This constriction did not emerge from a simple shortage, but from deliberate policy decisions made in the wake of . School closures, discriminatory placements and the mass dismissal and demotion of tens of thousands of Black educators occurred alongside formal compliance with desegregation mandates, all but dismantling the Black teacher pipeline. 

In the decades since these actions were taken, policymakers have enacted a range of initiatives — from grow-your-own teacher programs to financial incentives and certification reforms — to strengthen the Black educator workforce. However, because these efforts have largely taken a general approach, they have not been sufficient to repair the damage at scale. 

Rebuilding the Black teacher pipeline will require sustained, intentional investment in targeted pathways into the profession — particularly programs that provide early, hands-on teaching experience for Black students and aspiring educators.   

One example is the , a five-week summer program offered both virtually and in person at four elementary schools in Philadelphia. It brings together high school and college students who serve as apprentices in classroom- based teaching roles. College-aged Servant Leader Apprentices facilitate instruction, while high school students assist with small-group lessons and classroom activities as Junior Servant Leaders, all under the guidance of experienced educator-coaches who also provide professional development and structured feedback cycles. This builds instructional skill, leadership and a foundation in Black pedagogy. Together, participants gain hands-on experience while supporting students entering first through third grade.  

In 2025, 82 apprentices participated across the five sites. In Servant Leader Apprentice-led classrooms, apprentices delivered culturally responsive literacy instruction, academic enrichment and social–emotional support to approximately 10 elementary students. Through this work, the apprentices experienced the demands of  planning, leading and supporting a classroom — helping many begin to see teaching as both a craft and a viable career.  

This shift in how participants view teaching is reflected in survey data: By the end of the five weeks, interest in teaching among Servant Leader Apprentices rose from 89% to 95%, and 77% of all participants indicated they plan to return the following year. One Junior Servant Leader said, “I learned to be more confident … building bonds was my favorite part.” A Servant Leader Apprentice shared something similar: “My favorite part … was getting to know the scholars and building relationships in my classroom.” In these moments, teaching shifts from an abstract profession to a commitment rooted in trust, care and a growing sense of responsibility.  

Student outcomes improved as well. Nearly nine in 10 scholars in the program met or exceeded literacy growth goals. Students reported increased confidence and a stronger sense of self, and 90% of participating families plan to return. For many students, even if only for the summer, the classroom became a place where academic growth and cultural affirmation went hand in hand — demonstrating the kind of learning environment that attracts and retains future educators.

While not every apprentice enters the classroom immediately, the academy serves as an entryway to a longer pathway into the profession, connecting participants to structured that provide academic support, professional development, financial assistance and ongoing guidance as prospective educators progress toward the profession.  

Taken together, these outcomes point to a larger conclusion: Rebuilding the Black teacher pipeline will require more than initiatives aimed at strengthening the overall educator workforce. It will need investments in opportunities that allow young Black people to experience teaching and see themselves reflected in it. Programs like the academy create those opportunities, helping aspiring educators build confidence in their ability to influence the futures of the students they serve. 

For policymakers, this means investing in early, structured pathways — such as summer learning programs, and — as a core strategy for expanding entry points into the teaching profession. Investments in these programs allow young people to discover, through practice, that teaching is not simply a job, but a form of freedom work, a commitment to the communities that shaped them and to the students who will shape what comes next.    

At a time when Pennsylvania’s Black educator pipeline remains constrained, failing to invest in these emerging educators will only reinforce the conditions that produced the historic gap.  

The question is not whether talent or interest exists — it does. The question is whether  legislators, school systems and advocacy organizations will build and invest in targeted pathways that directly address the specific harm done to the Black teacher pipeline in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. 

For Rachael Garnick, a former first grade teacher, the results were a reminder of how tough it’s been for schools to recover from historic declines in learning since the pandemic. 

“The literacy scores are still abysmal and we should be displeased,” said Garnick, who heads the Pennsylvania Literacy Coalition. Made up of over 70 organizations, the group has pushed and state officials to fund and implement reading reform.

But despite the discouraging statewide results, she also sees districts, like in northeastern Pennsylvania and the Mohawk Area district, northwest of Pittsburgh, “trending in the right direction,” and demonstrating urgency over reading scores. Their attitude, she said, was “the opposite of ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Instead, ‘It’s broke; we’ve got to fix it.’ ” 

on pandemic learning loss from NWEA, an assessment company, captured that combination of frustration and hope over the state of academic recovery. About a third of schools have reached pre-COVID performance levels in reading or math, and just 14% have recovered in both subjects. But even some that were hit the hardest, like high-poverty schools, have made impressive gains.

The report was just the latest collection of results pointing to a long road ahead for most schools. Last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress scores showed students in the majority of states losing more ground, but included a few standouts with strong progress, like Louisiana in reading and Alabama in math. And state test scores tell a similar story: few have topped pre-COVID performance.

It’s not like experts didn’t predict a slow recovery. 

“If student performance improvement follows historical prepandemic trends, it could take decades for students to fully catch up,” researchers with McKinsey and Company, a consulting firm, .

Even the nation’s education chief isn’t expecting good news soon. 

“I would like to say that NAEP scores, when they come out again in January 2027, are going to show marked improvement,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a recent K-12 Dive . “I don’t think they are.”

But Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, said it’s important to put NWEA data, and all measures of kids’ learning, in context.

“One of the reasons that we’re not seeing recovery and that the results aren’t better is because of what was happening in the decade ,” he said. “There was a slow degradation of academic achievement.”

Resisters and rebounders

Schools that were able to resist further declines during the pandemic are those that are more likely to be back on track, according to NWEA’s data, which represents five million students who took the MAP Growth tests through fall 2024. Such schools make up nearly three quarters of the recovered schools.

The Los Angeles-area is one example. 

Before the pandemic, the high-poverty, majority Latino district was already seeing gains on state assessments. When testing resumed in 2022, reading scores held steady. Math scores caught up the following year, and the district has continued to post gains ever since. 

Superintendent Darin Brawley highlighted a mix of academic routines, like a math problem of the day, weekly quizzes and challenging writing assignments, that the district continued despite the disruption of school closures. Teachers were encouraged to dial back their use of smart boards in the classroom and require students to keep math and language arts journals to improve retention. 

“Everything was being done on the smart board and kids weren’t notating anything,” Brawley said. “Certain things have to be worked out on paper.”

NWEA data also pointed to what the researchers call “rebounder” schools, those that saw significant drops in achievement but have been able to climb their way back. High-poverty schools are among those with impressive gains, but even districts seeing higher-than-ever performance still struggle to close wide achievement gaps.

“We’ve never had scores this high in English language arts or math,” said Buffy Roberts, associate superintendent of the Charleston County schools in South Carolina. “It’s been quite phenomenal.”

She was talking about , which, unlike NWEA and NAEP, aren’t comparable because states don’t all measure proficiency the same. But they can still reflect post-COVID trends if states haven’t changed their tests since 2019. 

South Carolina’s math test has remained constant. Results show that statewide, scores have nearly recovered. It’s a trend that NWEA noted as well, explaining that while schools “lost significant ground,” in math, many made “substantial gains afterward.”

In Charleston, 54% of students in grades three through eight met or exceeded expectations in math last year, up from 48% in 2019 and about 10 percentage points higher than the state average. The district also made the Harvard Center for Education Policy Research’s fully recovered districts in the nation last year.

Roberts pointed to a swift return to in-person instruction and high-dosage tutoring as some of the factors contributing to strong growth. But she said at the outset of the pandemic, leaders “knew there were some vulnerable groups” that would need “structures and support to mitigate some of that learning loss.”

The district’s , she explained, provided extra dollars to schools with high-poverty students even when the schools didn’t qualify for federal Title I funding. The schools used the funds for extra staff to reduce class sizes, incentives to increase attendance and mental health services.

But there’s still a lot of work to do. In fourth grade math, there’s a more than 50 percentage point gap between white and Black students, and students from wealthier families outscore students in poverty by 39 percentage points. 

“We agree that progress must be faster,” the district on Facebook after a conservative community group to the disparities. 

In an analysis of scores, Education Data Center researchers, led by Brown University’s Emily Oster, were hopeful about continued math recovery in 2026. Of the 32 states that have kept the same math test since before COVID, seven met or exceeded 2019 proficiency rates: Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Rhode Island and Tennessee.

But even if they didn’t, they all made some gains. Despite Pennsylvania’s decline in reading, for example, its performance in math is less than a percentage point from reaching the 2019 level. 

But the results in reading were less encouraging. Six out of 28 states have met or surpassed pre-pandemic performance. But several others, like Massachusetts, Minnesota and Oregon, remain well off that mark. 

Goldhaber, with CALDER, suggested that states haven’t seen improvement on tests because parents trust those scores less than the grades kids bring home on report cards and assignments. 

A recent reiterated that point. In a survey of over 2,000 parents, nearly three quarters said they believe grades more than tests when making decisions about their children’s learning. They’re also less likely to take action, like seeking out tutoring or other help for their child, when grades are good. 

The problem is that because of grade inflation, which was on the rise even before the pandemic, grades are a less accurate measure of how students are really doing. 

The results of that survey were no surprise to Bibb Hubbard, founder and CEO of Learning Heroes, a nonprofit that focuses on helping parents understand achievement data. She said she’s been “screaming from the rooftops for 10 years” that parents are about their kids’ performance. 

“Good grades do not equal grade level,” she said. “Parents are deeply engaged, but we can’t afford to leave them on the sidelines relying on grades alone. The stakes are too high.”

Cursive writing lessons will be back in Pennsylvania classrooms after state lawmakers passed legislation requiring its reintroduction this month.

Gov. Josh Shapiro signed the bill into law Wednesday. It adds printing, joined italics and cursive to the writing curriculum in the commonwealth’s school code and takes effect April 12.

Sponsored by Rep. Dane Watro (R-Schuylkill) and Sen. Wayne Langerholc (R-Clearfield), the bill passed in the House in June and received final approval Feb. 3 in the Senate.

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Act 2 of 2026 requires cursive handwriting to be taught at Pennsylvania public and private schools. Pennsylvania will join 18 other states requiring cursive to be taught in school.

It is at least the second attempt to resurrect the flowing, formal style of penmanship, as lawmakers have decried the lack of cursive skills among younger adults. They note many older legal documents were handwritten in cursive and a signature in cursive is more secure than printing.

“By reintegrating cursive into the curriculum, we are not simply teaching handwriting, we are investing in our students’ cognitive development, strengthening their legal preparedness and preserving their connection to historical literacy,” said Langerholc.

Most  states, including Pennsylvania, dropped their cursive writing requirements after switching to the Common Core standards, an initiative launched in 2010 to improve consistency in education requirements between the states.

Spokesperson Erin James said with Act 2 now law, the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) is developing guidance for schools across Pennsylvania.

“Many schools have continued to include cursive writing in their curriculum, while others will need time and support to incorporate it into their schedules. Our priority is to provide practical assistance and clear expectations so teachers can focus on students and learning,” James said.

Watro noted after House passage of his bill that historical documents, including the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, are written in cursive script. People who have the skills to read and write cursive are better able to access and comprehend historical sources, which Watro said is vital for an informed and engaged citizenry.

“At least 24 states have laws requiring cursive instruction because those states understand cursive provides students another way to learn, express themselves and be better prepared for their future academic, professional and personal lives,” said Watro.

In a House Education Committee meeting where the bill was approved for consideration by the full chamber, Chairman Peter Schweyer (D-Lehigh) said that while he learned cursive during his Catholic school education, his own daughter lacked the skill.

“Watching her try to endorse her first paycheck was quite the interesting experience on a human level,” Schweyer said. “I just think that a part of education is actually teaching human skills, not knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but actually preparing people for real life. And this is perfectly reasonable and a smart way to go about it.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Tim Lambert for questions: info@penncapital-star.com.

In the three years since Pennsylvania overhauled its high school graduation requirements, Philadelphia students have increasingly graduated without passing state exams.

Instead, students last year were most likely to graduate by fulfilling alternate requirements, according to .

All students still must earn a certain number of course credits. But they can meet additional graduation requirements by being accepted into a four-year college, earning a certain score on career and technical education exams or SATs, and showing “evidence” that they’re prepared for college or jobs, among other options.

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The change has been fast. The Class of 2023 was the first to graduate via the new system. Since then, the portion of Philly students who graduated by meeting certain score thresholds for their state exams dropped from more than 50% to around a third.

But lawmakers and state officials have published little follow-up that examines whether the shift has left young Pennsylvanians more or less prepared for their futures.

Pennsylvania Department of Education spokesperson Erin James said in a statement that it is “difficult to correlate graduation pathways with other postsecondary metrics” because it is hard to track students after high school. Researchers partnering with the district in Philadelphia say understanding the impact of the new system in the city will likely take years.

Since the switch, one alternative pathway to graduation has ballooned in popularity: submitting industry-recognized credentials. That’s a broad term used to describe certifications that are sought after by certain sectors, like medical assistant credentials, emergency first aid certifications, and auto mechanic qualifications.

Last school year, more than 3,400 Philly students — around 40% of those who had completed enough credits that made them eligible to graduate — submitted at least one industry-recognized credential to graduate. Some submitted them exclusively.

Neither the district nor the state publish a list of which credentials students are using to fulfill this requirement.

When then-Gov. Tom Wolf signed the new graduation requirements into law in 2018, he that the aim was to give students “several options to demonstrate what they’ve learned and that they’re ready to graduate from high school to start a career or continue their education.”

The move permanently did away with the legislature’s previous plan to make passing the Keystones a requirement to graduate.

“How a student does on high stakes tests is not a useful way to decide if someone is ready to graduate from high school,” Wolf said at the time.

Yet amid the booming number of students earning industry-recognized credentials in Philadelphia and nationwide, some researchers worry that there isn’t enough evidence that they’re all useful.

“It’s great to have an alternative option, because there just are going to be some kids who aren’t going to go to college,” said Jay Plasman, a professor at The Ohio State University who has studied how earning credentials affects student outcomes. “The problem is not all credentials are created equally.”

Earning credentials is part of what’s called the “evidence-based” pathway to graduation. It requires students to submit three pieces of “evidence” from a pre-approved state list. Credentials count as evidence, as does being accepted into a two-year college; attaining a guarantee of full-time employment; earning a college-level course credit; achieving certain AP, IB, or SAT scores; and other options.

There are a total of 12 evidence options. Submitting credentials is the most popular one by far.

The state’s includes everything from certifications for barbers and child care workers to credentials related to Microsoft Office and ladder safety. Experts warn it’s important that states carefully review credentials to ensure they’re valuable to students and can lead to good jobs.

Philadelphia offers credentials from a subset of the state’s list, along with additional options based on student interest and industry recommendations for students graduating via the “evidence-based” pathway, according to district Executive Director of Career and Technical Education Michelle Armstrong.

It’s unclear which credentials are most popular among students, given the lack of public data about them.

The district’s graduation rate has risen in recent years, with more than 77% of students graduating within four years in the 2023-24 school year, the most recent year of data available.

Obtaining a high school diploma is valuable, and researchers have found that those who graduate high school are likely to earn more and live longer than those without.

But the increase comes as Philly students’ achievement on some state exams . Last year, Keystone. Even fewer achieved proficient scores in algebra and biology.

Alyn Turner, co-director of the Philadelphia Education Research Consortium, which partners with the district, said her team is working to analyze which pathways students are accessing and what evidence they’re using to fulfill requirements. But she said the larger question of whether students are more prepared for jobs or college is still unknown.

“The extent to which this policy is supportive of that, or adding additional barriers to that, we just don’t know,” Turner said.

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As an education support professional in Hawley, Pennsylvania, about 30 miles east of Scranton, she’s been a teacher’s assistant, substitute, district registrar, homeless liaison and attendance officer. She’s currently the principal’s secretary, serves on the city council, is a board member for the state education retirement system and is the president of her district’s educational support professionals union.

Her experience and passion for helping homeless youth were reasons why she was recently named the Pennsylvania State Education Association’s Dolores McCracken Education Support Professional of the Year.

Monaghan was the Wallenpaupack district’s homeless liaison for 15 years. She helped arrange transportation for students and when they didn’t come to school. Before the pandemic, she launched a nonprofit in an effort to find temporary housing for students who didn’t have a permanent home.

When Monaghan received news about her award in November, she said in a that she was honored to be associated with its namesake, who was the first educational support professional to serve as president of the state teachers union. McCracken died of cancer in 2018.

“Having known Dolores and witnessed all that she accomplished on behalf of education support professionals makes this so much more significant and humbling,” Monaghan said. “I have tried to use her belief that if something needs to be done, you just do it and then move on to the next project, all with the hope of improving circumstances for those around you.”

There are more than 2.2 million education support professionals in U.S. public schools, according to the . These include paraprofessionals, office staff, food service workers, security personnel, bus drivers and custodians

More than 75% of education support professionals have responsibilities for ensuring student and student safety. About 84% work full time, with an average of $37,097.

Aaron Chapin, president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, said in a that Monaghan is a “model of dedication and citizenship” and consistently gave back to her school and community. 

“Ann excels on so many levels,” Chapin said. “She is a compassionate leader, hardworking volunteer, skilled support professional and effective public official. As a leader in her local [union] and in PSEA, she is a strong voice for her fellow support professionals.”

