It was in physical education class when Laila Gutierrez swapped out self-harm for a new vice. 

The freshman from Phoenix had long struggled with depression and would cut her arms to feel something. Anything. The first drag from a friend’s vape several years ago offered the shy teenager a new way to escape. 

She quit cutting but got hooked on nicotine. Her sadness got harder to carry after her uncle died and she felt she couldn’t turn to her grieving parents for comfort. Bumming fruity vapes at school became part of her routine. 

“I would ask my friends who had them, ‘I’m going through a lot, can I use it?’” Gutierrez, now 18, told The 74. “Or ‘I failed my test and I feel like smoking would be better than cutting my wrists.’” 

It worked until she got caught. 

Like students across the country, Gutierrez got dragged into a nicotine-fueled war between vape manufacturers — including a company that leveraged online advertisements on the websites of Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network to hook kids on e-cigarettes — and educators, who’ve turned to digital surveillance tools and discipline to crack down on the youngest users. Gutierrez was suspended for a week after she was nabbed vaping in a crowded school bathroom during her lunch hour.

An in-depth investigation by The 74 reveals how nicotine-addicted teens, who often begin vaping under social pressure or, like Gutierrez, to cope with hardship, are routinely kicked out of school instead of receiving meaningful services that could steer them away from tobacco and help them break free of their vape pens. 

Candid interviews with a dozen high schoolers and recent graduates from across the country reveal how vaping has become ubiquitous in schools. The battery-powered nicotine sticks are more than an addiction: They define students’ social status, friend groups and coping strategies years before they’re 21 and legally old enough to buy them. 

“At my school, vaping starts because you want to be part of the popular crowd, you want to get invited to parties, you want to feel like you’re a part of a community,” said Ayaan Moledina, a 16-year-old from Austin, Texas. “And you start doing those things because you’re pressured into doing it.” Moledina says he doesn’t vape and has been excluded socially as a result.

Public records obtained by The 74 from a vape detector pilot program at Minneapolis Public Schools presents a unique window into the severity of the problem and of educators’ efforts to contain it. The main battlefield in the fight is the school bathroom. As they have for generations, teens take cover in the bathroom to socialize and smoke, but because vapes allow them to consume nicotine more discreetly than traditional cigarettes, district leaders are also embracing technological advancements to police them. 

Purchasing records from schools across the country show that districts are spending millions to install sensors in student bathrooms — once considered a privacy no-go for electronic surveillance — to alert them of changes in air quality. The 74’s analysis of the data from Minneapolis Public Schools reveals that the vape detectors brought a spike in school discipline, but they also produced a near-endless stream of alerts that could overwhelm district administrators. 

For University of Texas master’s student Cameron Samuels, Students Engaged in Advancing Texas when they were a freshman in college, all this means is that schools are spending money on invasive tech — the detectors, often equipped with microphones, are no less intrusive than security cameras, they argued — that could go to mentorship programs “where teachers and educators can support students, meeting us where we’re at.”

“Surveillance is only a diagnosis,” Samuels said of the decision to use sensors to counter student vaping. “It only recognizes symptoms of a failed system without actually solving [them].”

Vaping is ‘everywhere now’

In Minneapolis, the $100,000 pilot program placed sensors in the bathrooms of two high schools and two middle schools with in 2022. The result, The 74’s investigation reveals, was a marked increase in students being punished for vaping in the months that followed. 

Across the four campuses, a student was disciplined for vaping every 3.1 school days on average in the two years before the devices were activated and inundated administrators with tens of thousands of alerts. In a nine-month period after they were deployed in September 2024, a student was disciplined for the same offense every 1.4 days. 

The increase was particularly pronounced at Anwatin Middle School where, in the 2022-23 school year, there were 15 vape-related disciplinary incidents. During the 2024-25 school year, after the sensors were installed, disciplinary actions for vaping reached 67.

Across the four campuses, at least half of the vape-related disciplinary incidents occurred in school bathrooms. Nearly 81% led to suspensions. Just 7% led to a referral to an alcohol and drug abuse counselor, according to the discipline logs, and after the vape detectors were installed, the rate of treatment referrals declined compared to the average over the two years before.

While the number of alerts were far greater at the two high schools, it was the younger students at the two middle schools who were more likely to be removed from their classrooms.

The escalation in vape-related suspensions in Minneapolis comes as federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show teen nicotine use dropping since a 2019 high that reflected e-cigarettes’ growing hold on the market. In 2024, some 8.1% of middle and high school students reported using tobacco products within the last 30 days, according to the most recent results from the . Nearly reported vaping e-cigarettes.

Stanford Medicine pediatrician Bonnie Halpern-Felsher, who helped create a and curriculum that’s used in schools across the country, has found higher youth vaping rates than the CDC figures. And released in September about student vaping reports the behavior is “everywhere now,” especially at “ground zero”: the bathrooms.

The survey was published by The Truth Initiative, a national nonprofit that is focused on preventing nicotine addiction among youth and young adults and opposes school discipline as a means of combating it. Some students were brazen — vaping openly in school hallways — while others hid e-cigarettes in bathroom fixtures, ceiling tiles and tampon dispensers, the survey found. 

Educators who were polled voiced concern about students’ “distracting preoccupation” with vaping and how constant bathroom breaks interrupted learning, said Jennifer Kreslake, the senior vice president of Truth Initiative’s Schroeder Institute.

“It also takes away from the teacher’s ability to do their jobs,” Kreslake said. “Their primary jobs are not monitoring vapes around campus, and it’s taking them away from what they’re in the school to do.” 

In Lancaster, South Carolina, county health workers spent more than $150,000 on about 70 that are scheduled to go live at local schools next month. Officials said they chose the Triton sensors, in particular, because they go beyond vape detection to identify “aggression,” “keywords associated with vandalism” and “loitering.”

School officials’ previous efforts with vape detection centered on student discipline, said Ashlie Harder, the prevention director at Counseling Services of Lancaster.

“The goal for them was punitive — they wanted to catch the students,” Harder said. “They wanted the students to get whatever the disciplinary action was. That was the plan.” 

Harder, who had already been working with the district to stop schools from sending kids home for vaping, hopes to change that. Her office, which serves as the county’s commission for drug and alcohol abuse, secured the new, high-tech Triton sensors earlier this year with the goal for school officials to “leave it for us” to do in-school tobacco prevention programming based on the Stanford toolkit with young people caught vaping by the devices.

Lancaster County School District officials said they hope the sensors will prevent vaping on campus while also providing a new layer of bathroom security. School-based police officers will have access to the alerts in an effort to prevent fights and to stop students from camping out in the restrooms and skipping class.

Lonnie Plyler, the district’s director of safety and transportation, said nicotine use isn’t the full extent of the problem — students have also been bringing marijuana vapes to school.

“We hope that it will deter these people from actually bringing it into the schools and using it, knowing that we’re actually monitoring it and can see it,” Plyler said. The vape detectors help create a process, he said, where students are “being punished through the school and possibly law enforcement.”

Gutierrez, the student from Phoenix, was suspended in September 2024 after a school security guard caught her vaping in a bathroom stall. It’s also common for schools to station monitors outside bathrooms to sniff out vaping and for some restrooms to be locked altogether as a blanket deterrent.

Getting kicked out of school didn’t make Gutierrez’s  situation any easier. An online quiz she was required to take during those days depicted vaping as ruining her life, she said, offering no help for her depression and making her feel ashamed. 

“When I went back to school, I felt the eyes of the security guards,” she said. “It made me feel like I was in a jail.”

Seven months, 45,000 alerts

It was 2 p.m., in late January when Anwatin Middle School Assistant Principal Nate Lee logged a new disciplinary action against two of his 334 students.

Vaping. 

As part of the pilot program, Anwatin was supplied last year with HALO vape detection sensors. The plastic, ceiling-mounted discs are sold by a subsidiary of the communications giant Motorola and are designed to notify administrators of vapor, smoke and, with certain microphone-equipped models, gunshots. Officials installed the devices in two boys’ and two girls’ bathrooms.

Once all 29 sensors across the two middle schools and two high schools went live in September 2024, administrators began receiving real-time alerts notifying them of suspected vaping, smoking — and evidence of students masking vape plumes with like Axe Body Spray.

At Anwatin, administrators responded to vape sensor alerts with fervor, student disciplinary records show, often resulting in suspensions. In the January incident, a seventh and an eighth grader were suspended after “investigative efforts” found they were in the bathroom “at a time when the vape detector monitoring system alerted staff to illicit activity.”

“Students denied involvement,” disciplinary records note, “but were both found to be in the bathroom.” 

