National Center for Civil and Human Rights Unveils Broken Promises Gallery “Guided” by Ida B. Wells
ATLANTA, December 5, 2025 (Newswire.com)
– The National Center for Civil and Human Rights’ new gallery, “Broken Promises,” is a permanent exhibit on Reconstruction-the period after the Civil War and Emancipation when America first attempted to build a multi-racial democracy. The Center invites people to experience the new gallery which opens to the public today, December 5, 2025, as part of the Center’s $58 million expansion.
The gallery presents Black progress during the Reconstruction Era, when nearly four million newly freed Black Americans claimed their rights as citizens, voted, won elected office, created schools, and reshaped economic and civic life across the South. It also presents the violent backlash that met and then suppressed those gains – through racial terror, political disenfranchisement, and Jim Crow legal segregation.
“Reconstruction reminds us that the expansion of rights in America has never moved in a straight line. Every reform toward wider freedom has been accompanied by efforts to limit those rights,” said Jill Savitt, the CEO of the Center. “Recognizing that pattern helps us understand the forces that have long shaped America, up until today.”
Curated by the Center’s Chief Program Officer, Kama Pierce, the gallery has anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells as its “docent,” and focuses on three cities – Wilmington, N.C., Atlanta, Ga., and Tulsa, Okla. In each city, Black achievement provoked white backlash that resulted in massacres and racial terror.
The immersive gallery contains artifacts from the Without Sanctuary Collection, including a fragment of a noose and photographs of lynchings that were turned into postcards for entertainment. The artifacts deepen visitors’ understanding of how racial terror was wielded as a strategy.
The gallery’s memorial space features a historical marker honoring Mary Turner, who was lynched in 1918. Turner’s family erected the public marker to honor her – but it was consistently defaced. The family donated the marker — marred by 11 bullet holes — to the Center. Artist Lonnie Holley has interpreted the marker in the gallery’s memorial space.
“The Mary Turner marker is a powerful artifact that bears witness twice – first to the original terror, and again to the present resistance to let the truth be told,” said Pierce.
The Center decided to add a gallery on Reconstruction because the era has not always been fully or accurately represented in American classrooms. The Center also wanted to provide more context for its signature gallery on the Civil Rights Movement.
“After Reconstruction, the United States entered a decades-long period of Jim Crow segregation and unequal protection for Black Americans,” said Pierce. “The Civil Rights Movement emerged not as a new struggle, but as a renewed demand to enforce the promises first made during Reconstruction.”
The Center received a $2 million grant from the Mellon Foundation for the exhibition.
About the National Center for Civil and Human Rights The National Center for Civil and Human Rights is a museum and cultural organization that inspires the changemaker in each of us. Opened in 2014, the Center connects US civil rights history to global human rights movements today. Our experiences highlight people who have worked to protect rights and who model how individuals create positive change. For more information, visit civilandhumanrights.org. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram @civilandhumanrights and LinkedIn at linkedin.com/company/ncchr.
PASCO COUNTY, Fla. — The spirit of Giving Tuesday is alive in Pasco County as the Pasco County Library System teams up with Friends of the Library to support local schools with a major book donation effort.
This year, hundreds of children’s books are being delivered to schools across the county — an initiative that began with a simple request from Chester Taylor Elementary School in Zephyrhills.
What You Need To Know
Pasco County Libraries donating books to local schools for Giving Tuesday
Effort to collect books started over the summer after a request to help restock books at Chester Taylor Elementary School in Zephyrhills
Hundreds of books will be donated at events across the county on Tuesday
The school was working to restock its library to boost reading scores on state assessments.
That request quickly turned into a large-scale collaboration spanning multiple schools.
According to Pasco County Public Library System Director Sean McGarvey, the idea gained momentum quickly.
“The school board had reached out to us as perhaps we could help restock. We talked to them, and the Friends of the Libraries jumped on this — they thought this was an amazing idea, and all eight of our libraries pitched in to collect these books.”
On Tuesday morning, the donation effort kicks off at Chester Taylor Elementary School, where the first batch of books will be delivered. From there, additional Pasco County schools will receive donated materials throughout the day.
While Tuesday’s library donations are making a big impact, residents across Tampa Bay can also participate in Giving Tuesday in a variety of ways.
Local nonprofits accepting donations include:
Crisis Center of Tampa Bay
Feeding Tampa Bay
Metropolitan Ministries
Feeding Tampa Bay announced that all donations made Tuesday will be matched, doubling the number of meals provided to families in need this holiday season. Community members can also give back by volunteering their time.
PASCO COUNTY, Fla. — Pasco County schools are in need of school bus drivers.
What You Need To Know
49 of the district’s 297 bus routes do not have permanent coverage, meaning students are showing up to school after class has begun
The district says it will pay drivers who have limited absences $500 per quarter, and those who take designated high-need routes will earn another $250 per quarter
Dozens of bus routes do not have permanent coverage, meaning some students are showing up late to class. So now, Pasco County Schools is offering new incentives to get more drivers on board.
The district says it will pay drivers who have limited absences $500 per quarter. Those who take designated high-need routes will earn another $250 per quarter.
Behind the wheel of one Pasco County school bus, bus driver Lynn Zion-Weick has her eyes on the road.
“I’m pretty good with kids and I decided to give it a shot,” she said.
“The bus is so easy to drive. A lot of times that scares a person, you know, with such a big vehicle. But the way buses are now, they’re just like driving a nice car.”
Zion-Weick has been a bus driver here for the last four years. Originally retired, she wanted to get behind the wheel after seeing an ad for the role.
“I kept seeing it and kept thinking, ‘You know, I like to drive and they need drivers,’” said Zion-Weick. “So I said let me give it a shot. I think the hardest part of it was learning the engine. You had to learn at that time and the parts of the engine of the bus.”
But times have changed and so too has the need for school bus drivers in Pasco. Forty-nine of the district’s 297 bus routes do not have permanent coverage.
“Our goal is to ensure that every student gets to school on time so that learning can occur,” says Superintendent Dr. John Legg.
Legg says the school district has developed a plan, offering pay incentives to bring in more school bus drivers.
“If our bus drivers are in attendance and are able to drive the routes, they get a quarterly bonus,” said Legg. “And if they take on our more challenging routes, they get a bonus as well.”
Those challenging routes are the more remote areas of the county, such as Zephyrhills. But for someone who grew up in Port Richey, like Zion-Weick, driving the next generation of Pasco County students means a little more.
“It’s really, pretty nice because some of the kids, actually, I went to school with their grandparents,” she says. “More than likely grandparents.”
On the job training is in focus because of the rapid rise of AI technology and a widening gap between management expectations and the actual skill levels of many workers are now required to use AI. Hence there’s lots of talk of “upskilling” or “reskilling” the workforce. But education and work match up in different ways too, as a new report from the University of Phoenix and the Harris Poll reminds us. It turns out that nearly two in three U.S. workers who don’t have a college degree are unaware that their ongoing and former experiences at work can actually count toward earning one.
The gap in understanding on this issue is actually pretty big: the study also found that 45 percent of employed Americans aren’t aware that their on the job training can map into college credits, even though 90 percent of workers are currently developing their skill sets in some way, science news site Phys.org notes.
More interestingly, the Harris data also show that over seven in 10 workers have turned down options for professional development, with 35 percent saying this was because of cost issues, 32 percent because of schedule issues and nearly one in five people saying their employers weren’t supportive. The scheduling issues marry up with at least one other report that showed recently managers aren’t taking professional development opportunities because they’re just too busy and too tired out to learn new skills — a problem that also likely afflicts many nonmanagerial workers.
The question of costs is interesting here, especially since the study found over half of workers have paid out of their own funds for training that wasn’t covered by their employers, and 23 percent have done this more than once. At least for the issue of AI training, this aligns with several reports that say workers are sometimes bringing in their own AI tools to the office, partly because their employers don’t offer any and partly because the ones on offer are inadequate—some of this self-propelled AI use probably involves workers covering their own training costs. A recent study pointed out that Gen-Z workers, in particular, would like their employers to spend more on training.
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The study also dug into what experiences people think count as college degree credits, and highlighted some surprising details. For example, 59 percent of the over 2,000 adult respondents to the survey didn’t think life experiences could count as credits, 46 percent doubted professional experience mattered, and 43 percent thought professional training courses weren’t credit-worthy. And while overall a third of respondents didn’t realize previous college coursework could carry forward, Gen-Z (the workers most recently in college) was more likely to think this way than older generations.
Why is this important to your company?
