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For LGBTQ youth whose rights have been under attack by Republican state officials, new federal regulations protecting them from discrimination at school were a welcome sign that someone in power had their back.

But within two days of new Title IX rules being published Monday, top officials in 15 states announced they were suing to block the new rules from going into effect. In four separate lawsuits, Republican officials alleged the new rules endangered free speech and represented an attack on the very group Title IX was designed to protect: women.

Officials in many of these states had already warned schools not to implement the new rules, which would protect students’ ability to use restrooms that match their gender identity and use the names and pronouns they prefer.

[Related: New Title IX rules offer ‘comprehensive coverage’ for LGBTQ+ students and sexual violence survivors]

“Do not comply,” Louisiana State Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley told schools at a Monday press conference announcing his state’s lawsuit. “Allow this process, this legal process to unfold, rely on our office if you need support, but do not comply with these radical rules from the Biden administration.”

The lawsuits highlight an ongoing culture war centered on the rights of trans students at school. Republican states have passed a host of laws limiting trans youth’s participation in sports, which bathrooms these students can use, and which names they can go by. Supporters of these laws say they protect fairness, privacy, and free speech. Advocates for LGBTQ youth say they endanger vulnerable students and actually infringe on privacy and free speech, and that the new Biden Title IX rules give students key legal safeguards.

Some legal experts believe the new Title IX rules — which clarify that gender identity is covered by laws prohibiting sex discrimination — are likely to withstand conservative challenges. In the meantime, teachers and school administrators are caught between federal law, which usually takes precedence, and state law, which can loom larger in the classroom.

And queer youth and their allies say their states’ defiance of federal law reinforces the idea that their existence is a problem and that their government is targeting them.

“You already had kids who literally did not use the bathroom at school,” said A’Niya Robinson, an advocacy strategist at the ACLU of Louisiana. “They were afraid that they would be targeted for just completing a bodily function. These rules are a reprieve from kids having to experience that, and then to have your state want to undo that, it’s just unfortunate.”

States say new Biden rules undermine Title IX

In 2016, under former President Barack Obama, top officials at the Education and Justice departments issued guidance to schools saying that transgender students were protected from discrimination based on their gender identity under Title IX.

But that guidance was quickly rescinded by the Trump administration.

When President Joe Biden took office, officials moved to make the Obama-era interpretation binding by going through nearly two years of formal rule-making. The final rule, which the Biden administration announced April 19 and is slated to take effect Aug. 1, gives LGBTQ students and others explicit protection from sex discrimination “based on sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity.”

The backlash has been swift. Within days, top education officials in several states told schools to disregard the rule changes. This week, 15 states filed four separate lawsuits seeking to block the rules from taking effect.

At a Monday press conference announcing one of the lawsuits, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said the new regulations sought “to remake American societal norms through classrooms, lunchrooms, bathrooms, and locker rooms of American schools.”

“These rules eviscerate Title IX,” Murrill said.

The following day, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said the text of Title IX refers “over and over again to a sex binary, to men and women, to one sex or the other.”

Though each lawsuit is slightly different, they all essentially argue that the U.S. Department of Education exceeded its authority by expanding the definition of what constitutes sex discrimination, and that the changes run contrary to the original intent of Title IX.

Even though the new rules don’t address sports and the Education Department is working on separate sports guidance, opponents of the new rules have said they believe they open the door to widespread participation by trans athletes in girls’ and women’s sports.

That view was underscored at Tuesday’s joint press conference with the attorneys general of Tennessee and West Virginia, which featured elite swimmer Riley Gaines. Gaines became an outspoken advocate for keeping transgender women out of women’s sports after having to compete against and share a locker room with transgender swimmer Lia Thomas.

Similarly, West Virginia is engaged in ongoing litigation to prevent a 13-year-old from competing in girls’ track.

The bulk of the concerns in the lawsuits focus on trans girls being permitted to use girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms, and that school staff will be compelled to call trans and non-binary students by their preferred names and pronouns.

Skrmetti said the facilities concern is not just about gender identity. He fears that the new Title IX rules could require that any boy be allowed in girls’ restrooms. A girl who expressed discomfort with that could be liable for creating an illegal hostile environment because she questioned that student’s gender, he said.

But the Title IX rules make clear that schools can still maintain single-gender restrooms.

While the new rules bar invasive medical tests or burdensome documentation to establish gender identity, schools can request a written confirmation from the student, a parent, or other adult. Schools can also rely on the child’s consistent self-identification.

Several states’ laws forbid trans students from accessing bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity and permit school staff to use the pronouns and name a student was assigned at birth, even if the student now uses a different name or pronouns.

National surveys have repeatedly found that these kinds of policies negatively affect LGBTQ youth, who often feel unsafe at school, struggle with mental health, and are more likely to consider suicide than their peers. When the Education Department gathered feedback on a draft version of the rules, officials said many students reported that schools ignored bullying, threats, and harassment based on their gender identity, leaving them in constant fear and anxiety.

For Zelda Duitch, who is trans and co-president of the Gender Sexuality Alliance at Benjamin Franklin High School in New Orleans, finding a supportive school has been critical to his educational success.

“When I was socially transitioning, all of my teachers were really supportive,” he said. “That was integral not just for my mental health, but for my education. I would not have been able to learn if I hadn’t been accepted.”

When Florida adopted its “Don’t Say Gay” bill, Zelda felt sorry for queer youth there. Now his own state has a ban on gender-affirming care for minors, and a package of anti-LGBTQ bills is sailing through the Louisiana Legislature.

“It’s hard to describe how much anger and pain there is,” Zelda said. “It made me feel like my state was trying to kill me.”

Why the new Title IX rules matter

Practically, the new rules matter because they give students, families, and advocates sturdier ground to stand on when they file a federal civil rights complaint or a lawsuit seeking to challenge a school’s policy.

The Title IX complaint process can be slow and cumbersome, but it’s a powerful tool for students to protect their rights, said Craig White, who runs the supportive schools program for the Campaign for Southern Equality. That’s especially true for students in small towns who may not have access to attorneys or large advocacy groups.

Students can say: “This discrimination is wrong, and I’m standing up,” White said.

The new rules explicitly state that denying a trans student access to a bathroom or locker room that corresponds with their gender identity causes harm to the student in a way that generally violates Title IX.

If a teacher repeatedly refused to call a student by their preferred name and pronouns, leaving the student feeling unwelcome at school, that could violate Title IX, too.

Suzanne Eckes, a professor of education law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says the big legal question now is whether the definition of sex in Title IX can include sexual orientation and gender identity.

The Supreme Court decided in 2020 in Bostock v. Clayton County that employees are protected from sex discrimination, including based on sexual orientation and gender identity, under Title VII, another federal civil rights law.

And while there are a few outlier cases, plenty of federal courts have already ruled that Title IX should be interpreted the same way, Eckes said.

“The vast majority of federal and state courts have ended in favorable results for trans students,” Eckes said.

But Matt Sharp, senior counsel for conservative legal group the Alliance Defending Freedom believes the Bostock case doesn’t apply in many of the scenarios covered under Title IX, an interpretation shared by many Republican AGs.

Access to bathrooms and locker rooms implicates personal privacy, he said, and courts have found that physiological differences between men and women justify separate facilities.

Advocates say anti-LGTBQ laws silence allies, spread fear

White, of the Campaign for Southern Equality, said the climate fostered by states’ policies can send ripple effects through the school day.

A student might be misgendered by a teacher in first period, attract scrutiny for which bathroom they use in second period, be unable to use a locker room in third period, then get bullied at lunch — only to be told by a lunch monitor that other students don’t agree with their “lifestyle.”

“Students do not experience these as isolated incidents,” White said.

But he also noted that such laws can spread fear and silence allies. In Indiana, for example, where a new law requires schools to notify parents if a student wants to go by a different name, Gender Sexuality Alliance clubs have stopped meeting in many schools, as students fear sponsors would be required to out them, said Chris Paulsen, CEO of Indiana Youth Group, which supports GSAs across the state.

Indiana is among the states that have directed schools not to change their policies to comply with the new Title IX rules, and it has joined Tennessee’s lawsuit.

Peyton Rose Michelle, who leads Louisiana Trans Advocates, remembers being bullied as early as first grade and called slurs she didn’t understand. By middle school, she had trained herself not to use the bathroom until she got home around 4:30 p.m.

She hears about students doing the same thing today — as well as skipping school to avoid bullying. The new Title IX protections are about doing the right thing for kids, she said.

“Bathrooms in middle school are for peeing and looking at yourself in the mirror,” Michelle said, “and trans kids should be able to do both of those things without fear of bullying and harassment.”

***

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet focused on education.

Fernandes was a student at Newbury College near Boston whose enrollment had declined in the previous two decades from more than 5,300 to about 600.

“Things started closing down,” Fernandes remembered. “There was definitely a sense of things going wrong. The food went downhill. It felt like they didn’t really care anymore.”

The private, nonprofit school had been placed on probation by its accreditors because of its shaky finances. Then the shuttle bus connecting the suburban campus with the nearest station on the public transportation system started running late or not showing up at all. “That was one of the things that made us feel like they were giving up.”

After students went home for their winter holiday, an email came: Newbury would shut down at the end of the next semester.

“It was, ‘Unfortunately we have to close after all these many years, and blah, blah, blah,’ ” said Fernandes, who was a junior. “I was very angry.”

The loans that students had taken out to pay the college weren’t forgiven, “which was infuriating. I had already put so much money into my education, and my family didn’t have that money. How am I going to apply this to my future if it doesn’t exist?”

This and other questions are on the minds of more and more students this spring as the pace of college closings dramatically speeds up.

About one university or college per week so far this year, on average, has announced that it will close or merge. That’s up from a little more than two a month last year, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, or SHEEO.

So many colleges are folding that some students who moved from one to another have now found that their new school will also close, often with little or no warning. Some of the students at Newbury, when it closed in 2019, had moved there from nearby Mount Ida College, for example, which shut down the year before.

