The Supreme Court over the next two weeks will hear two cases that have the potential to erode the separation of church and state and create a seismic shift in public education.
Mahmoud v. Taylor, which goes before the court on April 22, pits Muslim, Roman Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox families, as well as those of other faiths, against the Montgomery County school system in Maryland. The parents argue that the school system violated their First Amendment right of free exercise of religion by refusing to let them opt their children out of lessons using LGBTQ+ books. The content of the books, the parents say, goes against their religious beliefs.
Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, which will be argued on April 30, addresses whether the St. Isidore of Seville Virtual Charter School should be allowed to exist as a public charter school in Oklahoma. The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa had won approval for the charter school from the state charter board despite acknowledging that St. Isidore would participate “in the evangelizing mission of the Church.”
The state’s attorney general, Gentner Drummond, later overruled the approval, saying the school could not be a charter because charter schools must be public and nonsectarian. The petitioners sued and ultimately appealed to the Supreme Court, claiming Drummond violated the First Amendment’s free exercise clause by prohibiting a religious entity from participating in a public program.
Teachers unions, parents groups and organizations advocating for the separation of church and state have said that rulings in favor of the plaintiffs could open the door for all types of religious programs to become part of public schooling and give parents veto rights on what is taught. In the most extreme scenario, they say, the rulings could lead to the dismantling of public education and essentially allow public schools to be Sunday schools.
At issue in both cases is the question of whether the First Amendment rights of parents and religious institutions to the free exercise of religion can supersede the other part of the amendment, the establishment clause, which calls for the separation of church and state.
“I think a chill wind is blowing, and public education as we know it is in extreme jeopardy of becoming religious education and ceasing to exist,” said Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, an advocacy organization that has filed an amicus brief in the St. Isidore case. “The whole idea is to have churches take control of education for American children. It’s about money and power.”
For some conservative lawmakers, evangelical Christian groups and law firms lobbying for more religiosity in the public square, decisions in the petitioners’ favor would mean religious parents get what they have long been owed — the option of sending their children to publicly funded religious schools and the right to opt out of instruction that clashes with their religious beliefs.
“If we win this case, it opens up school choice across the country,” said Mathew Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel, an Orlando, Florida-based conservative Christian legal firm that has filed a brief supporting the petitioners in both cases. “I see school choice as a reaction to the failed system in the public schools, which is failing both in academia but also failing in the sense they are pushing ideology that undermines the parents and their relationship with their children.”
By taking the cases, the Supreme Court once again inserts itself in ongoing culture wars in the nation, which have been elevated by presidential orders threatening to take away funding if schools push diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and state laws banning teaching on various controversial subjects. Legal scholars predict that the Supreme Court will lean toward allowing St. Isidore and the opt-outs for parents because of how the justices ruled inthreecases between 2017 and 2022. In each case, the justices decided that states could not discriminate against giving funds or resources to a program because it was religious.
Of the two cases, St. Isidore likely could have the greatest impact because it is attempting to change the very definition of a public school, say opponents of the school’s bid for charter status. Since charter schools first started in the 1990s, they have been defined as public and nonsectarian in each of the 46 state statutes allowing them, according to officials at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Today,charter schools operate in 44 states, Guam, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., andserve roughly 7.6 percent of all public school students.
“It would be a huge sea change if the court were to hold they were private entities and not public schools bound by the U.S. Constitution’s establishment clause,” said Rob Reed, the alliance’s vice president of legal affairs.
A victory for St. Isidore could lead to religious-based programs seeping into several aspects of public schooling, said Steven Green, a professor of both law and history and religious studies at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon.
“The ramification is that every single time a school district does some kind of contracting for any kind of service or curricular issues, you’re going to find religious providers who will make the claim, ‘You have to give me an opportunity, too,’” Green said.
St. Isidore’s appeal to the Supreme Court is part of an increasing push by the religious right to use public funds for religious education, said Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University and author of a 2024 book on school vouchers. Because of previous court decisions, several voucher programs across the country already allow parents to use public money to send their children to religious schools, he said.
“What’s going to happen if the court says a public school can be run by a religious provider?” Cowen asked. “It almost turns 180 degrees the rule that voucher systems play by right now. Right now, they’re just taking a check. They’re not public entities.”
The effect of a St. Isidore victory could be devastating, he added. “It would be one more slippery slope to really kicking down the wall between church and state,” Cowen said.
Jim Campbell, chief legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, which is representing St. Isidore’s bid to become a charter, discounted the idea that a St. Isidore win would fundamentally change public schools. Like Staver, he views St. Isidore as simply providing another parental option. “We’re not asking the state to run a religious school,” Campbell said. “These are private entities that run the schools. This is a private organization participating in a publicly funded program.”
Opponents of religious charter schools question whether St. Isidore would have to play by the same rules as public schools.
“How are they going to handle it when there’s a teacher who has a lifestyle that doesn’t align with Catholic school teaching? They’re talking out of both sides of the mouth,” said Erika Wright, an Oklahoma parent and plaintiff in a lawsuit protesting a Bible in the classroom mandate by Oklahoma’s state superintendent of instruction. She also joined an amicus brief against St. Isidore’s formation.
“As a taxpayer, I should not be forced to fund religious instruction, whether it’s through a religious charter school or a Bible mandate,” Wright said. “I shouldn’t be forced to fund religious indoctrination that doesn’t align with my family’s personal beliefs.”
Notably, in the Montgomery County parents’ case going before the court, parents use similar reasoning to support their right to opt out of instruction. “A school ‘burdens’ parents’ religious beliefs when it forces their children to undergo classroom instruction about gender and sexuality at odds with their religious convictions,” the parents’ brief said.
The school district in 2022 adopted several books with LGBTQ+ themes and characters as part of the elementary language arts curriculum. Initially, families were allowed to opt out. But then the school system reversed its policy, saying too many students were absent during the lessons and keeping track of the opt-outs was too cumbersome. The reversal led to the lawsuit.
Historically, school districts have given limited opt-outs to parents who, for example, do not want their child to read a particular book, but the Montgomery County parents’ request is broader, said Charles C. Haynes, a First Amendment expert and senior fellow for religious liberty at the Freedom Forum in Washington, D.C. The parents are asking to exclude their children from significant parts of the curriculum for religious reasons.
“If the court sides with the parents, I think the next day, you’re going to have parents across the country saying, ‘I want my kids to opt out of all the references to fill-in-the-blank.’ … It would change the dynamic between public schools and parents overnight,” Haynes said.
Sarah Brannen, author of “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” one of the LGBTQ+ books Montgomery County schools adopted, sees major logistical issues if the school system loses. “Allowing parents to interfere in the minutia of the curriculum would make their already difficult jobs impossible,” she said.
Colten Stanberry, a lawyer with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty representing the Montgomery County parents, disagreed. School systems manage to balance different student needs all the time, he said.
A triumph for the Montgomery County families and St. Isidore would cause much more than logistical issues, said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association. It could lead to a public education system where parents can pick a school based on religious beliefs or try to change a traditional public school’s curriculum by opting out of lessons in droves.
“For us to be a strong democracy, then we necessarily need to learn about all of us. To separate us flies in the face of why we were founded,” Pringle said.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
LOS ANGELES — After the Palisades Fire destroyed her son’s high school, Shoshanha Essakhar found herself among the thousands of Los Angeles County parents wondering what to do.
“I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, we’re going to be doing Zoom for the next God knows how long,’” said Essakhar. “It was a lot of fear, a lot of uncertainty.”
The fire devastated Palisades Charter High School, where Essakhar’s son was a ninth grader, as well as two elementary schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The Eaton Fire, which broke out around the same time in early January, severely damaged or destroyed six school facilities in Pasadena Unified School District. Together, the fires disrupted learning for more than 725,000 kids and displaced thousands of students from their schools, their homes or both.
For Essakhar, a potential solution came by way of an executive order California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Jan. 14. For students in Los Angeles County schools affected by the fires, the order paused, through the remainder of the school year, the requirement that a student live within their school district’s boundaries. That meant she could enroll her son at nearby Beverly Hills High School, where another parent she shared carpool duties with was also enrolling her child. She quickly completed the necessary paperwork.
But roughly a week later, Beverly Hills Unified School District abruptly stopped accepting students displaced by the fires, closing the door on Essakhar’s son and dozens of other students who expected to spend the semester at Beverly Hills High.
“As a mom, you try to do your best for your child, but it got so unpleasant,” Essakhar said. Beverly Hills school leadership said it could not afford to accept additional students, nor did it need to: Students who lost their school but whose homes were still intact did not need their help.
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The dispute between Beverly Hills Unified School District and some Palisades parents raises questions that school districts across the U.S. increasingly must grapple with as wildfires and other extreme weather events become more common because of climate change: What does a school district owe its neighbors after a major disaster?
For Beverly Hills Unified, the answer was admitting 47 students before pausing enrollment over concerns that a surge of newcomers midyear would siphon resources from the district’s 3,000-plus existing students.
“You’ve got a community where a lot of those folks lost their homes, and half lost their school but their homes weren’t impacted,” said Los Angeles Unified School District board member Nick Melvoin, whose district includes Palisades Charter High School. Like Beverly Hills, its students are predominantly from affluent backgrounds.
Newsom’s order was an attempt at a fix: It urged districts to “extend every effort to support and facilitate the enrollment of students displaced by the fires.” Lori Peek, director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, which focuses on the societal effects of disasters, said it “provided the necessary flexibility that disaster survivors really need, because their circumstances are so diverse.”
In Beverly Hills, school board members resisted the order. Beverly Hills is one of the few “basic aid” districts in the state, meaning it collects more in local property tax revenue than an annual funding target set by the state, which is based on average daily attendance and other factors. Most districts fall short of the target, and the state makes up the difference.
The January fires in Southern California disrupted learning for more than 725,000 students. Credit: Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
At a series of meetings in January and February, Beverly Hills school board members argued that the district couldn’t absorb additional students without harming those already enrolled. While other school districts see increased funding from increased attendance, that’s not true for basic aid districts like Beverly Hills.
Board members also questioned whether students who lost their schools, but not their homes, such as Essakhar’s son, should be considered affected by the fire and able to enroll. Board members told district administration that they believed only students whose homes were destroyed should qualify.
Not so, said Melissa Schoonmaker with the Los Angeles County Office of Education, which provided guidance to the county’s school districts on implementing the order. “It’s not that they had to lose their home or be evacuated, it could be a broad range of impacts,” she said.
Board members supported making this pause permanent.
“Going forward we are closed to any enrollment that comes right now as a result of a student going to Pali who has not been displaced from their home but would like to come to Beverly Hills because they don’t want to go on Zoom,” board President Rachelle Marcus said at the meeting, referring to Palisades Charter.
Essakhar, who lives in Brentwood, a Los Angeles neighborhood roughly halfway between Beverly Hills and the Pacific Palisades, called the entire process traumatic.
She gave up on finding an in-person school option for her son, settling instead for Zoom through Palisades Charter. “Honestly, I didn’t want to go through the experience again,” she said. Plus, most of his friends who left Palisades Charter had enrolled at Beverly High. “Being with your group of friends is different than sending my kid alone to some other school to transition in the middle of the year after the fires on his own,” said Essakhar.
