersing federal education functions that are required by law to other departments in its chapter on getting rid of the Education Department. The author of that chapter, Lindsey Burke, now works for the Education Department as the deputy chief of staff for policy and programs.

The Education Department is also moving educational services for Native Americans to the Department of Interior, child care for college students who are parents and accreditation of foreign medical schools to Health and Human Services, and international education to the Department of State.

The Washington Post first reported the outline of the agreements Tuesday.

These arrangements, which the department is calling partnerships, are modeled after one that moved career-technical education to the Department of Labor earlier this year. Policy and statutory oversight will stay with the Education Department, but grant management and other functions will be the responsibility of other federal departments. Education Department staff are expected to move to other agencies.

Funding for federal programs should not be affected, officials said.

For more than a month, rumors swirled that a similar interagency agreement would move oversight for special education to Health and Human Services, a change that disability advocates strongly oppose.

The changes announced Tuesday do not affect the Office for Civil Rights, the Office for Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, or Federal Student Aid. However, those functions could move to other departments in the future.

U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, did not respond to a question about what role Congress should play in restructuring the department.

“I agree with President Trump that education decisions should be in the hands of parents and local communities,” Cassidy said in a statement emailed by a spokesperson. “My hope is that these changes further that goal.”

U.S. Sen. Mike Rounds, a South Dakota Republican who introduced a bill last year to dismantle the department, said the administration’s approach aligns with his legislation.

“This is an excellent first step, and I look forward to working with President Trump and Secretary McMahon to pass my legislation and finish the job,” he said by email.

But U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, said in a statement that the administration was subverting the law, and Republicans should work with Democrats to stop it.

“This is an outright illegal effort to continue dismantling the Department of Education, and it is students and families who will suffer the consequences as key programs that help students learn to read or that strengthen ties between schools and families are spun off to agencies with little to no relevant expertise and are gravely weakened — or even completely broken — in the process,” she said.

The School Superintendents Association said in a blog post that its members have serious concerns about consistent provision of services and technical support and about state education agencies’ capacity to take on more work.

David Law, Minnetonka Public Schools superintendent and president of the superintendents association, said school administrators regularly need guidance about which uses of federal funds are allowed or which programs are supported by evidence. The Department of Labor may not have the expertise to help.

“If the Department of Labor is going to do a better job supporting students’ reading and math abilities, that would be a win,” he said. “It would certainly be a new job for them.”

This story has been updated throughout with additional information and comments.

Chalkbeat Senior Reporter Ann Schimke contributed.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Immigration enforcement appears to hurt test scores, and not just for immigrant students: study

2025-11-10T06:14:55+00:00

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Dramatic increases in immigration arrests could be hurting students in the classroom, including U.S. citizen students from Spanish-speaking households.

A study released Monday as a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research uses test score data from a large countywide school district in Florida and immigration arrest data to track the impact of increased enforcement after President Donald Trump took office. Study authors David Figlio and Umut Özek found modest but noticeable declines in spring test scores compared with recent years.

The test score declines didn’t just affect foreign-born students. The effect, which was concentrated in high-poverty schools and among students who were already struggling, was similar for Spanish-speaking immigrant and U.S. citizen students.

That’s “compelling evidence” that students are affected by being part of a community that’s subject to more scrutiny and arrests, regardless of their own or their parents’ immigration status, said Figlio, a University of Rochester economist.

Florida students take state standardized tests three times a year, allowing researchers to see how students were doing before and after immigration enforcement increased under the Trump administration. The analysis found that each percentage point increase in immigration enforcement intensity reduced Spanish-speaking students’ scores on state tests by an amount equivalent to about 10 to 15 points on the SAT.

This decrease accounted for about 10% of the average test score gap between English- and Spanish-speaking students in the district, the study found. The study does not name the district; researchers often grant anonymity to districts and organizations in exchange for data access.

Higher-performing Latino and Spanish-speaking students largely maintained their scores when compared with peers from previous years, but lower-performing students did not.

“This is not turning a kid who was knocking it out of the park into a kid who is struggling academically, but it does appear to be a drag on kids who were already struggling,” Figlio said.

The study adds to a body of research that had already established wide-ranging effects of immigration enforcement on young people, from increased anxiety to higher dropout rates. But this new research reflects the impacts of much more intense interior enforcement efforts under Trump.

Increased immigration enforcement was also associated with a decline in disciplinary incidents for both Latino students and Spanish-speaking students. Figlio and Özek are not sure if this was because students tried to avoid getting in trouble, or if administrators responded with more leniency out of sympathy for student hardships, or if they wanted to avoid exposing students to law enforcement.

Figlio and Özek did not find significant impacts on students’ attendance in the school district they studied, but other recent studies have.

Thomas Dee, a Stanford University education professor, found a 22% increase in daily absences in the two months after a January immigration raid in California’s Central Valley, an agricultural region with large numbers of immigrant farmworkers. That was a sharp deviation from attendance patterns in previous years.

Absences were higher among elementary students, perhaps because parents worried more about being separated from young children.

Another recent study from Kirsten Slungaard Mumma at Columbia University’s Teachers College found increased absences among English learners in both Connecticut and Rhode Island.

In the past, including under the first Trump administration, interior enforcement more often took the form of large workplace raids, which might affect a large number of families in one community.

In recent months, federal agents have raided apartment complexes, arrested parents and teens outside school buildings, and recently dragged a Chicago child care worker from the center where she worked. The Trump administration did away with a longstanding policy that deemed schools and day cares “sensitive locations” where immigration enforcement was largely prohibited.

Administration officials say they are targeting violent criminals. Public records show that many of those detained have no criminal record or committed only minor offenses. ProPublica documented at least 170 incidents in which federal immigration agents detained U.S. citizens, sometimes for days.

“This is an era of immigration enforcement unlike any in recent memory in terms of its intensity and scope,” Dee said. From a research standpoint, acute events like the Central Valley raids are easier to study — there’s a distinct before and after — but immigration enforcement now is an “everywhere and always” phenomenon, he said.

Figlio and Özek try to account for that by tracking increases in immigration arrests by country of origin, identifying schools with a higher percentage of students from those countries, and comparing test scores in schools that serve more and less affected communities.

One Latino mother in Chicago, who lives in a part of the city that’s been targeted by federal immigration agents, said her son traditionally earned As and Bs and is taking several advanced courses this year as a high school sophomore. She’s now noticing more Cs. (Chalkbeat is not identifying the mother due to the sensitivity of her situation and privacy concerns.)

The family doesn’t go out as much, the mother said. Her son is watching videos of alleged ICE activity on social media, and hearing from friends who are worried their families will be targeted by ICE. One of her son’s teachers told her, “before he was more participative and turning everything in, and now sometimes he falls asleep,” she said.

Figlio said his study doesn’t tell us what U.S. immigration policy should look like, but it does point to places where students may need more support.

“Educators are responsible for educating all the students who go to school,” he said. “School districts might want to put more resources into schools that have a lot of foreign-born students and students from the countries that are subject to more enforcement, and not just for the kids who are foreign-born but for everyone.”

Chalkbeat Chicago reporter Reema Amin contributed reporting.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Where to find free food in Philadelphia as SNAP benefits remain in limbo

2025-11-07T20:15:11+00:00

President Donald Trump’s administration asked a federal appeals court on Friday to block an order requiring full Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program payments to be paid to states today.

On Thursday, a federal judge ordered Trump’s administration to deliver November’s SNAP payments. More than 42 million Americans relied on federal food stamps January through August during fiscal year 2025, according to the U.S Department of Agriculture.

U.S. District Judge John McConnell, who issued Thursday’s order, was one of two federal judges who ruled last week that the Trump administration is required to fund SNAP through the government shutdown.

Nearly 2 million people in Pennsylvania rely on federal food stamps, including around 472,000 Philly residents.

This week, Mayor Cherelle Parker announced a citywide “One Philly SNAP Support Plan,” which she said is a $14 million “coordinated intergovernmental, public/private partnership response” to fund food distribution efforts as well as rent and utility assistance. Philly-based businesses such as Aramark and GIANT Company have also donated fresh produce to some Philly schools.

However, Parker acknowledged in a statement the city “cannot fully replace the SNAP funds in limbo,” and the ongoing budget impasses at both the state and federal level are “creating a significant cash management challenge” for the city.

Below is a map of food pantries and other places offering free food and meals to students and families in Philadelphia. Each location has a phone number listed if you would like to contact them about donations or volunteering.

If you can’t see the map, there is also a list of the locations offering free food below it.

Please call the locations beforehand to make sure they are open.

Where to get free food in Philadelphia

Mercy Neighborhood Ministries

1939 W. Venango St.

Philadelphia, PA 19140

215-222-4393

Food distribution program

Wednesdays at 7:30 a.m.

Saturdays at 10:00 a.m.

We Love To Give and Beloved St. John

4541 N. Broad St.

Philadelphia, PA 19140

267-433-2227

Grocery distribution

Saturday, Nov. 8

Noon–2 p.m.

Saturday, Nov. 22

Noon–2 p.m.

Saturday, Dec. 13

Noon–2 p.m.

Saturday, Dec. 27

Noon–2 p.m.

TCRC Community Healing Center food distribution sites

215-791-0645

First African Baptist Church

6700 Lansdowne Ave.

Philadelphia, PA 19151

Second and fourth Mondays of the month

9 a.m.–1 p.m.

Nazarene Baptist Church

3981 Nice St.

Philadelphia, PA 19140

Wednesdays

10 a.m.–1 p.m.

Community members can also get clothing, diapers, toys, and school supplies.

Northeast Baptist Church

4744 Tackawanna St.

Philadelphia, PA 19124

Wednesdays

Noon–3 p.m.

Faith Assemblies of God Church

1926 Margaret St.

Philadelphia, PA 19124

Thursdays

10.a.m–1 p.m.

Temple University Community Garden Field

Northeast corner of Broad and Diamond Streets

Philadelphia, PA 19122

First and third Fridays of the month

10.a.m–1 p.m.

Ujima Friends Peace Center

1701 Lehigh Ave.

Philadelphia, PA 19132

First and third Saturdays of the month

9 a.m.–noon

Germantown Friends Meeting

47 W. Coulter St.

Philadelphia, PA 19144

Every third Sunday of the month

Noon–3 p.m.

Community members can also get clothing and books.

People’s Emergency Center

325 N. 39th St.

Philadelphia, PA 19104

267-777-5880 (main office)

267-777-5477 (community resource hotline)

Food cupboard

Saturdays

10:30 a.m.–1:30 p.m.

A photo ID is required to receive food. Food is distributed on a first-come, first-served basis. Participants are asked to come just once a month.

Prevention Point Philadelphia

2913-2915 Kensington Ave. (corner of Kensington Avenue and Monmouth Street)

Philadelphia, PA 19134

215-634-5272

Snacks and sandwiches

Monday–Friday

Breakfast

Tuesdays

10 a.m.

Hot lunch

Wednesdays

Noon–2 p.m.

Community night

First Thursdays of the month

5–8 p.m.

First Redemption Evangelical Church

4400 N. Broad St.

Philadelphia, PA 19140

215-324-3775

Food pantry

Thursdays

10:30 a.m.–1:30 p.m.

Food is distributed on a first-come, first-served basis as long as supplies last.

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

Free pop-up produce markets

Pediatric Primary Care, Cobbs Creek

225 Cobbs Creek Parkway

Philadelphia, PA 19139

215-476-2223

Wednesdays

9 a.m.–noon

Karabots Pediatric Primary Care Center, West Philadelphia

4865 Market St.

Philadelphia, PA 19139

267-425-9800

Thursdays

9 a.m.–noon

Mighty Writers food distribution

There may be longer lines at some locations. Some recipients may have to fill out registration forms and/or show identification. The organization does not require proof of U.S. citizenship.

Mighty Writers West

35th and Fairmount

Philadelphia, PA 19104

215-387-1066

Monday–Friday

11:30 a.m.–1:30 p.m.

Mighty Writers El Futuro

1025 S. Ninth St.

Philadelphia, PA 19147

215-602-0236

Tuesday–Friday

Noon–1:30 p.m.

Mighty Writers North

23rd and Seybert

Philadelphia, PA 19121

610-263-5379

Tuesdays and Thursdays

Noon–1:30 p.m.

Lucien E. Blackwell Community Center

761 N. 47th St.

Philadelphia, PA 19139

Tuesdays

2–3 p.m.

First and third Wednesdays of the month

2–3 p.m.

John Street Community Center

1100 Poplar St.

Philadelphia, PA

Thursdays

1:45–2:45 p.m.

Broad Street Love

315 S. Broad St.

Philadelphia, PA 19107

215-735-4847

Lunch

Monday–Friday

11:30 a.m.–1:15 pm.

St. Francis Inn

2441 Kensington Ave.

Philadelphia, PA 19125

215-423-5845

Seated meals

Monday–Thursday

4:30–6 p.m.

Friday–Sunday

11:30 a.m.–1 p.m.

Takeaway breakfast

Tuesday–Wednesday

10–11 a.m.

Can’t find what you need on this list? Find more food services in the Philadelphia area by visiting this list from ShelterBridge, this spreadsheet of resources supporting SNAP recipients in the Philly area, the City of Philadelphia’s food and meal finder, Philabundance’s food map, or the Share Food Program’s map.

Susan Gonzalez is Chalkbeat’s editor for social media and platforms. If you know of any food resources or news tips that might be helpful to students and families in Philadelphia, send her an email at sgonzalez@chalkbeat.org.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Where to find free food in NYC and Newark as the future of SNAP remains in limbo

2025-10-31T17:13:23+00:00

Two federal judges ruled Friday that President Donald Trump’s administration will be required to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program through the government shutdown.

The rulings came before Nov. 1, the day SNAP benefits were to be delayed for the first time in the program’s 60-year-history.

More than 42 million people relied on SNAP benefits January through August during fiscal year 2025, according to the U.S Department of Agriculture.

Prior to Friday’s rulings, New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced that the city is adding $15 million in emergency funding to the Community Food Connection Program to help the roughly 1.8 million NYC residents who will be losing SNAP benefits as a result of a government shutdown. This came after New York Gov. Kathy Hochul committed $30 million in state funds earlier this week to cover about 16 million meals at food pantries.

New York City schools were also scrambling to help families who were at risk of losing federal food stamps.

Meanwhile, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy announced Thursday that the state would be expediting $42.5 million in grants to support local food banks across the state in anticipation of the Trump administration’s failure to fund SNAP. But the administration has yet to comment on Friday’s rulings and the future of SNAP.

The loss of the food safety net benefits could affect more than 800,000 people in New Jersey, almost half of whom are children, according to a statement from Murphy’s office.

Below is a list of food pantries and other places offering free food and meals to students and families in New York City and Newark, New Jersey. Each location also has a phone number listed if you would like to contact them about donations or volunteering.

Where to get free food in NYC

Ascension Outreach, Inc.

12 W. 11th St.

New York, NY 10011

212-254-8620

Open the first and third Saturdays of the month 8:30 a.m.-9 a.m.

The first time you come there will be a registration process to sign up to receive food.

African Services Committee

429 W. 127th St.

New York, NY 10027

212-222-3882

Monday–Thursday

10 a.m–4 p.m.

All first-time visitors must have a referral from a social services agency, community center, or church.

Another Choice Youth and Family Outreach, Inc

1765 Madison Ave.

New York, NY 10029

212-369-6643

Fridays

10 a.m.–11 a.m.

Antioch Outreach Ministries

41 W. 124th St.

New York, NY 10027

917-974-8261

Saturdays

7:30 a.m.–11 a.m.

Lines can be long so it is recommended that people show up as early as they can.

Beth Hark Christian Counseling Center

26 E. 120th St.

New York, NY 10035

212-860-6765

The food pantry program is operated using a cellphone app called Plentiful. In the app, people can check for service times, reserve their spot in line, and receive updates. For information on how to download the app to your cellphone, email info@plentifulapp.com or visit their website.

Stacey’s Pantry at Bethany Lutheran Church/St. Jacobus

4808 91st Place

Elmhurst, NY 11373

917-533-1679

Saturdays

8 a.m.–10 a.m.

Broadway Community

601 W. 114th St.

New York, NY 10025

212-864-6100 ext. 120

Thursdays (by appointment only)

2 p.m.–4 p.m.

The food pantry operates on a first-come, first-served basis. Visit their website for instructions on how to schedule an appointment, which is required to receive food.

Catholic Charities - Central Harlem - Kennedy Center

34 W. 134th St., 1st Floor

New York, NY 10037

212-862-4601

Wednesdays

10 a.m.–1 p.m.

Saturdays

10 a.m.-noon

Community League of the Heights

508 W.159th St.

New York, NY 10032

212-795-4779

Registration to receive food from the pantry takes place on Tuesdays from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. People must provide a valid New York state picture ID and proof of address. Registration is done in-person at 511 West 157th St.

Crossroads Community Services

325 Park Ave.

New York, NY 10022

212-378-0229

Food pantry

Thursdays (by appointment)

9:30 a.m.–12:45 p.m.

To make an appointment, please call 212-378-0234 or email Crossroads Community Services at pantry@crossroadsnyc.org. They are also on the Plentiful app. People should bring current identification and proof of address for all household members on the first day.

To-go meals

Meals are served at 108 E. 51st St. between Park and Lexington Avenues on a carry-out basis.

Breakfast

Sunday, Monday, Wednesday

7:45 a.m.–8:45 a.m.

Brunch

Saturdays

10 a.m.–11 a.m.

Dinner

Daily

5:30 p.m.–6:30 p.m.

Cabrini Immigrant Services

630 Isham St.

New York, NY 10034

212-791-4590

Saturdays

7 a.m.–9 a.m.

People are registered as members on their first visit. Registration happens during pantry hours.

Chambers Memorial Baptist Church

219 E. 123rd St.

New York, NY 10035

347-600-9820

Wednesdays

10 a.m.

Registration for the food pantry is from noon to 1 p.m. on Tuesdays. People need to bring valid identification.

Christ and St. Stephen’s Church/Brown Bag Program

120 W. 69th St.

New York, NY 10023

212-787-2755 ext. 5

Monday–Friday

9:30 a.m.–10:30 a.m.

The grab-and-go lunch program requires no documentation.

Fraternite Notre Dame Food Pantry

2290 First Ave.

New York, NY 10035

212-876-5855

Fridays

2 p.m.–4 p.m.

A referral is not required.

Community Impact at Columbia University/Ford Hall Food Pantry

616 W. 114th St. (between Broadway and Riverside Drive)

New York, NY 10025

212-854-6310

Monday, Wednesday, Thursday

11 a.m.–2 p.m.

The food pantry is closed on major holidays, including the week between Christmas and New Year’s.

BOOM! Health

Monday-Friday

Various locations and times can be found here

718-295-5605

To learn more or enroll in a program, call their central office at the phone number listed above or email them at info@boomhealth.org.

Bronx Bethany Community Corporation

964 E. 227th St.

Bronx, NY 10466

718-231-5276

Wednesdays

9 a.m.–11 a.m.

Thursdays

3 p.m.–6 p.m.

Everyone is allowed two visits per month. They will be closed the following dates in 2025: November 26, 27, December 24, 25, and 31. This organization also uses the Plentiful app for updates.

BronxWorks/Carolyn McLaughlin Community Center

1130 Grand Concourse

Bronx, NY 10456

646-596-1316

Saturdays

9 a.m.–3 p.m.

Appointments are given in 20-minute intervals and only 180 appointments are given weekly. To schedule an appointment, people can call the phone number listed from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every Wednesday. Distribution is subject to change.

BronxWorks/Twin Parks West

355 E. 183rd St.

Bronx, NY 10458

347-862-9538

Every second and fourth Thursday

10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Anyone interested in using the pantry must call the listed phone number and speak to assistant program director Dominique Jackson to schedule an appointment. While appointments are preferred, they do accept walk-ins. Distribution takes place inside the Twin Parks West Community Center, which is located behind 365 Ford St.

Trinity Commons/Trinity Church

89 Broadway

New York, NY 10006

917-594-6300

Grab-and-go meals are served in front of the church on the following days and times.

Breakfast

Monday–Friday

9 a.m.–10 a.m.

Lunch

Daily

Noon–1 p.m.

Dinner

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday

4:30 p.m.–5:30 p.m.

Groceries

Trinity Commons (enter at 109 Greenwich St.)

Tuesdays

9 a.m.–11:30 a.m.

Thursdays

9:30 a.m.–1:30 p.m.

People can schedule their grocery visit using the Plentiful app. Walk-ins are welcome while supplies last.

Can’t find what you need on this list? Visit the Food Pantries Food Connect Map, the Food Bank for NYC’s map, the city’s Food Help map or this list of food pantries and community kitchens to find free food and meals near you in New York City and the surrounding areas.

Where to get free food in Newark, New Jersey

Salvation Army/Ironbound

11 Providence St.

Newark, NJ 07105

973-344-2698

Food pantry

Tuesday and Thursday

9 a.m.–2 p.m.

Office hours/emergency food assistance

Monday and Wednesday

9 a.m.–2 p.m.

MEND Network Food Pantries

Please call these food pantries in advance to ensure the location is open.

The Apostles’ House

24 Grant St.

Newark, NJ 07104

973-482-0625

Monday, Wednesday, and Friday

10 a.m.–3 p.m.

Blessed Sacrament Church

19 Van Ness Place

Newark, NJ 07108

973-824-6549

Every third and fourth Wednesday

11 a.m.–1 p.m.

Every third and fourth Saturday

8 a.m.–10 a.m.

Elizabeth Ave. Presbyterian Church

761 Elizabeth Ave.

Newark, NJ 07112

973-923-5655

Every second and fourth Thursday

10 a.m.–noon

First Hopewell Baptist Church

525 Orange St.

Newark, NJ 07107

973-485-1165

Every second, third, and fourth Wednesday

8 a.m.–11:30 a.m.

Please register for the food pantry by 11:20 a.m.

Franciscan Charities’ soup kitchen

242 South 8th St.

Newark, NJ 07103

908-403-6252

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday

11:30 a.m.–1 p.m.

Habitat for Humanity of Greater Newark

298 South Orange Ave.

Newark, NJ 07103

973-624-3330 ext. 103

Wednesday

10 a.m.–12:30 p.m.

Pierre Toussaint food pantry/St. Mary’s Church

528 Dr. MLK Jr Blvd.

Newark, NJ 07102

973-792-5790

Saturdays

9 a.m.–11 a.m.

Roseville Presbyterian Church

36 Roseville Ave.

Newark, NJ 07107

973-483-3361

Every second Monday

10 a.m.–noon

St. James Social Service Corp food pantry

604 Dr. MLK Jr. Blvd.

Newark, NJ 07102

973-624-4007

Monday–Friday

1 p.m.-3 p.m.

Urban League of Essex County

513 Central Ave.

Newark, NJ 07107

973-624-9535

Thursday

Noon–2 p.m.

Mobile markets giving away fresh produce

West Side High School

403 S Orange Ave.

Newark, NJ 07103

November 14 and December 22

4 p.m.–6 p.m. or until supplies last

Essentially Yours From the Heart at The Urban League

513 Central Ave.

Newark, NJ 07107

November 22 and December 20

11 a.m.–1 p.m. or until supplies last

Essex Pantry/New Community Corp. Family Comfort

220 Bruce St.

Newark, NJ 07103

973-623-6114

Food pantry distribution

Monday–Friday

10 a.m.– 2 p.m., or until supplies last

The food pantry requires a valid New Jersey ID and/or proof of residency, proof of income, and a birth certificate for each child younger than 18 years old.

Community food distribution

Every first Tuesday

10 a.m.– 2 p.m., or until supplies last

For the community food distribution, recipients just need to sign for the items received. To participate in all food distributions, people should bring their own bags or carts.

Grace Church food ministry

950 Broad St.

Newark, NJ 07102

973-623-1733

Saturdays

11 a.m.–1 p.m.

Food is distributed through the Broad Street doors.

Can’t find what you need on this list? Find more food pantries and resources in this spreadsheet from the MEND network, this search tool from the Community Food Bank of New Jersey, or on NJ 211’s food assistance resources page.

Susan Gonzalez is Chalkbeat’s editor for social media and platforms. If you know of any food resources or news tips that might be helpful to students and families in New York City or Newark, send her an email at sgonzalez@chalkbeat.org.

As SNAP cuts loom, NYC schools scramble to stockpile food for families in need

2025-10-29T18:48:13+00:00

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With nearly 2 million New York City residents soon to lose federal food stamps, schools across the five boroughs are scrambling to create plans to quickly get extra food to hungry families.

Officials in President Donald Trump’s administration have said they will stop funding the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, starting Nov. 1 if the federal government, which has been shut down for nearly a month, doesn’t reopen.

That would cut off benefits for roughly 1.8 million city residents who received $5 billion worth of food assistance in 2025, according to the Independent Budget Office. That count includes about 500,000 children.

It’s not clear exactly how many city students receive SNAP, but more than three-quarters of district and charter school students — roughly 806,000 — qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, or government benefits including SNAP, last year, according to city data.

School leaders say the abrupt loss of food benefits would be devastating and could set off a cascade of other challenges for kids that would show up in the classroom.

“I’m worried it’s going to be a crisis,” said Ben Geballe, principal of M.S. 131 in Chinatown, where nearly 90% of students live in poverty. “If you’re on SNAP, you’re living on the edge already. You give people a little push, and it can be very challenging.”

Schools like Geballe’s are now scrambling to set up their own ad hoc food distribution systems, tapping into their budgets, raising outside funds, and leveraging their relationships with parents and community partners to help ensure families don’t have to rely only on outside food banks that will be facing a crush of new demand.

Geballe’s school is restarting a school food pantry where families who are homeless or otherwise food insecure get a bag of groceries every two weeks. He’s asked a private donor who contributed money to help cover field trips to repurpose those funds for food. And the school is brainstorming ways to get kids involved as helpers, including by allowing them to donate prizes they earn for good behavior to the school’s food bank.

The school partners with a community based organization on an after-school program, and they are working together to expand meal service for those who stay later, so kids can count on three free hot meals — a breakfast before school, lunch, and a hot “supper” around 3:30 p.m.. All students get free breakfast and lunch in city schools.

State leaders pledge to help plug some gaps

State leaders have promised to step in to fill some of the federal funding gap. Gov. Kathy Hochul committed $30 million in state funds earlier this week to cover about 16 million meals at food pantries. State Attorney General Letitia James also joined a multistate lawsuit that seeks to force the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees SNAP, to tap into billions of dollars in emergency reserves to continue funding SNAP.

So far, the city Education Department hasn’t launched any systemwide efforts to get extra food to families losing SNAP benefits.

“We are aware of potential SNAP disruptions that may affect our school community,” said Isla Gething, a department spokesperson, “and our students can continue to count on their school meals.”

Hochul has said she’s exploring the idea of using schools to send home additional food with families but hasn’t released any concrete plans.

In the meantime, city schools are continuing to devise their own food distribution plans.

At M.S. 50 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Principal Ben Honoroff said the school has spent years building systems to help families facing food insecurity. It now expects a big uptick in demand.

The school is planning to tap its federal Title I funds for students in temporary housing to give families vouchers they can redeem at local restaurants and subsidize orders on the online grocery site Fresh Direct. Families living in shelters, he noted, don’t have access to kitchens and need meals that don’t require much preparation.

Other schools are turning outwards to collect extra money.

