On his couch in Hemet, California, Wally Henry watches an old TV special about him.

“In the 20th century, the sports superstar has become an American hero,” the broadcaster – his cousin, Jimi Lyons – booms out as silhouettes of football players trot out of a stadium tunnel and onto the wide expanse of a National Football League field.

Henry played wide receiver and kick returner for the Philadelphia Eagles.

“For Afro Americans, in particular, a people who have been brutalized by 200 years of institutionalized racism and the violent denial of the human rights guaranteed by the Constitution, the athlete was the most visible image of success and manhood,” Lyons continues.

The walls around Henry are covered with photos of his life, including his 1950s and ‘60s childhood in Logan Heights.

Neighborhood kids would pile onto the open grass known then as “40 Acres,” off South 30th St. and Ocean View Boulevard, and play football, baseball and run track, marking lanes and lines with whatever they could, digging holes for starting blocks.

“Sports was seen as the way out of the ghetto,” Lyons says, as images of a younger Henry flit across the screen, sporting a crop top training tee and an impressive afro.

Surrounded by NFL giants, Henry was small – 5’8” and 170 pounds.

“Hey, this little guy he can't do nothing,” young Henry on the screen says. “Then they see me knocking down people. That's how I made the team, doing extra.”

In one incredible punt return, Henry bursts from the melee, dodging players twice his size, and zips all the way down the field for a touchdown.

At that time, sports made college possible for kids like Henry.

“We were all trying to get out of southeast San Diego. We were trying to make something of our lives. Our parents didn't have that kind of money to send us to college, so the only way we can get to college is to get a scholarship,” Henry said.

By the time Henry was in high school, the stakes were even higher. College was also one of the only ways out of the Vietnam draft.

Getting a college football scholarship is already an extraordinary feat, let alone making the NFL. Each year, out of over a million high school football players, only a few hundred do, according to the National Football Foundation.

It’s like getting struck by lightning. But Henry is very matter-of-fact about it – both the Henry on his couch now and the Henry on the screen.

“Deep down inside, I knew that this was just another test for me. I have to overcome. And I will, and I did,” his younger self says.

He credits that mentality all the way back to the Boys and Girls Club in Logan Heights.

“Having confidence in yourself to do what you can do and not not be a bullsh—. You know, you can't fool yourself. I mean, and people would say, ‘Got a big head or you're cocky.’ Well, so be it. If you think you're the best and you act the best, and you are the best, you are the best. Period,” he said.

He said communities in southeastern San Diego back then were close knit. Everybody knew everybody. It was a village-wide effort to raise the kids. Employment for Black San Diegans was limited, and parents worked hard.

“Actually, we didn’t really know, you know – too young to realize that you were poor,” he said.

By the late ‘60s, like now, the area was mostly Black and Latino and low-income. It wasn’t always that way. When Lincoln High School opened in 1955, it served mostly white students.

But San Diego demographics were changing. Black families took military and defense jobs and moved west to San Diego. Redlining and freeway construction funneled growing racial minorities into the southeastern neighborhoods. And white families, out.

Willie Jones is Lincoln class of ‘65. He said he witnessed “white flight” in real time, and by the time he graduated, he could count white students on a couple of hands.

Alumni say just the visual of a lot of Black and brown people in one area drew overpolicing and stereotypes.

“The news media was bombarding society with, you know, ‘This Lincoln High School, southeast San Diego is, you know, it's a rough place to live,’” Henry said.

Even many Black families, like Henry’s, avoided Lincoln. At first, his mom sent him to San Diego High School.

But the Civil Rights movement was unfolding across the country, and Lincoln gave Black students a chance to explore their identity. It offered African American studies, and it hired the district’s first African American high school principal.

“It was a wakening time,” said Jackie Thompson, who ran track for the school then.

She said at most schools, students weren’t allowed to wear afros. They couldn’t be themselves. It was different at Lincoln.

“We were proud of who we were,” she said. “Finally, you know, somebody saying ‘I’m Black and I’m proud!’”

Henry said the nationwide movement sparked a decision for athletes from southeastern San Diego.

“Look, if we all went to Lincoln, we can dominate the city, you know, and then show them what this Black power is really all about, you know, in a positive way,” he recounted. “Let's change the idea of what they think about us. Period.”

Instead of running from the stigma, they’d return to prove it wrong.

Proving the city wrong

Henry said he’s one of a group of athletes who transferred home to Lincoln then.

Earl Faison, former San Diego Chargers Hall of Famer, started coaching the football team, and he brought in other ex-professionals to help.

A lot of talent packed into one school.

Henry said practices were intense, long and hot. On a talent-stacked team, everyone wanted to brag they were a starter.

Still, they were a small team in a big league. Many had to play both offense and defense against teams that could afford to switch out players. Henry said when they did lose, it was often because they “just ran out of gas.”

What they lacked in numbers they made up for with the chip on their shoulder.

“We always had something to prove, see,” Henry said. “We have to beat the team, plus the zebras.”

The zebras – the referees – were all white then, he said, and made calls that felt unfair against the minority teams.

“Basketball comes down to the final shot and you make it and you go win the game and boom! All of a sudden it was a foul or traveling, something ridiculous. Something enough to make you so angry, you want to fight,” he said.

Some of the calls felt like they were punishing them for their differences.

“You score a touchdown or interception against, say, El Cajon or something, and you do a little dance or something like that – shoo! – see a yellow flag. You know what I mean? ‘Showing out, unsportsmanlike conduct!’ S— like that. That's how we play!” he said.

Lincoln didn’t have lights for their field, so they couldn’t play their night home games at home. They had to travel and play on enemy turf.

The community showed up anyway, carpooling and hitchhiking to games all over the city.

One alumna said community groups like the San Diego Black Federation, Brown Berets and low riders would keep a presence at the games to make sure the students got home safe from the schools north of Lincoln.

“You have to be strong mentally, and you're going to have to be able to take the n-word and all the other words that come with it,” Henry said, “and still keep going and keep your head, keep your cool, you know, and try to stay focused on the gold.”

The adversity didn’t stop them, Henry said: “For Lincoln, oh well, we're used to this s—. We're still going to dominate.”

Henry thinks all that adversity created a mentality that may have been their greatest strength.

“You expect this s— to happen and we just gonna fight through it. We gonna dominate. We gonna keep it moving,” he said.

Jackie Thompson graduated Lincoln in 1972, and ran for the U.S. at the Olympics that same year.

She remembers walking into the stadium in a white pleated skirt and red blazer, overwhelmed by the beauty of all the different countries marching in and the release of white doves flooding the air. She felt the responsibility of representing southeastern San Diego.

“We always wanted to be a credit to our community and shine,” she said.

Lincoln’s track is now dedicated to her. Hers is far from the only name emblazoned on the school.

Most U.S. high schools never produce a professional athlete, but Lincoln and Morse High School, just five miles down the road, have produced numbers that stun: at least 68 NFL, MLB and NBA players between them, more in other pro leagues, and at least three Olympians. They won Super Bowls and MVP awards, Heisman trophies and gold medals. They cross decades, generations, coaches and teams.

“I mean we joke about it a lot but it must be in the water because it is true. We have exceptional athletes in southeastern San Diego,” Henry said.

‘Something in the water’

Chances are, at one time or another, most of those athletes passed through Berry’s Athletic Supply.

Today, Berry’s is off Lemon Grove and Lester Avenues. The gear on the shelves has evolved over the last 74 years they’ve been in business – safer helmets, lighter baseball bats – but in the back office, you can still find co-owner John Enright.

He’s been helping Lincoln and Morse athletes, quietly, for many decades.

“Dorothy would say she needed something for a football player or softball player. We would give it to them if they couldn't afford it,” he said. “Just wanted to help.”

By Dorothy, he means Dorothy “Dot” Robinson. She oversaw Lincoln athletics from the ‘80s through the early ‘aughts as the district’s first African American female athletic director. The old gymnasium now bears her name.

“You've got a female that's in charge of men, and the men didn't take it too well, you know. And I understood that, but I still forged ahead,” she said.

She ensured the budget stretched evenly across genders and the school’s many sports, despite inadequate facilities and equipment – like a football helmet a player brought her with a screw coming through it.

When asked what this community’s secret athletic sauce is, she didn’t hesitate.

“Love for the kids, number one. You have to care about kids at a school in order for kids to succeed or even attempt to succeed,” she said.

When Robinson describes “care,” it’s a verb. Giving students rides home from late practices. Noticing whether or not they’d eaten, or if they needed to talk after school.

“I can be in the room with you, but do I see you?” she said. “If they needed to come away from the home, stay for a while, I ask the parents, ‘Can I keep your kid for a while? I'll take care of them. Here's my phone number.’”

She said she was far from the only one.

“That’s what we had at Lincoln was the village,” she said.

That’s crucial in an area with some of the lowest household incomes in the county, she said. The teams couldn’t always afford a bus. Robinson had to build a network of parents, and those parents had to extend that network to include the people around them.

People like John Enright.

“I could call them and say, you know, ‘I have a kid that need cleats. I don't get paid for such and such a day.’ And before I could get it out, he said, ‘Send them on down.’ And I said, ‘But I don't –’ He said, ‘Send them down.’ you know, and that's the kind of community that we had. It extended beyond the physical building,” Robinson said.

She said the athletes made the whole community proud. She still gives rides to neighbors who want to go to the games.

“Am I going to ever stop? I guess not,” she said, laughing.

She’s never changed her phone number, just in case an old student calls – and they do.

Robinson, Enright, Thompson and Jones were among many alumni that filled the stands for this year’s homecoming game. Decades of community pride shone in full force.

Up in the bleachers, Wally Henry sat alone.

Lincoln alumnus Harold Allen said all those superstar athletes from southeastern San Diego – once just kids who overcame enormous odds – are largely forgotten, “ghosts in their own community.”

He’s brother to Marcus Allen and Damon Allen, both Lincoln alumni, both widely seen as two of the greatest to ever play the game of football.

He sees both pain and power in southeastern San Diego’s history, but he doesn’t see the magnitude of that power being celebrated.

“When I look back now, I say, ‘Well, how do we believe the hype that we're not good people or we're negative people because the color of our skin?’ And yet we believe what we hear from others and then we fall prey to it,” Allen said.

He’s on a mission to change that.

“I'm now 50, 60 years later, trying to highlight the good of who we are. So let's celebrate us. We don't need anybody else to celebrate us,” he said.

He started holding ceremonies honoring alumni and educating the current players on the legacy they’re now continuing.

Whether today’s athletes know it or not, they have many of the same challenges, and strengths, as alumni from a half century ago.

The legacy continues

Lincoln High School was bulldozed in 2003. Replaced with a brand new, $129 million campus – at the time the most expensive campus in the San Diego Unified School District.

They lost a lot of athletes during the four-year closure. Coaches had to rebuild legendary Lincoln teams from sparse rosters.

The school hired David Dunn to coach football, former Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver and Morse High School alumnus.

Despite the new campus, he faced budget challenges.

“We're talking $400 to $500 per helmet, $300 for a good pair of shoulder pads, and uniforms, and we can't keep up with some of the other things out there. We’re losing a bunch of kids to the private schools,” Dunn said.

The San Diego Unified School District allocated $98,200 this year for all of Lincoln’s athletics programs, not including coaching stipends, according to spokesperson James Canning. Dunn estimated his team received about $12,000 of that, including travel.

He has to fundraise the rest in an area with some of the lowest household incomes in the county.

By 2024, the need was even clearer.

“The field was not safe. Everyone knew it wasn’t safe,” he said.

He could pull back the turf in places to reveal concrete directly underneath. The field began to sink in places and water started puddling up. There was a hole in the track.

He brought out over one hundred red flags and tried to mark every problem area. He ran out of flags.

He convinced the school to fix it, leaving Lincoln with no field of their own that season.

They bused to facilities willing to share a field. Left school early. Stayed up late. Squeezed odd hours of practice in whatever field time was available.

“We lost so many hours of practice time,” Dunn said.

Sometimes the buses were too small, or came late. The team would sit outside with their water bottles and uniforms and whatever equipment they could haul, waiting for buses for over an hour.

When they did get to the shared fields, they weren’t always well equipped. Many didn’t have football markings, equipment or even goalposts. They didn’t have access to a weight room or sleds.

The players had so many valid reasons to skip practice, but they didn’t take them.

“It was so, so crazy,” said Jesus “The Beast” Jimenez, a center and guard on the current team who played in 2024. “All of us were just tired. But, you know, all of them, everybody on that team, really wanted it and wanted to show everybody wrong.”

Wide receiver and cornerback Dareyen Bridges said something that echoed Lincoln alumni across the decades.

“As much as we went through, we was just playing on a chip on our shoulder because we know nobody else was doing this. So we had to go out there and win. Win every game,” he said.

It paid off. Despite all these challenges, the team went all the way to the state championship, and won.

Dunn still wonders if the team fully understands what they accomplished.

“To have none of the stuff available to you – you don’t really know how much this really meant,” he said.

He said this year’s team still doesn’t have a secondary utility field to practice on like most schools. They’re traveling farther to play harder schools, but without a bigger travel budget. And, like alumni across the decades, they still face racism.

Dunn remembers when he was a student athlete being told to not retaliate when he got called a derogatory name or even spat on.

“It's heartbreaking to have to tell my same kids, 40 years later, I’m telling them the same thing,” he said.

At a 2021 game against Cathedral High School, social media posts circulated of a student wearing a T-shirt that said ‘Catholics vs. Convicts.’ It made headlines in the news, but alumni and current students say the racism is not unusual.

Dunn said this year, another coach told the Lincoln players “you’ll definitely be working at McDonald’s in three years” and “we’re going to college and you guys will be going to jail.”

Bridges has noticed.

“They just think we grow up, like, this is hood. But I wouldn't say that. I feel like we have great kids here who take very good responsibility,” he said.

Jimenez agreed.

“People call it ghetto. But for me, I don't think it’s ghetto at all. I think everybody around here knows each other, and I think it's just like a big old family,” he said.

Dunn said that stigma is still causing enrollment challenges for the school and the football team, but like the teams of the ‘60s and ‘70s, they hold high expectations regardless – and that chip on their shoulder.

“No matter what they put in front of us, watch how we come out of this,” he tells his players. He developed a motto: “They hate to watch us win, but they have to watch us win.”

Generations of alumni cheered them on at this year’s homecoming game. Some, with remarkable pro athlete careers behind them.

More than half a century of shared struggle and power filled the stands to bear witness to their continuing legacy. A sea of kelly green, white and black marked the undefeatable spirit of Lincoln and the surrounding communities.

Together, they watched today’s students win, 43 to 15.

“It’s always been a struggle,” Dunn said. “But it’s our struggle and it’s our story.”

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Colleges and universities will soon have to make it easier for students to request more financial aid, as well as be more transparent about how they estimate the cost of attendance.

A new law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in September requires colleges and universities to clearly display how students can request additional financial aid if they believe their awarded amount does not sufficiently cover their costs. Institutions must also publish how they calculate their costs of attendance, which is used to determine how much financial aid students receive.

Authored by Democratic Assemblymembers Celeste Rodriguez of the San Fernando Valley and Marc Berman of Menlo Park, Assembly Bill 2251 requires schools to implement the changes by the fall of 2027.

Existing law already requires campuses to publish cost estimates, which not only include tuition and fees, but also housing, transportation, food and other likely expenses. With the new requirements, advocates say that students will now have an easier time finding what to do when their costs exceed those estimates.

“California has a really strong record of looking at new ways to improve college affordability and AB 2251 is yet another example,” said Laura Szabo-Kubitz, senior policy advisor at The Institute of College Access and Success, an organization that advocates for college affordability. “It’s a step towards other advocacy efforts to bridge the affordability gap.”

Students can appeal their financial aid award

Junely Merwin, now a consultant for The Foster Youth Pre-College Collective, received a full-ride scholarship to attend Cal State Fullerton in 2015. But as a former foster youth and young mother, she needed additional aid to help cover childcare costs.

“My money really went down the drain to child care and just how expensive it was,” Merwin said. “Even with the full-ride scholarship, it was not enough.”

Seeking more financial support, Merwin came across her school’s process to revise her cost of attendance. However, the website was unclear and, when she reached out to the financial aid office with questions, she was passed along to multiple staff members.

After she was finally able to complete an appeal process, Merwin’s cost of attendance was adjusted to include her childcare expenses. This allowed her to accept more scholarship funds.

Over half of colleges and universities statewide use estimates that are lower than what students actually pay to attend college, with some underestimating it by over $10,000, according to 2024 research from John Burton Advocates for Youth, the lead sponsor of the law. The California organization advocates for unhoused and foster youth.

Students cannot receive more financial aid – including loans, grants and some scholarships – than the estimated cost of attendance calculated by the campus. This can lead them to work excessive hours and take fewer classes to make up the difference, according to research from The Institute for College Access and Success.

When students’ costs exceed those calculated by their college, they can apply for a cost of attendance adjustment. But students often don’t know that is an option.

According to a March report from John Burton Advocates for Youth, almost half of colleges statewide fail to adequately inform students of the resources and options available to them when applying for aid adjustments.

Those adjustments can be especially helpful to low-income students and former foster youth, who often receive the maximum amount of aid but still need more, said the organization’s director of education, Jessica Petrass. Because of this, students often have to turn down additional aid they would otherwise be eligible for.

Representatives of campus programs that provide support for foster youth across the state’s three higher education systems do not find cost adjustment processes to be accessible, concluded a report by the John Burton youth advocacy organization. A majority of those surveyed said information on campus websites is insufficient and unclear.

“That is why I see AB 2251 as both a transparency and student access issue, because it is not enough to simply have a policy in place,” Merwin said. “Information needs to be communicated clearly, consistently, in a way that students can actually understand and use.”

Colleges must clearly explain adjustment process

Colleges vary greatly in how and where they explain how to request an adjustment to the cost of attendance and financial aid limit. While some schools plainly detail costs on their websites, others lead students through a maze of weblinks and documents.

Under the new law, campuses must publish clear details on how a student can submit an adjustment request, how long it might take and who they might need to speak to. This information will need to appear on the same page as the school’s cost of attendance details.

Jackie Cordero, a first-generation college student who attends UC Santa Cruz, is currently going through the process of requesting an adjustment to her cost of attendance. Cordero chose UC Santa Cruz because of the generous financial aid package she was offered. But after her father was injured and could no longer work, she was left to figure out how to pay for the expenses her financial aid didn’t cover.

Through her own research, and by contacting the financial aid office herself, she found that requesting more financial aid was an option. But it has not been easy. Cordero said that the documents her school asked for — detailing her father’s work termination and her mother’s income — didn’t exist in physical form. She’s struggled to supplement that paperwork, and instead has had to write letters detailing her family’s finances.

“There should probably be a little bit more help towards people who want to do a cost of attendance (adjustment),” she said. “I still am a little confused about the process and approaching (the financial aid office) can be a little difficult.”

Under federal law, students are not required to submit documentation for cost of attendance adjustments, but colleges almost always request them before granting additional awards.

Colleges vary on cost calculation sources

Across all three public higher education systems, staff at John Burton Advocates for Youth found that 83% of campuses do not reveal the breakdown of the total cost of each expense category – such as housing and transportation – on their websites. This information allows students to have a clearer understanding of whether their expenses exceed the calculated costs and if they might be eligible for a cost of attendance adjustment.

“At the end of the day, these budgets are an estimate … You’re doing your best guess to get the best average to represent every student’s unique circumstance,” Petrass said.

Most campuses do not cite the data sources behind their estimates. Only 17% of UCs, 26% of Cal States and 22% of community colleges explain how they come up with these estimates, according to the youth advocacy organization.

Each system calculates costs differently. UC schools use a survey conducted by its Office of the President. Cal State campuses and community colleges use a mix of data, including from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and survey estimates from the California Student Aid Commission.

What the new law doesn’t do

While the law guarantees a new standard of transparency for financial aid, it does not provide any new financial aid funding, nor does it guarantee that any student’s cost of attendance adjustments will be approved.

The California Student Aid Commission estimates the state may spend anywhere from $805,000 to $2.3 million more on Cal Grant awards due to adjustment applications that wouldn’t have otherwise been submitted. That assumes a 3% to 5% increase in the number of adjustments approved annually, according to the commission.

Even if a student’s appeal for a financial aid increase is accepted, many campus financial aid websites say additional aid typically comes in the form of loans. The law will also not change the often-complicated cost adjustment process, or the way colleges estimate their cost of attendance.

“I think there are still areas in which California could continue to change policy to better strengthen this process,” Petrass said. “I think there’s opportunities to look at reducing documentation requirements for students as well to, again, just make it a more seamless process that aligns with the minimum federal requirements.”

Mariam Farag and Max Guerra are contributors with the College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. CalMatters higher education coverage is supported by a grant from the College Futures Foundation.

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SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. — Overwhelming.

That's how 17-year-old high school senior Alex Zaret described the college admissions process, during a tour of the Skidmore College campus — the fourth school Zaret had visited, with another half-dozen to go.

"It is kind of a full-time job," Zaret's father, Owen, said.

He wasn't joking. With research to do, visits to make and applications and financial forms to fill out, "it's a lot, and it's a lot on top of two full-time-employed parents and a very engaged high school student," Owen Zaret said.

But even in the year or so that the family has been doing this, the Zarets have detected a subtle shift.

At first, the process seemed to be what Owen Zaret called an ivory tower approach. It signaled: "'You're lucky if you come here.' And now, I think, for a variety of reasons, that's changed. It's more like, 'We want you to be here.'"

Hurting for students, colleges are striving to transform an admissions process that has often been intimidating, secretive and stressful into an experience that's open, easier and downright friendly.

"It's one of those things that's in everybody's interest," said Marc Conner, president of Skidmore, which has been making a particular push to do this. Even though application and enrollment data show his college is not among the many others having trouble filling seats, he said, "We depend on students coming to our campuses and, when they do come, getting them to enroll."

Some universities and colleges are waiving application fees and promising additional financial aid for students who show up for campus tours. Public universities in 17 states now admit high school students who haven't even applied, according to the Education Commission of the States; more than 150 private colleges also make direct admissions offers to students who fill out the Common App, a standardized online application used by about 1,200 institutions. And the overall odds of getting accepted to college are going up.

Now Skidmore and a small number of other institutions have taken a surprising next step: enlisting faculty to help recruit new students — a role they previously left entirely to the admissions office — by meeting with and opening their labs and classrooms to prospective and admitted applicants.

"It creates a feeling of what it would be like to be seen, valued and to find a place of belonging on a campus," said Jess Ricker, the college's vice president for enrollment. And that, Ricker said, can help distinguish Skidmore from the other schools on students' lists.

Admissions leaders are looking for any advantage. Two-thirds of them had trouble meeting their enrollment targets in at least one of the last two years, according to a survey by the ratings platform Niche. Ninety-seven percent expect the competition to increase.

The reality they face: The supply of traditional-age freshmen nationwide is projected to decline by 13 percent over the next 15 years, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. The proportion of high school graduates choosing to go on to college is also down, from 70% in 2016 to 63% in 2024, the most recent year for which the figure is available, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.

Good news for students, not colleges

One little-noticed result: Being accepted to college is generally easier than it has been in the past and than Americans seem to think it is.

Nearly 8 in 10 first-year applicants for undergraduate admission to public and 7 in 10 to private colleges and universities get in, the National Association for College Admission Counseling, or NACAC, reports. That's up from 68% and 65%, respectively, about 10 years ago. Nearly 9 in 10 private, nonprofit four-year universities and colleges admit half or more of applicants, according to separate research by the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute.

This news has been slow to trickle down to students. More than 40% of 18- to 29-year-olds wrongly think it's harder to get into college than it was for people in their parents' generation, a Pew Research Center survey found.

"Most of the public actually doesn't understand that the majority of institutions in the United States actually accept the majority of students who apply," said Angel Pérez, NACAC's CEO.

He blamed an obsession with acceptance rates at institutions such as CalTech, Harvard, Princeton and Stanford, which each take about 1 applicant in 25.

In fact, only 33 colleges and universities in the country admit 10% or fewer of their undergraduate applicants, NACAC figures show.

The intensifying competition for them might be good for students, but it's bad for many colleges. At some, offices of admission are struggling to shake what Ricker joked is their historic reputation as "offices of rejection."

A few, including Skidmore, are appealing to the faculty for help. At Ohio Northern University, at least one member of the faculty now meets with every visiting applicant. Faculty at Washington College in Maryland sit down with visiting applicants on designated Fridays during the admissions season and at open houses.

"Presidents and vice presidents of enrollment are telling people that every interaction counts." said Rob Springall, a consultant at the executive search firm WittKieffer and former executive director of undergraduate admissions at Pennsylvania State University.

There's another reason for this that's less widely understood among consumers. As students hedge their bets by applying to more colleges than their historical counterparts — Common App users now apply to an average of more than seven schools apiece, a number that's been steadily increasing — it's getting harder for enrollment managers to predict how many they admit will actually enroll. In admissions lingo, this is called the yield.

Yield has declined from 32% in 2014 to 22% in 2024 at public and from 24% in 2014 to 18% in 2024 at private, nonprofit colleges and universities, on average, federal data shows. That's the last period for which the figures are available.

This means colleges have to admit around five times as many students as they need — and that admitted applicants need to be persuaded to follow through and put down their deposits, including the many of them who come back to take another look around.

Reluctant faculty get in on the recruiting

Colleges "are realizing that everyone has to help with the recruiting process," said Leah Beth Hubbard, assistant vice president of enrollment strategies at the enrollment consulting firm The Parish Group. She advises clients to "teach everyone to smile. Teach everyone to introduce themselves and say what they do at the institution."

Coaxing faculty to do this, on top of their existing obligations, isn't always easy, campus leaders said — at least, at first.

"Some faculty didn't want to be part of it," said Johnnie Johnson, Washington College's vice president for enrollment management. "They'd say, 'You go recruit and I'll teach.'"

Like other university and college administrators, Johnson said he countered with a frank assessment of enrollment trends.

"When you put a financial figure on every student who comes in, that equates to programmatic funding. That equates to raises," he said. And faculty are seeing what happens when those numbers fall. "They have colleagues who have been at colleges that closed" or whose programs have been cut, said Johnson. "They don't want to be next."

Skidmore, which has 2,719 students, hasn't experienced the problems many other small private, nonprofit colleges are confronting. It's seen its number of applications rise, not fall; unlike colleges in general, its acceptance rate is down, from 37% 10 years ago to 24% today. Yield is an above-average 24%.

Still, said Conner, the president: "Even if the school is doing all right during these times, we're still facing the same headwinds as everybody else."

Everyone from dining hall workers to groundskeepers are encouraged to be welcoming, he said.

"It helps that we're in a tough time in higher ed and they see what's happening at other schools," said Conner. "And they know a school is going to rise or fall depending on how much the community joins together."

More than three-quarters of admitted students who came to the campus last year other than for a weekend open house requested to sit in on a class or meet with a faculty member, the college says. That added up to 300 personal visits.

There's not yet data about whether those young visitors apply or enroll. But Psychology Department Chair Becca Johnson, who often meets with applicants, said she hears feedback that it makes a difference.

One mother told her, " 'You know, my student has applied to so many schools, been accepted, had a number of wonderful possible possibilities,' " Johnson recounted. " 'And you're the first person from outside of an admissions office to contact us. And that was so meaningful for them in their decision."

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

Edited by Nirvi Shah
Digital story reported and written by Jon Marcus
Audio story reported and written by Emily Russell
Audio story edited by Elissa Nadworny
Audio story produced by Lauren Migaki

Copyright 2026 NPR

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Kendrick Gaussoin remembers it all so clearly — the August day a decade ago when his dream of becoming a professional photographer suddenly collapsed.

He was driving to the Ventura, Calif., campus of Brooks Institute, the private, for-profit college where he'd been working on a bachelor's degree in photography. When he pulled up, he was surprised to find classmates and friends milling outside. The school's doors were chained.

"It was very eerie," he remembers. "Everyone was crying. Everyone felt like they'd lost everything."

Brooks had suddenly been shut down by its parent company, leaving Gaussoin and some of his classmates with enormous student loan debts and no clear path to a degree.

"I was completely discouraged," Gaussoin remembers. "I basically gave up, and I've spent the past nine years really just trying my best to move forward."

Today, though, Gaussoin is revisiting what happened to him at Brooks — and is trying to get his student loans erased.

For more than three decades, federal law has required the U.S. secretary of education to cancel the debts of qualified borrowers whose schools close suddenly, a process known as "closed school discharge." But a lawsuit filed Wednesday against the Department of Education claims the Trump administration is illegally refusing to fully follow all of the program's rules.

The lawsuit was filed in federal court by Student Defense, a nonprofit borrower advocacy group, on behalf of Gaussoin and potentially thousands of other borrowers.

The Education Department told NPR it stands by its implementation of the program.

How closed school discharge works

According to a review by the nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office, between 2010 and 2020, more than 1,100 colleges closed, including Brooks, leaving 246,000 borrowers eligible for a closed school discharge.

To qualify for a traditional discharge, borrowers have to either 1) have been enrolled at the time of closure or 2) have left school no more than six months before the closure.

Gaussoin's school, Brooks Institute, closed in August 2016. But in December 2015, he took an eight-month leave of absence to work as a photographer. Because the school was closing as he returned, Gaussoin's leave put him beyond the program's standard look-back window. He had been away too long to have his loans discharged.

But nearly a decade later, in 2025, Gaussoin's luck appeared to change.

In the waning days of the Biden administration, the Education Department expanded the look-back window for borrowers who had attended several closed schools, including Brooks.

Under the change, any borrower who was enrolled as of May 6, 2015, would qualify for a loan discharge and refund of any past payments. Gaussoin was suddenly eligible.

In an order dated Jan. 6, 2025, the department's then-undersecretary, James Kvaal, wrote that the administration was expanding the window of eligibility because the schools had been closed under "exceptional circumstances," justifying more leniency for borrowers.

Denials under Trump

Gaussoin learned about the Biden-era change over the summer. On Aug. 23, 2026, he applied for his closed school discharge, noting in his application that he now falls within the new, expanded look-back window. A week later, in a letter dated Aug. 31, the Trump administration denied his request for loan forgiveness.

