In many school systems, the biggest factor is that far fewer families are coming from other countries. As fewer people cross the U.S. border, administrators in small towns and big cities alike are reporting fewer newcomer students than usual.
In Miami-Dade County Public Schools, about 2,550 students have entered the district from another country so far this school year — down from nearly 14,000 last year, and more than 20,000 the year before that. School board member Luisa Santos, who attended district schools herself as a young immigrant, said the trend is “a sad reality.”
“I was one of those arrivals when I was 8 years old,” Santos said. “And this country and our public schools — I’ll never get tired of saying it — gave me everything.”
Collectively, the enrollment declines in Miami-Dade erased about $70 million from the district’s annual budget, forcing administrators to scramble to cover the unexpected shortfall.
In San Diego, Principal Fernando Hernandez has enrolled dozens of newcomer students from across Latin America over the past couple years. But so far this school year, he hasn’t enrolled a single newcomer student.
The drops in immigrant students add to strains on enrollment at many traditional public schools, which have seen overall numbers dip due to demographic changes and students opting for alternatives like private schools and homeschooling. Despite needs for English instruction and social supports, the newcomers in some districts have helped to buoy enrollment and bring critical per-pupil funding in recent years.
In northern Alabama, Albertville City Schools Superintendent Bart Reeves has seen the local economy grow along with its Hispanic population, which for decades has been drawn by the area’s poultry processing plants. Albertville soon will be getting its first Target store, a sign of the community’s growing prosperity.
Reeves’ district is home to one of Alabama’s largest Hispanic student populations, with about 60% identifying as Hispanic. But Reeves said the district’s newcomer academy at a local high school hasn’t been enrolling any new students.
“That’s just not happening this year with the closure of the border,” said Reeves, who expects the hit to his budget from enrollment declines will cost him about 12 teacher positions.
Some students are self-deporting with their families
One Sunday morning in August, Edna, a 63-year-old immigrant from El Salvador, got the call she had been dreading. Her friend, a mother from Guatemala with seven young children, had been detained in Lake Worth, Florida, on immigration charges while she was out grabbing a treat for her kids’ breakfast.
The family had prepared for this moment. There were legal documents in place granting temporary custody of the children to Edna, who asked to be identified only by her first name because she fears immigration enforcement.
“I’ll be here, and we’ll be OK,” she recalled telling the oldest child, a 12-year-old boy.
In the weeks that followed, Edna stayed home with two younger kids and got their five older siblings on the bus each day to attend Palm Beach County public schools, where enrollment has fallen by more than 6,000 students this year. One day in September, all seven children boarded a plane to Guatemala to be reunited with their mom, leaving behind neighborhood friends, band practices, and the only life they had ever known.
“My house feels like a garden without flowers,” Edna said. “They’re all gone.”
The family is now living in a rural part of Guatemala, out of reach of phone service. School there had already started for the year and the mother, who did not attend school herself as a child, was keeping them home and weighing whether to enroll them next year, Edna said.
Teachers look on as students play on the playground at Perkins K-8 School in San Diego. The schools principal said he worries students are missing out on chances to learn how to show empathy, to share, to disagree, to understand each other.
Schools accustomed to newcomers see far fewer this year
The declines in the numbers of immigrants coming to the U.S. were already becoming evident in school registration numbers this summer.
Denver Public Schools enrolled 400 new-to-country students this summer, compared to 1,500 during the previous summer. Outside Chicago, Waukegan Community Unified School District 60 signed up 100 fewer new immigrant students. And administrators in the Houston Independent School District shuttered the Las Americas Newcomer School, a program dedicated to children who are new to the U.S., after its enrollment fell to just 21 students from 111 last year.
The shift is visible in places like Chelsea, Massachusetts, a city outside Boston that has long been a destination for new immigrants. The 6,000-student Chelsea Public Schools system has attracted Central Americans looking for affordable housing, and more recently, the state housed newly-arrived Haitians in shelters there. This year, the usual influx of newcomers didn’t materialize.
“This year has been different. Much more quiet,” said Daniel Mojica, director of Chelsea’s parent information center.
Over the summer, 152 newcomers signed up for Chelsea Public Schools, compared to 592 new-to-country students the previous summer.
Some are also picking up and leaving. Since January, 844 students have withdrawn from the district, compared to 805 during the same period last year. Mojica said a greater share of students leaving – roughly a quarter – are returning to their native countries.
He attributes that partly to the presence of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers walking the city’s streets.
“You can feel the fear in the air,” he said.
Educators worry students are missing out
In San Diego, Principal Fernando Hernandez has enrolled dozens of newcomer students from across Latin America over the past couple years. Many made the treacherous journey through the jungles of the Darien Gap before setting up camp in a park near Perkins K-8 school.
About a third of students at the school are homeless. Staff have become experts on supporting kids who are facing adversity. As more newcomers arrived, Hernandez watched as Mexican American students switched up their playground slang to be better understood by their new classmates from Venezuela, Colombia and Peru.
But so far this school year, he hasn’t enrolled a single newcomer student. Other families did not return when the new school year began.
Hernandez fears the toll of the disruption will extend far beyond students’ academic progress. He worries students are missing out on chances to learn how to show empathy, to share, to disagree, to understand each other.
“This is like a repeat of the pandemic where the kids are isolated, locked up, not socializing,” he said.
“These kids, they have to be in school,” he added.
Natacha, a parent who moved with her family to California after leaving Venezuela, said she tries to avoid going out in public, but continues sending her daughters to school. Natacha, who asked to only be identified by her first name because she fears immigration enforcement, said she braces herself as she drives the girls home each afternoon, scanning the road behind her in case another car is following hers.
“I entrust myself to God,” she said.
The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
Five students at U.S. military academies and three each from Yale University, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are among the 32 American winners named Sunday as 2026 Rhodes scholars.
The group includes students focused on housing, health outcomes, sustainability and prison reentry programs. They include:
Alice L. Hall of Philadelphia, a varsity basketball player at MIT who also serves as student body president. Hall, has collaborated with a women’s collective in Ghana on sustainability tools, plans to study engineering.
Sydney E. Barta of Arlington, Virginia, a Paralympian and member of the track team at Stanford University, who studies bioengineering and sings in the Stanford acapella group “Counterpoint.” Barta plans to study musculoskeletal sciences.
Anirvin Puttur of Gilbert, Arizona, a senior at the U.S. Air Force Academy who serves as an instructor pilot and flight commander. Puttur, who is studying aeronautical engineering and applied mathematics, also has a deep interest in linguistics and is proficient in four languages.
The students will attend the University of Oxford as part of the Rhodes scholar program, which awards more than 100 scholarships worldwide each year for students to pursue two to three years of graduate studies.
Named after British imperialist and benefactor Cecil John Rhodes, the scholarship was established at Oxford in 1903. The program has more than 8,000 alumni, many of whom have pursued careers in government, education, the arts and social justice.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
SANTA FE, N.M. — On a recent field trip to view historical markers in New Mexico’s capital city of Santa Fe, seventh grader Raffi Paglayan noted the range of careers and contributions made by the women featured on them.
Paglayan’s favorite was Katherine Stinson Otero, a skywriter who was one of the first women to obtain a pilot’s license in the U.S. After Stinson Otero contracted tuberculosis while driving ambulances in World War I, she moved to New Mexico and started a second career as a renowned architect.
“She seems pretty cool,” Paglayan said with a smile.
Introducing New Mexicans to women from the state’s history is the goal of a decades-long program that has put up nearly 100 roadside markers featuring the significant contributions of women from or with ties to New Mexico. Now the New Mexico Historic Women Marker Program is branching out to create a curriculum for schools based on its research.
“It’s just so essential that all students, not just female students, but every student has the ability to recognize and see the significance of the people that have done so much work to create what we have,” said Lisa Nordstrum, the education director and middle school teacher who took Paglayan and her classmates on the field trip.
The road marker efforts started decades ago. Pat French, a founding member of the International Women’s Forum – New Mexico, a leadership and networking group, noticed in the 1980s that there were hardly any women mentioned in any of the state’s historic roadside markers. In 2006, the group secured state funding to work with the New Mexico Department of Transportation to change that.
Over the years, the group visited individual counties and Native American communities, asking for stories about important women in their history. The research compiled biographies of dozens of women from precolonial times through the Spanish and Mexican territory periods, and into the time when New Mexico became a state.
Now those women’s stories are displayed on 6-foot signs across the state and in an online database. While some honor well-known historical figures such as American modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe and New Mexico’s first female Secretary of State Soledad Chávez de Chacón, many others feature local women whose stories have not been widely told.
For example, Evelyn Vigil and Juanita Toledo are remembered for reviving the Pecos Pueblo style of pottery in the 1970s, after the indigenous Pecos Pueblo population was decimated by years of disease and war by the 1890s, and the pottery techniques were lost.
“There is just a sense of justice about it,” said program director Kris Pettersen. “These women put all this effort in and made all these contributions, and they were unrecognized, and that’s just wrong.”
Other markers are dedicated to groups of women, such as healers and the state’s female military veterans. The collection notes that the history of the state cannot be told without recognizing the conflict that came with colonialization and the wars fought over the territory.
“They are not, however, the first women to take up arms and defend their homes and society in our region,” the veterans’ online blurb notes. “New Mexico is a state of culturally diverse people who have protected themselves over many centuries.”
For now, the group has paused creating new markers, opting to maintain the current ones and focus on the educational mission.
Over 10 years ago, Nordstrum had a revelation similar to French’s: There was a lack of women in the standard state history curriculum. She stumbled upon online biographies from the marker program and started teaching their stories to her seventh graders.
In 2022, the New Mexico Historic Women Marker Program secured state funding to hire Nordstrum to develop a K-12 curriculum from women’s biographies.
“We have women that wouldn’t be in any textbook,” Nordstrum said.
The funding was renewed in 2024 with bipartisan support. One of the legislation’s co-sponsors, Republican state Rep. Gail Armstrong, believes it’s important for New Mexico residents, young and old, to understand how the world they live in was formed.
