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Tag: education administration

  • 5 people were shot at Morgan State University and police have yet to locate a suspect, officials say | CNN

    5 people were shot at Morgan State University and police have yet to locate a suspect, officials say | CNN

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    CNN
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    Five people were shot Tuesday night at Morgan State University in Baltimore and police have yet to locate a suspect as the investigation into the shooting continues, officials said.

    University police heard gunshots around 9:25 p.m. local time and responded to find multiple gunshot victims on campus and saw multiple shattered windows, Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley said in a media briefing.

    The victims, four men and one woman aged 18 to 22, were taken to a hospital with non-life threatening injuries, according to the commissioner. Four of the victims are Morgan University students, according to Morgan State University Police Chief Lance Hatcher.

    A SWAT team and officers from several agencies responded to search for the suspect at the university – a small HBCU in northeast Baltimore – while students and teachers were urged to shelter in place and avoid the area.

    “We did not locate the suspect at this time,” Worley said. No suspect description was provided by police as of early Wednesday morning and it’s unclear whether the person is affiliated with the university.

    Officials said the incident is no longer considered an active shooter situation and lifted a shelter in place order.

    Footage from CNN affiliate WJZ showed multiple emergency response vehicles surrounding a taped-off student dormitory building. The glass of one of the building’s upper-floor windows appears to be shattered.

    Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott was on scene at the university early Wednesday as law enforcement and school officials were handling the ongoing investigation, he posted on X.

    ATF Baltimore said its agents were assisting police in responding to the shooting.

    As police combed the university for a suspect Tuesday night, they also asked concerned family members of students to continue to avoid the campus area.

    “Please stay clear of the area surrounding Thurgood Marshall Hall and the Murphy Fine Arts Center and shelter in place,” the university said in a notice on its website. Police said they were responding to the 1700 block of Argonne Drive.

    Morgan State is a historically Black university and had about 9,000 students enrolled in Fall 2022. The shooting occurred at the beginning of its Homecoming week as it prepared to welcome alumni and community members to campus for celebratory events including a pep rally, gala and parade.

    It also falls just days before a scheduled candlelight memorial service intended to honor university members who have died over the past year.

    Morgan State University President David Wilson announced that classes will be canceled Wednesday and counselors will be available to students.

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  • Temple University Acting President JoAnne Epps dies suddenly after falling ill during event | CNN

    Temple University Acting President JoAnne Epps dies suddenly after falling ill during event | CNN

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    CNN
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    Temple University Acting President JoAnne Epps died suddenly Tuesday afternoon after falling ill during a university memorial service, the school said in a statement.

    She was 72.

    “While attending a memorial service at Temple for Charles L. Blockson, curator of the Blockson Collection, President Epps became ill. She was transported to Temple University Hospital, where she was pronounced dead around 3:15 p.m,” the university, which is in Philadelphia, said.

    Epps appeared to have suffered a “sudden episode during the event,” said Temple University Health System’s Daniel del Portal during a Tuesday afternoon news conference.

    She was tended to by EMS staff and transported to the hospital, where “resuscitation efforts continued but unfortunately were unsuccessful,” del Portal said.

    Epps was appointed acting president in early April, shortly after the university announced the resignation of its previous president, Jason Wingard, amid continuing concerns over campus safety and enrollment declines.

    By then, Epps had been a member of the university’s faculty for more than three decades and served in roles including the dean of the university’s law school, the executive vice president and provost, and Temple’s chief academic officer, the university said.

    And it all began with a job at the school’s book store.

    “JoAnne embodied everything that is great about Temple University, rising from working in the bookstore more than 40 years ago to the office of the president,” Ken Kaiser, Temple University’s senior vice president and chief operating officer, said during Tuesday’s news conference.

    Epps had previously shared that her first job as a teenager was at the campus bookstore. She later went on to join the university’s faculty in 1985, she has said.

    “No one was more beloved at our university than JoAnne was,” Kaiser said Tuesday. “She was a personal friend and mentor to so many of us and she pushed each of us to be the best versions of ourselves.”

    Before joining the school’s faculty, Epps served as an assistant US attorney from 1980 to 1985, according to Jacqueline C. Romero, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

    “She was an icon in the legal community, dedicating her life to public service, the rule of law, experiential legal education, equity and diversity in the profession, and the advancement of civil rights,” Romero said in a Tuesday statement. “She was tireless and passionate about the issues she held dear.”

    “On a personal note, JoAnne was a mentor and confidante,” she added. “Today I mourn with countless women who had the pleasure of Joanne’s wise advice, mentorship, and counsel over the years.”

    In accepting the position of acting president at Temple University earlier this year, Epps wrote how much the university meant to her, sharing that her mother worked at the school as a secretary for 40 years.

    “Temple has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember,” she wrote in an April statement to the community.

    “When you see me around campus, please stop to say hello. One of my greatest pleasures is meeting and listening to Temple students, faculty, staff and alumni, hearing your stories and dreams for the future,” Epps wrote.

    In a statement posted Tuesday on social media, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said Epps was “a powerful force and constant ambassador for Temple University for nearly four decades.”

    “Losing her is heartbreaking for Philadelphia,” the governor said. “Lori and I are holding JoAnne’s loved ones in our hearts right now. May her memory be a blessing.”

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  • Fact check: The first Republican presidential debate of the 2024 election | CNN Politics

    Fact check: The first Republican presidential debate of the 2024 election | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Republican presidential candidates delivered a smattering of false and misleading claims at the first debate of the 2024 election – though none of the eight candidates on stage in Milwaukee delivered anything close to the bombardment of false statements that typically characterized the debate performances of former President Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner who skipped the Wednesday event.

    Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina inaccurately described the state of the economy in early 2021 and repeated a long-ago-debunked false claim about the Biden-era Justice Department. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie misstated the sentence attached to a gun law relevant to the investigation into the president’s son Hunter Biden. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis misled about his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, omitting mention of his early pandemic restrictions.

    Below is a fact check of those claims and various others from the debate, some of which left out key context. In addition, below is a brief fact check of some of Trump’s claims from a pre-taped interview he did with Tucker Carlson, which was posted online shortly before the debate aired. Trump made a variety of statements that were not true.

    DeSantis and the pandemic

    DeSantis criticized the federal government for its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, claiming it had locked down the economy, and then said: “In Florida, we led the country out of lockdown, and we kept our state free and open.”

    Facts First: DeSantis’s claim is misleading at best. Before he became a vocal opponent of pandemic restrictions, DeSantis imposed significant restrictions on individuals, businesses and other entities in Florida in March 2020 and April 2020; some of them extended months later into 2020. He did then open up the state, with a gradual phased approach, but he did not keep it open from the start.

    DeSantis received criticism in March 2020 for what some critics perceived as a lax approach to the pandemic, which intensified as Florida beaches were packed during Spring Break. But that month and the month following, DeSantis issued a series of major restrictions. For example, DeSantis:

    • Closed Florida’s schools, first with a short-term closure in March 2020 and then, in April 2020, with a shutdown through the end of the school year. (In June 2020, he announced a plan for schools to reopen for the next school year that began in August. By October 2020, he was publicly denouncing school closures, calling them a major mistake and saying all the information hadn’t been available that March.)
    • On March 14, 2020, announced a ban on most visits to nursing homes. (He lifted the ban in September 2020.)
    • On March 17, 2020, ordered bars and nightclubs to close for 30 days and restaurants to operate at half-capacity. (He later approved a phased reopening plan that took effect in May 2020, then issued an order in September 2020 allowing these establishments to operate at full capacity.)
    • On March 17, 2020, ordered gatherings on public beaches to be limited to a maximum of 10 people staying at least six feet apart, then, three days later, ordered a shutdown of public beaches in two populous counties, Broward and Palm Beach. (He permitted those counties’ beaches to reopen by the last half of May.)
    • On March 20, 2020, prohibited “any medically unnecessary, non-urgent or non-emergency” medical procedures. (The prohibition was lifted in early May 2020.)
    • On March 23, 2020, ordered that anyone flying to Florida from an area with “substantial community spread” of the virus, “to include the New York Tri-State Area (Connecticut, New Jersey and New York),” isolate or quarantine for 14 days or the duration of their stay in Florida, whichever was shorter, or face possible jail time or a fine. Later that week, he added Louisiana to the list. (He lifted the Louisiana restriction in June 2020 and the rest in August 2020.)
    • On April 3, 2020, imposed a statewide stay-home order that temporarily required people in Florida to “limit their movements and personal interactions outside of their home to only those necessary to obtain or provide essential services or conduct essential activities.” (Beginning in May 2020, the state switched to a phased reopening plan that, for months, included major restrictions on the operations of businesses and other entities; DeSantis described it at the time as a “very slow and methodical approach” to reopening.)

    -From CNN’s Daniel Dale

    Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and US ambassador to the United Nations, said: “Donald Trump added $8 trillion to our debt, and our kids are never going to forgive us for this.”

    Facts First: Haley’s figure is accurate. The total public debt stood at about $19.9 trillion on the day Trump took office in 2017 and then increased by about $7.8 trillion over Trump’s four years, to about $27.8 trillion on the day he left office in 2021.

    It’s worth noting, however, that the increase in the debt during any president’s tenure is not the fault of that president alone. A significant amount of spending under any president is the result of decisions made by their predecessors – such as the creation of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid decades ago – and by circumstances out of a president’s control, notably including the global Covid-19 pandemic under Trump; the debt spiked in 2020 after Trump approved trillions in emergency pandemic relief spending that Congress had passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.

    Still, Trump did choose to approve that spending. And his 2017 tax cuts, unanimously opposed by congressional Democrats, were another major contributor to the debt spike.

    -From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Katie Lobosco

    North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum claimed that Biden’s signature climate bill costs $1.2 trillion dollars and is “just subsidizing China.”

    Facts First: This claim needs context. The clean energy pieces of the Inflation Reduction Act – Democrats’ climate bill – passed with an initial price tag of nearly $370 billion. However, since that bill is made up of tax incentives, that price tag could go up depending on how many consumers take advantage of tax credits to buy electric vehicles and put solar panels on their homes, and how many businesses use the subsidies to install new utility scale wind and solar in the United States.

    Burgum’s figure comes from a Goldman Sachs report, which estimated the IRA could provide $1.2 trillion in clean energy tax incentives by 2032 – about a decade from now.

    On Burgum’s claim that Biden’s clean energy agenda will be a boon to China, the IRA was specifically written to move the manufacturing supply chain for clean energy technology like solar panels and EV batteries away from China and to the United States.

    In the year since it was passed, the IRA has spurred 83 new or expanded manufacturing facilities in the US, and close to 30,000 new clean energy manufacturing jobs, according to a tally from trade group American Clean Power.

    -From CNN’s Ella Nilsen

    With the economy as one of the main topics on the forefront of voters’ minds, Scott aimed to make a case for Republican policies, misleadingly suggesting they left the US economy in record shape before Biden took office.

    “There is no doubt that during the Trump administration, when we were dealing with the COVID virus, we spent more money,” Scott said. “But here’s what happened at the end of our time in the majority: we had low unemployment, record low unemployment, 3.5% for the majority of the population, and a 70-year low for women. African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians had an all-time low.”

    Facts First: This is false. Scott’s claims don’t accurately reflect the state of the US economy at the end of the Republican majority in the Senate. And in some cases, his exaggerations echo what Trump himself frequently touted about the economy under his leadership.

    By the time Trump left office and the Republicans lost the Senate majority in January 2021, US unemployment was not at a record low. The US unemployment rate dropped to a seasonally adjusted rate of 3.5% in September 2019, the country’s lowest in 50 years. While it hovered around that level for five months, Scott’s assertion ignores the coronavirus pandemic-induced economic destruction that followed. In April 2020, the unemployment rate spiked to 14.7% — the highest level since monthly records began in 1948. As of December 2020, the unemployment rate was at 6.7%.

    Nor was the unemployment rate for women at a 70-year low by the end of Trump’s time in office. It reached a 66-year low during certain months of 2019, at 3.4% in April and 3.6% in August, but by December 2020, unemployment for women was at 6.7%.

    The unemployment rates for African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians were also not at all-time lows at the end of 2020, but they did reach record lows during Trump’s tenure as president.