Sally Schwab, an assistant principal at University Prep Charter High School in the South Bronx said roughly 85% of her students’ families receive SNAP. She launched a GoFundMe page Tuesday with the goal of raising $5,000, and had already surpassed that goal by Wednesday morning. The school plans to use the funds to buy grocery store gift cards and stock up on basics that they’ll distribute through a school food pantry.

At the Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women in downtown Brooklyn, administrators sent home a letter to families and staff earlier this week warning about the looming SNAP cuts and asking for donations to the school’s food and clothing pantry.

The school’s principal, Kiri Soares, said she’s trying to stockpile food that fits her families’ cultural backgrounds as well as other supplies like diapers and menstrual products that families use SNAP benefits to purchase.

Several school leaders said that if the SNAP shutdown drags on, they hope the city and state will launch a more comprehensive effort to tap public schools as a way of distributing food. During the COVID pandemic, schools became community food distribution centers, handing out millions of free meals to both students and families and other community members.

“The infrastructure is there,” said Soares. “It would be an easy switch to flip.”

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

ICE agents detain Colorado teacher after routine immigration appointment

2025-10-28T22:37:10+00:00

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A fifth grade teacher from a metro Denver charter school was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement last week.

The teacher is now being held with family members, including minor children, in a Texas detention center, according to a letter sent to school staff by Stacy Bush, principal of Global Village Academy-Douglas County in Parker.

The teacher was arrested with her family on Friday during a routine immigration appointment at a Centennial ICE office, the letter said.

Michael Henderson, executive director of Global Village Academy Collaborative, which oversees the Parker school and two other Colorado locations of the language immersion school, said in a statement that the network had inspected the teacher’s employment documentation forms and conducted a background check through the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

“This employee has a valid employment authorization document, authorizing her lawful employment in the United States, with any U.S. employer through the spring of 2029,” he wrote.

The teacher is from Peru and has taught at Global Village Academy-Douglas County since July, according to a LinkedIn account that matches her name. Chalkbeat is not naming the teacher to protect her privacy. The school’s Douglas County campus offers language immersion programs in Spanish, French, and Mandarin.

Global Village Academy Collaborative is one of several plaintiffs in a recent lawsuit against the Trump administration over a federal plan to charge $100,000 for each worker on an H-1B visa, a type of visa that allows American companies to employ foreign workers in certain jobs that require a bachelor’s degree or higher.

President Trump unveiled the proclamation on H-1B visas on Sept. 19, with the new rule taking effect on Sept. 21. The lawsuit was filed in early October by Democracy Forward and other legal organizations on behalf of groups that represent nurses, doctors, teachers, college professors, researchers, and religious workers.

Henderson declined to comment on whether the teacher is an H-1B visa holder.

The lawsuit is ongoing, but the Trump administration recently appeared to ease the new visa rules. Updated language on the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website suggests that generally the $100,000 fee may not apply to people already in the United States who are changing from certain immigration statuses to H-1B visas.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat covering early childhood issues and early literacy. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

16-year-old Bronx high schooler arrested by ICE at check-in

2025-10-24T21:30:47+00:00

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A 16-year-old public high school student in the Bronx was arrested at a check-in with ICE agents in Lower Manhattan on Thursday — marking the latest in a growing number of children and young adults swept up by the Trump administration’s deportation dragnet.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security confirmed the teen’s arrest in a statement Friday. Joel Camas, a student at Gotham Collaborative High School, was being held at an Office of Refugee Resettlement youth shelter in The Bronx, his attorneys said.

Joel, who immigrated to the U.S. from Ecuador in 2022, had been living with relatives after his mother recently self-deported, according to his attorneys.

The New York Times, which wrote about Joel’s case ahead of his appointment this week, first reported his arrest at that appointment.

Joel came to the U.S. fleeing gang violence with his mother in 2022, according to the habeas writ. The two didn’t have a lawyer, and lost their asylum cases and were ordered removed by an immigration judge in February of 2024, his attorneys said. Joel was later connected to legal resources, who applied for other relief as he was still a minor, which he was granted in family court this past April.

Despite that protection, however, ICE still required him to report to the agency for a check-in where he was arrested on Thursday.

“His mother self-deported to Ecuador, and Camas remained in the USA alone as a minor. Fortunately, now Mr. Camas will be reunited with family,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement confirming his arrest.

When THE CITY then asked about Joel’s SIJS status, McLaughlin replied only that “he has a final deportation order.”

According to Joel’s lawyers at the NYCLU and The Door, who filed an emergency writ of habeas corpus Friday seeking to have a federal judge halt his deportation and order his release, Joel had qualified for Special Immigrant Juvenile status in April. That means a state family court judge and the federal government had agreed he had been “abused, abandoned, or neglected” by one or both parents and thus might qualify for lawful permanent residency.

“ICE’s actions of arresting a child – with legal status reserved for particularly vulnerable minors – at a routine check-in is breathtakingly cruel and a clear violation of U.S. immigration law and the Constitution,” said Elizabeth Gyori, senior staff attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union. “When the Trump administration punishes children with lawful status for following the rules, it turns our justice system into a farce.”

Once a person qualifies for SIJS, it can take years to secure a green card due to a backlog tens of thousands of people long, and a limited number of these types of visas issued each year.

The Biden administration had halted deportations of these young people saying DHS’s resources were better spent on “higher priority cases, such as noncitizens who pose a threat to national security, public safety, and border security.” But the Trump administration withdrew that directive in June, prompting immigrants rights groups to sue, in a case that is ongoing.

“Many young people with special immigrant status are getting detained all over the country,” said Beth Baltimore, the Deputy Director of Legal Services Center at The Door. “It’s not something we’ve seen before.”

The Trump administration, Baltimore said, is effectively “saying they don’t have any protection — that’s it. Sorry.”

Nicole Brownstein, a spokesperson for the city’s Education Department, said the agency was “very saddened” about Joel’s arrest. “This is a student who should be at school today with his classmates,” she added.

An expanding dragnet

While immigration courthouse arrests in New York City have targeted adults and unfolded in public courthouses often in view of court watchers and photographers, ICE agents have arrested dozens of children behind closed doors at ICE check-ins, which occur either inside the agency’s offices at 26 Federal Plaza, or at one of three satellite offices ICE operates through a subcontractor.

ICE data from the Deportation Data Project shows federal agents in the New York City area arrested 48 children in June and July as part of a wave of immigration arrests across the country. Of those children, 32 have already been deported. More than 60 children born after 2008 between late January and late July. More recent data is not yet available, in part because of the government shutdown.

Among them have been a number of public school students including Mamadou Mouctar Diallo, Joselyn Chipantiza-Sisalema, Dylan Lopez Contreras.

In August, the summer THE CITY reported on the case of a 6-year-old and her mother who were arrested at an ICE check-in at 26 Federal Plaza. The mother and daughter were swiftly sent to a family detention in Texas before they were deported to Ecuador days later.The Trump administration has announced other efforts to target young immigrants, including a new effort targeting unaccompanied immigrant youth turning 18, encouraging them to leave the country with cash payments of $2,500.

Indiana submits federal funding flexibility request to Trump administration

2025-10-20T20:29:43+00:00

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Indiana has submitted its plan to use hundreds of millions of dollars in federal education funds with fewer restrictions to the U.S. Department of Education, state officials said Monday.

If approved, the plan would allow Indiana to merge several federal Title programs — funds currently earmarked for certain programs and groups of students — into a block grant. The state would then be able to spend that block grant on other priorities permissible under the Every Student Succeeds Act, the main federal K-12 law.

The controversial proposal, which the state submitted Friday, would also allow districts to spend their federal funding in the same way.

Doing so would reduce the administrative burden associated with federal funding, the state has said, and free up more staff to work directly with students. But advocates have expressed concern that the plan would cut funding for certain groups of students, like English learners and rural students.

Other aspects of the plan would substitute federal accountability standards for the state’s A-F school accountability model — the latest version of which is currently in development.

The plan would also redirect a fund meant for low-performing schools to other nearby schools, even if those schools are not low-performing.

This aspect of the plan has drawn criticism from education advocates who say that students who can’t transfer to another school would be hurt by the loss of School Improvement Grants. The state has denied that redirecting the funds would amount to abandoning low-performing schools.

The priorities of the plan as submitted are largely unchanged from the first draft the state presented in July.

Indiana’s proposal is similar to waiver proposals submitted by Iowa and Oklahoma after a call by the Trump administration to “return education to states.” Indiana officials have heeded that call.

“Indiana continues to lead the nation in education and innovation,” Gov. Mike Braun said in a statement Monday. “We can best support Hoosier students when we return education to the states, empower parents with high-quality educational options, get red tape out of the way for educators, and focus on improvement for every student.”

The U.S. Department of Education has 120 days to respond to Indiana’s request, according to the state. If approved, the plan would go into effect for the 2026-27 school year.

Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. Contact her at aappleton@chalkbeat.org.

NYC sues Trump officials for revoking $47 million in school grants over trans student protections

2025-10-16T19:24:48+00:00

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New York City has filed a lawsuit to restore $47 million in grant funding the Trump administration yanked from schools because city officials refused to scrap policies that protect transgender students.

In cancelling the grants issued through the U.S. Department of Education’s Magnet School Assistance Program, the federal government put “politics before public schools,” claimed the complaint filed Wednesday in federal court.

“The Department’s unprecedented actions — undertaken without notice, investigation, hearing, or opportunity to respond, and without a valid substantive basis — represent a blatant attempt to avoid the exacting process required by law,” the lawsuit stated.

The magnet grant funding supports 19 schools across the city and is designed to help spur racial integration by launching a range of new programs, including in journalism, math, science, performing arts, and civic activism, according to the complaint. Grants for school districts in Chicago and Fairfax, Virginia, were also canceled.

The grant cancellation marked the first known attempt by the Trump administration to revoke funding for the city’s public schools because of its contested interpretation of civil rights laws. The lawsuit notes that the feds had routinely signed off on the city’s compliance with federal law in past years and appeared to be using the grants as leverage to pressure the city on unrelated policies designed to protect trans students.

Officials for the U.S. Education Department said the lawsuit did not have merit. They reiterated the administration’s position that the grant could not be certified because the city’s policies allowing transgender students to use facilities in line with their gender identity violate Title IX, prohibiting sex discrimination at educational institutions receiving federal funding. The Trump administration has mounted an aggressive push to roll back protections for transgender students and has targeted districts in Virginia, Colorado, and Illinois.

The city’s legal challenge is notable because Mayor Eric Adams previously signaled that he agreed with the Trump administration’s position that the city’s protections go too far. After federal officials threatened to cancel the grant funding, Adams railed against city policies that allow transgender students to use bathrooms and participate in sports teams in accordance with their gender identity.

A press release from City Hall announcing the lawsuit included a statement from the schools chancellor and the city’s top lawyer, but not the mayor. (City Hall spokesperson Zachary Nosanchuk noted that the mayor posted on X in support of the case.)

“While many talk about change, the Adams administration has always been about real, meaningful action — which means challenging the federal government’s unfair, illegal, and actually impossible demand for New York City Public Schools to change a state law,” Nosanchuk said in a statement.

The fight over the funding began a month ago, when the federal government threatened to withhold funding over Title IX violations, giving the city a week to agree to adopting “biology-based definitions for the words ‘male’ and ‘female.’”

The city asked for more time, but Trump administration officials said they needed to certify compliance before its fiscal year ended on Sept. 30. When the city did not meet the deadline to overhaul its policies, the federal government announced it would not release the grant money.

City lawyers contend that the Trump administration failed to follow rules for revoking funding under Title IX, including offering an opportunity for a hearing, communicating findings on the record, and filing reports with congress.

“Department actions are a clear attempted end run around the Congressional directive that school funding not be pulled on a whim,” the suit claims. It asks the court to restore the $47 million grant and block the Trump administration from canceling it in the future.

Roughly 7,700 New York City students attend the affected schools, which are predominantly Black and Latino, according to the suit. City officials previously said about 8,500 students would be affected; a spokesperson did not explain the discrepancy.

The mayor’s desire to rethink the city’s policies on transgender students drew fresh attention to his ties to the Trump administration, which has reportedly considered offering him a job. Last year, the Justice Department successfully pressed federal prosecutors to drop corruption charges against Adams.

This week, the mayor said he is mulling three “dream jobs,” though he has not said what they are.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Illinois launches its own Blue Ribbon Schools program after feds cut long-standing initiative

2025-10-15T18:05:22+00:00

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Illinois is awarding blue ribbons to 28 public and private schools despite a decision by the Trump administration to cancel the long-standing program recognizing high-performing schools.

The newly-launched Governor’s Blue Ribbon Schools Program recognized schools that went through the application process for the U.S. Department of Education’s National Blue Ribbon Schools Program before it was abruptly canceled in late August.

Prescott Elementary in Roscoe Village is the only public school in Chicago to earn recognition. It was named a National Blue Ribbon school in 2019. Three private elementary schools — Our Lady of Mount Carmel Academy, St. Matthias School, and St. Therese Chinese Catholic School — also received the honors.

Illinois follows several other states, including Connecticut, Maryland, Nebraska, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, and Wyoming, launching local versions of the national Blue Ribbon program, which was created in 1982 under then-President Ronald Reagan’s administration.

Erin Roche, the principal of Prescott, said the school was preparing to do a celebration with the students when he heard the National Blue Ribbon program was cut in late August.

He said although it’s unfortunate the national program ended, it’s “very, very impressive” Illinois is continuing to honor high-performing schools. At Prescott, Roche said the school prioritizes “old-fashioned good teaching and learning” and puts students at the center of its work.

“We want them to be strong readers and curious about math and science,” Roche said. “We also want them to be good friends and know right from wrong, and know how to solve social problems and be introspective as well as contribute to community.”

William H. Prescott Elementary School won a National Blue Ribbon in 2019 and was set to be honored again this year before the Trump administration canceled the program. Now, Illinois is launching a Governor's Blue Ribbon Schools Program.

Under the National Blue Ribbon program, schools could be recognized for overall high academic achievement or for success closing performance gaps between different groups of students. Winning a blue ribbon from the federal government did not come with any financial rewards, but did bring positive attention to schools, helping them attract families, recruit teachers, and sometimes boost private fundraising.

In eliminating the program, federal officials said states should continue the program and would have flexibility to determine criteria for selection.

Gov. JB Pritzker’s office said in a press release that the 2025 recipients had already been selected by the U.S. Department of Education before the program ended.

Going forward, the Illinois State Board of Education, which in the past nominated schools for the national program, will manage the Governor’s Blue Ribbon Schools application process.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

New York City schools lead in solar power. A federal law could slow solar development.

2025-10-14T20:20:55+00:00

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With solar panels on 126 school building rooftops, New York City schools are central to the city and state’s green energy goals and generate the majority of solar energy installed on municipal buildings.

These solar arrays produce nearly 20 megawatts — enough to power about 24,000 city households — and make up roughly 80% of the overall solar power capacity from city buildings. They are also critical to achieving a local mandate of 150 megawatts of solar citywide by 2035.

Experts say school solar projects not only cut energy costs and reduce emissions, but also ease students’ climate anxiety and strengthen community resilience during emergencies. More than half of FEMA’s approximately 67,500 designated shelters nationwide are located in schools, making it more urgent to equip them with solar storage systems that can provide backup power during outages.

Solar has even entered the mayoral race: Zohran Mamdani has highlighted it in his green schools platform, one of the first education policies the mayoral frontrunner put forth.

But solar projects now face uncertainty under the “one big beautiful bill” signed by President Donald Trump in July. Under the law, federal tax credits that have incentivized and funded school solar initiatives are set to expire by the end of 2027, leaving districts scrambling to initiate and complete projects before the phaseout. Tax credits generally pay for 30% of installation costs.

It’s one of several blows to school systems that want to be more green, including cuts to federal grants for electric school buses.

Advocates are urging schools to start new solar projects before the end of this calendar year and finish by June 2026 — a window that would allow them to circumvent many of the new restrictions in the law that, they warn, could make it harder for schools to qualify for credits.

“ What I don’t want to have happen is for schools to unwittingly move forward, be counting on that credit, and then be surprised if one of these new rules trips them up,” said Sara Ross, cofounder of UndauntedK12, a nonprofit that supports K-12 public schools’ transition to clean energy.

New York City schools are pressing ahead on solar work, with an additional 90 solar projects in progress and another 200 schools under review for future installations, officials said.

“New York City Public Schools remains committed to sustainability and climate education for our students,” Education Department spokesperson Jenna Lyle said in a statement.

Department officials did not comment directly on the federal legislation, saying they are “monitoring this situation.”

To pay for the 126 school solar installations, Education Department officials said the city invested $30 million in capital funds and an additional $100 million through long-term power purchase agreements, an arrangement where private developers pay for installation of a solar system and schools agree to pay the developer for the electricity they use, typically over a long period of time.

Schools’ role in transitioning to clean energy

Although they account for just 1% of total carbon emissions in the United States, school buildings produce an estimated range of 41 million to 72 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to researchers at Brown University. They also consume a significant amount of energy.

In 2019, New York’s roughly 1,400 school facilities accounted for more than a third of all energy consumption across city-owned buildings.

The city’s Education Department already spends about $275 million per year on energy, a figure experts say is likely to grow as utility costs rise and aging school facilities face mounting stress from extreme weather tied to climate change.

But schools’ size — they make up 36% of all city-owned square footage — also make them ideal stewards of clean energy.

“Schools have a lot of land, they have a lot of assets,” said Ross. “When sunlight is hitting those every day, why wouldn’t we be harvesting that sunlight to reduce our costs?”

P.S. 125 in Queens has solar panels on its rooftop.

New York schools installed their first rooftop solar arrays nearly 20 years ago, Education Department officials said. But the program’s expansion didn’t gain momentum until 2021, with installations ramping up in the last five years.

The city is currently developing solar and battery storage systems at five schools in partnership with several city agencies. Among them are P.S. 48 and M.S. 424 in the Bronx, both of which double as emergency shelters.

Education department officials said they could not provide an estimate of how much money completed projects have saved to date, but added that in the long term, the city will have saved more than it has spent on solar installation. Ross said those savings can help schools afford other needs.

“ School budgets are tight, and fundamentally, solar is the cheapest energy around, so when schools install solar, they can reduce their operating costs,” Ross said. “That frees up more dollars to go back into their core mission — whether that’s improving other parts of their facility, having more dollars for student programming, and increasing teacher salaries.”

Karin Goldmark, founder of GreenLink Education, an organization that helps schools take climate action, noted that rising temperatures will contribute to higher energy costs.

“It’s worth it to do solar, particularly if you have 1,400 buildings and you’re paying energy bills for all of them,” she said.

Goldmark said that in the summer, when school buildings sit largely empty, they can sell excess solar power back to utilities, thereby providing clean energy that offsets the need for gas-fired plants.

“That’s an important contribution to the energy transition the country needs to make, and it generates revenue for schools in the process,” she said.

Funding school solar projects

Installing solar panels can deliver major long-term savings, but the upfront costs are steep and often out of reach for school districts, especially those that want to install large-scale solar projects like in New York City.

The Inflation Reduction Act, signed under former President Joe Biden, changed that by opening up clean energy tax credits to schools in 2022. Although schools are tax-exempt and cannot claim credits directly, an “elective pay” provision allowed them to convert those credits into cash reimbursements. That effectively created new funding for solar and other clean energy projects — with virtually no cap, Ross said.

“We have spent the last three years shouting this from every rooftop, going to conferences of superintendents and business officers and school board members and facilities leaders and really spreading the word about this massive opportunity to have the federal government defray the cost of these very energy and cost-efficient machines,” she said.

Now, UndauntedK12 and other clean energy advocates are working to educate schools on how to make the most of the tax credits before they disappear.

In addition to the narrow timeline for initiating and completing school solar projects, a process experts note can take years, “the one big beautiful bill” imposes a new set of restrictions schools must follow in order to qualify for tax credits.

One requirement, for example, mandates that a share of solar panels be sourced and assembled domestically.

Solar developer Jared Lang said that the rule is driving up costs, since domestic solar developers have long relied on imported materials after Chinese manufacturers flooded the American market years ago.

“All the new tax credit requirements forcing us to use domestically assembled panels are basically costing us about 50% more,” said Lang, who also owns Housing Sustainability Advisors, which supports affordable housing owners in moving to solar.

“It’s really going to affect how much solar we can build,” Lang said.

Ross said that while the expiration of tax credits will make the transition to solar more challenging, schools funded projects before the Inflation Reduction Act created new clean energy incentives.

She pointed to power purchase agreements as a longstanding, affordable method for schools to launch solar projects.

“There’s a path forward, even for districts that don’t have money,” Ross said.

Seyma Bayram is a New York City-based journalist.

Education Department layoffs hit offices that oversee special education and civil rights enforcement

2025-10-13T21:08:33+00:00

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WASHINGTON (AP) — A new round of layoffs at the Education Department is depleting an agency that was hit hard in the Trump administration’s previous mass firings, threatening new disruption to the nation’s students and schools in areas from special education to civil rights enforcement and after-school programs.

The Trump administration started laying off 466 Education Department staffers on Friday amid mass firings across the government meant to pressure Democratic lawmakers over the federal shutdown. The layoffs would cut the agency’s workforce by nearly a fifth and leave it reduced by more than half its size when President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20.

The cuts play into Trump’s broader plan to shut down the Education Department and parcel its operations to other agencies. Over the summer, the department started handing off its adult education and workforce programs to the Department of Labor, and it previously said it was negotiating an agreement to pass its $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio to the Treasury Department.

Department officials have not released details on the layoffs and did not immediately respond to a request for comment. AFGE Local 252, a union that represents more than 2,700 department workers, said information from employees indicates cuts will decimate several offices within the agency.

All workers except a small number of top officials are being fired at the office that implements the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, a federal law that ensures millions of students with disabilities get support from their schools, the union said. Unknown numbers are being fired at the Office for Civil Rights, which investigates complaints of discrimination at the nation’s schools and universities.

The layoffs would eliminate or heavily deplete teams that oversee the flow of grant funding to schools across the nation, the union said. It hits the office that oversees Title I funding for the country’s low-income schools along with the team that manages 21st Century Community Learning Centers, the primary federal funding source for after-school and summer learning programs.

It will also hit an office that oversees TRIO, a set of programs that help low-income students pursue college, and another that oversees federal funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

In a statement, union president Rachel Gittleman said the new reductions, on top of previous layoffs, will “double down on the harm to K-12 students, students with disabilities, first generation college students, low-income students, teachers and local education boards.”

The Education Department had about 4,100 employees when Trump took office. After the new layoffs, it would be down to fewer than 2,000. Earlier layoffs in March had roughly halved the department, but some employees were hired back after officials decided they had cut too deep.

The new layoffs drew condemnation from a range of education organizations.

The deep cuts “make it impossible to do what’s laid out in federal law,” said Katy Neas, CEO of The Arc of the United States, a disability rights advocacy group. “If you have no people, you can’t monitor states.”

Neas, who served as deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services during the Biden administration, said that federal employees play an especially valuable role providing consistency and expertise when there is turnover in state and district leadership. Most people want to do right by students with disabilities, she said, but some don’t know what the law requires or allow limited resources to get in the way.

The cuts are more damaging when coupled with cuts to the Office for Civil Rights, she said. Even before the latest round of layoffs, local Arc chapters reported that parents have become more reluctant to file complaints because they believe no one will listen or investigate. More schools are delaying evaluations or steering parents toward plans that provide fewer services, Neas said.

“The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act still stands, and everything kids are entitled to still stands,” Neas said. “It will just be harder to get them.”

Although states design their own competitions to distribute federal funding for 21st Century Community Learning Centers, the small team of federal officials provided guidance and support “that is absolutely essential,” said Jodi Grant, executive director of the Afterschool Alliance.

“Firing that team is shocking, devastating, utterly without any basis, and it threatens to cause lasting harm,” Grant said in a statement.

The government’s latest layoffs are being challenged in court by the American Federation of Government Employees and other national labor unions. Their suit, filed in San Francisco, said the government’s budgeting and personnel offices overstepped their authority by ordering agencies to carry out layoffs in response to the shutdown.

In a court filing, the Trump administration said the executive branch has wide discretion to reduce the federal workforce. It said the unions could not prove they were harmed by the layoffs because employees would not actually be separated for another 30 to 60 days after receiving notice.

Chalkbeat National Editor Erica Meltzer contributed reporting.

Dozens of Education Department employees face layoffs as shutdown continues

2025-10-11T00:00:56+00:00

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House budget office said Friday that mass firings of federal workers have started, an attempt by President Donald Trump’s administration to exert more pressure on Democratic lawmakers as the government shutdown dragged into a 10th day.

Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, said on the social media site X that the “RIFs have begun,” referring to reduction-in-force plans aimed at reducing the size of the federal government.

A spokesperson for the budget office said the reductions are “substantial” but did not offer more details.

Employees at the departments of Education, Treasury, Homeland Security and Health and Human Services, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, were set to receive the notices, according to spokespeople for the agencies and union representatives for federal workers.

Rachel Gittleman, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents Education Department employees, said the Trump administration is laying off almost all employees below the director level at the agency’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. The office was down to about 165 employees after mass firings that nearly halved the Education Department in March.

The office oversees much of the department’s grantmaking activities to school districts. It supports work ranging from helping schools affected by natural disasters to allocating funding for teacher training and disbursing money allocated by Congress.

Fewer than 10 employees were being terminated at the Education Department’s Office of Communications and Outreach. It will eliminate one of two teams remaining in the office after the March layoffs.

The union said it’s unclear exactly how many Education Department staffers are being laid off as part of mass firings across the federal government Friday.

The aggressive move by Trump’s budget office goes far beyond what usually happens in a government shutdown and escalates an already politically toxic dynamic between the White House and Congress. Talks to end the shutdown are almost nonexistent.

Typically, federal workers are furloughed but restored to their jobs once the shutdown ends, traditionally with back pay. Some 750,000 employees are expected to be furloughed during the shutdown, officials have said.

Some leading Republicans were highly critical of the administration’s actions.

“I strongly oppose OMB Director Russ Vought’s attempt to permanently lay off federal workers who have been furloughed due to a completely unnecessary government shutdown,” said Maine Sen. Susan Collins, the chair of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, who blamed the federal closure on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

For his part, Schumer said the blame for the layoffs rested with Trump.

“Let’s be blunt: Nobody’s forcing Trump and Vought to do this,” Schumer said. “They don’t have to do it; they want to. They’re callously choosing to hurt people — the workers who protect our country, inspect our food, respond when disasters strike. This is deliberate chaos.”

The White House had previewed its tactics shortly before the government shutdown began on Oct. 1, telling all federal agencies to submit their reduction-in-force plans to the budget office for its review.

It said reduction-in-force plans could apply to federal programs whose funding would lapse in a government shutdown, are otherwise not funded and are “not consistent with the President’s priorities.”

Education Department layoffs hit offices that oversee special education, civil rights enforcement

The American Federation of Government Employees asked a federal judge to halt the firings, calling the action an abuse of power designed to punish workers and pressure Congress.

“It is disgraceful that the Trump administration has used the government shutdown as an excuse to illegally fire thousands of workers who provide critical services to communities across the country,” AFGE President Everett Kelley said in a statement.

Democrats have tried to call the administration’s bluff, arguing the firings could be illegal, and had seemed bolstered by the fact that the White House had not immediately pursued the layoffs once the shutdown began.

But Trump signaled earlier this week that job cuts could be coming in “four or five days.”

“If this keeps going on, it’ll be substantial, and a lot of those jobs will never come back,” he said Tuesday in the Oval Office as he met with Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney.