Most students at colleges that close give up on their educations altogether. Fewer than half transfer to other institutions, a SHEEO study found. Of those, fewer than half stay long enough to get degrees. Many lose credits when they move from one school to another and have to spend longer in college, often taking out more loans to pay for it.

The rest join the growing number of Americans — now more than 40 million, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center — who spent time and money to go to college but never finished. And that’s happening at a time when efforts to increase the proportion of the population with degrees are already facing headwinds.

“I was asking my dad, ‘Can I not go back?’ ” said Fernandes, who eventually decided to continue at another college and now works as a patient coordinator at a hospital.

“I’m glad I did. But it honestly scares me for the future of education. I’m not sure where education’s going to go if all of these colleges keep closing. It’s just another roadblock, especially with people who are struggling with tuition in the first place.”

Colleges are almost certain to keep closing. As many as one in 10 four-year colleges and universities are in financial peril, the consulting firm EY Parthenon estimates.

“It’s simply supply and demand,” said Gary Stocker, a former chief of staff at Westminster College in Missouri and the founder of College Viability, which evaluates institutions’ financial stability. The closings follow an enrollment decline of 14 percent in the decade through 2022, the most recent period for which the figures are available from the Education Department. Another decline of up to 15 percent is projected to begin in 2025.

“The only thing that’s going to fix this is enough closings or consolidations at which supply and demand reach equilibrium,” Stocker said.

That’s likely little comfort to students who attend or have attended closing schools.

Already this year, and within a span of a few days, Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama, Fontbonne University in St. Louis and Eastern Gateway Community College in Ohio all announced that they would close — Birmingham-Southern in May, Fontbonne next year and Eastern Gateway by June, unless it gets a financial bailout.

The private, for-profit University of Antelope Valley in California was ordered by the state in late February to shut down because of financial shortfalls. Lincoln Christian University in Illinois and Magdalen College in New Hampshire will close in May, Johnson University of Florida in June and Hodges University in Florida by August. The College of Saint Rose in New York, Cabrini University in Pennsylvania, Oak Point University in Illinois, Goddard College in Vermont and the Staten Island campus of St. John’s University will all be shuttered by the end of this semester.

Notre Dame College in Ohio will also close its doors at the end of this semester, stranding for a second time students who transferred there from Alderson Broaddus University in West Virginia, which shut down just days before classes were scheduled to begin the year before.

Seven out of 10 students at colleges that have closed got little or no warning. Of those, a smaller proportion were likely to continue their educations than students at colleges that gave more notice and ended operations in an “orderly” way, the SHEEO study found.

Tatiana Hicks was at her laptop preparing for her final exams in the nursing program she attended at for-profit Stratford University in Virginia when her group chat with fellow students started to blow up. “The only thing that was going through my mind was studying for finals, but my phone would not stop ringing,” said Hicks, who was going to school while working 12-hour shifts three days a week as a nurse assistant in a hospital to pay for it.

An email from the university president had just gone out saying Stratford had lost its accreditation and was closing, effective immediately. Students had a month to get their transcripts, it said. But within a day, the university’s phones and email were shut down, said Hicks, now 27, who lives in Gainesville, Virginia.

“I started panicking. I cried. I cried for hours that day. This just happened out of nowhere,” said Hicks, who lost all of the 94 credits she had earned and owed $30,000 in student loans, though they would later be forgiven after more than a year of red tape.

“Everyone kept asking me, ‘When are you going to go back?’ And I didn’t want to go back,” she said. “I thought, this just proved I shouldn’t have gone to college in the first place.”

Hicks did eventually enroll in a new program, beginning again from scratch on her way to a degree in respiratory therapy.

More common is the experience of Misha Zhuykov, who ended his formal education when Burlington College in Vermont shut down during his junior year there. The college had embarked on an ill-fated expansion, buying an abandoned Catholic orphanage so spooky Zhuykov helped make an award-winning movie in it for his film studies program. (The president at the time of the controversial expansion project was Jane O’Meara Sanders, wife of Sen. Bernie Sanders.)

“There was always this ramshackle feeling” at Burlington, he said. Adjunct instructors were gradually replacing full-time faculty. “We kind of all suspected something might happen. I thought, ‘Just hold out for another two years and I’m out of here.’ ”

Instead, Zhuykov and the last 100 or so other undergraduates were given less than two weeks’ notice that the college would be closing. A private security company came to lock up the buildings. He said he found that not all of his credits would be accepted if he transferred.

Students who transfer lose an average of 43 percent of the credits they’ve already earned and paid for, the Government Accountability Office found in the most recent comprehensive study of this problem.

Like many of his classmates, Zhuykov never took his formal education any further. He now works as a graphic designer in New Hampshire. “A lot of folks just kind of dropped off. They were banking on that degree. I have a friend who’s working at a gas station.”

Even those who graduated from colleges that later closed run into uncomfortable questions when they look for jobs. Roy Mercon went to Burlington after serving in the Army. He managed to graduate before the college stopped operating. But when he’s applied for jobs, he gets skeptical reactions. “They say, ‘Oh, you’re from that school. I tried to look it up,’ ” he said.

“You kind of trusted the people teaching you that they know what they’re doing. This makes you feel a little cynical and sets the tone for the rest of your life,” said Mercon, who is 35 and working on the help desk of a citywide internet service provider in Burlington. He now has a 12-year-old daughter of his own. If she decides to go to college, he said, he will investigate to make sure the one she picks won’t close. “That’s an insane thing to have to think about.”

Laila Ali, who was in the last group of students to graduate from Newbury College, has run into similar paperwork problems. When she started a new job in December, she said, her employer tried to verify her education, but couldn’t. “I didn’t really know what route to take. Who do I contact?” She ultimately showed them the physical degree that she was handed when she walked at graduation, which the employer accepted. But it triggered unwelcome memories.

“I remember graduation and my last semester being gloomy,” said Ali, now 27 and living in Atlanta. She said she saw a few signs that the college was in trouble, but it had also recently renovated a gym, with new equipment, and added sports teams. So the closing came as a surprise. “They could have given us a warning.”

How much difference a warning can make was evident at Presentation College in South Dakota, which — before announcing that it would close — contracted with the nonprofit College Possible to help its 384 remaining students continue their educations. After the announcement, the college stayed open for a final full semester and kept paying its athletics coaches to connect its many student-athletes with new teams.

At first, when administrators gathered everyone in the fieldhouse to announce the closing, “the students were so struck with disbelief that about half of them just got up and left,” said Catherine Marciano, College Possible’s vice president for partnerships. “Other students were crying very publicly or expressing anger toward the administration.” And when the college held a “teach-out fair” in the same gym with institutions that had agreed to accept its students and their credits, none showed up, despite a deluge of social media promotion.

“It took a little while for us to gain momentum,” Marciano said. Faculty and staff were looking for new jobs, while “students at that point were still in that state of grief where they were paralyzed.”

But given time, she said, “we saw those emotions shift to, ‘Okay, I have to figure out my next steps. I want to keep playing sports or keep pursuing my nursing degree.’ ”

In the end, 90 percent of those last students either graduated in the final semester before the college closed its doors for good or transferred to another institution, Marciano said — a far higher proportion than at closed colleges elsewhere.

Cassy Loa was one of those. A junior at Presentation when it closed, she played on its softball team and managed to transfer to Dickinson State University. But even with the help provided to her, she said, the path from the day the closing was announced was bumpy.

“All these thoughts were going through my mind. What was I going to do? Will my credits transfer? Can I still play softball? Where will my friends go? I had one more year until I graduated, and now I had to go and find a school for one more year.”

Living through that process, she said, “felt like being a senior in high school again.” In the end, because Presentation had a teach-out agreement with North Dakota’s Dickinson State, most of her credits transferred.

That kind of an experience is an exception to the rule, however. “Students don’t always do well when colleges close. In fact, they typically don’t do well,” said Paula Langteau, the last president of Presentation. “Some colleges literally padlock the door, and that’s their announcement.”

This is not deliberately malicious, Langteau said. Struggling schools “think they can somehow stay open. Or maybe they’re afraid of looking like they failed.”

She now works as a consultant to help other colleges through the process — a sign of how frequently it’s happening.

“We’re starting to get through to colleges and to boards that there needs to be more pre-planning, and it’s hard,” Langteau said. “It’s hard to admit when it’s time for an institution to close or to merge.’ ”

Mergers are also picking up, though they almost always end with the struggling partner fading away. Woodbury University is being merged into the University of Redlands, and St. Augustine College in Chicago into Lewis University. The Pennsylvania College of Health Sciences was absorbed by Saint Joseph’s University in January. Salus University will become part of Drexel University in June and stop running as a separate institution next year. Bluffton University in Ohio will be integrated into the University of Findlay, also next year.

This seems an easier route for students, who presumably can finish at the successor college. But it isn’t always. Students who attended Mills College received a $1.25 million settlement in a lawsuit charging that they were promised they could finish their degrees after the college was absorbed by Northeastern University. The lawsuit alleged that Northeastern phased out programs it didn’t already offer, in which 408 of the Mills students had enrolled. The universities deny having misled the students.

These shutdowns also affect taxpayers, who have to absorb the cost of the federally subsidized student loans that are forgiven in some instances. Students attending ITT Tech had $1.1 billion in debt forgiven when it shut down, for instance.

New U.S. Department of Education rules take effect in July that will require institutions to report if they are entering bankruptcy or facing expensive legal judgments, and to set aside reserves to cover the cost of student loans if they go under.

It’s also growing more important that consumers understand the financial status of colleges they consider, said Stocker, of College Viability.

“If a restaurant has health complaints, we don’t want to go there,” said Stocker. “If a car manufacturer is having trouble, why would we want to buy that car? Same thing for colleges.”

***

Jon Marcus writes and edits stories about, and helps plan coverage of, higher education. A former magazine editor, he has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Wired, Medium.com and the Times (U.K.) Higher Education magazine, among others.

This story about college closings was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Additional reporting by Sara Hutchinson. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

WASHINGTON — Families gathered outside the U.S. Capitol Tuesday to “make a fuss for babies,” who they believe are being left behind by lawmakers who direct only a fraction of U.S. resources to young children.