Monaghan spoke recently with The 74’s Lauren Wagner. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about your time as a homeless student liaison.

I was a homeless student liaison for about 15 years. I did not realize how many students are homeless in this district. A lot of people didn’t realize. Our poverty rate is 64% to 65%, but we have a good tax base because we’re land-rich. So people were like, “What do you mean we have homeless students? We don’t have homeless people in this area.” I was like, “Yeah, you do. If you really look very closely at the definition, we have a lot of homeless in this area, especially kids.” I became very interested in the topic, especially when we tried to find places for some of these kids to go. I realized there was nowhere to go in this area. 

Wayne and Pike counties are the only two counties in the state that do not have a homeless shelter. It was not a new situation for the district, it was just one that was never really acknowledged. I was able to work with the administration — even though we didn’t have a place to send the kids — and we were able to work with agencies and made sure they had transportation. The district was really good about taking care of all that. Even though I’m not the homeless student liaison anymore, I work with the person who is now the liaison, and I haven’t given up on the idea of getting a homeless shelter in the area.

In your work with the homeless community, you began the creation of Hawley Forward, an afterschool program nonprofit. How is that going?

The whole idea started prior to COVID, and we had a building that we wanted to see if we could talk to the owner into donating and turning it into a hub for afterschool programs. There was space upstairs that we thought about making into a dorm area for kids we call sofa surfers — for whatever reason, they’re not with their parents or they don’t have a place to go. With COVID, all those plans fell through. So we’re still working on that. I’ve been talking to one of the local pastors who has a church property they’re not utilizing. They’re talking with their church council, so we may be able to do something on a small scale for our students. Sometimes we just need some place for kids to spend a couple of nights because there’s something going on at home and things are not stable. We’ve had seniors who aren’t able to be at home, and we just have to get them through to graduation. That’s what we’re hoping to still be able to do.

What made you want to go into education?

When I was in high school, I wanted to go to college and I wanted to be a teacher. I got my teaching certification in New York. I taught for the Diocese of Brooklyn for a number of years, and then I moved to Pennsylvania. But there were no teaching jobs available, so I subbed for a while and then I was asked if I wanted to take a position as a teacher assistant to do attendance and study halls. That’s how I got into working at the school here. That position just gradually morphed into what it ultimately became. 

I was ready to retire three years ago, and the principal asked if I would take over as [his] secretary. He said, ‘I can coach you.’ Because I wanted to be a grandma, I worked out babysitting issues with my daughter. And I stayed on to be the administrative assistant. 

You’re the president of both a local education support professional union and the Pennsylvania State Education Association’s northeastern region. What are you working on in both positions?

I’ve been the local union president since 2009 and am finishing my third year as president of the Northeastern Education Support Professional Division. Right now, my local Wallenpaupack union isn’t negotiating. We settled a contract last year, so we’re in the second year of the new contract. But [for the regional organization], I’m working with the Bloomsburg School District. They have a whole bunch of new leaders and they’re going into a negotiation, so we’re trying to work with them to get fully acclimated. 

Advocating for a living wage for support staff is still key. I know support staff who have been in their job for 25 to 30 years and are barely making $25,000 a year. That’s not a living wage, and especially in this day and age, with the cost of groceries, gas and utilities. Even [making] $15 an hour, we have people who work two or three jobs just to make ends meet. It’s important that support staff be recognized and be paid adequately, because buildings could not run without support staff. We’re the ones who answer the phones, keep the place clean, keep the kids fed, get them to and from school. It’s a vital role, and it needs to be recognized. For a lot of years, people [thought] it was just a side job. But it’s a career for people, and we need to support them in that profession. We don’t have as many dedicated people coming in as we used to because the money is not there.

It was 1969. Two men from the Pennsylvania Association of Retarded Children made an appointment to meet with the young lawyer with a reputation for taking pie-in-the-sky cases more experienced attorneys wouldn’t touch. Gilhool was five years out of Yale Law School, practicing out of an office that was no wider than his desk — barely large enough to receive the visitors. 

Wedged in sideways, the men handed him a report they had commissioned on conditions at the Pennhurst State School and Hospital, the state’s notoriously overcrowded asylum for the mentally retarded. They were hoping to use the courts to better the lives of the people confined there. (In the interest of historical accuracy, in portions of this article The 74 uses terminology now recognized as offensive.)

Gilhool had never heard of the organization, now known as The Arc of Pennsylvania, but he knew more than most people about Pennhurst. At the time, children could be deemed retarded for a host of reasons: for having an intellectual disability, but also for seizure disorder, cerebral palsy, birth defects, bad behavior, even not speaking fluent English. 

Public school was often the first stop on a short path to institutionalization. Children would enroll, quickly be deemed “ineducable” and consigned to places like Pennhurst, where forced labor, neglect and violence often cut their lives short. 

Gilhool’s brother Bob had been committed to the asylum, the attorney told his stunned guests.  

By the meeting’s end, Gilhool had taken the case — never mind that the three were still uncertain exactly what the case would be. The lawyer asked for a little time to think. Nine months later, he reappeared, grand design in hand. 

Eventually, they should ask the courts to close the facility. But the first task, Gilhool told his new clients, was to establish disabled children’s right to an education. 

Prohibiting schools from using asylums as dumping grounds was the initial step toward shutting down the pipeline of new residents and triggering the creation of alternatives — including the classroom instruction that would help children fulfill their potential. 

Providential, indeed. 

The cultural and political waters had been warmed up by a decade of Kennedy family activism. Rosemary Kennedy, sister to John F., Robert F. Sr. and Ted, had been born with a developmental delay, lobotomized as a young woman to a tragic result and institutionalized. JFK had to push for a new era for people with intellectual disabilities. 

Indeed, upon touring New York’s notorious Willowbrook asylum in 1965, RFK Sr. . “We have a situation that borders on a snake pit,” he said. “The children live in filth …  many of our fellow citizens are suffering tremendously because of lack of attention, lack of imagination, lack of adequate manpower. There is very little future for these children who are in these institutions.”   

The ARC, the Council for Exceptional Children and other organizations pushing for more humane conditions knew it was time — and that the moment called for someone with an audacious vision.  

“They knew they needed a lawyer who was prepared to imagine with them, and dream,” Gilhool, who died in 2020, recalled in a series of interviews that are preserved as an oral history at the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. “And act on those dreams with them to kick over the traces and to restructure the world which had so thoroughly confined them.” 

The 1971 case Gilhool filed and won, PARC vs. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, was swiftly copied by disability advocates in dozens of states. The settlement — which anticipated the sundry ways in which children like Bob Gilhool were excluded from school — became the template for one of the strongest of the era’s civil rights laws, enacted by Congress in 1975.    

Fifty years after passage of what is now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, it’s hard to overstate the law’s impact. Originally titled the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, but better known as Public Law 94-142, it said no child could be declared ineducable. Advocates celebrated the end of the school-to-asylum pipeline.��

Today, however, people with disabilities see flashing warning lights. In the sweeping proposals advanced by President Donald Trump, they see the start of a new era of institutionalization. And in the dehumanizing descriptions of disabled children made by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who grew up visiting his aunt at her asylum — they hear echoes of past rhetorical justifications. The same groups that tapped Gilhool half a century ago today are suing to protect the law.

Pennhurst was not built to care for people who could not live independently. Like most asylums, the motive for its construction was crystal clear: Eugenics.

The era’s dominant belief was that disability, poverty and race were matters of poor breeding. In the parlance of the time, “normal” children needed protection from exposure to disordered ones. “Idiotic, imbecile or feeble-minded persons” should be , the Pennsylvania legislature proclaimed. State after state mandated confinement, and many went so far as to order the sterilization of anyone deemed defective. 

Conditions at Pennhurst were wretched.

“Large numbers of retarded persons have been herded together to live as animals in a barn, complete with stench,” said the report that ARC leaders gave to Gilhool. “Many are forced into slave labor conditions; deprived of privacy, affection, morality; suffering the indignities of nakedness, beatings, sexual assaults and exposure. Some are doped out of reality with chemical restraints while others are physically deformed by the mechanical ones. Many are sitting aimlessly without motivations, incentives, hopes or programs.” 

In 1965, researcher Burton Blatt and photographer Fred Kaplan used a miniature spy camera to secretly take pictures at five unnamed asylums in four Eastern states. They self-published their photos as Christmas in Purgatory, shocking the public and policymakers.

was hardly a secret. But without services to help care for their children or classrooms where they could learn, families struggled to stand up to authorities who pushed institutionalization. Which is how Bob Gilhool ended up at Pennhurst.  

The third child born to Tom and Mary Gilhool, Bob was social and curious. As a result, he was not diagnosed as intellectually disabled until it turned out he was also slow to talk and toilet train. For a little while, he went to a special school, but only for two hours at a time, twice a week. The rest of the time, he was home.  

At the time, a child’s developmental disabilities were viewed as the parents’ deficit. “The diagnosis was very wrenching to my mother and father,” Gilhool would tell the UC Berkeley oral historian. “The learned understanding that it was, of course, the parents’ fault; that these things were genetic … and that they should be embarrassed and ashamed and feel guilty.”

Gilhool’s father was taunted and shamed at work for having a disabled child, to the point that he had what was then called a nervous breakdown. Still, the family resisted experts’ recommendations to institutionalize Bob, who was 10. A few years later, dying of pancreatic cancer, the older Tom urged his wife to consider sending her youngest away. 

“Probably, you’d have to look around and find a place for Bobby,” Gilhool recalled his father telling his mother one night. “Because surely … you will not be able to keep him at home.” 

It was 1954, and Tom Gilhool was 13. It was his job as an older brother, Gilhool later recalled believing as a child, to set aside his anger at what was happening and focus on keeping his mother’s spirits up. 

Whatever Bob understood, he did not complain. 

During the nine months when attorney Tom Gilhool was exploring ways for the ARC to take on the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, he heard, over and over again, about the role schools played in funneling children to Pennhurst.

Like Mary Gilhool, sometimes parents were simply unable to provide around-the-clock care unassisted. But often, families would enroll their children in school, only to have them rejected. Commitment, social workers and other experts would argue, wasn’t just in the best interest of the retarded children; it was to protect their siblings and spare their parents experiences like that of Gilhool’s father.

A Catch-22 for Parents

In 1955, around the time Bob Gilhool was being institutionalized, Minneapolis Public Schools opened an experimental school in a former orphanage and polio hospital. on The Sheltering Arms’ first five years provides a vivid illustration of how school was frequently the first step toward confinement in an asylum. 

Today, to guard against children languishing, IDEA requires schools to assess individual students’ needs, identify strategies for meeting them and document progress, or lack thereof. But in 1960, Sheltering Arms’ administrators were free to dismiss pupils they believed were neither “educable” or “trainable” for a variety of general and subjective reasons. 

An outburst-prone 8-year-old, for instance, was dropped for being “unable to adjust” despite having gained six IQ points during his seven-week school trial period. “His family situation was also a ‘problem’ one,” evaluators wrote, so they called in county welfare officials to arrange “institutional placement.”  

Another 8-year-old was excluded for behaviors that included wanting “maternal-style closeness” with his teacher. During his trial, he learned to “play happily” with other children and formed “some meaningful social relationships” with adults. But in the evaluators’ opinion, “These gains seemed too small to justify the time and attention he was consuming in the classroom.”

Though they were often vague when it came to documenting their own efforts, the Sheltering Arms evaluators were quick to scrutinize students’ home lives in search of justifications for institutionalizing a child. 

In administrators’ opinion, parents who said they faced minimal issues at home often were in denial: “Their discrimination will also be affected by the degree of their defensiveness about the fact of the retardation,” the program report explained. “A parent unable to accept this emotionally may very well proceed, in her diary, to deny all problems and describe the child as ‘perfectly alright.’ ”

Sometimes, children were excluded because evaluators felt the break their family got while they were in class only postponed a painful, inevitable decision. “This was a situation in which we felt that school attendance was permitting the family to just barely survive the situation so that, in effect, a disservice rather than a service was being done to the whole family unit,” Sheltering Arms reported in one case. “These parents were highly realistic and competent people, and his exclusion from school led to institutional placement rather promptly.”

The report declared the overall effort a success. Children gained independence, communication and socialization skills and behaved better. Still, it recommended institutionalization as the long-term outcome for most “trainable” children, and parent education as key to achieving it. 

“We think that great harm is done by the casual provision of classroom experience for children with no effort to interpret to parents in what ways and for what reasons this experience differs from that which their normal children are having in school,” they wrote. “We see this kind of provision as a step backward.”  

Of the 54 children enrolled in the five-year experiment, 23 were subsequently confined to institutions in Minnesota, while 16 were sent home with no possibility of future education. 

PARC v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania 

On Jan. 7, 1971, Gilhool filed a federal against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and 13 school districts with the backing of numerous advocacy groups, most notably the Council for Exceptional Children, the American Association on Mental Deficiency and the National Association for Retarded Citizens.

Gilhool’s goal was to get the court to outlaw the classification of any student as “ineducable.” To that end, the stories of the 13 children named as plaintiffs were representative of the array of excuses schools used to justify their exclusion.  

Citing Brown v Board, in 134 numbered paragraphs that the state’s failure to educate all children violated the U.S. Constitution’s due process and equal protection clauses: 

On Aug. 12, the court was scheduled to hear preliminary statements from seven witnesses. In the afternoon, after just four had testified, the three-judge panel hearing the case stopped the proceedings. Gilhool and his opposing counsel agreed to turn their efforts to drafting an order for the court to approve. On Oct. 7, the judges signed off on the document. 

“This landmark agreement commits the state to a program of identifying, locating, evaluating and placing of all children adjudged to be retarded,” Gov. Milton J. Shapp said at a news conference the next day. “In the long run, this agreement will save the taxpayers money because it is a known fact that many children adjudged to be retarded can lead normal and productive lives if given the proper kind of educational assistance early enough. In the short run, this agreement seeks to put as many children as feasible into the public school system.”

The New York Times weighed in with an editorial: “The court ruling is humane and socially sound. Whatever the cost of educating retarded children, the cost of setting them adrift in the world without giving them the means to lead useful lives is far higher.” 

The suit and settlement were quickly copied by advocates in 26 other federal court cases, pressuring Congress to act. In 1975, lawmakers passed what was then known as the Education for all Handicapped Children Act, guaranteeing the right to a free, appropriate public education for all students, including those with severe disabilities.

On Dec. 2, 1975, President Gerald Ford signed the bill, but reluctantly, noting both that Congress promised states more money than it actually appropriated and complaining, in essence, that Gilhool’s checks and balances — the oversight required by the law to keep schools from shirking their obligations — were burdensome. 

“Everyone can agree with the objective stated in the title of this bill — educating all handicapped children in our nation. The key question is whether the bill will really accomplish that objective,” . “It contains a vast array of detailed, complex and costly administrative requirements which would unnecessarily assert federal control over traditional state and local government functions.”

Ford was right about the first part. Congress promised to fund 40% of IDEA’s average per-pupil cost but has never appropriated anything close to full funding. Right now, states get 13%. 

But as for the checks and balances, Gilhool was correct in anticipating that states and school districts — historically poor enforcers of civil rights — would need continuous federal oversight to deliver on the law’s central tenets: that children with disabilities have a right to a “free and appropriate public education” in the “least restrictive environment” possible. 

Creating Special Education

By the time the PARC case went to trial, Brown v. Board of Education had been the law of the land for 17 years. Yet from coast to coast, communities had to return to court to try to force districts to take even baby steps toward integrating schools racially. 

Anticipating similar resistance to desegregating students with disabilities, Gilhool asked the court to give the Pennsylvania defendants one year to find kids who were not being served by schools — and to continue to identify children who might have unmet needs. 

The clause became one of IDEA’s most important provisions, a duty known as Child Find. It requires school systems to seek out and evaluate students who may need special education services — no excuses. It applies to children from birth to age 21, whether they are being homeschooled or are enrolled in a private school, are migrants or without homes.  

When IDEA became law, Linda Stevens was one of a very small number of educators trained to work with children with disabilities. A speech pathologist with a master’s degree — rare for a woman at the time — she taught a class of  “18 educable mentally retarded students” in Florida’s Alachua County Public Schools. 

“So much of retardation can be attributed to a language problem,” she was quoted as saying in the April 1974 newsletter of the local chapter of the Council for Exceptional Children. “If you can get the students to master the oral skills first, the difficulty of other tasks is then reduced.” 

To that end, her class played phonics-heavy games with puppets and enjoyed homemade books on tape. Stevens’ efforts were so admired that the University of Florida sent special education teaching candidates to learn in her classroom.

When the federal law passed, Stevens and an art-teacher neighbor were tasked with figuring out how to fulfill the district’s Child Find obligations, according to her daughter, Elizabeth Clark, now a teacher in the same school system and a member of the Council for Exceptional Children. Working together, Stevens and her neighbor canvassed the community, showing up at doctor’s offices, PTA meetings and other places families congregated. 

“At the dinner table, my mother would talk about having spent the day going door to door … to let families know that their kids with exceptionalities, moderate to severe, were not only now allowed to come to school, but would have supports,” says Clark. 