In the denial letter, Gaussoin was told he did not meet the traditional pre-Biden eligibility requirements. NPR asked the department why it appeared to be ignoring the Biden-era eligibility expansion, and Education Department spokesperson Ellen Keast responded with this statement:

"The Biden Administration was laser-focused on implementing unlawful policies to shift student loan debt onto the back of every single hardworking American taxpayer. Literally days before leaving office, the former Biden Under Secretary used the stroke of a (digital) pen to inappropriately expand the closed-school discharge period for certain institutions targeted by the previous Administration."

Viewing this authority as "unlawful" is new for a Trump Education Department.

In November 2019, during the first Trump administration, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos used the same authority, citing "exceptional circumstances," to expand the look-back window for borrowers who had attended the troubled Art Institute of Colorado and the Illinois Institute of Art.

"Students were failed and deserve to be made whole," DeVos said at the time. "By canceling these students' loans … as well as extending the closed school discharge period, we hope that these impacted students will now have the tools and resources they need to complete their education."

"Legally, the secretary has the authority to expand the window [of eligibility]," says Bonnie Latreille, a former top official in the office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) during the Biden administration. If the Trump administration is now trying to quietly ignore or revoke that rule change, Latreille says, "then I think that raises legal flags."

Latreille worked at FSA as the Education Department was transitioning between the Biden and Trump administrations. She says a top department official instructed her to not immediately process any closed school discharges using the expanded look-back window without approval from the incoming Trump team.

NPR spoke with two other former department officials who corroborated Latreille's story but who asked that NPR not use their names because they feared professional repercussions for speaking out.

In this week's lawsuit, attorneys at Student Defense argue that the Trump administration cannot simply ignore or abandon the Biden-era changes, because those changes were made well within the bounds of the department's legal authority.

Multiple higher education attorneys not associated with the case told NPR that if the Trump administration wants to reverse those changes, it would have to do what the Biden administration did: build a reasoned, legal explanation and then share that with the public.

The department did not respond to a request to share its legal justification for ignoring the Biden-era changes.

"This is a joke, right?"

Unbeknownst to Gaussoin, Brooks had been in trouble for years. Founded in 1945, the visual arts school was once well regarded. But after its sale in 1999, enrollment began to decline as borrowers accused Brooks of high-pressure sales tactics, lying about graduation and job placement rates and misleading students about the school's high cost.

Gaussoin's mother, Christine Gaussoin, took out Parent PLUS loans to pay for her son's education. She says the school led her to believe that her loans would be enough to cover Kendrick's costs at Brooks. The plan was for him to remain debt free.

"Then I get an email from the counselor," she remembers. "It says, 'We need more money.' And I was like, 'I'm tapped out.'"

At the time, Christine says she was living on disability while recovering from a total knee replacement.

"Then Kendrick calls me and says, 'I need you to write this letter that says I'm not your dependent anymore.' I was like, 'Really?' He's like, 'Yeah. I'm going to take out federal loans so I can finish the degree.'"

Christine pauses, remembering this conversation. "What is a mom to do?"

When Kendrick called his mother to tell her the schools' doors had been chained shut, she remembers thinking, "This is a joke, right? Really, this was a joke, because he had just taken out those federal loans, and I didn't know what to tell him."

For the past 10 years, Kendrick and his mother have both felt the weight of those loans.

He is now married with two young children and works for an online retailer. He's saddled with nearly $22,000 in student loan debt, including interest, but no degree.

"I've been working hard at just trying to survive off minimum wage," Kendrick says. "It's been really tough."

Christine says she also works in retail and owes about $28,000 that she worries she may never pay off, even though her debts also, technically, qualify for discharge under the Biden-era change. Her application for a closed school discharge was denied this month.

Christine says she regrets how she and her son fell for the promises of a troubled school.

"The school promised us that this was gonna be his ticket — to make the most money he will ever be able to [as a photographer]," she remembers.

Instead, a decade later, the school and the Gaussoins' unpaid debts are still holding them back.

Copyright 2026 NPR

The public education landscape is a bit of a minefield these days.

Inflation is blowing up school budgets. A new education tax credit that will direct federal tax dollars into private schools goes into effect in January. At the same time, the Trump administration is dismantling the Department of Education brick by brick.

Enter Princess Moss, the new face of the nation's largest labor union, the National Education Association. Its membership includes 3 million teachers and public workers from every state.

"Public education is under attack," she says. "Our students are under attack. The very foundation of this democracy is public education — that is under attack."

Her vision for the NEA — what she calls "resistance to renaissance" — has some markings of past leadership. It puts things like professional autonomy and community organizing front and center, but there is one stark departure she wants for the union.

"I want us to become our own political authority," Moss says. "Meaning that we're not aligning ourselves with a political party."

"I know this can work because I've done it before"

Princess Moss grew up the daughter of two school bus drivers in Spotsylvania County in rural Virginia. She recalls many teachers from her childhood who inspired her to pursue a career in schools. But her second grade teacher, Lucy T. Lewis, stands out. Moss remembers Lewis telling her she was smart back in 1968, even after she misspelled the word refrigerator in front of the entire class.

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"I wanted to be just like Mrs. Lewis," she says. "Where you could help students learn and help students be the best that they could be even if they made a mistake every now and then."

Moss went on to work as an elementary school music teacher for more than 20 years in a neighboring county. Along the way she rose up the ranks in state union leadership, presiding over the Virginia Education Association from 2004 to 2008 and eventually moving up the ladder at the NEA. Moss now takes on the challenge of navigating a difficult political climate over her three-year term as president.

"We are the experts," she says. "We want to be at the decision-making tables."

One lesson she brings from her time in Virginia is that when she focused on the issues, there were allies to be found in unexpected places.

At the time, Virginia had a Democratic governor and Republican-controlled general assembly. She worked on building coalitions across the aisle and emphasized that public education is for everyone. With the midterms rapidly approaching, Moss said she's bringing that mentality to the NEA.

"Talk about your students"

"We're telling our members: 'Talk about your students. What do your students need?'" she says. "Don't make it a Democrat or Republican issue."

Michael Petrilli, the president of the right-leaning think tank the Fordham Institute, isn't quite so convinced: "Look, that would be a huge departure for the NEA," he says. "They have been stalwart supporters of the Democratic Party and vice versa."

In 2020, the NEA recommended Joe Biden for the office and in 2024 issued a formal endorsement for Vice President Kamala Harris.

Petrilli has long held reservations about the nation's teachers unions, saying their positions often block meaningful changes to teaching and perpetuate strict salary rules that can make it hard to recruit and fill certain jobs. But he says he's open to seeing where things go this year, especially with many state-level races leaning in the direction of the union's longtime allies — Democrats.

"This is going to put the unions in a very good position to be able to drive education policy," he says. "I think this is the question: What are they going to do with that power? What are they going to push these Democratic governors to get done?"

Even with Democrats favored to win some races and continued criticism of the union from some Republicans, Moss says she's focused on building a broad coalition of support for public schools.

"The bottom line is that we will work with those who want to put public education first," she says. "No matter what the political party, no matter what your inclination."

Edited by Nirvi Shah
Audio story produced by Lauren Migaki

Copyright 2026 NPR

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

California is on the brink of a total overhaul in the way it governs K-12 schools, but whether those changes actually happen or fade into irrelevance will come down to one person: the next governor.

“We used to ask, who’s in charge here? It was everybody and nobody,” said Michael Kirst, former head of the State Board of Education. “Now we know. It’s the governor. That’s a total sea change – I never thought I’d live to see it.”

In January, Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed a realignment of the education governance structure, which for more than a century had been fragmented between the state superintendent of public instruction, State Board of Education, governor’s office, the Legislature, local school boards and a dozen other entities. That system was so diffuse, according to the think tank Policy Analysis for California Education, that policies were rarely implemented evenly and it was easy to blame someone else when things went wrong.

Newsom’s proposal, Assembly Bill 181, passed overwhelmingly in July. It calls for a new governor-appointed education commissioner, who will oversee the California Department of Education and ensure that policies set in Sacramento are enacted in classrooms. It also strips most duties from the state superintendent, a voter-elected position that will soon have few job responsibilities besides championing various education policies.

The idea is that one person – the governor – will be in charge. Most other states, particularly those with high test scores like Mississippi and Massachusetts, have a similar system.

But that alone won’t fix California’s convoluted K-12 governance, according to researchers Heather Hough and Jason Willis, who recently published a report through a state agency called the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence on what the state needs to do next.

The new education commissioner needs to simplify and clearly communicate goals for schools, provide stricter oversight and offer more direct assistance for struggling schools. Basically, the state needs to take more responsibility for improving student outcomes, Hough said.

“Right now, if a district is performing badly, there’s not a lot of clarity about what should happen,” said Hough, an education policy consultant. “The state has to be able to step in.”

For example, if a school has persistently low scores on standardized tests, the education commissioner should intervene, Hough said. That could mean bringing in experts, tutors or other resources, or removing barriers. If all else fails, the commissioner should have the power to take drastic action such as replacing the superintendent, she said.

So far, California’s gubernatorial candidates have offered few hints about their plans for education commissioner or K-12 schools generally.

Xavier Becerra, a former state attorney general and cabinet member under President Joe Biden, said in a recent televised debate that he thinks schools are mired in too much bureaucracy, and schools should hold back students who are failing. Steve Hilton, a former Fox TV commentator, said in his platform he favors education savings accounts that would allow parents to use public funds to pay for private school.

Neither campaign responded to requests for more information.

Pressure on new education commissioner

The next governor will name an education commissioner after they take office Jan. 4, and there won’t be much down time. By early June, the commissioner must produce a draft report for the Legislature on how he or she plans to reshape the system. A final report is due in the fall.

Among the commissioner’s priorities should be strengthening – and expanding – the Department of Education so there’s more oversight and assistance for schools, said Marshall Tuck, executive director of the advocacy group EdVoice.

“We will not have a state that is effectively educating all students unless we have a highly effective state Department of Education,” said Tuck, who ran for state superintendent in 2014 and 2018. “It’s just not possible. And it’s something we have not had.”

Overall, he’s hopeful that the new education commissioner and governor will have the political clout to persuade all the major players in education policy, including the powerful California Teachers Association, to support changes in governance. Previously, the teachers union had opposed Newsom’s plan because its members thought it shifted too much power away from voters and toward the governor. In the past, the teachers union spent heavily on superintendent candidates – including those running against Tuck.

“This is a real opportunity to change things,” Tuck said. “But it’s very, very important that the governor makes this a top priority and appoints the right person.”

California Teachers Association President David Goldberg said his organization is looking forward to working with the new commissioner, regardless of the union’s past opposition to the idea.

“We’re hoping for an ally,” Goldberg said, “someone who will advocate for the same things we do and elevate the voices of families and teachers.”

‘An extraordinary opportunity’

In Humboldt County, Superintendent Michael Davies-Hughes is optimistic about the possibility for positive change, and how it could bring about better outcomes for students. A more streamlined system, with a stronger state Department of Education, could reduce the paperwork burden for local schools. That, he said, would give teachers and administrators more time to help students in the classroom.

“Educators spend too much time navigating the bureaucracy. If we can remove those barriers, students will benefit,” said Davies-Hughes, who’s the incoming head of California County Superintendents.

School staff often spend hours a week filling out state-mandated paperwork. For instance, every three years school districts are supposed to make a report describing their finances and goals. One from a small district could top 100 pages. Los Angeles Unified’s is nearly 800 pages. The reports are supposed to be updated regularly.

The new commissioner will have a difficult job balancing policy in Sacramento with the needs of local school districts, Davies-Hughes said. The commissioner will also have to take risks and be willing to stand up to powerful political interests, if necessary.

“This person will have to break through a system that’s been in place for decades,” he said. “Otherwise the current problems will just be exacerbated.”

El Dorado County Superintendent Ed Manansala said that the new commissioner’s role will be important, but it's only the start. Larger changes in governance could have a long-lasting, beneficial impact on schools and students.

“It’s an extraordinary opportunity to rethink how the whole system works,” Manansala said. “But we need to be able to speak openly about what’s working and what isn’t, and collaborate to create a more focused and coherent system.”

Kirst was an architect of the Local Control Funding Formula, which in the early 2010s shifted the bulk of budget decisions from the state to local school boards. Even though the new structure calls for more power concentrated at the state level, Kirst feels it’s the right path forward.

“I don’t think it affects local control. It adds efficiency,” said Kirst, who’s an emeritus education professor at Stanford. “It’ll actually improve local control because it gives teachers and schools clearer guidance.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

One of Kathleen Tejeda's students began freshman year just trying to get by. High school can be tricky for any teenager, but she was navigating it as a blind person.

By the end of her junior year, with support from Tejeda and other school staff, the student had gone from getting by to going big: She made the cheerleading squad and the school choir. She even sang the national anthem in front of the whole school.

Tejeda, who has been a special educator for 20 years in Riverside County, Calif., said that kind of advocacy is just as much a part of her job as teaching her students. But teachers like her can be hard to find.

There is a shortage of special educators in 45 out of 50 states, according to the Learning Policy Institute, an education research organization. That shortage is growing because the number of special education students is climbing: It's now more than 8.2 million — about 1 out of 6 public school students.

While turnover worsened sharply after the COVID-19 pandemic, the shortage isn't new. It has existed since special education became embedded in federal law with the passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1975. Half a century later, a fundamental question remains: Why is this shortage of special education teachers so persistent?

Myths and realities about teaching special education

Let's start with a common misconception: The kids are hard to work with, so teachers don't want to do the job. "That is not the case," said Liz Bettini, a former special education teacher who is now a researcher and professor at Boston University. "That has not borne out in our research at all."

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What Bettini's research does show: Special educators can feel isolated from other school staff and feel they have too many student needs to manage. The volume of required paperwork can be crushing. These educators are often responsible for teaching across several subjects and grade levels. Many feel they don't get paid enough to do this essential work.

"That's a very heavy weight to carry as a teacher," Bettini said.

NPR set out to hear directly from about a dozen special educators from around the United States' public schools to learn what it takes to do their jobs day to day. They have been sharing snippets of their lives through voice memos since the start of the school year, and some will open their classroom doors to NPR in the coming months.

"No teacher does this for the paycheck," said third-year high school teacher Diana Swanson, who works in Vail, Ariz., as she sat at her desk the day before her school year began in July. "Just the students, that fulfillment, seeing them fill their cup a little bit, seeing them smile, be a member of society and part of their community. That's what fulfills me."

"I feel like I was coming into this school year more prepared this time around," fourth-year elementary school teacher Danalyn Garcia said late one school night from her living room in Chicago. "Yet, I feel the needs are even greater than the year before."

"Honestly, I had no life outside of school and outside of being a teacher," said Kaori Anderson-Walker, looking back on his first year of teaching middle school in Philadelphia. Now in his fourth year, he said he has finally learned to manage his time more effectively but said the work is still never-ending. "When my students aren't performing where I want them in the classroom, my mind is just constantly moving."

Much of the day isn't spent on teaching 

Being an educator of any kind is demanding and requires immense skill. Research shows that burnout among all kinds of public school teachers is high, but it's even more acute for special educators. These teachers work with students who have an incredibly diverse set of needs, including those with autism, learning disabilities such as dyslexia, developmental delays and physical disabilities.

Special educators also do a lot more than teach — in fact, one study found that they spent only about a third of their day on instruction. They spend the rest of their time tracking student goals, coordinating specialized services for students (say, speech therapy or extra reading help), training support staff and writing individualized education programs (IEPs), which are legal documents that track each special education student's needs at school.

In many states, that means teachers must have specialized certification and training, but they typically aren't paid more. In 32 states, teachers get no extra pay for the hardest-to-staff positions, including in special education, according to a recent study.

While all 13 special educators NPR has spoken to said building relationships with students is their favorite part of the work, they also described the realities of those students' needs being more complex than those of many general education students.

"Special educators have reported, 'I can't teach this kid and respond to the student's crisis simultaneously. So I'm abandoning instruction because the crisis has to take priority,'" Bettini said.

For example, Grace Fitzgerald, who teaches elementary school in Peoria, Ill., shared on a drive home from school that one of her students had an emotional crisis that forced her to evacuate the rest of her class for their safety. "It's been challenging mentally and emotionally to kind of go through that at the very end of the first quarter, my first year of teaching," she said. "No one gets a road map to deal with that kind of situation."

Several teachers shared that behavioral challenges with individual students can make it harder to meet the needs of their many other students.

"Our school doesn't have walls. So we have six classes per grade level in one ginormous room, and it's separated by dividers," Garcia, in Chicago, said. "So when one kid is screaming and crying and begins to escalate, it disturbs the whole pod and then other kids react to it." Getting students back on track can be difficult in these kinds of situations, she said.

Essential but time-consuming paperwork

Individualized education programs are a key part of special education. These written plans, required by federal law, are managed by teachers and other school staff and serve as a kind of road map for each special education student. IEPs outline the student's unique needs and their annual goals. For example, a goal of a student with autism may be to maintain eye contact for a certain period of time.

IEPs help families hold schools accountable, and they also help enforce a primary aim of special education: to teach students in the "least restrictive environment," meaning students with disabilities are taught alongside students without disabilities as much as possible. But IEPs also require regular meetings with families, an understanding of special education law and time spent away from teaching students — time that teachers often don't have.

Then there's the work of putting the IEP into practice in the classroom. Tejeda, of Riverside County, said when she's "pushing in" to other teachers' general education classrooms, she provides targeted support without singling out special education students. "We're going to walk the classroom and check in with everybody, but at the back of our minds, we know that we need to make sure we're [making] accommodations for that particular student."

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For Anderson-Walker, in Philadelphia, "the biggest struggle" was feeling like he had to juggle IEP paperwork with teaching duties. Then, last year, his school, Boys' Latin of Philadelphia, hired staff members who are responsible for the paperwork part of IEPs, leaving teachers more time for the classroom. "Not having that stress is amazing," Anderson-Walker said.

Searching for solutions

In addition to the workload, at the core of the special education teacher shortage are pay and the sheer number of qualified people. Research shows that paying teachers more can help attract and retain them.

For example, in 2020, Hawaii raised special education teacher salaries by $10,000 annually. That cut the state's vacancies by 35%, but it wasn't enough to keep many special education teachers in their jobs. Seventeen states now pay teachers additional money to work in hard-to-staff subjects, including special education. That's down from four years ago, when 22 states did so.

The pipeline of qualified special educators is another big problem. According to education policy researcher Chad Aldeman's analysis of federal data a few years ago, about 46,000 special ed teachers leave public schools every year, while teacher preparation programs train fewer than 30,000 annually to replace those teachers.

Aldeman calls it a crude estimate but said that the rapid increase in demand for special education teachers is outpacing the supply of people trained to do those jobs. Many schools end up resorting to hiring teachers who aren't fully qualified for the work.

But research has found that "grow-your-own" programs that focus on recruiting people who already live in the community may be effective at filling special education jobs. Bettini and her research partners also found that supportive administrators and adequate planning time can help make the work feel more sustainable for teachers.

For example, Fitzgerald, the first-year teacher in Illinois, said she was feeling overwhelmed by her workload at the start of the year. So she worked with her school leadership to build more dedicated planning time into her day.

"I think that's going to be very beneficial and will hopefully lead to a decrease in time spent after school," Fitzgerald said. She uses that time to focus on lesson plans, logging data and writing IEP goals.

It allows her to be more present in the classroom, working with her students.

Visuals and graphics design by LA Johnson and Julianna Conley

Copyright 2026 NPR

A candidate for school board in an affluent San Diego coastal area has a history of far-right activism and espousing anti-vaccine conspiracy theories — and some residents are worried she's hiding her political beliefs from voters.

Summer Boger is running for a seat on the board of the San Dieguito Unified High School District. The area in which she’s running — Area 3 — includes Del Mar, Solana Beach and Cardiff-by-the-Sea, as well as part of Rancho Santa Fe.

Her campaign website says she’s an educator, a healthcare practitioner and a mom.

It said she’s an special education instructional assistant in SDUHSD schools — a “dedicated teacher.”

Her campaign website lists her priorities as academic achievement, budget accountability and college and career readiness.

"With a parent’s perspective, a teacher’s compassion, and a leader’s commitment to common sense and academic excellence, Summer Boger is ready to serve SDUHSD students and families," the website said.

But what’s not there is raising concerns among parents who spoke with KPBS. They said Boger isn’t being up-front about her controversial beliefs and history of far-right activism.

An Encinitas attorney cataloged Boger's history of far-right activism in a Sept. 30 post on Substack and compared the campaign to a "Trojan Horse."

People in the community told KPBS the post is making the rounds in parent group chats.

Boger previously spoke to the Union-Tribune in a Q&A in which she admitted to using artificial intelligence to write her responses.

KPBS invited Boger to sit for an interview to answer questions directly. She declined to discuss anything other than her work with special education students.

After being sent a list of questions about her recent comments on abortion and vaccines, she sent KPBS a statement.

"With two weeks left, I'm keeping my focus on the job this seat actually does," Boger said in the emailed statement. "A school board doesn't set vaccine policy, abortion policy, or many of the other items you mention."

"It was like a fire hose"

Attorney Eleanor Musick — the author of the Substack post — is active in progressive politics and said she’s pretty well-informed as a voter.

But even she was caught off guard by Boger. One day, Musick said, she noticed a flood of Boger's campaign signs around the community. She had no idea who Boger was.

"Oh, man — it was like a fire hose," Musick said. "There was so much information. You know — just doing a simple Google search with her name."

And what showed up first, Musick said, was a Getty Images photo of Boger in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 21, 2025 — the day after Donald Trump's second inauguration.

Boger wears a red "TRUMP" hat and holds a sign — "PARDON ALL J6 HOSTAGES DAY ONE," it said.

The day before, Trump had done just that, granting broad clemency to those charged in connection to the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

What bothered Musick, she said, was that nothing on Boger's campaign website suggested she was anything but a middle-of-the-road candidate.

"I think that she has a fooled a lot of people," Musick said.

The school board race is nonpartisan but Boger is endorsed by the county Republican Party. Her opponent, Helen Doyle, is endorsed by the Democrats.

"It's witches brew; it's witchcraft; it's sorcery"

Boger's record of anti-vaccine politics stretches back at least 16 years. She's featured in a 2010 KPBS report — "More parents not vaccinating kids," the headline reads.

By 2022, Boger was among a series of activists who were anti-vaccine, anti-mask and anti-trans showing up to San Diego County Board of Supervisors meetings to berate the board over its pandemic response.

"You must reinstate all lost jobs from mandates and resign from office," she told then-Supervisor Nathan Fletcher at a meeting April 6, 2022.

She returned weeks later on April 26 to oppose an anti-discrimination ordinance meant to protect women because the ordinance was inclusive of trans women.

"If I want to pretend that I'm a fireman but I'm not a fireman," Boger told the board during public comment. "It's a perversion."

Boger also served as the acting California state president of The Eagle Forum, the national conservative advocacy group started by anti-feminist and anti-gay activist Phyllis Schlafly in the 1970s.

In January 2023, during a two-hour webinar, Boger hosted a slide show promoting a range of far-right conspiracies related to vaccines, abortion and antisemitism that are not based in fact or science.

She espoused misinformation that vaccines contain aborted fetal tissue and "human DNA" and suggested vaccines in part cause children to identify as gay or trans.

"So when we are injecting female DNA into males and female DNA into females I really wonder how that’s changing our culture," Boger said. "It does affect our children's chemical makeup and the things that they think and feel ... it is no surprise to see the LGBTQ culture that we have today in our society."

She also said human fetuses are harvested from abortion clinics to make vaccines.

"We know that satanic rituals feed on the blood of innocent children and that there is a god — Moloch or Satan — that in the Bible they sacrifice babies to for the cleansing of the parents' souls," Boger said. "And that's exactly what abortion clinics today are doing."

She said vaccines are "witchcraft."

"It's satanic, like I said — it's witch's brew, it's witchcraft," Boger said "It's sorcery what they are doing ... the people that put together vaccines."

Early in the presentation Boger shows a slide equating the effort to vaccinate people as being the work of a "Jewish communist global satanic cabal New World order."

A "dedicated teacher"

Boger works part-time in the San Dieguito district as a substitute special education instructional assistant — a job title featured prominently on her campaign website.

But Jeff Ladman, a full-time special education instructional assistant in the district, said she's misrepresenting her work when she calls herself a "teacher."

"She is not an accredited teacher with a degree," Ladman said.

Ladman is father to triplet boys, all of whom he said are on the autism spectrum and part of the special education program.

Records from SDUHSD show Boger was hired as a substitute in March. In an email to a parent, a district official said Boger has worked a total of 46.3 hours since being hired — fewer than six work days.

Emily Berliant, of Cardiff, is a mother of three. She lives in Area 3 where Boger is running for the board seat. She said she thinks Boger isn't being truthful with voters.

"When somebody knocks on your door and says, 'oh, I'm just a mom trying to give back,' without disclosing what their views are about things that are very important in a public school system — like vaccination, like women's health issues, like, you know, inclusive education — that becomes a problem for me," Berliant said.

Berliant said she disagrees with Boger's politics but that's not her issue with this campaign — it's the fact Boger's left her politics out of it.

"She isn't telling constituents she harbors these views and has these political affiliations, which makes it really hard for voters to make an informed choice about her," Berliant said.

In her written response to KPBS, Boger said the teacher's union opposes her and is using her opponent's supporters to attack her.

Berliant, the only voter in Area 3 who spoke with KPBS, confirmed she supports Doyle for the board position.

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When Zyearre Amoah was a student at Sacramento State in 2023, there were times when he felt like the only Black student.

"There were African-American students on our campus," he recalls. But at a sprawling state university with more than 30,000 students, "it just felt like we had to look for each other."

Amoah graduated in 2024, just as his university was launching its Black Honors College, a school within a school with a special focus on Black history, life and culture. He's now a staff member at the BHC, as it's called, helping recruit students.

"Unfortunately I didn't have the luxury to be part of it as a student," he says, but the university's effort to elevate, and celebrate, the scholarship of Black students has changed how he perceives his alma mater.

"Black students on our campus are actually showing their faces," he says, laughing. "That is really helpful for everyone here. We're finding each other relatively easier. "

The initiative at Sacramento State, formally known as the California State University, Sacramento, began just months before the Trump administration began its widespread assault on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs on college campuses. In the last two years, dozens of colleges and universities have rolled back or eliminated such offerings to avoid accusations of racial discrimination that have led to loss of research funding and other sanctions.

"Historically, the campus struggled to create an environment of success" for Black students, says Luke Wood, Sac State's president, who helped create the BHC. "So we created an intervention that was designed to meet their needs while also serving any student who was interested in being part of it."

Wood sees this as a vital part of his, or any university's, mission. "I think that more institutions could be easily doing the same."

An 'elite, specialized experience'

There are more than 800 students currently enrolled in the BHC, and while the majority of them identify as Black, African, African-American or mixed race, Wood insists it's not exclusive and that it complies with federal and state laws.

"It's nondiscriminatory because you can be a white student, an Asian student or Latino and be in the Black Honors College," he says, "and we have non-Black students who apply who want to have an elite, specialized experience."

All of the college's courses are taught from a Black studies perspective. A math class, for example, also includes stories of famous Black mathematicians.

Faculty are chosen based on their track record of educating Black students. Among the criteria are low withdrawal and failure numbers for those students.

Now in its third year, women make up a majority of the BHC's enrollment, according to the college's dean, Boatamo Ati Mosupyoe. That's the case on most U.S. campuses. She says one of her priorities is to change that. To do so, she plans to provide more male role models and mentors: not just to convince more men to enroll, but to support them when they do.

A climate of disappearing diversity programs

Following the Supreme Court decision in 2023 banning affirmative action, the Trump administration has launched civil rights investigations targeting programs that single out a specific race — such as a scholarship program for Black students or an office designed to celebrate multiculturalism.

In September, the Treasury Department proposed a new rule that would strip private schools and colleges of their tax-exempt status if they provide help to students based on their race.

At President Trump's State of the Union address in February, he declared, "We ended D-E-I in America!"

Around the country, many students have felt increasingly isolated, and let down, as diversity programs have disappeared.

"I was pretty sad just at the fact that our university would comply with those federal guidelines," says Hayden O'Neill, a senior at the University of Michigan. She was part of a scholarship program that was shut down last year.

"It definitely feels disheartening," she says, "I don't feel as comfortable as I thought I would at a school like this."

O'Neill is one of the many students around the country who say that understanding their identity – especially as it relates to their race – is a high priority in college. And while O'Neill feels like she is losing some of that opportunity, students in the Black Honors College say they're being given that chance.

A strong sense of belonging 

The bell above the door to the Black Honors College headquarters – housed on the first floor of Sac State's library – rings often:

A sophomore arrives to meet with an advisor. A first-year student has a question about tuition. Over in the corner, a professor has come to ready his notes before class. It's a hub, a home within a home.

On a recent day, one of the students in the office is Naomi Thrower, a junior majoring in Deaf Studies and American Sign Language.

She wanted to attend a historically black college, but California doesn't have any. So, she says, Sacramento State with its BHC felt like the closest alternative.

Growing up in the East Bay, she had what she calls a very multicultural experience, going to school with kids of all different races. While she gained a lot from that, she also felt she was missing a deep understanding of Black culture and identity.

"The kids used to bully me in middle school and say I was whitewashed," Thrower says. "So when it came time for college, I wanted to be surrounded by students who looked like me and also had that same academic drive."

She runs a natural hair business on campus as a side hustle, and says it has helped her develop a creative expression. "In high school, when I'd say I have to do my hair, my friends wouldn't understand it's an all day thing. They'd be like, 'Why does it take so long to wash and brush out your hair?'"

But when she made friends in the honors college, it seemed everyone understood. "Two of my friends helped me take down my hair. We detangled it, washed it. We were just listening to music and hanging out, and that was the community that I was longing for, just someone who understood."

She and others NPR talked with often quoted the saying, Ubuntu, which comes from South African philosophy. It describes an interconnected way of living, often translated as, "I am because we are."

