Nearly 9,000 children across 16 states and Puerto Rico remained locked out of Head Start programming as of Friday evening, according to the National Head Start Association, despite the federal government’s reopening on Wednesday night.
For some programs, the promise of incoming funding will be enough to restart operations. But many won’t be able to open their doors until they receive their federal dollars, which could take up to two weeks, said Tommy Sheridan, deputy director at the NHSA.
Sheridan said the Trump administration understands the urgency and is “moving as fast as they possibly can.”
That said, this interruption had an opportunity cost, and it’s led to instability for families and providers, he said, adding that the shutdown caused staff to focus on issues they “should not be worried about,” such as fundraising and contingency planning.
“They’re going to be working as hard as they can, but they’re going to be doing it with half the capacity,” said Katie Hamm, former deputy assistant secretary for early childhood development under President Joe Biden.
And even once the funding comes through, closed centers will need to go through a series of logistical hurdles, including reaching out to families who may have found alternative child care arrangements and calling back furloughed staff, some of whom have found employment elsewhere.
“Head Start is not a light switch,” Hamm said. “You can’t just turn it back on.”
This interruption has also further eroded trust between grantees and the federal government that was already shaky, she added.
The Administration for Children and Families did not respond to a request for comment on when programs can anticipate communication from the office or their funding.
Since Nov. 1, approximately 65,000 kids and their families — close to 10% of all of those served by Head Start — have been at risk of losing their seats because their programs had not received their awarded funding during the longest government shutdown in history. The early care and education program delivers a range of resources to low-income families including medical screenings, parenting courses and connections to community resources for job, food and housing assistance.
At the peak of the Head Start closures, roughly 10,000 kids across 22 programs lost access to services, according to Sheridan. A number of the remaining programs were able to stay open through private donations, loans, alternative funding streams and staff’s willingness to go without pay.
Valerie Williams, who runs a Head Start program with two facilities in Appalachian Ohio, was excited to tell parents that classrooms would be reopening soon. Her centers have been closed since Nov. 3, impacting 177 kids and 45 staff, many of whom already live paycheck to paycheck, she said.
Valerie Williams runs two Head Start centers in Appalachian Ohio, serving 177 kids. (Valerie Williams)
A number of families were doubly impacted, losing access to Head Start’s resources as well as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP, simultaneously. In the days leading up to the closure, Williams and her staff prepared families as best they could, sharing information about resources for food, assistance for utilities and heating and guidance on child care options.
On Thursday, Williams wrote to parents via an online portal that she hopes to restart the normal school schedule sometime next week. The post was quickly flooded with comments.
“This is super exciting!!” wrote one parent. “Best news in a long time. Carter has been asking every day. Hope to see u guys very soon.”
“Yayyy,” wrote another. “The kids miss you guys so much!”
Valerie Williams, who runs a Head Start program in Appalachian Ohio, was excited to tell parents that classrooms would be reopening soon. (Valerie Williams)
Still, Williams knows reopening won’t be seamless. Along with program leaders across the country, she’ll need to call back furloughed staff, place food orders and handle a number of other operational challenges.
And despite the excitement, the transition back may also prove tricky for some kids.
“I do think that it will feel like starting school again for a lot of our classrooms,” Williams said. “They’ve been out for two weeks … You’re going to work on separation anxiety issues, you’re going to have to get into that routine again and the structure of a classroom environment. So I think that will be a big issue for a lot of our teachers.”
As of Friday afternoon, Williams was still awaiting communication from the federal Office of Head Start with information about the anticipated timeline for next steps.
“As soon as we get that notice of award, [I want to] start our staff and kids back immediately,” she said. “The very next day.”
Now that the shutdown has ended, what’s next for Head Start?
Funding for Head Start is complex. Some 80% comes from federal grants that are released to local providers on a staggered schedule throughout the year. This year, grant recipients with funding deadlines on the first of October and November were left scrambling, as the federal shutdown dragged on.
The government began to resume operations late Wednesday night after President Donald Trump signed a bill, funding most federal agencies through Jan. 30 and allowing programs that didn’t receive their funding on time, including Head Start, to use forthcoming dollars to backpay expenses incurred over the past month and a half.
Here’s what Hamm predicts will happen next: The Office of Head Start will recall all staffto resume, including those who were furloughed during the shutdown. The employees will review grant applications, a process which now requires them to flag any language that might be reflective of diversity, equity and inclusion practices. Next, money will be sent along to the remaining regional offices, and eventually dispersed to individual grantees. The NHSA is hopeful that this process will be completed by Thanksgiving for all grantees.
There are two things the federal government can do to help centers open faster, according to Hamm. First, they could waive a typical protocol that leads to a period of seven days between when a member of Congress is notified that their state will be receiving funding and when the funding actually goes out, Hamm explained.
Officials could also notify grantees, in writing, about how much money they’ll get and when it’s expected to come through, so they can begin planning.
Unlike SNAP, which received guaranteed funding through the budget year, money for Head Start remains uncertain beyond Jan. 30. While the fear of another shutdown has caused “quite a bit of worry” among the Head Start community, Sheridan said it would likely lead to fewer program disruptions, since it wouldn’t fall at the start of the fiscal year.
Tommy Sheridan, deputy director of the National Head Start Association. (Tommy Sheridan)
To prevent similar chaos moving forward, Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin introduced a bill in the final days of the shutdown that would guarantee uninterrupted service for fiscal year 2026.
“The 750,000 children and their families who use Head Start shouldn’t pay the price for Washington dysfunction,” Baldwin, the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee for Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies, wrote in a statement to The 74.
