Across the country, state legislatures have passed bills to ban “age-inappropriate” books from schools, in many cases subjecting teachers and school librarians to criminal charges for possession of such books. In January, EveryLibrary, a group that tracks legislation that puts school and college librarians, higher ed faculty and museum professionals at risk of criminal prosecution, identified 44 bills in 14 states as “legislation of concern,” for the 2024 session.

This climate has teachers and librarians feeling fearful, confused and stressed. Lindsey Kimery, the coordinator of library services for Metro-Nashville Public Schools, said she has “no hidden agenda other than that reading was my favorite thing.” Having books by, about and for LGBTQ+ students, she said, “does not mean we are out there promoting it. It just means we have books for those readers, too. What I try to convey is that a library is a place for voluntary inquiry.” 

Krause’s List

It is unclear how the recent book ban fervor started. Certainly, a former Texas state representative, Matt Krause, deserves some credit. On October 25, 2021, using his power as chair of the Texas House Committee on General Investigating, Krause sent a letter to the Texas Education Agency and to school districts listing some 850 books. He demanded that districts (1) identify how many copies of each title they possessed and where they were located, including which campuses and classrooms; (2) say how much the district spent to acquire the books; and (3) identify books not on his list that dealt with topics such as AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases, or other subjects that “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex or convey that a student, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

Districts had until November 12, less than a month, to respond. This alarmed librarians. At the time, Mary Woodard, president of the Texas Library Association, was also in charge of school libraries in the Mesquite Independent School District (ISD). She recalled receiving the letter. “I was actually at home. My superintendent forwarded it to me. It was in the evening,” she said. “I just felt a cold chill. I was beyond shocked that somebody from our state government was asking what books were available in our school libraries. I never thought I would see anything like that.”  Like librarians around the state, Woodard was quickly called into a meeting with her superintendent. Ultimately, they gathered the information Krause asked for, but decided not to send it unless it was specifically requested. It wasn’t.

The lack of follow-up by Krause was interesting. He has repeatedly refused to say how he compiled the list or what he was trying to accomplish. But around the time the letter gained attention, Krause was running for state attorney general. He failed to make it onto the Republican ballot in March 2022, then decided to run for district attorney in Tarrant County as a “Faithful, Conservative Fighter,” but lost. His legislative term ended on January 10, 2023. He is now running for Tarrant County Commissioner.

Related: The (mostly) Republican moms fighting to reclaim their Idaho school district from conservatives 

The list was probably the most newsworthy thing he did as state legislator — it caught fire. Suddenly, Krause’s list was a state resource and discussed in the national media. Governor Greg Abbott called on the Texas Education Agency to launch criminal investigations into the availability of “pornographic books” in school libraries. Some of writer Andrew Solomon’s books were on the list, prompting him to write an essay titled “My Book Was Censored in China. Now It’s Blacklisted — in Texas.”

Actually, Krause’s list was quite sloppy. Media outlets dove into specifics and unearthed a ridiculous assemblage. Of course, books that mention LGBTQ+ students or are about sexuality (even from the 1970s) or race were well represented. But there was a lot that was puzzling. “Almost one in five of the books listed, I have no idea why they’re included,” wrote Danika Ellis of Book Riot, a podcast and website about books and reading, who sifted through the entire list. “Probably the one that has me the most stumped is ‘Inventions and Inventors’ by Roger Smith from 2002. What’s controversial about a book on inventions??” Other outlets shared similar head-scratching reactions. The Dallas Observer named their “10 most absurd” books on the list.

Actually, Krause’s list was quite sloppy. Media outlets dove into specifics and unearthed a ridiculous assemblage.

Yet many educators treated the list like an instructional manual. Chris Tackett, a political campaign finance expert, tweeted a photo of a man in a hoodie leaving the high school library in Granbury ISD pulling a dolly of cardboard boxes labeled “Krause’s List.” Granbury ISD’s superintendent, Jeremy Glenn, was eager to comply, as a leaked audio recording showed. He gathered librarians in January 2022 and told them that students didn’t need access to books about sexuality or transgender people. A secret recording shared by the Texas Tribune–ProPublica Investigative Unit and NBC News revealed a stunning disregard for students’ First Amendment rights.

Yet when Glenn addressed the librarians, there was clearly no room for disagreement. He stated that school board trustees had been in touch. “I want to talk about our community,” he said in a firm but syrupy drawl. “If you do not know this, you have been probably under a rock, but Granbury is a very, very conservative community and our board is very, very conservative.” He warned, “If that’s not what you believe, you’d better hide it because it ain’t changing in Granbury. Here, in this community, we will be conservative.”

He then detailed that meant not having books about sexuality or LGBTQ+ or “information on how to become transgender.” Then, Glenn revealed his discomfort with gender-fluid individuals, saying, “I will take it one step further with you and you can disagree if you want. There are two genders. There’s male and there’s female. And I acknowledge that there are men that think they are women and women that think they are men. And I don’t have any issues with what people want to believe, but there is no place for it in our libraries.” He told librarians that he was forming a review committee of parents and educators and that they would “pull books off the shelves, especially the 850” on Krause’s list. He finished with a directive that camouflaged the seriousness of what he asked them to do: “When in doubt, pull it. Let the community sign off on it, put it back on the shelf. You’re good to go.”

Objections Reflect Times, Personal Views

Not surprisingly, the matter of what should and may be included in school libraries has long been a source of contention, often influenced by the political climate of the time. In 1950, amid the fervor of McCarthyism, the Yale Law Journal delved into a controversy between The Nation and The New York City Board of Education after the left-leaning magazine published articles critical of Roman Catholic church doctrine and dogma. The school board voted to remove The Nation from school libraries. A multi-year battle followed with The Nation offering free subscriptions, but appeals to the state department of education failed. Was it censorship, as the Yale Law Journal and The Nation defense suggested? Libraries cannot subscribe to every periodical. The schools did not remove existing materials but did not include new issues.

The example hits on a current matter. Aside from pressure to remove materials, what should be included in the first place? Nowadays, rather than face controversy, some librarians are simply choosing not to purchase some books. A survey conducted by School Library Journal in Spring 2022 received input from 720 school librarians, 90 percent from public schools (all anonymous). It found that 97 percent weighed the impact of controversial subjects when making purchases. “The presence of an LGBTQIA+ character or theme in a book led 29 percent of respondents to decline a purchase,” the survey report said. Forty-two percent admitted removing a “potentially problematic” book that had not faced challenge or review. An updated 2023 survey revealed that this has only become more common. Thirty-seven percent said they declined to select books with LGBTQIA+ subject matter; 47 percent admitted to removing a book on their own. Interestingly, one-third said they had considered leaving the profession “in reaction to the intensity over book bans” — but two-thirds said that intensity has moved them to be more active in fighting censorship.

Book banning is a chaotic and illogical business. How a book is received or understood is often subject to the historical moment — and the tastes of individuals.

Book banning is a chaotic and illogical business. How a book is received or understood is often subject to the historical moment — and the tastes of individuals. The notion of an objective measure or checklist to decide what is “appropriate” — something far-right school boards have worked to police and enforce — is slippery to define. In the late 1930s, the children’s book “The Story of Ferdinand,” about a bull who would rather smell flowers than fight a matador, was interpreted as carrying a pacifist political message. But in a whirl of confusion, it was marked as both pro-Franco and anti-Franco — and also as “communist, anarchist, manic-depressive, and schizoid,” according to an analysis of children’s book censorship in the Elementary School Journal in 1970.  

Related: Florida just expanded school vouchers — again. What does that really mean?

In other words, people saw what they wanted to see. That also happened to “Sylvester and the Magic Pebble,” a children’s book by William Steig about a donkey who finds a magic pebble and, frightened by a lion, wishes himself into becoming a rock. The book contained images of police officers dressed as pigs. In 1971, the International Conference of Police Associations took offense at that portrayal of police as pigs — “pig” being a derogatory term for law enforcement officers. According to the author of the journal article, school librarians who agreed with the police association view of the drawings and “considered [the portrayal] a political statement,” pulled the books from shelves in many locales, including Lincoln, Nebraska; Palo Alto, California; Toledo, Ohio; Prince George’s County, Maryland; and several cities in Illinois.

Books often get singled out because they make someone uncomfortable. Lately, far-right activists have particularly objected to graphic images, including of intimate body parts. Which is what happened in the 1970s with Maurice Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen.” The book includes drawings that reveal the toddler hero’s penis on several pages. School and public libraries quietly devised a solution: They used white tempera to paint diapers on Mickey, the main character. At a meeting of the American Library Association in Chicago in June 1972, some 475 librarians, illustrators, authors and publishers were outraged at the practice of the painting over the penis and signed a petition denouncing it as a form of censorship.

“School libraries are for all students but not all students are the same — they have diverse interests, abilities, and maturity levels, and varied cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.”

Texas Library Association

Books that involve drugs, violence, sex and sexual orientation can attract fierce opposition, regardless of the intended message, literary merit or value. Sometimes these books offer windows into other worlds and experiences, which in 1971 bothered school board members and a few parents in a white middle-class section of Queens, New York City. Community School District 25 board voted to ban “Down These Mean Streets,” by Piri Thomas, in which the author shares his tough story of survival in Harlem as the dark-skinned son of Puerto Rican immigrants. The five members of the school board who voted to ban the book did not have children in any public schools governed by the district. At a meeting that drew some 500 people and lasted for six hours, 63 attendees spoke with most objecting to the ban. According to a New York Times account, “Book Ban Splits a Queens School District,” the five school board members who favored the ban were nicknamed “The Holy Five” or “The Faithful Five.” Four had run on a slate sponsored by the Home Schools Association, a support group for Catholic parents home-schooling their children. In a parallel to the present, some questioned their motives, concerned that they were reflecting personal interests and not the district’s. A few years later, in December 1975, the board, composed of different and recently elected members, voted to repeal the ban. The board president called the book banning “abhorrent” and “undemocratic.”

Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico

Thomas’s book also played a role in a case on which the Supreme Court ruled in 1982. It began in September 1975, when several board members of the Island Trees Union Free School District on Long Island, New York, attended a weekend education conference in Watkins Glen, New York, organized by a far-right group, Parents of New York United, Inc. (PONY-U. Inc. for short). Island Trees Union Free School District board members mixed with representatives from the Heritage Foundation and parents opposed to school desegregation in Boston. The keynote speaker, Genevieve Klein, a member of the New York State Board of Regents, advocated for adoption of a voucher system for education. “If you are a parent who believes that reading, writing, spelling and arithmetic are basic tools necessary for developing into a contributing member of society, then you know that parental control is an immediate necessity,” she told the group. “If there is to be any hope for saving another generation from becoming functional idiots the time to act is now.”

PONY-U. Inc. was not just a local group eager to talk about schooling. Headed by Janet Mellon, a far-right activist, the group had spent several years orchestrating opposition to sex education and human relations education in schools and to student busing across Upstate New York. Yet books were top of mind leading up to Watkins Glen. A few weeks prior, the group hosted a talk titled “Book Censorship in Our Schools” at the Central Fire Station in Ithaca, New York. The Watkins Glen conference also came on the heels of one of the most violent and divisive school textbook battles in history. For six months in 1974 and 1975, bitter conflict roiled West Virginia’s Kanawha County after a new school board member, Alice Moore, sought the removal of textbooks that she found objectionable. She had won her seat by convincing voters that schools were “destroying our children’s patriotism, trust in God, respect for authority and confidence in their parents.”

Moore mobilized other conservatives locally and nationally, including prominent education activists Mel and Norma Gabler, who sought to “excise the rot from the nation’s schoolbooks,” as Adam Laats writes in “The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education.” That “rot” included teaching evolution; communicating a “liberated” sexuality; “graphic accounts of gang fights; raids by wild motorcyclists; violent demonstrations against authority; murders of family members; of rape” and “books that denigrated traditional patriotic stories” in favor of popular subjects at the time, including Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Gertrude Ederle, Bobby Jones, Joan Baez, W. E. B. Du Bois “and many others dear to liberal hearts.”

Related: Who picks school curriculum? Idaho law hands more power to parents

As protests in Kanawha County grew, violence spread. Reverend Marvin Horand, a fundamentalist minister and former truck driver, called for school boycotts, arguing that “no education at all is 100 percent better than what’s going on in the schools now. If we don’t protect our children from evil, we’ll have to go to hell for it.” The controversy resulted in two shooting deaths and multiple bombings. Horand was charged and ultimately found guilty in connection with the dynamiting of two elementary schools. The Heritage Foundation was also on the ground, providing legal support and helping a local group hold a “series of ‘Concerned Citizen’ hearings on discontent with the public schools.” Mellon of PONY-U. was one of their “expert” speakers.