“History, good or bad, should not be changed. It needs to be remembered so that we don’t make the same mistakes again and so that we can celebrate the good things that have happened,” she said.
___
The Associated Press’ women in the workforce and state government coverage receives financial support from Pivotal Ventures. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — On a recent field trip to view historical markers in New Mexico’s capital city of Santa Fe, seventh grader Raffi Paglayan noted the range of careers and contributions made by the women featured on them.
Paglayan’s favorite was Katherine Stinson Otero, a skywriter who was one of the first women to obtain a pilot’s license in the U.S. After Stinson Otero contracted tuberculosis while driving ambulances in World War I, she moved to New Mexico and started a second career as a renowned architect.
“She seems pretty cool,” Paglayan said with a smile.
Introducing New Mexicans to women from the state’s history is the goal of a decades-long program that has put up nearly 100 roadside markers featuring the significant contributions of women from or with ties to New Mexico. Now the New Mexico Historic Women Marker Program is branching out to create a curriculum for schools based on its research.
“It’s just so essential that all students, not just female students, but every student has the ability to recognize and see the significance of the people that have done so much work to create what we have,” said Lisa Nordstrum, the education director and middle school teacher who took Paglayan and her classmates on the field trip.
The road marker efforts started decades ago. Pat French, a founding member of the International Women’s Forum – New Mexico, a leadership and networking group, noticed in the 1980s that there were hardly any women mentioned in any of the state’s historic roadside markers. In 2006, the group secured state funding to work with the New Mexico Department of Transportation to change that.
Over the years, the group visited individual counties and Native American communities, asking for stories about important women in their history. The research compiled biographies of dozens of women from precolonial times through the Spanish and Mexican territory periods, and into the time when New Mexico became a state.
Now those women’s stories are displayed on 6-foot signs across the state and in an online database. While some honor well-known historical figures such as American modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe and New Mexico’s first female Secretary of State Soledad Chávez de Chacón, many others feature local women whose stories have not been widely told.
For example, Evelyn Vigil and Juanita Toledo are remembered for reviving the Pecos Pueblo style of pottery in the 1970s, after the indigenous Pecos Pueblo population was decimated by years of disease and war by the 1890s, and the pottery techniques were lost.
“There is just a sense of justice about it,” said program director Kris Pettersen. “These women put all this effort in and made all these contributions, and they were unrecognized, and that’s just wrong.”
Other markers are dedicated to groups of women, such as healers and the state’s female military veterans. The collection notes that the history of the state cannot be told without recognizing the conflict that came with colonialization and the wars fought over the territory.
“They are not, however, the first women to take up arms and defend their homes and society in our region,” the veterans’ online blurb notes. “New Mexico is a state of culturally diverse people who have protected themselves over many centuries.”
For now, the group has paused creating new markers, opting to maintain the current ones and focus on the educational mission.
From roadsides into classrooms
Over 10 years ago, Nordstrum had a revelation similar to French’s: There was a lack of women in the standard state history curriculum. She stumbled upon online biographies from the marker program and started teaching their stories to her seventh graders.
In 2022, the New Mexico Historic Women Marker Program secured state funding to hire Nordstrum to develop a K-12 curriculum from women’s biographies.
“We have women that wouldn’t be in any textbook,” Nordstrum said.
The funding was renewed in 2024 with bipartisan support. One of the legislation’s co-sponsors, Republican state Rep. Gail Armstrong, believes it’s important for New Mexico residents, young and old, to understand how the world they live in was formed.
“History, good or bad, should not be changed. It needs to be remembered so that we don’t make the same mistakes again and so that we can celebrate the good things that have happened,” she said.
The Associated Press’ women in the workforce and state government coverage receives financial support from Pivotal Ventures. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
Volmert reported from Lansing, Michigan.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
A judge ordered federal agencies Friday to end their “blanket policy of denying any future grants” to the University of California, Los Angeles, and further ruled that the Trump administration can’t seek payouts from any UC campus “in connection with any civil rights investigation” under Titles VI or IX of federal law.
The ruling also prohibits the Department of Justice and federal funding agencies from withholding funds, “or threatening to do so, to coerce the UC in violation of the First Amendment or Tenth Amendment.” In all, the order, if not overturned on appeal, stops the administration’s attempt to pressure UCLA to pay $1.2 billion and make multiple other concessions, including to stop enrolling “foreign students likely to engage in anti-Western, anti-American, or antisemitic disruptions or harassment” and stop “performing hormonal interventions and ‘transgender’ surgeries” on anyone under 18 at its medical school and affiliated hospitals.
The administration’s targeting of the UC system came to the fore on July 29. That’s when the DOJ said its months-long investigations across the system had so far concluded that UCLA violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in its response to alleged antisemitism at a spring 2024 pro-Palestinian protest encampment.
Federal agencies—including the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and Department of Energy—quickly began freezing funding; UC estimated it lost $584 million. But UC researchers sued and, even before Friday’s ruling, U.S. District Court judge Rita F. Lin of the Northern District of California ordered the restoration of almost all of the frozen funding.
Friday’s ruling came in a case filed this fall by the American Association of University Professors, the affiliated American Federation of Teachers and other unions. Lin again was the judge.
“Defendants did not engage in the required notice and hearing processes under Title VI for cutting off funds for alleged discrimination,” she wrote.
“With every day that passes, UCLA continues to be denied the chance to win new grants, ratchetting [sic] up Defendants’ pressure campaign,” she wrote. “And numerous UC faculty and staff have submitted declarations describing how Defendants’ actions have already chilled speech throughout the UC system. They describe how they have stopped teaching or researching topics they are afraid are too ‘left’ or ‘woke,’ in order to avoid triggering further funding cancellations by Defendants. They also give examples of projects the UC has stopped due to fear of the same reprisals. These are classic, predictable First Amendment harms, and exactly what Defendants publicly said that they intended.”
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Rayann Martin sat in a classroom hundreds of miles from her devastated Alaska Native village and held up 10 fingers when the teacher asked the pupils how old they were.
“Ten — how do you say 10 in Yup’ik?” the teacher asked.
“Qula!” the students answered in unison.
Martin and her family were among hundreds of people airlifted to Anchorage, the state’s largest city, after the remnants of Typhoon Halong inundated their small coastal villages along the Bering Sea last month, dislodging dozens of homes and floating them away — many with people inside. The floods left nearly 700 homes destroyed or heavily damaged. One person died, two remain missing.
As the residents grapple with uprooted lives very different from the traditional ones they left, some of the children are finding a measure of familiarity in a school-based immersion program that focuses on their Yup’ik language and culture — one of two such programs in the state.
“I’m learning more Yup’ik,” said Martin, who added that she’s using the language to communicate with her mother, teachers and classmates. “I usually speak more Yup’ik in villages, but mostly more English in cities.”
There are more than 100 languages spoken in the homes of Anchorage School District students. Yup’ik, which is spoken by about 10,000 people in the state, is the fifth most common. The district adopted its first language immersion program — Japanese — in 1989, and subsequently added Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, German, French and Russian.
After many requests from parents, the district obtained a federal grant and added a K-12 Yup’ik immersion program about nine years ago. The students in the first class are now eighth-graders. The program is based at College Gate Elementary and Wendler Middle School.
The principal at College Gate Elementary, Darrell Berntsen, is himself Alaska Native — Sugpiaq, from Kodiak Island, south of Anchorage. His mother was 12 years old in 1964 when the magnitude-9.2 Great Alaska Earthquake and an ensuing tsunami devastated her village of Old Harbor. He recalls her stories of joining other villagers at high ground and watching as the surge of water carried homes out to sea.
His mother and her family evacuated to a shelter in Anchorage, but returned to Kodiak Island when Old Harbor was rebuilt. Berntsen grew up living a subsistence life — “the greatest time of my life was being able to go out duck hunting, go out deer hunting,” he said — and he understands what the evacuees from Kipnuk, Kwigillingok and other damaged villages have left behind.
He has also long had an interest in preserving Alaska Native culture and languages. His ex-wife’s grandmother, Marie Smith Jones, was the last fluent speaker of Eyak, an indigenous language from south-central Alaska, when she died in 2008. His uncles had their hands slapped when they spoke their indigenous Alutiiq language at school.
As the evacuees arrived in Anchorage in the days after last month’s flooding, Berntsen greeted them at an arena where the Red Cross had set up a shelter. He invited families to enroll their children in the Yup’ik immersion program. Many of the parents showed him photos of the duck, goose, moose, seal or other traditional foods they had saved for the winter — stockpiles that washed away or spoiled in the flood.
“Listening is a big part of our culture — hearing their stories, letting them know that, ‘Hey, I live here in Anchorage, I’m running one of my schools, the Yup’ik immersion program, you guys are welcome at our school,’” Berntsen said. “Do everything we can to make them feel comfortable in the most uncomfortable situation that they’ve ever been through.”
Some 170 evacuated children have enrolled in the Anchorage School District — 71 of them in the Yup’ik immersion program. Once the smallest immersion program in the district, it’s now “booming,” said Brandon Locke, the district’s world language director.
At College Gate, pupils receive instruction in Yup’ik for half the day, including Yup’ik literacy and language as well as science and social studies. The other half is in English, which includes language arts and math classes.
Among the program’s new students is Ellyne Aliralria, a 10-year-old from Kipnuk. During the surge of floodwater the weekend of Oct. 11, she and her family were in a home that floated upriver. The high water also washed away her sister’s grave, she said.
Aliralria likes the immersion program and learning more phrases, even though the Yup’ik dialect being spoken is a bit different from the one she knows.
“I like to do all of them, but some of them are hard,” the fifth-grader said.
Also difficult is adjusting to living in a motel room in a city nearly 500 miles (800 km) from their village on the southwest coast.
“We’re homesick,” she said.
Lilly Loewen, 10, is one of many non-Yup’iks in the program. She said her parents wanted her to participate because “they thought it was really cool.”
