Immigration Agents Given OK to Conduct Raids at Schools
ICE agents can’t be frozen out of making arrests and carrying out raids on school campuses anymore.
In the first days of Donald Trump’s new presidency, his administration overturned a 13-year-old policy aimed at preventing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol agents from getting in the way of people at schools, places of worship, and hospitals.
“The Trump administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement and instead trusts them to use common sense,” a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said.
“With each new raid or series of high-profile arrests, ... school districts are really bracing for what the impacts might be on parents’ willingness or fears about even driving their children to school, fears about enforcement on school grounds,” said Margie McHugh, the director of the National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy at the Migration Policy Institute.
In light of the policy change, legal experts and immigration advocates urged schools to act on their legal responsibilities to safeguard and educate all children, regardless of immigration status.
A 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision guarantees undocumented students the constitutional right to a free, public education. Another federal law, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, keeps most student information confidential without parents’ permission to release it.
Roughly 4.4 million children in the United States live with undocumented parents, and about 850,000 children were undocumented themselves in 2022, according to the Pew Research Center.
In anticipation of the policy change under Trump, some districts have already outlined what their staff should do if immigration agents come calling.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta pointed schools to an updated guide his office released outlining how school staff should handle requests from ICE, according to EdSource.
Recent polls have generally found high levels of support for Trump’s immigration agenda, though it’s not unqualified. For instance, a new Associated Press-NORC Center survey found about 6 in 10 respondents oppose arrests of children in schools and people in churches. Even Republicans aren’t fully on board—less than half favor those kinds of arrests.
Biden’s Title IX Rule to Expand Protections for Transgender Students Struck Down
Even before President Joe Biden left the Oval Office, his new Title IX regulation that added sexual orientation and transgender status to sexual-discrimination protections appeared to be doomed.
A federal district judge in Kentucky made it so this month. His ruling—the first to fully consider the merits of the Title IX rule—appears to apply nationwide. And the likelihood of the Trump administration appealing it is nil.
The ruling also marks the first time a court has found that the regulation interpreted by some as requiring teachers to address transgender students by their preferred names and pronouns violates the First Amendment.
If the regulation is invalidated nationwide, it would erase provisions providing greater protections to pregnant students and new requirements for sexual-harassment complaints.
Efforts to both expand and restrict policies related to transgender students remain divisive political fights that animated local, state, and national campaigns and elections. Roughly 3.3 percent of high school students identify as transgender, and 2.2 percent are questioning their gender identity, according to federal data.
Several federal courts had already blocked—at least temporarily—the regulation. The result has been that the rule has been halted in 26 states and in some schools in other states.
“Expanding the meaning of ‘on the basis of sex’ to include ‘gender identity’ turns Title IX on its head,” said Judge Danny C. Reeves, an appointee of President George W. Bush.
The challenge was led by a handful of states. Christian Educators Association International intervened to focus on provisions that it contends would require teachers to use the names and pronouns preferred by transgender students, even when doing so went against the teachers’ religious beliefs.
“The plaintiffs reasonably fear that teachers’ (and others’) speech concerning gender issues ... would constitute harassment under the Final Rule,” Reeves said.
“Put simply, the First Amendment does not permit the government to chill speech or compel affirmance of a belief with which the speaker disagrees in this manner,” the judge said.
U.S. Supreme Court to Decide If Parents Can Opt Children Out of Classes Using LGBTQ+ Books
The U.S. Supreme Court is jumping into the fray over LGBTQ+ books in elementary classes. In this instance, though, the plaintiffs’ direct target isn’t the books themselves but whether a Maryland district can prevent parents from opting their children out.
Lower courts had refused to block the Montgomery County schools’ policy, and the parents’ case has become a rallying point among groups fighting school policies meant to be supportive of LGBTQ+ students.
A federal appeals court’s ruling “that parents essentially surrender their right to direct the religious upbringing of their children by sending them to public schools … contradicts centuries of our history and traditions,” says the appeal.
The school system in 2022 approved books such as Pride Puppy!, My Rainbow, and Uncle Bobby’s Wedding to help teach reading to students as young as prekindergarten. An associate superintendent said in court papers the books were not meant to explicitly teach about gender identity and sexual orientation but to be a classroom option.