Another Palisades Charter parent, Negeen Ben-Cohen, was initially optimistic that the school would quickly secure a temporary campus. But as the weeks went by, she started considering other options for her ninth grader.
“It was mostly about keeping my son in a healthy social environment, and not isolated at home,” said Ben-Cohen. “Covid already showed that with the amount of learning loss and how much kids fell behind during Zoom.”
Like Essakhar, Ben-Cohen filled out all the necessary paperwork to enroll her son and was told she would hear soon about his class placements. Then enrollment was paused.
“They shut the door in our faces. And that was after the kids got their hopes up, they think that they’re going to be able to go in-person, they think they’re going to be able to start with their friends,” said Ben-Cohen.
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At board meetings, parents and students expressed similar outrage.
“Beverly had the opportunity to extend a hand when we needed it the most but instead they turned around and slammed the door in our faces,” said Kylie Abdi, a senior at Palisades Charter, at a Feb. 11 meeting.
“We do not even want to get an education in a school that kicks others while they are down, you have lost the opportunity to teach your students how to be there for each other,” said another Palisades student, junior Rosha Sinai, calling the board “selfish.”
Jason Hasty, the interim superintendent of Beverly Hills Unified School District, said in an interview that enrolling any more than 47 students would have strained the district’s resources and required hiring more teachers — although he acknowledged that his district is better funded than most.
“We get more money than the state formula because of the way we’re funded. That is a fact. Also what is a fact is on July 1 of every year, we set a budget … based on the students we are projecting to have,” Hasty said.
State Sen. Ben Allen, who represents both the Pacific Palisades and Beverly Hills areas, said that Beverly Hills would be compensated for taking in displaced students, although the details are still being worked out.
“We’re going to have their backs and that they’re going to be fully compensated for any students that they take in,” he said.
Hasty said the district has been “in direct discussion” with Allen’s office, but “until we are sure that those funds are materializing and will be provided,” the pause on enrollment under the executive order (which expires at the end of the school year) remains in place. The district continues to enroll students who move to Beverly Hills or who are eligible under the McKinney-Vento Act, said Hasty. That legislation provides protections for students who are homeless, which is defined as “individuals who lack a fixed, regular, and adequate, nighttime residence.”
Nearby Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District is also a basic aid district, but it interpreted the order “to mean that any student who wants to come here can come here right now,” said Gail Pinsker, the district’s chief communications officer. So far, the district has enrolled more than 140 students, with about 200 enrollment requests still being processed. The influx of students prompted the district to combine some elementary classes and hire a new high school teacher, Pinsker said.
Three months after Palisades Charter High School burned, students remain on Zoom. The school just finalized plans to use an old department store building in downtown Santa Monica about 20 minutes southeast of the high school as its temporary campus. In-person instruction should resume sometime after the school’s spring break in mid-April, according to Palisades Charter High School.
Palisades Elementary Charter School, which was devastated by the wildfires in January. Credit: Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Allen, the state senator, said the episode shows the need for a policy for compensating basic aid districts that take in displaced students to make the process smoother after future disasters.
Also helpful would be a website listing districts accepting affected students, said Peek, the University of Colorado researcher.
Lessons from the Los Angeles fires could inform policymaking elsewhere, she added. “They’re going to need it sooner rather than later, as other disasters continue to unfold across the country.”
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, on Signal at CarolineP.83 or via email at preston@hechingerreport.org.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
NORMAN, Okla. — Sometimes, Jakob Topper teaches his Christian faith to his 6-year-old daughter using children’s Bible stories illustrated with teddy bears. Other days, he might use her kid-friendly Bible featuring Precious Moments figures as characters. One thing he knows for sure: The King James version is not on the reading list, given some of its adult themes of sexual assault and incest.
As a parent and a Baptist pastor, Topper opposes Oklahoma’s state superintendent of public instruction’s mandate to put a King James Version Bible in every grade 5–12 classroom. The father of three is also not keen on the state’s newly proposed social studies standards that would require biblical lessons starting in first grade.
“I want the Bible taught to my daughter, and I want to be the one who chooses how that’s done,” said Topper, who also has a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old and is pastor of NorthHaven Church in Norman, a university town. “If we’re talking about parental choice, that’s my choice. I don’t want it to be farmed out to anyone else.”
Norman, a central Oklahoman city of about 130,000, is an epicenter of resistance to the Bible mandate that the state superintendent of public instruction, Ryan Walters, announced last June. Opposition here has come from pastors, religion professors, students, parents, teachers, school board members and the school district superintendent, among others. The prevailing philosophy among Norman residents, who are predominantly Christian, is that they do not want the state — and namely, Walters — mandating how children should be taught scriptures. They want their children to learn from holy books at home or in church.
Pastor Jakob Topper, of NorthHaven Church, says he prefers to teach his children about the Bible rather than placing that responsibility on teachers. Credit: Mike Simmons for The Hechinger Report
Many residents see Walters’s pitch as a play for national attention, given his abundance of social media posts praising Donald Trump, who campaigned on returning prayer to schools and as president has established a White House Faith Office and a task force to root out “anti-Christian bias.” In September, Walters proposed spending $3 million to buy 55,000 copies of the Bible that has been endorsed by the president and for which he receives royalties. More recently, Walters — who in February clashed with his state’s governor for proposing that public schools track students’ immigration statuses — made media lists as a possible candidate for Trump’s education secretary. He was not picked.
But beyond Walter’s national aspirations, the Bible mandate also seems like an attempt at one-upmanship, with other states angling to infuse Christianity into public schools. Louisiana, for instance, is in a court battle over its push for Ten Commandments posters in schools. Texas fought off Democratic opposition to approve an optional Bible-infused curriculum and financial incentives for school districts that use the materials. A slew of states have passed or promoted similar measures, including ones allowing chaplains to act as counselors in schools. Unsurprisingly, Walters, too, has advocated for displaying the Ten Commandments in every classroom and also has backed the conversion of a private virtual Catholic school into a charter school; the Supreme Court plans to hear oral arguments on the case on April 30.
It goes without saying that Walters’s crusade is multifaceted. But fundamentally, all of his efforts amount to teaching the Bible “in inappropriate ways in public schools,” said Amanda Tyler, author of “How to End Christian Nationalism” and executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, a Washington, DC–based organization of attorneys, ministers, and others who advocate for religious freedom. “He’s saying you can’t be a good American citizen if you don’t understand the Bible,” she added. “It’s this merger of American and Christian identities, the idea that only Christians are true Americans.”
On March 10, the Oklahoma Supreme Court dealt a blow to Walters’s plans: It issued a temporary stay prohibiting the state’s department of education from purchasing 55,000 Bibles with certain characteristics and from buying Bible-infused lessons and material for elementary schools.
The stay stems from a lawsuit led by Americans United for Separation of Church and State on behalf of 32 plaintiffs, including parents, clergy, students and teachers. The group, which is suing Walters, claims the Bible mandate violated the state’s prohibition against using state funds for religious purposes and the state’s own statutes allowing local district control over curriculum.
As of now, until the court issues a final ruling, its decision marks a victory in Americans United’s attempt to stop Walters, said Alex Luchenitser, the organization’s associate legal director: “It protects the separation of church and state. It protects the religious freedom of students.” Speaking about the court’s stay, Walters, through spokeswoman Grace Kim, said in a statement: “The Bible has been a cornerstone of our nation’s history and education for generations. We will continue fighting to ensure students have access to this foundational text in the classroom.”
Oklahoma Supreme Court, pictured in the state Capitol building, in March issued a stay that would prohibit the state education department from purchasing Bibles and Bible-infused lessons for elementary students. Credit: Sue Ogrocki/ Associated Press
Meanwhile, Walters was also sued separately last summer by a parent in Locust Grove who contended the mandate violated the state and federal constitutions. The state education department has denied the claims of both suits and contended in legal briefs that using the Bible for its secular value does not violate the state’s constitution.
Walters’s mandate has also sparked concern because of the proposed social studies standards that followed. The standards, which were initially released in December and would require legislative approval, mention the Bible and its historical impact more than 40 times. Several of the standards attempt to erroneously frame the Bible, and specifically the Ten Commandments, as the foundation of American law. Biblical scholars from the University of Oklahoma and elsewhere believe these standards promote the long-standing trope of Christian nationalism, which is premised in part on the false idea that the nation’s founding documents stemmed from the Bible. (The founders were Bible readers, but not necessarily fans of the same versions or holy texts in general. In fact, Thomas Jefferson cut up pages of the Bible to remove mention of miracles or the supernatural.)
For example, Walters’s standards would require students in first grade to learn about David and Goliath, as well as Moses and the Ten Commandments, because the standards cite them as influences on the American colonists and others. Second graders would be asked to “identify stories from Christianity that influenced the American colonists, Founders, and culture, including the teachings of Jesus the Nazareth (e.g. the ‘Golden Rule,’ the Sermon on the Mount).”
“These new standards,” said a news release from the state department of education, “reflect what the people of Oklahoma — and all across America — have long been demanding of their public schools: a return to education curricula that upholds pro-family, pro-American values.” (Walters’s press office, despite repeated requests, did not make the state superintendent available for an interview.)
Critics in Oklahoma and elsewhere see Walters’s Bible mandate as part of a broader Christian nationalist movement. “I think Oklahoma is the test case for the nation,” said Dawn Brockman,a Norman school board member.
Walters, though, has been steadfast in his belief that the mandate is legal and critical for the education of Oklahomans. In the fall, after Americans United sued, Walters wrote on X: “The simple fact is that understanding how the Bible has impacted our nation, in its proper historical and literary context, was the norm in America until the 1960s and its removal has coincided with a precipitous decline in American schools.”
But nothing is simple about the history of the Bible in America’s schools. When public schools started to open in the 1800s, some required regular Bible readings. From the beginning, that practice was controversial: Schools typically favored the King James Version, pitting Protestants against Catholics, and riots over school Bible readings broke out from the 1840s into the 1870s, said Mark Chancey, a professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. By 1930, 36 states allowed Bible reading to be a requirement or an option, but another dozen banned such activities.
A few decades later, a Pennsylvania family sued their school district for heeding the state’s 1949 law requiring the reading of 10 Bible verses and the recitation of prayers at the start of each school day. In 1963, just a year after a similar opinion, the Supreme Court ruled that requiring in-school Bible readings and prayers was unconstitutional. After those rulings, daily teaching from the Bible, for the most part, was halted, Chancey said, but backlash continued, with critics charging that removing prayer and Bible readings from schools had led to a decline in the morality of schoolchildren.
In subsequent decades, the Supreme Court ruled against clergy-led prayer and prayer over the loudspeakers at football games in several school-related cases. But in a seeming reversal, in 2022, the high court ruled in favor of allowing a football coach to conduct midfield, postgame prayers, shifting the legal landscape. The majority’s opinion on the football coach’s prayer has prompted politicians and states to further test the limits of the separation of church and state. In February, lawmakers in Idaho and Texas even proposed measures to allow daily Bible readings in public schools again.