Meanwhile, the halls of the Capitol were quiet Friday, the 10th day of the shutdown, with both the House and the Senate out of Washington and both sides digging in for a protracted shutdown fight. Senate Republicans have tried repeatedly to cajole Democratic holdouts to vote for a stopgap bill to reopen the government, but Democrats have refused as they hold out for a firm commitment to extend health care benefits.

Some Republicans on Capitol Hill have suggested that Vought’s threats of mass layoffs have been unhelpful to bipartisan talks on the funding standoff.

And the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, said in a statement that the “shutdown does not give Trump or Vought new, special powers” to lay off workers.

“This is nothing new, and no one should be intimidated by these crooks,” she added.

Still, there was no sign that the top Democratic and Republican Senate leaders were even talking about a way to solve the impasse. Instead, Senate Majority Leader John Thune continued to try to peel away centrist Democrats who may be willing to cross party lines as the shutdown pain drags on.

“It’s time for them to get a backbone,” Thune, a South Dakota Republican, said during a news conference.

The Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan organization that tracks federal service, says more than 200,000 civil servants have left since the start of this administration in January due to earlier firings, retirements and deferred resignation offers.

“These unnecessary and misguided reductions in force will further hollow out our federal government, rob it of critical expertise and hobble its capacity to effectively serve the public,” said the organization’s president and CEO, Max Stier.

___

AP Education Writers Collin Binkley and Annie Ma and AP writers Kevin Freking, Matthew Daly, Rebecca Santana and Mike Stobbe contributed to this report.

Trump gave the Labor Department more control over career-technical education. Will students benefit?

2025-10-03T22:58:16+00:00

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Career and technical education is a lot more than learning to weld or draw blood.

It can expose kids to jobs they didn’t even know existed and help them figure out what they want to do with their lives.

It can also teach students concrete skills they can use on the job right after they graduate high school. But high school programs haven’t always lined up well with what employers are looking for, or prepared students for jobs available in their communities.

The Trump administration wants to see career and technical education, or CTE, focus more on preparing students for jobs. To do that, last month it took money and programs that have been under the Education Department’s purview for decades and moved them to the Labor Department, which has historically focused on short-term job training for unemployed adults.

Trump officials say the end goal is to boost participation in the labor force, especially for the millions of young adults who are not in school or working. The change, they say, will reduce the administrative burden on states and make it easier for states to centralize their own workforce development programs.

‘The kids everyone forgot’: The faltering post-pandemic push to reengage teens and young adults not in school, college, or the workforce

Jason Tyszko, a senior vice president for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, said there could be some short-term disruption, as well as some hard questions to work through. But if the end result is more accountability for programs and more young people in jobs, that would be a “win for families and learners.”

“We think the more alignment, the better,” Tyszko said.

But many career-technical education advocates, as well as Democrats in Congress, say this move is another step toward dismantling the Education Department. They fear there are simply too few staff in both the Education and Labor Departments to manage the transition, and they worry the change will end up steering kids toward short-term job training with fewer paths to advancement.

High school CTE programs can help create “a springboard for lifelong opportunity,” said Amy Loyd, who served as the assistant secretary over career and technical education during the Biden administration.

For example, students who take advanced manufacturing classes in high school can set themselves up for admission to a trade school, while teens who take college-level health care classes can often earn credit toward an associate or bachelor’s degree.

“One of the challenges that we in the career and technical education community have been working to combat is the still-pervasive stigma of career and technical education being for ‘those kids,’” she said. “I think by focusing on the shorter-term credentials we are again rebuilding this narrative that CTE is for kids who are not college material.”

Two agencies in charge of career-technical education

The Education Department says this change is in line with the president’s April 23 executive order calling for the consolidation of “fragmented Federal workforce development programs that are too disconnected from propelling workers into secure, well-paying, and high-need American jobs.”

In May, Trump officials signed an interagency agreement that maintains the Education Department’s oversight authority for career-technical education, but hands over the day-to-day operations to the Labor Department. That includes distributing over $1 billion to states in Perkins funding, which pays for CTE programs in K-12 schools and community colleges, making compliance monitoring visits, and helping states and schools with technical questions.

High-ranking Democrats in Congress have said this transfer of funds and responsibilities is illegal, and the proposal should have gone to Congress. Others in the career and technical education field say the Education and Labor Departments already work closely together and this move isn’t necessary to improve collaboration.

Anna Chappelle, the executive director of the Alabama Workforce Board, hopes what happens at the federal level resembles the transformation happening in her state. The share of young people who were not working or in school in Alabama was the highest in the nation in 2019, according to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

In recent years, Alabama has worked to align its education and workforce programs, and has seen the share of people age 16 or over who are employed or actively looking for work tick up. In June, the Trump administration tapped Nick Moore, who led that work under Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, as the second-in-command for CTE at the Education Department.

Alabama launched a state apprenticeship agency that offers tools to connect young people to training opportunities. The state also developed a detailed system for identifying which job credentials and career pathways are most valuable in different parts of the state — whether that’s the space industry in the north or the maritime industry in the south.

“When we have this separation, that keeps states siloed,” Chappelle said. “Being able to have credentials of value and workforce pathways in Labor, that is going to help people get the education and training that they need.”

Philadelphia's Thomas Edison High School leads a welding demonstration at a CTE summer program. Skilled trades programs in high schools can set students up for apprenticeships or admission at a technical college.

She thinks the federal change will lead to more money for training and education programs, “rather than the bureaucratic red tape.”

But Loyd, who is now the CEO of All4Ed, a nonprofit that advocates for equity in education, worries there aren’t enough federal staffers left to provide the kind of “personalized and intensive” guidance her team of 80 once did.

The office “was really leaning into helping states think differently, to not just rubber stamp what always has been,” Loyd said. “I worry that all of that capacity-building, all of that partnership with the field, is ultimately hindered and gutted.”

The Education Department said it would send some staff to the Labor Department, but how many is unclear. The Education Department did not respond to questions. Chalkbeat received out-of-office automatic replies from multiple spokespeople due to the government shutdown.

Some advocates fear states and schools won’t get clear answers to questions about whether new ideas are allowable under the law or how to make sure CTE programs serve all students.

“If we had a question about kids with disabilities and CTE, we knew where to go,” said Braden Goetz, who served in the CTE office during the Biden administration and is now a senior policy advisor at the Center on Education and Labor at New America, a left-leaning think tank. “I’m concerned that in the Department of Labor they won’t have those resources.”

Some fear overemphasis on short-term job training

The Education Department has said its agreement with the Labor Department will integrate education and job training programs “with an employment first perspective, which places employers at the forefront of workforce development programs.” The document mentions “upskilling” students — a term that’s typically used to refer to retraining adults in the workforce, not kids in K-12 schools.

Some education advocates worry that sends the wrong messages to students about the purpose of career-technical education programs, and harkens back to a time when many low-income Black and Latino kids were tracked to lower-level vocational classes.

Loyd, the former Biden official, worries that folding CTE into the Labor Department’s work will lead to an overemphasis on helping students earn industry credentials that often don’t translate to higher wages in the workforce.

Federal law requires CTE programs to prepare students for jobs that are “high-skill, high-wage, or in-demand.” A heavier focus on short-term job outcomes could steer more students toward in-demand jobs that don’t pay very well, Loyd said, such as certified nursing assistants or home health care aides.

“I love programs like phlebotomy programs in high schools where students can earn meaningful certificates that can get them a job,” Loyd said. “But again, this should be a stepping stone,” she said, not the end game.

Tyszko, of the Commerce Foundation, says time will tell if kids get steered like that. He notes that the Labor Department does have experience connecting young people with apprenticeships, which generally do help workers earn more than their peers.

“They’re very capable of supporting a set of activities in the field that promote career awareness and aren’t directly tied to job placement,” Tyszko said, adding it would be wrong to assume the Labor Department’s focus on short-term job training “would entirely consume” career-technical education.

The Labor Department also may be better positioned to hold CTE programs accountable for their outcomes in the workforce, and whether they actually match what employers want and need, he said.

Chappelle in Alabama says what programs kids have access to also affects whether they can make an informed decision about their path. The kind and quality of CTE programs offered at schools varies a lot depending on where kids live, and states and businesses share in the responsibility of closing any gaps.

“We are all working together to make sure we have what’s available for our students and our citizens to go up in life,” she said. “We’re not trying to keep people down. That doesn’t serve anybody.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

These Bronx students’ U.S. Capitol tour was canceled by the shutdown. Then AOC stepped in.

2025-10-02T20:29:53+00:00

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Eighth graders from Zeta Charter Schools in the Bronx were scheduled to tour the U.S. Capitol building Wednesday morning when the federal government shut down, placing their tour guide on furlough and leaving the disappointed students with no way to get inside the building.

But the group soon got an unforgettable civics lesson when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez offered to step in as a replacement tour guide.

Ocasio-Cortez, who represents swaths of Queens and the Bronx where some Zeta students live, had already planned to greet the group on their tour. When she found out the tour was canceled, she decided to get the students into the building the only way she could: by personally escorting them.

“It was a totally different direction than we thought the day would go,” said Dan Rojas, the school manager and one of the chaperones. “We knew that what we had planned was not going to happen in the way that we had planned it many months ago. It turned very, very quickly into, actually, a much better experience.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gives a high-five to a Zeta student during their U.S. Capitol tour.

The adult chaperones were immediately star-struck when Ocasio-Cortez, a 35-year-old Democrat representing Queens and the Bronx who has shot to national prominence as a vocal leader of the party’s progressive wing, strolled up to the group outside the Capitol, Rojas said.

But few of the 12- and 13-year-old students recognized her.

“Before we actually met her, I had no idea who she was,” said 13-year-old Jordan Allen.

But Allen was excited to learn about Ocasio-Cortez’s backstory of growing up in the Bronx and Westchester County and working as an organizer and bartender before unseating a powerful incumbent, Joe Crowley, at age 28 in the Democratic primary.

The impromptu tour hit many of the major spots in the Capitol building, including the Rotunda and Senate chambers, where lawmakers just hours earlier had reached an impasse over health care funding and sent the government into a shutdown.

Seeing the Capitol, eerily empty without its normal tours, in the immediate aftermath of the shutdown — the first in seven years — made the Zeta students feel like they were witnessing history.

“It was like seeing America change in live,” said Allen. “It was amazing.”

The tour led by Ocasio-Cortez, often referred to as AOC, also included some stops that aren’t on the normal visitor agenda.

The tour focused on the long history of discrimination facing female lawmakers — and their creativity in overcoming it. Ocasio-Cortez took the students to a reading room only accessible to members of Congress that serves as a gathering place for the women.

She told them about Patsy Mink, the first woman of color elected to the House of Representatives, and Shirley Chisholm, the Brooklyn native and first Black woman in Congress whose portrait now hangs in the Capitol.

For 12-year-old Maia Gilliam, it was seeing Ocasio-Cortez in action that made the biggest impression.

“It was inspiring to see such a powerful woman,” she said.

“She made the tour a lot more interesting,” added 13-year-old Zachary Martinez.

Ocasio-Cortez wanted the students to leave the tour feeling like they were welcome at the Capitol — a building she reminded them is called “the people’s house” — said Karla Santillan, a spokesperson for Ocasio-Cortez who joined the tour.

Some Zeta students left feeling hopeful they can make a positive change at a moment when political divisions have never felt sharper and the federal government has ground to a halt.

“I feel like all these old people are often not making good decisions, and it’s really affecting us a lot,” said Martinez. “But as time goes on, people of our generation, or even people coming close to our generation, they’re making big changes. They’re changing the world. They’re making it better for everyone.”

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

‘Absolutely devastating’: Rural schools say $100K visa fee could make it hard to hire teachers

2025-10-01T19:32:06+00:00

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The Kuspuk School District owns two small planes and employs a pilot to stay connected with schools spread across 12,000 square miles along the Kuskokwim River in western Alaska.

And to keep those schools staffed, the remote school district works with its own immigration attorney.

Some 60% of Kuspuk’s certified teachers come from the Philippines. That includes all of the special education teachers and all of the teachers at five of the district’s eight currently operating schools. (A ninth school is temporarily closed.)

Most of those teachers hold J1 visas, a cultural exchange visa that allows people to work in the United States for up to five years before returning to their home countries. But a growing number in Kuspuk and in rural districts around the United States hold H1B visas, which allow for longer-term work. That matters in tight-knit rural communities, where connection is key but teacher turnover is high.

Last month, President Donald Trump issued an order to impose a $100,000 fee on new applications for H1B visas, part of a broader effort to restrict immigration and preserve opportunities for Americans. The order focuses on tech sector jobs, which account for the majority of H1B visa holders and where critics argue that foreign-born engineers and programmers have crowded out Americans.

Proponents say that companies can afford the fee if they’re bringing on truly exceptional employees who will generate more than that in profit — otherwise those jobs should go to American workers. But the fee could make it nearly impossible for rural and underserved districts like Kuspuk to hire enough teachers for hard-to-fill jobs, district leaders said.

Kuspuk Superintendent Madeline Aguillard said many of the American teachers she hires are inexperienced new graduates, and many don’t stay long. Grow-your-own programs that train people from small communities to be teachers hold promise, but they’re slow. The international teachers who work in her district’s far-flung villages aren’t a short-term stop gap, she said. They’re a critical part of the long-term workforce — and they stay for years.

“We are able to hire more experienced teachers,” she said. “I have multiple teachers with doctorates. They max out our pay scale. They are top-notch teachers that we can put in front of our kids.”

Susan Nedza, superintendent of the Hoonah district in southeast Alaska, recently hired three teachers on H1B visas to fill positions in special education and high school English and math that had sat vacant for an entire school year. A $100,000 fee would be “absolutely devastating,” she said.

“No district could afford that even for one teacher, much less multiple teachers,” Nedza said. “We would have so many students without teachers.”

Teachers on visas make up a relatively small share of the total teacher workforce and of the H1B program. Federal data analyzed by Chalkbeat indicates at least 2,000 H1B visas sponsored by school districts and charter networks were approved this year. Those teachers work for large districts like New York City, Dallas, Chicago, and Denver, and they work in one-room schoolhouses in Montana.

Many of them work in hard-to-fill positions like secondary math and science, bilingual education, and special education, but in rural districts they can be found in nearly every role, including working as principals in Kuspuk. The large majority of them come from the Philippines, where teachers are fluent in English and the educational system is similar to the United States.

While J1 teachers typically work with an agency that helps place them at no cost to the district, school districts already take on considerable administrative costs and fees — anywhere from $3,000 to $20,000 per teacher candidate, according to superintendents — to sponsor H1B visas. Some superintendents say it’s worth it to hire teachers who can work in their districts long-term. In Alaska, districts have been forced to use the H1B program after J1 agencies stopped placing teachers in school districts off the road system, where amenities, housing, and access to medical care are scarce.

The School Superintendents Association is hoping to secure an exemption from the fee for K-12 educators. The proclamation allows Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to waive the fee for certain sectors if she finds that it is “in the national interest and does not pose a threat to the security or welfare of the United States.”

“Clearly I’m biased, but I think making sure all children have access to quality educators would be of the greatest national interest,” said Tara Thomas, senior government affairs manager for the superintendents’ group.

Whatever the dynamics are in the tech sector, they don’t apply to rural schools, said Tobin Novasio, superintendent of the Hardin school district in Montana. He’s not outsourcing American jobs or undercutting wages, he said. On the contrary, teachers on visas tend to earn more because they have more experience and education.

“The mindset is that this is a Silicon Valley thing where this is a quarter-million-a-year engineering job, and they’re bringing in an Indian engineer to do it for half the price,” Novasio said. “That’s just not the situation.”

Hardin serves about 1,800 students, most of them on the Crow and Northern Cheyenne reservations. Out of 150 certified teachers, 27 are on J1 visas and two are on H1B visas, with a third H1B visa pending. Fully half of Novasio’s special education teachers are visa holders.

“The value of the H1B and the reason we’ve been trying to find pathways, is that once they’re here, they can stay here and stay part of the community,” Novasio said.

Districts are working to increase the supply of American teachers, he said, but it’s a slow process.

“We’ve been very deliberate in building relationships with our local colleges,” Novasio said. “We’ve started a para pathway and have four people in that program. We’re starting an apprenticeship program. We increased our starting salary by $5,000. We’re trying everything we can.”

H1B visas allow districts more stability

The Kuspuk School District had always struggled with staffing, Aguillard said, but Alaska schools used to be able to draw teachers from the lower 48 with higher salaries, even if they didn’t stay long.

But other states have raised their pay — and milk doesn’t cost $16 a gallon in Washington State. The villages in the Kuspuk district are only accessible by plane or, in the summer, by boat. Some villages don’t have stores, and some teachers have to live in their schools because there isn’t any other housing.

“It’s difficult to get here, it’s difficult to live here, it’s difficult to function here,” Aguillard said.

She hired her first international teacher after she had four of five special education teacher positions open and didn’t receive a single application from an American teacher. That teacher, Dale Ebcas, came from the Philippines and is still with the district six years later. He works with preschool through second grade students at Joseph and Olinga Gregory Elementary School in Kalskgag and helps with case management for high school students. With support from Aguillard and the district’s immigration attorney, he was able to convert his J1 visa to an H1B, a difficult process.

It wasn’t an easy adjustment — “I had never seen snow,” he said — but Ebcas said he was drawn to the small class sizes, low student-teacher ratios, and opportunities for professional growth, along with a competitive pay scale. He fully intended to return to the Philippines at the end of his tour, but as he approached his fifth year, the district didn’t want to lose him and he didn’t want to leave his students.

“It takes time to build relationships and trust,” Ebcas said. “It’s really important for the students here. With the community being so welcoming, I really wanted to continue and help the kids.”

Ebcas hopes the federal government considers the needs of rural and underserved schools.

“If exemptions are not given, it would really close the doors for international teachers who bring their skills and knowledge,” he said.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica atemeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago Public Schools should sue feds over magnet school money, teachers union president says

2025-09-30T21:18:08+00:00

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Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates said Tuesday Chicago Public Schools should “absolutely” sue the U.S. Department of Education over its decision last week to cut millions in federal magnet school funding from the district.

Trump administration officials said $5.8 million will not be awarded to Chicago in the coming year under the Magnet Schools Assistance Program and $17.5 million would not be awarded for the remaining years of the district’s grants. The move created an $8 million hole in the current school year’s CPS budget, district officials said.

The federal government’s decision stems from a dispute over whether Chicago’s school district is violating federal civil rights laws with its efforts to help improve Black student achievement and protect transgender students’ rights.

“This time period is going to require an entire encyclopedia of strategies employed at every turn, because that’s what it’s going to take to both resist, challenge, and win in this moment,” Davis Gates said. “So yes, they have to sue. That is their duty to sue.”

A CPS spokesperson said the district is “considering all legal options” regarding the magnet school money.

A spokesperson for Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson echoed the district, noting that with CPS’ current budgetary constraints, “every single dollar counts.” Johnson said earlier this year that he would take the Trump administration to court if it took federal funding away from CPS because of the district’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

About two weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Education’s acting assistant secretary of civil rights Craig Trainor told CPS he would not certify the district’s eligibility for the magnet school money unless the district abolished its Black Student Success Plan and changed its policies on transgender students by Sept. 23.

Chicago called the demand “unreasonable and untenable” and requested an additional 30 days to respond. The district’s interim general counsel Elizabeth K. Barton also argued that the federal department was violating its own procedures and “investigatory process” given that there are still two open investigations into both the Black Student Success Plan and Chicago’s compliance with Title IX as it relates to transgender students.

Both of the matters under investigation are requirements of Illinois law, putting Chicago’s school system between a “rock and a hard place,” Davis Gates noted. A 2024 state law requires Chicago’s school board to create a Black Student Achievement Committee and make a plan for serving Black students. Illinois Human Rights Law also requires schools to allow transgender students access to facilities that correspond to their gender identity.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Colorado colleges serving students of color will lose millions from Trump cuts

2025-09-26T21:37:40+00:00

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Colorado universities enrolling the highest percentages of students of color will lose millions of dollars after a recent decision by the Trump administration.

The U.S. Department of Education announced on Sept. 10 that it will end $350 million in discretionary funding for Minority-Serving Institutions, known as MSIs. These colleges are federally designated as MSIs because they serve a greater percentage of students of color, including Native American and Hispanic students.

The Trump administration plans to redirect the funding to Historically Black Colleges and Universities and tribal colleges, which are different from the MSI designations because they’re identified based on the history of the institution or who controls them.

Colorado does not have any HBCUs or tribal colleges. It has 15 public MSIs, six of which receive federal grant funding. The decision means schools won’t get the money promised to them starting in October.

Statewide, the cuts will most affect two-year colleges and schools that enroll more students from rural communities. School leaders say they’re still evaluating how the cuts will affect student services.

For instance, the Colorado Community College System will lose about $5.1 million at three of its seven colleges designated as HSIs, according to school officials.

Morgan Community College, Lamar Community College, and Pueblo Community College use the money for programs that include student retention and student support efforts, said Fiona Lytle, system spokesperson.

The Education Department news release said federal officials believe the grant programs discriminate by benefitting schools that meet racial or ethnic quotas.

“To further our commitment to ending discrimination in all forms across federally supported programs, the Department will no longer award Minority-Serving Institution grants that discriminate by restricting eligibility to institutions that meet government-mandated racial quotas,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon.

Congress created different MSI designations over several decades. For example, the Hispanic-Serving Institution designation, created in 1992, is given to schools that enroll at least 25% Hispanic students.

Advocates say the federal grants help students of color and students from lower-income families who are less likely to go to college. They also argue the money benefits all students, including rural and white students, at many schools that enroll almost every student that applies.

The Trump administration and conservative activists have wanted to end these programs. The grant programs already face cuts in the 2026 fiscal year budget. And a lawsuit by a conservative group argues Hispanic-Serving Institution funding is discriminatory.

Colorado has five universities that are designated HSIs — the University of Northern Colorado, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Colorado State University Pueblo, Adams State University, and the University of Colorado Denver. Fort Lewis College is the state’s only Native American-Serving Nontribal Institution.

Of those four-year schools, Adams State, CSU Pueblo, and Fort Lewis College receive federal funds.

Adams State, the state’s oldest HSI, was recently awarded a $3 million grant over five years in 2024 to improve college preparation, student advising, and cultural understanding.

University officials plan to seek additional support from private and individual donors, as well as other financial sources.

“This challenge only strengthens our resolve,” said Linda Relyea, an Adams State University spokesperson.

CSU Pueblo became a Hispanic-Serving Institution in 2007 and has three active grants that will be discontinued. The school will lose $3.6 million over the next three years.

The school can use 2024 money to continue providing student services into fall 2026, but spokesperson Gena Alfonso said in an email that “the remaining resources are not sufficient to continue programs at their current level.”

“We are in the process of identifying the most critical student support services, such as advising, tutoring, and other programs that support student retention and graduation,” she said.

Fort Lewis College received its designation in 2008. School spokesperson Nardy Bickel said the federal money supports Southwest Colorado’s Four Corners region and Indigenous students.

The school won’t be able to spend $2.27 million in the final two years of a five-year grant.

The money supports the entire campus, including a summer and first-year support program that helps students get acclimated to college, she said. The money also helps keep students on track to graduating.

“For many of these students, FLC provides a crucial path to an affordable four-year college degree while remaining close to their families and communities,” Bickel said. “We are disappointed about the decision to cut funding to this program, which will be felt deeply across our campus.”

And Colorado Mountain College, which offers two- and four-year degree programs, doesn’t receive federal money as a designated HSI, but did submit a $5 million grant proposal this year. A school spokesperson said he does not expect the application will be considered.

Correction: Oct. 1, 2025: The original story omitted Metropolitan State University of Denver from the list of public MSIs in the state. There are 15 public MSIs in the state.

Sept. 26, 2025: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified Arapahoe Community College as an HSI. The story also has been updated to reflect that the Colorado Community College System’s HSIs will lose $5.1 million, not $5.6 million.

Chicago Public Schools loses millions in magnet school money amid dispute over diversity efforts with Trump administration

2025-09-24T22:35:47+00:00

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Chicago will lose millions in federal funding for magnet schools this year due to a dispute with the U.S. Department of Education over how the district serves Black and transgender students.

As a result, Chicago Public Schools now faces a $8 million hole in its current $10.2 billion budget, district officials said Wednesday. Some of that total is carryover funds from last year.

The federal government and CPS operate on different fiscal calendars, with Chicago’s starting July 1 and the federal government starting Oct. 1.

The new multimillion dollar budget hole comes as Chicago continues to be a target of the Trump administration on various policy issues, including diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in public schools.

Despite the funding fight, CPS is continuing to forge ahead with a Black Student Success Plan it rolled out in February and a Black Student Achievement Committee mandated by Illinois law. The district is also maintaining compliance with the Illinois Human Rights Act requirements to allow transgender students access to bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond with their gender identity. Both are subject to ongoing investigations by the Trump administration.

Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary of civil rights in the U.S. Department of Education, sent a letter last Tuesday to CPS demanding the district abolish its Black Student Success Plan and change its policies on transgender students by last Friday in order to maintain eligibility for the Magnet Schools Assistance Program. Chicago was awarded a $15 million grant under the program in 2024 and $14.3 million in 2022.

These grants support personalized learning and science, technology, and arts programming at six elementary schools, according to grant applications from 2022 and 2024.

CPS responded to the Education Department on Friday requesting more information and an additional 30 days.

Trainor said the district’s arguments were “unpersuasive” in an email late Saturday and gave CPS until Tuesday to comply.

A letter sent by CPS’ Acting General Counsel Elizabeth K. Barton, ahead of Trainor’s new Tuesday deadline, said the department “failed to cite any violation of law or provide any evidence of harm done to our students.” She also noted the two ongoing investigations and called the exchange a “one-sided process” that “overly disregards” the federal department’s formal process and procedures.

“Without due process or an opportunity to engage in meaningful remediation, CPS cannot implement the proposed remedial actions at this time,” Barton wrote.

On Wednesday morning, Department of Education spokesperson Julie Hartman said Trainor would cut off the magnet school grant for Chicago, New York City, and Fairfax, Virginia. The latter two have maintained policies allowing transgender students the right to use facilities that correspond with their gender identity.

“The Department will not rubber-stamp civil rights compliance for New York, Chicago, and Fairfax while they blatantly discriminate against students based on race and sex,” Hartman said. “If these entities are willing to risk federal funding to continue their illegal activity, that decision falls squarely on them.”

CPS did not comment on the department’s decision.

Although the cancellation of this federal grant is small compared to the overall $10.2 billion CPS budget, it comes at a precarious time for the district. Late last week, the bond rating agency Fitch revised the district’s outlook to negative, which can affect the school system’s ability to borrow money at reasonable interest rates. And this week, officials said they’re considering a restructure of middle management in order to save money.

Joe Ferguson, president of the nonpartisan budget watchdog Civic Federation, said the amount is small enough that CPS should be able to find a way to make up for the loss of federal grant money and CPS should be applauded for “remaining true to its principles and remaining true to the legal obligations they have under state law.”

But, he said Chicago should have a contingency plan in case more federal money gets withheld.

“This sharpens the notion that the specter is real,” he said.

“I don’t think people understand what it would mean in the worst case scenario if a substantial portion of the remaining federal money was pulled away,” Ferguson said. “It would be useful for CPS to simply do kind of the austerity doomsday exercise of what they would have to undertake, and what that would look like, and how that would impact schools and families and children.”