Firstly, it’s a reminder that in-work education is valuable, both to the employers and to employees themselves. And if your workplace training program doesn’t include mention of the fact that it may count as college course credits, it’s probably worth reminding your staff of this fact. The U.S. workforce is constantly training too, the Harris data show, with 90 percent of the survey respondents saying they get some training time every month, and 18 percent saying they spend over 20 hours a month in training.
Secondly, recent reports highlight a skills gap between recent college grads and the kind of expertise and knowledge that businesses — particularly smaller ones—are looking for in new hires. Offering your workers the chance to further their education with college-level training is a complex issue, since it raises questions of workers taking time off periodically for college studies, or even sabbatical periods. But offering meaningful perks to your workers like this may be more important than ever, studies show, since the workforce’s needs and expectations are evolving, and they may also boost workers’ engagement and efficiency in a period where worker performance may be dipping under many sources of stress.
A Syracuse University student wrote in The Daily Orange, the university’s campus newspaper, that Thanksgiving is a “celebration of genocide.”
“Thanksgiving is, in essence, a celebration of genocide. The mass rationalization of this fact sustains the contemporary structures that inform American culture itself. Without genocide, the foundation of our traditional American identity falls apart,” Mateo Lopez-Castro wrote in a column last week.
Citing the John Sullivan campaign, he said the country at the outset of the American Revolution opted for “mass erasure” instead of peace and diplomacy toward Indigenous peoples in the country, “creating adequate conditions for the expansion of settler colonialism” and its development as an “independent entity,” Lopez-Castro wrote.
A Syracuse University student wrote in The Daily Orange, the university’s campus newspaper, that Thanksgiving is a “celebration of genocide.”(iStock)
Lopez-Castro noted slavery and “white supremacy” as being celebrated throughout literature and film, including the film “Gone With the Wind,” although the U.S. “used the enslavement of African people as the primary tool in their respective genocide.”
U.S. society rationalizes genocide, Lopez-Castro claims, and the collective denial of genocide’s effects allows it to survive.
Lopez-Castro, a senior sociology, television, radio and film major, urged that Americans educate themselves in order to challenge their pre-established understandings of American society and “transform our culture.” (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey)
“Our entire society was built on genocide and continues to be,” Lopez-Castro wrote.
“We have internalized, accepted and standardized it throughout our efforts of cancerous growth. Recent American media, like the 2018 show ‘Yellowstone’ and the 2018 film ‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,’ have hesitated from or ignored the accuracy necessary to properly contextualize the role of Indigenous people in their stories,” the student added.
Lopez-Castro, a senior studying sociology, television, radio and film, pivoted to the Trump administration’s handling of the dissemination of information about the conflict in Gaza.
“Donald Trump’s administration has taken great efforts to silence the truths about the genocide against the Palestinians. It seeks to weaponize our struggles so that we may turn on one another, mold false narratives in the media and whitewash our true history and current reality. It pedestals genocidal campaigns and looks to hand out awards for its accomplices,” Lopez-Castro wrote.
A Syracuse student criticized the Trump administration’s handling of the dissemination of information about the conflict in Gaza.(AP/Evan Vucci)
Lopez-Castro urged that Americans educate themselves in order to challenge their pre-established understandings of American society and “transform our culture.”
Universities and colleges across the country marked Thanksgiving with alternative events protesting the national holiday, according to reports from college news websites. Diversity offices at several colleges held events this month on “decolonizing” Thanksgiving and acknowledging the “National Day of Mourning,” which falls on Thanksgiving Day.
Lopez-Castro did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital‘s request for comment.
Fox News’ Kristine Parks contributed to this report.
Joshua Q. Nelson is a reporter for Fox News Digital.
Joshua focuses on politics, education policy ranging from the local to the federal level, and the parental uprising in education.
Joining Fox News Digital in 2019, he previously graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in Political Science and is an alum of the National Journalism Center and the Heritage Foundation’s Young Leaders Program.
Story tips can be sent to joshua.nelson@fox.com and Joshua can be followed on Twitter and LinkedIn.
At a time when the federal government is dismantling civil rights protections in K-12 schools, California is expanding them — although some wonder how far the state will go to combat discrimination in schools.
A new law, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last month, creates an Office of Civil Rights within the California Department of Education. The office will have a staff of at least six, including an antisemitism coordinator, who will educate school districts about the harms of bias and investigate discrimination complaints.
“I think it’s a good idea and the state of California will pull it off. The risks are small and the possibility for good is large,” said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. “But for it to be successful, it has to have real responsibility and real power.”
The new law stems from a surge in antisemitic incidents in California last year following the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks in Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. Authored by Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur (D-Los Angeles) and Assemblymember Dawn Addis (D-Morro Bay), the law is intended to eliminate anti-Jewish and other bias in the classroom and ensure that students of all ethnicities and religions feel protected.
But the road to Newsom’s desk was not smooth. The bill faced tough opposition from the California Teachers Assn. , the state’s largest teachers union, which argued that the law would limit teachers’ right to free speech by curbing their ability to discuss the conflict in Gaza or other topical issues. The union declined to comment for this article.
Zbur, who was among the law’s authors, said the new Office of Civil Rights and the antisemitism coordinator are not intended to punish teachers. The idea, he said, is to help schools stamp out bullying, discrimination and other acts targeting specific groups of students.
“The idea that this law is about policing is hogwash,” Zbur said. “It’s intended to be productive, to provide districts with resources so they can prevent students from being harmed in school.”
Federal layoffs and closures
Discrimination has long been illegal in California schools. Individuals who feel they’ve been discriminated against can file complaints with the state’s Civil Rights Department or with their local school district. But much K-12 anti-discrimination enforcement has fallen on the federal government’s Office of Civil Rights. Created in the mid-1960s, the office investigates complaints about a range of issues, such as school segregation, unfair discipline practices and whether students with disabilities or English learners are receiving the services they’re entitled to.
In March, the Trump administration announced it was laying off nearly half of the U.S. Department of Education workforce and closing numerous branches of the Office of Civil Rights, including the one in California. That’s meant a steep decline in the number of cases and long delays for those the office investigates. In the three months after the Department of Education cuts, for example, the office received nearly 5,000 complaints but investigated only 309.
On Tuesday, the Department of Education went even further, spinning off some of the agency’s largest responsibilities to other federal departments — including much of the administration of elementary and high school funding. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative vision for the country that so far Trump has followed, calls for the Office of Civil Rights to become part of the Department of Justice and for it to “reject gender ideology and critical race theory.”
The U.S. Department of Education didn’t respond to a request for comment.
‘Cutting off funding, that’s what works’
California’s new Office of Civil Rights will have a director and several coordinators who will oversee anti-discrimination cases based on race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and religion. The director and anti-discrimination coordinators will be appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Legislature, likely after Jan. 1.
The office will provide schools with materials about preventing discrimination, and work with districts that have been the subject of complaints from students, families or the public. In serious cases, the office will recommend more intensive assistance to the state Department of Education to correct problems. For districts that persistently flout anti-discrimination laws, “the department may use any means necessary to effect compliance,” according to laws already in place. That may include cutting funding for textbooks or other materials found to be discriminatory.
The office will also submit an annual report to the Legislature on the overall picture of discrimination in schools, including the number of complaints, how they were resolved, and their outcomes.
But to be successful, the office will have to be nonpartisan, transparent and fair, Orfield said. Cases against a school should include strong evidence, and schools should have the opportunity to defend themselves and appeal a verdict if they believe it was wrongly issued.
And the office should not shy away from cutting funds to schools that don’t comply, he said. In the 1960s and ‘70s, the federal Office of Civil Rights cut funds to more than 100 schools in the South that refused to desegregate — a move that may have been the only way to force compliance, Orfield said.
“Cutting off funding, that’s what works,” he said. “Although if you’re going to have sanctions, there must be due process.”
Photo ops and reports?
Mark Rosenbaum, senior special counsel for strategic litigation for the public interest law firm Public Counsel, agreed that enforcement will be the key to whether the new office is effective.
“If the office just issues reports and does photo ops, we don’t need another one of those,” Rosenbaum said. “The issue is whether or not they can enforce these rights across the board.”
He’d also like to see the office take a more proactive approach instead of only responding to individuals’ complaints. Education itself, he said, is a civil right, and too many students are not receiving the high-quality lessons in safe, well-equipped schools that they’re entitled to.
Still, he’s happy to see the office get off the ground, particularly in light of the federal cuts to civil rights enforcement.
“There’s an urgency for California to fill a void,” Rosenbaum said. “It should have happened decades ago, but it’s a good start.”