Darcy Pippins, who teaches Spanish at Norman High School, said she doesn’t feel qualified to teach about the Bible. Credit: Mike Simmons for The Hechinger Report
In Norman, many teachers reacted to news of the Bible mandate with concern and fear. Spanish teacher Darcy Pippins,who is in her 27th year at Norman High, said she sometimes teaches about Catholicism because it is the religion of the Spanish-speaking world. But putting a Bible in every classroom and teaching from it is different. “I just don’t feel comfortable,” said Pippins, also a parent. “I’m not qualified to teach and to incorporate the Bible into what I teach.’’
Other teachers, said Brockman, the school board member, worried about professional repercussions were they not to follow the mandate, given that Walters had already targeted at least one Norman teacher in the past for objecting to bans on particular books.
Nick Migliorino, the public school system’s superintendent since 2017, was the first superintendent in the state to publicly oppose the Bible mandate. When asked about it in a July interview with a local paper, he responded: “I’m just going to cut to the chase on that. Norman Public Schools is not going to have Bibles in our classrooms, and we are not going to require our teachers to teach from the Bible.”
Other superintendents followed, and by late July, at least 17 school district leaders said they had no plans to change curriculum in response to the Bible mandate, according to a report by StateImpact Oklahoma.
In an interview at his district’s headquarters, Migliorino emphasized that his school system already teaches how different religions affect history. Bibles, he noted, are accessible to students through the library. Migliorino added that the state superintendent had no authority to make school districts follow the mandate and that it would result in pushing Christianity on students.
“It’s a captive audience, and that is not our role to push things onto kids,” he said. “Our role is to educate them and to create thinkers.”
Oklahoma already has a 2010 measure allowing school districts to offer elective Bible classes and to give students the latitude to pick the biblical text they prefer to use. But unlike Walters’s mandate, it allows for different biblical perspectives, said Alan Levenson, chair of Judaic history at the University of Oklahoma and a biblical scholar. Even still, there has never been widespread interest in a Bible elective in Norman, said Jane Purcell, the school system’s social studies coordinator. Nor was there much interest in such a class when she taught in Florida. Since 2006, at least a dozen states have passed laws promoting elective Bible classes.
This may be, in part, because educators worry about potential issues with teaching Bible courses, said Purcell: “It’s very easy for it to appear to be proselytizing.”
Walters, for his part, has not taken any of this pushback in stride. At a July 31 state board of education meeting, he lashed out against “rogue administrators” who opposed him, saying of the left: “They might be offended by it, but they cannot rewrite our history and lie to our kids.”
After the public schools superintendent publicly rejected Walters’s mandate, community members and teachers in Norman expressed relief. Meg Moulton, a realtor and mother of three, came to a July board meeting to thank the superintendent in person. “I’m a Christian mama,” she said. “I love teaching my kids about God. I love going to church.”
But, she added, “Ryan Walters’s mandate makes it so that teachers and students who may not be Christians…[or] who may believe something different, are going to be essentially forced to learn something that they may not believe in.”
Students and others I met with at a popular Norman coffee shop said they were concerned about how Walters’s mandate could affect religious minorities, women, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. “What Ryan Walters is trying to push goes in line with a lot of trends of kind of pushing back against LGBTQ,” said Isandro Moreno,a 17-year-old senior at Norman High.
Phoebe Risch, a 17-year-old senior at Norman North, the town’s other public high school, said Walters’s mandate was part of what motivated her to restart her high school’s Young Democrats club and recruit roughly 30 members. Risch, already upset about her state’s readiness to ban abortion following the Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe v. Wade, fears that requiring Bible-based instruction could lead to the promotion of the idea that women are submissive. “As a young woman, the implications of implementing religion into our schools is a little scary,” she said, “especially because Oklahoma is already a very conservative state.”
Among the half dozen teens attending a confirmation class in December at Oklahoma City Reform temple B’nai Israel, most opposed the mandate, except for one. She said she supported it as long as the classroom teacher was careful and encouraged critical thinking.
One teen recounted tearily how, during class the previous week, a friend had drawn a swastika on her paper as a taunt. “Stuff like that is so normalized,” she said. “It’s antisemitism. If that’s so normalized, normalizing Christianity further, it’s just worse.”
Imad Enchassi, an imam who oversees an Oklahoma City mosque and also chairs the Islamic Studies department at Oklahoma City University, said he worries that Superintendent Ryan Walter’s policies will further isolate Muslim children. Credit: Mike Simmons for The Hechinger Report
Imad Enchassi, an imam who oversees an Oklahoma City mosque and serves as chair of Islamic studies at Oklahoma City University, echoed similar fears for the Muslim community. “We’re already experiencing Islamophobia. Muslim kids who wear the headscarf already have been told they’re going to hell because they don’t believe in the Bible or they don’t believe in Jesus,” he said. “When curriculum mandates one religion over the other, that will further isolate our children.”
Some Oklahomans, though, do support the mandate. And at one of the state board of education meetings where Walters touted it, three residents expressed support for the idea — during public comment — as did at least one board member. That board member said he thought biblical literacy was important, while other supporters see the Bible mandate as a way to instill morality in the public schools. Ann Jayne,a 62-year-old resident of Edmond, about 15 miles north of Oklahoma City, makes a point of letting Walters know on his Facebook page that she’s praying for him, because she believes public schools need to instill Christian values. “I think we need church in the state,” she said. “I don’t see a problem with God being back in the school. Nobody is forcing them to become a Christian.”
Since last summer, Walters’s efforts to push Christianity have only become bolder. In mid-November, he announced the opening of the Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism, which would, among other things, investigate alleged abuses against religious freedom and patriotic displays. Two days later, he announced that he was sending 500 Bibles to Advanced Placement government classes. He also emailed superintendents around the state with the order to show their students a one-minute-and-24-second video announcing the religious liberty office and praying for newly elected President Trump.
At a Christmas parade in Norman in early December, some residents called the video embarrassing, with many superintendents, including Norman’s, having declined to show it. However, while many residents seem to abhor the Bible mandate, they do not agree on how religion should be handled in public life. Despite some religious diversity and some liberal leanings common in a university town, Norman skews religiously conservative. That dichotomy means many residents see the Bible as so sacrosanct that they don’t want it taught in schools, yet they see no problem with other Christian-oriented school activities.
In some cases, residents like school board member Brockman, who is also a former teacher and lawyer with training on the First Amendment, have objected to school promotion of the religious aspects of Christmas. When she was a teacher at one of Norman’s two high schools, she asked to stop the playing of overtly religious Christmas songs in the halls during passing periods. She saw it as a “gentle reminder that the Supreme Court says we need to remain neutral on religion.” Her wish was granted. “They took it down with some consternation and played the Grinch in my honor.”
Residents have also quibbled over what to call the parade featuring Santa each December. Should it be called the Norman holiday or Christmas parade? It’s now known as the Norman Christmas Holiday Parade. In early December, the city’s mix of liberal and conservative influences shone through the glitz during the parade. The Knights of Columbus float had a sign that said “Merry CHRISTmas.” Norman’s Pride organization participated, with its human angels wearing wings lit up in rainbow colors.
Tracey Langford, watching the parade from the back of her SUV, was dressed in a red stocking cap and a red sweatshirt that read “Santa, define good,” a jab at the fact that she is a lawyer who cares about legal definitions. To her, the Bible mandate is a clear violation of separation of church and state.“Every home here has a Bible…. We don’t need to spend a dollar to get a Bible in every classroom,” said Langford, a lawyer at the University of Oklahoma and a parent of a first grader in Norman schools and a 15-year-old in a private school.
Traci Jones, a parent of both a Norman sixth grader and fifth grader, likewise asked, “Who’s supposed to be teaching these kids the Bible? Is it just a random person? What if it’s an atheist or someone who has totally different beliefs than me?” As a nondenominational Christian, she added, “I think it’s wack to ask these poor teachers to teach that.”
What happens next may ultimately be decided in a courtroom. There is no sign yet when final opinions may be issued in either lawsuit.
State lawmakers at recent appropriation hearings said they were worried about the directive’s constitutionality, and in fact, in March, the Senate Appropriations’ Education Subcommittee said it did not consider Walters’s $3 million request to purchase Bibles. The next day Walters announced he was launching a national campaign with a country singer to get Bibles donated to Oklahoma schools. (The legislature gets the final word on the Bible purchases, a line item in the education budget, and the standards, which the state board of education approved in late February.) Meanwhile, the fate of religion’s place in public schools on a national level likely will rest with the Supreme Court, with various lawsuits against state measures promoting Christianity making their way through the court system.
A Ten Commandments monument that sat on Oklahoma State Capitol grounds until the state Supreme Court ruled its presence violated the separation of church and state. It now is at the headquarters of a conservative lobbying group. Credit: Linda K. Wertheimer for The Hechinger Report
In Norman, Jakob Topper, Kyle Tubbs and other Baptist pastors I met with at the headquarters of a statewide Baptist church organization were increasingly aghast at Walters’s mixing of religion and politics. Rick Anthony, pastor of Grace Fellowship, a Baptist church, centered his November 17 sermon on such concerns. “Almost comically, we’ve heard this week about a video made that was ordered to be shown to all children in the public schools and then sent to their parents,” he said. “Our question is…where are our voices as our political leaders cozy up to faith leaders, all the while destroying our faith institutions?”
Kaily Tubbs, Tubbs’s wife and a fifth grade teacher in Norman schools, said the mandate conflicts with her personal belief on how faith should be handled in schools. She spoke also as a mother of a kindergartener and a third grader, both in Norman schools. “Our faith is really important to us,” she said. “I don’t want it to be used as a prop in a classroom.”
Topper said that at his church, the majority of his congregation believes in separation of church and state. He said he is aware of the religious diversity that exists in his town, too, and has both Muslim and Jewish neighbors. Like Anthony, he spoke with his congregation about Walters’s mandate, though in an informal weeknight meeting at his church, rather than as part of a formal sermon. “I wish,” he said, “that Jesus was left out of schools and left for the religious realm.”
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
This week I dug into how the Trump administration’s anti-climate blitz is hampering schools’ and colleges’ ability to green their operations, plus a new report on the California wildfires’ impact on students. Thank you for reading, and reply to this email to be in touch. — Caroline Preston
LeeAnn Kittle helps oversee the Denver public school district’s work to reduce carbon emissions by 90 percent by 2050.
In January, her job got a lot tougher.
Denver expected to receive tax credits via the Inflation Reduction Act for an additional 25 electric school buses. President Donald Trump attempted to freeze clean energy funds through the IRA in his first days in office. Kittle, the district’s executive director of sustainability, also considered applying for tax credit-like payments for energy-efficient heat pumps for the district’s older buildings that lack air conditioning. And she’d intended to apply this spring for a nearly $12 million grant through Renew America’s Schools, a Department of Energy program to help schools become more energy efficient. Staff working on that program have left and its future is uncertain.
“I think we’re all in shock,” said Kittle. “It’s like someone put us in a snow globe and shook us up, and now we’re asked to stand straight. And it’s like I don’t know how to stand straight right now.”
Since January, the Trump administration has launched a broadside against efforts to reduce gases that cause climate change, including by freezing clean energy spending, slashing environmental staff and research, scrubbing the words “climate change” from websites, and rethinking decades of science showing the harms of global warming to human health and the planet. Experts and education leaders say those actions — some of which have been challenged in court — are disrupting, but not extinguishing, efforts by schools and colleges to curtail their emissions and reduce their toll on the planet.
