Tag: Reduce

  • AmeriCorps Cuts Force College Access Groups to Reduce Staff

    AmeriCorps Cuts Force College Access Groups to Reduce Staff

    Brianne Dolney-Jacobs has spent the last year advising high school seniors in Bay City, Mich., on their options after graduation.

    She met with 96 percent of the seniors at least once to talk about college applications, financial aid options, standardized tests and more. In doing so, she helped nearly 30 students access a countywide scholarship, up from under 10 in the previous year.

    But now, she’s one of 32,000 people affected by sweeping cuts to AmeriCorps, a federal agency focused on service and volunteerism across the United States. At least 100 college-access groups, including the Michigan College Access Network, where Dolney-Jacobs works, rely on AmeriCorps funding or members to make the college application process more accessible to high school students, especially those in low-income areas and at schools with low rates of college attendance.

    MCAN lost its grant funding this week and was ordered to cease all AmeriCorps work immediately, though the organization was able to use its own funds to buy staff members an extra month. Dolney-Jacobs will now wrap up her time at the high school at the end of May; she was supposed to stay on through late June.

    Without someone in her position, Dolney-Jacobs told Inside Higher Ed, there is no one at her school who would have the bandwidth to meet with individual students as they navigate the college application process. Many students would never have heard about different scholarships that are available to them or know that community college—including both an associate’s degree and some trade certifications—is free for recent high school graduates in Michigan.

    When her students heard that her position had been impacted, a group brought flowers to her office.

    “They told me, ‘you are the Class of 2025’s hero,’” she recounted. “And I was just bawling.”

    The National College Attainment Network, the association for MCAN and other similar organizations, is still taking stock of how many of its members have been impacted, said Elizabeth Morgan, NCAN’s chief external relations officer. But damage has been widespread.

    “I think it’s safe to say probably our members that use AmeriCorps are serving hundreds of thousands of students across the country,” Morgan said. “They are devastated by this news for a couple of reasons: The students they are supporting right now, many are high school seniors who are just weeding through their [college] decision-making process … [and] the AmeriCorps members are being thrown out of work months early.”

    A total of $400 million in AmeriCorps grants were axed, according to America’s Service Commission, a nonprofit that represents state and national service commissions, including funding for food pantries and disaster relief programs in areas impacted by recent natural disasters. The majority of AmeriCorps’ staff was also put on administrative leave in mid-April.

    It’s just one of the many agencies that have faced funding cuts and grant cancellations as part of the Trump administration’s war on government spending. Its defenders say that the agency, which pays modest stipends to its members, is anything but wasteful: It provides both vital supports for American communities and professional development training to its members, all for a low price tag.

    “I don’t believe Washington is really in tune to what is going on in the local communities,” said Grady Holmes, who works with a different MCAN AmeriCorps program that provides college success coaching to community college and tribal college students. “This is a program that is not government waste. It basically assists the government in making sure their productive citizens are being moved toward self-sufficiency and obtaining a college degree … When the powers that be decided this is wasteful spending—they don’t understand AmeriCorps.”

    Twenty-four states sued the Trump administration over the cuts, calling the dismantling of the agency, which was created by Congress in 1993, “unauthorized.”

    Advisers’ Impacts

    MCAN is facing cuts to two student-facing programs: AdviseMI, which is focused on college readiness for high schoolers, and the College Completion Corps, which is geared toward students at tribal and community colleges. Both rely on AmeriCorps grants and are staffed by AmeriCorps members, who work in yearlong service positions in exchange for stipends and educational awards that can cover current educational expenses or pay off student loans. The organization employs over 100 AmeriCorps members across both programs.

    Both programs have been successful, MCAN leaders say. In the 2023–24 academic year, students supported by AdviseMI advisers submitted 21,420 college applications and were awarded more than $32 million in financial aid.

    The advisers “often interact with parents, as well, to help parents understand the role of FAFSA and help parents understand what’s happening with their student,” said Ryan Fewins-Bliss, the organization’s executive director. “And [they] engage the school in what we hope to be a schoolwide college-going culture … so when the juniors become seniors, they’re ready for this.”

    After MCAN learned Friday night that it lost one of its AmeriCorps grants, the organization spent the weekend trying figure out how it could keep its AmeriCorps staff on board if the rest of the grants were also canceled. (In total, MCAN lost $2.1 million in AmeriCorps funds.)