    -From CNN’s Tara Subramaniam

    Scott said that the Justice Department under President Joe Biden is targeting “parents that show up at school board meetings. They are called, under this DOJ, they’re called domestic terrorists.”

    Facts First: It is false that the Justice Department referred to parents as domestic terrorists. The claim has been debunked several times – during the uproar at school boards over Covid-19 restrictions and anti-racism curriculums; after Kevin McCarthy claimed Republicans would investigate Merrick Garland with a majority in the House; and even by a federal judge. The Justice Department never called parents terrorists for attending or wanting to attend school board meetings.

    The claim stems from a 2021 letter from The National School Boards Associations asking the Justice Department to “deal with” the uptick in threats against education officials and saying that “acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials” could be classified as “the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” In response, Garland released a memo encouraging federal and local authorities to work together against the harassment campaigns levied at schools, but never endorsed the “domestic terrorism” notion.

    A federal judge even threw out a lawsuit over the accusation, ruling that Garland’s memo did little more than announce a “series of measures” that directed federal authorities to address increasing threats targeting school board members, teachers and other school employees.

    -From CNN’s Hannah Rabinowitz

    Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations and governor of South Carolina, said the US is spending “less than three and a half percent of our defense budget” on Ukraine aid, and that in terms of financial aid relative to GDP, “11 of the European countries have given more than the US.”

    Facts First: This is partly true. Haley’s claim regarding the US aid to Ukraine compared to the total defense budget is slightly under the actual percentage, but it is accurate that 11 European countries have given more aid to Ukraine as a percentage of their total GDP than the US.

    As of August 14, the US has committed more than $43 billion in military aid to Ukraine since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, according to the Defense Department. In comparison, the Fiscal Year 2023 defense budget was $858 billion – making aid to Ukraine just over 5% of the total US defense budget.

    As of May 2023, according to a Council of Foreign Relations tracker, 11 countries were providing a higher share in aid to Ukraine relative to their GDP than the US – led by Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland.

    -From CNN’s Haley Britzky

    Former Vice President Mike Pence said Wednesday that the Trump administration “spent funding to backfill on the military cuts of the Obama administration.”

    Facts First: This is misleading. While military spending decreased under the Obama administration, it was largely due to the 2011 Budget Control Act, which received Republican support and resulted in automatic spending cuts to the defense budget.

    Mike Pence, a senator at the time, voted in favor of the Budget Control Act.

    -From CNN’s Haley Britzky

    Christie said President Biden’s son Hunter Biden was “facing a 10-year mandatory minimum” for lying on a federal form when he purchased a gun in 2018.

    Facts First: Christie, a former federal prosecutor, clearly misstated the law. This crime can lead to a maximum prison sentence of 10 years, but it doesn’t have a 10-year mandatory minimum.

    These comments are related to the highly scrutinized Justice Department investigation into Hunter Biden, which is currently ongoing after a plea deal fell apart earlier this summer.

    As part of the now-defunct deal, Hunter Biden agreed to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors and enter into a “diversion agreement” with prosecutors, who would drop the gun possession charge in two years if he consistently stayed out of legal trouble and passed drug tests.

    The law in question makes it a crime to purchase a firearm while using or addicted to illegal drugs. Hunter Biden has acknowledged struggling with crack cocaine addiction at the time, and admitted at a court hearing and in court papers that he violated this law by signing the form.

    The US Sentencing Commission says, “The statutory maximum penalty for the offense is ten years of imprisonment.” There isn’t a mandatory 10-year punishment, as Christie claimed.

    During his answer, Christie also criticized the Justice Department for agreeing to a deal in June where Hunter Biden could avoid prosecution on the felony gun offense. That deal was negotiated by special counsel David Weiss, who was first appointed to the Justice Department by former President Donald Trump.

    -From CNN’s Marshall Cohen

    Burgum and Scott got into a back and forth over IRS staffing with Burgum saying that the “Biden administration wanted to put 87,000 people in the IRS,” and Scott suggesting they “fire the 87,000 IRS agents.”

    Facts First: This figure needs context.

    The Inflation Reduction Act, which passed last year without any Republican votes, authorized $80 billion in new funding for the IRS to be delivered over the course of a decade.

    The 87,000 figure comes from a 2021 Treasury report that estimated the IRS could hire 86,852 full-time employees with a nearly $80 billion investment over 10 years.

    While the funding may well allow for the hiring of tens of thousands of IRS employees over time, far from all of these employees will be IRS agents conducting audits and investigations.

    Many other employees will be hired for the non-agent roles, from customer service to information technology, that make up most of the IRS workforce. And a significant number of the hires are expected to fill the vacant posts left by retirements and other attrition, not take newly created positions.

    The IRS has not said precisely how many new “agents” will be hired with the funding. But it is already clear that the total won’t approach 87,000. And it’s worth noting that the IRS may not receive all of the $80 billion after Republicans were able to claw back $20 billion of the new funding as part of a deal to address the debt ceiling made earlier this year.

    -From CNN’s Katie Lobosco

    Trump repeated a frequent claim during his interview with Carlson that streamed during the GOP debate that his retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House was “covered” under the Presidential Records Act and that he is “allowed to do exactly that.”

    Facts First: This is false. The Presidential Records Act says the exact opposite – that the moment presidents leave office, all presidential records are to be turned over to the federal government. Keeping documents at Mar-a-Lago after his presidency concluded was in clear contravention of that law.

    According to the Presidential Records Act, “upon the conclusion of a President’s term of office, or if a President serves consecutive terms upon the conclusion of the last term, the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President.”

    The sentence makes clear that a president has no authority to keep documents after leaving the White House.

    The National Archives even released a statement refuting the notion that Trump’s retention of documents was covered by the Presidential Records Act, writing in a June news release that “the PRA requires that all records created by Presidents (and Vice-Presidents) be turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) at the end of their administrations.”

    -From CNN’s Hannah Rabinowitz

    While discussing electric vehicles, Trump claimed that California “is in a big brownout because their grid is a disaster,” adding that the state’s ambitious electric vehicle goals won’t work with the grid in such shape.

    Facts First: Trump’s claim that California’s grid is currently in a “big brownout” and is a “disaster” isn’t true. California’s grid suffered rolling blackouts in 2020, but it has performed quite well in the face of extreme heat this summer, owing in large part to a massive influx of renewable energy including battery storage. These big batteries keep energy from wind and solar running when the wind isn’t blowing and sun isn’t shining. (Batteries are also being deployed at a rapid rate in Texas, a red state.)

    Another reason California’s grid has stayed stable this year even during extreme temperature spikes is the fact that a deluge of snow and rain this winter and spring has refilled reservoirs that generate electricity using hydropower.

    As Trump insinuated, there are real questions about how well the state’s grid will hold up as California’s drivers shift to electric vehicles by the millions by 2035 – the same year it will phase out selling new gas-powered cars. California state officials say they are preparing by adding new capacity to the grid and urging more people to charge their vehicles overnight and during times of the day when fewer people are using energy. But independent experts say the state needs to exponentially increase its clean energy while also building out huge amounts of new EV chargers to achieve its goals.

    -From CNN’s Ella Nilsen

    Trump and the border wall

    Trump claimed to Carlson, “I had the strongest border in the history of our country, and I built almost 500 miles of wall. You know, they’d like to say, ‘Oh, was it less?’ No, I built 500 miles. In fact, if you check with the authorities on the border, we built almost 500 miles of wall.”

    Facts First: This needs context. Trump and his critics are talking about different things when they use different figures for how much border wall was built during his presidency. Trump is referring to all of the wall built on the southern border during his administration, even in areas that already had some sort of barrier before. His critics are only counting the Trump-era wall that was built in parts of the border that did not have any previous barrier.

    A total of 458 miles of southern border wall was built under Trump, according to a federal report written two days after Trump left office and obtained by CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez. That is 52 miles of “primary” wall built where no barriers previously existed, plus 33 miles of “secondary” wall that was built in spots where no barriers previously existed, plus another 373 miles of primary and secondary wall that was built to replace previous barriers the federal government says had become “dilapidated and/or outdated.”

    Some of Trump’s rival candidates, such DeSantis and Christie, have used figures around 50 miles while criticizing Trump for failing to finish the wall – counting only the primary wall built where no barriers previously existed.

    While some Trump critics have scoffed at the replacement wall, the Trump-era construction was generally much more formidable than the older barriers it replaced, which were often designed to deter vehicles rather than people on foot. Washington Post reporter Nick Miroff tweeted in 2020: “As someone who has spent a lot of time lately in the shadow of the border wall, I need to puncture this notion that ‘replacement’ sections are ‘not new.’ There is really no comparison between vehicle barriers made from old rail ties and 30-foot bollards.”

    Ideally, both Trump and his opponents would be clearer about what they are talking about: Trump that he is including replacement barriers, his opponents that they are excluding those barriers.

    -From CNN’s Daniel Dale

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  • Florida’s feud with the College Board’s AP Psychology course explained | CNN

    Florida’s feud with the College Board’s AP Psychology course explained | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A long-simmering feud between the College Board, the non-profit that administers Advanced Placement courses, and Florida’s Department of Education became public this week, as officials argued over whether the Advanced Placement Psychology course could be taught in Florida without breaking state laws.

    In Florida, students are prohibited from learning about sexual orientation or gender identity in the classroom.

    But the College Board says these lessons are a core component of the AP Psychology course and have refused to change the curriculum.

    On Thursday, the College Board announced that unless AP Psychology is taught in its entirety – including lessons on sexuality and gender – “the “AP Psychology” designation cannot be utilized on student transcripts.”

    The future of the course appeared to be in jeopardy until, late Friday, Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, Jr., informed school superintendents that students will be able to take the class “in its entirety” but only if the course is taught “in a manner that is age and developmentally appropriate.”

    The public scuffle over the AP Psychology course is just the latest installment in an ongoing feud between the College Board and Florida education officials over what subjects can be taught in the state’s classrooms. Let’s discuss how we got here.

    In July, a new law came into effect in Florida that banned classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity for students in pre-K through the 8th grade. For high school students, instruction must be “according to state standards,” the Board of Education said.

    But over the last year, Florida’s education officials have amended state standards to effectively ban all students from learning about sexual orientation and gender identity.

    The changes are in line with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ vow to eradicate so-called “woke” gender ideology from Florida’s classrooms.

    In 2022, the governor signed a bill titled “Parental Rights in Education,” which prohibited discussion of gender and sexuality issues in kindergarten through third grade. The bill also gave parents the right to take legal action if a school violates the law. DeSantis has since amended the law to prohibit instruction on sexuality and gender from pre-K through the eighth grade.

    The governor has said he believes parents should “have a fundamental role in the education, health care and well-being of their children.”

    Supporters say the bill allows parents to decide when to talk to their children about LGBTQ+ topics instead of the schools. But critics have dubbed it the “Don’t Say Gay” law and say it will further marginalize LGBTQ+ students.

    The College Board’s AP Psychology course is organized into nine units of study. The unit on developmental psychology includes lessons on gender and sexual orientation.

    According to the College Board, the course asks students to “describe how sex and gender influence socialization and other aspects of development.”

    These lessons are now considered illegal under Florida law.

    In June, Board of Education officials sent a letter to the College Board requesting the non-profit “conduct a thorough review” of all Advanced Placement courses to ensure they were compliant with Florida law.

    In a statement, the College Board equated the request to censorship.

    “(We) will not modify our courses to accommodate restrictions on teaching essential, college-level topics. Doing so would break the fundamental promise of AP: colleges wouldn’t broadly accept that course for credit and that course wouldn’t prepare students for careers in the discipline,” the non-profit said.

    Advanced Placement courses are standardized to ensure students who pass the final exam can transfer college credits to participating colleges and universities nationwide. The College Board has said all required topics, including sexual orientation and gender identity, must be included for the course to be designated advanced placement and count toward college credit.

    This isn’t the first time the College Board has sparred with the Florida Board of Education over what can be taught in Advanced Placement classes.

    Earlier this year, DeSantis rejected the non-profit’s AP African American Studies course because it included lessons on reparations, Black queer studies, and the Movement for Black Lives.

    The College Board initially attempted to revise the course framework, but the decision sparked outrage among academics and activists who said students should learn the “full history” of the Black experience in America.

    “We have learned from our mistakes in the recent rollout of AP African American Studies and know that we must be clear from the outset where we stand,” the non-profit later said in a statement.