The 74’s analysis of vape detection alerts suggest the sensors are accurate — or at least go off most when kids are likely to be in the building. Few alerts occurred outside normal school hours, according to the logs. 

Over a seven-month period between September 2024 and April 2025, the HALO sensors went off more than 45,000 times across the four Minneapolis campuses. On any given school day, the data reveal, Minneapolis educators at the four schools received an average of 412 alerts — roughly one every minute. On their most active day, the sensors alerted school officials to vaping 755 times.

The sheer number of alerts raises the question of whether school officials can reasonably respond to them and, if not, whether they’re an effective way to stop students from vaping at school — or curb their habit in general. 

Youth have existed in schools since the 1960s after a linked smoking to deleterious health consequences, including lung cancer and heart disease. Technological advancements in e-cigarettes were sold as healthier alternatives for adult cigarette smokers, but the vapes have been blamed for breeding a new generation of nicotine addicts. By the time the vape detectors emerged on the market, kids were already hooked.

Student interviews reveal the degree to which vaping culture has become fully ingrained in student life, with teens describing the allure of nicotine as so strong that addiction is nearly inevitable. For some teens who are sick of it, vaping has become a reason to avoid school bathrooms altogether. 

“They do it at school, they do it in the bathrooms, they do it with their friends and they think it’s cool but they don’t understand the long-term impacts of it,” said Moledina, the Austin teen and who is the federal policy director for Students Engaged in Advancing Texas. 

Over the summer, he and dozens of other students from across the country convened in a cafeteria at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, to discuss the of vape detection sensors and other digital surveillance tools increasingly employed in schools. 

Even here, where adults warned teens about vape sensors’ intrusiveness, students offered varying perspectives about the factors that lead to teen vaping — and the best strategies to prevent it. Nathan Wanna, a 14-year-old freshman from St. Paul, said he wished the sensors were installed in the bathrooms at his school. 

“I say it might be an invasion of privacy, but if it’s needed, it should be in there,” Wanna said. “I wouldn’t see my friends tempted by peer pressure or the pain they go through to start doing that.” 

Student-savvy workarounds

The four Minneapolis pilot schools saw a surge in vape alerts just before noon, suggesting students used the lull during lunch break to get their fix. Vaping was by far the most common trigger, the HALO logs show, accounting for 74% of alerts. Smoking cigarettes accounted for another 25%. In just 87 incidents, the sensors were triggered by tetrahydrocannabinol, the mind-shifting compound in cannabis, which can be consumed by vaping or other delivery methods.

The high schools were also overrepresented in the vape logs, even after accounting for their larger student populations, a finding that correlates with a higher percentage of tobacco users among older teens compared to those in middle school. Nearly 93% of vape alerts were registered on the sensors at Camden and Roosevelt high schools while just 7% were logged at Anwatin and Andersen United middle schools. Yet the middle schools accounted for 53% of all disciplinary write-ups for vaping. The disparity in the alert-to-discipline ratio suggests that high school administrators may have gotten buried by the noise. 

The 74 provided Minneapolis Public Schools with a list of key findings from its investigation but officials didn’t agree to an interview or provide a written statement. Plans for vape detection beyond the four-campus pilot program at the district are unclear. But a national network of advocates and researchers that convened the student gathering in St. Paul this summer, has called on the district to give it up. When Minneapolis students are caught by the sensors, “they’re just told to go home,” said local activist Marika Pfefferkorn, a NOTICE Coalition founder. 

“Teachers and administrators have said that with vaping and vape detection, that we’re treating some students as if it’s a mental health issue …  and then for other students, it’s a behavior issue,” Pfefferkorn said. 

The analysis accounts for a blackout period from early December 2024 through the end of January when the logs provided by Minneapolis Public Schools show zero sensor alerts. The data may have been excluded in error because the student disciplinary records provided to The 74 show some vape-related incidents during that same period, including several that cite the sensors.

While a single vaping session could trigger multiple alerts, records indicate such occurrences are rare. Fewer than 5% of alerts were within 10 seconds of another notification from the same device. Of the pings across the four schools, just over half occurred 60 seconds or more after another alert on the same device, meaning it’s likely the sensors were picking up separate vaping incidents. 

IPVM, a surveillance industry research firm that runs a 12,000-square-foot testing facility in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, has conducted audits on the HALO sensors, alongside similar devices, for several years and found they’re at their intended purpose: detecting plumes of vapor. 

But the sensors aren’t foolproof — they could be beaten by blowing the vapor into a bottle or a jacket sleeve — and there were other drawbacks, including alerts delayed by more than 20 seconds, the firm found. The detectors’ efficacy is highly dependent on where they’re installed, said Nikita Ermolaev, an IPVM senior research engineer.

In Minneapolis, the number of vape detections decreased over time, though it’s unclear if that’s because the sensors were a deterrent for students or if their placement was fine-tuned. 

“How big is the school bathroom, how high are the ceilings?” Ermolaev said. “How savvy are the students when it comes to workarounds? Are there windows in the bathroom that you can blow vape to?”

After asking The 74 for a list of detailed questions, Motorola did not provide answers in writing or otherwise and did not respond to follow-up requests for comment.

In its marketing efforts to schools, Motorola has highlighted as a resource districts could use to finance the HALO sensors, each of which cost about $1,000. The company has also from lawsuits against e-cigarette maker Juul. In 2022, Juul reportedly agreed to more than 5,000 lawsuits, including by school districts. Many alleged it knowingly and unlawfully advertised tobacco to minors.

School systems identified by Motorola as using Juul settlement money to buy the sensors include those in Stockton, California, and Fairfax, Virginia, from the tobacco company.  

Vape City

These days, Elijah Edminster works at Vape City, a chain with more than 250 locations in multiple states and ambitions to become “the #1 vape shop in the USA.” 

But a few years before he started selling vapes at the shop north of Austin — Edminster said he’s required to ID all his customers and none are underage — he was a high schooler who got sent to an alternative school as punishment for vaping. It all happened after he took a hit his junior year in the school’s main bathroom.

“None of our bathrooms have doors or anything so, you know, it’s all pretty open,” said Edminster, now 21. He said he met up with a classmate in a stall to buy a THC vape pen, “tested out the little thing,” and got caught by school staff on his way out the door. 

The school official “pulls us off to the side and starts questioning us, basically talking about how it was suspicious that we were in there,” said Edminster, who was 18 at the time. “And he was like, ‘Oh, I have this vape detector that goes off, yada yada, and it went off. So what does that mean?’” 

Edminster said he confessed after school officials threatened to call the police. Under a new state law, he was assigned to an alternative program housed in an “inactive, old elementary” school for a month. 

Thirty days is a long time to be away from regular classes, and the impact of schools’ punitive vaping crackdown has been particularly pronounced in Texas. School districts in the state have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to deploy sensors across hundreds of campuses, district procurement records show.  In 2023, Texas state leaders passed a law requiring that students, like Edminster, be placed in an alternative school if caught vaping on campus. 

The number of kids removed from traditional classrooms after the law was enacted — so high that state lawmakers backtracked this spring and returned vape-related disciplinary decisions to local districts. 

Andrew Hairston, the director of the Education Justice Project at the nonprofit Texas Appleseed, said the state’s two-year, anti-vaping enforcement effort has become “one of the most pressing things that we’re working on.” 

“A lot of parents are reaching out to us — or young people — and telling us that their entry into the school-to-prison pipeline is fueled by vaping,” Hairston said. “It’s just a really unfortunate reality, especially for so many working-class Black and brown families across the state who are disproportionately impacted by punitive vaping policies.”

A year after his first offense, Edminster said school administrators used a detector to bust him again, this time for trying to mask a vape cloud with cologne. He was suspended for three days. 

“I still smoke, I still vape, you know what I mean?” he said. “I’m trying to quit vaping, but ya, [getting suspended] didn’t really do too much. It definitely just made me try and stop at school — but not even that much.” 

Students should not be suspended for vaping but instead made to attend tobacco cessation programs, said Halpern-Felsher, the pediatrics professor behind the widely used tobacco prevention toolkit and director of . And even if kids are sent home — where they’re likely to vape more, she points out — they should still be offered help quitting in school.

Halpern-Felsher’s own data suggests the CDC’s teen vaping numbers are an undercount and, based on her conversations with educators, she’s challenged the narrative that the country is “going in the right direction.” 

She worries the vape detectors in school bathrooms could be tripped up by both false positives and negatives. While something as simple as hairspray could trigger an alarm, she said, delayed alerts could give school administrators bad information that could lead to disciplinary action against the wrong student. 

Minnesota’s own state health department has to stop youth vaping, as have two leading tobacco prevention organizations, and the American Lung Association. Last year, American Lung Association president and CEO Harold Wimmer called out vape detectors in particular. 