“It is just really amazing to get to talk to people in another language other than just what I speak mostly at home,” Loewen said.
Berntsen is planning to help the new students acclimate by holding activities such as gym nights or Olympic-style events, featuring activities that mimic Alaska Native hunting and fishing techniques. One example: the seal hop, in which participants assume a plank position and shuffle across the floor to emulate how hunters sneak up on seals napping on the ice.
The Yup’ik immersion program is helping undo some of the damage Western culture did to Alaska Native language and traditions, he said. It’s also bridging the gap of two lost generations: In some cases, the children’s parents or grandparents never learned Yup’ik, but the students can now speak with their great-grandparents, Locke said.
“I took this as a great opportunity for us to give back some of what the trauma had taken from our Indigenous people,” Berntsen said.
Last month, Zenaida Perez, a Fairfax County Public Schools teacher, filed a lawsuit alleging that school and district officials defamed her character and retaliated against her for being a whistleblower.
A decade of court oversight of special education services in New Orleans public schools, the result of a legal settlement, will most likely cease by the end of the year, the judge presiding over the legal settlement said Wednesday.
The decision, if it comes to pass, would come at the request of the Louisiana Department of Education and the Orleans Parish School Board, which have been subjected to intensive monitoring under a consent decree since 2015. The agreement settled a 2010 class-action lawsuit that alleged the city’s charter schools discriminated against special education students in their application processes and did not provide them appropriate educational services, as federal law requires.
The case was brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of parents and guardians of special-needs students in New Orleans schools. Though problems with special education continue to be identified at some New Orleans charter schools, the consent decree was intended to address systemic issues — whether the state and district are catching those issues and implementing plans to correct them — not individual students’ experiences, said U.S. District Judge Jay Zainey.
For the past eight years, an independent monitor assigned by the court has found the defendants — the Department of Education and OPSB — in substantial compliance with all provisions outlined in consent decree. Citing those findings, the state and school board earlier this year formally requested an end to the agreement.
The plaintiffs oppose terminating the settlement, arguing that the state and NOLA Public Schools district have not created sufficient monitoring, oversight or complaint systems. Their opposition hinges on a 2024 report from the Louisiana Legislative Auditor that found faults in the state’s monitoring of special education programs — most districts self-reported their compliance with federal rules dictating education plans, without on-site monitoring. (However, some of those problems resulted from the fact that much of the state’s monitoring capacity has been directed toward New Orleans schools, possibly as a result of the consent decree, according to the audit report.) The audit also noted that the agency reduced the number of workers dedicated to special education between 2012 and 2019.
Lauren Winkler, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said her team has asked the district to make it easier for parents to bring issues about schools forward to the central office through creating an open complaint system on their website. That was never implemented.
“(There are) really simple solutions that are not super costly,” Winkler said. “We tried to meet with them to agree to some and they just wouldn’t.”
Winkler said noncompliance still exists in the schools. More people contacted the SPLC about their negative experiences with New Orleans schools’ special education programs ahead of this week’s hearing.
“If we didn’t have any parents coming forward with issues, we’d maybe have a different position,” Winkler said. “With the breadth of issues in the amount of people that came to us, as we’ve been preparing for this, I think that’s indicative of the systemic issues that are still here.”
But in a court filing last week, Zainey wrote that the court anticipates ending federal oversight by the end of the year.
“The consent judgement was a temporary measure and was never meant to be a permanent fixture of the school system,” Zainey said in court. “Things have been much improved from how they used to be in Orleans Parish.”
Zainey invited parents to share their experiences with the court and representatives from the LDOE and Orleans Parish School Board during informal hearings on Nov. 12 and 13. Most parents asked the court to continue the federal monitoring of New Orleans schools, but it’s unclear whether their statements will change Zainey’s plans. Zainey encouraged the state’s ombudsman, who connects families with resources and informs them of their rights in relation to special education, to connect with parents following their statements.
But most of the parents speaking at the informal hearing were those who had already tried, and were still trying, to seek recourse through communication with district or state officials.
Grace Thompson spoke in front of the judge Wednesday morning about her son’s experience at Audubon Gentilly. According to Thompson, her son was supposed to receive speech therapy and a one-on-one aide to help in class, but never received them. Thompson said she’s tried to seek help through the district’s accountability office, which, she said, has offered little guidance and has been “slow” and “inconsistent” in its communications.
“I’ve literally been calling them for the last year and a half,” Thompson told the judge. “They know who I am.”
Steve Corbett, CEO of Audubon Schools, said Audubon Gentilly has provided students with all necessary services and has been found fully compliant with federal special education law. The most recent state special education monitoring report found “no unresolved areas of noncompliance” at the school.
Other parents also spoke of slow communication with the district and the schools their children attend. They said their children weren’t receiving the services outlined in their individualized education plans, that their learning has regressed, that schools were slow in performing evaluations and reevaluations, and that oversight was only afforded to children with parents that could be there to actively fight for them.
District Superintendent Fateama Fulmore and state representatives were present at the hearing. In response to hearing parent concerns, Fulmore said she appreciated the opportunity to hear from them directly and that her team will follow up.
“We have an obligation to every child in this system to get this right,” Fulmore said. “We are doing better.”
Lyric Lee, a former student at Morris Jeff Community School who had an IEP and graduated last year, said she learned at a young age how to advocate for herself, her brother and other students who have special needs. She said the consent decree should continue.
“I’ve learned when people are not kept on a watch, they feel like they don’t have to do it, and they’ll do everything possible to make sure they don’t have to,” Lee said.
This story was originally published by Verite News and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Former University of Virginia president Jim Ryan has broken his silence concerning his abrupt resignation, accusing the Board of Visitors of dishonesty and complicity in his ouster, which came amid federal government scrutiny over the university’s diversity, equity and inclusion practices.
In a 12-page letter to the UVA Faculty Senate on Friday, Ryan wrote that he was “stunned and angry” over the board’s lack of honesty as it faced pressure from the federal government to force him out due to an alleged failure to dismantle DEI initiatives. Ryan also wrote that recent letters by UVA rector Rachel Sheridan and Governor Glenn Youngkin do not “present an accurate accounting of my resignation,” which prompted him to release his own statement.
Ryan accused Youngkin of playing a significant part in attracting scrutiny from the Department of Justice, first by handing down a resolution to the board drafted by his office that “was quite sweeping and filled with inflammatory rhetoric criticizing DEI.” Ryan wrote that the board passed a modified, “fairly mild” version of the resolution, which required UVA to dissolve its DEI office and “move all permissible programs to another institutional home.”
But after its passage, Youngkin declared on Fox News that “DEI is dead” at UVA. That statement, Ryan wrote, created confusion and overstated the reach of the resolution. As UVA began efforts to implement the resolution, Ryan wrote that Sheridan told him not to publicly announce any DEI changes, which he alleged created the perception of inaction and attracted the DOJ’s attention.
Ryan wrote that UVA soon received an inquiry about why it was slow to dismantle DEI.
“The letter asked us to explain why we hadn’t complied with the Board’s resolution, though it exaggerated the scope and nature of that resolution, suggesting—as had Governor Youngkin on television—that we were supposed to eliminate the entirety of DEI,” Ryan wrote. “It was unclear, and still is, why the United States Department of Justice would have the interest or authority to enforce a resolution of the Board of a state university as opposed to enforcing federal law.”
Ryan also questioned whether the board was truthful about the DOJ seeking his resignation or if it was a scheme concocted by members who wanted to remove him as their relationship soured.
In closing his letter, Ryan argued that he was committed to following the law and revising policies and practices that were flawed or “if there were persuasive, principled reasons to change course.” But he would not sacrifice UVA’s core values or his principles in doing so—especially if those changes were due to “prevailing political winds” or “the political ambitions of some,” he wrote. He added that both the board members and governor’s office had accused him of being stubborn, which was perhaps true and may have been the real reason for his exit.
“But stubborn and principled often look the same, especially to those who are unprincipled,” Ryan wrote.
Inside Higher Ed has uploaded Ryan’s full letter below.
Ryan’s letter follows a message Sheridan sent to the UVA Faculty Senate on Thursday. In that letter, Sheridan downplayed the pressure from the federal government to force Ryan out. While she acknowledged that the Department of Justice “lacked confidence in President Ryan to make the changes that the Trump Administration believed were necessary to ensure compliance,” she disputed the notion that his resignation was part of the agreement that the university recently reached with the federal government to pause investigations into DEI practices.
While Sheridan did not elaborate on specific threats from the Department of Justice, as Ryan alleged, she wrote that Trump administration officials “made clear that if the University did not chart a different course, the DOJ could and would expand its investigations into additional issues, subject other personnel to scrutiny, and pursue the cutoff of federal funding.”
The full text of that letter is available below.
Also on Thursday, Youngkin sent a letter related to Ryan’s departure to Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger, who has called for UVA to halt its ongoing presidential search until her board picks are in place. The Republican governor pushed back on his Democratic successor’s claims that Ryan was ousted as a result of federal overreach and accused her of interfering in the search. Youngkin also accused Ryan of “not being committed to following federal law.”
That letter has been uploaded in full below.
Board Under Fire
Ryan’s letter prompted a flurry of criticism of the board from faculty, lawmakers and others.
The UVA Faculty Senate passed a resolution Friday calling for greater transparency, a pause in the presidential search until the board “is at full complement with members confirmed by the general assembly,” and the immediate resignation of Sheridan and Vice Rector Porter Wilkinson.
Faculty members accused the board of making UVA a target.
“The rector, the vice rector, and others on the board conspired to oust Jim Ryan, and they made the decision to leverage pressure from the Department of Justice in order to enact that ouster,” Matthew Hedstrom, a religious studies professor, said in Friday’s Faculty Senate meeting.
Democratic state lawmakers also blasted the board in the aftermath of Ryan’s letter.
“Former UVA President Jim Ryan’s letter details a shocking abuse of power by the UVA Board of Visitors and collaboration between a Governor & [attorney general] who betrayed the state and schools they swore to protect so they could curry favor with MAGA extremists—this is far from over,” Virginia state senator Scott Surovell, the Democratic majority leader, wrote on X.