Multiple funding threats and deep staffing cuts by the Trump administration over the past year have plunged programs across the country into uncertainty. In the wake of that recent upheaval, a leadership change is also underway. The acting director of the Office of Head Start, Tala Hooban, accepted a new role within the Office of Administration for Children and Families and will be replaced by political appointee Laurie Todd-Smith, according to an email statement from ACF. Todd-Smith currently leads the Office of Early Childhood Development, which oversees the Office of Head Start.
Sheridan described this move as anticipated and not particularly concerning, though others were less sure. Joel Ryan, the executive director of the Washington State Association of Head Start, noted that Hooban was a longtime civil servant and strong supporter of the Head Start program. Without her, he fears “there’s nobody internally with any kind of power that will push back,” on future threats to the program.
Another worry plaguing providers: current funding for Head Start has remained stagnant since the end of 2024, meaning that through at least Jan. 30, programs will be operating under the same budget amid rising costs across the board.
In previous years, the program’s grant recipients typically got a cost-of-living adjustment, such as the 2.35% bump ($275 million) for fiscal year 2024. In May, a group of almost 200 members of Congress signed a letter to a House Appropriations subcommittee, requesting an adjustment of 3.2% for 2026. A recent statement from NHSA suggested that instead, the proposed Senate bill for next year includes a jump of just 0.6%, or $77 million.
“If we don’t see a funding increase in line with inflation, that means that Head Start will be facing a cut of that degree,” said Sheridan. “It’s just kind of a quiet cut, or a silent cut.”
“I think what will end up happening,” said Ryan, “is you’ll end up seeing a massive reduction in the number of kids being served.”
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A judge ordered federal agencies Friday to end their “blanket policy of denying any future grants” to the University of California, Los Angeles, and further ruled that the Trump administration can’t seek payouts from any UC campus “in connection with any civil rights investigation” under Titles VI or IX of federal law.
The ruling also prohibits the Department of Justice and federal funding agencies from withholding funds, “or threatening to do so, to coerce the UC in violation of the First Amendment or Tenth Amendment.” In all, the order, if not overturned on appeal, stops the administration’s attempt to pressure UCLA to pay $1.2 billion and make multiple other concessions, including to stop enrolling “foreign students likely to engage in anti-Western, anti-American, or antisemitic disruptions or harassment” and stop “performing hormonal interventions and ‘transgender’ surgeries” on anyone under 18 at its medical school and affiliated hospitals.
The administration’s targeting of the UC system came to the fore on July 29. That’s when the DOJ said its months-long investigations across the system had so far concluded that UCLA violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in its response to alleged antisemitism at a spring 2024 pro-Palestinian protest encampment.
Federal agencies—including the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and Department of Energy—quickly began freezing funding; UC estimated it lost $584 million. But UC researchers sued and, even before Friday’s ruling, U.S. District Court judge Rita F. Lin of the Northern District of California ordered the restoration of almost all of the frozen funding.
Friday’s ruling came in a case filed this fall by the American Association of University Professors, the affiliated American Federation of Teachers and other unions. Lin again was the judge.
“Defendants did not engage in the required notice and hearing processes under Title VI for cutting off funds for alleged discrimination,” she wrote.
“With every day that passes, UCLA continues to be denied the chance to win new grants, ratchetting [sic] up Defendants’ pressure campaign,” she wrote. “And numerous UC faculty and staff have submitted declarations describing how Defendants’ actions have already chilled speech throughout the UC system. They describe how they have stopped teaching or researching topics they are afraid are too ‘left’ or ‘woke,’ in order to avoid triggering further funding cancellations by Defendants. They also give examples of projects the UC has stopped due to fear of the same reprisals. These are classic, predictable First Amendment harms, and exactly what Defendants publicly said that they intended.”
Maia Jackson should have been cranking out a research paper for her communications class. Instead, she found herself queuing up at a food pantry to secure groceries for her household amid the nation’s longest government shutdown.
“I walked out with a shopping cart full of food,” the 25-year-old college senior said. “I could barely carry it all. I got cereal. I got some frozen meat, hamburger buns. I got a bag of black beans, and then I got a bag of rice.”
Finding a package of chicken strips, a dish she knew her picky 2-year-old daughter would actually eat, almost made her cry, Jackson said. She expects the combination of perishable, bagged and canned foods to last them a month. By then, she hopes her Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) payments — widely known as food stamps — will have resumed.
On November 1, SNAP benefits ground to a halt during the federal budget impasse that began a month earlier, with President Donald Trump’s administration refusing to fully fund these payments, a matter now tied up in court. Even as the Senate has reached a framework deal that leaves lawmakers and the White House a step closer to ending the shutdown, the disruption in benefits has revealed how fragile the social safety net is for vulnerable Americans. That includes single parents and young adults experiencing food insecurity, a problem that occurs when people lack regular access to the nourishment needed to sustain their health.
An estimated 1.1 million college students rely on SNAP, including parents like Jackson, who attends North Dakota State University (NDSU) in Fargo. For such students, a delayed SNAP payment isn’t a mere hiccup, but a serious setback that can imperil their education, their health and stability for their children, experts contend.
“It’s such a distraction for me as a single mom in school,” Jackson said. “I don’t have any bandwidth to give to trying to find food at pantries.”
She tried to minimize the time she spent at the food pantry last week by making an appointment first, but she was still one of a couple of dozen people in line. The visit prevented her from completing her research paper by its due date, which will likely result in her grade being docked. Jackson, who has so far maintained a 4.0 grade point average, isn’t happy about that prospect, but with her family members an hour away and her child’s father mostly out of the picture, she had to prioritize food over her education.
