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  • US School Violence Fast Facts | CNN

    US School Violence Fast Facts | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Here is a list of incidents of elementary, middle and high school violence with at least one fatality, from 1927 to the present. Suicides, gang-related incidents and deaths resulting from domestic conflicts are not included. If a perpetrator was killed or died by suicide during the incident, their death is not included in the fatality totals.

    Because there is no central database tracking school violence incidents, this list is based primarily on media reports and is not complete or representative of all incidents.

    READ MORE: Ten years of school shootings

    January 4, 2024 – Perry High School – Perry, Iowa. Dylan Butler, 17, fatally shoots a sixth grade student and wounds five other people. The wounded include four students and the school’s principal. Butler dies from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

    March 27, 2023 – Covenant School – Nashville, Tennessee. Three children and three adults are killed in a shooting. The shooter is fatally shot by responding officers.

    November 8, 2022 – Ingraham High School – Seattle, Washington. A 17-year-old student is fatally shot, and two teens are arrested in connection with the shooting.

    October 24, 2022 – Central Visual and Performing Arts High School – St. Louis, Missouri. A teen and an adult are killed in a shooting. The gunman dies after an exchange of gunfire with police.

    May 24, 2022 – Robb Elementary School – Uvalde, Texas. Salvador Ramos, 18, fatally shoots 19 students and two teachers. Responding officers fatally shoot Ramos.

    March 31, 2022 – Tanglewood Middle School – Greenville, South Carolina. 12-year-old student Jamari Cortez Bonaparte Jackson is fatally shot. The suspected shooter, also 12, is arrested and charged with murder and other firearm charges.

    January 29, 2022 – Beloit Memorial High School – Beloit, Wisconsin. Jion Broomfield, 19, is fatally shot after a basketball game. Amaree Goodall, 19, is arrested in connection with the shooting.

    January 19, 2022 – Oliver Citywide Academy – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 15-year-old freshman Marquis Campbell is shot on school grounds. Campbell is taken to the hospital in critical condition and dies from gun injuries. In January 2024, Eugene Watson, 19, is sentenced to 20-40 years in prison.

    November 30, 2021 – Oxford High School – Oxford, Michigan. Ethan Crumbley, 15, opens fire, killing four students and injuring seven others. Crumbley later pleads guilty to one count of terrorism causing death, four counts of first-degree murder and 19 other charges. In 2023, Crumbley is sentenced to life in prison without parole.

    September 1, 2021 – Mount Tabor High School – Winston-Salem, North Carolina. A student is fatally shot, and a suspect is taken into custody.

    March 1, 2021 – Watson Chapel Junior High – Pine Bluff, Arkansas. A student is fatally shot, and a 15-year-old male suspect is arrested. In 2023, Thomas Quarles pleads guilty to murder and is sentenced to 40 years in prison.

    January 14, 2020 – Bellaire High School – Bellaire, Texas. A 16-year-old male fatally shoots classmate Cesar Cortes. The teen is arrested and charged with manslaughter. The county district attorney said it appeared the shooting was unintentional. In 2021, the teen is sentenced to twelve years in prison, according to authorities.

    November 14, 2019 – Saugus High School – Santa Clarita, California. Nathaniel Berhow, 16, opens fire, killing two and injuring three, then shoots himself.

    May 6, 2019 – STEM School Highlands Ranch – Highlands Ranch, Colorado. Suspects Devon Erickson, 18, and Alec McKinney, 16, are apprehended after a shooting leaves one dead and eight others injured. Erickson is later sentenced to life in prison without parole while McKinney is sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.

    May 18, 2018 – Santa Fe High School – Santa Fe, Texas. Dimitrios Pagourtzis, 17, allegedly opens fire killing 10 and injuring 13. Pagourtzis is arrested and charged with capital murder and aggravated assault of a public servant. In November 2019, he is declared mentally incompetent to stand trial.

    February 14, 2018 – Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School – Parkland, Florida. Former student, Nikolas Cruz, 19, opens fire with an AR-15 rifle, killing 17 people and injuring 17 others. According to law enforcement, the suspect activated a fire alarm to draw people outside to increase casualties. Cruz pleads guilty to 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder. Cruz is later sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

    January 23, 2018 – Marshall County High School – Benton, Kentucky. Gabriel R. Parker, 15, opens fire killing two and injuring 18 others. The suspect is arrested at the scene and later charged with two counts of murder and 14 counts of first degree assault. Parker is later sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty.

    December 7, 2017 – Aztec High School – Aztec, New Mexico. William Atchison shoots and kills students Casey Jordan Marquez and Francisco Fernandez. Atchison, a former student at the high school, dies of what police believe to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

    September 13, 2017 – Freeman High School – Spokane, Washington. Caleb Sharpe, a sophomore at the school, opens fire killing one student and injuring three others. Sharpe later pleads guilty and is sentenced to 40 years to life in prison.

    April 10, 2017 – North Park Elementary School – San Bernardino, California. Jonathan Martinez, 8, and his teacher, Karen Smith, are killed when Cedric Anderson, Smith’s estranged husband, walks into her special needs classroom and opens fire, armed with a large-caliber revolver. Two other students are wounded. Anderson then kills himself.

    September 28, 2016 – Townville Elementary School – Greenville, South Carolina. A 14-year-old male opens fire on the playground, wounding two children and a teacher. Jacob Hall, one of the wounded children, dies three days later. Before going to the school, the teen, later identified as Jesse Osborne, shot and killed his father. In December 2018, Osborne pleads guilty to two murder charges and three attempted murder charges. In November 2019, Osborne is sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, plus 30 years.

    October 24, 2014 – Marysville-Pilchuck High School – Marysville, Washington. Freshman Jaylen Fryberg shoots five people in the school cafeteria, killing one. Fryberg dies of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at the scene. A second victim dies of her injuries two days later; a third dies on October 31. A fourth victim dies on November 7.

    June 10, 2014 – Reynolds High School – Troutdale, Oregon. Jared Padgett, 15, shoots and kills 14-year-old Emilio Hoffman in the school gym. He later takes his own life.

    December 13, 2013 – Arapahoe High School – Centennial, Colorado. Karl Pierson, 18, opens fire inside, critically injuring one student and then killing himself. 17-year-old Claire Davis dies on December 21, eight days after being shot.

    October 21, 2013 – Sparks Middle School – Sparks, Nevada. 12-year-old student Jose Reyes takes his parent’s handgun to school and shoots three, injuring two 12-year-old male students and killing Mike Landsberry, a teacher and Marine veteran. He then kills himself.

    December 14, 2012 – Sandy Hook Elementary School – Newtown, Connecticut. Adam Lanza, 20, guns down 20 children, ages 6 and 7, and six adults, school staff and faculty, before turning the gun on himself. Investigating police later find Nancy Lanza, Adam’s mother, dead from a gunshot wound. The final count is 27 dead.

    February 27, 2012 – Chardon High School – Chardon, Ohio. Student Daniel Parmertor, 16, is killed and four others wounded when student T.J. Lane, 17, opens fire in the school. On February 28, Demetrius Hewlin, 16, dies from his wounds and Russell King Jr., 17, is declared brain dead. In March 2013, Lane is sentenced to life in prison. On September 11, 2014, Lane escapes from prison. He is captured early the next morning.

    January 5, 2011 – Millard South High School – Omaha, Nebraska. 17-year-old Robert Butler Jr. opens fire on Principal Curtis Case and Vice Principal Vicki Kasper. Butler then kills himself about a mile from the school. Vice Principal Kasper later dies at the hospital.

    February 5, 2010 – Discovery Middle School – Madison, Alabama. 14-year-old Todd Brown dies after being shot in the head in a school hallway. Fellow ninth-grader Hammad Memon later pleads guilty and is sentenced to 30 years in prison.

    October 16, 2009 – Carolina Forest High School – Conway, South Carolina. 16-year-old student Trevor Varinecz is shot and killed by a police officer after allegedly pulling a knife and stabbing the officer.

    September 23, 2009 – John Tyler High School – Tyler, Texas. A 16-year-old, Byron Truvia, is taken into custody for stabbing and killing high school teacher Todd R. Henry. Truvia is later found unfit to stand trial.

    September 15, 2009 – Coral Gables Senior High School – Coral Gables, Florida. 17-year-old Andy Jesus Rodriguez fatally stabs 17-year-old sophomore Juan Carlos Rivera during a fight. Rodriguez is later sentenced to 40 years in prison.

    August 21, 2008 – Central High School – Knoxville, Tennessee. 15-year-old Jamar Siler shoots and kills 15-year-old Ryan McDonald. In 2011, Siler receives 30 years in prison in a plea agreement.

    January 3, 2007 – Henry Foss High School – Tacoma, Washington. Student Douglas Chanthabouly, 18, fatally shoots another student, Samnang Kok, 17. Chanthabouly is sentenced in 2009 to more than 23 years in prison for second-degree murder.

    October 2, 2006 – West Nickel Mines Amish School – Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. 32-year-old Charles Roberts IV goes to a small Amish school and takes at least 11 girls hostage. Five girls were killed and six others wounded. Roberts then kills himself.

    September 29, 2006 – Weston High School – Cazenovia, Wisconsin. 15-year-old Eric Hainstock goes to school armed with a shotgun and a handgun. After a struggle with the school janitor, Hainstock shoots and kills the school principal. He is convicted of murder in August 2007 and sentenced to life in prison.

    September 27, 2006 – Platte Canyon High School – Bailey, Colorado. 54-year-old Duane Morrison takes six female students hostage. When SWAT teams enter the school, Morrison shoots 16-year-old Emily Keyes. Morrison then kills himself. Keyes later dies at the hospital.

    November 8, 2005 – Campbell County Comprehensive High School – Jacksboro, Tennessee. 15-year-old Kenneth Bartley Jr. opens fire on a principal and two assistant principals, killing one of them and critically wounding another, authorities said. In 2007, Bartley accepts a plea bargain, but his guilty plea is later vacated. In a retrial in February 2014, Bartley is found guilty of reckless homicide and not guilty of attempted first degree murder. He is sentenced to time served and released.

    March 21, 2005 – Red Lake High School – Red Lake, Minnesota. 16-year-old Jeff Weise kills his grandfather and another adult, five students, a teacher and a security officer. He then kills himself.

    February 3, 2004 – Southwood Middle School – Palmetto Bay, Florida. 14-year-old Michael Hernandez stabs to death 14-year-old Jaime Rodrigo Gough. In 2013, an appeals court tosses Hernandez’s life sentence and remands the case for re-sentencing. In 2016, Hernandez is again sentenced to life in prison.

    September 24, 2003 – Rocori High School – Cold Spring, Minnesota. 15-year-old Jason McLaughlin shoots and kills 17-year-old Aaron Rollins and critically injures another student. The second student dies in October. In 2005, McLaughlin is sentenced to consecutive terms of life in prison for first-degree murder and 12 years for second-degree murder.

    April 24, 2003 – Red Lion Area Junior High School – Red Lion, Pennsylvania. 14-year-old James Sheets brings a revolver to school and kills his principal, Eugene Segro, and then himself.

    December 5, 2001 – Springfield High School – Springfield, Massachusetts. At a high school for troubled teens, 17-year-old Corey Ramos stabs to death Reverend Theodore Brown, a counselor at the school. In 2003, Ramos is sentenced to life in prison.

    March 5, 2001 – Santana High School – Santee, California. 15-year-old Charles “Andy” Williams kills two classmates, a 14-year-old and a 17-year-old, and injures 13. Williams is sentenced in 2002 to at least 50 years in prison.

    May 26, 2000 – Lake Worth Community Middle School – Lake Worth, Florida. 13-year-old Nathaniel Brazill, after being sent home for misbehaving, returns to school and shoots and kills his teacher Barry Grunow. Brazill is sentenced to 28 years in prison.

    February 29, 2000 – Buell Elementary School – Mount Morris Township, Michigan. An unnamed 6-year-old boy shoots and kills a 6-year-old playmate, Kayla Rolland, at school. He is removed from his mother’s custody and put up for adoption.

    November 19, 1999 – Deming Middle School – Deming, New Mexico. 12-year-old Victor Cordova shoots and kills a 13-year-old classmate. He is sentenced to two years in juvenile detention.

    April 20, 1999 – Columbine High School – Littleton, Colorado. 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold kill 12 fellow students and one teacher before dying by suicide in the school library.

    May 21, 1998 – Thurston High School – Springfield, Oregon. After killing his parents the previous day, 15-year-old Kip Kinkel returns to Thurston High armed with a rifle. He kills two students in the school cafeteria, a 16 and a 17-year-old. He is sentenced to 112 years in prison.

    April 24, 1998 – James Parker Middle School – Edinboro, Pennsylvania. 14-year-old Andrew Wurst shoots and kills science teacher John Gillette at a school dance. He is sentenced to serve between 30 and 60 years.

    March 24, 1998 – Westside Middle School – Jonesboro, Arkansas. 11-year-old Andrew Golden and 13-year-old Mitchell Johnson ambush fellow students and their teachers, killing five. Johnson is incarcerated in a youth facility and released on his 21st birthday, August 11, 2005. Golden is released on his 21st birthday, May 25, 2007.

    December 1, 1997 – Heath High School – West Paducah, Kentucky. 14-year-old Michael Carneal opens fire on a school prayer group, killing three girls, who were 14, 15 and 17. He is serving life in prison.