Surovell is among a group of Democratic lawmakers who have recently amplified pressure on UVA over Ryan’s resignation and the subsequent agreement it reached with the DOJ. Democrats, who have blocked multiple Youngkin board appointments this year—many of them GOP donors and conservative political figures—have accused UVA of a lack of transparency around Ryan’s exit and of giving in to “extortionate tactics” in striking a deal with the DOJ.
Ross Mugler, interim president and CEO of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, released a statement in which he argued, “What happened at UVA shows how deeply damaging it is when governing boards become extensions of political actors rather than independent fiduciaries.” Mugler also warned of potential harms to academic freedom, community trust and the long-term health of the university due to external political pressures.
“President Ryan’s detailed account of the pressures leading to his resignation reveals an alarming example of political and ideological interference in university governance,” he wrote.
Neither UVA nor Youngkin’s office responded to requests for comment from Inside Higher Ed.
ATLANTA (AP) — When families are evicted, it can lead to major disruptions to their children’s schooling.
Federal law includes provisions to help homeless and evicted kids stay at their schools, but families don’t always know about them — and schools don’t always share the information. Beyond the instability that comes with losing their home, relocating also can deprive kids of networks they rely on for support.
AP followed the year-long quest of one Atlanta mother, Sechita McNair, to find new housing after an eviction. The out-of-work film industry veteran drove extra hours for Uber and borrowed money, eventually securing a lease in the right neighborhood so her eldest son could stay at his high school. At $2,200 a month, it was the only “semi-affordable” apartment in the rapidly gentrifying Old Fourth Ward that would rent to a single mom with a fresh eviction on her record.
Even so, her son was not thriving. McNair considered a homeschooling program before re-enrolling him at the coveted high school. Despite continuing challenges, McNair is determined to provide her three children with better educational opportunities.
Evictions often lead families to schools with fewer resources
Like many evicted families, McNair and her kids went from living in a school district that spends more money on students to one that spends less.
Atlanta spends nearly $20,000 per student a year, $7,000 more than the suburban district the family moved to after they were evicted from their apartment last year. More money in schools means smaller classrooms and more psychologists, guidance counselors and other support.
Thanks to federal laws protecting homeless and evicted students, McNair’s kids were able to keep attending their Atlanta schools, even though the only housing available to them was in another county 40 minutes away. They also had the right to free transportation to those schools, but McNair says the district didn’t tell her about that until the school year ended. Once they found new housing, their eligibility to remain in those schools expired at the end of last school year.
Support systems matter, too
The suburban neighborhood where the family landed after the eviction is filled with brick colonials and manicured lawns. McNair knows it’s the dream for some families, but not hers. “It’s a support desert,” she said.
McNair, who grew up in New Jersey near New York City, sees opportunities in the wider city of Atlanta. She wants to use its libraries, e-scooters, bike paths, hospitals, rental assistance agencies, Buy Nothing groups and food pantries.
“These are all resources that make it possible to raise a family when you don’t have support,” she said. “Wouldn’t anyone want that?”
It’s tough to find safe, affordable housing after an eviction
It took months for McNair to scrape together funds and find a landlord in her gentrifying neighborhood who would rent to her in spite of her recent eviction.
On Zillow, the second-floor apartment, built in 2005, looked like a middle-class dream with its granite countertops, crown molding and polished wood floors. But up close, the apartment looked abused. Her tour of the apartment was rushed, and the lease was full of errors. She signed anyway.
Shortly after — while she was still waiting for the landlord to install more smoke detectors and fix the oven and fridge — McNair’s keys stopped working. The apartment had been sold in a short sale.
The new owners wanted McNair to leave, but she consulted with attorneys, who reassured her she could stay. Eventually, she even moved some of the family’s belongings to the apartment.
But a new apartment in their preferred neighborhood doesn’t solve everything. At night, McNair’s 15-year-old son, Elias, has been responsible for his younger brothers while she heads out to drive for Uber. That’s what is necessary to pay $450 a week to rent the car and earn enough to pay her rent and bills.
While McNair is out, she can’t monitor Elias. And a few days after he started school, Elias’s all-night gaming habit had already drawn teachers’ attention. As she drove for Uber one night, she couldn’t stop thinking about emails from his teachers. “I should be home making sure Elias gets to bed on time,” she says, crying. “But I have to work. I’m the only one paying the bills.”
Consistency is important for a teen’s learning
McNair attributed some of Elias’s lack of motivation at school to personal trauma. His father died after a heart attack in 2023, on the sidelines of Elias’s basketball practice. Wounded by that loss and multiple housing displacements, Elias failed two classes last year, his freshman year. His mother feared switching schools would jeopardize any chance he had of recovering his academic life.
But after Elias started skipping school this fall, McNair filed papers declaring her intention to homeschool him.
It quickly proved challenging. Elias wouldn’t do any schoolwork when he was home alone. And when the homeschooling group met twice a week, McNair discovered, they required parents to pick up their children afterward instead of allowing them to take public transit or e-scooters. That was untenable.
McNair considered enrolling her son in the suburban school district, but an Atlanta schools official advised against transferring if possible. He needs to be in school — preferably the Atlanta school he has attended — studying for midterms, the official said.
Now, with Elias back in school every day, McNair can deliver food through Uber Eats without worrying about a police officer asking why her kid isn’t in school. If only she had pushed harder, sooner, for help with Elias, she thought.
But it was easy for her to explain why she hadn’t. “I was running around doing so many other things just so we have a place to live, or taking care of my uncle, that I didn’t put enough of my energy there.”
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The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
ATLANTA (AP) — As an education reporter, I’ve heard teachers worry that the most pernicious challenges their students face, like poverty or housing insecurity, are beyond the realm of what schools can fix.
I wanted to understand better how the rising cost of housing and the prevalence of eviction could undermine a young person’s ability to thrive in school and in life.
Research shows schoolchildren threatened with eviction are more likely to transfer to another school, often one with less funding, more poverty and lower test scores. They’re more likely to miss school, and those who end up transferring are suspended more often.
I’ve seen this firsthand through my own reporting. A few years ago, when I was writing about students who missed school for months or longer, many of them said a housing disruption had first kept them out of class. They lost their home, ended up staying with a relative, and didn’t get back in school for weeks or longer.
So I called up a parent organizer in Atlanta who had introduced me to other families struggling with that city’s rapid gentrification.
McNair was one of the easiest people I’ve ever written about because she was a film-industry veteran. She understood my desire to document or understand every step in the process of getting evicted or advocating for her children. I never had to explain why I was asking a question, why I wanted so much detail about where she was when she received a certain phone call, or why I wanted her to send me emails or documents. She’s an open book and sincerely thought others might benefit from reading about her perseverance and resourcefulness.
She also was challenging to write about because her life was extremely complicated. McNair has immense family responsibilities, without support from other relatives, yet she holds a deep belief that things will work out if she just keeps moving. Her situation and plans would change rapidly. Sometimes I struggled to keep up.
I traveled to Atlanta three times over several months to visit McNair, and in between we were in constant touch. I often spoke to her while she drove the kids to and from school or while she picked up orders for Uber Eats. The result is a close-up portrait of life as a single mother trying to swim upstream while carrying three boys on her back.
This is the hardest part: Everything McNair was working toward — getting her kids back into Atlanta — is exactly what researchers would say she should do. She should keep her kids in the same school so they can be in a stable environment.
But so far, it hasn’t been enough.
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Bianca Vázquez Toness covers the intersection of education and children’s well-being. She led the nation in showing how many students were missing school after the pandemic, and her work was honored as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
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The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
ATLANTA (AP) — It was the worst summer in years. Sechita McNair’s family took no vacations. Her younger boys didn’t go to camp. Her van was repossessed, and her family nearly got evicted — again.
But she accomplished the one thing she wanted most. A few weeks before school started, McNair, an out-of-work film industry veteran barely getting by driving for Uber, signed a lease in the right Atlanta neighborhood so her eldest son could stay at his high school.
As she pulled up outside the school on the first day, Elias, 15, stepped onto the curb in his new basketball shoes and cargo pants. She inspected his face, noticed wax in his ears and grabbed a package of baby wipes from her rental car. She wasn’t about to let her eldest, with his young Denzel Washington looks, go to school looking “gross.”
He grimaced and broke away.
“No kiss? No hugs?” she called out.
Elias waved and kept walking. Just ahead of him, at least for the moment, sat something his mother had fought relentlessly for: a better education.
The link between where you live and where you learn
Sechita McNair, center, and sons Derrick McNair-White, left, and Malachi McNair-Nesbitt, right, walk to catch a city bus in Jonesboro, Ga. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
Sechita McNair, center, and sons Derrick McNair-White, left, and Malachi McNair-Nesbitt, right, walk to catch a city bus in Jonesboro, Ga. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
Last year, McNair and her three kids were evicted from their beloved apartment in the rapidly gentrifying Old Fourth Ward neighborhood of Atlanta. Like many evicted families, they went from living in a school district that spends more money on students to one that spends less.
Thanks to federal laws protecting homeless and evicted students, her kids were able to keep attending their Atlanta schools, even though the only housing available to them was in another county 40 minutes away. They also had the right to free transportation to those schools, but McNair says the district didn’t tell her about that until the school year ended. Their eligibility to remain in those schools expired at the end of last school year.
Still wounded by the death of his father and multiple housing displacements, Elias failed two classes last year, his freshman year. Switching schools now, McNair fears, would jeopardize any chance he has of recovering his academic life. “I need this child to be stable,” she says.
Bianca Vázquez Toness covers the intersection of education and children’s well-being. She led the nation in showing how many students were missing school after the pandemic — work that was honored as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
With just one week before school started, McNair drove extra Uber hours, borrowed money, secured rental assistance and ignored concerns about the apartment to rent a three-bedroom in the Old Fourth Ward. At $2,200 a month, it was the only “semi-affordable” apartment in the rapidly gentrifying ward that would rent to a single mom with a fresh eviction on her record.