Related: Want to read more about how climate change is shaping education? Subscribe to our free newsletter.
At the start of the year, the State University of New York was awarded $15 million to buy 350 electric vehicle charging stations. “We have yet to see the dollars,” said its chancellor, John B. King Jr. A webinar on the Department of Transportation grant program, which is funded by the bipartisan infrastructure act, was canceled. “It’s been radio silence,” said Carter Strickland, the SUNY chief sustainability officer.
The SUNY system, which owns a staggering 40 percent of New York State’s public buildings, had also planned to apply for IRA payments for a variety of projects to electrify campuses, reduce pollution and improve energy efficiency. In November, it applied for approximately $1.45 million for an Oneonta campus project that uses geothermal wells to provide heating and cooling. It still expects to get that money since the project is complete and the IRA remains law, but it can no longer count on payments for newer projects, King said.
“What the IRA did was turbocharged everything and gave many more players the ability to see themselves as part of a clean energy economy,” said Timothy Carter, president of Second Nature, a group that supports climate work in higher education. But the confusion that the Trump administration has sowed — even though the IRA has not been repealed — means both K-12 and higher education institutions are reconsidering clean energy projects.
There’s no count of how many colleges have sought funding through the IRA and bipartisan infrastructure act-funded programs, said Carter, but the work is spread across red and blue states, and some education systems have dozens of projects under construction. The University of California system, for example, filed applications for more than 70 projects, including a $1 billion project to replace UC Davis’s leaky and inefficient heating and cooling system and a project at UC Berkeley to phase out an old power plant and replace it with a microgrid.
“We remain hopeful that funding will be provided per the program provisions,” David Phillips, associate vice president for capital programs at the University of California, wrote in an email.
Sara Ross, co-founder of Undaunted K12, which helps school districts green their operations, said her group tells school leaders that for now, “energy tax credits are still the law of the land.”
But she expects those credits could be eliminated in the new tax bill that Congress is negotiating this year.
In the past, entities that begin construction on projects before any changes in a new law go into effect have been grandfathered in and still received that money, she said. “No promises,” Ross said, but historically that’s how such tax credit scenarios have worked. She said some school districts are speeding up projects to beat that possible deadline, while others are abandoning them.
There is some political movement to preserve clean energy tax credits. Roughly 85 percent of the private-sector dollars that have gone into clean energy projects are in GOP-led districts, according to a report last year. Some GOP lawmakers have advocated for maintaining that funding, which has contributed to a surge in renewable energy jobs.
Steven Bloom, assistant vice president of government relations with the American Council on Education, said that gives supporters of the IRA some hope. But he said that many higher education institutions are facing so much pain and uncertainty from other Trump administration actions, like the National Institutes of Health’s plan to slash overhead payments and investigations into alleged antisemitism, that unfortunately “climate investments may get pushed down the ladder of priorities in the near term.”
Another important vehicle for greening schools, the Renew America’s Schools grant program, was started in 2022 with $500 million for school districts. Many of the Department of Energy staff working on that effort have left, Ross said, and some school districts have not heard back about the status of funding for their projects.
In Massachusetts, the Lowell school district won a prize through the Renew America program that could unlock up to $15 million to help the district improve its aged facilities. The district’s facilities for the most part lack air conditioning and schools have been closed on occasion due to high temperatures.
Katherine Moses, the city of Lowell’s sustainability director, wrote in an email that the district had so far pocketed $300,000 that it is using for energy audits to identify inefficiencies and lay the groundwork for a larger investment. It’s unclear what could happen beyond that and if the district will receive more money. She said Lowell is proceeding according to the requirements of the grant “until we hear otherwise from DOE.”
More than 3,400 school districts have applied for money through programs created under the bipartisan infrastructure law and the IRA to electrify school buses. After a federal judge ruled against the administration’s freeze on clean energy spending, grants through those programs appear to have been unfrozen and districts have been able to access payments, said Sue Gander, director of the electric school bus initiative with the nonprofit World Resources Institute.
But rebates for electric buses are still stalled, she said. Districts are submitting forms to receive rebates, she said, “but there’s no communication coming back to them through the system about the status of their award or any indication that any payment that may have been requested is being provided.”
The Transportation and Energy departments and the Environmental Protection Agency, which runs the Clean School Bus Program, did not respond by deadline to requests for comment for this article.
King, of SUNY, noted that climate change is already negatively affecting young people and contributing to worsening disasters like floods and fires. For some faculty, staff and students, the backtracking from climate action at the federal level is stirring disappointment and fear, he said. “There is this very intense frustration that as a society we are stopping efforts to deal with what is truly an existential threat.”
Contact Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, on Signal at CPreston.83 or via email at preston@hechingerreport.org.
This story about clean energy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our climate and education newsletter.
What I’m reading:
My colleague Neal Morton traveled to northwest Colorado for a story on how phasing out coal-powered plants affects school budgets and career prospects for graduates. School districts haven’t done enough to plan for those changes or prepare students for alternate careers, he writes, and renewable energy projects are not popping up fast enough to smooth the financial pain.
Some 725,000 students at more than 1,000 schools faced school closures during the California wildfires in January, according to a new report from Undaunted K12 and EdTrust. The fire had a disproportionate impact on students living in poverty and from underrepresented backgrounds, the report says: Three-quarters of the affected students came from low-income households, and 66 percent were Hispanic.
The U.S. Coast Guard Academy removed the words “climate change” from its curriculum, reports Inside Climate News. The academy falls under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security, whose new director, Kristi Noem, issued a directive in February to “eliminate all climate change activities and the use of climate change terminology in DHS policies and programs.”
Schools with satisfactory heating systems reduce student absences by 3 percent and suspensions by 6 percent, and record a 5 percent increase in math scores, according to a study by researchers at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Schools with satisfactory cooling systems see an increase of 3 percent in reading scores.
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, on Signal at CPreston.83 or via email at preston@hechingerreport.org.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
The Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms, is investigating the unintended consequences of AI-powered surveillance at schools. Members of the Collaborative are AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.
One student asked a search engine, “Why does my boyfriend hit me?” Another threatened suicide in an email to an unrequited love. A gay teen opened up in an online diary about struggles with homophobic parents, writing they just wanted to be themselves.
In each case and thousands of others, surveillance software powered by artificial intelligence immediately alerted Vancouver Public Schools staff in Washington state.
Vancouver and many other districts around the country have turned to technology to monitor school-issued devices 24/7 for any signs of danger as they grapple with a student mental health crisis and the threat of shootings.
The goal is to keep children safe, but these tools raise serious questions about privacy and security – as proven when Seattle Times and Associated Press reporters inadvertently received access to almost 3,500 sensitive, unredacted student documents through a records request about the district’s surveillance technology.
The released documents show students use these laptops for more than just schoolwork; they are coping with angst in their personal lives.
Tim Reiland, 42, center, the parent of daughter Zoe Reiland, 17, right, and Anakin Reiland, 15, photographed in Clinton, Miss., Monday, March 10, 2025, said he had no idea their previous schools, in Oklahoma, were using surveillance technology to monitor the students. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)
Students wrote about depression, heartbreak, suicide, addiction, bullying and eating disorders. There are poems, college essays and excerpts from role-play sessions with AI chatbots.
Vancouver school staff and anyone else with links to the files could read everything. Firewalls or passwords didn’t protect the documents, and student names were not redacted, which cybersecurity experts warned was a massive security risk.
The monitoring tools often helped counselors reach out to students who might have otherwise struggled in silence. But the Vancouver case is a stark reminder of surveillance technology’s unintended consequences in American schools.
In some cases, the technology has outed LGBTQ+ children and eroded trust between students and school staff, while failing to keep schools completely safe.
Gaggle, the company that developed the software that tracks Vancouver schools students’ online activity, believes not monitoring children is like letting them loose on “a digital playground without fences or recess monitors,” CEO and founder Jeff Patterson said.
Roughly 1,500 school districts nationwide use Gaggle’s software to track the online activity of approximately 6 million students. It’s one of many companies, like GoGuardian and Securly, that promise to keep kids safe through AI-assisted web surveillance.
Vancouver schools apologized for releasing the documents. Still, the district emphasizes Gaggle is necessary to protect students’ well-being.
“I don’t think we could ever put a price on protecting students,” said Andy Meyer, principal of Vancouver’s Skyview High School. “Anytime we learn of something like that and we can intervene, we feel that is very positive.”
Dacia Foster, a parent in the district, commended the efforts to keep students safe but worries about privacy violations.
“That’s not good at all,” Foster said after learning the district inadvertently released the records. “But what are my options? What do I do? Pull my kid out of school?”
Foster says she’d be upset if her daughter’s private information was compromised.
“At the same time,” she said, “I would like to avoid a school shooting or suicide.”
Gaggle uses a machine learning algorithm to scan what students search or write online via a school-issued laptop or tablet 24 hours a day, or whenever they log into their school account on a personal device. The latest contract Vancouver signed, in summer 2024, shows a price of $328,036 for three school years – approximately the cost of employing one extra counselor.
The algorithm detects potential indicators of problems like bullying, self-harm, suicide or school violence and then sends a screenshot to human reviewers. If Gaggle employees confirm the issue might be serious, the company alerts the school. In cases of imminent danger, Gaggle calls school officials directly. In rare instances where no one answers, Gaggle may contact law enforcement for a welfare check.
A Vancouver school counselor who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation said they receive three or four student Gaggle alerts per month. In about half the cases, the district contacts parents immediately.
“A lot of times, families don’t know. We open that door for that help,” the counselor said. Gaggle is “good for catching suicide and self-harm, but students find a workaround once they know they are getting flagged.”
Related: Have you had experience with school surveillance tech? Tell us about it
Seattle Times and AP reporters saw what kind of writing set off Gaggle’s alerts after requesting information about the type of content flagged. Gaggle saved screenshots of activity that set off each alert, and school officials accidentally provided links to them, not realizing they weren’t protected by a password.
After learning about the records inadvertently released to reporters, Gaggle updated its system. Now, after 72 hours, only those logged into a Gaggle account can view the screenshots. Gaggle said this feature was already in the works but had not yet been rolled out to every customer.
The company says the links must be accessible without a login during those 72 hours so emergency contacts—who often receive these alerts late at night on their phones—can respond quickly.
In Vancouver, the monitoring technology flagged more than 1,000 documents for suicide and nearly 800 for threats of violence. While many alerts were serious, many others turned out to be false alarms, like a student essay about the importance of consent or a goofy chat between friends.
Foster’s daughter Bryn, a Vancouver School of Arts and Academics sophomore, was one such false alarm. She was called into the principal’s office after writing a short story featuring a scene with mildly violent imagery.
“I’m glad they’re being safe about it, but I also think it can be a bit much,” Bryn said.
School officials maintain alerts are warranted even in less severe cases or false alarms, ensuring potential issues are addressed promptly.
“It allows me the opportunity to meet with a student I maybe haven’t met before and build that relationship,” said Chele Pierce, a Skyview High School counselor.
Between October 2023 and October 2024, nearly 2,200 students, about 10% of the district’s enrollment, were the subject of a Gaggle alert. At the Vancouver School of Arts and Academics, where Bryn is a student, about 1 in 4 students had communications that triggered a Gaggle alert.