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Dylan, Bronx high schooler detained by ICE, loses asylum case, faces possible deportation

2025-09-24T21:45:54+00:00

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Dylan Lopez Contreras, a Bronx high schooler arrested by federal immigration agents in May, was denied asylum and ordered to be deported back to Venezuela, his attorneys said Wednesday.

His legal team from the New York Legal Assistance Group, or NYLAG, plans to appeal the decision made Tuesday by a Newark immigration judge and push for his release on bond. The appeal will stop the deportation process, and Dylan will remain detained in a Pennsylvania facility.

Dylan’s lawyers have 30 days to file the appeal.

“It’s certainly not the outcome we were hoping for and not the outcome he deserves,” said Lauren Kostes, a NYLAG attorney, adding that evidence was “overlooked and ignored.”

Four months ago, Dylan showed up at his routine immigration court date at Manhattan’s 26 Federal Plaza and became the first known public school student to be detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

Dylan’s case, which was first reported by Chalkbeat, offered a stark example of how the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown affected New York City school communities — and how educators have tried to reassure families with mounting deportation fears. Dylan’s school, ELLIS Preparatory Academy rallied to his defense, connecting his family with legal support, raising money, and sending him letters, while also trying to reassure its other students who feel threatened by the current political climate.

Several schools across the five boroughs have since grappled with detentions of their own students, including Grover Cleveland High School in Queens, Brooklyn’s Frontiers High School, and P.S. 89, a Queens elementary school that saw a 6-year-old student deported to Ecuador.

The Education Department said they could not share how many public school students have been detained by ICE, especially since they do not track or ask families to disclose country of origin or immigration status.

But hundreds of young people in New York City have been caught in the federal government’s wave of arrests: About 275 people in New York City who were born in 2004 or later have been detained by ICE, according to government data provided by ICE in response to a public records request to the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by Chalkbeat.

Whether someone wins or loses their asylum case, Kostes said, might depend on the luck of the draw in terms of their judge, which “demonstrates a lot of the problems with the immigration system.” In Dylan’s case, his judge had a 95.8% denial rate, Kostes said, noting that the judge’s ruling was not public.

“You can have wildly different interpretations of the same law by different judges,” she said, “so different judges can have wildly different grant rates.”

Immigration Judge Maria Akalski, who oversaw Dylan’s case, had a much higher asylum denial rate than judges nationwide, according to an analysis of 2019-24 data by the nonprofit Transactional Records Clearinghouse.

The appeal process might also be challenging.

The Trump administration has fired many immigration judges, Kostes said, and many in the legal community worry that the firings have targeted those who tended to have higher asylum-granting rates.

Crackdown brings immigration slowdown

When Dylan made the trek from Venezuela across the U.S. border in April 2024 he requested asylum and was permitted to enter the country and work under a Biden-era humanitarian program. The 20-year-old made his way to New York, enrolling in ELLIS Prep, which typically serves older students who have been in the country less than a year. Dylan picked up a part-time job as a delivery worker to help his mom who worked multiple jobs. He helped her save enough money so they and Dylan’s two younger siblings could move out of a city-run shelter and into their own apartment.

Kostes said Dylan did everything right but was still being punished.

“Even with cases that should win under the law, they are not winning,” Kostes said. “It’s doing what it’s supposed to do, which is convincing people to leave and convincing people to stop fighting and convincing people to get out. And that’s heartbreaking and horrifying because they’re getting sent back to places they fled when they had a right to stay.”

President Donald Trump campaigned on promises of mass deportations and has made immigration a focal point of his second term. In his inaugural address, he pledged to return “millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.” In the months that followed, many immigrants without legal status and without criminal histories — like Dylan — have been detained across the nation at routine immigration hearings.

Department of Homeland Security officials have criticized former President Joseph Biden’s policy allowing immigrants like Dylan to enter the country, saying previously, “ICE is now following the law and placing these illegal aliens in expedited removal, as they always should have been.”

The federal government’s approach has dramatically slowed immigration into the country. In July, the number of immigrants unlawfully crossing the U.S.-Mexico sank to a historic low. New York City saw the effects in its shelter system: In the same month, the rate of new migrants entering city-run shelters dropped to fewer than 100 per week from a high of more than 4,000 per week two years before.

A photo of Dylan Lopez Contreras before he was detained by ICE agents.

Dylan has spent most of these past months in Pennsylvania’s Moshannon Valley Processing Center, the largest detention facility in the Northeast. Many have been calling for the facility’s closure, following a federal complaint filed over insufficient medical and mental health care and inadequate translation services.

Dylan recently told Chalkbeat he remained committed to learning English and continued to hold out hope to pursue a college degree in the U.S.

“This unjust detention has frustrated and paralyzed my education and effort momentarily,” Dylan wrote in Spanish a few weeks ago in response to questions Chalkbeat sent through his legal team. “But it won’t make me give up on working hard toward my educational goals.”

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy atazimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Trump administration push to cut support for English learners turns spotlight on states

2025-09-23T23:28:16+00:00

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Even if the federal government renounces its role in educating English learners, Cheruba Sophia Chavez knows what’s in the fine print.

A federal toolkit helped the New Orleans educator support new immigrant students. Federal guidance helped her train teachers to avoid common violations of English learners’ civil rights. And U.S. Department of Education resources have shown her how Louisiana’s instruction stacks up with other states.

So when the Trump administration reduced the office that oversees English learners to a single person, revoked that guidance, and took the toolkits offline, she pointed teachers to the expansive footnotes on the now-rescinded guidance chock full of “precedent, and law, and case studies, and rulings.”

“Those are still standing,” said Chavez, who has worked with English learners for over a decade. “Our obligation to serve these children remains the same.”

Under President Donald Trump, the federal government is systematically retreating from helping educate English learners and protecting their civil rights. In addition to yanking federal guidance and resources, the president is seeking to eliminate all $890 million in federal funding for English language acquisition programs in schools.

All of that puts more responsibility on states and local schools to educate English learners. Their track record of doing so is mixed.

Some say states can and will fill the void, and may do a better job without federal oversight. But many educators and experts fear that setup will leave English learners and their families behind. Services and protections for English learners will become more scattershot, they say, and students whose rights are violated may have no recourse other than to file lawsuits — an expensive and uncertain proposition for families and schools.

Already, about 1 in 5 teachers say their school rarely or never meets the needs of children learning English, according to a 2023 nationally representative survey.

“We have states who will make sure that the students keep receiving the resources and the instruction that English learners need, but we have other states who aren’t necessarily going to,” said Montserrat Garibay, who led the federal Office of English Language Acquisition during the Biden administration. She worries “we’re going to go back to the ’90s ‘sink or swim’ methods, where you have students who are not going to learn the language and are going to fail.”

Should the feds pay for students to learn English?

All schools must help English learners overcome language barriers so they can access a meaningful education. It’s a requirement under the 1974 landmark Supreme Court ruling in Lau v. Nichols.

Right now, states get federal Title III dollars for English language acquisition programs based on census counts of children learning English. School districts apply for that money, and states award it based on how many English learners and immigrant students they enroll.

Immigrants are generally more successful in the U.S. if they acquire English skills, said Jessica Vaughan, the director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that advocates for lower rates of immigration. And public school programs that teach kids English are “an investment that’s generally understood as worth it,” Vaughan said, especially for younger children.

But she understands why taxpayers might be “frustrated by having to bear the cost” of programs for older children who arrive with little formal schooling and may need more intensive support.

To Vaughan, the Trump administration is doing the right thing by moving away from influencing what states provide with offers of federal funding.

“I would expect states to support local communities that are dealing with it,” she said. “States are going to have to work this out within their own budget.”

States already dictate what kind of instruction they offer to English learners and how much native language support schools provide.

Jonathan Butcher, a senior research fellow in education policy at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, says eliminating Title III funding would rightly reduce the federal government’s role in education.

“I don’t believe that we need Title III in order to have programs for English language learners,” Butcher said. States should be able to identify on their own which student needs deserve the most support, he said. “This is the kind of freedom that we should be giving state officials.”

And if a state chose not to spend anything to help English learners become proficient in English? “There would be a civil rights lawsuit,” Butcher said.

Others say the federal government sets immigration policy, so it should help states pay for the K-12 education of new arrivals, and that the federal government has a vested interest in helping English learners — most of whom were born in the U.S.

“If they’re not well-equipped with the skills that they need for the 21st century, who’s going to pay for my retirement?” said Garibay, the former Biden official. “I hate to say that it’s an economy thing, but it is.”

Congress currently puts $890 million annually toward English language acquisition. That Title III money is meant to pay for extra support like after-school tutoring, family outreach, and teacher training.

But many educators and advocates say those federal funds have failed to keep pace with the growth of the English learner population and fall far short of what schools need.

Still, Trump has proposed eliminating Title III funds from the fiscal year 2026 budget, a move that his administration says would “end overreach from Washington.” After the president signed an executive order designating English as the nation’s official language, Trump officials said the English language acquisition program should be eliminated because it “actually deemphasizes English primacy” and encourages bilingualism.

The broader political climate is also a factor. Many children from immigrant families are experiencing heightened stress and fear as the Trump administration’s deportation campaign intensifies. That makes it harder to show up regularly to school and stay focused in class.

Federal law and court decisions say states can choose what kind of instruction they provide to English learners. Some states lean more heavily on helping children become proficient in their native language first, which research has shown can help them transfer skills and develop stronger English abilities.

The Senate appropriations committee passed a bipartisan bill that would hold Title III funding steady at $890 million. But the House appropriations committee approved the elimination of Title III, citing “funding constraints.”

Leslie Villegas, a senior policy analyst at New America, a left-leaning think tank, says ending Title III would be a general funding cut that would “hurt all students.” And it would put educators in “a really difficult position to make hard choices that they shouldn’t have to make.”

Becky Trammell, a special education teacher in Minneapolis Public Schools, knows what that’s like.

Recent waves of immigration brought more Spanish-speaking families to her elementary school, in addition to Somali- and Hmong-speakers. After splitting an English learner teacher with other schools, her school now has two full-time.

But Trammell said she still has to rely on apps and phone interpretation services that don’t always work.

Students at a New York City high school for newcomers work on a history essay using resources in the hallway.

Once, a Somali-speaking parent thought she was being pranked because the phone interpreter didn’t actually speak Somali. And one of her students told her he doesn’t like the phone translation app, so she reads it aloud in her broken Spanish.

“We’re already working at a deficit when it comes to staffing and money,” Trammell said. If her school were to lose Title III dollars, she worries “they’re going to cut positions or what little supports we do have, we’re not going to have those.”

What are key state policies for English learners?

States already set many of their own policies for educating English learners and see a wide range of outcomes.

English learners in Texas, for example, are much more likely to be enrolled in bilingual education programs where they receive native language support than in California, which has a complicated history with English-only instruction. Texas’ English learners consistently outperform English learners in California on key national tests — though state test scores in Texas have raised concerns.

With less federal involvement and oversight, Villegas at New America worries families of English learners and their advocates will find it harder to seek redress for their complaints.

“Leaving it up to the discretion of states to do that, that’s really troubling,” she said. That is “not the point of civil rights.”

The Trump administration has released several school districts, including Boston and Newark, New Jersey from settlement agreements meant to correct inadequate services for English learners. In Newark, the end of government monitoring came just months after the Biden administration flagged the district for failing to consistently use qualified interpreters.

Chavez, the Louisiana educator, fears that if Title III goes away, there will be less federal monitoring, and that English learners will only get their needs met if they make up a “critical mass” at a school.

One moment sticks in her memory: When Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry was sworn in last year, one of the Republican’s first actions was to veto a new policy Chavez and other educators lobbied for to help more English learners get their diplomas.

“We know their posture toward English learners,” Chavez said, adding that she and others aren’t “looking to the state for anything affirmative to protect our children and to close the disparate outcomes for English learners in our state.”

Still, advocates for English learners say there is a lot states can do.

They can enshrine the Supreme Court ruling that gave children the right to receive a free public education regardless of their immigration status in state law, as Illinois and Massachusetts recently did. Or they can bolster requirements for how English learners are taught in their state, as Michigan recently did.

School boards could also adopt policies that add oversight and consequences if goals aren’t met, Villegas said.

When Garibay worked in the federal English learner office, she saw “a lot of great work” happening in dual language programs and parent engagement.

“That gives me a lot of hope,” she said. “In these very uncertain times, the most important work happens at the local level.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago Public Schools rebuffs Trump administration’s threat to cut magnet school funding over diversity efforts

2025-09-19T23:39:03+00:00

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Chicago Public Schools told the U.S. Department of Education Friday it would not be walking back the rollout of its Black Student Success Plan or changing its policies related to transgender students until a federal investigation is completed.

A letter sent by CPS’ Acting General Counsel Elizabeth K. Barton called the department’s demands outlined in a letter the Trump administration sent Tuesday as “unreasonable and untenable” and requested 30 days to respond. Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary of civil rights in the U.S. Department of Education, said his office found CPS violated anti-discrimination laws and would lose grant dollars through the Magnet School Assistance Program.

But Barton wrote back that the district’s “policies and practices are prescribed by state and local law, and CPS remains in compliance with those laws.”

The feds demanded CPS abolish the Black Student Success Plan it unveiled in February and issue a statement saying it will require students to compete in sports or use locker rooms and bathroom facilities based on their biological sex at birth, among other demands.

But Illinois law conflicts on both fronts, Barton noted. The state issued guidance in March that outlines compliance with the Illinois Human Rights Law, including that schools must allow transgender students access to facilities that correspond to their gender identity. Separately, an Illinois law passed in 2024 requires the Chicago school board to have a Black Student Achievement Committee and plan for serving Black students.

In its response, CPS argues that the Trump administration “made a legal conclusion” without completing an investigation.

“Moreover, the Department has not articulated whether any specific students have been harmed by the Black Students Success Plan, as the Plan has not yet been implemented,” Barton wrote.

Chicago school board members told Chalkbeat they are forging ahead with plans to announce the members of the Black Student Achievement Committee next week.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

After Charlie Kirk’s assassination, new scrutiny on what teachers can — and should — say

2025-09-17T19:04:13+00:00

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America’s teachers have been put on notice.

If they posted “despicable comments” about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, they could lose their state certification, Florida Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas warned in a letter. Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters said the same. Texas says it is investigating some 180 complaints about teachers’ social media posts about Kirk’s death.

Republicans have highlighted the most extreme responses to Kirk’s public murder — “1 Nazi down” one teacher is alleged to have posted — to fuel their message that public schools have become deeply out of step with broader American values. South Carolina Republican Rep. Nancy Mace urged the Education Department to withhold federal funding from schools that don’t take action against teachers who “glorify or justify political violence.”

In a video posted to X, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the “small but vocal fringe” celebrating Kirk’s killing nonetheless represented “further evidence of the profound crisis in our classrooms and on our campuses.”

“We must end the ideological capture that causes our schools and universities to become cradles of intolerance and political violence,” she said as she praised schools that had taken action against teachers. McMahon urged others to do the same.

This intense scrutiny of educators’ online comments at the federal and state level has reignited debate about educators’ free speech rights inside and outside the classroom. But it has also underscored tensions between the many roles teachers inhabit: role model, facilitator, change maker, public employee, and private citizen.

What teachers can say legally isn’t the only factor they should consider, said Derek Black, a University of South Carolina professor and constitutional law expert.

“There are things I don’t say at Thanksgiving, and it’s not because I think I’m wrong, but because the peace of the Thanksgiving dinner is more important and the peace of the family is more important,” he said.

But scholars who study education and polarization say that with many states already restricting how teachers approach contentious issues, the current climate only makes it more likely they’ll avoid those topics entirely. That would be to the detriment of their students, they said.

“These efforts to just dismiss people are very dangerous,” said John Rogers, a professor at the University of California Los Angeles. “These efforts have a strong political motivation behind them, and I worry that it will contribute to the feeling that teachers already have that they just shouldn’t say anything.”

Kirk loomed large in young people’s political lives

Kirk, 31, founded Turning Point USA, arguably the most influential organization for young conservatives. Kirk espoused gun rights and Christianity and opposed abortion and LGBTQ rights. He called the passage of the Civil Rights Act a “mistake.”

The group claims some 800 college chapters and more than 1,000 high school chapters, and is credited with helping President Donald Trump secure his 2024 victory by gaining votes among young men.

Politically aware students of all stripes knew Kirk from video clips of his campus debates that circulated widely on platforms such as TikTok. Kirk was participating in just such an event at Utah Valley University when he was shot and killed Sept. 10. Many students encountered gruesome uncensored video of the shooting on their phones.

In social media groups where teachers gather, some wondered about how to guide conversation among students with divergent views about Kirk’s legacy, or whether they really had any wisdom to impart when they themselves were reeling from another act of political violence. Some veteran teachers advised their colleagues to just stick to the lesson plan.

Not everyone had complicated feelings, though. Some people took to social media to say they were glad Kirk was dead. Some said they weren’t sad. Some of those people were teachers.

Right-wing influencers urged their followers to find and report anyone celebrating Kirk’s death. Those targeted have included people who condemned the killing but used harsh words to describe Kirk.

The firings and suspensions soon followed.

Teachers are on leave pending investigations in dozens of districts, according to media reports. One Wisconsin associate principal received death threats after she was falsely linked to a social media post about Kirk. A Massachusetts school requested extra police patrols.

Social media has made controversial private speech public

The U.S. Supreme Court in 1968 sided with a teacher who was fired after writing a letter to the editor complaining about a school board tax proposal, establishing that teachers have most of the free speech rights enjoyed by other citizens when they’re speaking outside the classroom.

But teachers still can face consequences when their speech affects their school or district in a negative way, and conflict can occur across the political spectrum. The Supreme Court declined to take up the case of a Massachusetts teacher fired over social media posts mocking transgender people. But an appeals court sided with a teacher who was disciplined for displaying a Make America Great Again hat during a diversity training.

“People of more conservative persuasion believe that progressive educators have been policing the conversation to their liking over the last five or six years,” Black said.

Technology has blurred the line between public and private speech. Screenshots and sloppy privacy settings convert opinions that once might have stayed among friends into viral content.

That new online reality has led the National Education Association to caution teachers against offensive and vitriolic posts in its guide to social media use. The union highlighted when a Milwaukee teacher was placed on leave after posting that it was “awesome” that conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh was dying of cancer.

“By engaging in personal and vicious commentary, the teacher became an easy target for local outrage,” the guide says.

Now that outrage is nationalized. Vice President J.D. Vance called for investigations into foundations that support left-leaning nonprofits, and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi suggested that refusing service to Kirk’s supporters may violate their civil rights.

Are teachers being threatened or given fair rules?

But does that zeal translate into clear and fair boundaries for teachers outside their classrooms?

Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, said Kirk’s killing horrified him, and he doesn’t condone comments celebrating it. But personal opinions expressed on social media — especially on pages that teachers may have believed were private — don’t mean a teacher can’t be professional in the classroom.

“The overwhelming majority of teachers saw [the letter] as a threat and not a guidance document,” he said.

Nathalia Medina, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Education, said it was “false and misleading” to suggest the state was trying to silence teachers.

“Florida makes it clear: free speech does not excuse unprofessional conduct,” she wrote in an email. “Teachers are entrusted with positions of authority and responsibility over children. The Commissioner is committed to ensuring the educational environment is not impacted by inappropriate statements made outside the classroom.”

Medina did not respond to questions about how Florida defines inappropriate statements.

Public school is often children’s first experience of government and civil society, said Robert Kim, executive director of the Education Law Center. When teachers face severe consequences for private speech, that tells students they don’t really have free speech.

“That’s not the kind of civil liberties education we want to give students or perpetuate as a society,” Kim said.

To encourage student debate, teachers need a plan

Teachers’ classroom speech has also been under more scrutiny in recent years.

Eighteen states have laws restricting how teachers talk about race, history, and sexuality in the classroom or limiting discussion of so-called divisive concepts. Even in states with no restrictive laws, teachers report self-censoring to avoid conflict.

And school districts are spending less time on professional development to help teachers guide students through discussions of contentious issues respectfully, according to research by Rogers of UCLA and Joseph Kahne, a professor at University of California Riverside.

In 2018, more than half of school districts in politically mixed areas conducted such training. By 2022, it was just a third, and it may be even fewer now.

The classroom can be a space where students learn to disagree respectfully, bring evidence to support their arguments, and remain open to other opinions, Kahne said. Teachers can talk about their political views if they have a careful plan for how to share that information and make sure that disagreement is not just tolerated but welcome.

But Kahne fears more teachers will simply steer clear of current events and contentious issues, meaning that students get less practice in the skills that might move us toward a better political climate.

“That is the fundamental goal of a public school in a democratic society,” he said. “The fear is that as partisanship ramps up, more people will try to use the public school as a place to promote their perspective, but perhaps even more that as tensions rise, public schools will just avoid dealing with these issues.”

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Dylan, estudiante de secundaria detenido por ICE, revela cómo es su vida ahora

2025-09-17T18:20:02+00:00

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Tres meses de detención han pasado factura a Dylan López Contreras, el estudiante de la ciudad de Nueva York arrestado por agentes federales de inmigración en mayo.

Pero las cartas de sus compañeros de clase han sido un bálsamo, dijo en una entrevista con Chalkbeat, la primera que da desde su arresto.

“Las cartas que he recibido y el apoyo que he recibido me han ayudado a seguir adelante”, dijo el joven de 20 años en español, respondiendo preguntas por escrito a través de sus abogados del New York Legal Assistance Group (Grupo de Asistencia Legal de Nueva York). “Aun así, es extremadamente estresante y angustiante. He visto peleas, racismo e incluso muerte. Me han dado muchas pesadillas”.

Dylan se entregó en la frontera estadounidense en abril de 2024 tras un viaje desde Venezuela. Solicitó asilo y se le permitió entrar al país. Se dirigió a Nueva York y se matriculó en la Academia Preparatoria ELLIS. Fue arrestado por el Servicio de Inmigración y Control de Aduanas (ICE, por sus siglas en inglés) en mayo en una cita judicial de rutina y ha pasado la mayor parte de los últimos tres meses en el centro de procesamiento Moshannon Valley Processing Center en Pensilvania, el centro de detención más grande del noreste.

Chalkbeat dio a conocer la noticia del arresto de Dylan, lo cual se convirtió en un claro ejemplo de cómo la represión migratoria de la administración Trump se está extendiendo en la ciudad de Nueva York y está afectando a los estudiantes. Chalkbeat también ha relatado cómo los estudiantes y el personal de ELLIS, una escuela secundaria del Bronx que admite a estudiantes con menos de un año en el país, se movilizaron en su defensa, recaudando fondos para su caso y enviándole cartas.

Dylan López Contreras en una fotografía sin fecha antes de ser detenido.

“Nunca imaginé que recibiría tanto apoyo”, escribió Dylan. “Sinceramente, fue una sensación muy hermosa y llena de esperanza”.

El caso de asilo de Dylan continua el lunes, 15 de septiembre, cuando regresará a la corte de inmigración. [Durante una audiencia el viernes 13 de junio, un juez de inmigración aceptó una moción para reconsiderar la desestimación indebida del caso de asilo de Dylan.]

Cientos de jóvenes neoyorquinos detenidos este año

Cuando el presidente Donald Trump asumió el cargo, prometió “iniciar el proceso de devolver a millones y millones de extranjeros delincuentes a sus lugares de origen”. Meses después, muchos inmigrantes —quienes, como Dylan, se encontraban sin estatus legal, pero tampoco tenían antecedentes penales— fueron detenidos en el número 26 de Federal Plaza, en el Bajo Manhattan, y en otros juzgados de todo el país durante audiencias de inmigración rutinarias.

La administración Trump ha descrito esto como un enfoque de “sentido común”, que les permite encontrar sus objetivos sin tener que dispersarse por los barrios, y dijo que están cumpliendo la promesa de deportaciones masivas que impulsaron la victoria de la campaña de Trump.

Los funcionarios del Departamento de Seguridad Nacional no respondieron de inmediato a las preguntas sobre el caso de Dylan o Moshannon Valley.

Desde que ICE detuvo a Dylan en mayo, se han producido otros arrestos y deportaciones de jóvenes de la ciudad de Nueva York.

El Departamento de Educación de la ciudad dijo que no podía compartir cuántos estudiantes de escuelas públicas han sido detenidos por ICE, especialmente porque no rastrean ni piden a las familias que revelen el país de origen o el estado migratorio.

Este año, ICE ha detenido a unas 275 personas en la ciudad de Nueva York nacidas en 2004 o después, según datos gubernamentales proporcionados por ICE en respuesta a una solicitud de registros públicos al Deportation Data Project (Proyecto de Datos de Deportación) y analizados por Chalkbeat. La mayoría de los detenidos eran hombres, y aproximadamente dos tercios provenían de Latinoamérica. Entre los detenidos se encontraban niños de tres y cuatro años provenientes de Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras y Venezuela.

En agosto, una niña de 6 años que asistía a la escuela pública 89 de Queens fue deportada a Ecuador con su madre, según informes. Ese mismo mes, Mamadou Mouctar, un joven guineano de 20 años que asistía a la escuela secundaria Frontiers de Brooklyn, fue detenido. Al igual que en el caso de Dylan, educadores y líderes municipales expresaron su apoyo.

Del aula del Bronx a la celda de detención

Dylan dijo que sus días en Moshannon Valley han sido monótonos: recuentos de personas a altas horas de la noche y a primera hora de la mañana, y tratando de hacer poco ruido para evitar que las otras 60 personas en su celda le dijeran que guardara silencio. (Cientos de manifestantes se congregaron cerca del centro el mes pasado exigiendo su cierre, tras una denuncia federal presentada contra Moshannon Valley por atención médica y de salud mental insuficiente y servicios de traducción inadecuados.)

“La mayoría de la gente aquí está deprimida”, escribió Dylan. “Pasan la mayor parte del tiempo hablando de su última o próxima decisión judicial, de su familia en el exterior o de la injusticia de estar aquí”.

Dylan López Contreras se dedicó a sus estudios y a apoyar a su familia.

Antes del arresto de Dylan, estaba concentrado en sus estudios y en ayudar a su madre a cuidar a sus dos hermanos menores, en parte gracias a lo que ganaba trabajando como repartidor. Estaba ocupado haciendo amigos en ELLIS, compartiendo arepas con ellos durante el almuerzo. Dijo que esperaba seguir aprendiendo inglés para obtener una licenciatura en Estados Unidos, una meta que, según él, aún planea alcanzar.

“Esta detención injusta ha frustrado y paralizado mi educación y mis esfuerzos momentáneamente”, dijo Dylan. “Pero no me hará renunciar a esforzarme por alcanzar mis metas educativas”.

Dylan sueña con el día en que pueda ser liberado y abrazar a su familia, comer bien y dormir bien. También bromeó sobre tener que recuperar terreno perdido tras perder su racha de 230 días en Duolingo.

Dylan dijo que quería que Trump recordara que los inmigrantes contribuyen a la economía y argumentó que el dinero gastado en medidas drásticas contra la inmigración podría destinarse a otros ámbitos, como la educación. A principios del verano, el Congreso aprobó un proyecto de ley de gastos que destinó una cantidad sin precedentes de $170 mil millones a la aplicación de la ley migratoria.

“Entiendo el punto de vista del presidente al querer que su país sea mejor, pero debe recordar que esta es una nación de migrantes, construida por ellos”, escribió.

