OpenAI is reportedly telling investors that it plans on charging $22 a month to use ChatGPT by the end of the year. The company also plans to aggressively increase the monthly price over the next five years up to $44.
The documents obtained by shows that OpenAI took in $300 million in revenue this August, and expects to make $3.7 billion in sales by the end of the year. Various expenses such as salaries, rent and operational costs will cause the company to lose $5 billion this year.
OpenAI is reportedly circulating the documents the NYT reported on as part of a drive to find new investors to prevent or lessen its financial shortfall. Fortunately, OpenAI is raising money on a $150 billion valuation, and a new round of investments could bring in as much as $7 billion.
OpenAI is also reportedly in the midst of switching from . The business model allows for the removal of any caps on investor returns so they’ll have more room to negotiate for new investors at possibly higher rates.
This story is a collaboration between Grist and High Country News and is reprinted with permission.
On a wet spring day in June, fog shrouded the Mission Mountains on the Flathead Indian Reservation in northwest Montana. Silver beads of rain clung to blades of grass and purple lupine. On a ridge overlooking St. Mary’s Lake in the southeastern corner of the reservation, the land was mostly cleared of trees after state-managed logging operations. Some trees remained, mainly firs and pines, spindly things that once grew in close quarters but now looked exposed without their neighbors.
Viewed from the sky, the logged parcel was strikingly square despite the mountainous terrain. It stood in contrast to the adjacent, tribally managed forest, where timber operations followed the topographic contours of watersheds and ridgelines or imitated fire scars from lightning strikes.
“It’s not that they’re mismanaging everything, but their management philosophy and scheme do not align with ours,” said Tony Incashola Jr., the director of tribal resources for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, or CSKT, as he looked out the window of his Jeep at the landscape. “Their tactics sometimes don’t align with ours, which in turn affects our capability of managing our land.”
This nearly clear-cut, 640-acre parcel is state trust land and is a small part of the 108,886 state-owned acres, above- and belowground, scattered across the reservation — this despite the tribal nation’s sovereign status.
The Douglas fir and ponderosa pine trees that remained in the square would thrive on the occasional fire and controlled burn after logging operations, benefiting the next generation of trees. Instead, the area was unburned, and shrubs crowded the ground. “I see this stand right here looking the exact same in 20 years,” said Incashola. It’s his first time being on this land, despite a lifetime on the reservation — because it’s state land, the gate has always been locked.
State trust lands, on and off Indian reservations, make up millions of acres across the Western United States and generate revenue for public schools, universities, jails, hospitals and other public institutions by leasing them for oil and gas extraction, grazing, rights of way, timber, and more. The state of Montana, for example, manages 5.2 million surface acres and 6.2 million subsurface acres, a term pertaining to oil, gas, minerals, and other underground resources, which distributed $62 million to public institutions in 2023. The majority of that money went to K-12 schools — institutions serving primarily non-Indigenous people.
States received many of these trust lands upon achieving statehood, but more were taken from tribal nations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries through a federal policy of allotment, in which reservations were forcibly cut up into small parcels in an effort to make Indigenous peoples farmers and landowners. The policy allowed for about 90 million acres of reservation lands nationwide to move to non-Indigenous ownership. On the Flathead Reservation, allotment dispossessed the CSKT of a million acres, more than 60,000 of which were taken to fund schools.
But the Flathead Reservation is just one reservation checkerboarded by state trust lands.
To understand how land and resources taken from Indigenous peoples and nations continue to enrich non-Indigenous citizens, Grist and High Country News used publicly available data to identify which reservations have been impacted by state trust land laws and policies; researched the state institutions benefiting from these lands; and compiled data on many of the companies and individuals leasing the land on those reservations.
Tony Incashola Jr., Director of Tribal Resource Management for CSKT looks out at state-owned parcels from an airplane on August 8, 2024. Credit: Tailyr Irvine / Grist / High Country News
Altogether, we located more than 2 million surface and subsurface acres of land on 79 reservations in 15 states that are used to support public institutions and reduce the financial burden on taxpayers. In at least four states, five tribal nations themselves are the lessees — paying the state for access to, collectively, more than 57,700 acres of land within their own reservation borders.
However, due to instances of outdated and inconsistent data from federal, state, and tribal cartographic sources, our analysis may include lands that do not neatly align with some borders and ownership claims. As a result, our analysis may be off by a few hundred acres. In consultation with tribal and state officials, we have filtered, clipped, expanded, and otherwise standardized multiple data sets with the recognition that in many cases, more accurate land surveying is necessary.
The state trust lands that came from sanctioned land grabs of the early 20th century helped bolster state economies and continue to underwrite non-Indian institutions while infringing on tribal sovereignty. “The justification for them is very old. It goes back to, really, the founding of the U.S.,” said Miriam Jorgensen, research director for the Harvard Project on Indigenous Governance and Development. The goal, she said, was to help settlers and their families gain a firmer foothold in the Western U.S. by funding schools and hospitals for them. “There’s definitely a colonial imperative in the existence of those lands.”
Although tribal citizens are a part of the public those institutions are supposed to serve, their services often fall short. On the Flathead Reservation, for example, Indigenous youth attend public schools funded in part by state trust lands inside the nation’s boundaries. However, the state is currently being sued by the CSKT, as well as five other tribes, over the state’s failure over decades to adequately teach Indigenous curriculum despite a state mandate to do so. Arlee High School is a public school on the Flathead Reservation. Six tribes, including CKST, have sued the state of Montana for failing to implement its Indian Education for All curriculum in public schools over the past few decades, despite a mandate to do so.
Since 2022, the CSKT and the state of Montana have been negotiating a land exchange in which the tribe will see some 29,200 acres of state trust lands on the reservation returned, which could include the logged, 640-acre parcel near St. Mary’s Lake. In the trade, Montana will receive federal lands from the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture, or potentially both, elsewhere in the state. Such a return has been “the want of our ancestors and the want of our tribal leaders since they were taken,” Incashola said. “It’s not a want for ownership, it’s a want for protection of resources, for making us whole again to manage our forests again the way we want to manage them.”
Tribal nations and states have struggled with state and federal governments over jurisdiction and land since the inception of the United States, says Alex Pearl, who is Chickasaw and a professor of law at the University of Oklahoma. But the potential return of state trust lands represents an opportunity for LandBack on a broad scale: an actionable step toward reckoning with the ongoing dispossession of territories meant to be reserved for tribes. “The LandBack movement that started as protests has become a viable policy, legally,” Pearl said.
The Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation is one of the largest reservations in the U.S., stretching 4.5 million acres across the northeastern corner of Utah. But on closer look, the reservation is checkerboarded, thanks to allotment, with multiple land claims on the reservation by individuals, corporations, and the state of Utah. Altogether, the Ute Tribe oversees about a quarter of its reservation.
The state of Utah owns more than 511,000 surface and subsurface acres of trust lands within the reservation’s borders. And of those acres, the Ute Tribe is leasing 47,000 — nearly 20 percent of all surface trust land acreage on the reservation — for grazing purposes, paying the state to use land well within its own territorial boundaries. According to Utah’s Trust Lands Administration, the agency responsible for managing state trust lands, a grazing permit for a 640-acre plot runs around $300. In the last year alone, the Utes have paid the state more than $25,000 to graze on trust lands on the reservation.
Of all the Indigenous nations in the U.S. that pay states to utilize their own lands, the Ute Tribe leases back the highest number of acres. And while not all states have publicly accessible lessee information with land-use records, of the ones that did, Grist and High Country News found that at least four other tribes also lease nearly 11,000 acres, combined, on their own reservations: the Southern Ute Tribe, Navajo Nation, Pueblo of Laguna, and Zuni Tribe. According to state records, almost all of these tribally leased lands — 99.5 percent — are used for agriculture and grazing.
The Pueblo of Laguna, Zuni, part of the Navajo Reservation, and Ramah Navajo, a chapter of Navajo Nation, are located in the state of New Mexico, which owns nearly 143,000 surface and subsurface acres of state trust lands across a total of 13 reservations. The Navajo Nation leases all 218 acres of New Mexico state trust lands on its reservation, while the Ramah Navajo leases 17 percent of the 24,600 surface state trust land acres within its reservation’s borders. The Pueblo of Laguna leases more than half of the 11,200 surface trust land acres in its territory, while the Zuni Tribe leases 37 of the 60 surface trust land acres located on its reservation. The nations did not comment by press time.
Cris Stainbrook, president of the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, said that for tribes, the cost of leasing state trust lands on their reservations for grazing and agriculture is likely lower than what it would cost to fight for ownership of those lands. But, he added, those lands never should have been taken from tribal ownership in the first place.
“Is it wrong? Is it fundamentally wrong to have to lease what should be your own land? Yes,” said Stainbrook. “But the reality of the situation is, the chances of having the federal or state governments return it is low.”
A clear line divides forest managed by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribe and recently harvested state-owned land. Credit: Tailyr Irvine / Grist / High Country News
In theory, tribal nations share access to public resources funded by state trust lands, but that isn’t always the case. For example, Native students tend to fare worse in U.S. public schools, and some don’t attend state-run schools at all. Instead, they enroll in Bureau of Indian Education schools, a system of nearly 200 institutions on 64 reservations that receive funding from the federal government, not state trust lands.
Beneficiaries, including public schools, get revenue generated from a variety of activities, including leases for roads and infrastructure, solar panel installations, and commercial projects. Fossil fuel infrastructure or activity is present on roughly a sixth of on-reservation trust lands nationwide.
While state agencies can exchange trust lands on reservations for federal lands off-reservation, the process is complicated by the state’s legal obligation to produce as much money as possible from trust lands for its beneficiaries. Still, some states are attempting to create statewide systematic processes for returning trust lands.
At the forefront are Washington, which is currently implementing legislation to return lands, and North Dakota, which is moving new legislation through Congress for the same purpose. But because of the lands’ value and the states’ financial obligations, it’s difficult to transfer complete jurisdiction back to Indigenous nations. Trust lands must be swapped for land of equal or greater value, which tends to mean that a transfer is only possible if the land in question doesn’t produce much revenue.
That’s the case with Washington’s Trust Land Transfer program, which facilitates exchanges of land that the state’s Department of Natural Resources, or DNR, deems unproductive. Those lands are designated as “unproductive” because they might not generate enough revenue to cover maintenance costs, have limited or unsustainable resource extraction, or have resources that are physically inaccessible. A 540-acre plot of land that was transferred to the state Department of Fish and Wildlife in a 2022 pilot program was considered financially unproductive because “the parcel is too sparsely forested for timber harvest, its soils and topography are not suitable for agriculture, it offers low potential for grazing revenue, it is too small for industrial-scale solar power generation, and it is located too close to the 20,000-acre Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge for wind power generation.”