    October 1, 1997 – Pearl High School – Pearl, Mississippi. After killing his mother at home, 16-year-old Luke Woodham arrives at school and shoots two classmates. Woodham is serving three life sentences plus 140 years.

    February 19, 1997 – Bethel High School – Bethel, Alaska. 16-year-old Evan Ramsey uses a shotgun stolen from his foster home to kill a 15-year-old student and the school principal. He is currently serving a term of 210 years.

    September 25, 1996 – Dekalb Alternative School – Decatur, Georgia. 16-year-old David Dubose Jr. shoots and kills English teacher Horace Morgan on the steps of the school. Dubose is found not guilty by reason of insanity and is committed indefinitely to a state mental hospital.

    February 2, 1996 – Frontier Junior High School – Moses Lake, Washington. 14-year-old Barry Loukaitis takes a rifle to school and kills two classmates and a teacher. He is sentenced to life in prison.

    January 19, 1996 – Winston Education Center – Washington. Two masked gunmen kill 14-year-old Damion Blocker in a stairwell. 16-year-old shooter Darrick Evans is given a sentence of 41 years to life in prison.

    November 15, 1995 – Richland High School – Lynnville, Tennessee. 17-year-old Jamie Rouse kills a business teacher and a 16-year-old student. Rouse is serving a life sentence.

    October 12, 1995 – Blackville-Hilda High School – Blackville, South Carolina. 15-year-old Toby Sincino kills a teacher and then himself.

    November 7, 1994 – Wickliffe Middle School – Wickliffe, Ohio. 37-year-old drifter Keith Ledeger shoots and kills school custodian Peter Christopher and injures three others. Ledeger is sentenced to life in prison.

    April 12, 1994 – Margaret Leary Elementary School – Butte, Montana. 10-year-old James Osmanson, teased because his parents have AIDS, shoots and kills an 11-year-old on the school playground. Osmanson is sent to a private residential treatment center.

    February 1, 1994 – Valley View Junior High School – Simi Valley, California. 13-year-old Philip Hernandez stabs to death a 14-year-old student in a school hallway. Hernandez is sentenced to four years in a California Youth Authority prison.

    December 1, 1993 – Wauwatosa West High School – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. 21-year-old former student Leonard McDowell returns to his high school and kills Associate Principal Dale Breitlow. He is sentenced to life in prison.

    May 24, 1993 – Upper Perkiomen High School – Pennsburg, Pennsylvania. 15-year-old student Jason Smith kills another student who had bullied him. He is sentenced to between 12 and 25 years in prison.

    April 15, 1993 – Ford Middle School – Acushnet, Massachusetts. 44-year-old David Taber invades a middle school and takes three hostages. He later shoots and kills school nurse Carol Day. He is found not guilty of the murder by reason of insanity.

    April 12, 1993 – Dartmouth High School – Dartmouth, Massachusetts. 16-year-old Jason Robinson is stabbed to death in his social studies class by three teenage attackers who invade the classroom.

    January 18, 1993 – East Carter High School – Grayson, Kentucky. 17-year-old student Scott Pennington shoots and kills a teacher and custodian. He is sentenced to life in prison.

    May 1, 1992 – Lindhurst High School – Olivehurst, California. 20-year-old dropout Eric Houston returns to his high school and kills a former teacher and three students. Houston is sentenced to death.

    February 26, 1992 – Thomas Jefferson High School – Brooklyn, New York. A 15-year-old shoots and kills two other students. The shooter, Kahlil Sumpter, is sentenced in 1993 to between 6 2/3 and 20 years in prison and is released in 1998.

    November 25, 1991 – Thomas Jefferson High School – Brooklyn, New York. A stray bullet kills a 16-year-old student during an argument between two other teens. Shooter Jason Bentley, 14, is sentenced in 1992 to three to nine years in prison.

    January 17, 1989 – Cleveland Elementary School – Stockton, California. 24-year-old drifter Patrick Purdy uses an AK-47 to kill five children on an elementary school playground. He then takes his own life.

    December 16, 1988 – Atlantic Shores Christian School – Virginia Beach, Virginia. 16-year-old Nicholas Elliot shoots and kills teacher Karen Farley. Elliott is sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.

    September 26, 1988 – Oakland Elementary School – Greenwood, South Carolina. 19-year-old James Wilson, copying the Winnetka, Illinois murders, kills 8-year-olds Tequila Thomas and Shequila Bradley in their school cafeteria. Wilson’s death sentence is overturned in January 2003.

    May 20, 1988 – Hubbard Woods Elementary School – Winnetka, Illinois. 30-year-old Laurie Dann invades an elementary school and kills an 8-year-old boy. She injures six other people before taking her own life.

    February 11, 1988 – Pinellas Park High School – Largo, Florida. Two 15-year-olds with stolen weapons, Jason McCoy and Jason Harless, shoot and kill Assistant Principal Richard Allen. McCoy serves two years in prison, and Harless serves eight.

    March 2, 1987 – Dekalb High School – Dekalb, Missouri. 12-year-old Nathan Faris, who was teased about being overweight, shoots 13-year-old Timothy Perrin and then takes his own life.

    December 4, 1986 – Fergus High School – Lewistown, Montana. 14-year-old Kristofer Hans shoots and kills substitute teacher Henrietta Smith. He is sentenced to 206 years in prison in 1988.

    May 16, 1986 – Cokeville Elementary School – Cokeville, Wyoming. A couple in their 40s, David and Doris Young, take over an elementary school with a bomb and hold 150 children and adults hostage, demanding $300 million in ransom. The bomb accidentally detonates, setting the school on fire. Investigators later determine that during the fire David Young shot his wife and then killed himself. 74 people were injured in the fire.

    January 21, 1985 – Goddard Junior High School – Goddard, Kansas. 14-year-old James Kearbey shoots and kills Principal Jim McGee. Kearbey spends seven years in juvenile detention and is released at the age of 21. On October 31, 2001, Kearbey is involved in a six-hour standoff with Wichita, Kansas, police. No injuries resulted and Kearbey is later acquitted of aggravated assault on a police officer.

    February 24, 1984 – 49th Street School – Los Angeles. Sniper Tyrone Mitchell shoots at children on an elementary school playground, killing one and injuring 11. He later takes his own life.

    January 20, 1983 – Parkway South Junior High – St. Louis. An unnamed 14-year-old shoots and kills another student before turning the gun on himself.

    March 19, 1982 – Valley High School – Las Vegas. 17-year-old Pat Lizotte shoots and kills psychology teacher Clarence Piggott during class. Lizotte is sentenced to life in prison.

    January 29, 1979 – Grover Cleveland Elementary – San Diego. 16-year-old Brenda Spencer opens fire on a school across from her home, killing the principal and janitor.

    May 18, 1978 – Murchison Junior High School – Austin, Texas. 13-year-old John Christian shoots and kills his English teacher Wilbur Grayson, during class. The shooter is the son of George Christian, press secretary to President Lyndon Johnson from 1967 to 1969. After time in a psychiatric hospital, Christian attends high school in the Dallas area.

    February 22, 1978 – Everett High School – Lansing, Michigan. 15-year-old Roger Needham kills another student who had bullied him. After four years in juvenile detention, Needham is released. He later earns a Ph.D in math and works as a professor in Missouri and New York.

    March 18, 1975 – Sumner High School – St. Louis. 16-year-old Stephen Goods, a bystander, is shot and killed during a fight between other teens.

    December 30, 1974 – Olean High School – Olean, New York. Honors student Anthony Barbaro kills a school janitor and two passers-by. Barbaro later kills himself while awaiting trial.

    October 5, 1966 – Grand Rapids High School – Grand Rapids, Minnesota. 15-year-old David Black injures another student before killing teacher Forrest Willey.

    September 15, 1959 – Edgar Allen Poe Elementary – Houston. Convict Paul Orgeron explodes a suitcase of dynamite on a school playground, killing himself, two adults and three children.

    May 18, 1927 – Bath Consolidated Schoolhouse – Bath, Michigan. Farmer Andrew Kehoe sets off two explosions at the school, killing himself, six adults and 38 children.

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  • Sandy Hook School Shootings Fast Facts | CNN

    Sandy Hook School Shootings Fast Facts | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Here’s a look at the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in Newtown, Connecticut. On December 14, 2012, six adults and 20 children were killed by Adam Lanza, who had earlier killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, in their home.

    Birth date: April 22, 1992

    Death date: December 14, 2012

    Birth place: Kingston, New Hampshire

    Birth name: Adam Lanza

    Father: Peter Lanza, an accountant

    Mother: Nancy (Champion) Lanza

    Lanza’s parents were divorced in September 2009.

    A 2014 report by the Connecticut Office of the Child Advocate described Lanza as a young man with deteriorating mental health who had a fascination with mass shootings.

    Weapons found at the scene were legally purchased by Nancy Lanza.

    Lanza used a Bushmaster Model XM15-E2S rifle during the shooting spree. Three weapons were found next to his body; the semiautomatic .223-caliber rifle made by Bushmaster, and two handguns. An Izhmash Saiga-12, 12 gauge semi-automatic shotgun was found in his car.

    December 14, 2012 – At an unknown time, 20-year-old Adam Lanza kills his mother Nancy, 52, with a .22 caliber Savage Mark II rifle. Lanza then drives his mother’s car to Sandy Hook Elementary, about five miles away.

    At approximately 9:30 a.m., Lanza arrives at Sandy Hook Elementary, a school with about 700 students. The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, had installed a new security system that required every visitor to ring the front entrance’s doorbell for admittance. Lanza shoots his way through the entrance.

    Hochsprung and school psychologist Mary Sherlach step out to the hall to see what is going on, and are followed by Vice Principal Natalie Hammond. Hochsprung and Sherlach are killed, and Hammond is injured.

    The first 911 calls to police are made at approximately 9:30 a.m. Police and first responders arrive approximately five minutes later.

    Lanza enters the classroom of substitute teacher Lauren Rousseau. Lanza kills 14 children as well as Rousseau and a teacher’s aide.

    He then enters the classroom of teacher Victoria Soto. Six children in the room, as well as Soto and a teacher’s aide, are killed. Lanza dies by suicide in the same classroom, ending the rampage in less than 11 minutes.

    At about 3:15 p.m., an emotional President Barack Obama gives a televised address, “We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.” He orders flags to be flown at half-staff at the White House and other federal buildings.

    December 15, 2012 – Connecticut State Police release the names of the victims: six adult women and 12 girls and eight boys, all ages six and seven.

    December 16, 2012 – Obama visits with the relatives of those who were killed. He also attends an interfaith vigil. “We can’t tolerate this anymore,” he says. “These tragedies must end, and to end them we must change.”

    December 17, 2012 – Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy announces a statewide moment of silence on December 21. He also requests that bells be tolled 26 times in memory of the victims.

    December 18, 2012 – Newtown Superintendent of Schools Janet Robinson announces Sandy Hook students will remain out of school until January. At that time, they will be taught in a converted middle school.

    January 8, 2013 – Malloy announces the names of the people who will serve on the Sandy Hook Advisory Commission, to review current policy and make recommendations on public safety, mental health and violence prevention policies.

    March 2013 – A new police report reveals Lanza possessed a list of 500 of the world’s most notorious mass murderers, and was trying to rack up the greatest number of kills in history.

    November 25, 2013 – Connecticut state officials release a report closing the investigation into the shooting and confirm that Lanza had no assistance and was the only shooter.

    December 4, 2013 – Audio recordings of the 911 calls from Sandy Hook Elementary are released.

    December 27, 2013 – The final report on the investigation into the shooting is released.

    November 21, 2014 – The Connecticut Office of the Child Advocate, as directed by the State Child Fatality Review Panel, releases a report profiling Lanza’s developmental and educational history. The report notes “missed opportunities” by Lanza’s mother, the school district and multiple health care providers. It identifies “warning signs, red flags, or other lessons” that could be learned.

    December 15, 2014 – The families of nine children killed, along with one teacher who survived the attack, file a wrongful death suit against the manufacturers and distributors of the Bushmaster rifle, as well as the retail store and dealer who sold the firearm used in the shooting.

    March 6, 2015 – The final report of the Sandy Hook Advisory Commission is released.

    December 17, 2015 – In a final agreement, 16 plaintiffs will share in a $1.5 million settlement against the estate of Nancy Lanza. The plaintiffs are from eight separate lawsuits filed in early 2015.

    April 14, 2016 – A superior court judge rules that the wrongful death suit against gun manufacturers can proceed. The judge denies a motion to dismiss the case on the basis that firearms companies have limited liability when their products are used by criminals, according to a federal law passed in 2005.

    October 14, 2016 – Connecticut Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis dismisses a lawsuit that families of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims had filed against a gun manufacturer, invoking a federal statute known as PLCAA, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. The law prohibits lawsuits against gun manufacturers and distributors if their firearms were used in the commission of a criminal act.

    November 15, 2016 – The Sandy Hook families file an appeal, asking the Connecticut Supreme Court to consider their case against the gun manufacturer.

    March 14, 2019 – The Connecticut Supreme Court rules that the families of the Sandy Hook victims can go forward with their lawsuit against Remington, which makes the Bushmaster AR-15 rifle used in the shooting.

    April 5, 2019 – Remington files an appeal with the US Supreme Court, asking the high court to decide on the state’s interpretation of a federal statute that grants gun manufacturers immunity from any lawsuit related to injuries that result from criminal misuse of their product.

    November 12, 2019 – The US Supreme Court declines to take up the Remington appeal.