At the Watkins Glen conference — with the memory of Kanawha County still fresh — board members of the Island Trees Union Free School District received a list of 32 books described as “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and just plain filthy.” Then, in February 1976, the board ordered the Island Trees Union Free School superintendent to remove 11 books from the district’s junior and senior high schools, including nine from school libraries. The move stirred outrage, but the board defended the ban, claiming that the books contained “material which is offensive to Christians, Jews, blacks and Americans in general.” Two of the books — “The Fixer,” by Bernard Malamud, and “Laughing Boy,” by Oliver La Farge — had won the Pulitzer Prize. At a press conference, school board member Frank Martin read aloud from “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, citing sentences in which Jesus is called a “bum” and a “nobody.” Martin said that “even if the rest of the book was the best story in the world, I still wouldn’t want it in our library with this stuff in it.” The other books: “Down These Mean Streets,” by Piri Thomas; “The Naked Ape,” by Desmond Morris; “Soul on Ice,” by Eldridge Cleaver; “Black Boy by Richard Wright;” “Best Short Stories of Negro Writers,” edited by Langston Hughes; “Go Ask Alice,” by an anonymous author; “A Hero Ain’t Nothing but a Sandwich,” by Alice Childress; and “A Reader for Writers,” by Jerome Archer.

“We are not even allowed to order the newest ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ or the latest ‘Guinness World Records’ unless the board gives express permission for those specific titles. We can’t get any new nonfiction books about camels or squirrels or football without specific approval of the school board.”

A librarian from the Bear Creek Intermediate School, Keller Independent School District, Texas

Opposition to the ban grew. In April 1976, 500 people jammed a local school board meeting. Many juniors and seniors in high school also attended. One told a reporter, “These books are very tame. It’s nothing you can’t hear in the sixth-grade school bus.” Yet the board upheld the ban. Then, several months later, it reaffirmed the ban, saying that board members had read the books and pronounced them “educationally unsound.” By September 1976, the matter had attracted broad notice and Thomas, the author of “Down These Mean Streets,” wrote in The New York Times arguing for “the right to write and to read.”  He explained that the book “was not written to titillate but to bring forth a clarity about my growing up in El Barrio in the 1930’s and 1940’s.” He added, “Since the horrors of poverty, racism, drugs, the brutality of our prison system, the inhumanity toward children of all colors are still running rampant, let the truth written by those who lived it be read by those who didn’t.”

When the books were first removed, Steven Pico, at 16, was vice president of the junior class and a member of the school newspaper’s editorial board. The following year, as student council president and a liaison to Island Tree Union Free District Board of Education, he attended school board meetings. He decided to mount a challenge to the ban. Pico connected with lawyers from the New York Civil Liberties Union, and four other students joined the suit. It took years for the case to make it to the high court. Pico went off to college, earning his BA from Haverford College in 1981. Just over a year later, on June 25, 1982, the Supreme Court handed down its decision. The Court ruled that the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech limited the discretion of public school officials to remove books they considered offensive from school libraries. The New York Times ran its story on the ruling on page one. Linda Greenhouse, who covered the Supreme Court, noted that Bruce Rich, general counsel to the Freedom to Read Committee of the Association of American Publishers, “called the ruling ‘marvelous’ and said it ‘sends a very important message to school boards: Act carefully.’”

The decision in Pico was taken as a victory by those opposed to book bans, but as Greenhouse’s story also stated, it was a complicated win. It was a plurality ruling, which included a four-justice majority and two concurring opinions, that recognized school officials had violated students’ rights when they removed library books they didn’t like. “Our Constitution does not permit the official suppression of ideas,” wrote Associate Justice William J. Brennan Jr. But, as Greenhouse noted, “The Court did not define the precise limits of the Constitutional right it recognized.”

In the late 1930s, the children’s book “The Story of Ferdinand,” about a bull who would rather smell flowers than fight a matador, was interpreted as carrying a pacifist political message. But in a whirl of confusion, it was marked as both pro-Franco and anti-Franco — and also as “communist, anarchist, manic-depressive, and schizoid.”

School board members in Pico wanted to remove books whose content they disapproved of. But what if books were removed as a result of a restrictive policy? Or if state legislatures or school boards passed rules that restricted library materials? Would that run afoul of the law? Or would it provide cover for de facto book bans? What if a district made a process for approving books so onerous that librarians simply stopped ordering books with certain content?

These and related questions are playing out in real time now over what should be allowed in school libraries. Keller ISD, near Fort Worth, Texas, has faced controversy. When Governor Abbott announced plans to investigate school libraries amid reports of “pornographic” books, he specifically targeted Keller ISD, putting librarians in the district on the defensive. And when the Texas Education Agency released new guidelines for how districts should prevent “obscene content” from entering school libraries — a bid for wholesale changes in how books were acquired for libraries, bypassing the graduate training that is part of being a librarian — a far-right majority Keller ISD school board, newly-election in Spring 2022 with backing from the Patriot Mobile Action PAC, was only too happy to get involved.

Related: Moms For Liberty flexes its muscles — and faces pushback

At the time, the Texas Library Association and the Texas Association of School Librarians (a division of the Texas Library Association) objected to the new state guidelines. Those guidelines included the language of the Texas Penal Code Åò43.24(a)(2), a clear political statement, and a not-so-veiled threat. In most states, after all, K–12 schools and public libraries are typically exempt from obscenity laws; it is recognized that items that may clash with the language of those standards — art, biology, literature — involve creative and educational works that seek to deepen understanding of the human experience. Removing that exemption was the goal of the failed Tennessee House Bill 1944; it is a focus of several proposed bills around the country. 

The Texas Library Association objected to the increased burden on librarians, superintendents and school boards to read and review thousands of titles, acknowledging the difficult task for people who lack training as librarians. Such a process means relying on personal views of elected officials and other untrained people, which got the Island Trees Free Union School Board in trouble. In a statement, the Texas Library Association also underscored the actual role that libraries play: “School libraries are for all students but not all students are the same — they have diverse interests, abilities, and maturity levels, and varied cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.” The statement also pointedly rebuffed Abbott’s charge, adding, “Furthermore, school libraries do not collect obscene content.”

Yet the new Keller ISD school board was more than eager to take up removing “obscene content” from school libraries, and on July 8, 2022 passed an updated book policy that largely mirrored the new state guidelines. They weren’t done. A month later, on August 22, the board voted 4-2 (with one abstention) to adopt new district guidelines for selecting books. Each would be judged according to how often certain items appeared in its pages. Ill-defined terms like “prevalent,” “common,” “some” or “minimal” would indicate what amount of specific flagged content — profanity, kissing, horror, violence, bullying, drug or alcohol use by minors, drug use by adults, the glorification of suicide or self-harm or mental illness, brief descriptions of nonsexual nudity, and sexually explicit conduct or sexual abuse — would be permitted at different age levels.

Veteran board member, Ruthie Keyes, who had abstained, puzzled over how to apply the guidelines. In talking about violence, she asked, “Are they talking about military combat?” She had spoken with teachers who estimated having to remove two-thirds of their classroom library books. “That’s a lot,” she said. “And none were talking about explicit sex scenes.” (In November 2022, the board added one more rule: No mention of “gender fluidity” was permitted.)

The new policy created a selection process with more layers of librarians reviewing each purchase. Books would be also placed on a list open to review and challenge by members of the community for 30 days. The board would then approve the purchase of each book. This had an almost immediate effect. At the October 24, 2022, school board meeting, a librarian from the Bear Creek Intermediate School made her way to the mic, her hair piled in a messy swirl, glasses affixed to her face, and paper in hand. She spoke calmly about the policy, which she considered an affront to the training she and her peers had undergone. The board “has shown by its actions that Keller ISD librarians are not respected at all,” she said. “We are not even allowed to order the newest ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ or the latest ‘Guinness World Records’ unless the board gives express permission for those specific titles. We can’t get any new nonfiction books about camels or squirrels or football without specific approval of the school board.”

“I just felt a cold chill. I was beyond shocked that somebody from our state government was asking what books were available in our school libraries. I never thought I would see anything like that.” 

Mary Woodard, president of the Texas Library Association

She described “a huge environment of fear” among librarians who “are not even trusted to order a new alphabet book like ABC Cats for pre-K students.” Students, she said, keep asking why there are no new books. She must constantly say that titles are coming soon and makes excuses for the lack of new books. What she doesn’t reveal is the truth: “I certainly don’t mention the role that politics is playing in our libraries and our district.”

But in a reminder that this is political, the far-right Keller ISD Family Alliance PAC used the new policy and book removals to fundraise, trumpeting that the board had “stood up against the left’s woke agenda in schools, now we MUST hold the line and protect our hard-earned victories and our children.” Then it asked, “Can we count on you today to support our school board with a donation of $25, $50, $100, $250 or even $500?” Below the text was a “donate” button.

Much as moves to ban books get cast by far-right activists as “protecting” students, they are —and long have been — baldly political. Just last week, a federal judge in Florida heard oral arguments in a case brought by PEN America, publishers, authors and parents against the Escambia County School District and Escambia County School Board. The plaintiffs charge that the board and district removed and restricted books “based on their disagreement with the ideas expressed in those books.” Further, they “have disproportionately targeted books by or about people of color and/or LGBTQ people.”

As this case proceeds, as state legislatures prepare to take up bills that threaten librarians, teachers and the freedom of students to read, however, it is important to remember that this is more than some theoretical debate. There are consequences — for librarians doing their jobs, for children who want ordinary books, and for those for whom these restrictions are received as an attack.

In Keller ISD, during the five-and-half-hour school board meeting at which the board adopted restrictive book selection policies, a high school senior spoke during public comments. He said that he was gay, and in middle school had been told by peers that he was “a freak.”  I began to agree with them,” he said. Then, he recounted, “I found a book about boys that felt the same way as I did.” Reading it made him less alone; he gained confidence as he reached high school. Yet the new library and book policies made students like him “feel attacked by the school board,” he said. “This pervasive censorship is about more than politics,” he added. “It is about lives.”

This is an adapted excerpt from “School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics and the Battle for Public Education” by Laura Pappano. Copyright 2024. Excerpted with permission by Beacon Press.

The post The magic pebble and a lazy bull: The book ban movement has a long timeline appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Millions of families may now face a lack of child care following the recent expiration of pandemic-era federal funding.

The child care “stabilization” funds included in the American Rescue Plan Act were just that — emergency funding to stabilize the sector amid a pandemic.

As vital as that funding was, it was insufficient to address the many systemic problems impacting early childhood education and its workforce, including inequitable wages.

Wages for early childhood workers already lag far behind those of their K-8 colleagues who have similar credentials. These workers, disproportionately Black, Latina and indigenous, face poverty rates an average of 7.7 times higher than other teachers.

This financial condition perpetuates economic inequality and reflects systemic racism, with early childhood education programs continuing to be subsidized through the long hours that Black, Latina and indigenous women work for unjust wages and limited benefits.

Related: Early education coalition searches for answers to raise teacher pay, even as budgets are cratering

This inequity and the end of the crucial pandemic-era federal lifeline for early childhood educators will negatively impact families and workers, The Century Foundation estimates. Some 70,000 child care programs are likely to close; millions of families will struggle to get access to child care; 232,000 jobs could soon be lost; and states will lose $10.6 billion in tax and business revenue every year.

There is one bright note: State and local governments are offering models of innovation and glimmers of hope in the face of such a dire challenge.

In late 2022, New Mexico became the first state in the nation to create a permanent child care fund, making child care free or affordable for many families and increasing early educator wages.

State and local governments are offering models of innovation and glimmers of hope.

Washington, D.C., recently established the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund, which aims to achieve pay parity between early childhood educators and their K-12 counterparts. Since 2022, almost $70 million has been distributed to nearly 3,000 early childhood educators. The district is also expanding health insurance for early childhood educators.

In Louisiana, a coalition of state and local government partners is working with a nonprofit to test the impact of projects that increase child care workers’ wages in key communities; if positive, they intend to scale the programs across the state.

Minnesota last year signed into law the Great Start Compensation Support Payment Program to fill the gap following the ending of the federal child care stabilization grants. The program will provide $316 million this fiscal year, and $260 million every two years ongoing, to directly increase child care workers’ pay.