Currently, Washington’s state constitution does not allow for the exchange of subsurface acreage; the DNR retains mineral rights to state trust lands even after exchange. Transfers are funded by the state, with the Legislature paying the DNR the value of the land to be exchanged so the agency can then purchase new land. The value of all the lands that can be exchanged is capped at $30 million every two years.
Even that money isn’t guaranteed: The legislature isn’t obligated to approve the funding for transfers. Additionally, the program is not focused solely on exchanges with Indigenous nations; any public entity can apply for a land transfer. Through the pilot program in 2022, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, Department of Natural Resources, and Kitsap County received a total of 4,425 acres of federal land valued at more than $17 million in exchange for unproductive trust lands. All three entities proposed using the land to establish fish and wildlife habitat, natural areas, and open space and recreation. None of the proposed projects in the pilot program had tribes listed as receiving agencies for land transfer. However, six of the eight proposals up for funding between 2025 and 2027 would be transferred to tribal nations.
In North Dakota, the Trust Lands Completion Act would allow the state to exchange surface state trust lands on reservations for more accessible federal land or mineral rights elsewhere. The legislation made it through committee in the U.S. Senate last year and, this fall, state officials hope to couple it with bigger land-use bills to pass through the Senate and then the House.
But one of the legislation’s main caveats is that it, like Washington, excludes subsurface acres: North Dakota’s constitution also prohibits ceding mineral rights. North Dakota currently owns 31,000 surface and 200,000 subsurface acres of trust lands on reservations. State Commissioner of University and School Lands Joe Heringer said that returning state trust lands with mineral development would be complicated because of existing development projects and financial agreements.
Right now, the only mineral development happening on reservation-bound state trust lands is on the Fort Berthold Reservation in the state’s northwestern corner, with the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, also known as the Three Affiliated Tribes.
Initial oil and gas leases are about five years, but they can stay in place for decades if they start producing within that time. “There’s already all sorts of leases and contracts in place that could get really, really messy,” Heringer said.
By design, subsurface rights are superior to surface rights. If land ownership is split — if a tribe, for instance, owns the surface rights while an oil company owns the subsurface rights — the subsurface owner can access its resources, even though the process might be complicated, regardless of what the surface owner wants.
“It’s not worthless, but it’s close to it,” Stainbrook said of returning surface rights without subsurface rights.
Still, Stainbrook acknowledges that programs to return state trust lands are meaningful because they consolidate surface ownership and jurisdiction and allow tribes to decide surface land use. Plus, he said, there’s a lot of land without subsurface resources to extract, meaning it would be left intact. But split ownership, with tribes owning surface rights and non-tribal entities holding subsurface rights, prevents tribes from fully making their own choices about resource use and management on their lands. And states are not required to consult with tribes on how these lands are used.
“In the sense of tribal sovereignty, it has not increased tribal sovereignty,” Stainbrook said. “In fact, I mean, it’s pretty much the status quo.”
Of the 79 reservations that have state trust lands within their boundaries, tribal governments of 49 of them have received federal Tribal Climate Resilience awards since 2011. These awards are designed to fund and assist tribes in creating adaptation plans and conducting vulnerability and risk assessments as climate change increasingly threatens their homes. But with the existence of state trust lands inside reservation boundaries, coupled with state-driven resource extraction, many tribal governments face hard limits when trying to enact climate mitigation policies — regardless of how much money the federal government puts toward the problem.
In 2023, a wildfire swept the Flathead Reservation, just west of Flathead Lake. Afterwards, the CSKT and the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, which manages the state’s trust lands, discussed salvage timber operations — in which marketable logs are taken from wildfire-burned forests — on two affected state trust land parcels, both inside the reservation. The tribe approved a road permit for the state to access and salvage logs on one parcel, but not the other, since it wasn’t as impacted by the fire. Later, the tribe found out that the state had gone ahead with salvage operations on the second parcel, bypassing the need for a tribal road permit by accessing it through an adjacent private property.
That lack of communication and difference in management strategies is evident on other state trust lands on the reservation: One logged state parcel is adjacent to a sensitive elk calving ground, while another parcel, logged in 2020, sits atop a ridgeline and impacts multiple streams with bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout. The uniformity and scale of the state logging — and the prioritization of profit and yield — do not align with the tribes’ forestry plans, which are tied to cultural values and use of land, Incashola said. “Sometimes the placement of (trust lands) affects cultural practices, or precludes cultural practices from happening on those tracts,” he said. “We can’t do anything about it, because they have the right to manage their land.”
Montana’s Department of Natural Resources and Conservation did not make anyone available to interview for this story, but answered some questions by email and said in a statement that the department “has worked with our Tribal Nations to ensure these lands are stewarded to provide the trust land beneficiaries the full market value for use as required by the State of Montana’s Constitution and the enabling legislation from Congress that created these trust lands.”
While logging used to be the tribe’s main income source, it has diversified its income streams since the 1990s. Now, the tribe’s long-term goal is for its forests to return to pre-settler conditions and to build climate resiliency by actively managing them with fire. The state’s Montana Climate Solutions Plan from 2020 acknowledged the CSKT as a leader on climate and recommended that the state support tribal nations in climate resilience adaptation. However, that suggestion remains at odds with the state’s management of, and profit from, reservation lands. The 640-acre parcel near the Mission Mountains that Incashola had never been able to visit because of the locked gate, for example, abuts tribal wilderness and is considered a sensitive area. Since 2015, the state has made $775,387.82 from logging that area.
The legislation that included the Montana-CSKT land exchange passed in 2020, but progress has been slow. The exchange doesn’t include all the state trust land on the reservation, which means the selection process of those acres is ongoing. The lands within the tribally protected areas, as well as those near the Mission Mountain Wilderness, are of high priority for the CSKT. There are some state lands that are ineligible, such as those that do not border tribal land. But the state has also interpreted the legislation to exclude subsurface acres that could be used for mining or other extractive activities. The tribe is steadfast that subsurface acres are included in the legislation. The impasse has complicated negotiations.
“It’s out-and-out land theft,” said Minnesota State Senator Mary Kunesh of state trust lands on reservations. Kunesh, a descendant of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, has authored two bills that returned state land to tribes, each with a decade or more of advocacy behind it.
On the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe’s reservation in Minnesota, for example, the tribe owns only about 5 percent of the reservation, although federal legislation recently returned more than 11,000 acres of illegally taken national forest. Meanwhile, the state owns about 17 percent. That ownership has an impact. Tribes in Minnesota do not receive revenue from state trust lands on their reservations, nor do tribal schools, Kunesh says. “Hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars that could have perhaps been used to educate, to create housing, to create economic opportunity have been lost to the tribes,” Kunesh said. Still, “it’s not that the tribes want money. They want the land.”
Land return is contentious, but Kunesh has seen support for it from people of all backgrounds while working to pass legislation. “We do need our non-Native communities to stand up and speak the truth as they see it when it comes to returning the lands, and any kind of compensation, back to the tribes.”
But those land returns will also require political support from senators and representatives at both the state and federal level. “Ultimately, it is up to Congress to work with States and other affected interests to find solutions to these land management issues,” the National Association of State Trust Lands’ executive committee said in an email.
In some states, legislators have indicated strong resistance. Utah lawmakers passed a law this year that allows the state’s Trust Land Administration to avoid advertising state land sales. The law gives Utah’s Department of Natural Resources the ability to buy trust land at fair market value, ultimately avoiding possible bidding wars with other entities, like tribes. The legislation came after the Ute Indian Tribe outbid the Department of Natural Resources when trying to buy back almost 30,000 acres of state trust land on their reservation.
“It’s going to have to take the general public to get up in arms over it and say, ‘This is just morally wrong,’” said Stainbrook of the Indian Land Tenure Foundation. “We haven’t gotten to that point where enough people are standing up and saying that.”
Near the southeast edge of the Flathead Reservation is a place called Jocko Prairie — though it hasn’t looked like a prairie for some time — with stands of large ponderosa pines and other trees crowding in, a result of federal fire-suppression practices on tribal lands. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes have worked to restore the prairie by keeping out cattle, removing smaller trees, and reintroducing fire. Land that was once crowded with thickets of brush is now opening up, and as more sunlight reaches the ground, grasses and flowers have come back.
This year in early June, a sea of blue-purple camas spread out on the ground under the trees, reactivated by fire after decades of lying dormant. It was a return.
This story is a collaboration between Grist and High Country News and is reprinted with permission.
This story was reported and written by Anna V. Smith and Maria Parazo Rose. Data reporting was done by Maria Parazo Rose, Clayton Aldern, and Parker Ziegler. Aldern and Ziegler also produced data visuals and interactives.
Original photography for this project was done by Tailyr Irvine. Roberto (Bear) Guerra and Teresa Chin supervised art direction. Luna Anna Archey designed the magazine layout for High Country News. Rachel Glickhouse coordinated partnerships.
This project was edited by Tristan Ahtone and Kate Schimel. Additional editing by Jennifer Sahn and Katherine Lanpher. Kate Schimel and Jaime Buerger managed production. Meredith Clark did fact-checking, and Annie Fu fact-checked the project’s data. Copy editing by Diane Sylvain.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
The Biden administration submitted a special request to congressional committees in August asking for a boost to funding for the U.S. Secret Service in the weeks leading up to and after the 2024 election, according to sources familiar with the matter, warning of “insufficient resources” for the agency if the request isn’t granted.The Office of Management and Budget submitted the so-called anomaly request, which includes the White House’s proposed additions to the standard contents of a short-term funding bill, after the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, the sources told CNN.Congress and the White House are largely expected to negotiate a deal in the coming weeks to fund the government for a period of several months, lasting at least through the election, through a package known as a continuing resolution, or “CR.”The White House’s funding request, sources said, notes that if the change is not granted, the Secret Service would have “insufficient resources to sustain and enhance protective operations” during that period of time.A detailed amount of ramped-up spending was not specified in the request, which called instead for more flexible language that allows the Department of Homeland Security to provide funding “at a rate of operations necessary to continue protective and presidential campaign operations during the CR period.”Federal agencies customarily submit such requests to the Office of Management and Budget ahead of negotiations over short-term government funding. They detail an administration’s desired sidebars to the standard language of a continuing resolution, often serving as a warning that certain programs could be under-resourced if funding stayed at the prior year’s levels, even for a short period of time.In prior years, the administration has bundled these requests with supplemental funding for disaster relief, COVID-19 and military aid for Ukraine, which made them more politically unpalatable on Capitol Hill.The language proposed by the Biden administration for enhanced Secret Service funding through the 2024 election has appeared in at least one Republican-sponsored funding bill, lending credence to the belief that such an effort would see bipartisan support on the Hill.In a radio interview that aired Tuesday, President Joe Biden reiterated his belief that the Secret Service needs more personnel to handle an elevated threat environment for political candidates.”One of the things is we need more resources,” Biden said. “We need more agents, we need more protection, we need to expand the availability of help.”Biden described the climate as “up across the board,” describing how increased security had changed his style of campaigning.”Everything’s frightening,” he said.
