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  • Is ‘David’ porn? See for yourself, Italians ask Fla. parents

    Is ‘David’ porn? See for yourself, Italians ask Fla. parents

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    ROME — The Florence museum housing Michelangelo’s Renaissance masterpiece the “David” invited parents and students from a Florida charter school to visit after complaints about a lesson featuring the statue forced the principal to resign.

    Florence Mayor Dario Nardella also tweeted an invitation for the principal to visit so he can personally honor her. Confusing art with pornography was “ridiculous,” Nardella said.

    The incredulous Italian response highlights how the U.S. culture wars are often perceived in Europe, where despite a rise in right-wing sentiment and governance, the Renaissance and its masterpieces, even its naked ones, are generally free of controversy.

    But the board of the Tallahassee Classical School pressured Principal Hope Carrasquilla to resign last week after an image of the “David” was show to a sixth-grade art class. The school has a policy requiring parents to be notified in advance about “controversial” topics being taught.

    Carrasquilla believes the board targeted her after three parents complained about a lesson including a photo of the “David,” a 5-meter tall (17 foot) nude marble sculpture dating from 1504. The work, considered a masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance, depicts the Biblical David going to fight Goliath armed only with his faith in God.

    Carrasquilla has said two parents complained because they weren’t notified in advance that a nude would be shown, while a third called the iconic statue pornographic.

    Carrasquilla said in a phone interview Sunday that she is “very honored” by the invitations to Italy and she may accept.

    “I am totally, like, wow,” Carasquilla said. “I’ve been to Florence before and have seen the ‘David’ up close and in person, but I would love to go and be a guest of the mayor.”

    Cecilie Hollberg, director of the Galleria dell’Accademia, where the “David” resides, expressed astonishment at the controversy.

    “To think that ‘David’ could be pornographic means truly not understanding the contents of the Bible, not understanding Western culture and not understanding Renaissance art,” Hollberg said in a telephone interview.

    She invited the principal, school board, parents and student body to view the “purity” of the statue.

    Tallahassee Classical is a charter school. While it is taxpayer-funded and tuition-free, it operates almost entirely independently of the local school district and is sought out by parents seeking an alternative to the public school curriculum.

    About 400 students from kindergarten through 12th grade attend the three-year-old institution, which is now on its third principal. It follows a curriculum designed by Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian school in Michigan frequently consulted by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on educational issues.

    Barney Bishop, chairman of Tallahassee Classical’s school board, has told reporters that while the photo of the statue played a part in Carrasquilla’s ouster, it wasn’t the only factor. He has declined to elaborate, while defending the decision.

    “Parents are entitled to know anytime their child is being taught a controversial topic and picture,” Bishop said in an interview with Slate online magazine.

    Several parents and teachers plan to protest Carrasquilla’s ouster at Monday night’s school board meeting, but Carrasquilla said she isn’t sure she would take the job back even if it were offered.

    “There’s been such controversy and such upheaval,” she said. “I would really have to consider, ‘Is this truly what is best?’”

    Marla Stone, head of humanities studies at the American Academy in Rome, said the Florida incident was another episode in escalating U.S. culture wars and questioned how the statue could be considered so controversial as to warrant a prior warning.

    “What we have here is a moral crusade against the body, sexuality, and gender expression and an ignorance of history,” Stone said in an email. “The incident is about fear, fear of beauty, of difference, and of the possibilities embedded in art.”

    Michelangelo Buonarroti sculpted the “David” between 1501-1504 after being commissioned by the Cathedral of Florence. The statue is the showpiece of the Accademia, and helps draw 1.7 million visitors each year to the museum.

    “It is incredibly sought-after by Americans who want to do selfies and enjoy the beauty of this statue,” Director Hollberg said.

    The museum, like many in Europe, is free for student groups. There was no indication that any trip would be subsidized by the city or museum. ___

    Spencer reported from Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

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  • Florida school uproar leads Italy to invite viewing ‘David’

    Florida school uproar leads Italy to invite viewing ‘David’

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    ROME — A Florence museum on Sunday invited parents and students from a Florida charter school to view Michelangelo’s “David” in person after the school principal was forced to resign following parental complaints that an image of the nude Renaissance masterpiece was shown to a sixth-grade art class.

    Florence Mayor Dario Nardella also tweeted an invitation for the principal to visit so he can personally honor her. Confusing art with pornography was “ridiculous,” Nardella said.

    The incredulous Italian response highlights how the U.S. culture wars are often perceived in Europe, where despite a rise in right-wing sentiment and governance, the Renaissance and its masterpieces, even its naked ones, are generally free of controversy.

    The Italians are responding to the board of the Tallahassee Classical School forcing Principal Hope Carrasquilla to resign last week. The school has a policy requiring parents to be notified in advance about “controversial” topics being taught.

    Carrasquilla believes the board targeted her after three parents complained about a lesson including a photo of the “David,” a 5-meter tall (17 foot) nude marble sculpture dating from 1504. The work, considered a masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance, depicts the Biblical David going to fight Goliath armed only with his faith in God.

    Carrasquilla has said two parents complained because they weren’t notified in advance that a nude would be shown, while a third called the iconic statue pornographic.

    Cecilie Hollberg, director of the Galleria dell’Accademia, where the “David” is housed, expressed astonishment at the controversy.

    “To think that ‘David’ could be pornographic means truly not understanding the contents of the Bible, not understanding Western culture and not understanding Renaissance art,” Hollberg said in a telephone interview.

    She invited the principal, school board, parents and student body to view the “purity” of the statue.

    Tallahassee Classical is a charter school. While it is taxpayer-funded and tuition-free, it operates almost entirely independently of the local school district and is sought out by parents seeking an alternative to the public school curriculum.

    About 400 students from kindergarten through 12th grade attend the three-year-old institution, which is now on its third principal. It follows a curriculum designed by Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian school in Michigan frequently consulted by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on educational issues.

    Barney Bishop, chairman of Tallahassee Classical’s school board, has told reporters that while the photo of the statue played a part in Carrasquilla’s ouster, it wasn’t the only factor. He has declined to elaborate while defending the decision.

    “Parents are entitled to know anytime their child is being taught a controversial topic and picture,” Bishop said in an interview with Slate online magazine.

    A message was left Sunday seeking comment from Carrasquilla about the invitations from Florence.

    In a statement last week to the Tallahassee Democrat, which first reported the story, Carrasquilla said Bishop “expressed his displeasure with my leadership when parents became upset about policies or procedures not being followed to the ‘T.’”

    Marla Stone, head of the Humanities Department at the American Academy in Rome, said the Florida incident was another episode in escalating U.S. culture wars and questioned how the statue could be considered so controversial as to warrant a prior warning.

    “What we have here is a moral crusade against the body, sexuality, and gender expression and an ignorance of history,” Stone said in an email. “The incident is about fear, fear of beauty, of difference, and of the possibilities embedded in art.”

    Michelangelo Buonarroti sculpted the “David” between 1501-1504 after being commissioned by the Cathedral of Florence. The statue is the showpiece of the Accademia, and helps draw 1.7 million visitors each year to the museum.

    “It is incredibly sought-after by Americans who want to do selfies and enjoy the beauty of this statue,” Director Hollberg said.

    The museum, like many in Europe, is free for student groups. There was no indication that any trip would be subsidized by the city or museum. ___

    Spencer reported from Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

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  • Florida school uproar leads Italy to invite viewing ‘David’

    Florida school uproar leads Italy to invite viewing ‘David’

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    ROME — A Florence museum on Sunday invited parents and students from a Florida charter school to view Michelangelo’s “David” in person after the school principal was forced to resign following parental complaints that an image of the nude Renaissance masterpiece was shown to a sixth-grade art class.

    Florence Mayor Dario Nardella also tweeted an invitation for the principal to visit so he can personally honor her. Confusing art with pornography was “ridiculous,” Nardella said.

    The incredulous Italian response highlights how the U.S. culture wars are often perceived in Europe, where despite a rise in right-wing sentiment and governance, the Renaissance and its masterpieces, even its naked ones, are generally free of controversy.

    The Italians are responding to the board of the Tallahassee Classical School forcing Principal Hope Carrasquilla to resign last week. The school has a policy requiring parents to be notified in advance about “controversial” topics being taught.

    Carrasquilla believes the board targeted her after three parents complained about a lesson including a photo of the “David,” a 5-meter tall (17 foot) nude marble sculpture dating from 1504. The work, considered a masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance, depicts the Biblical David going to fight Goliath armed only with his faith in God.

    Carrasquilla has said two parents complained because they weren’t notified in advance that a nude would be shown, while a third called the iconic statue pornographic.

    Cecilie Hollberg, director of the Galleria dell’Accademia, where the “David” is housed, expressed astonishment at the controversy.