Es posible que la audiencia de Dylan no tenga un resultado inmediato, según informaron miembros de su equipo legal. El equipo planea presentar testimonio detallado y pruebas que respalden su solicitud de asilo, lo que podría extender el plazo para una resolución. También existe la posibilidad de que permanezca detenido si obtiene el asilo, pero el Departamento de Seguridad Nacional presenta una apelación. También podría apelar si se le deniega el asilo.

Esta traducción fue proporcionada por The Latino Spirit, en asociación con el Centro de Medios Cooperativos de la Universidad Estatal de Montclair, y cuenta con el apoyo financiero del Consorcio de Información Cívica de NJ. La historia fue escrita originalmente en inglés por Chalkbeat y se vuelve a publicar en virtud de un acuerdo especial para compartir contenido a través del Servicio de noticias de traducción al español de NJ News Commons.

This translation was provided by The Latino Spirit, in association with the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University and is financially supported by the NJ Civic Information Consortium. The story was originally written in English by Chalkbeat and is republished under a special content sharing agreement through the NJ News Commons Spanish Translation News Service.

Two mothers and Trump’s Head Start rule: Child care shortages meet anti-immigrant politics

2025-09-15T12:00:00+00:00

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Solangel, a Venezuelan immigrant, is the mother of a 7-year-old who blossomed at the Head Start preschool program he attended in a Denver suburb.

He received therapy for his speech delay, came out of his shy shell, and grew to love books.

Her son is a U.S. citizen. But Solangel fears the Trump administration’s plan to bar undocumented children from the federally funded preschool program will hurt other children.

“They are little ones,” she said. “They need their education.”

But Carmit Poyras, a Sacramento mother, supports the new Head Start policy. She believes undocumented immigrants may be taking seats from citizens like her 7-year-old son, who spent around two years on Head Start waitlists when he was younger.

Poyras sees providing Head Start to undocumented children as irresponsible largesse.

“Are you going to go out and treat all of your coworkers to lobster and champagne … and come home and tell your child, ‘Oh sorry, I don’t have food for you’?” she said.

The two mothers represent opposite sides of a debate that came to a head in July, when the Trump administration unveiled a new policy barring undocumented children from Head Start. The announcement upended 60 years of precedent and played up a message that resonates with many Americans, including Trump’s base: Undocumented immigrants are taking scarce resources from citizens.

But in practice, the new Head Start policy may free up relatively few spots. And some providers fear that it will become harder to serve the most vulnerable children and families due to new logistical hoops.

The new policy, which is currently blocked by injunctions in two separate lawsuits,, comes after the White House made a short-lived push to cut all Head Start funding and disrupted the program in other ways. The administration has also pushed to make life in the U.S. more uncomfortable or wholly untenable for certain immigrants.

Advocates say that barring certain immigrant children from Head Start could keep them from learning English, getting developmental screenings, and preparing for kindergarten. But the ripple effects might not stop there.

“A lot of these attacks on public benefits, they are branded as being about … immigrants that supposedly are taking from the native-born population,” said Valerie LaCarte, a senior policy analyst at Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. “But really what they do is that they are weakening the social safety nets for low-income people overall.”

Head Start has historically welcomed undocumented children

Since it was established by the federal government in 1965 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, Head Start has never required families to prove citizenship or divulge immigration status.

In fact, Migrant and Seasonal Head Start, which serves about 25,000 young children, is specifically designed to serve the children of migrant farm workers, many of whom are immigrants.

Even when a landmark 1996 welfare reform law barred undocumented immigrants from getting most forms of government assistance, including child care subsidies, nothing changed for Head Start.

Walter Gilliam, executive director of the Buffett Early Childhood Institute, said the 1996 law treated the two programs differently because they have different histories and goals.

Child care subsidies, which help low-income families pay for child care, were “designed specifically and solely to support the employability of the parents,” he said.

In contrast, Head Start focuses on child development. Edward Zigler, one of the architects of Head Start, drew heavily from his own experiences as an immigrant child who benefited from the services offered by settlement houses, said Gilliam, who counted Zigler as a mentor.

There’s no solid data on how many Head Start seats are occupied by undocumented children.

On the low end, Trump administration officials have estimated that 12,000 of 719,000 Head Start participants, or 1.7%, are undocumented. On the high end, their estimate is 115,000 participants, or 16%.

Lisa Stone, executive director of Tri-County Head Start in southwestern Colorado, said she doesn’t know how many of the 275 children served by her program may be undocumented.

“If a child is living in the United States of America and they are income eligible, there’s no questions asked” about immigration status, she said. “I think that’s been a beautiful part of this program.”

U.S. Health and Human Services officials said in a press release the new rule barring undocumented participants from Head Start, would take effect immediately and provide an additional $374 million annually worth of Head Start services to Americans.

But the government’s own analysis and legal and regulatory filings suggest a much more modest impact.

For example, two-thirds of Head Start are programs run by charitable nonprofits, which are exempt from verifying immigration status under the 1996 welfare reform law. And Head Start is still open to some non-citizens, including immigrants who have been granted asylum, refugees and six other categories of “qualified aliens.”

Even for Head Start programs that are subject to the new rule — those run by public schools, cities, and counties — government lawyers wrote in court filings that there’s no danger of “sudden and major disruption.” That’s because students who are already enrolled in Head Start can stay enrolled through the year.

But some Head Start families and providers are already reacting out of fear.

Parents in multiple states have disenrolled their children from Head Start or declined services to avoid providing their home address, according to a recent court filing. In addition, some nonprofit Head Start providers are already trying to verify immigration status by checking birth certificates even though they’re exempt from the rule.

Although the rule technically took effect in mid-July, the government has yet to issue instructions explaining how to implement it.

Nationwide, there are far more children eligible for Head Start than available Head Start seats. But the new rule alone won’t solve that problem.

In fact, the Trump administration’s own analysis finds that verifying immigration status will cost providers money, reducing some new seats made available by excluding undocumented children. Some U.S. citizens may also struggle to provide the right documents.

Meanwhile, providers with low enrollment could be forced to close.

Two mothers, two different paths for their children

Poyras, the Sacramento mother, was eager to get her son into Early Head Start when he was 2.

“I was so excited,” she said. “I heard so many good things about the program from the beginning.”

But her son, who has a speech delay and learning disabilities, never got off the Early Head Start waitlist. When he turned 3, he started on a new waitlist for Head Start. When he finally was offered a seat, Poyras turned it down because her son, then 4, would have had a long bus ride to a neighborhood she didn’t consider safe.

Poyras, a single mother, now homeschools her son. She doesn’t know for sure that undocumented children are the reason he waited so long waiting for a spot.

But she’s heard people in her school district, San Juan Unified, say things like, “The school has so many immigrant children … and like, the schools are full and the waitlists are long.”

Solangel, the Colorado mother, took a plane to the United States with her family in 2018 and sought asylum. Water and electricity outages were routine in her native Venezuela, and there were always long lines for food and gas. Speaking out often led to political persecution, she said.

“You don’t have any lifestyle,” she said. “It’s just like doing lines and just waiting.”

The youngest of her three children, the one who participated in Head Start, was born here in 2019. Solangel, a single mother, is now a citizen.

Today, Solangel runs a maternal mental health program in the Denver area. She always recommends Head Start to her clients, who include many immigrant mothers. (Chalkbeat is not using Solangel’s last name due to privacy concerns.)

“If you start segregating immigrants like me, that is so bad,” she said. “It’s a fact that the migrants, they contribute a lot [to] this country,” she said.

Trump administration decisions put Head Start’s future in doubt

Polls show that many Americans oppose allowing undocumented immigrants to access public benefits, though they don’t ask specifically about preschool. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reflected that sentiment when he announced the rule change.

“For too long, the government has diverted hardworking Americans’ tax dollars to incentivize illegal immigration,” he said in a July press release.

In reality, there’s little evidence that migrants are uprooting their lives for Head Start or other programs, said Cassandra Zimmer-Wong, an immigration policy analyst at the center-right Niskanen Center

“To suggest that it’s a pull factor for migrants, I think is pretty ridiculous,” she said.

Rather, the rule change on Head Start represents “low-hanging fruit” that can make Trump’s base feel like they’re getting a win, she said.

Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, agreed with Zimmer-Wong that Head Start and other welfare programs are not the main draw for immigrants. That said, he cited a famous quote from the economist Milton Friedman: “It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.”

Conservatives who have the president’s ear have long called for getting rid of Head Start entirely. In a draft budget proposal earlier this year, the Trump administration proposed cutting all Head Start funding, before backpedaling and proposing level funding at $12.3 billion.

But the new rule is among a host of recent disruptions, including sudden funding freezes, mass layoffs of federal workers, and closures of five regional Head Start offices that are undermining the program.

“They’re not eliminating the program at the federal level, but it’s like, community by community by community,” said Yvette Sanchez Fuentes, senior vice president of national policy at Start Early, a Chicago-based Head Start grantee.

But McCluskey, director of Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom, said that Head Start is “not something the federal government should be doing.”

To Gilliam, the new Head Start rule would send negative effects rippling beyond undocumented children to their families and the broader community.

Amid the “national debate over who is entitled to what,” he said it’s easy to lose track of what the nation gains from programs like Head Start.

“It’s important to all of us to have families that are well functioning, to have children who are growing up succeeding and are likely to be contributing members to the American society,” Gilliam said.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat, covering early childhood issues and early literacy. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

In his own words: Dylan reveals what it’s like for the high schooler 3 months into his ICE detention

2025-09-12T21:10:07+00:00

Leer en español.

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Three months in detention have taken a toll on Dylan Lopez Contreras, the New York City student arrested by federal immigration agents in May.

But letters from his classmates have been a balm, he said in an interview with Chalkbeat, the first he’s given since his arrest.

“The letters I have received and the support I’ve been given have kept me going,” the 20-year-old said in Spanish, responding to questions in writing through his attorneys at the New York Legal Assistance Group. “Still, it is extremely stressful and distressing. I have seen fights, racism, and even death. It has given me many nightmares.”

Dylan turned himself in at the U.S. border in April 2024 after a trek from Venezuela. He requested asylum and was permitted to enter the country, making his way to New York and enrolling in ELLIS Preparatory Academy. He was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, in May at a routine court date and has spent most of the past three months at Pennsylvania’s Moshannon Valley Processing Center, the largest detention facility in the Northeast.

Chalkbeat broke the news of Dylan’s arrest, which became a vivid illustration of how the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is playing out in New York City and affecting students. Chalkbeat has also chronicled how the students and staff at ELLIS, a Bronx high school school that enrolls students who have been in the country less than a year, rallied to his defense, raising money for his case and sending him letters.

Dylan Lopez Contreras in an undated picture before he was detained.

“I never imagined I would receive so much support,” Dylan wrote. “Honestly, it felt very beautiful and hopeful.”

Dylan’s asylum case continues Monday, when he is expected to be back in immigration court. The hearing could determine whether he’s released from detention or deported.

Hundreds of young New Yorkers detained this year

When President Donald Trump took office, he vowed to “begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.” Months later, many immigrants — who, like Dylan, were without legal status but also had no criminal histories — were detained at Lower Manhattan’s 26 Federal Plaza and other courthouses across the nation at routine immigration hearings.

The Trump administration has described that as a “common-sense” approach, enabling them to find their targets without having to fan out into neighborhoods, and said they are fulfilling the promise of mass deportations that fueled Trump’s campaign victory.

Department of Homeland Security officials did not immediately respond to questions about Dylan’s case or Moshannon Valley.

Since ICE detained Dylan in May, other arrests of New York City youth — and deportations — have followed.

The city’s Education Department said they could not share how many public school students have been detained by ICE, especially since they do not track or ask families to disclose country of origin or immigration status.

This year, ICE has detained about 275 people in New York City who were born in 2004 or later, according to government data provided by ICE in response to a public records request to the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by Chalkbeat. Most of those detained were male, and roughly two-thirds were from Latin America. Three- and 4-year-olds were among those detained from Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, and Venezuela.

In August, a 6-year-old who attended P.S. 89 in Queens was deported to Ecuador with her mother, according to reports. That same month, Mamadou Mouctar, a 20-year-old from Guinea who attended Brooklyn’s Frontiers High School, was detained. As in Dylan’s case, educators and city leaders spoke out in support.

From Bronx classroom to detention cell

Dylan said his days at Moshannon Valley have been monotonous: late night and early morning head counts and trying to make little noise to avoid being told by the other 60 or so people in his cell to be quiet. (Hundreds of protesters gathered near the facility last month calling for its closure, following a federal complaint filed against Moshannon Valley over insufficient medical and mental health care and inadequate translation services.)

“The majority of the people here are depressed,” Dylan wrote. “They spend most of the time talking about their last, or next, court decision, their family outside, or the injustice of being here.”

Dylan Lopez Contreras was dedicated to his studies and supporting his family.

Before Dylan’s arrest, he was focused on his studies and helping his mom care for his two younger siblings, in part, through the money he made working as a delivery driver. He was busy making friends at ELLIS, sharing his arepas at lunch with them. He said he hoped to continue learning English to pursue a degree in the U.S. — a goal he said he still plans to work toward.

“This unjust detention has frustrated and paralyzed my education and effort momentarily,” Dylan said. “But it won’t make me give up on working hard toward my educational goals.”

Dylan dreams of a day he might be released and be able to hug his family, eat good food, and sleep well. He also joked about having to make up ground after losing his 230-day Duolingo streak.

Dylan said he wanted Trump to remember that immigrants contribute to the economy, and he argued that the money being spent on an immigration crackdown could be dedicated to other things like education. At the start of the summer, Congress approved a spending bill that set aside an unprecedented $170 billion for immigration enforcement.

“I understand the president’s point of wanting his country to be better, but he must remember that this is a nation of migrants, built by them,” he wrote.

It’s possible that Dylan’s hearing on Monday will not yield an immediate outcome, members of his legal team said. The team plans to present detailed testimony and evidence supporting his asylum claim, which could extend the timeline for a resolution. There’s also a chance he could remain in detention if he wins asylum, but the Department of Homeland Security files an appeal. He also could appeal if he’s denied asylum.

Chalkbeat Senior Data Editor Thomas Wilburn contributed.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy atazimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Trump rule barring undocumented children from Head Start blocked by judges

2025-09-11T23:40:18+00:00

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The Trump administration’s effort to prevent undocumented immigrant children from enrolling in Head Start preschool programs is on hold nationwide after federal judges issued injunctions in two separate lawsuits.

The Department of Health and Human Services in July declared that Head Start, along with a wide swath of health care services and workforce training programs, should be considered public benefit programs, a category of programs only available to U.S. citizens and immigrants with particular statuses, such as legal permanent residents and refugees.

Undocumented immigrants are already excluded from most welfare programs, but the rule changes abruptly expanded the list of programs that would need to verify participants’ immigration status.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued to block the rule change on behalf of four state Head Start associations as well as some parent groups. Twenty states and the District of Columbia filed their own lawsuit.

In both cases, federal judges ruled this week that the Trump administration had not followed appropriate procedures for changing rules; that in some cases the rule changes appeared to go against Congressional intent; and that providers, families, and state governments would suffer significant harm if the rules were allowed to go into effect.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Mary McElroy of Rhode Island blocked the rule from going into effect in D.C. and the 20 states that sued. McElroy, a Trump appointee, wrote in her opinion that the administration appeared to be arguing that the federal government had been mistaken about its own rules going back to 1996, when Congress passed the law that restricts access to public benefits.

“The Government argues that it has somehow interpreted this statute incorrectly for the nearly thirty years that it has been the law,” she wrote.

On Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo Martinez of Washington issued a nationwide injunction in favor of Head Start providers. He noted that Congress repeatedly has updated Head Start eligibility rules and never added immigration status to the list of factors to consider.

Head Start’s enabling legislation also requires Health and Human Services to consult with experts and providers before changing rules and not to adopt rules that might reduce services. The department failed to follow this and other procedures, said Martinez, who was appointed by President George W. Bush.

The new rule was set to go into effect immediately in July, but the department put it on pause in some states as part of an agreement related to the lawsuit. Health and Human Services has not issued guidance on how providers were supposed to check eligibility.

Nonetheless, Head Start providers told the court they had already experienced a chilling effect, with some families withdrawing out of fear and some providers asking for proof of citizenship in the form of birth certificates.

“Today the court was clear: HHS does not have the authority to impose an immigration-based restriction on Head Start families,” Jennesa Calvo-Friedman, senior staff attorney in the Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU, said in a press release. “No child and no family should have to fear accessing critical early learning services, and we will continue to defend the families that Head Start aims to serve.”

The U.S. Supreme Court recently restricted the use of nationwide injunctions, but Martinez said one was necessary in this case because some providers have preschools in multiple states, including programs designed to serve migrant farmworker families.

A spokesperson for Health and Human Services could not immediately be reached for comment. The agency told the Associated Press it disagrees with the decision and is considering next steps.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica atemeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Students, schools race to save clean energy projects in face of Trump deadline

2025-09-11T13:26:55+00:00

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This story was produced by The Hechinger Report and is republished with permission. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

Tanish Doshi was in high school when he pushed the Tucson Unified School District to take on an ambitious plan to reduce its climate footprint. In Oct. 2024, the availability of federal tax credits encouraged the district to adopt the $900 million plan, which involves goals of achieving net-zero emissions and zero waste by 2040, along with adding a climate curriculum to schools.

Now, access to those funds is disappearing, leaving Tucson and other school systems across the country scrambling to find ways to cover the costs of clean energy projects.

The Arizona school district, which did not want to impose an economic burden on its low-income population by increasing bonds or taxes, had expected to rely in part on federal dollars provided by the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, Doshi said.

But under HR1, or the “one big, beautiful bill,” passed on July 4, Tucson schools will not be able to receive all of the expected federal funding in time for their upcoming clean energy projects. The law discontinues many clean energy tax credits, including those used by schools for solar power and electric vehicles, created under the IRA. When schools and other tax-exempt organizations receive these credits, they come in the form of a direct cash reimbursement.

At the same time, Tucson and thousands of districts across the country that were planning to develop solar and wind power projects are now forced to decide between accelerating them to try to meet HR1’s fast-approaching “commence construction” deadline of June 2026, finding other sources of funding, or hitting pause on their plans. Tina Cook, energy project manager for Tucson schools, said the district might have to scale back some of its projects unless it could find local sources of funding.

“Phasing out the tax credits for wind and solar energy is going to make a huge, huge difference,” said Doshi, 18, now a first-year college student. “It ends a lot of investments in poor and minority communities. You really get rid of any notion of environmental justice that the IRA had advanced.”

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The tax credits in the IRA, the largest legislative investment in climate projects in U.S. history, had marked a major opportunity for schools and colleges to reduce their impact on the environment. K-12 school infrastructure releases an estimated 41 million metric tons of emissions per year, according to an analysis from the New Buildings Institute. The K-12 school system’s buses — some 480,000 — and meals also produce significant emissions and waste. Clean energy projects supported by the IRA were helping schools not only to limit their climate toll but also to save money on energy costs over the long term and improve student health, advocates said.

As a result, many students, consultants, and sustainability leaders said, they have no plans to abandon clean energy projects. They said they want to keep working to cut emissions, even though that may be more difficult now.

Solar panels, electric vehicles affected by policy changes

Sara Ross, cofounder of UndauntedK12, which helps school districts green their operations, divided HR1’s fallout on schools into three categories: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

On the bright side, she said, schools can still get up to 50% off for installing ground source heat pumps — those credits will continue — to more efficiently heat and cool schools. The network of pipes in a ground source pump cycles heat from the shallow earth into buildings.

In the “bad” category, any electric vehicle acquired after Sept. 30 of this year will not be eligible for tax credits — drastically accelerating the IRA’s phase-out timeline by seven years. That applies to electric school buses as well as other district-owned electric vehicles. Electric vehicle charging stations must be installed by June 30, 2026, at an eligible location to claim a tax credit. EPA’s Clean School Bus Program still exists for two more years and covers two-thirds of the funding for all electric school buses districts acquire in that time. The remaining one-third, however, was to be covered by federal and state tax credits.

Electric school buses give students a healthier ride. The break from pollution could also help their grades.

The expiration of the federal tax credits could cost a district up to $40,000 more per vehicle, estimated Sue Gander, director of the Electric School Bus Initiative run by the nonprofit World Resources Institute.

Solar projects will see the most “ugly” effects of HR1, Ross said.

Los Angeles Unified School District is planning to build 21 solar projects on roofs, carports and other structures, plus 13 electric vehicle charging sites, as part of an effort to reduce energy costs and achieve 100% renewable energy by 2040. The district anticipated receiving around $25 million in federal tax credits to help pay for the $90 million contract, said Christos Chrysiliou, chief eco-sustainability officer for the district. With the tight deadlines imposed by HR1, the district can no longer count on receiving that money.

“It’s disappointing,” Chrysiliou said. “It’s nice to be able to have that funding in place to meet the goals and objectives that we have.”

LAUSD is looking at a small portion of a $9 billion bond measure passed last year, as well as utility rebates, third-party financing, and grants from the California Energy Commission, to help make up for some of the gaps in funding.

Many California State University campuses are in a similar position as they work to install solar to meet the system’s goal of carbon neutrality by 2045, said Lindsey Rowell, CSU’s chief energy, sustainability, and transportation officer.

Student climate activist Emma Weber leads a chant at a rally in front of the Colorado State Capitol in support of “The Green New Deal for Colorado Schools.”

Tariffs on solar panel materials from overseas and the early sunsetting of tax credits mean that “the cost of these projects are becoming prohibitive for campuses,” Rowell said.

Sweeps of undocumented immigrants in California may also lead to labor shortages that could slow the pace of construction, Rowell added. “Limiting the labor force in any way is only going to result in an increased cost, so those changes are frightening as well,” she said.

Projects will need to start work soon to qualify

New Treasury Department guidance, issued Aug. 15, made it much harder for projects to meet the threshold needed to qualify for the tax credits. Renewable energy projects previously qualified for credits once a developer spent 5% of a project’s cost. But the guidelines have been tightened — now, larger projects must pass a “physical work test,” meaning “significant physical labor has begun on a site,” before they can qualify for credits. With the construction commencement deadline looming next June, these will likely leave many projects ineligible for credits.

“The rules are new, complex, [and] not widely understood,” Ross said. “We’re really concerned about schools’ ability to continue to do solar projects and be able to effectively navigate these new rules.”

Schools without “fancy legal teams” may struggle to understand how the new tax credit changes in HR1 will affect their finances and future projects, she added.

Some universities were just starting to understand how the IRA tax credits could help them fund projects. Lily Strehlow, campus sustainability coordinator at the University of Wisconsin, Eau-Claire, said the planning cycle for clean energy projects at the school can take 10 years. The university is in the process of adding solar to the roof of a large science building, and depending on the date of completion, the project “might or might not” qualify for the credits, she said.

“At this point, everybody’s holding their breath,” said Rick Brown, founder of California-based TerraVerde Energy, a clean energy consultant to schools and agencies.

Brown said that none of his company’s projects are in a position where they’re not going to get done, but the company may end up seeing fewer new projects due to a higher cost of equipment.

Tim Carter, president of Second Nature, which supports climate work in education, added that colleges and universities are in a broader period of uncertainty, due to larger attacks from the Trump administration, and are not likely to make additional investments at this time: “We’re definitely in a wait and see.”

Student activists look for new paths toward climate goals

For youth activists, the fallout from HR1 is “disheartening,” Doshi said.

Emma and Molly Weber, climate activists since eighth grade, said they are frustrated. The Colorado-based twins, who will start college this fall, helped secure the first “Green New Deal for Schools” resolution in the nation in the Boulder Valley School District. Its goals include working toward a goal of Zero Net Energy by 2050, making school buildings greener, creating pathways to green jobs, and expanding climate change education.

“It feels very demoralizing to see something you’ve been working so hard at get slashed back, especially since I’ve spoken to so many students from all over the country about these clean energy tax credits, being like, ‘These are the things that are available to you, and this is how you can help convince your school board to work on this,’” Emma Weber said.

Emma, far left, and Molly Weber, far right, work with climate leaders from the Boulder Valley School District’s Sunrise Movement to prepare for Colorado’s legislative session.

The Webers started thinking about other creative ways to pay for the clean energy transition and have settled on advocating for state-level legislation in the form of a climate superfund, where major polluters in a community would be responsible for contributing dollars to sustainability initiatives.

Consultants and sustainability coordinators said that they don’t see the demand for renewable energy going away. “Solar is the cheapest form of energy. It makes sense to put it on every rooftop that we can. And that’s true with or without tax credits,” Strehlow said.

Correction: This version of the story includes updated information on the timeline for the expiration of tax credits for electric vehicle charging stations.

Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org.

This story about tax credits was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

All-gender school restroom: Denver asks feds for 90 days to negotiate resolution per Title IX

2025-09-08T19:19:45+00:00

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Denver Public Schools had 10 days to agree to revert the all-gender restrooms at East High School back to single-sex ones or face consequences from the Trump administration. Instead, the school district on Sunday asked the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights for 90 days to negotiate another resolution.

“DPS is committed to effectively implementing the Title IX regulation according to the law, and there is clearly much to discuss in regard to this matter,” DPS Senior Counsel Kristin Bailey wrote in a letter addressed to Erica Austin, the acting regional director for the federal Office for Civil Rights in Denver. “Consequently, we are not at an impasse.”

The Office for Civil Rights recently found that an all-gender restroom at Denver’s East High School violates Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination. OCR said DPS would face “imminent enforcement actions” if it didn’t get rid of its all-gender restrooms and adopt “biology-based” definitions of “male” and “female,” among other actions.

The U.S. Department of Education did not respond Monday to a request for comment about DPS asking for a 90-day negotiation period.

President Donald Trump has made targeting transgender rights a key part of his second term. The investigation into DPS’ all-gender restroom was the first launched by OCR after his inauguration in January.

OCR concluded on Aug. 28 that the conversion last year of a girls’ restroom on the second floor of East High to an all-gender restroom meant that only girls “bore the burden of seeking an exclusive restroom elsewhere in the building or limiting their restroom use,” according to a letter from Austin to Denver Superintendent Alex Marrero.

Because boys still had a single-sex restroom on the second floor, OCR found that girls at East High were being treated differently, in violation of Title IX.

In an attempt to address any disparity, DPS converted a second-floor boys’ restroom to an all-gender restroom over the summer. But OCR called the move a “misguided effort” that ended DPS’ “different treatment” of girls but did not fix its Title IX violation.

Marrero criticized the Trump administration for pushing “an anti-trans agenda through the weaponization of Title IX.” In a joint letter, more than 40 Colorado and Denver elected officials called OCR’s investigation “an ideologically driven attack.”

In a Sept. 7 letter to OCR, DPS accused the federal agency of being unwilling to communicate about the investigation. “Due to your office’s intransigence,” the communication between DPS and OCR was limited to one phone call in February, an email in March, and another phone call in June, wrote Bailey, DPS’ senior legal counsel.

On those phone calls, OCR staff were vague and noncommittal, saying they would have to run ideas “up the flagpole,” and that OCR’s position “depends on what the issue is,” Bailey wrote.

Bailey also took issue with OCR’s finding that the all-gender restrooms created a hostile environment at East High, an issue she said was a “new and different allegation.”

“If OCR can provide a more precise articulation, based in fact, of the reasons it purports to have sufficient evidence to support a legal conclusion that the bathroom created a hostile environment, it may prompt an appropriate resolution to this matter,” Bailey wrote.