The Biden administration submitted a special request to congressional committees in August asking for a boost to funding for the U.S. Secret Service in the weeks leading up to and after the 2024 election, according to sources familiar with the matter, warning of “insufficient resources” for the agency if the request isn’t granted.
The Office of Management and Budget submitted the so-called anomaly request, which includes the White House’s proposed additions to the standard contents of a short-term funding bill, after the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, the sources told CNN.
Congress and the White House are largely expected to negotiate a deal in the coming weeks to fund the government for a period of several months, lasting at least through the election, through a package known as a continuing resolution, or “CR.”
The White House’s funding request, sources said, notes that if the change is not granted, the Secret Service would have “insufficient resources to sustain and enhance protective operations” during that period of time.
A detailed amount of ramped-up spending was not specified in the request, which called instead for more flexible language that allows the Department of Homeland Security to provide funding “at a rate of operations necessary to continue protective and presidential campaign operations during the CR period.”
Federal agencies customarily submit such requests to the Office of Management and Budget ahead of negotiations over short-term government funding. They detail an administration’s desired sidebars to the standard language of a continuing resolution, often serving as a warning that certain programs could be under-resourced if funding stayed at the prior year’s levels, even for a short period of time.
In prior years, the administration has bundled these requests with supplemental funding for disaster relief, COVID-19 and military aid for Ukraine, which made them more politically unpalatable on Capitol Hill.
The language proposed by the Biden administration for enhanced Secret Service funding through the 2024 election has appeared in at least one Republican-sponsored funding bill, lending credence to the belief that such an effort would see bipartisan support on the Hill.
In a radio interview that aired Tuesday, President Joe Biden reiterated his belief that the Secret Service needs more personnel to handle an elevated threat environment for political candidates.
“One of the things is we need more resources,” Biden said. “We need more agents, we need more protection, we need to expand the availability of help.”
Biden described the climate as “up across the board,” describing how increased security had changed his style of campaigning.
Educators around the country are scrambling to save jobs and programs created in the last few years as they face the end of the federal funds aimed at helping schools recover from the pandemic.
The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund gave districts nearly $200 billion. School systems leveraged these funds to pay for high-dosage tutoring, early literacy support, leadership development, enhanced counseling, expanded student exposure to career pathways and other endeavors. But when access to that money ends later this year, school administrators will face stark choices. To make a difference now, they will have to do even more with less resources as their students continue to struggle.
That means coming up with answers to some tough questions. Can educators free up essential resources from ineffective programs and nonstrategic professional development? Will they close buildings that have dwindling numbers of students? Should states put money into a coalition to expand evidence-based reforms? How should school leaders address funding inequities and invest in historically marginalized students?
School administrators cannot rely on existing strategies and instead should use the lessons learned from the last few years to boldly envision and invest in the future. The task will not be an easy one because the education field is obsessed with shiny new objects when we should be investing more in leaders and systems advancing the hard work that will drive scalable innovation.
Related: Widen your perspective. Our free biweekly newsletter consults critical voices on innovation in education.
In Ector County, Texas, student achievement rose after the district reorganized to focus on talent development and rigorous academics. The district also dramatically increased internship and associate degree credit opportunities.
In Oklahoma City, the district consolidated schools before the pandemic, and it has used the savings to invest in instruction, student support, leadership development and popular student programs that focus on technology. These purposeful actions led to the start of overdue academic gains, decreasing the number of underperforming schools from 30 to 10, increasing districtwide proficiency in 14 of 14 tested areas in grades 3 to 8, and ensuring every high school achieves growth on the ACT.
In Englewood, Colorado, an intensive focus on instructional leadership and systems helped every school that had been placed on the state’s accountability watch list move to good standing, and one of those schools received the state’s highest rating.
As part of UVA-PLE’s 20th anniversary, we closely examined recent successful system change efforts to better understand what leaders need to do next. We found that our most successful partners are more responsive to the reality of schools, teachers and students and collectively display three attributes:
They ignite action with a compelling vision and a willingness to disrupt the system. Leaders face up to harsh realities, drive focus and allocate resources to where change is possible.
They build coalitions for sustained effort. Enduring change can’t be top down or bottom up but must include administrators, teachers, students and the larger community.
They lead the learning and embrace evidence. Leadership teams consider opportunities and risk-taking with a data-driven approach so that they can understand and amplify what is working.
Today, our instructional supports are often not interconnected, our tutoring efforts are typically not complementing instruction and our students are not given enough rigorous learning experiences to expand their postsecondary opportunities.
States and funders can play a critical role in system change by drawing attention to and expanding effective efforts like those mentioned above. Today, too much attention is being paid to issues that may or may not lead to long-term transformation but are very unlikely to help current students. That must change. Emerging AI efforts, for example, show great promise but, like past technological innovations, will have negligible student impact unless leaders design them with greater attention to coherence and rollout.
We need to invest more in initiatives that promise to advance educational outcomes and opportunity now and lay a stronger foundation for future ingenuity. And no matter the challenge, leaders must be supported as they make tough choices and reimagine resource allocation.
Rather than fear the end of ESSER funds, we see it as a galvanizing moment. Now is a time to invest resources boldly in successful strategies and in leaders who are ready to insist that teams work together to achieve compelling results.
William Robinson is executive director of the University of Virginia Partnership for Leaders in Education (UVA-PLE).
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Reports about schools squandering their $190 billion in federal pandemic recovery money have been troubling. Many districts spent that money on things that had nothing to do with academics, particularly building renovations. Less common, but more eye-popping were stories about new football fields, swimming pool passes, hotel rooms at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas and even the purchase of an ice cream truck.
So I was surprised that two independent academic analyses released in June 2024 found that some of the money actually trickled down to students and helped them catch up academically. Though the two studies used different methods, they arrived at strikingly similar numbers for the average growth in math and reading scores during the 2022-23 school year that could be attributed to each dollar of federal aid.
One of the research teams, which includes Harvard University economist Tom Kane and Stanford University sociologist Sean Reardon, likened the gains to six days of learning in math and three days of learning in reading for every $1,000 in federal pandemic aid per student. Though that gain might seem small, high-poverty districts received an average of $7,700 per student, and those extra “days” of learning for low-income students added up. Still, these neediest children were projected to be one third of a grade level behind low-income students in 2019, before the pandemic disrupted education.
“Federal funding helped and it helped kids most in need,” wrote Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, on X in response to the two studies. Lake was not involved in either report, but has been closely tracking pandemic recovery. “And the spending was worth the gains,” Lake added. “But it will not be enough to do all that is needed.”
The academic gains per aid dollar were close to what previous researchers had found for increases in school spending. In other words, federal pandemic aid for schools has been just as effective (or ineffective) as other infusions of money for schools. The Harvard-Stanford analysis calculated that the seemingly small academic gains per $1,000 could boost a student’s lifetime earnings by $1,238 – not a dramatic payoff, but not a public policy bust either. And that payoff doesn’t include other societal benefits from higher academic achievement, such as lower rates of arrests and teen motherhood.
The most interesting nuggets from the two reports, however, were how the academic gains varied wildly across the nation. That’s not only because some schools used the money more effectively than others but also because some schools got much more aid per student.
The poorest districts in the nation, where 80 percent or more of the students live in families whose income is low enough to qualify for the federally funded school lunch program, demonstrated meaningful recovery because they received the most aid. About 6 percent of the 26 million public schoolchildren that the researchers studied are educated in districts this poor. These children had recovered almost half of their pandemic learning losses by the spring of 2023. The very poorest districts, representing 1 percent of the children, were potentially on track for an almost complete recovery in 2024 because they tended to receive the most aid per student. However, these students were far below grade level before the pandemic, so their recovery brings them back to a very low rung.
Some high-poverty school districts received much more aid per student than others. At the top end of the range, students in Detroit received about $26,000 each – $1.3 billion spread among fewer than 49,000 students. One in 10 high-poverty districts received more than $10,700 for each student. An equal number of high-poverty districts received less than $3,700 per student. These surprising differences for places with similar poverty levels occurred because pandemic aid was allocated according to the same byzantine rules that govern federal Title I funding to low-income schools. Those formulas give large minimum grants to small states, and more money to states that spend more per student.
On the other end of the income spectrum are wealthier districts, where 30 percent or fewer students qualify for the lunch program, representing about a quarter of U.S. children. The Harvard-Stanford researchers expect these students to make an almost complete recovery. That’s not because of federal recovery funds; these districts received less than $1,000 per student, on average. Researchers explained that these students are on track to approach 2019 achievement levels because they didn’t suffer as much learning loss. Wealthier families also had the means to hire tutors or time to help their children at home.
Middle-income districts, where between 30 percent and 80 percent of students are eligible for the lunch program, were caught in between. Roughly seven out of 10 children in this study fall into this category. Their learning losses were sometimes large, but their pandemic aid wasn’t. They tended to receive between $1,000 and $5,000 per student. Many of these students are still struggling to catch up.
In the second study, researchers Dan Goldhaber of the American Institutes for Research and Grace Falken of the University of Washington estimated that schools around the country, on average, would need an additional $13,000 per student for full recovery in reading and math. That’s more than Congress appropriated.
There were signs that schools targeted interventions to their neediest students. In school districts that separately reported performance for low-income students, these students tended to post greater recovery per dollar of aid than wealthier students, the Goldhaber-Falken analysis shows.
Impact differed more by race, location and school spending. Districts with larger shares of white students tended to make greater achievement gains per dollar of federal aid than districts with larger shares of Black or Hispanic students. Small towns tended to produce more academic gains per dollar of aid than large cities. And school districts that spend less on education per pupil tended to see more academic gains per dollar of aid than high spenders. The latter makes sense: an extra dollar to a small budget makes a bigger difference than an extra dollar to a large budget.