Many students said this concept is central to their educational experience.

And at Sacramento State, Wood says, the efforts to build that identity and sense of community are paying off: Enrollment of Black students is up – and those students are doing better – with more of them re-enrolling, and graduating.

This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association's Reporting Fellowship program.

Copyright 2026 NPR

There are a lot of people in San Diego County who aren’t sure where their next meal is coming from. Feeding San Diego said 13%, or about 430,000 people, are food insecure. That includes 123,000 children.

Food insecurity was the subject of a state senate hearing in Kearny Mesa Wednesday. “Addressing inequality means listening to our community,” Sen. Dr. Akilah Weber-Pierson, D-39, said as the hearing got underway.

Weber-Pierson was joined by her colleague, State Sen. Steve Padilla, D-18. For about two hours, the senators listened to experts in food insecurity and healthcare.

“In California in 2025, 24% of all adults in California experienced food insecurity,” said Jared Call, the Director of Public Policy and Advocacy at the California Association of Food Banks.

Call said for 16 million Californians, the cost of basic needs in their community exceed their income. "The basic needs we use to calculate this measure include housing, healthcare, transportation, childcare and food,” Call said.

Another witness told the senators that not having enough to eat can often lead to poor health.

“As a surgeon, this has very real implications on not only pre-op care and post-op care,” said Dr. Alexandra Kharazi, a cardiothoracic surgeon who advocates for cardiovascular health. She sees the cumulative effects of decades of food insecurity and poor nutrition in many of her patients.

“Particularly in the South Bay, where I do a lot of my work, people oftentimes, there’s more of a disparity with the food people are able to have access to,” Kharazi said.

Healthy food for children pays off

Representatives of the San Diego Unified School District and California Department of Education said state support for getting good, healthy food to children is paying off. They credit a program called California Universal Meals that the state launched five years ago.

“It’s just kind of a no-brainer, it’s just common sense and the research confirms that when they’re well-nourished, there’s improved concentration and cognitive function,” said Kim Frinzell, with the California Department of Education Nutrition Services.

Both Weber-Pierson and Padilla sit on committees that deal with the health of Californians. They said they’ll take what they learned back to Sacramento, and work on crafting policies that will improve people’s lives. That will include where they money will come from to support those policies.

After more than a year of public outcry, the Grossmont Union High School District will reinstate nine teacher-librarian positions that the school board cut in early 2025.

The reinstatement comes after the Grossmont Education Association, the teachers’ union, filed an unfair practice charge with the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB). The charge alleged that the district violated the Educational Employment Relations Act.

Under a settlement agreement announced Wednesday, the teacher librarians will be offered their jobs back for the 2027-28 school year and will have protections from layoffs for two full school years.

“This agreement is focused on the future and serves the best interest of our East County community following a challenging period,” said Grossmont Union High School Board President Robert Shield.

In early 2025, the school board's conservative majority, which included Shield, Scott Eckert, Gary Woods and Jim Kelly, pushed through the cuts claiming they were needed in part to close a budget deficit.

Later, the San Diego Union-Tribune revealed private text threads that included members of the board majority. The text threads raised questions regarding whether the board members violated California’s open meetings law by discussing the cuts outside of a public meeting.

Teacher-librarian and GEA President Stephanie Macceca said Wednesday’s settlement agreement to bring back the teacher librarians is a “testament to the power of solidarity and our unwavering commitment to our students.”

While the agreement resolves the unfair practice charge, the district is still facing a lawsuit filed by the group of teacher librarians who lost their positions.

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Immigration enforcement agents are inciting panic at California’s community colleges.

Santa Monica College said that one of its students was arrested and deported last May. Then in December, Santa Barbara City College said that federal immigration officers used their campus parking lot as a staging ground, prompting an uproar from community activists. 

Last month, the San Diego Community College District said ICE agents arrested a student on a public street that cuts through the urban campus and proceeded to chase another student up the steps of the school’s Arts and Humanities building.

Last Monday, federal agents arrested the father of a student in a campus parking lot at Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria, south of San Luis Obispo.

College presidents say they’re doing everything in their power to keep students safe and prevent federal immigration enforcement officers from coming on campus. But they admit that they have limited power in these situations.

“If ICE agents want to come and walk in the middle of campus, they can do that,” said Kevin Walthers, the president of Allan Hancock College.

State laws require colleges to notify students if immigration enforcement agents are on campus and agents must present a warrant before entering a "nonpublic” area in a school, such as a classroom or office building. But parking lots, quads and many other outdoor spaces are considered public.

By the time Walthers learned ICE agents had arrived at the campus parking lot, they were gone — the arrest happened in a matter of minutes. He said he never received a warrant and was only able to issue a notification to students and faculty after the arrest. The same was true in San Diego, said district Chancellor Gregory Smith.

President Donald Trump rescinded a longstanding policy that prevented immigration enforcement in “sensitive” locations, such as schools. The California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, which oversees the state’s 116 colleges, has been outspoken about protecting students without legal status and offered guidance to schools on dealing with immigration agents. Attorney General Rob Bonta released his own, more detailed guide last month.

Chandler Rebel, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration enforcement, said “ICE does not target schools” and denied arresting anyone on the Allan Hancock campus, despite witness testimony and photographs. Rebel did not respond to questions about the officer who chased a San Diego City College student on campus.

After their interactions with immigration agents, Santa Barbara and San Diego city colleges put up or are in the process of installing signs in parking lots, sidewalks or at the entrances to classrooms and buildings, telling agents they need approval to enter.

In practice, these messages may not prevent immigration agents from coming onto their campuses, college presidents say. “It's kind of our district putting every effort that we can think of, and hopefully it is a deterrent,” Smith said.

A regular Monday 

Last Monday morning, Mayrin, 18, said she was sitting in the passenger seat while her father drove her to Allan Hancock College, where she had statistics class that day. As they drove by the Olive Garden just outside of campus, she said she saw a large black car follow them down the road.

Mayrin and her father parked in the campus lot, she said, where a masked man approached the window and asked for their identification. CalMatters agreed to withhold her full name because she fears drawing attention to her family’s legal status.

“I was calling people. I was crying. It was a mix of emotions, mostly just worried about my dad,” she said. Maryrin gave the officer her state ID and told him that she’s a U.S. citizen. Her father, who immigrated from Mexico and has lived in the U.S. for about two decades, did not have identification on him and the officer pulled him into his car, she said.

Mayrin spent the next 20 minutes alone in her father’s car, crying and calling family, before college staff, including campus police officers and the dean of counseling, brought her into a conference room to ask what happened and provide support.

Mayrin’s father was one of at least 17 people who were arrested last Monday by immigration enforcement agents in the Santa Maria area, said Assemblymember Gregg Hart, a Santa Barbara Democrat, in an emailed statement. “Mass enforcement sweeps like this are designed to send a message of fear and intimidation – one straight from President Trump.”

The largely Latino towns in California's Central Coast region, which include Santa Maria, have experienced waves of immigration enforcement since Trump took office.

In April, Walthers said the college’s police chief had a meeting with other local police chiefs, the FBI and ICE officers who oversee the Central Coast. The college’s police chief asked immigration officials to provide advance notice before coming on campus. “The response was that ICE would not be coming to campus,” Walthers said. In retrospect, he said he wished the agreement was more formal.

After the arrest last week, Walthers said he got in touch with a federal immigration officer in Los Angeles and said he felt “optimistic” after the conversation that it wouldn’t happen again.

‘Without us knowing or without any previous approval’

In December, a local organization that advocates for immigrants, 805 UndocuFund, alerted Santa Barbara City College officials that ICE agents were at a campus parking lot and appeared to be using it as a staging area, according to Jordan Killebrew, the executive director of public affairs for the college.

Killebrew said agents were “occupying our parking lots without us knowing or without any previous approval.”

The college has since signed an agreement with 805 UndocuFund to help alert the college of the presence of federal law enforcement agents. The group will also provide college students and staff with resources and referrals including legal, financial, mental health, and emergency support services for immigration-related matters.

Killebrew said the college spent about $1,200 on 12 signs, which say its campuses “may not be used for civil immigration enforcement staging areas, processing locations, or operations bases.”

The San Diego college district was already in the process of putting up similar signs when ICE appeared on campus last month. District spokesperson Jack Beresford said the four-college district spent $71,000 on 68 signs, including the cost of the labor to install them. The district also created a new policy requiring any entity, including law enforcement, to get prior approval before conducting “official business” on campus.

“We don't let a bank just come and set up a booth,” said Smith, the chancellor of the San Diego district. He said immigration enforcement agents would need approval before conducting their business, including arrests.

Whether the policy will actually work is less clear. “By the time I know that they're here and get down there to tell them they're not allowed to be here, they're going to be gone,” Smith said. “What I'm hoping that we have set up with this is a legal argument that it's an illegal seizure, the same as if they just broke into somebody's home.”

The policy has never been tested in court. He said he hopes it never gets there.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

A few dozen San Diego State University students marched to the campus's student union on Tuesday. They called for the California State University system to end its contract with OpenAI.

CSU first entered into a no-bid, $17 million contract with OpenAI in 2025. It gave students, faculty and staff access to an educational version of ChatGPT.

The previous school year, campuses across the university system cut jobs to offset an ongoing budget crisis.

CSU later renewed the OpenAI contract for another three years for $39 million.

The students’ signs reflected wide-reaching concerns beyond job loss: OpenAI’s co-founder funding President Donald Trump’s interests; the use of artificial intelligence by immigration enforcement and the Israeli military; the environmental harm caused by data centers.

Claudia Gonzalez questioned whether AI is even good for them.

“A lot of students nowadays don't know how to write sentences. They don't know how to write paragraphs, even basic emails. So, it's really not good for us at all,” Gonzalez said, who interns for the student-led activist organization Students for Quality Education.

A 2025 CSU survey found widespread use but mixed feelings about AI among staff and students. The majority were skeptical that it was benefiting education overall.

And while most students said they used ChatGPT, the vast majority said they used the free version — not the version paid for and provided by CSU.

University system leaders, meanwhile, claim the contract as a win.

CSU Chancellor Mildred García wrote in a 2025 systemwide email that CSU was establishing itself “as the nation’s first and largest AI-powered public university system.”

"No other university system in the U.S. or internationally is doing anything like this, not at this scale," she said at a press conference announcing the partnership with OpenAI.

“The CSU respects the rights of our students to voice their opinions on matters important to them,” said CSU spokesperson Amy Bentley-Smith by email Tuesday. “AI is fundamentally changing how people learn and work across nearly every industry. Higher education cannot ignore this shift and must approach it thoughtfully and responsibly. By providing resources and training for students, the CSU is working toward ensuring graduates are prepared for a rapidly evolving economy where AI fluency is increasingly essential.”

Gonzalez warned that AI’s harm would eventually impact everyone.

“A lot of people may think that it’s not affecting them, but it’s coming,” she said.

The San Diego Unified School District will begin instructing students about El Niño in the coming weeks, even as the district itself prepares for the expected significant weather pattern, officials said Tuesday.

On Tuesday, Superintendent Fabi Bagula, Deputy Superintendent of Operations Drew Rowlands, science educators, members of the San Diego Unified Police Department and trustees from the Board of Education announced steps the district was taking to protect schools.

Some measures underway by SDUSD's Physical Plant Operations include clearing roof drains, removing vegetation/debris from around swales and storm drain inlets and stocking up on flood control materials.

"When El Niño brings extreme weather, keeping our children safe is at the very heart of everything we do," Bagula said. "Severe rain, localized flooding and sudden storms can be overwhelming for families, so taking thoughtful, early steps to protect our school community is our top priority."

More details can be found in a new online family resource at SanDiegoUnified.org/ElNino.

Board of Education Trustee Cody Petterson represents many of San Diego Unified's coastal communities, some of which can be heavily impacted during severe weather.

"Protecting our students isn't just about reacting to the storm. It's vital we prepare them for the reality of climate change," Petterson said. "By bringing these real-world environmental challenges directly into our classrooms, we empower our students with the knowledge and resilience they need to stay safe. Equipping our children to understand and navigate these climate events ensures that our schools, families, and coastal communities are prepared for the next storm and for the future."

At least 10 schools are in flood-prone areas: Cesar Chavez Elementary, Mission Bay High School, Millennial Tech Middle School, Lincoln High School, Hoover High School, Carver Elementary School, Pacific Beach Middle School, Barnard Elementary School, Ocean Beach Elementary School and Morse High School.

The district's PPO is working proactively on campuses and is preparing for a heavy volume of calls.

"Preparing our campuses for severe weather isn't done overnight. It takes weeks and months of continuous rigor, planning, and hands-on maintenance behind the scenes," Rowlands said. "By putting in the proactive work early, we eliminate preventable risks and create the operational flexibility needed to handle whatever unexpected challenges a major storm brings."

Students in the district will partake in El Niño Explorer Week, a week- long science lesson series by the district's science team focusing on causes, regional impacts and safety preparations in San Diego.

"As science educators, we know El Niño is more than a weather headline," said Julie Garcia, the district's senior director of future-ready learning, curriculum and instruction. "It is a recurring Pacific Ocean atmosphere pattern that can influence fall and winter weather across San Diego, increasing the likelihood of heavy rain, atmospheric rivers, flooding, and related disruptions.

"Bringing El Niño into the classroom goes beyond teaching science. It helps students understand how Earth's interconnected systems can shape conditions in their own communities and empowers them to share accurate information, prepare their families, and advocate for community readiness," she added.

Additionally, the district's Police Department is working on site- specific safety plans for emergency situations.

"During high-impact weather events, our officers work hand-in-hand with emergency services and school administrators to monitor conditions, secure campuses, and maintain clear emergency pathways," said Manuel Del Toro, assistant chief of the district's police department. "If severe weather hits during the school day, I want our families to know that our officers will be on the front lines at schools, proactively managing hazards, ensuring safe arrivals and dismissals, and maintaining a calm, secure environment for our school communities."

With schools frequently at the center of communities, district leaders also said Tuesday that "depending on the conditions and circumstances San Diego Unified is ready to support our communities and families if called upon to have a school or schools serve as gathering places and/or temporary shelters."

Renatho Casseus, a San Diego City College student who was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) near campus, has been set free from immigration detention.

Last Friday, a federal judge ordered the release of the 20-year-old.

On Saturday afternoon he was driven out of Otay Mesa Detention Center and dropped off near the border. He spoke exclusively to KPBS Monday from his attorney’s office in Normal Heights.

“I’m happy to see my mom and dad, my friends, my brothers,” Casseus said.

His mother and father were seated off to the side, still too fearful to show their face on camera or speak on the record. He said he’s the eldest of three siblings.

Casseus had been held at the detention center for over a month. He was arrested by ICE on Sept. 8.

“While I was going to the parking lot of my school I saw the ICE agents coming up from their cars and asking me to roll down my window and I did it,” Casseus said. “And they arrested me.”

His arrest, and the arrest of other Haitians following the end of their country’s Temporary Protected Status, sparked an outcry from the larger San Diego community.

Casseus said he’s grateful for all of the support. He said prior to his arrest he wasn’t worried about his own immigration status.

“I was worried for the Haitian community, but I wasn't worried for me. Because I was a student — I didn't think ICE agents would target a student,” Casseus said.

He told KPBS he was not fully aware of the community support he was receiving until he saw himself on local news reports while inside the detention center. It caused mixed emotions.

“I was a little bit sad,” Casseus said.

Inside the detention facility, Casseus said he made unexpected connections with older detainees. They shared advice with him.

“I saw some Haitians who were older than me, Latinos, older people from other countries that … supported me inside,” he said. “I think I was the youngest one in my cell.”

Casseus said that advice helped him “stay strong,” a message he now wants to share with others who find themselves in similar situations.

“If that can happen to me — that can happen to any immigrant student who is studying at City College or any state (across the country)," he said.

Meanwhile, officials at San Diego City College said much has changed since Casseus’ arrest. There is now new signage around the perimeter of campus that states immigration agents are not allowed to carry out operations on district property.

“I think it changed students’ perception of: ‘is this a safe campus, is it safe for me to be in school?’ So we've had to look at our policies and practices,” said the college’s Vice President of Student Services Marciano Perez.

That includes policies like when students are dropped from classes. Perez said usually students are dropped from classes after two weeks of not being present.

“In the past if a student stopped coming to campus you know instructors would typically drop a student for non-attendance, now in some cases it might mean a student is detained,” Perez said.

Since Casseus’ Sept. 8 arrest, the San Diego Community College District said it’s expanded counseling and legal support services for students. Plus it now uses text alerts if immigration officials come onto campus.

Still, at an institution like City College with a large immigrant and mixed immigration-status population, Perez said there’s been a ripple effect from Casseus' arrest. It took place just off of campus grounds.

“We saw an increase in students who were reaching out asking about the process for withdrawing this semester — whether that was taking a temporary pause or completely withdrawing,” Perez said. “We had students who were reaching out to the instructors saying ‘Hey, I’m afraid to come to class but you have an attendance policy in place. I don't know if I can get to campus safely, what are my options?’”

A spokesperson for the San Diego Community College District (SDCCD) said enrollment at the College of Continuing Education has been “significantly impacted due to fears about immigration enforcement activity,” dating back to this spring.

District data show that year-over-year decline at that college between spring 2025 and spring 2026 was over 1,600 students.

“We have seen a decline in enrollment given the immigrant and refugee populations we serve,” a spokesperson for the College of Continuing Education said in a statement. “We remain steadfast in our commitment to supporting our students, removing barriers to education, and ensuring that our programs and services remain accessible during these challenging times.”

District data also show a year-over-year drop of over 440 students at City College dating back to this spring.

Casseus is not one of those students looking to withdraw. He’s eager to return to campus and to continue his studies as soon as possible. He wants to set an example for others.

“I’m planning to go back to school to continue my education to make my dream come true and help other immigrant students,” he said.

Casseus’ attorney said he has a pending asylum case. He estimated that it could take up to a year for a final decision.

An online fundraiser has been organized to help Casseus and his family deal with the fallout of his arrest and detainment.

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Democrats and public school advocates have until the end of the year to make a tough decision: Whether to embrace a Republican program that might help some public-school families pay for things like tutoring and summer school – even if it will also pour taxpayer dollars into private schools.

Colorado's Jared Polis was the first Democratic governor to opt in to the coming Federal Scholarship Tax Credit, a new program the Trump administration is calling "America's first nationwide school choice program."

"An obvious decision," says Polis of his choice to embrace the policy that, with the help of a generous tax credit, could raise billions of dollars in taxpayer donations nationwide.

"Of course I want Colorado kids to be the beneficiaries of that," Polis tells NPR. "I think many other governors would like kids in their state to be the beneficiaries of that."

Many Republicans, yes. But his fellow Democrats aren't so sure.

"That is never going to happen," Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said earlier this year when asked if he would be opting his state into the program for 2027. "We are not doing it."

In between Polis and Walz, between yes and no, 15 Democratic governors, as well as the mayor of Washington, D.C., remain undecided, according to a tracker by Ed Week. And the clock is ticking. To be able to participate next year, they have to opt in by Jan. 1.

"This is really, really hard because the policy is designed to try to make these [political] wedges," says Jessica Levin, litigation director at Education Law Center, a nonprofit legal advocacy group that opposes private school vouchers.

She says Democratic governors may feel they can't pass on this program "because they think, 'Oh, there is a benefit for public schools, and I'm going to get flack.'"

But Levin, along with many of her fellow public school advocates, sees the program as a kind of Trojan horse. Billed as a boon to public schools, she says vouchers can lead some families to leave for private schools, which can then result in declines in public school funding.

How the tax credit will work

Beginning in January, qualifying taxpayers will be able to donate up to $1,700 to a scholarship-granting organization, or SGO. The SGO will then convert those donations into scholarships, also known as vouchers, to help families cover a wide range of education costs, including private school tuition as well as tutoring, summer school and even new computers.

The government's end of the bargain is that, in exchange for making a scholarship donation, these qualifying donors will get every penny back come tax season: For every dollar they contribute to one of these SGOs, they will owe the IRS a dollar less in federal income tax up to $1,700.

Put another way, if you're thinking of donating, "It's not your money. It's money that you would have sent to the IRS," says Marguerite Roza of Georgetown University's Edunomics Lab.

More than 138 million people could qualify for the full tax credit, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Plus, given the generosity of the credit, the U.S. Treasury Department predicts it could raise nearly $26 billion in scholarship donations by 2030.

For comparison, the largest source of federal education funding, known as Title I, sent more than $18 billion to schools in 2023 to help them serve low-income students.

Of the 31 states that have signed on to the new program, most are led by Republicans. Just one Democratic governor has willingly joined Polis: Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York. In Kansas, Kentucky and North Carolina, top Democrats fought the program but were overridden by Republican legislatures.

If a governor does not opt in, that state's taxpayers can still make donations to SGOs and receive the tax credit, but families in that state won't qualify for scholarships or vouchers to pay for educational expenses.

Governors who have opted in for 2027 can also choose to opt out for 2028 or vice versa.

Why some opponents feel they need to get on board

Like many of the nation's Democratic governors, groups that have championed public education in Republican-led states now face a similarly uncomfortable choice:

Continue to fight the scholarship program on principle or make a practical pivot, encouraging school districts and public school families to embrace the program so they can benefit from it.

The Southern Education Foundation (SEF) – created in the aftermath of the Civil War to guarantee schooling to the children of formerly enslaved people – chose to pivot.

"The question for me became less about whether I agreed with every aspect of the program, because I don't, and more about what happens now that the program is moving forward," Raymond C. Pierce, SEF's president and CEO, said in a press release.

"We've always been an organization that has promoted public schools, and we oppose private school vouchers," says Fred Jones Jr., SEF's senior director of public policy and advocacy.

Jones says foundation leaders fought "very hard" against the new program but decided to change their approach after most of the states where they operate opted in. The group is now launching an alliance of SGOs to focus specifically on raising funds for public school students.

"If we have tutoring, if we have afterschool programming, if we get summer learning… I think a number of students in the public school system could be tremendously better off," Jones says. 

Deborah Gist felt the same way. "I am making sure that public school students benefit," she says.

The former superintendent of Tulsa Public Schools, one of Oklahoma's largest districts, Gist recently founded Future School Fund, a national SGO focused on serving public school students.

"I pulled up the bill language itself and saw right there that public schools were very explicitly included," Gist says. "So I immediately started wearing my public school educator hat. I immediately started thinking about all the kinds of things that we could fund." 

Even with help from organizations like SEF and Future School Fund, public schools in states that have opted-in will have a lot of catching-up to do.

Many states already have state-level tax credits focused on helping families pay for private school, and very few of the SGOs that are already up and running are public school-oriented.

In other words, Jessica Levin explains, private schools already have the SGOs, the infrastructure and the advertising budgets.

That's one reason Levin, along with many other public school advocates, continues to push back against the tax credit. She predicts, "The vast majority of the money is going to be used on private school tuition and other private education expenses."

To get the money, public schools will need to start charging fees 

Marguerite Roza says public schools hoping to benefit from the tax credit will now need to decide which of the services they provide might legally be reimbursed.

"You can't charge a fee for math class," Roza says, or for much of what public schools do.

At its most basic, the program allows families to use donations to pay for education services that they'd normally have to cover out of pocket. That's a challenge for public schools, since they are required to provide education free-of-charge — they can't start charging for traditional services just so they can receive donation dollars through the new tax credit.

Private schools, on the other hand, can legally charge tuition, and the Republican program can easily be used to reimburse families for that cost. What can public schools charge for?

Roza has some ideas. "A fee could cover field trips, assemblies, access to tutoring, access to aftercare, homework drop-in hours, end of the year parties."

That doesn't sit right with Levin, though. She says, even if this kind of reimbursement is allowable under the law, "it's very wrong and very dangerous. Public schools don't charge for most of what they provide because that's the entire point of public education."

The best way to support public schools, she says, "is to fund public schools. It is not to accept a privatization program that throws a few crumbs at public school students."

When it comes to generating money for public schools, Roza agrees this new tax credit is "the most convoluted, circuitous way possible anybody could have ever laid out — and with all sorts of caveats in it."

But, she says, it's also a real program that won't benefit districts unless they actively embrace it.

For the tax credit to raise a meaningful amount of money for public school communities, Roza says, they will not only need to team up with public-school focused SGOs. They'll also need to convince local employers to include the option to donate as part of their regular payroll operations. School districts will want to fold it into their own payroll systems.

"The money is not showing up automatically," Roza says. "Districts will have to play this game in order to get the money. And where districts shrug their shoulders and say, 'I'm not doing this, I'm not gonna participate,' then they're not going to get any."

Wealthier public schools will have a big advantage

Even if some public school communities do everything right, and money pours in, an old problem is sure to surface: The schools that need the most help, may benefit the least.

"It's the public schools that are in wealthy communities that have the most money locally that they can raise," says Jon Valant, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and director of its Brown Center on Education Policy. "And if the patterns of giving for this program look like patterns of giving for other programs across the country, we expect that most people are going to give to [SGOs] that then give back to the schools in their communities."

Valant and a team of Brookings researchers estimate that the wealthiest counties will generate roughly three times as much money through the program as the nation's poorest counties.

And that means, for lower-income, rural communities to benefit, they'll have to rely on wealthy donors' willingness to give beyond their own communities. That's not likely, Valant says.

What's more, the program is not limited to helping low-income families.

A student can qualify for help as long as their household earns less than 300% of the gross median income in their area. That's roughly 95% of all students, according to the Treasury Department's own estimates. Valant says, "There are kids across the country whose families make a half-million dollars a year who are income-eligible."

Given how disproportionately the program is likely to benefit wealthy communities, Valant warns, "there's a real chance that we end up seeing this program as Title I for rich kids."

All of which makes the decision to opt in or out that much harder for hold-out Democrats.

For Fred Jones Jr., of SEF, embracing the program was purely practical. He doesn't like it, and would advise those undecided Democratic governors to opt out. But, in the South, where SEF works, most states have opted in. It's real, like it or not.

And Jones says, if there's no conscious effort in those states to raise funds for public school students, then it simply won't happen and most of the money will, indeed, go to private schools.

Copyright 2026 NPR

A high school civics project brought U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff to Point Loma High School Thursday.

“We are the next generation of voters,” senior Molly Gallagher told about 100 of her fellow students. The project was hers, done in conjunction with the office of Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-51. It led to an invitation from the superintendent of the San Diego Unified School District, Fabiola Bagula. The district said Schiff was the first U.S. senator to visit one of its schools in 13 years.

California’s junior Democratic senator drew a contrast for the student audience between their world today and the one that existed when he was their age, and talked about how to approach the challenges they face now — mainly social media.

“We need courses in high school and probably even middle school that teach people how to find out what is true and what is not true online,” said Schiff.

The senator took a number of questions from students, including one on his recently introduced Promoting Authenticity with Influencer Disclaimers Act. He said that the legislation would force online influencers to reveal where they get their financial support.

Schiff explained, “Now, if they were doing a commercial, the law would require that a commercial say at the end of the ad, ‘This ad was paid for by Adam Schiff for U.S. Senate.’ But if it’s an influencer, right now they don’t have to disclose that they’re being paid,” he said.

After the students returned to class, Schiff held a news conference. With a little more than two weeks until the midterm elections, KPBS asked him about his confidence that the vote will be free and fair here in California and across the country.

Schiff said he and his Democratic colleagues had done similar planning prior to the 2020 election. He said they considered lots of possibilities, with the exception of an attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“This time, we’ve had to really open the aperture and consider things that would’ve been unimaginable just a few years ago. But through a strategy of litigation and mobilization, legislation and legislative oversight, we’re taking every step to prepare and make sure that our elections are free and fair and that’s all we can do,” Schiff said.

Schiff was joined by Democratic members of San Diego’s congressional delegation. The chief topic on everyone’s mind was actions by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in and around San Diego.

“Unless we figure out that what we’re doing is immoral, we’re not gonna change and we have to change this,” said Rep. Juan Vargas, D-52.

“Many of us have talked to the local ICE office and asked for a commitment that they will not do enforcement around schools, and we have been unable to get that commitment,” Jacobs said.

In his parting words to the students, Schiff urged them to get engaged, recognize the polarized situation this country is in politically, and as they grow into adulthood, do everything they can to help us get through it.

Chula Vista Elementary School District board members are pressing the district over reports of extreme heat on school buses. The district transports more than 1,600 students daily, according to figures it published last year.

At a Sept. 9 school board meeting, bus driver Sarah Ramos described sweltering temperatures inside a bus she was driving during last month’s heat wave.

“Tuesday morning, the bus I was driving reached 92.5 degrees despite every window being down, roof hatch open and two fans open. This was before 9 a.m.,” Ramos told the board. “That afternoon it averaged 103 degrees and reached up to 104.7.”

Ramos told board members that only 39 of the district’s 93 buses have air conditioning.

“The district moved recess, lunch and PE indoors to protect students and staff from the extreme heat but afterwards we place students on buses exceeding 100 degrees,” Ramos said.

On Wednesday outside district offices, board members held up a photo they said showed a temperature gauge inside a bus reading 108 degrees, taken by a bus driver.

“When children's safety is involved, we have an obligation to look for solutions,” board member Delia Dominguez Cervantes said.

One month after Ramos alerted the board to the issue, Cervantes said they're still waiting for a response from the district.

“I am not asking for the impossible,” Cervantes said. “I am asking that we explore our options, identify what is financially feasible, and taking meaningful steps to protect our children.”

Students with special needs were a particular concern for board member Keren Ramirez Dominguez.

“A lot of them are nonverbal. A lot of them are, you know, in wheelchairs, and they need all these other help,” she said. “So having them inside of a bus that's more than 100 degrees for a long period of time can be really damaging to them.”

The district told KPBS it is providing air-conditioned buses for medically fragile students, making water available to students and staff and establishing cooling areas for bus drivers. The district also described Dominguez Cervantes’ comments as politically motivated.

In a written statement, the district questioned why Cervantes voted against purchasing new air conditioning. “The public deserves an explanation of that vote,” she said.