Parents and kids representing 50 states and the District of Columbia convened for the eighth annual “Strolling Thunder.” Moms and dads pushing strollers decked out in state license plates rallied on the Capitol’s East Lawn to lobby lawmakers to fund child care, establish national paid family leave, and permanently expand the child tax credit.

Matthew Melmed, executive director of ZERO TO THREE, the organization behind the event, rallied parents to tell their representatives that the 11 million babies in the U.S. “make up 3.4% of our population, but 100% of our future.”

“You’re here with the pork producers and the insurance lobby and the pharmaceutical industry. Members of Congress don’t normally see real people, and they rarely see babies and toddlers, particularly babies and toddlers who need to have their diapers changed on their desks. And that’s what I encourage you to do if you need to have that happen,” Melmed told the crowd.

The nonprofit ZERO TO THREE bases its advocacy on health and developmental research findings in infants up to age 3, the years the group describes as “the most important for lifelong mental health and well-being.”

Melmed praised top Democratic appropriators Sen. Patty Murray of Washington and Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut for achieving a $1 billion increase for child care block grants and Head Start in this year’s government funding bills.

DeLauro, who spoke to the crowd, said “families deserve better.”

“The cost of living has increased year after year, and more and more Americans simply do not get paid enough to live on, let alone to raise a family,” the Connecticut lawmaker said, promising to advocate for the reinstatement of a fully refundable child tax credit.

‘Diapers, child care, formula’

Candace Winkler, a former Alaska resident and current ZERO TO THREE leader, sat on the Capitol lawn next to Sabrina Donnellan who traveled to D.C. from Girdwood, Alaska, with her 13-month-old Blakely to advocate for lower child care costs and paid family leave.

Winkler, the organization’s chief development and strategy officer, said the group of families would divide up in the halls of Congress Tuesday to meet with their representatives about six key policy issues, including permanently expanding the child tax credit to pandemic levels.

“We’ve seen that time and time again that families are using those resources for diapers, child care, formula and things their babies and their family needs. And it’s really critical for their success,” Winkler said.

The current child tax credit is $2,000 a year after tax liability, but the amount a parent could receive per child under 17 in a refund check is capped at $1,600 in 2023. The credit phases in at 15% on every dollar after earnings of $2,500.

As the U.S. was digging out from under the COVID-19 economic crisis, Congress approved a one-year expansion of the tax credit to $3,000 per child under age 18, and $3,600 for those under age 6 — including for families who made $0 in income. Lawmakers made the entire amount refundable, and a portion of it was sent to families in monthly installments.

Advocates hailed the research findings that showed the temporary move was a game changer for lifting children from poverty in the U.S.

A current bipartisan proposal, widely supported by U.S. House lawmakers, to temporarily expand the child tax credit until 2025 — though not to pandemic levels — is currently stalled by U.S. Senate Republicans who liken aspects of the bill to a welfare program.

The proposal, as passed by the House, would increase the credit’s refundable portion to $1,800 in 2023, $1,900 in 2024 and $2,000 in 2025. The legislation would also increase the phase-in rate to 15% per child, simultaneously — in other words, 30% for a family with two children, 45% for a family with three, and so on.

Credit card debt for child care

Cruz Bueno, a parent from Rhode Island, shared her story of racking up credit card debt to enroll her 11-month-old Rosie in child care, along with her 2-year-old sister Amalia.

“Putting Rosie into daycare means that we must put a halt to our dream of buying a home,” said Bueno, an economist who lives in Warwick with her husband, Xhuljan Meta.

“One of the stipulations of our mortgage pre-approval was to keep our credit card balances low. Even so, we remain hopeful that one day in the not-so-distant future we will be able to buy a home to raise our girls and pass on wealth to them,” she said.

When asked about the Strolling Thunder event at Tuesday morning’s regularly scheduled House Republican press conference, House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana said, “There’s lots of ideas out there. What we stand for, what our party stands for, is support of families. We support infants and children, and there’s an appropriate role to play in that.”

“The devil’s always in the details on legislation, so I’m not sure exactly what they’re proposing, but all of us are looking at those avenues. We want to support families. That’s good public policy,” Johnson said. “In our view, the best way often for the government to do that is to step back and allow the local and state officials to handle their business at that local level.”

Rep. Elise Stefanik, House Republican Conference Chair, said the GOP is “proud to be a pro-family conference.”

“There are many of our members who have proposed innovative solutions — one is rural child care. Home-based child care, that’s an issue I’ve worked with many of my colleagues on the Education and Workforce Committee,” Stefanik, of New York, said. “But the economy, the border, crime, these issues, these crises caused by Joe Biden, they impact every family.”

***

Ashley Murray covers the nation’s capital as a senior reporter for States Newsroom. Her coverage areas include domestic policy and appropriations.

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. 

This story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. 

While applications for federal student aid dropped by double digits across all 50 states this year, those with universal FAFSA completion policies seemed to fare slightly better, with the majority performing in the top half of the country.

Of the 10 states with the highest completion rates, three — Louisiana, Illinois and New Hampshire — have mandatory FAFSA policies for high school seniors. Across all states, Connecticut had the highest completion rate among high school seniors and Alaska had the lowest, according to the National College Attainment Network.

Indiana saw the smallest change year-over-year in its completion rate and Tennessee had the greatest year-over-year swing, with a 44.3% drop — though it still had the second-highest completion rate in the country. Typically, the stronger states were last year, the further they fell this year, according to the network.

Mandatory states’ existing support infrastructure may have insulated them

Experts attribute this relative success to the mandatory states having supportive infrastructure that provided students with the tools they needed to navigate the submission process in what has turned into a notoriously problem-ridden year.

But no state has emerged from the process unscathed.

“While there is certainty some variation across the states, the pattern holds,” said Katharine Meyer, fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center of Education Policy. “Where submissions are down, completions are down. There are large gaps between the high-income and low-income high schools and then it’s just the magnitude to which those play out in different states.”

This year marked the release of the new form following the FAFSA Simplification Act, which was meant to streamline and simplify the historically complicated application for federal student aid, expand access to Federal Pell Grants for low-income students and change the way expected family contribution is calculated. But a botched rollout marred by delays and technical glitches — particularly for students whose parents are undocumented and don’t have Social Security numbers — has led to a dramatic drop in the number of students who have been able to submit the form. That’s left seniors in a lurch and both high schools and colleges scrambling.

[Related: ‘Bungled’ financial aid rollout leaves graduating seniors in limbo]

New FAFSA impact inequity

Not all students have been impacted equally, though. Among those at higher-income schools — where fewer than half of students qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch — about 36% completed the FAFSA this year, while only about a quarter of students at lower-income schools have, according to the college attainment network. The year-over-year drop is also significantly higher for students at low-income schools with an almost 10-point difference.

“It’s the lowest-income students, the first-generation students, who don’t have additional resources to guide them through this process, who are ultimately paying the price for this rollout,” said Meyer, “which is awful because the entire goal of the FAFSA Simplification Act was to target and support those students and make this an easier process.”

While there have always been gaps between students who have extra support and those who don’t, the added complexities and “minefields to navigate” on this year’s form exacerbated them, she added.

Overall, there’s been a 24% drop in the number of forms submitted as compared to the same time last year, according to The 74’s analysis of U.S. Department of Education data, and a 38% drop in the number of forms that have been completed without errors, according to the college attainment network, whose members include school districts and nonprofits.

National College Access Network

Changes in FAFSA completion

As of April 9, 16% of FAFSA applications still needed student corrections and about 30% of forms were potentially impacted by processing or data errors, according to a report released by the U.S. Department of Education.

[Related: Ed Dept. holds ‘Week of Action’ on financial aid, months after bungled rollout]

FAFSA completion rates significant

The completion rates are of particular significance, according to Bill DeBaun, the network’s senior director of data and strategic initiatives.

“Completions remain the target for NCAN and our members, and it’s what we’re encouraging the field to pursue,” he wrote to The 74. “Having a college-intending student who was motivated enough to submit the FAFSA, but who did not connect with financial aid because of an error that they didn’t correct, is a tragic outcome.”

Sheri Crigger, a college counselor at the School of Cyber Technology and Engineering in Huntsville, Alabama, said the biggest challenge is for students who still don’t have FAFSA results or aid packages from schools, even as the traditional May 1 decision day deadline quickly approaches. Normally by now, she said, kids would be announcing where they’re headed in the fall and wearing their new schools’ colors. Instead, she said, there’s just a feeling of uncertainty.

“I feel for them because there’s not a fix for that until they have the information they need,” she said. “I like to be able to kind of point them in a direction [but this year] there is no direction.”

Changing the mindset from optional to required

Nationally, seven states — Illinois, California, Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, Indiana and New Hampshire — have implemented universal FAFSA policies and five additional ones — Connecticut, New Jersey, Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma — have passed them, according to the network. Louisiana, which was the first state to implement a universal FAFSA policy in 2018, became the first to roll theirs back this year. State lawmakers said they were reversing course for a range of reasons, including arguments that the policy prioritized college over trade schools — although federal aid can often be used for the latter — and that completion is a burdensome requirement for families.

Elizabeth Morgan, the attainment network’s chief external relations officer, disagreed with their line of thinking.

“Universal FAFSA is not about penalizing students or holding students back,” she said. “It’s about changing the mindset from optional to required.”

Students — especially those from lower-income backgrounds — don’t always realize that financial aid is available to them until they submit their FAFSA form, Morgan added. They also might not know that the aid can be used at institutions other than four-year universities, such as trade schools and community colleges. Filling out FAFSA, she said, is important for these students because it fixes these misconceptions.

In states where there are mandates or universal FAFSA rules, schools are more likely to integrate support for completion into the school day and create more of a culture around it, leading to a significant increase in filing, according to Meyer, the Brookings fellow. Events such as FAFSA drives can also help to boost completion rates in a typical year by providing families with the tools they need to navigate the cumbersome, complex process.

[Related: Financial aid reform was his legacy. Now, Lamar Alexander calls it ‘a big mess’]

Are universal policies the solution?

