Ed. Department Tries New Twist to Make FAFSA Accessible
If at first you don’t succeed … That’s the adage the U.S. Department of Education is following to what it’s touted as a new and improved FAFSA for college students.
In this go-round, the department is planning a phased-in rollout for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid in hopes of addressing technical glitches before the revamped form becomes available to all students by Dec. 1.
Under the gradual rollout, a subset of students will have access to the 2025-26 FAFSA starting Oct. 1. The department will monitor that group’s experience submitting the application for any technical problems and other hiccups to ensure the software the department uses to collect and process forms is operating smoothly by Dec. 1 for the universal rollout.
The new timeline is the Education Department’s attempt to prevent major problems after the botched 2024-25 FAFSA rollout caused significant delays for students across the country, said Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. The original goal of the FAFSA rollout was to modernize the system and make it easier for students and their families to access, he said.
“We can’t reach our potential if we normalize the mediocre results FAFSA provided us the last 40 years,” Cardona said. “And we’re not shying away from disrupting a broken system of financial aid.”
But delays and technical flaws dominated the 2024-25 rollout, depressing the number of FAFSA applicants earlier this year. As of March, there had been a 40 percent drop in submissions compared with the same time in 2023. The department said the submission gap has since narrowed to a 4 percent drop.
With the form only becoming universally available by Dec. 1, not all students will have access to it in time for early-decision application deadlines.
Shortly after the Education Department announced its new timeline this month, Republicans in Congress criticized the Biden administration for failing to open the form to all students by Oct. 1 for the second year in a row.
No law requires the department open FAFSA applications by Oct. 1, but the federal government has traditionally started the FAFSA cycle on that date.
While the deadline is later than usual, it still allows time for states, colleges, and universities to adapt their processes, department officials said.
Where School Buses Emit the Most Toxic Fumes Help Is on the Way Via New Electric Vehicles
Disparities between well-resourced and disadvantaged school communities even show up in how students get to school.
The oldest school buses in the nation, which pose the biggest health risks to students and staff, are concentrated in the poorest districts and those with the highest proportions of students of color, a new data analysis shows. But the push for electric school buses appears to be slowly turning that around.
Roughly 9 in 10 school buses run on diesel fuel. The average school bus is 9 years old. The older the bus, the more pollution it emits, research shows.
But an estimated 110,000 of the nearly half-million school buses on America’s roads were built before 2010. At least 6,300 were built before 2000.
Of those built before 2000, 36 percent shuttle children to and from school in the lowest-income districts, while only 17 percent serve the highest-income districts, according to a report published this month by the World Resources Institute’s Electric School Bus Initiative.
Nearly half of buses older than 24 years are in districts with the largest shares of students of color, the report says. By contrast, districts with the smallest shares of students of color have only 8 percent of the nation’s buses built before 2000.
Those numbers add to the growing concern over diesel school buses’ contribution to poor air quality, which affects students’ health and their academic performance.
While diesel school buses contribute a relatively small share of toxins in the air in any given place, they add yet another toxic element to environments that already pose health risks to students and staff, the report says. High-poverty areas, and areas with large shares of racial minorities, are more likely to be located near highways and factories that emit toxic fumes.
The report identifies a silver lining, though: New electric buses are disproportionately heading to the highest-need districts. Of the 5,612 electric school buses districts had committed to buying prior to Dec. 31, 2022, 43 percent are concentrated in the one-quarter of lowest-income school districts, and 68 percent are headed to the one-quarter of districts with the highest proportions of students of color.
Google Invests in High School Well-Being Projects as Teen Mental Health Shows Slight Improvement
Google, one of the behemoth organizations blamed for exacerbating the mental health crisis among children, is directly financing high school well-being projects on a classroom crowdfunding platform.
The tech company’s philanthropic arm on Aug. 12 flash funded all mental health-related listings on DonorsChoose, an online charity where members help buy supplies requested by public school teachers. With $10 million in new gifts and the help of actress Selena Gomez, the Silicon Valley giant hopes to center mindfulness as an educational goal at the start of the academic calendar.