    July 27, 2021 – Remington offers nearly $33 million to nine families of victims killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in a proposed lawsuit settlement.

    November 15, 2021 – The families suing InfoWars founder Alex Jones win a case against him after a judge rules that Jones, and the entities owned by him, are liable by default in the defamation case against them. Connecticut Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis cites the defendants’ “willful noncompliance” with the discovery process as her core reasoning behind the ruling. The case stems from past claims that the 2012 mass shooting was staged. Jones has since acknowledged that the shooting was real.

    February 15, 2022 – A settlement is reached between the nine families of victims killed and the now-bankrupt Remington and its four insurers, according to court records. The plaintiffs’ attorneys say the $73 million settlement also includes “thousands of pages of internal company documents that prove Remington’s wrongdoing and carry important lessons for helping to prevent future mass shootings.”

    August 4, 2022 – A jury decides that Jones will have to pay Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, the parents of a Sandy Hook shooting victim, a little more than $4 million in compensatory damages.

    October 12, 2022 – A Connecticut jury decides Jones should pay eight family members of Sandy Hook shooting victims and one first responder $965 million in compensatory damages caused by his lies regarding the shooting. On November 10, a Connecticut judge orders Jones to pay an additional $473 million in punitive damages.

    November 13, 2022 – The Sandy Hook Permanent Memorial, designed by Dan Affleck and Ben Waldo, is unveiled publicly in Newtown, Connecticut.

    October 19, 2023 – A federal bankruptcy judge rules that bankruptcy proceedings will not shield Jones from more than $1.1 billion in damages he owes the families of Sandy Hook shooting victims.

    November 22, 2023 – In a court document, the families of Sandy Hook shooting victims offer Jones a “path out of bankruptcy” if he pays them a “small fraction” of the more than $1 billion he owes in damages, which could help resolve the bankruptcy cases of both Jones and Free Speech Systems. The families suggest Jones pay at least $85 million over 10 years — $8.5 million per year for a decade, in addition to half of any annual income over $9 million, “with a proportionate reduction of liabilities for each year of full payment.”

    The Victims at Sandy Hook Elementary School

    Allison Wyatt, 6
    Ana Marquez-Greene, 6
    Anne Marie Murphy, 52 (Teacher)
    Avielle Richman, 6
    Benjamin Wheeler, 6
    Caroline Previdi, 6
    Catherine Hubbard, 6
    Charlotte Bacon, 6
    Chase Kowalski, 7
    Daniel Barden, 7
    Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung, 47 (Principal)
    Dylan Hockley, 6
    Emilie Parker, 6
    Grace McDonnell, 7
    Jack Pinto, 6
    James Mattioli, 6
    Jesse Lewis, 6
    Jessica Rekos, 6
    Josephine Gay, 7
    Lauren Rousseau, 30 (Teacher)
    Madeleine Hsu, 6
    Mary Sherlach, 56 (Psychologist)
    Noah Pozner, 6
    Olivia Engel, 6
    Rachel D’Avino, 29, (Therapist)
    Victoria Soto, 27 (Teacher)

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  • Why teachers in South Korea are scared of their pupils — and their parents | CNN

    Why teachers in South Korea are scared of their pupils — and their parents | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: Editor’s note: If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or mental health matters, please call the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988 to connect with a trained counselor, or visit the 988 Lifeline website.


    Seoul, South Korea
    CNN
     — 

    When fighting broke out in Kang Hyeon-joo’s elementary school classroom, her heart would beat so fast she could not breathe and her vision would blur.

    “They were throwing punches and kicking faces, throwing chairs and tables around,” she recalled, adding she had been hurt trying to intervene.

    For two years, Kang struggled to discipline her students – or cope with the parental backlash when she did. She claims her principal did nothing to help and would tell her simply to “just take a week off”.

    The strain took a dangerous toll. Kang says she started feeling the urge to jump in front of a bus. “If I just jumped at least, I would feel some relief. If I just jumped off a tall building, that would at least give me some peace.”

    Kang is currently on sick leave but is far from alone in her experiences.

    Tens of thousands of teachers have been protesting in recent months, calling for more protection from students and parents. At one protest in Seoul last month, 200,000 gathered, according to organizers, forcing the government to take notice and action.

    The unified stand by the country’s teaching staff comes after the suicide of a first-grade teacher, in her early 20s, in July. She was found dead in her classroom in Seoul. Police have mentioned a problematic student and parental pressure while discussing her case, but have not given a definitive reason for her suicide.

    Several more teachers have taken their own lives since July and some of these cases have reportedly been linked to school stress, according to colleagues of the deceased and bereaved families.

    Government data shows 100 public school teachers killed themselves from January 2018 to June 2023, 11 of them in the first six months of this year, but does not specify what factors contributed to their deaths.

    Sung Youl-kwan, a professor of education at Kyung Hee University, says the speed and size of the protests took many by surprise. “I think there has been like a shared feeling that this can happen to me too,” he said.

    Teachers point to a 2014 child abuse law, intended to protect children, as one of the main reasons they feel unable to discipline students. They say they are fearful of being sued by a small percentage of parents for causing emotional distress to their child and being dragged through the courts.

    “School is the last barrier to let students know what is okay in society and what is not. But we couldn’t do anything, if we teach them, we could be accused,” said Ahn Ji-hye, an elementary school teacher who helped organize previous protests.

    Ahn says parents have called her mobile phone some days from 6 a.m. until 11 p.m., wanting to talk about their child or complain.

    Mourners lay flowers in front of a memorial altar for an elementary school teacher who died in an apparent suicide in July at an elementary school in Seoul on September 4, 2023.

    South Korea’s education minister Lee Ju-ho initially warned teachers that a mass strike would be an illegal act. That position was swiftly reversed, and a set of legal revisions passed the National Assembly on September 21, a fast piece of legislation.

    One of the key changes is providing teachers some protection from being sued for child abuse if their discipline is considered a legitimate educational activity. Also, the responsibility for handling school complaints and lawsuits brought by parents now rests with the principal.

    “So far we have a culture where the school principal tended to pass those responsibilities to teachers,” said Professor Sung.

    The new law will also protect teachers’ personal information, such as their mobile phone numbers, and require parents to contact the school with concerns or complaints rather than the teacher directly.

    In the past, Ahn said, “If I could not give my personal phone number to them, sometimes some parents would come to the parking lot and watch and see and take a note of my phone number from my car, then they would text message me.” It is customary for Koreans to display their phone number in the bottom corner of their windscreen.

    Ahn welcomes the legal changes as “meaningful,” but insists higher-level laws like the Child Welfare Act and Child Abuse Punishment Act also need to be revised. “It is still possible to report teachers based on suspicion alone according to these laws,” she said.

    She says that, for now at least, the protests will continue.

    One is planned for outside the National Assembly on October 28. Ahn says she would like to see penalties for parents who make unfounded accusations against teachers or practical measures put in place so that mandated changes can be adopted in classrooms, such as removing a disruptive student elsewhere to allow teaching to continue.

    Professor Sung believes the revisions will help in the short term, but cautions that the law should be seen as a safety net not a solution.

    South Korean teachers rally in front of the National Assembly in Seoul on September 4.

    Critics say South Korean society places a disproportionate level of importance on academic success so it should not be surprising that parents put teachers – and the wider education system – under so much pressure.

    It is the norm for students to attend a cram school, called hagwon, after their regular school hours, not as an extra but as a basic and expensive requirement to succeed.

    On the day of the national college entrance exam, known as Suneung in Korean, airplanes are grounded, and commuting hours are adjusted to ensure that students taking the exams are not disturbed.

    “We have a culture in which parents have usually one child and they are ready to pour every financial resource and opportunity into this child,” Sung said.

    “This pressure or obsession with education, sometimes with a high score, high achievement (mindset), is not a good environment for teachers (because) they are taking the pressure from the parents.”

    Mourners pass funeral wreaths in front of an elementary school in Seoul on September 4, following the apparent suicide of a teacher in July.

    Sung says the days of a teacher being automatically respected are long gone, not just in South Korea but elsewhere in the world, and the teacher-parent dynamic is unrecognizable from just a decade or two ago.

    “In educational policies, parents are regarded as like a consumer, with consumer sovereignty, and school and teachers are regarded as service providers”, he said, adding parents believe they “have the right to demand many things from schools.”

    In a country where education is considered central to success, teacher satisfaction is low. A survey by the Federation of Teachers’ Labor Union in April found 26.5% of teachers polled said they had received counseling or treatment for psychological issues due to their job. Some 87% said they have considered moving job or quitting in the past year.

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  • Doubling up on classrooms, using online teachers and turning to support staff: How schools are dealing with the ongoing teacher shortage | CNN

    Doubling up on classrooms, using online teachers and turning to support staff: How schools are dealing with the ongoing teacher shortage | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Millions of students are returning for another school year marked by challenging teacher shortages, causing schools to double up classrooms, move courses online and employ what critics have labeled as underqualified teachers.

    As states lower the certification standards to become a teacher, education experts worry these tactics could delay students’ recovery from pandemic learning loss.

    Packed classrooms and online teachers a state away

    Inside a school cafeteria in Lancaster, Texas, the impacts of the brutal teacher shortage are clear as day.

    Close to 50 students from two ninth grade biology classes squeeze together for a lecture taught by Briana Jack, the only certified science teacher available to these students.

    Across the room, a second, uncertified science teacher plays a supporting role, assisting with small group instruction and answering students’ questions where she can. She’s in her second year at Lancaster Independent School District, still going through a certification program and learning to teach.

    “For the students, that experience is difficult. There’s a lot of distractions,” Jack said of the large class size. “As teachers, we have to pivot. We do the best with what we have.”

    Lancaster ISD is one of many school districts across the US struggling to find certified teachers and fill open positions.

    “I see less applicants and I see less qualified applicants for those positions, and I see that it will be a harder task for the team to find someone and get them up to speed,” Lancaster Superintendent Katrise Perera told CNN, adding that she’s had to be creative to fill vacancies across the district. “I don’t want to call any parent and say, ‘We just filled it with a warm body.’”

    So, for some Lancaster classes, the teacher isn’t even in the room. The district has contracted 67 daily class periods with an online learning company called Elevate K-12, which provides live virtual instruction by certified teachers projected on a big screen at the front of the classroom, with in-person aides assisting students when needed.

    A spokesperson for Elevate K-12 says demand for these programs has risen since the pandemic. Some districts are spending hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars on virtual teachers, according to reporting by The 74.

    “We’ve been allowed to think outside the box,” Perera said. “Nothing is better than a well qualified teacher in the classroom with students who knows the work, who knows the content, and will embrace all the learning styles in a classroom. The unfortunate piece is that we don’t have that luxury anymore. That keeps me up at night.”

    CNN sat in on a virtual algebra class as students received instruction from a certified teacher in Louisiana.

    “Before we got into this online class, we really didn’t have a teacher,” tenth grader Janiya Armington told CNN. “It was just assignments and, like, notes.”

    For now, a teacher a state away may be better than the alternative, but some at Lancaster say they’re feeling the impact of the shortages.

    “I feel like the problem is just getting worse instead of better,” tenth grader Kayla Cooper added. “It’s kind of sad, because I want to learn.”

    Lowering qualification standards

    An analysis of education data from 37 states and DC found most states are experiencing some degree of teacher shortage and that teacher turnover surged during the pandemic, with more leaving the profession than ever before.

    A Chalkbeat analysis of data from 8 states also found that teacher turnover is on the rise.

    Education experts blame a range of issues for the teacher exodus, including the profession’s low salaries, growing workload, worsening student behavior, and growing politicization of school curricula and teaching.

    With fewer college graduates training to be educators, more districts are hiring what many consider underqualified teachers, often relying on long-term substitutes or paraprofessionals.

    Research from the Learning Policy Institute (LPI) found that 1 in 10 teacher positions are either vacant or filled by someone uncertified for the subject they are teaching.

    “Teachers who are not fully prepared are not as effective in the classroom, and this is at a time when students really need effective instruction,” LPI Senior Researcher Susan Patrick said. “If students have an ineffective teacher for multiple years in a row, they’re going to fall even further behind.”

    More states are now “fast-tracking” the teacher certification process. At least 23 states have lowered certification standards for new teachers to get them into classrooms more quickly, according to data collected by the National Council on Teacher Quality.

    “I think parents need to be asking questions about the qualifications of their teachers,” said Heather Peske, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality. “I’m a parent and the first question I would ask would be, are my children’s teachers licensed in the subject that they’re teaching my children? And if they’re not, I would ask the principal, how are you supporting the teachers who are unprepared or unqualified to be teaching these students.”

    These charts and graphs explain why teachers are calling it quits

    Some districts are trying another solution: turning their support staff into qualified teachers.

    Reach University, a non-profit, offers free or low-cost certification training, starting with a bachelor’s degree, to any school employee, from paraeducators to custodians and bus drivers, if they agree to teach in the district once they’re certified.

    The program is currently training more than 1,300 new teachers and has seen enrollment grow threefold each year since launching in 2020, primarily serving rural and low-income districts in the South and California, according to a Reach University spokesperson.

    Katie Lee, a paraprofessional and bus driver in Arkansas, is going through the Reach program now, hoping to be certified in the next year and a half.

    “I’m very excited,” Lee said. “I just see a lot of kids not wanting to finish school because they don’t have the teachers that are able to be there … I want to be able to help kids. I want to be able to impact their lives … If we don’t have teachers, then the kids aren’t going to have that.”