When looking at the list of top submitters this year, a lot of them are states that have these mandates in place, Meyer said, suggesting that universal policies may have helped insulate them — and their students — during the messy rollout.

“They still aren’t good FAFSA submission and completion numbers… but it is less bad than in some other states,” she said.

Some experts in the field remain anxious that this will be an ongoing issue in future years. Meyer warned that there are already signs that next year’s form won’t be released on time once again. If the form is delayed but not riddled with errors, she added, students may still avoid this year’s chaos, especially since institutions are staffing up in anticipation.

“I do think long term I am an optimist,” she said. “I’m hopeful that this act will ultimately increase college access for those students, but it’s a bumpy couple of years in the process.”

***

Amanda Geduld is a staff reporter at The 74. She previously reported for The Maine Monitor and The Miami Herald, covering book bans, homeschooling regulations, the substitute teacher shortage, stagnant teacher salaries and private for-profit universities. Geduld’s work has appeared in The Washington Post, Chalkbeat, CNN Digital and elsewhere. Her background includes six years teaching high school English in urban public schools in Boston and New York City.

This story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. Sign up for free newsletters from The 74.

A two-story, holiday-decorated house with a line of people winding through room after seating-less room turned what should have been a fun-filled visit with Santa into something that the Rayne family of suburban Chicago suffered through.

Instead of a cheery chat about Christmas wish lists, Rohan Rayne got a few seconds and a couple of quick photos with the bearded guy. After that, the 11-year-old, who has a rare seizure disorder and problems handling crowds and noise, had to be rushed out of the house so he could find calm.

“It was a very difficult and challenging experience,” said Dr. Beena Kamath-Rayne, Rohan’s mother, a pediatrician, who was there with all three of her boys, trying to navigate that while providing Ro with space where he would not be as overwhelmed by all of the stimulation.

If the visit with Santa had been held in a place arranged according to concepts of the growing field of universal design, Rohan might not have been thrown off kilter as he waited more than an hour to spend time with Santa. Spaces adhering to universal design are built and laid out to meet the needs of people of varying ages, abilities and disabilities. 

For example, it would give Rohan, who also has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, a spot away from where he got so agitated while waiting his turn with Santa. 

Rohan Rayne with his mother, Dr. Beena Kamath-Rayne. (Courtesy of Kamath-Rayne family)

“I don’t have a problem with the actual waiting,” said Kamath-Rayne, also a Cerebral Palsy Alliance Research Foundation board member. “It’s just the way in which we could have been accommodated.” 

Going beyond Americans With Disabilities Act provisions 

Universal design expands upon accessibility as outlined in the Americans with Disabilities Act, the 1990 law resulting such accommodations wheelchair ramps and lifts being added to buildings and public transit buses and trains. Whereas, for example, an accessible multi-story building may have an elevator at the side of a structure, a universally designed one might start with a series of ramps at the entrance so that a person with mobility challenges doesn’t need to go hunting for an elevator. 

And instead of retrofitting a building, universal design considers what each person would need for ease of use in the design phase.

Passed in 2004, the Assistive Technology Act provided federal funding that began yielding such examples of universal design as speakerphones and closed-captioning on television.

John Vick, a public health strategist and director of the Tennessee Department of Health’s Office of Primary Prevention, said that universal design views everyone’s needs for access as equally important, regardless of physical, social or other limitations. “Everything around us that people construct, whether it’s a building, a sidewalk or a park impacts our health. So, considering all users in the design can contribute to improving public health.” 

Polio patient-turned-architect launched universal design 

The concept of universal design was first coined in the 1960s by U.S.-born, internationally recognized architect and product designer Ronald Mace, who developed polio in the mid-1950s when he was 9 years old and used a wheelchair. After he enrolled at North Carolina State University, Mace found that his wheelchair couldn’t pass through the bathroom doors on that campus. Plus, he had to be carried up and down the school’s stairs, according to attorney Stephanie Woodward, executive director of the Disability EmpowHer Network. Previously, she was director of advocacy at the Center for Disability Rights. 

When Mace, who died in 1998, became an architect, Woodward wrote on the center’s website that he focused on accessibility designs that would “be visually pleasing and usable to the greatest extent possible by everyone, regardless of age, ability, or situation.”

Those principles are reflected in zero-step entrances to buildings; handles instead of knobs; covered bus shelters with on-demand heating; street-crossing signals that can be both heard and seen; ramps and wide sidewalks for wheelchairs and strollers; benches in public places; protected bike lanes; and directional signs and maps with large text. 

“The beauty of universal design is that it considers everyone.”
John Vick,
public health strategist”

And while those and other design elements can be applied, Vick, who’s based in Nashville, stressed that universal design is far from a prescriptive approach with specific directions. Rather than having standards or required design features, it encourages creativity because multiple components and new thinking are often required to make spaces as inclusive as possible. 

Although aging people have catalyzed awareness of universal design, Vick says young people benefit from it because it considers both their current and future needs. 

“We’re all aging — even youth— so the approach ensures that those spaces will serve young people’s needs as they change across their lifespan,” he wrote, in an email to Youth Today. “Many young people also have physical, social, and other limitations that can be considered and addressed through the design process. The beauty of universal design is that it considers everyone.”

Universal Design inspired Universal Design in Learning

The National Center for Learning Disabilities cites universal design in architecture as the inspiration for Universal Design in Learning, which advocates for developing curriculum and assessments, or testing, of students. Some examples include incorporating assistive technology — items or software designed to enhance learning for students with disabilities — into learning and curriculum for all students, as well as providing multiple means of representation, action and engagement. 

Kamath-Rayne said that Rohan works with a physical therapist at in his elementary school’s special education programs for children with disabilities. She said that students in special education often are invited to join general education students to help place them in mainstream classrooms. But her son’s elementary school has been doing the reverse by inviting general education students into her son’s special education classroom. 

[Related: No more cures, no more fixes: How autistic leaders are changing the therapy debate]

Rohan’s classroom, she said, has ample space for letting kids who use wheelchairs, walkers, crutches and other mobility aids to navigate the room. Some furniture can be adapted so kids can stand while learning. There’s also a quiet space for kids who are over-stimulated and need to take sensory breaks, Kamath-Rayne said. Plus, special education teachers offer students toys to manipulate when they are fidgeting; step-by-step pictures that help guide participation in certain activities; and reward charts to help them self-regulate and become more independent.

[Related: ‘She just wants a friend’: Families push for full school days for children with disabilities]

Using universal design at the start of building projects is laudable, Kamath-Rayne said, and the broader public should also know its deeper aims.  

“Everyone wants to feel like they belong somewhere,” she said. “And so what I wouldn’t want to happen is that this design philosophy became so popular, but then it was like, hidden. You know, I want people to know that we’re doing this intentionally to make people feel like they belong.”

***

Erin Chan Ding, is a Chicago-based journalist, covering fitness, health, parenting, travel, politics, race, gender. She has a special interest in the intersection of justice and journalism. Her work has appeared in several publications including the The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, National Geographic Family, The New York Times, Detroit Free Press, Forbes, Time Out Chicago magazine, The Huffington Post, Chicago Health, Los Angeles Times, and Miami Herald.

LAUSD gradually scaled up its investment, rolling out training in 2015 for teachers and administrators in “restorative” practices like the ones Valladares described. Educators were also encouraged to implement an approach called positive behavioral interventions and supports. Together, these strategies seek to address the root causes of challenging behavior. That means both preventing it and, when some still inevitably occurs, responding in a way that strengthens the relationship between student and school rather than undermining it.

The district also created new positions, hiring school climate advocates to give campuses a warm, constructive tone, and “system of support advisors,” or SOSAs, to train current employees in the new way of doing discipline. From August to October 2023, SOSAs offered 380 such sessions; since July 2021 alone, more than 23,000 district staff members and 2,400 parents have participated in restorative practices training, according to LAUSD.

[Related: Breaking walls, building bridges: A call for restorative justice in school discipline]

All that work has been expensive: The district budgeted more than $31 million for school climate advocates, $16 million for restorative justice teachers and nearly $9 million for the SOSAs for this school year. Combined with spending on psychiatric social workers, mental health coordinators and campus aides, the district’s allocation for “school climate personnel” totaled more than $300 million this year.

That’s money other districts don’t have. And it’s part of what prompted the California School Boards Association to support the recent legislation only if it were amended to include more cash for alternative approaches to behavior management.

Troy Flint, the organization’s chief communications officer, said administrators in many remote, rural districts in particular do not have the bandwidth, or the ability to hire consultants, to train staff on new methods. Their schools also often lack a space for disruptive students who have had to leave class but can’t be sent home, and lack the adults needed to supervise them, he said. “You often have situations in these districts where you have a superintendent or principal who’s also a teacher, and maybe they drive a bus – they don’t have the capacity to implement all these programs,” said Flint.

The state’s 2023 budget allocated just $7 million, parceled out in grants of up to $100,000, for districts to implement restorative justice practices. If each got the full amount, only approximately 70 districts would receive funding — when there are more than a thousand districts in the state. Even then, the grants would give each district only a small fraction of what LAUSD has needed to make the shift.

[Related: Hidden expulsions? Schools kick students out but call it a ‘transfer’]

“The district doesn’t have my back.” Researchers, legislators and school board members, wear “rose-colored glasses.”
Abram van der Fluit, science teacher,
Maywood Academy High School

Even in LAUSD, the money only goes so far. The district of more than 1,000 schools employs nearly 120 restorative justice teachers, meaning only about a tenth of schools have one. Roughly a third of schools have a school climate advocate. SOSAs are stretched thin too, in some cases supporting as many as 25 schools each, and some budgeted SOSA positions haven’t been filled. There’s also the continual threat of lost funding: In recent years, the district has been using federal pandemic funding, which ends soon, to pay for some of the work. “School sites are having to make hard choices,” said Tanya Ortiz Franklin, an LAUSD school board member.

And money hasn’t been the district’s only challenge. Success requires buy-in, and buy-in requires a change in educators’ mindsets. Back in 2013, van der Fluit recalls, his colleagues’ perspective on the ban on willful defiance suspensions was often: “What is this hippie-dippie baloney?” Teachers also questioned the motives of district leaders, wondering if they wanted to avoid suspending kids because school funding is tied to average daily attendance.