With temperatures forecast to hit the upper 80s to mid-90s starting Thursday, school board members are questioning whether those measures are enough.

I love horror. So when I heard that Southwestern College (SWC) was doing a “blood” rehearsal for its new horror comedy, “Dyin’ for Dracula,” I had to check it out. Warning: Blood will flow … but it’s all fake and even edible.

SWC's "Dyin’ for Dracula" serves up a play within a play.

"It's a horror comedy about a group of actors who are putting on a play called 'Dracula,' the traditional 'Dracula' play. However, there's a vampire in the theater, and we have to figure out who it is before everyone perishes," said Ruff Yeager, co-author of the play and a professor of theater arts at SWC.

Late last month, the cast and crew were getting ready for their first blood rehearsal.

"We've hired an expert, Monique Hanson, who is helping us with the gore," added Omri Schein, co-author of the play and an adjunct instructor at SWC.

Hanson gleefully calls herself "the blood sport queen" and was not the least bit shy about covering students, the set and herself in various types of blood.

"I'm making all of the blood packs, the blood, all of the wet stuff you see for 'Dyin' for Dracula,'" Hanson said.

I arrived as the cast and crew prepared for their first blood splatter rehearsal. A tarp covered the stage as Hanson's blood crew wheeled out a cart filled with squibs, intestines, gallons of blood and hoses to spray actors down with blood.

Estrella Gomez is an SWC student who plays a character that gets turned into a succubus.

"For weeks, I've been waiting for this moment because I was really excited to play with, like, fake blood," Gomez said enthusiastically.

Hanson could not be happier to introduce students to all the bloody devices they would be using in the play.

"Watching them through the process and just commit to it and not be shy. It's really cool to watch them enjoy it, and we're not forcing them to do it," Hanson said.

And she wasn't forcing anyone. When Hanson asked for volunteers to test squibs — packets of fake blood that are burst open to simulate a bullet wound or bite on the neck — the students eagerly lined up.

Dakarrai Roberson needed to test a squib for a scene in which he gets shot.

"It was like a little bloody packet made out of laundry detergent," Roberson said. "And I just squeezed it against my chest, and then it just blew up all over my shirt, and that's how people die in the play."

And a lot of them die — almost the entire cast. That requires a lot of blood.

"So there are three buckets of blood back there," Yeager noted. "Home Depot five-gallon buckets of blood, from which they are taking the blood for the stage. Someone gets an arm torn off, someone gets decapitated, someone has their intestines eaten. Yeah, it's great fun."

Hanson is particularly proud of the intestines she has made.

"We have some edible parts in the show that I made with marshmallows and treats and Halloween fun stuff," Hanson said.

Hanson said there is no instruction manual for this kind of stuff. You just have to use your imagination and have some fun. She proudly served up a sample intestine for me, and it was indeed sweet, fruity and effectively gruesome. It was also vegan to accommodate the actors who needed to rip them out and eat them.

"So in the scene, I'm supposed to eat the guts," Gomez said. She followed Hanson's instructions: Rip into the gut bag, pull out the intestines, play with them and chew on them. Swallowing was optional, even though they were 100% edible.

The cast was enthusiastic about the display of blood effects at the splatter rehearsal.

"The audience is gonna love it," Roberson said. "I feel like they're gonna be amazed with the blood."

Hanson wanted to make sure all the actors were comfortable with the blood because the production is live theater.

"The thing I love about theater across the board in general is there is no stop. There is no retake. There is no cut. You continue. You can't go back to the top of the show if you didn't like something," Hanson said. "There's like a different heartbeat because the show has a forward pulse."

But "Dyin’ for Dracula" is a comedy about a production where everything goes wrong, so there is room to have fun, especially with the blood.

"I'm a big fan of camp, especially horror camp. I love the gore. I grew up a lot with the Hammer movies. So the show is very camp. The show is not realistic. It's over the top and fun," Schein said.

"Seeing how the blood is gonna work makes it even more camp, and I really like it," Gomez said in agreement.

And once this comedy of terrors is set in motion, nothing can stop it from reaching its bloody end.

"At the end of the play — I will give this away — the stage is strewn with dead, bloody bodies," Yeager said.

Hanson is delighted to help deliver that high body count, with gallons of blood every night and a level of enthusiasm that inspires everyone to put on a killer show. It's rare to see someone having this level of fun at work.

"Dyin' for Dracula" has four more gloriously gruesome and bloody performances Oct. 14-17 at the Studio Theatre at SWC's Performing Arts Center.

You can also find out more about SWC's excellent Theatre Arts Department and its offerings, including a program for high school students), on the department's website.

Cornell University has banned parties and social events at fraternities for the rest of the school year and will bring sexual assault investigators into its police unit, in response to a former student's allegation of gang rape in 2024.

The changes came on Tuesday as the university said it is committed to addressing a "deeply disturbing" culture of drug and alcohol abuse, and a rise in sexual violence on campus following a civil lawsuit filed by a former student, Jane Doe, which set off national outrage and a crisis at Cornell.

"I am deeply sorry for the harm Jane Doe suffered in 2024, and appalled that this act of sexual violence occurred within our Cornell community," Michael I. Kotlikoff, who is Cornell's president, wrote in a letter addressed to the campus on Tuesday. "It is clear that women on our campus continue to question whether they are safe. We must meet this moment by acknowledging where we have fallen short and taking meaningful action."

The lawsuit, which Doe filed nearly one month ago, alleges that Doe was plied with ketamine and was sexually assaulted by members of the Chi Phi fraternity during a party in October of 2024. The details of the allegations, which disclosed how fraternity members used a Snapchat group chat to discuss the woman and events at the party with openly crude language, sparked fury across the nation.

Doe's lawyer, Thomas Giuffra, told news outlets that Doe has been sent death threats and police swarmed her family's home since she filed the lawsuit.

The administration's changes come after student groups organized protests last week on campus.

"The administration is clearly feeling the heat and needed to make a move," says John Hartnett, a sophomore at Cornell who has helped organize protests. He called the changes a "half measure," and said that banning frats was not a long term solution to systematic issues at the university.

The faculty senate is considering a vote of no confidence in the university administration at a meeting scheduled for Wednesday. It's a rare move that demonstrates the deep seated frustration and distrust stemming from the 2024 case.

"Trust is still eroded on campus — that hasn't changed," says Julia Chang, an associate professor of Hispanic studies in the Department of Romance Studies. "The fact that these changes are coming about now — two years later — is a testament to the power of the student movement and the global conversation it has sparked; not the integrity of the administration."

The moratorium on events at fraternities is expected to have a reverberating effect on campus, where about one-third of all students participate in fraternities and sororities. The university's ties to Greek life, Kotlikoff said, has in part created a toxic culture on campus that requires serious course correction.

"While this is not a problem unique to Cornell, we are committed to setting a higher standard for education, oversight, and enforcement of safe social behavior and citizenship," Kotlikoff wrote.

Ray Epstein, who works with a consent education company, and is one of the organizers of a rally planned just steps away from Cornell's campus on Tuesday, said that while the measures from Cornell are "overall a win," they also serve as an "effort to save face."

"What I think they should be doing, is operating first instead of as a business, the way that they are now, as institutions that are meant to educate and keep their students safe," Epstein said.

Kotlikoff said that in addition to enhancing bystander training programming, the university will also improve its services to survivors of sexual assault by increasing staffing in its civil rights office, which would help individuals navigate the reporting process for incidents.

Additionally, the university will work with the New York State Police's criminal investigators on campus sexual assault investigations. The move allows the investigators, who are independent from the university, to take on cases in which survivors pursue criminal charges.

The university plans to bring in faculty who are experts in sexual assault and rape culture to help reform the Presidential Task Force on Sexual Assault through listening events with the Cornell community.

Kotlikoff's letter did not explain why these events are only being issued now — two years after administrators at Cornell learned about the allegations in 2024.

Although the district attorney did not prosecute the case in 2024, Cornell's Title IX office conducted an investigation in 2025. In March 2025, a panel of staff and faculty at Cornell moved to expel or suspend some of the men. The panel required the remaining men to write "essays" in addition to other sanctions.

Cornell also barred the Chi Phi fraternity chapter, which was closed in 2024.

Copyright 2026 NPR

A sixth case involving rape or sexual assault has been reported at Cal State University San Marcos student on-campus housing since the start of the 2026 fall semester.

Five of those reports, from Sept. 9 through Sept. 21, triggered Clery Timely Warnings — a mandatory campuswide alert.

The university said in response late September that it increased University Police patrols, added additional overnight security and increased front desk staffing at residential communities.

So far, there have been mixed reactions from students as to how the school is dealing with the spike in sexual assault cases.

“I'm more fearful. I mean I feel like every woman has pepper spray. I have a taser,” said junior Hannah Herd. “School is such a gift, and not being able to feel safe in this environment is really upsetting.”

The school said in a written message to parents that the “reported incidents are not connected, and there is no serial or random attacker targeting students.”

CSUSM said law enforcement has identified individual suspects for the cases reported this year. It also said University police investigators have been in direct contact with the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office. The cases are still under investigation.

Even with the updates to safety and security, Herd said the changes haven't gone far enough.

She’s a commuter student and said she hasn’t noticed many of the changes, which are focused in residential areas.

Herd agreed with what another CSUSM student posted in an Chage.org petition regarding the reported assaults, requesting the university “provide more campus security in parking lots, the quad and other poorly-lit areas on campus.”

Herd also said there hasn't been enough campus-wide discussion on the matter, nor enough accountability for victims.

“I think it just impacts how safe I feel on this campus. But also I've seen the sense of every woman I talk to has a fear on campus, and why is this being normalized?” she said.

Freshmen Larissa Millikan and Faye Dumont live in the newly-opened student residence Black Oak Hall, where some of the assaults took place according to Timely Warning reports shared with KPBS.

“We know some of the victims, we know some of the perpetrators which is really intense,” Millikan said.

The 18-year-old roommates said they've noticed a significant change in safety and security measures in recent weeks at their dormitory.

“We have security … in the hallways. And then we have to check in every time. It feels really safe,” Dumont said.

They said it was shocking to hear about the sexual assault reports, but ultimately they’re proud of how the school has responded.

“It's just a little scary for (me and my) friends, just to be nervous about are we in a safe space? But I think the most frustrating part for me is that a lot of people have said (CSU) San Marcos isn't a safe campus, and that they're not doing enough,” Millikan said.

According to the U.S. Department of Education Campus Safety and Security Database, CSUSM has specifically tracked criminal rape and fondling cases on campus since in 2014.

Data show the university reported the most rape and fondling incidents in 2015, with 11 rapes and five cases of fondling, and in 2023, with 11 rapes and six cases of fondling.

2024 and 2025 saw a slight decline in both reported rapes and fondling cases.

On Monday, the university confirmed to KPBS that so far in 2026 there have been 10 reported rapes on campus and four fondling incidents.

The year still isn’t over, and those numbers are close to the peak years of reported cases in 2015 and 2023.

Herd said what’s been happening at Cal State San Marcos and other U.S. colleges like Cornell University is why higher education needs to change the way sexual assaults are reported and handled.

Specifically, she said the Title IX reporting process does not go far enough to hold perpetrators accountable.

Title IX is a federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination at any educational institution that receives federal financial assistance. It requires schools to respond when sexual assault affects a student’s education.

Still, a campus Title IX investigation is separate from a criminal police investigation.

“It doesn't start a judicial process for students. It doesn't start a way of going through the criminal justice system,” Herd said.

Anita Rodriguez is a fourth year student at the university. She’s describes herself as a victim of sexual harassment.

“Going through the Title IX personally myself, the Title IX process can take up to three semesters and that doesn't guarantee you a success in your case at all. And it's very hard to go through,” Rodriguez said.

She said she and other young women want to feel safe on campus.

“We want to be able to have the motivation to complete our academics without having to worry about safety or going through mental health issues because we were affected by sexual violence,” Rodriguez said.

She agrees with the changes third-year student Herd proposes — like campus-wide discussions on sexual assault, more security across campus, brighter lighting in dimly-lit parking lots and pathways, and big picture changes to Title IX reporting.

Rodriguez said she also views requiring more rigorous sexual assault trainings as a key to changing college rape culture.

“They require us to do a Title IX training, but it's all online and not in person,” Rodriguez said. “And the only students subjected to go to sexual harassment meeting is first-year students living in the dorms.”

CSUSM President Ellen Neufeldt posted a video on Sept. 22, but has not agreed to any interviews since. In the video, she explains how CSUSM has implemented additional education measures regarding sexual violence and consent.

The school is also encouraging all students to download CSUSM Cougar Safe, the school’s official public safety app.

A University spokesperson said the app will eventually replace the blue light emergency poles across campus, which they plan to phase out over time.

Herd and Rodriguez said some of the emergency poles have not been working on campus.

But the name of the institution that calls it home is.

“This is a 1904 cottage that was the home of Virginia Scripps, the half-sister of Ellen Browning Scripps,” said Lauren Lockhart, who leads what was the La Jolla Historical Society. “This incredible property and the four structures on it were gifted to our organization by the Revelle family, descendants of the Scripps family.”

But Lockhart said feedback from visitors convinced her and the board of directors that a change was needed.

“Are people not visiting us or not discovering us because our name doesn’t reflect who we are and who we’ve evolved to be today? So, the board of directors and my team and I, we talk about this transition of the Museum of History and Culture, La Jolla, as our name catching up with our work,” said Lockhart, who’s now officially the Executive Director of the Museum of History and Culture La Jolla.

Their work continues on as before, primarily showcasing exhibitions that typically change every three to four months. When KPBS interviewed Lockhart for this story, they were featuring “Stories in Cloth, Communicating through Textiles.”

Lockhart described it as “a beautiful example of we’re looking at history, but in this instance, through textiles.”

Now on exhibit at the museum, “The Scientific Art of Historic Preservation, ” a fascinating conglomeration of pictures, story boards and artifacts, exploring the hidden processes behind saving historic places.

The museum describes it this way: “The exhibition invites visitors to see preservation not simply as restoration, but as discovery: peeling back layers of paint, wood, plaster, and history to better understand the people and ideas that shaped the built environment.”

Even for fans of historic architecture, it’s almost guaranteed you’ll learn things from this exhibit.

When you walk into the museum, just to your right, is a part of the museum that never changes. It’s called the History Portal.

Timelines on the walls accompany historic pictures. Think of it as a thumbnail introduction to what the Museum of History and Culture has to offer.

“We wanted to find a way to give people access to our historic collection and really have those materials at their fingertips. Because today, we have over 100 individuals on an annual basis who physically come to our site to conduct research and we offer that service free of charge," Lockhart said. "So, it’s really important that we both make strides to digitize those items and have this physical space that anyone who walks through our door could recognize what we have available to them.”

In its archives are fascinating things kept in a separate building down the hill from Wisteria Cottage. It's a smallish space holding items you’d expect like copies of the San Diego Union, long before it became the Union-Tribune. There are books on a Jacaranda Tree Planting Program, sitting on top of boxes containing documents from the Village Garden Club, and on one wall, a number of paintings.

“The paintings have all been digitized and cataloged. We had an intern focus solely on that last year,” Lockhart said.

There are also lots of recordings stored here; oral histories on all things La Jolla.

“And interestingly that was in a lot of different forms. As you can imagine, we’re a 62-year old organization so we had them on cassette tapes, CDs, thumb drives, a record in one instance and so it was really important to protect the integrity of those, that they all be digitized,” Lockhart said.

The enormous task of digitizing thousands of items is more than Lockhart and her staff of five can handle. Fortunately, they have help.

“We’ve been fortunate to have support from the Institute For Museum and Library Services hire paid college interns very meticulously document and catalog everything included here and in the last year, we have uploaded the first 2,000 digitized objects," she said. "That’s a tiny fraction of the materials in our collection, but the goal is to digitize everything that we have and make that available to anyone.”

From the history of Wisteria Cottage itself, to the manifold ways it illuminates history and culture today, this museum is definitely worth checking out and — it’s always free!

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Ever since the University of California stopped using the SAT and ACT for freshman admissions in 2020, graduation rates have inched up, and the number of students returning for their second year of studies increased.

To backers of keeping the UC test-free, these are clear signs that ditching the SAT hasn’t resulted in broad academic declines at the venerable public university system.

But this progress is likely to compete with another truth: Thousands of UC professors say their students are absolutely not ready for college and blame the decision to cut the SAT. Now UC leaders are re-examining what, if anything, the system should do about the standardized tests the UC scrapped six years ago.

When a UC task force in 2020 recommended that the UC keep the SAT, it warned that dropping the test could result in declining student retention rates. Those prognostications didn’t materialize. The task force also expressed fear that first-year GPAs would drop without it, but new systemwide data show average freshman GPAs have actually increased since 2021, the first year of new students entering under the new no-SAT regime.

But that doesn’t mean some UC students aren’t struggling. Early this summer, roughly 3,000 current and former UC professors launched a campaign via two signed open letters to reinstate standardized tests in admissions. They say more of their students demonstrate weak math and writing skills, and the SAT ban means the system is not doing all it can to screen out students who cannot handle the rigors of the UC.

Those professors, who teach science, technology, engineering and math, as well as the humanities and social sciences, are a fraction of the system’s roughly 26,000 faculty.

And while whether the SAT should return is an unsettled question for now, UC leaders have asked a committee of academics to issue a detailed report on the system’s use of the standardized tests by Feb. 12. Then the UC Academic Senate will propose recommendations by June to the UC Board of Regents, which has final say on requiring the SAT. It is not clear if the board will then pursue a vote on whether to reinstate an admissions test requirement.

Nationally, most highly selective colleges and universities have returned to using standardized tests in admissions after not requiring them in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many went the test-optional route, meaning students can submit their scores but aren’t penalized for foregoing the test. UC is among the few college systems that are completely test-blind, so they don’t even look at test scores for admissions.

Officials at those campuses restoring the SAT point to studies that say tests predict whether applicants can do well in college better than high school grades can. Some research papers come to the opposite conclusion, viewing the tests as proxies for family wealth rather than student abilities. Students from well-off homes are much more likely to score high on the SAT than low-income students. To SAT critics, high school grades are a stronger measure, in part because they capture a longer arc of student progress.

The UC Student Association sent a letter to the regents in July opposing a return to the SAT. The association, which represents 237,000 undergraduate students at the UC, “does not believe SAT/ACT will result in better prepared students.” The letter notes that racial and ethnic diversity at the UC increased after 2020.

UC ditched the SAT to counter biases

UC jettisoned the test at an inflection point in the country’s social and academic history. The deadly COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020 ravaged communities unevenly, with Black people — who were more likely to have in-person jobs that increased their exposure to the disease — dying at more than double the rate of whites.

When the board voted unanimously to end the use of the SAT and ACT, some members, including the UC’s then-president, Janet Napolitano, described the tests as legacies of discrimination. At least one prominent academic who wanted to keep the test agreed, but argued the test was still valuable.

“The main reason we are looking at SATs is because they are racist,” said Kum-Kum Bhavnani, chair of the Academic Senate at the time of the 2020 regents meeting when the board voted to sink the test. But “the way in which the UC uses them stops them from being racist” because admissions officers used the test results as one of 14 factors in assessing applications. The Academic Senate endorsed keeping the SAT.

The regents, including Napolitano, decided that despite the benefits the SAT offered, they did not outweigh how the test seemed to favor rich students over poor students, many of whom are students of color.

However, in a recent interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Napolitano indicated she’d be open to revisiting the use of the SAT in admissions, but cautioned that faculty overstate the test’s powers. “I don’t think the SAT is a solution to the question of whether students are adequately prepared,” said Napolitano, now a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley. “It’s not a silver bullet.”

Still, she said admissions officials should use the SAT, “recognizing what it tells you and what it doesn’t tell you.”

Before dumping the test, ultra-selective UCLA admitted students with a wide range of SAT scores. The admissions office didn’t rely on a single cut-off score, said Gary Clark, UCLA’s associate vice chancellor of enrollment management, during a September regents meeting.

In 2019, 50% of admitted students had SAT scores between 1280 and 1530 out of 1600, Clark said. Individual student context is key, he said, and UCLA’s admissions office also relied on 14 factors, including test scores. One of those factors was whether students made the most of their time in high school. One student with a 4.3 GPA may be ranked lower than another student with the same grades because UCLA reviews to what extent students took advantage of the honors and advanced courses available to them. Since the SAT ban, retention and graduation rates increased at UCLA, he added.

Kim Wilcox was chancellor of UC Riverside until 2025 and supports using the SAT in admissions. All admissions indicators are biased against low-income students, he said in a phone interview. “It doesn’t matter what measure you have, GPA and SAT scores as well. They’re all higher for rich kids than they are for poor kids,” he said. “So with a set of biased measures, are you better with more of them or fewer of them? I would argue more.”

Data show struggles in math but not other subjects

It’s only in calculus-based entry-level math that freshmen across the UC are showing increasing signs of academic struggle, according to an analysis a senior official at the University of California presented to regents members last month.

Broadly, students in entry-level engineering and other science, math and technology courses have posted steady average GPAs of around 3.3 while their rates of Ds, Fs and withdrawals have been stable – around 6% to 7% – since 2021. The same is true for social science and humanities courses.

And few STEM majors leave their major after the first year, indicating strong persistence within the quantitatively demanding subjects. STEM majors graduated in four years at higher rates after the UC went test-blind than before the move.

But low grades increased among students in entry-level calculus, pre-calculus and lower-level preparatory math courses. For them, Ds, Fs and withdrawals spiked from 13% to 18% since the 2021-22 school year. Their average GPAs dropped in that time from 2.95 to 2.71. These classes account for about 5% of freshman enrollment and exclude other types of math classes, including statistics.

However, the UC Office of the President didn’t track those figures before it stopped accepting SAT or ACT scores, so there are no rates to compare them to.

A CalMatters analysis used a public UC Berkeley grading tool to compare first-year calculus performance at that campus before and after the SAT ban. The findings indicate that while GPAs stayed virtually the same between 2017 and 2025, the rate of Ds and Fs increased considerably for various entry-level calculus courses. In the years before the UC dropped the SAT, the combined D and F rates at these fall-term courses hovered at an average of 8%. But that rate of low grades jumped to an average of 11% for the years after the system went test-blind in admissions.

In 2019, around 6% of students in Calculus II courses earned a D or F. But last fall, the rate shot up to about 18%.

UC Berkeley grades can vary from year to year between instructors and course grading curves, so “some level of variation between semesters is to be expected,” wrote Janet Gilmore, a UC Berkeley spokesperson.

She pointed out that the D and F rates in Calculus I courses in fall 2025 were the same as in Fall 2018. Both were at about 11%.

What the pro-SAT faculty say

The professors who want the SAT back say they see more unprepared students, both as a percentage of the incoming class and in raw numbers given that the UC has expanded undergraduate enrollment since 2016 by roughly 27,000 students. In that time total enrollment grew slightly faster than the number of faculty at the system. They also say there is not enough support staff or tutors to help students do well in math and writing courses.

“UC has been a national leader in supporting under-resourced students to do well in mathematics. However, UC has finite resources and can help only so many students, and only when the preparation deficits they need to overcome are within reach,” one of the open letters said.

High school grades aren’t as reliable a measure of how prepared students are, the STEM-focused open letter contends. It argues the SAT is an essential independent check on grade inflation and the use of AI in college essay writing.

Both test scores and high school grades can help predict whether students will do well in college, wrote Li Cai, an education scholar who researches standardized tests at UCLA and signed the open letter to restore the SAT. And while each is an imperfect tool, there are no better alternatives, he observed.

SAT supporters also point to a 2025 UC San Diego faculty report that noted the number of freshmen who needed to repeat high school and even elementary school math soared from about .5% of UCSD college freshmen in 2020 to nearly 12% by 2025. The report observed that in 2024, the students placed in remedial math maintained an A average in their high school math classes. This suggests that high school grade point averages are weak tools for determining who is ready, the report said.

But Pamela Burdman, a critic of the SAT who also advocates for math reforms as executive director of the nonprofit Just Equations, has pointed out that UCSD appears to be an outlier. At seven of UC’s nine undergraduate campuses, no students were in courses below pre-calculus. She also observed that the UCSD placement exam introduced a policy in 2024 that barred students from using calculators. And the minimum score needed to avoid being placed in remedial math at UCSD went up that year. Both changes would have increased the number of students shunted to remedial courses, she wrote.

What backers of test-blind policy say

SAT skeptics argue that supporters of the test overstate its predictive value and that they champion an approach to admissions that would needlessly exclude more students from UC. Placing limits on who can enroll by relying on what they say is a flawed assessment has no place at a public university supported by taxpayer money, they contend.

Many of those views were synthesized in a lengthy report in September written by Jesse Rothstein, professor of public policy and economics at UC Berkeley and a critic of using the SAT in admissions.

SAT critics say whatever may be happening in entry-level math courses isn’t translating into overall college struggles, given the higher first-year GPAs, share of students coming back after their first year and the overall graduation rates. If students are generally ready for college but need support in specific math classes, the UC should provide that support and not prevent the student from otherwise entering, the critics say.

“If there are problems in preparation, what is UC doing about it?” asked Amanda Mangaser Savage in a phone interview. She’s a litigator with Public Counsel, the legal group that played a key role in forcing the UC to drop the SAT in admissions.

“Does imposing a barrier in the form of the SAT really address that specific problem,” Savage said, “or is it just designed to make life easier, frankly, for faculty that don’t want to be teaching students who have learning needs?”

Public Counsel’s 2019 lawsuit prompted a judge in 2020 to issue a preliminary injunction that forced the UC to drop its plan of using the SAT in a test-optional way. Then, in 2021, they settled with the UC to keep the SAT totally out of admissions through 2025. For both court outcomes, Public Counsel argued that even a test-optional approach was unfair to students with disabilities who needed accommodations during the shutdown period of the COVID-19 pandemic. The settlement expired last year, so the UC can legally bring back the SAT.

If the UC revives the SAT for admissions, Public Counsel may sue again, Savage said.

Critics of the SAT also say the arguments to bring back the test overlook declines in the math readiness of college students that predate the UC’s decision to stop using the SAT for admissions.

California’s high schoolers on average have yet to match pre-COVID-19 math and reading competency levels, though the gap is closing. Nationally, many eighth graders have been scoring lower in math on a highly regarded test since 2012. Fifteen-year-olds globally also struggle with math. The average test scores for dozens of relatively wealthy countries have been steadily declining since 2009, indicated Rothstein. “Changes in University of California admissions rules can’t have caused this,” he wrote in his explainer.

Why the slump in math among older students? There’s no consensus, but experts point to a slew of overlapping headwinds, such as pandemic-era disruptions, chronic school absences that haven’t yet reverted to pre-pandemic levels, teacher shortages and the reliance on uncredentialed instructors, as well as students’ use of generative artificial intelligence to problem-solve.

Rothstein also noted that graduation and retention rates at the UC since 2021 have remained steady or rose systemwide. But to Cai, the education scholar at UCLA, such broad data shouldn’t discount what math professors are seeing.

“Faculty members who teach introductory STEM courses often serve as the first observers of changes in student preparation,” Cai wrote in a response to Rothstein’s explainer. “Their responsibilities and their genuine concerns place them at the interface between admissions decisions and academic outcomes.”

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Amit Biligiri, a junior at Evergreen Valley High School in San Jose, Calif., sits on a big, right-angle couch in his living room alongside his mom, Kalyani Urs. They're recounting the story of a fight they've often had — that every teenager has with their parents.

Amit says he's often up late, and his mom, who tends to work late, "would be mad at me and say, 'Hey Amit, why are you going to sleep so late?'"

Urs laughs. Getting Amit to go to sleep, she says, has been "a constant battle."

"I was like, 'I'm not really sleepy,'" Amit remembers telling her. "And I looked into this, and I found out that the sleep cycle for teenagers is actually delayed by a few hours. And that means that teenagers — it's healthier for them to sleep later and then also wake up later."

Still, Urs remembers telling her son: "You need more sleep, you're forgetting things."

"I keep asking you, 'Did you submit this? Did you submit that?' You forget. And so it clearly shows your memory is affected," Urs remembers telling Amit.

But recently, her son surprised her. He said, "I remember when I had fries with Scooter Muttha."

The man known as Scooter Muttha is Amit's great-grandfather — Urs' grandfather — who died many years ago. Urs was raised by her grandparents, and the man remains a beloved figure in their family. Amit's point to his mother that day was, if he is so forgetful, why does he still vividly remember such a small moment: being 6 and sharing fries with Scooter Muttha at a Burger King in Bangalore?

Urs didn't know what to say. Memory is a mysterious thing.

In fact, this debate got Amit thinking: How does memory work? And Urs, an avid NPR listener, encouraged him to explore the question for NPR's annual Student Podcast Challenge.

Good thing she did, and he did. This year, some 1,500 students competed in the eighth year of the annual competition, and Amit's What Happens to Memories won the top prize.

The podcast

"There were entire weeks of my life I barely remember," so begins Amit's winning podcast. "What I ate for lunch last Monday, what assignments I turned in, what someone said to me in the hallway three Tuesdays ago."

As a busy 16-year-old, Amit says in the podcast, he was struck by how much of his daily life simply disappears from his memory. He was also intrigued by the moments that do last.

Like being 6 years old in a bright Burger King in India. "I'm sitting across from Scooter Muttha, as I fondly call my great-grandpa. He's 87. We are both wearing flimsy gold paper crowns and we're sharing a plate of french fries. Just two kings eating fast food."

An old photo captures the two kings, one at the beginning of his life, the other nearing the end of his. But Amit didn't know his father had taken the picture until he began working on his podcast.

This memory has outlasted so many others, Amit says, even though nothing really happens.

"I don't remember what we talked about, but I remember the salt on the fries, the energy of the room and the way his crown sat slightly crooked on his head." Amit says in the podcast that he started wondering, "Why does my brain let go of a math lecture from yesterday but hold onto a paper crown from a decade ago?"

In his seven-minute audio story, Amit offers a few different answers. "It turns out, memory isn't a filing cabinet. It's more like a construction site. And the foreman of that site is the amygdala."