The shame of having a child with an intellectual disability that had visited the Gilhools was still prevalent, so the women had to do a lot of coaxing. If a family wouldn’t agree to a home visit, Stevens would invite them for coffee. After each conversation, she would ask whom else she should reach out to.

The hardest part of the job was persuading people that schools would heed the law instead of finding justifications to exclude their children. “Sometimes she would have to visit with a family three times to convince them,” says Clark. “People were in disbelief.”

Once, a parent got up mid-sentence and called a relative: “There’s a lady here that says so-and-so can go to school even though he can’t use the toilet by himself,” the father said. “And that he’s going to be okay.” 

At the same time, in Illinois, Pam Gillet was using every conduit she could think of to find families with children who were not in school. She placed announcements in newspapers and tacked handwritten notes on grocery store bulletin boards. 

A member of the Council for Exceptional Children, Gillet, too, talked to parents who were reluctant to tell a stranger they had a disabled child, but also many who had tried to register their kids for school, only to be turned away. 

“Now we were going back to those parents trying to build trust with them to say, ‘Now we’re going to welcome you,’ ” she recalls. “We capitalized on the legal mandate that the parent must be an equal partner in the planning process and must agree to what the school district was recommending.”

Unlike before, a district could not say it lacked the resources to meet individual students’ needs. If a service was included in the Individualized Education Program, or IEP, that parents and teachers agreed to, the school must find a way to provide it.  

Just as Gilhool had hoped, Child Find put bottom-up pressure on the entire school system to find the classrooms, research the strategies and recruit and train the staff to be able to offer meaningful opportunities. Even as they were trying to find their sea legs, educators like Stevens and Gillet got pressed into service to envision and build out entire programs. 

Of the 33 fourth graders Gillet taught in 1968, her first year in the classroom, five had the word-recognition skills expected of first graders, while another five had some ability to read but not to comprehend. Often, kids who were behind academically were funneled into vocational programs in eighth grade, so there wasn’t much fuss when students were allowed to languish. 

Gillet turned to her principal for help, but didn’t get much. The school had an after-school program, but it was an informal effort, organized by concerned teachers, working without pay. Often, they grouped children according to where each was academically and assigned them to an educator who was strong in that subject. 

Frustrated, Gillet enrolled in a new university program that promised to train teachers to work with children with disabilities: “I thought, ‘Well, even if I don’t get a master’s in special education — because I wasn’t even sure what all that was — I’d at least maybe get some help with the children I was going to have for the rest of the year.’ ” 

Fast-forward six years to IDEA’s passage, and Gillet found herself running a federally funded initiative to train general educators to teach special ed. Using empty classrooms in a school in the northwest part of Cook County, near Chicago, the program enrolled 20 to 25 teachers per term for two semesters. 

During the first term, they would take intensive classes with instructors from five area universities. For the second, the teachers would work alongside highly qualified special educators. The goal was two-fold: to be able to staff special ed classrooms quickly and to expose faculty from different teacher preparation programs to colleagues with expertise in a variety of areas. 

Federal officials were watching. Every three years, the Office of Special Education Programs — a division Congress created to provide expertise and monitor IDEA’s implementation — would visit every school in the district. Still trying to figure out how to get the right staff in the right places to meet students’ varied needs, Gillet valued the feedback from the visits. 

As newly trained special educators opened classrooms throughout Illinois — rising to the challenge of educating children whom schools had never before attempted to accommodate — she sat back and considered how much had been built, and how quickly. “All of those evenings and weekends that we all spent together, and all of the tough times that we said, ‘We’ll never be able to do this,’ we did it,” she recalls thinking. “Kids are in school, they’re learning. They’re having opportunities that some never had and may not have had if it had not been for this law.”

Ignoring the Experts

The doctor who diagnosed Brianne Burger as deaf at age 2 warned her parents that she was unlikely to graduate from high school. They ignored him, becoming zealous advocates out of necessity. 

About 1 million U.S. children under 18 are blind, have limited vision, are deaf, hard of hearing or deaf-blind. Laws requiring publicly funded programs to educate them date, in one case, to the 1800s. Services are expensive, however, and states are quick to target them for cuts when budgets run lean. Because of this, the money, oversight and technical expertise required to keep them running is laid out in IDEA.  

Burger is living proof both of states’ tendency to try to restrict access to costly programs and of disabled children’s academic and career potential. When she was diagnosed in the early 1980s, her family lived in Stamford, Connecticut, 90 minutes’ drive from the state’s only school for deaf children — and the only option state officials offered. 

Burger’s parents, however, were unwilling to put a toddler on a bus for three hours a day. By word of mouth, they learned of two schools for the deaf in New York. One was just 15 minutes from their home. Connecticut had to pay the New York tuition. 

Burger got an excellent education there. When her family moved to Massachusetts, long a disability-friendly state, she was placed in a general-education classroom where her parents advocated for her to have an interpreter. 

She ended up at a California university with strong services for deaf students, and later at Emerson College for graduate school. After a stint in vocational rehabilitation, helping people with disabilities find and settle into jobs, she went to work managing federal grants for Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. 

Her timing could not have been better. President Barack Obama had pledged to increase the number of people with disabilities employed by the government. Burger worked in disability policy for several federal agencies, landing at the U.S. Department of Education in 2016. 

For nine years, she monitored a number of congressionally mandated institutions that provide expertise or services states don’t have: the American Printing House for the Blind; the Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center; Gallaudet University; the Helen Keller National Center for the Deaf-Blind; and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. 

In March, despite the fact that the law requires her position to be filled, Burger was one of more than 1,300 Education Department employees fired as Trump attempted to close it. Since his second inauguration, millions of dollars in funding for at least a dozen programs to support deaf and blind students has been eliminated. 

Shortly after Burger’s firing, South Dakota Republican Sen. Mike Rounds introduced legislation to transfer the department’s responsibilities to other federal agencies. Under the bill, oversight and support for the organizations she oversaw would be assigned to the Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Labor.

During the Great Recession of the late 2000s, Rounds — then governor of South Dakota — attempted to close the state’s residential school for the deaf, which was established in 1880. Federal stimulus funds saved it, albeit in a drastically curtailed form. 

A task force appointed by Rounds recommended that its functions be assigned to individual districts, which can draw on the school for support. But without the pressure to staff a residential school, services have ebbed. In 2016, for example, the last university degree program for deaf educators closed, choking off the supply of interpreters able to work in regular schools. 

This year, schools that serve deaf and blind students and universities that train their educators have been or threatened with closure in . At the same time, offices like Burger’s — created to ensure states and districts don’t shirk their obligations — have been hollowed out. 

In March, a group of educators, school districts and public-sector unions , hoping to stop the Education Department’s dismantling and reverse the mass firings. (The Arc of the United States has since joined the suit.) A Massachusetts judge issued an order halting the administration’s efforts, pending further legal proceedings, but in July, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed that ruling, at least temporarily allowing the dismantling of the department to proceed. 

Education Secretary Linda McMahon has since laid off more of the department’s employees, although some have been temporarily rehired. 

If Trump and McMahon eventually succeed, the department’s Office of Civil Rights, which investigates violations of disabled students’ rights, will have shrunk from 446 employees to 62. The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services — one of the divisions Congress explicitly required in IDEA — will retain just 14 of its 135 employees.

Echoes of a Dark Past

Over the last year, disability advocates have repeatedly warned that the Trump administration’s policies — and the president’s use of the slur “retarded” — open the door to a return to the dark past. Most visibly, as health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeated false claims about the causes of autism and promoted an unproven “cure.”

“These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date,” he said in April of autistic children. “Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”

Indeed, one of was to eliminate the Administration for Community Living, the HHS division that oversees programs that help people with disabilities and the elderly be as independent as possible. The office’s responsibilities, he announced in March, will be handled by other parts of the agency. 

Perhaps ignorant that Pennhurst and other asylums forced residents to grow their own food, Kennedy has also proposed the creation of “work farms,” where hard labor will supposedly heal people struggling with addiction, mental health issues and even attention deficit disorder. 

In July, Trump opened the door to re-institutionalization with an executive order titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets.” It calls for “the reversal of federal or state judicial precedents and the termination of consent decrees” that limit broad institutionalization, threatening to withhold federal funds from states and municipalities that don’t adopt and enforce “maximally flexible” commitment standards. 

Like the laws that justified confining in asylums people perceived as dangerous, the edict proposes to “restore public order” via the “civil commitment of individuals with mental illness who pose risks to themselves or the public or are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves in appropriate facilities for appropriate periods of time.”

A statement from the American Bar Association raises Gilhool used to frame PARC: “The order raises serious constitutional and civil rights concerns — particularly regarding due process under the Fourteenth Amendment and the rights of individuals with disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Its proposed standard for commitment — encompassing not only those who pose a risk to self or others but also those who are merely unable to care for themselves — falls short of established constitutional safeguards.”

Hoping “,” in 2010 a group of advocates and former residents formed the Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance with the intent of acquiring the abandoned facility and turning it into a national museum of disability history. 

But a businessman by the name of Robert Chakejian beat them to it, paying the state of Pennsylvania $2 million for Pennhurst in 2008. Chakejian was struggling to turn a profit on a composting business he had started on the grounds when his teenager suggested he convert the asylum — and its abandoned cribs, beds, wheelchairs and an electric shock chair — into a haunted house. 

After they sued and lost, advocates tried to persuade the entrepreneur to at least populate the attraction with vampires and monsters instead of mental patients. But when the haunted house opened in September 2010, it had an asylum theme, complete with a fictional backstory involving a made-up Austrian scientist (named Dr. Chakajian, an intentional misspelling of the owner’s name) who experimented on Pennhurst’s prisoners. 

These days, there’s a late-night paranormal tour — complete with actors in gory makeup who lunge at visitors — and holiday events like “Crazy Christmas” and “Bloody Valentine.” Because it’s too scary, children and pregnant women are not allowed to tour. Active members of the military get discounted admission. 

Between 1908 — when Pennsylvania built what was originally called the Eastern State Institution for the Feeble Minded and Epileptic — and 1987, nearly 11,000 people were confined to Pennhurst. About half died there, historians estimate. 

After Pennhurst’s closure, some 150,000 people moved out of institutions nationwide. Since then, an estimated half a million have been spared institutionalization. 

In one of the longest-running to date, researchers at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Temple University stayed in touch with 1,156 people who were at Pennhurst in 1978. Each got a visit once a year, aimed at answering a single question: “Are the people better off than they were at Pennhurst?” 

They were. None wound up homeless or in jail. They lived an average of six years longer than those confined had, and their care cost 15% less than in the institution. Many moved into small group homes in the community. 

Bob Gilhool was among those who eventually lived independently. Long after the trial that began the process of emptying the asylum, Tom Gilhool asked whether his brother wanted to tag along on a visit the lawyer was making with a group of Japanese disability activists. 

No way, was the quick response, Tom Gilhool told an interviewer compiling for Temple University’s Institute on Disabilities. But he was proud.

“As Bob tells me often,” Gilhool said, beaming, “ ‘You and I closed Pennhurst.’ ”

When Kimberly Halevy’s son Joshua was 3, she started hearing from his preschool that he was acting out. He rarely participated in circle time and had trouble playing with other kids.

Halevy’s friend had recently opened the preschool, and she liked that someone she knew took care of her son. But eventually, the preschool said it would only allow him back if he had a 1-to-1 aide to address his “disruptive” behavior, Halevy said.

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At first, Halevy thought getting him that aide would be straightforward. But she now describes the effort to get her kid support through Philadelphia’s federally mandated, publicly funded early intervention system as exhausting.

Though state evaluators found Joshua should receive multiple forms of therapy each week, it took months for any services to begin, Halevy said. Then, once providers contacted her, she said it became a “guessing game” whether her son would receive the home-based occupational therapy and specialized instruction he qualified for every week.

“I kept being mad at myself for not pushing,” Halevy said. “But now I realize that it’s just the program.”

Across Philadelphia, young kids like Joshua are waiting months and sometimes years for early intervention services that they are legally entitled to, according to families, therapy providers, and advocates Chalkbeat spoke with.

Federal law states a child must receive services as soon as possible after an evaluation team completes their Individualized Education Program, or IEP. Pennsylvania has interpreted that to mean 14 days. But one provider said the list she can access of children waiting for speech therapy — one of several early intervention services — is sometimes more than 2,000 families long.

Early intervention providers are , with not enough funding or staffing to meet the need. But in Philadelphia — home to 16% of the state’s early intervention population — one player is largely responsible for the system: a 170-year-old nonprofit called Elwyn that the state pays to manage the publicly funded program.

As Philly’s early intervention system struggles to meet the needs of all kids, some providers and advocates say neither Elwyn nor the state officials who oversee the program are doing enough to ensure kids get services on time.

In response to Chalkbeat’s questions, Elwyn President and CEO Charles McLister said Elwyn does not comment on specific cases, but the organization works quickly to assess children and provide them with services. “For the vast majority of cases, services are provided within the defined window,” said McLister.

But McLister acknowledged that there can be delays due to family communication, transportation, scheduling, provider availability, and severe staffing shortages across the sector.

Erin James, press secretary at the Pennsylvania Department of Education, said in a statement that the department stays in close contact with Elwyn throughout the year “to remind them of their legal obligations.”

James did not respond to questions about service delays for Philadelphia families. But she said that early intervention programs often lack resources. “Current funding levels for EI [early intervention] services are not sufficient because the population of students who qualify for EI services has been increasing for years,” James said.

In Philadelphia, the program’s delays are a key reason many of the city’s most vulnerable kids fall behind before they even start kindergarten, advocates say. Data from early intervention the state publishes shows Philly children in early intervention programs lag behind their peers elsewhere in key growth areas, like developing social emotional skills.

“The whole idea of having to wait more than the required time is really putting kids at a disadvantage,” said Inella Ray, director of parent advocacy and engagement at the advocacy organization Children First. “Because when kids don’t have the support that they need, in today’s current education or environment, they get pushed out.”

Parents face delays accessing early intervention services

Early intervention is part of the landmark Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which dictates that all children with disabilities must have access to a free and appropriate public education. Though each state creates and manages its own program, all kids through age 5 who are identified as having a developmental delay or disability are eligible.

In Pennsylvania, the Department of Education oversees local early intervention programs for preschool-age kids. In almost every county, families get connected with services through an intermediary unit, a kind of regional education service agency.

But in Philadelphia, things work differently. The state pays Elwyn a combination of state and federal dollars to administer the city’s preschool early intervention program, along with a much smaller program in Chester. Last fiscal year, its contract was worth around $90 million. Elwyn is in charge of assessing children, developing their IEPs, and subcontracting with a network of providers for services they qualify for.

When Halevy’s kids’ preschool said her son needed an aide, the preschool owner gave Halevy advice: phone Elwyn. So she did, and she was relieved when the organization told her they could fit Joshua in to begin his evaluation later that week.

That was July 2024. She hoped Joshua would have services in time to be back at preschool by the following September. But soon, Halevy said she began hitting roadblocks.

In August, she said she didn’t hear much from Elwyn. Like other early intervention programs statewide, Elwyn often takes a two-week service break at the end of summer — one of many scheduled break periods during the year.

But then when she did hear back that September, she learned Elwyn wouldn’t consider providing a 1-to-1 aide without observing Joshua in his educational environment. But the preschool said he couldn’t return to class unless he had someone there to specifically support him.

At the end of September, when evaluators wrote Joshua’s initial IEP, they documented that they discussed adding an aide to assist Joshua at preschool. But they wrote that because they could not observe Joshua in his educational environment, they did not have enough information to support that recommendation. “[T]he family is in a difficult position,” the team wrote on the IEP, which Chalkbeat has reviewed.

Joshua’s IEP states that he should receive occupational therapy and specialized instruction each week. The law requires services to begin within 14 days. But more than a month after, Joshua still wasn’t receiving services, Halevy said.

At the time, Halevy was stretched thin. She was also working to get services for her 2-year-old daughter, who struggled with speech, through the separate early intervention program that serves children up to age 3 run by the city.

For Halevy, sorting out her daughter’s services in the birth to 3 program was simple. Service providers quickly began contacting her and therapists started showing up for sessions. But for her son, nothing.

“One day, I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, what’s going on with Josh?’ and I start calling every number I had at Elwyn,” said Halevy.

It wasn’t until two more months later, in November, when he finally began to receive occupational therapy, she said recently after reviewing text messages. In December, she said his special instruction began.

Early intervention IEPs not always followed

Elwyn’s Philadelphia program is the largest in the state, serving around 11,000 preschool-age children, according to the from the 2023-24 school year. The organization first won its contract for early intervention services in Philadelphia in 1998.

But its outcomes for kids are behind the rest of Pennsylvania.

The state requires early intervention programs to report data on how kids progress in certain areas, like social emotional learning and acquiring new skills. show that for the last five years of data, children in Elwyn’s Philadelphia program have been less likely to progress in all three growth categories compared with the state average.

Margie Wakelin, a senior attorney at the Pennsylvania-based Education Law Center, said her team has assisted more than 80 Philadelphia families in the last year whose kids’ education was disrupted at least in part because they couldn’t access appropriate services from Elwyn. The vast majority of those children, she said, were Black and Brown kids affected by poverty.