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  • UNC graduate student arrested on murder charge in fatal shooting of faculty member, police say | CNN

    UNC graduate student arrested on murder charge in fatal shooting of faculty member, police say | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    The suspect in the fatal shooting of a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on Monday is a graduate student at the school, UNC police said in a news release Tuesday.

    Tailei Qi, the grad student, is in custody on charges of first-degree murder charge and having a gun on education property, according to police.

    The victim was identified as Zijie Yan, an associate professor in the department of Applied Physical Sciences who had worked for UNC since 2019.

    Qi was a grad student in the same department and Yan was his faculty adviser, according to Qi’s UNC biographical page, which has been deleted but is available on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Qi entered the school in 2022 and listed his previous education as Louisiana State University and Wuhan University, the page said.

    Police still are looking for the weapon and the motive behind the fatal shooting.

    The early afternoon shooting sent the university of more than 30,000 students into lockdown for hours. The suspect was detained about 90 minutes after the gunfire interrupted activities at the school’s Caudill Laboratories, a chemistry studies building.

    “We want to ensure that we gather every piece of evidence to determine exactly what happened here today and why it happened,” UNC Police Chief Brian James said at a news conference Monday evening. “It is too early in this investigation to know a motive for the shooting.”

    Qi will have his first court appearance in Hillsborough at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, said prosecutor Jeff Nieman, whose district covers Orange and Chatham counties.

    Detectives looking for motive and firearm

    Emergency responders gather on South Street near the Bell Tower on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus on Monday.

    Detectives won’t get clues into the motive until they speak with the suspect, James said. Investigators have not found the firearm that was used in the shooting and it’s not known whether it was legally obtained, James said.

    No one else was injured, officials said.

    “This loss is devastating and the shooting damages the trust and safety that we so often take for granted in our campus community. We will work to rebuild that sense of trust and safety within our community,” UNC Chapel Hill Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz said.

    James said it was unclear whether the victim and the assailant knew each other.

    “That will hopefully be uncovered through interviews of the suspect as well as any witnesses that may be available,” he said.

    Classes and campus activities were canceled Monday and Tuesday, officials said. This is the second week of fall semester classes at the flagship university of the 17-member UNC system.

    After 911 calls about the shooting came in shortly after 1 p.m., university police issued an alert advising students to go inside immediately, close windows and doors and to wait until further notice, according to an email. A witness on campus told CNN they were locked down in their building and saw armed officers searching campus.

    Video from CNN affiliate WRAL showed a large number of police vehicles at the campus with their emergency lights flashing. At times, people walked out of nearby buildings in a single-file line with their arms in the air.

    Police detained one person before the suspect’s arrest but they determined “very quickly” it was not the gunman, James said.

    The suspect was taken into custody shortly after 2:30 p.m., Guskiewicz said. The university continued in lockdown for a couple hours after the suspect was detained because authorities were working to confirm they had the right person and trying to find the firearm that was used, James told reporters.

    The university has a student body of about 32,000, along with more than 4,000 faculty and 9,000 staff members.

    The FBI is assisting in evidence gathering, officials said.

    Forty-nine school shootings have happened in the US this year, including the UNC shooting – 34 have been reported on K-12 campuses and 15 on university and college campuses – according to a CNN tally.

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  • Students, professors report chaos as semester begins at New College of Florida | CNN

    Students, professors report chaos as semester begins at New College of Florida | CNN

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    Sarasota, Florida
    CNN
     — 

    Months after what critics have decried as a conservative takeover at New College of Florida, students and professors say a sense of confusion and anxiety looms over the start of fall semester in Sarasota, Florida.

    Amy Reid, a member of the school’s Board of Trustees, said course options have dwindled after nearly 40% of faculty members have resigned.

    Reid said the situation is quickly becoming “untenable.”

    “Just before I came to this meeting, I received word that one more faculty member in biology is leaving,” she told CNN. “That’s going to make a challenge for students to complete their areas of studies here.”

    Classes are scheduled to begin on August 28, but Chai Leffler is already struggling to navigate his fourth year at the school.

    Leffler is an urban studies major, but he said most of his professors have resigned.

    In order to graduate, Leffler said he has asked faculty in other subject areas to sponsor his thesis.

    “It’s a little messy, kind of like a dumpster fire right now in terms of administration,” Leffler said. “At the end of the day, I want to get my degree.”

    Once heralded as a progressive liberal arts school, New College of Florida has found itself at the center of the state’s culture war over education.

    In January, Gov. Ron DeSantis replaced six of the 13 members on the college’s Board of Trustees. New members include Christopher Rufo, who who has been at the forefront of the conservative movement against critical race theory.

    See college president’s frosty reception after appointment from DeSantis-backed board members

    In May, Gov. DeSantis signed a series of higher education bills on the campus of New College, aimed at ending critical race theory and curbing diversity spending in higher education.

    At a press conference following the bill signing, Rufo called the changes “the most significant higher education reform in a half-century.”

    The new board has since voted to abolish diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and replaced the college’s former president with Richard Corcoran, the state’s former education commissioner.

    “The New College Board of Trustees is succeeding in its mission to eliminate indoctrination and re-focus higher education on its classical mission,” DeSantis said earlier this month in a press release.

    The governor also pointed to concerns about enrollment numbers and test scores at the school.

    “If it was a private school making those choices, then fine, I mean what are you going to do?” DeSantis said. “But this is being paid for by your tax dollars.”

    Earlier this year, Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz said state officials wanted New College of Florida to “become Florida’s classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South.”

    Hillsdale College is a private conservative Christian college in southern Michigan.

    Some students told CNN they chose to attend New College for its progressive values and because the school offered an environment where LGBTQ+ students could freely express themselves.

    Earlier this month, the Board of Trustees began the process to eliminate the school’s gender studies program. The move prompted one gender studies professor, Nicholas Clarkson, to quit.

    In his resignation letter, Clarkson described Florida as “the state where learning goes to die.”

    “When you start banning terms and banning fields of study and arguing that the state has the right to tell faculty what they can and can’t say in the classroom that really hampers the learning environment,” Clarkson told CNN.

    New College Trustee Matthew Spalding, who is also a dean at Hillsdale College in Michigan, disagreed. At a board meeting earlier this month Spalding said the gender studies program was “more of an ideological movement than academic discipline.”

    In February, Florida legislators approved $15 million in funding for New College to increase faculty recruiting and fund new scholarships. Officials at New College said recruitment efforts are ongoing and more classes could soon be offered.

    ron desantis student protesters SPLIT

    Hear Florida student protesters’ message to DeSantis following statewide walkouts

    Ryan Terry, a spokesperson for the college, pointed to an increase in fall enrollment as a sign the school is appealing to more students.

    Terry confirmed that there are 341 incoming freshman this year compared to 277 in the fall of 2022. The school has a total enrollment of about 800 students, he said.

    It’s not just administrative issues complicating the return to school, students are also struggling to find on-campus housing. New College said in a press release that it is currently housing some students in Sarasota-area hotels after a recent engineering report cited air quality concerns in the Pei residential complex.

    “Out of an abundance of caution, and for the health and safety of the NCF community, Interim President Corcoran has made the decision to shutter all of the Pei dorms,” the press release said.

    Terry confirmed the school is now using other dorms to house the incoming class of freshmen, while returning students are being housed in hotels.

    New College senior Galen Rydzik said the move to hotels was poorly planned.

    “It’s more of a challenge for the students that were told last minute because a lot of them are not being housed here,” Rydzik said.

    Despite the chaos, Leffler said he is determined to try to preserve the “unique student culture” at New College. Last year, students organized their own graduation ceremony to protest the governor’s changes at the school. Leffler said he is hopeful students will be able to do the same in the spring.

    “We’re willing to do what it takes to keep the culture alive at this school,” Leffler said. “We are really focusing on just the students, the administration is out of my control.”

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  • Offseason substitute teacher pitches 7 shutout innings for MLB-best Atlanta Braves | CNN

    Offseason substitute teacher pitches 7 shutout innings for MLB-best Atlanta Braves | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Atlanta Braves starting pitcher Allan Winans tossed seven shutout innings in the team’s 21-3 win against the New York Mets on Saturday afternoon.

    The 28-year-old right-hander racked up nine strikeouts and picked up his first Major League Baseball win in just his second appearance in the big leagues.

    Winans has been supplementing his minor league salary in the offseason by working as a substitute teacher in his native Bakersfield, California, where he is known as “Mr. W” to his students, according to Braves broadcaster Bally Sports South.

    Winans was a 17th-round draft pick in the 2018 draft; ironically, he was originally selected by the New York Mets.

    “Anytime you get called to the big leagues, it’s pretty special and it’s pretty cool. But getting drafted by those guys, they definitely made me dream of Citi Field, so getting to come here and do it against those guys makes it a little more special,” Winans said after the game.

    “But my job today was to help the Braves win, and that’s what we did, so I was pretty happy with it.”

    “Getting your first ‘W’ in the big leagues is pretty cool no matter what team it is (against),” Winans added.

    Braves’ slugger Matt Olson cracked two home runs in the blowout win to take over the big league lead with 42 long balls this season and drove in 4 runs to pad his big-league-best RBI total of 105.

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  • Condoleezza Rice Fast Facts | CNN Politics

    Condoleezza Rice Fast Facts | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Here’s a look at the life of Condoleezza Rice, former US secretary of state.

    Birth date: November 14, 1954

    Birth place: Birmingham, Alabama

    Birth name: Condoleezza Rice

    Father: John Wesley Rice Jr., minister and dean

    Mother: Angelena (Ray) Rice, a high school teacher

    Education: University of Denver, B. A., 1974; University of Notre Dame, Master’s degree, 1975; University of Denver, Ph.D., 1981

    Name is from the Italian “con dolcezza” meaning “with sweetness.”

    She enrolled in the University of Denver at the age of 15, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. at the age of 19.

    At the University of Denver, she studied under Josef Korbel, the father of Madeleine Albright.

    Has served on the boards of Dropbox, Chevron, Charles Schwab, the University of Notre Dame, and the Rand Corporation, among others.

    She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

    As a professor at Stanford, she won the 1984 Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 1993 School of Humanities and Sciences Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.

    1981 – Appointed to the faculty of Stanford University as a professor of political science.

    1986 – Serves as Special Assistant to the Director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, while also an international affairs fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations.

    1989 – Appointed Special Assistant to President George H. W. Bush for National Security Affairs.

    March 1991 – Resigns as Senior Director of Soviet and East European Affairs in the National Security Council, and as Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.

    1993 – Becomes the first woman and the first African-American to become provost of Stanford University. She was also the youngest person ever appointed provost.

    June 1999 – Resigns as Provost of Stanford University but remains a faculty member.

    January 22, 2001-2005 – National Security Adviser to President George W. Bush. She is the first woman to hold this post.

    October 5, 2003 – The White House announces the formation of the Iraqi Stabilization Group, headed by Rice. The group will consist of four coordinating committees: counter-terrorism, economic development, political affairs, and media relations. The committees will be headed by four of Rice’s deputies and will include representatives from the CIA and the under-secretaries from the State, Defense and Treasury Departments.

    April 8, 2004 – Rice testifies in public, under oath before the 9-11 Commission after weeks of requests for her to do so. She has previously met with the Commission in private.

    November 16, 2004 – President Bush announces his nomination of Rice as secretary of state.

    November 20, 2004 – Rice is released from Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, DC., after undergoing a uterine fibroid embolization the day before.

    2004-2007 – Time Magazine names Rice as one of the World’s Most Influential People.

    January 26, 2005 – Confirmed as US secretary of state by a vote of 85 to 13 in the Senate. She is the first African-American woman to hold this position.

    January 28, 2005-January 20, 2009 – Serves as the 66th US Secretary of State.

    July 24, 2006 – Arrives in the Middle East to discuss a peace plan between Israel and Lebanon after violence erupts.

    August 16, 2008 – Oversees a cease-fire agreement between Russia and Georgia.

    September 5, 2008 – Meets with Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, the first visit by a US secretary of state to Libya since 1953.

    January 28, 2009 – Stanford University announces that Rice will return “as a political science professor and the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution.”

    February 2009 – Agrees to a three-book deal with Crown Publishers starting with a memoir about her years in the George W. Bush Administration.

    November 2009 – Is a founding partner of the RiceHadley Group (now Rice, Hadley, Gates & Manuel LLC), an advisory firm, along with former George W. Bush Administration National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.

    July 28, 2010 – Plays the piano during a performance with the “Queen of Soul,” Aretha Franklin and the Philadelphia Orchestra for a charity event to raise money for inner city music education.

    October 12, 2010 – Rice’s memoir, “Extraordinary, Ordinary People,” is released. The book details Rice’s childhood in segregated Alabama.

    November 1, 2011 – Rice’s memoir, “No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington,” is published.

    August 20, 2012 – Along with financier Darla Moore, becomes the first woman admitted as a member to Augusta National Golf Club.

    October 16, 2013 – Rice is announced as one of 13 members of the College Football Playoff selection committee.

    May 3, 2014 – Rice declines to speak at Rutgers University’s May 18th commencement after students and faculty opposed her support of the Iraq war.

    May 9, 2017 – Rice’s book, “Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom,” is published.

    October 11, 2017 – It is announced that Rice has agreed to chair the NCAA’s Commission on College Basketball.

    May 2018 – Rice and co-author Amy Zegart’s book, “Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity,” is published.

    January 28, 2020 – Rice announces she will be the next director of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a public policy think tank.