It's during sleep that our brains clean up that construction site, saving some memories and throwing out others. So his mom was right: Without enough sleep, the cleaning crew can't do its job. It also doesn't help, Amit says, that teens often let phones muddy their memory-making.

"When we experience life through a screen, hunting for the right filter, the perfect caption, we experience it halfway: half-online, half-distracted, half-present. And emotion is exactly what gives memories a better chance of sticking."

As an example, Amit says in his podcast, he's spent time volunteering in a senior living community, and many of the people he's met there don't remember or talk about the big events of their lives. Instead they cherish memories of intense feeling. Like Amit's memory of being 6 in a Burger King and feeling loved unconditionally by his great-grandfather.

"Science can explain the neurons and the glymphatic system, but it doesn't fully explain why, years later, seeing an old man on the street makes me feel a sudden pang of warmth and loss. I don't just see a stranger. I see a flicker of a gold paper crown."

Amit says, since he finished the podcast, he's found his mom listening to it, by herself.

Urs tears up and says the podcast "makes me feel closer to my grandpa." 

Maybe memories are more than just stored information, Amit says at the end of his podcast.

Maybe they're proof that something — or someone — really mattered.

Listen to Amit Biligiri's What Happens to Memories?

Edited by Steve Drummond.

Copyright 2026 NPR

LONG ISLAND, N.Y. — Cora Walsh walks home from middle school every day. It's only a few tree-lined blocks in Rockville Centre on Long Island, but the movement helps clear her head of the school day. She probably thinks about how the brain works more than most seventh-graders.

"I want to be a doctor," she says. "And I want to go to Princeton and major in neuroscience."

Her fascination started a few years ago when she was struggling to figure out what was happening in her own head.

"It's kind of confusing what it is like in my brain," she says. All she knew back then was that reading was hard. Even when she spent more time working on it than her friends, she could never reach their level.

Like millions of Americans, Cora has dyslexia, but it took her almost five years to get the correct diagnosis.

Her podcast about the journey to understanding her own mind is the grand prize winner for middle school in this year's NPR Student Podcast Challenge. "Dyslexia and MEE" was chosen from nearly 1,500 submissions from 42 states and the District of Columbia.

"I feel really excited," Cora says about her victory. Her parents, who spent the whole journey right by her side, are thrilled too.

"This is a kid that works so hard and has such a good attitude," says her mom, Emily Johnson. "I'm so proud of her."

Finding the right learning style

Cora has come a long way. She has received tutoring for her dyslexia for two years now.

Her podcast takes the listener along to one of her lessons. She sounds out words over Zoom, and her tutor gives her feedback and tips. They don't move too fast, making sure Cora really understands something before moving on.

It can be tedious, but her hard work outside the classroom is starting to pay off.

"I think I'm a better reader now, and I enjoy it a lot more," she says. "I feel more comfortable reading bigger books, but not too big!"

Her mom says that this summer marked a turning point: She saw her daughter reading the first book in the Hunger Games series.

"She would pick it up for fun, and she would go read to [her pet] rabbit. Or we were traveling this summer, and she read on the train," Johnson says. "I mean, it's the first time that's ever happened."

It was a winding road to get to this point, but Cora and her parents are excited to see where it goes. Winning NPR's national competition is another bright spot.

"I'm kind of just proud of myself that I overcame this hard, annoying thing," she says. "And proud of myself that I created something really cool and interesting that everyone can listen to."

Cora hopes that her podcast might help dyslexia feel a little less scary for listeners and maybe even reach younger students who are still trying to figure out their own learning styles.

"I would say: Always try your hardest, and don't sell yourself short," she says. "I think trying is … the best thing you can do."

Cora Walsh is still trying: She just checked out that second Hunger Games book from the library.

Listen to Cora Walsh's "Dyslexia and MEE."

Edited by Steve Drummond.

Copyright 2026 NPR

The Grossmont Union High District board on Thursday will decide whether to censure Trustee Jim Kelly for his alleged disclosure of confidential information as part of an effort to influence district policy.

The proposed censure resolution said, among other things, that Kelly disclosed confidential, attorney-client privileged information to unauthorized people over a period of several months in 2026.

Specifically, the resolution alleges that Kelly engaged in an email exchange with a former California legislator in an attempt to influence district policy.

The resolution said Kelly sought to have the former legislator contact former California Republican Party Chair Jim Brulte, who is the spouse of Grossmont Union High Superintendent Kirsten Vital Brulte.

Superintendent Brulte did not agree to an interview, but her office issued a statement that included the following:

“The Superintendent’s standard has always been clear: the District must operate in accordance with federal and state law, District policies, Board bylaws, and established procedures. To support that standard, she held multiple Governance Team workshops and an ethics training session last school year.”

In an interview with KPBS, teachers’ union President Stephanie Macecca said she agrees with the proposed censure.

“Teachers are trusted to hold that private information, trustees should be held to that exact same standard,” said Macecca, who used to be a teacher and librarian. “If I did something like this, if I revealed confidential information about a student, I would lose my job.”

The resolution goes on to say that Kelly’s emails also shared his frustrations about two of the board members who voted in favor of policy change regarding how school staff should respond to ICE actions on district campuses.

Board President Robert Shield proposed the censure resolution.

“Declining to act would be choosing to ignore clearly documented evidence. I trust that a majority of this Board and the vast majority of our community believe trustees must respect the laws and rules we are entrusted to uphold,” Shield said in a written statement.

Kelly did not respond to a KPBS request for comment.

The Grossmont Union High board has been under fire in recent years over budget decisions and librarian layoffs, immigration enforcement policies and anti-LGBTQ lawsuits.

This is also not the first time the board has faced scrutiny for improper communications.

A 2025 San Diego Union-Tribune investigation revealed private text threads that included members of the governing board’s conservative majority — Scott Eckert, Robert Shield, Gary Woods and Kelly.

The communications raised questions regarding whether board members were violating state open meetings laws.

Kelly, who has served on the board for 24 years, is up for reelection this November. Macecca hopes the proposed censure might impact how people vote.

“We need honest, transparent, trustworthy trustees who will maintain confidentiality. What happens in closed session should stay in closed session,” she said. “And when we have people who believe they can just flaunt that, or they can just not follow those policies and rules, then it's a serious problem and a breach of trust.”

Thursday’s board meeting featuring the proposed censure resolution will begin at 6 p.m. in the Grossmont High School auditorium.

Catch up on what you missed with our Education newsletter, sent weekly.

The number of kids in preschool rose in the 2023-24 school year, while those in K-12 public schools declined. The population of students with disabilities grew. Black students were more likely to be suspended than students of other races. And the teacher workforce was far less diverse than the student population.

All of this information comes from the latest Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC): a federal survey that paints one of the most comprehensive pictures of how American students are being treated at school. The federal government has been gathering this kind of information for over 50 years, partly to help the U.S. Education Department hold schools accountable for protecting student civil rights.

The Trump administration published the latest CRDC from the 2023-24 school year six months later than promised. When it finally did share the information on Aug. 31, collected from over 97,000 public schools, it was without a usual "First Look Report" that makes the information easier to understand for the public. Now, that too, is available.

The findings are about 49.7 million public school students and include data on enrollment, harassment and the treatment of students with disabilities, among other things. But one group was left out: nonbinary students. While data on nonbinary students was collected under the Biden administration, the Trump administration chose to withhold it from the public release.

Maithreyi Gopalan of the University of Oregon, who helps lead the research and policy group AdvancED Equity, and Dan Losen of the National Center for Youth Law, both independently analyzed the data and shared some of what they learned with NPR.

Here are five things they found striking:

1. Public school enrollment

Some 1.5 million children were enrolled in public preschool programs — a 12% jump from the 2021-22 school year, but still slightly lower than 2019. "It's part recovery, part expansion," says Gopalan. By recovery, she means the number of preschoolers started rising again from a pandemic low. By expansion, Gopalan is referring to the fact that some states are investing more in early childhood education, which may account for some of the increases.

According to the National Institute for Early Education Research, state-funded pre-K enrollment rose nearly 15% between 2021-22 and 2023-24. For example, in 2023-24, California was in its second year of expanding its universal transitional kindergarten (TK) program for 4-year-olds, and the state enrolled nearly 36,000 more children in preschool or TK than the year before. Colorado and New Mexico are among other states that are rapidly expanding preschool access.

At the same time, K-12 enrollment fell almost 1% compared with the 2021-22 school year. The decrease is consistent with other data and could have to do with declining birthrates and an increase in private school and homeschooled students in some states, Gopalan says.

2. School Discipline

The number of students who were suspended increased across the board: 2.5 million students were punished with one or more out-of-school suspensions while 2.3 million students faced in-school suspensions in 2023-24. That's up by about 100,000 students in each category compared with the last report from 2021-22. Notably, nearly 7 out of 10 public schools reported an increase in students seeking mental health services since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to other federal data.

While the increase in suspensions may seem modest, Losen says it shows that the pattern of keeping children out of school as punishment is still widespread in America's public schools. His research shows that most districts suspend students for what he calls minor offenses rather than unsafe behavior.

"It could be truancy, it could be repeated tardiness, dress code violations." Those missed days of school mean missed days of learning: Losen's research shows that about a decade ago, students were losing out on 11 million days of school because of suspensions. According to the latest CRDC, he says they missed over 14 million days in the 2023-24 school year.

"That lost instruction time matters more than people realize," he says. "Even one out-of-school suspension greatly increases the risk of dropping out of a school or winding up in the juvenile justice system."

He adds that suspensions are often an ineffective way to change behavior and that there are more constructive ways to help students, including with emotional support and better training for teachers.

Another persistent pattern with school discipline is who faces it: Losen says the latest data show that Black students lost over four times as many days of school compared to white peers because of out-of-school suspension.

3. Students with disabilities

The CRDC reinforces what other national data shows: The population of students with disabilities is on the rise, and boys make up a much bigger share than girls — nearly two-thirds — of these students. While the previous CRDC showed 17% of students had disabilities, the newest data show they made up 19% of all students enrolled in public schools. And they were suspended out of school at disproportionately high rates.

Losen says the lost days of school for these students don't just mean they're missing learning, it also means they may be losing out on key services they get during school, such as mental health counseling or physical therapy.

Disabled students are also among the least likely groups to be enrolled in Advanced Placement (AP) classes in high school. Losen says that's a longstanding pattern, in part, because of assumptions that they can't achieve at high levels. AP classes might not be the right fit for some students with intellectual disabilities, he says, but many students have disabilities that have little to do with their academic potential.

And Gopalan says these classes don't just represent how much rigor students are exposed to. "These are all gateways to college, other opportunities beyond high school. And we see gaps in opportunity and access for students with disabilities."

4. Teachers and other staff

For the first time since the 1970s, the latest CRDC gathered information about teachers' race, ethnicity and sex. It found that the workforce is 75% white, 9% Black and 11% Latino — a drastically different makeup than the students they serve.

Gopalan says the data is valuable partly because teacher diversity can play a role in student success. For example, she says some research shows that "Black students have better achievement, better school discipline outcomes, and a whole host of other outcomes when they're taught by Black teachers." And studies show that having more Black or Latino teachers can help all students.

This collection also captures the qualifications of teachers. "Research shows that access to certified and experienced teachers and to counselors has a positive effect on who finishes high school, who graduates, and who goes on to colleges," Gopalan says. Yet, more than 720,000 students go to schools where fewer than half of teachers met state certification requirements, and Black and Latino students make up 73% of those students.

5. Nonbinary student data hidden

Under President Joe Biden, the CRDC required schools to report the experiences of nonbinary students for the first time. The information was collected for the 2023-24 school year, but the Trump administration chose not to release it, citing an executive order that called for the federal government to "recognize two sexes, male and female."

"There is no Civil Rights Data Collection where they intentionally collected data and then just suppressed it," says Losen, who has been analyzing the CRDC for more than 25 years. He says students who are nonbinary are more likely to face difficulties like bullying at school. "Whatever kinds of injustices they're experiencing, we would start to see that it was beginning to be reflected in those data, and now we can't see it." According to one UCLA analysis, about 3% of children ages 13 to 17 identify as transgender nationwide, which includes nonbinary youth.

In an emailed statement, the Education Department did not answer NPR's questions about its decision to withhold data on nonbinary students, instead highlighting the Trump administration's priority to collect data about sexual offenses on school campuses.

Data for the next CRDC is being collected for the 2025-26 school year, according to the Department. While much of the survey will remain the same, all questions about nonbinary students have been removed from the list. Questions related to whether students are harassed or bullied on the basis of gender identity will also be removed.

Edited by Nirvi Shah
Graphics by Rahul Mukherjee
Visual design by LA Johnson

Copyright 2026 NPR

Greg Hinchliff’s 11th-grade history students grappled with these questions on a recent morning at Bonsall High School.

They moved to different parts of the room depending on what they thought, gathering around signs that ranged from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.”

Then, they repeated the activity from the perspectives of Native Americans, European settlers, monarchs and religious leaders.

“European religious leaders,” Hinchliff said to a group of students. “What would they say about this statement, that explorers can claim that land?”

“That they can claim it because they’re Christians, basically,” a student responded.

“Right, because it goes back to that doctrine of discovery,” Hinchliff said.

The activity comes from California’s Native American Studies Model Curriculum. Published in 2025, it has hundreds of free lesson plans and teaching materials. Hinchliff helped write it.

There are lessons for elementary school students about Indigenous and colonial place names. Eighth graders can learn about tribal sovereignty and federal recognition. High schoolers can learn about cultural fire practices.

“The lesson plans available with the model curriculum can be interwoven into a bunch of different content areas,” Hinchliff said. “The great thing about this curriculum is, so many educators struggle with how to approach complicated topics. This gives them the tool kit to be able to do that.”

In 2021, the California Department of Education allocated $4 million to develop the curriculum. Joely Proudfit (Luiseño/Payómkawichum, Tongva), director of the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center at CSU San Marcos, was one of three people from across the state selected to lead the project.

“We really wanted tribal communities to take the lead in helping us write this curriculum,” Proudfit said.

They held dozens of meetings with tribal communities throughout the state. There are 109 federally recognized tribes in California, plus many other tribal communities that aren’t recognized.

“There's not a lesson plan for every single tribe in the state,” Proudfit said. “This is merely the first step in the right direction.”

Teachers can continue in the right direction, she said, by building relationships with members of local tribal communities.

“The tribes have to be at the table. It has to be community-centered,” she said. “The more buy-in and the more folks involved, the better.”

Hinchliff is collaborating with John Machado. He’s on the executive committee for the Pala Band of Mission Indians elected by the general council.

He’s also a Cupeño language instructor. He makes vocabulary flashcards and games, and he’s shared them with Hinchliff’s class. He’s also hosted class visits to the Cupa Cultural Center and the Wilderness Gardens County Preserve.

“We had a trip out there to discuss the plants and the nature, and we incorporated the TEK — the traditional ecological knowledge — of the wildlife out there,” Machado said.

Hinchliff said the experience helped connect his class to the community.

“We were learning about traditional ecological knowledge in class, and then boom, we were able to go out into the environment, go through some brochures, do like a scavenger hunt, and learn about how those plants were being used at the time and what their current uses are, too,” he said.

Some of Hinchliff’s students are Indigenous themselves. In the eight years he’s been teaching Native American studies, feedback from students, parents and community members has been positive, he said.

“I think for many of our students, it's a show of support and a commitment to authenticity that maybe, especially in this population, they haven't always felt coming from school systems,” he said.

Starting in the late 1800s, the U.S. government forced many Native American families to send their children to boarding schools. They were punished for speaking their language and practicing their culture.

In Pala, Machado said multiple generations weren’t able to pass down the Cupeño language. Roscinda Nolasquez, the last fluent speaker, died in 1987.

“Our language was an oral language. It was never written down. Everything was passed on generation to generation — songs, stories, the words themselves,” Machado said. “So what we have now is through that hardship.”

He hosts language groups with seniors in the community. Sometimes they’ll remember words or phrases they heard from their parents or grandparents.

“It’s awakening that inner Native language in you, that culture that you have in you that’s buried away and needs to be awoken,” he said.

Machado said the new curriculum is a step toward rebuilding trust in schools.

“We’re not just behind museum glass,” he said. “It’s important that people know that we’re still here.”

Challenges remain. San Diego County leaders are training teachers and school administrators on how to use the new curriculum, but Proudfit said they don’t have enough funding to reach every teacher.

“You can create the best curriculum, but if nobody knows how to use it or has the confidence to use it, then what is the point?” she said. “We want to provide a history that inspires, that showcases our Native people as the engineers, as the land protectors, as the scientists, the artists and the historians that we are. That’s going to take real resources in a state like ours.”

Proudfit hopes the next governor’s administration makes a bigger investment in training teachers on Native American studies.

She also wants its instruction to be mandatory.

“I always ask the question, do you want to be considered a settler or a guest?” she said. “And if you're a good guest, you would ask and learn and want to know about the people.”

Teachers can find the full curriculum and other resources on UC Davis’ website.

Weeks after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested one person near San Diego City College and pursued another onto campus, the San Diego Community College District on Thursday began installing signs prohibiting immigration enforcement on its property.

The 18-by-30-inch signs were being installed around the district's 10 campus locations at entry points.

"This property is owned by the San Diego Community College District (SDCCD). This property may only be used for purposes that have been authorized by SDCCD and may not be used for immigration enforcement staging areas, processing locations, or any related operations," the signs read.

On Sept. 8, at around 9:30 a.m., ICE agents in unmarked vehicles stopped a vehicle near the intersection of 16th and C streets, according to district officials. The driver, City College student Renatho Casseus, was taken into custody, while the passenger fled onto City College's campus.

District officials said the pursuing ICE agents "quickly stopped as they recognized they were entering a college campus. The agents went back to their vehicles and left. ICE is no longer in the area and did not engage with anyone else on campus."

SDCCD officials said the signs have been in the works since the spring, but were accelerated after the Sept. 8 incident.

"College campuses are a place of learning, and no one should have to be fearful about coming to work or attending class," said SDCCD Chancellor Gregory Smith. "These signs make it abundantly clear that immigration enforcement is prohibited on SDCCD property."

Santa Barbara City College installed similar signs last year after ICE used its campus as a staging site for immigration enforcement.

Since the Sept. 8 incident, the community college district has started the use of text alerts as soon as federal immigration officials come onto campus. In addition, the district and its colleges have expanded counseling and legal support services for students, and have raised funds to pay Casseus' legal bills.

Going forward, Smith said the district will "advocate with its congressional representatives for legislation that would prevent immigration enforcement activity at education, medical and religious facilities, and other sensitive locations," a district statement read.

The City College enforcement action, and a similar one in which ICE agents took two parents into custody while they were dropping off their child at John Marshall Elementary School in Chollas Creek, sparked backlash from local elected officials.

"Parents should be able to drop their children off at school without fearing detention, and students should be able to attend class without encountering federal immigration enforcement around their campus," read a letter sent to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin penned by Reps. Juan Vargas, Scott Peters, Sara Jacobs, all D-San Diego, Rep. Mike Levin, D-San Juan Capistrano, and California's senators, Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff. "Schools and institutions of higher education have long been places where students feel safe enough to learn, belong, and achieve their academic dreams without their lives being uprooted. Schools should not become the backdrop for immigration enforcement activity, nor should parents have to choose between bringing their children to school and fearing that they may be detained in the process.

"As back to school season continues, we demand that you end all ICE activity in the immediate vicinity of schools and college campuses, particularly during school arrival and dismissal times."

ICE has not responded to requests for comment regarding the actions.

According to SDCCD, California law restricts federal immigration enforcement officers from entering nonpublic areas of school campuses, questioning students, or accessing personal student and family data without a valid judicial warrant or court order. In addition, SDCCD policy prevents district employees from assisting federal immigration officials.

San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria denounced the ICE actions.

"No parent should have to fear being separated from their family simply for dropping their child off at school," he said. "Actions like these inflict fear and trauma far beyond those who are detained. Children are left wondering whether their parents will come home. Families may become afraid to take their children to school. And educators are forced to help children navigate fear and uncertainty that no child should have to experience.

"This is cruel, unnecessary and counterproductive. It does nothing to make our communities safer."

The SDCCD last month issued a statement that said the "intrusion" by law enforcement is "both disruptive, unwelcome and in conflict with the SDCCD's core values. City College and the SDCCD are reaching out with counseling and legal services to support students and employees who were affected by this activity."

When Liangfang Zhang got the news, it was a typical morning. He had just finished dropping his daughter off at school and was on his way to his lab.

But then something unusual happened. He received a phone call at seven in the morning — an hour he would not normally receive messages.

Like any good scientist he was skeptical.

“I just don't feel like it's real,” said Zhang, who is a chemical and bioengineer at UC San Diego. “The folks from the foundation ask me to verify my name and ask me if I could find a private place to talk. It felt quite suspicious.”

Zhang was awarded with a MacArthur fellowship, a prestigious grant given to inspiring creatives across the country. He was recognized for pioneering a new category of medicine called nanomedicine. The technology may lead to innovative therapies for difficult diseases like cancer, sepsis, and more.

Zhang was one of 20 individuals selected for the fellowship across an unlimited variety of disciplines. This year’s cohort includes professions such as an economic historian, poet, and forensic anthropologist.

The award is also known as the ‘genius grant’. The MacArthur Foundation gifts recipients with $800,000 to support their creative process. Unlike other types of grants, there are no strings attached to the funding. That means Zhang does not have to use the money for specific purposes.

“I see this as a great encouragement to my research team and myself to continue to do the creative and impactful research along the line we are working on,” he said.

Recipients are recognized for their potential to innovate work that changes society for the better. He was chosen for pioneering a new type of medicine.

It uses particles, called nanoparticles, that are one thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair to deliver drugs to the body. These nanomedicines can also help remove toxins, block infections, and treat diseases.

“Nanomedicine can not only make the current existing medicine more effective, less toxic, but it can also create new therapies that didn’t exist before,” Zhang said.

Traditional drugs often must target specific receptors, or sites, on a molecule to work. But nanomedicines are more versatile. Instead of creating new molecules, they use components of human cells that already exist. That means they can find infected areas more easily.

“If you have some internal infection, infection in certain organs and tissues, then we use the cells that can recognize these infected sites and then we send the drug there,” he said.

To sneak the nanoparticles past the human immune system, Zhang coasted them in cell membranes that our bodies already recognized. A cell membrane is a biological barrier that separates the inside of the cell from its outside environment.

“It’s sorta like we disguise the nanoparticles with human cells. The reason we do that is we want to protect the nanoparticles after we get into the human body,” Zhang said. “Because our body is very good at recognizing these foreign materials.”

The incognito nanoparticles can be used in many ways once inside the body. Zhang believes that using the body’s own biological materials as medicine may one day be able to help reduce antibiotic resistant infections.

He hopes to use the genius grant to continue advancing the technology and pushing his research closer to clinical trials.

Catch up on what you missed with our Education newsletter, sent weekly.

For nearly 50 years, the federal government has said people with disabilities should live, work and learn in the most integrated setting possible rather than be segregated in institutions like nursing homes.

The Trump administration just took its most concrete step yet to reverse that position.

Last week, a federal judge agreed to strip out mentions of "integration" from federal regulations tied to Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, a landmark civil rights law that prohibits disability discrimination. The judge did so after the Justice Department declined to defend its own rules in a lawsuit brought by several states challenging the legality of those rules.

Part of what is so striking about Texas v. Kennedy is that the federal government was originally the defendant in that lawsuit, brought by states fighting what's known as the integration mandate. Then, it switched sides and agreed with the states that the requirement should be undone.

Bruce Darling, president and CEO of the Center for Disability Rights, says when he heard about the ruling, it felt "like a knife in your chest. Because what we're hearing, what people are hearing, is that the federal government has made a determination that [disabled people] don't have a right to live in freedom, that they can be locked up against their will."

The court's decision removes regulations from Section 504 that explicitly required federally funded programs to provide services in the "most integrated setting."

"That lack of clarity will impact people's rights. It will likely impact what states do and how they behave," says Jennifer Mathis, a disability rights lawyer who helps lead the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law.

Mathis says it's important to note that the court's decision did not undo integration protections tied to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) or those established by decades of case law, including the landmark Supreme Court decision known as Olmstead. 

"My concern is that right now, where we're at is disabled people have a right to integration on paper. It is in the law, but whether it gets practically enforced is a serious question," Darling says. His organization is putting its energy behind a proposed law that would cement protections around integration, while others are working with states to strengthen their disability laws.

The Justice Department did not respond to multiple requests from NPR asking why it is changing course after decades of legal and bipartisan support for community-based services.

After 50 years, the government changes its position

In 1973, Congress passed the first civil rights law for people with disabilities: Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. But it took advocates years of fighting — until 1977 — to get actual regulations that would make that law enforceable.

The Department of Health and Human Services, under President Joe Biden, updated the regulations in 2024 so it would be clearer to states what they had to do to uphold the law. "They thought it was important to do that so those rights would be as clear as possible," Mathis says.

In recent months, the federal government, under President Donald Trump, began to publicly change its position: First, in June, the Justice Department issued an opinion saying it no longer interpreted disability law to "require states to treat mentally disabled patients in the most integrated setting appropriate to their needs." The memo even noted its position is "out of step with the common understanding" of the Olmstead decision.

Then in July, the Justice Department announced it would stop relying on its own longstanding guidance explaining how it enforces the integration mandate.

These actions led up to the federal government switching sides in Texas v. Kennedy. Finally, last week, a federal judge agreed to throw out the integration mandate rules under Section 504, including language that was first introduced nearly 50 years ago.

Mathis says this kind of about-face is highly unusual. "It is pretty significant and pretty unprecedented to see the federal government asking a court to vacate its own rules."

That could leave more of the work of defining and enforcing the right to community living to people with disabilities, private litigators, advocacy organizations and the courts.

All this, says Mathis, comes at a time when states are already under immense pressure from the federal government to cut Medicaid spending, which pays for disabled people to get many of the services they need. "States are looking for things to cut," she says. Mathis worries that because the government has changed its stance on integration, state leaders would feel freer to cut spending on programs for community-based living.

How enforcement is already changing

One of the clearest examples of the effects of the federal government's changing position involves children with complex medical needs in Florida.

Back in 2013, the Justice Department sued the state of Florida, arguing that it failed to provide adequate services to children who needed in-home care. As a result, some of their families were forced to put their children in nursing facilities. Other children were at risk of the same.

The federal government won its case in 2023, and the state of Florida was required to provide these families the services they needed to keep their children at home. But in August, the government told the federal court to throw out its victory and allow Florida to have the case heard again in district court, citing the Justice Department's new opinion on the issue.

Mathis calls the reversal shocking. "To do that in a case that involves ripping children away from families, taking them out of the homes where they have families that want to take care of them, and to force those children to grow up in an institution, really is just unthinkable to me and is incredibly heartless."

The Florida case suggests that coming battles for community integration may increasingly play out not through federal enforcement, but case by case, in the courts.

What disability advocates are doing now

The disability rights community is rallying around a number of actions to try to combat the federal government's latest actions.

"There's nothing that is more cherished and hard-won than the right to live, work and participate and be included in your community," says Alison Barkoff, who worked on disability rights enforcement during the Obama administration and is now a health law and policy professor at George Washington University. She says the disability community is hard at work trying to protect those rights.

Thanks to recent advocacy efforts, Barkoff says some members of Congress have reaffirmed their commitment to the rights of people with disabilities to get services they need in their community. Just this week, a group of bipartisan lawmakers introduced a resolution asserting the federal government's longstanding interpretation of Olmstead. In July, 100 members of Congress signed a letter asking the Justice Department to rescind its June opinion.

There is also movement at the state level: Delaware already passed a law incorporating the regulations in Section 504 that were stripped from federal law. Barkoff says other states are moving in a similar direction: "I've probably gotten calls in the last week from at least a dozen state leaders across the country about how to codify the integration mandate … in state law. I see a lot of momentum," she says.

Bruce Darling of the Center for Disability Rights helped draft the Latonya Reeves Freedom Act, a bipartisan bill that would codify integration for disabled people into federal law. He says his organization has been working to convince lawmakers to sign onto it.

Although the bill has some bipartisan support, it has failed in the past and would have a difficult road ahead, facing an executive branch now challenging integration. But Darling says he's hopeful that members of Congress are now more aware of the challenges facing his community.

"I think that the issue has really come to a head now and folks can see that Olmstead is seriously at risk, that we need to do something," says Darling. "I don't know, I'm optimistic."

Edited by Nirvi Shah
Visual design and development by LA Johnson

Copyright 2026 NPR

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Community colleges in California will be required to offer abortion medication through campus health centers starting in 2029, under a law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sunday.

Through the Community College Student Right to Access Act, California will extend the reproductive health service already required for public universities in the state. No specific dollar amount is mentioned in the new law, only that the implementation of abortion medication at community colleges will rely on the Legislature appropriating funding.

Community colleges were left out of Senate Bill 24, a law that was signed in 2019 and took effect in 2023, requiring University of California and California State University campuses to provide on-campus abortion medication at their health centers. The new law, authored by Assemblymember Catherine Stefani, a Democrat from San Francisco, will require abortion pill access at community college campuses with existing health centers. Today, 92 out of 115 community college campuses have health centers.

“We are closing a critical gap by ensuring that community college students, one of the most diverse and economically vulnerable populations in our state, have the same access to care as their peers at four-year institutions,” Stefani said during the Assembly Health Committee hearing in April.

Students at UC, Cal State and community college campuses on the Pro-Abortion Student Advisory Board supported the bill as part of Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity, a national advocacy and reproductive justice organization. The student board works to expand education outreach for reproductive healthcare across the state.

“The system is clearly moving towards the better,” said Angelica Campos, a student at City College of San Francisco and an advisory board member, in response to the governor’s signature.

Implementing the law

Medication abortion can be taken 10 to 11 weeks after the day of a person’s last period. It accounted for more than half of all U.S. abortions in 2023, according to Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization committed to advancing sexual and reproductive health.

Community college health services leaders were initially concerned about implementation due to the locally controlled model of the community college system. For this reason, community college health centers do not operate in the same way as university health centers.

