Author: BelieveAgain

School districts want more time to spend COVID-19 relief aid for homeless-student programs, citing growing need and logistical challenges in meeting the September 2024 spending deadline.Senators who first championed that aid—$800 million for homeless children and youth included in the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act—circulated a letter to colleagues this week, rallying support to give districts an additional year to allocate that money.District homeless liaisons have used the money to identify and locate homeless students, transport them to their original schools when their highly mobile families move into new attendance zones, and address the non-academic barriers that prevent them from…

Republican justices on North Carolina’s highest court signaled on Thursday that they’re open to revising a court order made less than two years ago requiring that the state spend billions more dollars on K-12 schools.It’s the latest twist in a three-decade-old attempt by North Carolina school districts to compel the state to invest more funding to minimize education inequities in the state’s public schools. And it’s an example of how public schools can win a victory in court, only to face fresh complications in the quest for more resources.Democrats controlled the seven-member court in November 2022 when it ruled in…

Nearly a decade ago, Congress handed states and districts near-autonomy to fix their worst-performing schools in the ways they saw fit.Now, many of those schools appear to have been left to languish in the academic doldrums, without clear improvement strategies to use or dedicated resources to execute turnarounds. Fewer than half of district plans for improving the bottom 5 percent of schools in each state dubbed “drop-out factories”—high schools where fewer than two-thirds of students graduate—meet bare minimum federal requirements, even though they received their state’s seal of approval, according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office, Congress’…

The Staunton schools in Virginia employ roughly 530 people. But according to the state, they only need 200.That means the state only contributes to the cost of salaries for roughly 40 percent of the district’s staff. And even then, the state pays for only 40 percent of those 200 staff members’ salaries.All told, the Staunton district spends $34 million, or $12,630 per student, on staffing. Local taxpayers cover half those costs.This discrepancy is the result of a complex K-12 school funding formula that the state hasn’t altered in decades, and applies decades-old assumptions about school staffing and student services to…

Renee Fairless runs three K-8 public charter schools in Nevada that enroll a total of nearly 4,000 students. Almost all of the students are English learners, economically disadvantaged, or both.Until recently, the state each year provided the Mater Academy of Nevada schools with a base amount of roughly $7,000 per student, as well as an extra dose of funding for roughly 1,700 students the state categorized as “at risk.”This school year, Fairless’ funding haul looked a little different: Only 45 students qualified as at risk and, therefore, were eligible for the additional aid.Now Fairless is pondering cuts to services like…

Clear K-12 themes dominated governors’ state of the state addresses this year, with one issue dominating priorities across party lines: workforce readiness.That’s the finding of analysts from the Education Commission of the States, a research group, who worked with the National Governors Association to review addresses made by governors in 41 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands for a report issued March 14. (Some governors only give the speeches biennially, in the years their state legislatures convene.)Thirty-seven of those speeches called for a focus on career and technical education and workforce development, an issue that has won the support of…

At least one state has begun using artificial intelligence to determine the number of students who are at risk of failing to graduate on time and thus eligible for additional K-12 funding for their districts. More could follow.But will AI serve as a game-changing tool for streamlining and refining the messy process of determining how much money schools need and receive? Or is it destined to further heighten the often inscrutable chaos of school funding formulas?Nevada education officials since last year have been working to develop a more precise calculation of the number of students in the state who aren’t…

The death last month of a nonbinary Oklahoma student following a fight with other students in a high school restroom, while still mired in questions about what exactly transpired, is drawing renewed attention to school responses to harassment and bullying.It remains challenging for teachers and administrators to prevent and respond to bullying. But it is also difficult for students and parents to hold schools and districts legally responsible for any failures. Laws in most states require schools to have anti-bullying policies and procedures, but most do not give families a right to sue over ineffective responses. There is a dichotomy…

David Blanchard, superintendent of the Schoharie schools in rural upstate New York, has been hard at work with his team preparing two versions of his district’s operating budget for next school year.One assumes the 800-student district will get the same amount from the state in the coming year as it did this year. The other incorporates Gov. Kathy Hochul’s proposed cuts and tweaks to state school funding, including an adjusted calculation of the inflation rate and the loss of pandemic-era protections meant to ensure schools don’t see steep, year-over-year funding drops.The latter plan would result in the district, which is…

President Joe Biden included his administration’s K-12 education priorities in a State of the Union address focused on American resilience Thursday.In a high-stakes appearance in the lead-up to the November presidential election, Biden echoed his past support for raising teacher pay and increasing access to early childhood education, and he highlighted his administration’s efforts to promote tutoring, summer learning, and career and technical education.“To remain the strongest economy in the world we need the best education system in the world,” Biden said.He pushed for high-quality tutoring and summer learning time and said he wants to “see to it that every…