No college student should have to choose between a basic need and school, said Deborah Martin, a senior policy associate for The Institute for College Access & Success, a nonprofit that advocates for college access and affordability.
“A lot of students have to make these daily tough decisions where they’re wondering, ‘Where am I going to get my next meal from?’ instead of focusing on homework, on classwork,” Martin said. “We know that when students have these unmet basic needs such as food insecurity, they’re more likely to struggle academically, less likely to persist from semester to semester, and in some cases, may even drop out of college altogether.”
Roughly 60 percent of college students are women. For the most marginalized students, the risk of quitting school due to food insecurity may be even greater. The Government Accountability Office (GAO), a nonpartisan federal agency that provides fact-based information to Congress, reported last year that about 80 percent of food-insecure students are nontraditional — meaning their parents don’t financially support them, they didn’t begin college immediately after high school or they are caring for dependents. Moreover, the 2023-2024 Student Basic Needs Survey Report from the Hope Center, a research center at Temple University focused on the food, housing and health of college students, found that around three-quarters of parenting, Black and Indigenous students experience insecurity related to a basic need.
Most of these students, the GAO discovered, do not sign up for services like SNAP, and those who do may hesitate to discuss their food insecurity. As a mom and a slightly older student who works part-time, Jackson has felt largely alone on campus as SNAP benefits have paused. Her classmates don’t appear to share her anxiety over the shutdown, if they know about it at all.
A woman shops at the Feeding South Florida food pantry on October 27, 2025 in Pembroke Park, Florida. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
“A lot of the kids that I’m in class with, they’re not in the same circumstance,” Jackson said. “It’s weird to see a lot of people just carrying on as usual.”
Since most of her classmates — about an even percentage of NDSU students are women and men — are childfree and on the school meal plan, she doesn’t want to be a “downer” by bringing up her difficulties. For the same reason, she didn’t explain to her professor why her paper was late. “I didn’t want to tell him, ‘Oh, I couldn’t write it because I was standing in the food pantry line’ because it just sounds so sad,” she said. “What’s he supposed to say? I don’t want him to feel bad for me. I don’t want to be pitied.”
But faking normal could come at a high cost for college students who don’t reach out for help. Martin fears these young adults will resort to using high-interest payment plans or acquire credit card debt just to afford groceries.
“The longer that students and other SNAP participants don’t receive their funds, this is just more days that students are going to have to make these difficult decisions,” she said.
Some college administrators are taking action. When the shutdown began, Compton College President and CEO Keith Curry contacted Everytable, a food company that offers inexpensive made-from-scratch meals via carryout storefronts and a delivery service. The college, about 18 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, has partnered with Everytable for seven years to provide all students — approximately 6,000 of whom attend full time — with one nutritious free meal on weekdays.
The federal government crisis prompted Curry and Everytable CEO Sam Polk to scale up that program so SNAP-recipient and economically disadvantaged students didn’t suffer during the shutdown.
“We need to do something. Can we split the cost?” Curry recalled asking Polk. “I think if we double the meals, at least they get another meal for the day.”
On November 5, Compton College’s most underprivileged students began getting two free meals per day, or 10 per week. The need for such an intervention there is substantial: A 2025 basic needs survey of students found that 81 percent of them experience at least one form of insecurity related to a basic need. That includes signs of food insecurity such as skipping meals, reducing meal sizes or fearing they will run out of food. Most Compton College students are moderately food insecure, the survey revealed, indicating persistent hardship. Women make up 61 percent of the student body.
“Right now, students have other stress, and what we’re doing to them is adding more stress,” Curry said of the shutdown. “They still want to do well in classes, but now they don’t have food.”
Together, Compton College and Everytable have the resources to supply students with 10 weekly meals for a month, Curry said. The students are deeply grateful for the additional provisions, according to Dee Garrett, who oversees Everytable’s operation at the college.
“What better way to start your studies than with a stomach that’s full?” Garrett asked. “You don’t have to think about, ‘Oh, my God, my stomach. I can’t concentrate or focus.’”
Asked what impact he hopes the scaled-up program makes, Curry said he’s more interested in letting students know they’re not alone.
“It’s not about the impact. It’s about our students knowing that we were there for them during this time,” he said. “In our community, when students need us most, we have to step up and be there for them, and they’re never going to forget that.”
Martin applauds the efforts of colleges and K-12 schools, which have connected students and their families to food banks, to curb food insecurity during the shutdown. But she also advocates for long-term policies to ensure students have enough food to eat. That includes the Enhance Access to SNAP Act, proposed legislation to remove the barriers that prevent economically disadvantaged college students from utilizing benefits generally — not just during the current crisis.
However, Martin continued, “the most important thing that we can do right now in this moment is for these SNAP benefits to be fully funded and for them to go out to students as soon as possible.”
Back in Fargo, Jackson has refocused her attention on her coursework now that she has a month’s worth of food. Still, she worries about the people who couldn’t make it to a pantry or that the government will cut other social services she needs. She currently earns $400 monthly working part time as an academic journal editor. The job, which she performs remotely, allows her to attend school and be her daughter’s primary caretaker when the toddler is not in day care.
“If they cut child care, if they cut these programs I rely on, I would have to drop out of school,” Jackson said. “But I’m trying to give my daughter a better life than that.”
Jackson is majoring in university studies with a pre-law emphasis, a dramatic shift from her life before motherhood when she dropped out of school and struggled with addiction. Getting pregnant inspired her to undergo a transformation, which she largely credits to the Jeremiah Program. The national nonprofit provides single mothers with support for college, child care and housing, and it recently started a campaign to raise $190,000 to cover essential needs for families who have lost SNAP and other benefits because of the shutdown. The organization estimates that single-parent families represent nearly a third of families in the United States, with 80 percent of those headed by mothers.