Some families hire attorneys to help them access the services they’re entitled to, or get pro bono representation from organizations like the Education Law Center. Many who win their cases get compensatory education, often in the form of money the family can use to pay for services after the case is over.

But that doesn’t make up for lost time as children quickly age out of early intervention. Research shows that than any other time of their life. Many families, Wakelin said, have also had their children or made to only attend partial days because of their disabilities.

“It’s such a critical period for kids to have access to high quality education,” said Wakelin. A system that identifies children as needing services but doesn’t follow through, she added, is “really failing our kids.”’

McLister, Elwyn’s CEO, said the organization has learned that, in some cases, children are suspended from their preschool programs because of learning or behavioral needs. “Elwyn is not part of this decision making and often learns about it after the fact,” he said. He added that the organization is developing tools “that will help us understand the frequency in which this happens” and is creating additional resource materials for families.

State reports show that Elwyn’s program is successful in some areas, like evaluating 97% of kids within 60 days, the state-required timeline. But that’s just the first step in what advocates say often becomes a month-long process to get services.

Though the law is clear that kids should receive services within 14 days of their IEP being written, the state does not publish information on how long kids wait for services after an evaluation, or how many service interruptions they’ll experience when providers are no longer available.

When it comes to Elwyn’s performance, CEO McLister said that students’ growth data does not account for the unique challenges of providing services in Philadelphia. The children Elwyn serves have higher needs than the state average, he said, with higher incidences of developmental delays and a greater prevalence of multiple other challenges, such as limited English proficiency, economic disadvantages, and other social risk factors.

“For younger children, these factors produce more modest gains,” said McLister.

McLister emphasized that Elwyn has been successful in evaluating the vast majority of children on-time, and said the most common reason an evaluation falls outside the 60-day window is a parent cancelling an initial evaluation appointment and needing it to be rescheduled.

He said delays in getting kids services are often the result of scheduling challenges and staffing shortages — 95% of service issues related to speech and language services, he said, are due to a lack of staff. He said other delays occur when families move or change their child’s preschool enrollment, and when providers return kids to the “needs list,” meaning they stop service for that child, which happens “for a variety of reasons.”

For Joshua, getting a consistent special instructor, a position meant to support Joshua’s learning, has been impossible, Halevy said. Her text history, which she reviewed recently, documents the challenges: The first special instructor who contacted her never visited and stopped responding to texts, she said. The next person was more helpful and saw Joshua a few times, but then abruptly quit. Now, after more than a month of no special instruction, a new provider comes mostly regularly, Halevy said.

Access to occupational therapy has been slightly better, Halevy said. For the first several months of service, Joshua’s occupational therapist showed up inconsistently and seemed rushed, Halevy said. Now, after working out a schedule, she consistently comes around once a week.

Early childhood intervention needs more funding, some say

These and other challenges aren’t unique to Philadelphia families. But preschool operators and early intervention providers say there are particular and longstanding problems in Philly.

Two years ago, Sharon Neilson, former director of the Woodland Academy Child Development Center in West Philadelphia, was part of a group pushing to bring attention to problems in the city’s early intervention program. Council members about parents’ challenges accessing services, and Neilson and other providers met with Elwyn.

At the time, Neilson said, she was hopeful that things would improve. But since then, she said, “we’ve actually seen it get worse.”

Neilson, who now works as support staff at Woodland Academy, said of the 22 children enrolled at the preschool, about four currently receive services from Elwyn, and three more are going through the process of getting evaluated.

The preschool helps families navigate the process, in part because submitting required paperwork and scheduling evaluations can create additional barriers, she said. But even with additional help, in her experience it still usually takes months for kids to be evaluated and services to begin, she said.

“I think that’s the saddest thing for me,” Neilson said. “The families are very frustrated because they don’t know what to do — they just know that they need help for their child, but it’s just very hard to navigate.”

Officials say a lack of resources is largely to blame. Over the past decade, the number of preschool-age children in Pennsylvania receiving early intervention services has grown by a third, and funding hasn’t kept up.

Pennsylvania Department of Education spokesperson Erin James said that is why Gov. Josh Shapiro proposed increasing funding for preschool early intervention by $14.5 million in the state budget. However, months past the budget deadline, lawmakers remain at an impasse over the budget and .

One provider who contracts with Elwyn said concerning inequities exist in Elwyn’s program. (Chalkbeat is not naming the provider due to her fears of retaliation from Elwyn.) It’s an accepted norm, the provider said, that kids in nicer neighborhoods get picked up for service much faster than those in poorer neighborhoods.

“There’s an access and equity issue across the board,” said the provider. “And that’s exacerbated by the shortage of providers.”

Asked about those access and equity concerns, McLister said that to address some related challenges, this year Elwyn is implementing more targeted training for staff and plans to develop a family resource center. He said the organization has also employed internal speech language pathologists to assign to high-priority cases.

When families reach out to Elwyn, McLister said staff provide them with documentation and verbal explanations of how the process works to ensure families understand their rights, next steps, and how to give consent for evaluations.

The organization also periodically notifies providers of historically underserved ZIP codes to encourage providers to serve kids equitably across the city, and includes provisions in its contracts meant to “promote fairness and accountability.” McLister said Elwyn places subcontractors on corrective action plans if the organization “detects patterns of non-acceptance that disproportionately impacts underserved areas.”

As for Halevy, she says her family has gotten relatively lucky. They were able to get Joshua started on an evaluation quickly. And she’s been able to get new therapists when others stop showing up.

But her family’s biggest piece of luck, she said, is that her husband recently got a new job with better health insurance. She plans to use that to get some of the services her kids need. That means she no longer will completely rely on Elwyn.

She just wishes she could erase the months of waiting and worrying about why Joshua’s services took so long to start.

“Basically, what happened is we fell through the cracks,” she said.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

The Philadelphia teachers union and school district reached a tentative contract agreement late Sunday night, potentially avoiding a citywide teachers’ strike hours before students and teachers return to the classroom.

District and union leaders announced they had reached a three-year contract agreement, but they did not disclose any details about the contents of the agreement as of Monday.

“The PFT is thrilled that we have been able to reach a tentative agreement with the School District of Philadelphia on a three-year pact ensuring that school will open on time, as well as three years of labor peace,” said Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Arthur Steinberg in a joint statement with Superintendent Tony Watlington.

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Watlington said in the statement that the agreement “both honors the hard work of our educators and maintains our record of strong financial stewardship.”

Watlington, Steinberg, and Mayor Cherelle Parker appeared side by side to praise the agreement, at the district’s back-to-school welcome event at Edward Steel Elementary School on Monday,

“You don’t prove that you value public education by simply pumping your fist in the air symbolically,” Parker said. “We’re going to keep moving forward, and we’re going to keep working together.”

Union leaders had been preparing their members for a strike in the leadup to the school year. The PFT, which represents some 14,000 educators and school staff, was negotiating for salary increases, amending the district’s controversial sick leave policy that union members say punishes teachers for using sick days, and adding paid parental leave.

The state budget impasse made negotiations more fraught, Steinberg said Monday. District officials have been operating off of a financial plan that assumed major funding increases under Gov. Josh Shapiro’s proposed budget, but Republican legislators have resisted approving those increases.

Steinberg said they came to a decision to rely on the budget figures Shapiro has proposed, and that “we’ll adjust on the fly if we have to.”

Parker said she believes teachers “should be paid what they’re worth.” She vowed that “every chance we get to generate more revenue to help them, we will,” but that under the deal announced Sunday, the district and union “did the best they could with what they had.”

Though neither Steinberg nor district spokespeople would comment on the details of the negotiation process earlier this month, Steinberg previously told Chalkbeat the district’s proposals “weren’t as irksome as they usually are” and that during negotiations “nothing that set a bad tone, as it has in the past.”

On Monday, Steinberg said while the collective bargaining process was “adversarial” at times, it “did not stray off into contentiousness very often.” He said Sunday morning both parties “sat down and had a frank conversation,” made progress, and then reached an agreement by late Sunday evening.

The three-year agreement will be put to PFT members for a ratification vote and if approved, it will also go to the Board of Education for a vote.

This story has been updated with additional comments from Mayor Cherelle Parker and Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Arthur Steinberg.

The Philadelphia teachers union and school district reached a tentative contract agreement late Sunday night, potentially avoiding a citywide teachers’ strike hours before students and teachers return to the classroom.

District and union leaders announced they had reached a three-year contract agreement, but they did not disclose any details about the contents of the agreement as of Monday.

“The PFT is thrilled that we have been able to reach a tentative agreement with the School District of Philadelphia on a three-year pact ensuring that school will open on time, as well as three years of labor peace,” said Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Arthur Steinberg in a joint statement with Superintendent Tony Watlington.

Watlington said in the statement that the agreement “both honors the hard work of our educators and maintains our record of strong financial stewardship.”

Watlington, Steinberg, and Mayor Cherelle Parker appeared side by side to praise the agreement, at the district’s back-to-school welcome event at Edward Steel Elementary School on Monday,

“You don’t prove that you value public education by simply pumping your fist in the air symbolically,” Parker said. “We’re going to keep moving forward, and we’re going to keep working together.”

Union leaders had been in the leadup to the school year. The PFT, which represents some 14,000 educators and school staff, was negotiating for salary increases, amending the that union members say punishes teachers for using sick days, and adding paid parental leave.

The state budget impasse made negotiations more fraught, Steinberg said Monday. District officials have been operating off of a financial plan that assumed major funding increases under Gov. Josh Shapiro’s proposed budget, but Republican legislators have resisted approving those increases.

Steinberg said they came to a decision to rely on the budget figures Shapiro has proposed, and that “we’ll adjust on the fly if we have to.”

Parker said she believes teachers “should be paid what they’re worth.” She vowed that “every chance we get to generate more revenue to help them, we will,” but that under the deal announced Sunday, the district and union “did the best they could with what they had.”

Though neither Steinberg nor district spokespeople would comment on the details of the negotiation process earlier this month, Steinberg previously told Chalkbeat the district’s proposals “weren’t as irksome as they usually are” and that during negotiations “nothing that set a bad tone, as it has in the past.”

On Monday, Steinberg said while the collective bargaining process was “adversarial” at times, it “did not stray off into contentiousness very often.” He said Sunday morning both parties “sat down and had a frank conversation,” made progress, and then reached an agreement by late Sunday evening.

The three-year agreement will be put to PFT members for a ratification vote and if approved, it will also go to the Board of Education for a vote.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

was originally reported by Nadra Nittle of .��

As a “pink-collar profession” — a nickname given to women-dominated occupations — teaching has historically paid less than comparable fields requiring a higher education degree, and in Philadelphia, the push to close the wage gap could lead to a strike by the end of the month.

Salaries for Philly teachers — — begin at $54,146. That’s . Now, concern over pay has become a sticking point between the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT) and the School District of Philadelphia as they negotiate a new contract, with the current collective bargaining agreement expiring August 31.

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The its executive board to initiate a strike if the union and the district don’t agree on a new contract by then. With the deadline imminent and no deal in sight, schools may open on August 25 only for teachers to appear on picket lines within days. A strike could leave working parents in a lurch, scrambling for childcare — a task moms usually have to complete. Many Philly teachers, however, are also parents and demanding higher salaries to better provide for their families.

PFT President Arthur Steinberg pointed out that even suburban teachers with less education often out-earn Philadelphia’s top-performing educators by up to $22,000.

“We would like to close that gap as much as we can with this next contract,” he .

Amid ongoing negotiations, Steinberg appeared with School District of Philadelphia Superintendent Tony Watlington at a welcome event for new teachers on Wednesday.

“We are optimistic about a successful conclusion by the end-of-the-month deadline, and it’s important to us that all of our employees feel seen, valued and heard,” said Watlington, who called Steinberg a “tough negotiator.”

To reach an agreement, Steinberg said, “There’s significant work that has to be done, but it’s doable.”

Still, union members are prepping for a strike, making protest slogans at the new teacher orientation. A , when teachers walked out for 50 days.

“Our schools are not safe, they’re not healthy for anybody to work in or go to school in,” chemistry teacher . “We have a hard time with teacher retention and a hard time attracting new talent.”

in 2023 about working in century-old buildings that swelter in early fall heat. Before then, the that the district was not taking robust action to prevent exposing teachers to COVID-19.

The , counselors, school nurses, librarians and other educators. Just , which has garnered nationwide attention since the hit workplace comedy “Abbott Elementary” — set in Philly — debuted in 2021.

In recent years, a number of large urban school districts have gone on strike. They include in March 2023, in September 2022 and in March 2022.

On Friday, the national bus tour of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) will arrive in West Philadelphia to support the PFT ahead of a possible strike. The event will be the last of six strike preparation events that have taken place before the teachers head back to work on Monday, a week before the first day of school.

This story was originally published on The 19th.

At the time, Castro’s salary was less than $20,000. Two decades later, after earning both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in sociology and urban studies and working as a special education and a language paraprofessional, she is earning $55,000 – still far below what most people would need to earn to afford to live in New York. To help her make ends meet, Castro lived with her parents early on in her career. 

But the main reason she has stuck with it? The impact she has had on the kids.  

“We are there with the students every period, so we see the challenges the students go through and their success,” Castro said. “To me, it’s amazing to see, especially when I’m [working with] an autistic child who, for the first time, is learning how to read and learning how to write their name.”

Castro now advocates for other classroom support staff as the president of the paraprofessional chapter of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City. The city is currently struggling with a shortage of more than 1,550 paraprofessionals. Hoping to attract and retain more people to the profession, the union is stepping outside of its traditional collective bargaining practices to that would of at least $10,000 for the city’s paraprofessionals.

Paraprofessionals are usually hourly workers who assist students and teachers with classroom work, supervision and instructing small groups. Roughly 75% of paras don’t have a bachelor’s degree, according to a . Average pay for paraprofessionals in 2024 was $35,240, according to the .  

Across the U.S., unions are seeking to boost paraprofessional pay, which remains so low that workers are struggling to get by in many states, according to an from the National Education Association.

A found that more than half of paraprofessionals worked other jobs on weekdays after classes ended and 75% said they had a problem making a living wage.

The NEA said that while paraprofessional pay has improved, “there is still a lot of work to be done.”

In April, paraprofessionals in Boston landed raises ranging from 23% to 31% over three years Most will see a pay increase of nearly $8,000 by the end of the , according to the Boston Teachers Union. 

Allentown School District in Pennsylvania accepted a contract last fall that will give its paraprofessionals . Pittsburgh Public Schools awarded its paras in December.

In addition, California lawmakers are that would increase pay for both teachers and staffers, including paraprofessionals, by 50% over the next 10 years. 

“I’ve received strong support from teachers and [other school] employees who are struggling to live in the communities that they work in,” said Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi, who authored the bill.

Dannel Montesano is one of them. She left her paraprofessional job earlier this year to become an office clerk at Liberty Ranch High School in Galt, California. The new job paid just $1 more per hour. It was the only way she could get a raise.

“Our starting paraprofessional pay is $18.63 an hour. This school year, we’ve had a hard time filling all of the positions because when you can go work at McDonald’s for over $20 an hour — and not have as much responsibility working one-on-one with students —- the draw isn’t there,” she said.

In New York City, paraprofessionals earn between $31,787 to $52,847 a year, according to the UFT. The city’s current system of collective bargaining ensures all job titles receive the same percentage wage increase. But those increases have a varying impact depending on an employee’s base pay. The union said in a that a 3% pay raise could mean roughly a $900 increase for a paraprofessional but a $6,000 bump for a principal. 

More than 1,600 union members rallied in front of City Hall in April to advocate for the paraprofessional pay bill, which would create a separate “” that would exist outside of collective bargaining. Each year, the city’s general fund would provide full-time paraprofessionals with a check of at least $10,000.

“We have paraprofessionals who are struggling,” Castro said. “I received an email from a paraprofessional who’s living in a shelter with a child. It broke my heart to receive this email. We have to make a difference. We have to ensure that the bill is passed in City Hall, because it would change so many lives.”

Growing up in Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, as one of seven kids of divorced parents, “I found school to be this place of stability, while some other parts of my life were in transition and in changes,” Crosson told The 74 in a recent interview. 

“I was a pretty natural student most of the time,” she added, “but it was mostly because I had incredible teachers who invested in their students so far beyond what is expected of the job.”

She said she can remember all the way back to a kindergarten teacher who wrote her letters over the summer because she’d be her teacher again in first grade. “I think I looked at that and said, ‘This is an incredibly rewarding way to spend a life.’”

It became a 14-year career that rewarded Crosson back — and on the national stage. The AP English teacher and high school journalism advisor was named the 2025 April 29 by the . The award, which follows her earning the Pennsylvania Teacher of the Year title, allows Crosson to spend the next year traveling across the country as an ambassador to fellow educators.

She’ll step away from her hometown high school five years after she went back there to answer “this higher calling to return to the place that made me into a successful adult and into somebody who had found joy and happiness in their adult life.”