“Students need additional education about the health risks and to be provided with resources to help them quit for good,” he said in a statement. “Teens should not be punished for being addicted to a product that was aggressively marketed to them on social media, through celebrities and with kid-friendly flavors.”

‘I stopped, but it wasn’t a good stop’

Garrison Parthemore observed the prevalence of vaping in his Pennsylvania high school and felt the bad habit was changing the lives of his peers for the worse. So he teamed up with his brother and a friend to do something about it. 

 “Every time we’d walk into the school bathroom we were met with a cloud of smoke,” Parthemore told The 74 in an interview. “We knew if there’s a problem at our school, it’s probably a problem everywhere.” 

In 2020, the trio built a vape detector and entered their creation into a state STEM competition. The device came in third place and quickly found success after hitting the market in 2022. After undergoing a few upgrades, vape detectors became the flagship product of his company Triton Sensors, which claims it offers “the most accurate sensor to detect Vape, THC, Loitering, Crowding, Keywords, Aggression, Gunshots and More.” There are thousands of them in campus bathrooms across the country, including in the nation’s two largest school districts, New York City and Los Angeles. 

But don’t call Triton Sensors “vape detectors”: Pathemore said the label is “one of my pet peeves, honestly.” They’re much more than that, he maintains. He called vape detection the company’s “low-hanging fruit,” as it pursues a more ambitious goal of promoting safety in public bathrooms and other private spaces where cameras are prohibited and authorities “have no idea of really what’s going on.” 

He claimed Triton sensors allow school officials to know how many students are in the restrooms at any given time, even without a video feed. With sensors that pick up 20 different environmental factors — from air quality to gunshots —Parthemore said they’re able to capture “about 90% of what a camera can.” 

“I can tell you where they’re at in the room, I can tell you how long they’ve been there, so we can detect things like class cutting or overcrowding,” he said. A keyword detection feature allows the sensors to notify officials of an emergency. “If someone’s in trouble, they can yell ‘help me,’ or ‘stop it,’ or ‘emergency.’” 

Equipping the sensors with cameras, he said, is outside the equation and that the devices don’t collect “any personally identifiable information,” so while they can zero in on how many students might be in a bathroom at any given time, they don’t attempt to pinpoint individual students. 

Yet as manufacturers like Triton and HALO branch out beyond flagging fragrant vape plumes, they raise additional privacy concerns. A massive vulnerability in the latest Motorola-owned HALO sensors, which include the microphones designed to alert school staff to fights, school shootings and “aggression,” . 

At a conference in Las Vegas, hackers revealed how the devices suffered from a flaw that allowed them to hijack the HALO sensors’ microphones. Once that weakness was exploited, the duo were able to eavesdrop remotely and create fake alerts. Motorola responded almost immediately, it was rolling out updates after the sensors suffered “critical vulnerabilities” that allowed hackers to take control of the sensors “through brute-force attacks.” 

It’s this creeping surveillance that gives some students pause, even those who told The 74 they otherwise support vape detectors in bathrooms. The possibility of unknown capabilities with the sensors is “very scary to me” said Moledina, the Austin teen, who worries about a future where bathrooms come with cameras.

“Just knowing that there is vape smoke in the bathroom doesn’t really help you because the administrators already know it’s happening and just by knowing that it’s there isn’t going to help them find out who is doing it,” he said. “So my concern is that, at the end of the day, we’re going to end up having cameras in bathrooms, which is definitely not what we want.” 

Minneapolis educators have used surveillance cameras in conjunction with the sensors to identify students for vaping in the bathrooms, discipline logs show.  

In February, for example, a Roosevelt High School senior was suspended for a day based on accusations they hit a weed vape in the bathroom. Officials reviewed footage from a surveillance camera outside the bathroom and determined the student was “entering and exiting the bathroom during the timeframe that the detector went off.” They were searched and administrators found “a marijuana vape, an empty glass jar with a weed smell and a baggie with weed shake in it.” 

That same month, educators referred a Camden High School student to a drug and alcohol counselor for “vaping in the single stall bathrooms.” 

“After I reviewed the camera it does show [a] student leaving out that same stall bathroom,” campus officials reported. 

Gutierrez, the 18-year-old from Arizona, said she quit vaping after she was suspended and now copes with depression through positive means like painting. What she didn’t do, however, was quit because she received help at school for the mental health challenges that led her to vape in the first place.

She stopped vaping while she was suspended, she said, because she was away from her friends and lacked access. She was frightened into further compliance, Gutierrez recalled, by the online lessons depicting vaping as a gross, gooey purple monster that would poison her relationships. 

“Yes I stopped, but it wasn’t a good stop,” she said. “I didn’t get no support. I didn’t get no counseling. I stopped because I was scared.”

Arizona Autism Charter Schools, whose founder Diana Diaz-Harrison has been tapped to oversee the education of children with disabilities in President Donald Trump’s second administration, has used controversial, potentially dangerous disciplinary practices on its students at an unusually high rate. 

In the 2020-21 academic year, the latest for which federal data is available, school staff physically restrained 41% of its students and put 20% in seclusion, which is defined by the U.S. Department of Education as the involuntary confinement of a child, typically in a locked room. That’s 50% higher than the rate at which students are restrained and confined nationally. 

For 35 years, the U.S. Government Accountability Office and have documented in which students as young as 4 were injured, traumatized or even killed while being isolated or held down — often in response to nonviolent behavior. In states that ban the practices, educators typically are allowed to intervene if there is imminent danger of serious physical injury to the student or to others.

Many states — including Arizona — have outlawed or severely curtailed the circumstances under which the practices are allowed. In 2017, federal education officials warned that in restraint and seclusion likely constitute discrimination. Eighty percent of U.S. students who are physically restrained have disabilities, as do 77% of those secluded.  

In 2019, then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to address inappropriate restraint and seclusion in U.S. schools. In January 2025, her outgoing successor, Miguel Cardona, called on states and school districts to entirely. 

At the time the data was collected, the charter network founded by Diaz-Harrison had two schools serving 283 students, 116 of whom were restrained and 57 secluded. Ninety-nine of the schools’ 146 K-5 students, or 68%, had been restrained.

Located in the same area served by the Arizona Autism Charter Schools, the 27,000-student Phoenix Union High School District restrained three students in 2020-21 and secluded none. The nearby Mesa Unified District, with more than 50,000 students, restrained 93 and secluded 67. 

In August 2020, in the midst of the COVID pandemic, schools to reopen for students who had no other safe place to spend the day and to prioritize serving children with disabilities, many of whom had missed months of crucial special education services. Schools to in-person schooling on March 15, 2021.

Of Arizona’s 1 million K-12 students, 675 were restrained in 2020-21, as were 28,000 of 49 million children nationally. 

Ron Harrison, the interim CEO of Arizona Autism Charter Schools, noted that unlike most other schools, the student population of Arizona Autism Charter is comprised almost entirely of children who have autism or learning differences.  

“Our intervention rates may be higher than traditional schools because of the distinct student population we serve and our practice to err on the side of reporting every applicable incident, regardless of how minor,” wrote Harrison in a statement. “By comparison, underreporting of similar interventions is rampant nationally – especially among large school districts – and has been the subject of federal scrutiny.”

Harrison added that independently tracked parent satisfaction scores at Arizona Autism Charter schools “have never fallen below 92%” and most recently were higher than 97%.

Diaz-Harrison, who has taken a leave from Arizona Autism Charter to focus on her new federal role, did not respond to requests for comment.

Since 2020-21, Arizona Autism Charter Schools has grown to five schools enrolling nearly 1,000 students. The schools use a controversial intervention called applied behavior analysis, or ABA, that is opposed by many autistic adults as coercive and traumatizing. Created by the researcher behind LGBTQ conversion therapy, ABA attempts to train children to appear and behave like their neurotypical peers. It is widely depicted as the gold standard despite scant independent evidence of its effectiveness and mounting research documenting its harms. 

For a story announcing her appointment as the U.S. Education Department’s deputy assistant secretary for special education and rehabilitative services, Diaz-Harrsion provided a statement to The 74 applauding the approach. “For the autism community, specifically, many families seek schools that integrate positive behavioral strategies,” she said. “The evidence supporting behavioral therapy is extensive and well-established. It has been endorsed by the U.S. surgeon general and the American Academy of Pediatrics as an effective, research-backed approach for individuals with autism.”     

In 2010, the Association for Behavior Analysis International opposing “inappropriate” restraint and seclusion but supporting the interventions when used by ABA practitioners as part of a formal plan. 