    With days to go until students return to school, the College Board announced it would not remove AP Psychology lessons on gender identity and sexual orientation. Instead, the non-profit advised school districts to “not to offer AP Psychology until Florida reverses their decision and allows parents and students to choose to take the full course.”

    Florida education officials responded by accusing the non-profit of “hurting Florida students.”

    It is unclear how the state’s directive to teach the course “in a manner that is age and developmentally appropriate,” will be enforced.

    “AP Psychology is and will remain in the course directory making it available to Florida students,” Diaz said in a statement.

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  • Youngkin pardons Virginia father who was arrested at 2021 school board meeting | CNN Politics

    Youngkin pardons Virginia father who was arrested at 2021 school board meeting | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin on Friday pardoned a Loudoun County father who was arrested at a school board meeting in 2021 while seeking answers about his daughter’s sexual assault on school property.

    Scott Smith was charged with obstruction of justice and disorderly conduct for his behavior at the meeting, which took place shortly after his 15-year-old daughter was assaulted in her school’s bathroom in Ashburn, Virginia, according to the New York Times. Smith was convicted of both charges in 2021. Smith’s conviction for resisting arrest was later dismissed, and he eventually received a suspended sentence of 10 days in jail, according to CNN affiliate WJLA.

    “Scott Smith is a dedicated parent who’s faced unwarranted charges in his pursuit to protect his daughter. Scott’s commitment to his child despite the immense obstacles is emblematic of the parental empowerment movement that started in Virginia,” Youngkin said in a statement announcing the pardon.

    “In Virginia, parents matter and my resolve to empower parents is unwavering. A parent’s fundamental right to be involved in their child’s education, upbringing, and care should never be undermined by bureaucracy, school divisions or the state. I am pleased to grant Scott Smith this pardon and help him and his family put this injustice behind them once and for all,” he added.

    Deputies ultimately arrested a male student in connection with the sexual assault against Smith’s daughter, according to the Times. He was found guilty in that case and later pleaded no contest to a separate sexual assault case at a different school, the newspaper reported.

    Smith’s arrest at the school board meeting helped fuel a national political conversation around school choice and parental rights. Conservative media in particular highlighted the sexual assault case in an effort to promote anti-transgender talking points.

    Youngkin leaned heavily on these issues during his 2021 gubernatorial campaign, vowing on election night, “We’re going to embrace our parents, not ignore them.”

    Smith, in an interview with WJLA following his pardon, said: “I think it’s pretty clear and convincing to the public that what happened to me that day should have never happened. I’m glad that this is finally over.”

    He added that the experience has led him to believe that “in today’s America, getting a fair and free trial is next to impossible.”

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  • A transgender girl misses her high school graduation after Mississippi judge denies emergency plea to permit her to go in a dress and heels | CNN

    A transgender girl misses her high school graduation after Mississippi judge denies emergency plea to permit her to go in a dress and heels | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A transgender teen in Mississippi missed her high school graduation after a federal judge denied a motion requesting she be allowed to wear a dress and heels under her robe.

    The 17-year-old, identified in court documents by her initials “L.B.,” did not attend her Gulfport high school graduation, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi. She opted to miss the ceremony when she was told she had to wear boy’s clothes to attend, telling CNN she would “rather stand up for what’s right than be humiliated.”

    The family has asked for the teen’s full name to be withheld for privacy and safety reasons.

    On May 9, less than two weeks before graduation, L.B. says she was pulled into Harrison Central High School Principal Kelly Fuller’s office and asked what she was going to wear for graduation.

    “I told her I was going to wear a white dress, then she told me I was not going to be allowed to wear a dress, and I would have to wear boy clothes,” L.B. said. “And she stated that the Superintendent called her asking about what students would wear to graduation.”

    As far as she knows, no other students were asked the same question.

    L.B. says she has attended Harrison Central High School as a girl for the past four years. She attended prom wearing a blue sparkly dress without any objection from the school. “I was being me, and I felt very accepted at the time,” she said. “I felt very understood. I felt that I had a great support system at that school.”

    L.B. and her parents, Samantha Brown and Henry Brown, filed the federal lawsuit Thursday, demanding Harrison County School District allow the teen to wear what she wishes during Saturday’s graduation ceremony from Harrison Central High School.

    Attorneys with the ACLU of Mississippi are representing the family.

    The Browns cited a violation of their child’s civil rights, accusing the school district of discrimination on the basis of sex and gender and violating the teen’s First Amendment rights, according to the complaint.

    On Friday, the day before graduation, a federal judge in Gulfport, Mississippi, denied a motion filed by L.B.’s family requesting she be allowed to wear her dress and heels at the high school graduation.

    The teen had picked out a dress and heels to wear with the traditional cap and gown in accordance with the school’s dress code for female students, according to a media release from the ACLU.

    “Our client is being shamed and humiliated for explicitly discriminatory reasons, and her family is being denied a once-in-a-lifetime milestone in their daughter’s life,” ACLU spokesperson Gillian Branstetter told CNN in an email. “No one should be forced to miss their graduation simply because of who they are.”

    Samantha Brown, L.B.’s mother, explained that after the conversation with the principal, they learned the dress code policy throughout the school year was different from the policy for graduation.

    A commencement participation agreement is included within the court documents. It shows L.B. and her mother signed the document on March 14, 2023, agreeing to follow conditions required for participating in the graduation ceremony.

    The Harrison County School District’s policy on graduation states: “Students are expected to wear dress shoes, dress clothes (dresses or dressy pant-suit for girls and dress pants, shirt, and tie for the boys).” The policy does not mention dress code rules for LGBTQ students or specify students must dress according to their sex assigned at birth.

    “Graduation school dress policy is girls have to wear white dresses and boys wear a white button up shirt with a tie and black pants and socks with black dress shoes,” Brown said. “This has never been an issue before. We felt like we were abiding by the dress code according to what she identifies as.”

    CNN has reached out to the Harrison County School District and Harrison Central High School for comment.

    L.B. called the news “unexpected and shocking,” saying, “I couldn’t understand why they would change it so suddenly.”

    “You’ve been allowing me to be this way, be myself, and express myself this way for so long. And it wasn’t even a thought in my mind that they would do this to me,” she told CNN.

    “This is a celebration of my high school, this is a celebration of my finish line,” L.B. said. “For me to be forced into something that I’m not, it wouldn’t have been fun for me at all…this kind of injustice is not okay.”

    “We have to do better as a community, as a country, as a state, as a city, as a county, we have to do better,” the teenager added.

    Brown said the ruling from the judge on Friday was hurtful and caused humiliation for her daughter, stating her opinion that it would have been more of a “distraction and shock to her peers and other teachers to show up like that, other than the way she usually dresses.”

    “She’s a good student, she made it to the finish line … that should be more of the things the children should be worried about rather than whether they will be targeted by what they identify as,” Brown said.

    Brown said they will be evaluating their legal options moving forward. “We’re going to continue to speak on this and continue to fight for what we feel is right,” she added.

    According to court documents, the school policy states that “a high school graduation ceremony is a sacred and inspirational ritual which is intended to be surrounded with decorum of dignity, grace, solemnity, reverence, pomp and circumstance.”

    “Students whose attire does not meet the minimum dress requirements may not be allowed to participate in the graduation exercises,” the policy states.

    “My graduation is supposed to be a moment of pride and celebration and school officials want to turn it into a moment of humiliation and shame,” L.B. said in the ACLU release. “The clothing I’ve chosen is fully appropriate for the ceremony and the superintendent’s objections to it are entirely unfair to myself, my family, and all transgender students like me. I have the right to celebrate my graduation as who I am, not who anyone else wants me to be.”

    Fact check: Why state lawmakers around the country keep citing junk science

    The student has been openly transgender since she began attending the school as a freshman, according to the complaint, and her identity has been known to her classmates, teachers, and administrators.

    Mitchell King, the superintendent of Harrison County School District, testified in court documents that the district relies on birth certificates to record whether students are male or female.

    The complaint describes a phone conversation between Samantha Brown and King, in which King says L.B. “is still a boy,” therefore “he needs to wear pants, socks, and shoes, like a boy.”

    The complaint also notes L.B. attended the school’s prom last year wearing a formal dress and high-heeled shoes, without any issues or repercussions.

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  • Florida teacher says she is under investigation after showing 5th grade class Disney movie with gay character | CNN

    Florida teacher says she is under investigation after showing 5th grade class Disney movie with gay character | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A fifth-grade teacher said she is being investigated by the Florida Department of Education after she showed her students “Strange World,” a 2022 animated Disney movie featuring a character who is biracial and gay.

    Jenna Barbee is a teacher in Hernando County’s Winding Waters K-8 school. “I am the teacher that’s under investigation with the Florida Department of Education for indoctrination for showing a Disney movie,” Barbee said in a TikTok post over the weekend.

    In the post, Barbee explained she played the Disney movie to a class which was partially full after a day of standardized testing. She also said she had previously-signed permission slips from all the parents, allowing the students to watch a movie rated PG.

    According to Barbee, a parent then complained and reported her to the state Department of Education.

    The parent who reported her, who is also a member of the Hernando County School District Board, complained to the principal about the movie not being appropriate for students, according to Karen Jordan, spokesperson for Hernando County Schools. Jordan also provided CNN with a copy of the announcement from the school district to parents.

    “Yesterday, the Disney movie ‘Strange World’ was shown in your child’s classroom,” the school district said. “While not the main plot of the movie, parts of the story involves a male character having and expressing feelings for another male character. In the future, this movie will not be shown. The school administration and the district’s Professional Standards Dept is currently reviewing the matter to see if further corrective action is required.”

    The complaint is part of Florida’s controversial legislation, signed last year by Gov. Ron DeSantis, banning certain instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom. DeSantis and other supporters pushed the measure as a form of “parental rights,” while opponents said it tried to erase LGBTQ people from schools and dubbed the law “Don’t Say Gay.”

    The law initially banned instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten through third grade or in a way deemed not age-appropriate for all other grades, but it has since been expanded to limit such information all through high school. Teachers who violate the state policy can be suspended or have their teaching licenses revoked.

    Disney was among those who spoke out against the law last year, spurring DeSantis and Florida Republicans to retaliate against the entertainment company by targeting their control over the land in and around its theme parks.

    The animated film “Strange World,” released last year, told the story of a family of explorers and starred the voices of Jake Gyllenhaal, Dennis Quaid and Lucy Liu. The movie also featured Disney’s first-ever out-gay character, voiced by comedian Jaboukie Young-White.

    On May 9, Barbee addressed the school board members during public comment at a meeting. In attendance was the parent who had complained, school board member Shannon Rodriguez, she acknowledged during the meeting.

    “A school board member, an elected official of power, who was supposed to be nonpartisan, is allowed to present to the public that she is Christian and that God appointed her to the board. And yet it is indoctrinated that I showed a Disney movie. I’m a first-year teacher,” said Barbee.

    The teacher told district board members the movie was in no way sexual and was tied to the current lesson plan of the environment and ecosystems.

    Barbee claimed in the meeting Rodriguez “came to my school took me away from my students to tell me how bad and wrong I was.”

    At the end of the school board meeting, Rodriguez said she called the state department of education regarding the incident, which prompted the state investigation. She said her daughter is in Barbee’s class.

    She said at the district meeting Barbee broke school policy because she did not get the specific movie approved by school administration and said the teacher is “playing the victim.”

    “It is not a teacher’s job to impose their beliefs upon a child: religious, sexual orientation, gender identity, any of the above. But allowing movies such as this assist teachers in opening a door, and please hear me, they assist teachers in opening a door for conversations that have no place in our classrooms,” Rodriguez said.

    Rodriguez said “as a leader in this community, I’m not going to stand by and allow this minority to infiltrate our schools … God did put me here,” she said.

    CNN has reached out to Rodriguez and Hernando County School District and the Florida Department of Education for comment.

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  • After their university’s president canceled a charity drag show, students found a new venue | CNN

    After their university’s president canceled a charity drag show, students found a new venue | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A group of students at West Texas A&M University have announced a new venue for their charity drag show, which was initially set to take place on campus before it was canceled by the school’s president.

    The performance, titled “A Fool’s Drag Race,” will occur at the Sam Houston Park in Amarillo, according to a flyer posted by Spectrum WT, the university’s student-led LGBT+ organization. It is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. local time Friday, according to the post.