On Zillow, the second-floor apartment, built in 2005, looked like a middle-class dream with its granite countertops, crown molding and polished wood floors. But up close, the apartment looked abused and held secrets McNair was only beginning to uncover.
The first sign something was wrong came early. When she first toured the apartment, it felt rushed, like the agent didn’t want her to look too closely. Then, even as they told her she was accepted, the landlord and real estate agent wouldn’t send her a “welcome letter” laying out the agreement, the rent and deposit she would pay. It seemed like they didn’t want to put anything in writing.
When the lease came, it was full of errors. She signed it anyway. “We’re back in the neighborhood!” she said. Elias could return to Midtown High School.
But even in their triumph, no one in the family could relax. Too many things were uncertain. And it fell to McNair — and only McNair — to figure it out.
The first day back
Sechita McNair, left, talks to her oldest son, Elias Washington, before he walks into Midtown High School for the first day of school on Aug. 4 in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
Sechita McNair, left, talks to her oldest son, Elias Washington, before he walks into Midtown High School for the first day of school on Aug. 4 in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
Midtown is a high school so coveted that school administrators investigate student residency throughout the year to keep out kids from other parts of Atlanta and beyond. For McNair, the day Elias returned to the high school was a momentous one.
“Freedom!” McNair declared after Elias disappeared into the building. Without child care over the summer, McNair had struggled to find time to work enough to make ends meet. Now that the kids were back in class, McNair could spend school hours making money and resolving some of the unsettled issues with her new apartment.
McNair, the first person in her family to attend college, studied theater management. Her job rigging stage sets was lucrative until the writers’ and actors’ strike and other changes paralyzed the film industry in 2023. The scarcity of work on movie sets, combined with her tendency to take in family and non-family alike, wrecked her home economy.
The family was evicted last fall when McNair fell behind on rent because of funeral expenses for her foster daughter. The teen girl died from an epileptic seizure while McNair and everyone else slept. Elias found her body.
McNair attributes some of Elias’s lack of motivation at school to personal trauma. His father died after a heart attack in 2023, on the sidelines of Elias’s basketball practice.
Elias Washington talks to a friend on the phone as he walks to Midtown High School in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
Elias Washington talks to a friend on the phone as he walks to Midtown High School in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
On his first day back at school this August, Elias appeared excited but tentative. He watched as the seniors swanned into school wearing gold cardboard crowns, a Midtown back-to-school tradition, and scanned the sidewalk for anyone familiar.
If Elias had his way, his mom would homeschool him. She’s done it before. But now that he’s a teenager, it’s harder to get Elias to follow her instructions. As the only breadwinner supporting three kids and her disabled uncle, she has to work.
Elias hid from the crowds and called up a friend: “Where you at?” The friend, another sophomore, was still en route. Over the phone, they compared outfits, traded gossip about who got a new hairdo or transferred. When Elias’s friend declared this would be the year he’d get a girlfriend, Elias laughed.
When it was time to go in, Elias drifted toward the door with his head down as other students flooded past.
The after-school pickup
Hours later, he emerged. Despite everything McNair had done to help it go well — securing the apartment, even spending hundreds of dollars on new clothes for him — Elias slumped into the backseat when she picked him up after class.
“School was so boring,” he said.
“What happened?” McNair asked.
“Nothing, bro. That was the problem,” Elias said. “I thought I was going to be happy when school started, since summer was so horrible.”
Of all of the classes he was taking — geometry, gym, French, world history, environmental science — only gym interested him. He wished he could take art classes, he said. Elias has acted in some commercials and television programs, but chose a science and math concentration, hoping to study finance someday.
After dinner at Chick-fil-A, the family visited the city library one block from their new apartment. While McNair spoke to the librarian, the boys explored the children’s section. Malachi, 6, watched a YouTube video on a library computer while Derrick, 7, flipped through a book. Elias sat in a corner, sharing video gaming tips with a stranger he met online.
“Those people are learning Japanese,” said McNair, pointing to a group of adults sitting around a cluster of tables. “And this library lets you check out museum passes. This is why we have to be back in the city. Resources!”
McNair wants her children to go to well-resourced schools. Atlanta spends nearly $20,000 per student a year, $7,000 more than the district they moved to after the eviction. More money in schools means smaller classrooms and more psychologists, guidance counselors and other support.
But McNair, who grew up in New Jersey near New York City, also sees opportunities in the wider city of Atlanta. She wants to use its libraries, e-scooters, bike paths, hospitals, rental assistance agencies, Buy Nothing groups and food pantries.
“These are all resources that make it possible to raise a family when you don’t have support,” she said. “Wouldn’t anyone want that?”
Support is hard to come by
Sechita McNair, right, and sons Derrick McNair-White, center, and Malachi McNair-Nesbitt, left, ride an escalator to take the MARTA train on June 11 in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
Sechita McNair, right, and sons Derrick McNair-White, center, and Malachi McNair-Nesbitt, left, ride an escalator to take the MARTA train on June 11 in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
On the way home, the little boys fall asleep in the back seat. Elias asks, “So, is homeschooling off the table?”
McNair doesn’t hesitate. “Heck yeah. I’m not homeschooling you,” she says lightly. “Do you see how much of a financial bind I’m in?”’
McNair pulls into the driveway in Jonesboro, the suburb where the family landed after their eviction. Even though the family wants to live in Atlanta, their stuff is still here. It’s a neighborhood of brick colonials and manicured lawns. She realizes it’s the dream for some families, but not hers. “It’s a support desert.”
As they get out of the car, Elias takes over as parent-in-charge. “Get all of your things,” he directs Malachi and Derrick, who scowl as Elias seems to relish bossing them around. “Pick up your car seats, your food, those markers. I don’t want to see anything left behind.” Elias would be responsible for making the boys burritos, showering them and putting them to sleep.
McNair heads out to drive for Uber. That’s what is necessary to pay $450 a week to rent the car and earn enough to pay her rent and bills.
But while McNair is out, she can’t monitor Elias. And a few days after he starts school, Elias’s all-night gaming habit has already drawn teachers’ attention.
“I wanted to check in regarding Elias,” his geometry teacher writes during the first week of school. “He fell asleep multiple times during Geometry class this morning.”
Elias had told the teacher he went to bed around 4 a.m. the night before. “I understand that there may be various reasons for this, and I’d love to work together to support Elias so he can stay focused and successful in class.”
A few days later, McNair gets a similar email from his French teacher.
That night, McNair drives around Atlanta, trying to pick up enough Uber trips to keep her account active. But she can’t stop thinking about the emails. “I should be home making sure Elias gets to bed on time,” she says, crying. “But I have to work. I’m the only one paying the bills.”
Obstacles keep popping up
Sechita McNair arrives at her new Atlanta apartment on Aug. 1 to find a door that she says looks like it was forced open. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
Sechita McNair arrives at her new Atlanta apartment on Aug. 1 to find a door that she says looks like it was forced open. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
Ever since McNair rented the Atlanta apartment, her bills had doubled. She wasn’t sure when she’d feel safe giving up the house she’d been renting in Clayton County, given the problems with the Atlanta apartment. For starters, she was not even sure it was safe to spend the night there.
A week after school started in August, McNair dropped by the apartment to check whether the landlords had made repairs. At the very least, she wanted more smoke detectors.
She also wanted them to replace the door, which looked like someone had forced it open with a crowbar. She wanted a working fridge and oven. She wanted them to secure the back door to the adjoining empty apartment, which appeared to be open and made her wonder if there were pests or even people squatting there.
But on this day, her keys didn’t work.
She called 911. Had her new landlords deliberately locked her out?
When the police showed up outside the olive-green, Craftsman-style fourplex, McNair scrolled through her phone to find a copy of her lease. Then McNair and the officer eyed a man walking up to the property. “The building was sold in a short sale two weeks ago,” he told McNair. The police officer directed the man to give the new keys to McNair.
The next day, McNair started getting emails from an agent specializing in foreclosures, suggesting the new owners wanted McNair to leave. “The bank owns the property and now you are no longer a tenant of the previous owner,” she wrote. The new owner “might” offer relocation assistance if McNair agreed to leave.
McNair consulted attorneys, who reassured her: It might be uncomfortable, but she could stay. She needed to try to pay rent, even if the new owner didn’t accept it.
So McNair messaged the agent, asking where she should send the rent, and requested the company make necessary repairs. Eventually, the real estate agent stopped responding.
Some problems go away, but others emerge
Finally, McNair moved her kids and a few items from the Jonesboro house to the Atlanta apartment. She didn’t allow Elias to bring his video game console to Atlanta. He started going to bed around 11 p.m. most nights. But even as she solved that problem, others emerged.
It was at Midtown’s back-to-school night in September that McNair learned Elias was behind in most of his classes. Some teachers said maybe Midtown wasn’t the right school for Elias.
Perhaps they were right, McNair thought. She’d heard similar things before.
Sechita McNair, center, rests in the summer heat as she works to repair her family van, while adopted son Derrick McNair-White, 6, right, plays in the driveway of their rented home in Jonesboro, Ga. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
Sechita McNair, center, rests in the summer heat as she works to repair her family van, while adopted son Derrick McNair-White, 6, right, plays in the driveway of their rented home in Jonesboro, Ga. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
Elias also didn’t want to go to school. He skipped one day, then another. McNair panicked. In Georgia, parents can be sent to jail for truancy when their kids miss five unexcused days.
McNair started looking into a homeschooling program run by a mother she follows on Facebook. In the meantime, she emailed and called some Midtown staff for advice. She says she didn’t get a response. Finally, seven weeks after the family’s triumphant return to Midtown, McNair filed papers declaring her intention to homeschool Elias.
It quickly proved challenging. Elias wouldn’t do any schoolwork when he was home alone. And when the homeschooling group met twice a week, she discovered, they required parents to pick up their children afterward instead of allowing them to take public transit or e-scooters. That was untenable.