“When used in the context of a behavior intervention plan, restraint in some cases serves both a protective and a therapeutic function,” the organization wrote. “These procedures can reduce risks of injury and can facilitate learning opportunities that support appropriate behavior.”

There is that restraint and seclusion have a positive effect on student behavior. Indeed, if the discipline is traumatizing, a child can manifest new behaviors, according to guidance from federal education officials.

“All of our teachers and staff members who interact with students are specially trained,” Harrison said. “When a behavioral intervention is required to ensure the safety of students or staff members, we follow strict protocols which are never punitive and always designed to de-escalate the situation.”

Federal education officials have school systems to train staff on de-escalation and to institute protocols for addressing inappropriate behavior without resorting to punitive measures. When a student with a disability is restrained or secluded, U.S. officials warn, it could mean that their special education plan may be insufficient or not providing the right services.

Editor’s Note: This story was updated on May 15, 2025 to include statements from Ron Harrison, the interim CEO of Arizona Autism Charter Schools.

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 .

As artificial intelligence tools become more common in schools, most teachers say their districts have adopted guidance and training for both educators and students, by the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology. What this guidance lacks, however, are clear instructions on how teachers should respond if they suspect a student used generative AI to cheat. 

“Though there has been positive movement, schools are still grappling with how to effectively implement generative AI in the classroom — making this a critical moment for school officials to put appropriate guardrails in place to ensure that irresponsible use of this technology by teachers and students does not become entrenched,” report co-authors Maddy Dwyer and Elizabeth Laird write.

Among the middle and high school teachers who responded to the online survey, which was conducted in November and December, 60% said their schools permit the use of generative AI for schoolwork — double the number who said the same just five months earlier on a similar survey. And while a resounding 80% of educators said they have received formal training about the tools, including on how to incorporate generative AI into assignments, just 28% said they’ve received instruction on how to respond if they suspect a student has used ChatGPT to cheat. 

That doesn’t mean, however, that students aren’t getting into trouble. Among survey respondents, 64% said they were aware of students who were disciplined or faced some form of consequences — including not receiving credit for an assignment — for using generative AI on a school assignment. That represents a 16 percentage-point increase from August. 

The tools have also affected how educators view their students, with more than half saying they’ve grown distrustful of whether their students’ work is actually theirs. 

Fighting fire with fire, a growing share of teachers say they rely on digital detection tools to sniff out students who may have used generative AI to plagiarize. Sixty-eight percent of teachers — and 76% of licensed special education teachers — said they turn to generative AI content detection tools to determine whether students’ work is actually their own. 

The findings carry significant equity concerns for students with disabilities, researchers concluded, especially in the face of are ineffective.

The Minnesota House of Representatives voted 124-8 Monday afternoon to approve legislation that removes a ban on school resource officers using prone restraint on students. The bill now moves to the Senate for consideration.

Nearly four years after George Floyd suffocated to death while being pinned face down to the pavement by a police officer, Minnesota Democrats are fast-tracking legislation that would undo a less-than-year-old ban prohibiting school-based cops from using that same type of restraint on students. 

As early as Monday, the state’s House of Representatives is slated to consider a proposal that presents a drastic departure by Democratic Gov. Tim Walz — rules that explicitly barred school resource officers from using face-down “prone restraint.”

The ban was part of a broader police reform movement that followed Floyd’s murder. The fatal physical hold led to the largest civil rights protest in U.S. history, a national reckoning on racism, policy reforms that sought to address police brutality and, in Minneapolis and dozens of districts nationwide, the removal of sworn officers from school campuses. In Minnesota, new state rules barred police officers from using chokeholds on people and prone restraints were banned in the state’s prisons. 

Now, as the state’s Democrats make a 180-degree turn on the campus reform, education equity advocates have accused state leaders of falling to the political pressure of law enforcement groups ahead of a November election where party lawmakers seek to maintain their narrow majority in the state House. The proposal cleared the House Ways and Means committee earlier this week. 

Physical restraints have for children including injury and, in some cases, death. Yet for Republican lawmakers and law enforcement, the change in Minnesota went a step too far. Police departments statewide pulled their cops from schools in protest of the restraint restriction. 

During a recent Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee hearing, Democratic Sen. Bonnie Westlin, lead sponsor of the Senate version of the bill that would restore prone restraints in schools, presented it less as a backtrack and more as an opportunity. The issue is about ensuring campus cops remain “important team members in our schools,” Westlin said, while creating uniformity across school resource officers’ duties, their training requirements and accountability.  

Along with removing restraint rules for school-based police and campus security staff, the pending legislation would allocate $150,000 this year to develop consistent, statewide training standards for school resource officers and require police to complete the lessons before working on campuses. The bill also seeks to clarify that school-based police officers should not be involved in routine student discipline. 

“When a local community determines that they would like to engage SROs, we want to make sure there is uniformity about expectations for everyone concerned,” Westlin said.

Advocates who lauded the prone restraint ban, however, say that lawmakers have turned their backs on Floyd’s legacy. 

“How is it that — in the state where this man gets killed and the world erupted — that we are not the leading people who are banning this on our kids?” asked advocate Khulia Pringle, the Minnesota director of the National Parents Union and a steering committee member of the Solutions Not Suspensions Coalition, a group of education nonprofits that has lobbied against the legislation. “It’s banned in prisons, it’s banned for students with disabilities. 

“Why can’t we extend that same courtesy to all children?” 

The ‘fix’

Presented by Democratic leaders as an “SRO fix” bill, the proposal comes after police departments got wind of the restraint ban last fall — an under-the-radar change in a larger education bill that passed without opposition. In response, about 40 law enforcement agencies removed their school resource officers from campuses. 

, school resource officers and campus security personnel are prohibited from using face-down prone restraints and “certain physical holds,” including those that restrict or impair “a pupil’s ability to breathe” or their “ability to communicate distress.” 

The ban represented an extension of state rules that have been on the books for years. In 2015, after that “it is only a matter of time before a Minnesota child is seriously injured or killed while in prone restraint,” lawmakers banned educators from using the technique on children with disabilities. Nationally, that curtail educators from using prone restraints and other tactics that restrict students’ breathing. 

In Washington, D.C., Democratic lawmakers have sought for years to pass . Nationally, about 35,000 students were placed in physical restraints at school during the 2020-21 school year, from the Education Department’s civil rights office. Black students represented 15% of K-12 school enrollment and 21% of those placed in physical holds. Meanwhile, students with disabilities represented 14% of the national enrollment — and 81% of those subjected to restraints. 

After the new changes were put in place in Minnesota and students returned to classes last fall, law enforcement agencies argued it stirred confusion among their ranks, opened their departments to lawsuits and tied their officers’ hands in how they work to keep schools safe and combat crimes like vandalism. Republican lawmakers seized on the furor and demanded a special legislative session to repeal the law. 

The Coon Rapids Police Department, located in a northern Minneapolis suburb, is among the agencies that removed its officers from schools. That decision was reversed and the agency’s four campus cops after the state attorney general issued a clarification on the law’s limits. The school resource officer program was put on hold temporarily last fall in part because of how officers are trained to do their jobs, Captain of Investigations Tanya Harmoning told The 74. She said she wasn’t sure how often prone restraint had been used by her officers inside schools. Regardless of whether an officer is stationed inside a school building or on a city street, she said, they “are all trained in the same tactics.” 

“Our officers are trained a certain way to handle certain situations,” she said. “Some of these people transition back out onto the road, so to expect them to transition from ‘you can do it here, but you can’t do it here,’ kind of thing, that’s just not how we train our people.”

In last fall, Attorney General Keith Ellison clarified that the ban didn’t restrict officers from using prone restraints in cases involving imminent harm or death, which offered assurances to many law enforcement agencies that agreed to return officers to schools. 

The special session that Republicans and police brass demanded didn’t come to fruition but the issue has become a top priority this year for Gov. Walz and his Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which controls both chambers of the state legislature. 

State officials and education leaders have sought to frame the debate as being not about prone restraint, but rather the need to get police back in schools. 

‘The voices of all stakeholders’

When Democratic Rep. Cedrick Frazier appeared before the House Education Policy Committee in mid-February, he acknowledged the timing of his testimony: “We are not far removed,” he said, “from the tragic murder of George Floyd.” 

He pivoted to a state law passed in response that banned police from using chokeholds — rules that he said were critical to their discussions about school-based police. With the chokehold ban in place, he suggested the prone restraint prohibition was unnecessary. 

“The tension and anxiety that has been discussed, in large part, stems from the egregious visual of that tragic day,” Frazier testified. But even without a ban on prone restraints, he said that state law would continue to prohibit school-based officers from pinning students to the ground in ways that restrict breathing.