    Proceeds from the show will support The Trevor Project, a suicide prevention organization for LGBTQ young people, the student group said.

    West Texas A&M University President Walter V. Wendler announced the cancellation of the student drag show in an email earlier this month. In that email, Wendler said drag shows “discriminate against womanhood,” compared them to blackface and said there was “no such thing” as a harmless drag show, angering both students and free speech advocates and prompting a federal lawsuit.

    But the organization putting together the performance was determined to make it a reality, and it began a GoFundMe page which helped them secure the new venue, a group member said. The GoFundMe had raised more than $5,700 as of Thursday evening.

    “Despite the pushback we’ve gotten from the university, we’re holding this show no matter what. It doesn’t matter if we have to be off-campus or not, our primary goal is to raise money for a good cause and celebrate our identity at the same time,” K Klein, the secretary of Spectrum WT, told CNN in a statement. “The show must go on.”

    Last week, Spectrum WT and two of its student leaders sued Wendler and other officials.

    “We are upset and disappointed that President Wendler does not respect the First Amendment and that the Texas A&M System would not lift a finger to protect our First Amendment rights,” Barrett “Bear” Bright, the Spectrum WT president, said in a statement. “We will be seeing President Wendler in court.”

    CNN has reached out to Wendler, the university’s vice president, chancellor and members of the Board of Regents of the Texas A&M University System for comment.

    The students are represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which said the president’s decision to ban the show on campus violated students’ First Amendment rights.

    That lawsuit is ongoing and “will proceed until the First Amendment is restored at West Texas A&M,” a FIRE spokesperson said in an email to CNN.

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  • Shift in San Francisco politics serves as warning from Asian American voters to Democrats in 2024 | CNN Politics

    Shift in San Francisco politics serves as warning from Asian American voters to Democrats in 2024 | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Allene Jue used to vote in a simple, rapid manner – scan the names on the ballot and pick the Asian sounding names.

    That was before 2020.

    “Something turned on during the pandemic and lit a fire,” said Jue, a Chinese American mother of two girls, ages 3 and 5, living on the west side of San Francisco. Throughout the pandemic, Jue watched as violent hate crimes against Asian Americans brought fear to the community with not enough response from local law enforcement or prosecutors. As the school closures wore on and on in California, Jue saw her local school board discuss progressive policy issues like renaming schools ahead of focusing on simply returning students to the classroom.

    Jue, who generally considers herself a Democrat, recalled her anger at liberal local politicians.

    “They care about policies that don’t really help someone who just lives in the city and just want to be safe, who wants their kids to be educated well,” she said. “They forgot the core problems for regular people. I wanted to do something to try to change and take that power back. It was fear and frustration, a lot of frustration, that I turned into action.”

    Her involvement began with stuffing envelopes for recall campaigns against the district attorney and several school board members and then grew – she even appeared in Chinese language campaign ads for a moderate Democrat running for city supervisor.

    It was a political awakening replicated to varying degrees by other Asian Americans in San Francisco, resulting in a series of political upheavals in one of the United States’ most progressive cities – including a moderate White man unseating a progressive Chinese American incumbent for supervisor of the majority-Asian American Sunset District

    California activists warn that these shifts in the politics of San Francisco – a place that has long been a beacon for progressives – are a signal to national Democrats ahead of 2024 that the party needs a course correction with the fastest growing racial group in the US – Asian Americans.

    “I see this frustration with the direction of the party,” said Charles Jung, a civil rights attorney and local Bay Area advocate. “Asian Americans feel like Democrats are focused on the wrong things, that they’ve let ideology run amok. If Democrats don’t redouble their efforts to focus on core Democratic issues, they will lose people of color over time.”

    Supervisor Joel Engardio, a gay married man who by most national standards is a liberal, describes himself as a moderate in San Francisco. And he is quick to criticize the word “progressive.”

    “To me, progressive is forward thinking, moving into the future and building a better city,” said Engardio from his San Francisco City Hall office. “For too long, we have not followed that definition of progressive. Progressive is a city that works and functions and builds toward the future.”

    Engardio unseated a Chinese American incumbent last year, becoming the first non-Asian supervisor to represent the majority Asian American district in more than 20 years. He campaigned on removing roadblocks for small businesses, putting more police officers on the streets, and using merit-standards for public schools. He said his supervisor race, while close, sends a broader political message about the limits of liberal ideology.

    “We should all pay attention that San Francisco, the most liberal place in America, is saying enough. We want safe streets. We want good schools. That should tell anyone – pay attention,” said Engardio.

    CNN national exit polls do show the pendulum shifting among Asian American voters in recent elections. In 2018, during the Donald Trump presidency, Asian Americans overwhelmingly supported Democrats by 77% vs. Republicans at 23%. In 2022, Asian Americans remained supportive of Democrats, but that preference slid 58% vs. Republicans at 40%.

    That’s a significant shift, warns Jung. “You saw a substantial double-digit erosion of support from Asian Americans from this midterm election to 2018. And incidentally, it’s not just Asian Americans, you saw the same thing among Hispanic voters,” he said. “I think if Democrats don’t redouble their efforts to focus on core democratic issues, they will lose people of color over time.”

    While Asian Americans may be thought of as a Democratic constituency, Jung warns recent history shows that wasn’t always the case.

    CNN’s historical exit polls on congressional vote choice show Asian American voters were closely divided or tilting toward Republicans in the 1990s. But since 1998, they have generally leaned toward the Democratic Party, by varying margins.

    Erosion among Asian and Latino voters, said Kanishka Cheng of grassroots community building organization Together SF, is explained by Democrats forgetting the core values for immigrant communities.

    Kanishka Cheng is the founder of community building organization Together SF and Together SF Action, whose mission includes fighting against crime, homelessness and high housing costs through change at San Francisco's city hall.

    “Democrats have a really hard time talking about public education and public safety,” said Cheng. “That’s the common denominator between the Asian and Latino community – we are immigrant communities. We came to America for stability and opportunity. Public safety and public education are the things that give us stability and opportunity. We need education and we need to feel safe.”

    Engardio said that message came through loud and clear as he knocked on “14,000 doors, talking to voters. My advice is to talk about what they need, and actually, listen.”

    Listening to Asian American voters is the work that Forrest Liu continues in the Sunset District as 2024 approaches. A former Bay Area finance worker, Liu left the business world and became an Asian community advocate to fight hate crimes targeting Asians.

    Liu spends his day conducting field interviews to try to understand the political shift that took place among San Francisco’s Asian voters, because Liu believes it’s predictive of what will happen in the upcoming national elections. “I want to understand why they made the decisions they made last year and what they want moving forward. And what we should be advocating for,” said Liu.

    What he’s learned so far, he said, is the community is far savvier than politicians may think.

    “There are some politicians out there who are like, ‘Let me get in a photo with some Asian people. Let me walk through Chinatown, shake hands with a few Asian community leaders and that’s it. I got the Asian vote,’” said Liu. “No. You actually need to be in tune with what this demographic needs.”

    Liu said the political discontent that led to Engardio’s victory remains, even as publicity around “Stop Asian Hate” may have faded.

    “‘Why should I feel unsafe?’ I would say that’s the summary of the emotion of the people I’m interviewing. They still feel unsafe.”

    You hear three languages spoken in Jue’s house – English, Mandarin and Cantonese. Her 5-year-old daughter, Eloise, is in a Cantonese immersion kindergarten, though she also speaks Mandarin. Lucille, 3, speaks Mandarin to her parents. Jue flips from one language to the next, a product of the multilingual public schools in San Francisco.

    “I’m a public school kid, from kindergarten all the way to college,” she said. “There is a common background from my core group – children of immigrants who went through public school.”

    Work hard, strive for educational success, and build a safe community – that’s what Jue and her generation grew up seeking.

    The effects of the pandemic began to crack into all those core values. The attacks targeting Asian American – which spiked 567% from 2019 to 2021 in San Francisco – worried Jue.

    07 Asian American Voters Allene with Kids

    “I’m Asian, my family’s Asian. If I have to worry about just stepping out to run an errand, I think that’s a huge problem and I can’t live in a city like that,” she said.

    Amid those concerns in 2021, Jue noticed the school board vote to rename 44 schools whose names were linked to former presidents like Abraham Lincoln, stating the names were linked to “the subjugation and enslavement of human beings/ or who oppressed women.”

    The school district at that time still had shared no public plan for reopening schools.

    Jue, juggling working at her tech job and raising kids about to enter pre-school, was incensed.

    Jue was among the Asian Americans in San Francisco who rolled out recall actions first against the school board, recalling three members. Jue then helped the successful effort to recall San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, which a majority of the west side Asian communities backed.

    Last November, Jue volunteered for her neighboring district’s supervisor race – where Engardio successfully challenged the Sunset district’s sitting city supervisor. She was featured in two Mandarin and Cantonese campaign ads.

    Like many political shifts, Jue said the Sunset District was driven by discontent. And Jue said that discontent, while felt most profoundly in her city, is not limited to San Francisco.

    The self-described socially liberal-fiscal conservative said while she is a registered Democrat, she struggles with the current state of the party entering 2024. “I don’t think they’ve gotten those basics down yet, like crime and education,” said Jue. “I know of folks that have traditionally voted Democrat that are now voting Republican because they do not feel that the Democratic Party is representing them.”

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  • A Texas university president canceled a student drag show, calling it ‘divisive’ and misogynistic. First Amendment advocates disagree | CNN

    A Texas university president canceled a student drag show, calling it ‘divisive’ and misogynistic. First Amendment advocates disagree | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A student drag show aimed at raising money for the LGBTQ community was canceled Monday by West Texas A&M University’s president, who called such shows “derisive, divisive and demoralizing misogyny,” drawing backlash from students and free speech advocates.

    In an email to the school community, university President Walter V. Wendler said drag shows “discriminate against womanhood,” compared them to blackface and said there was “no such thing” as a harmless drag show.

    “A harmless drag show? Not possible. I will not appear to condone the diminishment of any group at the expense of impertinent gestures toward another group for any reason, even when the law of the land appears to require it,” the email read.

    Proceeds of the show were due to support The Trevor Project, a suicide prevention organization for LGBTQ young people.

    The show was scheduled for March 31.

    A university spokesperson declined to provide further comment on the president’s email, citing pending litigation.

    Wendler’s decision and remarks drew backlash from both students and advocates who said the move was wrong – and unconstitutional.

    A Change.org petition said the university’s student body “is calling for the reinstatement” of the performance on campus and called its canceling an “indirect attack on the LGBT+, feminist, and activist communities of the WTAMU student body.”

    The petition said the president’s comparison of blackface and drag performances was a “gross and abhorrent comparison of two completely different topics” and “an extremely distorted and incorrect definition of drag as a culture and form of performance art.”

    In a letter to Wendler, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a group focused on freedom of speech and religion in academia, wrote it was “seriously concerned” by his decision and asked that he reinstate the performance.

    “The First Amendment and Texas law protect student expression from administrative censorship,” FIRE said in a later statement.

    “As an individual, Wendler can criticize this particular drag show, or the existence of drag writ large. No reasonable person would argue that public university administrators personally endorse the views expressed at every event hosted by every student group on campus. But as a government actor, President Wendler cannot co-opt state power to force his own views on the WTAMU community,” the statement said.

    “WTAMU must allow the show to go on — and we’ll continue watching to ensure that happens,” it added.

    PEN America, a literary and free expression advocacy organization, called the cancellation an “abhorrent trampling on students’ free expression rights.”

    “Drag shows should be welcome on campus; censoring speech the university president dislikes should not,” Kristen Shahverdian, PEN America senior manager of free expression and education, said in a statement.

    As transgender issues and drag culture have increasingly become more mainstream, a slew of bills – mostly in Republican-led states – have sought to restrict or prohibit drag show performances.

    LGBTQ advocates have told CNN those bills add a heightened state of alarm for the community, are discriminatory and could violate First Amendment laws.

    Earlier in March, Tennessee became the first state this year to restrict public drag show performances. Its law will go into effect on July 1.

    A Texas House bill introduced this year also seeks to regulate public venues hosting drag performances.

    At least nine other states are also considering anti-drag legislation.

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  • 2 personal stories shed light on the unforeseen consequences of Brown v. Board of Education | CNN Politics

    2 personal stories shed light on the unforeseen consequences of Brown v. Board of Education | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Everett R. Berryman Jr. was 11 years old when the Supreme Court handed down the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which made racial segregation in public schools illegal.