NEW YORK (AP) — MacKenzie Scott, one of the world’s wealthiest women and most influential philanthropists, is now known for her “no strings attached” surprise grantmaking. But, as a Princeton University sophomore, she learned what it was like to be on the receiving end of generosity.
Facing the prospect of dropping out if she couldn’t come up with $1,000, Scott was crying when her roommate, Jeannie Tarkenton, found her and got her dad to loan Scott the money.
“I would have given MacKenzie my left kidney,” Tarkenton told the Associated Press recently. “Like, that’s just what you do for friends.”
Today, Scott’s net worth is around $34 billion, according to Forbes. In October, Scott wrote that Tarkenton’s act is among the many personal kindnesses she has considered as she has donated more than $19 billion of the wealth she amassed mostly through Amazon shares as part of her 2019 divorce from company founder Jeff Bezos. And when Tarkenton started Funding U, a lending company that offers last-gap, merit-based loans to low-income students without co-signers, Scott said she jumped at the chance to help.
A quarter century passed between the end of their sophomore year and Funding U’s creation, a period when Tarkenton realized just how many more students were being pushed into her former roommate’s position by the rising cost of college. That Scott took an interest in her old friend’s mission to help economically disadvantaged students finance school is unsurprising. Her unusual gifts — which she rarely discusses or discloses outside of essays and a database on her website, Yield Giving — tend to focus on issues of equity, higher education and economic security.
Jeannie Tarkenton poses for a photo Friday, Nov. 21, 2025, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Megan Varner)
Jeannie Tarkenton poses for a photo Friday, Nov. 21, 2025, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Megan Varner)
But the revelation of Scott’s Funding U support offers a new glimpse into her investments. Scott wrote last year that she would invest in “mission-aligned ventures” led by “undercapitalized groups” that focus on “for-profit solutions” to the challenges that her philanthropy seeks to address. However, this is among the few confirmed publicly.
“She’s looking for innovative ways to create opportunity for those that don’t have it,” said Marybeth Gasman, who runs Rutgers’ Center for Minority Serving Institutions and follows Scott’s donations. “I have to say, as somebody who went to school on a Pell Grant and who came from an extremely low-income family, that’s really meaningful.”
Amplifying impact
Scott, in many ways, resembled the exact students that Funding U seeks to serve. Tarkenton recalled the undergraduate Scott as a “hardworking student with very good grades” who was “highly focused” and had already been accepted into a competitive program.
Her lending company plugs those sorts of details — student transcripts and internship experiences, for example— into an algorithm that determines the likelihood applicants will complete college, get a job and make enough money to pay back the loan.
Tarkenton suggested that this formula is fairer — and more predictive — than existing criteria that determine loan eligibility based on the credit histories of students or their co-signers.
Scott provides most of the “junior debt” they use to reduce the risk for larger investments from banks such as Goldman Sachs, according to Tarkenton. She is among a handful of philanthropists who provide 30 cents for every dollar that Funding U loans. These funders lend at concessionary rates, meaning they make less money back than the market suggests they should and wait a longer period of time to recoup the money.
Funding U gets the other 70% from banks, who support them to comply with federal laws aimed at preventing anti-poor discrimination by requiring banks to make loans that benefit their communities.
“I wanted to combine capital from people who were participating in this because they cared about the underlying person,” Tarkenton said, “and also, knowing that scale of philanthropy wasn’t quite big enough, bring to the table some sort of market solution alongside that capital.”
Jeannie Tarkenton poses for a photo Friday, Nov. 21, 2025, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Megan Varner)
Jeannie Tarkenton poses for a photo Friday, Nov. 21, 2025, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Megan Varner)
A philanthropic endeavor?
Tarkenton is clear: the endeavor isn’t philanthropic. Funding U is a company, after all, and Scott will eventually get her money back — just as she repaid Tarkenton’s informal loan all those years ago at Princeton.
But the approach represents a model that Scott’s former roommate thinks more philanthropists should embrace. Tarkenton said there’s more space for the likes of Scott to “bring a spirit of investment” that serves a “greater good” but isn’t purely charitable.
“I think philanthropists can get a little messier and do more with their money,” Tarkenton said. “I’m all about pushing philanthropists in a very aligned way.”
It’s why she started Funding U. Working at an Atlanta-based adult literacy nonprofit, Tarkenton said she noticed persistent disparities in degree completion rates based on socioeconomic status. She found the problem too big for philanthropy to solve. But the need was too small for most market players to care about addressing, she said.
Scott described the Funding U loans as “generosity- and gratitude-powered” in an Oct. 15 essay about the ripple effects of kindness.
Panorama founder Gabrielle Fitzgerald, whose social impact nonprofit tracks Scott’s giving, said the investment is “very consistent with her approach to ensuring students have access to higher education.” She said many funders see impact investing as a critical part of their giving portfolios.
“It shows that she’s using all the tools at her disposal to pursue her goals,” Fitzgerald said.
And the full circle impact of Tarkenton’s college-era loan?
“It’s a really lovely story in a time when we’re not seeing a lot of kindness and generosity,” Fitzgerald added. “And just a reminder that helping your fellow humans is both a good thing to do at the time and something that could have a massive impact down the road.”
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Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.
As AI increasingly automates technical tasks across industries, students’ long-term career success will rely less on technical skills alone and more on durable skills or professional skills, often referred to as soft skills. These include empathy, resilience, collaboration, and ethical reasoning–skills that machines can’t replicate.
This critical need is outlined in Future-Proofing Students: Professional Skills in the Age of AI, a new report from Acuity Insights. Drawing on a broad body of academic and market research, the report provides an analysis of how institutions can better prepare students with the professional skills most critical in an AI-driven world.
Key findings from the report:
75 percent of long-term job success is attributed to professional skills, not technical expertise.
Over 25 percent of executives say they won’t hire recent graduates due to lack of durable skills.
COVID-19 disrupted professional skill development, leaving many students underprepared for collaboration, communication, and professional norms.
Eight essential durable skills must be intentionally developed for students to thrive in an AI-driven workplace.
“Technical skills may open the door, but it’s human skills like empathy and resilience that endure over time and lead to a fruitful and rewarding career,” says Matt Holland, CEO at Acuity Insights. “As AI reshapes the workforce, it has become critical for higher education to take the lead in preparing students with these skills that will define their long-term success.”
The eight critical durable skills include:
Empathy
Teamwork
Communication
Motivation
Resilience
Ethical reasoning
Problem solving
Self-awareness
These competencies don’t expire with technology–they grow stronger over time, helping graduates adapt, lead, and thrive in an AI-driven world.
The report also outlines practical strategies for institutions, including assessing non-academic skills at admissions using Situational Judgment Tests (SJTs), and shares recommendations on embedding professional skills development throughout curricula and forming partnerships that bridge AI literacy with interpersonal and ethical reasoning.
A West Virginia judge ruled on Wednesday that parents can use religious beliefs to opt out of school vaccine requirements for their children.
Raleigh County Circuit Judge Michael Froble on Wednesday issued a permanent injunction, saying children of families who object to the state’s compulsory vaccination law on religious grounds will be permitted to attend school and participate in extracurricular sports.
Froble found that a state policy prohibiting parents from seeking religious exemptions violates the Equal Protection for Religion Act signed into law in 2023 by then-Gov. Jim Justice.
West Virginia was among just a handful of states to offer only medical exemptions from school vaccinations when Gov. Patrick Morrisey issued an executive order earlier this year allowing religious exemptions.
West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey said that the ruling “is a win for every family forced from school over their faith.”(Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
However, the state Board of Education voted in June to instruct public schools to ignore the governor’s order and follow long-standing school vaccine requirements outlined in state law.
The board said following Wednesday’s ruling that it “hereby suspends the policy on compulsory vaccination requirements” pending an appeal before the state Supreme Court.
Morrisey said in a statement that the ruling “is a win for every family forced from school over their faith.”
Two groups had sued to stop Morrisey’s order, arguing that the legislature has the authority to make these decisions instead of the governor.
Legislation that would have allowed the religious exemptions was approved by the state Senate and rejected by the House of Delegates earlier this year.
The judge found that a state policy prohibiting parents from seeking religious exemptions violates the Equal Protection for Religion Act signed into law in 2023.(Julian Stratenschulte/dpa (Photo by Julian Stratenschulte/picture alliance via Getty Images))
The judge ruled that the failure to pass the legislation did not determine the application of the 2023 law. He rejected the defendants’ argument that religious exemptions can only be established by legislative moves.
“Legislative intent is not absolute nor controlling in interpreting a statute or determining its application; at most, it is a factor,” Froble said.