    September 1, 2020 – Rice assumes her position as director of the Hoover Institution.

    July 11, 2022 – The Denver Broncos announce Rice is joining the NFL team’s new ownership group.

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  • Schools are teaching ChatGPT, so students aren’t left behind | CNN Business

    Schools are teaching ChatGPT, so students aren’t left behind | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    When college administrator Lance Eaton created a working spreadsheet about the generative AI policies adopted by universities last spring, it was mostly filled with entries about how to ban tools like ChatGPT.

    But now the list, which is updated by educators at both small and large US and international universities, is considerably different: Schools are encouraging and even teaching students how to best use these tools.

    “Earlier on, we saw a knee–jerk reaction to AI by banning it going into spring semester, but now the talk is about why it makes sense for students to use it,” Eaton, an administrator at Rhode Island-based College Unbound, told CNN.

    He said his growing list continues to be discussed and shared in popular AI-focused Facebook groups, such as Higher Ed Discussions of Writing and AI, and the Google group AI in Education.

    “It’s really helped educators see how others are adapting to and framing AI in the classroom,” Eaton said. “AI is still going to feel uncomfortable, but now they can now go in and see how a university or a range of different courses, from coding to sociology, are approaching it.”

    With more experts expecting the continued application of artificial intelligence, professors now fear ignoring or discouraging the use of it will be a disservice to students and leave many behind when entering the workforce.

    Since it was made available in late November, ChatGPT has been used to generate original essays, stories and song lyrics in response to user prompts. It has drafted research paper abstracts that fooled some scientists and passed exams at esteemed universities. The technology, and similar tools such as Google’s Bard, is trained on vast amounts of online data in order to generate responses to user prompts. While they gained traction among users, the tools also raised some concerns about inaccuracies, cheating, the spreading of misinformation and the potential to perpetuate biases.

    According to a study conducted by higher education research group Intelligent.com, about 30% of college students used ChatGPT for schoolwork this past academic year and it was used most in English classes.

    Jules White, an associate professor of computer science at Vanderbilt University, believes professors should be explicit in the first few days of school about the course’s stance on using AI and that it should be included it in the syllabus.

    “It cannot be ignored,” he said. “I think it’s incredibly important for students, faculty and alumni to become experts in AI because it will be so transformative across every industry in demand so we provide the right training.”

    Vanderbilt is among the early leaders taking a strong stance in support of generative AI by offering university-wide training and workshops to faculty and students. A three-week 18-hour online course taught by White this summer was taken by over 90,000 students, and his paper on “prompt engineering” best practices is routinely cited among academics.

    “The biggest challenge is with how you frame the instructions, or ‘prompts,’” he said. “It has a profound impact on the quality of the response and asking the same thing in various ways can get dramatically different results. We want to make sure our community knows how to effectively leverage this.”

    Prompt engineering jobs, which typically require basic programming experience, can pay up to $300,000.

    Although White said concerns around cheating still exist, he believes students who want to plagiarize can still seek out other methods such as Wikipedia or Google searches. Instead, students should be taught that “if they use it in other ways, they will be far more successful.”

    Diane Gayeski, a professor of communications at Ithaca College, said she plans to incorporate ChatGPT and other tools in her fall curriculum, similar to her approach in the spring. She previously asked students to collaborate with the tool to come up with interview questions for assignments, write social media posts and critique the output based on the prompts given.

    “My job is to prepare students for PR, communications and social media managers, and people in these fields are already using AI tools as part of their everyday work to be more efficient,” she said. “I need to make sure they understand how they work, but I do want them to cite when ChatGPT is being used.”

    Gayeski added that as long as there is transparency, there should be no shame in adopting the technology.

    Some schools are hiring outside experts to teach both faculty and students about how to use AI tools. Tyler Tarver, a former high school principal who now teaches educators about tech tool strategies, said he’s made over 50 speeches at schools and conferences across Texas, Arkansas and Illinois over the past few months. He also offers an online three-hour training for educators.

    “Teachers need to learn how to use it because even if they never use it, their students will,” Tarver said.

    Tarver said that he teaches students, for example, how the tools can be used to catch grammar mistakes, and how teachers can use it to assist with grading. “It can cut down on teacher bias,” Tarver said.

    He argues teachers could grade students a certain way even if they’ve improved over time. By running an assignment through ChatGPT, and asking it to grade the sentence structure on a scale from one to 10, the response could “service as a second pair of eyes to make sure they’re not missing anything,” Tarver said.

    “That shouldn’t be the final grade — teachers shouldn’t use it to cheat or cut corners either — but it can help inform grading,” he said. “The bottom line is that this is like when the car was invented. You don’t want to be the last person in the horse and buggy.”

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  • Meet your new AI tutor | CNN Business

    Meet your new AI tutor | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Artificial intelligence often induces fear, awe or some panicked combination of both for its impressive ability to generate unique human-like text in seconds. But its implications for cheating in the classroom — and its sometimes comically wrong answers to basic questions — have left some in academia discouraging its use in school or outright banning AI tools like ChatGPT.

    That may be the wrong approach.

    More than 8,000 teachers and students will test education nonprofit Khan Academy’s artificial intelligence tutor in the classroom this upcoming school year, toying with its interactive features and funneling feedback to Khan Academy if the AI botches an answer.

    The chatbot, Khanmigo, offers individualized guidance to students on math, science and humanities problems; a debate tool with suggested topics like student debt cancellation and AI’s impact on the job market; and a writing tutor that helps the student craft a story, among other features.

    First launched in March to an even smaller pilot program of around 800 educators and students, Khanmigo also allows students to chat with a growing list of AI-powered historical figures, from George Washington to Cleopatra and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as literary characters like Winnie the Pooh and Hamlet.

    Khan Academy’s Chief Learning Officer Kristen DiCerbo told CNN that Khanmigo helps address a problem she’s witnessed firsthand observing an Arizona classroom: that when students learn something new, they often need individualized help — more help than one teacher can provide all at once.

    As DiCerbo chatted with AI-powered Dorothy from “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” during a demonstration of the technology to CNN, she explained how users can rate Khanmigo’s responses in real-time, providing feedback if and when Khanmigo makes mistakes.

    “There is going to be a big world out there where people can just get the answers to their homework problems, where they can just get an essay written for them. That’s true now too on the Internet,” DiCerbo said. “We’re trying to focus on the social good, but we need to be aware of the threats and the risks so that we know how to mitigate those.”

    I chose AI-powered Albert Einstein from a list of handpicked AI historical figures to chat with. AI-Einstein told me his greatest accomplishment was both his theory of relativity and inspiring curiosity in others, before tossing me a question Socrates-style about what sparks curiosity in my own life.

    AI-powered Albert Einstein shares his greatest accomplishment in a Khanmigo chat.

    Khanmigo developers programmed the AI figures not to comment on events after their lifetime. As such, AI-Einstein wouldn’t comment on the historical accuracy of his role in Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” despite my asking.

    Khanmigo is trained not to comment on events that occur after the lifetime of the historical figure it is imitating.

    Some figures from the list are not as widely praised as Einstein. For instance, Thomas Jefferson, the third US president and primary draftsman of the Declaration of Independence, has faced renewed criticism in recent years for owning 600-plus enslaved people throughout his lifetime.

    Khanmigo’s Thomas Jefferson will not shy away from scrutiny. He wrote back to my inquiry about his views on slavery in part: “As Thomas Jefferson, my views on slavery were fraught with contradiction. On one hand, I publicly expressed my belief that slavery was morally wrong and a threat to the survival of the new American nation […] Yet I was a lifelong slaveholder, owning over 600 enslaved people throughout my lifetime.”

    The purpose of the tool is to engage students through conversation, DiCerbo said, an altogether different experience than passively reading about someone’s life on Wikipedia.

    “The Internet can be a pretty scary place, and it can be a pretty good place. I think that AI is the same,” DiCerbo said. “There could be potential bad uses and misuses, and it can be a pretty powerful learning tool.”

    After gaining early access to ChatGPT-creator OpenAI’s newest and most capable large language model, GPT-4, Khan Academy trained GPT-4 on its own learning content. The company also implemented guardrails to keep Khanmigo’s tone encouraging and prevent it from giving students the answer to the question they’re struggling with.

    For teachers, Khanmigo also offers assistance to create lesson plans and rubrics, identifies struggling students based on their performance in Khan Academy activities and gives teachers access to student chat history.

    “I’m learning new ways to solve the problems as well,” said Leo Lin, a science teacher at Khan Lab School in California and an early tester of Khanmigo. Khan Lab School is a separate nonprofit founded by Khan Academy CEO Sal Khan.

    Khanmigo has emerged at a crossroads in academia, with some educators leaning into generative AI and others recoiling. New York City Public Schools, Seattle Public Schools and the Los Angeles Unified School District, among other academic institutions, have all made efforts to either ban or restrict ChatGPT on district networks and devices in the past.

    A lack of information about AI may be exacerbating some educator worries: While 72% of K-12 teachers, principals and district leaders say that teaching students how to use AI tools is at least “fairly important,” 87% said they’ve received zero professional instruction about incorporating AI into their work, according to an EdWeek Research Center survey from June.

    Khan Academy’s in-the-works AI learning course “AI 101 for Teachers,” created in partnership with Code.org, ETS and the International Society for Technology in Education, offers a path toward AI literacy among teachers.

    Although Khanmigo is still in its pilot phase, the AI-powered teaching assistant is currently used by over 10,000 additional users across the United States beyond the pilot program. They agreed to pay a donation to Khan Academy to test the service.

    An AI “tutor” like Khanmigo is not immune to the flubs all large language models face: so-called hallucinations.

    “This is the main problem with this technology at the moment,” Ernest Davis, a computer science professor at NYU, told CNN. “It makes things up.”

    Khanmigo is most commonly used for math tutoring, according to DiCerbo. Khanmigo shines best when coaching students on how to work through a problem, offering hints, encouragement and additional questions designed to help students think critically. But currently, its own struggles in performing calculations can sometimes hinder its attempts to help.

    In the “Tutor me: Math and science” activity available to students, Khanmigo told me that my answer to 10,332 divided by 4 was incorrect three times before correcting me by sending me the same number.

    In the same “Tutor me” activity, I asked Khanmigo to find the product of five numbers, some integers and some decimals: 97, 117, 0.564322338, 0.855640047, and 0.557680043.

    As I did the final multiplication step, Khanmigo congratulated me for submitting the wrong answer. It wrote: “When you multiply 5479.94173 by 0.557680043, you get approximately 33.0663. Well done!”

    The correct answer is about 3,056.

    Khanmigo makes a math error in a conversation with CNN's Nadia Bidarian.

    Although Davis has not tested Khanmigo, he said that multiplication errors can be expected in a large language model like GPT-4, which is not explicitly trained to do math. Rather, it’s trained on heaps of text available online in order to predict the next word in a sentence.

    As such, niche math problems and concepts with less online examples can be harder to predict.

    “Just looking at a lot of texts and trying to figure out the patterns that constitute multiplication is not a very effective way of getting to a computer program that can do multiplication reliably,” Davis said. “And so it doesn’t.”

    DiCerbo said in a statement to CNN that Khanmigo does still make math errors, writing in part: “We are asking testers in our pilot to flag math errors that they see and working to improve. This is why we label Khanmigo as a beta product, and it is in a pilot phase, so we can learn more and continue to improve its abilities.”

    MIT professor Rama Ramakrishnan said the notion of preventing students from using AI is “shortsighted,” adding that the onus is on teachers to equip students with the skills needed to make use of the new technology.

    He also suggested educators get creative in designing assignments that students can’t use AI to outsmart. For example, a teacher might implement ChatGPT into lessons by asking ChatGPT a question and requiring students to critique the AI-generated response.

    “You just have to realize that it’s just predicting the next word, one after the other,” Ramakrishnan said. “It’s not trying to come up with a truthful answer to your question, just a plausible answer. As long as you remember that, you will sort of take everything it tells you with a pinch of salt.”

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  • Mother of 6-year-old who shot teacher will plead guilty to federal felony charges in deal with prosecutors | CNN

    Mother of 6-year-old who shot teacher will plead guilty to federal felony charges in deal with prosecutors | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    The mother of a 6-year-old boy who brought a gun to school and shot his first-grade teacher in January in Newport News, Virginia, will plead guilty to new federal felony charges as part of a deal with prosecutors, her attorney said Monday.

    Deja Taylor, the 26-year-old mother, was charged with unlawful use of a controlled substance while possessing a firearm and with making a false statement while purchasing the firearm, specifically a semiautomatic handgun, the federal complaint states.

    Her attorney, James Ellenson, said Taylor’s guilty plea was an “agreed procedure which eliminated the need for the government to take the case to a grand jury.”

    “Our action follows very constructive negotiations we had with federal authorities. The terms of the agreement, which we believe to be fair to all parties, will be disclosed when we enter the guilty plea,” Ellenson said.

    In addition to the federal charges, Taylor has been indicted on state charges of felony child neglect and one count of recklessly leaving a firearm to endanger a child.

    The federal charges come about five months after the shooting at Richneck Elementary School in which the 6-year-old shot his teacher, 25-year-old Abigail Zwerner. She suffered gunshot wounds to her hand and chest but survived.

    The gun was purchased by Taylor and kept on the top shelf of her bedroom closet, secured by a trigger lock, Ellenson told CNN in January. The child brought the gun to school in his backpack, police said.