“Our only focus must be doing everything we can to ensure that while our young people are in our schools, that we ensure that their environment is safe from any type of harm,” Frazier said. “We must ensure our young people have the best environment to have the best possible outcomes.” 

His testimony didn’t explicitly touch on prone restraints or why police needed greater autonomy around their use in classrooms. Representatives for Frazier and the governor didn’t respond to requests for comment and state Sen. Westlin’s office declined an interview request. 

In his testimony, Education Commissioner Willie Jett focused on schools’ need for campus police officers and the bill’s new training requirements. He, too, didn’t touch specifically on restraint procedures. 

“SROs are viewed by many as essential to maintaining safe and secure learning environments and data from the tells us that an overwhelming majority of students from all demographic areas value the SROs in their schools,” Jett said. 

In Minnesota, state education officials have sought to reduce schools’ reliance on restraint tactics for years. The reveal that students with disabilities were subjected to more than 10,000 physical restraints during the 2021-22 school year, with such holds disproportionately used on Black and Indigenous students. Frequently, , these holds result in injuries — and more often for adults than children. During the 2021-22 school year, districts reported 733 staff injuries from placing students in restraints — a rate that equates to about one staff injury for every 14 physical holds. That same year, 161 students were reported injured.  

Frazier’s work leading the reform bill appears to be at odds with his broader championing of policing and public safety. After Floyd’s murder, Frazier became known in the state as in favor or progressive police reforms, often drawing on his personal experiences with inequities growing up as a Black teen on Chicago’s South Side. In September, as police agencies statewide began pulling officers from schools, Frazier signaled his support for the new prone restraint ban. The House People of Color and Indigenous Caucus, which Frazier co-chairs, released a statement expressing that same sentiment.

“The provision in the education bill passed earlier this year related to school personnel is clear: School staff, including school resource officers, are not allowed to use prone restraints,” or other holds that restrict a student’s ability to breathe, the caucus wrote in the statement, which bore Frazier’s name. Given the attorney general’s opinion extending SROs’ authority to restrain kids in serious cases, the group wrote, “changes to the law are not needed.”

In Republican’s unsuccessful bid to force a special legislative session, they found common ground with Education Minnesota, the state teacher’s union, which noted that on how to protect themselves and students during potentially dangerous situations. In 2021, union spokesperson Chris Williams told The 74 the group was concerned about “the ongoing racial disparities that we know exist in the use of restrictive procedures,” and noted support for rules that prohibited prone restraint in classrooms. 

Williams didn’t respond to a list of questions about the pending legislation introduced by Frazier who, along with being a state representative, works as a . 

‘Prone kills kids’

When Matt Shaver testified at the House education committee last month, he opened with a grim warning: “Prone kills kids.”

“We are advocates for kids — and prone kills kids,” said Shaver, the policy director of the nonprofit EdAllies, which is a member of the Solutions Not Suspensions Coalition working to maintain the current prone restraint ban. “This is not about whether SROs belong in schools,” as lawmakers and state education officials have cast the conversation, he said. “This is about whether we believe holds that kill children belong in school.” 

Shaver cited which examined childhood fatalities that stemmed from physical restraints over a 26-year period. Researchers identified 79 incidents where restraints led to deaths in settings including foster homes, psychiatric agencies and schools. Deaths were most common when children were held in the face-down prone restraints — and most often for benign childhood behaviors like failing to remain silent or sit without wriggling. Investigations into the fatalities found that adults routinely failed to follow proper restraint policies and laws. 

“In 15 fatalities, children vomited, urinated or turned blue during the restraint,” researchers concluded in the 2021 study, which was published in the academic journal Child & Youth Care Forum. “These signals should have been detected by an adult monitoring these events and immediately triggered a change in tactics or discontinuation of the restraint.”

Shaver told The 74 he believes the Democrats are reacting to the politics of the police “work stoppage” and a desire not to appear soft on crime ahead of the November election. That has placed them in the position, he said, of wanting to overturn the restraint restriction, but “not in a way that will freak out their base.” 

“They may have failed at doing that,” Shaver said.

In about a third of Florida school districts, and concentrated in rural panhandle enclaves like Daniels’s Liberty County, corporal punishment as a form of student discipline remains deeply ingrained in the culture. It’s why on this morning in early December, school leaders instructed the 18-year-old to bend over a desk.

What came next — a paddling that left deep purple bruises and welts for a minor school offense that Daniels said stemmed from a misunderstanding about Christmas decorations on a campus door — was far beyond routine student discipline, the Liberty County High School senior told The 74.

It was, she alleges, sexual assault. 

“They were so eager to go in there and spank me,” said Daniels, who said she was struck by Assistant Principal Tim Davis, a former Major League Baseball player who pitched for the , while Principal Eric Willis observed and laughed. “They took their time, they watched me.”

Liberty County School District officials didn’t respond to multiple interview requests. Reached by The 74 on his cell phone, Davis declined to comment on the incident or allegations that his use of force was sexual assault.  

The incident, which has sparked controversy in Florida’s least populous county roughly 50 miles west of Tallahassee, comes as state lawmakers debate the fate of rules that have long permitted teachers to spank students as a disciplinary measure. A significant body of research suggests that corporal punishment has the opposite effect of improving student behaviors and a data analysis by The 74 shows in parts of Florida, it’s most often used to address minor infractions like “excessive talking,” “insubordination” and “horse play.” 

where laws explicitly allow educators to use corporal punishment on students, and the practice is not expressly prohibited by laws in an additional seven states, according to by the U.S. Department of Education. In a letter last year, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona urged state lawmakers and school leaders “to move swiftly toward condemning and eliminating” a practice that “can lead to serious physical pain and injury,” is associated with heightened mental health issues, stunted brain development and hindered academic performance. Nationally, federal data show that corporal punishment is disproportionately used on students of color and those with disabilities. 

Prompted by the advocacy of two Florida college students, there is now , where roughly a third of districts use corporal punishment to discipline kids, that would require educators to get permission from parents each year before spanking their children. The measure would also ban the use of physical force on students with disabilities. The bill garnered unanimous support in a state House subcommittee last month. Yet a companion bill in the Senate has remained stalled and lawmakers worry the effort will falter this legislative session — as similar efforts have for years. 

Rep. Katherine Waldron, a Democrat who co-sponsored the bipartisan bill, said the subcommittee hearing was the furthest any effort to reform state corporal punishment rules has gotten to date. She credited the momentum to student advocacy, and specifically to the University of Florida students who launched a statewide campaign to change the law. 

“It’s great that we have this level of student involvement in the whole process and they’re really helping to push the bill and they’re learning a lot,” Waldron said. “Any time we have that kind of momentum for a good bill like this, I think representatives should pay attention and try to help.” 

In Liberty County, Daniels said that school officials accused her of lying to a substitute teacher and using her position in the school honor society to get her friend out of class to help with the holiday decorating. When school administrators approached her about the incident a week later, they gave her two options: in-school suspension or corporal punishment — a choice she said left her feeling coerced. The entire incident stemmed from an honest misunderstanding, she said, and accepting in-school suspension would have required her to miss an exam for a dual-enrollment college class and to be late for work at Chick-fil-A. 

She chose to get spanked. 

“As soon as it happened, I really just felt sexually assaulted. I felt disgusted with myself that I even kind of gave them permission,” said Daniels, who transitioned to online-only instruction after the incident and fears she may someday run into Davis or Willis at their small-town grocery store. Daniels has spoken out against corporal punishment in Florida schools and her paddling . Her mother calling on lawmakers to ban the “systemic issue prevalent across 19 school districts in Florida.” 

“I felt like they really just got off by it,” Daniels said, adding that a parent could face child protective services investigations for leaving similar bruises on their kid. “I don’t even think I could look them in the eyes now, not even now. And you know about my senior year, after the situation I really truly started realizing, I’m not going to have a senior year anymore.” 

‘You can get a paddling’

In recent years there have been numerous cases in Florida that resemble the one involving Daniels. Yet even in districts where parents can opt their children out of being hit as a form of discipline — and even in incidents where parents accuse educators of going too far — law enforcement officials have pointed to a state law permitting the practice. Kristina Vann, Daniels’s mother, said she had not given Liberty County educators consent to hit her daughter.

That didn’t stop Assistant Principal Davis from drawing the paddle. 

Daniels reported the incident to the Liberty County Sheriff’s Office and, in an interview with The 74, Undersheriff Robert “Dusty” Arnold acknowledged the agency looked into the case but said they don’t plan to pursue criminal charges. He called the case “a non-issue” involving a permitted form of discipline that Daniels had consented to. The entire incident, he said, was “being blown out of proportion.” 

“It’s the state law,” Arnold said in an interview. “And if you choose to take a paddling, you can get a paddling. My understanding is she was given options and she chose that.”