Crosson, a first-generation college graduate, was selected from a pool of 56 local winners who were narrowed down to three other finalists: American Samoa’s Mikaela Saelua, an English language teacher who is the first finalist from the seven islands in the program’s history; Washington, D.C.’s Jazzmyne Townsend, an elementary school special education teacher and children’s book author; and Colorado’s Janet Renee Damon, a high school history teacher at a transfer school who runs a school-based podcast program focused on mental health disparities.

“Ashlie is an authentic, self-reflective leader who uses her experiences to help elevate her students into successful careers and life after high school,” the National Teacher of the Year Selection Committee said in a “She is also a strong and passionate representative for educators, using her voice to help people understand the weight of the teaching profession and the gravity of what teachers do.” 

Crosson said she grounds the bulk of her classroom work in real-world connections and projects, which allow her students to explore English from a careers-based perspective, while also building understanding and empathy for people of diverse backgrounds across the world.

This is perhaps most apparent in her 10th-grade elective course called Survival Stories, which she began designing as a Fulbright Teachers for Global Classrooms fellow. In it, she wants her students to consider sweeping questions like, “What problems are we trying to solve and in what ways do we need to communicate across borders?” 

To keep the course accessible and age appropriate, all the material —from non-fiction texts and memoirs, to podcasts and films — come from the voices of teens and adolescents. This allows her students, Crosson said, to have, “really authentic and approachable conversations about things that can feel really big and really unapproachable.”

In today’s political climate, traversing some of these charged topics in rural Mifflin — an almost exclusively white town of just over , where almost of the vote went to President Donald Trump in 2024 — might seem daunting. Crosson’s approach is to begin with texts that take place as far from central Philadelphia as possible, so that by the time students reach stories from their own community — some of which they may have otherwise met with preconceived notions — they are able to analyze them with more nuance, greater empathy and a stronger text-based knowledge. 

“We are all here, going through our own human experience,” Crosson said. She wants her students to ask, “ ‘How do I relate to these people? How do I better understand these people?’ Because at the end of the day, my students also want to be better understood. So there’s a reciprocity there.”

When her students come to her with challenging political questions — for example about Trump’s recent executive orders looking to eradicate any focus on diversity, equity and inclusion in schools — she encourages them to return to the facts, asking, “What are the actual details?”

“I’m able to keep my opinions out of things because I’m also first asking my students to put their opinions on pause,” she said, “so that we have a chance to become more informed about things and have a better, more well-rounded understanding of what’s going on before we start trying to figure out our feelings about it.”

In addition to Survival Stories, Crosson teaches AP English Language and Composition and 10th-grade English, while also running the school’s journalism elective. At the newspaper and district magazine, called the Pawprint, she functions more as a boss and editor than teacher, she said, a position she cherishes, especially since a number of the high schoolers end up going into journalism.

“If students are basically getting simulations of future careers, I love that. And I love facilitating that.”

Crosson’s classroom is covered with colorful student artwork from floor to ceiling and ”where students place the word that will most motivate and inspire them throughout the year. 

In a video for , her students were asked to choose five words to describe Crosson: joyful, funny, caring, energetic (but not too much), passionate and dedicated were among their picks.

One student said she sees Crosson as “a safe space.” Another said that whenever she spots students struggling, “She’ll try to make you better as a student and [in] doing that you also learn lessons in how to take help and help others. So I think it makes students better people.”

Along with her teaching responsibilities, Crosson serves as the communications chair for her union’s negotiating team, assists with the school’s programming, leads the district’s international student trips and co-hosts “,” a podcast dedicated to teachers’ professional learning.

When asked her favorite book to teach, Crosson laughed and said, “I honestly think that every book becomes my favorite book.”

“There are some books that I’ve taught for 10 years,” she continued “and so now there’s so many different colored pens [on the pages]. The book is the timeline of my teaching career. And there’s something really beautiful about that.”

That’s what happened to 15-year-old Blake Robbins, who was accused by officials in Pennsylvania’s affluent Lower Merion School District of dealing drugs in 2009 after they surreptitiously snapped a photo of him at home with the chewy candy in his hand. The moment was captured by the webcam on his school-issued laptop, one of some 66,000 covert student images collected by the district, including one of Robbins asleep in his bed. 

Robbins sued and the subsequent case, dubbed “WebcamGate,” is at the center of now streaming on Amazon Prime, that examines the high-profile student surveillance scandal and the explosion of student privacy threats that followed it.

The Lower Merion School District, which settled the class-action lawsuit, was an early adopter of one-to-one computer education technology programs that provide school-issued laptops to students. Such programs have since , particularly since the pandemic. So, too, have digital surveillance tools like Gaggle and GoGuardian, which alert educators when students express thoughts of self-harm or discuss topics deemed taboo, like sex, violence or drugs. 

Directed by Jody McVeigh-Schultz and executive produced by Mark Wahlberg, the documentary offers a cautionary tale about what happens when student monitoring initiatives — often intended to promote young people’s safety and well-being — go awry. It also explores how covert student surveillance intersects with far-reaching school equity issues involving race, disability, privilege and discipline. 

After years of reporting on digital student surveillance myself, I caught up last week with McVeigh-Schultz, whose other documentaries include about reality TV’s seemingly wholesome Duggar family and the Emmy-nominated which delves into the brutal 1960 killing of three women in an Illinois state park. We talked about what he wants viewers to take away from the Robbins’ scandal 15 years after it unfolded and the lessons it holds for contemporary student privacy debates and schools’ growing reliance on ed tech. 

The interview was edited for length and clarity. 

What motivated you to take a deep dive into the Robbins case, and why is it important right now?

I grew up just outside of Philly in a suburb called Cheltenham and I had heard about this story. I knew Lower Merion as the high school that Kobe [Bryant] went to. That’s what it was famous for, but I knew about the Robbins story and I was like, “That’s crazy,” when I heard about it back in 2010 and then I kind of never heard anything more about it. It was a really big story and then just kind of went away. 

When we talked to folks from wealthy suburbs outside of Philadelphia, I think it’s very clear to me that one of the key indicators of status is education. It’s more important than anything else to people. 

The public schools in Lower Merion are really highly rated and people care a ton about the quality of the education and the image of the institution. What are the real world implications of that? 

In this case, the way it played out, some of the things that happened were counterintuitive. Many folks from that community didn’t want to see a lawsuit come to bear against their school. It was like, “Oh well, you know, this actually is perhaps going to affect our home values,” if you’re selling your home and the biggest selling point is the quality of the education.

That’s something that you wouldn’t expect to be one of the first reactions to finding out that the schools may be surveilling your kids. But it was, and the fact that the Robbins family had lived in the community for a long time but just weren’t considered part of the in-group just because of who they were was very interesting and, I think, led to people being skeptical of them.

The documentary leaves it up to you to decide whether that skepticism is deserved or not.

Absolutely. The documentary certainly highlights how people are complex and have complicated stories. What did you learn about debates over personal privacy, especially when it comes to information about children?

People’s expectations of how much privacy you should be afforded, and how much you should expect without having to ask any questions, those expectations vary a lot. 

Somebody who was interviewed in a news piece that ran in 2010 said, “You know, this is the school district’s laptop, they could tap in at any time and rightfully so.” I’m a parent, I have a 2-year-old and a 7-year-old who’s in first grade. To me, that seems a bit absurd, but the truth is, I think there are certain contexts where a school-issued laptop is going to be surveilled. We know it’s going to be surveilled, but we don’t expect that it will be able to take pictures in our kids’ bedrooms. 

To me it’s a matter of where are [the] spaces where we should reasonably expect privacy? Transparency is the most important aspect of all of this. Not only were there no conversations going on like, “Hey look, these laptops are going to be surveilled in a number of ways. You should not be leaving them open in your bedroom, You should not be going on any website you wouldn’t want your principal to also see.” The IT department specifically thought it would be a bad idea if parents and students were alerted to the existence of the software that could take images. They felt like, “Well then we won’t be able to recover the stolen laptop because people will just put tape over it.”

Well, that is their decision not to have images taken of them in their bedroom, right? One of the journalists we interviewed said it was like trying to kill a fly with a bazooka. This level of surveillance was not required to track inventory. It just wasn’t. 

Hindsight is 20/20 but it’s obvious from what transpired that they spent a lot more money on legal fees and settling these lawsuits than they ever saved by making sure a handful of laptops were not stolen or lost.

What did you learn about the motives of the school district officials, the lawyers and the families involved?

When I’m making a documentary I’m never thinking in terms of quote-unquote good guys and bad guys. Everyone in this story thought they were doing what was best for the students involved. But in the end, I think there was this balance of protecting students ‘ privacy and protecting the image of the school district. When a mistake is made, there is a reluctance to admit and take responsibility and accept blame. Once you do that, you are admitting to what happened and then there’s all these legal ramifications. 

Multiple people are like, you know, these kids need therapists, they need somebody to check on them and to be like, “Hey, your privacy was violated, are you doing OK?” and that did not happen.

I can’t say why that didn’t happen but to me it seems likely that part of not offering people help is that the minute you say this person needs a therapist because of what we did, you’re admitting to a pretty major violation. 

The documentary doesn’t focus just on the Robbins case. It offers a deep dive into education policy debates around racial inequities, school integration, gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights. What did you find were the implications of surveillance for these populations? 

We talked to Elizabeth Laird at the Center for Democracy and Technology and one of the things she said she sees all the time is that when surveillance is ubiquitous and regularly used in education, vulnerable populations end up feeling the brunt of the negative repercussions. 

In this case, back in 2010, people discovered that a disproportionate amount of the students that were surveilled were African American. There was a sense that if this technology was being misused to discipline students or to check up on students then the chances are it was going to be misused for somebody that was a student of color. 

When we started talking to students of color who had their images taken, we started to understand, “Oh, there is this whole context to what they’re experiencing.” Somebody said you can’t understand the laptop issue without understanding all these other battles that were happening at the time. There was a history of an achievement gap there and African-American parents felt like if you wanted to get an equal education for your kids, you had to fight for it. In this context, there was a real lack of trust of the school district by African-American parents. 

Keron Williams and his mother really wanted to tell his story. It was a story of somebody suspecting him of stealing a bracelet and him being brought into the principal’s office. He says his laptop webcam was activated a couple days later after they searched his pockets and found nothing but a Boy Scouts handkerchief. 

There’s racial profiling but also this idea of the misuse of technology meant to keep laptops from being stolen. If something like this is misused, vulnerable populations are going to feel the brunt of it more. 

That brings me to one of the other stories we talked about, which was more recent. 

In 2020, with the pandemic, school-issued devices and remote learning became the norm. We talked to two students who started high school online, went to classes on Zoom, and they were using their school-issued laptops for everything. 

The way they communicated instead of seeing their friends at lunch was through a Google Hangouts chat. What they didn’t realize was their school was using monitoring software that essentially scooped up everything they wrote while logged into their school account, including private chats. They were brought to the principal’s office and were confronted with what they wrote. 

The context of it is that the school decided it was bullying. What we reveal is that they were using the word “gay” because they were. The term they used was “we’re a pretty gay friend group. Gay was a descriptor to us.”

One of these kids had to come out in the principal’s office with his father there. Luckily his parents were pretty great about it, but that’s a really awful position to put a kid in and, you know, again, a vulnerable population bearing the brunt of overzealous surveillance. 

The goal of this surveillance is to protect kids, it’s to make sure kids aren’t hurting themselves, hurting other students. There’s obviously a mental health crisis going on in terms of high school-aged kids, but there really has to be a discussion about whether these tactics are making the mental health crisis better or worse. 

You’re talking about the tools that schools nationally have increasingly used to collect and analyze reams of information about students in the name of keeping them safe. This includes tools like Gaggle and GoGuardian. Given the growth in these tools, do any guardrails need to be put in place? 

First of all, it’s so important that students know what is being used to surveil any device they’re using. The fact that kids hadn’t heard of Gaggle is really a problem. 

But if they know about it, that doesn’t solve all the problems because what you’re asking high schoolers especially to do is to find their own voice, understand how to freely express themselves, to be vulnerable. In some of my best creative writing courses my teachers were saying, “Look, if it scares you to write this, you’re probably going in the right direction.” 

The minute a kid realizes, “Well, everything that I’m writing in a creative writing class — a poem, a personal essay — is going through this software, maybe going to my principal, maybe going to law enforcement,” they’re going to express themselves differently. That’s just a really dangerous road to go down.

Students and parents have to be aware, but also I just think it should be less powerful. I don’t think we should be able to say there are no ways in which you can use our technology, which is kind of unavoidable if you’re a high school student, without being constantly surveilled.

In Minnesota, the story we cover, they . That’s a pretty huge step, and I think that’ll happen more and more as people become more aware of this stuff. 

 There are just places where we should not be allowing this.

Three union members filed suit in March, just days after the union announced a data breach had occurred on July 6, 2024.

A union investigation into the incident, completed Feb. 18, found that an “unauthorized actor” gained access to records like Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, birthdates and taxpayer identification information.

The Rhysida ransomware gang claimed on its dark web site in September that it had carried out the cyberattack.

The union refused to comment on how widespread the attack was, but a data breach tracker maintained by the said 517,487 people were affected.

The suits allege the union failed “to properly secure and safeguard private information that was entrusted to them” and that those affected — including the relatives of members — will suffer financial losses and lost time detecting and preventing identity theft. 

Educators must provide personal information to the union to receive its benefits, according to the lawsuits. 

The plaintiffs also allege that the union waited too long to announce the data breach. were sent out on March 17, a month after the union’s investigation was finished.

“We took steps, to the best of our ability and knowledge, to ensure that the data taken by the unauthorized actor was deleted,” the union said in the notification letter.

The attack occurred on computer systems that needed security upgrades, the lawsuits allege. Two of the plaintiffs have reportedly experienced increased numbers of spam calls and emails.

“[The union] failed to properly monitor the computer network and systems that housed the private information,” one lawsuit says. “Had [the union] properly monitored its computer network and systems, it would have discovered the massive intrusion sooner rather than allowing cybercriminals almost a month of unimpeded access.”

The union, which represents 178,000 members, said in a previous statement that it isn’t aware of identity theft connected to the breach. It did not respond to a request for comment from The 74 about the lawsuits.

The plaintiffs are seeking compensatory damages and want the court to order the union to pay for at least 10 years of credit monitoring services for those affected. Motions were filed in a Pennsylvania district court Tuesday to consolidate the lawsuits into one class-action case.

On , the state’s largest teachers union about a security data breach that occurred July 6, 2024. An investigation into the incident, completed Feb. 18, found that sensitive personal information was acquired by an “unauthorized actor” who accessed files on the union’s network, according to the letter.

The letter said people’s names were revealed, along with birthdates, user names and passwords, Social Security numbers, payment information, passport numbers, taxpayer identification and bank account numbers, and health insurance and medical information.

The union refused to comment on how widespread the attack was, but a data breach tracker maintained by the said 517,487 people were affected.

“We took steps, to the best of our ability and knowledge, to ensure that the data taken by the unauthorized actor was deleted,” the union said in the notification letter.

The Rhysida ransomware gang claimed on its dark web site in September that it had carried out a cyberattack on the union. In 2023 and 2024, the same group claimed data thefts of sensitive documents from school districts in Maryland, Texas, New Jersey and Tennessee.

The union, which represents 178,000 members, said in an email statement that it isn’t aware of identity theft connected to the breach.

“As soon as we became aware of this incident, we engaged cybersecurity professionals with expertise in these occurrences,” the union told The 74. “We are complying with all legal and regulatory requirements, and are providing credit monitoring for eligible individuals who were impacted by this incident.”

Lancaster, Pennsylvania 

After surviving more than a decade in a Tanzanian refugee camp where learning was limited, Riziki Elisha, 11, wanted nothing more than to attend the elementary school just a few hundred yards from her front door. 

Though she could see the playground from her porch, she wasn’t permitted to partake: Paperwork delays left her sitting at home for weeks, spending long afternoons watching CoComelon, a cartoon created for babies and toddlers.

“I was very frustrated,” she said with the help of a translator on a recent afternoon. “I felt bad.”

It’s been nearly nine years since the School District of Lancaster was for denying or delaying enrollment for young refugees — or for sending them to an off-site, for-profit alternative school focused on behavior management. The case was settled in  

But families, staff and advocates say the district, which serves kids in an , is once again erecting barriers that have left dozens of newcomer children idle in the past few years — some for months. A major contributing factor, they say, is Lancaster’s insistence on tuberculosis testing. 

Other Pennsylvania districts with sizable multilingual learner populations have chosen not to require a test for the infectious lung disease, including Philadelphia, Reading, Norristown, Harrisburg City, Pittsburgh, Lebanon and Chambersburg. Upper Darby does require TB testing. State officials told The 74 schools “should not delay a student’s enrollment while TB test results are pending” and that parents or guardians concerned about this issue should .

Another holdup, newcomer families note, is the district’s need for birth certificates. They can be hard to obtain quickly, and, according to federal guidelines, their absence Proof of address, they say, has also been an obstacle as some families initially struggle to secure permanent housing. 

Immigrant advocates, including staffers inside the district, say these students should be seated immediately while their families are given time to produce the requisite paperwork. The new arrivals, many of them behind their American-born peers, would be able to make fast gains, they argue, if granted speedy enrollment.  

The 74 presented its findings to the district, which said it wants students to be enrolled “as quickly as possible when all requirements are met,” — and those include TB testing for some kids.