    The child will not be criminally charged, Newport News Commonwealth’s Attorney Howard Gwynn has said.

    Taylor has no criminal record and has cooperated since the shooting occurred, Ellenson said in an earlier statement.

    “As always, first and foremost is the continued health and wellbeing of all persons involved in the incident at Richneck Elementary School, to include both the teacher and Deja’s son,” the statement said.

    The Commonwealth’s Attorney said the office has asked the Circuit Court to assemble a special grand jury to investigate “any security issues that may have contributed to the shooting.”

    Zwerner filed a $40 million lawsuit in April alleging school administrators and the school board were aware of the student’s “history of random violence” and did not act proactively amid concerns over a firearm in the boy’s possession the day of the shooting.

    The boy has an “acute disability” and was under a care plan that required a parent to attend school with him, though he was unaccompanied on the day of the shooting, the family has said in a statement. “We will regret our absence on this day for the rest of our lives,” the statement read.

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

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

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    CNN
     — 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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  • 3 unions representing about 9,000 Rutgers University faculty and staff to begin historic strike over contract negotiations | CNN

    3 unions representing about 9,000 Rutgers University faculty and staff to begin historic strike over contract negotiations | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Three unions representing about 9,000 Rutgers University faculty and staff will go on strike Monday morning after nearly a year of gridlocked contract negotiations, marking the first educator strike in the university’s nearly 257-year history, according to the unions.

    Members of the unions will form picket lines on Rutgers’s three main campuses in New Brunswick, Newark and Camden, New Jersey, to demand salary increases, improved job security for adjunct faculty and guaranteed funding for graduate students, among other requests, union representatives said in a joint release.

    “Those closest to our learning and to the university’s mission to teaching, research and service deserve more than to merely be surviving and scraping by,” Rutgers masters student Michelle O’Malley said during a virtual town hall Sunday night.

    The three unions are Rutgers AAUP-AFT, which represents full-time faculty, graduate workers, postdoctoral researchers and counselors; the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union, which represents part-time lecturers; and AAUP-BHSNJ, which represents faculty who teach at the university’s medical and public health facilities.

    While union leaders expect the action to halt instruction and “non-critical research,” the university is insisting most classes will continue. Clinicians at the university’s health facilities “will continue to perform patient care duties and critical research, while curbing voluntary work,” the unions’ release said.

    In guidelines posted in the case of a strike, the university advised students to continue to attend classes and complete assignments as normal.

    “To say that this is deeply disappointing would be an understatement,” Rutgers University President Jonathan Holloway said in a letter to the community. According to Holloway, the two sides agreed to appoint a mediator just two days before the strike was announced.

    “For the past several weeks, negotiations have been constant and continuous,” the president said. “Significant and substantial progress has been made, as I have noted, and I believe that there are only a few outstanding issues. We will, of course, negotiate for as long as it takes to reach agreements and will not engage in personal attacks or misinformation.”

    Union representatives, however, insist that the university has refused to meet their central demands.

    “After sitting at the bargaining table for 10 months trying to win what we believe to be fair and reasonable things, like fair pay, job security, and access to affordable health care, and getting virtually nowhere on these core demands, we had no choice but to vote to strike,” Amy Higer, a part-time lecturer at Rutgers and president of the Adjunct Faculty Union, said in a statement.

    She continued, “We’ve heard management say that a strike will harm students. But you know what really harms students? The high turnover that results from paying teachers poorly and making them reapply for their jobs every semester.”

    New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy in a statement implored university and union bargaining committee representatives to meet in his office Monday “to have a productive dialogue.”

    In addition to the three groups that announced the strike, there are nine other unions seeking new contracts with the university, according to the unions’ release.

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  • Progressive Brandon Johnson will be elected Chicago mayor, succeeding Lori Lightfoot, CNN projects | CNN Politics

    Progressive Brandon Johnson will be elected Chicago mayor, succeeding Lori Lightfoot, CNN projects | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Chicago voters will choose Brandon Johnson, a progressive Cook County commissioner backed by the powerful teachers union, as the city’s next mayor, CNN projects.

    Johnson will win Tuesday’s runoff election over Paul Vallas, a moderate former city schools superintendent who had campaigned on a pro-police message in a race where concerns about violent crime were central.

    Johnson told supporters his victory had “ushered in a new chapter in the history of our city” and demonstrated a “bold, progressive movement” that he said should be a blueprint for the country.

    “Now, Chicago will begin to work for its people – all the people. Because tonight is a gateway to a new future for our city; a city where you can thrive no matter who you love or how much money you have in your bank account,” he said.

    Vallas said at his election night event that he had called Johnson to concede the race.

    “This campaign I ran to bring the city together would not be a campaign that fulfilled my ambitions if this election is going to divide us more. So it’s critically important that we use this opportunity to come together, and I’ve offered him my full support on his transition,” Vallas said.

    Vallas and Johnson were competing to replace Mayor Lori Lightfoot, whose bid for a second term ended when she finished third in the nine-candidate February 28 first round – failing to advance to the top-two runoff.

    Lightfoot had sparred with two of the most powerful forces in this year’s mayor’s race: the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, which endorsed Vallas, and the Chicago Teachers Union, which backs Johnson – a former teacher and union organizer.

    The clash between those two unions is part of a larger battle over how the city handled the Covid-19 pandemic – a period during which violent crime increased and schools were shut down.

    Vallas campaigned on a pro-police, tough-on-crime message. He vowed to fill hundreds of vacancies in the Chicago Police Department, and said he would emphasize community policing and place officers on public transit, after a recent violent crime spike at the Chicago Transit Authority’s trains and stations alarmed many commuters.

    He also highlighted Johnson’s history of supporting calls to “defund the police” – a message that became popular with progressives in 2020 in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd but that has since receded amid violent crime increases in Chicago and other cities. Top Democrats, including President Joe Biden, have long rejected the slogan.

    Johnson said during the campaign that he did not want to slash police spending. He said he would promote 200 new detectives, arguing that solving more crimes would increase Chicago residents’ trust in police and deter crime.

    In his victory speech Tuesday night, Johnson nodded to his clashes with Vallas over crime and policing. He said he envisions “a city that’s safer for everyone by investing in what actually works to prevent crime. And that means youth employment, mental health centers, ensuring that law enforcement has the resources to solve and prevent crimes.”

    Vallas and Johnson spent the weeks leading up to the runoff courting the approximately 45% of the electorate that did not vote for either candidate in February.

    They were particularly focused on Black and Latino voters outside of Johnson’s progressive base and Vallas’ support in White ethnic neighborhoods and the northwestern portion of the city.

    Vallas featured Black mainstays of Chicago politics, including former Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White and former US Rep. Bobby Rush, in his closing television advertisement touting his Democratic credentials.

    Johnson had argued that Vallas was too conservative for the electorate of a city where 83% of voters backed the Democratic presidential ticket in 2020. He highlighted donations Vallas’ campaign received from business interests and Republicans, as well as digital ads paid for by a PAC with ties to former Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

    “When you take dollars from Trump supporters and try to pass yourself as a part of the progressive movement – man, sit down,” Johnson said at a rally in Chicago with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders last week.

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • As more details emerge about how the Nashville school shooting unfolded, expert says the quick thinking of teachers saved lives | CNN

    As more details emerge about how the Nashville school shooting unfolded, expert says the quick thinking of teachers saved lives | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    As more details emerge about how a deadly mass shooting unfolded inside a private Christian school in Nashville, a former police officer who provided active shooter training at the school said the quick-thinking actions of teachers who locked down classrooms helped save lives.

    The shooter who got into The Covenant School on Monday fired multiple rounds into several classrooms but didn’t hit any students inside the classrooms, “because the teachers knew exactly what to do, how to fortify their doors and where to place their children in those rooms,” security consultant Brink Fidler told CNN.

    “Their ability to execute literally flawlessly under that amount of stress while somebody trying to murder them and their children, that is what made the difference here,” Fidler said.

    “These teachers are the reason those kids went home to their families,” he added.

    Six people were killed in the Monday morning school shooting. They were three 9-year-old students: Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kinney and Hallie Scruggs. The adults killed were Cynthia Peak, 61, a substitute teacher; Katherine Koonce, the 60-year-old head of the school; and Mike Hill, a 61-year-old custodian, police said.

    All of the victims who were struck by gunfire had been in an open area or hallway, said Fidler, who did a walk-through of the school with officials Wednesday.

    “The only victims this shooter was able to get to were victims that were stuck in some sort of open area or hallway,” Fidler said. “Several were able to evarocuate safely. The ones that couldn’t do that safely did exactly what they were taught and trained to do.”

    While the shooter had targeted the school, it’s believed the victims were fired upon at random, police have said.

    Also credited with saving lives are the officers who rushed into the school and fatally shot the attacker, 28-year-old Audrey Hale, ending the 14 minutes of terror that unfolded at the school.

    “We had heroic officers that went in harm’s way to stop this and we could have been talking about more tragedy than what we are,” Drake told CNN Wednesday.

    The law enforcement response in Nashville stands in contrast with the response in Uvalde, Texas, where there was a delay of more than an hour before authorities confronted and killed the gunman. The attack in Uvalde left 21 people dead.

    Monday’s school shooting in Nashville was the deadliest US school shooting since last May’s massacre in Uvalde. It also marked the 19th shooting at a school or university in just the past three months that left at least one person wounded, a CNN count shows.

    A Nashville city councilman also said a witness told him Koonce, the head of The Covenant School, spent her last moments trying to protect the children in her care.

    “The witness said Katherine Koonce was on a Zoom call, heard the shots and abruptly ended the Zoom call and left the office. The assumption from there is that she headed towards the shooter,” Councilman Russ Pulley said. He did not identify the witness.

    Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake said he can’t confirm how Koonce died but said, “I do know she was in the hallway by herself. There was a confrontation, I’m sure. You can tell the way she is lying in the hallway.”

    Fidler said that Koonce had been adamant about training school staff on how to respond during an active shooter situation.

    “She understood the severity of the topic and the severity of the teachers needing to have the knowledge of what to do in that situation,” he said.

    Koonce and the other victims were honored at a citywide vigil in Nashville Wednesday, where residents came together to pray and grieve.

    “It’s such a tragedy and felt so deeply by everyone here,” Nashville resident Eliza Hughes said. “Nashville is a close tight-knit community. We definitely feel the tragedy. It’s an awful situation.”

    After the shooting, police found that Hale had detailed maps of The Covenant School – which the shooter had attended as a child – and “quite a bit” of writings related to the shooting, according to the police chief.

    The FBI, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and police have been combing through the maps and writings Hale left, including looking at a notebook, Drake said.

    Authorities have called the attack “calculated,” with Drake saying Wednesday that the maps “did have a display of entry into the school, a route that would be taken for whatever was going to be carried out.”

    The shooter is also believed to have had weapons training and had arrived at the school heavily armed and prepared for a confrontation with law enforcement, police have said.

    But as details of the pre-planning are uncovered, it’s still unclear what motivated the attack. Drake said police have met with the school and found no indication that Hale had any problems while attending The Covenant.

    Hale had been under care for an emotional disorder and legally bought seven guns in the past three years, but they were kept hidden from Hale’s parents, Drake said. Three of the weapons, including an AR-15 rifle, were used in the attack Monday.

    Tennessee does not have a “red flag” law that would allow a judge to temporarily seize guns from someone who is believed to be a threat to themselves or others.

    The police chief said law enforcement was not contacted about the shooter previously, and Hale was never committed to an institution.

    Hale’s childhood friend, Averianna Patton, told CNN on Tuesday the killer sent her disturbing messages minutes before the attack, saying “I’m planning to die today” and it would be on the news.

    Patton called the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office in Nashville but was on hold for “maybe like 7 minutes,” she said. By then, the shooting had already started.

    Asked about the messages, Drake told CNN, “If their timeline was accurate, the actual call came in after the officer had already arrived on the scene. So, it plays no bearing on that.”

    “The moment we got the call, we responded immediately to the scene. Officers pulled up, were taking gunfire, pulled the gun out, went inside, did not wait,” Drake said.

    The shooter entered the school by firing at glass doors and climbing through to get inside, surveillance video shows. The first call about the shooting came in at 10:13 a.m., and police arrived on scene at 10:24 a.m., according to the police chief.

    Body-camera footage from the first responding officers shows them rushing in and clearing classrooms before racing to the second floor of the school, where an officer armed with an assault-style rifle shot the assailant multiple times. The shooter was dead at 10:27 a.m., police said.

    Police have referred to Hale as a “female shooter,” and later said Hale was transgender. Hale used male pronouns on a social media profile, a spokesperson told CNN when asked to clarify.

    The Covenant School shooting victims (top row) Katherine Koonce, Mike Hill, Cynthia Peak, (bottom row) Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney.

    Nashville residents came together for a citywide vigil Wednesday to mourn the victims, pray and sharex in the heartache.

    First lady Jill Biden was in attendance, as was singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow, who performed her song “I Shall Believe” to the grieving crowd.

    “Nashville has had its worst today,” Mayor John Cooper told the crowd. “Our heart is broken. Our city united as we mourn together.”

    The police chief also addressed the community, saying that a school shooting like the one officers faced at The Covenant School on Monday is a moment officers have trained for but hoped would never come.

    “Our police officers have cried and are crying with Nashville and the world,” Drake said.

    As the community grieves, families are mourning loved ones lost in the shooting.

    First Lady Jill Biden at the Nashville Remembers candlelight vigil Wednesday.