Sam Boyd, a supervising attorney at the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center, which has in Florida and nationally, said he’s aware of “a fact pattern” of corporal punishment incidents “that may be much more of a serious sexual assault than punishment.” 

The case involving Daniels, who is an adult in the eyes of the law, presents its own set of complicated legal questions, he said. 

“To the extent that schools are stepping in for parents, if that’s the theory behind corporal punishment, it’s hard to see how that makes any sense in the context of people who are legally adults,” he said. “As a policy matter, it doesn’t make any sense to be using corporal punishment against adults, although of course it doesn’t in our view, make any sense to be using it against minors either.” 

Florida’s law permitting corporal punishment in schools has been used in previous incidents to shield educators from criminal charges. In 2018, for example, against a Lake County bus monitor who was accused of using in ways that constituted child abuse, including grabbing children by their faces, twisting their heads and pushing them against a wall in the bus. Prosecutors concluded that the state law superseded a school district policy banning corporal punishment. 

Three years later, in 2021, an elementary school principal in Hendry County was caught on video spanking a 6-year-old girl with a wooden paddle despite a district policy prohibiting such actions. Although the state corporal punishment law requires educators to comply with local district rules, prosecutors declined to pursue charges and claimed the girl’s mother — an undocumented immigrant who filmed the encounter and shared the footage with a local television station — had consented to the beating and at no point spoke up to “raise any objection.” 

The Hendry County incident prompted an investigation by The 74, which revealed numerous incidents where students had been subjected to corporal punishment in school districts across the country where that practice had been outlawed. 

For University of Florida student Graham Bernstein, that investigation served as a wake-up call. The Hendry County incident coincided with another failed legislative effort to ban corporal punishment and he felt that more needed to be done to stop the practice, he told The 74. He joined up with a classmate, Konstantin Nakov, and wrote the bill now pending in Tallahassee that the duo hopes will persuade state officials to view Florida’s history of corporal punishment in a different light. 

The business of hitting kids

First, Bernstein and Nakov set out to get a better understanding of corporal punishment in Florida which, according to state data, was used to punish 509 students last school year.

Through emails and public records requests with districts statewide, the students found that the practice was being used to discipline the same students repeatedly — about half of whom were in special education — and often for minor classroom infractions. In Columbia County, records shared with The 74 revealed, spanking was primarily reserved for elementary school students. Of the 824 incidents of corporal punishment in the north central Florida county between August 2018 and May 2022, 84% were attributed to minor infractions including the use of inappropriate language, disrupting the classroom environment and inappropriate use of electronic devices. Fewer than 13% of incidents were initiated after a student hit a classmate.

The practice was also used more than a dozen times at Pathways Academy, an alternative education program in Columbia County that it specifically serves students “with behavior, academic and attendance barriers” and those with disabilities who need additional support “to overcome their own barriers.” 

Columbia County school district officials didn’t respond to requests for comment about their corporal punishment practices. 

While previous efforts to ban corporal punishment in Florida schools have focused on the research suggesting it’s an ineffective disciplinary tool and has negative consequences for students, Bernstein and Nakov used another tact to get support from Republicans, who represent the rural, predominantly conservative counties where the practice is primarily used. 

They took a page from GOP Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s playbook and presented the issue as one of parental rights.

“I don’t know what it is about conservative Republicans, but some of them just think that it’s a good disciplinary intervention to strike children,” Bernstein said. “A big emphasis has been recently on the whole idea of parental rights and making it so the government doesn’t have the ability to do something without a parent agreeing to it. And so we thought we can apply that here. … Especially with some of these more conservative legislators, who are really zealous supporters of this idea of parental rights, let’s test their rhetoric against them and see if it sticks.” 

Still, getting buy-in from lawmakers wasn’t easy, said Nakov, who graduated from the University of Florida last year and now attends medical school in Bradenton, Florida. He and Bernstein have spent the last several years sending emails to legislative offices and taking road trips to the statehouse to speak with potential sponsors. 

Rep. Mike Beltran, a Republican from Apollo Beach who co-sponsored the bill, said the legislation fits in line with other efforts in Florida to bolster parental rights. 

“I don’t think the parents should spank the kids either, but certainly the school should not be doing it and certainly the school should not be doing it without the parents’ approval or knowledge,” Beltran said. “There’s no due process — there’s no due process at all — and you’re going to spank them?”

If Florida bans corporal punishment and educators fail to comply, Beltran said that students and parents should “sue their pants off.” 

‘I took it very easy on her’

Back in Liberty County, Brooklynn Daniels’s mother used a school communication platform to confront Davis on the way he spanked her daughter. In a text chat on the app ParentSquare that she shared with The 74, Vann offered the assistant principal photographic proof that her daughter’s “butt is red all over,” from the paddling. Davis declined the photo and defended his actions. 

“I can assure you I took it very easy on her,” Davis wrote. “I’m teased by staff in the front office about how soft I swing a paddle and I took it especially easy on Brooklyn, as I do with any female.” 

Vann was floored at his characterization, especially given Davis’s career in professional baseball in the 1990s, which also included stints with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and . 

“That man went from swinging bats for a living to beating children,” she said. “So how do I know where he went to school to learn how to — instead of hitting a baseball out into the outfield — to gently swing a paddle to hit my kid?” 

Vann sees insular, hometown favoritism at the root of how school leaders handled her daughter and defended Davis, a Liberty County High School alumnus. The family moved to the rural county from urban Tallahassee — and longtime residents, Vann said, resented Brooklynn.

“She’s made homecoming twice, she’s a cheerleader, she’s well known in the community. She’s made her mark here and she’s not from Liberty County,” she said. “We have what they call the good ol’ boys system here. If you’re not born and raised here, they’re not going to protect you and they don’t like you. They don’t like outsiders.” 

To Undersheriff Arnold, a fourth-generation Liberty County resident, the culture of school corporal punishment contributes to a polite community where people refer to others by “sir” and “ma’am.” He recalled the times when he was paddled inside the local schools, where he and other students were sternly punished “if you got out of line.” 

“It’s a lot of what our country is missing now: Too many people get away with too many things and there’s no punishment for anything, there’s no accountability for anything anymore,” Arnold said. “When you’re held accountable, it keeps you in check.” 

Arnold said he isn’t aware of any other instances in the county where a student reported school corporal punishment to law enforcement. He described the incident involving Daniels as one where a high school beauty pageant contestant has sought to rake in views and likes on social media. He offered a steadfast endorsement of local education leaders, adding that he’s “a little bit passionate when it comes to our school district.” 

“I know what kind of school we have, I have children at that school, and I trust those individuals with my kids’ lives,” he said. “They are good people — they are really good people. They don’t want to do anything else in this county but help these children get an education.”

Yet for Daniels, she can’t get away from the thick wooden paddle and the bruises it left on her body.

“It was black and blue and purple and yellow and you could see where all the bruises had already started forming” in just minutes, she said, after she left the principal’s office and rushed into a school bathroom.

“It’s insane how hard they hit me.”

After a school year unlike any other, we’ve begun a summer sprint unlike anything we’ve seen — to reconnect with students, to rebuild trust with families and to reboot efforts to repair the learning losses from the darkest days of the pandemic. Our most widely shared article in June touched on this very issue of learning recovery, and whether it’s better to focus on remedial education or accelerating learning. Other standouts this month: An analysis of where schools were (and weren’t) closed for in-person learning last academic year, how COVID led some teachers to change the way they were teaching reading, and profiles of educators in Tulsa who insist they’re committed to teaching “hard” history even as state lawmakers push legislation restricting anti-racist instruction amid the anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre.

Here were our most popular articles of the month:

A Better Equation: New Pandemic Data Supports Acceleration Rather than Remediation to Make Up for COVID Learning Loss

Learning Recovery: In a new report, researchers have some advice for education leaders. As they decide how to spend their federal stimulus dollars and address learning losses in the school year to come, they should consider the lackluster impact of remediation — the typical gap-closing practice of making up missed material before moving on — and emerging evidence suggesting there’s a better way. TNTP and Zearn analyzed the experiences of 2 million students during the current academic year and found that, on Zearn’s math app, classrooms featuring acceleration — a strategy in which students are challenged by grade-level lessons and instructed in specific missing skills as needed — saw dramatic growth. Students receiving this kind of support completed over 25 percent more grade-level work than they would have using remediation. By contrast, students in remediation continued to struggle. Beth Hawkins talks to the team behind the report about their findings.