    “To think that ‘David’ could be pornographic means truly not understanding the contents of the Bible, not understanding Western culture and not understanding Renaissance art,” Hollberg said in a telephone interview.

    She invited the principal, school board, parents and student body to view the “purity” of the statue.

    Tallahassee Classical is a charter school. While it is taxpayer-funded and tuition-free, it operates almost entirely independently of the local school district and is sought out by parents seeking an alternative to the public school curriculum.

    About 400 students from kindergarten through 12th grade attend the three-year-old institution, which is now on its third principal. It follows a curriculum designed by Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian school in Michigan frequently consulted by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on educational issues.

    Barney Bishop, chairman of Tallahassee Classical’s school board, has told reporters that while the photo of the statue played a part in Carrasquilla’s ouster, it wasn’t the only factor. He has declined to elaborate while defending the decision.

    “Parents are entitled to know anytime their child is being taught a controversial topic and picture,” Bishop said in an interview with Slate online magazine.

    A message was left Sunday seeking comment from Carrasquilla about the invitations from Florence.

    In a statement last week to the Tallahassee Democrat, which first reported the story, Carrasquilla said Bishop “expressed his displeasure with my leadership when parents became upset about policies or procedures not being followed to the ‘T.’”

    Marla Stone, head of the Humanities Department at the American Academy in Rome, said the Florida incident was another episode in escalating U.S. culture wars and questioned how the statue could be considered so controversial as to warrant a prior warning.

    “What we have here is a moral crusade against the body, sexuality, and gender expression and an ignorance of history,” Stone said in an email. “The incident is about fear, fear of beauty, of difference, and of the possibilities embedded in art.”

    Michelangelo Buonarroti sculpted the “David” between 1501-1504 after being commissioned by the Cathedral of Florence. The statue is the showpiece of the Accademia, and helps draw 1.7 million visitors each year to the museum.

    “It is incredibly sought-after by Americans who want to do selfies and enjoy the beauty of this statue,” Director Hollberg said.

    The museum, like many in Europe, is free for student groups. There was no indication that any trip would be subsidized by the city or museum. ___

    Spencer reported from Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

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  • These Native American Boys Are Being Told To Cut Their Hair Due To School Policy

    These Native American Boys Are Being Told To Cut Their Hair Due To School Policy

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    Hair policing — the act of trying to dictate the style or length of another person’s hair — is a peculiarly persistent form of discrimination. That’s especially true of predominantly white institutions policing the hairstyles of people of color, who often have nuanced and culturally specific relationships to their hair.

    Nonetheless, Classical Charter Schools of America, a system that includes four schools in North Carolina, is requiring two Native American boys to cut off their long hair if they want to return to class after the spring break, local outlet WRAL News reported Tuesday.

    One of the students is a first grader whose mother, Ashley Lomboy, defended her son’s long braid by informing the administration that the hairstyle symbolizes a part of the Waccamaw Siouan Tribe’s heritage, in which hair is linked with spirituality, per the American Civil Liberties Union. Under that reasoning, Lomboy said that the school system’s “grooming standards” would force her son to abandon an important cultural custom.

    In response to her and another parent’s complaints, Classical Charter Schools released a statement doubling down on its stance. Among other rules, its grooming standards state that boys’ hair “must be neatly trimmed and off the collar, above the eyebrows, not below the top of the ears or eyebrows, and not an excessive height.” It also states that “Distracting, extreme, radical, or faddish haircuts, hair styles, and colors are not allowed.” The question here is, distracting and radical to whom, exactly?

    This rejection of hairstyles linked to a nonwhite culture is not unique to Native American students. Black students across the country are repeatedly chastised (or worse) for possessing hairstyles that deviate from a white supremacist system of beauty and grooming. In both academic and professional settings, many people’s natural hair is seen as “unprofessional” or “unkempt.”

    In some instances, Black students, as well as grown Black professionals, are expected to style their hair in ways that can be damaging or unsustainable. (And meanwhile, some products for relaxing and straightening hair have recently been found to contain harmful chemicals.) Hair policing is such a prevalent problem that California passed the CROWN Act in 2019, a law that prohibits discrimination based on hair texture. Though that local legislation will hopefully catch on, no federal laws currently protect employees from hairstyle-based discrimination.

    In many Indigenous communities across the country, long hair signifies strength and is a symbol of cultural pride. It makes sense that groups whose cultures are constantly undermined and often erased altogether would want to keep such signifiers intact.

    Although Classical Charter Schools’ grooming rules might make sense for some, they completely disregard the nuance that exists in nonwhite communities. This country is composed of various cultures, and not everyone needs to live by the same rules, as long as they’re not causing harm. Embracing that nuance would show a higher level of open-mindedness that all schools should strive to teach their students.

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  • Florida Principal Out After Viewing Of Michelangelo’s ‘David’ Upsets Parents

    Florida Principal Out After Viewing Of Michelangelo’s ‘David’ Upsets Parents

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    The principal of Florida’s Tallahassee Classical School is out of a job after parents complained that their sixth-grade children were shown Michelangelo’s 16th century “David” sculpture, with one parent calling it “pornographic,” the Tallahassee Democrat first reported.

    The now-former principal, Hope Carrasquilla, told HuffPost the situation was also “a little more complicated than that,” noting that the usual protocol is to send parents a letter before students are shown such classical artwork.

    Due to “a series of miscommunications,” the letter did not go out to the sixth-grade parents, and some complained, Carrasquilla said.

    One parent was “point-blank upset,” Carrasquilla continued, and “felt her child should not be viewing those pieces.”

    Michelangelo’s “David.”

    Roberto Serra – Iguana Press via Getty Images

    The board of the charter school decided Monday to oust the principal after less than a year in the job. She was the school’s third principal since it opened in the fall of 2020, per the Tallahassee Democrat.

    The marble sculpture of the Biblical figure David was crafted between 1501 and 1504, originally commissioned for display inside an Italian cathedral. It now resides at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence.

    Carrasquilla said she had taught in classical education for a decade and knew that “once in a while you get a parent who gets upset about Renaissance art” — hence the letter. She was not surprised by the reaction from the school board chair, Barney Bishop, but the fact that other board members went along with him was unexpected.

    Bishop told the Tallahassee newspaper that “parental rights are supreme.”

    “And that means protecting the interests of all parents, whether it’s one, 10, 20 or 50,” he added.

    Carrasquilla said many other parents and faculty members were upset about her ouster and have been reaching out with support.

    The move comes as conservatives in Florida and elsewhere battle to step up their input in primary education.

    The Tallahassee school is a public charter institution that focuses on classical learning, a teaching philosophy centered on a traditional Western liberal arts education that aims to impart critical thinking skills children can use throughout their lives. Classical learning is also popular within the Christian homeschooling movement.

    The Tallahassee Classical School is affiliated with Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian institution that has sought to expand its influence over the last decade by helping set up public charter schools. Hillsdale briefly cut ties with the Tallahassee school in early 2022 for not meeting improvement standards, but it later regained affiliation.

    Hillsdale has raised funds for the charter school network by pledging to fight “leftist” and “distorted” teaching of American history, such as the lessons about slavery contained in The New York Times’ 1619 Project, the newspaper reported last year.

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  • Denver high school shooting suspect dead, coroner confirms

    Denver high school shooting suspect dead, coroner confirms

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    DENVER — A body found in the Colorado woods near an abandoned car was that of a 17-year-old student accused of wounding two administrators in a shooting at his Denver high school, a coroner’s office said.

    Park County Sheriff Tom McGraw said the body was discovered Wednesday not far from the student’s car in a remote mountain area about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southwest of Denver, near the small town of Bailey, in Park County. The town had been ordered to shelter in place while while officers from a number of agencies including the FBI combed the forest.

    Earlier in the day, Denver police identified the suspect as Austin Lyle. The Park County coroner’s office confirmed in a Facebook post that the body was that of Lyle’s. Cause of death wasn’t released, pending the completion of an autopsy.

    The shooting occurred at East High School in Denver, not far from downtown, while two administrators searched Lyle for weapons, a daily requirement because of the boy’s behavioral issues, authorities said. Lyle fled after the shooting.

    It occurred at a school shaken by frequent lockdowns and violence, including the recent killing outside the school of a classmate that prompted East High School students to march on the Colorado Capitol earlier this month. Parents who converged on the 2,500-student campus on Wednesday voiced frustration that officials had not done enough to protect their children.

    “I am sick of it,” said Jesse Haase, who planned to talk with her daughter about taking her out of classes for the rest of the school year.

    Amid the flurry of criticism over lax security, Denver school officials said after the shooting that they would once again put armed officers into the city’s public high schools.

    There were no school resource officers on campus at the time of Wednesday’s shooting, said Denver Police Chief Ron Thomas.

    The shooting happened just before 10 a.m. in an office area as Lyle was undergoing a search as part of a “safety plan” that required him to be patted down daily, officials said.