It said the district’s clinic provider contacts families directly to schedule the tests and that it recently added a full-time bilingual enrollment navigator to identify and work with families “who are slow to complete the process.”

State officials said schools have been able to opt-out of student TB testing since 1997 — and many do. But not Lancaster.

It asked the state to keep its TB testing requirement for a specific group: newly enrolling students who have been outside the U.S. within the past six months. The district cited recommending testing for those who are at higher risk of exposure, including people “who are born in or frequently travel to countries where TB is common, including some countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.”

The state is clear that enrollment should not be held up pending results.

Riziki’s father, Elisha Sumaili, who hails from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, told The 74 through a translator that he was confused by the delay, which stemmed from his inability to immediately produce a lease. The family tried to enroll October 25, 2024, but his daughters were not admitted until November 22. 

Sumaili wants his children to hold tight to their education so they might one day become doctors. Instead, Riziki and her high school-age sister were kept out of the classroom.

“When the kids were home, it was really bad,” their father said in Swahili. “It was bringing the family a lot of distress.” 

Carolin Cruz, 29 and from the Dominican Republic, has always prioritized education, both for herself and her daughter. Cruz completed more than two years of college — she dropped out because of the cost — and wants 10-year-old Ferolin to go even further, which is what prompted the pair to move to the United States last fall, she said. 

“I want to see her become a great professional so she can have what I cannot,” Cruz said. 

Public education in her home country is and expensive, she said: She’d have to pay for her daughter to learn English. Plus, her local school was overcrowded. 

“If there are 30 or 40 students, there is no way a teacher can pay attention to any one student,” she said. 

She hoped for much better in the United States, but her daughter’s start date was delayed by two months, primarily because of the TB testing requirement. When she tried to schedule the shots, Cruz said she was told the only available appointments were weeks out. 

On two occasions, she said, the appointments were cancelled. 

Ferolin, a fourth grader who loves mathematics, said she felt sad sitting at home. 

“I was not doing anything,” she said through a translator. “I wanted to go to school so I can learn more. I would get up, help my mother around the house, and then I would be on my mother’s cell phone watching TikTok and YouTube.”

Fifteen-year-old Kevin, whose family asked that their last name not be used because of immigration-related concerns, suffered the same fate — except his went on for several months. 

His family fled Cuba because the country lacked a “functioning economy,” Kevin’s mother Neydis told The 74. They arrived in the U.S. in March 2024. 

Neydis’s husband, a medical doctor in his home country, wanted his son to enroll in eighth grade right away. Kevin tried to register for school on April 16, 2024, but wasn’t seated until the next school year on August 26 — mostly because of immunizations and the TB test. His mother said they sent the TB results to enrollment staffers several times and assumed they would call back with a start date, but the call never came. The family was forced to restart enrollment because the process had dragged on for so long.

Kevin spent those months at home surfing the internet and watching nature programs. 

“It was boring, I would just sit on that sofa,” he said through a translator, pointing to a cream-colored couch in the living room. 

By the time the district admitted him, he had missed the rest of his eighth-grade year and had to go right into high school.

Born in a forest

Such delays are not unique: Rwamucyo Karekezi, who served as The 74’s translator with the Sumaili family, is a refugee and immigrant community organizer with Church World Service. He estimates that he’s helped more than 100 children register in Lancaster public schools between 2021 and 2024. 

Karekezi, who noted that he was not speaking on behalf of Church World Service, said month-long delays are common — most of the children he worked with experienced them — and stressful on the families. 

Vaccinations play a key role in the delays, he said, as does proof of address. Many families initially live in temporary housing — Airbnbs and hotels — and can’t quickly prove they reside in the district, he said. 

“Sometimes it takes months to find a house,” he noted. “This becomes a challenge for registration to go smoothly.”

As for birth certificates, some children around the world aren’t issued such formal documents upon their birth — or their families might lose them in their chaotic journey to safety. Karekezi, 30 and who is also from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, understands their plight.  

“I never had a birth certificate,” he said. “I was born in a forest, not a hospital. In Congo, they don’t register kids like that. And even when you bring a birth certificate, they don’t recognize it: It’s a scrap of paper in another language.”

Karekezi said he sent the district follow-up emails on students’ behalf, but they did little to expedite the process. 

While Lancaster has its own history of refusing or slow walking newcomer students’ registration, related issues are now playing out on the national stage: President Donald Trump pledges to deport undocumented families — — and opened schools to immigration enforcement actions. 

His conservative allies in multiple states seek to in a direct challenge to the Supreme Court’s landmark 1982 Plyler v. Doe decision.

Likewise, federal budget cuts have crippled the agencies that help immigrant families most, including , a faith-based group founded just after World War II that resettled more than 100,000 people in the United States in its first decade. Trump recently and even though that move was blocked in the court, he said it will . 

Lancaster’s local Church World Service office has recently shrunk in size and capacity. Once located inside a massive building on a well-traveled block, it’s now squeezed into an alleyway hidden by parking garages. It had to drastically cut services when it was forced to furlough 40 of its 67 staff members for three months at the end of January. Valentina Ross, its director, said she hopes to call some of those staffers back into the office soon.

After lost learning, big gains

Riziki Elisha has made great strides since starting elementary school just days before last year’s Thanksgiving break, her English language development teacher Laura Kanagy said. 

“In three months, Riziki went from knowing three- or four-letter sounds to reading and writing short sentences,” the educator noted. “She can identify the hydrosphere, biosphere and geosphere. She can add and subtract triple digits and fractions. Imagine what she’d be doing if we had been able to work with her for those extra months?”

Kanagy, who has taught at the district for 14 years, said she and her fellow educators “want the most time possible” with these new students. 

“Each day that they sat at home in front of their TVs was a lost day of learning: 10 new vocabulary words, a few letter sounds closer to reading, a math skill important to navigating the grocery store, a social phrase to connect with peers,” the teacher said. 

Enrollment also means these students — and their families — have access to myriad services, including English and GED classes for their parents, help obtaining eye glasses, clothing, food, dental care and other necessities.  

“The sooner they have access to English and literacy/math skills, the sooner they — and, therefore, their families — can make more of their own choices about how to live and participate here,” she said.

Once admitted, Neydis’ mother said her son, Kevin’s experience at the school was excellent.

“The teachers are nice and just go out of their way using different teaching strategies — a game or whatever they could come up with — to help him learn,” she said. “He would come home very excited, very, very content. And this was a huge relief for me.”

When Ferolin Nunez Cruz finally enrolled — she started the process on December 2, 2024, and wasn’t seated until January 27 — she thrived in the classroom. Since then, she’s begun using simple phrases in English around the house, her mother said, including “yes,” “hi” and “good morning” and shares what she’s gleaned with her mom and other relatives, helping them crack the language divide. 

“She is more focused in regards to her learning,” Cruz said of her daughter. “She is very motivated. And I want to say that I have received a lot of support from the teachers. They are paying attention to my daughter. I appreciate that very much because I really needed that.”

Asked what she loves about the experience of an American education, Ferolin’s answer was simple: Everything. 

If she could speak directly to Lancaster school administrators, Ferolin said she would ask them to make the enrollment process easier for students like her.  

“Help us,” she said. “They have to help us to make it possible to go to school. They should help me get into school so I can learn many things so I can help my family prosper, to help them when it’s my turn.”

They are journalism advisors, volleyball coaches, mentors, authors, learners, environmental conservationists, meditation guides, literacy coaches, and equity advocates.

Their communities range from a small island in America Samoa serving multilingual, Indigenous students; a rural town in Pennsylvania; an immigrant hub in Denver; to a proud but underserved Black neighborhood in Washington D.C. 

Though the communities they serve cover a broad spectrum, 2025’s Teacher of the Year finalists recognized by the Council of Chief State School Officers are united in their commitment to children. 

Chosen from a pool of 56 local winners,they have found ways to make kids excited about school in a particularly difficult period in public education’s history. 

The finalists, all English and history educators, have designed lessons and extracurriculars for students to reflect on some of the most pressing issues today: Gun violence, substance abuse, suicide, poverty, food insecurity, health and hygiene, and the environment. 

They acknowledge the world outside school walls, involve local organizations to expand students’ opportunities, and prioritize building relationships with kids and their families. 

“Students don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care,” said elementary teacher Jazzmyne Townsend, Washington D.C.’s finalist. 

Utilizing family interview projects, field trips to hydroponic farms and herbal gardens, all four find ways to bring students’ experiences, cultures and curiosities into the classroom.  

At a time when public education is under fiscal and political threat from the Trump administration, finalists share what has nourished their careers and how they keep joy in learning: 

Mikaela Saelua 

All of ’s high school students are learning English as a second language. Their mother tongue is Samoan – poetic, full of expressive vowel sounds and unique – leaving most words without a direct English translation. 

To break up the monotony of reading and writing, she launched a song translation project. In what culminates in music videos, students learn figurative idioms, metaphors and words to capture the soul of Samoan songs. 

“The goal isn’t just to teach them English; it’s to help them appreciate and express themselves in a way that feels true to who they are,” Saelua wrote in her finalist . 

Saelua encourages student expression outside the classroom as an advisor for a peer leader club, which with the help of a local nonprofit, performs skits at local elementary schools to discuss hard topics, from substance use to suicide. 

America Samoa for suicide for over 20 years. Saelua’s school in particular has lost two students in the last three years. Their teachers are learning to spot warning signs in things like journal entries. 

Saelua, a proud product of America Samoa’s public education system who returned after  a spell of homesickness in California, is the first finalist from the seven islands in the program’s history. 

“I’m carrying that with me and I don’t carry it lightly,” she said. “… it’s more than just me. It’s now me and all of American Samoa.” 

Ashlie Crosson

As wildfires raged in Los Angeles earlier this year, two former students ran into ’s Pennsylvania classroom, cell phones in hand. 

The sophomores shared headlines about the Trump administration’s – exclaiming how taking away resources during a catastrophe was exactly like what they’d read in Dry by Jarrod and Neal Shusterman. 

They were curious: How was the media covering this? What would happen next? 

Dry was the only fiction text from their course Survival Stories, a half-year elective designed by Crossen for students to build media literacy and talk about what they see happening in the real world. And though they’d read it months earlier, they were making connections and eager to chat.

In Survival Stories, they’d discussed humanitarian crises through the lens of young people surviving them – such as and stories about families navigating the Darién Gap. 

Survival is not new to their community, deeply impacted by the opioid epidemic. 

Crosson brings in texts that show them “what you’re experiencing here isn’t isolated. These are problems that exist all over the place. Your hometown is not the ‘problem.’” 

Now in her fourteenth year teaching, she stays attuned to body language, emotional reactions, attendance. A kid’s experience in her classroom clues her into their world.  

She has also found ways for young people growing up in poverty to challenge negative associations with their area and build hope for future careers by .   

“I teach English, but I can’t really get to that content if I don’t have a rapport and understanding of my students and what their needs are,” Crosson said. “… There’s no content mastery happening in American schools right now if we’re not evaluating and meeting the needs of students and families.” 

Jazzmyne Townsend 

Coming from a family of teachers, wanted to carve her own path in business. 

But today the Washington, D.C. Teacher of the Year is a self described “big kid” – eager to be on the floor, immersed in sand, Play-Doh, and paint, modeling active listening and motor skills.  

“I’m willing to hold your hand and walk you through it until you are in a place where I can release you to do that independently,” the special education teacher explained about her approach with her second and third graders. 

She’s the teacher that knows their families and weekend plans, who notices their haircuts and new shoes, who shows up to games that are important to them. 

Townsend launched a , a place for kids to gather twice a week to chat about their bodies, social media, healthy relationships and whatever was weighing on them. 

She makes a point, too, of sharing her experiences with kids so they can dream big. A children’s book author, she explained the process of drafting a manuscript, pairing with an illustrator and publishing. 

Her kids then became authors and illustrators themselves. Their book publishing project became a community showcase, with one student choosing the ability to manage the world’s trash, to keep the planet clean and healthy. 

“I’m showing you in my actions, how we interact and how we engage,” she said. “I’m showing you that I’m invested in you… Kids need people who are irrationally passionate about them.”

Janet Renee Damon

After 25 years in the classroom, high school history teacher finds herself working at a transfer high school, a culmination of “all of my skills, all of my heart and all of my joy.” 

She spends her days joking and encouraging introverted, empathetic “diamond souls,” kids who’ve faced undue pressure who are still shining through parental death or incarceration, the trauma of immigration, homelessness, gun and gang violence and teen pregnancy. 

Over half of Damon’s students are immigrants, from Rwanda to Honduras and Iraq. All have mourned someone killed by gun violence. 

She guides students in breathing and meditation exercises, a tool for emotional regulation. They create “life maps,” imagining how to prepare for life’s milestones, like renting an apartment. 

She explores, “how history has impacted your own community, your own family.” After a project where students explored how the body’s DNA is impacted by generational trauma, one student told her he never used substances again. 

She and her administrators are committed: When kids don’t show, a team goes looking, conducting home visits. 

Damon also helped students’ bridge past and present through an ongoing podcast program. Students researched the history of mental health disparities and called attention to their high needs for support amid clinical shortages, landing on Colorado Public Radio.

Only 5% of registered psychologists nationwide speak Spanish. After their podcast went on air, a Therapists of Color collective reached out to provide care free of charge. The student podcast project led another to discover her family were survivors of the federal government’s Indian Residential Schools. A different high schooler interviewed a relative about his history with incarceration. Both said the work was “healing” and helped them feel closer to their families and identity.

“We have to make school a place where kids want to be,” Renee Damon said, “not just have to be.”

Many stories also picked up on the fact that achievement gaps are growing, as lower-performing students have fallen further behind. For instance, in eighth grade math, the scores for the top 10% of students rose 3 points, while the bottom 10% fell 5 points.

But these national numbers are hiding the fact that achievement gaps are growing in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. While they vary in magnitude, the extent of the divergence playing out in schools across the country is alarming. 

Before going into those state-level results, it’s important to acknowledge that this is a uniquely American problem. The separation between the higher- and lower-performing students in the United States has over the last decade, and there’s no signs yet of that slowing down. 

Last spring, I did an analysis that showed that before 2013, achievement scores were rising, and those gains were broadly shared across student performance levels. 

Consider the left side of the graph below, which shows the NAEP results in eighth grade math, updated through 2024. It is clear that something happened around 2013: On average, scores fell a little bit, but lower-performing students (in red) fell off a cliff. 

Meanwhile, the scores of higher-performing students (in blue) suffered a bit in the wake of COVID-19, but they improved noticeably last year, while the lowest performers did not.

A similar pattern shows up across a wide range of national and international tests, grade levels and subject areas. 

It is also evident in state after state. After the latest results came out, I looked to see how these gaps were changing at the state level. I looked specifically at eighth grade math, and the numbers were shockingly bad. In fact, in every state, the achievement gap has grown over the last two years. 

But those short-term changes don’t explain the full extent of what has happened to American children over the last decade. Each state has seen its achievement gap increase significantly.

To see the full state-level results, check out the table below, which shows the changes from 2013 to 2024. It breaks down the gains (or losses) for students at the 90^th percentile, the midpoint of all students in the state (the median) and the bottom 10^th percentile. It also shows how much these groups have diverged over time and the gap that has grown. 

And those gaps have increased in every state, most dramatically in Massachusetts, California, Texas, Arizona, Washington, Rhode Island, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. In all of these, the gap widened by 20 points or more.

How meaningful are these changes? Depending on the year, the average student gains about 10 points per year on the NAEP math tests. As a rough comparison, that means  achievement gaps have grown by the equivalent of one to two years’ worth of schooling. That’s substantial.

These gaps may seem daunting, and policymakers might be tempted to throw up their hands. But they should take heart from the fact that this recent period of academic stagnation is unusual. Until about a decade ago, small but steady gains were the norm. When researchers M. Danish Shakeel of the University of Buckingham and Paul Peterson from Harvard University looked at this question a few years ago, they that, “average student achievement has been increasing for half a century. Across 7 million tests taken by U.S. students born between 1954 and 2007, math scores have grown by 95% of a standard deviation, or nearly four years’ worth of learning.” They found smaller but still positive results for reading and a narrowing of gaps across racial, ethnic and socioeconomic status. 

In other words, progress is possible. At the moment, American achievement scores are falling and gaps are growing, but it wasn’t that long ago when the data were going in a much more positive direction.

The Pennsylvania Department of Education on Wednesday denied an application for a controversial cyber charter school that uses artificial intelligence called Unbound Academy, which was seeking to operate in Pennsylvania.

The proposed school would have been part of a multi-state network of schools where classes are led by AI tutors and human staff serve as “guides.”

“The artificial intelligence instructional model being proposed by this school is untested and fails to demonstrate how the tools, methods and providers would ensure alignment to Pennsylvania academic standards,” the Department of Education’s decision said.

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Human teachers’ unions and advocacy groups applauded the decision.

“AI can help teachers, but it can never replace a teacher guiding a student’s learning in a classroom,” Pennsylvania State Education Association President Aaron Chapin said in a statement. “Pennsylvania’s students are better off because the Department of Education rejected this cyber charter school application today.”