While schools continue to use surveillance technology, its long-term effects on student safety are unclear. There’s no independent research showing it measurably lowers student suicide rates or reduces violence.
A 2023 RAND study found only “scant evidence” of either benefits or risks from AI surveillance, concluding: “No research to date has comprehensively examined how these programs affect youth suicide prevention.”
“If you don’t have the right number of mental health counselors, issuing more alerts is not actually going to improve suicide prevention,” said report co-author Benjamin Boudreaux, an AI ethics researcher.
In the screenshots released by Vancouver schools, at least six students were potentially outed to school officials after writing about being gay, trans or struggling with gender dysphoria.
LGBTQ+ students are more likely than their peers to suffer from depression and suicidal thoughts, and turn to the internet for support.
“We know that gay youth, especially those in more isolated environments, absolutely use the internet as a life preserver,” said Katy Pearce, a University of Washington professor who researches technology in authoritarian states.
In one screenshot, a Vancouver high schooler wrote in a Google survey form they’d been subject to trans slurs and racist bullying. Who created this survey is unclear, but the person behind it had falsely promised confidentiality: “I am not a mandated reporter, please tell me the whole truth.”
When North Carolina’s Durham Public Schools piloted Gaggle in 2021, surveys showed most staff members found it helpful.
But community members raised concerns. An LGBTQ+ advocate reported to the Board of Education that a Gaggle alert about self-harm had led to a student being outed to their family, who were not supportive.
Glenn Thompson, a Durham School of the Arts graduate, poses in front of the school in Durham, N.C., Monday, March 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Karl DeBlaker)
Glenn Thompson, a Durham School of the Arts graduate, spoke up at a board meeting during his senior year. One of his teachers promised a student confidentiality for an assignment related to mental health. A classmate was then “blindsided” when Gaggle alerted school officials about something private they’d disclosed. Thompson said no one in the class, including the teacher, knew the school was piloting Gaggle.
“You can’t just (surveil) people and not tell them. That’s a horrible breach of security and trust,” said Thompson, now a college student, in an interview.
After hearing about these experiences, the Durham Board of Education voted to stop using Gaggle in 2023. The district ultimately decided it was not worth the risk of outing students or eroding relationships with adults.
The debate over privacy and security is complicated, and parents are often unaware it’s even an issue. Pearce, the University of Washington professor, doesn’t remember reading about Securly, the surveillance software Seattle Public Schools uses, when she signed the district’s responsible use form before her son received a school laptop.
Even when families learn about school surveillance, they may be unable to opt out. Owasso Public Schools in Oklahoma has used Gaggle since 2016 to monitor students outside of class.
For years, Tim Reiland, the parent of two teenagers, had no idea the district was using Gaggle. He found out only after asking if his daughter could bring her personal laptop to school instead of being forced to use a district one because of privacy concerns.
The district refused Reiland’s request.
When his daughter, Zoe, found out about Gaggle, she says she felt so “freaked out” that she stopped Googling anything personal on her Chromebook, even questions about her menstrual period. She didn’t want to get called into the office for “searching up lady parts.”
“I was too scared to be curious,” she said.
School officials say they don’t track metrics measuring the technology’s efficacy but believe it has saved lives.
Yet technology alone doesn’t create a safe space for all students. In 2024, a nonbinary teenager at Owasso High School named Nex Benedict died by suicide after relentless bullying from classmates. A subsequent U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights investigation found the district responded with “deliberate indifference” to some families’ reports of sexual harassment, mainly in the form of homophobic bullying.
During the 2023-24 school year, the Owasso schools received close to 1,000 Gaggle alerts, including 168 alerts for harassment and 281 for suicide.
When asked why bullying remained a problem despite surveillance, Russell Thornton, the district’s executive director of technology responded: “This is one tool used by administrators. Obviously, one tool is not going to solve the world’s problems and bullying.”
Despite the risks, surveillance technology can help teachers intervene before a tragedy.
A middle school student in the Seattle-area Highline School District who was potentially being trafficked used Gaggle to communicate with campus staff, said former superintendent Susan Enfield.
“They knew that the staff member was reading what they were writing,” Enfield said. “It was, in essence, that student’s way of asking for help.”
Still, developmental psychology research shows it is vital for teens to have private spaces online to explore their thoughts and seek support.
“The idea that kids are constantly under surveillance by adults — I think that would make it hard to develop a private life, a space to make mistakes, a space to go through hard feelings without adults jumping in,” said Boudreaux, the AI ethics researcher.
Gaggle’s Patterson says school-issued devices are not the appropriate place for unlimited self-exploration. If that exploration takes a dark turn, such as making a threat, “the school’s going to be held liable,” he said. “If you’re looking for that open free expression, it really can’t happen on the school system’s computers.”
Claire Bryan is an education reporter for The Seattle Times. Sharon Lurye is an education data reporter for The Associated Press.
Contact Hechinger managing editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, on Signal at CarolineP.83 or via email at preston@hechingerreport.org.
This story about AI-powered surveillance at schools was produced by the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Hancy Maxis spent 17 years incarcerated in New York prisons. He knew that he needed to have a plan for when he got out.
“Once I am back in New York City, once I am back in the economy, how will I be marketable?” he said. “For me, math was that pathway.”
In 2015, Maxis completed a bachelor’s degree in math through the Bard Prison Initiative, an accredited college-in-prison program. He wrote his senior project about how to use game theory to advance health care equity, after observing the disjointed care his mom received when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. (She’s now recovered.)
When he was released in 2018, Maxis immediately applied for a master’s program at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. He graduated and now works as the assistant director of operations at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. He helped guide the hospital’s response to Covid.
Maxis is one of many people I’ve spoken to in recent years while reporting on the role that learning math can play in the lives of those who are incarcerated. Math literacy often contributes to economic success: A 2021 study of more than 5,500 adults found that participants made $4,062 more per year for each correct answer on an eight-question math test.
While there don’t appear to be any studies specifically on the effect of math education for people in prison, a pile of research shows that prison education programs lower recidivism rates among participants and increase their chances of employment after they’re released.
Hancy Maxis spent 17 years incarcerated in New York prisons. He now works as the assistant director of operations at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. Credit: Yunuen Bonaparte for The Hechinger Report
Plus, math — and education in general — can be empowering. A 2022 study found that women in prison education programs reported higher self-esteem, a greater sense of belonging and more hope for the future than women who had never been incarcerated and had not completed post-secondary education.
Yet many people who enter prison have limited math skills and have had poor relationships with math in school. More than half (52 percent) of those incarcerated in U.S. prisons lack basic numeracy skills, such as the ability to do multiplication with larger numbers, long division or interpret simple graphs, according to the most recent numbers from the National Center for Educational Statistics. The absence of these basic skills is even more pronounced among Black and Hispanic people in prison, who make up more than half of those incarcerated in federal prisons.
In my reporting, I discovered that there are few programs offering math instruction in prison, and those that do exist typically include few participants. Bard’s highly competitive program, for example, is supported primarily through private donations, and is limited to seven of New York’s 42 prisons. The recent expansion of federal Pell Grants to individuals who are incarcerated presents an opportunity for more people in prison to get these basic skills and better their chances for employment after release.
Alyssa Knight, executive director of the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound, which she co-founded while incarcerated, said that for years, educational opportunities in prison were created primarily by people who were incarcerated, who wrote to professors and educators to ask if they might send materials or teach inside the prison. But public recognition of the value of prison education, including math, is rising, and the Pell Grant expansion and state-level legislationhave made it easier for colleges to set up programs for people serving time. Now, Knight said, “Colleges are seeking prisons.”
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Jeffrey Abramowitz understands firsthand how math can help someone after prison. After completing a five-year stint in a federal prison, his first post-prison job was teaching math to adults who were preparing to take the GED exam.
Fast forward nearly a decade, and Abramowitz is now the CEO of The Petey Greene Program, an organization that provides one-on-one tutoring, educational supports and programs in reading, writing and now math, to help people in prison and who have left prison receive the necessary education requirements for a high school diploma, college acceptance or career credentials.
The average Petey Greene student’s math skills are at a fourth- or fifth-grade level, according to Abramowitz, which is in line with the average for “justice-impacted” learners; the students tend to struggle with basic math such as addition and multiplication.
“You can’t be successful within most industries without being able to read, write and do basic math,” Abramowitz said. “We’re starting to see more blended programs that help people find a career pathway when they come home — and the center of all this is math and reading.”
Abramowitz and his team noticed this lack of math skills particularly among students in vocational training programs, such as carpentry, heating and cooling and commercial driving. To qualify to work in these fields, these students often need to pass a licensing test, requiring math and reading knowledge.
The nonprofit offers “integrated education training” to help students learn the relevant math for their professions. For instance, a carpentry teacher will teach students how to use a saw in or near a classroom where a math teacher explains fractions and how they relate to the measurements needed to cut a piece of wood.
“They may be able to do the task fine, but they can’t pass the test because they don’t know the math,” Abramowitz said.
Math helped Paul Morton after he left prison, he told me. When he began his 10.5 years in prison, he only could do GED-level math. After coming across an introductory physics book in the third year of his time in prison, he realized he didn’t have the math skills needed for the science described in it.
He asked his family to send him math textbooks and, over the seven years until his release, taught himself algebra and calculus.
The recent expansion of federal Pell Grants to individuals who are incarcerated presents an opportunity for more people in prison to get these basic skills and better their chances for employment after release. Credit: Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post via Getty Images
“I relentlessly spent six hours on one problem one day,” he said. “I was determined to do it, to get it right.”
I met Morton through the organization the Prison Mathematics Project, which helped him develop his math knowledge inside prison by connecting him with an outside mathematician. After his release from a New York prison in 2023, he moved to Rochester, New York, and is hoping to take the actuarial exam, which requires a lot of math. He continues to study differential equations on his own.
The Prison Mathematics Project delivers math materials and programs to people in prison, and connects them with mathematicians as mentors. (It also brings math professors, educators and enthusiasts to meet program participants through “Pi Day” events; I attended one such event in 2023 when I produced a podcast episode about the program, and the organization paid for my travel and accommodations.)
The organization was started in 2015 by Christopher Havens, who was then incarcerated at Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. Havens’ interest in math puzzles, and then in algebra, calculus and other areas of mathematics, was ignited early in his 25-year- term when a prison volunteer slid some sudoku puzzles under his door.
“I had noticed all these changes happening inside of me,” Havens told me. “My whole life, I was searching for that beauty through drugs and social acceptance … When I found real beauty [in math], it got me to practice introspection.”
As he fell in love with math, he started corresponding with mathematicians to help him solve problems, and talking to other men at the prison to get them interested too. He created a network of math resources for people in prisons, which became the Prison Mathematics Project.
The group’s website says it helps people in prison use math to help with “rebuilding their lives both during and after their incarceration.”
But Ben Jeffers, its executive director, has noticed that the message doesn’t connect with everyone in prison. Among the 299 Prison Mathematics Project participants on whom the program has data, the majority — 56 percent — are white, he told me, while 25 percent are Black, 10 percent are Hispanic, 2 percent are Asian and 6 percent are another race or identity. Ninety-three percent of project participants are male.