These solutions are critical, because it is our nation’s youngest students who will ultimately suffer the consequences of high teacher turnover and an unstable learning environment at a key time in their development.

Early childhood education directly impacts their future learning outcomes and lifelong success; it deserves our attention and investment.

Building on these efforts, the Early Educator Investment Collaborative — a group of funders that has come together to accelerate progress in the early childhood education profession — recently announced grants for state and local partnerships in Colorado, Louisiana and Washington, D.C.

These grants will bolster innovative approaches to increasing early childhood education workforce pay, including the creation of dedicated revenue streams and pilot demonstration projects to evaluate the impacts of salary increases.

They will also promote greater collaboration between agencies to improve workforce compensation — aimed at increasing the capacity of financial and data systems to support long-term wage and benefits increases.

Related: OPINION: School district leaders must make early education a priority, so children enter school prepared

I’m excited for the solutions these grants will amplify and hope they can provide useful models and encouragement for other states to explore ways to better compensate early childhood educators.

But we also need state and federal legislators to step up for their constituents on this issue. It’s critical for legislators to reflect the majority of voters’ interest in early childhood education reform by increasing investment, enacting legislation to boost compensation and advocating for broader support of early childhood educators.

Philanthropy also has a big role to play. By supporting governments with the funding needed to explore unique solutions, philanthropic organizations can help find what works, scale successful models and support sustainable change.

Along with boosting the rallying cry for increased federal investment in early childhood education and its workers, this moment is an opportunity for states, communities and philanthropists to find truly long-term solutions to fully support early childhood education workers and the families they serve.

Ola J. Friday is the director of the Early Educator Investment Collaborative.

This story about early childhood educator pay was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

The post OPINION: A hopeful note for early childhood education in 2024 — Some states are stepping up investment appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Elected officials are pushing university presidents to categorically silence student speech on salient political issues. This runs afoul of the values of academic freedom and free speech.

In the case of public institutions, giving in to such pressure is unconstitutional.

Free speech is a vital liberty that the American Civil Liberties Union has fought to protect at all levels of government, on campuses and across society for over 100 years.

With the rest of the world, we’ve been anxiously watching the catastrophe unfolding in Israel and Palestine. These events have caused inconceivable pain to many and will have untold effects on our collective future.

It is precisely in moments of crisis and fear like this one that free speech is most important.

While the ACLU does not take positions on international conflicts, we must take positions when the rights of Americans to speak out about these crises are endangered.

Universities are supposed to be spaces where people develop, communicate and debate ideas, including the most topical, difficult and controversial ones.

Students, professors and others on campus must have the freedom to publicly speak about and debate matters of public concern — regardless of how radical or offensive their views are.

For that to work, school leaders must resist pressure to conflate protected political speech with prohibited harassment; making that mistake today will not only impact students now but for decades to come. Yet, troublingly, we’re seeing politicians and school administrators seeking to punish and censor students rather than ensure that all students are able to safely and freely speak their mind.

Related: Students have reacted strongly to university presidents’ Congressional testimony about antisemitism 

And the leaders aren’t just taking this problematic approach about speech pertaining to the conflict in the Middle East. For many years now, school administrators have sought to censor controversial speech, whether that’s canceling a book talk by right-wing Milo Yiannopoulos or removing artwork about reproductive health care from a campus exhibit.

The consequences for students are not hypothetical. In late October, the State University System of Florida’s chancellor, Ray Rodrigues, in consultation with Gov. Ron DeSantis, ordered state universities to deactivate the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters, based on nothing more than the national SJP organization’s political advocacy — which is protected political speech. That is a clear violation of the student groups’ rights to free speech and association, which is why we, ACLU of Florida, and Palestine Legal are now representing the University of Florida chapter of SJP in its legal challenge against Florida officials.

Today, some in Congress seem to think there is, or should be, a “controversial speech” exception to the First Amendment.

Once it becomes acceptable to silence one form of political speech, the rights of everyone to speak and dissent are at risk.

But, if we learned anything from the experiences of our country’s universities during the McCarthy era and more recently in the years since 9/11, it’s that viewpoint-based efforts to police speech on campuses destroy the foundations on which academic communities are built.

Throughout U.S. history, people in power have attempted to silence students when they say things that the leaders find unpopular or offensive. During the Vietnam War, for example, universities tried to stop students on their campuses from creating chapters of the antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society by refusing to recognize them as a campus organization. This dispute went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which reaffirmed the group’s First Amendment rights.

That case, Healy v. James, is not an outlier. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that students have a right to associate and speak out on matters of public concern, with Chief Justice Earl Warren famously stating 60 years ago that either “teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate” or “our civilization will stagnate and die.”

Therefore, schools should not punish students, as some leaders have proposed, for chanting phrases like “From the River to the Sea,” “No Ceasefire,” “Make America Great Again” and “No Justice, No Peace,” regardless of how much they offend others.

To be clear: Antisemitism, anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab hate must be condemned and combatted. True threats and incitement are not protected speech. And colleges and universities have a moral and legal obligation to address harassment committed by, or directed at, members of their communities.

Related: How teachers can talk about the Israel-Hamas conflict

Nonetheless, students have a First Amendment right to use controversial slogans and to have differing opinions about what those slogans mean.

Congress cannot expect university administrators to be in the business of deciding which ideas and beliefs are acceptable for students to express and which should be silenced.

To do so would undermine the values of learning and expression on which all academic institutions are built. And while one group is at the center of such affronts today, other students, groups and speech could face similar attacks tomorrow.

Universities must defend against bad actors who conflate suppression of speech with safety, because once it becomes acceptable to silence one form of political speech, the rights of everyone to speak and dissent are at risk.

Drawing the line between protected political speech and targeted harassment isn’t always easy, but the lines our leaders draw today are the ones that will apply across issues, views and debates for years to come.

 Jenna Leventoff is senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union.

This story about student free speech was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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When I made the challenging, life-altering decision in April 2023 of where to pursue my Ph.D., the University of Texas at Austin seemed like the best fit.

As an underrepresented student, I felt assured by the school’s diverse faculty and student population, along with their embrace of a robust diversity, equity and inclusion mission, and looked forward to continuing my research on improving the quality of mental health care for all families.

Then came Texas Senate Bill 17, which became law on January 1, making it illegal to have DEI offices and programming in public universities. This bill also outlaws mandatory diversity training and does not allow departments to ask prospective faculty about their commitment to building diverse campuses.Texas is not the only state to pass such a bill.

Legislation that bans many DEI initiatives in our universities is already having a significant chilling effect on students like me, creating concerns over the potential impact on the quality of our education and raising questions regarding whether Texas even wants us.

Had the Texas bill passed before my decision to attend UT Austin, I would most likely not have chosen to come here. For me, as a new resident of Texas and a first-year Ph.D. student planning to learn, teach and research for the next four to five years, this bill, now law, creates a hostile environment.

Given that top-ranked programs fight for the most qualified applicants, states that adopt these policies have to realize that they will discourage top diverse talent from attending their schools.

Related: Beyond the Rankings: The College Welcome Guide

Some educational leaders and policymakers argue that institutions will remain true to their values of welcoming diverse ideas and people — despite the bills and their policies.

I disagree. As a first-generation Mexican immigrant in this country, I believe that establishing structural and transparent mechanisms that offer support and keep schools accountable are the keys to creating and preserving spaces of genuine belonging for students and faculty from diverse backgrounds.

I align most with the view expressed in UT Austin’s Change Starts Here strategic plan: Tangible benefits for students and the greater community cannot be accomplished without “creating processes and policies that cultivate a diverse, equitable, and inclusive campus.”

My abuelita taught me that “mas hace una hormiga andando que un buey echado” (“an ant on the move does more than a dozing ox”).

During my post-master’s work at the Yale Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine, I vividly remember navigating a difficult situation with the support of the chief diversity officer.

While no institution has it all figured out, that experience allowed me to appreciate the tangible benefits of having DEI structures in place.

Lawmakers, university presidents, deans and all those who decide on and carry out educational policies should understand that students like me are no longer settling for simply being allowed into higher education institutions. We now demand what we all deserve: structures and mechanisms that support our educational growth.

Related: STUDENT VOICE: Poor and first-generation transfer students often don’t feel welcome on college campuses

While many academics may genuinely hold values that align with diversity, equity and inclusion, fear of the retaliation empowered by legislation like Senate Bill 17 (e.g., losing their campus positions, department appointments, etc.), and a sense of powerlessness, may override those values.

But my Abuelita taught me that “mas hace una hormiga andando que un buey echado” (“an ant on the move does more than a dozing ox”).

This expression, or “dicho,”reminds me that while I may be no more than a tiny ant compared to massive systems, I can still act. Additionally, coming from a multigenerational migrant farmworker family taught me the importance of planting seeds.

That is why I am confident that if enough of us collectively call for additions to DEI efforts (e.g., expanding DEI offices and resources), we can help reverse the backlash against DEI.

During this liminal period, as we decide if we will move forward or backward as it pertains to DEI, we must remember the new message introduced by the University of Texas at Austin: “What starts here changes the world.”

We need decision-makers to plant seeds that bear fruit to nurture all community members and have roots strong enough to break the concrete foundations of inequitable systems.

Hector Chaidez Ruacho is a doctoral student at The University of Texas at Austin Steve Hicks School of Social Work and a recipient of the Graduate School Recruitment Fellowship and Graduate School Mentoring Fellowship.

This story about DEI and universities was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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OWENTON, Ky. — During a school-wide club fair in this northern Kentucky town, a school administrator stood watch as students signed up for a group for LGBTQ+ students and their allies.

After the club sign-up sheet had been posted, students wrote derogatory terms and mockingly signed up classmates, according to one of the club’s founders. The group eventually went to the administrator, who agreed to help.

Simply being able to post the sign-up sheet in school was a victory of sorts. For two years, the club, known as PRISM (People Respecting Individuality and Sexuality Meeting), gathered in the town’s public library, because its dozen members couldn’t find a faculty adviser to sponsor it. In fall 2022, after two teachers finally signed on, the group received permission to start the club on campus.

Much of that happened because of one parent, Rachelle Ketron. Ketron’s daughter Meryl Ketron, who was trans and an outspoken member of the LGBTQ+ community in her small town, had talked about wanting to start a Gay-Straight Alliance when she got to high school. But in April 2020, during her freshman year, Meryl died by suicide after facing years of harassment over her identity. 

Following Meryl’s death, Ketron decided to continue her daughter’s advocacy. She gathered Meryl’s friends and talked about what it might mean to start a Gay-Straight Alliance, a student-run group that could serve as a safe space for queer youth on campus. After trying, and failing, to get the school to sign off on the idea, the group decided to gather monthly at the public library, where its members discussed mental health, sex education and experiences of being queer in rural areas. Ketron, a coordinator of development at a community mental health center just across the border in Indiana, also founded doit4Meryl, a nonprofit that advocates for mental health education and suicide prevention, specifically for LGBTQ+ youth in rural communities like hers.

Around the country, LGBTQ+ students and the campus groups founded to support them have become a growing target in the culture wars. In 2023 alone, 542 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced by state legislatures or in Congress, according to an LGBTQ-legislation tracker, with many of them focused on young people. Supporters of the bills say schools inappropriately expose students to discussions about gender identity and sexuality, and parents deserve greater control over what their kids are taught. Critics say the laws are endangering already vulnerable students. 

Kentucky’s law, passed in March, is one of the nation’s most sweeping anti-LGBTQ+ laws, prohibiting school districts from compelling teachers to address trans students by their pronouns and banning transgender students from using school bathrooms or changing rooms that match their gender identity. The law also limits instruction on and discussion of human sexuality and gender identity in schools. A separate section of the law bans gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth in the state.

“What started out as really a bill focused on pronouns and bathroom use morphed into this very broad anti-LGBTQIA+ piece of legislation that outlawed discussions of gender and sexuality, through all grades, and all subject matters,” said Jason Glass, the former Kentucky commissioner of education. Glass left the state in September to take a job in higher education in Michigan after his support for LGBTQ+ students drew fire from Republican politicians in Kentucky, including some who called for his ouster.

Related: In the wake of ‘Don’t Say Gay,’ LGBTQ students won’t be silenced 

Because the law’s language is sometimes ambiguous, it’s up to individual districts to interpret it, Glass said. Some have adopted more restrictive policies that advocates say risk forcing GSAs, also known as Gender and Sexuality Alliances or Gay-Straight Alliances, to change their names or shut down, and led to book bans and the cancellation of lessons over concerns that they discuss gender or sexuality. Others have interpreted the law more liberally and continue to offer services and accommodations to transgender or nonbinary students, if parents approve.