The most frustrating part of both reports is that we have no idea what schools did to help students catch up. Researchers weren’t able to connect the academic gains to tutoring, summer school or any of the other interventions that schools have been trying. Schools still have until September to decide how to spend their remaining pandemic recovery funds, and, unfortunately, these analyses provide zero guidance.
And maybe some of the non-academic things that schools spent money on weren’t so frivolous after all. A draft paper circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research in January 2024 calculated that school spending on basic infrastructure, such as air conditioning and heating systems, raised test scores. Spending on athletic facilities did not.
Meanwhile, the final score on pandemic recovery for students is still to come. I’ll be looking out for it.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Adept, a startup developing AI-powered “agents” to complete various software-based tasks, has agreed to license its tech to Amazon and the startup’s co-founders and portions of its team have joined the ecommerce giant.
Geekwire’s Taylor Soper first reported the news. According to Soper, Adept co-founder and CEO David Luan will join Amazon, along with Adept co-founders Augustus Odena, Maxwell Nye, Erich Elsen and Kelsey Szot and other Adept employees.
Adept isn’t closing up shop, however. Zach Brock, head of engineering, is taking over as CEO as Adept refocuses its efforts on “solutions that enable agentic AI.”
“[Our products] will continue to be powered by a combination of our existing state-of-the-art in-house [AI] models, agentic data, web interaction software and custom infrastructure,” Adept wrote in a post on its official blog. “Continuing with Adept’s initial plan of building both useful general intelligence and an enterprise agent product would’ve required spending significant attention on fundraising for our foundation models, rather than bringing to life our agent vision.”
The deal provides a lifeline for Adept, which has reportedly been in talks with Meta and Microsoft over the past few months about a potential acquisition. Microsoft previously invested in the startup.
As for Amazon, it gets valuable talent — and tech to bolster its generative AI ambitions. Geekwire reports that Luan will work under Rohit Prasad, the former Alexa head who’s leading a new AGI team focused on building large language models.
“David and his team’s expertise in training state-of-the-art multimodal foundational models and building real-world digital agents aligns with our vision to delight consumer and enterprise customers with practical AI solutions,” Prasad wrote in a memo to employees obtained by Geekwire. “[The license] will accelerate our roadmap for building digital agents that can automate software workflows.”
Adept was founded two years ago with the goal of creating an AI model that can perform actions on any software tool using natural language. At a high level, the vision — a vision now shared by OpenAI, Rabbit and others — was to create an “AI teammate” of sorts trained to use a wide variety of different software tools and APIs.
Adept managed to win over backers including Nvidia, Atlassian, Workday and Greylock with its technology, raising over $415 million in capital and reaching a valuation of around $1 billion. But the startup’s been plagued with disfunction. Adept lost two of its co-founders, Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar, early on, and it’s struggled to bring any product to market despite months and months of testing.
The market for AI agents is a tad more crowded than it was at Adept’s launch. Well-funded startups like Orby, Emergence and others are vying for a slice of what promises to be a lucrative pie; market research firm Grand View Research estimates that the AI agents segment was worth $4.2 billion in 2022.
But perhaps the Amazon tie-in will get Adept over the finish line. Or — with much of its executive ranks departing — it’ll resign Adept to the same fate as Inflection, the AI startup that was effectively gutted, talent-wise, by Microsoft earlier this year. Or regulators increasingly skeptical of these types of AI aqui-hires will step in (if they aren’t rendered toothless by Friday’s Supreme Court decision).
Theranos is the telltale story of when VC funding goes awry. The company, which claimed it developed a revolutionary blood-testing technology, raised roughly $724 million from investors. It was valued at $9 billion before it imploded because of a fatal flaw in the company—its product didn’t work. It was all hype, no real value. Even when VC-backed founders aren’t fraudulent, there’s a tendency to prioritize funding and scaling to the detriment of the product.
I founded my company Jotform over 18 years ago. With no outside funding, it’s been a slow climb at times, but today, we have over 25 million users worldwide. I learned a lot about bootstrapping and how it creates the right mix of pressure, thrift, and creativity for developing great, profitable products. Here’s a closer look at why VC funding can cause startups to make bad products.
Where VC funding goes awry
People often assume “small business” and “startup” are interchangeable. But ask any founder and they’ll likely tell you their ambitions are huge. Bootstrappers are no different. In fact, according to a recent report from startup lender Capchase, bootstrapped software-as-a-service businesses are growing just as fast as their venture-backed counterparts—despite spending only a quarter of what VC-backed businesses do on acquiring each new customer.
What’s more, studies show that 64% of the top 100 unicorn startups—those valued at over $1 billion—aren’t profitable at all.
As the Capchase report explains, before investing in growth, top-performing startups focus their efforts on nailing the product-market fit. That means finding a match between your product and the people who need it. This, in turn, creates happy customers, high demand, and organic, sustainable growth. A staggering 34% of startups fail because they don’t find the right product-market fit. A brilliant idea doesn’t always cut it.
Let’s say you’re a VC-backed startup and you’re not seeing the growth you’d hoped for. Maybe you’ll ramp up spending on sales and marketing campaigns, leaving a shorter runway (the amount of time your business can keep afloat with cash reserves alone). And maybe you’ll achieve the desired effect (customer acquisition), but it’s risky and the long-term return is uncertain. If you’re a bootstrapper, you don’t have that option.
So, what do you do instead?
What bootstrappers do differently
Bootstrapping may sound scrappy, but in many respects, it’s a luxury. As a bootstrapper, you have the luxury of focusing obsessively on your product and answering to no one.
When I first founded my company, I loved our initial product, online forms, because I saw its potential to make people’s lives easier. That factor—ease of use—was my principal concern, hence our original tagline “The Easiest Form Builder.” I loved the product so much, and I got so much joy from seeing people using it, that I gave it away for free (while clocking 9-5 at my day job). From February 2006 to March 2007, we didn’t have a paid version of our product. Nonetheless, this was a pivotal period for the company.
Why? Because I listened to early users and received invaluable feedback on how they were using our product and how I could improve it. I refined and iterated before I ever released a paid version. Because people genuinely saw the value in our product, we grew our customer base before spending a dime on marketing.
If I had investors who required me to meet arbitrary KPIs, I would have been spending my early days mastering PR and sales. I wasn’t an expert in either of those fields, nor did I enjoy them. I’m certain the company wouldn’t have taken off if I’d been forced to focus exclusively on those aspects of the business.
Your most important stakeholders
Today, as a mentor to several founders, I always share my rule of 50-50: spend half your time on the product, and half your time on growth. I also encourage founders to release their most important features as soon as possible so they can get them into users’ hands. Then, they can elicit critical feedback on their product—before even asking people to pay for it.
That’s another takeaway: Never stop listening to users—your most important stakeholders. When people are too tied to their product, and ignore whether it meets their users’ needs, they’re bound to fail. Organically growing a business requires letting go of your ego and understanding that even smart products fall flat if they don’t meet a target audience’s specific needs.
Another thing that bootstrappers do differently is that they focus their efforts on making an impact. The Capchase report, for example, found that the healthiest businesses don’t spend the most on sales and marketing, but rather, have a “razor-sharp” understanding of which channels and campaigns have the biggest impact and show a quicker return. In the early startup stages, perfecting your product has more of an impact than flashy marketing campaigns. With tighter budgets and smaller teams, bootstrappers tend to apply this way of thinking to everything they do. That’s why I tell entrepreneurs and team membersto automate their busywork—to dedicate more time to “the big stuff,” or more meaningful work that moves the needle for your company or career.
Recent reports show that in 2024, VC-funding hit a six-year low. This may have sent shudders across the startup landscape, but it shouldn’t. Bootstrapping is a safer, more reliable route. And perhaps most importantly for your company, it creates the optimal environment for developing a better product for your customers.
More must-read commentary published by Fortune:
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
Even before the pandemic, education leaders championed the necessity of strong internet connectivity in schools and communities. This need skyrocketed with the nation’s move to online and hybrid learning during peak pandemic years, and now, strong and reliable connectivity remains a must-have for every educator and student.
A high-speed, reliable internet connection can elevate technology-driven learning and harness new learning potential, said Verizon experts during an eSchool News webinar on connectivity, moderated by eSN Content Director Kevin Hogan.
The webinar delves into the current state of and future possibilities for technology-driven education, exploring solutions to elevate digital infrastructures while maximizing E-rate funding to foster inclusive, secure, and efficient learning environments. Paramount to the discussion is the critical role of increased bandwidth in empowering schools to harness the potential of new technologies.
Cybersecurity is one of K-12’s biggest technology challenges–and strong connectivity can help meet this challenge. “One of the biggest things we learned during the pandemic is how we protect our kids now that we’re encouraging them to use online and digital tools. How do we make sure our kids are safe?” noted Kim Mirabella, Vice President, Business Development for Verizon.
And with 17 million households still lacking internet access–leaving students unable to get online at home for research, homework, and other tasks–digital equity is another issue requiring a solution grounded in connectivity, particularly as funding programs expire.
“We’ve had a lot of government programs, grant programs, and funding, but as those programs start to wind down, the problems don’t go away,” Mirabella said.
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.
Wake County public schools will get more money in local funding, and many homeowners can expect higher property tax bills after this year’s property revaluation.
Wake County leaders are increasing the property tax rate in the county manager’s recommended budget to provide $58.3 million in additional local funding to the Wake County Public School System.
But that falls short of the $63.2 million in additional funding that school leaders said they needed.
The Wake County Board of Commissioners approved the budget unanimously Monday evening. Wake County Commissioner Vickie Adamson was excused and absent from the meeting.
This budget debate “felt more painstaking” that previous debates in recent years, said Wake County Vice Chair Susan Evans.
Fast budget facts
The $2.1 billion budget is a 10.7% increase over the current year’s budget.
The approved property tax rate is 51.35 cents per $100 of assessed property value, or 0.3 cents over the county manager’s proposal. That’s higher than the rate Wake County would have needed to set at 46.36 cents per $100 to maintain the same level of revenue.
The current rate is 65.7 cents per $100.
The new budget is effective July 1.
WCPSS funding
The Wake County Public School System will get 58.3 million in local funding, or a 9% increase, over the current budget.
The school board’s request would fund 4% raises, institute a $17.75-per hour minimum wage for “non-certified staff” and a $20-per hour minimum wage for bus drivers.
Several WCPSS teachers and employees rallied during the county’s budget public hearings, calling on the elected leaders to fully fund the school board’s request.
School employees should be paid “livable, comparable wages” to those of county workers, said Christina Spears, president of the Wake chapter of the North Carolina Association of Educators.