    But supervisors in Prince Edward County, Virginia, where Berryman was attending public school, had no intention of complying. Five years later, in 1959, as Berryman was looking ahead to attending 7th grade, the county shuttered all public schools and opened a private school – for White children only. It would take five years, an intervention by the Department of Justice and another Supreme Court order, before integrated public schooling in Prince Edward County proceeded.

    Around the same time, in North Carolina, Dr. E.B. Palmer was working as the executive secretary of state for the North Carolina Teachers Association, advocating for Black teachers after Brown was decided.

    “When the school system said ‘separate but equal,’ that was fine,” Palmer recalled to CNN. “But when we moved a little further, they tried to say, ‘We don’t want Black teachers teaching White students.’”

    Nearly 40,000 teaching positions held by Black teachers in 17 southern and border states would be lost in the ensuring years, according to Samuel B. Ethridge, a National Education Association official who was a leader in the movement to integrate teacher organizations during the civil rights movement.

    Today, Brown v. Board of Education is remembered as a watershed moment in the history of America’s civil rights progress and the fight against systemic racism. But the ruling also had the unintended effect of leaving behind thousands of Black students and educators whose fates were not considered when America moved to reshape its education system.

    Berryman and Palmer shared their stories with CNN as part of the “History Refocused” series, which explores surprising and personal stories from America’s past that may bring new understanding of today’s conflicts.

    The Supreme Court officially struck down the legal basis for segregated classrooms in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, but a second, follow-up ruling a year later outlined the process for implementing school desegregation. In “Brown II,” the Supreme Court ordered district courts to enforce desegregation “with all deliberate speed,” reasoning that such language would provide local authorities with time to adjust to the new law of the land.

    Instead, those opposed to desegregation exploited the terms, including officials in Prince Edward County, who figured that by starving the local public school system of funding, they could do an end-run around the high court’s order by opening a private – and all-White – school.

    “Even in cases where White children or White families rather could not afford to attend the school, they even charged as little as a dollar to allow White students to attend school,” Dawn Williams, dean of Howard University’s School of Education, told CNN. “Now, for the Black community – something totally different for the Black community. There were no forms of public schooling.”

    To combat the lack of educational opportunities, members of the Black community in the area created a grassroots community center, which also served as a makeshift school, but it was not the real thing.

    Two years into the lockout, the Berryman family looked for other ways to keep their children in school. They tried to enroll their children in the neighboring county of Appomattox, Virginia, only to find out that they had to live in the county and present a valid address to do so. The next step was to move in with a family friend.

    At that point, Berryman was a 14-year-old who stood 6-foot-2 but was still in 7th grade, when he should have been in the 9th grade had he not missed out on years of public schooling.

    “I was the tallest guy in the whole school,” he recalled.

    Eventually, the Supreme Court had to become involved again. In 1964, it ruled that the time for desegregating schools “with all deliberate speed” had passed and that there was no justification for “denying these Prince Edward County school children their constitutional rights to an education equal to that afforded by the public schools in the other parts of Virginia.”

    Berryman and his family returned to Prince Edward County when the public schools reopened, and he remembered feeling “happy to be back home.” But there were constant reminders of the toll taken on the Black community.

    “We ran across students – all students were with us that hadn’t been in school for going on five years. And some of the students here began school at 10 years old. … And on the upper end, we had guys and girls graduating high school at 21 and 22 years old,” Berryman said. “So we had – it was like a kaleidoscope of pupils every which way in this grand scheme of school opening again.”

    Brown was intended to protect education opportunities for students. It didn’t say anything about teachers whose jobs would be soon jeopardized by school integration, when Black students often moved to White facilities that had superior conditions.

    In the wake of Brown, various tactics were used across the nation to undercut Black teachers and educators, from outright dismissals or demotions to forcing teachers to teach unfamiliar subjects or grades – making it easier to fire them based on poor performance.

    In Alabama, tenure rules were rewritten in several counties and teachers believed they were dismissed because of their participation in the civil rights movement, the NEA found in a 1965 report. North Carolina and South Carolina repealed their teachers’ continuing contract laws.

    “I had to spend day and night traveling all over the state following behind complaints of Black teachers being dismissed where schools were being desegregated,” recalled Palmer, the former official with the North Carolina Teachers Association.

    Ethridge, writing in the Negro Educational Review in 1979, found that by the mid-1970s, 39,386 teaching positions had been lost by Black teachers as a result of desegregation in 17 states, mostly in the South. In the 1970-71 school year alone, the cumulative loss in income to the Black community in those states totaled $240,564,911, the NAACP found.

    “The cumulative amount is staggering to the imagination,” Ethridge wrote in his research, noting that even as the Black student population grew in those years, the number of Black teachers decreased in those states.

    The Black teaching force has never recovered from the tremendous losses. In the 2017-18 school year, even though Whites accounted for less than half of the students in public schools – the result of a steady increase in diversity over the last 30 years – White teachers made up 79% of the workforce, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, down from 87% three decades earlier. The percentage of public school Black teachers – 7% in 2017-18 – decreased one percentage point over that same time period.

    “Sadly, the reasons for this disparity go far back, and a key impetus happened just as the nation attempted to fix our public education system,” Williams said.

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  • Students denounce bullying in New Jersey school district where teenager died by suicide | CNN

    Students denounce bullying in New Jersey school district where teenager died by suicide | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    At the first school board meeting in Bayville, New Jersey, since a 14-year-old student died by suicide days after being attacked by four classmates, administrators heard powerful commentary from current and former students who said they’ve been bullied without recourse from school district officials.

    Several current and former students approached the microphone at a Central Regional School Board of Education meeting Thursday, sharing their struggles with bullying at Central Regional High School in Berkeley Township.

    Some said they had experienced thoughts of suicide.

    “We’re scared to walk in the hallway,” one freshman told the school board. Another student said she has been called names she can’t repeat out loud.

    One student said she returns home from school feeling threatened.

    “My name is Danielle. I am also so many other names that people have called me over the years and you guys have done nothing,” that student said.

    Adriana Kuch, 14, was found dead in her Bayville home February 3, her father told CNN. Two days before her death, a TikTok video showed the freshman student being assaulted in a school hallway by a group of teenagers, prosecutors say. Michael Kuch believes his daughter died late at night on February 2, shortly after she sent her last text message at 10:46 p.m., he said.

    In the wake of Kuch’s death, four students at the high school were charged in connection with the attack, Ocean County Prosecutor Bradley D. Billhimer said in a statement to CNN. The former superintendent of the school district, Triantafillos Parlapanides, resigned from his post Saturday, effective immediately, the district said in a statement on its website.

    The incident has sparked outrage among students and parents who say it reflects a culture of bullying in the district. The community is calling on school district officials to improve how it handles allegations of bullying.

    One student’s allegations of bullying at the high school were detailed in a lawsuit filed in October, CNN previously reported. The lawsuit claims a different 14-year-old girl was physically assaulted by two teenagers, one of whom had allegedly sent her threatening text messages in December 2021.

    The school district said in a statement days after Kuch’s death that it is “evaluating all current and past allegations of bullying” and will “undergo an independent assessment of the District’s anti-bullying policies and ensure every necessary safeguard is in place to protect our students and staff.”

    The attack on Adriana Kuch, who was walking with her boyfriend in the hallway at the time, was recorded on video and posted later that same day on social media platforms, including TikTok, which prompted a slew of hateful comments and online bullying that Michael Kuch said drove his daughter to take her own life.

    The video, obtained and reviewed by CNN, shows the freshman student being hit in the face with a water bottle several times. The footage shows Adriana was punched, kicked and her hair was pulled. Kuch says his daughter suffered bruising and blacked out for a short time as a result of the attack.

    Kuch has accused the school district of mishandling the attack. He says police should have been notified immediately and that his daughter should have been taken to the hospital.

    “I want this to stop happening to other kids,” Kuch previously told CNN. “This isn’t just my daughter. A lot of kids are facing this at school.”

    Hundreds of people were in attendance Thursday, including family members and parents, when School Board of Education President Denise Pavone-Wilson started the meeting, saying she wanted to begin the process of healing at school.

    The school board president said the board offered their “most sincere deepest sympathies to the family of our student, Adriana Kuch.”

    During the meeting, one student said their classmates have tried to “jump” them because of their sexual orientation and that photographs taken of them in school have been posted on social media.

    This student said they were suicidal and self-harmed in the past because of “things that happened to me in this school.”

    Kuch was remembered warmly by another student who described her as a “very sweet and kind girl” who helped her on her first day of school when she didn’t know anyone yet.

    Parents and family members also shared their emotional testimony at the meeting.

    One parent said food had been thrown at her daughter in a school cafeteria. Another woman, who said her niece was severely bullied at a high school in the district, asked why a student had to die by suicide for “us to hit rock bottom.”

    “It should have never gone there,” that woman said. “Rock bottom should have been the first time a student was bullied, and it should have been taken care of from that point on.”

    When Pavone-Wilson told attendees at the meeting that faculty and staff always had the “best interest of the students and their education at the forefront,” one person in the audience yelled out “not true” and applause followed.

    Then, amid jeering from the crowd, the board moved to officially appoint Dr. Douglas Corbett as the district’s acting superintendent following Parlapanides’s resignation. Some members of the audience shouted “resign” and “leave” as the motion to appoint Corbett passed.

    Shortly before the meeting began, Corbett said the circumstances of Kuch’s death “were disturbing and we share in the community’s shock.”

    New school district leadership is looking into a handful of initiatives, including retaining an outside party to examine the district’s policies and response to crises and creating a focus group of teachers and parents to handle the issues, according to Corbett.

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  • DeSantis says Florida requires African American history. Advocates say the state is failing that mandate | CNN Politics

    DeSantis says Florida requires African American history. Advocates say the state is failing that mandate | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Facing accusations of whitewashing history after his administration blocked a new Black studies course for high-achieving high schoolers, Gov. Ron DeSantis has countered that Florida students already must learn about the triumphs and plight of African Americans.

    “The state of Florida education standards not only don’t prevent, but they require teaching Black history,” DeSantis said last week. “All the important things, that’s part of our core curriculum.”

    Indeed, Florida has required its schools to teach African American history since 1994, long before the recent push in many states to move toward a more complete telling of the country’s story. The stated goal at the time was to introduce the Black experience to a generation of young people. That included DeSantis himself, then a student in Florida’s public school system when the mandate became law.

    But nearly three decades later, advocates say many Florida schools are failing to teach that history. Only 11 of the state’s 67 county school districts meet all of the benchmarks for teaching Black history set by the African American History Task Force, a state board created to help school districts abide by the mandate. Many schools only cover the topic during Black History Month in February, said Bernadette Kelley-Brown, the principal investigator for the task force.

    “The idea that every Florida student learns African American history, it’s not reality,” Kelley-Brown said. “Some districts don’t even realize it’s required instruction.”

    The persistent focus in Florida on instruction of African American topics comes as DeSantis has partially built his Republican stardom by targeting public schools for signs of progressive ideologies. His administration has forced K-12 schools to comb their textbooks and curriculum for any evidence of Critical Race Theory or related topics and he championed a new law that puts guardrails on lessons about racism and oppression. Both measures were cited in the state’s decision last month to block a new Advanced Placement class on African American Studies from Florida high schools. (On Wednesday, the College Board, which oversees AP courses and exams, released an updated framework of African American Studies class that did not include many of the authors and topics DeSantis had objected to. His administration said it was reviewing the changes to see if the course now complies with state law.)

    Black Democratic lawmakers say the state Department of Education under DeSantis has shown far more zeal in enforcing these new restrictions on how race can be taught in schools than the state, in almost 30 years, has ever demonstrated toward ensuring that Black history is taught at all.

    “If we say that the speed limit is 70 and someone goes 80, the Highway Patrol is there with some consequences,” state Sen. Geraldine Thompson said at a recent press conference. “But there have been no consequences for not teaching African American history.”

    The governor’s office and the Florida Department of Education did not respond when asked about the state’s efforts to enforce the mandate to teach Black history. But DeSantis recently elaborated on how he expects the subject to be taught.

    “It’s just cut and dried history,” DeSantis said. “You learn all the basics. You learn about the great figures, and you know, I view it as American history. I don’t view it as separate history.”