Across the country, the number of GSAs is at a 20-year low, according to GLSEN, an LGBTQ+ education advocacy nonprofit. GLSEN researchers say there may be two somewhat contradictory forces at work. Fewer students may feel the need for such clubs, thanks to school curricula and textbooks that have become more inclusive of LGBTQ+ individuals and thanks to an increase in the number of school policies that explicitly prohibit anti-gay bullying. Conversely, the recent surge in anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, as well as the halt to extracurricular activities during the pandemic, may also be fueling the drop, the researchers said.

Willie Carver, a former high school teacher and Kentucky’s Teacher of the Year in 2022, left teaching this year because of threats he faced as an openly gay man. Laws like the one in Kentucky legitimize and legalize harassment against LGBTQ+ kids, he said, and may even encourage it. “We’ve ripped all of the school support away from the students, so they’re consistently miserable and hopeless,” he said.

Owenton is a picturesque farming community with rolling green hills and winding roads located halfway between Cincinnati and Louisville. Its population of about 1,682 is predominantly white and politically conservative: The surrounding county has voted overwhelmingly Republican in every presidential election since 2000.

Ketron moved here from Cincinnati in 2014 with her then-husband, seeking to live on a farm within driving distance of large cities. Shortly after the move, she recalled, a city official visited the property to give Ketron a rundown of expectations in the community — and a warning.

“It was basically ‘You better watch what you do and don’t get on the bad side of people because one person might be the only person that does that job in this whole county.’ Do you understand what I mean?’ ‘Yup,’” Ketron recalled saying, “‘I understand what you mean.’”

A few years later, she met her now-wife, Marsha Newell, and the two began raising their blended family of eight children on the farm. They also started fostering LGBTQ+ kids. Ketron said her family is one the few in the county to accept queer kids. Their children were often met with hostility, Ketron said; other students made fun of them for having two moms and told them that Ketron and her wife were sinners who were “going to hell.”

Ketron said the couple thought about moving, but beyond the financial and logistical obstacles, she worried about abandoning LGBTQ+ young people in the town. “Just because I’m uncomfortable or this is a foreign place for a queer kid to be doesn’t mean there aren’t queer kids born here every day,” she said.

Related: Inside Florida’s ‘underground lab’ for far-right education policies

After Meryl came out to family and friends in fifth grade, the bullying at school intensified, Ketron and Gwenn, Meryl’s younger sister, recalled. Few adults in Meryl’s schools took action to stop it, they said. When Meryl complained, school staff didn’t take her seriously and told her to “toughen up and move on,” Ketron said. (In an email, the high school’s new principal, Renee Boots, wrote that administrators did not receive reports of bullying from Meryl. Ketron said by the time Meryl reached high school, she’d given up on reporting such incidents.)

That said, as she got older, Meryl became more outspoken. As a ninth grader, in 2019, she clashed with students who wanted to fly the Confederate flag at school; Meryl and her friends wanted to fly a rainbow flag. The school decided to ban both flags, Ketron said. After that, Meryl brought small rainbow flags and placed them around campus. (According to Boots, students were wearing various flags as “capes” and were advised not to do so as it was against school dress code.)

Ketron said she generally supported her daughter’s advocacy, but sometimes wished she’d take a less combative approach. “You might need to dial it back a little bit,” Ketron recalled telling Meryl once, when her daughter was in eighth grade.

Ketron recalled seeing Meryl’s disappointment; she said it was the only time she felt that she let her daughter down.

For years, the most effective wedge issue between conservatives and progressives was marriage equality. But when the Supreme Court in 2015 recognized the legal right of same-sex couples to marry, opponents of gay rights pivoted to focus on trans individuals, particularly trans youth. After early success with legislation banning trans kids from playing sports, conservative legislators began to expand their efforts to other school policies pertaining to LGBTQ+ youth.

The ripple effects of these laws on young people are becoming more apparent, said Michael Rady, senior education programs manager for GLSEN. Forty-one percent of LGBTQ youth have seriously considered suicide in the past year, according to a 2023 survey by The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ+ suicide prevention nonprofit. Nearly 2 in 3 LGBTQ+ youth said that learning about potential legislation banning discussions of LGBTQ+ people in schools negatively affected their mental health.

Konrad Bresin, an assistant professor in the department of psychology and brain sciences at the University of Louisville whose research focuses on LGBTQ+ mental health, said that for LGBTQ+ individuals just seeing advertising that promotes legislation against them has negative effects. “Even if something doesn’t pass, but there’s a big public debate about it, that is kind of increasing the day-to-day stress that people are experiencing,” he said.

Bresin said that student participation in GSAs can help blunt the effect of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment, since the clubs provide students a sense of belonging.

Supporters of Kentucky’s new law argue that the legislation creates necessary guardrails to protect students. Martin Cothran, spokesperson for The Family Foundation, the Kentucky-based conservative policy organization that advocated for the legislation, said the law is designed to keep students from being exposed to “gender ideology.”

Cothran said that nothing in the law impedes student speech, nor does it entirely prohibit traditional sex education. “It just says that you can’t indoctrinate,” he said. “Schools are for learning, not indoctrination.”

Related: College wars on campus start to affect students’ choices of college

When the law, known as SB 150, went into effect last spring, Glass, the former education commissioner, said school districts were forced to scramble to update their curricula to comply with the bill’s restrictions. In some cases, that meant removing any information on sexuality or sexual maturation from elementary school health curricula, and also revising health, psychology and certain A.P. courses in middle school and high school, he said.

Some families have sued. In September, four Lexington families with trans or nonbinary kids filed a lawsuit against the Fayette County Board of Education and the state’s Republican attorney general, Daniel Cameron, alleging that SB 150’s education provisions violate students’ educational, privacy and free speech rights under state and federal law. The families say that since the law passed, their kids have been intentionally misgendered or outed, barred access to bathrooms that match their gender identity and had their privacy disregarded when school staff accessed their birth certificates in order to enforce the law’s provisions.

School districts that don’t comply fully with the law could face discipline from the state’s attorney general, said Chris Hartman, executive director of the Fairness Campaign, a Kentucky-based LGBTQ+ advocacy group.

“Teachers who before this were willing to speak out and advocate are, as a general rule, unwilling to speak publicly about what’s happening.”

Willie Carver, Kentucky Teacher of the Year, 2022

Meanwhile, LGBTQ+ and student rights advocates fear that GSAs in the state will close or change their names because of the law. Teachers from across the state have also shared stories about their schools removing pride flags and safe space stickers, banning educators from using trans students’ pronouns and names, and removing access to bathrooms for trans kids, according to Carver, the former Teacher of the Year, who is collecting that information as part of his work with the nonprofit Campaign for Our Shared Future. The law’s broad language has not only affected teaching about gender and sexuality, he said: Educators have complained of schools banning references to the Holocaust in image or film, removing books with LGBTQ+ characters, and nixing discussion of scenes in Shakespeare’s plays because of images that may depict nudity, sex or language that talks about sexuality and gender.

Educators and school staff are fearful, said Carver. “It’s nearly impossible to know what’s happening because the law gets to be interpreted at the local level. So, the district itself gets to decide what the law’s interpretation will look like,” he said. “And teachers who before this were willing to speak out and advocate are, as a general rule, unwilling to speak publicly about what’s happening.”

For supporters of the law, that may be the point. GLSEN’s Rady said the bills are often written in intentionally vague ways to intimidate educators and school district leaders into removing any content that might land them in trouble. This year, his group is focused on providing educators, students and families information about their rights to free speech and expression in schools, including their right to run GSAs, Rady said.

In March 2020, when the pandemic hit and schools went remote, Meryl, then a high school freshman, posted a video diary on social media. In it, she strums her ukulele, and shares a message to her friends. “Some of you guys don’t have social media, some of you guys don’t like being at home,” Meryl said in the video. “I won’t get to see you guys for a whole month which is awful because you guys make me have a 10 times better life, you guys make mountains feel like literally bumps and steep cliffs just feel like a little bit of walking down the stairs.”

The video ends with her saying she’ll see her peers in school on April 30, when schools were scheduled to reopen. On the morning of April 18, Meryl died.

Ketron, Meryl’s mother, had thought remote school would be a relief for her daughter after years of bullying in school buildings. But it was difficult to be separated from her friends, she said, and Meryl also knew some of them were struggling in homes where they did not feel accepted.

“Suicide is never one thing,” Ketron said. “A lot of times people talk about death by a thousand paper cuts. As sad as it sounds, for me to have that come out of my mouth, I feel like that really speaks to Meryl’s life. She had wonderful things, but it was just like thousands of paper cuts.”

For months after Meryl’s death, Ketron would read text messages on Meryl’s phone from her friends sharing stories about how she’d stood up for them in school and in the community. Ketron said she made a promise to herself — and to Meryl — that she was going to be loud like her daughter and “make it better.” In the spring of 2020, she started doit4Meryl.

“I don’t ever want this to happen again, ever, to anyone,” she said. “I never want someone to be in that place and pieces of it that got them there was hate and ignorance from another human being.”

In 2021, the anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-critical race theory book bans movement reached the Owenton community after a teacher in the district taught “The 57 Bus,” a nonfiction book that features a vocabulary guide explaining gender identities and characters who are LGBTQ+.

The book created an uproar in the town, with parents calling for its removal and for the educator to be disciplined. After that, Ketron said the few teachers who had seemed open to sponsoring the GSA no longer felt comfortable.

Related: Teachers, deputized to fight the culture wars, are often reluctant to serve

In mid-2021, Ketron decided to start the club herself, at the public library. Each month, a dozen or so kids gathered in one of the building’s study rooms, talking about what it means to be queer in rural Kentucky, and what they hoped to accomplish through their GSA. Some of them were Meryl’s friends, others were new to Ketron.

In July 2022, the group held a Color Run, a 5K to bring together various advocacy groups from around the county and state to uplift people after the isolation of Covid. Later that year, they invited Carver to speak about his experiences as an openly gay man growing up in rural Kentucky. The students worked with Ketron and doit4Meryl to create a “Be Kind” campaign: They printed signs with phrases like “You’re never alone” and “Don’t give up,” along with information on mental health resources, and placed them in yards around town.

In the fall of 2022, after two teachers agreed to serve as advisors for the GSA, the school principal allowed the club on campus. While Ketron checks in with the students occasionally, the club is now student-led, she said. The past school year would have been Meryl’s senior year, and the club’s students were excited about finally being welcomed onto campus, Ketron said.

Then Kentucky’s 2023 legislative session began with the onslaught of bills targeting LGBTQ+ youth that eventually merged to become SB 150.

Around the same time, tragedy entered Ketron’s life again: She lost one of her foster children, who was trans, to suicide. The loss of her daughters prompted her to spend countless hours in the state capitol, attending committee meetings and hearings and signing up to testify against the anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ bills on the senate floor. She watched, devastated, as legislators quickly voted on and passed SB 150.

“All I could think about was Meryl,” she said. “They’re just starting and this world is supposed to love them through this hard part. When you’re shaping yourself and instead we’re going to tell you that we don’t want you to exist.”

In Owenton, the district follows SB 150 as per law, said Reggie Taylor, superintendent of Owen County Schools. Little has changed as a result of the legislation, he said: “It’s been business as usual.” Trans and nonbinary students have long had a separate bathroom they could use and that hasn’t changed, he said, and the district offers a tip line for students to anonymously report bullying, as well as access to school counselors.

Ketron, though, sees fallout. Fearful of bullying and other harms, she said that she and the other parents with trans kids in the school system are trying to get their children support by applying for help through Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. While 504 plans are typically for students with disabilities, they are sometimes used to help secure LGBTQ+ students services and accommodations, such as protection from bullying, mental health counseling and access to bathrooms that match their gender identity.

SB 150 has also had a chilling effect on the work of the school’s GSA, according to Ketron. During the summer, after the law went into effect, PRISM members discussed changing the club’s name and direction to focus on mental health.

Related: How do we teach Black history in polarized times?

Across the state, students and educators are grappling with what their schools will look like as the law takes hold. In March, Anna, a trans nonbinary student from Lexington, launched an Instagram account called TransKY Storytelling Project, anonymously documenting the impact of the new law on young people and teachers.