Many placed blame on the North Carolina General Assembly for not providing enough funding for local schools, but asked local leaders to make up the difference.
“We understand that the state has failed to fulfill its constitutional obligation to fully fund the public educational system instead choosing to invest in private school vouchers with little-to-no-income limit nor oversight and in charter schools with limited oversight,” said Teresa Jones, president of the Wake PTA Council. “But the Wake County Commission is uniquely positioned to ensure that all children within its borders do not suffer from the legislature’s failure to invest in them.”
This article will be updated as more information becomes available.
Anna Johnson covers Raleigh and Wake County for the News & Observer. She has previously covered city government, crime and business for newspapers across North Carolina and received many North Carolina Press Association awards, including first place for investigative reporting.
This is a tough summer of budget cuts, forcing many districts to reduce staff and cut back on purchases. For school and district technology leaders, the end of the school year also means the end of billions of dollars of federal COVID-19 relief funding that was available to K-12 schools through various packages–money that was used to implement 1:1 technology programs that were essential for remote learning. We’ve been calling it the “funding cliff”–that time when the additional single-purpose funds have been spent, and schools have to return to their typical annual budgets.
The funding cliff, and resulting cuts to services and equipment, creates a significant barrier to digital equity in schools, as consistent access to devices and connectivity is one of the five domains of Digital Promise’s Digital Equity Framework. Funding cliffs can also be caused by the loss of extra funds from bond and referendum projects, and something as simple as gifts to the school. To effectively support teaching and learning, a school technology program must approach all expenditures by asking how the purchase or new staffing position will be sustained with future funding.
Let me explain: Every item purchased with the school tech budget comes with the financial upfront cost, as well as ongoing maintenance, support, and replacement costs. While special projects provide funds for the upfront costs, schools are often left to find local funds for the ongoing costs. We consider this to be the “total cost of ownership.”
School and district leaders committed to digital equity allocate resources and dedicated personnel to ensure the sustainability of their systems and technology programs. As experienced technology leaders, we share several strategies with IT leaders in the Verizon Innovative Learning Schools program to avoid future funding cliffs, therefore building sustainability into school programming and technology purchases. These can be tailored to support your district’s policies and procedures, and will provide you with a good place to start planning for sustainability. For more details on funding for sustainability, check out Digital Promise’s recently updated Technology Sustainability Toolkit.
Strategy 1: Develop a technology lifecycle plan
Technology purchases are often cyclical; we know that certain equipment must be replaced every 3-5 years. By creating a lifecycle plan, major expenditures can be scheduled to avoid major purchases in the same budget year. For example, in year one, network equipment is replaced; in year two, desktop computers are replaced; in year three, mobile devices are replaced; and so on. This type of budget planning allows a department budget to be about the same year after year. Also, short-term leasing allows expenditures to be spread over several budget cycles to balance budgets. This sample Technology Lifecycle Plan is an example of how a district could balance technology expenditures year-over-year.
Strategy 2: Establish technology standards
Schools can reduce costs for support and training by standardizing their equipment. For example, when a district purchases one model of device for all schools, it reduces its costs for training, support, and repair parts. The tech support staff will be more efficient, reducing the time needed to provide support, because they will have fewer warranty partners and require less training to support devices. Also, combining orders will allow for better discounts for a larger quantity.
Strategy 3: Disclose the total cost of ownership with all purchases
Schools are often gifted with technology. However, while the tech may have been a gift, there are additional costs that people don’t consider, such as the purchase of licenses, repairs and parts, and a replacement device in 2-3 years. By including these costs before a gift is accepted, the technology budget is not forced to reallocate funds for these “gift” purchases.
Strategy 4: Be creative in providing support!
Technology support has two expenses: the cost of repair, and the cost of lost use (the cost to students and teachers when they are not able to learn and teach because the technology is broken). There are several ways in which schools can reduce the cost and time to complete repairs:
Work with vendors to complete repairs on-site. Some vendors will provide training and provide access to parts, allowing for a quick turnaround of repairs.
Create student tech teams, where students are trained to provide tier 1 support for school technology. This can be done as a class, where students earn course credit and industry certifications, and can be extended into paid summer internships. Digital Promise’s Student Tech Team Toolkit can assist schools in creating a student tech team.
Strategy 5: Use data to make informed decisions
In the Verizon Innovative Learning Schools program, we analyze repair claims each month to identify trends and be proactive in avoiding future damage claims. Recently, we saw many repair claims for one specific component on a model of hardware. This early detection allowed us to work with the manufacturer for extended warranty support, and to provide support tips to the tech staff to reduce future damages and claims.
Strategy 6: Increase cybersecurity efforts
Ransomware continues to be a real—and expensive—threat to schools. A district’s investment in cybersecurity efforts is an investment in risk mitigation and lowers the chances of falling prey to attacks. Moving to single sign-on (SSO) or multi-factor authentication, implementing password management tools, transitioning to passphrases, and teaching staff how to recognize phishing attempts are all ways districts can keep their district’s data secure. For further information go to CoSN’s Cybersecurity page.
Effectively managing a technology budget requires planning and flexibility to ensure teachers and learners have the tools and access they need. What strategies have you been using to balance your technology budgets and avoid future funding cliffs?
To dive deeper into these strategies for avoiding a funding cliff and planning for sustainability, check out our recently updated Technology Sustainability Toolkit.
Content Provided by Digital Promise
Michael Mades, Ed.D. is the director of technology for the Digital Equity team at Digital Promise.
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Owners of small- and medium-sized businesses check their bank balances daily to make financial decisions. But it’s enterpreneur Yoseph West’s assertion that there’s typically information and functions missing from bank accounts that owners could really use.
“SMBs make up 44% of U.S. GDP, underpin the economy and have a deep impact on all of us,” West said in an interview with TechCrunch. “And yet most SMBs only have enough cash on hand to last 27 days. They need greater cash flow clarity and control in their banking.”
West, who studied equity and debt finance in college, co-founded Vuru, a stock market research app, in 2012. After fintech firm Wave Accounting acquired Vuru later that year, West stayed on, eventually graduating to the role of director of product engagement.
While at Wave, West had the idea for his next company: Relay, a business banking and money management service for SMBs. West teamed up with Paul Klicnik, an ex-IBM engineer who previously developed the core technical infrastructure at coupon app Flipp, to launch Relay in October 2018.
“Relay is an online business banking and money management platform designed to help small businesses take control of their cash flow,” West explained. “The platform is focused on delivering true cash-flow clarity to SMBs.”
Relay’s platform lets SMBs organize their income, expenses and reserves across up to 20 checking accounts. (Relay isn’t a bank itself; the company relies on its partner Thread Bank for the banking services it provides, which West says are FDIC-insured.) Through Relay, a company can automatically set aside cash into savings accounts with 1%-3% APY and issue up to 50 physical or virtual Visa debit cards to employees.
Relay users can send and receive ACH transfers, wires, and check payments like they would with traditional banks. And they can capture and store receipts, allowing people in their employ access through role-based accounts.
The company makes money through interest on customer deposits, card interchange fees and a $30 per month premium service (Relay Pro) that adds features like same-day payments, and competes with neobanks such as Bluevine and Mercury. But West argues that Relay is one of the few of its kind not focused on tech startup or individual business owner customers.
“Relay is built for the 33-million-plus SMBs in the U.S. and their in-house or outsourced finance functions,” he said. “We primarily serve ‘heart of America’ small businesses that have 2-plus employees — full-time, part-time or contracted — and make $20,00 to $200,000 in monthly revenue.”
Image Credits: Relay
This has proven to be a winning strategy.
West predicts that Relay will reach $100 million in annualized revenue by the second half of this year. Revenues rose 3x in 2022 — and close to 6x in 2023 — thanks to a robust client base that now stands at ~100,000 businesses.
That’s all the more impressive considering the state of the fintech industry.
Last year, venture investment in financial services and fintech fell to $43 billion, its lowest level in six years and down more than 50% year-over-year from the $89.5 billion invested in 2022, according to CrunchBase. The austere funding environment contributed to the collapse of fintechs such as Synapse, the banking-as-a-service startup whose bankruptcy has impacted the finances of millions of customers.
To help lay the groundwork for expansion into new spaces including spend management, crediting and financial APIs, Relay this week closed a $24 million Series B round led by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from BTV, Garage, Industry Ventures, and Tapestry. The new cash bring the startup’s total raised to $51.6 million.
“We chose to raise because of our growth rate,” West said. “To truly get predictive cash flow analytics, SMBs need a unified view of the inflows and outflows of cash across their back office. Relay is building towards that vision … In the future, the platform will make smart recommendations to small businesses based on what is happening in their entire back office.”
Relay, which is based in Toronto, plans to grow its workforce from 140 people to 200 by the end of the year.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Jacqueline Strickland has spent nearly her entire life caring for children in Washington, D.C., starting at age 7, when she began babysitting her siblings after school, and then more formally at 14, when she began working at a daycare center.
Despite the low pay, Strickland, 59, has stuck with her career, even as colleagues left child care for better-paying jobs at the post office or driving school buses.
“People look at child care providers as, you know, babysitters,” Strickland said. “But early childhood is the foundation. It’s the most important part of a child’s life because of the brain development that takes place.”
Three years ago, the financial landscape changed. Her salary jumped from $57,000 to $75,000 a year, thanks to a massive experiment underway in the nation’s capital, which seeks to solve one of the major drivers of the child care crisis: Most educators don’t make a livable wage.
The city-funded $80 million Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund has been transformational for district child care providers like Strickland; they’ve been able to pay down credit cards, move into new apartments, buy or pay off cars, schedule overdue dental procedures, help care for family members and even buy first homes.
But earlier this year, the roughly 4,000 early educators who have benefited from the pay equity program were dealt a blow by Mayor Muriel Bowser’s 2025 budget proposal. Bowser is suggesting eliminating funding for the program — along with cuts to other agencies — because of a requirement from the District of Columbia’s chief financial officer that the city replenish its depleted reserve fund, she said. That would mean a pay cut for the people who have already received a salary bump.
Educare DC, which provides daycare and Pre-K programs to 240 children in the nation’s capital, has been able to raise the salaries of its employees thanks to the city’s pay equity fund. Credit: Valerie Plesch for The Hechinger Report
The budget is scheduled to be approved by the D.C. Council in June. The mayor’s office did not return a request for comment about her proposal.
Strickland, who had started the process of buying a home, has now put it on hold. She said that, before the equity fund, she had been waiting for the city to do right by child care providers like her.