    The gun used in the shooting was not immediately recovered, Thomas said.

    One of the wounded administrators was released from the hospital Wednesday afternoon and the second was in serious condition, said Heather Burke, a spokesperson for Denver Health hospital.

    Hundreds of students on March 3 skipped class and marched in support of stricter gun laws following the death of Luis Garcia, 16, who was shot while sitting in a car near East High School.

    In June 2020, amid a summer of protests over racial injustice following the murder of George Floyd, Denver Public Schools became one of the districts around the US that decided to phase out its use of police officers in school buildings. That push was fueled by criticism that school resource officers disproportionately arrested Black students, sweeping them into the criminal justice system.

    After Wednesday’s shooting, two armed officers will be posted at East High School through the end of the school year, and other city high schools also will each get an officer, said Denver Public Schools Superintendent Alex Marrero.

    In a Wednesday letter to the city’s Board of Education, Marrero said his decision violated district’s policies but added he “can no longer stand on the sidelines.”

    “I am the leader of this district who is charged with keeping our scholars and staff safe every day,” he wrote. The school board said it supported the decision.

    Gun violence at schools has become increasingly common in the U.S. with more than 1,300 shooting incidents recorded between 2000 and June 2022, according to government researchers. Those shootings killed 377 people and wounded 1,025, according to a database maintained by the researchers.

    Students from East High School had been scheduled to testify Wednesday afternoon before the Colorado Legislature on gun safety bills.

    “This is the reality of being young in America: sitting through a shooting and waiting for information just hours before you’re scheduled to testify in support of gun safety bills,” said Gracie Taub, a 16-year-old East High School sophomore and volunteer with Students Demand Action in Colorado.

    Lyle transferred to East High School after being disciplined and removed from a high school in nearby Aurora last school year because of unspecified violations of school policies, said Cherry Creek School District spokesperson Lauren Snell.

    Marrero said safety plans for students are enacted in response to “past educational and also behavioral experiences,” adding that it’s a common practice throughout Colorado’s public schools. Officials did not give further details on why Lyle was searched daily.

    But daily pat downs are rare, said Franci Crepeau-Hobson, a University of Colorado Denver professor specializing in school violence prevention.

    “Clearly they were concerned,” said Crepeau-Hobson. “I can’t imagine they’d do that if there wasn’t a history of the kid carrying a weapon.”

    Safety plans often follow threatening or suicidal behavior from a student, said Christine Harms with the Colorado School Safety Resource Center.

    In response to the shooting, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre repeated President Joe Biden’s calls for stricter gun laws, including bans on assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines, and for Congress to “do something” on gun control.

    Wednesday was also the second anniversary of 10 people being shot and killed at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado.

    ___

    Associated Press reporters Sarah Brumfield in Silver Spring, Maryland, and Matthew Brown in Billings, Montana, contributed to this report.

    ___

    Bedayn is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

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  • Officials: 2 hurt after shooting at Texas school

    Officials: 2 hurt after shooting at Texas school

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    Police and school officials in Texas say two students were injured after a shooting at a high school

    ARLINGTON, Texas — Two students were injured after a shooting at a Texas high school on Monday and a suspect is in custody, police and school district officials said.

    The shooting happened on the Lamar High School campus in Arlington outside a school building, news outlets report.

    The school was placed in lockdown and once that is lifted, students will be released for the day, Arlington Independent School District spokeswoman Anita Foster said in an email. Others, including parents, were urged to stay away from the campus while Arlington Police investigate, she said.

    The two injured students were receiving medical care, according to the district. Their conditions were not known, the Arlington Fire Department said.

    Arlington police said the scene was secure in a tweet at 7:21 a.m.

    Monday was the first day back to class after the district’s spring break last week.

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  • Florida may ban girls’ period talk in elementary grades

    Florida may ban girls’ period talk in elementary grades

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    Legislation moving in the Florida House would ban discussion of menstrual cycles and other human sexuality topics in elementary grades

    TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Legislation moving in the Florida House would ban discussion of menstrual cycles and other human sexuality topics in elementary grades.

    The bill sponsored by Republican Rep. Stan McClain would restrict public school instruction on human sexuality, sexually transmitted diseases and related topics to grades 6 through 12. McClain confirmed at a recent committee meeting that discussions about menstrual cycles would also be restricted to those grades.

    “So if little girls experience their menstrual cycle in 5th grade or 4th grade, will that prohibit conversations from them since they are in the grade lower than sixth grade?” asked state Rep. Ashley Gantt, a Democrat who taught in public schools and noted that girls as young as 10 can begin having periods.

    “It would,” McClain responded.

    The GOP-backed legislation cleared the House Education Quality Subcommittee on Wednesday by a 13-5 vote mainly along party lines. It would also allow parents to object to books and other materials their children are exposed to, require schools to teach that a person’s sexual identity is determined biologically at birth and set up more scrutiny of certain educational materials by the state Department of Education.

    McClain said the bill’s intent is to bring uniformity to sex education across all of Florida’s 67 school districts and provide more pathways for parents to object to books or other materials they find inappropriate for younger children.

    At the committee meeting, Gantt asked whether teachers could face punishment if they discuss menstruation with younger students.

    “My concern is they won’t feel safe to have those conversations with these little girls,” she said.

    McClain said “that would not be the intent” of the bill and that he is “amenable” to some changes to its language. The measure must be approved by another committee before it can reach the House floor; a similar bill is pending in the Senate.

    An email seeking comment was sent Saturday to the office of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is widely seen as a potential 2024 presidential candidate.

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  • Texas Announces Takeover Of Houston Schools, Stirring Anger

    Texas Announces Takeover Of Houston Schools, Stirring Anger

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    HOUSTON (AP) — Texas officials on Wednesday announced a state takeover of Houston’s nearly 200,000-student public school district, the eighth-largest in the country, acting on years of threats and angering Democrats who assailed the move as political.

    The announcement, made by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s education commissioner, Mike Morath, amounts to one of the largest school takeovers ever in the U.S. It also deepens a high-stakes rift between Texas’ largest city, where Democrats wield control, and state Republican leaders, who have sought increased authority following election fumbles and COVID-19 restrictions.

    The takeover is the latest example of Republican and predominately white state officials pushing to take control of actions in heavily minority and Democratic-led cities. They include St. Louis and Jackson, Mississippi, where the Legislature is pushing to take over the water system and for an expanded role for state police and appointed judges.

    In a letter to the Houston Independent School District, Morath said the Texas Education Agency will replace Superintendent Millard House II and the district’s elected board of trustees with a new superintendent and an appointed board of managers made of residents from within the district’s boundaries.

    Morath said the board has failed to improve student outcomes while conducting “chaotic board meetings marred by infighting” and violating open meetings act and procurement laws. He accused the district of failing to provide proper special education services and of violating state and federal laws with its approach to supporting students with disabilities.

    He cited the seven-year record of poor academic performance at one of the district’s roughly 50 high schools, Wheatley High, as well as the poor performance of several other campuses.

    “The governing body of a school system bears ultimate responsibility for the outcomes of all students. While the current Board of Trustees has made progress, systemic problems in Houston ISD continue to impact district students,” Morath wrote in his six-page letter.

    Most of Houston’s school board members have been replaced since the state began making moves toward a takeover in 2019. House became superintendent in 2021.

    He and the current school board will remain until the new board of managers is chosen sometime after June 1. The new board of managers will be appointed for at least two years.

    House in a statement pointed to strides made across the district, saying the announcement “does not discount the gains we have made.”

    He said his focus now will be on ensuring “a smooth transition without disruption to our core mission of providing an exceptional educational experience for all students.”

    The Texas State Teachers Association and the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas condemned the takeover. At a news conference in Austin, state Democratic leaders called for the Legislature to increase funding for education and raise teacher pay.

    “We acknowledge that there’s been underperformance in the past, mainly due to that severe underfunding in our public schools,” state Rep. Armando Walle, who represents parts of north Houston, said.

    An annual Census Bureau survey of public school funding showed Texas spent $10,342 per pupil in the 2020 fiscal year, more than $3,000 less than the national average, according to the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University in Houston.

    The state was able to take over the district under a change in state law that Houston Democratic state Rep. Harold Dutton Jr. proposed in 2015. In an op-ed piece in the Houston Chronicle on Monday, Dutton said he has no regrets about what he did.

    “We’re hearing voices of opposition, people who say that HISD shouldn’t have to face consequences for allowing a campus to fail for more than five consecutive years. Those critics’ concern is misplaced,” Dutton wrote.

    Schools in other big cities, including Philadelphia, New Orleans and Detroit, in recent decades have gone through state takeovers, which are generally viewed as last resorts for underperforming schools and are often met with community backlash. Critics argue that state interventions generally have not led to big improvements.

    Texas started moving to take over the district following allegations of misconduct by school trustees, including inappropriate influencing of vendor contracts, and chronically low academic scores at Wheatley High.