Yet just 30 percent of the U.S. prison population is white, while 35 percent of those incarcerated are Black, 31 percent are Hispanic and 4 percent are of other races, according to the United State Sentencing Commission. (The racial makeup of the program’s 18 female participants at women’s facilities is much more in line with that of the prison population at large.)
“[It’s] the same issues that you have like in any classroom in higher education,” said Jeffers, who is finishing his master’s in math in Italy. “At the university level and beyond, every single class is majority white male.”
He noted that anxiety about math tends to be more acute among women and people of any gender who are Black, Hispanic, or from other underrepresented groups, and may keep them from signing up for the program.
Sherry Smith understands that kind of anxiety. She didn’t even want to step foot into a math class. When she arrived at Southern Maine Women’s Reentry Center in December 2021, she was 51, had left high school when she was 16, and had only attended two weeks of a ninth grade math class.
“I was embarrassed that I had dropped out,” she said. “I hated to disclose that to people.”
Smith decided to enroll in the prison’s GED program because she could do the classes one-on-one with a friendly and patient teacher. “It was my time,” she said. “Nobody else was listening, I could ask any question I needed.”
In just five months, Smith completed her GED math class. She said she cried on her last day. Since 2022, she’s been pursuing an associate’s degree in human services — from prison — through a remote program with Washington County Community College.
In Washington, Prison Mathematics Project founder Havens is finishing his sentence and continuing to study math. (Havens has been granted a clemency hearing and may be released as early as this year.) Since 2020, he has published four academic papers: three in math and one in sociology. He works remotely from prison as a staff research associate in cryptography at the University of California, Los Angeles, and wrote a math textbook about continued fractions.
Havens is still involved in the Prison Mathematics Project, but handed leadership of the program over to Jeffers in October 2023. Now run from outside the prison, it is easier for the program to bring resources and mentorship to incarcerated students.
“For 25 years of my life, I can learn something that I wouldn’t have the opportunity to learn in any other circumstances,” Havens said. “So I decided that I would, for the rest of my life, study mathematics.”
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SUPAI, Ariz. — Kambria Siyuja always felt like the smartest kid in Supai.
Raised by educators in this tribal village at the base of the Grand Canyon, she started kindergarten a little ahead of her peers. Her teachers at Havasupai Elementary School often asked Siyuja to tutor younger students and sometimes even let her run their classrooms. She graduated valedictorian of her class.
But once she left the K-8 school at the top of her grade, Siyuja stopped feeling so smart.
“I didn’t know math or basic formulas,” she said. “Typing and tech? Nonexistent.”
Siyuja, now 22, wiped tears from her face as she sat alongside her mother and grandmother — the educators of the family — one afternoon last year in the Havasupai Tribal Council chambers. The trio wept as they recalled Siyuja’s move as a teenager to a private boarding school 150 miles away in Sedona, Arizona, which she’d chosen to attend because the federal agency that runs Havasupai Elementary, the only school in her village, provides no options for high school.
Kambria Siyuja, right, plans to teach in Supai, like her mother, Jackie Siyuja, middle, who teaches at the tribe’s preschool program. Grandmother and Havasupai Tribal Council chair Bernadine Jones, left, previously taught at the elementary school. Their tribe’s seal is reflected from a window onto a wall in the council chambers. Credit: Matt Stensland for The Hechinger Report
Once there, however, Siyuja discovered how little she’d learned at the Supai school. She had only superficial familiarity with state and U.S. history, and knew none of the literature her peers had read years earlier. She was the only freshman who’d never taken pre-algebra.
Last year, eight years after Siyuja graduated, the K-8 school still did not offer pre-algebra, a course that most U.S. public school students take in seventh or eighth grade, if not earlier. It had no textbooks for math, science or social studies. The school’s remoteness — on a 518-acre reservation the government forcibly relocated the Havasupai people to more than 150 years ago — makes it a challenge to staff, and chronic turnover required the few educators who remained to teach multiple grades at once. Only 3 percent of students test proficiently in either English language arts or math.
“I know they struggle a lot because of how few resources we have down here,” said Siyuja of Supai, which visitors must reach either by an 8-mile hike or helicopter. “But what are they teaching here?”
In 2017, six Havasupai families sued the federal government, alleging that the Bureau of Indian Education, which operates Havasupai Elementary and is housed within the Interior Department, deprived their children of their federal right to an education. The tribe, in a brief supporting the lawsuit, argued that the bureau had allowed Havasupai Elementary to become “the worst school in a deplorable BIE system” and that court intervention was required to protect students from the agency.
The families eventually secured two historic settlements that fueled hopes across Indian Country that true reform might finally improve outcomes both in Supai and perhaps also at BIE schools throughout the U.S.
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So far, the settlements have brought new staff to Supai, and the BIE had to reconstitute the school board. Teachers now must use lesson plans, and they finally have a curriculum to use in English, science and math classes. A new principal pledged to stay longer than a school year.
“We now have some teachers and some repairs to the building that are being done,” said Dinolene Kaska, a mother to three former students and a new school board member. “It has been a long time just to get to this point.”
Valencia Stinson leads a kindergarten class through a lesson matching lowercase letters with their corresponding uppercase letters. Credit: Matt Stensland for The Hechinger Report
The legal wins followed an effort to reform the BIE as a whole. In 2014, federal officials unveiled a sweeping plan to overhaul the beleaguered bureau, which had long struggled to deliver better student outcomes with anemic funding. If the BIE were a state, the schools it operates would rank at or very near the bottom of any list for academic achievement.
But in the past decade, and after a nearly doubling of its budget, the BIE has finally started to make some progress. Graduation rates have improved, staff vacancies are down and the bureau built its own data system to track and support student achievement across its 183 campuses in 23 different states. Now, those milestones could be at risk.
President Donald Trump, in his seismic restructuring of the federal government, laid off thousands of workers that will trigger deep cuts to the BIE, among other agencies that work directly on Indian Country. The White House in January also issued an executive order to turn the BIE into a school choice program, draining the bureau of funding and, according to some advocates in Washington, D.C., threatening the government’s long-established trust responsibility to tribal nations. It also remains unclear how the policy would benefit families in isolated communities like Supai where other schooling options are scant or nonexistent.
“Tribes in rural areas don’t have a lot of school choice,” said Quinton Roman Nose, executive director of the Tribal Education Departments National Assembly, a nonprofit that works with tribal education agencies. “For Native students, that’s not a good model. I don’t think it’s going to work for so many.”
Brian Schatz, a Hawaii Democrat and vice chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, said the Trump administration’s actions are devastating. “What Trump is doing to the federal government isn’t just reckless — it’s arson,” he said in a statement to The Hechinger Report. “We will do everything we can to ensure that this manufactured chaos does not have lasting impacts on our trust and treaty responsibilities to Native communities.”
Last fall, as conservative critics called for dismantling the BIE and converting its funding into vouchers, longtime director Tony Dearman defended the bureau. He also pitched a new, five-year strategic direction that will emphasize tribal sovereignty and cultural education — both promises the bureau made in its reform agenda more than a decade ago.
“We have really built the capacity of the BIE,” Dearman said. “It’s just taken a while. Anything in the government does.”
Still, he insisted that the BIE could fulfill the government’s obligation to deliver a quality education to tribal nations. “I truly believe that we can handle the trust responsibility with the support from Congress through appropriations,” Dearman said.
For decades, the Department of the Interior, which manages natural resources and wildlife, placed control of schools on tribal reservations within its Bureau of Indian Affairs. The agency oversees law and justice across Indian Country, as well as agriculture, infrastructure, economic development and tribal governance. The agency’s poor management of schools, meanwhile, had been well documented, and in 2006, an internal shakeup resulted in the creation of the BIE.
Almost from the start, the new bureau faced criticism.
In 2008, the Government Accountability Office dinged the BIE for stumbling in its early implementation of the No Child Left Behind education law. A year later, the Nation’s Report Card found Native students in traditional public schools performed much better than those in BIE schools. (About 92 percent of Native students attend traditional public schools and 8 percent attend BIE schools.) Senators scolded the bureau after only 1 in 4 of its schools could meet the new federal education standards. A 2011 report, “Broken Promises, Broken Schools,” cataloged the deterioration of BIE schools, estimating it would cost $1.3 billion to bring every educational facility to an “acceptable” condition.
In 2013, then-Interior Secretary Sally Jewell assembled a study group to diagnose the root causes of academic failures in BIE schools. A year later, the group released the Blueprint for Reform. At its unveiling, Arne Duncan, then the federal education secretary, had damning words for why the BIE needed to change, calling it “the epitome of broken” and “utterly bankrupt.”
The blueprint, issued through a formal secretarial order, called for dramatically restructuring the BIE over two years, starting with its management of tribally controlled schools. In 1988, as part of a renewed focus on tribal sovereignty, Congress had created a grant program to help tribes take control of their respective BIE schools, and as of 2014, a full two-thirds of campuses had already converted.
The 70-page blueprint proposed transforming the agency from a top-down operator of schools into more of an educational services and support center. It would create a division within the BIE to focus on assisting principals with the day-to-day operation of schools. New regional directors and offices would oversee tribally controlled schools, BIE-operated campuses and schools on the sprawling Navajo Nation.
The plan also pitched the addition of “school support solutions teams” at each regional office that would assist with teacher and principal recruitment, school facilities, financial management and technology. A new Office of Sovereignty and Indian Education would help tribes convert their schools to local control and encourage them to shape culture and language classes. Other proposed changes included allowing tribes to tie staff pay to student performance and creating incentives to replicate successful tribally controlled schools.
The study group, however, did not address whether the bureau needed additional funding to pull off the reforms. And without additional funding, the BIE faced deep cuts as budget negotiations pressured then-President Barack Obama to require all federal agencies to reduce their spending by 20 percent.
That essentially tasked the BIE with achieving a turnaround of its failing schools with a fifth less funding. By the time of the blueprint, those cuts were already phasing in: Between 2011 and 2014, for example, the number of full-time administrators located on or near Indian reservations to oversee school spending fell from 22 to 13, leaving the remaining staff to still split 64 reservations among them.
“It was a terrible set up,” said one former top agency official who worked at the BIE during the blueprint’s release. The official, like many of the more than 75 interviewed by The Hechinger Report for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the DOI’s large role in tribal communities and worries that criticizing the agency could cost them jobs or contracts.
Famous for its turquoise waterfalls — Havasupai means “people of the blue-green water” — Supai village greets visitors at the banks of Havasu Creek.
The creek and waterfalls feed a hidden canyon oasis here. Trees bursting with blooms of apricot and pomegranate offer much-welcome shade for backpacking tourists and the mules carrying their gear. Tribal elders wind their way through Supai’s unmarked dusty roads as children on the preschool playground shield their eyes from sand swirling around the adjacent helipad. Benches, some made from milk crates, ring the town square at the front gate of Havasupai Elementary.
Eight years ago, lawyer Alexis DeLaCruz sat on one of those benches in Supai town square. She had recently started working at the Native American Disability Law Center, a firm based in Farmington, New Mexico, that represents Native Americans with disabilities. The firm had recently hosted a training on special education law for parents, and several from Supai, incensed about their kids’ education, traveled out of the canyon to attend. They convinced DeLaCruz and two colleagues to book a helicopter ride into the village to hear directly from parents about their experiences with the BIE.