The parents sued after the district began enforcing the no opt-out policy for the 2023-24 school year. They argue that the policy violates their First Amendment right to free exercise of religion and their 14th Amendment due-process right to direct the upbringing of their children.
The appeal has the support of friend-of-the-court briefs filed by several leading religious liberty scholars, the Christian Legal Society, and 25 states.
In a brief urging the court not to take up the case, the district said the challengers “seek to unsettle a decades-old consensus that parents who choose to send their children to public school are not deprived of their right to freely exercise their religion simply because their children are exposed to curricular materials the parents find offensive.”
The district noted that it first tried to accommodate opt-out requests by parents. But the option, it said, raised concerns about absenteeism, the infeasibility of administering the requests, and the risk of exposing some students to social stigma and isolation.
Such consequences would defeat the district’s efforts to ensure safe and inclusive classroom environments, the brief says.
Big Challenges Confront School Meal Programs
What keeps school nutrition directors up at night? They point to food, labor, and equipment costs; staffing shortages; and procurement issues in the School Nutrition Association’s annual poll.
The findings come after years of challenges for directors who adapted quickly to serve students grab-and-go meals during pandemic-related school closures and now face competition in hiring and challenges in sourcing ingredients for meals.
They also come as child-nutrition advocates brace for possible changes in federal food policy. President Donald Trump has promised to slash spending across agencies. School meal directors are unsure if such cuts could include their programs.
Healthy school meals help offset food costs for families and contribute to academic achievement, said Shannon Gleave, the association’s president. “But for less than the average price of a latte, school nutrition professionals are expected to prepare and serve a nutritionally balanced lunch, complete with fruits, vegetables, lean protein, and milk,” she said.
Cost factors were the top three issues respondents identified as “significant” or “moderate” concerns: 98 percent had concerns about food costs, 95 percent about labor costs, and 91 percent about equipment costs.
School meal programs often operate apart from general district budgets, covering their own costs on tight margins. That’s why shifts in supply chains and labor markets can be particularly disruptive.
Seventy-two percent of respondents reported at least one employee vacancy in their program. And a reported staff vacancy rate of 8.7 percent was higher than the 6.2 vacancy rate for hospitality and food-service employees in general, according to federal data.
As for the future, 92 percent of the respondents said they had “significant” or “moderate” concerns about the sustainability of their meal programs three years from now.
Teachers, Administrators at Odds Over Job Duties
From paperwork to chaperoning to changing HVAC filters, America’s teachers say they take on a host of nonteaching duties.
Their views on these tasks diverge sharply from administrators’, according to Education Week’s 2024 State of Teaching survey: Thirty-two percent of principals indicated they don’t believe teachers are asked to perform duties beyond their professional responsibilities, while only 14 percent of teachers share that sentiment.
The findings reveal substantial gaps in how both groups view administrative work, supervision duties, and nonteaching obligations, pointing to what could be a factor in teachers’ generally low morale.
Scott Goldstein, the executive director of EmpowerEd, a nonprofit focused on teacher support and retention, sees some of the disconnect stemming from different interpretations of core teaching duties. “Part of the discrepancy is just what is in the official role of the teacher,” he said.
Goldstein points to several systemic challenges such as differing awareness about daily classroom demands and COVID-era disruptions that require teachers to manage complex student needs without adequate support or training.
“I think a lot of school leaders have been trained in a mindset that if we’re prioritizing adult needs, we’re not putting students first, and that just could not be further from the truth,” Goldstein said. “If we are prioritizing adults so that they are fully well and able to pour into the students, we are absolutely prioritizing kids.”
The disconnect between administrators and teachers on job responsibilities appears likely to persist without structural changes. One Nebraska school administrator responded to a survey question about what tasks teachers perform that shouldn’t be part of their role: “None, we have been very protective of teachers’ time but as a result we aren’t meeting [student achievement] targets.”
A Massachusetts teacher expressed a common sentiment: “Too many to list. I’m a counselor, social worker, hall monitor, administrative assistant, ... I just want to be a teacher.”