A group of parents had sued the state and local boards of education and the Raleigh County schools superintendent. One parent had obtained a religious exemption to the vaccine mandate from the state health department and enrolled her child in elementary school for the current school year before receiving an email in June from the local school superintendent rescinding the certificate, according to the lawsuit.
In July, Froble issued a preliminary injunction allowing the children of the three plaintiffs’ families in Raleigh County to attend school this year.
State law requires children to receive vaccines for chickenpox, hepatitis B, measles, meningitis, mumps, diphtheria, polio, rubella, tetanus and whooping cough before attending school.(iStock)
Last month, Froble certified the case as a class action involving 570 families who had received religious exemptions in other parts of the state. He said the class action also applies to parents who seek religious exemptions in the future.
Froble said the total number of exemptions so far involved a small portion of the statewide student population and “would not meaningfully reduce vaccination rates or increase health risks.”
State law requires children to receive vaccines for chickenpox, hepatitis B, measles, meningitis, mumps, diphtheria, polio, rubella, tetanus and whooping cough before attending school.
At least 30 states have religious freedom laws. The laws are modeled after the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was signed into law in 1993 by then-President Bill Clinton, allowing federal regulations that interfere with religious beliefs to be challenged.
The U.S. Department of Education launched an investigation into the University of California at Berkeley Tuesday over violence that erupted earlier this month at protests outside an event organized by conservative group Turning Point USA.
The department said it will investigate whether UC Berkeley violated the Jeanne Clery Campus Safety Act, a federal law that requires colleges and universities that receive federal financial aid to record and report campus crime data.
The announcement comes as UC Berkeley also faces a Department of Justice investigation into the university’s handling of the event and protests, which resulted in at least four arrests and left one person injured after being struck in the head by a thrown object. Turning Point USA, a nonprofit that promotes conservative values on high school and college campuses, was co-founded by Charlie Kirk, who was fatally shot in September during a tour stop at a university in Utah.
“Just two months after Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was brutally assassinated on a college campus, UC Berkeley allowed a protest of a Turning Point USA event on its grounds to turn unruly and violent, jeopardizing the safety of its students and staff,” U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement Tuesday.
She said the department is reviewing UC Berkeley’s procedures to ensure that it maintains campus safety and security.
“This is not about students’ First Amendment rights to protest peacefully. This is about ensuring accurate and transparent reporting of crime statistics to the campus community and guaranteeing that every student can safely participate in educational programs and activities,” McMahon said. “The department will vigorously investigate this matter to ensure that a recipient of federal funding is not allowing its students to be at risk.”
In a statement Tuesday, UC Berkeley said the university has “an unwavering commitment” to abide by the laws and will cooperate with the investigations, as well as continue to host speakers and events representing a variety of viewpoints “in a safe and respectful manner.”
The university said the campus provided public reports about two violent crimes that happened that evening — a fistfight over an attempted robbery and the person hit by a thrown object.
“The campus administration went to great lengths to support the First Amendment rights of all by deploying a large number of police officers from multiple jurisdictions and a large number of contracted private security personnel,” the university said Tuesday. “The campus also closed adjoining buildings and cordoned off part of the campus in order to prevent criminal activity, keep the peace, and ensure the event was not disrupted by protests.”
The Education Department’s office of Federal Student Aid will lead the investigation. It gave UC Berkeley 30 days to provide copies of the school’s annual security report, all incidents of crime from 2022-2024, all arrests made by law enforcement and referrals for disciplinary action against students or employees disclosed in the annual security report, daily crime logs from 2022-2025 and several other reports.
In 2020, UC Berkeley was fined $2.35 million for failing to comply with the Clery Act after a six-year federal review revealed thousands of crime incidents were misclassified — the majority of which were related to liquor, drug and weapons violations. UC Berkeley said the campus had referred students for disciplinary proceedings but wrongly classified the violations — many involving minors in possession of alcohol in residence halls — as a campus policy violation rather than a law violation, as required under the Clery Act.
The Department of Education’s investigation — started in July 2014 — also found a range of issues including failure to comply with sexual violence policies and procedures, failure to maintain accurate and complete daily crime logs, failure to disclose accurate hate crime statistics and failure to issue emergency notifications. UC Berkeley entered into a settlement agreement with the Education Department in 2020 and acknowledged that the campus had made “many administrative errors in the past,” but said it has taken aggressive steps toward improvement.
The Education Department’s investigation said the university failed to notify students of any violence until an hour after protests began to escalate — a delay the department said could have compromised community members’ safety. In a response to the department, UC Berkeley said the finding was based on an incorrect timeline of events and that it had alerted the community immediately after learning the protest had become violent.
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Columbus City Schools is considering eliminating yellow bus transportation for high school students or shifting them to Central Ohio Transit Authority (COTA) service as it looks to close a $50 million budget gap, raising safety and access concerns among families.
What You Need To Know
Columbus City Schools may eliminate high school bus service or shift students to COTA to help close a $50 million budget gap, with a board vote set for Dec. 2
Parents have raised safety and access concerns, including early-morning waits and loss of transportation for sports and after-school activities
District leaders say major cuts are unavoidable, and the board continues to gather community feedback
Superintendent Angela Chapman said transportation is one of several spending areas under review as the district searches for substantial savings.
“Small cuts will not close this budget gap. We have to make big decisions, tough decisions,” Chapman said.
One proposal would end high school bus service entirely, leaving students in grades 9 through 12 without transportation and returning the district to the state minimum. Another option would replace district-run buses with COTA passes for high school students. Parent Latrice Bradley, whose son is a junior, said the change would disrupt his commute and daily routine.
“The fact that there’s a chance you will not have a bus sounds ludicrous to me. It doesn’t make sense,” she said.
Bradley said she is concerned about her son waiting for a public bus before sunrise, riding alongside adults and depending on drivers who are not trained to transport minors. She added that he relies on district buses to travel between schools for sports and after-school activities.
“That’s a big deal to put kids in front of adults that are going to work, that are just riding a bus,” she said.
Board members acknowledged the difficulty of the decisions.
“No matter what decision we make, kids will be affected by those determinations,” board member Sarah Ingles said.
Bradley said she fears some students may skip school without the structure that traditional transportation provides. School Board President Michael Cole said attendance will remain a firm expectation.
“Not attending school is not an option. It is not for legal purposes and most importantly, for the highest aspirational purposes of your education and your future,” he said.
District officials say they will continue collecting community feedback as they finalize the budget reduction plan. The school board is expected to vote on the cost-cutting recommendations at its Dec. 2 meeting.
According to an August email obtained by The Chronicle, Jenny Edmonds, associate dean of communications and marketing at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, encouraged faculty to “continue to engage with the media to disseminate [their] research as [they] have always done,” while also cautioning that “media attention to institutions of higher education and discussions about institutional responses to policy changes have become more prominent than ever.”
“In this moment in particular, questions about Duke and current events are being answered by Frank Tramble and his team,” Edmonds wrote. “If you are contacted by the media about overarching issues confronting the University, please forward the requests to [Sanford’s Senior Public Relations Manager Matt LoJacono] and me.”
Although it wasn’t a universitywide directive, The Chronicle obtained emails that show some other departments also gave their faculty similar instructions to route media requests through the university’s central communications channels.
At an Academic Council meeting in October, Duke’s president, Vincent Price, and council chair, Mark Anthony Neal, commended faculty members for not speaking to a New York Times reporter; the reporter had visited the campus while working on a story about the Trump administration targeting Duke’s diversity, equity and inclusion program.
“It was pretty amazing that [the reporter] actually got no commentary from Duke officials and Duke faculty,” Neal continued. “Even if it wasn’t overtly communicated to the community, the community understood the stakes of that mode of inquiry.”
At that meeting Price also called Trump’s higher education compact—which would allegedly give universities preferential funding in exchange for making sweeping institutional policy changes— “highly problematic,” according to The Chronicle. Despite public pressure, Duke hasn’t officially rejected the terms of the compact.
Trustees at Nassau Community College are poised to file a lawsuit after the State University of New York’s Board of Trustees denied their presidential pick.
At a special meeting on Sunday, the Nassau Community College Board of Trustees unanimously voted to allow the board chair to file a lawsuit challenging the SUNY board’s decision, with one board member absent, Newsdayreported. Earlier this month, SUNY trustees voted unanimously, with three members absent, to reject Maria Conzatti, who has run the college as interim or acting president for almost four years. A SUNY official told Newsday it was the first time the system’s board disapproved a presidential nominee.
The resolution voted on asked that Conzatti’s appointment by Nassau Community College’s board be “disapproved” with no further explanation.