OCR’s Aug. 28 letter said that East High received “many complaints from students and their families” about the all-gender restroom, including that boys were leering at girls in the restroom and, in one instance, pounding on the door of a stall while a girl was using the toilet.

But DPS said OCR’s findings were “based solely on a handful of negative emails,” and that the federal agency ignored the positive emails that DPS received. At a school of about 2,400 students, OCR’s conclusions were based on three emails, “none of which provide information from a direct witness to any concerning conduct,” Bailey wrote.

“All supportive comments seem to have been disregarded,” she wrote.

OCR said that if DPS didn’t agree to its proposed resolution within 10 days, the agency would issue “a letter of impasse that confirms the District’s refusal to voluntarily come into compliance with Title IX.” Ten days after that, OCR said it would issue a letter of impending enforcement action. It did not say what that action would be.

Five Virginia school districts are now receiving their federal education funding by reimbursement only — meaning the districts must pay those costs up front — because OCR found that their restroom and locker room policies for transgender students violated Title IX.

Nearly 7% of Denver Public Schools’ budget last year, or about $96 million, was federal funding, according to district budget documents.

DPS had not yet received a letter of impasse from OCR as of Monday morning, according to a district spokesperson.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Trump administration axes federal Blue Ribbon program that recognized high-achieving schools

2025-09-04T23:37:41+00:00

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The Trump administration won’t be handing out any blue ribbons to schools this year.

As President Donald Trump seeks to scale back the federal role in education in key respects, Education Department officials told state education agencies on Aug. 29 that they were ending the longstanding National Blue Ribbon Schools program, which honors high-performing schools and schools that have successfully narrowed academic gaps between student groups.

Madi Biedermann, a spokesperson for the department, said in the letter that the move was “in the spirit of Returning Education to the States” — a common refrain from Education Secretary Linda McMahon as the Trump administration has slashed staff at the department and sought to reduce federal spending on education.

“State leaders are best positioned to recognize excellence in local schools based on educational achievements that align with their communities’ priorities for academic accomplishment and improvement,” Biedermann wrote. “Awards conceived by those closest to the communities and families served by local schools will do more to encourage meaningful reforms than a one-size-fits-all standard established by a distant bureaucracy in Washington, D.C.”

The decision appears to have been made abruptly: States had already nominated schools for the award. In fact, the deadline for states to sign off on their picks was just one week prior to the cancellation letter. In some cases states had informed schools that they had won, pending the official federal announcement.

The Alabama Daily News first reported the cancellation.

The Blue Ribbon program’s goal is to highlight standout public and private schools and share best practices across the country. Winning the award typically brings positive attention and news coverage to schools, and is a badge of honor that can help attract new students, recruit teachers, and boost private fundraising.

Biedermann said the department is still encouraging states to recognize the schools they nominated for the 2025 competition. But she added that states can now get creative and tailor their own recognition programs to celebrate exemplary schools in certain subjects, or focus on new areas, such as success in preparing students for the workforce and apprenticeships.

Raven Hill, a spokesperson for the Maryland Department of Education, said the state is exploring next steps, but the pride that comes from national recognition won’t be easy to replace.

“The schools that receive the Blue Ribbon recognition are our crown jewels,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how long ago a school was recognized, they carry that pride. We can revive our state program, but it would be difficult to replicate the prestige.”

Terrel H. Bell, President Ronald Reagan’s first education secretary, created the Blue Ribbon program in 1982. Bell famously commissioned the study that became “A Nation At Risk,” which raised alarms about the quality of American education and spurred various reforms. Reagan also wanted to eliminate the Education Department at the time.

There have been other attempts to get rid of the program, including in 1992 when Congress defunded the program, leading to the abrupt cancellation of the competition. Letters and phone calls poured into Congress, Education Week reported at the time, and funding was eventually restored.

National editor Erica Meltzer contributed reporting.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Denver schools chief: Trump administration is weaponizing Title IX and pushing ‘anti-trans agenda’

2025-08-29T21:03:06+00:00

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Denver Public Schools Superintendent Alex Marrero said Friday that the Trump administration is pushing “an anti-trans agenda through the weaponization of Title IX,” a federal law the administration says DPS violated when it converted a girls’ restroom to an all-gender one.

“They have claimed Title IX prohibits the conversion of a girls’ restroom to an all-gender restroom,” Marrero said in a statement. “They now claim Title IX prohibits the use of any multi-stall, all-gender restroom. This has never been true; it remains untrue today.”

Marrero’s comments come one day after the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced that DPS’ restroom conversion at East High School violated Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination. Officials with the Office for Civil Rights said that the all-gender restroom at East High places a burden on girls to seek a single-sex restroom elsewhere, and that DPS is endorsing “a self-defeating gender ideology.”

Marrero strongly disagreed.

“To our LGBTQ+ students, families, and supporters, we see you, and we will not stand for these attempts at your erasure,” Marrero said.

However, Marrero did not say whether or not DPS will comply with the Office for Civil Rights’ demands, which include reverting the district’s all-gender restrooms to single-sex restrooms. A DPS spokesperson said, “We are still looking at our options.”

The U.S. Department of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Marrero’s statement.

DPS’ federal funding could be at risk. The U.S. Department of Education recently sanctioned five Virginia school districts that it found to be violating Title IX for allowing students to use restrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity. All federal funding for those districts — a total of more than $50 million — will now be distributed by reimbursement only, meaning the districts will have to pay those expenses up front.

Nearly 7% of Denver Public Schools’ budget last year, or about $96 million, was federal funding, according to district budget documents.

The Office for Civil Rights on Thursday gave DPS 10 days to agree with a proposed resolution.

In addition to reverting all restrooms to single-sex, the proposed resolution would require the district to rescind any policies that allow students to use restrooms based on their gender identity, adopt “biology-based” definitions for “male” and “female,” and issue a memo to all schools saying they “must provide intimate facilities that protect the privacy, dignity, and safety of its students and are comparably accessible to each sex.”

In his statement, Marrero said the language proposed by the Office for Civil Rights is “the dangerous rhetoric and definitions of their administration.”

“We will protect all of our students from this hostile administration while we continue to raise the bar on achievement,” Marrero said.

The investigation into the all-gender restroom at East High was the first Title IX investigation launched by the Office for Civil Rights in Trump’s second term. Using a disputed interpretation of the law, his administration has used Title IX to challenge transgender rights policies in schools.

A January letter from federal officials to Marrero cited a 9News story about East High converting a girls’ restroom into an all-gender restroom. At the time, DPS said it was “unprecedented” to initiate an investigation based on a news story. The district said East High’s all-gender restroom was added at the request of students and has 12-foot-tall partitions to ensure privacy.

This month, East High opened a second all-gender restroom, Chalkbeat reported. The second one was formerly a boys’ restroom, and DPS said it added it in an attempt to address any disparity. But the Office for Civil Rights said on Thursday that the second conversion did not fix the situation “because males are still allowed to invade sensitive female-only facilities.”

Marrero said that reasoning is a shift in the Trump administration’s legal theory. He also criticized the investigation itself.

“While they label this a ‘directed investigation,’ make no mistake: there was no on-site review, not a single witness interview was ever conducted, and not one substantive conversation with any OCR attorney ever occurred,” Marrero said.

“The district’s requests for conversation, clarification, mediation, and discussion of remedies all went unanswered,” he said. “This is unprecedented behavior from an OCR we no longer recognize.”

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

All-gender restroom at Denver’s East High School violates Title IX, Trump administration finds

2025-08-28T23:04:08+00:00

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The Trump administration has found that Denver Public Schools’ conversion of a girls’ restroom into an all-gender restroom at East High School violates the federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination.

The U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights said in a press release Thursday that the all-gender restroom places a burden on girls to seek a single-sex restroom elsewhere, “thereby denying their right to equal educational facilities and opportunities” under Title IX.

President Donald Trump has made targeting protections for transgender students a key part of his second term, and his administration’s interpretation of Title IX is contested.

DPS recently converted a boys’ restroom at East High to an all-gender restroom in an attempt to address any disparity. But the Office for Civil Rights said the second conversion did not fix the situation “because males are still allowed to invade sensitive female-only facilities.”

“Denver is free to endorse a self-defeating gender ideology, but it is not free to accept federal taxpayer funds and harm its students in violation of Title IX,” acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor said in a statement.

“The Trump Administration will work relentlessly to hold accountable school districts that harbor the ideological fanatics and policies that sully students’ educational experience with sex discrimination,” Trainor said.

In a statement, DPS said it has received the findings and “is determining our next steps.”

The investigation into the all-gender restroom at East High began in January. It was the first Title IX investigation launched by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights in Trump’s second term.

A January letter from federal officials to Denver Superintendent Alex Marrero cited a 9News story about East High converting a girls’ restroom into an all-gender restroom.

At the time, DPS said it was “unprecedented” for the Office for Civil Rights to initiate an investigation based on a news story. The district defended East High’s all-gender restroom, saying it was added at the request of students and has 12-foot-tall partitions to ensure privacy.

The Office for Civil Rights has issued a proposed resolution agreement and given DPS 10 days to agree, according to the press release. The proposed agreement would require DPS to convert its all-gender restrooms to single-sex restrooms.

It would also require the district to rescind any policies that allow students to use restrooms based on their gender identity, adopt “biology-based definition for the words ‘male’ and ‘female,’” and issue a memo to all schools saying they “must provide intimate facilities that protect the privacy, dignity, and safety of its students and are comparably accessible to each sex.”

If DPS doesn’t agree, it will “risk imminent enforcement action,” the press release said. That action is not defined in the press release, but recent cases in other states offer some clues. Last week, the Office for Civil Rights found that five Virginia school districts were violating Title IX by allowing students to use restrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity.

All federal funding for those districts — a total of more than $50 million — will now be distributed by reimbursement only, meaning the districts will have to pay those expenses up front.

Nearly 7% of Denver Public Schools’ budget last year, or about $96 million, was federal funding, according to district budget documents.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Trump administration tells 40 states to remove gender identity from sex ed or lose federal funds

2025-08-26T21:11:05+00:00

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The Trump administration is threatening to pull federal funding from 40 states for a sex education program aimed at vulnerable teens unless those states remove references in their curriculum to gender identity and transgender people.

In a Tuesday press release, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said the action reflected the Trump administration’s “ongoing commitment to protecting children from attempts to indoctrinate them with delusional ideology.”

The threat comes after California refused to change its curriculum last week and HHS terminated the state’s nearly $6 million-a-year grant.

The states that received notices to change their curriculum are: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Withholding federal funds to punish states for teaching about gender identity is yet another way the Trump administration has sought to control what young people learn and advance the president’s view that there are only two sexes, male and female.

Through numerous civil rights investigations and lawsuits, the Trump administration is also seeking to prevent trans girls from playing on girls’ sports teams and stop schools from letting trans kids use the bathroom or locker room that corresponds with their gender identity.

States will have 60 days to comply or risk losing their federal funds for the Personal Responsibility Education Program, or PREP.

PREP represents a small slice of sex ed nationwide, and provides most states with just a few million dollars a year. But it targets a particularly vulnerable group of teens and pre-teens who are at a higher risk for pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. In California, many of the 13,000 young people who participate each year live in foster care, are incarcerated, or are experiencing homelessness.

Back in June, HHS told California that it was out of compliance with the federal law that established PREP, because its materials included instruction about what it means to identify as transgender and that gender identity is not always synonymous with the sex someone is assigned at birth. The agency subsequently reviewed curriculum used by other states — many of which use some of the same materials as California.

In the termination announcement, HHS also said that parts of California’s curriculum “could encourage kids to contemplate mutilating their genitals, ‘altering their body … through hormone therapy,’ ‘adding or removing breast tissue,’ and ‘changing their name.’” This appears to refer to the possibility that students might socially transition or pursue gender-affirming medical care.

California officials told HHS that they wouldn’t change their materials because they were medically accurate, previously approved by the agency, and compliant with federal law — which is silent on whether PREP should teach about gender identity. State health officials also said that changing the curriculum could prompt public schools that use the same materials to drop them, because California law requires sex ed to include information about gender identity.

A spokesperson for the state’s public health department did not respond to Chalkbeat’s questions about how it planned to address the funding gap. California health officials told the Trump administration they reserved the right to challenge the funding termination, but they have yet to do so.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Amid Trump administration investigation, East High converts boys’ restroom to all-gender restroom

2025-08-20T23:51:02+00:00

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Seven months after the Trump administration began investigating Denver Public Schools for converting a girls’ restroom at East High School into an all-gender one, the school started classes this week with a new addition: another all-gender restroom.

The new all-gender restroom was formerly a boys’ restroom. DPS added it after officials with the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights said in January that converting a girls’ restroom into an all-gender restroom “denied female students a restroom comparable with their male counterparts” and violated the civil rights of Denver’s female students.

DPS said in a statement that the new restroom was meant to address any disparity.

“The addition of a second all-gender restroom on the same floor as the first restroom was suggested and paid for by the District to help address the notion of any unfairness or lack of parity across facilities,” the statement from DPS said.

“Students will continue to have access to gender-specific restrooms as well as existing single-stall gender-neutral bathrooms throughout the school,” the statement said.

The district said it “remains responsive” to information requests from the Office for Civil Rights.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education said the Office for Civil Rights’ investigation into DPS is ongoing. The spokesperson did not answer a question about whether the district’s conversion of a boys’ restroom into an all-gender restroom nullifies the alleged discrimination.

The Trump administration has taken aim at policies meant to protect transgender students. On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Education found that five northern Virginia school districts were violating the federal Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination, by allowing students to use restrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity.

All federal funding for those districts — a total of more than $50 million — will now be distributed by reimbursement only, meaning the districts will have to pay those expenses up front.

In a statement, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the Virginia districts were being penalized for “choosing to abide by woke gender ideology in place of federal law.”

Nearly 7% of Denver Public Schools’ budget last year, or about $96 million, was made up of federal funding, according to district budget documents.

The Trump administration began investigating DPS shortly after the president’s inauguration. A letter from federal officials to Superintendent Alex Marrero cited a January 9News story about East High converting a girls’ restroom into an all-gender restroom.

Kayleigh Baker, an attorney and senior consultant with TNG Consulting and an advisory board member of the Association of Title IX Administrators, said many school districts are caught between their own inclusive policies and interpretations of the law and the Trump administration’s new interpretation of Title IX. The courts may ultimately decide whose interpretation prevails.

Baker said she doesn’t believe that simply having an all-gender restroom violates the law, but she’s not sure that converting a boys’ restroom along with a girls’ restroom would satisfy the Trump administration, which has emphasized protecting access to single-sex restrooms.

“My concern would be taking something away, whether that’s a girls’ restroom or a boys’ and a girls’ restroom,” she said.

But Scott Skinner-Thompson, an associate professor of law at the University of Colorado Boulder who focuses on LGBTQ issues, said he thinks converting both boys’ and girls’ restrooms into all-gender restrooms weakens the Trump administration’s discrimination claim — which he believes was legally weak to begin with.

“Title IX has never required identical facilities. It’s only ever required comparable facilities,” he said. “Creating an all-gender restroom doesn’t exclude anyone.”

Chalkbeat National Editor Erica Meltzer contributed to this report.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Trump administration rolls back pivotal guidance about educational rights of English learners

2025-08-20T20:01:44+00:00

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The Trump administration has quietly rescinded guidance spelling out the educational rights of the nation’s more than 5 million English learners that educators say was crucial to serving children from immigrant families.

In recent weeks, a Dear Colleague letter issued in 2015 by the Education Department and Department of Justice was stamped with a red message saying the document had been formally rescinded. Neither agency issued a public notice explaining the rationale for the change as they usually do when they roll back federal guidance.

The rescission comes after the Trump administration laid off nearly every staffer in the Education Department responsible for serving English learners and looks to wind down a federal website that provides toolkits for helping English learners. The administration has also proposed zeroing out dedicated Title III funding for English learners and issued an executive order declaring English the official language of the United States.

Trump officials also cleared the way for immigration agents to make arrests at or near schools, child care centers, and after-school programs, undoing a longstanding precedent to treat those places as sensitive locations. The administration’s mass deportation campaign has left many school communities shaken and lowered student attendance in some parts of the country.

Unlike students with disabilities, whose rights are clearly spelled out in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the rights of English learners stem from multiple Supreme Court cases and federal laws that prohibit discrimination based on national origin, which courts have interpreted to mean schools must take steps to help children overcome language barriers so they can obtain a meaningful education.

The 40-page Dear Colleague letter was groundbreaking when it was released under former President Barack Obama and remained a critical resource, according to educators who relied on the guidance. It gathered various case law, legal precedents, and federal requirements regarding English learners in the same place and provided clear examples about how students should be served.

Rescinding the guidance doesn’t change those laws, but advocates for English learners worry it will now be harder for schools to know if they are complying with the law and to hold schools accountable when they are not.

“A lot of people are very worried at the state and district level,” said Montserrat Garibay, the advocacy chair for the National Association for Bilingual Education. Without clear guidance, “there’s a high risk that EL students are not going to be receiving their linguistic and their academic support that they need.”

Trump Education Department decimates office serving 5 million English learners in public schools

Garibay, the former director of the Office of English Language Acquisition during the Biden administration, likened the guidance to a “bible” for educators who work with students learning English. Her organization is hosting a training next month to help schools navigate its loss.

Garibay said she used to print out the 40-page guidance document when she was a teachers union leader in Texas and use it to train teachers. She knew teachers who would highlight the pages and bring it to their principal to ensure they assessed English learners properly and provided families with documents in their native language.

An Education Department spokesperson told Chalkbeat on Tuesday that the department had rescinded the guidance “because it is not aligned with Administration priorities” but did not respond to followup questions about what exactly was out of alignment.

A Justice Department spokesperson said the agency had no comment on Wednesday.

But the agency referred the Washington Post to a July memo from Attorney General Pam Bondi sent to all federal agencies offering guidance to comply with Trump’s order that English be the official language.

That memo says the Justice Department would rescind any guidance that interprets the federal ban on national original discrimination to require language services for people who aren’t proficient in English. It also said the agency would “lead a coordinated effort to minimize non-essential multilingual services” and “redirect resources toward English-language education and assimilation.”

The 2015 guidance document says that schools must, to the extent practicable, translate certain notices for parents into a language they can understand and provide free oral translation when a written translation isn’t possible.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Schools do not have to follow Trump administration’s DEI order, federal judge rules

2025-08-15T20:57:58+00:00

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Schools do not have to abide by or certify compliance with the Trump administration’s contested interpretation of civil rights law laid out in February, after a federal judge overturned the policy and related guidance on Thursday.

In an opinion that applies to schools nationwide, U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher wrote that the Trump administration had failed to follow the proper administrative procedures to make such a sweeping change, and that both a Feb. 14 Dear Colleague letter issued by the Education Department and a related certification requirement were unlawful.

Multiple lawsuits against the rules already had resulted in a patchwork of injunctions. However, Gallagher’s decision will likely bring some relief to many school leaders and state education officials who had worried they would lose federal funding if they did not certify compliance with the Trump administration’s interpretation of federal anti-discrimination laws — and that complying could mean dropping commonly used diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.

“The government did not merely remind educators that discrimination is illegal: it initiated a sea change in how the Department of Education regulates educational practices and classroom conduct, causing millions of educators to reasonably fear that their lawful, and even beneficial, speech might cause them or their schools to be punished,” Gallagher wrote.

The Feb. 14 guidance and certification requirement had been put on hold as three separate lawsuits worked their way through the courts. That included the case brought by the American Federation of Teachers and others that led to the Thursday ruling, as well as lawsuits from a coalition of state attorneys general and the Legal Defense Fund on behalf of the NAACP.

Randi Weingarten, the head of the AFT, said in a statement on Friday that the judge’s ruling represented “a huge win for students, families and educators” and a rebuke of the government’s attempt to “chill teachers’ duty to create safe and welcoming classrooms where critical thinking is valued and history is presented in an open and honest way.”

In an email, a spokesperson for the Education Department said the department was disappointed in the judge’s ruling, but that getting rid of the guidance “has not stopped our ability to enforce Title VI protections for students at an unprecedented level,” referring to the federal law that bans discrimination based on race, skin color, and national origin in schools.

“The Department remains committed to its responsibility to uphold students’ anti-discrimination protections under the law,” the spokesperson wrote.

The spokesperson did not respond to a question about whether the Trump administration intends to appeal the decision.

The Trump administration continues to advance its opposition to DEI on several fronts. It is conducting civil rights investigations into states and school districts over practices ranging from the launch of a Black student success plan in Chicago to the use of race-based affinity groups for staff and students. Officials have slashed federal grants designed to expand opportunities for students of color or that were awarded with student diversity in mind.

And Attorney General Pam Bondi recently issued a memo to all federal agencies with similar intentions as the Education Department’s now-defunct guidance, noting that DEI programs can be discriminatory and that relying on certain race-neutral criteria, such as “cultural competence,” “lived experience,” or geography, can violate federal law if it’s used a proxy for a protected characteristic, like race, to create advantages for some people.

Gallagher, who was nominated to her position by President Donald Trump during his first term, did not weigh in on whether the Education Department’s DEI policy was “good or bad,” but said that the agency could not go “leapfrogging” over important procedures in federal law.

The judge held that the Education Department’s guidance and certification requirement amounted to new legislative rules — not a restating of existing federal laws and requirements, as the Trump administration has said — and that the Education Department should have explained why it changed course and offered a public notice and comment period to give schools and others adequate time to weigh in.

The department’s Feb. 14 guidance also interprets the Supreme Court ruling that bars affirmative action in higher education admissions “far more broadly,” the federal judge wrote, to include much more than “preventing using race as a factor in ‘zero-sum’ opportunities like admissions, hiring, promotions, or awards.”

“The administration is entitled to its own views, including on how court cases and laws should be interpreted,” Gallagher wrote. “But it is not entitled to misrepresent the law’s boundaries, and must at a minimum acknowledge and consider the relevant legal framework as it is. It cannot blur the lines between its viewpoint and existing law.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

As Trump’s deportation campaign grows, a Bronx school and undocumented teen face tough choices

2025-08-14T10:30:00+00:00

This is part two of a two-part series. Read the first story here.

Fifty students stood in front of the White House, with its manicured lawn and billowing American flag. They hailed from countries like Ecuador, Nicaragua, Senegal, and Mali. They spoke Spanish, French, Pulaar, and English. Some wore hijabs.

Like other tourists on that April day, the students on a field trip with their Bronx high school posed for a group photo.

Several asked if President Donald Trump was inside. One had told an English teacher before the trip that he wanted to ask Trump why he was so anti-immigrant. Others joked, “Trump is gonna get you,” not knowing the president’s mass deportation campaign would soon sweep up one of their classmates.

Students from ELLIS look at the Capitol on a tour of Washington, D.C., on April 30, 2025.

In the months since Trump took office, Norma Vega, the principal of ELLIS Preparatory Academy, had vowed to stick to the same practices that for years had helped her school lift immigrant students into college and out of poverty — even as fears grew. That meant forging ahead with the trip to Washington, D.C., an ELLIS tradition that strengthened first-year students’ connection to the school and exposed them to U.S. history outside the classroom.

“We can’t function out of fear,” Vega said before the trip. “We just can’t.”

The trip was particularly meaningful for 18-year-old Bridget, an undocumented first-year ELLIS student from Ecuador who almost stayed behind because her mom, Marta, was scared of spending two days apart. She marveled at the size and beauty of the White House and the clean streets and white limestone architecture of the city. The free night in a Holiday Inn Express and hotel breakfast the next day felt like an escape from the hardship and fear that marked her life in New York City.

“It’s very beautiful. It’s like a vacation,” she said in Spanish.

But for both students and staff, the glow of the trip was short-lived. Three weeks after they returned, their classmate, Dylan Lopez Contreras, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

Dylan’s arrest marked an aggressive new phase of immigration enforcement and a turning point for ELLIS. Federal policy reached into the school as never before, threatening ELLIS’ ability to recruit new students, retain its current ones, and send its graduates to college. Even as Vega and other ELLIS staffers clung to the approach that had long made the school successful, they began to fear their model of education may not survive the Trump administration.

Nowhere was the challenge facing ELLIS more apparent than in the school’s attempts to keep Bridget on track.

Bridget gazes at the Lincoln Memorial on a field trip to Washington, D.C., in April 2025.

Bridget had several key ingredients for success at ELLIS: a deep relationship with staffers like counselor Hedin Bernard, a firm grasp on math and English, and a yearning to make it to college.

But despite her strong foundation, Bridget was drifting from school. As her fears grew and her mental health deteriorated in the wake of the Washington trip, Bridget’s grades slipped and her attendance faltered. She began seriously considering the prospect of going back to Ecuador. Even her eldest sister in their home city of Guayaquil — the one who initially encouraged her to come to the U.S. — had seen the news about Dylan. She urged Bridget and Marta to return.

ELLIS stepped up its support in response. Bernard connected Bridget with a therapist, helped her apply for housing, referred her to a lawyer to help with a court hearing coming up in late June and an ICE check-in a month later, and enrolled her in July classes to keep her engaged after the school year ended. But as a pivotal summer approached, he wasn’t sure it would be enough.

His work with Bridget felt like being caught in a riptide. “You can see the shore,” he said. But “you can’t move anywhere.”

Bridget and ELLIS Prep wrestle with doubts after Dylan’s arrest

When Bridget learned about Dylan’s arrest, she couldn’t stop picturing him in an orange jumpsuit with cuffs around his hands and feet. That was the uniform Bridget’s eldest sister had worn when she was detained by U.S. border agents a year earlier.

Bridget decided not to tell Marta that the lanky, purple-haired Venezuelan who’d made a point to shake her hand on a visit to ELLIS earlier that year was now in ICE detention.

“She would be very scared that they could deport us at any moment,” said Bridget, who, like her mother, asked to use a pseudonym, fearing immigration enforcement.

Bridget stands for a portrait in Madison Square Park in the Manhattan borough of New York City.

Bridget had tried for months to keep her own growing deportation fears at bay and stay strong for her mom. But after Dylan’s arrest, that grew harder. She started watching more TikTok videos about immigration raids and didn’t leave her midtown Manhattan shelter except for her trips to school and back.

ICE agents, facing pressure to meet stringent arrest quotas, had begun detaining immigrants after routine court dates and ICE check-ins, leading to a surge in arrests. Federal agents arrested roughly seven times as many immigrants in New York City during the first part of June compared to the same period last year. Nearly three-quarters of those arrests were of people who, like Dylan, had no criminal convictions or charges.

Bridget wasn’t the only one struggling to process the news about Dylan and the surge in immigration enforcement.

Students filled Bernard’s office to talk through questions about their immigration cases, and the stress crept into his home life. His own middle-school-aged children knew the details of Dylan’s case, and he often had to excuse himself from time with his family to take phone calls.

Dylan Lopez Contreras and his mother, Raiza.

But the stakes felt too high to dial back his work. Normally, in the final month of school, students were worried about moving to the next grade or graduating. This year, he said they wondered: “Is a masked person going to grab me off the street?”

Vega mapped out the school’s response to Dylan’s arrest from her cavernous office adorned with student artwork and overlooking the school’s football field and the Harlem River.

As ICE shuttled Dylan from New Jersey, to Texas, to Louisiana, making it impossible for his lawyers to contact him, Vega grew angry.

“This situation makes it really, really real,” she told a room full of mostly quiet staffers during a meeting in a science classroom. “One of our kids was taken.”