While the law requires community colleges with health centers to start offering abortion medication, it does not require that it happens on campus, unlike the law for UC and Cal State campuses. Instead, community colleges have multiple options. They can prescribe the medication onsite via a licensed provider on staff or telehealth. The health center can utilize partnerships with an offsite provider who can prescribe abortion medication. Or, they can offer a “warm handoff” directing students to resources off campus, with follow-up care on their campus. Implementation cost will depend on the model community colleges choose to adopt.

Some community colleges, like El Camino College in Torrance, already have a “robust” healthcare system, according to Susan Nilles, faculty coordinator of El Camino College Student Health Services and a nurse practitioner. While the campus doesn’t currently offer abortion medication, Nilles said she does not anticipate challenges to comply with the law.

“We’re fortunate enough to where we can handle something like this. It’s nice to know that legally, we’re backed,” Nilles said.

College of the Redwoods, located in the Northern California coast city of Eureka, is one of the 23 community college campuses in the state without an on-campus health center. That campus relies on telehealth services, community partnerships and referrals to local healthcare organizations. Students can currently access medication abortion services through referrals from their telehealth provider, TimelyCare.

Stephanie Freyermuth, manager of Basic Needs, Housing Insecurity & Wellness at the college, said due to campus size, rural location and lack of medical community resources, she does not believe College of the Redwoods will adopt in-person services, including abortion medication, in the immediate future.

Dr. Rosafel A. Nogra, who serves as director of De Anza College’s Student Health Services in Cupertino, said the law is an opportunity to expand their health center’s reproductive healthcare. The campus doesn’t offer abortion medication onsite currently. Instead, it offers services through the Family Planning, Access, Care and Treatment Program provider that offers confidential reproductive health services at no cost to students who meet certain requirements.

Service costs may vary among colleges

The previous law requiring medication abortion services at public universities established the College Student Health Center Sexual and Reproductive Health Preparation Fund with private funds, which provided a $200,000 grant to each campus student health center to implement services. Community colleges were left out of that law because there was not enough capacity to extend funding to them all, Connie Leyva, a former Democratic state senator from Chino and the author of that bill, told CalMatters in a phone interview.

The cost for abortion medication at UC and Cal State campuses varies. Some Cal State campuses give it to students for free. For UC students, medication costs are covered by the required on-campus UC Student Health Insurance Plan.

Cal Poly Humboldt’s costs are free due to grant funding from the California Commission on the Status of Women and Girls, while Sonoma State covers the cost with mandatory student health fees and part of the implementation funding. Cal State San Marcos charges students $20 to $28 for the prescription.

Sonoma State listed their cost as $50 on their health center website but Tim Grace, director of the student health center, told CalMatters in an email it was free. After CalMatters asked about the cost, the college confirmed the medication is free and the website was updated.

The cost for abortion medication at community colleges will depend on how much the Legislature appropriates in the state budget for 2029 and may vary among campuses.

Bringing awareness to students

The law will require all campuses, both community colleges and universities, to inform students that abortion medication services are offered at their health centers. This was another component left out of the previous law.

Four years after she left office, Leyva said that she still receives calls from people frustrated by the lack of advertising about reproductive health services on campuses.

“That part of the bill is tangible and I think that can make a big difference for a lot of young women,” said Leyva, who is now the executive director for KVCR public media in San Bernardino.

The new law will require all campuses to post about medication abortion availability on their websites. Currently, all UC campuses have abortion medication listed on their websites. All Cal State campuses have it on their websites except Chico State, which does not explicitly mention abortion medication and instead highlights birth control and “comprehensive care tailored to specific gender-related health needs” for men and women. Chico State Media Relations Coordinator Michael Drummond said the school will comply with the awareness requirements outlined in the law.

Cal Poly Humboldt student Kaylee Luna works as the Sex, Health and Body Educator at the Women’s Resource Center at her university. Luna connects students to sexual health and reproductive resources on campus. While she was aware abortion medication was provided on campus, she didn’t know it was free until she researched it for her job. From her personal perspective, she feels abortion medication and reproductive resources aren’t talked about enough.

“I don’t think that students on campus are really aware of that. I mean, no one’s really talking about it or, you know, making (social media) posts or flyers,” Luna said. “I feel like it is still a touchy subject for some folks but I don’t think there’s much awareness and I think there should be.”

Faith Chinnapong says in her work alongside college students as a California-based organizer for Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity, she sees the knowledge gap across campuses.

“It’s common to meet a student who is completely unaware of the services on her own campus,” Chinnapong said. “When campuses especially are in these rural areas, it makes it more difficult for these young people to be able to go and seek these services, especially when they’re working multiple jobs and taking care of their family.”

Students like Campos working on the Pro-Abortion Student Advisory Board have heard student concerns first-hand. According to her, access can make all the difference, and going offsite can be a deterrent for some seeking care.

“Comfort is really important, and I think students sometimes feel more safe going to somewhere they’re more familiar with, and oftentimes that’s campus,” Campos said.

Moving forward 

The new law won’t take effect for more than two years, and only upon appropriation of funds by the state Legislature.

“Even if we’re not gonna see the changes potentially overnight, it’s really good that we’re here doing the foundational work,” Campos said.

Now, groups like Pro-Abortion Student Advisory Board will work towards bringing more awareness about the law to students and campus health centers.

“Students should have the option to whatever they choose to decide on how to care for their bodies and having that access would just make it all the better on campus,” said Vanetta Godinez, a San Diego City College student and board member.

Noelle Doblado and Skylar Stock are contributors with the College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. CalMatters higher education coverage is supported by a grant from the College Futures Foundation.

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Schools seeking to spend their windfall of Proposition 28 arts education money will have more clarity and guidelines under a law Gov. Gavin Newsom signed over the weekend.

The new law, Assembly Bill 2440 by Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, a Democrat from Torrance, is intended to clear some confusion as schools tried to implement Prop. 28. The 2022 measure provides about $1 billion a year to California’s public K-12 schools for visual art, music, dance, theater and other arts.

Although schools welcomed the extra funding, some returned their money to the state because they weren’t sure how to spend it and feared getting sued. Austin Beutner, a former superintendent of Los Angeles Unified who authored Prop. 28, sued his former district last year over allegations it cut existing arts programs and backfilled the cuts with money generated by the proposition — something not permitted in the law. That case is pending in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

Under Prop. 28, schools must use their money to supplement, not replace, existing arts funding. But some schools weren’t sure if that applied to existing arts grants from other sources, such as donations from band boosters. Smaller schools were also in a bind because their proposition allotment wasn’t enough to hire a full-time teacher, and they weren’t sure if they could pool funds with a neighboring school to share an arts teacher.

In some cases, schools were confused about what constitutes an arts class. For example, some wondered if a physical education class that includes dance could count as an arts class.

The new law clarifies these and several other points of confusion: It’s OK for schools to pool their resources; arts grant money from other sources does count toward a school’s baseline arts spending; and arts instruction must align with the state’s arts education framework (so no, P.E. is not an arts class).

Over the summer Beutner came out against the bill, saying it would give schools too much latitude and essentially gut the intention of the measure. After lawmakers made some minor changes he switched his position and the bill passed unanimously.

Advocates of Prop. 28 has a multitude of benefits. Students involved in the arts are more likely to attend school, less likely to be disciplined and more likely to graduate, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. High-quality arts education will also provide students with job skills in California’s creative economy — film, television, music, design and other industries, they say.

The arts play a significant role in California’s economy, according to Create for California, a nonprofit advocacy group, making up nearly 10% of the state’s economic output and employing over 1 million people.

“An arts class can give a child something to look forward to at school and a place where they feel they belong,” said Veronica Alvarez, executive director of Create CA, an arts advocacy group that supported the bill. “They learn critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity in practice, skills they’ll carry into their lives and the jobs of today and tomorrow.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Here are the honorable mentions from the 2026 NPR Student Podcast Challenge. You can listen to our middle school and high school finalists here.

Thanks again to students, teachers and educators for being a part of our annual contest! Please share your experience, send us photos and give us feedback at studentpodcastchcallenge@npr.org. And if you haven't already, check out our newsletter for the latest updates.

Congratulations to all these outstanding podcasts! Hope to hear from you again next year!

Middle School Honorable Mentions

A Step Ahead
Students: Alfred Cash Anderson, Amber Jan, Anna de Koning, Daphne Dalton, Fuller Phillipy, Harmony Guzman, Jax Freitag, Kalia Nabours, Kirra Drude, Lottie Wickham, Oliver Tait, Ryan Wilson, Lucy Luria, Wyatt Thompson, Olivia Chilingirian, Noah Cowell and Trey Adamson
Teacher/Sponsor: Andrew Luria, Thrive School in Encinitas, Calif.

AI vs. Polar Bears
Students: Oscar Zheng and Karter Wu
Teacher/Sponsor: James De Lange, Mesa Robles Middle School in Hacienda Heights, Calif.

Ants, Ants, and More Ants
Students: Nicole Piasecki, Sloane Rogers and Meghan Wang
Teacher/Sponsor: Kristie Guevremont, The Foote School in New Haven, Conn.

Autism Explained
Student: Luke DQ
Teacher/Sponsor: Kristie Guevremont, The Foote School in New Haven, Conn.

Childrens' Online Lives
Students: Amelia R Ramcharan and Sharini Somalinga
Teacher/Sponsor: Elizabeth Kennedy, Riverwatch Middle School in Suwanee, Ga.

City Hope San Francisco
Student: Samuel Schwartz
Teacher/Sponsor: Sarah Costello, San Francisco Day School in San Francisco, Calif.

First Time's the Charm: Teacher's Confessions
Student: Jeanne Kim
Teacher/Sponsor: Melissa Henry, Dallas International School in Dallas, Texas

From Dorm Room to Dream: VC Explained
Student: Nina Mattamana
Teacher/Sponsor: Anastasia Sullo, Kingswood Oxford School in West Hartford, Conn.

Grow: Johnson County
Student: Adelaide Kurth
Teacher/Sponsor: Morgan Jeffery, Excelsior Middle School in Marion, Iowa

Homework Stress
Students: Sylpa Jan Kafle, Emmerson Quinn and Dara Widzowski
Teacher/Sponsor: Jaime Harrington, Hewlett Elementary School in Hewlett, N.Y.

How Is My Life Like In US
Student: Yicheng Sun
Teacher/Sponsor: Andrew Barker, Rectory School in Pomfret, Conn.

Is It Worth the Hype?
Students: Jocelyn Luea and Evie Wolf
Teacher/Sponsor: Karen Bonness, Highlands Elementary School in Mission, Ka.

Judge Ellie
Student: Ellie Exner
Teacher/Sponsor: Catherine Rinko-Gay, Barrington Elementary School in Columbus, Ohio

Just Why? - Homework
Student: Derin Dogru
Teacher/Sponsor: Megan Tillotson, Thayer J. Hill Middle School in Naperville, Ill.

Life of a Soldier
Students: Della Axelband, Peyton Johnson, Lily Epstein and Lilly Murillo
Teacher/Sponsor: Sireesha Rutter, Jupiter Middle School in Jupiter, Fla.

Malala Youzafei: The Impact of Her Life Upon her Loved Ones, and How  Her Shooting Changed EVERYTHING
Student: Tunjeena Khan
Teacher/Sponsor: Jenna Conner-Harris, Lake Ridge Middle School in Woodbridge, Va.

Mary's Dictionary
Students: Elliott Mannis-Young, Caitlyn Prather, Ben Loo and Kanalu Asam
Teacher/Sponsor: Vanessa Manuel-Mazzullo, Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawaii

Maxwell's History of Video Games
Student: Maxwell Gibbs
Teacher/Sponsor: Jaime Harrington, Hewlett Elementary School in Hewlett, N.Y.

Middle Child Mayhem
Students: Harry Sheridan and Scarlett LaFemina
Teacher/Sponsor: Amy Smith-Faczan, Victor Intermediate School in Victor, N.Y.

Modern Dental Advertising: Unethical Dentistry Didn't Die With Painless Parker
Student: Athena Rader
Teacher/Sponsor: Morgan Jeffery, Excelsior Middle School in Marion, Iowa

More Than A Photograph
Student: Josie Sloan-Westmoreland
Teacher/Sponsor: David Bird, The Learning Community School in Swannanoa, N.C.

Moving From Country to Country
Students: Ida Buerckert, Daniella Cubas, Ayano Enishi and Anastaiia Koshyk
Teacher/Sponsor: Alysson Olsen, Irving A. Robbins Middle School in Farmington, Conn.

My Wrestling World
Student: Emma Enquist
Teacher/Sponsor: Gina Luber, Rocky Heights Middle School in Lone Tree, Colo.

Peas on Earth
Students: Ninette Khanna, Sophia Lacagnato, Julianna Marshall and Madison Marsillio
Teacher/Sponsor: Lisa Scalici, Marlboro Middle School in Marlboro, N.J.

Perfectly Placed
Student: Kate Vogel
Teacher/Sponsor: Laura Frisbie, Minnetonka Middle School West in Excelsior, Minn.

Roots to Routes
Student: Aphrodite Flevaris
Teacher/Sponsor: Jennifer Kahlenberg, Sunset Ridge School in Northfield, Ill.

Screen Zombies
Students: Fletcher Sams, Brody Lahr and Charles Johnson
Teacher/Sponsor: Morgan Jeffery, Excelsior Middle School in Marion, Iowa

Sheridan Scares
Students: Olivia Robinson and Wells Monash
Teacher/Sponsor: Kelsey Gamza, Sheridan School in Washington, D.C.

Soccer Starters
Students: Francesca DiGeronimo, Sophia Orozco and Bianca Sobolewski
Teacher/Sponsor: Tara Meara, Marlboro Middle School in Marlboro, N.J.

Spooky Scary Stories
Students: Maura Treuhaft, Sofia Jaramillo and Anaika John
Teacher/Sponsor: Jennifer Hall, Keystone School in San Antonio, Texas

Teddy Roosevelt and His Pets
Students: Abbott Mearns and Keaton Rainwater
Teacher/Sponsor: Colindra Connolly at College Place Middle School in Lynnwood, Wash.

The Battle of Monmouth: A Twist on History
Student: Leonardo Zinna, Kaiden Belanger and Oliver Batista
Teacher/Sponsor: Tara Meara, Marlboro Middle School in Marlboro, N.J.

The Cost of a Click
Students: Mallorie Branch, Lily Hall, Olivia Powell and Ella Yancey
Teacher/Sponsor: Tonie Weddle, Mount Washington Middle School in Mount Washington, Ky.

The Largest Elk Herd in the World is in Colorado!
Students: Piper Christofferson, Stella Reyes, Estelle Austin and Brooklynn Burney
Teacher/Sponsor: Karen Penry, Cloverleaf Enrichment School in Castle Rock, Colo.

The Lightbulb
Students: Julia McEvoy and Cate Thompson
Teacher/Sponsor: Jennifer Hall, Keystone School in San Antonio, Texas

The Reintroduction of Wolves in Colorado
Students: Levi Baldwin and Jesse Unger
Teacher/Sponsor: Karen Penry, Cloverleaf Enrichment School in Castle Rock, Colo.

The Unfair Playbook
Student: Hanna Dold
Teacher/Sponsor: Jennifer Kahlenberg, Sunset Ridge School in Northfield, Ill.

The Unscripted Diagnosis
Student: Charley Rasmussen Beckett Eiffert
Teacher/Sponsor: Morgan Jeffery, Excelsior Middle School in Marion, Iowa

What the Sigma? Decoding Digital Slang
Students: Oscar Zheng and Karter Wu
Teacher/Sponsor: James De Lange, Mesa Robles Middle School in Hacienda Heights, Calif.

Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
Student: Valentina Lopez-Cuculich
Teacher/Sponsor: Catherine Rinko-Gay, Barrington Elementary School in Upper Arlington, Ohio

High School Honorable Mentions

A Hunt for Importance
Student: Wyatt Duke
Teacher/Sponsor: Stephanie Brush, Texas High School in Texarkana, Texas

A Taste of His World
Student: Dounia Peters-Abbadi
Teacher/Sponsor :Jennifer Billings, Marblehead High School in Marblehead, Mass.

Before You Drop a Track
Student: Lukas Boulom
Teacher/Sponsor: Su Hudson, Public Academy for Performing Arts in Albuquerque, N.M.

Big Brother is Always Watching: Exploring the Influence of the Internet on Politics
Student: Ayushi Wadhwa
Teacher/Sponsor: Allison Stitham, Kent Place School in Summit, N.J.

Blackpillmaxxing
Student: Percy Gray
Teacher/Sponsor: Kyle Wannen, Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Md.

Born After the Storm: Mai
Student: Mai Smith
Teacher/Sponsor: Joanna Farley, Be Loud Studios in New Orleans, La.

Chronic Homework
Student: Owen Weiss
Teacher/Sponsor: Debra Klevens, Clayton High School in Clayton, Mo.

Combating Holocaust Denial with Creativity
Student: Eva Spiegelman
Teacher/Sponsor: Matthew Vogt, Roslyn High School in Roslyn Heights, N.Y.

Dear Mother
Student: Roxanne DeGrie
Teacher/Sponsor: Paula Wolak, Renaissance High School in Franklin, Tenn.

"Deferred Acceptance": An Algorithm You Won't Defer
Student: Eric Shao
Teacher/Sponsor: Natalie Woods, Mercer Island High School in Mercer Island, Wash.

Dollar Disparities: Is "Adequate" School Funding Good Enough?
Students: Christopher Lin and Zadie Kruglov
Teacher/Sponsor: Molly Earle, Edgemont Jr./Sr. High School in Scarsdale, N.Y.

Everything Given Forward
Student: Lara Leon
Teacher/Sponsor: Tom Chang, Mountain View High School in Mountain View, Calif.

Fanfiction in the classroom
Students: Sana Reynolds, Jenna Westaby and Ash Spiegel
Teacher/Sponsor: Katie Meyers, Kirkwood High School in Kirkwood, Mo.

Focusing through Music: How Music Expands Our Ability to Concentrate
Student: Reid Heavner
Teacher/Sponsor: Hollis Fennen, Santa Rosa High School in Santa Rosa, Calif.

Foes to Friends: How One Fight Made Us Rethink Male Friendship
Students: Aidan Robinson, Omri Dotan and Cesar Verdie
Teacher/Sponsor: Jamie Rinaldi, Newton South High School in Newton, Mass.

Habol - Episode 1: Tag, You're It
Student: Angela Querubin
Teacher/Sponsor: Jonathon Medeiros, Kaua'i High School in Lihue, Hawaii

Hope in Motion
Student: Najia Kohzad
Teacher/Sponsor: Laszlo Bardos, Emma Willard School in Troy, N.Y.

Improving the Accessibility and Affordability of Pursuing Higher Education
Students: Abby Reid, Aryanna Balancier, Malonia Jackson and Denese Chisholm
Teacher/Sponsor: Phillip Day, East Hartford High School in East Hartford, Conn.

Legacies
Student: Isabella Cisneros
Teacher/Sponsor: Su Hudson, Public Academy for Performing Arts in Albuquerque, N.M.

Lost in Transit, Found in Stories
Students: Jacob Vadakkan, Joya Ishak, Nina Cantos, Ellice Lim and Bianca Tarazhi
Teacher/Sponsor: Molly Earle, Edgemont Jr./Sr. High School in Scarsdale, N.Y.

Mastering Time Management
Student: Connor Riley
Teacher/Sponsor: Debra Klevens, Clayton High School in Clayton, Mo.

Misuse of Slang among Teenagers
Students: Jane Kasselman and Leslie Zheng
Teacher/Sponsor: Laura Stewart, The Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science in Columbus, Miss.

Owning Backyard Chickens–What Are the Benefits?
Students: Samantha Diamond and Carson Williams
Teacher/Sponsor: Laura Stewart, The Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science in Columbus, Miss.

Pave the Parklet? The Debate Over Public Space in Newton Centre
Students: Emily Zhu and Mia Silberstein
Teacher/Sponsor: Jamie Rinaldi, Newton South High School in Newton, Mass.

Picketts Charge
Student: Zoe Snyder
Teacher/Sponsor: Terrance Shepler, Susquenita High School in Duncannon, Pa.

Pretending to Party: Acting Out to Fit In
Students: Naomi Allison and Liam Kranenburg
Teacher/Sponsor: Jamie Rinaldi, Newton South High School in Newton, Mass.

Recidivism
Student: Shay Poindexter
Teacher/Sponsor: Kara Wicks, Texas High School in Texarkana, Texas

Setting The Record Straight
Students: Ray Bonney, Ike Nachman and Em Scheckner
Teacher/Sponsor: Kyle Wannen, Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Md.

Shades of Green
Student: Drew Garfinkel
Teacher/Sponsor: Debra Klevens, Clayton High School in Clayton, Mo.

Something to Hold Onto
Student: Amrita Kumar
Teacher/Sponsor: Kymberly Acuña, Bergen County Academies in Hackensack, N.J.

SUPER BIG SISTER
Student: Arianna Corona
Teacher/Sponsor: Rachel Reyes, West Hempstead Secondary School in West Hempstead, N.Y.

The Art of Wingmaning: The Dating Shift
Students: Noelle Elizabeth Howell, Ornelle Nguedjieu and Payton Ariella Newsome
Teacher/Sponsor: Kyle Wannen, Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Md.

The Dinosaurs Will Disappear
Student: Lola Melian Lafinur
Teacher/Sponsor: Lauren Schechter, Mercer Island High School in Mercer Island, Wash.

The Flutter of Forbidden Pages
Student: Cristel Cabral
Teacher/Sponsor: Joel Ruvalcaba, J. Sterling Morton High School East in Cicero, Ill.

The Harm to Communities from Aggressive Immigration Enforcement
Student: Irene Doyle
Teacher/Sponsor: Laura Stewart, The Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science in Columbus, Miss.

The Sound of Both: Finding Identity in Ethiopian Jazz
Student: Gabe Norton
Teacher/Sponsor: Jamie Rinaldi, Newton South High School in Newton, Mass.

The Things We Forget
Student: Ariah Orsi
Teacher/Sponsor: Alicia Borcich Abuliak, Fort Bragg High School in Fort Bragg, Calif.

To My Mother, After Alcohol
Student: Allison Wang
Teacher/Sponsor: Arielle Chang, Crean Lutheran High School in Irvine, Calif.

Unwrapped
Student: Avinash Prasad
Teacher/Sponsor: Megan McCann, El Segundo High School in El Segundo, Calif.

What We Win When We Lose
Students: Nate Sanwald, Ryan Sanwald and Jackson Rohrer
Teacher/Sponsor: Devon Treharne, Shelter Island High School in Shelter Island, N.Y.

Where Have the Fireflies Gone?
Student: Angelina Tan
Teacher/Sponsor: Laura Stewart, The Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science in Columbus, Miss.

Whose Hawaii Is It?
Students: Elijah Sorge, Neveah Smith, Krystelle Jamhil Tacata, Kalea Planas and Caleb Taba
Teacher/Sponsor: Jonathan Medeiros, Kauai High School in Lihue, Hawaii

Copyright 2026 NPR

What do Americans really know about their country? What do we mean when we think of "home"? When a father dies, what lessons does he leave for his son? And, was Andy Warhol a woman named Patricia?

These topics – from fifth graders in Hewlett, N.Y., a high school student in Ann Arbor, Mich., an 11th grader in Cicero, Ill., and a middle schooler in Brooklyn – make up just a few of the many questions that students around the country turned into audio stories and sent us this year. Their answers to those questions are among our 2026 honorees as the best student podcasts in America.

In its eighth year, the NPR Student Podcast Challenge received nearly 1,500 podcasts from students in 42 states and the District of Columbia. Our education team spent the summer listening to each of them, and from all those entries we've chosen the very best.

So here are this year's finalists in our two main categories – grades five through eight and grades nine through 12. We'll send these finalists to our team of judges, and in the coming weeks we'll announce our grand prize winners. Those podcasts will air on Morning Edition, All Things Considered and other NPR programs.

Among the big themes this year was our special challenge to students: In this year marking the 250th anniversary of the nation's founding, explore what it means to be an American.

We also heard a lot about technology in school – AI, cell phone bans, and concerns about screen time. Another big theme was memory. Why do some memories stick and others don't? How do you process the loss of memory? And can you keep a memory alive?

And, a consistent thread over the years, many students were interested in learning from their elders – everything from family histories to intergenerational advice and tough conversations about grief.

Thanks again to the thousands of students, and their teachers, parents and sponsors, who participated, and congratulations to our finalists and honorable mentions!

Here are the middle and high school finalists of the 2026 NPR Student Podcast Challenge, listed in alphabetical order. You can find the list of honorable mentions here.

Winners and honorable mentions in the fourth grade category will be announced at a later date.

Middle School Finalists

Andy Warhol Was a Woman Named Patricia
Student: Ike Anolik
Teacher/Sponsor: David Khoury, Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, N.Y.
NPR Member Stations: WNYC, WFUV, WBGO and WNYE

What started as a walk in the park led Ike to make an unexpected friend: Andy Warhol. Sort of. In his podcast, Ike interviews writer Pat Hackett about her time working for the famous artist.

Civics in Our Schools
Students: Izabella Anthony, Benjamin Baigel, Bridget Castellon, Rile DeLeon, Maxwell Gibbs, Daniel Hernandez, Malcolm Johnson, Sylpa Kafle, Mason King, Kyle Li, Maximus Lin, Emmerson Quinn, Ariella Schoenfeld, Owenize Udevbulu and Dara Widzowski
Teacher/Sponsor: Jaime Harrington, Hewlett Elementary School in Hewlett, N.Y.
NPR Member Stations: WNYC, WFUV, WBGO, WNYE and WSHU

For America's 250th birthday, this group of fifth graders asked each other: "What do you really know about our country?" In their podcast, they talk to their classmates and teachers about the importance of civics, and learn from an expert how they can help get people engaged.

Dear Kate
Student: Kate Baker
Teacher/Sponsor: Morgan Jeffery, Excelsior Middle School in Marion, Iowa
NPR Member Stations: IPR and WVIK

"Words couldn't even describe how much he meant to me." Middle schooler Kate grew up writing letters to her grandpa in between visits when they played games and he'd tell her stories of his life. In her podcast, she pays homage to her Grandpa Ted, and seeks to understand the disease – dementia – that took him from her.

Dyslexia and MEE
Student: Cora Walsh
Teacher/Sponsor: Emily Johnson, South Side Middle School in Rockville Centre, N.Y.
NPR Member Stations: WNYC, WFUV, WBGO, WNYE and WSHU

"People with dyslexia can be amazing in so many ways." Cora has always had a hard time reading, but she says her dyslexia isn't all bad. She talks to her mom and her tutor to learn more about her diagnosis and explores what it's like to be an adult with dyslexia.

I.C.E. Out
Student: Anthony Perez
Teacher/Sponsor: Linda Ov, High Tech Middle Media Arts in San Diego, Calif.
NPR Member Station: KPBS

Increased I.C.E. activity in 2026 got middle schoolers from California wondering why the agency was created. They research its history and conduct interviews to learn more.

Leaving Greece
Student: Livie Courser
Teacher/Sponsor: Shelly Hughes, Wickliffe Progressive Elementary School in Upper Arlington, Ohio
NPR Member Stations: WOSU and WCBE

Middle Schooler Livie grew up hearing stories of Greece from her grandpa, who emigrated to the United States. "It was very difficult for him and his family, and he had many chores after school." In her podcast, Livie interviews her grandpa about what it was like to leave his small village on Crete for America.

More Than Just a Differability
Student: Lucas DeVries
Teacher/Sponsor: Laura Frisbie, Minnetonka Middle School West in Chanhassen, Minn.
NPR Member Station: MPR

"People often think they understand Down syndrome, but a lot of times, they really don't." Lucas' brother Jacob has Down syndrome, and he wants people to know that it's about so much more than a diagnosis – it's a differability.

Ms. Sessa-Fuul Circle
Students: Selah Walkup, Emily Jane Gravitt, Millie Lorence, Addison Jones and Izabella Zapeda
Teacher/Sponsor: Greg Walkup, Otwell Middle School in Cumming, Ga.
NPR Member Stations: WABE, GPB and WCLK

Why do some teachers feel like they belong in the classroom? These five middle schoolers say their teacher "really does." In their podcast, they talk to one of their favorite teachers and some of her former students to figure out what makes her so special.

The Careers Kids Consider
Students: Zoey Nolan and Abigail Stettler
Teacher/Sponsor: Catherine Rinko-Gay, Barrington Elementary School in Upper Arlington, Ohio
NPR Member Stations: WOSU and WCBE

What did you want to be when you were a kid? Zoey and Abigail asked their fellow middle schoolers what careers they want to pursue when they grow up. And they talked to some professionals about what their jobs are actually like.

The Device Debate
Student: Eleanor Deutsch
Teacher/Sponsor: Jessica Deutsch, Troy Intermediate School in Avon Lake, Ohio
NPR Member Station: Ideastream

As a fifth grader, Eleanor said she has been using her computer in school more than ever. She interviewed students, parents and administrators to learn more about the pros and cons of technology in school. She even proposed a few alternatives like good 'ol paper and pencil.

High School Finalists
A Small Town's Meteoric Significance
Students: Addy Dooley, Mallory Stone, Carson Becker, Aidan Bell and Anna Crall
Teacher/Sponsor: Jade Sewell, Illini Bluffs High School in Glasford, Ill.
NPR Member Stations: WCBU, WILL, WUIS and WGLT

"I remember sitting out on the curb and I felt light headed." A group of high schoolers investigate a suspected gas leak at school. But instead of busted pipes, they find a crater millions of years old and a subterranean storage facility.

Artificially Intelligent
Student: Miles Jackman
Teacher/Sponsor: Su Hudson, Public Academy for Performing Arts in Albuquerque, N.M.
NPR Member Stations: KUNM and KANW

Miles is a high schooler in New Mexico who loves to write. But with artificial intelligence pervasive in school, this student wanted to know: How is it influencing students' work?