Parents described how their children couldn’t tell the difference between North and South America and, despite BIE regulations requiring Native culture in all curriculum areas, the students never had a class in Havasupai culture, history or language. Because of a teacher shortage, children learned in classes that combined students from three or even four grades. The school had 10 principals in as many years. The BIE closed Havasupai Elementary for nearly a month in 2015 because of insufficient staffing.
About 100 students each year enroll in Havasupai Elementary School, one of 183 schools that the Bureau of Indian Education manages on 64 tribal reservations across the U.S. Credit: Matt Stensland for The Hechinger Report
Siyuja, who graduated from the school in 2016, remembered cooks and janitors stepping in as teachers — and then having to leave class midday to check on school lunch or plumbing problems.
Until Siyuja reached the fourth grade, Havasupai Elementary, which serves about 80 students, had two tribal members on staff. They led culture and language classes, and Siyuja still owns a copy of the Havasupai dictionary they gifted her as a child. But then they left, and most of the other teachers soon followed, during the 2011-12 school year, she recalled.
That’s when Obama tasked federal agencies with cutting a fifth of their administrative budgets, hollowing out the BIE’s ability to support its schools. In Supai, the already revolving door of educators suddenly started spinning much faster, Siyuja said.
“We were just in this constant loop of relearning the same thing over and over,” she said.
It wasn’t until college, at Fort Lewis College in Colorado, where Siyuja chose to study education, that she learned it was not normal for a school to lump so many grades together in one classroom. “That’s one of the major big no-nos,” she said. (In an email, a BIE spokesperson said, “Many schools implement implement multi-grade instruction as an intentional and effective educational model,” particularly in rural and remote locations, “to enhance individualized learning, maximize resources and promote peer collaboration.”)
In January 2017, nine students from six families sued the BIE and the Interior Department, naming as defendants Dearman, Jewell — who did not respond to interview requests — her deputy assistant secretary and the Havasupai Elementary School principal. The lawsuit listed all plaintiffs under pseudonyms to protect their identity, and the two families involved in the lawsuit who spoke with The Hechinger Report for this story asked to remain anonymous even after the settlements were signed. Some of the students still attend BIE schools, and parents remain worried about exposing any of their children’s privacy, even as adults.
The families hinged their case on a well-established federal right to education for Native American children.
There is no federal right to education in the Constitution, according to a landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision. But for Native Americans, congressional statutes, executive orders, treaties and other Supreme Court opinions dating back virtually to this nation’s founding have cemented education as a major component of the government’s trust responsibility — a set of legal and moral obligations to protect tribal sovereignty and generally look out for the welfare of tribal members. In 1972, lawmakers made it even more clear with the Indian Education Act, which says that the “federal government has the sole responsibility for the operation and financial support” of tribal schools. They also required the BIA — the BIE had not yet been established — to work with tribes to create a system of schools of “the highest quality.” To this day, the BIE pitches itself as a provider of a “world class education.”
DeLaCruz, not long after filing the Havasupai case, started imagining what impact it could have beyond that tiny community.
“Most cases in our legal system end in money,” she said. “This isn’t the same calculus. We’re weighing what we think we can get in place that won’t just make a difference for students now but frankly for generations to come.”
The lead plaintiff in the case was a sixth grader described in the lawsuit as Stephen C. Diagnosed with ADHD, he had never received counseling as mandated in his Individualized Education Program, or IEP, a legal document detailing the interventions and supports that a student with a disability will get from their school. None of the fifth grade teachers the school hired stayed more than two weeks, the lawsuit said, and Stephen C. was taught in a combined sixth, seventh and eighth grade class.
His teacher’s attention split among kids across three grades, Stephen C. started to act out. The school sent him home three to four times a week for behavior issues related to his disability, the lawsuit alleged. Even as an eighth grader, he could barely read or write.
In its friend-of-the-court brief, the Havasupai Tribe said its “people have been isolated at the bottom of one of the world’s most rugged canyons and for more than a century have been forced to depend on the federal government to educate their children.
“Although the days of forced removal and assimilation are over,” the brief continued, “the BIE is still failing its students.”
The federal government didn’t entirely dispute the claims of Stephen C. and his co-plaintiffs.
The BIE and DOI, in June 2017, formally petitioned the U.S. District Court of Arizona to dismiss the case, arguing that the students couldn’t prove the BIE failed or refused to comply with its regulations for what counts as a “basic” education. Also, by that point Stephen C. and four other plaintiffs all had graduated or transferred from Havasupai Elementary, making them ineligible to pursue compensatory educational services, according to the government.
But Lisa Olson, an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, also acknowledged the BIE’s shortcomings.
“We are not saying there’s no accountability here. We are just saying that it’s for Congress and the executive to resolve these problems,” Olson said during a November 2019 hearing before U.S. District Judge Steven Logan. “The agency doesn’t dispute that its efforts have been unsatisfactory and they have fallen short.”
Olson asked Logan to consider the many challenges of providing instruction in Supai: There was no funding for an agency helicopter to transport teachers in and out, for example, and new hires often failed their background checks or took other positions before the FBI checks were completed.
“There’s nothing we can do to change that,” she said.
Passengers load into a helicopter at a landing zone next to the preschool’s playground in a central part of Supai village. Credit: Matt Stensland for The Hechinger Report
Logan seemed unmoved. “So what you are basically saying, counsel, is it is the problem of the parents, and they need to make better decisions about where they have children so they can be properly educated?” he said. Olson responded, saying, “It is not the parents’ fault, but we need the cooperation of the parents and the community.” She continued, “I’m saying that BIE is doing its best and tries to enlist the support of parents and the tribe.”
The families also presented a secondary argument — that the complex trauma of Native American children qualifies them for services and protections of the sort that are guaranteed for students with disabilities. They argued that exposure to adversity — specifically, the long-lasting trauma from this nation’s official policy to separate Native children from their families in order to eradicate their cultures and seize tribal land — limited their ability to access the benefits of a public education. To this day, Havasupai families must ship their children away to attend high school, often in other states, and the BIE has no plans to open one in the canyon.
The government warned Logan against following that line of logic, cautioning that it would set a dangerous precedent linking childhood adversity to a student’s ability to learn. The families filed their lawsuit under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prevents discrimination against people with disabilities in federal programs. It does not include adversity or trauma on its list of qualifying conditions, and its applicable regulations expressly note that social disadvantage, such as homelessness or family violence, do not count as impairments, the government noted.
Expanding that definition would threaten to impose “unwieldy” obligations on high-poverty schools across the U.S., the government’s attorneys argued.
“The alleged ‘forced relocation, loss of homes, families and culture,’ and poverty within the Havasupai community … do not constitute a physical or mental impairment,” the motion to dismiss reads.
In August 2020, the federal court issued a mixed decision. Logan allowed the case to continue for students with disabilities. The families also persuaded the court that complex trauma — including interaction with juvenile justice systems, extreme poverty and a denial of access to education — qualifies as a protected disability in the rehabilitation law. But he dismissed the general education claims, deciding that the older students, including Stephen C., had aged out of the school and no potential remedy would be precise enough for a court to enforce.
The Havasupai families cheered Logan’s ruling, but only in part. As they continued to pursue the special education claims, the Havasupai families challenged his decision to dismiss the rest of the case. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which includes Arizona, heard their arguments in February 2022.
“The agency is attempting to comply,” Laura Myron, a Justice Department attorney, told the judges. There are, she added, “numerous, practical obstacles to operating a school at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.”
Kathryn Eidmann, president and CEO of Public Counsel, a pro bono public interest law firm, represented the Havasupai families and argued that their ancestors never chose to permanently live in such an isolated location. The government restricted the tribe to the reservation to make way for Grand Canyon National Park.
Hoai-My Winder, new principal at Havasupai Elementary Schools, holds a student’s hand while walking with him during recess. Credit: Matt Stensland for The Hechinger Report
“The obstacles that the government is pointing to that make compliance hard are entirely problems of the government’s own making,” Eidmann said.
In a short five-page decision, the 9th Circuit panel allowed the older students to continue their lawsuit against the BIE. They clarified that judges — namely, Logan — could indeed compel an agency to comply with its own regulations.
The three judges also ruled that the students could seek monetary compensation for the educational services they never received.
Tara Ford, also a pro bono attorney on the Stephen C. case, said at the time that the ruling would reverberate across Indian Country: “Students who have been harmed by the Bureau of Indian Education’s broken promises now have a path to hold the federal government accountable for its failures.”
By then, the students and government had settled the special education claims. Their deal provided each student with $20,000 for compensatory services and required the BIE to follow anti-discrimination provisions of the Rehabilitation Act while creating its first-ever complaint process for parents to challenge suspected discrimination. After the 9th Circuit ruling, however, negotiations to settle the rest of the Stephen C. case stretched beyond a year.
The eventual deal, signed in May 2023, established an $850,000 compensatory education fund for any student who attended Havasupai Elementary since 2011. The BIE estimates about 215 kids could qualify to use that money, meaning each child would receive roughly $4,000, less than some families had hoped for. It also agreed to pay stipends to help recruit and retain teachers in Supai, build additional housing for staff and hire a cultural instructor from the community. The BIE also had to form a new school board.
A year after the case closed, Breanna Bollig, a fellow at the California Tribal Families Coalition, wrote in a legal publication that it could change Native education far beyond Supai.
“The BIE could be held accountable at every other BIE school through similar lawsuits,” Bollig wrote. “Perhaps the federal right to education for Indian children can even be used to improve inadequate and inequitable state public schools that Indian children attend.”
Billy Vides stopped counting at 19.
That’s how many principals he worked with in his first three years as a teacher at Havasupai Elementary. He stayed two more years, submitting his resignation in June.
A longtime educator in Phoenix public schools, Vides first heard of Supai from a pair of grandmothers at an early learning conference. He had considered retiring, but knew he would miss working with kids. Vides searched online for Havasupai, bookmarked an article calling it “America’s Worst Tribal School” and sent in his application.
“I wanted to make a difference,” he said.
The BIE hired Vides in 2019 as a kindergarten and first grade teacher. On his first day, the interim principal assigned him to a combined kindergarten, first, third and fourth grade class. The ages didn’t mix well, he said, and the older kids bullied and sometimes assaulted the younger children.
Joy Van Est, a special education teacher who quit in June, said many of her students’ IEPs had not been updated for several years. It took her four months, the entirety of her tenure there, to update every child’s support plan.
As part of the settlement, an independent monitor every six months must visit Supai and inspect whether the BIE has complied with its own regulations at the school. The monitor must review 104 specific requirements covering student-to-teacher ratios, curriculum taught in each subject, textbooks, grading rules and more. In its first report following a January 2024 visit, the monitor found the bureau in violation of 72 of those requirements.
The school had a curriculum for just one subject — English language arts — and no textbooks for math, science and social studies, the compliance report reads. Teachers used no lesson plans, in any subject, and the school had no librarian. Only one tribal member taught at the school, leading culture and language classes once a week for 45 minutes.
The compliance officer granted the BIE some credit for hiring a school counselor and physical education teacher. However, once-a-week P.E. classes only happened if the part-time teacher could catch a helicopter flight. The counselor started in November 2023, but staff shortages required her to cover teachers’ classrooms too often for her to do any counseling work, the compliance officer found.