People shared examples of the ways the legislation affects them, such as making them afraid to go to school, erasing their identities and making the jobs of educators and librarians tougher. A middle school guidance counselor in rural Kentucky wrote that the new law makes it harder to connect with students and support them: “If we are the only ones students have, and we can’t provide them the care they desperately need and deserve, the future looks very bleak.”

Even in the state’s more progressive cities, the law has changed daily life in schools, Anna, the Instagram account’s curator said. The GSA at Anna’s Lexington high school used to announce club meetings and events on the loudspeakers and post flyers in school hallways, Anna said. But the group has since gone underground, to avoid bringing attention to its existence lest administrators force it to stop meeting.

“The school felt so much safer knowing that [a GSA] existed because there were students like you elsewhere. You could go in and say, ‘Hey, I’m trying out this set of pronouns. I’m trying to learn more about myself. Can you all like call me this for a couple of weeks?’” Anna said. “It just allowed for a place where students like me could go.”

But while the absence of a GSA is concerning, Anna fears most the impact of SB 150 on students in rural parts of Kentucky. GSA members from rural communities have shared that they no longer have supportive school staff to advocate for their clubs because of the climate of fear created by the law, Anna said.

That said, November’s election brought some hope for LGBTQ+ advocates: Cameron, the state attorney general who backed SB 150 and campaigned on anti-trans policies, lost his bid for the governorship to incumbent Andy Beshear, and several other candidates for office who advocated anti-trans policies were defeated too.

Back in Owenton, Ketron is working with Carver to plan a summit for Kentucky’s rural, queer youth. Ketron said she hopes the gathering will serve as a reminder for students that even though they may be isolated in their communities, there are people like them across the state.

But as of this fall, participating in a GSA is no longer an option for students at the Owenton high school. Boots, the school principal, wrote in an email that the club had changed its focus, to one geared toward addressing “social needs across a variety of settings.”

But according to Ketron, students said they were afraid to continue a club focused on LGBTQ+ issues in part because of SB 150. She offered to help students restart the club in the library, or at her house, she said, but members worried that would be too difficult because many of them have not come out to their families.

Ketron said she’s not giving up. “At its core,” she said, a GSA is “a protective factor and so very needed, especially in a rural community.”

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org for free, 24-hour services that can provide support, information and resources.

This story about LGBTQ+ students in schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter, and share your thoughts about this story at editor@hechingerreport.org. 

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Everyone and their mother seems to have an opinion on the three college presidents who testified before Congress last week on the topic of antisemitism on campus. Yes, I’m talking about the hearing that resulted in one university president losing her job and investigations into three elite universities.

Did the university leaders speak out strongly enough? Where is the line between free speech and hate speech, and at what point should someone be disciplined?

Congressmembers, faculty, alumni and donors have all weighed in. But how do the students feel? Based on reports in their student newspapers and statements from different campus groups, they seem to be just as divided as everyone else. 

During the hearing, Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, Claudine Gay of Harvard University and Sally A. Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said they opposed antisemitism and supported the existence of Israel, but when asked whether calls for the genocide of Jews constitute harassment and bullying, they said it depended on the context. Since then, Gay and Magill have issued apologies and Magill has resigned.

Many students see this as a free speech issue, raising the question of whether calling for a genocide is free speech or hate speech.  Others say that such questions are quibbling compared to the hatred and fear created by both antisemitic and anti-Islamic rhetoric. 

Harvard Hillel students wrote that “President Gay’s failure to properly condemn this speech calls into question her ability to protect Jewish students on Harvard’s campus,” adding that they would like to work with the university administration on ways to educate the community on “the history of the Jewish people and the evolution of antisemitism.” At Penn, students and community members rallied in support of the protection of Jewish students. And Jewish MIT students told ABC News that they felt there was institutional support for students who support Palestine but not for Jewish students, and that they felt Jewish and Muslim students had been pitted against each other.

Here are some excerpts of students’ thoughts. 

Harvard University

The editorial board of The Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, published an editorial in which they strongly opposed both antisemitism and calls for President Gay to resign. They wrote that antisemitism has “been treated as a prop in political theater.” 

“Recent rhetoric has portrayed non-Jewish Harvard students — and Harvard more broadly — as deeply antisemitic. We reject this careless characterization. We believe the vast majority of our peers do not harbor hate toward Jewish people.

“This perspective has been obscured as Congress has portrayed Jewish and pro-Palestinian students as diametrically opposed monoliths with uniform sets of beliefs and emotions. In reality, our campus is home to Jewish students who advocate for a free Palestine, Arab students who endorse a Jewish right to self-determination, and many more individuals whose experiences have shaped complex, well-reasoned beliefs.”

“Recent rhetoric has portrayed non-Jewish Harvard students — and Harvard more broadly — as deeply antisemitic. We reject this careless characterization.” 

The Harvard Crimson

The editorial board urged students not to let snippets of the Congressional hearing define what is happening at Harvard. Having witnessed the vitriol of the past few months, the students said, they wanted to set the record straight. 

“Gay’s response about context dependence may seem unsatisfying, but there is — equally unsatisfyingly — no University policy that unequivocally answers Stefanik’s question. These policies do warrant more robust discussion and clarification, but a truthful answer about their ambiguity does not merit such opprobrium.”

Read more about Harvard student perspectives in Harvard’s student newspaper, The Crimson.

The University of Pennsylvania

The Daily Pennsylvanian’s editorial board opted not to weigh in on Magill’s resignation. Instead, it published an editorial urging students to speak for themselves about their experiences at Penn. 

“As global and local events continue to converge on this campus now and into the future, we should not let voices that are prominent, but distant, speak for us,” the editorial board wrote. “The path forward for Penn must be paved with more, not less, speech. As members of the Penn community, we have a special opportunity, and some may even say responsibility, to speak up about our experiences here.”

The publication has published a series of opinion pieces on Magill’s resignation from a range of viewpoints.

One student writer, Mritika Senthil, wrote that pressure from media attention and donor demands could lead to performative changes, rather than substantive ones. 

“The path forward for Penn must be paved with more, not less, speech. As members of the Penn community, we have a special opportunity, and some may even say responsibility, to speak up about our experiences here.”

The Daily Pennsylvanian

Senthil wrote that there are administrators and faculty making decisions every day that do not involve the president. She questioned how much difference the president’s departure could make without a “comprehensive restructuring of campus standards.”

“Our leadership needs to recognize that their speech can contribute to student discomfort and fear of open dialogue. I’m sure that most of Penn’s community not only accepts but actively seeks the exploration and debate of differing ideas. But when students and faculty cease to maintain mutual respect, the ethics of the academic community are ironically ignored,” Senthil wrote. 

Mia Vesely, an opinion writer for the Daily Pennsylvanian, expressed fear that Magill’s resignation could lead to censorship for faculty and students. 

“I ask you: what is next? If university presidents can be bullied into stepping down for allegations that serve as a contrast for actual policies they’re implementing, where do we go from here? Do we censor free speech and punish students for saying political statements that don’t align with major donors? Do we cast aside the First Amendment and live on a campus that doesn’t allow free expression?” Vesely wrote. 

Read more student perspectives in Penn’s student publication, The Daily Pennsylvanian. 

M.I.T. 

The Tech, M.I.T.’s student newspaper, hasn’t published any news story or opinion piece since the university leaders testified before Congress. But the student body appears to have been divided on these issues before the hearing. 

On Nov. 1, The Tech published an opinion column by Avi Balsam, who detailed the distress he experienced hearing chants of “intifada,” on campus during a demonstration outside M.I.T.’s Hillel. He wrote, “Words gain meaning from the historical context in which they are used. In this case, the historical context is violence and terrorism in the name of resistance. Claims to the contrary are either misinformed or dishonest.”

Balsam, a sophomore who serves as vice president of the student board of M.I.T.’s Hillel, called on Kornbluth to condemn calls for “intifada.” 

On Nov. 30, The Tech published an opinion column by a group of graduate students requesting several things from the university administration, including that it “make clear what students’ legal and institutional rights are in demonstrating on and off campus, and how to seek protection if needed.”

“We ask the MIT administration to support all students whose safety and well-being are adversely impacted by the decades-long violence in Israel and Palestine and who are expressing their views on campus,” the students wrote.

“Above all, we ask that MIT be an institution true to its values as a place where rights to freedom of expression are upheld, and where commitments toward making a better world are driven by the desire for human flourishing—not the interests of donors, the net gain of financial holdings, or US foreign policy agendas.”

This story about antisemitism on campus was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Check out our College Welcome Guide.

The post Students have reacted strongly to university presidents’ Congressional testimony about antisemitism  appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

PRIEST RIVER, Idaho —The moms seated at the conference table on Election Day were worried. They had good reason: Their poll watchers at voting sites — grange halls on dirt roads, community centers hardly larger than a bungalow— suggested things were not going their way.

There were no formal exit polls conducted in West Bonner County, where the school district covers 781 square miles over timbered hills and crystalline lakes in the north Idaho panhandle. But Dana Douglas, a fit and forceful blonde sipping on an Americano and a water bottle boosted with electrolytes (she was teaching spin at 6 p.m.) had been poll-watching at Edgemere Grange Hall, and she had her indicator for how voters were casting their ballots: “Anyone who said, ‘Hello, good morning’” was in their camp. “Anyone with a scowl” who would not look her in the eye was in the other. 

“It’s going to be a battle,” she said at the table. Sitting beside her, Candy Turner, a retired elementary school teacher who had brought Ziploc bags of pear slices and dried cranberries for the hours ahead, agreed. “I think we are in trouble based on what I saw.”

After Election Day, headlines in key locales all around the country spoke of moms fighting extremists in local school board races and winning. But even as some celebrated “flipping” their school boards back, far-right groups like Moms for Liberty remain. As the organization declared in an email blast in which they claimed winning 50 new school board seats: “WE ARE JUST GETTING STARTED!” 

Some people overlook school board skirmishes, seeing them as trivial. For Turner, Douglas, and many in the West Bonner County School District, they are anything but. It’s not about Democrats versus Republicans (Turner is a registered Democrat; Douglas is “a proud conservative Republican”). It’s about the viability of public education in their community. 

This is not hyperbole. The national infection facing public schooling—the tug-of-war between education professionals and extremist culture warriors—has brought chaos and damage to West Bonner County. After this past school year ended, the superintendent acknowledged that 31 percent of teachers, counselors, and education leaders left the district, and scores of parents pulled their children, opting for homeschooling, online learning, or enrolling in another district. Buildings are infrequently cleaned; an elementary school principal reported at an October school board meeting that mice were running over children’s feet and hallways smelled of urine. 

What has happened in West Bonner County offers a warning to public school supporters elsewhere. Douglas, Turner, and others are fighting to restore normalcy to an institution that should not be up for grabs — but is.

“We’ve been the canary in the coal mine,”Margaret Hall, the current school board chair who faced a far-right challenger, said on the eve of the November election. Hall, a soft-spoken but firm force, has served on the board for eight years, even through chemotherapy treatments for cancer. “What has to happen,” she said, “is people have to wake up and decide, ‘We don’t want someone to come in and tell us what we want. We want to decide ourselves.’”

Idaho is a conservative state and Bonner County is even more so, with registered Republicans outnumbering Democrats by almost seven to one (statewide it’s closer to five to one). Despite the nation’s bitter party politics, residents of this county have traditionally exercised a neighborly pragmatism in which the kids — or, as Douglas prefers, “our babies” — come first.

People filled in the gaps when it came to local needs, from sending groceries home with some children over weekends to teachers helping students brush their teeth or spending extra hours with struggling readers. But that spirit is now being tested by extremists who see a soft target in a stressed school district. Suddenly, the far-right’s anti-public-education catchphrases blared regularly on the national stage have become wedged into the local lexicon. 

For example, “transgenderism” (described by one candidate as “boys in girls bathrooms, boys in girls sports, ‘gender-affirming care,’ and related absurdities”) became a top issue in this November’s school board race. One candidate for reelection, Troy Reinbold, a nonchalant figure who has attended meetings in cutoff shorts and exited mid-agenda without explanation, touted his work on “the strongest transgender policy in Idaho schools” and opposition to “social emotional learning,” which he called “a precursor to critical race theory.”

Hall, for her part, abstained in an August vote on a school district policy that would require teachers and staff to “refer to students by their biological sex” and students to use bathrooms and locker rooms corresponding to their genders assigned at birth, along with bar transgender girls from girls’ sports teams. She said it was confusing, poorly written, and not vetted by the board’s legal counsel (instead it was reviewed by the anti-LGBTQ Christian legal advocacy group, Alliance Defending Freedom). Hall’s campaign signs were later tagged with rainbow stickers. The policy ended up passing 4-0.