School Closures: Through the pandemic, schools in Republican states offered in-person learning at nearly twice the rate of those in Democratic states, according to new data, for those students. The numbers, provided to The 74 by the school calendar tracking website Burbio, deliver a cumulative view of schooling decisions throughout COVID-19 and reinforce evidence of a partisan divide long highlighted by researchers. Averaged from September through May, states that voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election gave students the chance to learn in the classroom 74.5 percent of the time, compared to 37.6 percent of the time in states that voted for Joe Biden. The full impact of that disparity remains largely unmeasured, says Chad Aldeman, policy director at Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. But he suspects the effects on students could be vast. “Time is a rough proxy for learning,” he told The 74’s Asher Lehrer-Small. “So lost instructional time is likely to lead to lost learning.” .

Falling Birth Rates Spur Clash over Race and School Choice in Michigan

Enrollment: America’s birth rates have trended downward since the onset of the Great Recession, and the crashing fertility is increasingly forcing school districts to adjust to lower student enrollment. The problem is reaching a head in Michigan, where hundreds of communities are now home to fewer children than they were a decade ago. But the state’s unique policy environment — in which families have an abundance of school choice, and money follows students wherever they go — makes things even more complicated. The example of Grosse Pointe, one of the most highly regarded school systems in Michigan, is instructive: Local leaders had already seen a years-long enrollment decline in 2019, when they opted to close two elementary schools. But some wonder why the district wouldn’t simply open its under-capacity schools to children from nearby Detroit — the overwhelming majority of whom are nonwhite and from low-income families. One parent told The 74’s Kevin Mahnken that she doubted the community would ever allow it: “We’re bordered on one side by Detroit, and the other side is the lake; people would rather welcome the fish.” Read our full report.

—‘We are becoming grayer’: Shrinking birth rates and shuttered schools in New Hampshire offer preview for the nation

Remote Learning: “Tigers, today we’re going to keep unpacking the alphabetic code,” first-grade teacher Victor De La Cerda told a lively group of 6-year-olds — some in person, others on Zoom. “Watch my mouth,” he said, making a long “u” sound. The idea was to focus on the spelling “u_e,” as in “cute” — one of the four ways the sound can be rendered. If the children didn’t get it, no problem — the class would revisit the skill soon, in a future lesson, following a structured approach that which he learned in graduate school. But as a teacher in Texas, he’s smack dab in the middle of what some have called the latest chapter in the reading wars, the multi-decade battle — freshly complicated by the pandemic — over whether structure or curiosity best teaches kids to read. .

The Truth is Out There. But With New UFO Report Expected to Land Soon, Talk of Alien Life is Also Becoming More Common in the Nation’s Science Classrooms

Student Engagement: Few topics stimulate debate among Alec Johnson’s students like the possibility of interplanetary visitors observing us from above. “The kids get into it, especially if you don’t take a side,” says Johnson, a Georgia astronomy teacher and one of many science educators who finds that asking “Are we alone?” is a great way to engage students. The government’s upcoming release of an intelligence report on “unidentified aerial phenomena” will give teachers like Johnson new material for discussions about UFOs and the math and science principles involved in traveling to Earth from another galaxy. Teachers introduce students to the solar system in elementary school and go into greater depth in middle school. But in high school, full astronomy courses aren’t common, and science teachers who build lessons on the subject often have a personal interest. Johnson enhances his classroom experience with “The X-Files” theme music and told reporter Linda Jacobson, “Any self-respecting astronomy teacher has to have a Fox Mulder poster on the wall.” Read the full report.

College Enrollment Continues to Plunge, Marking the Worst Single-Year Decline Since 2011

Higher Education: Hopes that college enrollment would begin to indicate some signs of resilience in the face of a waning pandemic were dashed again when the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center released more detailed numbers this month The fuller data set for spring 2021 shows that overall college enrollment fell by 603,000 students, from 17.5 million to 16.9 million — a drop that is seven times worse than the year before, when the pandemic first hit, and marks the steepest year-over-year decline since 2011, the first year the center began keeping track. Community colleges, which enroll the greatest percentages of low-income students and students of color, were hit hardest, declining 9.5 percent, or 476,000 fewer students. More than 65 percent of all undergraduate enrollment losses this spring occurred among community colleges. Author and 74 contributor Richard Whitmire reports on the persistently bad news, wondering, “will enrollments ever recover?” Read the full report.

Analysis: Tutoring, Summer School, Pods — Survey Finds Parents Aren’t So Thrilled About Most K-12 COVID Recovery Solutions on the Table

Innovation: One lesson from the ongoing crisis of school hesitancy is just how influential parents are in determining their children’s educational pathways. Education leaders must factor in parents’ perspectives, or reopening can be a flop — students won’t show up. So contributors Anna Rosefsky Saavedra and Morgan Polikoff asked the Understanding America Study’s nationally representative sample of some 1,500 K-12 parents how they feel about a range of practices. Many of the results are surprising: Parents are not very enthusiastic about in-person summer school, tutoring or pods, and they’re not thrilled about added instructional time or most other policies under consideration, either. But remote tutoring scored high in the survey, and parents want to use technology for teacher conferences; storage, organization and distribution of class materials; and as an alternate means for keeping school open when the weather is bad. Half of parents support allowing students to work on their own time, without a teacher physically present. What these results make clear is that education leaders need to talk to parents to figure out what programs and policies they would support before creating COVID-19-relief programs. Otherwise, participation may be far too weak to really move the needle on students’ academic and social/emotional needs. Read the full analysis.

History: When Tulsa, Oklahoma fifth-grade teacher Akela Leach began her lesson this month on the race massacre that wiped out the city’s Greenwood District 100 years ago, . The state had recently passed a controversial bill that observers described as an “antiracism teaching ban,” part of a wave of legislation from Republican lawmakers across the country intended to limit classroom discussion of systemic racism. When Leach explained that the law would not prevent the class from learning about the 1921 Race Massacre, she was met with cheers from students. Leach said her fifth-graders thought: “I’m learning something that someone doesn’t want me to learn, so this must be really, really important.” The 74’s Asher Lehrer-Small reports on how Leach and others in Tulsa .

Math Proficiency: Christopher Ochoa of McAllen, Texas, has loved mathematics since he was a child, his interest fueled by summer math camps and trips to Space Center Houston. . “When you’re in the classroom, you can ask a question, go to the whiteboard with your teacher and he’ll work through it with you,” he told 74 contributor Jo Napolitano. “Now, when you ask a question, you have to unmute your mic and you can’t see the teacher face to face or make eye contact.” Teachers say pandemic-related setbacks in math will linger well into the coming school year, especially for students who suffered the most during shutdowns. Unable to peer over their students’ shoulders and correct their work, math teachers lost the ability to offer on-the-spot tutorials. The results showed: A November NWEA study of fall 2020 test scores for nearly 4.4 million children in grades 3 through 8 found they lagged 5 to 10 points in math compared with students in the prior year. .

Miami Data Could Offer Dire Warning of ‘Unfinished Learning’ Nationwide, With 54% of District Students Testing Below Grade Level in Math

Learning Loss: Florida’s Miami-Dade County Public Schools reported earlier this month that 43 percent of students in pre-K to 3 who took reading tests in January scored below grade level in reading, and 54 percent were below grade level in math. As 74 contributor Greg Toppo reports, the data from the nation’s fourth-largest district could be a bellwether for schools across the U.S. “The national trends are pointing in a direction at least as severe as what’s happening in Miami-Dade, and likely more severe,” said Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates, a Massachusetts-based firm whose tests are used in schools in the district and elsewhere nationwide. Read the full report.

Cicadas During COVID — A ‘Golden Moment’ For Classroom Engagement At the End of an Isolating School Year

Science: For teachers in places where the Brood X periodical cicadas emerged this spring, the timing has been perfect: After a long year of virtual lessons, flagging student engagement and ongoing stress, a real-life science lesson has crawled out of the ground — and started singing. Teachers around the eastern United States have found lessons about the bugs, which students can see, hear and touch in the schoolyard, are a boon for student engagement. Even kids watching their teachers interact with cicadas through Zoom “come alive” at the sight of the insects, one teacher said. “It just turns into a real magical experience” when kids can encounter nature without fear, another said. Read Laura Fay’s full report.

Go Deeper: Every month, we round up our most popular and shared articles from the past four weeks. See our top highlights from March, April, and May right here. 

Looming decisions over how schools should prioritize federal relief funds, emerging plans for how to catch kids up this summer and a new supreme court case surrounding students’ free speech rights — these were just a few of the biggest storylines we covered in May. And our most popular item this month: An emotional tribute from families about the educators who helped them get through the darkest days of the pandemic.