“SUNY is committed to excellent leadership for all of our campuses and the success of our students, and we will vigorously defend ourselves against any frivolous lawsuit,” a spokesperson for the system said in a statement to Inside Higher Ed.
The college’s Student Government Association also passed a measure on Monday expressing “gratitude and appreciation” for Conzatti while also acknowledging the SUNY board vote and encouraging the college to “conduct an equitable, transparent and expeditious search for a new permanent president.”
The conflict comes amid broader tensions between the college’s faculty union and the administration over the consolidation of academic departments and a union contract that expired in August, among other issues. The union sued the college last year arguing the elimination of 15 department chairs violated state regulations, but a judge dismissed the case. The union has since appealed.
Nassau has also reported less-than-optimal student outcomes in recent years. It has the lowest two-year graduation rate and second lowest three-year graduation rate among community colleges in the SUNY system, 9.4 percent and 23.6 percent respectively.
Colleges and universities sit on a large wealth of data, ranging from student attendance and interactions with learning management systems to employment and earnings data for graduates. But uniting legacy systems and having responsive data remains a wicked problem for many institutions.
This year, Central New Mexico Community College is deploying a new AI-powered predictive analytics tool, CampusLens, part of CampusWorks, to improve data visibility in student retention, early alerts and career outcomes.
In the latest episode of Voices of Student Success, host Ashley Mowreader speaks with Tracy Hartzler, president of Central New Mexico Community College, to discuss the risks with taking on new tools, the college’s approach to change management and the need for more responsive data.
An edited version of the podcast appears below.
Q: Can you introduce yourself, your role and your institution?
Tracy Hartzler, President of Central New Mexico Community College
A: My name is Tracy Hartzler. I’m president of Central New Mexico Community College. We’re located in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We serve three counties around us, and our population is about 900,000 residents in our area, so it’s about half the state of New Mexico who lives in our service area, but it’s an incredibly diverse area.
We have a significant population of Hispanic, Latino students. We have a large population of Indigenous students, as well. We are the largest undergraduate institution in the state, and that’s distinct because we only issue or grant certificates and associate degrees. We are not a bachelor’s degree–granting institution, so our focus really is on those students who are seeking entry into college—whether that’s our dual credit students who are still in high school—but also those who are returning for upskilling. They’ve already earned their bachelor’s degree or degrees, and they’re coming back for some hands-on or applied skills, or those who are getting back into education and training because they’re looking for greater financial stability.
Like so many other colleges, we know we want to learn from others, and so we’re really proud that we work with many of our other colleges across the state of New Mexico, but we certainly engage in conversations with leaders and schools who participate in American Association of Community Colleges who are part of the global community college leader network.
But we’re really pleased and we’ve been really pushed by our peers who are members of the Alliance for Innovation and Transformation—group of higher education institutions, there’s about 60 of us—with some other thought partners to really help us think how we can best leverage technology and change our processes and deliver better education and training for our students and better serve our employers.
We also are relying on lessons learned from those outside of higher education, so whether it’s in hospitality, healthcare, manufacturing and others. So while we know we have great work to do in New Mexico, and we are incredibly fortunate to work with strong partners who tell us what they want and how we can best serve them, we certainly look to other schools and other organizations to help us make those transitions faster so we can better serve our community.
Q: From my vantage point, it seems community colleges are often some of the most nimble when it comes to learning from other institutions.
A: Absolutely. You know, it’s great to be scrappy. I think we and here at CNM, we certainly punch above our weight. We are excited to take on new challenges. We are, frankly, fortunate to be able to move faster. So, if something doesn’t work, we can pivot away from it entirely or continue to revise it. And frankly, the urgency to do so is really placed on us by our employer partners, our community partners and our students. They really are pressing us to be responsive to them because they don’t have time to waste, and they certainly don’t have resources to waste. So, we really step in. And again, I don’t think CNM is unique in that we all respond to the need as quickly and as best we can.
Q: We’re talking today about a new AI-powered predictive analytics tool that you all implemented. Historically, what has been the college’s retention and persistence strategy? What are some of the challenges you have seen when supporting students?
A: Before the pandemic, we were able to and we were participating in a lot of futures work: What do students need? What do they need now? What do employers need in the future? Which, at that time, seemed so far off, and so we were already on a journey again, whether it was working with AFIT or others to help us better identify what we needed to do and how we needed to change to better meet our student and our employer needs.
We knew that that would include certainly technology and leveraging technology, but we also knew it would mean changing how we do things, how we schedule, how we use the data in our systems. And we also knew we have a tremendous amount of information. We have a lot of data, but like so many other places, it’s in seven legacy systems. And we have over 100 applications that help our data systems talk to each other, to generate reports that our staff use, and it’s incredibly challenging to wrangle this data in a way that is useful, that helps us drive and drive change again.
Most of the data is legacy data. It’s what happened last year, and how do we think that’s going to improve? What are we doing now to then improve performance a year ahead, and then we hope that what we do over the next year meets the need, but it takes us too long to really react.
So, we were looking for ways to take the assets we have—which includes our incredible faculty and a number of our leaders and our office of data strategy and some of our contractors, like CampusWorks and consultants—to help us wrangle this data in a way that helps us be data informed in a time-sensitive way.
We had a lot of processes in place that were helping us to do that. A lot of our steps were manual and creating reports, and it really slowed down what our frontline advisers and navigators and employment advisers really were able to do, because we were requiring them to do so much manipulation with the data then to be able to identify what they should do once they got this great report.
So, we were looking for ways to leverage technology. And again, the pandemic happens. We’re increasingly dependent on our systems, using them to greater degrees than we had before, including our learning management system. We are also undertaking a transition conversion from our old student information system to a new student information systemin Workday. We’re making all these changes and upgrading technology, and frankly, AI is coming along that’s really dramatically changing how we work, or could change how we work. We’re trying to figure out a better way to wrangle all these opportunities.
We were so excited to learn about CampusWorks and their product, CampusLens, because we think that tool will help us leapfrog, not only the tool but the experts that that CampusWorks brings to the table to help us to analyze data and develop tools that will help our frontline staff much more quickly and easily identify how they can help students. To register from class A to B, to help them identify all the predictors that say, if the student’s missing one assignment or they haven’t attended class, here are the automatic prompts for you as an adviser or navigator—or if you choose to automate that process you can. But really, how can we help individuals—our employees—still help and better connect with students to keep them on the track of success?
It certainly can also help us schedule, help our faculty and all of our associate deans who do incredible jobs trying to figure out ways to schedule our incredible programming to be most effective for students. Some of this information that we’ve had in different places, when it comes together in a product like CampusLens, will help us generate these tools so that we can we can more quickly assess our situation and better adapt, test, try and iterate ways to better, like I said, schedule classes, schedule our work-based experiences, help our employers predict the number of graduates who are going to come out of our programs at any given time.
When we have employers come to us with dramatic needs, you know, they need 1,000 technicians over three years, well, what do we need to do to scale and ramp up our programming to meet that need?
I’m excited that we have a tool that will help us do that, instead of the army of staff and technical staff that I would have to try to find to help us do that in an efficient way. That’s why a product and a team, a quality, curious and an innovative team at CampusWorks to help us work through some of these projects.
Q: How does the tool work logistically? What are you excited about when it comes to the capabilities of CampusWorks and CampusLens?
A: It helps us better, frankly, use staff time to keep students and others on the right track—on the track that they’ve chosen, by the way.
What is most exciting, at least for us with CampusLens, is their Career Lens. So all institutions, all community colleges, are focused on many phrases, but all go to the federal emphasis, or your statewide emphasis on return on investment. What is the value that a learner gets from your program that can be defined a lot of ways. It could be defined by wages, wages a year out, it could be defined for many years out from completing a certificate or degree. It looks at what’s your job in a particular program. We know the federal government, whether when they’re leading the rules around rule-making for Workforce Pell, we know that those regulations are going to help us require that we analyze our programs for results. Will these programs allow students to be eligible for federal assistance?
We know that we can use all of this data and CampusLens is going to be able to help us identify which programs are eligible for Workforce Pell, what are the wages? It’ll help us report out the successes of our programs, or, frankly, identify those programs where wages are not at the median level. What do we need to do, then, to repackage or reschedule or build up some of our programs to meet the wage requirements that we want individuals to accomplish, to achieve and earn, but also that will meet some of our federal standards?