    The district sued to block a takeover, but new education laws subsequently passed by the GOP-controlled state Legislature and a January ruling from the Texas Supreme Court cleared the way for the state to seize control.

    “All of us Texans have an obligation and should come together to reinvent HISD in a way that will ensure that we’re going to be providing the best quality education for those kids,” Abbott said Wednesday.

    Schools in Houston are not under mayoral control, unlike in New York and Chicago, but as expectations of a takeover mounted, the city’s Democratic leaders unified in opposition.

    Race is also an issue because the overwhelming majority of students in Houston schools are Hispanic or Black. Domingo Morel, a professor of political science and public services at New York University, said the political and racial dynamics in the Houston case are similar to instances where states have intervened elsewhere.

    “If we just focus on taking over school districts because they underperform, we would have a lot more takeovers,” Morel said. “But that’s not what happens.”

    Weber reported from Austin, Texas. Associated Press writer Acacia Coronado in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report.

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  • Oregon eyes mandate for climate change lessons in schools

    Oregon eyes mandate for climate change lessons in schools

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    SALEM, Ore. — Oregon lawmakers are aiming to make the state the second in the nation to mandate climate change lessons for K-12 public school students, further fueling U.S. culture wars in education.

    Dozens of Oregon high schoolers submitted support of the bill, saying they care about climate change deeply. Some teachers and parents say teaching climate change could help the next generation better confront it, but others want schools to focus on reading, writing and math after test scores plummeted post-pandemic.

    Schools across the U.S. have found themselves at the center of a politically charged battle over curriculum and how matters such as gender, sex education and race should be taught — or whether they should be taught at all.

    One of the bill’s chief sponsors, Democratic Sen. James Manning, said even elementary students have told him climate change is important to them.

    “We’re talking about third and fourth graders having a vision to understand how this world is changing rapidly,” he said at a Thursday state Capitol hearing in Salem.

    Connecticut has the only U.S. state law requiring climate change instruction, and it’s possibly the first time such a bill has been introduced in Oregon, according to legislative researchers. Lawmakers in California and New York are considering similar bills.

    Manning’s bill requires every Oregon school district to develop climate change curriculum within three years, addressing ecological, societal, cultural, political and mental health aspects of climate change.

    It’s unclear how Oregon would enforce the law. Manning told The Associated Press that he is going to scrap an unpopular proposal for financial penalties against districts that don’t comply, but didn’t say whether another plan was coming.

    For now, the bill doesn’t say how many hours of instruction are needed for the state’s education department to approve a district’s curriculum.

    Most states have learning standards — largely set by state education boards — that include climate change, although their extent varies by state. Twenty states and Washington, D.C., have specifically adopted what are known as the Next Generation Science Standards, which call for middle schoolers to learn about climate science and high schoolers to receive lessons on how human activity affects the climate.

    New Jersey’s education standards are believed to be the most wide-ranging. For the first time this school year, climate change is not just part of science instruction, but all subjects, like art, English and even PE.

    Several teens testified at the state Capitol in favor of the bill. No students have submitted opposition testimony.

    “In 100 years are we going to have to teach our children what trees are because there aren’t any left? It’s a thought that horrifies me,” said high school sophomore Gabriel Burke. “My generation needs to learn about climate change from a young age for our survival.”

    Some teachers testified in support of the bill. But others say they’re already struggling to address pandemic learning losses. Adding climate change on top of reading, writing, math, science and social studies is “a heavy lift that will end up coming down on the backs of teachers,” said Kyler Pace, a grade school teacher in Sherwood, Oregon.

    Recent surveys conducted by Columbia University’s Teachers College and the Yale Program on Climate Communication suggest that a majority of Americans think that climate change and global warming should be taught in school. But climate change is still seen by some as a politically divisive issue, and Pace said that mandating its instruction could inject more tension into schools.

    Nicole De Graff, a self-described parents’ rights advocate and former GOP legislative candidate, testified that her children, ages 9, 15, and 16, are “done being overwhelmed with things that are fear-based, like COVID.”

    In Pennington, New Jersey, wellness teacher Suzanne Horsley aims for age-appropriate lessons on what can be a daunting topic. In her K-2 physical education classes at Toll Gate Grammar School, she plays a game with pretend trees, using bean bags representing carbon to show students that fewer trees leads to higher levels of atmospheric carbon.

    In Horsley’s lesson plan for teens, students learn how climate change disproportionately impacts low-income communities. They look at air quality maps in areas with higher industrial activity or car traffic.

    There is a push for students to feel as though they have some ability to influence their world, Horsley said. “Whether it’s conserving water or finding ways to plant more trees or take care of the trees that already exist … they want to feel empowered.”

    ___

    Claire Rush is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

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  • Detectives seek motive in fatal California school stabbing

    Detectives seek motive in fatal California school stabbing

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    SANTA ROSA, Calif. — Detectives on Thursday were investigating what prompted a fight between three students at a Northern California high school that ended in one fatally stabbing another as more than two dozen classmates watched.

    A 15-year-old freshman was booked on suspicion of homicide and other charges in connection with Wednesday’s fatal stabbing in an art classroom at Montgomery High School in Santa Rosa, California. One 16-year-old junior was killed and another injured, police said.

    The attack shocked Santa Rosa — a community best known for its wineries about 50 miles (80.5 kilometers) north of San Francisco — and prompted lockdowns of several nearby schools as officers searched for the teenage suspect.

    The school will be closed for the rest of the week. Principal Adam Paulson, in a message to parents, students and the school community, called the stabbing “the darkest day anyone can remember at Montgomery High,” according to the Press-Democrat.

    The deceased victim was identified as Jayden Jess Pienta, 16, according to Santa Rosa police. He was a junior. The victim who survived the stabbing is also a 16-year-old junior.

    Jayden’s grandmother, Cheryl Griffith, told reporters that her daughter was struggling with his loss.

    “How is she going to get through this?” Smith asked. “How do you let her bury her baby? I don’t understand.”

    Santa Rosa Police Sgt. Christopher Mahurin on Thursday said investigators are working to interview the 27 students who were inside the classroom at the time, as well as the teacher and teacher’s aides.

    Members of the New Vintage Church gathered Thursday morning to pray for the school community.

    Officers will be on the school’s campus Monday when it reopens, Mahurin said.

    The violence started when the two juniors came into the classroom and started a fight with the freshman, police said. Teachers initially broke up the brawl but the freshman then pulled out a knife and allegedly stabbed the juniors.

    Mahurin said detectives have not yet discovered why the upperclassmen began the brawl, though the three students appear to have known each other and had fought previously.

    Santa Rosa police have not released the name of the 15-year-old student, a freshman, because he is a juvenile. He was booked on felony charges of homicide, attempted homicide and having a weapon on a school campus. He was additionally booked on a misdemeanor charge of battery on a school campus.

    The teenager was taken into custody Wednesday hiding in a creek bed after he fled the classroom. It was not immediately clear whether he had an attorney who could speak on his behalf.

    The Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office did not immediately have a comment Thursday about the potential filing of charges.

    “This is truly a sad day. The tragedy that happened here today is heartbreaking,” Anna Trunnell, the Santa Rosa City Schools superintendent, said at a news conference.

    Several students raised questions at the news conference about their safety and asked why school officials did not do more to stop the students’ behavior despite knowing there were problems between the three teens. The officials walked out instead of answering.

    Officials had earlier said none of the campuses in the Santa Rosa City Schools District have metal detectors or police officers inside.

    There were no mentions of the violence on the district’s website or social media accounts on Thursday morning. A Facebook page for Montgomery High School appeared to have been taken down.

    Paulson, the high school’s principal, and Santa Rosa City School District spokeswoman Vanessa Wedderburn didn’t answer voice and email messages seeking comment Thursday.

    With more than 1,600 students, Montgomery High School is the second largest school in Santa Rosa and in need of major repairs, according to a report published by The Press-Democrat last week.

    The school built in 1958 has exposed wires hanging from the rafters in hallways, wooden skirting around the foundation of old portable classrooms is rotting and students often must wait to get home to go to the bathroom because the ones at the school are foul smelling and there aren’t enough available, according to students who spoke to the newspaper.

    Lisa Cavin, associate superintendent of business services for the Santa Rosa City Schools district, told the newspaper the district hasn’t had the funds for some projects over the years and that constant vandalism diverts money.

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  • California high schooler fatally stabbed in classroom fight

    California high schooler fatally stabbed in classroom fight

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    SANTA ROSA, Calif. — A 16-year-old student involved in a fight at a Northern California high school was fatally stabbed Wednesday inside a classroom full of students, authorities said.

    Another student also suffered a stab wound and the suspect, a 15-year-old freshman, is in custody, according to Santa Rosa police. All three students are male.