Last year, for example, when he asked a student who was late to get a tardy slip, she refused. She also refused when a campus aide, and then the restorative justice coordinator and then the principal, asked her to go to the school’s office. The situation was eventually resolved after her basketball coach arrived, but van der Fluit said it had been “a 20-minute thing, and I’m trying to teach in between all of this stuff.”

That sort of scene is rare at Maywood, van der Fluit said, but it happens. There are students “who just want to disrupt, and they know how to manipulate and control and are gaslighting and deflecting.” He described seeing a student with his phone out. When van der Fluit said, “You had your phone out,” the student denied it. Van der Fluit said there are days he feels “the district doesn’t have my back” under this new system. Researchers, legislators and school board members, he said, wear “rose-colored glasses.”

His concerns are not uncommon. But according to Losen, in LAUSD, “The main issue for teachers was that the teacher training was phased in while the policy change was not.”

In recent years there has been some parental pushback too: At a November 2023 meeting of the school district safety and climate committee, for example, a handful of parents described their kids’ schools as “out of control” and decried a “rampant lack of discipline.”

Ortiz Franklin acknowledged an uptick in behavioral incidents over the last three years, but attributed it to the pandemic and students’ isolation and loss, not the shift in disciplinary approach. Groups like Students Deserve, a youth-led, grassroots nonprofit, have urged LAUSD to hold the line on its positive, restorative approach.

[Related: Giving first-time juvenile offenders avenues away from detention in New York]

“Our schools are not an uncontrollable, violent, off-the-wall place. They’re a place with kids who are dealing with an unprecedented level of trauma and need an unprecedented level of support,” said W. Joseph Williams, the group’s director.

District survey data presented at the same November meeting, meanwhile, suggests most teachers remain relatively committed to the policies: On a 1 to 4 scale, teachers rated their support for restorative practices at around a 3, on average, and principals rated it close to a 4.

Even van der Fluit, who maintains that the new way takes more work, said: “But is it the better thing for the student? For sure.”

“And what’s the point in a school if there’s no corrections, just instant punishment?”
Mikey Valladares, 12th grader,
Maywood Academy High School

At Maywood, Marcus Van, the restorative justice coordinator who met with Valladares after the teen argued with a teacher, said students have a chance to talk out their problems and grievances and resolve them. In contrast, Van said, “When you just suspend someone, you do not go through the process of reconciliation.”

Often, so-called defiant behavior is spurred by some larger issue, he said: “Maybe somebody has parents who are on drugs [or] abusive, maybe they have housing insecurity, maybe they have food insecurity, maybe they’re being bullied.” He added: “I think people want an easy fix for a complicated problem.”

Valladares, for his part, knows some people think suspensions breed school safety. But he said he feels safer — and behaves in a way that’s safer for others — when “I’m able to voice how I feel.”

Twelfth grader Yaretzy Ferreira said: “I feel like they actually hear us out, instead of just cutting us out.”

Her first year and a half at Maywood, she was “really hyper sassy,” according to Van. But, Ferreira recalled, that changed after Van invited her mom and a translator to a meeting: “He was like, ‘Your daughter did this, this, this, but we’re not here to get her in trouble. We’re here to help.’” Now, the only reason she ends up in Van’s office is for a water or a snack.

Van der Fluit said the new approach is better for all kids, not just those with a history of defiance. For example, the class that watched the tardy slip interaction unfold saw adults model how to successfully manage frustration and de-escalate a situation. “That’s incredibly valuable,” he said, “more valuable than learning photosynthesis.”

The Maywood campus is calmer than it used to be, educators at the school say. Students, for the most part, no longer roam the halls during class time. There’s less profanity, said history teacher Michael Melendez. Things are going “just fine” without willful defiance suspensions, he said.

Nationally, researchers have come to a similar conclusion: A 2023 report from the Learning Policy Institute, based on data for about 2 million California students, concluded that exposure to restorative practices improved academic achievement, behavior and school safety. A 2023 study on restorative programs in Chicago Public Schools, conducted by the University of Chicago Education Lab, found positive changes in how students viewed their schools, their in-school safety and their sense of belonging.

In Los Angeles, many students say the hard work of transitioning to a new disciplinary approach is worth it.

“We’re still kids in a way. We are growing, but there’s still corrections to be made,” said Valladares. “And what’s the point in a school if there’s no corrections, just instant punishment?”

***

Gail Cornwall, a San Francisco-based award-winning, freelance writer, is a former ninth-grade public school teacher and higher education lawyer. Her articles on education, parenting and other topics impacting children and families have been published by the Atlantic, Boston Globe, Guardian, the LA Times, New York Times, Salon, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, U.S. News & World Report, and the Washington Post, among others.​

The Hechinger Report is a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

This story also appeared in USA TODAY.

For the first 57 minutes of the basketball game between two Bend, Oregon, high school rivals, Kyra Rice stood at the edges of the court taking yearbook photos. With just minutes before the end of the game, she was told she had to move.

Kyra pushed back: She had permission to stand near the court. The athletic director got involved, Kyra recalled. She let a swear word or two slip.

Kyra has anxiety as well as ADHD, which can make her impulsive. Following years of poor  experiences at school, she sometimes became defensive when she felt overwhelmed, said her mom, Jules Rice.

But at the game, Kyra said she kept her cool overall. Both she and her mother were shocked to learn the next day that she’d been suspended from school.

“OK, maybe she said some bad words, but it’s not enough to suspend her,” Rice said.

The incident’s discipline record, provided by Rice, lists a series of categories to explain the suspension: insubordination, disobedience, disrespectful/minor disruption, inappropriate language, non-compliance.

Experts say report’s findings are a sign that federal legal protections are falling short

Broad and subjective categories like these are cited hundreds of thousands of times a year to justify removing students from school, a Hechinger Report investigation found. The data show that students with disabilities, like Kyra, are more likely than their peers to be punished for such violations. In fact, they’re often more likely to be suspended for these reasons than for other infractions.

For example, between 2017-18 and 2021-22, Rhode Island students with disabilities were, on average, two and a half times more likely than their peers to be suspended for any reason, but nearly three times more likely to be suspended for insubordination and almost four times more likely to be suspended for disorderly conduct. Similar patterns played out in other states with available data including Massachusetts, Montana and Vermont.

A Flourish chart

Federal law should offer students protections from being suspended for behavior that results from their disability, even if they are being disruptive or insubordinate. But those protections have significant limitations. At the same time, these subjective categories are almost tailor-made to trap students with disabilities, who might have trouble expressing or regulating themselves appropriately.

Districts have wide discretion in setting their own rules and many students with disabilities quickly earn reputations at school as troublemakers. “Unfortunately, who gets caught up in a lot of the vagueness in the codes of conduct are students with disabilities,” said attorney Robert Tudisco, an expert with Understood.org, a nonprofit that provides resources and support to people with learning and attention disabilities.

[Related: When your disability gets you sent home from school]

Students on the autism spectrum often have a hard time communicating with words and might yell or become aggressive if something upsets them. A student with oppositional defiant disorder is likely to be openly insubordinate to authority, while one with dyslexia might act out when frustrated with schoolwork. Students with ADHD typically have a hard time controlling their impulses.

“Disruptive conduct” accounted for more than 50% of suspensions in Oregon

Kyra’s disability created challenges throughout her school career in the Bend-La Pine School District. “Nobody really understood her,” Rice said. “She’s a big personality and she’s very impulsive. And impulsivity is what gets kids in trouble and gets kids suspended.”

Kyra, now 17, said that too few teachers cared about her individualized education program, or IEP, a document that details the accommodations a student in special education is granted. She’d regularly butt heads with teachers or skip class altogether to avoid them. Her favorite teacher was her special ed teacher.

“She understood my ADHD and my other special needs,” Kyra said. “My other teachers didn’t.”

Scott Maben, district spokesperson, said in an email he could not comment on specific disciplinary matters because of privacy concerns, but that the district had a range of responses to deal with student misconduct and that administrators “carefully consider a response that is commensurate with the violation.”

In Oregon, “disruptive conduct” accounted for more than half of all suspensions from 2017-18 to 2021-22. The state department of education includes in that category insubordination and disorderly conduct, as well as harassment, obscene behavior, minor physical altercations, and “other” rule violations.

Individuals with Disabilities Education Act provides federal protections

Disruptive behavior is the leading cause of suspensions because of its “inherently subjective nature,” the state department of education’s spokesperson, Marc Siegal, said in an email. He added that the department monitors discipline data for special education disparities and works with school districts on the issue.

The primary protections for students with disabilities come from the federal government, through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA. But that law only requires districts to examine whether a student’s behavior stems from their disability after they have missed 10 total days of school through suspension.

At that point, districts are required to hold a manifestation hearing, in which officials must determine whether a student’s behavior was the result of their disability. “That’s where it gets very gray,” Tudisco said. “What happens in the determination of manifestation is very subjective.”

In his experience, he added, the behavior is almost always connected to a student’s disability, but school districts often don’t see it that way.

[Related: Senators call for stronger rules to reduce off-the-books suspensions]

“Manifestation is not about giving Johnny or Susie a free pass because they have a disability,” Tudisco said. “It’s a process to understand why this behavior occurred so we can do something to prevent it tomorrow.”

The connections are often much clearer to parents.

Inequities in Rhode Island suspensions

A Rhode Island mother, Pearl, said her daughter was easily overwhelmed in her elementary school classroom in the Bristol Warren Regional School District. (Pearl is being referred to by her middle name because she is still a district parent and fears retaliation.)

Her child has autism and easily experiences a sensory overload. If the classroom was too loud or someone new walked in, she might start screaming and get out of her seat, Pearl said. Teachers struggled to calm her down, as other students were escorted out of the room.

Sometimes, Pearl was called to pick up her daughter early, in an unrecorded informal removal. A few times, though, she was suspended for disorderly conduct, Pearl recalled.