Jackson has been deeply disturbed to see the misperceptions that abound about mothers like herself. She’s encountered online commenters who have characterized SNAP recipients as “welfare queens.”
If she could confront such individuals in person, Jackson would emphasize how much value mothers add to society. “And on top of it… we are all in school and working, too,” she said. “The insinuation is that we’re just scammers, freeloaders, when, in reality, I’m working very hard every day to hopefully not need these supports.”
Senate lawmakers on Monday advanced legislation that would launch the most comprehensive overhaul of New Jersey’s regulation of charter schools in 30 years.
The bill advanced by the Senate Education Committee on Monday would outright ban for-profit charter schools, require them to post a range of documents online, and impose residency requirements for some charter school trustees.
“We have not looked at charter schools as a whole legislatively in this committee since the 1990s, so this is an opportunity where we’re trying to do that,” said Sen. Vin Gopal (D-Monmouth), the panel’s chair and the bill’s prime sponsor.
The bill comes as New Jersey charter schools have faced scrutiny after reporting revealed top officials were paid far more than their counterparts at traditional public schools, including, among others, a Newark charter school CEO who was paid nearly $800,000 in 2024.
The proposal, which Gopal said was the product of a year of negotiations, would require charter schools to post user-friendly budgets that include the compensation paid to charter school leaders and school business administrators. They must also post existing contracts.
Charters would be required to post meeting notices, annual reports, board members’ identities, and facility locations online. Some critics have charged that charter schools routinely fail to provide notice of their public meetings.
The legislation would also require the state to create a dedicated charter school transparency website to host plain language budgets, 990 disclosure forms filed with the IRS, contracts with charter management organizations, and a list of charter schools on probation, among other things.
It would also ban fully virtual charter schools.
“We support the bills as a step forward in holding all public schools in our state accountable for fiscal and transparency requirements that will ultimately best serve our students,” said Debbie Bradley, director of government relations for the New Jersey Principals and Supervisors Association.
The two sides remained at odds over the membership of charter school boards.
Charter critics argued residency for those positions — which, unlike traditional public school boards, are largely appointed rather than elected — should mirror those imposed on regular public schools.
In New Jersey, school board members must live in the district they serve. That’s not the case for charter schools, whose trustees face no residency or qualification limits under existing law.
The bill would only impose a residency requirement on one-third of a charter school’s trustees, and rather than forcing them to live in the district, the bill would require charter trustees to live in the school’s county or within 30 miles of the school.
That language was criticized by statewide teachers union the New Jersey Education Association, which has called existing law governing charter schools outdated and flawed.
“School board representation should remain primarily local, and when we mean local, we don’t mean within a 30-mile radius. A 30-mile radius of Newark could include Maplewood, South Orange, communities that don’t necessarily represent what Newark looks like as a community,” said Deb Cornavaca, the union’s director of government relations.
Charter school supporters said their boards need flexibility because their leadership has broader responsibilities than counterparts in traditional public schools.
“Running a charter is a little different than running a traditional district. You need experience in school finance. You need to fundraise a bunch of money on the front end because you’re not getting paid on the front end,” said New Jersey Charter School Association President Harry Lee, adding they also needed familiarity with real estate and community experience.
Amendments removed provisions that would have required charter school board members to be approved by the state commissioner of education, though the commissioner retains sole power over whether to allow the formation of a new charter, a power that gives the commissioner some veto power over a charter’s board.
Gopal acknowledged the 30-mile residency rule was a sticking point and said legislators would discuss it before the measure comes before the Senate Budget Committee. Earlier, he warned the bill was likely to see more changes as it moved through the Legislature.
Some argued enrollment in charter schools should be more limited by geography, arguing that out-of-district enrollments that are common at New Jersey charters could place financial strain on the students’ former district.
Most per-pupil state and local funding follows students who enroll in charter schools, even if their departure does not actually decrease the original district’s expenses because, for example, those schools still require the same number of teachers and administrators.
Charter operators said that would make New Jersey a national outlier and argued that a separate provision that would bar new charter schools when there are empty seats in existing area charters should come out of the bill.
“It could be read as a moratorium on charters, so we want to revisit that provision,” Lee said.
Such vacancies could exist for various reasons, they argued, including student age distributions.
Alongside that measure, the panel approved separate legislation that would bar charter schools from setting criteria to enroll students, ban them from imposing other requirements on a student randomly selected to attend, and place new limits on how such schools can enroll children from outside their district.
That bill would also bar charter schools from encouraging students to break with the district. Some opponents have charged that charter schools push out low-performing students to boost their metrics.
The committee approved the bills in unanimous votes, though Sens. Owen Henry (R-Ocean) and Kristin Corrado (R-Passaic) abstained from votes on both bills, saying they are broadly supportive but need more time to review amendments.
New Jersey Monitor is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence T. McDonald for questions: [email protected].
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LEWISTOWN — Slaughterhouses and butchers used to be scattered throughout the United States, numbering about 10,000 in 1967.
Only about 3,000 remain and about 85% of the American meatpacking industry is controlled by four companies: JBS, Tyson Foods, Cargill and Smithfield. The other 15% of that market share is held in part by small and very small meat producers scattered across the country, including some in Montana.
This is true for much of the agricultural industry, and many small businesses have disappeared as corporate America has exerted its will on farmers and ranchers. About 70% of the consumer’s dollar went to cattle producers in 1970, with the other 30% going to processors and retailers. Cattle producers now get about 30% of the consumer’s dollar, according to Farm Action.