    The two victims, both juniors at Montgomery High School, walked into an art classroom around 11:15 a.m. and began fighting with the freshman, Santa Rosa Police Chief John Cregan said during a news conference. About 30 people were in the classroom.

    Teachers initially broke up the fight but the freshman pulled out a folding knife and stabbed the juniors, the chief said.

    The juniors went to the school nurse and both were conscious and alert when they were taken to the hospital, Cregan said. But one of the teens, who had three stab wounds to his upper body, died there.

    The other is expected to survive a stab wound to his left hand, the chief said. The juniors were not armed.

    The freshman fled and was later found hiding in a creek bed and taken into custody, Cregan said. Investigators are still looking for the folding knife.

    The three students appear to have known each other and had fought previously, but Cregan said it wasn’t immediately clear what prompted Wednesday’s fight.

    “It appears that there had been some previous altercations between these students,” Cregan said, without providing additional details.

    The students’ names were not immediately released.

    “This is truly a sad day. The tragedy that happened here today is heartbreaking,” Anna Trunnell, the Santa Rosa City Schools superintendent, said at the news conference.

    Several students raised questions at the news conference about their safety and asked why school officials did not do more to stop the students’ behavior despite knowing there were problems between the three teens. The officials walked out instead of answering.

    Officials had earlier said none of the district’s schools have metal detectors or police officers inside.

    “We are going to be assessing how we approach supporting our students and making sure that they know that this is a safe place and we will be examining how exactly we’re going to do that,” Trunnell said.

    The district’s board voted in 2020 to “pause” the school resource officers program for a review, The Santa Rosa Press-Democrat reported, but the department is clamoring to get back inside the classrooms.

    “In 2022, SRPD responded to 945 calls for service at schools here in Santa Rosa. Our city is feeling the impact of not having School Resource Officers on campus,” the Santa Rosa Police Officers Association, the union that represents the department’s rank-and-file officers, wrote on Facebook after Wednesday’s violence.

    Santa Rosa, a city known for its wineries, is about 50 miles (80.47 kilometers) north of San Francisco.

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  • For poor schools, building repairs zap COVID relief money

    For poor schools, building repairs zap COVID relief money

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    JACKSON, Miss. — The air-conditioning gave out as students returned from summer break last year to Jim Hill High School in Jackson, Mississippi, forcing them to learn in sweltering heat. By Thanksgiving, students were huddling under blankets because the heat wasn’t working.

    Along the way students dealt with broken showers in locker rooms, plumbing issues and a litany of other problems in the nearly 60-year-old school building.

    “There’s been times we’ve been cold, there’s been times we’ve been hot,” said Mentia Trippeter, a 17-year-old senior. “There’s been times where it rained and it poured, we’ve been drowning. We go through it — we go through it, man.”

    Like other schools serving low-income communities across the country, Jim Hill has long dealt with neglected infrastructure that has made it harder for students to learn. So when Jackson Public Schools received tens of millions of dollars in federal COVID relief money, it decided to put much of the windfall toward repairing heating and plumbing problems, some of which temporarily caused the school to switch to remote learning.

    For poorer school districts, deciding what to do with that money has involved a tough tradeoff: work on long-term academic recovery or fix long-standing infrastructure needs.

    All told, the federal government has allocated $190 billion in pandemic relief aid to help schools recover — more than four times the amount the U.S. Education Department spends on K-12 schools in a typical year, and with few strings attached.

    An Associated Press analysis of school district spending plans from across the country found that the poorest districts in each state are far more likely than the richest districts to spend emergency relief funds on upgrading their buildings or transportation systems.

    Jackson’s academic needs are no less pressing. The majority of students in the district learned virtually for a year and a half during the pandemic and math test scores plummeted by the equivalent of over a full year’s worth of learning, according to Harvard and Stanford’s Education Recovery Scorecard. But school officials didn’t want to miss a rare opportunity to fix infrastructure issues — some of which date back decades.

    William Merritt, the school district’s chief of staff, said the funds gave the district the ability to “provide our students with tools that other students in well-to-do districts have.”

    The data in AP’s analysis came from education market research firm Burbio, which reviewed how more than 6,000 districts across the country, representing over 75% of the nation’s public school students, planned to spend their federal relief money. The data covered the final and largest round of federal aid to schools, totaling $122 billion.

    The AP found that school districts with the highest percentage of children living in poverty — the poorest 20% of districts in each state — were more than three times as likely as the wealthiest school districts to dedicate money to the construction of new buildings or classrooms. School districts with high levels of poverty were also more than twice as likely to include money for facilities repairs.

    “The poor districts are doing it because they’re chasing after emergencies,” said Mary Filardo, executive director of the 21st Century School Fund.

    Infrastructure is a prime example of long-standing inequities in school funding. While affluent districts can rely on local tax revenue to pay for major improvement projects such as installing state-of-the-art heating and ventilation systems, poorer districts that cannot often spend more money over time on short-term fixes.

    In Texas, the Victoria Independent School District is also grappling with competing infrastructure needs and pandemic recovery. It plans to spend half of the $28.4 million it received in the last round of relief funds on academics, teacher retention and student supports that include social-emotional behavior specialists.

    But the other 50% of the money is devoted to improving air quality, such as updating ventilation systems. Superintendent Quintin Shepherd says he’d love to spend more on counselors and less on fixing broken air conditioners, but there’s no way kids can learn safely in a classroom that’s 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius).

    “We got into education to improve educational outcomes and life expectations. It’s a hard position to have to make these impossible decisions,” Shepherd said.

    Some have argued the money shouldn’t be spent on infrastructure projects, which can take years to complete and often with with no immediate benefit to students. But the government only required 20% of the emergency relief funds to be spent addressing learning loss.

    U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a recent speech that the relief funding was “intended to accelerate reopening and recovery, not to fill decades of underinvestment in education funding and support for students.”

    Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, said it was right for the government to allow a high degree of flexibility in how to spend the relief funds, rather than bogging districts down in red tape.

    In Jackson, officials chose to spend over half of the $109 million the district received in the last round of federal funding on fixing the facilities in schools like Jim Hill.

    Students at the school generally agreed that it needed infrastructure upgrades. Still, when asked what they would do if they were put in charge of spending that money for the district, some had bigger wishes.

    “I believe we could hire more teachers to teach different types of subjects,” said Elijah Fisher, a 17-year-old junior. But, he admitted, first he would use the money to fix the drainage system around the school.

    Overall, officials in Jackson are confident that they’re making the right investment.

    Though much of the funding went toward infrastructure needs, the school district also bought laptops for every student and invested in after-school programming. Jim Hill now offers near year-round school with the summer term devoted to field trips and “learn by doing” experiences.

    The school’s principal, Bobby Brown, said the money spent on infrastructure needs is very necessary — although not enough to address decades of inequity in the majority Black school system.

    “As you listen to the students, and them having generations of families that have similar experiences,” Brown said, “this also sheds light on the types of investment that we have — or the lack of investment that we have in communities where people look like us.”

    ___

    The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Michigan State University police say shootings wound several

    Michigan State University police say shootings wound several

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    EAST LANSING, Mich. — Michigan State University police say multiple people have been reported injured in shootings on campus.

    The police made the statement Monday night on Twitter, saying there appeared to be only one suspect. It did not say if anyone was in custody.

    Michigan State University police had ordered students and staff to shelter in place after a report of shots fired around the school’s East Lansing campus.

    In an alert sent shortly after 8:30 p.m., campus police reported a “shots fired incident occurring on or near the East Lansing campus.” The alert advised students and staff to “Secure-in-Place immediately” and to monitor alert.msu.edu for information.

    The East Lansing High School auditorium, where a school board meeting was being held Monday night, was locked down and people were being prevented by police from leaving, the Lansing State Journal reported.

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  • 4 charged over taped beating of teen who later took own life

    4 charged over taped beating of teen who later took own life

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    BAYVILLE, N.J. — Four students have been charged and a school district superintendent has resigned after a recorded attack against a 14-year-old New Jersey student in the hallway of her school spread on social media in the days before her family says she took her own life.

    One juvenile was charged with aggravated assault, two were charged with conspiracy to commit aggravated assault and one was charged with harassment, prosecutors in Ocean County, New Jersey, said Saturday.

    All four juveniles and their guardians were given copies of the complaints and they were released pending future court appearances, Ocean County Prosecutor Bradley D. Billhimer said in an email Saturday.

    The family of Adriana O. Kuch found her body on Feb. 3, two days after her beating beside school lockers at Central Regional High School in Bayville, her father has said.

    The Central Regional School District announced Superintendent Triantafillos Parlapanides’ resignation Saturday, but did not immediately provide any additional information.

    The district said in a statement that it “is evaluating all current and past allegations of bullying.”

    In an interview with WNBC-TV, her father, Michael Kuch, said Adriana had been hit with a 20-ounce (0.56 liter) water bottle. She received care from the school nurse after the attack left her with bruises and wounds.