So, I’m really excited about the workforce component of this, which is really what we’re all looking for. All of us [higher education leaders] want, I’d say, a silver bullet when it comes to unifying this data and being able to tell the story and being able to design programming is responsive and frankly to be able to tell our stakeholders, whether they’re legislators or federal government agencies giving us funding for workforce training, what are the outcomes? That’s so important that we’re able to show and tell the story with really valuable data? And I’m excited that CampusLens allows us to achieve that.
Q: How have you all been thinking about AI as a tool on campus, what are those conversation looking like with your staff and employees?
A: I want to start with our governing board. CNM is governed by a seven-member elected governing board, and our governing board represents geographic areas in our community. They are focused on how we are best serving our students, our employers and our community members and what does that mean for technology? Is the college investing in programming and the right tools? Are we getting the greatest benefit from the tools we’ve purchased? That also includes the question of, how are our faculty and staff using the tools to better help our learners?
We talked about retention and persistence and how we use data, but it takes training and professional development to be able to use the tools to the greatest advantage. And of course, this is all in service to our learners and our employers. So it starts with our leadership, and then it flows through.
I don’t think we’re any different than a lot of other colleges. We’ve looked at our policies, and we’ve built on our existing academic integrity policies around AI use, and we have faculty policies on how they describe and expect use, or have authorized use, if you will, approved use, embedded use of AI in their coursework, in their programs. We have policies in place.
We also have done some pilot work. We’ve created a fund for individuals to come to a group around data, frankly, out of our data governance team and our IT team to be able to pitch ideas for three-month sprints or pilots, and they report back. What was the result? What did we learn? Is it something we should scale
I will say many of those pilots are both on the business side or the operation side of the college, but also on the student and teaching and learning side. So that’s really interesting. We look forward to some of those first official pilots coming forward in the next month or so.
What I’m most excited about, though, is the systemic use of AI across the institution. I appreciate the pilots get us excited and interested. It gets people familiar with tools as they evolve and change. But how do we embed AI into our systems work? That’s why I’m excited about CampusLens.
You can only have so many pilots and scale up pilots, and you can read how many articles that tell you and advice pieces from Gartner to McKinsey to whatever source you may choose that help you try to identify how to scale up pilots. But I wanted something that was going to help us leapfrog that, and frankly, CampusLens allows us to do that with a multi-year co-development opportunity to help us focus on the student journey, but really in a systemic way, look at all of our data sources and our use and all of even our new systems like Workday that help us to leverage a tool that sits above our data sources. We’ll learn the operational side of this as we go on. But I’m really focused on students, and this was the easiest way to take a risk at a systemic change with a trusted partner who has incredible expertise, as we’ve known for years, and our relationship with them to help us take that leap, to help us implement a system-wide approach to using AI and how that can change and enhance all the human work that we do with our students.
It’s not necessarily about eliminating the human touch to what we do. It’s about helping our advisers and our navigators and our faculty members and our intern placement officers, helping them do their work more successfully, always evaluated by student satisfaction, student placement, employer satisfaction and the like.
I appreciate pilots, there’s a great role for them. And I really appreciate that we are able to take a systemic swing at this work.
Q: You used the work risk earlier applied to taking on this system, what do you consider the risks or challenges of this process?
A: There’s always a risk in the investment you’re making initially and the ongoing risk. The risk is not only the contract for the service, hiring the expertise and hiring a partner who’s been affiliated and connected to higher education for decades, who understands students, understands institutional requirements and for compliance and integrity and data governance and permissible uses. Working with a partner that has that basic understanding is critical. That mitigates your risk immediately.
The financial risk is always: Are we chasing AI attachments to every system we have, or are we helping to right size those to be able to leverage a holistic or a system-wide, comprehensive AI-aided business analytics or business intelligence tool? That’s a very different approach then again, enhancing all of the six legacy systems I have, plus using one system or one tool to be able to do that intelligence work. That’s a risk, and that’s something different that we’ve had to navigate.
I don’t underestimate the time and challenge and excitement of staff in using technology, that can be seen as a risk. There’s a real temptation, and I see it almost daily, to just lift what we do currently in our old systems and shift it to a new system and just be satisfied with going faster or generating a nicer looking report. It’s not what we wanted and that is so not what we can do in higher ed. We are called to be more innovative and to really use our information differently. And this tool will allow us to do that in terms of really getting to the intelligence side of predictive analytics.
That’s always seen as almost a holy grail for us, and to see that it’s within reach now, that’s worth the risk for us. We’ll be able to see the analytics and the predictive analytics that we were at one time working on a project, and we thought we might get there in two or three years. The fact that I can probably do this by the end of this academic year is really important for us. And by the way, not just see some results at the end of this academic year, but know that it’s going to be iterative and evolve, so that we’re going to continue to see growth and change and adaptation and be a part of that shaping is really important to us.
I think I mean the risk is time, resources, and security, and we face those all the time. But I will dare say the risk is also not doing anything. If we aren’t moving in this direction, you are risking putting resources, and particularly too much money and technologies that you still have to reconcile in some way. You risk, frankly, burning out your staff by adding another dashboard they’ve got to learn instead of one that’s much more comprehensive. You’re still going to have them look at 10 different screens to come up with all the information they need to advise one student. So, you don’t want to burn out your staff. You actually need them to be more efficient and effective and spend time with the student in a different way.
The risks of not taking a step like this are substantial, because the world will continue. Students will still demand more, and they always demand more to make their work easier, which means our work can be a little bit harder, and employers are expecting us to be responsive. So if you don’t act and take certain risks, you’re either irrelevant or your students are unprepared for the world that they’re going to be entering, and we just don’t have time for that. That’s just not an option.
Q: I appreciated your comment on the risks of using a new tool to do the exact same thing. We know that faculty and staff are often crunched for time and ensuring that we’re creating new systems that are evolutionary and actually creating efficiencies for everyone involved is important.
A: Yeah, and that’s scary. It does mean that we will be changing how we work. It means we will be removing some of the guesswork of whether our efforts will work. We can see whether, if I move certain levers in a student journey, does this really make the difference? Does it really move the needle, not only for that student, but maybe very similarly situated students?
It’s really important. This will change how we work. We’ll be asking our employees, my colleagues, to think differently and do their work differently, because they’ll have more information available to them with suggestions on how to act, so they don’t have to always consider and frankly, reinvent the wheel. That’s really important, but I don’t underestimate what that change looks like, because when you have expertise in old systems or even evolving systems, and that expertise can be threatened or seem to be threatened, then we have to navigate that, and again, always make sure we’re serving our students and doing it the best way we can.
This technology, the tools, the guidance and the continued evolution will, I think, go a long way toward mitigating that fear. When I brought this option for CampusLens to my team, I made sure my team kicked the tires. This wasn’t a president’s folly. It was sincere, deliberate vetting by many individuals across the college to say, is this the right approach? What are our questions? What are our fears? What’s my role? Will it really better serve our students, and what does that look like with professional development? How do I use this team of experts that I’m not used to working with? How are they going to integrate and challenge us and help us do our work? So there were a number of challenges in the five or six months that it took us to ascertain whether this is the right approach for us, and I appreciate that it’s a collaborative effort, and that that is continuing as we talk about change management and the work that we have to test the tool and move it out in the college.
Q: Where are you all at in this change process? What are you looking forward to as the next step?
A: We’re still early in our stages of implementing CampusLens. Much of what we hope for centers arounds adoption and effectiveness and we really hope for a long-term operational integration. Again, my interest is not only in pilots, but in helping us make systemic change and better leveraging all the legacy data sources that we have.
What we are hoping to see in the next 12 months would be how we move from tracking legacy data and focusing on what has happened to helping us think about what is likely to happen based on the data we see. So again, shift in mindset from always reporting out past data, old data, lagging data to what do we think will happen? And then how do we change behavior to improve what we think will happen or change the trajectory, if that’s what we want to do? I think it’s really important for our community, for us to continue to test the model, the tool and the logic, so it’s going to continue to be refined. I know that as we go through over time, we will continue to improve, refine, revise the model so that it better reflects what our community here in Central New Mexico needs and what our students need.
We’re early in the stages. What I’ve seen so far is exciting, and it’s what we wanted to accomplish, and this tool is going to help us accomplish it, I think, sooner, and to be able to test our work sooner.
Abedini’s detention makes real the fears of many foreign and American academics who are rethinking or boycotting travel to academic conferences in the U.S.
Peter Zay/AFP/Getty Images
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained a University of Oklahoma professor Saturday while he was on his way to a conference.
Vahid Abedini, a professor of Iranian Studies, was stopped and detained while he was boarding his flight to attend the Middle East Studies Association conference in Washington, D.C. He was released Monday night, according to a LinkedIn post.