Between 2017-18 and 2020-21, students with disabilities in the Bristol Warren Regional School District made up about 13 percent of the student body, but accounted for 21 percent of suspensions for insubordination and 30 percent of all disorderly conduct suspensions.

The district did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

The Rhode Island Department of Education collects data on school discipline from districts, but special education and discipline reform advocates in the state say that the agency rarely acts on these numbers.

Department spokesperson Victor Morente said in an email that the agency monitors discipline data and is “very clear that suspension should be the last option considered.” He added that the department has published resources about alternatives to suspension and discipline specifically for students with disabilities.

A 2016 state law that limits the overall use of out-of-school suspensions also requires that districts examine their data for inequities. Districts that find such disparities are supposed to submit a report to the department of education, said Hannah Stern, a policy associate at the Rhode Island American Civil Liberties Union.

Her group submits public records requests for copies of their reports every year, but has never received one, she said, “even though almost every single school district exhibits disparities.”

[Related: Sent home early — Lost learning in special education]

Pearl said that her daughter needed one-on-one support in the classroom instead of punishment. “She’s autistic. She’s not going to learn her lesson by suspending her,” Pearl said. “She actually got more scared to go back. She actually felt very unwelcome and very sad.”

Is the federal road map for responses to misconduct related to a student’s disabilities being followed?

Students with autism often have a hard time connecting their actions to the punishment, said Joanne Quinn, executive director of The Autism Project, a Rhode Island-based group that offers support to family members of people with autism. With suspension, “there’s no learning going on and they’re going to do the same thing incorrectly.”

Quinn’s group provides training for schools throughout Rhode Island and beyond, aimed at helping teachers understand how the brain functions in people with autism and offering strategies on how to effectively respond to behavior challenges that could easily be labeled disobedient or disorderly.

Federal law provides a road map for schools to improve how they respond to misconduct related to a student’s disability. Schools should identify a student’s triggers and create a behavior intervention plan aimed at preventing problems before they start, it says.

[Related: How a disgraced method of diagnosing learning disabilities persists in our nation’s schools]

But, doing these things well requires time, resources and training that can be in short supply, leaving teachers feeling alone, struggling to maintain order in their classrooms, said Christine Levy, a former special education teacher and administrator who works as an advocate for individual special education students in the Northeast, including Rhode Island.

Levy recently worked with a student with disabilities who was suspended after he tickled a peer at a locker on five straight days. But, she said, the situation should have never reached the point of suspension: Educators should have quickly identified what the boy was struggling with and set a plan in motion to help him, including modeling appropriate locker conduct.

Had this boy’s teachers done that, the suspension could have been avoided. “The repair of that is so much longer and so much harder to do versus, let’s catch it right away,” she said.

Do teachers need more — or new — training?

Many parents described similar situations, though, in which a child routinely got in trouble for repeated behavior. When Michelle Gomes’s daughter became upset in her kindergarten classroom, she’d often run out and refuse to come back in. Sometimes, she’d tear things off the walls.

“Whenever she gets like that, it’s hard to see,” Gomes said. “I hurt for her. It’s like she’s not in control.”

Gomes received regular calls from Cranston Public School officials to come pick her daughter up. A couple of times, the child was formally suspended, Gomes said. The school described her as a safety risk, Gomes recalled.

“She obviously doesn’t feel safe herself,” she said.

Cranston Public Schools did not respond to requests for comment.

Gomes’s daughter had a speech delay and anxiety and qualified for special education services. A private neurological evaluation concluded that she was compensating for that delay with her physical responses, Gomes said.

This can be a common cause of behavior challenges for students with disabilities, experts say.

[Related: What happens when suspensions get suspended?]

“Behavior is communication,” said Julian Saavedra, an assistant principal and an expert at Understood.org.* “The behavior is trying to tell us something. We as the IEP team, the school team, have to dig deeper.”

On her own, Gomes found strategies that helped. Gomes’ child struggled with transitions, so they’d go over her day in advance to prepare her for what to expect. A play therapist taught both her and her daughter breathing exercises.

Her daughter was switched to another district school where a social worker would sometimes walk the girl to class. When the child got worked up, she’d sometimes be allowed to sit with that social worker or in the nurse’s office to calm down. That helped, but sometimes, those staff members weren’t available.

In the end, Gomes moved her daughter to a school outside the district that was better equipped to help the girl deescalate. Her behavior problems lessened and she started enjoying going to school, Gomes said.

But Gomes still can’t understand why more teachers weren’t able to help her child regulate herself. “Do we need retraining or do we need new training?” she said. “Because this is mind blowing to me, not one of you can do that.”

***

Note: The Hechinger Report’s Fazil Khan had nearly completed the data analysis and reporting for this project when he died in a fire in his apartment building. USA TODAY Senior Data Editor Doug Caruso completed data visualizations for this project based on Khan’s work.

This story about suspension of students with disabilities was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

This story also appeared in USA Today.

This story was originally published by The 19th.

Advocates for the LGBTQ+ community and sexual violence survivors are largely applauding the Department of Education’s newly released federal regulations to protect the rights of these groups in schools, though they also expressed reservations about the lack of clear protections for transgender athletes.

Unveiled on Friday, the final rule under Title IX includes provisions that strengthen the rights of sexual violence survivors during investigations and of LGBTQ+ individuals to experience school in a way that aligns with their gender identity. Title IX is a historic civil rights law preventing federally funded academic institutions from practicing sex discrimination.

The new regulations stop short of stating that transgender students have the right to play on the sports teams that correspond with their identities, a move that supporters of these young people hoped the Department of Education would make given the series of state laws enacted in recent years to prevent trans and nonbinary youth from participating in athletics. Instead, education officials have left rulemaking related to sports and gender identity for future consideration.

Some equal rights supporters say changes do too little

A coalition of equal rights supporters representing over 20 groups —  including LGBTQ+ advocacy groups the Human Rights Campaign, GLSEN and the Trevor Project — issued a joint statement on Friday arguing that the new regulations do too little to protect transgender athletes.

“This regulation does not go far enough in making the law’s protections clear for all student athletes,” the statement said. “Currently, 37 percent of transgender, nonbinary, and intersex youth live in states with laws that ban them from participating in sports consistent with their gender identity. As with all students, Title IX protects transgender, nonbinary and intersex student athletes from discriminatory policies, as the Biden administration has already argued in court and a federal appeals court upheld just this week.”

The coalition called on the Biden administration to “finish the job” by leaving no doubt in the regulations that transgender, nonbinary and intersex student-athletes have protections under Title IX.

Even critics call final rule a “milestone” in protecting LGBTQ+ civil rights

While the coalition criticized the lack of clarity in the regulations about nonbinary student-athletes, it characterized the final rule overall as a “milestone” for protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ students to use school bathrooms, attend school dances with same-sex dates or mention their gender identity or sexual orientation in their schoolwork.

Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said on Thursday during a call with reporters that Title IX serves to ensure that no one in a federally funded school faces sex discrimination. He also discussed how the law has historically protected women and girls.

“For over half a century, Title IX has opened doors, expanded access and promised fairness,” he said. “Before Title IX was passed in 1972, women and girls didn’t have equal access to education in this country. That was unacceptable then, and it’s unfathomable now.”

Since President Joe Biden took office, advocates have pressed his administration to quickly adopt new Title IX regulations. They raised concerns that the former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, appointed by then-President Donald Trump, rolled back Title IX safeguards in 2020 by narrowing the definition of sexual harassment, giving protections to alleged perpetrators, failing to protect LGBTQ+ students and instituting controversial rules for questioning during sexual misconduct hearings. Although Title IX is a federal law, each administration takes a different approach to enforcing its regulations about sex discrimination.

New Biden administration regulations strengthen protections for sex discrimination, reversing Trump-era changes

After suggesting updates to the regulations in 2022, the Department of Education fielded over 240,000 public comments that it took under consideration during its rulemaking process. The newly finalized Title IX rule under Cardona not only repeals many of the DeVos-era changes but also represents “the most comprehensive coverage under Title IX since the regulations were first promulgated in 1975,” said Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary for the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education, during Thursday’s call with reporters. “The final regulations encourage reporting of sex discrimination under Title IX and require institutions to respond promptly and effectively.” The 2020 regulations asked little of schools, only tasking them with not deliberately ignoring sexual harassment, she added.

Tracey Vitchers, executive director of It’s On Us, a nonprofit that works to end college sexual assault, said that requiring schools to promptly investigate sexual misconduct is an important change from the DeVos-era guidelines.

“The 2020 regulation eliminated the prior 60-day time limit for schools to complete Title IX investigations, which resulted in institutions dragging investigations out for months on end,” she said. Sometimes, investigations would span multiple semesters and summer breaks, she said. This resulted in student survivors graduating before investigations ended. This “was obviously very harmful to student survivors who were looking for a swift resolution to their allegations,” Vitchers said.

The new regulations also undo the DeVos requirement that called for sexual violence survivors and their accused perpetrators to undergo live cross-examinations during misconduct hearings. Advocates for survivors said this mandate was designed to scare them.

“Fundamentally, the live cross-examination requirement was never about upholding due process for respondents, but rather was an intimidation tactic intended to push survivors out of the Title IX investigation process,” Vitchers said. “The requirement for live cross-examination is really emblematic of the harmful thesis at the core of the 2020 regulations that women must be able to withstand a more onerous investigation process and that their claims must meet a higher burden of proof in order to protect college men from false allegations of sexual assault.”

As Biden faces an election rematch with former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, Department of Education officials made a point to contrast the updated Title IX regulations with those of the Trump era. Rather than weaken protections for sexual violence survivors, LGBTQ+ people and pregnant people, their regulations fortify them, they said.

Final rule defines sex-based harassment and sex discrimination

The final rule also describes what sex-based harassment and sex discrimination are, noting that schools must provide an educational environment free of biases “based on sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity.”

Department of Education officials said that the new regulations could address the disturbing trend of pornographic deepfake images circulating in schools, a phenomenon that was not even a possibility when Title IX was first established in the 1970s. Lhamon said that if deepfake harassment creates a hostile environment in a school setting that it could also constitute sex discrimination under the federal law.