Related: Florida just expanded school vouchers — again. What does that really mean?

How a place that had long treated differences with a live-and-let-live ethos adopted the intolerant tone of national politics is anyone’s guess. Some blame an influx of newcomers. Bonner County, like the rest of Idaho, is growing, and over the past decade, the tally of registered voters has risen almost 50 percent to nearly 32,000. 

But who they are and why some of them don’t support public education is a more complicated question. It’s possible that Idaho’s lax COVID-19 rules lured extremists, survivalists, and those lacking a communal impulse. There’s also a broader arc at play in a state economy that’s forced people to shift from work in local sawmills to commuter jobs that get them home later and leave them reliant on others to keep civic life running — a common pattern in 21st-century America. But Priest River, where the district is headquartered, is close-knit, populated by descendants of the six Naccarato brothers, who came from Italy to build the Great Northern Railroad in the late 1800s and stayed. That includes many mom organizers like Candy Naccarato Turner. 

Priest River police chief Drew McLain dates the start of recent drama to the school board vote to rescind the English Language Arts curriculum from the well-established education publisher McGraw Hill. It had been swiftly and unanimously approved in June 2022 and was delivered to replace the curriculum that was out of print. But far-right activists objected, complaining that it included aspects of social emotional learning. Such instruction — on skills like “self-confidence, problem-solving, and pro-social behavior,” as McGraw Hill described the curriculum on its website — is a bugaboo for conservative ideologues. And on August 24 of last year, with one member missing, the board voted 3-1 to return the texts to the publisher. 

The decision got the attention of moms like Douglas, Turner, and others. Whitney Hutchins, a new mother who graduated from West Bonner County schools in 2010 and whose family has operated a resort on Priest Lake for generations, started attending school board meetings. Ditto for Jessica Rogers, a mom of three daughters who had served on the curriculum committee and was upset by the reversal. Others, too, wondered what was happening.

After all, for years the meetings had been quiet affairs at the district’s storefront office on Main Street in a room with aged wood floors, folding chairs and tables, and a capacity of 34. By late 2022, such serenity was a thing of the past. People started lining up three to four hours in advance, which McLain said forced him to close Main Street for safety. Quickly, the gatherings got more and more unruly. First, McLain sent one officer, then several. At times, he called on the sheriff for backup. 

Things escalated even further when Jackie Branum, who was hired as superintendent in the summer of 2022, proposed a supplemental levy, which sets a chosen amount as property tax to support local schools’ operating costs, and a four-day school week to address financial issues — then abruptly resigned. The board approved the shorter week, angering many parents. Then it appointed Susie Luckey, a popular elementary school principal, as interim superintendent until June. By May, the board had put a levy before voters that would provide roughly one-third of the district’s budget.

Supplemental levies in Idaho, which ranks 50th nationally in public school funding, had long been used for capital projects and are now essential for operations. But residents suddenly sorted into “for” and “against” factions. Signs sprouted along rural roads; arguments raged on Facebook. The levy failed by 105 votes out of 3,295 cast. Parents expressed concern at a public meeting that the district would cut sports and extracurricular activities; some worried about teacher retention. Not to mention: The district still had no permanent superintendent.

In a swift but puzzling process, the school board eventually announced two finalists for superintendent. One was Luckey. The other was a far-right former elected politician who worked for the Idaho Freedom Foundation by the name of Branden Durst. Durst was an unusual choice given his lack of school experience and the IFF’s hostility to public education. (In 2019, the president of the IFF called public schools “the most virulent form of socialism (and indoctrination thereto) in America today,” adding, “I don’t think government should be in the education business.”) 

Then again, it wasn’t Durst’s first go-around: In 2022, the Democrat turned Republican ran for state superintendent of public instruction. He lost the GOP primary but in Bonner County beat his two challengers with 60 percent of the vote. Among the donors to his campaign were IFF leaders and a local resident who had opposed the McGraw Hill curriculum.

It is unclear how Durst, an abrasive outsider from 420 miles south in Boise, was so quickly ushered into contention. Jim Jones, former Idaho attorney general and a former justice of the Idaho Supreme Court, points to the IFF. He said the organization aims to “discredit and dismantle” public schools throughout the state, “starting with West Bonner County School District.” 

Related: Inside Florida’s ‘underground lab’ for far-right education policies

Jones also credits the IFF for helping extremists Keith Rutledge and Susan Brown get elected to the West Bonner County School Board in November 2021 in a low-turnout race. It was a pivotal election — but people didn’t realize it then. In hindsight, Douglas said residents “got lazy and complacent and we didn’t get to the polls and put people in the district that valued public education.” 

By early 2023, Rutledge and Brown — along with Reinbold, who revealed himself as a fellow extremist — had become a majority voting bloc on the five-person school board. Hall, the school board chair who works on climate change mitigation and who readily references the Idaho education code, and Carlyn Barton, a mother and teacher who describes herself as a “common sense constitutional conservative,” were at odds with the other three. 

Durst’s candidacy earlier this year turned up the heat on divisions both on the board and in the community. School board meetings were packed. Militia started showing up. And while the Second Amendment is cherished in Idaho, residents were alarmed to find men donned in khaki with walkie-talkies — and presumably guns — present for conversations on children’s education.

“The militia should not be at school board meetings,” argued McLain, the police chief who claimed that one grandfather “was so pissed at the militia” that he arrived drunk with a rifle. “It’s been frustrating,” he added. “If you told me I had the choice of a school board meeting or a bank robbery, I would be way less stressed going to the bank robbery.”

Following multiple contentious meetings with Hall and Barton, who pressed board members to reconsider Durst’s candidacy, in late June, he was selected by a 3-2 vote. After his hiring was finalized, Barton charged that “the direction of our board has turned into a fascist dictatorship with an agenda which is far from our conservative point of view.” 

From the moment he slid into the superintendent’s maroon Naugahyde-upholstered chair in the West Bonner County School District office, Durst seemed to relish his position of power. There was serious work to do — like negotiating a teacher contract — but he appeared far more interested in burnishing his reputation, describing his takeover as “a pilot” that others could learn from.

This was a chance, he told me in multiple interviews, to use the district to test his “ideas that are frankly unorthodox in education,” including some rooted in his Christian values. He wanted intelligent design taught alongside evolution in biology classes. He was working to have a Christian university offer an Old Testament course to high school students at a Baptist church near their school. He hoped the district would adopt curricula developed by the Christian conservative college Hillsdale in Michigan.

Durst also cast himself as a model for how non-educators could take charge of a school district. He boasted that national far-right figures were in touch and encouraged him not to “screw this up.” As he put it, “I broke into the club. I got a superintendency without having to go through the traditional process of doing it.” Indeed, he had not been a school principal, administrator, or classroom teacher.

Related: Teachers struggle to teach the Holocaust without running afoul of new ‘divisive concepts’ laws

That lack of process was a major problem for the state Board of Education, which in August gave the district notice it was not in compliance with Idaho law, a determination that jeopardized tax dollars critical for funding the schools. A letter sent to Rutledge, the chair at the time, cited budget irregularities, missed school bus inspections, concerns about discipline rates of special education students, and the failure to file forms to access federal funds. But the main issue, the state’s board said, was the district’s “decision to employ a non-certified individual as superintendent.” Durst had sought emergency certification but was rebuffed by the state. 

All of the uncertainty and division grew so dire that teachers found themselves struggling to carry on, leaving many no choice but to give notice. “It breaks my heart that I had to leave,” Steph Eldore, a fixture at Priest Lake Elementary School for 26 years, told me over tears in late August. With her daughter starting high school, Eldore and her husband, Ken, who had been director of facilities and capital improvements for 16 years, quit the district, finding jobs and enrolling their daughter elsewhere.

By the end of summer, 27 teachers had retired or resigned, along with 19 other staff members, including the director of special education, a school principal, and three counselors. Families followed. By fall, school district enrollment was down to 1,005 students, 100 less than projected. Even McLain, the police chief, had rented a place in Sandpoint, about half an hour from Priest River, and enrolled his two high school–aged children there. “We call ourselves the Priest River refugees,” he said. SergeantChris Davis, the district’s school resource officer, similarly said his daughter has opted to finish high school online. All in all, the Lake Pend Oreille School District in Sandpoint, whose permanent levy offers steady funding, reported 43 student transfers from West Bonner County School District.

Others, of course, remained. As the school year began, the West Bonner County School District 83 (“Strive for Greatness”) Facebook page was active with notices of cross-country races, soccer games, and picture day. But behind the sheen of normalcy were problems. A shortage of bus drivers led the district to cancel or combine routes. Many students’ commute times doubled, upsetting parents whose young children got home after dark, while other students had no bus transportation at all. There were also issues with school cleanliness. Kylie Hoepfer, a mom of a fourth grader, took on cleaning mouse turds on the bleachers at her daughter’s volleyball game. “I had heard about the mice problem but sweeping it all up was pretty gross,” she recalled.

The biggest hurt for families, however, was the loss of seasoned teachers. The district hired new ones, but a number of them soon quit. Trinity Duquette, a 1997 graduate of the high school, said her 8th-grade daughter “is on her third language arts teacher this year,” each with different styles and expectations. “They have been assigned essays and had a turnover in the midst of the assignment.” 

For Paul and Jessica Turco, who built strong bonds with their son’s special education teachers who have since left the district, the loss “was like breaking up a family.” They said it was weeks into the school year before the new teachers read their son’s Individualized Education Program, the written plan outlining his learning needs. “It was like he was starting from the very beginning rather than a stepping stone from where he left off the prior year,” said Jessica. And it’s showing. “We have been dealing with constant outbursts,” she added, and “when he comes home from school, he doesn’t want to talk about his day.”

While watching the disruption, Hutchins, the new mom whose soft features belie a fierce frankness, made a decision: She and her husband were moving to Spokane, Washington. “I’m not going to raise my daughter here,” she said, curling into a leather chair at her family’s resort. Hutchins’s brother is gay. Watching his experience in school had been painful, and the hostility toward LGBTQ+ students seemed to be growing worse. “This is horrible to say,” Hutchins said after Durst’s hiring, “but the right-wing extremists, they are taking over our community.” 

She wasn’t the only one thinking that — but not everyone was in a position to leave. Rogers, the mom of three who was on the curriculum committee, and her husband had recently built a home with sweeping views of Chase Lake. There was no moving away. So, she got involved at the school, first as a volunteer, then as a paraprofessional, and, more recently, teaching technology. Initially, she hadn’t wanted to get political, but soon, it no longer felt like a choice. 

Back in late 2022, after the school board rescinded the McGraw Hill curriculum and voted for a four-day week, parents like Paul and Jessica Turco reached out to Turner, the retired elementary school teacher, who dialed up Douglas, the Election Day poll-watcher. “I called Dana and said, ‘The kids want some help,’” Turner recalled.

Although Douglas grew up over the state line in Newport, Washington, she married her high school sweetheart from Priest River and now bled Spartan orange. They had built a thriving family business, sent two children through the local schools, and had grandchildren enrolled. She understood that what she saw happening was at odds with what she stood for.  

“I am a Republican. I am a Christian conservative,” said Douglas. “But I am 100 percent pro–public education, and I am pro–every child, and I will do anything for this community to embrace everyone and to love everyone.”

She, Turner, and others, including Hutchins, Rogers, and the Turcos, began meeting. How to take back the district? It started with the school board and, said Douglas, included a notion that should seem obvious: “getting people who value public education” to serve. 

By the summer of 2023, they had collected signatures for a recall vote of Rutledge and Brown, the board’s chair and vice chair respectively. The group’s slogan—“Recall, Replace, Rebuild” — blossomed on signs in downtown storefronts, in yards, and banners posted in fields. The group collected endorsements, video testimonials, and built a website. By the time they were days out from the August 29 vote, their numbers had swelled. Over 125 people gathered in the wood-beamed great room at the Priest Lake Event Center for what was part rally, part check-in: Who could pick up “WBCSD Strong” T-shirts? Who would hold signs at key spots ahead of the vote? 

Related: Inside the Christian legal campaign to return prayer to public schools

Recalls usually fail. But in West Bonner County, the result was resounding. With a 60.9 percent turnout, Rutledge and Brown were recalled by a wide margin. But then, after the election but before votes were officially certified, Rutledge and Brown posted notice of a board meeting for Friday, September 1, at 5 p.m., just before Labor Day weekend. The top agenda items — “Dissolve Current Board of Trustees” and “Turn Meeting Over to the Superintendent”— raised alarms. 