“Just to be able to know that you can meet your monthly bills on time and not juggle money. To know that you can buy groceries and buy medication. To be able to afford healthcare and go to the doctor. To be able to put a little aside for retirement. I feel like I’m healthier because I don’t have to stress as much,” said Strickland, who works at an Educare center in the city’s Deanwood neighborhood.
If the mayor’s budget proposal comes to fruition, Strickland will go back to waiting.
Even before the Covid-19 pandemic toppled the country’s long-eroding child care system, policymakers in Washington had a vision for tackling the sector’s most intractable challenges, including access, recruitment, retention and pay.
That vision resulted in the pay equity fund, passed by the D.C. Council in 2021. It provides supplemental payments to teachers in licensed child development centers and homes, with the goal of bumping up their pay to match the minimum salaries of D.C. public school teachers with the same credentials. The program has been funded through a tax on residents earning more than $250,000 a year.
Related: Our biweekly Early Childhood newsletter highlights innovative solutions to the obstacles facing the youngest students. Subscribe for free.
“It’s one piece of a larger law and larger suite of investments meant to support the whole child,” said Anne Gunderson, a senior policy analyst at the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute. “Specifically, it’s a compensation program meant to disrupt pervasive and centuries-long undervaluing of caregiving, where, due to structural racism and sexism, that’s really disproportionately harming Black and brown women.”
The pay equity program requires teachers to earn more advanced certificates and degrees if they want their salaries to increase. The costs of their tuition and books are covered almost entirely by a child care scholarship from the district in tandem with the pay equity program.
Although the mandate to earn more credentials can be taxing and eats into the time early educators can spend caring for their own families, more than a dozen teachers interviewed for this story said it’s well worth the effort.
Children play on the campus of Educare DC, which has two schools in Washington D.C. northeast quadrant. The program also offers free meals and medical and dental screenings to its students. Credit: Valerie Plesch for The Hechinger Report
Artia Brown, who has been working at the Educare center in Washington’s Parkside neighborhood for 10 years, graduated with her associate degree this year from Trinity Washington University and is already enrolled in classes in the bachelor’s degree program. She plans to get her master’s degree and doctorate as well.
“I have a long journey ahead of me, but the pay equity really motivated me to go back to school and to make sure I get as much credentialing as I can,” Brown said. “It will pay a livable wage, and people are starting to understand how important early education is.”
The 41-year-old, who lives in Montgomery County, Maryland, with her college student son, saw her salary increase from $27,000 before the pay equity program to roughly $37,000 with the supplemental funding. It’s allowed her to pay off her car, start saving and support her two nieces.
Artia Brown, who has worked at Educare DC for 10 years, has seen her salary rise from $27,000 to $37,000 due to supplemental funding from a city pay equity fund. The program is now under threat due to proposed budget cuts. Credit: Valerie Plesch for The Hechinger Report
The pay equity program also provides funding for child care facilities to offer free or low-cost health insurance to educators and other staff.
“Really what we’re seeing for the first time is an appropriate level of compensation and benefits for a workforce that has really been ignored for far too many years,” Gunderson said.
Early data suggests that the pay equity program has helped the city hire, recruit and retain child care employees.
The research firm Mathematica found that, by the end of 2022, the program’s initial payments had increased child care employment levels in Washington by about 100 additional educators, or 3 percent. Moreover, nearly 2 in 3 educators said that, because of the program, they intend to work in the sector longer than they’d previously planned.
Three “feelings and emotions” dolls on a shelf in a classroom at Educare DC, a daycare center in northeast Washington, D.C. Credit: Valerie Plesch for The Hechinger Report
And the program’s impact has continued to grow. Comparing child care employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics between 2019 and 2023, Mathematica associated the program with an increase of 219 educators, or nearly 7 percent.
Child care center directors said that they believed the program’s payments were not only influencing their “best” educators’ decisions to stay at their centers, but helping them recruit qualified educators.
Early anecdotal data from the Urban institute shows that quality has increased alongside educator pay. When researchers asked early educators about the statement “Because of the Pay Equity Fund payments, I can better focus on the needs and development of children I work with,” 71 percent somewhat or strongly agreed.
Washington’s efforts to tackle pay equity in the child care sector are unique. While several states began experimenting with increasing the pay of child care employees following the pandemic, they’ve mostly focused on one-time bonuses, with funding from federal pandemic aid, rather than long-term solutions. Maine’s $30 million program, which provides an average monthly stipend of $400 to educators, is one of the largest responses from other states or cities, but doesn’t come close to matching the reach of Washington’s pay equity fund.
“It is really systems reform in a way that I don’t think other states have approached,” said Erica Greenberg, senior fellow at the Urban Institute’s Center on Education Data and Policy.
Because of the unique nature of the program, Greenberg says that there’s been deep interest from the federal government, states, cities, counties, philanthropists and advocates — all of whom are trying to keep the child care sector afloat.
“They all want to understand how to do something like this,” she says. “D.C. has really been a beacon in that way.”
Yet, as with the rollout of any major new policy, the equity fund has had its share of implementation hiccups.
Chief among them — at least from the educators’ perspective — is that it has sometimes been a hassle to get the money they are due. In 2024, for example, the program switched from making direct payments to teachers to disbursing the money to child care providers, who were then in charge of getting the money to their employees. And the requirements to opt into the program can pose major financial hurdles for smaller centers and home-based providers.
Beyond the particular operating challenges, however, is the program’s solvency.
As educators earn more advanced credentials, the District of Columbia must pay them more — as much as $114,000 for the highest degree earners. As child care centers recruit more teachers, the costs will continue to rise. The mayor considers the natural growth of the program unsustainable, advocates say they’ve been told.
“What I would say is cutting the program or eliminating the program is what’s unsustainable,” said Adam Barragan-Smith, advocacy manager at Educare DC. “The early childhood system in this country is a market failure. Families can’t pay any more. Programs cannot pay teachers any less. The fund has been a really important and game-changing investment so that we don’t have to pass any costs on to families, and we are able to pay teachers what they deserve.”
Artia Brown, a lead teacher at Educare DC, works with one of the children in her class. Brown said the city’s pay equity program will allow providers a livable wage. The program is on the chopping block due to city budget cuts. Credit: Valerie Plesch for The Hechinger Report
Amber Hodges, 36, is a lead teacher at Bright Beginnings, a center in the southeast quadrant of the city. When her salary went from roughly $43,000 to $52,000 annually, she used the money to buy a car, move into a nicer apartment building closer to work and take her five nieces and nephews back-to-school shopping.
The supplemental funding makes her feel like, finally, after so many years in the industry, the work of early childhood educators is getting the respect it deserves.
“We have the most important age group, and a lot of people just look at us and say, ‘Oh, you’re daycare teachers or babysitters,’” she said. “There is nothing worse for me when you say that to me. What? I am not a babysitter. Not a babysitter. At all.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
It’s no secret that the startup world is hardcore. Half of startups fail before year five, and only one in ten survive in the long run. Recent economic trends aren’t too encouraging either. Last year saw a 38% drop in global startup investment and a 30% decrease in the U.S., specifically. Moreover, of the available funds, a significant amount was gobbled up by trendy artificial intelligence startups. So, if you’re not in AI, the picture may appear even more grim.
Today’s founders have to come to terms with the fact that the VC funding round they’ve been working toward might not materialize. Though this has always been the case, the bar is now so high that a plan B is essential — how will your business survive if it doesn’t receive funding?
Alternative startup funding is one increasingly popular option, e.g., taking out a loan with a traditional credit institution. But this isn’t for everyone and definitely not for pre-revenue startups because the bank needs to see how you will repay the loan. Plus, collateral — or the lack thereof — may disqualify any software or other startups up front, as, unlike VCs, banks don’t operate on faith.
So, if nobody’s giving you funds and you don’t have the runway to hold out until the ecosystem picks up again, there’s only one way your startup can grow — become profitable.
Why profitability needs to be top-of-mind even if you’re doing well
I have been actively fundraising for my on-demand Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) startup since its inception three years ago. First, we raised $1.9 million in pre-seed capital for building out our business core, which we did — securing the necessary partnerships, putting together a base of operations, developing our software and growing the team.
With a solid foundation and proven business model, it was time to scale, and we sought VC partners to help us ramp up our operations. What I expected to be three to six months of active fundraising turned into a year that bled into the next and, to this day, is ongoing.
Despite demonstrably positive business results and a slew of warm contacts and cold pitches, investor response was tepid. Interest came with conditions and homework — “Let’s reconnect when you achieve these figures.” But when we did, the goalposts shifted. Fundraising started to feel like a goose chase, and the increasingly turbulent economic environment didn’t do us any favors either.
Right now, competition is intense and startups that investors would swarm just a few years ago might not get a second look today. With that in mind, founders should avoid placing all their eggs in one basket and hedge their bets by approaching growth in a profit-oriented direction.
Because if you don’t, you have two equally unappealing options: going bust or getting chained to an opportunist investor who will pay pennies on the dollar.
Three things a founder must do to be profitable
Four months ago, my startup reached profitability for the first time. It came after more than a year of active work and planning, and here’s what it took.
1. Change your mindset
The main job of a startup founder is to raise funds — this is something that gets drilled in at incubators, accelerators and other mentorship programs. Accordingly, a founder’s focus often lies in beautifying their startup for investors, i.e. finding ways to boost KPIs even if it’s unsustainable, focusing on design over functionality, and spending big in marketing to demonstrate growth.
When pursuing profitability, this must be unlearned. Growth cannot be cosmetic, and for many, that demands a change in mindset. Goals and priorities must be redefined. Forget maximizing sign-ups; focus on paying customers; forget vanity metrics; focus on conversions; forget your personal wants; focus on business needs.
Note that this doesn’t mean you should stop fundraising, but you probably will have to revise your pitch deck.
A changed mindset is not enough—you need to get in the trenches and optimize, optimize, optimize. For a regular business, your runway is limited, and if you don’t bring your balance sheet into the green, then it’s game over.
Here’s one specific area to pay attention to: startups often hyperfocus on client acquisition and neglect user retention. They’ll pay through their nose to get a signup but invest little in ensuring clients stick around, leading to a profitability-killer combo of high CPA (cost per acquisition) and a high churn rate.
As my co-founder always tells our clients: “All you need is 100 loyal customers for a successful full-time business.” We adopted the same mentality, going for quality over quantity.
Tackling this was a cornerstone of our journey to profitability. We went to great lengths to understand specifically when and where our clients churn and put all our effort into answering their pain points to ensure people keep using our services. This way, you’ll get more bang for every buck you’ve invested in acquisition.