Additionally, about 98% of America’s beef is processed in just over 50 plants. Beef processing co-ops have been created around the state in an effort to help give beef producers more options, but there’s another problem too — employees.
That’s the place some educators in Montana are looking to step in. Fergus High School in Lewistown, for example, has a robust agricultural education program. It’s also part of the Central Montana Career and Technology Education Academy, a public charter school that was set up this year to connect students with skills and knowledge needed to work in agriculture.
‘A dying art’
Logan Turner, one the teachers at Fergus High School, put it pointedly.
“Kids aren’t really getting into it,” he said. “Cutting meat is kind of a dying art.”
His goal has been, in part, to help change that trend. The technical academy seeks to bridge a gap of agricultural knowledge. Beyond meat cutting, classes at the school include farm business management, fabrication and science classes geared toward teaching about soil health among others.
Turner grew up on his family’s farm outside Missoula and quickly decided he wanted to be a teacher. There’s an urgency for him too, with worries, among them a feeling no one knows where their food comes from and the world’s growing population.
“We’ve always been faced with this big issue as agriculturalists,” Turner said. “2050 is right around the corner, and there’s going to be two billion more people on the face of the planet, and how are we going to feed them all? I think it all starts with education and understanding … and so I felt like being an educator probably was the best way for me to contribute.”
Only about three percent of the food Montanans eat is produced in the state. There are options for eating local food, but they can sometimes be hard to find.
Having kids learn about these could also help them enter the workforce with more ideas about what they want to do, which is one of the goals of the program. Orin Johnson, the Central Montana CTE Academy director, said they also want to get students as close as possible to certification in a variety of careers.
“Every kid doesn’t learn the same way,” Johnson said. “And some really do strive and need to be hands on, and it’s about finding a way to create opportunities that they can be hands on.”
Students at the school have shown interest and it’s included partnerships with Future Farmers of America and the Montana Farmers Union, which gave the meat processing program two grants totaling about $13,000 over the summer.
“We do a lot of meat processing at my house because my dad loves hunting, and so we do a lot of wild game,” said Shyanne Ricks, a student at the school who’s gone through the program. “And so doing the meats class really helps with seeing the whole process, not just wild game.”
Ricks, along with Tori Rindal, a freshman at the school, and the other Lewistown agricultural education teacher — Jared Long — went to the Montana Farmers Union Annual convention and spoke about the program.
Rindal said she’s hoping to take the meats class next year. Long pointed out agricultural education is broad and students can take many different paths.
The program offers five pathways: welding, natural resource and conservation, meat processing, animal science and agricultural mechanics. There’s a variety of classes within those, both Long and Turner explained.
“The common misconception is that it’s just cows and plows,” Long said. “So that’s really our job, we feel like, is to open doors to kids that they might never have.”
Daily Montanan is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Daily Montanan maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Darrell Ehrlick for questions: [email protected].
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Former University of Virginia president Jim Ryan has broken his silence concerning his abrupt resignation, accusing the Board of Visitors of dishonesty and complicity in his ouster, which came amid federal government scrutiny over the university’s diversity, equity and inclusion practices.
In a 12-page letter to the UVA Faculty Senate on Friday, Ryan wrote that he was “stunned and angry” over the board’s lack of honesty as it faced pressure from the federal government to force him out due to an alleged failure to dismantle DEI initiatives. Ryan also wrote that recent letters by UVA rector Rachel Sheridan and Governor Glenn Youngkin do not “present an accurate accounting of my resignation,” which prompted him to release his own statement.
Inside Higher Ed has uploaded Ryan’s full letter below.
Ryan’s letter follows a message Sheridan sent to the UVA Faculty Senate on Thursday. In that letter, Sheridan downplayed the pressure from the federal government to force Ryan out. While she acknowledged that the Department of Justice “lacked confidence in President Ryan to make the changes that the Trump Administration believed were necessary to ensure compliance,” she disputed the notion that his resignation was part of the agreement that the university recently reached with the federal government to pause investigations into DEI practices.
The full text of that letter is available below.
Also on Thursday, Youngkin sent a letter related to Ryan’s departure to Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger, who has called for UVA to halt its ongoing presidential search until her board picks are in place. The Republican governor pushed back on his Democratic successor’s claims that Ryan was ousted as a result of federal overreach and accused her of interfering in the search. Youngkin also accused Ryan of “not being committed to following federal law.”
That letter has been uploaded in full below.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated.
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Since 2022, there’s been a surge in the number and types of applications using generative AI, but not all tools are the same. So how can faculty, staff and students learn to identify the differences and determine when it’s appropriate to leverage these tools?
Colby College developed a platform, called Mule Chat, that allows users to explore several large language models, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and LLaMA. The platform provides a safe on-ramp into generative AI usage and relies on student tutors to disseminate information to peers.
In the latest episode of Voices of Student Success, host Ashley Mowreader speaks with David Watts, the director of Colby College’s Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and Michael Yankoski, Davis AI research and teaching scientist, to learn about the college’s AI institute and how Mule Chat works.
An edited version of the podcast appears below.
Inside Higher Ed: Can we start the conversation by talking a bit about what AI at Colby College looks like? What is the landscape you’re working with and how are you thinking about AI when it comes to teaching and learning?
David Watts: I am new to Davis AI, as we call it at Colby, but the [Davis AI] Institute has actually been around since before ChatGPT, so Colby kind of had a pioneering approach.
David Watts, director of the Davis Institute for AI at Colby College
Colby is a small liberal arts college, and they had the vision that this was going to be around for a while. And rather than, as most institutions were doing, sort of keep it at bay or ban it from campus, Colby dove in and wanted to engage with it and understand how it is going to impact education.