La Vida Llena
Student: Ulysses McKittrick
Teacher/Sponsor: David Khoury, Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, N.Y.
NPR Member Stations: WNYC, WFUV, WBGO and WNYE

"Wouldn't questions about identity and defining experiences be better suited for people who had already lived full, exciting lives?" That's what high schooler Ulysses asks in his podcast. As he is working on his college essays, he interviews an elderly woman to get some generational insight.

Music on the Mind
Student: Haarrathi Kanna
Teacher/Sponsor: Molly Earle, Edgemont Jr./Sr. High School, Greenville, N.Y.
NPR Member Stations: WNYC, WFUV, WBGO, WNYE, Connecticut Public and WSHU

High schooler Haarrathi volunteers with a music therapist, and she's seen first hand how music can help students with learning differences. But how does music affect the brain? That's the question she posed to three neurologists.

Refusing the Sideline
Student: Charles Post
Teacher/Sponsor: Pamela Ng, Los Altos High School in Los Altos, Calif.
NPR Member Stations: KQED and KALW

"They say life is 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you react to it." That's the lesson Charles has learned from his junior varsity football coach. Coach Mellow has struggled with health complications, but this student says his impact has never been greater. In his podcast, Charles talks to his teammates and Coach Mellow about the difference he's made in their lives.

The Government Exodus: Why Federal Workers Resign
Student: Anna Su
Teacher/Sponsor: Kyle Wannen, Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Md.
NPR Member Station: WAMU

While hundreds of thousands of federal workers voluntarily left their jobs in 2025, Anna's mom stayed. But this high schooler wanted to know, why did so many other government employees leave? She interviews former federal workers to understand what was going through their heads.

The Person I am Becoming
Student: Allen Mondragon
Teacher/Sponsor: Joel Ruvalcaba, J. Sterling Morton High School East in Cicero, Ill.
NPR Member Stations: WBEZ and WILL

Four years ago, Allen's father died. But his presence never faded. "Death ended his life, but it didn't end his impact." Now, Allen is working to become the man his father knew he could be. So he set out to learn: What was his dad's legacy, and what about him did people love?

The Sounds of Our Home
Student: Jacob Zheng
Teacher/Sponsor: Jeff Oleksinski, Skyline High School in Ann Arbor, Mich.
NPR Member Stations: Michigan Public, WEMU, WDET and WKAR

When you think of home, what sounds come to mind? For Jacob, it's the ring of a FaceTime call, the debates over superheroes and the latest family mission on Minecraft. When his sister moved away to college, those nights around the computer became all the more meaningful.

What Happens to Memories?
Student: Amit Biligiri
Teacher/Sponsor: Pejing Lee, Evergreen Valley High School in San Jose, Calif.
NPR Member Stations: KQED, KALW and KAZU

"There are entire weeks of my life I don't remember." And that got high school junior Amit wondering, why? "My name, Amit, translates to limitless, to infinite. But when it comes to my own life, my archive feels quite limited." In this podcast, Amit gets to the bottom of why some memories stick, and why others seem to fade away.

Why Collect?
Student: Jay Burnett
Teacher/Sponsor: Shane Burnett, Lakeside School in Seattle, Wash.
NPR Member Stations: KUOW, KNKX and NWPB

To what lengths would you go to finish a collection? High schooler Jay says he's heard wild stories. But what drives people to collect things to begin with? Maybe it's a challenge. Or perhaps it's about control. Jay talks to friends and fellow collectors in an attempt to answer that question.

Copyright 2026 NPR

A new law will require all California school districts to test students’ math skills in kindergarten, first grade and second grade. If students need extra support, their schools must provide it.

State Sen. Dr. Akilah Weber Pierson, a Democrat who represents District 39, wrote the bill. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it into law over the weekend.

“This will help identify students who are having challenges in math early and connect students with timely, evidence-based support before they fall behind,” Weber Pierson told the State Senate’s education committee in April.

The assessments will check students’ understanding of grade level math skills.

“You might see a question that shows a picture of five fish and three fish, and it’ll say, ‘Which one has more fish?’” said Marshall Tuck, the chief executive officer of EdVoice. The nonprofit sponsored the bill.

Kids who don’t go to preschool might miss out on those skills. If kids don’t get the support they need to catch up, it can mean years of difficulty with math.

“If you don’t learn multiplication, fractions are super difficult,” Tuck said. “And if you don’t learn fractions, algebra is out of reach.”

Less than half of San Diego County’s students are doing math at grade level, according to state testing data. That number drops below 30% for students who are socioeconomically disadvantaged.

Weber Pierson has also cited the rising need for remedial math education among UC San Diego students.

Some teacher and administrator groups worry that the law doesn’t come with additional funding. Kathlan Latimer, with the California Mathematics Council, asked the education committee in April to fund teacher training and additional classroom support staff.

“We urge the prioritization of investments that build educator expertise, support effective teaching, and expand access to high quality mathematics learning experiences for all students,” she said.

Instead, the law encourages districts to use existing state funding to support students who need extra help. That help could include one-on-one or small group tutoring, according to the law.

Some districts already test their youngest students’ math skills. (San Diego Unified uses iReady assessments in kindergarten, first and second grade, according to a district spokesperson.) Many other districts don’t, Tuck said. He said this is a big step in prioritizing math instruction in California.

“We think, in many ways, what’s great about this bill is it’s going to push districts and schools to focus more on math,” he said.

Districts must start assessing students’ math skills by the 2028-29 school year.

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

In New Mexico, all children get free childcare, regardless of the family’s income. Vermont offers nearly the same thing. New York City is rolling out a similar program, and a handful of other cities and states are exploring the idea.

Yet the idea of universal childcare rarely arises in the halls of Sacramento, even though California has some of the highest childcare costs in the country.

“Why is this not a priority in California?” said Patricia Lozano, executive director of Early Edge California, an advocacy group. “The demand is so high. … This could have an enormous positive impact on California’s families and the economy.”

Infant and toddler care in California can cost well over $30,000 a year depending on the region, according to Kidsdata. That’s more than a year at the University of California, or for many families, more than rent or a mortgage payment. Programs are also hard to find: most childcare centers have months-long waiting lists.

Childcare is so expensive that it’s driving some families to leave the state, have fewer children or drop out of the workforce entirely. That’s had broad economic impacts, as K-12 schools see declining enrollment and fewer parents are in the workforce. In the past decade, California schools have lost nearly half a million students, in part due to parents leaving the state because of the high cost of living. Declining birth rates and a drop in immigration have also played a role, according to the state Department of Finance.

Big investments, big costs

In the past few years, California has poured billions into childcare and preschool subsidies for low-income families, but extending those benefits to every family would be complicated, said Assembly Majority Leader Cecilia Aguiar-Curry, a Democrat from Winters who chairs the Legislative Women’s Caucus.

The state would have to ensure there are enough childcare workers, who are already in high demand, and that they’re paid adequately. It would also have to link existing services – currently, a hodgepodge of licensed childcare centers, neighborhood babysitters and everything in between – to a broader state infrastructure. The process could take years.

It would also be expensive. Stanford economists estimated it would cost up to $21 billion a year.

But that doesn’t mean the state shouldn’t try, Aguiar-Curry said. There are no current bills pushing for universal childcare, but a handful of recent bills have addressed issues such as parental leave and requirements to receive subsidized childcare. Aguiar-Curry said she’d like the state to make the enrollment process easier for parents and boost quality across the entire system.

“It’s a family issue, a workforce issue, and an economic issue,” she said. “When parents have reliable childcare, they can go to work, stay in the workforce, and provide for their families. We’ve made a lot of progress in California, and I don’t want us to lose sight of that, but I also don’t think we should be satisfied with where we are. We’ve got more work to do.”

Investing in childcare easily pays for itself through increased tax revenue, according to a team of Stanford researchers who examined the issue earlier this year. Universal childcare would allow more parents to work, expanding the family’s budget and boosting lifetime earnings. It also benefits employers who’d have less turnover when new parents stay on the job.

Still, that argument can be hard to quantify, said Chloe Gibbs, a fellow at the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research who coauthored the study.

“The upfront costs are high and the return is diffuse,” Gibbs said. “But we did find substantial benefits.”

Good for parents, but maybe not kids

Meanwhile, California is chipping away at the gaps in services. The state has more than doubled the number of childcare vouchers for low-income families since 2018, and expanded free preschool eligibility so a family of four earning up to $136,000 a year now qualifies. Transitional kindergarten is also now available to all 4-year-olds.

More recently, the state shifted preschool funding to the same funding stream used by K-12 schools. That essentially means that state-funded preschools are part of the K-12 system, bringing stability to a sector that was previously subject to the ups and downs of the state’s general fund.

In addition, the state added more preschool slots for children whose parents work for school districts, county offices of education and community colleges.

But universal childcare may not be the panacea its proponents are hoping for, said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at UC Berkeley who studies early childhood education. There’s no question it would be a financial boon for parents, but the research is mixed on how much and which children benefit, he said.

Children, especially those from low-income households, benefit from high-quality childcare, but low-quality childcare yields few benefits at great cost, he said. The state would have to improve its standards, including the training protocols for childcare workers, for all children to benefit.

“We know that universal childcare is good economic policy, but does it advance children’s early learning? Not necessarily,” Fuller said.

He also noted that California’s early childhood investments have come so quickly that quality has been uneven. The state should sort out the current hiccups, such as the impact of transitional kindergarten on community preschools, before embarking on a larger expansion.

“Are we growing so quickly we’re losing quality? That’s something we need to consider,” Fuller said.

Fuller favors a more gradual approach, starting with expanding state-funded preschool to all low- and middle-income 3-year-olds. A perfect place for such an expansion could be the K-12 classrooms and schools left vacant by declining enrollment, he said.

‘She loves it here’

That’s the focus of Kidango, a Bay Area nonprofit that runs 54 childcare centers at dozens of school campuses in San Jose, East Palo Alto, Hayward and other communities. The centers serve children from birth through age 5 from some of the lowest-income families in the region – those living below the federal poverty line, which is $33,000 a year for a family of four.

Yeison Velez travels an hour every day from Sunnyvale to bring his 2-year-old daughter to the Kidango childcare center at the former Toyon Elementary School in east San Jose. In the four months since his daughter started at Kidango, Velez has watched her grow from being shy and quiet to being “very social,” he said.

“She loves it here,” Velez said in Spanish.

On a recent sunny morning, about 50 toddlers wiggled, bounced, clambered and daydreamed in the Toyon center’s shaded play area under the supervision of more than a dozen teachers. Some chased bubbles, others rolled hula hoops, some plowed toy trucks through the sand. A few played with blocks. Not a single child was crying, or even fussing.

“We try to build relationships with the children and the families. We want the children to feel safe and welcome,” said Yesenia Rivas-Bejarano, the center director. “We know that’s important to the parents, and we don’t want to let them down. We try to build these deep connections.”

Merliz Parra said she was thrilled when she found out that her 3-year-old son, Carlos Josue, got a spot at the Kidango Toyon Early Learning Center. He had been on the waiting list for months.

“Now my son is able to go to school, engage with other children, gain social skills,” Parra said through a translator. “And I can go to work.”

Parra and her husband both work as delivery drivers, earning just enough to survive in the Bay Area. Subsidized childcare “is very, very important” for the family to make ends meet, she said.

But more important, she said, is the high quality of care for her son.

“He’s happy here,” she said. “That makes a difference.”

Remember Us The Holocaust (RUTH) occupies a somewhat small room in downtown San Diego’s central library. But the history it represents is vast: the history of a dark time, reminders of an incomprehensibly profound evil one group of humans visited upon another, preserved in a collection of artifacts that tells the story in a vivid, visceral way — of those who died and those who lived through the Holocaust.

RUTH is more than just an acronym for this exhibit.

“It’s named after my mother Ruth Goldschmied,” said Sandra Scheller, the founder and president of RUTH.

Before RUTH, Scheller and her late mother educated people about the period from 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power, through 1945, when the Allies defeated Nazi Germany.

“My mother and I were speaking all the time in the schools. We were going to this school, that school, this high school, this elementary school, doing talks,” Scheller said.

In 2018, she broadened her reach to the world stage — from right here in San Diego.

“I put a proposal together to do art from the Holocaust to Comic-Con, and we’ve been there now for eight years. Can you imagine? From 2018 until this last year, I have had a panel at Comic-Con called 'Art from the Holocaust,'” said Scheller.

Before her mother died, Scheller said they talked about establishing a museum. After her passing, she did the next best thing, arranging an exhibit at the Chula Vista Library.

Once that exhibit ended, she moved it to the library in Rancho San Diego, then a library in La Jolla, and now downtown San Diego’s central library.

KPBS interviewed Scheller earlier this month when she and her colleagues were setting things up. We watched as artifacts were carefully placed — a sign from a shop window bearing the words “Juden sind hier unerwünscht,” which means “Jews are unwanted here.”

There's also yellow star of David with the word “Jew” sewn onto a jacket; Jews were forced to wear them before the concentration camps opened.

A pair of shoes. Scheller said the size you got was the size you got, whether they fit or not.

And something truly horrific — a garment with a white X painted on the back, a target for the Nazis to shoot at if prisoners tried to escape.

All around are pictures: the faces of innocent people caught in the moment of madness, some seen for a second looking at the photographer—a gaze of confusion, sadness, utter grief. Those pictures were taken in concentration camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau.

But also all around, the faces of survivors. Life-size cutouts are spread throughout the room showing those who lived to tell the tale, those dedicated to making sure this history never repeats itself.

One of those cutouts depicts 98-year-old Simon Spiegelman, a San Diego County resident and Holocaust survivor. Scheller interviewed him recently, and he had this message for young people: "It’s very important not to believe the Holocaust deniers and to believe that this (the Holocaust) happened, it actually happened and that it can’t happen anywhere at any time again. And it’s up to you, the young generation, to prevent it from happening,” Spiegelman said.

A message years ago from another survivor propelled Scheller to bring RUTH to life.

“Her name was Gita. And she started crying and she said, 'The only way that I can see my family is when I close my eyes at night because I don't even have a photo. I'm jealous of what you have,’” Scheller said. ”So I went to the other Holocaust survivors, and I made a promise to them. 'If I ever do this again, I will make sure that I will incorporate all the Holocaust survivors that I meet.'"

And so she has. The survivors and those left behind — and the items that help tell the tale — all in the Central Library for the next two years.

After that, Scheller hopes they have a permanent location so San Diego can have its own Holocaust museum.

Catch up on what you missed with our Education newsletter, sent weekly.

For a few weeks last school year, a small group of students in Dayton, Ohio, regularly sat in front of laptops in conversation with a social-emotional learning chatbot named Jordan.

Unlike AI chatbots that are designed to be agreeable — and even sycophantic — Jordan presents as angsty: On the day NPR visited, the chatbot told students, "Lately, I've been feeling like what's the point of any of this? I'm not failing. I just don't care. You ever feel like that?"

"Jordan's a little whiner, but I always help him out," said K, a sophomore at the Alternative School at Jackson Center, which is part of Dayton Public Schools.

"I built a little relationship with him," K explained. "So I don't really see it as like an AI on a computer. It's Jordan — like, I'm texting somebody. That's how I see it."

Many students at this alternative school would otherwise be suspended or expelled, and staff told NPR that students here often struggle with both behavioral and academic challenges. NPR is using only K's first initial because of the stigma associated with attending a school for students with a history of disciplinary problems.

Dayton schools paid the ed tech company SchoolAI $72,600 last academic year for multiple AI tools, including the Jordan chatbot, which administrators designed in collaboration with the company and an outside consultant. District leaders said they wanted to see whether Jordan could help students open up about their emotions and experiences outside of school, information that could be useful for school therapists and staff. (According to administrators, families and students were notified that the chat logs could be viewed by school employees, an external evaluator and SchoolAI staff.)

Instead of directly asking students how they feel, Jordan asks students for advice and then grades their responses for engagement and authenticity.

K, who spent just part of his sophomore year at the alternative school, said Jordan could be frustrating at times, but he also found the chatbot's responses relatable.

"I would say it helped me kind of solve my own problems … just answering Jordan every morning and getting him through his problems," K said. "I will go home … but I won't have nobody to talk to. So one day … I put myself in a Jordan perspective. I'm just talking to myself, and it's helped ever since."

Across the United States, school districts and individual educators are experimenting with AI in the classroom.

Teachers are using it to develop lesson plans; special educators are using it to track student progress; in some districts, students have access to AI chatbots that give them feedback on their work; and a San Diego charter school recently introduced its students to an AI-powered humanoid robot.

"It feels very Wild West in terms of the randomness," says Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, which has been tracking AI adoption in K-12 schools.

Meanwhile, the research around how schools can use AI to help students — and avoid potential harms — is extremely limited, according to a recent Stanford University review of more than 800 academic papers. According to that report, some of the existing studies suggest that carefully designed AI tools show more promise than general-purpose chatbots.

There's also no consensus around how schools and educators should be measuring what works and what doesn't.

"There are so many questions. This is bigger than individual schools, even individual districts can figure out on their own. We need state and federal leadership," Lake says.

But states and the federal government have been mostly hands off, which means many schools are forging ahead on their own.

NPR asked Dayton Public Schools Superintendent David Lawrence about his district's decision to experiment with AI on vulnerable students, like the ones at the alternative school that K attended. He said educators must constantly adapt to keep up with the changing times.

"I think when the history is written, it'll say that 'Hey, they were really cutting-edge, innovative and ahead of the curve in the interest of children.'"

The challenge of measuring what works and what doesn't

In Dayton, administrators say they will continue using AI at the alternative school, and they will more than likely deploy more social-emotional chatbots like Jordan. The district also renewed its contract with SchoolAI at a cost of $78,650 for the current school year.

Mike Kentz, an external consultant the district hired to help design and evaluate the pilot, says the experiment produced enough positive evidence — drawn from chat logs and feedback from students and staff — to continue testing.

However, he says he doesn't think it's ready to be rolled out to students across the district.

Kentz says that's partly because it's difficult to measure the success of such an experiment.

"Every test, every experiment that I try to measure in some sort of concrete way, I can only get as far as perception," he says, referring to how students and staff feel about it.

Katelyn Schoenhofer, the AI specialist for Wichita Public Schools in Kansas, says they're facing the same problem.

"We wrestle with what does success really mean when it comes to AI use? And what metric do we want to use in order to evaluate that? And we have not come to an answer yet," she says.

That challenge has prevented Wichita schools from moving forward with a large-scale rollout of student-facing AI tools. But they've slowly begun to introduce the technology in more controlled ways.

In the earlier grade levels, Schoenhofer says, students don't have access to chatbots, but they do learn about the technology. "So it's a robot. It's pattern recognition. It is not your friend," she explains.

In middle school, students have limited access to tools like Canva AI for image generation, and she says that last school year, students were allowed to use the tool's coding feature to create educational games.

And in high school, some students in upper-level math courses can use an AI math tutor from the ed tech company Edia.

Until they figure out how to measure the value of these AI initiatives, Schoenhofer says, these experiments will remain small, but they will continue.

"We are still going ahead with caution but with optimism with our students because it is something that is going to impact their lives. It is something they need to be educated about," she says.

Some school communities are pushing back on experiments

Mark Beehler, superintendent of the Salamanca City Central School District in western New York, had planned an AI experiment of his own, until community outrage halted it.

Beehler's district is located on territory that belongs to the Seneca Nation. The district, which serves many Native American students, paid a tech company called Realbotix nearly $58,000 for an AI-powered humanoid robot named Sally.

Beehler told NPR in July that he planned to bring Sally to some of the district's high school classrooms this fall. He said many students struggle to ask for help from teachers and friends and said, "I'm anticipating that some students will be more likely to interact with a humanoid robot than they would with an actual human."

He added that the robot could help teachers as well.

"When they need to know something, they can just ask Sally, you know, 'Hey, what's the history of this? I'm not exactly sure.' And boom, you know, in 30 seconds to a minute, it spits it out."

But as news of the planned pilot spread, teachers, parents and even state education leaders raised concerns around student data privacy, among other things. By the end of July, the district had put the Sally plan on hold.

Beehler did not respond to NPR's follow-up requests for comments.

In July, he said: "I don't mind being a little bit on the forefront of how we can make this work for a school and ultimately benefit the students."

The pressure to proceed … with caution

Rebecca Winthrop, a senior fellow who researches AI and education at the Brookings Institution, says there's good reason to be cautious.

"I don't think you should just sort of wildly experiment, especially with really marginalized communities," Winthrop says. She says these kinds of experiments could have unintended consequences for students, like "cognitive stunting, diminishing their learning potential" and shifting how students are socialized. Winthrop worries that students could become reliant on AI to do their thinking or navigate relationships for them.

That's why she says she doesn't believe anyone under age 18 should have access to general-purpose AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude.

But she does support educators experimenting with AI in narrowly targeted ways — for example, using a chatbot trained on a teacher's grading rubric to provide feedback to students.

"Educators should really be at the forefront [of AI experimentation], and it should be [for] a problem they're facing," Winthrop says.

But even as experimentation continues, some districts are leaning away from AI.

The country's largest district, New York City Public Schools, issued a one-year ban on student-facing AI beginning this school year for its preschool through 8th-grade students, while allowing only limited AI pilots for a small number of high school classrooms. And the second-largest district, the Los Angeles Unified School District, recently followed suit, banning students from using AI on district devices. As LAist has reported, the district previously allowed students 13 and older to use AI tools under school supervision and after they had completed a lesson on "digital citizenship."

Lake, of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, agrees that AI poses significant risks to students. But she says there are also risks in not engaging with the technology.

"If we really close off AI experimentation, if we prevent kids from learning about AI, learning how to use it really well, thinking about how teaching could be transformed, we will set our kids back from being able to navigate a world that is changing outside of schools faster than we can possibly imagine."

To keep up, Lake says, the world inside schools also needs to change.

Edited by Nicole Cohen
Audio story produced by Lauren Migaki
Visual design and development by LA Johnson

Copyright 2026 NPR

It’s been more than two years since torrential rain flooded Bancroft Elementary School in Spring Valley.

Valentina Solis was in transitional kindergarten then. Despite the sunny weather this Friday, the now-second grader vividly remembers when water flooded her campus.

“I started to worry because I saw the rain going all over,” she said. “It was so rainy that I had to get picked up by my dad.”

Her mom, Isabela Solis, said that moment had a lasting impact on both of them.

“There’s never been a time where if I see rain in the forecast after that has happened, that I don’t think about that,” Isabela Solis said.

Teachers, staff and roughly 400 students evacuated after water rushed downhill onto the campus. Classes were held at nearby Spring Valley Academy.

The district cleaned and repaired Bancroft in the months that followed.

“One of the beautiful things about what happened here is our entire Bancroft community came together,” said Tina Douglas, assistant superintendent of business services. “There were so many people that jumped in to help where help was needed.”

But for Valentina Solis, memories of that day left a sense of fear.

“Any time it was raining, she would have panic attacks and she would get really scared,” Isabela Solis explained. “But we worked through that.”

Forecasters say this winter’s El Niño could be historic and bring substantial rainfall. That led Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare a state of emergency this month to boost statewide preparedness.

Douglas said the district is taking steps to prevent flooding at schools like Bancroft and Kempton Elementary schools.

“Every time we know that there’s rain coming, we always go out to those school sites specifically, in addition to the regular maintenance that we’re doing … to make sure that things are cleaned up to prevent and mitigate any blockages,” Douglas said.

She said the district’s plan includes clearing gutters and having sandbags. Douglas added they have also identified areas that are most prone to flooding.

“We are doing everything we can to mitigate things like that from happening on a normal basis with regular rain,” Douglas said. “And (we) hope that what we are doing helps mitigate anything that might be more than the rain that we get when we have a heavier rain like El Niño.”

Valentina Solis is happy her classrooms have stayed dry the last couple of years.

“They rebuilt the school. I like this school,” she said. “I love it so much because it reminds me of friends, memories and teachers who are very nice.”

The County of San Diego has launched an information hub with guidance and resources explaining El Niño, the potential impacts and how to prepare for inclement weather.

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Worker pay at the country’s largest four-year public university is uneven, with some employees earning well below and others above national averages.

The findings from a new compensation report show two truths: Overall, unionized staff and faculty compensation at the California State University is on par with national averages for similar public universities, but about a third of workers’ total salary and benefits are below national averages. Between 13% and 19% of workers earn well above the average. The report also found that workers at Bay Area campuses are generally underpaid after factoring in the higher wages employers tend to pay in the region.

The Cal State chancellor’s office paid the Segal Group, a human resources research firm, a little more than $1 million for the 27-page report, according to a Cal State spokesperson, Amy Bentley-Smith.

The conclusions are likely to factor heavily in ongoing and increasingly charged contract negotiations between Cal State and its largest unions, which are demanding raises that currently far exceed what the Cal State system is willing to pay. Cal State has budgeted for 4% raises this year; unions are seeking roughly double that or more.

A Cal State trustee Wednesday said the report shows the university system is on the right track, but it leaves her with concerns that workers with the lowest salaries struggle to pay for California’s high living costs. Benefits, while generous, cannot alone pay for basic needs or allow workers to live close to campus, said trustee Leslie Gilbert-Lurie.

“We want them to be able to have food, and we want them to be able to have housing,” she said. “And so I want to be sure that our base salaries at these lowest levels align with what it means to live in California.”

Dozens of representatives from four labor groups briefly shut down the Cal State trustees meeting Tuesday after chanting “no contract, no peace” and “if we don’t get it, shut it down” during the public comment period. All trustees and campus presidents left the meeting space during the demonstration. As the system leaders were exiting, one worker yelled, “Don’t walk out on us!”

Adding to the tension is data that shows 91% of the roughly billion dollars the system got in new money from the state and tuition increases between 2021 and 2025 went toward wage raises for union members. Cal State trustee Julia Lopez first cited the figure at the July meeting, suggesting that steering the majority of new funds to wages is why campuses battled deficits — they struggled to handle all their other growing expenses.

“That's why every single campus had to really look at their budgets and figure out how to make the adjustments that they needed to live within the money that we were sending to them, and that's why there's so much pain in the system,” she said. Lopez co-chaired a working group in 2023 that determined the system is shortchanging its students by not spending enough on academic support and student services, such as libraries and counseling.

Cal State received a record amount of extra taxpayer funding this year, something the unions say was at least partly due to their advocating with state lawmakers. Union leaders are angry their efforts aren’t yet translating into higher wage increases. Meanwhile, Cal State campus presidents received raises of 10% to 20% last year, on top of additional potential bonuses — another source of ire for union leaders.

What unions want

In an interview a few hours after the Tuesday worker protest, a senior union official said that her members don’t want to strike. But they will “strike if they have to for what's right because a temporary, you know, economic hardship will solve years and years of economic disparity,” said Jessica Dalton, vice president for representation for CSU Employees Union. The union represents over 36,000 support staff, student assistants, and healthcare, technical, and administrative workers.

The union seeks a 7% raise for all its non-student workers in 2026 plus other increases for some totalling an 11.8% increase and a 5% raise in 2027. Cal State countered with a 1.2% increase in 2026 and 4% in 2027. The union wants every eligible worker to receive automatic 2% raises annually if they stay at their positions, a concept known as step increases. Cal State, Dalton said, has opposed automatic step increases and instead wants to move workers up only after signing new labor contracts.

A third of workers are on lower pay steps than they should be based on their experience levels.

The faculty union representing 29,000 professors, lecturers and other employees wants predictable, annual raises that equal inflation plus two percentage points. Cal State instead proposes 3% increases for this year and next. The union also wants the lowest-paid workers to earn at least 10% of the $795,000 salary that Cal State’s chancellor, Mildred Garcia, receives. Right now the lowest-paid faculty receive around $66,000 annually.

The report states that median Cal State salaries for unionized workers are actually 1% below the national average, but the system’s health and retirement benefits are generally more generous than those at other schools, making the overall compensation of workers about 3% above the national average.

Unions and university officials disagree over whether Cal State’s proposals will make health benefits more expensive. For CSU Employees Union, Cal State negotiators want to impose a new $5 monthly fee to workers that would grow to $20 for an additional two dependents in 2029. Dalton already pays $100 a month for her health insurance, she said. The extra charges would eat into the raises Cal State is offering, she added. But Cal State notes that employees on the most popular plan, through Kaiser Permanente, will see their health insurance costs drop by $13 to about $150 per month between 2026 and 2027.

Amanda Harrison, a lecturer of English and queer studies at Cal State Northridge, said her health insurance is almost $1,000 a month for herself and her partner — 14% of her salary. In 2018 it was $138 for the same plan, she said. The current rate should be much lower, she contends. Harrison is a cancer survivor and wants the more expensive PPO to access hospitals with research centers. She taught at Santa Monica College and knows faculty there with identical plans who pay nothing.

For the faculty union, Cal State wants to propose a working group to re-evaluate how much the system pays for health benefits. Cal State officials say this group will have no authority to change how much workers will pay for their benefits. But the union is alarmed.

“This would be an unfathomable take-back, causing a reduction in buying power and eroding already low wages,” wrote faculty negotiator Kevin Wehr in an email. He leads the bargaining team for the faculty union and is a sociology professor at Sacramento State. The union is in a dispute with the system over its contract. The next stage of negotiations would permit strikes.

Cal State calculates that its health benefits spending will rise by $81 million between 2026 and 2027.

Union criticism of report

The faculty union is critical of the compensation report because it didn’t consider the much higher cost of living in California compared to other states. The report only considered the higher cost of labor in the state. The differences can be extreme. The report states workers in San Francisco should earn 18% more than workers in Bakersfield. But public calculators show that the cost of living is 50% higher in San Francisco than in Bakersfield.

In a written statement, a spokesperson for Cal State’s Office of the Chancellor, Jason Maymon, defended using cost of labor rather than cost of living. “Cost of living can vary significantly between locations and is an important consideration for employees, but it addresses affordability rather than the market competitiveness of compensation,” he wrote. “Because the purpose of this study was to compare CSU compensation with the external labor market, cost of labor was the appropriate measure for the analysis.”

Another report on non-unionized staff is due by the end of the year. Cal State published a similar report on executive compensation in 2025.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Computer science student Jack Zemke was getting nowhere despite sending out hundreds of job applications that mostly disappeared into the void — ignored.