    For a state that had to be dragged to desegregate all of its schools well into the 1970s, the move to require African American history in Florida classrooms was notably unceremonious. Lawmakers unanimously approved the mandate in 1994 with little debate. Few newspapers covered then-Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles signing the bill into law.

    After it passed, the state created the African American History Task Force to help school districts with this new directive and to come up with a strategy for implementation. But neither the law nor the Florida Department of Education set a deadline for districts to comply.

    Former state Rep. Rudolph Bradley, the Black lawmaker who sponsored the bill to require African American history back then, now says there was a major flaw in the legislation that kept it from accomplishing what he set out to achieve: Lawmakers didn’t set aside any money for school districts to update their textbooks, buy new instructional materials or train teachers.

    “The mistake on my part, being a freshman, I didn’t understand the importance of attaching appropriations,” Bradley told CNN in a recent interview. “I didn’t understand what an unfunded mandate was and how difficult that would make it for school districts to incorporate it.”

    Even districts that had sought to comply with the law faced hurdles. Among those early adopters in 1994 was Pinellas County, where efforts to incorporate African American history into their lessons were underway prior to the law’s passage – and where a teenage DeSantis was entering sophomore year of high school that fall.

    At Dunedin High School, a predominantly White school within walking distance of Florida’s gulf shores, DeSantis should have been among the first wave of students to be exposed to this more complete telling of history. The school already offered African American history as an elective and the district had tapped the teacher of that class, Randy Lightfoot, to guide Pinellas schools into compliance with the new law. (Lightfoot said DeSantis was not a student in his African American history class.)

    Lightfoot and his team met after school for three hours a day, four times a week for months to forge a plan to incorporate Black history, culture and figures into every grade level, he told CNN in a recent interview. They printed a blueprint called “African American Connections.”

    The accurate teaching of African American studies, the document said, “explains the causes of racial division in society, including prejudice, stereotyping and discrimination” and the “systematic oppression perspective of Africans and African-Americans and their resistance to that oppression.”

    The state heralded Lightfoot’s efforts as a model for adhering to the new law, according to news accounts from the time. The Florida education commissioner liked it so much he handed a copy to every school district, Lightfoot said. DeSantis more recently has called the idea of systemic racism “a bunch of horse manure.”

    By 1996, Lightfoot was warning that his efforts were being stymied by lack of resources. Lightfoot struggled to convince the Pinellas school board to acquire textbooks that included the new lessons on Black history, according to the St. Petersburg Times, which also noted that the district cut his staff.

    The attempts to expand the curriculum to teach African American history also came during a period of racial strife in Pinellas County. In 1996, riots broke out in St. Petersburg, the city 20 minutes south of DeSantis’ suburban home, after the police killed an unarmed Black teenager during a traffic stop, and again when the officers involved were cleared of charges. Meanwhile, graduation rates for Black male students remained stubbornly low in Pinellas, the Times reported, and the county school board had broached the controversial idea of curbing forced busing to desegregate the public schools, leading to a period of distrust between the board and Black residents.

    By the time DeSantis graduated in 1997 – having earned recognition as a decorated Advanced Placement history student, according to his senior yearbook – getting African American history in Pinellas schools was still a work in progress, Lightfoot said.

    Statewide, only a handful of schools had earned “exemplary” status from the African American History Task Force by the end of that decade, meaning they had reached benchmarks for compliance. “Exemplary” school districts must demonstrate their curriculum included African American topics beyond Black History Month, training for teachers in the subject, involvement of parents in the learning and collaboration with a local university for support. In 1999, a bill that would have required public school textbooks to include African American history went nowhere in the state legislature.

    Carlton Owens, a Black classmate of DeSantis’ at Dunedin High, said he only saw people like himself reflected in the curriculum during Black History Month or lessons around slavery and the Civil Rights movement.

    “There’s so much more history that’s inspiring that is interwoven in the American story as a whole,” Owens, now a lawyer and small business owner, said. “And that wasn’t highlighted then, and that needs to be happening now.”

    The state “put the material out there for districts,” said Lightfoot, now a history professor at St. Petersburg College. “But they didn’t put the kind of money in to check and make sure everyone is doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”

    “We were trying to fill in the gaps and the holes in history,” he added. “At the same time, we had Black male students who we thought we could help improve their grades if they saw their stories in history and science and literature. Where it worked, we had pretty good success with it. But we had the support of state leaders to do it. It was a different climate then.”

    In a 2019 press release, the Florida Department of Education announced it would require districts for the first time to report how they were teaching required subjects including “Holocaust education, African American history, Hispanic heritage, women’s history, civics and more.”

    A CNN review of those reports for the 2021-22 school year found wide discrepancies in how districts lesson-plan around the subject of African American history. Some districts provide lengthy plans for weaving the African American experience into social studies from kindergarten through high school graduation; others suggest exploration comes primarily during Black History month. More than a dozen submissions largely parroted the requirements listed in state law without including any details of the instruction.

    Leon County, declared an exemplary school district by the African American History Task Force, included details like its lessons on African American scientists, songwriters and artists during grades K-5. Dixie County, near the Florida Panhandle, submitted 1,600 words on how it teaches African American history to high schoolers. Madison County, a school district near the Florida-Georgia border, simply wrote: “Courses are taught on a daily basis by a Florida certified teacher. The district also stresses Black History Month with daily mini-lessons for all grade levels.”

    The Florida Association of School Superintendents did not respond to a request for comment.

    Democrats and advocates contend the state has done little with this information. They also say the administration has not yet indicated how it will ensure schools are complying with a new state law signed by DeSantis that requires annual instruction of the 1920 Ocoee massacre, when dozens of Black Floridians were murdered in a horrific Election Day racial cleansing.

    Democratic lawmakers say they intend to introduce legislation that would require the state to enforce whether school districts are teaching African American history as the law intends, though its supporters acknowledge any bill is unlikely to gain traction in a statehouse controlled by Republicans.

    “It won’t go anywhere,” said state Sen. Shevrin Jones, a member of the legislature’s Black caucus. “But it’ll be a helluva message that we’re getting behind true and accurate Black history being taught in the state of Florida.”

    Early in his first term, there was some hope from the state’s Black community that DeSantis would forge a different path than some of his Republican predecessors. In one of his first acts as governor, DeSantis voted to pardon the Groveland Four – two Black men who were lynched and two who received lengthy sentences for allegedly raping a White woman in 1949 – widely considered one of the darkest episodes in Florida’s violent past. Former Gov. Rick Scott, who served two terms prior to DeSantis taking office, had refused to pardon the four men despite overwhelming evidence of their innocence.

    But DeSantis’ posture changed following the 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. DeSantis responded to the national unrest by mobilizing the state’s national guard and pushing through what he called an “anti-riot” law that included harsh new penalties for protesters if a demonstration turns violent.

    DeSantis then turned his attention to schools. In June 2021, he urged the state Board of Education to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory, an academic framework based around the idea that systemic racism is embedded in many American institutions and society. His administration then rejected math textbooks on the grounds that they included Critical Race Theory and other forbidden topics. Last year, lawmakers approved one of DeSantis’ top legislative priorities: the so-called “Stop WOKE Act,” which said schools cannot teach that anyone is inherently racist or responsible for past atrocities because of their skin color. The bill, which DeSantis signed into law, also said schools could teach that oppression of races has existed throughout US history but not persuade students to a particular point of view.

    The controversies around these actions have catapulted DeSantis into the national conversation on teaching race and helped fuel his rise as a potential presidential contender. Throughout these episodes, DeSantis has often maintained that African American history is built into Florida’s education framework.

    “Florida statutes require teaching all of American history including slavery, civil rights, segregation,” DeSantis contended during his debate against his Democratic opponent last year, Charlie Crist. “It’s important that that’s taught. But what I think is not good is to scapegoat students based on skin color.”

    Reginald Ellis, a professor of History and African-American Studies at Florida A&M University, said if students were adequately learning Black history, he would see it first hand in his classroom.

    “What I find, even at a historically Black college, the vast majority of students have not really been exposed to much African American history and experience,” Ellis said. “It is a law on the books. There is a task force. But, for the most part, it clearly isn’t a curriculum that is being enforced. School districts effectively have the option to opt-in or opt-out.”

    Bradley, the original bill sponsor, said the law’s shortcomings fall on those who have held power in Tallahassee and in school districts for the past three decades, and not DeSantis. Bradley, who changed his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican later in his political career, said he was supportive of DeSantis’ education agenda and accused activists of using schools to “drive a wedge between Blacks and Whites.”

    “The law is still a work in progress, but if we want to use it as a tool to divide then that is a total violation of the spirit of the law,” Bradley said. “When I passed that bill, it was designed to bring people together, not divide.”

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  • Jim Jordan issues first subpoenas targeting Biden administration’s response to school board threats | CNN Politics

    Jim Jordan issues first subpoenas targeting Biden administration’s response to school board threats | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan on Friday subpoenaed the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Department of Education for documents as part of its investigation into whether a Justice Department strategy to address threats against teachers and school officials was abused to target conservative parents.

    The flurry of subpoenas are the first from the Judiciary’s subcommittee dedicated to investigating the alleged weaponization of the federal government and are an early indication that the newly minted chairman intends to aggressively pursue its probe into the Biden administration’s response to rising tensions and threats of violence surrounding school board meetings.

    The subpoenas set a document deadline of March 1. The panel sent the subpoenas after initially sending letters to the agencies for voluntary cooperation on January 17.

    The allegations being investigated date to 2021, when protests and some violence erupted at school board meetings across the country. Most of the anger came from conservative parents who wanted to repeal mask mandates, opposed anti-racism courses and had concerns about LGBTQ policies.

    With that backdrop, the National School Boards Association wrote to President Joe Biden asking for federal help to address the violence and threats against school administrators. The group said that “these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism” and encouraged the Justice Department to explore which laws, possibly including the Patriot Act, could be applied.

    The group soon apologized for “some of the language” in its letter. But it quickly drew backlash, particularly among conservatives.

    Attorney General Merrick Garland had issued a memo in response – which didn’t cite the letter, compare parents to “terrorists” nor invoke the Patriot Act. It merely told the FBI and federal prosecutors to step up collaboration with state and local law enforcement on the issue.

    According to a report Jordan released last year, emails show that the Biden White House consulted with the NSBA on the letter before the group made its letter public. An independent review by NSBA concluded, however, that there was no “direct or indirect evidence suggesting the Administration requested the Letter” or reviewed the contents before the letter was sent.

    Other emails also show that the Justice Department sent an advance copy of Garland’s memo to the NSBA.

    The FBI later established a “threat tag” to internally track cases about school board threats under the same categorization. Republicans have seized on the “threat tag” to accuse the FBI of carrying out Biden’s desire to stomp out conservative speech at school boards. But the creation of an internal database does not mean the FBI initiated any sort of crackdown against parents.

    Judiciary Republicans are requesting Garland provide a paper trail of the DOJ’s communications with the White House, intelligence agencies and members of the National School Boards Association about alleged violence at school board meetings.

    The subpoena also calls for a number of documents relating to Garland’s directive for FBI and US attorneys’ offices to meet with federal, state and local law enforcement partners to discuss strategies for addressing the issue, focusing specifically on what meetings took place and what recommendations were made.

    A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment. Three days after Jordan’s voluntary request to DOJ, a department official responded to the Ohio Republican that “we share your belief that congressional oversight is vital to our functioning democracy” and encouraged the committee to prioritize its document requests to elicit efficient responses, according to a letter obtained by CNN.

    The FBI subpoena specifically demands that Director Chris Wray produce a variety of documents, including communications related to meeting with US attorneys’ offices and “establishment of the Department of Justice’s task force.”

    Wray is also told to hand over all documents related to formal and informal recommendations created or relied upon by FBI employees in accordance with Garland’s October 2021 memo.

    The FBI said in a statement that the bureau “has never been in the business of investigating speech or policing speech at school board meetings or anywhere else, and we never will be,” adding that “attempts to further any political narrative will not change those facts.”

    “The FBI recognizes the importance of congressional oversight and remains fully committed to cooperating with Congress’s oversight requests consistent with its constitutional and statutory responsibilities. The FBI is actively working to respond to congressional requests for information – including voluntary production of documents,” the FBI statement read.