The compliance report seemed to have some impact: In the spring, the BIE went on a hiring spree to replenish the beleaguered staff in Supai. A second counselor and special education teacher — Van Est — plus a few additional teachers meant Havasupai Elementary was fully staffed for the first time in years.
A more recent work plan for the school, updated in December, documented further changes: The bureau hired enough staff to meet class size caps. Teachers now submit weekly lesson plans, and the school selected a curriculum and purchased computers for all grades.
The recent recruits include Hoai-My Winder, the school’s new principal. Winder had been working for the Department of Defense, as an administrator at an elementary school in Japan. She previously taught and worked as an assistant principal in Las Vegas, where her family settled after fleeing Vietnam during the fall of Saigon.
Havasupai Elementary School enrolls students from kindergarten through eighth grade. The Bureau of Indian Education directly operates the campus in Supai village, which visitors must reach via an 8-mile hike or helicopter ride. Credit: Matt Stensland for The Hechinger Report
“Day Six!” Winder hollered one afternoon this past May as she entered the spiked gates that separate Havasupai Elementary from the rest of the village. It was her tally of the number of days she’d been principal — both at Havasupai Elementary and ever.
While her husband unpacked boxes in their new home, Winder took inventory at her new school. She discovered 40-year-old math textbooks on classroom shelves. Havasupai teachers at some point had created a Supai dictionary and draft curriculum for language instruction; Winder found it collecting dust in a box.
As she met with parents and tribal members during her first week, ahead of the eighth grade graduation ceremony that afternoon, Winder repeated a pledge to stay at Havasupai Elementary for at least five years, maybe 10.
Felicia Siyuja, the longtime school secretary, stood next to Winder as families packed into the cafeteria for the ceremony. As the aroma of frybread wafted from the kitchen, Siyuja tapped the mic before addressing the 13 students sitting in the front row.
“I also want to apologize,” she told the soon-to-be freshmen. “All the teachers and principals rotating for all these years. It was hard for me as a grown-up. I can’t imagine how it was for you.”
Eighth graders wearing turquoise-and-gold colored gowns prepare for their graduation ceremony at Havasupai Elementary School. The tribal village, at the base of the Grand Canyon, is famous for its turquoise waterfalls. Credit: Matt Stensland for The Hechinger Report
Aside from Winder and her supervisor, the BIE would not allow The Hechinger Report to interview school staff on the record. But six current or former Havasupai teachers, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity, placed blame on the bureau for Havasupai Elementary’s dysfunction.
“The BIE is the problem,” said one teacher. “The BIE lacks humility.”
The educator, who now works at another BIE school, said he never received cultural training to prepare him for working with Native children and families. Several colleagues resigned before winter break his first year in Supai, making him the most veteran teacher on staff.
“I had no curriculum. No student names, no mentor, no oversight or guidance,” he said. “You don’t want to be yet another teacher who comes and goes. After three years, it gets old. It’s just exhausting.”
In a February 10 email, a BIE spokesperson wrote that cultural training, including language preservation, had been scheduled for later that month.
Van Est, who joined the bureau specifically to support its mission of uplifting tribal communities, said last summer that she no longer believed it was capable of doing that job. “The entity that has most recently oppressed the Havasupai people is making absolutely no effort to use education as a tool for repair, as a gold mine for building their future,” she said.
The BIE blames Havasupai Elementary School’s isolation and lack of housing for its troubles.
Even before the Stephen C. lawsuit, the BIE offered lucrative stipends to lure educators to Supai. It also guarantees housing, in theory, but in a pinch has forced teachers to room together. And a recent hiring spree, to satisfy the settlement, has made housing even tighter.
Dearman said a recent housing needs analysis determined the BIE now needs 30 beds in Supai, but has only 12. One teacher simply didn’t return to their position this fall when the bureau couldn’t secure housing for more than a few weeks.
“That puts a major strain on us being able to keep staff there,” Dearman said about the housing shortage. “We have housing needs at other locations as well. However, Havasupai is so isolated that if you’re not able to stay in our quarters there, there’s no other options.”
He said that it’s hard for some educators to uproot their lives to live in Supai. “It’s a difficult place to come in and out of. It really is,” Dearman said.
Poverty surrounds many BIE schools on tribal reservations, largely as a result of former government policies to eradicate Native peoples. In Supai, nearly 40 percent of the tribe lives in poverty, almost four times the national average. Tourism provides an economic bedrock for the Havasupai economy, though many families rely on government assistance.
Vides, the teacher, struggled with his decision to quit. His wife had remained 300 miles away in Phoenix, raising their 3-year-old daughter without him. He missed a lot of her firsts, and felt torn between her and the Havasupai children.
“It was difficult. I was grieving for the future of these students,” Vides said.
“Either the system is continually broken,” he added, “or the system is working successfully to slowly eradicate this tribe.”
Long before Trump’s executive order in January, some conservatives had pushed school choice as a solution to the BIE’s troubles. In 2016, the right-wing Heritage Foundation proposed turning the BIE into an education savings account, or ESA, which would grant families a portion of their child’s per-pupil funding to spend on private school tuition, home-school supplies and other educational expenses. That same year, the late Arizona Sen. John McCain introduced legislation offering ESAs equal to 90 percent of what the BIE spends on each student.
The bill didn’t advance, but Heritage resurrected the idea last year in its Project 2025 transition plan for the next president. Notably, the conservative think tank — despite citing the BIE’s poor track record as justification for converting much of its funding into vouchers — also proposed granting it even more authority over the education of all Native American students, in all U.S. public schools.
In his January order, Trump required the BIE to identify “any available mechanisms” for families to tap federal funding for private and faith-based schools, as well as to report on the performance of its schools and identify alternatives for families to consider. The agency has until April to submit its plan, for implementation this fall. The White House did not respond to several requests for comment.
In certain tribal communities across Arizona, some parents have started to consider opting out of the BIE system. The state passed a universal school voucher program in 2022, giving any family who wants roughly $7,400 to spend on private or parochial schools or other options. Christian academies on the Gila River Indian Community, a reservation near Phoenix, have already used the program to recruit students.
The walls of Havasu Canyon surround the village of Supai, where water from Havasu Creek later connects to the Colorado River at the Grand Canyon. Credit: Matt Stensland for The Hechinger Report
But in Supai, some residents worry the ESA option is meaningless. The closest private schools, in Kingman, are more than two hours away. Internet access in the village is virtually nonexistent, a hurdle for any parents trying to teach their kids at home.
The National Indian Education Association, an advocacy group, has yet to issue a position on Trump’s order but said in a statement that it’s “closely monitoring” potential impact on cultural preservation and access to education for Native students. In the past, the group has said BIE is the best option to fulfill the federal government’s responsibility to educate Native students. It blames its poor results on Congress — the branch of government holding the purse strings.
“The BIE in general, they just have a difficult time,” said Roman Nose, with the national group for tribal education departments. He noted that Department of Defense schools — the only other K-12 system run by the federal government — receive more funding. And Roman Nose worried how the recent federal layoffs and school choice proposal could further erode BIE’s ability to fulfill the trust responsibility.
The BIE lost dozens of employees in the recent layoffs, sources told ICT. Among those laid off were approximately 30 from non-school positions in the BIE agency offices, excluding kindergarten through 12th grade schools.
“There won’t be any progress made during this administration,” Roman Nose said. “It’s a difficult job, but these are treaty obligations.”
Dearman, the bureau’s longtime director, insisted that the BIE could fulfill the government’s obligation to deliver a quality education to tribal nations.
Under his leadership, the BIE has secured some financial wins for its schools. Lawmakers now funnel about $235 million into the bureau for school construction – it has asked for more than $400 million – and $150 million for replacing older campuses, according to the agency. Counselors and teachers now make the same amount as their counterparts in Department of Defense schools. And Dearman, a longtime champion of early childhood education, has expanded the bureau’s popular preschool program into more schools.
Traditional beadwork decorates an eighth grader’s graduation cap at a Havasupai Elementary School ceremony. The school’s mascot is the eagle. Credit: Matt Stensland for The Hechinger Report
Graduation rates have also climbed. Last year, according to the bureau, 75 percent of its high schoolers earned a diploma on time — a 31 percentage point jump since 2014 and slightly above the national average for Native American students. As of 2021, the last time the BIE reported achievement data, 17 percent of students tested on grade level in English language arts, and 11 percent in math. For three states where the BIE runs two-thirds of its schools, students have posted 8 percentage point increases on English exams and 13-point increases on math exams since 2016, according to the bureau.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office, which has tracked the BIE’s “systemic management weaknesses” since 2013, recently reported that it had achieved substantial progress on school construction and safety. The bureau’s oversight of special education, distance learning and school spending remain open problems, the GAO found, while also noting in its report — released just days before Trump’s recent layoffs — that meager staffing “has been a challenge for BIE for over a decade.”
DeLaCruz left the Native American Disability Law Center in October to work on education litigation for the Tulalip Tribe in northern Washington state. A little more than a year after closing the Havasupai case, she hesitated to call either settlement a win.
Still, she noted in an email that the creation of a school board at Havasupai Elementary had been a big step forward: “The fact there is a community-led School Board to ask questions and voice concerns to the BIE is vital to improving education at Havasupai Elementary School.”
Kambria Siyuja works during her summer break at Supai’s preschool program. Siyuja graduated from Havasupai Elementary School down the road and plans to teach there after graduating from Fort Lewis College next year. Credit: Matt Stensland for The Hechinger Report
The morning after the eighth grade graduation ceremony, Kambria Siyuja walked past her old elementary school as the sun crawled over the rust-red walls of Supai Canyon.
She greeted parents dropping off their sleepy toddlers at the federal Head Start preschool. Siyuja has worked there every summer break in college, hoping to decide whether to pursue a job in early learning or teaching down the road, at Havasupai Elementary.
Her grandmother, Bernadine Jones, attended Havasupai Day School in the 1960s, when it only offered K-2 classes, before attending and graduating from a Phoenix high school. She eventually returned to Supai and taught at her old school and the village preschool for 20 years. Siyuja’s mother teaches at the tribal Head Start program.
Academically, Siyuja finally feels prepared to be a teacher.
“It’s really weird taking a class in college and learning stuff they should have taught me at that elementary school,” she said. “Now I’m really able to understand math, and also teach math.”
This winter, Siyuja returned home for break with big news. Not only had she finally finished remedial math and qualified for a math class this past semester that would earn her full college credit, she’d passed it, receiving a B.
Siyuja also recently learned she qualified for about $3,500 from the Stephen C. settlement. She said she had planned to use the money to pay for her spring semester of college, but as of February, had not heard back from a BIE representative about the payment.
She graduates from Fort Lewis College, the former site of a notorious Indian boarding school, in 2026.
Despite her misgivings about the BIE, she said she views becoming an educator at the school as the best way possible to help her community. “I just want the younger kids to have a much better education than we got.”
Contact staff writer Neal Morton at 212-678-8247 or morton@hechingerreport.org.
This story about the Bureau of Indian Education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, in collaboration with ICT (formerly Indian Country Today). Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter. Sign up for the ICT newsletter.
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