The school helped launch a fundraiser that collected $43,000 for Dylan’s family, organized a schoolwide letter-writing campaign, and redoubled its efforts to connect students with lawyers.

As Dylan’s arrest sparked national headlines and local protests, even Mayor Eric Adams voiced his support, despite initially refraining from weighing in. The city’s Law Department filed a friend of the court brief in Dylan’s legal case, arguing ICE’s tactics would prevent undocumented New Yorkers from using city services.

In the days after Dylan’s arrest, Vega never wavered from the refrain she’d repeated since Trump took office in January.

“There’s nothing — nothing — that we are to say, or behave, that’s going to send a message other than: ‘You are going to college. You are going to graduate and have a future,’” she said at the staff meeting. “Our kids need to have a hope.”

Principal Norma Vega participates in a virtual meeting in her office at ELLIS in the Bronx.

In the weeks to come, though, Vega wrestled privately with her own doubts about whether the playbook she’d long relied on still worked. Many of her students went to private colleges in upstate New York because those schools had a relationship with ELLIS and offered significant scholarships. But ELLIS students were often among the few immigrants in their classes. Would that make them bigger targets for immigration enforcement?

And the Trump administration was trying to make it harder for undocumented students to access college at all. Trump issued an executive order seeking to curtail undocumented students’ access to in-state tuition at public colleges, a key benefit that allows some ELLIS students to pursue higher education.

Vega had always believed that a college education was the “great equalizer” for ELLIS students. “I feel like that comes into question right now,” Vega said in June. “Is it?”

Housing uncertainty and hardship lead to tough choices for an undocumented teen

On a Friday morning in late May, a week after Dylan’s arrest, Bernard got a call he’d been waiting weeks for. With Bridget and Marta’s permission, he had applied on Bridget’s behalf to a shelter for unaccompanied youth that could provide long-term housing along with extra support.

He knew stability was critical for Bridget. She had stayed in family and friends’ spare rooms in recent months and was tired of not having a place to call her own. Some nights, she curled up on the floor while her mom shared a bed with other relatives, sleeping only a few fitful hours.

Shortly after Bernard applied, Bridget and Marta were offered spots in a city-run homeless shelter in midtown Manhattan. It provided free food and privacy, but it was farther from ELLIS.

On the phone, Bernard learned the youth shelter had an open room and needed to hear back by noon that day. But Bridget would have to live apart from Marta.

Hedin Bernard, a school counselor at ELLIS, checks on students in a history class at the Bronx public school.

For Bridget, the youth shelter’s offer was another reminder that her best chance at building a future in this country might require leaving her mom behind. Bridget had also applied, with the help of a lawyer recommended by Bernard, for Special Immigrant Juvenile status, a type of legal protection for youth abandoned or neglected by at least one parent. Bridget knew it was her best chance at legal protection, but it wouldn’t cover Marta.

Sitting in class that morning, Bridget could barely focus. She turned Bernard’s offer over in her head. In her English class, she stared at the pages of an autobiography she’d been working on for weeks.

On a page entitled “important people,” Bridget had written: “First my mom.” Marta had worked hard to make Bridget a “good person” and give her “a good future,” she wrote in neat handwriting.

Bridget turned down the spot in the youth shelter.

“Mama was alone. All she has is me,” she later said.

Whether they stayed in the U.S. or left, Marta and Bridget were going to do it together. Increasingly, they thought about returning to Ecuador.

Bridget missed her eldest sister, the smell of Ecuadorian street food, like caramelized apples, and sitting outside her house with her family, sipping on soda or juice as children played nearby.

On a warm morning in mid-June, as Bernard prepared for a meeting with parents to share legal resources, he got a WhatsApp message from Bridget that stopped him in his tracks.

“Mr Hedin good morning my mom is very frightened with everything and so am I,” she began. “To tell the truth I don’t feel good about all of this and we haven’t left the shelter at all, I know things are going to get worse and I think it would be best to go back to Ecuador.”

She asked if he knew how “voluntary removal” worked. For months, the Trump administration had been offering to pay for the flights of immigrants who agreed to “self-deport.” But few ELLIS families knew the details of the offer, or trusted the Trump administration enough to take them up on it, Bernard said.

Bernard quickly sent Bridget a voice memo asking her not to “make any decisions before talking to me.”

When they met in person the next day, Bernard urged her to stay in school while her legal case played out. Her court hearing was in a few weeks, on June 25, and the ICE check-in was about a month later.

Bridget hugs her counselor, Hedin Bernard, at ELLIS. She often seeks him out when she is overwhelmed by stress.

He encouraged her to come to July classes to keep up her connection with ELLIS and prepare for the English Language Arts Regents exam next year. The school had placed her in an advanced English course starting in the fall.

Bridget reluctantly agreed. She still wanted to leave, but it was logistically complicated. She and Marta didn’t have the money for plane tickets, which would cost upwards of $1,000. It would also take time to arrange travel.

And anyway, Bridget had started helping Marta collect bottles and occasionally clean apartments. Even though their daily earnings were meager, it was far more than they could make in Ecuador.

Bernard had bought some time, but he wasn’t sure how much.

ELLIS’ mission put to the test under Trump’s policies

As ELLIS’ staffers entered the summer, they faced two challenges: keeping up a connection with current students and figuring out how the school would need to adapt over the year ahead.

ELLIS expanded its summer school last year to keep students engaged and on track to graduate. But the accelerating mass deportation campaign had made that more difficult, and it showed no signs of abating.

ELLIS, a public school for newly arrived immigrants, shares the John F. Kennedy High School campus in the Bronx.

At the start of the summer, Congress approved a spending bill that set aside an unprecedented $170 billion for immigration enforcement. When an undocumented migrant shot a border agent in a Manhattan park just across the river from ELLIS, Border Czar Tom Homan promised to “flood the zone” with ICE agents, and Attorney General Pam Bondi sued the city over its “sanctuary” policies limiting local law enforcement’s cooperation with ICE.

On the last day of the school year, Bernard got a call from another first-year student and friend of Bridget’s: Her mom had been detained by ICE. The girl was devastated. With the arrest, she’d also lost the primary source of child care for her own toddler and the household’s main wage earner. She told the school she wouldn’t be able to make it to summer school.

Vega offered to take care of the student’s son in the principal’s office while she attended class. But the student never took her up on it, opting to work instead.

ELLIS has always had students balancing work and school. But some staffers saw the pressure to work growing — and starting earlier than usual — as deportation fears mounted.

“They feel the urgency to make money now,” said Maciel Lantigua, an ELLIS alumna and social worker for the Mission Society, a nonprofit that operates out of ELLIS, providing students with extra resources and support. “They don’t have the luxury of that time.”

Vega worried about hanging on to existing students. She was also stressed about recruiting new ones.

Cards informing students of their rights sit on Principal Norma Vega's desk at ELLIS.

As a result of Trump’s policies, the number of immigrants unlawfully crossing the U.S.-Mexico border sank to the lowest point in decades in July. The rate of new migrants entering New York City shelters, meanwhile, had dropped to fewer than 100 per week from a high of more than 4,000 weekly two years earlier.

ELLIS staffers noticed only a handful of new students registering through the end of July, compared with 20-30 over the same period last year.

The slowdown forced Vega to consider whether the 275-student school would need to adjust its policy of only enrolling students over 16 who have been in the country less than a year.

At the same time, the Trump administration ramped up its efforts to cut off undocumented students’ access to public education.

In July, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that undocumented preschoolers would no longer qualify for Head Start, a federally funded free child care program. Older undocumented students lost access to federally funded dual-enrollment, career and technical education, and adult education programs. Later that month, the Department of Education launched a civil rights investigation into universities providing financial aid to undocumented students who arrived as young children in the U.S. and have temporary legal protection, commonly known as Dreamers.

Norma Vega, principal of ELLIS, poses for a portrait.

“The way this second Trump administration is targeting every aspect of life for immigrants makes students’ ability to access education that much harder,” said Alejandra Vázquez Baur, a fellow at the left-leaning Century Foundation and founder of the National Newcomer Network. “For that reason, it might be the most intense attack on immigrant students to date.”

At ELLIS, Vega has been raising money from outside donors for years to help subsidize undocumented students’ college costs. The school raised a record, over $40,000, this year.

And while Vega is committed to keeping students at ELLIS for four years, she knows the school will have to be nimble about developing flexible schedules for students feeling pressure to earn money right away.

She’s hopeful that the tides will eventually turn.

As Americans have started to see the effects of the administration’s aggressive enforcement campaign, the anti-immigrant sentiment that helped propel Trump into office has begun to reverse. The percentage of Americans who support curbing immigration dropped from 55% in July 2024 to just 30% a year later, according to a poll from Gallup.

That’s why Vega is confident that if she can make it through a few years of lean enrollment, the school’s situation will improve.

“The goal is to survive,” she said. “To still be here post-Trump.”

Can Bridget hold on to her education dreams?

Bridget and Marta, who were still terrified of being detained by federal immigration agents, had one stroke of good luck: Their June 25 court hearing was virtual.

In the weeks leading up to the proceeding, the pair found a pro bono lawyer to help them submit applications for asylum and for Bridget’s special juvenile status. The judge scheduled another hearing for 2027 while their claims wound their way through the slow-moving courts.

But they still had their in-person ICE check-in on July 21. Bridget, who had been watching videos about immigration enforcement, knew ICE agents were increasingly using the check-ins to detain migrants.

The night before the appointment, Marta and Bridget barely slept. At the subway station, Marta didn’t have enough money to buy her own one-trip pass and slipped through the turnstile with Bridget when she tapped her student OMNY card — knowing full well that getting caught could have devastating consequences.

On the train, Bridget, wearing a matching set of pink pants and shirt with the logo from the Nickelodeon kids show “Rugrats,” carried the immigration papers in crisp folders and stared ahead.

Dressed in a white and blue floral dress, Marta thumbed the small brown stuffed mouse named Mickey, who had traveled with her from Ecuador, attached by keychain to her fanny pack.

She played the possibilities and questions over in her head. Should she have brought a suitcase with her in case she was deported? Would she be separated from Bridget if they were detained? Would they send her back to Ecuador, or to a country she’d never set foot in?

A couple of weeks earlier, she’d found a stuffed pink rabbit on the street, and she clipped it next to Mickey on her keychain.

“If we get out of this, I’ll give it a name,” she said.

President Donald Trump's photo hangs on the wall at 26 Federal Plaza.

A snaking line wound its way inside to the first checkpoint at 26 Federal Plaza, an imposing steel and glass federal immigration building. On the courthouse wall, looking down on them, was a stern-faced portrait of Trump. Marta leaned her head on Bridget’s shoulder, and Bridget wrapped her arm around her mom.

Bridget and Marta — who still had a shared immigration case because Bridget entered the country as a minor — were referred to a room on the fifth floor for family cases. Five floors above them, dozens of recently detained migrants were being held in a makeshift detention center, forced to use the toilet in public and sleep on the floor with only thin blankets.

Two hours later, Marta and Bridget emerged, wearing faint smiles and clutching paperwork that listed the date of their next ICE check-in: exactly a year later.

Outside the building, with the sun shining, Bridget and Marta made a video call to Bridget’s eldest sister in Ecuador, who had been waiting for news. Marta christened the stuffed rabbit on her fanny pack “Pinky.”

The women were relieved, but they didn’t feel like celebrating. Marta wanted a coffee, but had no money to buy one.

Bridget’s dream of becoming the first person in her family to attend college for the moment felt a little more within reach — at least until her next court date. She still thought often about her friend Dylan, who remains in detention in Western Pennsylvania.

Bridget and her mother, Marta, hold Marta's stuffed animals, a mouse she named Mickey and a rabbit she named Pinky.

ELLIS staffers also hadn’t given up trying to reel Bridget in.

One morning in late July, Lantigua, the social worker, spotted Bridget and Marta near the school with a shopping cart full of cans and bottles. Bridget had for weeks been helping Marta collect them in the punishing heat. Lantigua invited Bridget to go see “Superman,” one of a series of activities she’d organized for students to keep them connected to ELLIS over the summer.

Bridget didn’t go. But Lantigua tried again with a trip on Wednesday to the New York Botanical Garden. She attempted a move that had worked in the past: inviting Bridget and Marta, too.

This time, they both showed up.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org

Are federal tax-credit scholarships ‘free money’ for Democratic governors, or a poison apple?

2025-08-13T22:23:22+00:00

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North Carolina’s Josh Stein recently became the first Democratic governor to embrace a new federal school choice tax credit — right after vetoing a bill in support of it.

Stein’s veto statement rebuffing Republican lawmakers’ effort to enroll North Carolina in the program described the tax credit, which Congress included in a budget bill backed by President Donald Trump, as bad policy that would funnel “billions in tax giveaways to wealthy parents” whose children already attend private school.

But the program could also help public school students, he said. And the law gives governors the final say over whether their states participate.

“I see opportunities for the federal scholarship donation tax-credit program to benefit North Carolina’s public school kids,” Stein wrote on Aug. 6. “Once the federal government issues sound guidance, I intend to opt North Carolina in so we can invest in the public school students most in need of after school programs, tutoring, and other resources.”

Many Democratic governors have opposed vouchers as diverting public money to private schools. But the tax-credit program doesn’t touch state budgets — instead the federal government reimburses taxpayers for donations to scholarship-granting organizations. And the law allows donations to pay for tutoring and other educational expenses for both private and public school students, not just private school tuition, at a time of growing budget uncertainty.

Chalkbeat asked all 23 Democratic governors whether they plan to opt into the federal tax-credit scholarship. Only two said no, saying it would hurt public schools. Stein’s veto statement represents the first tentative yes. Another indicated he’s “excited” about the program’s potential to help kids from low-income backgrounds. Others declined to comment or said they were waiting to learn more about the program while reiterating their support for public schools.

The hesitation of so many governors underscores the challenges facing the Democratic Party in defining its own education agenda and reconnecting with key constituencies. The gap leaves room for lobbying and political realignments.

Among the groups trying to sway the conversation is Democrats for Education Reform, which for nearly two decades opposed vouchers. CEO Jorge Elorza this year called on Democrats to embrace private school choice as a progressive value.

“What we are trying to do is get Democratic governors to see the possibilities in this,” Elorza said. “A lot of Democrats are choice-curious. Part of the work we’re doing is providing political cover, but we’re also trying to help them see how this advances their own priorities.”

Whether the tax-credit scholarship does, in fact, advance Democratic priorities could depend on rules the Trump administration still needs to develop. They could end up limiting governors’ ability to steer money to the neediest students.

In that scenario, given Democrats’ argument that the budget bill mostly helps the wealthy, “why would they then support a tuition tax program that essentially does the same thing, that gives money disproportionately to wealthy families who already have their kids in private schools?” said Thomas Toch, director of the think tank FutureEd. “Is that an argument that a Democrat wants to run on?”

Tax-credit program gives school choice supporters a foothold

Starting in 2027, the tax-credit scholarship program will offer taxpayers a dollar-for-dollar credit on their federal income tax for donations up to $1,700 to eligible scholarship-granting organizations. The money can go toward any expense allowed under Coverdell education savings accounts, which includes tuition, tutoring, specialized services for children with disabilities, and computers.

Families earning up to 300% of area median income qualify. That threshold includes well-off families in expensive urban areas but might exclude middle-class families in some rural communities.

Because of how the bill evolved in Congress, scholarship groups will need to raise a lot of money from small donors to generate significant revenue, and they’ll need to fight state-by-state battles to expand the program’s reach.

“The original goal was to bring school choice to all 50 states,” said Rob Enlow of the advocacy group EdChoice. “This does not do that. It brings the potential for school choice to all 50 states. It gives the advocates in those states something to grab onto.”

Vouchers are booming, but lack of rural private schools that accept them means students miss out

Norton Rainey, CEO of ACE Scholarships, is happy to grab on. Over 25 years, ACE has given out some 110,000 scholarships to students from low-income backgrounds worth a collective $333 million. He’s prepared to make the case to donors and governors that these scholarships transform lives and deserve their support.

“It’s a game changer for our parents, our kids, our communities, our country,” he said. “I think this is opening up the flood gates.”

Greta Alexander sent four boys to Fort Worth public schools where they struggled to learn in crowded classrooms and where they “sometimes had to fight.” Her youngest son got caught up in drugs. She wanted something different for her daughter Miracle — and an ACE scholarship provided it.

Miracle got one-on-one attention, a safe learning environment, and advanced academics at Temple Christian School, Alexander said.

“That she had the opportunity to be in an environment where she could thrive meant the world to us,” said Alexander, who testified in support of Texas’ voucher expansion and hopes the federal program helps even more students. “I’m so excited that other children will have the opportunity for that.”

Federal rules could sour Democrats on tax credits

Stories like Alexander’s highlight the crux of the school choice debate, said Elorza of Democrats for Education Reform, which is that “across the country, too many schools are just not getting it done for kids.”

School choice also polls well among working class parents of color, a key Democratic constituency where Republicans have made inroads. The tax credits represent “literally free money” to help these families, he said.

But governors like Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, who once supported vouchers, are waiting on federal regulations that won’t be finalized by the Treasury Department for some time. They could dictate the extent to which Democratic governors can steer money towards certain student groups, or put conditions on private schools that ultimately benefit from the tax credits.

Education advocates also wonder whether these rules will let a scholarship-granting organization raise money for public-school tutoring programs, or only for private services. Or could states find a way under the regulations to turn the money into a public school enrichment fund?

“The Shapiro Administration is reviewing potential impacts of the new federal school tax credit provision, which does not go into effect until 2027, and awaiting additional federal guidance,” spokesperson Manuel Bonder said in a statement.

It's not yet clear how much authority governors would have to steer money from federal tax-credit scholarships toward some groups and away from others.

While the law requires participating governors to submit a list of eligible scholarship-granting organizations each year, federal rules are unlikely to grant governors the ability to pick and choose among them, said Jim Blew, co-founder of the Defense of Freedom Institute, a conservative think tank.

Governors could encourage the formation of groups that align with their values and help them raise money, Blew said — but the price will be accepting organizations they disagree with.

In Illinois, where lawmakers let a state tax-credit scholarship program expire a few years ago, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said he’s concerned about enabling discrimination. But he didn’t rule out Illinois participating.

In response to a reporter’s question last month, Pritzker said the program would have to be inclusive, and “not just a program that’s about private schools, sometimes religious schools, and sometimes schools that would reject having an LGBTQ member as a teacher.”

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, who supported versions of a state voucher proposal early in his political career, “is excited by the possibility of unlocking new federal tax credits for donations to help low-income kids achieve,” spokesperson Eric Maruyama said. “He encourages the administration to ensure these tax credits lead to improved student outcomes and maintain maximum flexibility for states who choose to participate in this program.”

Other governor’s offices did not respond to Chalkbeat, said they had no comment at this time, or said they were reviewing the federal legislation to understand it better.

So far, only Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek and New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said they would not opt in.

Michael Coleman, a spokesperson for Lujan Grisham, said she is concerned students with disabilities might be shut out of the program because private schools aren’t required to admit them; that public schools could lose more students; and that there is no guarantee schools receiving vouchers would provide a high-quality education.

Critics also fear the tax credits could be used to justify cutting federal education spending in the future.

Voters have yet to support vouchers at the ballot box. But Blew believes the opt-in decision could become a potent issue in 2026 gubernatorial races and force a conversation about school choice that puts foes of the tax credits at a political disadvantage.

“You’ll have the education freedom candidates,” he said, “and they will be both Democrats and Republicans.”

Purple states could see power struggles over participation

Education politics can be particularly complicated in states with divided government, such as North Carolina.

Voters there backed Donald Trump in the last three presidential contests and at the same time elected Democratic governors. Republicans lawmakers overrode the veto of the previous Democratic governor to launch a major voucher expansion in 2024. Some Democrats have broken ranks to join Republicans on school choice bills.

Partners/Parents for Educational Freedom said in a statement that Stein’s veto “protects the status quo, deflects from real solutions, delays greater opportunity for students, and signals to every parent that their child’s educational opportunity depends on their zip code, their parents’ income, and political games.”

The advocacy group wants lawmakers to override Stein’s veto.

Heather Koons, communications and research director for the advocacy group Public Schools First NC, sees the federal tax-credit scholarship as “just another voucher program” and fears that any money for public school students will amount to “crumbs.”

“Gov. Stein has been a great friend to public education, and I don’t want to second guess him,” she said. “I’m sure he’ll do everything he can to make lemonade out of lemons, if lemons are going to be shoved down our throat anyway. Ultimately I wish this never existed.”

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

At a Bronx school for immigrants, an undocumented teen fights for an education under Trump

2025-08-13T10:30:00+00:00

This is part one of a two-part series. Read the second story here.

In the hours after one of his students was apprehended by federal immigration agents, Hedin Bernard was on the phone nearly nonstop. He’d comforted the student’s mother. He’d called advocates and lawyers.

And in the moments in between, the school counselor had agonized over how he would tell his other students at ELLIS Preparatory Academy that Dylan Lopez Contreras, a first-year student from Venezuela, had been detained.

He was particularly worried about telling one student.

Bridget, an 18-year-old Ecuadorian immigrant, was a friend of Dylan’s, close enough that he shared arepas with her at lunch. Bernard knew that Bridget and her mother, Marta, were dreading their own upcoming court date and immigration check-in, and word of Dylan’s arrest would get out soon. He wanted Bridget to hear it from him. In her eight months at ELLIS, Bridget had often retreated to his cramped office and sunk into a plush black bean bag whenever her stress became too much to bear.

Hedin Bernard, a founding staff member and school counselor at ELLIS, in his office in May, 2025.

For Bridget and Marta, who asked to use pseudonyms because they fear immigration enforcement, life in New York City as undocumented immigrants had been defined by hardship. They had bounced between three friends’ and relatives’ apartments before landing in a homeless shelter in midtown Manhattan. Marta collected cans, making about $20 a day, and was often unable to afford food.

Their anxiety had increased since President Donald Trump began his second term in January, promising to launch the “largest deportation program in American history.” Fearful that any wrong move could get them detained, separated, or deported, the mother and daughter tried to stick together. Marta even used some of her precious dollars to commute with Bridget to school.

With Dylan’s arrest, Trump’s enforcement campaign had arrived at the school’s doorstep.

Founded in 2008, ELLIS’ mission is based on the belief that all of its students, including undocumented ones, can build a future in the U.S. The Bronx school has pushed hundreds of newly arrived immigrants into college and out of poverty with a playbook staffers have honed for years, relying on strong relationships with students and a sophisticated network of support for families’ needs. For Bridget and Marta, ELLIS often felt like the only public institution with its arms open in a city and country that otherwise seemed not to want them.

“They’ve given her a lot of hope,” Marta said in Spanish. “It’s the reason we don’t want to leave.”

ELLIS is one of seven schools that share the John F. Kennedy High School campus in the Spuyten Duyvil section of the Bronx.

But over the last seven months, ELLIS educators have been forced to confront a fundamental question: Could the school continue to help its students work toward a life in this country when the federal government was sending the message that many of them weren’t welcome here?

Bernard stood in his office with Bridget that Thursday afternoon in late May, explaining how plainclothes agents had seized Dylan. He watched her smile fade.

He knew the arrest was stirring up painful memories from Bridget’s own immigration journey.

Bernard had helped Bridget find free food and clothes, navigate the city’s complex shelter system, and access legal advice. He had celebrated with her when she’d passed the Algebra I Regents exam required for graduation. He had seen her face light up talking about plans to attend college and become a veterinarian.

But now, Bridget just wanted to know if her friend was OK. And Bernard didn’t know what to tell her.

Starting high school, again

In Guayaquil, Ecuador, Bridget had been a strong student, just one year away from finishing high school. But gangs had become so prevalent in her neighborhood that she no longer felt safe walking home from night classes.

Bridget’s oldest sister, now 38, came up with the idea of immigrating to the U.S. so Bridget could continue her education.

Bridget poses for a portrait in Manhattan. She left Ecuador in search of a better education.

Bridget, who loves Korean pop music and animals, was devastated to part with her dog, Molli, a small white Pekingese, but excited for what the future held. Marta, anxious by nature, worried most about the trip, but agreed to go for Bridget’s sake.

“It’s not going to be my fault that her dream dies,” Marta decided.

The women had one advantage: Marta’s middle daughter, who left Ecuador six years earlier at age 19, had an apartment in the Bronx with her husband and two kids, giving the rest of the family a roadmap and a place to stay.

But the journey quickly veered off course. They got stuck for about a month in Mexico, losing almost all of their belongings. They arrived in the U.S. in April 2024 with just the clothes on their backs and a few prized possessions: a Bible, a hymnal, and a light brown stuffed mouse named Mickey who remains attached to Marta’s fanny pack.

As soon as they crossed into Texas, the women were detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and separated. As Bridget was a minor, she and Marta were released with plane tickets to New York. Her eldest sister was imprisoned by border agents for a month before being deported to Ecuador.

Bridget and Marta have clung to each other ever since.

Marta shows off "Mickey," one of her only possessions that survived the journey to the U.S.

In New York City, Bridget and Marta moved in with Bridget’s middle sister. Sharing a small apartment with her family of four wore on everyone. Marta struggled to find work. Then at their first check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, officials encouraged Bridget to enroll in school.

Bridget got a list of four public schools from an Education Department enrollment center, but three rejected her, saying they didn’t have space and didn’t accept older students.

Last on the list was English Language Learners and International Support Preparatory Academy, or ELLIS, a nod to the famous New York City island through which millions of immigrants have passed. That’s where Bridget started classes in September 2024.

She was part of a historic wave of roughly 50,000 migrants who have enrolled in New York City schools starting in summer 2022, according to the city’s estimates — a pattern echoed across the country as cities like Denver, Chicago, and Los Angeles absorbed thousands of families fleeing Latin America, Africa, and other parts of the world.

Bridget (right) and an ELLIS classmate work on an assignment for history class. ELLIS is one of the few NYC schools geared toward older newcomers.

The influx has posed new challenges, as schools scrambled to hire bilingual staff, add counselors and social workers to help students struggling with trauma from their journeys, and assist older students seeking to graduate quickly. But the new students have also been a boon for school districts previously losing students and funding. In New York City, former schools Chancellor David Banks described the migrant influx as a “godsend,” saying they staved off potential school mergers or closures.

ELLIS, a small school with 275 students, is one of only a handful in the city explicitly designed to enroll older, newly arrived students, who face a steep climb to graduation. At a meeting with the guidance team early in the school year, Norma Vega, ELLIS’ founding principal, told staffers: “Our 67% graduation rate is someone else’s 98%. The amount of work everyone does to get each kid to the finish line is beyond comparison.”

Unlike other schools, ELLIS requires all new students, regardless of age or how much high school they’ve completed in their home country, to enter as first-year students. The model ensures that students leave school with the English fluency and familiarity with the American education system they need to succeed in college and beyond.

Starting high school again made Bridget nervous: Her only knowledge of American high schools came from movies. She worried about speaking English and making friends. But she was also hopeful. She and her mother had traveled nearly 3,000 miles for this chance.

ELLIS Prep braces as Trump takes office

What Bridget and her mother hadn’t counted on was arriving in the U.S. at a moment when a growing number of Americans saw illegal immigration as a critical problem. A July 2024 poll found that 55% of Americans said they wanted to curb immigration — the first time since 2009 that a majority of the country expressed that view.

In the run-up to the presidential election, Trump focused his campaign on immigration, though he promised to target his deportation efforts on violent and dangerous criminals that most Americans agreed should be expelled from the country.