    Jordan’s subpoena to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona called on the Education Department to hand over any documents or communications related to a letter the National School Boards Association sent in September 2021.

    Jordan’s subpoena also called for any files related to Viola Garcia’s appointment to the National Assessment Government Board. Garcia was the president of the National School Boards Association and was one of two individuals who signed the September 2021 letter to Biden.

    An Education Department spokesperson told CNN that “the Department responded to Chairman Jordan’s letter earlier this week. The Department remains committed to responding to the House Judiciary Committee’s requests in a manner consistent with longstanding Executive Branch policy.”

    CNN has reached out to Garcia for comment.

    On Thursday, a day before the subpoena, the Education Department told Jordan’s team that the department played no role in crafting the letter from the National School Boards Association.

    “I would also like to reiterate – as the Department has repeatedly made clear – that the Secretary did not request, direct any action, or play any role in the development of the September 29, 2021, letter from the NSBA to President Biden,” Gwen Graham, assistant secretary for legislation and congressional affairs at the Education Department wrote in a letter obtained by CNN. Graham added that an independent review for counsel retained by the NSBA did not find any connection between the letter and Garcia’s appointment.

    Republicans gave Democrats on the committee a heads up that these subpoenas were coming, a source familiar told CNN. Democratic Del. Stacey Plaskett of the US Virgin Islands, the highest-ranking Democrat on the subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, said the subpoenas were underpinned by “conspiracy theories” and said she is confident that what the Republicans have asked for “will once again disprove this tired right-wing theory.”

    White House spokesperson for Congressional Oversight Ian Sams said in a statement to CNN, “Chairman Jordan is rushing to fire off subpoenas only two days after the Judiciary Committee organized, even though agencies already responded in good faith seeking to accommodate requests he made. These subpoenas make crystal clear that extreme House Republicans have no interest in working together with the Biden Administration on behalf of the American people and every interest in staging political stunts.”

    Since the uproar at school boards became a major political issue in late 2021, Republicans have pushed the baseless narrative that Biden, Garland and Wray have weaponized federal law enforcement to attack innocent parents who care about education.

    House Speaker Kevin McCarthy falsely claimed that “Biden used the FBI to target parents as domestic terrorists.” Jordan has said Garland tried “to use federal law enforcement tools to silence parents.” This claim even came up in the GOP response to last year’s State of the Union. These claims have been repeatedly debunked by fact-checkers from CNN and other outlets.

    For his part, Garland has aggressively pushed back against Republicans’ accusations. He previously testified to Congress that the Justice Department isn’t using counterterrorism resources against parents and said it was ridiculous to equate “angry” parents to “terrorists.”

    When GOP senators grilled Wray about the “threat tag” matter at an August hearing, he defended the FBI.

    “The FBI is not going to be in the business of investigating speech or policing speech at school board meetings,” Wray said. “We’re not about to start now. Threats of violence, that’s a different matter altogether. And there, we will work with our state local partners, as we always have.”

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  • Virginia school announces new safety protocols as students return to class nearly a month after a 6-year-old allegedly shot a teacher | CNN

    Virginia school announces new safety protocols as students return to class nearly a month after a 6-year-old allegedly shot a teacher | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Richneck Elementary School has announced new safety protocols as students return to classes on Monday, nearly a month after a 6-year-old student allegedly shot his teacher inside a classroom.

    In an email to families, newly appointed school administrator Karen Lynch said the school in Newport News, Virginia, will have police on campus to “assist with the transition.”

    Children should arrive without a backpack because the school plans to provide them with clear ones on Monday, Lynch said. If students bring lunch items to school, they will be run through a metal detector and are subject to search, the email says.

    The school district told CNN it has installed two metal detectors on campus.

    The school will be limiting visitors during this first week of instruction to allow staff “the opportunity to establish routines and procedures with students,” the email states. Parents will not be allowed to enter classrooms and those who choose to walk their children to class must show identification and are also subject to search, it said.

    The school closed after first grade teacher Abby Zwerner was critically injured on January 6 when a bullet was shot through her hand and into her chest, according to police. The 25-year-old was later stabilized and released from the hospital.

    The incident has resulted in the ousting of the Newport News Public Schools superintendent and the reassignment of the school’s principal to another school. Since the shooting, the school board has held several meetings as it grapples with how to handle the incident amidst backlash from frustrated parents.

    See school board meeting where decision to cut ties with superintendent was made

    The father of a student who was in the same class as the 6-year-old said Monday he has “no misgivings” about sending his son back to school.

    “I think with new administration, this administration that listens to teachers, listens to concerns and acts on those concerns … this is probably going to be the safest school in the area for a good long while,” Thomas Britton told CNN’s Brian Todd.

    Last week, a lawyer representing the injured teacher alleged that school administrators were warned multiple times by staff who expressed concerns that the student had a gun and was making threats to people the day of the shooting. The lawyer, Diane Toscano, alleged Zwerner was shot about an hour after an employee was denied permission to search the student.

    CNN has reached out to the school district for comment on Toscano’s claims.

    While police have not publicly identified the student, his family has released statements saying the boy suffers from “an acute disability.”

    The family has said the gun the child allegedly brought to school in his backpack was secured by a trigger lock and kept on the top shelf of a closet. As part of his disability care plan, a family member usually went to class with him, but he was not accompanied the day of the incident, they said.

    “We will regret our absence on this day for the rest of our lives,” the family statement said.

    As students return to school, the district says support services made available to them since the incident will continue on site.

    The school has compiled an Amazon wish list of items teachers have requested “to support students’ social-emotional needs post-tragedy,” a post on the school’s Facebook account said.

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  • Republican Sen. Ben Sasse resigns to become University of Florida president, opening seat for appointment by Nebraska governor | CNN Politics

    Republican Sen. Ben Sasse resigns to become University of Florida president, opening seat for appointment by Nebraska governor | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Sen. Ben Sasse, a Republican who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump after the attack on the US Capitol, officially resigned from the Senate Sunday, opening up his seat for appointment by Nebraska’s Republican Gov. Jim Pillen.

    Sasse announced last year that he would step down from his position to become the University of Florida’s next president. His academic appointment by Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis was approved by the university’s Board of Trustees in November despite criticism from students and faculty over the secretive search process, Sasse’s limited relevant experience and his past criticisms of same-sex marriage.

    “I’m here rather than at some other school, or rather than trying to claw to stay in the United States Senate for decades, because I believe that this is the most interesting institution in the state that has the most happening right now, and is therefore the best positioned to help lead our country through a time of unprecedented change,” Sasse told the UF board at the time.

    Sasse made little secret of the frustration he felt with the Senate and the changing nature of the Republican Party. He explained his decision to vote to convict Trump by saying that the former president’s lies about the election “had consequences” and brought the country “dangerously close to a bloody constitutional crisis.” He was one of seven Republican senators to vote to convict Trump after the House of Representatives impeached him for incitement of an insurrection.

    Before his election to the Senate in 2014, Sasse was president of Midland University, a private Lutheran liberal arts school in Nebraska with an enrollment of about 1,600 students. He graduated from Harvard and earned a PhD in American history at Yale and also worked at Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey and private equity firms, according to his website.

    The University of Florida has an enrollment of over 60,000 students on a 2,000-acre campus with over a thousand buildings. Unlike Sasse, the university’s most recent presidents had extensive careers as administrators at major universities prior to taking the school’s top job.

    Sasse was reelected to another six-year term in 2020. His resignation will not change the balance of power in the Senate. The seat will temporarily filled by an appointment made by Pillen, who was elected in November and was sworn in on Thursday.

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  • A Virginia superintendent is fired after a state report into handling of sexual assaults at school is issued | CNN

    A Virginia superintendent is fired after a state report into handling of sexual assaults at school is issued | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A Virginia school superintendent was fired Tuesday, a day after a report from the state accused him of lying about a sexual assault involving a student in May 2021.

    The special grand jury report, conducted by the office of Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, also criticized former school superintendent Dr. Scott Ziegler and other school officials for mishandling the investigation of an October sexual assault allegedly by the same student that year.

    The superintendent said of the May sexual assault “to my knowledge we don’t have any records of assaults occurring in our restrooms,” at a June 2021 school board meeting, according to the report. At the time, Ziegler said he misunderstood the question.

    The Loudoun County Public School Board voted unanimously to fire Ziegler Tuesday night, but provided no reason for the firing, school spokesman Wayde Byard told CNN.

    “The Special Grand Jury’s report contains important recommendations and information,” Miyares said in a statement to CNN Wednesday. “I’m glad to see that the school board is taking the report seriously, and hope it results in positive change for the LCPS community.”

    CNN has attempted to reach Ziegler for comment. Byard would not comment further regarding allegations into LCPS mishandling of the sexual assault cases outlined in the special grand jury report.

    A teenage student had been arrested for sexual battery and abduction of another student at a Loudoun County public school in October 2021, the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office said, according to the report.

    The teenager also allegedly sexually assaulted another student in May 2021, according to the report. In that assault, the grand jury report alleged that the sexual assault occurred in a women’s bathroom while the perpetrator was wearing a skirt.

    “National outrage focused on Loudoun County because the student was labeled as gender fluid, LCPS had recently passed a transgender policy to conform with the Virginia Department of Education’s model policy,” said the report.

    CNN could not find evidence substantiating that the student identified as transgender or gender-fluid.

    The 2021 Virginia Department of Education’s Model Policies for the Treatment of Transgender Students in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools outlined that transgender students should be allowed to use bathrooms and staff should use the personal pronouns that were most consistent with their gender identity.

    In 2022, under Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, the Department of Education replaced the policy with an updated one stating that students should use bathrooms according to his or her sex.

    On his first day in office on January 15, Youngkin passed an executive order authorizing an investigation of Loudoun County Public Schools by the Attorney General. Youngkin had mentioned the sexual assault cases at Loudoun schools several times while campaigning for governor.

    “The special grand jury’s report on the horrific sexual assaults in Loudoun has exposed wrongdoing, prompted disciplinary actions, & provided families with the truth. I will continue to empower parents & push for accountability on behalf of our students,” Youngkin tweeted Wednesday.

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  • Racist rhetoric greets increasing population of Latino students in this Tennessee county | CNN

    Racist rhetoric greets increasing population of Latino students in this Tennessee county | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Sitting in the back of a packed room in the Hamilton County Schools administration complex, Clara fought the urge to leave. She had taken the day off from her factory job to be there but was nervous to see a crowd of people supporting a board member who had referred to Latino students as a burden.

    On that fall afternoon, the mother of three felt like she carried the weight of those parents who wanted to defend their children but couldn’t show up out of fear, or could not leave their workplaces early to attend the school board meeting. Latino families who call Chattanooga, Tennessee, and its surrounding towns home are not invisible, and they don’t want to be a regular target of racist rhetoric and unequal treatment, she told CNN.

    “It hurts when someone speaks without really knowing our people and uses ill words to humiliate our children. It hurts because it’s hard to try to understand (English), be there, arrive on time and support my kids at school,” said Clara, 52, whose two younger sons attend schools in the district.

    “I’m not leaving because I want a much better future for my children,” she said.

    CNN agreed to only use Clara’s first name to protect her identity out of respect for her safety concerns.

    In the months since a Hamilton County Schools school board member suggested the rising number of Latino students who speak little to no English were overwhelming schools, several activists and educators who spoke with CNN said they received anti-immigrant, racist and hateful messages after condemning the remarks.

    In this county near the Tennessee-Georgia border, the growth in the Hispanic or Latino population has outpaced the national average. In the past decade, the number of residents who identified as Hispanic or Latino rose nearly 81% or more than 12,000 people, compared to 23% nationwide, according to US Census data.

    While the county’s more than 366,000 residents largely identify as White and about 7.4% identified as Hispanic or Latino in the 2020 Census, their presence has pushed a community with a dark racial history to face the inequalities that persist and adapt to a new normal that goes beyond the fractured Black-White paradigm that has characterized the South for a long time.

    Although there are ongoing efforts by the city and school officials to better serve Latino families, the demographic shift has also come with reminders of how heavily divided this region is and the fact that many Latinos live afraid of authorities because of their current or past immigration status.

    In an interview with The Chattanoogan in late August, Rhonda Thurman suggested the rising number of Latino students who speak little to no English were overwhelming schools. Thurman is a long-time board member representing schools with a majority White student population. She is known for her conservative views as well as her stance on books that have been deemed “inappropriate” for children by some or labeled “critical race theory.”

