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Congress on Friday passed a bill to extend a pandemic-era program through the summer that provided free meals to students regardless of income. The $3bn Keep Kids Fed Act, passed 376-42 by the House on Thursday, was amended and approved by the Senate, and passed in the House by a voice vote the following day. The measure also provides schools with a higher reimbursement rate per meal for the next school year and offers more flexible guidelines for school nutrition programs coping with supply chain problems and short staffing. However, it also reinstates a requirement, suspended during the pandemic, that low-income students above the poverty line pay a reduced price for their meals, rather than getting them free. The provision was added to the bill at the request of Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY). In addition to extending waivers for the 2022 summer meal program, the bill increases federal reimbursements for every school lunch by 40 cents and every school breakfast by 15 cents, above the annual inflationary adjustment. It extends waivers for schools unable to meet nutrition standards due to supply chain disruptions and to reduce administrative and reporting burdens.

 

CNN

Politico PRO

Washington Post

U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said this week that the federal government has a responsibility to Native American tribes, Alaska Native villages and Native Hawaiian communities to fully support and revitalize education, language and cultural practices that prior boarding school policies sought to destroy. Haaland testified before a U.S. Senate committee that is considering legislation to establish a national commission on truth and healing to address intergenerational trauma stemming from the legacy of Native American boarding schools in the United States. As the first and only Native American Cabinet secretary, Haaland, who is from Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico , noted she herself was a product of those policies as her grandparents were removed from their families and sent to boarding schools.

 

U.S. News

School districts in California struggle to hire bilingual teachers in all languages, including Spanish, but the shortage is more severe for teachers who are fluent in Asian languages. Many districts want to start or expand dual immersion programs in Asian languages but do not have enough teachers with bilingual authorizations in these languages to do so. This is to be addressed by the latest budget put forward by the California Legislature, which includes $5m for the Asian Language Bilingual Teacher Education Program Consortium, which helps prepare bilingual teachers in Asian languages, such as Vietnamese, Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese and Hmong. The program pools resources at 10 California State University campuses to allow students enrolled at any campus in the consortium to take classes at the other campuses to receive their bilingual authorization. A bilingual authorization allows teachers to teach English language development to students who are learning English, and to teach primary instruction in a language other than English. A large portion of the funding will go toward helping students pay for classes. Because so few students tend to enroll in these classes, most bilingual education classes in Asian languages are offered during the summer or in “extension programs,” which requires students to pay additional tuition with less access to financial aid.

 

EdSource

Bellflower USD obfuscated the true picture of its financial situation for years — and failed to provide students with proper resources during the pandemic despite having extra money, according to a new report released by the California Auditor’s office. Since 2016, BUSD has spent less on providing services to its students than the amount its Board of Education approved in its annual budgets — and purposefully provided misleading financial information to board members and the public, the report said. District officials, the report said, also repeatedly provided the Board of Education and public with incorrect financial information, thus preventing the board from conducting any real oversight of the district’s spending over the past several fiscal years. District officials said they disagreed with many of the report’s findings, but will “challenge itself to do more.”

 

Press-Telegram

Irene Boden has been named Assistant Superintendent of Business & Administrative Services at Castaic USD. Ms. Boden has worked in education for over 15 years and has served in the school business environment starting as an Account Technician with the William S. Hart Union School District to most recently, the Assistant Director of School Business Advisory Services at the Ventura County Office of Education.

 

SCV News

The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on Friday, removing the constitutional right to abortion that had been in place for nearly 50 years and setting off a chain of effects that could have wide-reaching consequences for schools, educators, and the children they serve. The 6-3 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization will effectively ban abortions in 13 states that have passed so-called “trigger laws,” which were written to enact abortion restrictions upon the overruling of Roe. Several other states are expected to reintroduce bills that would do the same, while others move to firm up their own laws protecting abortion. On Friday, many education groups condemned the court’s decision, suggesting the opinion may be a precursor to future decisions related to LGBTQ marriage, gender equality, and birth control. The order is “another example of how, over the last few years, we have seen the same faction of politicians working overtime to reverse decades of progress on racial justice, on women’s rights, on worker’s rights, on LGBTQ+ rights, on voting rights, on our right to privacy, and on our students’ freedom to learn in our public schools,” National Education Association President Becky Pringle said in a statement. “These attacks on our freedoms are designed to do one thing—consolidate unfettered power into the hands of a few,” Pringle said. “We must stand up for all of our rights.” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten linked the Dobbs ruling to other recent Supreme Court decisions this week, including those on states’ firearm laws and public funding for students to attend religious schools. “In the span of 24 hours, this court ruled that states can’t regulate gun owners but can regulate the bodies of anyone who can reproduce,” she said. Other groups celebrated the decision. Students for Life, an anti-abortion advocacy group, said in a statement that the ruling represented a “historic moment that will determine the fate of millions of precious children,” noting plans to push for legislation that would restrict abortion at the state level. Pro-abortion rights student activists also pledged to lobby state lawmakers. In a statement, the anti-gun-violence organization March for Our Lives called the ruling a “racist,” “classist,” attack. “We have organized before and won, and we will organize again to protect our right to be free of gun violence and choose what we do with our bodies,” it said.

 

Education Week

The federal Head Start program has contributed to multi-generational positive outcomes, according to a study from the University of Notre Dame and Texas A&M University published this month in the Journal of Political Economy, including increases in education attainment and wages and decreases in teen pregnancy and criminal involvement. A 122-page study of the 57-year-old Head Start program, created to improve the school readiness of preschool children from low-income families, shows higher education attainment for children of Head Start participants resulted in an estimated 6% to 11% increase in wages for those second-generation children through age 50. Although this and previous research has highlighted the benefits of Head Start and other quality preschool programs, early childhood programs do however often lack racial and socioeconomic diversity in workforce, curriculum and students, agreed panelists in a webinar hosted by The Hunt Institute this week.

 

K12 Dive

Mirroring wider trends, Catholic schools are serving fewer students than they were before the pandemic. Catholic schools have lost 2.8% of enrollment overall since the pandemic began, the same share as public schools, suggesting those leaving public schools are going elsewhere. Catholic school enrollment dropped especially sharply in a number of large states — New York, California, Illinois — that also lost significant numbers from their public schools.

 

Chalkbeat

Schools are awash in technology in a way never before seen, in large part due to the pandemic. Now, two years after schools rushed to employ digital tools to facilitate distance learning, school district leaders are being urged to ask more questions of education technology providers about the evidence supporting claims of their products' efficiency. There are few, if any, barriers to entry to the EdTech industry, and no governing body is holding companies accountable for their claims the way the Food and Drug Administration does with drug companies before they bring a product to market, according to Bart Epstein, chief executive of the Edtech Evidence Exchange. “More and more companies are ready for the question about efficacy and research, and that’s a step in the right direction,” Epstein says, “but there’s a world of difference between someone having an independent, third-party, government-funded gold standard efficacy study showing how a product performs in a similar environment, and on the other end of the spectrum something written by a marketing department that uses vaguely academic, flavored language that is meaningless.” As a result, folks in the industry—well-intentioned though they may be—have been incentivized not to invest millions on a high-quality research study, but to spend that money beefing up their sales and marketing teams, to send people to conferences and trade shows, to source new potential customers. “We are definitely moving in the right direction, but we’re moving very slowly,” Epstein says. “I would love to see a world in which the companies who do real research get rewarded and prioritized and make more sales.”

 

EdSurge