“The school would need to take prompt and effective steps to ensure nondiscrimination for the students on the basis of sex moving forward,” she said.

Title IX statute itself exempts religiously controlled institutions

The regulations acknowledge that stopping someone from experiencing school in a way that’s consistent with their gender identity causes harm, but they also do not prevent religious institutions from discriminating against LGBTQ+ students or staff.

“The Title IX statute itself exempts religiously controlled institutions, and the regulations are unchanged in tracking that statute,” Lhamon said.

Although the new regulations don’t protect LGBTQ+ students in religious institutions or, at present, protect the rights of trans and nonbinary student-athletes, the conservative group the Independent Women’s Forum announced Friday that it would sue the Biden administration for safeguarding gender identity.

[Related: Texas politics leave transgender foster youth isolated — during and after life in state care]

The regulations also stress the rights of parents and guardians to advocate for their children and the needs of individuals who allege they have experienced sex discrimination. They protect students and staff from reprisal, including from peers, related to their rights under Title IX.

“Students who experience sexual violence or discrimination shouldn’t have to weigh our safety against our ability to go to class or participate in campus life,” said Emily Bach, a New York-based college student, in a statement. Bach is an organizer with Know Your IX, a project of Advocates for Youth, which fights for sexual health, rights and justice. “The Biden Administration’s updated Title IX rule will make sure that students who experience harm can come forward and seek support without jeopardizing our ability to graduate on time or get a degree,” she said.

Vitchers said that survivors and advocates have fought tirelessly for these reforms dating back to when the Trump administration took office.

“It’s On Us has long advocated for updated Title IX regulations that prioritize the protection of all students and survivors of sexual assault,” she said. “We are glad that the Biden administration finally fulfilled its promise to student survivors to return Title IX to its original intent of protecting their civil rights in the aftermath of sexual violence.”

***

Nadra Nittle is an education reporter for The 19th. She was previously a senior reporter for Civil Eats and a staff reporter for Vox Media and the Long Beach Press-Telegram, where she covered K-12 education. Her writing has also appeared in publications including The Guardian, Business Insider, The Atlantic, BBC News, NBC News and EdSource.

The 19th — named after the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution — is an independent, nonprofit newsroom reporting on gender, politics and policy. Their goal is to empower women and LGBTQ+ people — particularly those from underrepresented communities — with the information, resources and tools they need to be equal participants in our democracy. 

At the same time, social media platforms like TikTok were flooded with videos purportedly highlighting service vulnerabilities that taught others “how to cheat.”K-12 schools’ use of remote proctoring tools, however, has largely gone under the radar. Nearly a year since the federal public health emergency expired and several since the vast majority of students returned to in-person learning, an analysis by The 74 has revealed that K-12 schools nationwide — and online-only programs in particular — continue to use tools from digital proctoring companies on students, including those as young as kindergarten.

Previously unreleased survey results from the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology found that remote proctoring in K-12 schools has become widespread. In its August 2023 educator poll, 36% of teachers reported that their school uses the surveillance software.

Civil rights activists, who contend AI proctoring tools fail to work as intended, harbor biases and run afoul of students’ constitutional protections, said the privacy and security concerns are particularly salient for young children and teens, who may not be fully aware of the monitoring or its implications.

“It’s the same theme we always come back to with student surveillance: It’s not an effective tool for what it’s being claimed to be effective for,” said Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. “But it actually produces real harms for students.”

It’s always strange in a virtual setting — it’s like you’re watching yourself take the test in the mirror.
Ammon Wiemers, Principal Kings Peak High School

Wiemers is aware that the school, where about 280 students are enrolled full time and another 1,500 take courses part time, must make a delicate “compromise between a valid testing environment and students’ privacy.” When students are first subjected to the software he said “it’s kind of weird to see that a camera is watching,” but unlike the uproar at colleges, he said the monitoring has become “normalized” among his students and that anybody with privacy concerns is allowed to take their tests in person.

“It’s always strange in a virtual setting — it’s like you’re watching yourself take the test in the mirror,” he said. “But when students use it more, they get used to it.”

Children ‘don’t take tests’

Late last year, Proctorio founder and CEO Mike Olsen published a blog post in response to research critical of the company’s efficacy. A tech-savvy Ohio college student had conducted an analysis and concluded Proctorio’s face-detection capabilities relied on an open-source software library with a history of racial biases — including a failure to recognize Black faces more than half of the time.

The student tested the company’s face-detection capabilities against a dataset of nearly 11,000 images, called FairFace, which depicted people of multiple races and ethnicities, with results showing a failure to distinguish Black faces 57% of the time, Middle Eastern faces 41% of the time and white faces 40% of the time. Such a high failure rate was problematic for Proctorio, which relies on its ability to flag cheaters by zeroing in on people’s facial features and movements.

Olsen’s post sought to discredit the research, arguing that while the FairFace dataset had been used to identify biases in other facial-detection algorithms, the images weren’t representative of “a live test-taker’s remote exam experience.”

“For example,” he wrote, “children and cartoons don’t take tests so including those images as part of the data set is unrealistic and unrepresentative.”

Are young children being monitored without informed consent?

To Ian Linkletter, a librarian from Canada embroiled in a long-running battle with Proctorio over whether its products were harmful, Olsen’s response was baffling. Sure, cartoon characters don’t take tests. But children, he said, certainly do. What he wasn’t sure about, however, was whether those younger test-takers were being monitored by Proctorio — so he set out to find out.

He found two instances, both in Texas, where Proctorio was being used in the K-12 setting, including at a remote school tied to the University of Texas at Austin. Linkletter shared his findings with The 74, which used the government procurement tool GovSpend to identify other districts that have contracts with Proctorio and its competitors.

Young children are unable to truly consent … and may not fully understand its potential ramifications.

More than 100 K-12 school districts have relied on Proctorio and its competitors, according to the GovSpend data, with a majority of expenditures made during the height of the pandemic. And while remote learning has become a more integral part of K-12 schooling nationwide, seven districts have paid for remote proctoring services in the last year. While extensive, the GovSpend database doesn’t provide a complete snapshot of U.S. school districts or their expenditures.

“It was just obvious that Proctorio had K-12 clients and were being misleading about children under 18 using their product,” Linkletter said, adding that young people could be more susceptible to the potential harms of persistent surveillance. “It’s almost like a human rights issue when you’re imposing it on students, especially on K-12 students.”

Young children, he argued, are unable to truly consent to being monitored by the software and may not fully understand its potential ramifications.

In 2020, Proctorio sued Linkletter  over a series of tweets in which the then-University of British Columbia learning technology specialist linked to Proctorio-produced YouTube videos, which the company had made available to instructors. Using the video on the tool’s “Abnormal Eye Movement function,” Linkletter tweeted that it showed “the emotional harm you are doing to students by using this technology.”

Proctorio’s lawsuit alleged that Linkletter’s use of the company’s videos, which were unlisted and could only be viewed by those with the link, amounted to copyright infringement and distributing of confidential material. In January, Canada’s Supreme Court declined to consider Linkletter’s claim that the litigation was specifically designed to silence him.

Remote proctoring costs K-12 schools millions

Editors note: Aside from Principal Wiemers, representatives for schools mentioned in this story didn’t respond to interview requests or declined to comment. Meazure Learning and Honorlock didn’t respond to media inquiries.

While there is little independent research on the efficacy of any remote proctoring tools in preventing cheating, one 2021 study found that Proctorio failed to detect test-takers who had been instructed to cheat. Researchers concluded the software is “best compared to taking a placebo: It has some positive influence, not because it works but because people believe that it works, or that it might work.”

A rubric at UT High School, the online K-12 school operated by the University of Texas, indicates that Proctorio is used for Credit by Exam tests, which award course credit to students who can demonstrate mastery in a particular subject. For students in kindergarten, first and second grade, the district pairs district proctoring with a “Proctorio Secure Browser,” which prohibits test takers from leaving the online exam to use other websites or programs. Beginning in third grade, according to the rubric uploaded to the school’s website, test takers are required to use Proctorio’s remote online proctoring.

Proctorio isn’t the only remote proctoring tool in use in K-12 schools. GovSpend data indicate the school district in Las Vegas, Nevada, has spent more than $1.4 million since 2018 on contracts with Proctorio competitor Honorlock. Spending on Honorlock by the Clark County School District surged during the pandemic but as recently as October, it had a $286,000 company purchase. GovSpend records indicate the tool is used at Nevada Learning Academy, the district’s online-only program which claims more than 4,500 elementary, middle and high school students. Clark County school officials didn’t respond to questions about how Honorlock is being utilized.

Meanwhile, dozens of K-12 school districts relied on the remote proctoring service ProctorU, now known as Meazure Learning, during the pandemic, records indicate, with several maintaining contracts after school closures subsided. Among them is the rural Watertown School District in South Dakota, which spent $18,000 on the service last fall.

How invasive are room scans? A federal judge ruled them unconstitutional.

At TTU K-12, an online education program offered by Texas Tech University, a web page notes the institution relies on Proctorio for “all online courses and Credit by Examinations,” flagging suspicious activity to teachers for review. In an apparent nod to Proctorio privacy concerns, TTU instructs students to select private spaces for exams and that if they are testing in a private home, they have to get the permission of anyone also residing there for the test to be recorded.

Documents indicate that K-12 institutions continue to subject remote learners to room scans even after a federal judge ruled a university’s use of the practice was unconstitutional. In 2022, a federal judge sided with a Cleveland State University student, who alleged that a room scan taken before an online exam at the Ohio institution violated his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures. The judge ruled that the scan was “unreasonable,” adding that “room scans go where people otherwise would not, at least not without a warrant or an invitation.”

[Related: Meet the gatekeepers of students’ private lives]

Marlow of the ACLU says he finds room scans particularly troubling — especially in the K-12 context. From an equity perspective, he said such scans could have disproportionately negative effects on undocumented students, those living with undocumented family members and students living in poverty. He expressed concerns that information collected during room scans could be used as evidence for immigration enforcement

“There are two fairly important groups of vulnerable students, undocumented families and poor students, who may not feel that they can participate in these classes because they either think it’s legally dangerous or they’re embarrassed to use the software,” he said.