    “I do know why it happened,” he said. “It happened because these two haven’t liked each other for a couple years, and she had been threatening my daughter online.”

    After students at the high school participated in a walkout on Wednesday, Parlapanides wrote in a letter to parents that the protest interfered with “the learning process” and future “rallies” will need prior approval from the administration.

    “I spoke with the student protestors in front of the school on Wednesday and offered to sit down and meet with them to discuss their concerns,” said the prosecutor, Billhimer, who was at the high school again on Friday to meet with protest organizers for more than two hours.

    Billhimer said he discussed ways to improve the district’s response to school “incidents” during a meeting on Saturday with Parlapanides.

    “I also shared some suggestions regarding staff changes as well as programming and services to respond to the needs of the students,” Billhimer wrote.

    Adriana was born in Toledo, Ohio, and moved to Bayville seven years ago, according to her obituary. She was described as an animal lover and a girl who helped children with special needs.

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  • These School Employees Are Crucial — But They Don’t Qualify For Family Leave

    These School Employees Are Crucial — But They Don’t Qualify For Family Leave

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    Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) had her first child while serving in the House of Representatives in 2014. Four years later, she became the first sitting senator to give birth while in office.

    “It was not until I became a mom and was traveling back and forth to Illinois twice a week and trying to pump breast milk for my baby that I realized there were no lactation rooms I could use in the airport,” Duckworth told HuffPost. “I was told, ‘Well, you can plug your breast pump in next to where those guys are charging their phones.’”

    The U.S. tends to lag behind other developed countries when it comes to progressive, family-friendly policies. One law that Duckworth says desperately needs some bolstering is the Family and Medical Leave Act, which turns 30 years old this year.

    The FMLA assures workers can take protected leave from their jobs for up to 12 weeks to care for a new child or a loved one who’s sick. Historic as it was at the time, the law came with some significant holes: Only unpaid time off is guaranteed, and millions of workers fall outside of the law’s protections because they work for small employers or don’t work enough hours.

    Duckworth plans to reintroduce a bill in the Senate on Thursday that would add about 3 million additional workers to the FMLA’s coverage: education support professionals. These are school employees who are not teachers and typically work nine or 10 months a year, like cafeteria workers, custodians, bus drivers, administrative staff and paraeducators who assist teachers in the classroom.

    While teachers have protections under the FMLA, many education support professionals are excluded because their schedules are part time and they don’t work 1,250 hours per year. Unless a local school district has negotiated a leave policy for these workers, they might be unable to take time off and still know they will have a job to come back to.

    “These are your lunch ladies, these are your janitors, these are your bus drivers, and they don’t qualify because it’s hard for them to reach the minimum number of hours,” Duckworth said. “Everybody deserves to have access to the FMLA, and these education support professionals are absolutely integral to students and schools across America.”

    Duckworth’s bill, which is co-sponsored by Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), would create a separate hours threshold for these workers. They would be able to qualify for unpaid leave so long as they worked 60% of the hours typically expected for their job over the course of a month. That way a cafeteria worker who might only work 15 hours a week would still have a job to come back to if they needed to stop working for a few weeks.

    The main teachers unions — the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers — are two of the biggest backers of Duckworth’s bill.

    Many school bus drivers don’t work enough hours to qualify for job-protected unpaid leave under the FMLA.

    The Washington Post via Getty Images

    Joshua Webster, a school employee and leader of his union local in Madison, Wisconsin, said workers shouldn’t have to quit their jobs because they have to care for someone. He said an assistant cook in his school district recently lost his fiancee and is now looking after their two children. Because he didn’t qualify for family leave, the union helped negotiate a special arrangement with the district due to the tragic circumstances.

    Webster said the worker is now on leave and has a job to come back to, but only because the school district was willing to compromise.

    “It speaks volumes to what’s going on,” said Webster, whose union is part of the AFT. “He did not have the hours. He would have ended up quitting. His spot never would have been held.”

    The National Partnership for Women and Families, a group that advocates for robust leave policies, estimates that more than 40% of U.S. workers do not qualify for unpaid leave under the FMLA. Of those who do take leave under the law, roughly half step away from work due to their own health issues, according to Labor Department data. The leave is typically short: More than three-quarters of workers take two months or less.

    “These are your lunch ladies, these are your janitors, these are your bus drivers, and they don’t qualify.”

    – Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.)

    Duckworth said expanding protections to school support workers is not only morally right but makes for smart public policy, considering school staffing shortages. School districts have struggled to hang on to bus drivers, cafeteria workers and other employees as COVID-19 took a toll on the workforce and the labor market tightened.

    In a federal survey released last year, 60% of U.S. principals said they were having a hard time filling non-teaching positions at their schools.

    “You see where folks were not able to take time or have access to FMLA to take care of a loved one during the pandemic,” Duckworth said. “Consequently, many of these workers have quit to go find other jobs where they could qualify for it, or they made the tough decision of stopping work. And we don’t want to lose that workforce.”

    Duckworth’s bill did not make it out of committee last time. Neither did a companion bill introduced by Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) in the House.

    Democrats haven’t had much success pursuing more aggressive reforms to the FMLA, either. While controlled by Democrats, the House passed a bill to create a paid leave program funded through a corporate minimum tax and administered through the Social Security Administration. That bill died in the Senate, however. Now that Republicans control the House, it’s unlikely any such legislation will go anywhere for the time being.

    But there have been some glimmers of hope for more modest legislation aimed at working parents. In the omnibus bill passed late last year, Republicans joined with Democrats to include two significant provisions: one that guarantees basic workplace accommodations for pregnant employees, and another that expands workplace protections for women who are breastfeeding. In a sign of how much support they had, the two measures passed, 73-24 and 92-5, respectively.

    Duckworth said the pandemic may have helped change some lawmakers’ perspectives on these issues.

    “People are finally understanding the decisions people are having to make,” she said. “It became much more visible, people having to choose between going to work sick and keeping a paycheck, or in many of these cases just dropping out of the workforce.”

    According to Duckworth, making sure a school bus driver can take leave without losing their job shouldn’t be such a heavy lift.

    “It’s the bare minimum we should be providing,” she said.

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  • Schola Closes $10M Series A to Further Improve Student Recruitment and Engagement in PK-12 Schools

    Schola Closes $10M Series A to Further Improve Student Recruitment and Engagement in PK-12 Schools

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    The growth capital will allow the EdTech SaaS company to match even more families with the ideal schools for their children and drive enrollment for Schola’s PK-12 school partners.

    Press Release
    –


    updated: Jan 17, 2023


    PHOENIX, January 17, 2023 (Newswire.com)
    –
     Schola, the online platform that helps families discover, connect, and enroll in the ideal PK-12 schools for their children, marks a new milestone by closing a $10M Series A round of funding. With triple-digit annual recurring revenue growth, this minority-founded and led organization has already surpassed 100K students searching for the most suitable school in their platform to improve educational outcomes across the United States. The growth investment will power Schola’s continued nationwide expansion and standardization of how families and schools connect with one another, creating brighter futures for all.

    “We’re very excited about the additional resources from this investment that will allow Schola to execute further our vision for families and schools across America. We will continue adding tools to the platform to help students in every state find their perfect school, giving them a better chance to reach their full potential.” – Jaime Martinez, Founder and CEO of Schola.  

    Channel Equity Partners led Series A, followed by significant investors Arizona Venture Development Corp, Revolution‘s Rise of the Rest (led by Steve Case, of AOL fame), EduLab, Stout Street, and Portfolia. Their support accelerates the addition of more mission-driven professionals to Schola’s team and expands the capabilities of its double-sided school choice marketplace, strengthening Schola’s commitment to increasing parents’ engagement with their children’s education. Schola will continue to revolutionize how English and Spanish-speaking families from various backgrounds connect with schools to build strong communities inside and outside the classroom.

    “PK-12 student recruitment is yet another market transitioning from offline methods to streamlined, digital channels. The data showed that Schola’s school partners receive a potential 15x return on investment from the value of enrollment applications generated by its marketplace. CEP is thrilled to support this amazing team that has developed the most efficient solution for schools and families to succeed.” – Jensen Bryant, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Channel Equity Partners.

    About Schola: Schola is the leading software company for families and schools to improve PK-12 education outcomes. Schola helps families discover, connect, and enroll in the ideal school setting and helps schools source, enroll, and engage with prospective families. Schola believes that enrolling in the ideal learning environment must be accessible; thus, it is entirely free to parents and students. Learn more by visiting schola.com

    Source: Schola

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  • EXPLAINER: What is ChatGPT and why are schools blocking it?

    EXPLAINER: What is ChatGPT and why are schools blocking it?

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    Ask the new artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT to write an essay about the cause of the American Civil War and you can watch it churn out a persuasive term paper in a matter of seconds.