Google.org committed earlier this year to back nonprofits that support kids’ mental health and online safety. The announcement—which will also provide $500 vouchers for eligible DonorsChoose campaigns in the near future—ups that pledge to $25 million.
The move comes amid widespread criticism and lawsuits claiming Google-owned YouTube and other social media sites have fueled the childhood mental health crisis by deliberately designing addictive features.
Justin Steele, a director at Google.org, said its initiative highlights the company’s efforts to lead this “important conversation” and “be one part of contributing to positive solutions.”
Its internet browser’s own data have showcased the rising interest; Steele said searches for “teen mental health” doubled over the last four years.
“Obviously, we want people to be able to take advantage of all the amazing things technology has to offer,” he said. “But we also want them to be able to do it in a healthy and safe way.”
Teen mental health actually showed “some signs of progress” in 2023 after record-high levels of mental health challenges in 2021, a new report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concludes.
In 2023, 40 percent of high school students said they had experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness during the past year, according to the report. That is down from 42 percent in 2021, but it’s still “concerningly high” compared with a decade earlier when it was at 30 percent, the report says.
Georgia Chief Backtracks on African American Class
Georgia’s schools chief Richard Woods now says school districts may teach a new Advanced Placement course in African American Studies after all, now that the state’s attorney general said the law against teaching divisive concepts specifically exempts such college-level courses.
Richard Woods said that a letter from Attorney General Chris Carr to a Republican lawmaker “completed the clarification process” for him. Woods had cited the law in refusing to recommend the course be added to the state’s course catalog.
Woods, a Republican, said the state will now consider all AP and similar college-level courses to be automatically adopted. That means after weeks of controversy, Woods won’t have to recommend the course be officially adopted and members of the state board of education won’t have to vote on the question.
“In compliance with this opinion, the AP African American Studies course will be added to the state-funded course catalog effective immediately,” Woods said, although he said there would be a disclaimer saying the state hadn’t reviewed the material.
Carr, also a Republican, said that AP, International Baccalaureate, and dual-enrollment courses are explicitly exempted from the law.
Woods’ evolving positions on the question led some districts to drop their plans to teach it without formal state approval. A lack of state approval could influence state funding and the credit students get when applying for college scholarships.
Woods had been saying that districts could teach the AP material and get state money by listing it as an introductory African American studies course approved by the state in 2020. He took that position after earlier saying districts would have to teach the course using only local tax money. But he also declared that he believed the course was illegal and that districts could expose themselves to legal challenges by using the introductory course to teach the AP material.
New Metal Detectors Cause Long Delays in Fla. District
The lines were so long, the teenagers might have been waiting to buy tickets to a Taylor Swift concert. Instead, they faced the first day back to school in Florida’s Broward County as a rollout of new metal detectors kept them in lines long after the first bell rang.
At high schools across the nation’s sixth largest district, scores of students stood in lines that snaked around campuses as staff members struggled to get thousands of teenagers through the new metal detectors, which were rolled out at 38 schools. It’s the first year all the district’s high schools have had the scanners.
The effort was intended to improve safety and security in the district where a gunman killed 17 people and injured 17 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018.
Rather, the bottleneck further aggravated many parents who have long criticized the district for rushing policy decisions and mismanaging new efforts.
Alicia Ronda said when her daughter got to Pompano Beach High School at 6:30 a.m., the line of students had already wrapped around the school. Her sophomore waited 30 minutes to get into her first period, which was supposed to start at 7:05 am. By 7:15 am, Ronda said only four students had made it to her daughter’s class.
“My daughter was actually supposed to be a part of the students helping freshmen find their classes today,” said Brandi Scire, another Pompano Beach High parent. “Freshmen don’t know where they’re going, and the kids weren’t there to help them.”
And it was hot as students queued outside their schools, with a heat advisory in place for much of the day.
A little after 8 a.m., Superintendent Howard Hepburn authorized schools to suspend the use of the metal detectors to allow the remaining students to get to class.
Hepburn apologized for the long wait times in a statement posted on the social media platform X. “We sincerely thank our students for their patience,” Hepburn said. “We are committed to improving this experience and will be making necessary adjustments.”