3. Expand your offering
Unless you’ve been striving for profitability since day one, chances are it’s going to take you a very long time to reach it. In fact, it may be impossible to reorient your business quickly enough. For this reason, it’s wise to look into additional revenue streams that can support your business while it turns over a new leaf. This can be anything from additional services to new products. For example, my CPG startup allows anyone to start a side hustle or full-blown business selling on-demand supplements, cosmetics, and packaged foods. However, to start selling, our customers need to set up an online store where they can direct their customers.
While our customers found our platform easy to use, they struggled to set up a store – so we began offering assistance with this as a separate service. Essentially, we leveraged our existing expertise to offer ecommerce development services, which was critical in extending our runway.
While virtual field trips are not a new phenomenon, they gained popularity shortly before COVID due in part to their ability to expose students to places and experiences they may not otherwise access due to funding barriers or geographical limitations.
When COVID mandated at-home and hybrid learning, many educators turned once again to virtual trips to keep students engaged in learning during pandemic-related instructional challenges.
Virtual field trips
In a nutshell, virtual field trips are digital experiences and explorations through places such as landmarks, museums, or even outer space. They employ animations, images, videos, sound clips, and 3D technologies to give students an authentic-as-possible opportunity to explore pyramids, underwater ecosystems, the Grand Canyon, well-known landmarks, and more. Some virtual trips for kids are accessible with a simple device, while others employ virtual reality headsets for a more immersive experience.
Virtual field trips and STEM learning
Hands-on STEM subjects are challenging to teach when students aren’t in the classroom all the time, and student engagement remains a challenge even after COVID. Virtual field trips address both of these persistent roadblocks. These trips can help students get a front-row look at STEM outside of the classroom. Where can those engineering concepts you learn during school take you in adulthood? Is it possible to be creative in a STEM career? Here’s how to boost STEM learning with virtual field trips for students.
Bringing real-world issues into the classroom with virtual trips
Climate change is an increasingly important subject in school curriculums. Today’s students will almost certainly inherit a climate-affected world and will need to understand the mechanisms of global warming if they are to grow into climate-conscious, civic-minded members of society. However, many students are dissuaded from pursuing environmental science due to mundane textbooks and complex diagrams. This is a serious issue, as students will need an in-depth understanding of greenhouse gases and ecological damage in the future. Educators can engage students and build excitement around environmental science using the latest virtual reality (VR) technology. This tech can take students on free interactive virtual field trips, meaning they can virtually visit climate-affected areas from the safety and comfort of the classroom. Make real-world issues more relevant for students.
Virtual field trips through augmented reality
Augmented reality gives educators the opportunity to bring the world to life. But first we need to see the world. For example, educators might enrich students’ learning by taking field trips to the heart of their capital city and asking students to draw landmarks, interview tourists, use iPad voice recorders, and make films using the camera on iPad, editing them in iMovie to bring those landmarks to life. Then, using augmented reality apps, educators can link the children’s artwork to their videos and embed it all in a Google Map. This means that anyone can point their camera at the trigger image and find out more about the landmark they are visiting that day–all narrated by students. Here’s how to do it.
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.
A center that provides free food, clothing, mental health support, workforce training, and more to students and families at six public schools in Denver will close in less than three months.
The middle and high schools served by the resource center are known as “pathways schools” and work with students who have struggled at traditional schools or are at risk of not graduating. Three years ago, the resource center — called The Village — opened at Contemporary Learning Academy, one of the pathways schools.
The Village was launched with grant funding and is now paid for by federal pandemic relief known as ESSER earmarked for schools, DPS spokesperson Scott Pribble said. The Village cost $771,690 to run this school year, he said.
But with that money expiring, Denver Public Schools must commit the last of its pandemic relief dollars by Sept. 30. Pribble said The Village is slated to close June 30.
NoSQL database Aerospike today announced that it has raised a $100 million Series E round led by Sumeru Equity Partners. Existing investor Alsop Louie Partners also participated in this round.
In 2009, the company started as a key-value store with a focus on the adtech industry; Aerospike has since diversified its offerings quite a bit. Today, its core offering is a NoSQL database that’s optimized for real-time use cases at scale.
In 2022, Aerospike added document support and then followed that up with graph and vector capabilities — two database features that are crucial for building real-time AI and ML applications.
“We were founded primarily as a real-time data platform that can work with data at really high scale, or, as we call it, unlimited scale,” Aerospike CEO Subbu Iyer said. “We’ve been fortunate enough that a lot of our customers have either started their journey at scale with us, or started the journey earlier and grown into the platform. So our premise has held good that real-time data and real-time access to data is going to be important pretty much across every industry. Our founding principles were really to deliver real-time performance with data at any scale, and the lowest [total cost of ownership] on the market.”
In part, Aerospike, which offers its service as a hosted platform and on-premises, is able to deliver on this promise through its hybrid memory architecture that allows it to augment the use of RAM to speed up data access with fast flash storage — or any combination of the two. Aerospike competitor Redis recently acquired Speedb to offer similar capabilities — also with an eye on helping its customers reduce costs.
Image Credits: Aerospike
Today, the company’s customers include the likes of Airtel, Transunion, Snap and TechCrunch parent company Yahoo.
Right now, though, it’s definitely the AI boom that is driving a lot of interest in Aerospike and the company wants to be in a position to capitalize on that through this new funding round.
Unsurprisingly, that means the company plans to use the new funding to accelerate its innovations around AI, which are mostly focused on its graph and vector capabilities. Iyer told me that Aerospike is specifically looking at combining those two capabilities.
“Going forward, there are some synergistic ways in which graph and work errors can come together,” he said. “A simple use case I use for this, for example, is if you’re looking for a specific document and you have embeddings and stored them in a vector database, you want to use a vector search to get to that specific document. But if you’re looking for a set of similar documents, a vector search can get you to the neighborhood and then a graph can get you a similar corpus of documents because of relationships and stuff.”
That, of course, is also what got investors interested in the company. Aerospike raised its last round in 2019 and according to the company’s CEO, it didn’t need to raise now, but there is a large opportunity for Aerospike to capitalize on now, something Sumeru co-founder and managing director George Kadifa also stressed.
“AI is transforming the economy and presents new opportunities for growth and innovation,” he said. “Aerospike, with its impressive customer base and performance advantage at scale, is uniquely positioned to become a foundational element for the next generation of real-time AI applications.”
Powerful unions have joined forces with former Los Angeles schools Supt. Austin Beutner to call for state intervention to stop what they allege is the misuse of voter-approved funding to expand arts education in California.
In a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state officials, Beutner and the unions claim that some school districts are taking funding, approved by voters in November 2022, to expand arts education and are using it for other purposes. This year that funding totals $938 million.
The unions that signed the letter are California Teachers Assn., the largest state teachers union, and CFT, the other major statewide teachers union. Also signing the letter are the largest unions in the L.A. Unified School District: Local 99 of Service Employees International Union, which represents the greatest number of non-teaching school employees, and United Teachers Los Angeles, the second-largest teachers union local in the nation. Other unions include Teamsters Local 572, which also represents L.A. school district workers, and the teachers union for Oakland Unified.
“Some school districts in California are willfully violating the law by using the new funds provided by Prop. 28 to replace existing spending for arts education at schools,” the letter states.
Under the new law, the money must be used by schools to increase arts programs and each school can decide how best to add on to their programs. The arts windfall is drawn from the state’s general fund — at an amount equal to 1% of all money spent on schools serving students in transitional kindergarten through 12th grade. Thus the money is ongoing and will generally increase each year.
The letter lists no specific examples and does not name districts that are suspected by unions of being in violation of the law. Beutner said there is concern that whistleblowers could become targets for retaliation.
The unions and Beutner are calling on the state to require that districts certify within 30 days “that Prop. 28 funds have not been used to supplant any existing spending for arts education at any school.” In addition, the signatories want the state to require school districts to list “additional arts and music teachers” employed by each school district in the current school year and “how that compares” to the prior year.
“We say more means more,” said UTLA President Cecily Myart-Cruz. “That means every student at every school in the entire state, and that also has to translate to more educators and classified workers in every school.”
Beutner authored Proposition 28 after he left L.A. Unified in June 2021 and voters subsequently approved the ballot measure by a nearly two-thirds margin. Students were to benefit starting in the current school year.
The text of Prop. 28, points to research that the overwhelming majority of public schools “fail to provide a high-quality course of study across arts disciplines” and that “access to arts education is worse for high-poverty schools,” adding that “the cause of the steady decline in arts and music education is directly linked to inadequate and unstable funding of such programs.”
If misuse of the Prop. 28 funding is or becomes widespread, “instead of hiring about 15,000 additional teachers [statewide] and aides, the funds would instead be used to pay for existing programs,” the letter states. “This means millions of children will miss out on the arts education voters promised them.”
The letter was sent to the governor late Friday, according to its authors. Neither the governor’s office nor the California Department of Education, which also received the letter, had an immediate response.
Although the letter does not name a school district, Myart-Cruz singled out L.A. Unified as one transgressor, probably one among many.
“LAUSD is supplanting Prop. 28,” Myart-Cruz said. “And I can only bet that districts across the state are doing the same thing.”
She said the union is trying to gather documentation but that the school system has been slow to provide requested information.
In two recent school board meetings, David Hart, the district’s chief business officer, said the district is abiding by legal requirements.
“I feel very confident that we are not, in any way, stepping afoul of the intended supplement versus supplant,” Hart told board members in response to a question on Feb. 20. “I will acknowledge that there is school-by-school variance.”
The budget at one L.A. school, Dixie Canyon Elementary in Sherman Oaks, has been cited by Prop. 28 advocates as an example of alleged misuse of the funding.
At that school, the issue was raised by Audrey Lieberstein, a parent leader in the PTA and the school’s governing councils, who provided school budget documents and copies of correspondence with L.A. Unified to The Times.
In her emails to district officials, Lieberstein noted that last year’s school budget set aside $48,766 for a two-day-a-week arts teacher. There was no such provision in this year’s budget, according to the budget documents. An additional budget document she said she obtained from the principal shows the arts position being paid for by Prop. 28 funds.
Lieberstein sees this situation as a violation. The Prop. 28 money, she said, should have been in addition to what the school spent in the prior year.
Dixie Canyon had 610 students last year and a poverty rate of about 25%. Per the state funding formula, that would add up to a Prop. 28 budget of about $78,000 — in addition, presumably, to the $48,766 already provided for a teacher at the school part-time as well as other previous funds used for materials.