With his graduation from Tulane University just days away, he was considering moving back in with his parents when he got a break thanks to a group project he had worked on involving an AI-powered search tool. As he touted it at an engineering conference, an employee at a civil engineering firm approached.

"We’re not like the most on top of trends, but we know that AI is becoming a big thing," he recalled the man saying. "We need somebody to be essentially an evangelist.”

Zemke responded: “I’m your man.”

It has been a difficult job market for new graduates, especially in fields like software development where artificial intelligence is shouldering more of the work. While college students majoring in computer science during the recent coding boom were getting job offers without even applying, graduates today in philosophy, art history and ethnic studies majors all have higher employment rates.

But as the job market evolves with AI and entry-level jobs become harder to find, students and schools are adapting. Colleges are experimenting with business-specific internships and bolstering training in AI tools. Schools say most graduates ultimately are getting jobs, although increasingly, the employers hiring aren’t tech giants but smaller businesses looking for help figuring out what to do with AI.

Such was the case with Zemke, 23, who spent a year at the engineering firm before getting hired this summer at an AI tech startup.

“These jobs are expecting you to be able to jump in and kind of operate on the frontier,” Zemke said. “There’s so much churn. People are getting laid off. People are leaving. It really feels like a total frenzy right now.”

A coding boom that enticed many students has fizzled

The elevated jobless rate in the field — at around 7.1% for recent computer science and computer engineering graduates, according to an Associated Press analysis — reflects in part the huge numbers of students who enrolled during the coding boom.

Hiring surged during the pandemic as everything went digital, with software development postings on the job search site Indeed peaking in early 2022.

But now tech giants like Microsoft, Meta and Google are turning to AI for a larger share of the code writing, and big employers like Amazon are shedding workers as spending on AI accelerates. Far fewer jobs in software development are being posted, according to a Federal Reserve analysis of the Indeed data.

For workers in their early 20s in what are being called “AI-exposed” occupations — such as software development — employment is 19% below where it would be if it had kept pace with employment in fields less exposed to being reshaped by AI, according to the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.

The U.S. Census Bureau likened the initial wage hit for graduates in AI-exposed fields to finishing college during a large recession.

What the industry is demanding now is workers who can oversee AI tools and not blindly accept their outputs — skills more common in seasoned workers, said Tracy Camp, the Computing Research Association’s executive director and CEO.

The effect on hiring of young workers is so concerning that the association has reached out to industry leaders, urging them to invest in entry-level workers.

“If they don’t change how hiring is currently happening, they’re not going to have mid-level career people in a few years,” Camp said.

Students also are taking note. After a decade that saw the number of recent computer science and computer engineering graduates triple to about 362,000 in 2024, enrollment began to drop last year. The latest data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center shows that by spring this year, computer and information science enrollment has fallen by 8.4% at four-year institutions.

A shift in hiring disadvantages international students

For international students, who have enrolled in high numbers in computer science programs, it has been an especially challenging job market. Their struggles owe partly to changes to U.S. immigration policy as well as the shift in the kinds of available jobs.

Samir Khuller, the chair of Northwestern University’s computer science department, said many of the smaller companies that are hiring don’t have big human resources departments with experience handling H-1B work visas.

International students generally need an H-1B work visa to stay in the U.S., which requires sponsorship from an employer. The program has become a target of the Trump administration, which is seeking to raise the fee for the visas to over $100,000.

Computer science graduate Collins Kibet, from Kenya, has sent out hundreds of applications and landed just a handful of interviews — mostly with AI bots. The Southern New Hampshire University graduate said that during the rare job interview with a person, the tone shifts when employers learn they would have to sponsor his H-1B work visa.

“Everybody just keeps quiet,” said Kibet, who started his own software company because he could not find a job.

Colleges are rethinking training for computer science students

Watching students navigate job searches has been hard for Nicholas Mattei, an associate computer science professor at Tulane. When he looks at some of the job ads, he thinks, “Really?”

“All the companies are coming back to us and saying, ‘Oh, well you need to train these people even better, and they need to be able to jump into a middle management role as opposed to an introductory or junior developer role,’” he said. “And it’s kind of crazy.”

Many colleges are retooling their computer science programs. With entry-level jobs going away, they are tasked with preparing students to do more.

To give students a leg up, professors at Georgia Tech researched what AT&T wanted and trained students for a month before they started internships with the company. The school plans to expand the effort for a program it will call “Bootcamp to Industry,” said Fisayo Omojokun, the associate dean for undergraduate education in the school’s College of Computing.

Staff tasked with recruiting businesses for College of Computing job fairs are also reaching out to a broader range of industries.

“Earlier this year, we got a call from a forestry company of all things,’” Omojokun said. “They’re like, ‘Hey, we are in forestry, and we know that AI can help in what we do in different ways.’"

Catch up on what you missed with our Education newsletter, sent weekly.

The Trump administration says it wants to close the Education Department to cut bureaucracy and increase efficiency, but NPR found that changes over the last 18 months have cost an unknown amount of taxpayer dollars and made the agency's work more complex and potentially inefficient.

NPR spoke to five Education Department employees to understand how the administration's publicly stated goals are unfolding inside the agency. They all asked not to be named because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the moves and fear professional repercussions for doing so.

"Cutting through layers of red tape in Washington is one essential piece of our final mission," Education Secretary Linda McMahon has said.

But some of the employees NPR spoke to said the changes have made it more difficult for them to serve states and schools who rely on billions of dollars in federal money to educate students who need the most support, including low-income students and those with disabilities.

The administration has also made costly changes around where staffers work — changes that some employees say don't seem to have been made with particular improvements in mind.

"A lot of the frustration we feel is from the fact that they came up with a solution for a problem they have not identified," an Education Department worker says.

Four of the staffers NPR spoke with are among the hundreds of Education employees who are now scattered across at least nine other agency buildings in Washington, including the special education and civil rights offices, which moved this month.

Getting money to students is becoming more complicated

Despite being the smallest cabinet-level agency, the Education Department manages one of the biggest pools of federal grants, sending billions of dollars each year to states and schools. "The funding will continue to flow," McMahon said in an interview with Fox News last year. "If the Department of Education moves different programs to different agencies, that will not shut down the funding."

The agency now says how that money gets to kids, however, should change: Some of those grants will now be sent through platforms used by other agencies instead of the single system long used at Education.

Education Department employees told NPR that other agencies' systems — including at the Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services — are not set up for education grants.

"Many of the students we serve are the kids that need extra support," says one worker responsible for overseeing hundreds of millions of dollars in grants. "Personally, I'm very worried [about the money reaching those students] because they're now going to be sending out funds through a challenging, complicated system."

For instance, Title I grants, worth roughly $18.4 billion per year, go to schools where many students are from low-income families. Employees from the office that oversees those grants have been moved to the Labor Department.

Staff say these changes make it more complicated to get money to students. They say the department has tried twice to use Labor's systems to send out Title I money and other large grants, and both attempts were halted after states pushed back, citing concerns about technical problems and lack of trained staff. The next tranche of Title I money, going out to students on Oct. 1, will be sent via the Education Department's system. But the department will, according to employees, try Labor's system again next year.

Other smaller, competitive grants have already switched to Labor's platforms.

"It's not efficient for us and it's not efficient for them," one staffer says, referring to states and other groups that rely on grant money. "This was done haphazardly. People don't feel like they've received sufficient training on new systems." Some employees must learn how to use three separate grant management tools instead of one. The people who receive the grants are having to do the same.

A staffer at the Office for Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) works with dozens of grant recipients and says, "We spend a lot of time calming nerves, which is not what we're paid to do."

Bryce McKibben, a higher education policy expert at Temple University, works with colleges and states who rely on federal grants including for low-income student parents, and says many have been struggling. "It's hard to know where to go for information, the systems/portals have changed, the amount of guidance they've been getting has been going down," he says. "It all seems to be a very intentional effort to simply … make folks less likely to want federal funds in the first place."

One of the grants that was completely transferred to Labor's systems last year was for career and technical education. After that change, several states reported they received their share of the money months late. Some employees who manage grants consider that situation a cautionary tale, although the following round of the same funding was sent on time earlier this summer.

When asked, Education Department press secretary Savannah Newhouse did not share details behind the initial delay but wrote in an email, "I'd hardly call successfully processing over 7,200 payments totaling over $1.93 billion since October 1, 2025, through the Department of Labor's payment system a 'cautionary tale' on inefficiency."

Scattering staff across Washington

The Education Department has physically moved hundreds of employees out of its longtime headquarters to several other federal agencies, among other steps to break up the Education Department.

Over a hundred special education staffers began reporting to work at an HHS building on Sept. 10. Then, dozens of employees who work on student civil rights moved to the Justice Department. The Education Department also confirmed some employees have started moving from its longtime headquarters in Washington, D.C., to a smaller building roughly a block away, with more workers to follow.

It's all in the name of efficiency, McMahon has said: "Partnering with agencies that are best positioned to deliver results for students and taxpayers … will streamline federal education activities on the legally required programs."

The administration is using interagency agreements (IAA) to shift workers around. IAAs have routinely allowed federal agencies to share resources and expertise. Newhouse said as much in an email to NPR: "Detailing employees to partner agencies is standard practice across the federal government — not a new phenomenon."

Although IAAs are not unusual, the way the Education Department is using them as a vehicle to reshape the entire agency is. Some members of Congress, including Republicans, called the scope of the IAAs "unprecedented" in a statement.

And they may come with a price tag. Senate Democrats have requested the Government Accountability Office (GAO) evaluate the costs of the interagency agreements and other steps the Trump administration has taken to split up the Education Department, says Jackie Nowicki, the director of K-12 education research at the GAO, a nonpartisan congressional watchdog.

One worker from the special education office who must now work at a federal HHS building says they see some benefit to collaborating with the agency, but they don't understand what the physical move accomplishes.

"We could walk over there and talk to these folks, have virtual meetings, but to pay … to move us basically across the street, it is asinine. "

The agreement between OSERS and HHS lasts until September 2027. Yet, staff are detailed to HHS only for renewable 120-day blocks — during which time they report to the Education Department while working at HHS. When employees were told they would be moving to HHS, an email from leadership emphasized, "You remain OSERS' team members and Department of Education employees. Your work and responsibilities remain the same."

"So then what? Are we going to move again in 120 days? A year?" an employee of that office says. "They have framed it as a permanent solution to our country and it's not."    

There already has been some documentation of how changes at the Education Department have resulted in wasted spending: In a report last year, the GAO found the Education Department spent as much as $38 million dollars between March and December 2025 paying staff not to work after it laid them off. During that time, GAO found that OCR resolved more than 7,000 discrimination complaints, but about 90% were resolved by the department dismissing the complaint, meaning staff received information from complainants but did not proceed to investigate.

Back in January, Congress directed the Education Department to give biweekly briefings about the implementation of IAAs, including on costs and how staff transfers would affect the quality of grant management. According to two congressional staffers familiar with the briefings, the department did not share any information about costs at those meetings. Both congressional staff members, who are not authorized to speak publicly about those briefings, say the department stopped them in June after Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, an Oregon Democrat, proposed impeaching McMahon. Newhouse, the press secretary, wrote that the department has continued to provide "significant updates on the IAAS" to committee members.

Others in Congress, on both sides of the aisle, have proposed legislation to stop the IAAs. They include Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, who recently said, "Tell Congress and the public what these interagency agreements actually cost taxpayers."

She added, "show us the receipts."

Costs of physical dismantling

The physical unwinding of the Education Department is also coming at a cost to taxpayers, contrary to the department's public claims.

In a March press release, the department announced that staff would leave its longtime headquarters at the Lyndon B. Johnson building in Washington, D.C., for a far smaller space roughly a block south, "saving taxpayers approximately $4.8 million annually in operating costs and eliminating wasted space in a building that is roughly 70% vacant."

The release also announced that staff from the Department of Energy would then leave their "outdated" headquarters and move into the LBJ building:

"By avoiding major and necessary maintenance on their current building, Energy's move to the ED headquarters will save taxpayers over $350 million in deferred maintenance costs," the release said. NPR reached out to the Energy Department for details about their plans and they repeated the same information about cost savings.

NPR also asked the Education Department how it arrived at those numbers. Press secretary Savannah Newhouse did not respond to those questions but wrote, "Taxpayers shouldn't be paying to keep the lights on in empty government buildings, and the Department of Energy shouldn't spend a single dollar building a new facility when an existing one can be renovated and put to better use."

Two key costs of those moves were omitted from the department's announcement.

First, the LBJ building cannot accommodate the needs of Energy staff without a major overhaul. For example, Rachel Gittleman, president of AFGE Local 252, says the Energy Department would need to add back high-cost, high-security rooms to the LBJ building that were recently removed. Republicans on the House committee that manages federal buildings moved quickly over the summer to free up $215 million for such a renovation.

And that costly overhaul would follow a yearslong renovation of the LBJ Building that began during the first Trump administration. In 2019, that renovation was projected to cost $37 million, but, according to government records, since 2021, roughly $49 million has been spent.

The purpose of that renovation was to do the opposite of what's happening now: to take Education staff spread across several federal buildings and, in the name of efficiency and collaboration, move them all to one place.

"This is a huge waste of taxpayer dollars," says Gittleman.

She also says the Education Department is paying for the employees moved to other offices to have up to three desks each: at the department's current headquarters, its new headquarters, and at agencies where they are being detailed. "This is not efficiency, this is chaos."

Every employee who spoke to NPR shared a similar sentiment, and each says they are sticking it out because they care about the department's mission of serving American students.

One education staffer who now works out of the Labor building says they feel physically and ideologically further from that mission. "I reported to a building this week that doesn't say 'education' anywhere."

Edited by: Nirvi Shah

Copyright 2026 NPR

Local and state Democratic leaders Wednesday sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin demanding he end Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity near schools.

The letter — penned by Reps. Juan Vargas, Scott Peters, Sara Jacobs, all D-San Diego, Rep. Mike Levin, D-San Juan Capistrano, and California's senators, Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff — comes just weeks after ICE agents made two enforcement actions near schools in San Diego.

One person was arrested by ICE agents near San Diego City College, while another person was pursued by agents onto the campus, according to the San Diego Community College District.

In a separate incident, ICE agents allegedly took two parents into custody while they were dropping off their child at John Marshall Elementary School in Chollas Creek.

"Parents should be able to drop their children off at school without fearing detention, and students should be able to attend class without encountering federal immigration enforcement around their campus," the letter from the lawmakers read. "Schools and institutions of higher education have long been places where students feel safe enough to learn, belong, and achieve their academic dreams without their lives being uprooted. Schools should not become the backdrop for immigration enforcement activity, nor should parents have to choose between bringing their children to school and fearing that they may be detained in the process.

"As back to school season continues, we demand that you end all ICE activity in the immediate vicinity of schools and college campuses, particularly during school arrival and dismissal times."

The lawmakers note several other incidents involving ICE actions near schools, including last school year.

Following the Marshall Elementary School and City College arrests, elected officials called the actions exploitative and cruel.

"I am deeply troubled by reports that students and parents were detained without warning while trying to attend classes or bring kids to school," Peters said. "Schools are supposed to be a safe place for young people to learn. Yet this administration exploits the places we trust most — schools, childcare facilities, hospitals, courthouses and places of worship. President Trump has turned these places into hunting grounds.

"Parents and children should not have to worry about ICE agents waiting outside a classroom or a doctor's office. That's why I led introduction of the Protecting Sensitive Locations Act, which would bar immigration enforcement within 1,000 feet of schools, hospitals and churches except in true emergencies. I will also continue working with SDUSD and City College to make sure San Diegans have the resources they need to stay informed and protected."

San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria shared Peters' sentiment.

"No parent should have to fear being separated from their family simply for dropping their child off at school," he said. "Actions like these inflict fear and trauma far beyond those who are detained. Children are left wondering whether their parents will come home. Families may become afraid to take their children to school. And educators are forced to help children navigate fear and uncertainty that no child should have to experience.

"This is cruel, unnecessary and counterproductive. It does nothing to make our communities safer."

ICE and DHS officials did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

The San Diego Education Association, the union for most of San Diego Unified School District's teachers, condemned the arrests.

"Federal Pol(ICE) are snatching parents and college students off our streets, traumatizing our students, educators, education workers, families and communities. This is unethical. This is unacceptable. This ends now," their statement said. "Our members watch children walk into classrooms carrying fear they should never have to carry. They console kids who do not know if their parent will be home tonight. They see young people pulled from college classrooms and campuses, their education and futures interrupted without warning. Our members are being asked to hold communities together while the federal government tears families apart. We see it. We feel it. And we will not pretend this is normal."

The SDCCD issued a statement that said the "intrusion" by law enforcement is "both disruptive, unwelcome and in conflict with the SDCCD's core values. City College and the SDCCD are reaching out with counseling and legal services to support students and employees who were affected by this activity."

Se está llevando a cabo una investigación sobre cuatro casos de violación en la Universidad Estatal de California, San Marcos (CSUSM).

Un portavoz de la universidad informó que las víctimas conocían a sus agresores y que todas las agresiones ocurrieron en las residencias estudiantiles.

A menudo se denomina "zona roja" a las primeras seis semanas del semestre, ya que es cuando aumenta el riesgo de violencia sexual en el campus. En un comunicado, la universidad señaló que inicia las labores de prevención y educación sobre el consentimiento antes de que los estudiantes lleguen al campus y mantiene estos esfuerzos durante todo el año.

La rectora de la CSUSM, Ellen Neufeldt, afirmó que la universidad está intensificando las medidas para abordar estas agresiones.

"Más educación y, no solo eso: mayor seguridad. Nuestro cuerpo policial, el personal de residencias, el equipo encargado de Title IX y muchos otros están listos y dispuestos a ayudar, y ya están actuando", declaró Neufeldt en un video dirigido a la comunidad universitaria.

Neufeldt indicó que hay recursos disponibles para cualquier persona que haya sufrido agresión o acoso sexual.

An investigation is underway into four rapes reported at California State University, San Marcos (CSUSM).

A university spokesperson said the victims knew or were acquainted with their attackers and that all attacks happened in residence halls.

The first six weeks of the semester are often referred to as the “red zone” because that’s when the risk of campus sexual violence is elevated. In a statement, the university said it begins prevention and consent education before students arrive on campus, and continues those efforts throughout the year.

CSUSM President Ellen Neufeldt said the university is doubling down on how it’s addressing the attacks.

“More education, and not just that — increased security. Our police, our housing staff, our Title IX staff and so many more are ready and willing to help and already in action,” Neufeldt said in a video shared with the campus community.

Neufeldt said resources are available to anyone who has experienced sexual assault or harassment.

San Diego Public Library officials announced Tuesday they are teaming up Google to offer free career advancement courses for county residents wanting to improve their workforce skills.

According to the library, people 13 and older with an active SDPL card may apply for access to the "Grow with Google" program.

"With this launch, SDPL joins over 9,000 community organizations partnering with Google to help close the digital skills gap," SDPL officials said in a statement.

Google Career Certificates "are industry-recognized credentials that equip participants with job-ready skills in digital fields, including cybersecurity, data analytics, IT support and more," library officials said.

The program also offers Google Artificial Intelligence courses, including hands-on training from expert, according to the SDPL.

"To date, over 1 million people have used these programs to train for higher-paying jobs, with over 70% of graduates reporting a positive career impact within six months of completion," officials added.

According to SDPL, certificate access is available on a first-come, first-served basis, and each license lasts six months.

Should all available slots be filled, SDPL will start a waitlist for interested residents.

Library Director Misty Jones said that digital skills "are a necessity in the modern workplace, and as a result, may become barriers to many job seekers."

The library system "is proud to partner with Google to remove barriers for San Diegans," said Jones, who added the free certification program is "opening the door to life-changing opportunities."

City Mayor Todd Gloria said he was grateful to Google and the public library "for bringing these resources directly to our communities."

"Our libraries have always been places where San Diegans can learn, grow and find new opportunities, and this partnership builds on that mission for today's economy," Gloria said.

The senior director of Grow with Google said her company "(wants) to make sure that the opportunities created by technology are available to everyone."

Amanda Brophy added that residents can learn at their own pace at city libraries and "build the skills they need to thrive."

Residents who receive a six-month license will "have the option to complete as many eligible courses and certificates as they wish," according to SDPL.

Courses are conducted online via the Coursera platform. According to SDPL, a person typically completes a certificate between three and six months by studying five to 10 hours per week.

All city libraries offer computer and Internet access with printing services, and WiFi hotspots. Laptops are available for checkout through the SDAccess4All program.

The library system's Digital Navigator Program also offers free assistance to help residents obtain a low-cost computer, sign up for affordable Internet service, improve digital skills and receive basic tech support.

Residents wishing to apply for a Google certificate may do so at www.sandiego.gov/public-library/job- start?utm_source=website&utm_medium=social+media&utm_campaign=Google+Certificat es&utm_content=1#grow.

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A set of bills signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom Friday aims to rein in the topsy-turvy expansion of bachelor’s degrees at California community colleges.

But the bills themselves caused new friction: In a last-minute shift, the community colleges that were championing these bills came out to formally oppose them after the lawmakers substantially revised the measures a day before a key constitutional deadline.

The two laws — Senate Bill 960 by Sen. Christopher Cabaldon, a Democrat from Napa, and Assembly Bill 2694 by David Alvarez — allow college districts to have anywhere from two to 12 new bachelor’s degrees a year starting in 2028. The bills bake in accountability metrics: Districts with higher graduation and transfer rates will be permitted to add more degrees. The new caps do not apply to existing bachelor’s degrees at college districts.

Today, 49 colleges either offer or will soon offer 66 bachelor’s degrees. Districts would also need to prove that there’s a workforce need in their region to justify the creation of a bachelor’s degree. The caps apply to all districts, whether they have one campus or nine.

The community colleges opposed tying the number of degrees they can offer to student metrics, arguing that they punish districts that educate low-income students who are less likely to finish their certificates and associate degrees or transfer to a four-year university but would also benefit from more bachelor’s degrees offerings that are tied to local labor market needs.

Other community college leaders said the bills’ numerous last-minute provisions were unclear.

“We’re being asked to … support a process that is not completely understood or vetted at the last minute, and so that’s just not great policymaking,” said Larry Galizio, president and chief executive of the Community College League of California, an association representing community college presidents and board leaders, in an interview for a previous story.

The bills directly address the central tension that buffeted relations between the community colleges and the California State University. Since 2022, the community colleges were allowed to introduce no more than 30 bachelor’s degrees annually, as long as they didn’t duplicate degrees offered by any Cal State or University of California campus. But Cal State routinely objected to the bachelor’’s degrees community colleges sought. And a few times the colleges went ahead with the degree programs anyway.

Community colleges and influential lawmakers said it was unfair to block the colleges from creating bachelor’s degrees that local students and employers wanted, especially if the existing UC or Cal State degree is at a university hundreds of miles away. Some students bemoaned the inability to earn bachelor’s degrees close to home. Many are priced out of relocating to those universities.

There are 115 local community colleges in the state, far more than the 31 UC and Cal state campuses offering bachelor’s degrees.

The bills Newsom signed Friday allow community colleges to create bachelor’s degrees even if a nearby Cal State offers a similar program, but only if that Cal State program rejects more than 25% of applicants from that nearby community college three consecutive years.

The bills also insert a process for handling an impasse between the colleges and Cal State, something missing in past law. A review by the state’s secretary of labor siding with the colleges would remove the Cal State system’s challenge to the degree. But if the labor secretary sides with Cal State, the district is barred from submitting an application for a similar program for five years.

The Cal State system, which opposed earlier versions of the bills, changed their position to neutral after the latest versions were published.

The community colleges are generally barred from duplicating a degree a UC campus offers, unless they come to a written agreement with the UC.

Newsom vetoed a related community college bachelor’s degree bill — one that he’s rejected twice before. For the third year in a row, Assemblymember Esmeralda Soria, a Democrat from Merced, sought a bill to allow students to earn a bachelor’s degree in nursing at a community college, something they cannot currently do. Newsom wrote in his veto message Friday that the bill is unnecessary because of the two bills by Alvarez and Cabaldon he signed.

“It is neither necessary nor appropriate to authorize an additional pilot or create an exception to the framework, as this bill proposes,” Newsom wrote. “California's public higher education segments should instead focus on implementing this newly created, comprehensive system.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

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California college students without legal immigration status still cannot work at public colleges and universities after Gov. Gavin Newsom again vetoed a bill Sunday that would have given them that right.

Assembly Bill 713 would have adopted an untested legal theory that argues that a 1986 federal law barring employers from hiring workers in the country without authorization doesn’t apply to state governments. The logic? That 40-year-old law doesn’t mention state governments as a type of employer that cannot hire workers without proper status.

But for the second time in three years, Newsom decided that adopting that theory for California would expose the state’s higher-education system to the wrath of the federal government.

“The current federal government has shown it is quick to wreak destruction for political spectacle — attacking California’s public higher education institutions and terrorizing immigrant communities, including students, with reckless disregard for consequences and a desire for chaos,” Newsom wrote in his veto message.

He added: “But given the gravity of this bill’s consequences — including potential criminal and civil liability for state employees — the federal courts must resolve the legality of the novel legal theory behind this legislation before we proceed. Seeking declaratory relief in federal court would provide such clarity.”

Newsom vetoed a nearly identical bill in 2024.

The latest bill by Assemblymember José Luis Solache, a Democrat from Lakewood, was meant to allow the estimated 60,000 students without legal immigration status at California’s community college and public universities to earn paychecks safely on campuses instead of working for cash under the table. Backers of the bill say campus jobs could be tailored to fit the students’ academic schedules or align with the research interests, such as employment in labs.

Campus jobs are a key way these students can afford college given that they are ineligible for federal Pell grants — up to $7,400 annually — and federal student loans that come with more borrower protections than ones offered by private lenders. California provides eligible in-state students tuition waivers regardless of their immigration status, so many of them can at least attend a public institution tuition-free.

“While California has a longstanding commitment to expanding access, affordability, and student success in higher education, our undocumented students continue to face significant financial and structural barriers,” Solache said at a bill hearing in June.

The University of California itself abandoned its review of employing students without legal status in 2024 out of fears that the federal government could punish the system by withholding federal money or prosecuting UC personnel.

That decision gutted a coalition of students who led the campaign to persuade the UC to voluntarily adopt the legal theory allowing them to work.

After Newsom vetoed the 2024 bill, a student and former lecturer at the UC sued the system. A state appellate court ruled that UC’s argument that the federal government might sue the system was an abuse of discretion under the state’s law that bans employment and housing discrimination. The court said UC’s policy of not hiring students without legal status was legally indefensible unless it can show that federal law requires the UC to continue its policy of not hiring undocumented students. The UC appealed, but the state Supreme Court let the appellate ruling stand. Still, the court ruling was silent on the soundness of the legal theory that the state can hire workers without legal status.

Newsom’s veto message indicated that a federal court must weigh in on the legal theory before California can adopt a law such as Solache’s.

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The 2026 College Podcast Challenge is now open. Submissions will close on Jan. 17, 2027 at 11:59 PM EST. You can submit here. Good luck!

On campus, there's that hum of excitement in the air as students find their way to classes, meet new roommates and scurry off to pep rallies and rush week.

And along with the brisk chill in the evening air, a hint of the coming fall, comes the seasonal excitement of intercollegiate competition:

Yes, it's that time of year for the NPR College Podcast Challenge.

Once again, students from campuses big and small will vie to win our $5,000 grand prize for the best college podcast in America. (And our $500 scholarship prize for finalists).

Now in its sixth year, the competition has engaged thousands of students from colleges in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

And it's brought to our audience a wide range of compelling stories – from personal narratives to sound-rich explorations of places and events to hard-hitting journalism on issues and topics that are important to students.

Our winners and finalists have come from a cross-section of campuses and fields of study:

• A vivid, sound-rich portrayal of life with a rare mental health condition, told with humor and insight from an international student at Miami Dade College.
• A Fordham University senior's interviews and personal reflections, in the form of a letter to his grandparents, as they cope with cancer and dementia.
• A Penn State freshman's reporting on a little-known run-in between some rough farm boys from Indiana and a 14-year-old Cassius Clay.
• A Colorado College student's journey of self-discovery when she learned that her biological father — a sperm donor she had always been told was a doctor — was in fact a jazz musician.

The College Podcast Challenge grows out of our NPR Student Podcast Challenge, launched in 2018 for students in grades 4-12, and is joined this year by something entirely new: the Senior Podcast Challenge for people 65 and older.

How it works

The rules for this year remain largely unchanged: Send us your audio story, no more than eight minutes in length, and free from any copyrighted music – see our rules page for very specific instructions on that.

Each year, we have to disqualify dozens of entries for failing to comply with these basic rules.

Ready? You can submit here. Deadline is Jan. 17, 2027.

Some helpful tips

We've noticed some positive trends in recent years – the sound production and storytelling have gotten a lot better. Clearly, students today are relaxed and comfortable when speaking into a mic. You've all gotten much better at editing and producing your stories.

But we've also noted a down side to this:

Just because sound effects are fun and available, it doesn't mean you need them. Especially in the quantity and volume we're hearing in some podcasts. Bottom line, when it comes to sound effects, the fewer the better. Or none at all.

Much the same can be said with music, or "scoring." Again, just because you can put music under your entire podcast doesn't mean you should. First off, that music often violates our strict rules about using original, non-copyrighted music.

And second, it's often a distraction: so loud that it drowns out the story you're trying to tell, or so constant that its value is diminished, or lost. We've got details here about how to – selectively – "score" your podcast, and a guide here on how to improve your audio recording.

And finally, since our best podcasts will appear on NPR, you should be mindful of the principles and ethics we follow in our journalism. First and foremost, you shouldn't be using AI to write or produce any part of your podcast.

Then there are other considerations: Are you taking care to tell both sides of a story? Have you reached out for a comment or made an attempt to respect the viewpoints of other people in your story? Have you included full names of characters in your story, and have you avoided revealing details that are private or personal to them? Learn more about that here.

Beyond those guidelines, though, all it takes is a good story. So, it's time to turn on your mic and start recording!

Copyright 2026 NPR