Elias wanted to stay at home and offered to take care of McNair’s uncle, who has dementia. “That was literally killing my soul the most,” said McNair. “That’s not a child’s job.”
Hell, no, she told him — you only get one chance at high school.
Elias Washington watches a video on his phone as he rests on a bed left by a previous tenant in his family’s new apartment in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
Elias Washington watches a video on his phone as he rests on a bed left by a previous tenant in his family’s new apartment in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
Then, one day, while she was loading the boys’ clothes into the washing machine at the Atlanta apartment, she received a call from an unknown Atlanta number. It was the woman who heads Atlanta Public Schools’ virtual program, telling her the roster was full.
McNair asked the woman for her opinion on Elias’s situation. Maybe she should abandon the Atlanta apartment and enroll him in the Jonesboro high school.
Let me stop you right there, the woman said. Is your son an athlete? If he transfers too many times, it can affect his ability to play basketball. And he’d probably lose credits and take longer to graduate. He needs to be in school — preferably Midtown — studying for midterms, she said. You need to put on your “big mama drawers” and take him back, she told McNair.
The next day, Elias and his mother pulled up to Midtown. Outside the school, Elias asked if he had to go inside. Yes, she told him. This is your fault as much as it’s mine.
Now, with Elias back in school every day, McNair can deliver food through Uber Eats without worrying about a police officer asking why her kid isn’t in school. If only she had pushed harder, sooner, for help with Elias, she thought. “I should have just gone down to the school and sat in their offices until they talked to me.”
Sechita McNair, center, and sons Derrick McNair-White, right, and Malachi McNair-Nesbitt, left, have breakfast on the steps of Midtown High School in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
Sechita McNair, center, and sons Derrick McNair-White, right, and Malachi McNair-Nesbitt, left, have breakfast on the steps of Midtown High School in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
But it was easy for her to explain why she hadn’t. “I was running around doing so many other things just so we have a place to live, or taking care of my uncle, that I didn’t put enough of my energy there.”
She wishes she could pay more attention to Elias. But so many things are pulling at her. And as fall marches toward winter, her struggle continues. After failing to keep up with the Jonesboro rent, she’s preparing to leave that house before the landlord sends people to haul her possessions to the curb.
As an Uber driver, she has picked up a few traumatized mothers with their children after they got evicted. She helped them load the few things they could fit into her van. As they drove off, onlookers scavenged the leftovers.
She has promised herself she’d never let that happen to her kids.
Dotted Line with Center Square
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The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
Vital federal funding is on the way for Head Start centers that were thrown into crisis by the government shutdown, but it could take time before some children who rely on the federal program can return to preschool.
Some centers that missed out on federal payments had to furlough staff. Others had to shut down entirely, destabilizing thousands of needy families around the country. And operators fear it could take weeks more for overdue payments to be processed.
Even when agencies receive long-delayed grant money, centers will have to rehire staff members and bring back families — both of which may have grown wary of instability in the program, which relies almost entirely on federal grants.
“The damage has been done in a lot of ways,” Massachusetts Head Start Association Executive Director Michelle Haimowitz said. “We know that it’s going to take some time to fill back up.”
Head Start serves children from low-income families from birth to age 5. The program offers a variety of services to families, such as early learning, support for children with disabilities, free meals and health screenings.
With the shutdown over, the federal Office of Head Start will expedite funding and contact affected Head Start programs to share when they can expect federal money, said Emily Hilliard, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the program.
Head Start operators anticipate that could take weeks.
Federal workers are returning to “a mountain of work” that will take time to process, Haimowitz said. That doesn’t just include sending out missed grant awards — other paperwork for a range of technical issues has been delayed since layoffs at the Office of Head Start earlier this year, she said.
“Those delays have just been piling up since April, with no fault to the existing civil servants at the Office of Head Start,” Haimowitz said. “They just have half the capacity that they had just a few months ago.”
Families prepare for the worst-case scenario
Depending on how quickly federal workers can send out funds, the backlog in grant renewals could spill over and affect Head Start agencies that are supposed to receive funding in December, operators said. Some of the families who attend those centers are already making preparations for that worst-case scenario.
Gena Storer, who works as a home health aide in Xenia, Ohio, is trying to “make as much money as I possibly can” in case her daughter’s Head Start center closes. The center staff told parents hours before the government reopened that they still expect to shutter temporarily on Dec. 1 if funding is delayed, Storer said.
If the center closes, Storer’s 4-year-old daughter, Zarina, will stay at home until it reopens. Storer will then need to adjust her work hours to make sure she can be home with Zarina while her fiance works 12-hour shifts at a Target distribution center.
Uncertainty about SNAP federal food aid payments has also added stress for Storer’s family. Storer had been working extra hours through the shutdown to help provide for her 72-year-old mother, who also uses SNAP benefits.
“If my mom didn’t have us to help her, what would she do?” the 31-year-old said.
For Storer, Head Start has been more than a reliable option for child care. Zarina used to receive speech therapy to address her lack of speaking. But since starting Head Start in September, Storer said she’s noticed her daughter becoming more talkative and outgoing because she learns from having conversations with her classmates.
Programs pay out-of-pocket to keep doors open
Programs that stayed open without a guarantee of reimbursement by the federal government could also face further financial strains. At Louis Russ’ home day care in Knox County, Indiana, he and his wife are planning a pop-up toy shop out of their garage to offset money they might lose by staying open.
Russ and his wife started operating a day care out of their home in April and partnered soon after with East Coast Migrant Head Start Project, a nonprofit that serves children of migrant farmworkers across 10 states. Six out of the eight children in Russ’ home day care are Head Start-funded.
East Coast Migrant Head Start Project was one of the programs affected by a funding lapse, which resulted in more than 1,000 children being shut out of their centers. Russ and his wife also stopped receiving their Head Start payments at the end of October, but the decision to keep their home open was a “no brainer,” Russ said. Offering the children consistency during an otherwise unpredictable time was important to them, he said.
“Staying open and keep taking the children we have, that was the easy part,” he said. “Figuring out how we’re going to stay open if this goes on too long, that’s the tricky part.”
It’s been tense operating the program without knowing when funding will be released. Russ and his wife already took a pay cut, and they have another employee on the payroll. About three-quarters of their budget is payroll, Russ said, but other expenses like groceries and maintenance needs can stack up quickly without an income.
“Our program, being so new, we were running pretty bare bones as is,” Russ said. “And especially in child care, which doesn’t have a huge profit margin, there’s only so much wiggle room when things like this happen.”
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The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
AI is now at the center of almost every conversation in education technology. It is reshaping how we create content, build assessments, and support learners. The opportunities are enormous. But one quiet risk keeps growing in the background: losing our habit of critical thinking.
I see this risk not as a theory but as something I have felt myself.
The moment I almost outsourced my judgment
A few months ago, I was working on a complex proposal for a client. Pressed for time, I asked an AI tool to draft an analysis of their competitive landscape. The output looked polished and convincing. It was tempting to accept it and move on.
Then I forced myself to pause. I began questioning the sources behind the statements and found a key market shift the model had missed entirely. If I had skipped that short pause, the proposal would have gone out with a blind spot that mattered to the client.
That moment reminded me that AI is fast and useful, but the responsibility for real thinking is still mine. It also showed me how easily convenience can chip away at judgment.
AI as a thinking partner
The most powerful way to use AI is to treat it as a partner that widens the field of ideas while leaving the final call to us. AI can collect data in seconds, sketch multiple paths forward, and expose us to perspectives we might never consider on our own.
In my own work at Magic EdTech, for example, our teams have used AI to quickly analyze thousands of pages of curriculum to flag accessibility issues. The model surfaces patterns and anomalies that would take a human team weeks to find. Yet the real insight comes when we bring educators and designers together to ask why those patterns matter and how they affect real classrooms. AI sets the table, but we still cook the meal.
There is a subtle but critical difference between using AI to replace thinking and using it to stretch thinking. Replacement narrows our skills over time. Stretching builds new mental flexibility. The partner model forces us to ask better questions, weigh trade-offs, and make calls that only human judgment can resolve.
Habits to keep your edge
Protecting critical thinking is not about avoiding AI. It is about building habits that keep our minds active when AI is everywhere.
Here are three I find valuable:
1. Name the fragile assumption Each time you receive AI output, ask: What is one assumption here that could be wrong? Spend a few minutes digging into that. It forces you to reenter the problem space instead of just editing machine text.
2. Run the reverse test Before you adopt an AI-generated idea, imagine the opposite. If the model suggests that adaptive learning is the key to engagement, ask: What if it is not? Exploring the counter-argument often reveals gaps and deeper insights.
3. Slow the first draft It is tempting to let AI draft emails, reports, or code and just sign off. Instead, start with a rough human outline first. Even if it is just bullet points, you anchor the work in your own reasoning and use the model to enrich–not originate–your thinking.
These small practices keep the human at the center of the process and turn AI into a gym for the mind rather than a crutch.
Why this matters for education
For those of us in education technology, the stakes are unusually high. The tools we build help shape how students learn and how teachers teach. If we let critical thinking atrophy inside our companies, we risk passing that weakness to the very people we serve.
Students will increasingly use AI for research, writing, and even tutoring. If the adults designing their digital classrooms accept machine answers without question, we send the message that surface-level synthesis is enough. We would be teaching efficiency at the cost of depth.
By contrast, if we model careful reasoning and thoughtful use of AI, we can help the next generation see these tools for what they are: accelerators of understanding, not replacements for it. AI can help us scale accessibility, personalize instruction, and analyze learning data in ways that were impossible before. But its highest value appears only when it meets human curiosity and judgment.
Building a culture of shared judgment
This is not just an individual challenge. Teams need to build rituals that honor slow thinking in a fast AI environment. Another practice is rotating the role of “critical friend” in meetings. One person’s task is to challenge the group’s AI-assisted conclusions and ask what could go wrong. This simple habit trains everyone to keep their reasoning sharp.