“I read the agenda and I was irate,” said Katie Elsaesser, a mom of two and a lawyer whose office is near the school district office. “I immediately started calling people.” She texted her husband that she would miss their son’s soccer game, then drafted a complaint, finishing at 2 a.m. In the morning, she drove to the district court in Sandpoint. One hour and fifteen minutes before the meeting was to take place, Elsaesser got a ruling to halt it. McLain delivered the news to the crowd in the high school cafeteria. “You would think I scored a touchdown,” he said.

In another strange twist after the recall, the board could not hold several meetings because Reinbold failed to show. Without a quorum, which required three present members, business halted. Finally, after a former school board chair alerted county officials, the sheriff agreed to investigate. Reinbold reappeared, and in mid-October, the board finally filled the vacant seats with two people who supported the recall. 

With his options running thin, on September 25, 2023, Durst announced plans for “an amicable and fair exit.” For the fourth time in less than two years — since a longtime superintendent retired in June 2022 — the district was again seeking a new leader. Hall reached out to Joseph Kren, a former principal at the high school who had also served as superintendent in a nearby district. Kren was enjoying retirement—he got Hall’s call at 9:30 p.m. before he was to wake at 3:30 a.m. to go elk hunting. He would agree to a 90-day contract (the four-day week means it runs through March). 

His appointment was greeted with relief. Kren, a serious-faced former wrestler, is religious but not ideological. On the sixth day of his new job, occupying the same spot Durst had just vacated, Kren showed me the silver-colored crucifix he had hung above his desk. Kren was clear that his faith “has guided [him]” but has “never gotten in the way.”

Growing up with a brother who was deaf, Kren said, has made him attuned to matters of inclusion and accommodation, which he called “a legal and moral responsibility.” His only agenda was to put things right. By Thanksgiving, he told me, the district had corrected state compliance issues, and he was working to add bus drivers. With so many turnovers, he acknowledged “disruptions can and do occur.” But his plan, he said, was steady: to “roll up [his] sleeves and work alongside” staff and to make “firm, consistent, morally sound decisions based in fact and the law.”  

The November 2023 election would be pivotal. With the two school board replacements set — picked by the recall supporters who lived in the two school zones that had been represented by Rutledge and Brown — the other three zones’ seats were on the ballot. The pro-recall crowd wanted to boot Reinbold and reelect Hall and Barton. The election, in essence, would decide which side had a majority.

But each had challengers. Hall faced Alan Galloway, a sharp-jawed army veteran and cattle rancher who opposed “transgenderism,” efforts “to impose the outlawed teaching of CRT through SEL or any other ‘trojan horse’ scheme,” and a levy. He circulated a controversial letter with inflammatory claims, including that Hall had “failed our children by delaying action related to bullying, dress codes and Pornography within our schools.” 

Barton faced Kathy Nash, who had pushed to rescind the curriculum, was treasurer of the Bonner County Republican Central Committee, and connected to far-right figures at the state level. Two of the far-right candidates shared a campaign treasurer and campaign finance reports show some of the same people donating to the three far-right candidates.

In other words, there were teams. Jim Kelly, Nash’s campaign manager, said Nash would bring scrutiny to school finances — and provide representation to those wounded by the recall. Kelly told me, “The big concern for Kathy, and for a lot of us, is that the school board is going to be 100 percent lopsided,” if the candidates he backed, whom many would consider far-right, were not elected. “People are objecting that there will not be a conservative voice.”

And yet, Nash’s opponent, Barton, was a conservative Christian. As was Reinbold’s challenger, Elizabeth Glazier, whose website described her as a “Proud Republican & Conservative Christian” who opposed the four-day week and the hiring of Durst. The race was not conservatives against liberals or Republicans against Democrats. It was, as locals told me, a referendum casting those who cared that students had books, buses, and teachers with a decent wage, against those who embraced extremist rhetoric. 

Related: Who picks school curriculum? Idaho law hands more power to parents

At various polling places on Election Day, far-right campaign volunteers were overheard promising that Nash and Reinbold would keep boys out of girls’ bathrooms. 

For parents who rely on the public schools, this kind of allegation was maddening. “It’s just paranoid bull honkey,” said Jacob Sateren, a father of eight (six in the schools). We met at a coffee shop across from the junior high on Election Day shortly after he had voted. Sateren, who’d turned a challenging childhood into a successful adulthood building pole barns, laughs when people call him “a woke liberal.” (His Facebook profile features an American flag emblazoned with the Second Amendment, he pointed out.)

He finds charges that schools are “indoctrinating” children absurd. “I haven’t had any of my kids come home and talk about any crazy weird stuff. And even if they did, if you are an involved parent, it doesn’t really matter. If teachers at the school are teaching my kids something I disagree with, it’s my job to be paying enough attention to catch it,” he said. “I don’t know why people get worked up. There is always going to be stuff you disagree with.” 

On the day before the vote, under steady rainfall, Hutchins, Rogers, and another volunteer placed signs along Route 57 across from Priest Lake Elementary School, a polling station. Rogers’s youngest daughter skipped while twirling a child-sized umbrella. “A lot of people are very confident of Margy winning — we are not,” said Rogers, referring to Hall by her nickname. 

There was good reason for concern. In the end, Hall did best Galloway by a 60-40 margin. But as Douglas and Turner had feared, Nash defeated Barton, and Reinbold won over Glazier. Retaking the district would not be quick or easy. Yet having a majority on the board offered relief. “We can rebuild,” said Douglas.

Hall, however, was concerned about the division that had eroded support for public education in the first place. The question on her mind was how to bring calm. On the eve of the election, she had made a soup with red lentils, ginger, and coconut milk, which she ladled into small ceramic bowls. As she sat at her dining table talking and eating, she rose periodically to let her dog, Cinco, outdoors, accompanying him with a flashlight. Because of a defect at birth, he now has only three legs; there were cougars and a pride of mountain lions in the dark woods. 

Between trips, she shared her idea of creating random seating assignments at the round tables in the high school cafeteria where school board meetings were now held, a strategy for encouraging residents on each side to sit together and actually converse. “How tired are people of the fighting and name-calling and bashing?” There was much work to do — a new levy needed, a curriculum people agreed on, teacher contracts, luring families back — but she told me it started with “trying to work as a team, to balance perspectives.”  

The day after the election, with the reality of the mixed board clear, Hall offered a sober assessment. “My work,” she said, “is definitely cut out for me.”

This story about West Bonner was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter. Laura Pappano is the author of School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics and the Battle for Public Education, to be published by Beacon Press in January 2024.

The post The (mostly) Republican moms fighting to reclaim their Idaho school district from conservatives   appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

New York state lawmakers will unveil legislation on Tuesday that would eliminate enormous property tax breaks for Columbia University and New York University, which have expanded to become among New York City’s top 10 largest private property owners.

The bills would require the private universities to start paying full annual property taxes and for that money to be redistributed to the City University of New York, the largest urban public university system in the country.   

Columbia and N.Y.U. collectively saved $327 million on property taxes this year. The amount the schools save annually has soared in recent decades as the two have bought more properties, and the value of their properties has also increased.

Repealing the tax breaks would face substantial obstacles. The exemptions — which apply to universities, museums and other nonprofits — are nearly 200 years old and part of the state constitution. Overriding them would mean lawmakers would have to adopt the changes in consecutive legislative sessions. Then, voters would have to approve them on a statewide ballot.

“When the constitution of the state was written, there was no idea that such an exemption could apply to two of the top landlords in New York City,” said Assemblyman Zohran K. Mamdani, a Queens Democrat who is introducing the bill in the Assembly. “This bill seeks to address universities that have so blatantly gone beyond primarily operating as institutions of higher education and are instead acting as landlords and developers.”

The proposed constitutional amendment follows an investigation by The Hechinger Report and The New York Times in September that revealed that the city’s wealthiest universities were bigger and richer than ever before, with vast real estate portfolios that have drained the city budget – and that as Columbia has grown to become the city’s largest private landowner, it has enrolled fewer students from New York City.

Related: ‘The Untouchables’: How Columbia and N.Y.U. benefit from property tax breaks

A Columbia spokeswoman said university officials were reviewing the legislation. But she added that Columbia was a driver of the city’s economy through its research, faculty and students, and its capital projects, including $100 million in upgrades to local infrastructure since 2009.

A spokesman for N.Y.U. said that repealing the tax exemptions would be “extraordinarily disruptive” and that the university “would be forced to rethink much of the way we operate.”

“To choose two charitable, nonprofit organizations out of the thousands in the state and compel them to be treated like for-profits certainly strikes us as misguided and unfair,” the spokesman, John Beckman, said in a statement. “We are deeply appreciative of those policies, which have been in place for two centuries, but we also take some modest pride in the many, many ways, small and large, that N.Y.U. contributes to the city’s well-being and its economy.”

All 50 states offer property tax exemptions for private, nonprofit entities, which supporters argue are crucial so that these organizations can provide social, economic and cultural benefits to their communities. But in some cities, officials have pressured private universities to make voluntary payments, known as payments in lieu of taxes, or similar annual donations. Private universities often have billion-dollar endowments and charge annual tuition in the high five figures.

The legislation would only apply to Columbia and N.Y.U. and not other large private universities that own significant land, such as Cornell University in Ithaca. Lawmakers said that other universities would be excluded because their tax breaks are far lower than those of Columbia and N.Y.U.; the annual real estate tax exemption threshold would be $100 million.

“This bill seeks to address universities that have so blatantly gone beyond primarily operating as institutions of higher education and are instead acting as landlords and developers.”

Assemblyman Zohran K. Mamdani, a Queens Democrat who is introducing the bill in the Assembly.

“I don’t fault these institutions for pursuing their tax breaks and using the tax breaks to greatly expand their empires,” said State Senator John C. Liu, a Queens Democrat who is introducing the legislation in the Senate. “But this is a point where we have to look where all revenues are coming from and where all revenues are leaking. We have to stop those leaks.”

The city is facing a series of budget cuts to K-12 schools, libraries and police, among other programs, in part, Mayor Eric Adams has said, because of rising costs to care for an influx of homeless migrants.

CUNY, which is made up of 25 campuses throughout the city and which serves 225,000 students, has also been eyed for city cuts. Most of the university’s $4.3 billion budget is provided by the state, but earlier this year, the mayor proposed a 3 percent cut to the funding the city provides.

Related: Activists question whether wealthy univdersities should be exempt from property taxes

If the constitutional amendment were approved, the property tax payments would be directed every year to CUNY. That would make a significant difference in the quality of education students receive, said James C. Davis, the president of the Professional Staff Congress, which represents 30,000 CUNY faculty and staff.

“Would an additional infusion of operating funding affect retention and graduation rates?” Mr. Davis said. “Clearly the answer is yes. Even a relatively small amount of money would make a big difference.”

He noted that 80 percent of first-year CUNY students are graduates of New York City public schools, and a majority are students of color. Half come from families with incomes under $30,000 a year.

“If you’re talking about the city making a commitment to economic equity and social mobility,” Mr. Davis added, “there really is not a wiser investment than CUNY.”

This story was produced in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit news outlet that covers education. Hechinger is an independent unit at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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In recent years, division over how social studies should be taught has plagued school districts around the country.

The irony, according to Lawrence Paska, executive director of the National Council for the Social Studies, is that in many places, the subject is “not being taught, period.”

Social studies is sometimes seen as an afterthought, left out of daily instruction, he said. But instead of strengthening social studies or helping more students engage with the subject, the focus in recent years has been on undermining or attacking it, he said.

The increasing politicization of social studies was a concern shared by many educators, education leaders, researchers and advocates at last week’s annual NCSS conference in Nashville. Sessions examined ways educators can navigate state laws that limit conversations on race and other difficult topics, as well as how they can develop the high quality materials and instruction those attending said was vital to preparing students for civic life.

About 3,500 people attended the conference, among them K-12 and higher ed educators who teach the subjects that constitute social studies — including history, civics, geography, economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, law and religious studies.

Last month, NCSS updated its definition of social studies as the “study of individuals, communities, systems, and their interactions across time and place that prepares students for local, national, and global civic life.” The revised definition is meant to emphasize an inquiry-based approach, in which students start by asking questions, then learn to analyze credible sources, said Wesley Hedgepeth, NCSS president.

The group also chose to set out guidance for elementary and secondary school social studies instruction, to emphasize that education in the topic must begin in the early grades, Hedgepeth said.