“I’m relieved to share that I was released from custody tonight. It was a deeply distressing experience, especially seeing those without the support I had,” Abedini wrote on LinkedIn early Tuesday morning. “My sincere thanks to my friends and colleagues at the University of Oklahoma, the Middle East Studies Association, and the wider Iran studies and political science community for helping resolve this.”
Abedini did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment. According to Joshua Landis, Abedini’s colleague and co-director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, Abedini has an H-1B visa.
“ICE arrested our beloved professor Vahid Abedini,” Landis wrote on X Monday. “He has been wrongfully detained because he has a valid H-1B visa—a non-immigrant work visa granted to individuals in ‘specialty occupations,’ including higher education faculty. We are praying for his swift release.”
Reached for comment, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed: “This Iranian national was detained for standard questioning. He’s been released.”
Abedini’s detention makes real the fears of many foreign and American academics who are rethinking or boycotting travel to academic conferences in the U.S. due to concerns about wrongful arrests by immigration enforcement.
In a statement, the MESA Board of Directors said they were “disturbed” to learn of Abedini’s detention and “deeply concerned” about the circumstances. The University of Oklahoma declined to comment on the situation.
On Tuesday, Dec. 2, Oldsmar City Council members will vote on a resolution to formally support the idea of making Oldsmar Elementary, a K-8 school
Oldsmar Mayor Katie Gannon said the idea has received lots of support from residents in Oldsmar. Pinellas School Board member Eileen Long is a long-time supporter of the idea too
The idea of adding middle schoolers to Oldsmar Elementary is not new, but there is a new sense of urgency to the proposal because of a new state law
A new Florida law allows charter schools, known as “Schools of Hope”, to co-locate with certain public schools that have low enrollment or are in low performing areas
A spokesperson for Pinellas County Public Schools said there has not been a request to co-locate at Oldsmar Elementary. But community leaders said it would be a bad idea and they want to be prepared – just in case there is a request in the future
Currently, students at Oldsmar Elementary leave the community to go to middle school after the fifth grade. But recently at city council, the mayor of Oldsmar brought up the idea of adding middle schoolers to Oldsmar Elementary. Many residents support the potential change.
“To have middle school here and to have that option for us to keep our kids here locally and not be on the bus two hours a day, I’m all for it, “said Oldsmar mother Pammy Grear- Florence.
After Oldsmar Elementary, Florence said she sent her youngest son to a private middle school because she did not like the zoned public school option.
“I would have done it all over again if I had that K-8 option,” Florence said.
The proposal for a K-8 school comes as a new state law allows charter schools to take over space in unused or underperforming public schools. So far, a spokesperson for Pinellas County Public Schools said there has not been a request by a charter school to locate at Oldsmar Elementar, but community leaders said it would be a bad idea and they want to be prepared – just in case there is a request in the future.
“I think it’s difficult to conceptualize how a charter school and an elementary school can operate literally out of the same set of buildings,” said Oldsmar Mayor Katie Gannon. “How does that work as far as administration how do those schools interact with each other? Who has the decision-making authority of who is using the lunchroom? Who’s using the library? I’m sure those logistical problems have answers, but I’d rather avoid them entirely and give our families an option that is proven to work better for them.”
This is not the first time the community has talked about adding sixth, seventh and eighth graders to Oldsmar Elementary, but Mayor Gannon said the new state law is bringing more urgency to the idea. And they already have support from Pinellas School Board Member Eileen Long – who has long advocated for it.
“We all have a stake in this,” School Board Member Long told residents and council members at a recent Oldsmar City Council meeting.
Next Tuesday, council members will vote on a resolution to formally support making Oldsmar Elementary a K-8 public school.
“The goal at this point is to find out more information and get this idea into a format of more than an idea,” Gannon said. “We need solid information, logistical plans on how this would really work and operate and to start working on it.”
The mayor is hoping to work with Pinellas school leaders to organize a community town hall in the near future.
An early literacy reform bill approved by the Massachusetts House of Representatives has intensified debate over whether some school districts and the creators of a controversial reading curriculum are seeking alternative routes to state approval.
Science-of-reading advocates describe the activity as a “back-door effort,” while supporters of the curriculum reject that and say the program is being scapegoated amid statewide declines in reading scores.
Rep. Ken Gordon, the House’s point person on education policy, said the curriculum would face an uphill battle under early literacy legislation passed unanimously in the House last month. The bill requires all districts to adopt state-approved, phonics-based materials.
At the center of the dispute is Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study, a workshop approach that encourages children to use context and sentence patterns to interpret unfamiliar words. Critics say these strategies conflict with decades of research supporting explicit, systematic phonics instruction — the foundation of the “science of reading” research base. Supporters of Calkins’ approach say it fosters student engagement, respects teacher expertise and has been wrongly blamed for falling scores.
Asked whether Units of Study could qualify as an approved curriculum under the House bill (H 4672), Gordon said the bill defines evidence-based reading as instruction supported by peer-reviewed research. Units of Study, he said, has not been submitted to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education for review, and its use of “three-cueing,” (an instruction method that includes teaching kids to guess unfamiliar words) would not meet the bill’s definition of evidence-based learning. Supporters dispute that the curriculum uses three-cueing.
The House approved the bill in late October and Senate President Karen Spilka has said the Senate expects to take up a literacy bill “in the near future.” Formal Senate sessions are not scheduled to resume until January.
The statewide debate has been especially intense in Lexington, where parents for years have urged the district to abandon Units of Study, citing declining MCAS performance among vulnerable subgroups and increased reliance on private tutoring. Parents say district leaders have not acted with sufficient urgency. Jennifer Elverum, co-founder of Lex for Literacy, said she learned Lexington used Units of Study after listening to the “Sold a Story” podcast chronicling national criticism of its methods.
“You talk to parents and everybody has tutors. They’re paying a ton of money to make sure their kids can read and do math. It all just felt like something was wrong,” Elverum said.
She later acknowledged, “We have very wealthy families… we have wealthy parents that step in and pay for tutors.” Still, she said, 73% of students are reading at grade level.
When Lexington Superintendent Julie Hackett publicly opposed restrictive literacy legislation last session, arguing there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to literacy instruction, the parent group launched an opposition campaign. Parents later obtained roughly 60,000 pages of district emails and documents through a public-records request.
In those exchanges, Hackett discussed a meeting with Education Secretary Patrick Tutwiler and then-interim Commissioner Russell Johnston about broadening the state’s definitions of “high-quality instructional materials.”
A December 2024 letter to administration officials — signed by Hackett, Lesley University professor emerita Nancy Carlsson-Paige and others — questioned why DESE was adhering so closely to a narrow list of approved curricula and argued for widening the state’s definition of HQIMs.
“Massachusetts has a healthy independent streak that has served us well in the past, as well as a strong track record of doing things right when it comes to public education. Is there a reason that we can’t expand what we believe is a narrow definition of HWIM to be more inclusive?” the letter says.
Elverum also pointed to emails from 2022 that suggest districts had been “working with Lucy to create that waiver document,” modeled on a process used in Connecticut, if the state ultimately excluded the program from its approved list.
Calkins’ team disputes the notion of a coordinated “workaround” strategy.
Amy Baker, vice president of operations at the Reading & Writing Project at Mossflower — the professional development organization associated with the curriculum — said talk of a “back-door” strategy misrepresents educators’ opposition to state-mandated curriculum.
“When there’s a push for something new, you have to demonize the old,” she said. “But there are educators in Massachusetts – and all over the world – who still use Units of Study because it works best for their students; there’s not a concerted, organized ‘backdoor’ effort like is being implied.”
DESE spokesperson Jackie Reis declined to comment on the meeting with district officials or whether the department would classify Units of Study as evidence-based under the proposed law.
“We don’t comment on bills that are still in progress,” she said.
Calkins herself framed the debate as an attack on educator judgment.
“Local educators are in the best position to make informed, thoughtful decisions,” she said.
She argued that on average, districts using Units of Study outperform the 3rd-grade averages on state tests and that many state-endorsed science-of-reading curricula lack strong peer-reviewed evidence, rely on scripted lessons or have been described as “culturally destructive” in recent research.
She also said many state-preferred programs limit student access to real books, instead having all students read the same passages and complete workbook-style questions, sometimes online. Lessons are “scripted down to the word,” she said, making it difficult for teachers to adjust instruction for students who are struggling or excelling.
“Educators, not legislators, should be making decisions about curriculum,” she said.
For many Lexington families, the debate is grounded in lived experience.