Next time you lean on AI for a key piece of work, pause before you accept the answer. Write down two decisions in that task that only a human can make. It might be about context, ethics, or simple gut judgment. Then share those reflections with your team. Over time this will create a culture where AI supports wisdom rather than diluting it.
The real promise of AI is not that it will think for us, but that it will free us to think at a higher level.
The danger is that we may forget to climb.
The future of education and the integrity of our own work depend on remaining climbers. Let the machines speed the climb, but never let them choose the summit.
Laura Ascione is the Editorial Director at eSchool Media. She is a graduate of the University of Maryland’s prestigious Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
ATLANTA (AP) — When families are evicted, it can lead to major disruptions to their children’s schooling.
Federal law includes provisions to help homeless and evicted kids stay at their schools, but families don’t always know about them — and schools don’t always share the information. Beyond the instability that comes with losing their home, relocating also can deprive kids of networks they rely on for support.
AP followed the year-long quest of one Atlanta mother, Sechita McNair, to find new housing after an eviction. The out-of-work film industry veteran drove extra hours for Uber and borrowed money, eventually securing a lease in the right neighborhood so her eldest son could stay at his high school. At $2,200 a month, it was the only “semi-affordable” apartment in the rapidly gentrifying Old Fourth Ward that would rent to a single mom with a fresh eviction on her record.
Even so, her son was not thriving. McNair considered a homeschooling program before re-enrolling him at the coveted high school. Despite continuing challenges, McNair is determined to provide her three children with better educational opportunities.
Evictions often lead families to schools with fewer resources
Like many evicted families, McNair and her kids went from living in a school district that spends more money on students to one that spends less.
Atlanta spends nearly $20,000 per student a year, $7,000 more than the suburban district the family moved to after they were evicted from their apartment last year. More money in schools means smaller classrooms and more psychologists, guidance counselors and other support.
Thanks to federal laws protecting homeless and evicted students, McNair’s kids were able to keep attending their Atlanta schools, even though the only housing available to them was in another county 40 minutes away. They also had the right to free transportation to those schools, but McNair says the district didn’t tell her about that until the school year ended. Once they found new housing, their eligibility to remain in those schools expired at the end of last school year.
Support systems matter, too
The suburban neighborhood where the family landed after the eviction is filled with brick colonials and manicured lawns. McNair knows it’s the dream for some families, but not hers. “It’s a support desert,” she said.
McNair, who grew up in New Jersey near New York City, sees opportunities in the wider city of Atlanta. She wants to use its libraries, e-scooters, bike paths, hospitals, rental assistance agencies, Buy Nothing groups and food pantries.
“These are all resources that make it possible to raise a family when you don’t have support,” she said. “Wouldn’t anyone want that?”
At night, McNair’s 15-year-old son, Elias, has been responsible for his younger brothers while she heads out to drive for Uber. That’s what is necessary to pay $450 a week to rent the car and earn enough to pay her rent and bills.
But while McNair is out, she can’t monitor Elias. And a few days after he started school, Elias’s all-night gaming habit had already drawn teachers’ attention. As she drove for Uber one night, she couldn’t stop thinking about emails from his teachers. “I should be home making sure Elias gets to bed on time,” she says, crying. “But I have to work. I’m the only one paying the bills.”
Consistency is important for a teen’s learning
McNair attributed some of Elias’s lack of motivation at school to personal trauma. His father died after a heart attack in 2023, on the sidelines of Elias’s basketball practice. Wounded by that loss and multiple housing displacements, Elias failed two classes last year, his freshman year. His mother feared switching schools would jeopardize any chance he had of recovering his academic life.
But after Elias started skipping school this fall, McNair filed papers declaring her intention to homeschool him.
It quickly proved challenging. Elias wouldn’t do any schoolwork when he was home alone. And when the homeschooling group met twice a week, McNair discovered, they required parents to pick up their children afterward instead of allowing them to take public transit or e-scooters. That was untenable.
McNair considered enrolling her son in the suburban school district, but an Atlanta schools official advised against transferring if possible. He needs to be in school — preferably the Atlanta school he has attended — studying for midterms, the official said.
Now, with Elias back in school every day, McNair can deliver food through Uber Eats without worrying about a police officer asking why her kid isn’t in school. If only she had pushed harder, sooner, for help with Elias, she thought.
But it was easy for her to explain why she hadn’t. “I was running around doing so many other things just so we have a place to live, or taking care of my uncle, that I didn’t put enough of my energy there.”
The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
ATLANTA (AP) — As an education reporter, I’ve heard teachers worry that the most pernicious challenges their students face, like poverty or housing insecurity, are beyond the realm of what schools can fix.
I wanted to understand better how the rising cost of housing and the prevalence of eviction could undermine a young person’s ability to thrive in school and in life.
Research shows schoolchildren threatened with eviction are more likely to transfer to another school, often one with less funding, more poverty and lower test scores. They’re more likely to miss school, and those who end up transferring are suspended more often.
I’ve seen this firsthand through my own reporting. A few years ago, when I was writing about students who missed school for months or longer, many of them shared a housing disruption had first kept them out of class. They lost their home, ended up staying with a relative, and didn’t get back in school for weeks or longer.
So I called up a parent organizer in Atlanta who had introduced me to other families struggling with that city’s rapid gentrification.
McNair was one of the easiest people I’ve ever written about because she was a film-industry veteran. She understood my desire to document or understand every step in the process of getting evicted or advocating for her children. I never had to explain why I was asking a question, why I wanted so much detail about where she was when she received a certain phone call, or why I wanted her to send me emails or documents. She’s an open book and sincerely thought others might benefit from reading about her perseverance and resourcefulness.
She also was challenging to write about because her life was extremely complicated. McNair has immense family responsibilities, without support from other relatives, yet she holds a deep belief that things will work out if she just keeps moving. Her situation and plans would change rapidly. Sometimes I struggled to keep up.
I traveled to Atlanta three times over several months to visit McNair, and in between we were in constant touch. I often spoke to her while she drove the kids to and from school or while she picked up orders for Uber Eats. The result is a close-up portrait of life as a single mother trying to swim upstream while carrying three boys on her back.
This is the hardest part: Everything McNair was working toward — getting her kids back into Atlanta — is exactly what researchers would say she should do. She should keep her kids in the same school so they can be in a stable environment.
But so far, it hasn’t been enough.
Bianca Vázquez Toness covers the intersection of education and children’s well-being. She led the nation in showing how many students were missing school after the pandemic, and her work was honored as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Family of student expelled after confronting teen over deepfake nude image plans lawsuit – CBS News
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A Louisiana family plans to file a federal lawsuit against their school district in a case involving a deepfake pornographic image. CBS News national reporter Kati Weis has the details.
Courses that “advocate race or gender ideology, sexual orientation, or gender identity” now require presidential approval at Texas A&M system campuses, the system Board of Regents decided Thursday.
Faculty members and external advocacy groups say the new rules violate academic freedom, and for many professors, questions remain about how the policies will be implemented and enforced. Approved in a unanimous vote after a lengthy public comment period, the policy changes fit a pattern of censorship at Texas A&M that escalated after a video of a student challenging an instructor about a lesson on gender identity went viral, leading to the instructor’s firing and the resignation of then-president Mark Welsh.
Dan Braaten, an associate professor of political science at Texas A&M San Antonio and president of the campus American Association of University Professors chapter, said he was shocked “at the egregiousness” of the policies, but not surprised by them.
“Faculty are extremely worried,” Braaten said. “They’re wondering, can they teach the classes they’re scheduled to teach in the spring? Who’s going to be looking at their syllabi? … Is the president of each A&M university going to have to approve every syllabus? Are there penalties for any of this? It’s just a complete … serious violation of academic freedom.”
The board approved the new rules as revisions to existing system policies. A policy on “Civil Rights Protections and Compliance” will be amended to state that “no system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, sexual orientation, or gender identity unless the course is approved by the member CEO.” It will also define “gender ideology” as “a concept of self-assessed gender identity replacing, and disconnected from, the biological category of sex.”
Similarly, “race ideology” is defined as “a concept that attempts to shame a particular race or ethnicity, accuse them of being oppressors in a racial hierarchy or conspiracy, ascribe to them less value as contributors to society and public discourse because of their race or ethnicity, or assign them intrinsic guilt based on the actions of their presumed ancestors or relatives in other areas of the world. This also includes course content that promotes activism on issues related to race or ethnicity, rather than academic instruction.”
Teaching Versus Advocacy
A previous version of the revision proposed that no system academic course will “teach” race or gender ideology, but the verb was changed to “advocate” before the policies were presented formally to the full board. It’s unclear how the system will differentiate between advocacy and regular instruction on these topics. Representatives for the board on Wednesday declined to comment on the policies ahead of the board vote. They did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s questions after the policies were approved.
A second policy on “Academic Freedom, Responsibility and Tenure” previously stated that “each faculty member is entitled to full freedom in the classroom in discussing the subject that the faculty member teaches, but a faculty member should not introduce a controversial matter that has no relation to the classroom subject.” The approved amendment adds that faculty members may not “teach material that is inconsistent with the approved syllabus for the course.”
In a partially redacted Nov. 10 email obtained by Inside Higher Ed, a Texas A&M faculty leader said that administrators at several universities were already discussing implementation plans ahead of the board vote. An administrator also told the faculty leader that the changes to the policy would not likely lead to a formal syllabus-approval process and instead are intended to keep course content aligned with learning outcomes.
The board received 142 written comments ahead of Thursday’s vote, and eight faculty members spoke out against the policy changes during the meeting’s public comment period. Several of them also called for Melissa McCoul, the professor fired in September, to be reinstated.
“This is not university-level education, it is cruelty and political indoctrination in wolf’s clothing,” said Leonard Bright, a professor of government and public service and president of the Texas A&M College Station AAUP chapter. “I would need to tell my students that ‘What you came here to learn, I’m unable to tell you, because I’m restricted to tell you that information, even though such knowledge is available at every major university in this world.’”