I spent most of my career in industry, mostly in research and development, and so I when I wanted to make the jump over to academia, I wasn’t expecting to find that small liberal arts colleges had done this, and when I saw what Colby had done, I was really drawn to it and came over. So I’ve really loved what has been going on and what continues to go on at Colby with the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
Inside Higher Ed: Michael, your role puts you directly in connection with faculty when it comes to integrating AI into their classrooms or into their programs. Can you talk about what that looks like and how maybe that looks different at a liberal arts institution?
Michael Yankoski, research and teaching scientist, Davis Institute for AI at Colby College
Michael Yankoski: One of the most amazing aspects of the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence here at a place like Colby is the liberal arts approach that the institution as a whole is able to engage with.
That means that we’re able to facilitate conversations from a multiplicity of different disciplines and bring faculty together from different approaches across the divisions in the college—from the STEM fields to the humanities to the social sciences. And have really productive, very generative conversations around ways to engage with artificial intelligence and the shared learning and shared knowledge of people who have been really pioneering in the area. To able to say, “How can I integrate generative artificial intelligence with my pedagogy? How can I help think with students about how to engage these technologies in a way that is beneficial for their education, help empower students in their education and then on the research side?”
Many faculty with whom we work at the Davis Institute are exploring ways to integrate artificial intelligence in their research program, and to say, “Is there a way that artificial intelligence can help me accelerate my research or take my research in new directions?” The opportunity to bring people together to discuss that and to facilitate those conversations across the disciplines is one of the best aspects of the liberal arts approach to artificial intelligence.
Inside Higher Ed: Does Colby have an institutional policy for AI use, or what appropriate AI use looks like?
Watts: It’s a moving target. Anyone who tells you they have it all figured out is probably embellishing. It is a moving target, but one of the things we did was make sure we engage faculty, and in fact, we started with faculty, then we engaged administrators, we engaged students and we engaged general counsel, and evaluated what the challenges are, what the downsides are. And we made sure that we built what we call guidelines rather than policy.
The guidelines talk through the dos and don’ts but also leave enough flexibility for our faculty to think through how they want to engage with AI, especially since AI is a moving target, too. As we grow and learn with our faculty, we adapt and adjust our guidelines and so they’re out there for everyone to see, and we will continue to evolve them as we move forward.
Inside Higher Ed: Can you introduce our listeners to Mule Chat? What is it and how does it work on campus?
Watts: Michael has been here and was one of the originators of creating Mule Chat on campus. And so he can tell you a lot of the details and how it’s been working.
But what I loved about what Michael and the team did, and it was a collaborative effort, was to create, I’ll call it an on-ramp. We were working towards moving the needle from banning AI, as one extreme, to engaging with AI and creating a tool that allowed faculty, students and staff to all easily engage with multiple tools through Mule Chat.
It lowered the activation barrier to entry to AI and allowed us to have an on-ramp for people to come in and start seeing what the possibilities are, and it has worked brilliantly.
Yankoski: The idea behind Mule Chat originally was to provide a place for students, faculty and staff to begin to get experience with and understanding around generative AI. To provide a space where folks could come and understand a bit more about, what are these tools? How do they work? What are they capable of? What are some of the areas we need to be aware of, the risks and the best practices, and how can we provide this on-ramp, as David described, for people to be able to engage with generative artificial intelligence?
This is about student success, empowering students to understand what these technologies are, what they’re good at, what they’re not good at. And then also, one of the key principles here was equity of access. We wanted to ensure that anybody on Colby’s campus, regardless of whether they could afford one of the premium subscription services, was able to get access to these frontier models and to understand how to then do the prompt engineering work, and to then compare the kinds of outputs and capabilities of some of the frontier models. And so really, the core sort of genesis and driving desire for the creation of Mule Chat was to provide this on-ramp that would empower student success, allow equity of access, and also would provide a safe and secure place for people to be able to engage these technologies and to learn.
Inside Higher Ed: Can you describe the functionality of Mule Chat? For someone who has never experimented with LLMs, what does it look like or feel like to engage with Mule Chat?
Watts: You touched on something really great there, because that was part of the idea. We introduced multiple models into Mule Chat so that people could compare and get an idea of what it’s capable of and what it’s not capable of.
I’ll give an example of a faculty member who we are working with right now who started with Mule Chat, engaged with it in their preparation—this is a professor of East Asian studies—how they prepare their classes, realized what the capabilities were, started doing more with it, with their students. The students then brought interesting ideas about what else we can do and pushed beyond even the limits of Mule Chat. And then Davis AI can go help them bring in, for example, they were looking at—not only just looking at old archives and using that in their teaching of East Asian studies, but also bringing in video capability, for example, and in fact, even creating new videos or some of the research that they’re doing now, bringing in more capabilities above and beyond Mule Chat. So it is exactly what Michael was saying, an on-ramp that then opens up the possibilities of what we can do with AI in higher education.
Yankoski: I think the real value of the Mule Chat interface is that it allows people to compare the different models.
Folks can use prompt engineering to compare the outputs of one model and then put that alongside the outputs of another model and be able to observe the way that different models might reason or might do their inference in different kinds of ways.
That side-by-side comparison is a really powerful opportunity for people to engage with the different models and to experience the different kinds of outputs that they create. To build on what David was saying, the ability to then put other tools [like videos] inside of the Mule Chat platform, that allows for deeper research into particular areas. For example, we have a tool that we built, which is called Echo Bot.