In a Feb. 16 email to Lieberstein, North Region Supt. David Baca disagreed with her interpretation of what the school was entitled to, suggesting — as did Hart at the board meeting — that the law requires increased district-wide spending, but doesn’t specify what must happen at each school.
“Proposition 28 stipulates that funds be used to increase funding of arts education programs within school districts. While this may differ school-to-school, the law assesses the overall expenditures and investments at the district level,” Baca wrote. “We are thrilled to share that Los Angeles Unified has increased investments in arts education programming.”
The letter to the state takes issue with such an interpretation, without citing a specific school:
“At least one school district claims that it is not supplanting funds for arts education because the total amount being spent by the district has increased. Again, this is not a correct understanding of the law. The law clearly states that every public school will receive increased funds for arts and music education. Prop. 28 allocates a certain amount of funding to each and every school to make this possible.”
Contacted about Dixie Canyonand the parent’s documentation, L.A. Unified said in a statement that it had no additional explanation beyond Baca’s.
Spokesperson Shannon Haber said that arts spending levels “meet and exceed legal requirements specific to Prop. 28.” She added that Supt. Alberto Carvalho has directed staff to provide a “comprehensive multi-layered scan of all investments and expenditures that will further expand opportunities for greater efficacy in arts education.”
Beutner reviewed the Dixie Canyon correspondence at the request of The Times and said that, based on his preliminary review, the district appears to be violating the law at that school.
Beutner also noted examples of school districts that appear to be using the new arts money properly, including the systems in Santa Monica, Compton and Bakersfield.
Decoding the potential misuse of funds could provecomplicated. For one, under the law schools don’t have to spend the money this year. Valid reasons for not spending the money could include the inability to hire a teacher, or the need to purchase equipment or provide training. Schools have three years to spend the money but aren’t supposed to sit on it just for the sake of doing so, Beutner said.
Per state requirements, school districts already must certify annually that their spending has been appropriate and report additional information. Schools also must create a spending plan. But the state has not posted specific deadlines in its guidance.
The letter, in essence, is seeking to tighten up and expedite the first version of an accountability system.
Beutner said it was important not to wait, because it will be hard to claw back for students money that has already been misspent.
Lieberstein told school officials she wants students to benefit fully from the arts infusion.
“I’m simply trying to understand the law and how it’s being carried out for all of our kids,” Lieberstein wrote in a Feb. 17 email to the district. “If there was a mistake in allocation or interpretation, then perhaps the schools have a chance at getting back their original source of arts funding and having Prop. 28 in addition as the law intended! This would be a big win for our public schools and help instill faith in the district.”
If you have concerns about how your school or school district is using Proposition 28 funds or related news tips or documents, please contact howard.blume@latimes.com.
When entrepreneur Stephen Chen’s mom began approaching retirement age, she was forced to borrow money from Chen — and Chen’s brother — to make ends meet. They wanted to help, but the siblings also wanted to figure out a more sustainable, long-term solution that’d help their mom retire without having to worry about finances.
Chen tried to get guidance from a financial adviser, but no one would take his mother as a client because her net worth wasn’t considered high enough. So Chen started building spreadsheets and financial models himself, doing his best to figure out how his mom could live the retirement lifestyle that she wanted.
“People like my mom lack the tools to look at their money holistically and strategically so they can make informed decisions, monitor their financial situation, understand which levers to pull and when and make the connection between the choices they make today and the long-term ramifications to their plan,” Chen told TechCrunch. “There’s a confluence of factors that may alter the future of financial planning and advising.”
It was after Chen helped his mom lower her expenses, figure out when to claim Social Security, decide when to downsize and take other steps to become financially independent that Chen realized lots of other older Americans were facing the same challenges.
So Chen founded NewRetirement, a Mill Valley-based company building software to help people create financial retirement plans. Today, NewRetirement’s direct-to-consumer products power financial planning for 70,000 users managing close to $100 billion in their own financial plans, according to Chen.
“Our models go beyond savings and investments, taking into account all of the other factors in a person’s life, from home equity, healthcare costs and taxes to Medicare and Social Security,” Chen said. “Every time a user makes a change, we run thousands of simulations in order to help them optimize their plan … We account for thousands of different scenarios, enabling users to confidently map out accumulation and decumulation projections with digital guidance.”
NewRetirement is Chen’s second startup after Embark, an online college search and admissions tool he launched in 1995. And, like Embark, Chen sees NewRetirement as a digital solution to a transition faced by millions of Americans.
“120 million Americans over age 50 hold 80% of the wealth in this country,” Chen said, “But running out of money remains a top 10 fear, with nearly half of Americans saying they are worried about it.”
NewRetirement’s platform uses predictive modeling and data analytics to help users suss out the right savings approaches. Image Credits: NewRetirement
NewRetirement, which began as a consumer offering and in 2021 expanded to the enterprise, charges $120 per year for access to a suite of tools, calculators, recommendations and scenario comparisons and ~$1,500 per year for check-ins with a certified financial planner. In addition, NewRetirement sells a subscription-based private label version of its tools aimed at financial advisers.
Now, you might wonder, what makes NewRetirement different from startups like Retirable, which similarly provides an array of retirement planning tools and access to asset managers? Chen asserts that NewRetirement is one of the few — and perhaps only — financial planning platform that serves consumers as well as advisers and workplaces.
“Our core innovation is allowing anyone to create a plan with industrial-strength tools, enabling advisers to collaborate with the end user and making this available at scale through enterprise partners who bring it to their customers,” Chen said. “As more financial services companies see their offerings like investment management become commoditized, there’s huge value in helping clients and prospects think about their money holistically. By offering self-directed digital planning to clients versus starting with a human adviser, they can scale and serve any number of users, learn about them, help them make good decisions and position their products and services more effectively.”
Chen says that about 70% of NewRetirement’s revenue is enterprise presently, with the remaining 30% coming from consumer customers. The platform has 20,000 individual subscribers and “several” wealth management clients as well as “multiple” enterprise customers including Nationwide, which recently expanded an existing partnership with NewRetirement.
That momentum no doubt helped NewRetirement to cinch its Series A funding round this month.
The company raised $20 million in a tranche that brings its total raised to $20.8 million, led by Allegis Capital with participation from Nationwide Ventures, Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures, Motley Fool Ventures and others. Chen says that the cash infusion will be used to expand 50-employee NewRetirement’s enterprise products, scale up onboarding, accelerate R&D efforts and build capacity to meet future demand.
“With this new capital, we will have three to four years of runway,” Chen said. “That gives us time to continue to scale our enterprise partnerships and enhance our product. What’s more, the current downturn is enabling us to bring in incredible talent. We have a strong team in place and will expand headcount further this year.”
TROY, N.Y. (NEWS10) — A local organization that supports new and expectant mothers received funding on Wednesday. Mom Starts Here was awarded a $20,000 grant from Fidelis Care.
The Troy-based nonprofit offers financial and social support to families in need. The money will be used to extend their community maternal health program. It puts community health workers in doctor offices to identify and eliminate barriers to prenatal and postpartum care such as lack of transportation and childcare.
“So by having a community health worker that’s helping address those social determinants, we’re increasing the likelihood that moms are able to access prenatal care, and we know those social determinants impact birth outcomes for both mom and baby,” Mom Starts Here Founder and Exec. Dir. Kyla Schmidt said.
The community maternal health program started in 2023. Organizers said the new grant will allow them to extend it for another six months.
Congressional leaders on Tuesday formally announced a deal to keep the rest of the government funded through the fiscal year, but with just days to go before a key deadline, members from both parties in the House and Senate will need to cooperate in order to prevent a partial government shutdown.Speaker Mike Johnson announced the deal in a statement, saying he hopes the text of the legislation will be released “as soon as possible,” a key step expected before either chamber votes.A GOP leadership aide told CNN on Monday night that congressional negotiators had reached an agreement on funding for the Department of Homeland Security. At a time when security at the southern border has become a central issue in the 2024 campaign, funding for the agency had become a major obstacle.Congress has until 11:59 p.m. ET Friday to pass the deal, and getting through both chambers is expected to take days. Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, will likely need many Democratic votes to pass the legislation as the far right wing of his conference have been pushing against the bill. And in the Democratic controlled Senate, any one member of the narrowly divided chamber can slow down the process, pushing the federal government passed its deadline.“House and Senate committees have begun drafting bill text to be prepared for release and consideration by the full House and Senate as soon as possible,” Johnson announced in his statement.Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries added: “In the next few days, upon completion of the drafting process, Congress will review and consider the appropriations package in order to fund the government and meet the needs of hardworking American taxpayers.”The leaders of the Senate, Democrat Chuck Schumer and Republican Mitch McConnell, also released statements regarding the agreement.In his own statement, President Joe Biden welcomed news of the deal.“We have come to an agreement with Congressional leaders on a path forward for the remaining full-year funding bills,” Biden wrote. “The House and Senate are now working to finalize a package that can quickly be brought to the floor, and I will sign it immediately.”
WASHINGTON —
Congressional leaders on Tuesday formally announced a deal to keep the rest of the government funded through the fiscal year, but with just days to go before a key deadline, members from both parties in the House and Senate will need to cooperate in order to prevent a partial government shutdown.
Speaker Mike Johnson announced the deal in a statement, saying he hopes the text of the legislation will be released “as soon as possible,” a key step expected before either chamber votes.
A GOP leadership aide told CNN on Monday night that congressional negotiators had reached an agreement on funding for the Department of Homeland Security. At a time when security at the southern border has become a central issue in the 2024 campaign, funding for the agency had become a major obstacle.
Congress has until 11:59 p.m. ET Friday to pass the deal, and getting through both chambers is expected to take days. Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, will likely need many Democratic votes to pass the legislation as the far right wing of his conference have been pushing against the bill. And in the Democratic controlled Senate, any one member of the narrowly divided chamber can slow down the process, pushing the federal government passed its deadline.
“House and Senate committees have begun drafting bill text to be prepared for release and consideration by the full House and Senate as soon as possible,” Johnson announced in his statement.
Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries added: “In the next few days, upon completion of the drafting process, Congress will review and consider the appropriations package in order to fund the government and meet the needs of hardworking American taxpayers.”
The leaders of the Senate, Democrat Chuck Schumer and Republican Mitch McConnell, also released statements regarding the agreement.
In his own statement, President Joe Biden welcomed news of the deal.
“We have come to an agreement with Congressional leaders on a path forward for the remaining full-year funding bills,” Biden wrote. “The House and Senate are now working to finalize a package that can quickly be brought to the floor, and I will sign it immediately.”