From new research surrounding the downside of four-day school weeks to multiple stories about student discipline — and school discipline reform — here were our most popular articles of the month:

‘She Made Me Feel Like I Wasn’t Entirely Alone’: 10 Students and Families Pay Tribute to the Teachers Who Helped Them Endure the Pandemic

Teacher Appreciation: As the mother of a teen with Down syndrome, Krystal Gurganus has seen her son Landon face his share of challenges. So it came as a shock when special education teacher Hannah Land taught Landon to read this year, via Zoom. “I’ve never heard my child read before. And he’s 14 years old,” she said. “So this was in that moment when I was sitting beside him on a computer, and I hear him read an actual story for the very first time … it was mind-blowing that this teacher was able to engage my child through a screen.” Every year, teachers like Land touch countless students’ lives with inspiring lessons, heartfelt advice and ice cream parties — but amid COVID-19, those gestures took on new meaning. From an art teacher who helped a student come to terms with her father’s death to an educator who moved out of her home so she could educate kids in person and another who bought tablets for her student’s siblings, parents and students from around the country shared stories about the educators who helped them get through the pandemic school year. Laura Fay introduces these 10 amazing teachers.

Early Look at District Plans to Spend Billions in Federal Relief Funds Shows Lack of Focus on Learning Recovery

School Funding: States have until Monday to distribute $81 billion in federal relief funds to districts — two-thirds of the total for K-12 schools in the American Rescue Plan. And while the law requires districts to allocate 20 percent of their funding on learning loss, the Georgetown Edunomics Lab’s early review of spending plans shows they’re not prioritizing efforts to help students catch up, such as tutoring and extending the school year. Rather, they are using the money to fill budget gaps, hire staff and issue “thank you” bonuses to teachers. The relief bill, passed in March, represents the largest-ever, one-time influx of federal funds for K-12, setting up a “fast and furious” planning process for districts over the next few months, said Edunomics Lab Director Marguerite Roza. Meanwhile, leaders are facing heightened scrutiny from parents and advocacy groups looking to hold leaders accountable for the funds, and districts are expected to make extensive efforts to get input from parents, educators and students, Roza said. “That means districts can’t go into a dark, smoke-filled room and make a plan.” Read Linda Jacobson’s full report.

Kids Keep Getting Hit at School, Even Where Corporal Punishment is Banned

Student Safety: Video of a Florida elementary school principal spanking a 6-year-old with a wooden paddle last month sparked national outrage and calls for her arrest. Though the district where the paddling took place prohibits corporal punishment, the state does not, and the principal was not criminally charged. The incident highlights a troubling reality across the country: Even in states and districts where corporal punishment is banned, kids are still getting hit in school. About a dozen districts in states where the practice is outlawed reported using it on students more than 300 times during the 2017-18 school year, according to a 74 analysis of the most recent civil rights data from the U.S. Department of Education. Of those, Chicago Public Schools accounted for the lion’s share, with children in the nation’s third-largest district struck 226 times in school that year. In Louisiana, where paddling is permitted except on students with disabilities, data show that special education students were hit nearly 100 times in 2017-18. While the practice has its proponents among some educators and those who cite parental rights, considerable research shows its harmful effect on children — and students of color and those with disabilities are disproportionately subjected to it. “It’s barbaric, and it opens the door to abuse,” the Florida lawyer representing the mother of the girl who was paddled told Mark Keierleber. Read our full report.

Cleveland’s Kinder, Gentler Summer School: District Mixes Pure Academics With Enrichment Activities to Entice Kids Back to Class after COVID Struggles

Accelerating Learning: Summer schools face a huge challenge in overcoming academic shortfalls after a school year disrupted by the pandemic. But in Cleveland, and some other districts around the country, summer classes are being combined with fun projects and activities like sports, arts and neighborhood-improvement efforts that expand learning beyond just math and English lessons. Cleveland district officials say their program, featured last night on “NBC Nightly News,” focuses on making students feel welcome at school. “We’re really thinking about how the recovery looks in the next one to three years, and not the notion that somehow, in one summer, we’re going to recover everything from the pandemic,” said district CEO Eric Gordon. Read Patrick O’Donnell’s full report.

A Big Raise For Texas Teachers: New Plan Will Give Top Educators $100,000 to Fight COVID Learning Loss at State’s Poorest Schools

Teacher Quality: When Texas created its Teacher Incentive Allotment as part of a historic 2019 school funding bill, it came with a compromise: Conservatives could have incentive pay — tying compensation to performance — but the largest stipends would go to teachers in the state’s poorest schools. “The Teacher Incentive Allotment is not a grant. It is a commitment to shift the culture of your district,” said Mohammed Choudhury, San Antonio ISD associate superintendent of strategy, talent and innovation. To get the money, districts must create a teacher evaluation system based on classroom observation and students’ academic growth, instead of single-year test scores that say more about neighborhood income than teacher quality. Two years later, 82 school districts and charter schools have been approved to receive funds from the allotment, and dozens of teachers will make over $100,000 this year working to combat COVID learning loss among some of the state’s most disadvantaged students. What’s best, said Longview ISD Chief Human Resources Officer John York, is that the most skilled teachers are staying in high-need schools. “The kids are the winners.” Read Bekah McNeel’s full report.

Supreme Court: Students’ First Amendment rights are on the line after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case about a profane Snapchat post that could define schools’ authority to regulate off-campus speech — an issue that’s particularly relevant in the social media era. The justices, and the court’s 6-to-3 conservative majority, . At issue is a Pennsylvania high schooler’s 2017 Snapchat post venting frustration because she didn’t make the varsity cheerleading squad, and whether her off-campus rant violated a Vietnam War-era Supreme Court precedent that lets educators punish student speech that causes a “substantial disruption.” Leading education groups and the Biden administration argued that schools must be able to hold students accountable for off-campus speech that is harassing or threatens violence. But justices were skeptical that the post was anything more than an expression of frustration laced with F-bombs. If schools could discipline kids for off-campus cursing, then “every school in the country would be doing nothing but punishing,” Justice Stephen Breyer said. .

Reinventing School Discipline in Texas: After Years of Unequal Punishment for Black Students, Dallas ISD Moves Toward Historic End to Most Suspensions

School Discipline: Texas’s second-largest school district is using tools it honed during the pandemic to end suspensions for low-level offenses. By giving students access to teletherapy and remote learning opportunities in what it calls reset centers, administrators plan to address the root causes of behavior issues without interrupting learning. “Suspension was never the right structure, but it is certainly not the right structure coming out of a global pandemic,” former Dallas school board trustee Miguel Solis told reporter Bekah McNeel. In addition to additional staff and technology, Solis said, teacher training will be key to making the new policy a success. “The teacher student dynamic is going to be radically different,” Solis said. Read our full report.

Schools that Switched to a Four-Day Week Saw Learning Reductions. What Does that Mean for the Pandemic’s Lost Instructional Time?

Learning Loss: Even before COVID-19, a fast-growing segment of American schools ran on a four-day week. The trend is partly a concession to scheduling challenges and lengthy commutes in many rural areas, but also a reflection of cost-cutting measures even years after the Great Recession. According to one analysis, over 20 percent of school districts in five Western states now operate four days per week — and according to a recently published study of one of those states, Oregon, the academic results can be dangerous. The research, featured in the journal Education Next, found that when schools shifted from a five- to a four-day schedule, students lost between three and four hours of instructional time each week and test scores dropped in both math and reading. Even worse, the longer schools stuck with the new schedule, the sharper the decline became. The findings are particularly striking in light of learning losses inflicted by school closures during the pandemic, which at least partially result from lack of time in classrooms. “Hopefully, some of these knowledge losses can be caught up,” study author and Oregon State University economist Paul Thompson told The 74’s Kevin Mahnken. “But there are questions about some of the long-run ramifications on outcomes besides achievement.” Read our full report.

Researchers Combed Through Over 1,600 Teachers of the Year Since 1988. Here’s What They Learned about the Winners

Big Picture: The Teacher of the Year award is the most prominent national program for recognizing and promoting excellence in K-12 instruction — and one of the oldest, dating to 1952. Each year, a winner is chosen from every state and territory, and the national awardee gets a celebration at the White House and a year to advocate for the profession. But what kinds of schools do these exemplars come from? Researchers decided to find out, studying state- and national-level teachers of the year going back to 1988. Their findings: Winners are disproportionately likely to work in high schools (and large schools more generally); they tend to teach English or social studies rather than health, foreign languages or special education; and, perhaps most strikingly, they’re employed at schools with lower than average numbers of low-income students. Read Kevin Mahnken’s full report.

— 2021 Teacher of the Year: Immigrant, bilingual special educator named National Teacher of Year (Read more)

Every month, we round up our most popular and shared articles from the past four weeks. (Go deeper: See our top highlights from April, March and February right here)