    That’s one reason why New York City school officials this week started blocking the impressive but controversial writing tool that can generate paragraphs of human-like text.

    The decision by the largest U.S. school district to restrict the ChatGPT website on school devices and networks could have ripple effects on other schools, and teachers scrambling to figure out how to prevent cheating. The creators of ChatGPT say they’re also looking for ways to detect misuse.

    The free tool has been around for just five weeks but is already raising tough questions about the future of AI in education, the tech industry and a host of professions.

    WHAT IS CHATGPT?

    ChatGPT launched on Nov. 30 but is part of a broader set of technologies developed by the San Francisco-based startup OpenAI, which has a close relationship with Microsoft.

    It’s part of a new generation of AI systems that can converse, generate readable text on demand and even produce novel images and video based on what they’ve learned from a vast database of digital books, online writings and other media.

    But unlike previous iterations of so-called “large language models,” such as OpenAI’s GPT-3, launched in 2020, the ChatGPT tool is available for free to anyone with an internet connection and designed to be more user-friendly. It works like a written dialogue between the AI system and the person asking it questions.

    Millions of people have played with it over the past month, using it to write silly poems or songs, to try to trick it into making mistakes, or for more practical purposes such as helping compose an email. All of those queries are also helping it get smarter.

    WHAT ARE THE PITFALLS?

    As with similar systems, ChatGPT can generate convincing prose, but that doesn’t mean what it says is factual or logical.

    Its launch came with little guidance for how to use it, other than a promise that ChatGPT will admit when it’s wrong, challenge “incorrect premises” and reject requests meant to generate offensive answers. Since then, however, its popularity has led its creators to try to lower some people’s expectations.

    “ChatGPT is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Twitter in December.

    Altman added that “it’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now.”

    “It’s a preview of progress; we have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness.”

    CAN IT BE USED FOR WRITING SCHOOL PAPERS?

    This is what ChatGPT said when The Associated Press asked it to answer that question in all caps from the perspective of a principal shouting a brief message through a school’s PA system:

    “DO NOT USE CHATGPT OR ANY OTHER AUTOMATED WRITING TOOL FOR SCHOOL PAPERS. THIS IS CHEATING AND WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. IF YOU ARE CAUGHT USING CHATGPT OR ANY OTHER AUTOMATED WRITING TOOL FOR SCHOOL PAPERS, THERE WILL BE SERIOUS CONSEQUENCES.”

    But when asked to answer the same question on its own, ChatGPT offered this more measured warning: “As a general rule, it is not appropriate to use ChatGPT or any other automated writing tool for school papers, as it is considered cheating and does not benefit the student in the long run.”

    WHAT DO SCHOOLS SAY?

    Many school districts are still scrambling to figure out how to set policies on if and how it can be used.

    The New York City education department said Thursday that it’s restricting access on school networks and devices because it’s worried about negative impacts on student learning, as well as “concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content.”

    But there’s no stopping a student from accessing ChatGPT from a personal phone or computer at home.

    “While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success,” said schools spokesperson Jenna Lyle.

    HUMAN OR AI?

    “To determine if something was written by a human or an AI, you can look for the absence of personal experiences or emotions, check for inconsistency in writing style, and watch for the use of filler words or repetitive phrases. These may be signs that the text was generated by an AI.”

    That’s what ChatGPT told an AP reporter when asked how to tell the difference.

    OpenAI said in a human-written statement this week that it plans to work with educators as it learns from how people are experimenting with ChatGPT in the real world.

    “We don’t want ChatGPT to be used for misleading purposes in schools or anywhere else, so we’re already developing mitigations to help anyone identify text generated by that system,” the company said.

    DOES THIS THREATEN GOOGLE?

    There’s been some speculation that ChatGPT could upend the internet search business now dominated by Google, but the tech giant has been working on similar technology for years — it’s just more cautious about releasing it in the wild.

    It was Google that helped jumpstart the trend for ever-bigger, ever-smarter AI language models that could be “pre-trained” on a wide body of writings. In 2018 the company introduced a system known as BERT that uses a “transformer” technique that compares words across a sentence to predict meaning and context. Some of those advances are now baked into Google searches.

    But there’s no question that successive iterations of GPT — which stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer — are having an impact. Microsoft has invested at least $1 billion in OpenAI and has an exclusive license to use GPT-3.

    HEY CHATGPT, CAN YOU PUT ALL THIS IN A RAP?

    “ChatGPT’s just a tool,

    But it ain’t no substitute for school.

    You can’t cheat your way to the top,

    Using a machine to do your homework, you’ll flop.

    Plagiarism’s a no-no,

    And ChatGPT’s text is not your own, yo.

    So put in the work, earn that grade,

    Don’t try to cheat, it’s not worth the trade.”

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  • A decade after Sandy Hook, grief remains but hope grows

    A decade after Sandy Hook, grief remains but hope grows

    [ad_1]

    NEWTOWN, Conn. — They would have been 16 or 17 this year. High school juniors.

    The children killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, 2012 should have spent this year thinking about college, taking their SATs and getting their driver’s licenses. Maybe attending their first prom.

    Instead, the families of the 20 students and six educators slain in the mass shooting will mark a decade without them Wednesday.

    December is a difficult month for many in Newtown, the Connecticut suburb where holiday season joy is tempered by heartbreak around the anniversary of the nation’s worst grade school shooting.

    For former Sandy Hook students who survived the massacre, guilt and anxiety can intensify. For the parents, it can mean renewed grief, even as they continue to fight on their lost children’s behalf.

    In February, Sandy Hook families reached a $73 million settlement with the gunmaker Remington, which made the shooter’s rifle. Juries in Connecticut and Texas ordered the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to pay $1.4 billion for promoting lies that the massacre was a hoax.

    In mid-November, a memorial to the 26 victims opened near the new elementary school built to replace the one torn down after the shooting.

    Ten years on, some victims’ relatives and survivors aren’t without hope for a brighter future.

    ACTIVISM IN TRAGEDY’S AFTERMATH

    After the massacre, Nicole Hockley and Mark Barden were among many victims’ relatives who turned to activism. They helped form Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit group that works to prevent suicides and mass shootings.

    Hockley, who lost her 6-year-old son, Dylan, and Barden, who lost his 7-year-old son, Daniel, both find it difficult to believe their children have been gone for a decade.

    “For me, Dylan is still this 6-year-old boy, forever frozen in time,” Hockley said. “This journey that we’ve been on the last 10 years, it doesn’t feel like a decade and it doesn’t feel like 10 years since I last held my son, either.”

    A decade hasn’t diminished the disbelief Barden and his wife feel over Daniel’s death.

    “Jackie and I still have moments where we just kind of look at each other, still wrapping our heads around the fact that our little 7-year-old boy was shot to death in his first grade classroom,” he said.

    “I can’t help but wonder what he’d be like now at 17,” he said, repeating the number 17. “I just think he would be still a more mature version of the beautiful, sweet, compassionate, thoughtful, intelligent little boy that he was at 7. And it breaks my heart to think of the wonderful impact he would have had in these last 10 years and what he would have still yet to come, and it’s all been taken away from him.”

    Sandy Hook Promise’s programs have been taught in more than 23,000 schools to over 18 million children and adults. Key components include education about the warning signs of potential school violence or self-harm and an anonymous tip system to report a classmate at risk for hurting others or themselves.

    Hockley and Barden say they believe the educational programs and reporting system have prevented many suicides and stopped some school shootings.

    “It’s a tremendous satisfaction and it’s a serious responsibility,” Barden said of the group’s work. “And it’s a gift in a way that we have built something that allows us this mechanism with which to honor our children by saving other children and by protecting other families from having to endure this pain.”

    GROWING UP A SURVIVOR

    Ashley Hubner was in her second grade classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary when the shooting happened. She and her classmates ran to the cubby area to hide. The school intercom system clicked on. Everyone could hear gunshots, screaming and crying.

    When police arrived, she and her classmates didn’t want to open the door. They thought bad guys could be impersonating officers. They screamed “No!” The officers had to convince them they were actually police.

    Ashley, now a 17-year-old senior at Newtown High School, developed post-traumatic stress disorder and has struggled with anxiety and depression, like other students who were there that day. Ashley said she always gets more emotional and irritable around the shooting anniversary.

    “Even though it’s been 10 years, like this is still a problem that a lot of us still have to handle in our everyday lives and it still affects us greatly,” she said.

    Adding to the grief is the fact that mass shootings keep happening, she said.

    “We’ve had 10 years to change things and we’ve changed so little, and that’s just disgusting to me,” she said.

    Ashley said there wasn’t much talk among her classmates yet about the anniversary.

    “I feel like everyone just tries to pretend like everything is normal and then when it gets to that day, I’m sure people will reach out and I’ll reach out to people.”

    Ashley wasn’t sure how she might mark the day. All town schools will be closed for staff development. She said she may make her first trip to the new memorial.