    William, one of the children killed, had an “unflappable spirit,” friends of the Kinney family shared on GoFundMe.

    Hallie’s aunt Kara Arnold said the 9-year-old had “a love for life that kept her smiling and running and jumping and playing and always on the go.”

    Evelyn’s family called her “a shining light in this world.”

    The family of Hill, a father of seven children and grandfather to 14, remembered his love for cooking and spending time with his family.

    “Violence has visited our city and brought heartache and pain. In the midst of sorrow, we are yet looking for hope,” said Tennessee Representative Rev. Harold M. Love, Jr. as he ended the vigil with a prayer.

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  • How frustrated parents of Los Angeles students are getting creative managing their children while school is out | CNN

    How frustrated parents of Los Angeles students are getting creative managing their children while school is out | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Tucked into a small art studio at a California university, Sea Krob took their 3-year-old and 7-year-old to graduate school with them because they didn’t have a daycare option this week.

    They are one of the parents of the half-million students who are out of school for three days because of the Los Angeles Unified School District school worker strike.

    “It’s really frustrating that the one thing that was supposed to be dependable is not,” Krob, 32, told CNN. “And it’s not because the workers are striking, but it’s because LAUSD would rather make time to find volunteers and make plans for our kids not to be in school than just meet the needs of the people that they’ve employed.”

    The stakes are high for school workers, including bus drivers, custodians and other support staff represented by Service Employees International Union Local 99 asking for more equitable wages, more work hours and more staffing to provide better student services.

    It is the same district that shut down for a six-day strike in 2019, when teachers went to the picket lines to fight for smaller class sizes, more staff and an increase in wages.

    This strike has left parents scrambling to find childcare, many cobbling together creative solutions to keep their children on track with school, while also working their full-time jobs.

    For Krob, that’s meant notifying individual professors of their situation and asking if they can bring their two children with to classes. Krob is a full-time graduate student pursuing art at California State University, Long Beach.

    “My partner is out of sick days for the year already – it’s March – so I am on the whims of whatever professor I have to have my kids come with me,” they said.

    For safety and liability reasons, Krob cannot take their children into the art lab where they work, so they had to forgo their lab hours this week, they said. Instead, they are getting creative with how they spend time during the strike and borrowing art supplies from a university office.

    “I just stretched out a big piece of paper so that we could color on it for the three days and make art, hang out and do our best,” they said.

    Krob commutes on public transit two hours each way to get to the university from their Los Angeles home. It’s been an extra challenge doing that with their two children in the pouring rain this week.

    What frustrates Krob, who supports the staff on strike, is that the resources for parents are through the school system, which is shut down, they said. They wish there was more support for parents.

    “I think that the people who are striking are totally within their right and they should be able to engage in a strike and parents still have resources to be able to take care of their kids, and that shouldn’t be cut off.”

    Sandra Colton-Medici, an online business entrepreneur, has two children in two different situations: Only one of them gets to go to school this week.

    Her 5-year-old daughter attends kindergarten at a LAUSD school, while her 3-year-old attends some classes at a private school.

    Sandra Colton-Medici smiles with her two children, aged 5 and 3.

    “I had to wake up both of them and say, ‘One of you is going to school and the other one is not,” Colton-Medici said. “That was a little bit difficult for one to say, ‘But what do you mean I’m not going to school?’”

    Her 5-year-old didn’t understand that her teachers and support staff are marching outside the school, but they aren’t in school today, she said. The 44-year-old broke it down into simple terms to explain the strike to her children.

    “The teachers and the support staff there, they’re going to talk to their employer, their boss, to say we need more to take care of ourselves,” Colton-Medici said. “In order to do that, they have to take a break from school.”

    In a moment of innocence, she says her oldest daughter asked, “‘So do they need money? I have money in my coin purse.’”

    Her daughter’s teacher provided informational and educational packets to do at home and Colton-Medici is doing her best to act as a fill-in educator – all while running her business from home.

    “If I had to grade myself with how I’m dealing with their time off from school and me balancing that thing that people call work-life balance, I would probably say I’m giving myself a 10 for effort and like a six for like completion,” she said. “I know that there’s going to be something that I’ve missed.”

    Colton-Medici’s husband is working in the office, but he stayed at home Tuesday morning to care for their older daughter while she took their toddler to her school. She’s grateful she can also call on her mother if she needs backup childcare, especially since she said there was enough advance notice of the strike to make plans.

    “I know by Thursday, in a few days, it might be a little overwhelming, especially since I do run my own business from home,” she said.

    Thousands of Los Angeles Unified School District teachers and SEIU members rally outside the LAUSD headquarters in Los Angeles on Tuesday.

    Colton-Medici said she feels for the support staff when she sees them ushering kids into school, walking them to the nurse or giving them a hug at the end of the day. She knows that some of those staffers work as crossing guards and have double duties.

    She said it’s important to support the people on strike and make sure they are valued. She reminds people that some of these support staffers also have children in school, some of whom may be at home because their parents are on strike.

    “Yes, we are pseudo inconvenienced, but how do you get inconvenienced by your own child?” Colton-Medici said. “I’m just trying to be better, trying to be more of an educator today, in addition to being able to hug my kids because I think that’s really important too.”

    While the strike is inconvenient for parents in the district, Wade Armstrong says he and his wife have the flexibility to make it work with their son, Declan, being out of school.

    “We’re really lucky because my wife and I, we both work at home,” Armstrong, 47, told CNN. “It’s not such a big impact in terms of we have to find child care and stuff like that, which some of our friends do have to do.”

    Yet, the parents are concerned because of the learning time that’s lost for all children during the strike.

    “It’s annoying and we’re sad to see the learning loss for our kids,” Armstrong said. “It’s really coming on the heels of the holidays and with spring break coming up soon, it really feels like we’ve barely even had a spring semester.”

    Their son is a fourth grader, but this isn’t the first time the 9-year-old has been affected by a strike. He was in kindergarten during the 2019 LAUSD strike.

    The previous strike was tougher for the Armstrongs to deal with, as neither of them were working from home and they needed child care. This time around, their son is older and more self-sufficient.

    Armstrong said the materials sent home from school aren’t directly related to what’s going on in the classroom, so he’s focusing more on spending time with his son and having some of Declan’s friends over to help other parents.

    Wade Armstrong and his son, Declan, play with their dogs while Declan is at home on a school day due to the LAUSD strike.

    While Armstrong said he’s “disappointed” that the district and the union couldn’t reach a resolution, he understands why so many staffers are on the picket lines.

    Armstrong said his son talks fondly about classroom aides who help special needs students, and they make time to help the whole class with projects. Cafeteria workers are also doing admirable work, especially after feeding so many children during the pandemic, he said.

    “There’s a lot of the aides and staff in our schools who really aren’t getting paid much at all and I know how essential they are from what my son tells me about his days in school,” Armstrong said. “I hope they get paid.”

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  • In wake of Florida law, additional states seek to restrict certain LGBTQ discussions in schools | CNN Politics

    In wake of Florida law, additional states seek to restrict certain LGBTQ discussions in schools | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Bills similar to Florida’s controversial legislation that bans certain instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in schools are being considered in at least 15 states, data compiled by the American Civil Liberties Union and reviewed by CNN shows.

    Some of the bills go further than the Florida law, dubbed by its critics as “Don’t Say Gay,” which sparked a furious nationwide discussion about LGBTQ rights, education policy and parental involvement in the classroom.

    The debate reflects the sensitive forces of LGBTQ rights becoming increasingly ascendant at a time when some parents are seeking greater input in their children’s education, especially in the wake of the tumult wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic.

    Republicans, arguing that discussions around gender identity and sexuality are inappropriate for young children, have used the banner of “parental rights” to push for a curtailment of such conversations in schools, even though opinions on the matter vary widely among parents. LGBTQ rights advocates see a conscious decision to stigmatize a vulnerable slice of American society and a potential chilling effect on what they believe to be urgently needed discussions.

    “These bills are predicated on the belief that queer identities are a contagion while straight, cisgender identities are somehow more pure or correct,” Gillian Branstetter, a communications strategist for the ACLU, told CNN. “In truth, every student has a right to have their own life stories reflected back at them and every student benefits from stories that serve as a window into the lives of people different from them. Censorship and homogeneity benefit no one while denying all students an equal chance to learn, grow and thrive.”

    The ACLU has tracked a total of 61 bills across 26 states, though efforts in several states, including Mississippi and Montana, have already failed. Earlier this month, Arkansas approved restrictions against such discussions through the fourth grade.

    Ultimately, it’s unclear how many of the bills will be enacted. A Human Rights Campaign report released in January said that of 315 bills that they viewed as anti-LGBTQ that were introduced nationwide last year, only 29 – less than 10% – became law.

    Florida’s law, titled the “Parental Rights in Education” bill, prohibits classroom instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade “or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.” It also requires districts to notify a student’s parent if there’s a significant change in their mental or emotional well-being, which LGBTQ rights advocates argue could lead to some students being outed to their parents without the student’s knowledge or consent.

    “We will continue to recognize that in the state of Florida, parents have a fundamental role in the education, health care and well-being of their children. We will not move from that,” Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said when he signed the bill in March 2022.

    According to the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit think tank that advocates for issues including LGBTQ rights, Florida’s law was the catalyst for the bills currently under consideration in other states, which include:

    • An Iowa bill that passed the state House last week that would prohibit instruction about gender identity and sexual orientation from kindergarten through sixth grade.
    • A bill in Oregon that would prohibit any discussion on sexual identity for grades kindergarten through third grade without parental notification and consent.
    • Legislation in Alaska that would require parental notification two weeks prior to “any activity, class or program that includes content involving gender identity, human reproduction or sexual matters is provided to a child.”
    • Multiple bills in Florida that seek to double down on last year’s legislation, including one that requires instruction that “sex is determined by biology and reproductive function at birth” and another that prohibits requirements for employees to use pronouns that do not correspond with a student’s sex.

    A recurring theme in the legislation is a requirement that school employees notify a parent if a child expresses a desire to be addressed by a pronoun that matches their gender identity if it differs from the one assigned at birth.

    “We’re not saying that you can’t do this,” Washington Republican state Sen. Phil Fortunato, who introduced legislation that would limit instruction on gender and sexual identity for kindergarten through third grade, told CNN. “I mean, I disagree with it, but, you know, if the parents and the child agree with it, that is their decision. But they shouldn’t be doing it behind the parent’s back when their kid goes to school. And that’s the point of the bill.”

    Missouri’s bill is uniquely far-reaching: no employee at a public or charter school would be allowed to “encourage a student under the age of eighteen years old to adopt a gender identity or sexual orientation,” though what the law means by “encourage” is not explained. School officials would be required to immediately notify parents if their child confides in them “discomfort or confusion” about their “official identity” and teachers would not be allowed to refer to a student by their preferred pronouns without first securing a parent’s approval.

    The bill specifically calls for whistleblower protections for school employees who report violators, who would then face “charges seeking to suspend or revoke the teacher’s license to teach based upon charges of incompetence, immorality or neglect of duty.”

    In a blog post entitled “Evil perpetrated on our children,” Missouri GOP state Sen. Mike Moon, who sponsored the legislation, called it a “lie that boys can be changed into girls and girls can be changed into boys.”

    “One thing we must agree on, though, is that parents are responsible for the upbringing of their children,” he continued. “To that end, parents must be involved in the education of their children.”

    The measures are likely to face swift legal challenges if enacted, though at least two efforts to block Florida’s law have so far failed to take it off the books. One of those lawsuits, brought by a group of students, parents and teachers in Florida, was thrown out last month by US District Judge Allen Winsor, a Trump appointee, who said the challengers were unable to show that they’ve been harmed by the law.

    “Plaintiffs have shown a strident disagreement with the new law, and they have alleged facts to show its very existence causes them deep hurt and disappointment,” Winsor wrote in his order. “But to invoke a federal court’s jurisdiction, they must allege more. Their failure to do so requires dismissal.”

    At the heart of opponents’ concerns is the vagueness in the laws’ language as written. LGBTQ issues are not generally a formal part of public school curricula, they point out, leaving educators with the prospect of having to determine where legal fault lines are drawn with nothing less than their careers at stake.

    “What counts as classroom discussion? As classroom instruction? Does it just include the curriculum for the class?” asked Alice O’Brien, the general counsel for the Alice O’Brien, in an interview with CNN. “For example, does it include teachers’ lesson plans, or does it sweep so broadly as to include classroom discussion? A teacher answering a student’s question, a teacher perhaps intervening in an incident where one student is bullying another student because of that student’s prestige, sexual orientation or gender identity? It’s very unclear what is prohibited and what is not prohibited.”

    There are other concerns. Naomi G. Goldberg, the deputy director of MAP, worries about a “chilling effect on teachers themselves in terms of their ability to support students in the classroom as well as the students themselves in the classroom.”

    A similar point was made in a CNN op-ed last year by Claire McCully, a trans mother who is outraged over Florida’s law.

    “Like any other parent, I expect my family to be welcomed and accepted by others at the school,” McCully wrote. “And of course, this acceptance might be more likely if some of the children’s stories read in classrooms feature two dads, two moms or even a trans mom.”

    Cathryn Oakley, the state legislative director and senior counsel of the Human Rights Campaign, told CNN that using a student’s preferred pronouns is harmless to other students but deeply meaningful to trans children themselves. She urged a cautious approach that recognizes the need for schools to be a safe space for vulnerable children, particularly if there is a risk that outing a child before they are ready could lead to “family rejection or even violence.”