    “It is mind-boggling to me the burden it puts on the schools, the teachers and the taxpayers,” Thurman told the newspaper about the number of Latino students.

    “Teachers tell me they cannot give the attention they deserve to the English-speaking students because they have to devote so much time to try to help the Hispanic students catch up,” she said according to the newspaper.

    During the board meeting last month, members briefly discussed resources for Latino students offered by the school district or their interest in new initiatives. That was something that Clara said reinforced her frustration over the lack of support for Latino families and her conviction to overcome the fear that some people of color have toward those with conservative views.

    “I’m not afraid of speaking up and share my opinion, it’s where we live. This is the South and this area is absolutely closed (minded) in many aspects,” she said.

    Clara, center, embraces her sons Daniel and Benjamin.

    The Hamilton County Schools district comprises 76 institutions and serves 45,000 students. About 19% of students, or 8,702, are Hispanic but not all of them have limited English proficiency.

    There are 5,039 students considered English Language Learners currently enrolled, data shows. Diego Trujillo, director of the district’s English as a New Language Program, said Spanish is the top language for ELL but students speak more than 100 different languages, including Arabic, Mandarin, Vietnamese and five Mayan dialects.

    “When we think about English learners, there’s this association strictly to folks that are Spanish speaking, and when you look across the district we’re seeing a diversity of language,” Trujillo said.

    The school district declined to comment specifically on Thurman’s comments. Thurman has denied that she specifically called children a burden. She told CNN the number of Latino students were “burdening the system” and the school district was dealing with things it had not faced before.

    “Different people say different words and some people just jump on it because I happen to be a conservative and a Christian and some people just don’t like that,” Thurman said.

    Semillas, a non-profit group focused on racial and educational justice for the Latino community, has called for Thurman’s resignation and for a new task force to create an action plan that would better support the needs of Latino students and parents. Their online petition has garnered nearly 1,400 signatures.

    “While some programming has been developed over the years, Latinx community members have seen little to no proactive action to actually take a moment to meet and listen to the challenges and barriers Latinx and immigrant students and parents face each and every day,” said Mo Rodriguez-Cruz, the group’s co-founder and field director.

    A student looks at schoolwork during an English as a New Language class at The Howard High School.

    Taylor Lyons, co-founder of the local parent group Moms for Social Justice, said negativity toward Hispanic students is just the latest in a list of “hot button” issues that have been the focus of conservatives who live in the county. Over the past several years, Lyons said, conservatives have flooded school board meetings to fight mask and Covid-19 vaccine mandates as well as books in school libraries, which made her group subject of threats and accusations. In 2018, Moms for Social Justice launched an initiative to help teachers stock classrooms with books.

    “What it tells us is that you have a small but very loud minority of extremists, who are very uncomfortable with the cultural change around them. They’re uncomfortable with the demographic change,” Lyons said.

    In Chattanooga, the county seat that largely touts itself as progressive, residents are seeing the demographic shift manifest itself in many aspects of their lives.

    At The Howard School, a high school that is the pride of the city’s Black community, numerous photos of its Black alumni decorate the hallways, but most of its current students speak Spanish and are of Guatemalan descent. Most evenings, families can sit on wooden bleachers at amateur soccer matches and cheer as Spanish-language music blasts on speakers. In the city’s Rossville Boulevard, there has been an influx of Guatemalan restaurants and other businesses that proudly display the country’s flag or its national soccer team jersey.

    As the tensions spurred by changes in the student body came to light in recent school board meetings, students and teachers at two schools (Howard and East Side Elementary) in the district opted to keep focusing on creating an inclusive environment around them.

    Daisy Hernandez said her friends and classmates at The Howard High School are proud to embrace their background and culture at school.

    When Daisy Hernandez walked to her first class at The Howard School three years ago, she heard the chatter of her peers in English, Spanish and Mam, the Mayan language spoken in Guatemala and by her parents. There, the 17-year-old said she doesn’t see or feel the animosity that families like hers often experience while living in the South.

    “I see Howard as a school that helps us out in knowing other people. I’ve seen Black students talk to Hispanic students. I think that’s beautiful because we are becoming one,” said Hernandez, who is the high school’s student body president.

    The Howard School is the largest high school in the county and one of 10 schools in the district where Hispanic students surpass the number of students of any other racial or ethnic group. The number of English Language Learners at those schools this year represents 56% of all ELL students in the district.

    For decades, the school was known for predominantly serving Black students, but enrollment data shows that at least half of the student body has been Hispanic in the past five school years.

    At the start of the day, students listen to Assistant Principal Charles Mitchell read announcements in English and then in Spanish. The tradition, which began five years ago and required him to learn a new language, is one of the many ways “we go beyond our means just to include everybody,” Mitchell said.

    Jose Otero, an English as a New Language teacher who has been at the school for the past four years, said most Hispanic students at Howard are Guatemalan and fall into two major groups. Like Hernandez, some children were born and raised in Chattanooga to immigrant parents, and others recently migrated from Guatemala, El Salvador or Mexico along with their families or by themselves.

    Jose Otero is among several teachers helping the rising number of Latino students arriving in Hamilton County learn English.

    All students, Hispanic or Black, have different realities and different experiences, Otero said, and one thing that helps them connect with each other has been sports, especially soccer.

    Most of the 40 soccer players at Howard are Guatemalan and the larger school community has taken an interest in the team because they’ve been district champions in recent years, said Otero, who is also the school’s head soccer coach.

    “The kids are starting to appreciate each other’s culture and want to be a part of it. I think with time, there’s gonna be more Guatemalan kids playing basketball and baseball and football, and there’s gonna be more Black kids playing soccer,” Otero said.

    About two miles east of the high school, teacher Amanda Edens and her fifth-grade students at East Side Elementary finished reading “Esperanza Rising” by Pam Muñoz Ryan, a novel about a young girl who flees Mexico and settles in a farm camp in California.

    Edens, whose Spanish is limited, said she used the book to teach her students the curriculum while also connecting with them. They are mostly Hispanic, she said, and they enjoyed giggling every time she pronounced the Spanish phrases and words scattered throughout the book.

    The 37-year-old teacher is facing the challenging task of navigating a state law that requires public schools to teach only in English and serving a fast-growing number of students who are not fluent in the language.

    But it’s something that Edens and other teachers in Hamilton County told CNN they embrace and said it’s far from being a burden.

    Dual-language flags hang in a hallway at East Side Elementary in Chattanooga.

    “There’s obviously the challenge of how am I going to help a child attain educational success when we don’t speak the same language and I’m giving them complex fifth grade texts in English,” Edens said.

    “It’s not necessarily an easy thing, but it is super rewarding when that child starts asking: ‘can I go to the restroom?’ in English, or when they’re speaking Spanish to me and I recognize what they’re saying well enough to communicate back,” she added. “But I’ve never felt burdened by that.”

    At the elementary school, English as a New Language teachers “push in” or join the general education classes and work with small groups to reduce the time the students are away from their classroom. Trujillo, the director of the district’s English as a New Language Program, said that type of language acquisition model is part of the work he hopes to achieve at more schools as the district works to have ENL programs at most campuses. In the past, he said, students were taken to a different campus to get language instruction if their schools did not offer the program or had ENL teachers.

    Andrea Bass, one of the ENL teachers at East Side Elementary, said the school staff respects and actively honors their students’ first language and culture. Many of the students are from Guatemala, and their families, who speak Spanish or Mayan dialects, are constantly engaged in their education despite the language barriers, she said.

    When Edens, Bass and other teachers heard their students might have been referred to as a burden, they signed a letter calling the remarks “offensive to those students, their families, and those of us who teach them.”

    “Our students don’t always have a voice and neither do their families,” Bass said. “I felt like it was my duty to speak up for them.”

    That sense of duty comes from seeing how many parents are afraid to speak up or advocate for themselves but nonetheless put a lot of their trust in educators, Bass said.

    Andrea Bass and several other teachers in Hamilton County signed a joint letter to show their love and support of Latino students earlier this year.

    The Latino or Hispanic community in Hamilton County, including Chattanooga, has grown and changed since Clara moved there nearly two decades ago. Yet, the challenges many families face remain the same.

    When Clara left her hometown in central Mexico, she went from working a desk job that required her to wear high heels and suits to factory jobs in Chattanooga, where sneakers and jeans are the norm. A change that was even more demoralizing, she said, would come on her son’s first day at school when she “realized that I had become illiterate.”

    “I could not speak English, I couldn’t have a conversation with my son’s teacher. It was very frustrating,” she said.

    Not much has changed for the increasing number of Latino families in the county, many who relocated from the neighboring state of Georgia after a state law that authorized police to investigate the immigration status and arrest undocumented immigrants went into effect in 2011. But city and school officials have launched initiatives in the past year hoping to address their needs.

    The city created the Office of New Americans last year to connect immigrant and refugee communities with city resources, including translation services and helping them with citizenship and naturalization paperwork.

    “It’s a way to make sure that we are empowering the people who are coming to Chattanooga and empowering our immigrant community to really be able to flourish,” said Esai Navarro, the office’s director.

    Navarro said the key is “emphasizing inclusion versus assimilation.”

    The Howard School launched a

    Meanwhile, the school district opened its International Welcome Center to assist international students with enrollment and connect them with support services. The center has helped 224 families since it opened last year.

    The melting pot of races, languages and cultures that Hamilton County and Chattanooga are seeing is everything Hernandez, the high school student, has known ever since she was born. What some see as a new normal is simply her reality – something she recently wrote about in a poem:

    “My left starred shoulder: red, white, blue”

    “My right striped shoulder: Quetzal white, light blue..”

    “A girl: two countries, one world, growing stronger, forever longer”

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  • Uvalde schools superintendent announces retirement after new details following the Robb Elementary massacre | CNN

    Uvalde schools superintendent announces retirement after new details following the Robb Elementary massacre | CNN

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    Uvalde, Texas
    CNN
     — 

    Hal Harrell, superintendent of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, announced his retirement Monday, according to a Facebook post by his wife, Donna Goates Harrell.

    “I am truly grateful for your support and well wishes. My decision to retire has not been made lightly and was made after much prayer and discernment,” the post read. “My wife and I love you all and this community that we both grew up in, and therefore the decision was a difficult one for us.”

    Harrell has been under scrutiny since the May 24 slaughter at Robb Elementary School in Texas.

    Harrell will remain throughout the year until a new superintendent is named, the post said. The school board was holding a meeting Monday night.

    Before the meeting Harrell was greeted and hugged by a throng of people. He responded to CNN questions by saying, “I think I’m going to enjoy this right now, thank you.” When pressed further by CNN, Harrell said, “I’m going to visit (with people).”

    During the meeting the board went into closed session. According to a meeting agenda part of the closed session was for an “attorney consultation regarding legal issues related to Superintendent retirement and transition.”

    Board members were then slated to resume the public part of the meeting and “take possible action regarding Superintendent retirement,” it added.

    The massacre left 19 children and two teachers dead. Months later, new details are still emerging about the school district’s response to the shooting.

    “My heart was broken on May 24th and I will always pray for each precious life that was tragically taken as well as their families,” the Facebook post said.

    According to the post, the superintendent asked his wife “to post this message since he doesn’t have Facebook.”

    Last week, Harrell emailed staff about his intention to retire.

    “I am in my 31st year in education, all served and dedicated to the students and families here in Uvalde,” Harrell wrote.

    That message came hours after the school district announced it was suspending operations of its police force and placing a lieutenant and another top school official on leave as part of its investigation.

    The email also came after CNN reported the Uvalde school district had recently hired Crimson Elizondo, a former Texas Department of Public Safety trooper under investigation for her response to the massacre.

    Elizondo arrived minutes after the shooting started and was heard on body-worn camera video saying she would have responded differently had her own son been inside the school.

    “If my son had been in there, I would not have been outside,” she told another officer. “I promise you that.”

    The school district apologized to the victims’ families and the Uvalde community “for the pain that this revelation has caused,” the district said last week. “Ms. Elizondo’s statement in the audio is not consistent with the District’s expectations.”

    Elizondo has been fired from the school district and declined to speak with CNN.

    While Harrell announced a series of new safety measures for this school year, some Uvalde parents have called for the superintendent’s removal for months.

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