    She said she has been happy with her senior year at Newtown High, calling it one of the best school years she’s had. She is looking forward to going to college.

    “I’m really, really excited to leave,” she said. “Just like to get new experiences, grow up and move on with this chapter of my life, you know?”

    LIGHT CONQUERING DARKNESS

    St. Rose of Lima Church has been a gathering point for the Newtown community since the day of the shooting, when hundreds of people packed the Roman Catholic church and stood outside for a vigil. It has held a special Mass every Dec. 14 since.

    Monsignor Robert Weiss still struggles with his own trauma. The church led the funerals for eight slain children. He hasn’t slept well ever since and becomes emotional easily. During Mass, he always keeps watch on the entrances, worried about a violent intruder.

    “It’s a very difficult time for me having buried eight of those children,” he said of the anniversary. “It just brings back so many memories of true sadness.”

    The anniversary Masses are hopeful, Weiss said, with a theme that light conquers darkness.

    “The darkness of evil is not going to conquer good and we as a community have to work together to be sure that happens,” Weiss said. “We want to celebrate and remember the children and the families, and how it’s turned this tragedy into so many positive things to assist other people.”

    2022 ‘TIPPING POINT’ IN GUN SAFETY

    After Sandy Hook, there was frustration among many gun violence prevention advocates that nothing was being done to stop such massacres. The failure of a gun control bill in the months after Sandy Hook was another hard loss.

    But U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, said the shooting gave new energy to the movement, with numerous groups forming to demand action.

    “In the 10 years leading up to Sandy Hook, the gun lobby controlled Washington. Anything they wanted they got,” said Murphy.

    “After Sandy Hook happened, we started building what I would describe as the modern anti-gun violence movement,” he said. “During the next 10 years, there was essentially gridlock. The gun lobby no longer got what they wanted, but unfortunately in Washington we weren’t getting what we wanted either.”

    After mass shootings last spring killed 21 people at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first major federal gun control law in decades. The law expands background checks for younger gun buyers, boosts school mental health programs and promotes “red flag” laws to temporarily confiscate guns from people deemed dangerous.

    “I think this summer marked the tipping point, where finally the gun safety movement has more power than the gun lobby,” Murphy said.

    “It’s going to be a hard December for those families, but I hope they know what a difference that they have made in the memory of their children in these 10 years.”

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  • A decade after Sandy Hook, grief remains but hope grows

    A decade after Sandy Hook, grief remains but hope grows

    [ad_1]

    NEWTOWN, Conn. (AP) — They would have been 16 or 17 this year. High school juniors.

    The children killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, 2012 should have spent this year thinking about college, taking their SATs and getting their driver’s licenses. Maybe attending their first prom.

    Instead, the families of the 20 students and six educators slain in the mass shooting will mark a decade without them Wednesday.

    December is a difficult month for many in Newtown, the Connecticut suburb where holiday season joy is tempered by heartbreak around the anniversary of the nation’s worst grade school shooting.

    For former Sandy Hook students who survived the massacre, guilt and anxiety can intensify. For the parents, it can mean renewed grief, even as they continue to fight on their lost children’s behalf.

    In February, Sandy Hook families reached a $73 million settlement with the gunmaker Remington, which made the shooter’s rifle. Juries in Connecticut and Texas ordered the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to pay $1.4 billion for promoting lies that the massacre was a hoax.

    In mid-November, a memorial to the 26 victims opened near the new elementary school built to replace the one torn down after the shooting.

    Ten years on, some victims’ relatives and survivors aren’t without hope for a brighter future.

    ACTIVISM IN TRAGEDY’S AFTERMATH

    After the massacre, Nicole Hockley and Mark Barden were among many victims’ relatives who turned to activism. They helped form Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit group that works to prevent suicides and mass shootings.

    Hockley, who lost her 6-year-old son, Dylan, and Barden, who lost his 7-year-old son, Daniel, both find it difficult to believe their children have been gone for a decade.

    “For me, Dylan is still this 6-year-old boy, forever frozen in time,” Hockley said. “This journey that we’ve been on the last 10 years, it doesn’t feel like a decade and it doesn’t feel like 10 years since I last held my son, either.”

    A decade hasn’t diminished the disbelief Barden and his wife feel over Daniel’s death.

    “Jackie and I still have moments where we just kind of look at each other, still wrapping our heads around the fact that our little 7-year-old boy was shot to death in his first grade classroom,” he said.

    “I can’t help but wonder what he’d be like now at 17,” he said, repeating the number 17. “I just think he would be still a more mature version of the beautiful, sweet, compassionate, thoughtful, intelligent little boy that he was at 7. And it breaks my heart to think of the wonderful impact he would have had in these last 10 years and what he would have still yet to come, and it’s all been taken away from him.”

    Sandy Hook Promise’s programs have been taught in more than 23,000 schools to over 18 million children and adults. Key components include education about the warning signs of potential school violence or self-harm and an anonymous tip system to report a classmate at risk for hurting others or themselves.

    Hockley and Barden say they believe the educational programs and reporting system have prevented many suicides and stopped some school shootings.

    “It’s a tremendous satisfaction and it’s a serious responsibility,” Barden said of the group’s work. “And it’s a gift in a way that we have built something that allows us this mechanism with which to honor our children by saving other children and by protecting other families from having to endure this pain.”

    GROWING UP A SURVIVOR

    Ashley Hubner was in her second grade classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary when the shooting happened. She and her classmates ran to the cubby area to hide. The school intercom system clicked on. Everyone could hear gunshots, screaming and crying.

    When police arrived, she and her classmates didn’t want to open the door. They thought bad guys could be impersonating officers. They screamed “No!” The officers had to convince them they were actually police.

    Ashley, now a 17-year-old senior at Newtown High School, developed post-traumatic stress disorder and has struggled with anxiety and depression, like other students who were there that day. Ashley said she always gets more emotional and irritable around the shooting anniversary.

    “Even though it’s been 10 years, like this is still a problem that a lot of us still have to handle in our everyday lives and it still affects us greatly,” she said.

    Adding to the grief is the fact that mass shootings keep happening, she said.

    “We’ve had 10 years to change things and we’ve changed so little, and that’s just disgusting to me,” she said.

    Ashley said there wasn’t much talk among her classmates yet about the anniversary.

    “I feel like everyone just tries to pretend like everything is normal and then when it gets to that day, I’m sure people will reach out and I’ll reach out to people.”

    Ashley wasn’t sure how she might mark the day. All town schools will be closed for staff development. She said she may make her first trip to the new memorial.

    She said she has been happy with her senior year at Newtown High, calling it one of the best school years she’s had. She is looking forward to going to college.

    “I’m really, really excited to leave,” she said. “Just like to get new experiences, grow up and move on with this chapter of my life, you know?”

    LIGHT CONQUERING DARKNESS

    St. Rose of Lima Church has been a gathering point for the Newtown community since the day of the shooting, when hundreds of people packed the Roman Catholic church and stood outside for a vigil. It has held a special Mass every Dec. 14 since.

    Monsignor Robert Weiss still struggles with his own trauma. The church led the funerals for eight slain children. He hasn’t slept well ever since and becomes emotional easily. During Mass, he always keeps watch on the entrances, worried about a violent intruder.

    “It’s a very difficult time for me having buried eight of those children,” he said of the anniversary. “It just brings back so many memories of true sadness.”

    The anniversary Masses are hopeful, Weiss said, with a theme that light conquers darkness.

    “The darkness of evil is not going to conquer good and we as a community have to work together to be sure that happens,” Weiss said. “We want to celebrate and remember the children and the families, and how it’s turned this tragedy into so many positive things to assist other people.”

    2022 ‘TIPPING POINT’ IN GUN SAFETY

    After Sandy Hook, there was frustration among many gun violence prevention advocates that nothing was being done to stop such massacres. The failure of a gun control bill in the months after Sandy Hook was another hard loss.

    But U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, said the shooting gave new energy to the movement, with numerous groups forming to demand action.

    “In the 10 years leading up to Sandy Hook, the gun lobby controlled Washington. Anything they wanted they got,” said Murphy.

    “After Sandy Hook happened, we started building what I would describe as the modern anti-gun violence movement,” he said. “During the next 10 years, there was essentially gridlock. The gun lobby no longer got what they wanted, but unfortunately in Washington we weren’t getting what we wanted either.”

    After mass shootings last spring killed 21 people at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first major federal gun control law in decades. The law expands background checks for younger gun buyers, boosts school mental health programs and promotes “red flag” laws to temporarily confiscate guns from people deemed dangerous.

    “I think this summer marked the tipping point, where finally the gun safety movement has more power than the gun lobby,” Murphy said.

    “It’s going to be a hard December for those families, but I hope they know what a difference that they have made in the memory of their children in these 10 years.”

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    Source link