Kyle York, whose daughter has dyslexia, described years of evaluations, denials and legal fees while trying to secure an Individualized Education Plan because his daughter was struggling to learn to read under Lexington’s Units of Study model. The family ultimately hired an advocate and then an attorney, spending more than $10,000 before receiving services.
York said Units of Study’s emphasis on recognizing whole words allowed his daughter to “cover up” her underlying difficulties.
“[During] her dyslexia assessment… She could read the word ‘believe’ because it’s written all over classroom walls, she knew ‘imagine.’… She knew those words without ever actually understanding how to sound out the word,” he said.
Watching her struggle with reading homework was difficult, he added. “It breaks your heart.”
“I was so disgusted with how the school treated us,” York said. Administrators, he added, insisted “everything is fine, we’re using [Units of Study] and everything is great.”
Education Reform Now President Mary Tamer, part of the MassReads coalition supporting the legislation, said efforts to broaden definitions or create alternative approval paths undercut the bill’s intent.
“If this law is not implemented with fidelity, if educators are not willing to do right by children by getting on board and by following the science that goes back 50 years, we are doing an incredible disservice to children,” she said. With only four in 10 Massachusetts students reading at grade level — and far fewer in high-poverty districts — she said district-by-district flexibility “is not working.”
Calkins’ team connected the News Service with Dr. Maurice Cunningham, a retired UMass political science professor who wrote “Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization.” Cunningham said MassReads is a “coalition of billionaires masquerading as a grassroots effort,” citing funding ties from groups such as the Barr Foundation and Walton Family Foundation.
“Letting every district do what they choose is not working,” Tamer said. “This is not about adult preferences. This is about following the science.”
Hackett has defended Lexington’s reading program and argued against government interference.
“Teachers, not politicians, should decide what works best for their students,” she told Lexington families in a Nov. 6 message about changes to the district’s K–5 literacy pilot. She said she and other educators had “written op-eds, met with legislators, spoken at events, and held meetings with the Commissioner, the Secretary of Education, the Governor, and others” to advocate for flexibility.
But with the House bill advancing and Senate action expected, Hackett said “despite our efforts” the district must “be realistic about what’s ahead.”
Lexington had planned to pilot three programs this year, including a revised version of Units of Study. She said that portion of the pilot would end immediately because it “won’t appear on the state’s approved list.”
Hackett said Lexington’s educators have “seen results” over more than a decade using the curriculum and highlighted “bright spots,” including new decodable chapter books and a fifth-grade journalism unit that “turned classrooms into newsrooms.”
As the Senate prepares its own literacy bill, questions remain about how DESE will implement new requirements — and whether the department will revisit its definitions of high-quality instructional materials. While the legislation is unfinished, Gordon said its guardrails are clear: curricula must be supported by peer-reviewed evidence and cannot rely on guessing-based strategies.
A series of six new agreements will shift major K-12 and higher education responsibilities and grant programs to federal government agencies like the Department of Labor, Health and Human Services, the Department of the Interior and the State Department.
The Department of Education will continue to oversee federal student loans and college accreditation, while also managing the country’s $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio and gathering data on school performance in the U.S.
“The Trump Administration is taking bold action to break up the federal education bureaucracy and return education to the states,” U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement.
“Cutting through layers of red tape in Washington is one essential piece of our final mission. Together, we will refocus education on students, families and schools – ensuring federal taxpayer spending is supporting a world-class education system,” she added.
How students could be affected by these shifts
Dig deeper:
The Trump administration has argued that these changes are necessary in order to ensure that American students recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the pandemic “has had a wide-ranging and long-lasting impact on education in the United States.” The sudden change to online learning, for example, proved difficult for students and teachers alike, as well as “dramatically decreased instructional time” and “hindered student understanding.”
John King, who served as secretary of the Department of Education during the Obama administration, told NPR’s All Things Considered that the changes outlined by the Trump administration are “the opposite of focus” when it comes to bouncing back from the pandemic.
“This is the wrong approach to what really is a very urgent crisis,” he said. “Our performance today is below where it was before COVID. We should be doing more, not less.”
According to a report by the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), a research team based out of Arizona State University, “the average American student in school during the pandemic is less than halfway to a full academic recovery.”
WASHINGTON, DC – NOVEMBER 20: Secretary of Education Linda McMahon (L) speaks during a White House press briefing with White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt (R) on November 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. McMahon addressed questions related to a r
Big picture view:
King additionally told NPR that these changes are generally “going to be very confusing for schools, school districts and higher ed institutions.”
“The early evidence from one of their moves — which was to move some career and technical education programming over to the Department of Labor — is that it has slowed the distribution of money and made things more confusing for educators,” he said. “It’s not helping.”
He added that his colleagues are already seeing the results of dismantling the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights – he says that regional offices have been closed and employees have been laid off.
“If you are a victim of discrimination on the basis of race or sex or disability, you don’t have anywhere to go,” he said.
The other side:
In response to the Trump administration’s announcement last week, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a statement calling it “an unprecedented move that undermines the department’s core mission and threatens students’ civil rights.”
“The Trump administration claims core education programs can be carried out elsewhere, yet it has offered no explanation for how agencies like Labor, Interior, Health and Human Services or State will uphold the education access requirements Congress explicitly entrusted to the Department of Education,” ReNika Moore, director of the ACLU Racial Justice Program, said in a statement.
“By transferring these offices across agencies that lack the expertise to lead education policy, the administration is breaking the law, eliminating academic supports to close education achievement gaps, deliberately weakening civil rights oversight and putting millions of students at risk,” Kimberly Conway, ACLU senior policy counsel and former attorney advisor with the ED’s Office for Civil Rights added.
Conway then called on Congress to “immediately intervene to halt this unlawful restructuring, safeguard the integrity of the department’s civil rights and education offices and demand that the department comply with the law and keep its central role in ensuring equal educational opportunity for every student.”
The Source: Information above was sourced from the Department of Education, The White House, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, NPR’s All Things Considered, the Center on Reinventing Public Education, the ACLU and Daniel Miller with FOX Local.
BootUp PD and Amazon Future Engineer collaborate on five year computer science initiative in Chicago Public Schools.
CHICAGO, November 25, 2025 (Newswire.com)
– Over the last five years, Chicago Public Schools (CPS), in collaboration with BootUp Professional Development and Amazon Future Engineer (AFE), has built one of the most expansive K-8 computer science (CS) initiatives in the United States, setting the stage for national transformation in how young learners access and experience computing education.
The impact of a five-year CS initiative was highlighted at the BootUp National Summit, which took place in Chicago from October 20-22, 2025. The BootUp National Summit convened over a hundred educators, district leaders, researchers, policymakers, and tech advocates from across the nation to chart a bold path forward for CS and AI education at the elementary level. A report detailing the outcomes and recommendations from the summit is expected to be released on BootUp’s website during CS Education Week (December 8-14).
Since launching amid the global disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic, the initiative has grown into one of the largest elementary CS programs in the nation, from 39 teachers across 10 schools to a vast network now reaching 540 teachers, 77,845 students, and 191 schools citywide.
This exponential growth reflects a shared commitment to ensuring that CS education is accessible to as many elementary schools as possible, including those in low-resourced communities. The program has prioritized underrepresented students and schools, offering tools that empower both educators and students with CS gaining a competitive edge in their learning trajectory.
“This work is not just about coding, it’s about closing opportunity gaps, building teacher capacity, and cultivating a generation of tech-literate students who reflect the brilliance and diversity of our city,” said Kris Beck, Director of Computer Science and Career Education at CPS. “Through this partnership, we’re proving that access and innovation can make a difference.”
The impact is echoed in the classroom. Teachers report increased confidence and excitement. Student engagement in computational thinking, creative problem-solving, and collaborative projects continues to rise in grades K-8 where early exposure is critical.
“When students see themselves as creators of technology, they see endless possibilities. Amazon Future Engineer is proud to partner with BootUp to help expand access to elementary computer science,” said Latoya Asaya, Senior Program Manager, Amazon Future Engineer.
“BootUp recognizes the significance of CS4ALL originating in Chicago. We believe computer science is for everyone,” said Lien Diaz, CEO of BootUp PD. “Chicago’s success reflects what’s possible when schools, communities, and partners work together to ensure that students in every neighborhood have access to learning experiences that open doors to the future.”
At a time when access to technology and representation in STEM remain starkly imbalanced, CPS is modeling what’s possible: a public education system that ensures students have the tools to shape the digital world they live in.
For more information on BootUp PD and Amazon Future Engineer, please visit bootuppd.org
The School District of Philadelphia and its principals union, Teamsters Local 502 Commonwealth Association of School Administrators, reached a four-year contract late Monday night that include wage increases.