Sonia Hernandez, a liberal arts professor who teaches about Latin American history, shared a past example that highlighted the pitfalls of the new policies.
“I had a student once who took issue with my discussion of the importance of military history. He was against war and felt strongly about war’s damaging effects on society, yet it was full academic freedom—not cherry-picking of topics, not advocacy, not ideology—that allowed me to share research on the intersections of war and identity with my class,” Hernandez said.
Two faculty members—finance professor Adam Kolasinski and biomedical engineering professor John Criscione—spoke in favor of the policy changes.
“I don’t think somebody should be able to say that Germans born two generations after the Holocaust somehow bear guilt for the Holocaust, because that’s really what’s being prohibited here,” Kolasinski said. “My colleagues seem to think that the policy says something it doesn’t.” Kolasinski also suggested the board change the language back from “advocate” to “teach.”
“By considering these policy changes, the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents is telling faculty, ‘Shut up and teach—and we’ll tell you what to teach,’” Evans said in the statement. “This language and the censorship it imposes will cause irreparable harm to the reputation of the university, and impede faculty and students from their main mission on campus: to teach, learn, think critically, and create and share new knowledge.”
In a Monday statement, FIRE officials wrote, “Hiring professors with PhDs is meaningless if administrators are the ones deciding what gets taught … Faculty would need permission to teach students about not just modern controversies, but also civil rights, the Civil War, or even ancient Greek comedies. This is not just bad policy. It invites unlawful censorship, chills academic freedom, and undermines the core purpose of a university. Faculty will start asking not ‘Is this accurate?’ but ‘Will this get me in trouble?’ That’s not education, it’s risk management.”
AI-Driven Course Review
Also on Thursday, the board discussed a detailed, systemwide review of all courses using an artificial intelligence–driven process. The system has already piloted the review process at its Tarleton State University campus, where most of the courses that were flagged are housed in the College of Education, which includes the sociology and psychology departments, the Nov. 10 email from a faculty leader stated. Board members said they intend to complete the course review regularly, as often as once per semester.
“The Texas A&M system is stepping up first, setting the model that others will follow,” Regent Sam Torn said about the course review at Thursday’s meeting.
The system will also use EthicsPoint, an online system that will allow students to report inaccurate, misleading or inappropriate course content that diverges from the course descriptions. System staff will be alerted when a student submits an EthicsPoint complaint, and if the complaint is determined to be valid, it will be passed along to the relevant university.
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Each day, PBS programming fills the airwaves of Alabama Public Television with shows such as “Sesame Street,” “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood,” “Antiques Roadshow” and “PBS Newshour.” Alabamians could lose access to those programs on state airwaves if the Alabama Educational Television Commission opts to become the first state network to sever ties with PBS.
The Alabama commission last month discussed the possibility of dropping PBS and is expected to discuss the matter again its Nov. 18 meeting.
The possibility comes after President Donald Trump and Congress in July withdrew funding for the nonprofit The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides grants to public radio and television, and as some state commissioners accused PBS of being an unneeded expense or politically biased.
“We have to figure out what our options are,” said Ferris W. Stephens, the chairman of the commission. “Before we decide those things, I just think we need a lot more information.” Stephens said he does not expect a vote at the November meeting.
Alabama Public Television Executive Director Wayne Reid said some commissioners asked him to research the possibility and ramifications of ending the contract with PBS. Ending the affiliation would cause APT to lose access to popular programs such as “Sesame Street” and “PBS NewsHour”, as well as its ability to distribute content on streaming platforms. Reid said the state network would have to buy other programming to replace it.
“If we cut ties, all of that would be gone. Right now, we’re doing a ton of research. Everybody here is working on what it would take to replace the things that are affected by PBS,” Reid said.
Reid said he was also asked to research if they could keep PBS but drop the news programs “PBS NewsHour” and “Washington Week.” Reid said the decision ultimately belongs to the commission.
No other statewide network has cut ties with PBS to date, a spokesperson for PBS confirmed.
The possibility prompted a backlash from Alabama public television viewers and donors.
Jennifer Greer, a retired writer and educator, is one of the volunteers helping to mount a postcard campaign to urge the state to keep the PBS affiliation. Preschoolers, students and adults across the state benefit each day from PBS programs, she said.
“When you take one of the most effective tools in the public education toolkit, and you defund it and you make it so only the wealthy can afford it, that’s just responsible. That’s a step backward,” Greer said.
Petitions and posts were shared across social media urging people to “Save PBS for Alabama Children” urging people to attend the upcoming meeting.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting provided about $2.8 million for Alabama Public Television although the money is not directly used to purchase PBS programming. Alabama Public Television pays about $2.2 million to purchase PBS programming. The amount was discounted after the federal funding cut.
Greer and others said they are concerned that dropping PBS would put Alabama Public Television in a downward financial spiral. Public media gets a substantial part of its funding from memberships and donations. “If we separate from PBS, our contributions are going to plummet, and that could jeopardize the stability of the whole operation,” she said.
Commissioners were divided at an Oct. 28 meeting, according to the Alabama Reflector and al.com.
“I just, I don’t want to fund it, PBS has made themselves the enemy of what I stand with, and so I do not like them, and I don’t follow the philosophy of feeding the beast,” commission member Les Barnett said during the meeting according to the Alabama Reflector. Barnett did not return an email from The Associated Press.
J. Holland, another commission member, said he is interested in exploring if the state can begin buying PBS programming on an a la carte basis, picking some shows but not others. The current PBS contract does not allow that.
Pete Conroy, another commission member, said they should keep PBS. He said he is concerned that some commissioners are “acting politically.”
“I know how much PBS programming is used in our public schools, private schools and churches. It’s always about the kids. These children need to be lifted up with this kind of programming,” Conroy said.
In the world of K-12 education, teachers are constantly making decisions that affect their students and families. In contrast, administrators are tasked with something even bigger: making decisions that also involve adults (parents, staff culture, etc.) and preventing conflicts from spiraling into formal complaints or legal issues. Therefore, decisions and actions often have to balance two competing values: truth and risk management.
Some individuals, such as teachers, are very truth-oriented. They document interactions, clarify misunderstandings, and push for accuracy, recognizing that a single misrepresentation can erode trust with families, damage credibility in front of students, or most importantly, remove them from the good graces of administrators they respect and admire. Truth is not an abstract concept–it is paramount to professionalism and reputation. If a student states that they are earning a low grade because “the teacher doesn’t like me,” the teacher will go through their grade-book. If a parent claims that a teacher did not address an incident in the classroom, the teacher may respond by clarifying the inaccuracy via summarizing documentation of student statements, anecdotal evidence of student conversations, reflective activities, etc.
De-escalation and appeasement
In contrast, administrators are tasked with something even bigger. They have to view scenarios from the lens of risk management. Their role requires them to deescalate and appease. Administrators must protect the school’s reputation and prevent conflicts or disagreements from spiraling into formal complaints or legal issues. Through that lens, the truth sometimes takes a back seat to ostensibly achieve a quick resolution.
When a house catches on fire, firefighters point the hose, put out the flames, and move on to their next emergency. They don’t care if the kitchen was recently remodeled; they don’t have the time or desire to figure out a plan to put out the fire by aiming at just the living room, bedrooms, and bathrooms. Administrators can be the same way–they just want the proverbial “fire” contained. They do not care about their employees’ feelings; they just care about smooth sailing and usually softly characterize matters as misunderstandings.
To a classroom teacher who has carefully documented the truth, this injustice can feel like a bow tied around a bag of garbage. Administrators usually err on the side of appeasing the irrational, volatile, and dangerous employee, which risks the calmer employee feeling like they were overlooked because they are “weaker.” In reality, their integrity, professionalism, and level-headedness lead administrators to trust the employee will do right, know better, maintain appropriate decorum, rise above, and not foolishly escalate. This notion aligns to the scripture “To whom much is given, much is required” (Luke 12:48). Those with great abilities are judged at a higher bar.
In essence, administrators do not care about feelings, because they have a job to do. The employee with higher integrity is not the easier target but is easier to redirect because they are the safer, principled, and ethical employee. This is not a weakness but a strength in the eyes of the administration and that is what they prefer (albeit the employee may be dismissed, confused, and their feelings may be hurt, but that is not the administration’s focus at all).
Finding common ground
Neither perspective (truth or risk management) is wrong. Risk management matters. Without it, schools would be replete with endless investigations and finger-pointing. Although, when risk management consistently overrides truth, the system teaches teachers that appearances matter more than accountability, which does not meet the needs of validation and can thus truly hurt on a personal level. However, in the work environment, finding common ground and moving forward is more important than finger-pointing because the priority has to be the children having an optimal learning environment.
We must balance the two. Perhaps, administrators should communicate openly, privately, and directly to educators who may not always understand the “game.” Support and transparency are beneficial. Explaining the “why” behind a decision can go a long way in building staff trust, morale, and intelligence. Further, when teachers feel supported in their honesty, they are less likely to disengage because transparency, accuracy, and an explanation of risk management can actually prevent fires from igniting in the first place. Additionally, teachers and administrators should explore conflict resolution strategies that honor truth while still mitigating risk. This can assist in modelling for students what it means to live with integrity in complex situations. Kids deserve nothing less.
Lastly, teachers need to be empathetic to the demands on their administrators. “If someone falls into sin, forgivingly restore him, saving your critical comments for yourself. You might be needing forgiveness before the day’s out. Stoop down and reach out to those who are oppressed. Share their burdens, and so complete Christ’s law. If you think you are too good for that, you are badly deceived” (Galatians 6:1-3). This scripture means that teachers should focus less on criticizing or “keeping score” (irrespective of the truth and the facts, and even if false-facts are generated to manage risk), but should work collaboratively while also remembering and recognizing that our colleagues (and even administrators) can benefit from the simple support of our grace and understanding. Newer colleagues and administrators are often in survival mode.
Dr. Yuvraj Verma, Bessemer City Middle School and William Howard Taft University