Susan Spicka, the executive director of Education Voters of PA, a nonprofit advocacy group, called Unbound Academy’s cyber charter application “egregiously deficient.”

The to reject the application cited multiple issues with Unbound Academy’s initial proposal. Those included concerns about unrealistic projections for enrollment growth, whether the school could attain insurance and its ability to support special education based on the proposed budget and tuition rates.

The Department of Education also said Unbound Academy’s application failed to provide sufficient information about the curriculum, courses and planned student activities.

“The department finds multiple, significant deficiencies,” the decision read. “These deficiencies, individually, collectively, and in any combination, are cause to deny the application. “

The for 2 Hour Learning, the company that provides the AI model Unbound Academy hoped to use, says their students “crush academics” at an accelerated pace with only two hours of academic instruction per day, based on data from their flagship “Alpha School.”

“Traditional school is broken. It’s outdated, full of busywork, and sadly for our kids, often a waste of time,” Mackenzie Price, the co-founder of 2 Hour Learning, says in a promotional video on their website. She said students at schools using their technology can learn “twice as much in two hours per day as they would in six hours of traditional school.”

The company says their program is already being used in schools in Texas and Florida, with more set to open in California and Arizona this fall.

Since it was announced, the proposed cyber charter school raised red flags with critics of cyber charter schools, as well as lawmakers in Harrisburg.

Sen. Lindsey Williams (D-Allegheny), the minority chair of the Senate Education Committee, said she plans to introduce a bill calling for a moratorium on the approval of new cyber charter schools, citing Unbound Academy specifically. said operators of schools like Unbound Academy “perceive our state as ripe for profiteering off of Pennsylvania’s children and taxpayers.”

The proposal is backed by Education Voters of PA.

There are currently 14 cyber charter schools operating in Pennsylvania, and they’ve experienced since the outbreak of the COVID pandemic. The schools are funded with taxpayer money, taken in part from the budgets of local school districts where their students would have otherwise enrolled. Though last year’s changes to the school funding formula eased that burden by providing reimbursements for some of those lost funds.

This week, Education Voters of Pennsylvania , Commonwealth Charter Academy. They found that hundreds of thousands of dollars were used on vehicles, dining, travel, entertainment and retail purchases.

Commonwealth Charter Academy’s chief branding and government relations officer told the Capital-Star that the findings were “cherry-picked” and the expenditures were “well within what is customary for organizations of like size that have a statewide footprint”

A 2019 Department of Education found that students at cyber charter schools typically performed worse or the same as those in traditional public schools based on academic tests. However, cyber charter students typically had higher rates of attendance and graduation.

A contact listed on Unbound Academy’s application did not respond to a request for comment.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor for questions: info@penncapital-star.com.

The Philadelphia school district and University of Pennsylvania are preparing to launch an artificial intelligence professional development program for school staff that they hope will serve as a transformative national model.

Beginning in March 2025, the Pioneering AI in School Systems or PASS program will be rolled out to select schools across the district with plans to expand to other regional schools and across the country, according to a joint statement from the Philadelphia school district and Penn’s Graduate School of Education Tuesday.

“Our goal is to leverage AI to foster creativity and critical thinking among students and develop policies to ensure this technology is used effectively and responsibly – while preparing both educators and students for a future where AI and technology will play increasingly central roles,” said Katharine O. Strunk, dean of Penn’s Graduate School of Education in a statement.

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Since the arrival of generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, educators and school leaders have been of Proponents herald the AI revolution as an inevitable boon that will improve academic progress tracking, save teachers time, and allow for more and curriculum personalization. According to , by the end of the 2023-2024 school year, some 60% of districts said they planned to train teachers about AI use. Notably, the report found that urban districts like Philadelphia were reportedly the least likely to deliver such training.

But AI skeptics have raised about inherent bias, inequity, and inaccurate information embedded within the technology along with questions about where students’ and teachers’ sensitive data is being fed, stored, and handled.

Philadelphia Superintendent Tony Watlington praised the PASS program in his statement Tuesday, saying it will “help advance academic achievement for our students by equipping our educators, school leaders, and district administrators with tools needed to make sure our students graduate college or career-ready.”

According to the press release, the program will have three tiers.

• Tier 1 for district administrators: Will focus on strategic planning, governance, and policy development to allow administrators to build “a solid framework for AI integration that aligns with educational standards and goals.”
• Tier 2 for school leaders: Will focus on implementing AI tools in schools and aligning the tools with already existing goals for classroom instruction and student support.
• Tier 3 for educators: Classroom teachers will get practical training on AI tools to “personalize learning, enhance instruction, and use AI-driven data to monitor student progress and provide timely support.”

The PASS pilot won’t carry any costs for the school district and is being developed in partnership with Penn’s, according to the joint statement. The program is funded in part by the Philly-based Marrazzo Family Foundation.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

The Newark charter school was selected for a free science field trip after another nearby school couldn’t go. It was May 2012, and middle school teacher Patricia Fartura was in charge of bringing 30 eighth graders to the organization’s technology center — a trip she would make an annual event. 

“That’s when the journey began. And our students loved it,” Fartura said. “It allowed students who would normally not be in that scenario or the situation of seeing what a science lab really looks like to get hands-on experience.” 

Fartura is now the curriculum supervisor at Varisco-Rogers, but its middle schoolers still visit Students 2 Science’s technology center to conduct multi-day experiments, such as simulating how the digestive system works or testing the energy content in caffeinated drinks.

Varisco-Rogers is one of more than 150 schools in New Jersey and Pennsylvania that partner with the 15-year-old , sending students three times a year to its technology centers for all-day programs in chemistry, biotechnology, physics and engineering. When students arrive, they are split into research teams and work with scientists to conduct experiments that connect to real-world issues, according to the nonprofit. 

For now, Students 2 Science serves middle and high school students at two centers, located in Newark and East Hanover, New Jersey. But the nonprofit recently of its program to elementary students, especially those in third and fourth grade, with a new 20,000-square-foot technology center near Whippany, New Jersey. It will replace the East Hanover facility in fall 2025.

The nonprofit also provides virtual laboratory lessons for teachers to livestream in their classrooms and a career-exploration program for high schoolers.

Dan Barnett, Student 2 Science’s chief development officer, said the organization decided to include younger students after hearing from schools that elementary classrooms had a shortage of science teachers.

“There’s such a lack of science teachers, or teachers that have a science background or can teach science in the elementary levels, especially for our school districts that are in such great need overall for resources,” Barnett said. “We worked with consultants to help develop a curriculum that aligned to New Jersey standards for learning and science. And now we are looking for a specialist to lead that program.”

Fartura said the decision to include elementary students will be critical to improving their academic success and trajectory. 

“I think at a younger age is where we want to get them [interested in STEM], because it’ll just continue to create passion for the subject, especially with all the careers that are out there now — everything is STEM,” she said.

show that young children begin to lose interest in science, technology, engineering and math as they grow older when they don’t have mentors to encourage them. found that this decline is more common among girls, students from low-income families and children of color.

This school year, Varisco-Rogers began incorporating STEM into its own elementary curriculum. Majority of the school’s are Hispanic and qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. 

Fartura said that so far, she has seen the school’s third and fourth graders become more engaged in their learning when STEM activities are involved.

“The little ones are … absorbing everything,” she said. “By the time I would get my students in sixth grade — even 10 years ago, 15 years ago — if they didn’t have that passion for science, it was so difficult for me to try to kind of push them.”

As Students 2 Science prepares to open its new site, the organization is also reimagining ways STEM can be taught through its two other programs, Barnett said. 

The V-Lab Program offers virtual laboratory lessons that can be remotely streamed at any school. Classroom teachers are given science materials, and a Students 2 Science instructor teaches a 45- to 50-minute lesson.

There is also a career advancement program that offers high school students opportunities for training and internships in STEM fields.

“We are really focused on exposure, making sure students know what options are out there, especially in the state of New Jersey,” Barnett said. “We recognize that for the communities that we serve, the students don’t necessarily get exposed to all of those opportunities, so that’s really what the focus of that program is, and that’s going to, I think, make a greater impact.”

About 90% of Students 2 Science participants are students of color, and 52% are female, according to the nonprofit. Since its inception in 2009, the organization has served more than 250,000 students.

One former student, Nomase Iyamu, said his participation in 2015 led him to a career in pharmaceuticals. He began at Students 2 Science as a sophomore at Bard High School Early College, which is part of Newark Public Schools, interned there as a college student and helped create the V-Lab Program. 

Imayu said Students 2 Science allowed him to make mistakes while experimenting with science and technology in high school. That opportunity sparked his interest in the pharmaceutical field, which eventually led him to enroll in business school to create his own pharmaceutical startup company.

“It took STEM for me to become an entrepreneur, so it may take STEM for someone to do something else that they’re actually passionate about,” he said. “I definitely see Students 2 Science as a very strong stepping stone to any career path that you want to have. I would definitely not be here without them.”

A Philadelphia group wants schools to focus more on being places of joy as a way to overhaul the culture in district schools, and it’s relying on parents and community voices for help.

Lift Every Voice, the organization behind this year’s Joy Campaign, is backing the creation of a to bolster access to recess, the arts, counselors, and the district’s program to bolster student mental health known as the Support Team for Educational Partnership. The blueprint would also create a Chief of Joy position in the district; in June, the City Council a resolution in Philly schools. The group says this approach to budgeting and community input is crucial for reducing things like disparities in student discipline.

The district has its own federally funded restorative justice program that focuses on student empowerment and engagement. But Lift Every Voice wants its work to be broader by auditing whether collective punishments like enforced quiet times and limited recess in schools contribute to inequities and an anti-Black environment. Parent surveys conducted by Lift Every Voice from earlier this year show that student mental health and school climate and environments are still major concerns that the district must address, the group says.

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Ultimately, it

“The school system is a closed system that doesn’t want to be told what to do and we’re starting to force them to come to grips with our voice that’s not going away,” said Wes Lathrop, Lift Every Voice’s organizing director.

Councilmember Kendra Brooks, who co-sponsored the June resolution, sees the campaign as a way to help schools embrace cultural differences, and as a way to to reduce disparities and biases, including those held by adults.

“We have to find a way to embrace the model and make it part of the normal cultural norms,” Brooks said. “A project we’re taking on has to be embedded. The only way we do that is consistency and sustainability, and oftentimes we haven’t seen that.”

Lathrop sees community involvement in restorative justice as a two-way street, pointing to the importance for all citizens of having students who are well-prepared for the job market and post-graduation life: “Parents can be a real guiding powerful force to really shape the future of the district.”

Susan McLeod, a Philadelphia public schools parent, got involved with Lift Every Voice because of issues her child was facing. She feels crucial decisions are made in the district without any parent involvement, such as announcements of district school closures more than 10 years ago that took her completely off guard. The group has helped her feel empowered on her own and her child’s behalf.

“It’s important for us to lay this foundation for our kids to have a better learning experience as young as elementary school,” McLeod said.

Racial disparities in student discipline represent one particular concern. The district has adopted practices rooted in restorative justice, an approach to discipline that emphasizes conflict mediation between students and other forms of resolving conflicts as alternatives to student suspensions and expulsions.

Overall suspensions have declined in Philadelphia public schools recently: The percentage of students with at least one suspension in a school year has dropped from about 11.5% in 2013 to about 5.7% in 2023. But over that same period, Black and Hispanic students were suspended at higher rates relative to their total enrollment than white students, according to data from the .

The district’s Relationships First initiative started in 2019 and expanded in 2023 to include more schools. It’s focused on developing students as leaders in restorative justice efforts and trains teachers to guide students in that work.

“Folks have the opportunity to engage in restorative conversations … and to be able to provide alternatives to suspension across the entire district,” said Luis Rosario, assistant director of school climate and culture for the district. “I do think it’s a testament to the leadership of our school district to move in that direction.”

These efforts dovetail with another led by Healing Futures. Healing Futures is operated by the nonprofit Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project that receives case referrals from the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office in place of a legal charge. In programs that last a minimum of eight weeks with mentor participation, students attend weekly discussions about their values and community and how to take accountability for the harm created by the student’s actions.

“We want to make sure that as many different perspectives of a situation can come into the room and offer their insight and support collectively,” said Hanae Mason, who is shadowing Healing Futures as part of her work as a to improve systems serving youth.

Building students’ agency and perspective can take different forms and lead to various outcomes.

Mary Libby, former principal at what’s now the Marian Anderson Neighborhood Academy, worked to introduce restorative justice practices and noticed students taking on more responsibility after formal restorative sessions. Students led the push when in honor of singer and local civil rights activist Marian Anderson, Libby said.

“In order for us to collectively move forward in a restorative and inclusive way, we need to trust and let the kids lead that process,” Libby said.

Malachi Grogan, an incoming seventh grader at Anderson who helped lead efforts to change the school’s name, is proud of the trust he has created with his peers where he can now lead restorative or cooling conversations.

“If we talk about it then we can get to know how people are feeling,” Grogan said. “And if we don’t know how people are feeling, how are we supposed to help them?”

Correction, Aug. 8, 2024: This article has been updated to clarify that Healing Futures is not led by the district attorney’s office, but is part of the nonprofit Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project. It receives case referrals from the district attorney’s office but is not part of city government.

This was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

PHILADELPHIA — Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz appeared together in Philadelphia Tuesday at a rally on Temple University’s campus, the first time she has visited Pennsylvania as the Democrats’ presumptive nominee for president. It’s been less than a month since Harris’ last visit to the City of Brotherly Love, but in that time she’s gone from being President Joe Biden’s running mate to leading at the top of the ticket.

The speculation about Harris’ running mate reached a fever pitch on Monday, with observers looking for any clue about who her pick would be. On Tuesday morning, she ended the guessing, .

The running mates took the stage at the Liacouras Center to raucous applause from the full arena, with “Freedom” by Beyonce playing.

“We are the underdogs in this race. But we have the momentum, and I know exactly what we are up against,” Harris said. She said in her past roles as a prosecutor and senator she “took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who scammed consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”

But her campaign is not just a fight against Trump, Harris added, “It’s a fight for the future.”

Harris described Walz’s career path as a teacher and high school football coach, taking a winless team to a state championship. He also championed students who were struggling with acceptance, she added, becoming the faculty advisor for students who wanted to start a support group for LGBTQ students.

“Tim knew the signal that it would send to have a football coach get involved,” Harris said. “Tim Walz was the kind of teacher and mentor that every child in America dreams of having, and that every kid deserves that kind of coach, because he’s the kind of person who makes people feel like they belong, and then inspires them to dream big. And that’s the kind of vice president he will be.”

Watch — Walz on Education:

When Walz took the stage, he began by praising Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who was also a finalist for the VP role.

“He can bring the fire. This is a visionary leader,” Walz said. “Also, I have to tell you, everybody in America knows when you need a bridge fixed call that guy,” in an apparent reference to Shapiro’s work to get a after it was damaged in a fiery crash in 2023.

He thanked Harris for bringing back the “joy” to the race for the White House.

Walz touched on several issues that illustrated his record as a lawmaker. He said he was old enough to remember “when it was Republicans who were talking about freedom. It turns out now, what they meant was the government should be free to invade your doctor’s office. In Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and their personal choices that they make, even if we wouldn’t make the same choice for ourselves.”

He also spoke about the challenges he and his wife Gwen had using in-vitro fertilization to start their family. “We spent years going through infertility treatments, and I remember praying every night for a call for good news, the pit in my stomach when the phone rang and the agony when we heard that the treatments hadn’t worked,” Walz said. “So it wasn’t by chance that when we welcomed our daughter into the world, we named her Hope.

When the vice president and I talk about freedom, we mean the freedom to make your own health care decisions, and for our children to be free to go to school without worrying they’ll be shot dead in their classrooms,” Walz added.

Walz next turned his focus on GOP vice presidential candidate, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, mocking his oft-told origin story of growing up in rural Ohio.

“Like all regular people I grew up with in the heartland, J.D. studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and then wrote a best seller trashing that community,” Walz said. “Come on, that’s not what Middle America is. And I gotta tell you, I can’t wait to debate the guy — that is if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”

The Harris campaign said there were 14,000 people at Temple either watching the rally at the Liacouras Center, or in an overflow room at nearby McGonigle Hall.

Shapiro warmed up the crowd before Harris and Walz took the stage. The fired-up audience began a chant of “he’s a weirdo” when he mentioned Vance, a call-back to comments and that the Harris campaign has run with, branding Trump and Vance as “weird.”

“I love you, Philly. And you know, what else I love? I love being your Governor,” Shapiro said. “I want you to know I am going to continue to pour my heart and soul into serving you every single day as your governor, and I’m going to be working my tail off to make sure we make Kamala Harris and Tim Walz the next leaders of the United States of America.”

If Shapiro was disappointed to not get the VP nod, however, he did not show it, thanking the audience and praising the Democratic ticket.

“Let me tell you about my friend, Kamala Harris, someone I’ve been friends with for two decades,” Shapiro said. “She is courtroom tough. She has a big heart, and she is battle tested and ready to go. Whether in a courtroom, whether fighting as attorney general, whether remembering the people who have oftentimes been left behind when she was sitting in the halls of power in the Senate, Kamala Harris has always understood that you got to be, every day, for the people.”