The Colby student newspaper is called the Colby Echo, so we’ve been able to bring all the archives of the Echo into a tool that allows students and faculty researchers to engage with those archives and chat with the entire archive of the Colby Echo. We’ve been working closely—and this goes back to the liberal arts approach—with different faculty across campus, as well as the college libraries, to bring this tool online and make it available within the Mule Chat system.
Inside Higher Ed: Let me know if you can build me an IHE bot, because I can never find anything in our archives. I could really benefit from something.
Watts: We can brainstorm on that.
Inside Higher Ed: Great, we’ll talk about licensing later.
I wanted to ask, it seems there’s a new AI tool that pops every other day. So when you’re talking about comparing different tools and thinking about what might be most relevant for students, how often are you scouting out the landscape to understand what’s out there and relevant?
Watts: That’s a great question, and actually extremely important that we do that.
Not only are we reaching out and finding, reading, learning, attending conferences, helping to create conferences ourselves that bring in people and experts who are different perspectives, but we also then have lots of people on campus who have their own ideas. People come to us regularly with, “Oh, look at this cool tool. We should use it for this thing on campus.”
And that’s when we use that for educating people about some of the potential pitfalls that we have to watch out for, talking about guardrails and when you’re bringing in new capability, just like you had to think about when you’re bringing in new software. But I think it’s even more imperative that we’re very careful about what AI tools we bring into campus. You’re absolutely right that there are tons of them that all have different capabilities. But one of the things we try to teach is that there’s a full spectrum: the great, the good, the bad and the ugly. You have to think about that entire spectrum. And that’s one of the beauties of what I loved about coming to a liberal arts college was that you have multiple perspectives, and coming from all forms of disciplines in the humanities, the arts, the natural sciences, the social sciences, and all are engaged and can be engaged across AI.
Yankoski: I think that’s what’s so unique and really powerful about the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence approach. When we work with faculty and students and really, if some faculty member or student has an idea that they want to explore, we have structures that allow for technology grants, for faculty to be able to come and to propose the use of a new tool, or to advance their teaching or to advance their research.
Then that’s a great opportunity to engage with that faculty member and perhaps their research assistants, and work with those students and that faculty member to explore the possibility of using that tool. Each faculty member knows their domain so much better than we do. As the core Davis AI team, we’re able to work with that faculty and those students to better understand the use case, better understand the tools that they want to engage, and then work with them to consult and to create a pathway forward. That’s an incredible opportunity as well for the students to understand, how do we think about the security of the data? How do we think about the processing pipeline? How do we think about the best practices with regards to utilizing artificial intelligence in this particular domain?
Really that’s about student empowerment and student success as they get ready to transition out of college into an economy where increasingly expectations around knowledge and the ability to utilize and to vet artificial intelligence are only going to increase.
Inside Higher Ed: How are students engaged in this work?
Yankoski: One the most intriguing aspects of Mule Chat has been that students have been really leading in teaching and empowering other students to utilize the tool and to understand the quantum engineering aspects and to understand the different models.
The student leaders have been working with Mule Chat and then actually teaching other students, teaching faculty and helping lead the sessions, as well as working on their own projects within Google Chat. So it’s been a really strong and quite incredible platform for student engagement and student empowerment as students learn from one another and then are able to learn how to teach about these tools to their peers.
Watts: That’s absolutely a huge part of what we did, and I mentioned that, even though students come first, we started working to move the needle with faculty first on purpose, with students in mind. And then we branched out into, now we can engage the students. Once you have enough buy-in from faculty, start engaging the students, and we’ve been doing a lot of that.
Then what’s beautiful, the magic happens when the students start coming up with thoughts and ideas that grow in ways that faculty haven’t thought of. Because remember that a lot of this is new to faculty as well.
So we actually then will identify key students that we have been working with and actually hire them on board as Davis AI research associates that then help us continue to move the needle, because there’s nothing better for students than to hear from other students about what’s possible. And the same goes for faculty, by the way. So, you know, Michael was mentioning a little bit about our strategy with faculty and how we engage them. But a part of what we do is faculty sessions. We give them creative names like “Bagels and bots,” and we include food and then we have those sessions where faculty talk to faculty. We do the same with the students, so students can talk to students. And it’s just wonderful to see the magic that happens when that begins to grow organically.
Inside Higher Ed: What has the reception been to Mule Chat?
Watts: Most people were skeptical [of AI] early on; most were in the mode of “push it away.” I think that drove some interesting behaviors in faculty and students.
So a big part of what we’ve been trying to do is essentially drive towards AI literacy for all. And when I say all, it’s an interdisciplinary approach. We’re looking across the entire campus, and so all students in all departments are what we’re driving towards. Now, you correctly point out that there will always be skeptics. I will strive for 100 percent, but if we asymptotically approach that into the future, I’ll live with that.
The goal is to prepare students, and that’s who we need to make sure that we’re preparing for the life they’re going to go into that’s been transformed by AI, that touches everybody. One of the cool things is we’re giving out grants to faculty to engage with AI and come up with ideas, and we’re doing that on multiple levels, and those faculty are now coming from all. We have art professors. We have writing professors. We have East Asian studies. We have professors from government, we have all of them engaging and so we’ve been able to, therefore, move the needle quite a bit so that a lot more people are a lot more receptive and open to it on campus, which is great.
Inside Higher Ed: You mentioned that Colby has a faculty-led approach, but sometimes that means that students from specific majors or disciplines might be less exposed to AI than others, depending on who their faculty are. It seems like you all are taking a balanced approach, not only encouraging enthusiastic AI entrepreneurs but also working with the skeptics.
Watts: It’s absolutely critical that we work on both ends of that spectrum, if that makes sense. We’re driving great innovation, and there’s great examples of research right here on campus that are doing wonderful things in an interdisciplinary way.