An ELLIS student works on an assignment in the hallway. Most of the school's students hail from Latin America or Africa.

Even some ELLIS students offered support for Trump’s immigration platform in class discussions, a history teacher said.

Some conservatives questioned, too, whether the country should continue to educate undocumented students, a practice codified in the 1982 U.S. Supreme Court case, Plyler v. Doe. Critics, including the authors of the influential Project 2025 domestic policy blueprint, argued that the recent influx of migrants put an unsustainable strain on public schools, to the detriment of U.S.-born students.

School systems don’t track the immigration status of students, making it difficult to know how many undocumented students have enrolled in public schools. But an estimated 850,000 undocumented children are living in the U.S., according to Pew Research Center. Another estimated 4.4 million U.S.-born children have at least one parent who is undocumented — an umbrella term describing migrants without a valid visa or legal residence.

After Trump’s win in the 2024 election, Bernard, the school counselor, noticed an uneasy quiet fall over the school.

A founding ELLIS staff member with a dry sense of humor and encyclopedic knowledge of history and geography, Bernard kept a fourth-floor office that was seldom empty, with visitors ranging from a teen caught vaping marijuana outside to a colleague looking to vent.

Counselor Hedin Bernard has been at ELLIS since the school launched in 2008.

Bernard had lived his own version of the immigrant success story. His parents came from the Dominican Republic and ran a grocery store on Manhattan’s Lower East Side so they could afford Catholic school. He wanted to give his students that same support, and he often served as a kind of stand-in family member for students who’d left their homes and loved ones thousands of miles away.

In the days after the November election, Bernard expected a queue of students with questions and concerns. But few students wanted to talk about the new administration. It felt like everyone was just “waiting for the other shoe to drop,” he said.

That happened the week of Jan. 21, after Trump delivered a fiery inauguration address vowing to “begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.” The next day, Trump rescinded longstanding guidance prohibiting ICE from carrying out immigration raids at or near schools.

Absences at ELLIS skyrocketed, like they did across the city. Bernard and other counselors tried to reach families by phone and WhatsApp to assure them it was safe to attend. Many students, including Bridget, said they wanted to wait a couple of days.

A week later, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted a video of an ICE raid in the Bronx — one of several in neighborhoods surrounding ELLIS — accompanied by the message: “Getting the dirt bags off the streets in New York City this morning.”

ELLIS students saw videos of ICE on social media and heard rumors of immigration agents showing up in their neighborhoods. ELLIS staffers posted “Know Your Rights” guidance on bulletin boards in the hallway, and Vega, the principal, went around to classrooms instructing students on what to do if they came into contact with immigration agents.

“They wanted to know: ‘Is someone going to come pick me up?’” said Vega. “The answer in this building is that every student here is going to be protected. The goal is to make sure every student … is aware of their rights. That they’re entitled to be in school.”

Principal Norma Vega, pictured in her office, sought to reassure students they would be safe at school after Trump's inauguration.

Most of the ELLIS students who skipped school quickly returned. But a few — like a senior who missed more than a month of school and only came back after Vega did a home visit — were paralyzed by fear of immigration enforcement.

The threat of deportation had become another obstacle standing between ELLIS students and graduation, one that the staffers faced like any other challenge: with a belief that caring educators can keep students on track. But Trump’s message was proving powerful, too.

Paving a path to college for immigrant students

Midway through the school year, Bridget had come on ELLIS’ radar as a first-year student with unusual maturity and potential who dealt with significant stress outside school.

Bridget had proven a quick study in English and math. Her attendance was excellent, and her grades were almost all As and Bs. Her fluency in English had progressed, and she’d made an impression on friends and educators with her generosity and kindness.

Vega believed Bridget would earn a scholarship to a good college if she made it to graduation.

Bridget works on an assignment for her English class at ELLIS.

In her 17 years leading ELLIS, Vega had developed a kind of radar for the barriers that could keep each student from making it to graduation and college.

The daughter of a tight-knit Puerto Rican family, Vega attended public schools on the Lower East Side until her family was priced out to the Bronx. Before founding ELLIS, she had worked as a social worker and principal of another school for new immigrants, but she was frustrated by the lack of options specifically geared toward older newcomers.

Starting and leading ELLIS had been a labor of love, propelled by the small schools movement under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

When it came to Bridget, Vega and Bernard quickly realized Marta’s anxiety about immigration enforcement was taking a toll.

Bernard asked Marta for permission to bring Bridget on an ice skating field trip in Manhattan. Marta refused, too worried about what could happen to Bridget to give her consent. “‘She’s all I have,’” she told Bernard.

The school didn’t give up. In early March, Bernard and Vega invited both Marta and Bridget on a school trip to John Jay College — a CUNY institution with an especially well-developed set of resources for undocumented students.

For Vega, it felt like a turning point in getting both Bridget and Marta to buy into the school’s guiding vision: that a college education and a future in the U.S. are within reach.

“[Marta] started crying when she realized there’s hope,” Vega recalled.

The trip also gave Vega a chance to offer a delicate piece of advice she often shares with fearful parents — one she sensed would be particularly relevant for Marta and Bridget, who were so fiercely attached: If Bridget were to build a life in the U.S., her mother would need to loosen her grip and let her explore.

Staying the course despite rising threats of deportation

On a Friday afternoon in mid-March, Vega was driving her kids to a martial arts tournament, listening to bachata on a music streaming app and trying not to think about work, when she heard an ad that made her jaw drop.

In a Department of Homeland Security ad, Noem said, “President Trump has a clear message to those that are in our country illegally: Leave now.

“If you don’t, we will find you, and we will deport you. You will never return.”

Vega was horrified. She took the app off her phone. But the ad popped up on another platform later that day.

In the months since Trump took office, Vega had done all she could to insulate her school from anti-immigrant political rhetoric. But listening to the ad, it occurred to Vega that if she was having difficulty escaping the fear campaign, it must be even harder for her students and their families.

“What they’re trying to do,” she said, “is scare people into leaving.”

A screenshot of an ad featuring Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

Just weeks earlier, she’d learned that a student who stopped coming to school after the presidential inauguration returned to Colombia — the first time Vega knew of that happening in the school’s 17-year history.

The ad, part of a multimillion-dollar campaign playing on radio, TV, and music streaming platforms across the country, was one prong of the administration’s quickly escalating immigration enforcement tactics.

Agents had detained U.S. green card-holders at airports, including a German citizen who had lived in the country for 17 years. The Trump administration had invoked an arcane law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to deport hundreds of migrants to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador. One of them was a 19-year-old Venezuelan living in the Bronx. He could have been an ELLIS student, Vega thought.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams, meanwhile, had signaled his willingness to cooperate with the enforcement push locally. Trump’s Justice Department succeeded in getting federal corruption charges against Adams dropped, in part, so he could better support the administration’s immigration agenda. After a meeting with Border Czar Tom Homan, Adams vowed to reverse a city policy barring ICE from making arrests on Rikers Island.

The school had several annual field trips approaching, including an overnight trip to Washington, D.C., for first-year students. The trip felt fraught with new risk this year, and some staffers and parents — including Marta — had expressed concerns. But Vega knew how important it was to give her students, all of whom came from low-income households, the same type of rich cultural experiences as students from more affluent families.

Vega believed, too, that going to the nation’s capital, where federal officials crafted the immigration policies shaping the lives of ELLIS students, would send a powerful message that the school would not cow to fear.

“We’re going. We’re going,” Vega said as the school began preparations for the trip to Washington.

A mother and daughter from Ecuador confront their future in NYC

By mid-April, Bridget and Marta were growing increasingly nervous about their upcoming court hearing and ICE check-in. Despite their best efforts, they hadn’t found a lawyer to represent them in front of an immigration judge in June.

But with Bernard’s recommendation, Bridget and Marta visited a Manhattan church that helps connect immigrants to services, securing a phone appointment with a screener for a legal organization.

They took the call at ELLIS in a storage room that Bernard unlocked so Bridget and Marta could have privacy.

The screener explained that winning an asylum claim — the most common path to legal status for Latin American migrants — would be an uphill battle given the high bar to prove they faced a specific fear of violence or persecution in Ecuador.

But there was another possible legal route. The screener suggested that Bridget would be a strong applicant for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, a type of legal protection available to immigrants under age 21 who had been abandoned or neglected by one or both parents. Bridget told the screener her father had never been a part of her life.

The protection would only apply to Bridget, not Marta.

Marta embraces Bridget in Manhattan's Madison Square Park.

After the screener hung up, the mother and daughter sat quietly for a few moments. Marta began to cry, and Bridget wrapped her arms around her.

“Maybe they’ll let her stay and send me back home,” Marta said, as if thinking out loud, before turning to Bridget. “Don’t help me, help your sisters. Be humble, love your sisters, keep moving forward. Don’t be like me and be nothing, and have to collect bottles.”

Bridget glanced at Mickey, the dirt-encrusted mouse attached to Marta’s fanny pack who’d been with them since they left Ecuador.

She thought about all they’d been through and all of the sacrifices her mother had made to enable her dream of pursuing an education in the U.S. She couldn’t imagine life here without her mom.

Over the days and weeks ahead, Bridget’s resolve to remain in the country began to falter.

It would be up to her school to keep it alive.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org

Trump plans to revive the Presidential Fitness Test. Here’s what 3 P.E. teachers say.

2025-08-08T19:03:07+00:00

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Ask just about any American 30 or older about the Presidential Fitness Test, and they are likely to have feelings. A lot of feelings.

Pride among the top performers, who managed to make pull-ups look easy; determination among those in the middle of the pack, as they huffed and puffed their way to a 10-minute mile; and, for many, embarrassment or worse because they could not sustain a flexed-arm hang or reach past their toes in a seated position. Students with disabilities were often left out altogether.

Now, those with memories of taking the Presidential Fitness Test have a new reason to share them: President Donald Trump said he is bringing the test back.

In reviving the test through a July 31 executive order, Trump invoked America’s upcoming 250th anniversary and the Make America Healthy Again Commission, chaired by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The president’s order said declining health hurts national morale and military readiness, and the order establishes a council to devise new versions of the Presidential Fitness Test and the Presidential Fitness Award for exemplary achievement.

A precursor to the Presidential Fitness Test was developed during the Eisenhower administration to ensure that young people were in fighting shape during the Cold War. An early version of the test included a softball throw that mimicked the motion of throwing a grenade.

Shortly before his inauguration, President John F. Kennedy unleashed something of a moral panic when, arguing in Sports Illustrated for national fitness standards, he wrote that American “softness” was tantamount to a national security threat. Trump cited that article in his executive order.

The test and award were phased out during the Obama administration in favor of a more inclusive and holistic program that stressed healthy fitness zones and personal goal-setting. It commonly included the PACER test, an aerobic capacity drill that involves running 20-meter laps at an increasingly fast pace.

Chalkbeat asked three public school P.E. teachers to share their thoughts on the likely return of the Presidential Fitness Test, what should be on it now, and the pros and cons of turning fitness testing into a national competition.

The teachers’ responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Tom Filline, who teaches P.E. to elementary school students in Melrose Park, Illinois, said returning to the Presidential Fitness Test is “a step backward” from the current iteration. Felline, known as The Angry Gym Teacher on TikTok, said he prefers the PACER test to the timed mile, which he struggled with as a kid.

In middle school, we did the mile run, and that’s what I have the most vivid memories of. I was always one of the last, if not the last. I think I ran a 12- or 13-minute mile in middle school. It was humiliating. It’s hard to build up your own confidence when you’re just thinking about that spotlight on you.

If students are constantly being pitted against each other and told they need to get strong so they can fight in a war someday, then what they are going to remember is the trauma, the pressure, the intensity of the moment, instead of, “I scored 20 laps on the PACER test last year, and this year I was able to get 25 or 30 laps.”

These days, kids go through a ton of standardized tests in the classroom, and imagine what it would be like if everyone could see each other’s reading and math scores. It would be a nightmare, and that’s how it is with fitness testing, so you have to be extra sensitive. The Presidential Fitness Test was not sensitive. It was more like a bootcamp experience.

It doesn’t surprise me that this is the approach the Trump administration is taking. Almost every policy decision they’ve made is based on “we need to toughen up.” The message it sends to individual boys and girls is, “you’re not good enough, you’re not strong enough,” when the focus should be on teaching kids to intrinsically value having a good level of fitness so they can live a long life and dream big and do whatever they want to do.

Even when presidents go after education, they usually leave us P.E. teachers alone. Now it’s come for me, and I’m in the position of having to defend the future generation against this whole macho B.S.

Gilbert Schuerch teaches high school P.E. in Harlem. Schuerch, who writes the Substack Fit to Teach, said he’s not convinced that reinstating the Presidential Fitness Test will curb America’s obesity epidemic, but if it “sheds a bit more spotlight on kids working hard on their fitness, I’m not opposed to it.”

It would not surprise me if this administration was looking to create this as a massive national competition again, and there are pluses and minuses to that.

Gilbert Schuerch

If you’re celebrating a kid who runs the fastest mile, that’s great. We recognize valedictorians and salutatorians in our schools all the time. You just have to acknowledge that this kid isn’t any better or more worthy than anybody else because of that. It’s your job as a teacher to emphasize, “Hey, did you improve?” That’s a huge deal, too.

I think people have such a visceral reaction to the Presidential Fitness Test because it may have been their first true introduction to pain. It’s not like failing a math test, where you’re sitting there helplessly and just don’t know what to do. This test is the opposite. You know exactly what to do, and your body is showing you why you may not be able to run as fast as you’d like to.

Maybe you do a pretest. Have them run half a mile, time it, and double it, and that’s their pre-score for the mile. Then you prepare for a month, and see if you can beat your time. And then, even if you’re in the bottom 50% but you improved on your test from a month ago, you can say, “You guys trained, you had a biological response to it, and you improved.” Much like any learning.

If I was going to design the Presidential Fitness Test [for my students], I think the PACER test is a great test. I also think it’s important for kids to learn how to move their body in a really safe way to pick up some weights. There would be some basic standards, like you’re healthy if you can lift your body weight off the ground in a trap bar deadlift. And then on test day, you celebrate the kids who can lift double, triple their body weight, because those are incredible feats of strength. That’s cool stuff.

Alicia Mannino will begin teaching at a K-8 school in Philadelphia this fall, marking her 16th year as a P.E. instructor. She worries that reinstating the Presidential Fitness Test will mean a return to a “one size fits all approach” to fitness that doesn’t work for everyone and could leave students feeling discouraged.

Over my whole career, I never had a coworker be like, “We’ve got to do the Presidential Fitness Test.” I don’t really know any gym teacher that thinks that’s a good idea.

I do kind of make my own fitness test, with push-ups and sit-ups. I work on different varieties of these exercises. There are wider push-ups. There are CrossFit push-ups — it’s not just one size fits all. I don’t like any of the mile runs because some people are born runners, and some people just aren’t. I do the [PACER] beep test, which is also not the best, but these tests don’t count for any type of grade.

Alicia Mannino

I love putting music on for them to relate to, that’s appropriate for them to dance to. If they’re breaking a sweat and doing the right things with the activity or game we’re doing, who am I to say what anyone else’s fitness is like? I like to lift weights. Some people like to dance. Some people like to walk. Gym is supposed to be that place where you go, you have fun, you let loose. So, standardizing a fitness test — we’re setting ourselves up for failure. I think it’s a publicity stunt, honestly.

It’s literally drawing out the athletes, and it’s going to create a line of who can do this the most, who can do it the best, and who can do it the worst. It’s just going to lead to bullying, to body dysmorphia, to low self-esteem.

You tell kids not to bring their phones to class, but they sneak them in no matter what. People take pictures if a kid wears the wrong thing. Now, imagine, on top of everything else, you have someone taking pictures of people in their gym uniforms, on the track, sweating and feeling vulnerable.

Gabrielle Birkner is Chalkbeat’s features editor and fellowship director. Email her at gbirkner@chalkbeat.org.

Music education programs aren’t playing second fiddle to workforce development

2025-08-07T16:27:46+00:00

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Nearly 40 Philadelphia teens toting drums half their size marched onto the Samuel Fels High School stage one day this summer. After performing covers of popular songs, what came next was unusual.

Some 20 musicians in the advanced group in the third annual Summer Drumline Showcase performed a rhythmic composition written not by a veteran professional musician, but by a fellow participant in the program, Christian Borges.

The program’s director and the school’s band director, Brian Morris, had asked Borges to compose a piece for the drumline. Borges — who had never composed his own music before and hadn’t played with a drumline prior to the summer — responded by handing in a first draft of “Redemption” in less than two days. Then he taught it to the other students.

Morris framed the assignment as real-world preparation for Borges, a recent Samuel Fels graduate who will be attending Temple University in the fall on a full scholarship to study music education.

If Borges hadn’t participated in Summer Drumline, a city school district program, he admits that he’d probably be working a typical summer job instead. But the program’s partnership with Career Connected Learning PHL meant some of the students were paid to participate in the program and learn about music as a career option. In short, they could treat drumline like a job.

Students close out the Philadelphia Summer Drumline showcase with Christian Borges' composition "Redemption" on July 23, 2025. Program Director Brian Morris said it was a unique experience for the other students in the program to be a part of the music composition process.

As high schools place more emphasis on preparing students for jobs after graduation, music education programs want to be viewed as part of the solution rather than merely an extracurricular activity. These programs are partnering more frequently with groups that help students explore different careers. These efforts give kids guidance about what it takes to be a violinist, DJ, or backstage producer. The approach could also help schools address a shortage of music educators and diversify the industry. But music education must also deal with new threats to its funding, as well as ongoing doubts about the importance of the arts to students’ career prospects.

The Biden administration issued guidance late last year encouraging schools to use federal money for career education to bolster their music programs. However, the Trump administration’s recent funding cuts threaten to further destabilize music education and limit students’ access to career pathways in music.

Career and workforce development initiatives for music take various forms and can have different goals.

Some programs, like Project STEP in Boston and the Philadelphia Music Alliance for Youth, are dedicated to equipping students from backgrounds historically excluded from classical music with instruments, private lessons, and skills to pursue instrumental music at colleges and conservatories. Project STEP works with roughly 60 students and aims to provide more opportunities to kids who are often underrepresented in music careers. About 60% of students in the program go on to careers in music, STEP says.

Students in Philadelphia's All City Orchestra Summer Academy rehearse on July 25, 2025. Music teachers from the Philadelphia school district staff the program, giving students the opportunity to develop strong relationships with their teachers outside of the classroom.

The Mann Center, a Philadelphia concert venue, is home to the All City Orchestra Summer Academy, a camp for young instrumentalists, that provides opportunities for students to work with professional musicians in the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Career preparation through the arts doesn’t necessarily mean career preparation for the arts. The program doesn’t expect most of the students to pursue careers in orchestral music, but connects them with resources to give them that option.

The Mann Center also runs an apprenticeship program that lets students work backstage at concerts and learn about behind-the-scenes aspects of the music industry.

“Not everybody’s going to be Beyonce,” said Catherine Cahill, the Mann Center’s CEO. “But we also know that in the music business, there’s an enormous amount of opportunities backstage. We want to give them a pathway.”

Music education is versatile career preparation, supporters say

In the face of growing competition for funding, those who run music education programs must constantly justify their importance not just to school administrators, but to the private donors who are often crucial.

Jamie Kasper, director of the Arts Education Partnership, said some policymakers are prioritizing subjects like reading, math, and maybe science and social studies, while also implying that “everything else doesn’t belong.”

That’s led arts educators to align themselves with the push to prepare students for college and careers.

At the same time, integrating music education and workforce development should be intentional and help students pursue their passions, said Frank Machos, former head of the Philadelphia school district’s Office of the Arts and Creative Learning. “We don’t want to just chase what’s popular,” said Machos, who now works at the Mann Center.

Joseph Coyners, principal bassist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, plays with students participating in the All City Orchestra Summer Academy. One of his former students, Dan McCain, now teaches in city public schools himself and is also an instructor at the academy. Academy students get chances to interact with professional orchestra members and build connections.

Coyners, who directs the city’s All-City Orchestra, founded Project 440, which provides students with after-school support to apply to college and pursue career pathways related to music. For some students, he notes, “The arts are part of their make-up, DNA. If we can provide a diversity of experiences for them, we can ensure their success.”

Music, he emphasizes, is “a right. When you take away those rights, you take the humanity away from young people.”

Dan McCain (left), an alum of the School District of Philadelphia, plays alongside his students at the All-City Orchestra Summer Academy on July 25, 2025. Evangelene Stanley (right) says that during the summer, she practices up to 11 hours a day. "The moment I heard the upright bass, I felt a spark in my heart," she said.

On a recent summer evening, as kids in the orchestra academy poured water over their heads to fend off the heat outside before their rehearsal got underway, one student decided he couldn’t wait.

He grabbed his saxophone, went under a tree, and practiced playing Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely.”

The connections between Coyners, his former student McCain, and McCain’s current students creates a “lineage” of music instruction, McCain said.

It also helps kids see music educators as role models, said Morris, band director at Samuel Fels High School. The Philadelphia school district makes a concerted effort to hire alumni like McCain who teach music education, and it offers instruction in DJing and music production to keep pace with students’ interests.

Funding climate gets tougher for music education

But those efforts have an uphill battle against federal funding cuts that signal broader concern about support for music education. There’s also increased financial pressure on private donations, philanthropy, and local grants that music programs have traditionally utilized to increase the accessibility of their music programs.

Buffalo String Works provides free music education to students — including refugee and immigrant children — in the Buffalo, New York, area. Its programming includes teaching children about sound production and recording.

In general, disparities in access to music training and resources in music education allows some children “to get a jump up from some of their peers,” said Amanda Karhuse, assistant executive director for advocacy and public policy at the National Associate for Music Education.

Still, the goal of Buffalo String Works “is not to create the next wave of accomplished musicians,” said Melinda Smith, the group’s executive director. “We’re really focused on meeting the social and emotional needs of students to make sure that wherever they go and whatever they do they have a core kind of foundation of skills that will support them to thrive.”

In the spring, the Trump administration began canceling grants funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Buffalo String Works’ $30,000 grant was one of them, and it estimates that its total budget next year will fall to 77% of its previous total. The group has laid off staff, eliminated one school-based program, and reduced another.

All-City Orchestra Summer Academy students rehearse on July 25, 2025. Most students attending ACOSA go to Title I schools, which rely on federal funds to purchase instruments and equipment. That can make learning expensive percussion instruments especially difficult, said band director Brian Morris.

The Mann Center lost a $25,000 NEA grant that supported collaboration between the Philadelphia Orchestra and students in the All-City Orchestra Summer Academy. Boston’s Project STEP lost funding too.

The Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal does away with dedicated funding for both arts enrichment programming and career education in K-12 schools, raising longer-term concerns. So far, though, lawmakers have preserved this funding in their initial budget bill.

Meanwhile, widespread cuts are putting new demands on philanthropic organizations. Some may conclude that arts education is dispensable. “Competition is very fierce and people are receiving unprecedented requests for support,” Smith said.

Small amounts of money can make a difference to students. Career Connected Learning Philadelphia provides about $1,300 to each student who participates in the Summer Drumline Showcase. Borges, who wrote the original composition, said that initially, “college was not in my plans at all.”

But with Morris’ support, he plans to return to the district after studying at Temple and become a music teacher in Philadelphia public schools.

“At first it was corny,” he said of teaching peers in Summer Drumline his own percussion composition. “I tried not to be too stern on them because they were my friends, but I did have to tell them some things.”

Norah Rami is a Dow Jones business reporting intern on Chalkbeat’s national desk. Reach Norah at nrami@chalkbeat.org.

Penny Schwinn out as nominee for Education Department’s No. 2 job after conservative pushback

2025-07-31T22:31:53+00:00

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Former Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn has withdrawn her nomination to serve in the No. 2 spot in the Trump Education Department after cultural conservatives mounted a campaign opposing her.

The U.S. Department of Education announced Thursday that Schwinn would serve instead as a senior adviser and chief strategist, roles that do not require Senate confirmation.

Schwinn enjoyed a good reputation among national conservative education advocates for her work in Tennessee to boost reading proficiency and target pandemic relief dollars toward academic recovery. Schwinn was the second name President Donald Trump announced to lead his Education Department, after Secretary Linda McMahon, even before he was sworn into office.

Despite support from Republicans like Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, increasingly influential conservative commentators in the state almost immediately came out in opposition to Schwinn. They pointed to her support for social and emotional learning and her support for reading curriculum they found objectionable. The right-wing advocacy group Tennessee Stands called Schwinn an “incredibly terrible” pick.

Their persistent opposition raised questions about Schwinn’s prospects for confirmation. Neither Sen. Marsha Blackburn nor Sen. Bill Hagerty, both Republicans from Tennessee, replied to multiple requests for comment through their offices regarding Schwinn’s nomination. But Blackburn in particular may be sensitive to concerns from the right flank of the party as she eyes a potentially crowded Tennessee gubernatorial primary in 2026.

In a press release, Schwinn said she had made the decision to withdraw “after thoughtful consideration about how I can best contribute at this moment in a way that supports progress for students and education.”

“I’m grateful to President Trump and Secretary McMahon, and remain committed to protecting kids, raising achievement, and expanding opportunity – my lifelong mission and north star,” Schwinn said.

Jim Blew, co-founder of the Defense of Freedom Institute, a conservative think tank, said he believes Schwinn could have been confirmed — but it might have been an ugly battle. That senators appear to have sided with conservative influencers over their own president raises serious concerns, he said.

“There was a time when senators could explain that they were going to disregard these fringe voices and say they were going to vote with the president,” said Blew, who served in the Education Department in the first Trump administration. “These senators allowed these influencers to shape their opinions in ways that are not good for the country and that are not good for students and that are not good for the administration.”

Asked why Schwinn withdrew and whether she had the votes to be confirmed in the Senate, Education Department spokesperson Madi Biedermann replied with a copy of the press release.

“I am grateful to Dr. Schwinn for her commitment to serving students, families, and educators across the nation,” McMahon said in a statement. “Penny is a brilliant education mind, and I look forward to continue working with her as my Chief Strategist to Make Education Great Again.”

Advocates hoped Schwinn’s education experience would complement McMahon’s background in business and administration. Her perspective as a former state schools chief would have been particularly valuable, they said, as Trump sought to “return education to the states.”

Schwinn’s critics feared she would undermine Trump’s agenda from inside the department. Less ideological critics also raised questions about Schwinn’s business dealings. Florida business filings indicated that she made plans to start an education consulting business with former Palm Beach County superintendent Donald Fennoy after she was nominated. The 74 reported that Schwinn and Fennoy filed paperwork to dissolve the company shortly before her confirmation hearing.

At her confirmation hearing in June, Schwinn pledged her alignment with Trump’s education agenda. The Senate education committee advanced her nomination in a party line vote later that month, but she never came up for a vote in the full Senate, where lawmakers have been consumed with divisive budget battles.

Many key leadership roles in the Education Department remain vacant as nominees await Senate confirmation even as McMahon tries to move forward with the legally complex task of reducing the department’s footprint.

“It’s lopsided to ask this secretary to do so much work and then not give her the team she needs,” Blew said.

Michael Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said Schwinn’s withdrawal reflects poorly on the Republican Party.

“This is a big loss for the country and for the Department of Education,” he said. “Shame on the Republicans for refusing to show any spine.”

This story has been updated to include additional context and reaction.

Chalkbeat Tennessee Bureau Chief Melissa Brown contributed reporting.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.