The inquiry-based approach is defined within the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards, a set of decade-old, Common Core-like guidance for social studies. The approach has received pushback from conservative politicians who want to see more “patriotic” social studies curriculums, experts at the conference said.

Critics say revisions, or attempted revisions, to social studies standards by policy makers in states such as Virginia and South Dakota remove inquiry-based learning. The new standards instead emphasize “rote memorization of facts that are deemed to help children become more patriotic,” said James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association. Educators and researchers say these efforts are part of a pattern — deliberate or not — of flooding state standards and curriculums with so much content that it becomes impossible for teachers to spend the time needed to go in-depth on topics and for students to engage in critical thinking or questioning.

While it isn’t new for state legislatures and boards to step in to dictate what’s taught, what’s different now is that laws prohibit teaching certain histories rather than requiring them to be taught, according to Grossman.

While many educators at the conference seemed to want to avoid politics and focus on their instruction, they recognized that simply choosing to be a social studies teacher can be seen as taking a political side. Conservative politicians today increasingly see social studies teachers as targets, attendees said. Educators from Virginia, Texas, Tennessee and Kentucky, among other states, said fights over social studies standards or anti-critical race theory and anti-LGBTQ+ laws have been bruising. Some talked about receiving death threats and being doxxed, while others said they were increasingly fearful of losing their jobs.

In a workshop on how educators can get involved in advocacy efforts surrounding state revisions of history and social studies standards, Virginia teachers shared how they organized to fight a controversial social studies standards revision under the administration of Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. Sam Futrell, a middle school social studies teacher and president of the Virginia Council for the Social Studies, said educators organized their state professional organizations and local unions to push back against a draft revision that she said included several errors and omissions such as referring to Native Americans as “America’s first immigrants.”

Sessions at the conference also focused on how to strengthen and improve social studies materials and instruction. Educators from several states, including Maryland, Iowa and Kentucky, spoke about the need for curriculum and resources that don’t simply cater to big states like Florida, California and Texas. Social studies curriculum publishers from Imagine Learning, Core Knowledge and Pearson also talked about their efforts to update materials to make them relevant to kids from diverse backgrounds and to work more closely with educators in different states to meet their needs.

Some school leaders said they need high-quality resources that can help teachers who aren’t specialists in a particular subject or area of history to fill gaps in their knowledge. Others said the absence of a national approach to social studies instruction is an obstacle to ensuring that all students have a common framework for understanding the country and its history and participating in civic life.

Bruce Lesh, supervisor of elementary social studies for Carroll County Public schools in Maryland, said that while math, science and English have national frameworks for instruction, nothing equivalent exists in social studies. The C3 Framework discusses how to teach social studies, but it’s not like the Next-Gen science standards or Common Core English and math standards that lay the groundwork for what to teach and help all students gather a common set of knowledge and skills.

In those other disciplines, said Lesh, “There was an effort to take the inequity out of what was taught to students.”

This story about social studies was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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Last year, Arizona became the first state in the nation to offer universal school choice for all families.

State leaders promised families roughly $7,000 a year to spend on private schools and other nonpublic education options, dangling the opportunity for parents to pull their kids out of what some conservatives called “failing government schools.”

But now, some private schools across the state are hiking their tuition by thousands of dollars. That risks pricing the students that lawmakers said they intended to serve out of private schools, in some cases limiting those options to wealthier families and those who already attended private institutions.

Critics of Arizona’s empowerment scholarship accounts, or ESAs, cite the tuition increases as evidence of what they’ve warned about for years: Universal school choice, rather than giving students living in poverty an opportunity to attend higher-quality schools, would largely serve as a subsidy for the affluent.

“The average amount of tuition is going to be more than the actual voucher, not to mention transportation and uniform costs,” said Nik Nartowicz, state policy counsel for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a legal advocacy group. “This doesn’t help low-income families.”

A Hechinger Report analysis of dozens of private school websites revealed that, among 55 that posted their tuition rates, nearly all raised their prices since 2022. Some schools made modest increases, often in line with or below the overall inflation rate last year of around 6 percent. But at nearly half of the schools, tuition increased in at least some grades by 10 percent or more. In five of those cases, schools hiked tuition by more than 20 percent – much higher than even the steep inflation that hit the Phoenix metro area and well beyond what an ESA could cover.

Nationally, a dozen other states now offer ESAs, also known as education savings accounts, that incentivize parents to withdraw their kids from the public K-12 system. Another 14 states offer vouchers, which allow families to direct most or all of their students’ per pupil funding to a private school. As the programs grow in number, they offer a test of subsidized school choice — a longtime goal of the political right — and its effectiveness in serving kids from all backgrounds.   

Related: Florida just expanded vouchers — again. What does that really mean?

As of September, nearly 62,000 students in Arizona have received an ESA — more than twice the number that received the aid in the same month last year. Participating students receive 90 percent of what the state would spend to educate them at a public school; children with disabilities can access much higher funding. Recent state data pegs the median ESA award at just under $7,200. Families can spend their ESAs on almost any education-related expenses, such as private school tuition, tutoring and homeschool supplies. 

Before Arizona expanded eligibility for ESAs last year, proponents of the program argued the median award would cover median tuition at private elementary schools and about three quarters of the median rate at private high schools. Now, the recent rise in tuition may price more Arizona families out of the nation’s most expansive experiment in school choice.

For example, the cost of enrollment for seventh and eighth graders at Arrowhead Montessori, in Peoria, soared to $15,000, an increase of $4,200. In Mesa, tuition at Redeemer Christian School rose by nearly a quarter across most grades; families of high schoolers now pay $12,979, approximately $2,500 higher than the year prior. Similarly, at Desert Garden Montessori, in Phoenix, middle and high school tuition is now $16,000, nearly 24 percent higher than last year’s tuition rate of $12,950. And Saint Theresa Catholic School, also in Phoenix, reserved its biggest price hike – of about $1,800, or nearly 15 percent – for non-Catholic students in the elementary grades. Tuition for those students is now more than $14,000.

The Arrowhead, Desert Garden, Valley Christian and Redeemer Christian schools did not respond to requests for comment. ESA proponents, meanwhile, dismissed any tuition inflation as early growing pains.

Lisa Snell, a senior fellow of education at Stand Together Trust, a libertarian think tank, said that over time more private schools and educational providers will open in the state, creating greater market competition and pushing down costs. Already, Arizona has registered more than 4,000 vendors for ESAs — including retailers, tutors and even traditional school districts — a jump of 35 percent over last year.

“There’s obviously more risk with experimentation, but the only way to improve quality is to allow people to experiment,” Snell said. “We’re at the very early days.”

Related: COLUMN: Conservatives are embracing new alternative school models. Will the public?

ESAs gained prominence with Arizona’s passage of the nation’s first such program in 2011.

The state initially reserved participation to children with disabilities, but lawmakers later expanded the program to other populations, including children of active-duty military members and those attending a school that earned a D or F on state accountability report cards. Originally, most eligible students had to attend a public school for the first 100 days of the prior school year before applying for an ESA.

Then, in 2022, state leaders expanded eligibility to all K-12 students and removed the requirement of initial public school attendance. The Arizona Department of Education, which administers the program, estimated nearly half of students with an ESA have never attended public school — suggesting the state is sending millions of dollars to families who’d previously covered private school tuition out of their own pockets.

For some families, including those already enrolled in private school, the tuition hikes have caused sticker shock.

Pam Lang previously received an ESA for her son, who has autism, to attend a private school for students with disabilities. A real estate agent in the Phoenix area, she confirmed tuition at his program rose nearly $4,000. She said families received no prior notice of the increase, which showed up in an invoice before the start of a new academic year.

“Parents are faced with the possibility of having to drop other things they use ESAs for, like tutors — an expense that also increased for my son,” Lang said.

Meanwhile, some private schools encourage currently enrolled families to secure an ESA to cover the higher tuition rates, according to Beth Lewis, executive director of Save Our School Arizona, a group that advocates for public education.

“It makes complete economic sense,” Lewis said. “If a family was already able to pay $11,000, what’s stopping the school from increasing tuition by the average ESA?”

Advocates of the program, however, argued families of varying income levels will make room in their budget for private schools.

Matt Ladner, a fellow with the nonprofit group EdChoice, said low-income parents might find second or third jobs to afford tuition for their kids. And, he added, even children whose families pay for private school on their own dime deserve some portion of state funding for education.

“Their parents pay taxes too,” Ladner said. “Everyone pays into the system, and everyone with a child should be entitled to an equitable share. We publicly fund education for all kids.”

Related: School choice had a big moment in the pandemic. Is it what parents want in the long term?

Of the 13 states with some version of ESA legislation, five — Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Utah and West Virginia — followed Arizona’s lead in granting eligibility to 100 percent of students, regardless of income level. The Grand Canyon State, though, stands apart in almost hands-off approach to the private school market.

Existing state codes set no requirements for the accreditation, approval, licensing or registration of private schools in Arizona. No public agency tracks the creation of new private schools in the state or what they charge for tuition. The state departments of education and treasury did not respond to repeated public records requests for vendor data on how families have spent their ESA awards.

“It’s a black box by design,” said Lewis.

“The average amount of tuition is going to be more than the actual voucher, not to mention transportation and uniform costs. This doesn’t help low-income families.”

Nik Nartowicz, state policy counsel for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a legal advocacy group

In contrast, Iowa requires parents to use their ESA at an accredited nonpublic school — a requirement that Snell, of the Stand Together Trust, described as limiting and rigid.

She and other fans of Arizona’s law said its looser structure will open the door to many more choices for families. One option: microschools, where families bring their children together in smaller learning communities, with or without a licensed teacher. 

“It’s kind of a great thing about demand-driven systems,” Ladner said. “We don’t know what families will value and what directions they will take things.”

He also pointed to a new report from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, showing that increases in private school tuition over the last 10 years were smaller in states that passed school choice policies than in those that didn’t.

Dan Hungerman, an economics professor at the University of Notre Dame who has studied the impact of vouchers on private school finances, noted that the Heritage report’s main finding lacked the common elements of rigorous academic research: statistical significance and standard error.

Hungerman’s own research, conducted in partnership with an economist at the U.S. Census Bureau, found that voucher programs significantly boost the bottom line of churches that operate private schools and likely prevent church closures and mergers.

That concerns Joshua Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University. He said that high-tuition private schools were already out of reach for most students and will remain so, regardless of ESA programs. More distressing, Cowen argued, were the public campaigns — including one from a foundation backed by former U.S. education secretary Betsy Devos — aimed directly at saving Catholic education through school choice.

“Vouchers are at least partly about bailing out financially distressed church schools,” Cowen said. “Once school vouchers come to town, taxpayers become the dominant source of revenue for churches.”

In Chandler, the Seton Catholic high school sets two tuition rates: A $18,775 general rate for students enrolling in the 2023-24 academic year, and a discounted rate of $14,100 for Catholic students. The college prep academy requires families to secure verification from their parish to receive the discount.

“As a Catholic school, we work with people of all faiths, but our ministry exists to serve the Catholic church,” said Victor Serna, the school’s principal.

“If you want this to be a shining example for the country, you gotta change some things. Because right now, we’re on the fast track to disaster.”

Beth Lewis, executive director, Save our Schools Arizona

Nartowicz, with Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said he suspects that as more states pass ESA legislation like Arizona’s, the number of church-based schools offering discounts based on religion will also increase, allowing the use of public funds, in effect, to advantage those with particular religious views.

“We’ve never really encountered this before,” Nartowicz said.

Earlier this year, the Arizona department of education projected the expansion of ESAs would cost the state about $900 million — well above an original estimate of just $65 million. The ballooning price tag prompted Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs to call on lawmakers to repeal the program’s universal eligibility. Republicans in control of both legislative chambers rejected the idea. 

ESA critics had hoped a bipartisan deal to create an oversight committee would lead to reforms of the program. But earlier this month, the committee ended its work with no proposed changes. 

Lewis, with Save our Schools Arizona, had previously said that the deal indicates even some Republicans may be worried about the financial impact of school-choice-for-all.

“If you want this to be a shining example for the country, you gotta change some things,” she said. “Because right now, we’re on the fast track to disaster.” 

But the state speaker of the House, Ben Toma, a Republican who chaired the ESA oversight committee, seemed to buck expectations that the program would significantly change soon.

“School choice is here to stay,” he wrote on social media.

Amanda Chen contributed reporting.

This story about Arizona school choice was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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