We just won an NSF grant for ARIA, an NSF institute looking at AI assistance in mental health, because that’s one of the most challenging spaces for how the models interact with people with mental and behavioral health challenges. It’s a perfect example of our interdisciplinary approach, with a professor from psychology working with a professor from computer science to go tackle these challenging areas. And I think that’s one of the things that Colby has done well, is to take that broader, interdisciplinary approach. Many people say that word now, but I think the liberal arts are primed for leading the charge on what that’s going to look like, because AI, by its nature, is interdisciplinary.
Inside Higher Ed: What’s next on campus? Is there any area that you’re all exploring or looking to do some more research in, or new tools and initiatives that our listeners should know about for the future?
Watts: We’re consistently evaluating that and bringing them in. What we’re trying to do is let it grow based on need as people explore and come up with ideas.
I mentioned the video; we’re now enabling video capability so we can do some of that research. It also opens up more multimodal approaches.
One of the approaches to the ARIA research, for example, is we want to be able to detect and therefore build context-aware assistance to have better results for everyone. So if we can solve the mental and behavioral health challenges, it’s probably one of the most difficult ones. It can also solve some of the other areas of underrepresented people who are left out or underrepresented groups who are left out of training, for example, which can lead to challenging behaviors.
I’m really excited about all of those possibilities and the areas that allow us to enable. We talked about access, we can also talk about accessibility.
We have on campus the Colby College Museum of Art; one of the faculty in computer science is exploring accessibility options using AI with a robotic seeing-eye dog. If someone wanted to visit the museum who was blind or visually impaired, they could interact with a seeing-eye dog that they’re used to, but this seeing-eye dog now might have more capability to communicate with people about what they’re seeing and in a museum setting, for example.
So really excited about that type of research: how do we really benefit humanity with these types of tools.
Inside Higher Ed: One thing I wanted to ask about is resources allocated from the university to be able to access all these tools. What investment is the college making to ensure that students are able to stay on the cutting edge of AI initiatives?
Watts: That’s absolutely critical. We want to make it no cost to our students and accessible to our students, but it still costs. So [it’s vital to] make sure that we have funding.
We were very lucky that we got a Davis endowment that enabled us to build the Davis Institute. That was huge because, and you can think about some of the challenges with federal funding and all of that stuff, but to have an endowment that allowed us to draw on that and really build strong capabilities at Colby College was critical. But you’re touching on the fact that we’re going to need to continue to do that. And that’s where, for example, the NSF grant and other grants that we will continue to explore will help us with how we continue to grow our impact and grow our value as we head into the future.
New early-applicant data from the Common App found that applications from Black, low-income, first-generation and rural potential students are all up compared to this point last year. However, international applications dipped, and the most selective institutions are experiencing the smallest application growth compared to other types of institutions. Applicants are also increasingly choosing to submit standardized test scores.
The Common App report, released Thursday, is the first in a series of monthly research briefs on college applicant trends typically released between November and March. The November brief showed that applicants, and applications, rose over all compared to this time last year, with notable growth among particular groups.
For example, applications from those who identified as Black or African American increased 16 percent and multiracial applicants rose 11 percent compared to the same time last application season. The report also found that applicants who identified as first-generation grew by 12 percent, while low-income applicants, who qualified for a Common App fee waiver, increased at more than twice the rate of other applicants. Rural applicants grew by 15 percent compared to last year, while thosefrom metropolitan areas grew only 6 percent.
But the number of international students applying dropped 9 percent compared to this point last year, driven by a 14 percent drop in applicants from India, which has historically been the second-biggest source of international applicants on the Common App platformafter China. Applicants from Asia broadly and from Africa also dropped significantly, 9 percent and 18 percent respectively, with a whopping 43 percent decline in applicants from Ghana. These trends suggest theTrump administration’s policies, including international student visa delays and denials, may be deterring students.
At a time when highly selective institutions are under new political pressures, the report found that colleges and universities with admit rates of 25 percent or below had the slowest application growth, at 4 percent. Applications to other types of institutions grew at two or three times that rate.
The return of standardized test requirements at some institutions is also driving more applicants to submit test scores. Notably, applications reporting scores rose 11 percent compared to this time last year. However, students who identify as underrepresented minorities or first-generation or who qualify for a Common App waiver were less likely to share their scores.
Johns Hopkins University announced Thursday that it’s eliminating tuition, fees and living expenses for its Homewood campus undergraduates whose families make less than $100,000 a year; students whose families earn up to $200,000 will pay no tuition. It joins a wave of other institutions—especially private, selective ones—that have announced tuition guarantees.
In a news release, the university said the change “means students from a majority of American families, including middle-class families earning above the national median household income of $87,730, can attend Hopkins at no expense.”
Further, Hopkins said, “Most families with incomes up to $250,000 will continue to qualify for significant financial aid. Even those with annual incomes exceeding $250,000 may qualify, especially when there are multiple children in college at the same time.”
Most of the university’s undergrads study on the Homewood campus, in North Baltimore. The release said the new aid levels “will go into effect for eligible current students in the spring 2026 semester and for new, incoming students next fall.”
In a message to the university community, JHU president Ron Daniels said that since businessman and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg donated $1.8 billion to the university in 2018, Hopkins’s share of Pell Grant–eligible students rose from 15.4 percent to 24.1 percent, the highest proportion in university history.
“Our financial aid investment has continued to grow, inspired by Mayor Bloomberg’s transformative gift, with generous contributions by more than 1,200 donors who have given $240 million for financial aid at Hopkins over the last several years,” Daniels wrote. “We are in their collective debt.”