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign released a statement shortly after the Walz news was announced Tuesday. “It’s no surprise that San Francisco Liberal Kamala Harris wants West Coast wannabe Tim Walz as her running-mate – Walz has spent his governorship trying to reshape Minnesota in the image of the Golden State,” Trump campaign Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “Walz is obsessed with spreading California’s dangerously liberal agenda far and wide. If Walz won’t tell voters the truth, we will: just like Kamala Harris, Tim Walz is a dangerously liberal extremist, and the Harris-Walz California dream is every American’s nightmare.”

Walz gets positive response

U.S. Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-4th District) said after the rally that she had been pulling for Shapiro to get the VP nod, but was impressed with Harris’ pick. “I was a hometown girl for Josh, but I think this is a terrific combination and Josh will be right by their side, lifting up this ticket,” Dean said. “This is a ticket that believes in the American values of small d, democracy, rule of law and freedom. It couldn’t be a greater contrast, so this was spectacular.”

Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker, the city’s 100th mayor and the first Black woman to hold the position, was the first local elected official to speak at the rally on Tuesday.

“I need you to know that this is a history-making day here in Philadelphia and in our country because we are on the cusp of electing our Vice President Kamala Harris to be the 47th president of the United States of America,” Harris said, to big applause.

Parker praised Harris’ record as vice president and noted they are both “divine nine sisters and graduates of Historically Black colleges and universities.”

Parker warned about staying focused on the race.

“Don’t let Trump the trickster take our eyes off the prize,” Parker said. “We have to remember that there is nothing that is more important than electing the Harris-Walz team and taking them where they belong, to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.”

Carlos Ruiz III of Philadelphia told the Capital-Star that prior to the rally his first choice for vice president was Shapiro, but after doing some research on Walz, he liked what he read and is happy with the pick.

“I think one of the, one of the groups of voters that she was probably going to have a hard time connecting with was older white voters, and I think that’s probably why she leaned towards Gov. Walz” Ruiz said. “And he’s very relatable, seems like the everyday kind of guy, and I think that’s going to bring what was missing to the ticket.”

Jane Poblano, a teacher from Montgomery County, told the Capital-Star that Walz seems like a “great guy, very humble,” and offered words of encouragement to him joining the ticket.

“I think it’s a good choice,” Poblano said. “She had a lot of good choices.”

How it started/How it’s going

The month of July began with Biden trailing in the polls after a poor debate performance in late June raised concerns about whether he could beat GOP nominee Donald Trump. Two days before the Republican National Convention, a gunman shot at Trump during a rally in Butler, killing one rally-goer and injuring two others. The following weekend, Biden bowed out of the race and immediately endorsed Harris, with Democrats quickly coalescing behind her candidacy.

Late Monday, the Democratic National Committee announced Harris had secured the support of 99% of delegates to formally become the party’s presidential nominee, following the conclusion of a five-day virtual vote.  She is expected to formally accept the nomination at the Democratic National Convention later this month.

The Biden-Harris $284.1 million between January 2023 and June 30, 2024,  while Trump’s campaign raised $217.2 million during that time period. Trump entered July with $128.1 million on hand, while Biden’s campaign had $96 million on hand.

But Harris raised $310 million in July according to her campaign, while Trump’s campaign said it raised $138 million.

And although the election is still less than three months away, Pennsylvanians are already being inundated with ads and will continue to be throughout the campaign. showed that Trump and Harris are slated to spend more than twice as much on advertising in Pennsylvania as any of the other pivotal battleground states.

Another race in the commonwealth garnering  a lot off ad spending is Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Casey’s bid for a fourth term against Republican challenger Dave McCormick.

At the rally on Tuesday, Casey praised Harris’ record “as a prosecutor putting away dangerous criminals, to her time in the United States Senate and as vice president, fighting for women’s rights, voting rights, and workers rights.”

He also told the crowd that they couldn’t trust McCormick, referencing his recent previous residency in Connecticut and work as a hedge fund manager.

McCormick, who was also in Philadelphia on Tuesday, sent out a statement earlier in the day calling Harris-Walz the “most liberal presidential ticket in history” and linked them with Casey  on border policies, inflation, energy production, and other issues.

Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), delivered brief remarks at the rally on Tuesday noting that he’s a “yinzer,” Steelers and Sheetz guy, referencing his roots on the opposite side of the commonwealth — which drew boos from the crowd — he said they were all on team Harris/Walz, which drew applause.

“This election is about moving our country forward with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz,” Fetterman said. “Or a couple of really really really really weird dudes.”

After Fetterman exited the stage, some “E-A-G-L-E-S” chants broke out.

While most of the state’s delegation backed Shapiro to join the ticket, about having him in the role.

Prior to Biden’s exit from the race, Trump was consistently polling slightly ahead of Biden in Pennsylvania. However, since Harris emerged as the presumptive nominee, shows the race in a statistical tie.

“One of the things that stood out to me about Tim is how his convictions on fighting for middle class families run deep. It’s personal,” Harris said in a statement  Tuesday, offering praise for Walz’s record as governor, including passing a law to provide paid family and medical leave and making Minnesota the first state in the country to pass a law providing constitutional abortion protections, and  a bill requiring universal background checks for gun purchases.

Tuesday is Harris’ seventh visit to Pennsylvania this year, according to the campaign. Her most recent appearance in the commonwealth was on . She’s also to tout the administration’s infrastructure investments, in , and in Montgomery County to . Harris has been the Biden administration’s primary voice on abortion rights, particularly in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

And in case anyone doubted Philadelphia’s importance in the 2024 race, Vance on Tuesday as well, for his first campaign event in Pennsylvania.

Trump was most recently in the state last Wednesday for an indoor rally in Harrisburg, since the assassination attempt.

Harris’s campaign swing with her running mate begins in Pennsylvania, then she’s scheduled to campaign in other key battleground states over the next few days. Planned campaign stops in and were postponed due to Hurricane Debby.

Trump and Vance are also slated to make appearances in key battleground states later this week.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kim Lyons for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on and .

After nearly three decades working in education, I would hardly call myself naive. I’ve been a school counselor, principal and district superintendent. I’ve served or worked in rural, urban and suburban schools. Along the way, I’ve received recognition for closing learning gaps, increasing graduation rates and recruiting male teachers of color to the workforce.

Yet, for all my experience, there’s one thing I underestimated: chronic absenteeism and the challenge of addressing the many factors that contribute to it.

I now recognize that chronic absenteeism is a symptom of deeper, systemic issues in schools and broader society. The reasons for missing class are complex, representing a confluence of school, home and community factors. Logistical challenges like transportation or lack of child care can pose insurmountable barriers, while young people who lack a sense of belonging at school or are generally disengaged may simply opt out.

Because students and families are the groups most impacted by these impediments to attendance, they must also be a part of developing the solutions. consistently shows that engaging communities leads to innovative and effective solutions.

I’m encouraged by the efforts I’ve seen through my work with Digital Promise’s Center for Inclusive Innovation. Inclusive innovation — an education research and development model that fosters deep district-community partnership to create novel student-centered solutions — is an opportunity for students and families, who are often excluded from positions of influence in education, to lead, participate in and benefit from problem solving and decision making. Inclusive innovation is not a new concept, but it is underutilized — and has the potential to significantly impact the nation’s attendance crisis. 

To that end, Digital Promise has Chronic Absenteeism: Insights and Innovations — a six-month cohort supporting 17 school districts ranging from suburban California to rural Ohio. The goal is to address chronic absenteeism through the deep investigation of its root causes, collaboration among districts around shared challenges and partnerships with students and families to identify solutions for improving attendance in their communities.

With the potential to impact more than 210,000 students, the cohort will develop strategies that meet the unique needs of their students and families, together with and alongside their students and communities. These districts will develop a chronic absenteeism blueprint by conducting data analysis; identifying the systems, conditions and processes needed to improve attendance; and engaging students in the design and development of solutions.

El Segundo Unified School District, Greenfield Union School District, Lynwood Unified School District and Mountain View Whisman Schools in California; Adams 12 Five Star Schools in Colorado; Wilmington Learning Collaborative in Delaware; NOLA Public Schools in Louisiana; Roselle Public Schools in New Jersey; East Irondequoit Central School District, Hudson City School District, Mount Vernon School District and Suffern Central School District in New York; Springfield City Public Schools in Ohio; Allentown School District and Elizabeth Forward School District in Pennsylvania; Richland School District 2 in South Carolina; and Spokane Public Schools in Washington.

The cohort will be co-led by Lynwood Superintendent Gudiel Crosthwaite, whose district is making progress in addressing chronic absenteeism. To start, the district asked a basic question of families: What conditions and barriers are preventing each and every student from participating and engaging in school? 

To find answers, Lynwood, which is over 90% Latino/a, distributed four surveys and hosted in-person meetings with families to hear their concerns. They increased communications with parents, including a social media campaign highlighting real students and their positive experiences in school, to remind families how being present and engaged can contribute to young people’s physical and mental well-being. As a result of these efforts, the district went from 1,200 students who attended virtually last year to 55 attending online this year and the rest returning to classes in person. 

Lynwood is also improving attendance among foster youth through a program created with student councils and staff. The program “hires” foster youth, who have lower attendance rates than other students, to work in their schools’ front offices or provide tutoring. This motivates these students because they know they know they have a purpose, build relationships with caring adults and are seen as role models to their younger peers. It also sets them on a pathway to entry-level jobs within the school district or at partnering agencies and afterschool programs, guiding them toward potential careers in education as well.

Another promising approach also draws a clear connection between attending school and students’ career and employment prospects: 

Digital Promise’s district- and community-led cybersecurity initiative provides access to inclusive STEM pathways for high schoolers in 10 school districts, from Alabama to New York. Students participate in a three-year, in-school cybersecurity program, earning industry-valued credentials and, ultimately, opportunities to secure employment and/or enroll in vocational and trade schools or colleges and universities in a related field. In all 10 districts, actual enrollment doubled or tripled projections due to student and parent demand. And those districts have seen a decrease in absenteeism among students in the program. 

For school leaders who want to develop lasting solutions for chronic absenteeism, the first step is to ensure the conditions — and the commitment — are in place to work alongside students, families and community members. This will lead to the next, crucial step: building trust and relationships to design and sustain solutions that enable all students to participate, engage in and thrive at school.

Soon after she had gone to jail for trying to get her children a better education, Kelley Williams-Bolar’s teenage daughter Jada confronted her mother with an accusation that will stick with her forever. 

“You’re not there for me,” said Jada, now 26. Like the rest of her family, Jada still struggles with her mother’s 2011 felony conviction for sending Jada and her sister Kayla to a suburban school outside Akron, Ohio, using their grandfather’s address.

By the time Jada stood firmly in front of her, Williams-Bolger had spent nine days in jail, overwhelmed by how a felony could upend their lives, jeopardizing future housing and employment opportunities. She started to defend herself, then went silent. She knew Jada was right.

“But you know, it was my mind that wasn’t there. It wasn’t there for years,” conceded Williams-Bolar, a longtime educator and child care provider. “…Honestly, it destroyed me. It was a lot to deal with. I wasn’t the same mom for my daughters.”

Years after their prosecutions and forced removal from districts, families across the country like Williams-Bolar’s are still paying the price, economically and emotionally, after being prosecuted for acting in the best interest of their children. 

In Pennsylvania, one family ultimately owed over $10,000 for tuition and amassed legal fees into the six figures for keeping their child enrolled in a suburban school after moving out of the district three months before the end of the school year. In Connecticut, Tanya McDowell, whose family was experiencing homelessness, used her babysitter’s address to enroll her five year old in a Norwalk school. She was convicted on larceny and unrelated drug charges, serving . 

Outside of the legal ramifications, many families still struggle with depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress, their family relationships and work suffering as a result. Their children have felt at times like they had lost their parents and interest in school. 

Now seven decades after the Supreme Court outlawed sorting children by race and promised quality education for all in the landmark Brown v. Board decision, experts are beating the drum that continuing to exclude children from quality schools based on their home addresses perpetuates segregation. Advocates have also called for an end to the practice of prosecuting parents who, knowingly or unknowingly, disregard zone lines when enrolling their children.

Williams-Bolar’s daughters were zoned for Akron Public Schools, 15 minutes but seemingly a world apart from Copley-Fairlawn, the predominantly white suburban district where her father lived and often cared for her daughters. Visiting Copley’s schools, she saw acres of land, science fairs, a sprawling greenhouse, and a full computer room. Akron’s schools at the time had rapidly decaying infrastructure. Styrofoam cups filled with dirt were the plants in her daughters’ science classes. 

Night and day, she said. She just couldn’t have anticipated what the cost of enrolling her kids in Copley would be. 

Months later, her trial began. Intense scrutiny on the case made their family recipients of unwanted, international attention. A school district contractor showed up to their front door, looking inside their refrigerator, closets, bathrooms, counting each toothbrush. Teachers and students at her daughters’ school made snide remarks about their mother’s jail time. They’d catch neighbors’ side eyed, judgemental gazes. 

White men started driving slowly by their home at any time of day, never speaking, only staring. This would happen about a dozen separate times. 

Williams-Bolar sometimes stayed in her room crying for days, not knowing how much time was passing. Her depression lingered well after . 

Three years on probation also meant the family couldn’t travel to see relatives in the south. She was also barred from visiting her father in prison for months. Though his involvement with her school enrollment case was dropped, soon after the state convicted him on fraud charges related to government benefits. Williams-Bolar maintains the case against her father would not have been pursued without the unprecedented spotlight on her family. 

“Once you get in the lion’s den, they’re not just gonna let you go,” she said. 

He served 11 months in prison, and died in its hospital one month before release. 

“He loved going out barbecuing in the front yard. He loved all his grand babies coming over, always listening to music,” said Kayla, now 30. “I mean, the greatest grandpa a girl could ever ask for. Damn near like a father to me, and I’d do anything to have him back. But here we are.”

Investigations in and recently confirmed districts still regularly confront families suspected of living outside of their boundaries. Today, their methods are usually less public, with districts hiring private investigators or threatening prosecution to get families to disenroll their children. The thousands known to be kicked out of their schools for address sharing are disproportionately Black and brown. 

In at least 24 states, parents can face criminal prosecution, fines and jail sentences for address sharing. Only one, Connecticut, has decriminalized the common practice. 

To reduce the scale of the issue and promote integration, districts could adopt county boundaries, encompassing more diversity and better reflecting work-life patterns, rather than neighborhood lines that mirror racist housing segregation. But they often “lack the political will,” to do so; quality schools remain scarce by design, said civil rights lawyer Erika Wilson. 

And though Williams-Bolar knows a friend was similarly confronted by the district who believed her family lived outside the boundary, they never prosecuted her or asked her to remove her two children. The friend was related to a prominent leader in the NAACP. Williams-Bolar later met a former Copley student who alleged he lived in Akron, too, and that the school knew at the time, but let him stay because he was an athlete. 

“I think it’s common at these, these selective schools. The problem is it’s very, very selectively enforced,” said Tim DeRoche, author, researcher and founder of Available to All, a watchdog organization. 

‘I remember my wife losing her hair’

Around the same time Williams-Bolar was navigating her trial, just one state over, six year old Fiorella Garcia pleaded with the governor of Pennsylvania to drop charges against her parents. Crying, she said she didn’t want to go into foster care. 

In 2012, her parents Hamlet and Olesia Garcia faced up to seven years in prison, felony convictions, and losing custody of their daughter. The suburban Lower Moreland Township School District alleged Fiorella lived outside of its zone, in Philadelphia. Fiorella and Olesia lived temporarily with her grandparents in Lower Moreland, but failed to notify the district that they had moved out. 

In records reviewed by The 74, the Garcias repeatedly offered to pay the district the cost for Fiorella to finish the school year in Lower Moreland so as to not interrupt her schooling. Their requests were denied. 

Their mug shots headlined local news the night they were arrested, alongside headlines that alluded to tax fraud. Olesia, who owned a private insurance company, risked losing her license and business. Their address made its way into coverage, and soon after, their car was vandalized.  

“This has never got off my head … I remember my wife losing her hair,” Hamlet Garcia said, trying to hold back tears. Losing so much sleep, he tried medication and experienced chest pains, which he attributes to the stress. 

Their tide only changed after leaving their public defender, who wanted them to settle for a guilty plea. The Garcias incurred close to $100,000 in debt to instead hire a high profile law team from Florida, money they say would have gone toward their daughters’ college education or family vacations. 

Ultimately, all . The family paid $10,752 “tuition” to the district and a $100 fine. 

In the decade that has followed, Garcia has devoted most of his time to learning education law, organizing for school choice and Republican political campaigns, feeling betrayed by the Democrats he felt were responsible. Fiorella, now 17, is about to graduate from high school. 

Telling her story and becoming a parent advocate has been Williams-Bolar’s “medicine.” She feels she’s a part of changing education policy to expand access to quality schools and “leave a legacy for my dad because he didn’t deserve none of that. He didn’t deserve to die in jail.” 

Today she works at one of Akron Public Schools’ high schools as a paraprofessional: the superintendent refused to fire her after the ordeal.

“Honestly,” said Kayla, who’s also considering going back to school to be an educator, “I’m still trying to heal.”