[Related: ‘Distrust, Detection & Discipline:’ New data reveals teachers’ ChatGPT crackdown]

The TTU web page notes that students “may be randomly asked to perform a room scan,” where they’re instructed to offer their webcam a 360-degree view of the exam environment with a warning: Failure to perform proper scans could result in a violation of exam procedures.

“If you’re using a desktop computer with a built-in webcam, it might be difficult to lift and rotate the entire computer,” the web page notes while offering a solution. “You can either rotate a mirror in front of the webcam or ask your instructor for further instruction.”

Wiemers, the principal in Utah, said that Proctorio serves as a deterrent against cheating — but is far from foolproof.

“There’s ways to cheat any software,” he said, adding that educators should avoid the urge to respond to Proctorio alerts with swift discipline. In the instances where Proctorio has caught students cheating, he said that instead of being given a failing grade, they’re simply asked to retake the test.

“There are limitations to the software, we have to admit that, it’s not perfect, not even close,” he said. “But if we expect it to be, and the stakes are high and we’re overly punitive, I would say [students] have a legitimate concern.”

During a TTU K-12 advisory board meeting in July 2021, administrators outlined the extent that Proctorio is used during exams. Justin Louder, who at the time served as the TTU K-12 interim superintendent, noted that teachers and a “handful of administrators within my office” had access to view the recordings. Ensuring that third parties didn’t have access to the video feeds was “a big deal for us,” he said, because they’re “dealing with minors.”

While college students “really kind of pushed back” on remote proctoring, he noted that they only received a few complaints from K-12 parents, who recognized the service offered scheduling benefits. Like Wiemers, he framed the issue as one of 24-hour convenience.

“It lets students go at their own pace,” he said. “If they’re ready at 2 o’clock in the morning, they can test at 2 o’clock in the morning.”

***

Mark Keierleber is an investigative reporter at The 74. Previously, Mark was a reporter at the Student Press Law Center, a Washington, D.C.-based legal assistance agency, where he reported on government transparency and First Amendment issues relevant to students and educators.

This story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. Sign up for free newsletters from The 74.

This story was originally published by The 19th*.

Participants in a guaranteed income program in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were able to save more money, cover emergencies and had more time and space for parenting, which in turn positively impacted their children’s educational outcomes, according to a program assessment from the Center for Guaranteed Income Research at the University of Pennsylvania.

“[$500 a month] can mean the difference between being able to get that tire fixed or not being able to make it to work, and that’s huge for so many American families.”
Stacia West, director/co-founder
Center for Guaranteed Income Research.

Cambridge Recurring Income for Success (RISE) was an 18-month guaranteed income program that offered 130 single caregivers $500 cash payments from September 2021 to February 2023. Participants — 96 percent of whom were women and 62 percent of whom were African American — had to have an income below 80 percent of the area’s median income to be eligible. Cambridge is just outside of Boston and home to Harvard University.

Participants’ ability to cover $400 emergencies increased from 33.8 percent at the start of the program to 41.5 percent six months after the program, though it declined to 30 percent by the program’s ending. Savings improved for participants between the 12 and 18-month marks, though most said their savings were stable throughout the program.

Mean housing cost burden, or the percentage of one’s income that goes towards housing needs, decreased for the RISE recipients from 50.5 percent to 41.8 percent by the end of the program. Full-time employment for participants increased from 36 percent at the baseline to 40 percent by the 12-month mark.

The pilot’s success validates supporters’ belief that guaranteed income programs help families and don’t encourage people to rely solely on the payments.

Financial stability increased for all caregivers in the guaranteed income program

“Quite consistently, we see across all of these programs that people spend the money to support their families. No one’s going to quit working for $500 a month,” said Stacia West, an associate professor at the University of Tennessee College of Social Work and the director and co-founder of the Center for Guaranteed Income Research.

“I think one of the major highlights out of Cambridge is this ability to save. Having $500 in your bank account can mean the difference between being able to get that tire fixed or not being able to make it to work, and that’s huge for so many American families,” West said.

Improved caregivers mental health and increased parenting time

Another important assessment of the program was on guaranteed income’s impact on participants’ sense of self, she said.

“When we introduce a guaranteed income, does that free up a little bit of mental space, or emotional, or even spiritual space that you can actualize as a human and not have all of your time completely spent on day-to-day survival?” West said. “Whenever you’re on the margins, and you’re dealing and negotiating a lower income, you just have less time and space to think about yourself and your own dreams and your own goals and your own agency.”

Results from Cambridge RISE show the extra money created time and space that participants spent with their children, and the children of RISE recipients had higher grades than their peers whose parents and caregivers were in a control group that did not receive funding, the report said.

At the start of the program, 59 percent of participants reported being able to help their children with hands-on learning activities such as building projects. That figure peaked at 78 percent by the program’s six-month mark and concluded at 71 percent. Fifty-two percent reported being able to do arts and crafts with their kids. That figure peaked at 74 percent by the program’s six-month mark and held steady at 64 percent for the 12- and 18-month marks.

This freed-up time allowed one recipient, identified in the study only as Veronica, to make arts and crafts and have Sunday dinner with her daughter.

“If I was not in my situation [with RISE], any way of trying to get extra money, I would be most likely working, which would then take my time away from my daughter and myself,” Veronica said. “This is not just benefiting me, it’s benefiting my daughter. … I get to show her things and that betters her.”

Pixabay

The pilot’s success validates supporters’ belief that guaranteed income programs help families and don’t encourage people to rely solely on the payments.

The results showing increased time and space for parenting stood out to former Cambridge mayor and current city council member Sumbul Siddiqui, who initiated Cambridge RISE during her time as mayor.

“I just think about my mom and dad [who] were just constantly working multiple jobs and how hard that was,” Siddiqui said. “Quality time is so important.”

Nation-wide organizations support guaranteed income

Siddiqui, who became the first Muslim mayor in Massachusetts when elected in January 2020, looked deeper into direct cash payments once she saw how much Cambridge residents remained in need even after she launched the city’s over-$5 million COVID-19 disaster relief fund.

That’s when she learned about the network organization Mayors for Guaranteed Income and their $500,000 grant for mayors to launch these programs in their cities if they could match the donation. Siddiqui, in partnership with Cambridge Community Foundation, Cambridge Economic Opportunity Committee, Cambridge Housing Authority and community organizations Just-A-Start and Up Together, raised $1.6 million to launch Cambridge RISE.

It’s been rewarding, she said, to see the impact the program has had on people and the way they view government officials.

“I was walking down the street the other day and, literally at a cross section, a woman got out of her car and just to say, ‘Thank you for everything. The RISE program has helped me so much.’ And literally the light was about to turn green, but she quickly did that. That was so meaningful to me,” Siddiqui recalled. “They just really appreciate that City Hall is looking out for them in this way. And I think it’s pretty gratifying to kind of see how people are viewing government as a result.”

[Related: Mississippi program shows how giving mothers guaranteed income helps children]

Mayors for Guaranteed Income, a network of local leaders, was founded in 2020 by Michael Tubbs, the former mayor of Stockton, California. Tubbs launched the country’s first mayor-led guaranteed income program. The organization has grown to nearly 150 mayors, expanded to Counties for Guaranteed Income with about 40 elected county leaders and launched a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization called United For A Guaranteed Income Action. The group has also launched over 60 pilots, including Cambridge RISE, director Sukhi Samra said.

“In addition to funding, we also provided robust technical assistance in terms of pilot design and also in terms of communications,” said Samra. She said her team helped the Cambridge RISE group “communicate about your pilot in a way that’s responsive to your community, in a way that meets your community’s needs.”

Samra said their work has been able to shift public opinion to be more favorable towards $500 to $1,000 monthly guaranteed income, but there is still some pushback.

 

“We’ve gone from the radical to the mainstream, but I think a lot of the opposition that we’re experiencing is still the same. It’s really rooted in these racist and sexist tropes about what poor people do when they’re given money, who is poor and why they’re poor in the first place,” Samra said.

Opposition’s concerns: Some states outlawed guaranteed income

Opponents of guaranteed income programs worry giving people cash payments with no strings attached will discourage them from working. West said studies prove otherwise. Still, guaranteed income programs have been outlawed in Arkansas and Iowa, and similar legislation has been proposed in Arizona and South Dakota.

“I think that municipalities and states are seeing the benefits and the return on investment … and are ready to scale it up at the state level … ”
Stacia West, director/co-founder
Center for Guaranteed Income Research.

In spite of this, experts say the movement for guaranteed income is still picking up steam across the country. California was the first to launch state-funded guaranteed income programs in November, and recently proposed legislation seeks to establish a council to study guaranteed income programs. Legislation is advancing through the Minnesota state House that would give residents living below 300 percent of the federal poverty level $500 per month.

[Related: NPR — Places across the U.S. are testing no-strings cash as part of the social safety net]

Harris County, Texas, is launching its first guaranteed income pilot this spring. And, last fall, Cambridge was able to expand its pilot to create the Cambridge Rise Up Program using American Rescue Plan funds. The new program is offering $500 per month for 18 months to all families that have children and income under 250 percent of the federal poverty level. It’s the first guaranteed income program with no lottery system and currently has nearly 2,000 participating households.

“I think that municipalities and states are seeing the benefits and the return on investment that it may have and are ready to scale it up at the state level and make some investments,” West said.

***

Darreonna Davis is a Memphis, Tenn.-based 2023-2024 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper reporting fellow for The 19th*.  She previously covered breaking news and explainers for Forbes; climate and environmental justice for Inside Climate News.

The 19th* — named after the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution — is an independent, nonprofit newsroom reporting on gender, politics and policy. Their goal is to empower women and LGBTQ+ people — particularly those from underrepresented communities — with the information, resources and tools they need to be equal participants in our democracy. 

The 19th* News Network, is a collective of national, regional and local publishers seeking to advance racial and gender equity in politics and policy journalism. The 19th* established the network in 2024 to shine a light on stories that elevate the voices of women and LGBTQ+ Americans of diverse backgrounds.