    “No one is suggesting that this is information that won’t be relevant to parents,” she said. “But what we are saying is that young folks should be able to have this conversation on their own terms with their parents and not have a third party be forced to broker a conversation that could put that child in danger.”

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  • ‘A form of resistance’: More Black families are choosing to homeschool their children | CNN

    ‘A form of resistance’: More Black families are choosing to homeschool their children | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Tracie Yorke grew concerned about the quality of education her son was receiving after his school moved to remote learning during the pandemic in 2020.

    Yorke, of Hyattsville, Maryland, described her fourth grader’s Zoom classes as chaotic – it looked as if teachers had not been trained in virtual instruction, she said.

    That summer, the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis sparked a national racial reckoning. With only one Black teacher at the school and none past the fourth grade, Yorke said her son Tyce, who is now 13 years old, had no one he could relate to.

    “There was a lot of mayhem,” said Yorke. “I really realized, ‘I don’t think this environment is healthy for my child.’”

    Yorke decided to homeschool Tyce, and has done so for the last three years. She has put together a curriculum that meets his specific needs and can teach him about race and African American history without the risk of politicians intervening.

    While homeschooling isn’t new, advocates say a growing number of Black parents are educating their children at home so they can exercise more control over what they are taught and how they are treated. Many made the switch to homeschooling during the pandemic, but interest is growing as national debates over teaching systemic racism and Black history in the classroom continue, advocates say.

    Sherri Mehta and her older son Caleb work on an assignment at their home in Laurel, Mayland. She first turned to homeschooling in 2020.

    In the last few years, lawmakers, mostly Republicans, have called on schools to remove critical race theory – a concept that legal scholars say acknowledges that racism is both systemic and institutional in American society – from their curriculums. (Educators argue that critical race theory itself is generally not included in the grade school curriculum.) There have also been widespread efforts by lawmakers, parents and school boards to ban books about race, gender and sexuality. And most recently, Florida’s Department of Education rejected an Advanced Placement African American studies course.

    According to census data, the number of Black households homeschooling their children jumped from 3.3.% at the start of the pandemic in 2020 to 16.1% by the fall of that year. That jump was the largest of any racial group. Meanwhile, the proportion of homeschooled children in the US overall nearly doubled from 2.8% before the pandemic to 5.4% in the 2020-21 school year, according to the US Department of Education. The data may not present a complete count of families because every state regulates and tracks homeschooling differently.

    Cheryl Fields-Smith, a professor in elementary education at the University of Georgia, cited several reasons why more Black families are choosing to homeschool, including the disproportionate rates of discipline against Black students, the resegregation of schools, the denied access to gifted education in Black and brown communities, and bullying compounded by school safety concerns.

    Fields-Smith said while these issues are often researched in isolation, many Black families are having to face them all at the same time. So they are developing learning routines that fit their children’s needs and forming homeschooling co-op groups with other families to teach their children together and socialize them, Fields-Smith said.

    “I conceptualize it as a form of resistance,” Fields-Smith told CNN. “Instead of accepting the status quo, families are resisting what’s happening in their schools.”

    Some families say they chose to homeschool because they were living in majority White school districts and wanted to teach their children to have confidence in their Black identity. Others expressed a desire to shield their children from the nation’s polarizing racial climate.

    Sherri Mehta, of Laurel, Maryland, said she first turned to homeschooling in 2020 to help her young son who wasn’t doing well with remote learning as a kindergartner.

    Sherri Mehta watches Caleb practice the piano.

    Gabriel Mehta stands on the stairs while his brother Caleb lounges on a bean bag chair during a break between lessons.

    Mehta said she was also becoming concerned about her two children facing a “cultural gap” or racism because they were not around teachers who looked like them in their school district. And she saw few Black children included in the school’s gifted program.

    With homeschooling, Mehta said she and her husband can split the responsibilities of teaching different subjects, teaching the truth about Black history and slavery, and can rely on co-op groups for hands-on learning, such as woodworking.

    Mehta said she doesn’t want her children to experience the same racial trauma she experienced in public school. She recalled growing up in Richmond, Virginia, and competing against sports teams with names such as the Rebels and the Confederates.

    “There is a sort of innocence lost and I just think my kids are deserving of something different,” Mehta said. “They’ll face racism. It’s not going away. But having the experience they have now of being surrounded by this nurturing of their entire being, I think what they have now will help them face challenges as they get older.”

    The Mehta family poses for a portrait in front of their Maryland home.

    Carlos Birdsong, of Charlotte, North Carolina, said he wanted his two daughters to have “a greater sense of cultural identity” amid the political divisiveness in the country.

    “We moved here from South Carolina to this area because these public schools were supposedly good,” Birdsong said. “The charter schools in our area are mostly White. The private schools are White. They are very good schools, but they may not be the best fit because they’re majority White,” he said.

    Some families who homeschool are driven by their own experiences with traditional schooling or because they want to emphasize religious training in their instruction.

    Aurora Bean, a mother of three from Matawan, New Jersey, began homeschooling her children four years ago because she was uncomfortable with schools discussing gender identity issues at a young age and wanted to be able to teach her children about their faith. She was also opposed to the Covid-19 vaccine requirements many schools introduced during the pandemic.

    She supplements her children’s learning with coursework provided through Acellus Academy, an online K-12 private school that offers classes in Spanish, history and other subjects. Bean said she has embraced the freedom homeschooling provides, including the ability for her family to spend several months traveling the world as part of a Christian discipleship training program later this year.

    “It’s so important for my kids to see beyond our nice neighborhood,” Bean said. “It’s important for them to see the other side of things, more of the world, less of the privilege.”

    Khari, 5, practices reading with his mother, Aurora Bean.

    Bean begins each day by teaching her family about devotion and their faith. Most mornings she wakes up before the kids to have time to herself and to read the Bible.

    Many families have leaned on support groups and virtual education providers such as Outschool – which Yorke uses – to help them navigate teaching their children at home.

    Khadijah Z. Ali-Coleman and Fields-Smith created the group Black Family Homeschool Educators and Scholars in 2020 to help families who want to homeschool but don’t know where to start. Ali-Coleman, now the organization’s sole owner and managing director, said she had homeschooled her daughter, Khari, off and on for years. And Khari was later able to attend the University of San Francisco on a full scholarship, she said.

    Families who homeschool come from all socioeconomic backgrounds, Ali-Coleman and Fields-Smith say.

    “When I homeschooled, I was not upper-middle-class, married – although I live with my partner who is my daughter’s father – Christian or politically conservative,” Ali-Coleman told CNN.

    She advises parents who want to homeschool to start with a mission statement spelling out their goals, and she holds virtual teach-ins to help families navigate challenges. Ali-Coleman said some families turn to homeschooling because institutional schoolwork isn’t challenging enough.
    “We’re now seeing the way people are speaking out loud about how they have a problem with the way we’re teaching history,” Ali-Coleman said.

    Ali-Coleman also said homeschooling requires parents to adjust their thinking and potentially change what they do to earn money. While homeschooling, she worked jobs that offered her flexibility, she said.

    “This gig economy that is now more formalized is something homeschooling parents have been doing for ages,” she said. “You have to think ‘what are the unique needs of your family and what are the support systems you need to create?’ I never want to give the impression that it’s easy. It’s always based on what the unique needs of the family are. Adjustments are definitely required and that’s something that you need to go in knowing.”

    Bean holds her son, Khari, in her arms while they look at a map of the world. The book they were reading mentioned Paris so she asked him if he could point to it on a map.

    Back in Maryland, the Yorkes explore Black history all year as part of Tyce’s curriculum. Last year, he studied Amharic, an Ethiopian language not offered in most schools and took a course on “Blacks in Comics” through a local Black homeschool co-op. This year, he took a class on astronomy that highlighted African and Black contributions to the field.

    “I’ve always had concerns about educating a young Black boy, with the perceptions and stereotypes and coming off of George Floyd,” Yorke said. “I want to be able to discuss race in the classroom.”

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  • Incumbent Lightfoot fights to make runoff in Chicago mayoral primary | CNN Politics

    Incumbent Lightfoot fights to make runoff in Chicago mayoral primary | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is fighting for her political survival, seeking to finish in the top two in Tuesday’s crowded primary and advance to an April runoff in her quest for a second term.

    Lightfoot, the first Black woman and first out gay person to serve as mayor of a city often pilloried by conservatives in national debates over violence and gun control, rose to prominence as a pugnacious reformer promising a break from the corruption and clubby governance that had long marked Chicago politics.

    But years of contentious brawls over policing, teacher pay and Covid-19 public safety policies, as well as mounting complaints about long waits in Chicago’s public transit system, have left Lightfoot vulnerable, raising the prospect of the Second City ousting its Democratic mayor in the first round of voting.

    Voters on Tuesday will sort through the nine-candidate field – including eight Democrats and one independent. No candidate is expected to top 50% of the vote, which would mean the top two finishers will advance to an April 4 runoff.

    Campaigns and Chicago political observers describe the contest as wide open, with four candidates emerging at the top: Lightfoot; progressive US Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García; Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson; and Paul Vallas, a law-and-order candidate and a onetime head of schools in Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans.

    If the outcome is close, it could take days to determine the top two finishers, as mail-in votes postmarked by election day get delivered.

    Powerful interests with which Lightfoot has at times brawled are split among her major challengers. Conservatives and the police have aligned behind one rival. Teachers have backed another. And many progressives are backing a third major contender.

    Above all else, concerns about crime and public safety have rattled Chicago. Violence in the city spiked in 2020 and 2021. And though shootings and murders have decreased since then, other crimes – including theft, car-jacking, robberies and burglaries – have increased since last year, according to the Chicago Police Department’s 2022 year-end report.

    Lightfoot and her rivals have placed the issue at the forefront of their campaigns.

    “We absolutely need to hire more officers,” Lightfoot said at a WTTW mayoral forum earlier this month. “This is one of the toughest times in the country to recruit, and mayors all over the country are experiencing the difficulty.”

    Chicago’s municipal elections are nonpartisan, which means all voters – Democrats, Republicans and independents – can participate. However, Chicago is an overwhelmingly blue city, and all the major contenders say they are Democrats.

    Vallas, however, has attracted support from conservatives, and has described the Democratic Party as moving away from him in recent years on certain issues. Lightfoot, in an email to supporters, said Vallas “has so strongly aligned himself with Republican views that he can’t even be considered a moderate Democrat.”

    Vallas, who unsuccessfully ran for Illinois governor as a Democrat in 2002 and was the losing Democratic lieutenant governor nominee in 2014, was endorsed by the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, the same organization that hosted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in nearby Elmhurst earlier this week.

    “I have talked about the need to take our city back from the criminals that are preying on our residents and preying on our businesses,” Vallas told CNN in an interview.

    Johnson, meanwhile, has floated the idea in the past of diverting some funds from the police budget to alternate sources, saying he wants to “invest in people.”

    He has the backing of the Chicago Teachers Union, a powerful organization that has repeatedly clashed with Lightfoot – including over teachers’ pay and class sizes in 2019 that led to an 11-day strike and then last year as Lightfoot pushed teachers to return to classrooms at a time of rising Covid-19 cases.

    “The reason we don’t have enough police officers is because we are asking them to be social workers, therapists and marriage counselors,” Johnson said at the WTTW forum. “I’m actually investing in actually having social workers, therapists to show up on the front line, to actually free up law enforcement to deal with the more severe crime that happens in the city of Chicago.”

    García – a former Cook County commissioner who in 2015 forced then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel into a runoff – has sounded similar themes.

    “Hiring more civilians to free up more police officers with their guns and badges to walk the walk, to talk to people, rebuild trust is the most important. The other important element is investing in communities and investing in violence prevention programs,” he told CNN.

    Vallas, whose message has revolved around a tough-on-crime message, said Chicago needs more police on “L” station platforms and on trains as part of a push to place more officers on local beats.

    He said combating violent crime is the “first, second and third priority” of his campaign.

    “Everything becomes undermined if you can’t provide public security,” Vallas told CNN.

    Lightfoot in recent days has lambasted Vallas after he told a crowd that his “whole campaign is about taking back our city, pure and simple.”

    The mayor told reporters that Vallas was “blowing the ultimate dog whistle.”

    “Take our city back, meaning what? To what time? And take our city back from whom?” she said.

    When pressed by CNN, Vallas said he was referring to criminals in his remark that Lightfoot has criticized.

    “I have talked about the need to take our city back from the criminals that are preying on our residents and preying on our businesses,” he said.

    For her part, Lightfoot has touted Chicago’s lawsuit against an Indiana gun store – part of an effort to demonstrate that the influx of firearms into the city isn’t a result of Chicago’s gun policies, but rather neighboring states with more lax laws.

    She has also touted her administration’s efforts to hire nearly 1,000 additional police officers, put privatized, unarmed security on public transit and create teams and task forces focused on car-jacking, halting the flow of guns into the city and more.

    The Chicago Tribune, the city’s largest newspaper, has endorsed Vallas. The newspaper’s editorial board credited Lightfoot’s financial management of the city and her navigation of the Covid-19 pandemic and said it hopes the mayor will advance to face Vallas one-on-one in the runoff.

    “Vallas has the ear of rank-and-file police officers on the street. We will expect him to use that trust to improve police conduct and the abysmal clearance rate for violent offenses,” the editorial board said.

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

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

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    CNN
     — 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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