    Come Monday, MCAN found out its remaining grants, including funding for AdviseMI and College Completion Corps, were indeed cancelled, and that it had to stop operating those programs immediately. MCAN was able to find funding in the budget to continue those programs for an extra month, but the future beyond then is uncertain.

    Other organizations had to lay off their AmeriCorps members entirely. Partnership 4 Kids, a Nebraska-based organization that works with students from prekindergarten through college, had two full-time AmeriCorps fellows working with high school seniors and three fellows working directly with college students. All five had to stop working Friday, immediately after P4K received word that its grants had been terminated.

    “These two in the high schools had great relationships with their students. They were doing one-on-one case management; they were the driving force [behind] college applications, scholarship applications, helping students overcome barriers they might have, and really to get them to that finish line to graduate,” P4K president Deb Denbeck said.

    This year, 97 percent of P4K’s senior cohort graduated and 80 percent of them are going to college—an impressive feat in a state where the college-going rate for high school graduates has been on the decline.

    ‘Brings Out the Best in People’

    AmeriCorps members have worked in high schools as college advisers for at least two decades, starting with the College Advising Corps, an organization that began in Virginia and has since expanded to 15 states. It’s a model that college-access leaders say has been incredibly effective, helping thousands of students go to college and boosting the careers of the advisers.

    It’s also been embraced by politicians on both sides of the aisle, according to Nicole Hurd, who founded the CAC and is now president of Lafayette College.

    AmeriCorps members are a natural fit for college-readiness work, these leaders say. Because many are recent college graduates, they can remember what it was like to be in the high schoolers’ shoes, making it easy for them to empathize with and respond to the challenges their students are facing. The college adviser positions are relatively easy to train, meaning individuals from any background can take on these roles.

    But perhaps most importantly, leaders of college-access nonprofits feel AmeriCorps’ long-standing ethos of volunteerism aligns perfectly with their missions to bring educational opportunity to all.

    “AmeriCorps brings out the best in people, and it gives them an opportunity to learn as well—to learn how to be professionals in their field,” said Denbeck. “When you look at everything that AmeriCorps does, whether it’s working in education or mentoring or agriculture or disaster relief, they’re doing it because of their heart.”

    The impacted organizations doubt they’ll be able to rely on AmeriCorps going forward. For now, they’re working to figure out how to continue their work and where they might get the funding necessary to deploy college advisers into the communities that need them most.

    “In the future, it’s safe to say that there are countless students that won’t attend college because they’re not getting this kind of support,” Morgan said.

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  • “Am I Sure?” — A Mindful Question to Reduce Stress & Gain Perspective (Dr. Ryan Niemiec, VIA Strengths)

    “Am I Sure?” — A Mindful Question to Reduce Stress & Gain Perspective (Dr. Ryan Niemiec, VIA Strengths)

    How often do we let our assumptions add to our stress—without even realizing it? In this short video, Dr. Ryan Niemiec invites us to pause and ask one simple, powerful question: “Am I sure?” By gently challenging our perceptions, we create space for clarity, balance, and authenticity. Learn how mindfulness and the character strength of Perspective can help reduce stress and bring you back to what truly matters.

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  • Ohio and Kentucky Ban DEI, Reduce Tenure Protections

    Ohio and Kentucky Ban DEI, Reduce Tenure Protections

    Republican-controlled legislatures in two bordering states, Ohio and Kentucky, have now passed laws requiring post-tenure review policies at public universities and banning diversity, equity and inclusion offices, along with other DEI activities.

    Many faculty and some Democratic leaders say the new laws threaten academic freedom and undermine tenure. In Ohio, lawmakers passed the sweeping higher education legislation, which has been in the works for a few years, over protests from faculty and students. The Ohio Student Association, for instance, said the bill would kill higher education in the state. Meanwhile, in Kentucky, Republican lawmakers rushed legislation through the process in order to successfully override their Democratic governor’s veto and put their higher education changes into law.

    Ohio and Kentucky join Arkansas, Utah and Wyoming this year as states where Republicans have passed laws targeting DEI and/or promoting alternative “intellectual diversity.” Even if the Trump administration’s ongoing nationwide attacks on DEI founder, these laws lock in restrictions on DEI in these states, preventing institutions from reversing course on diversity program rollbacks.

    Much of the new laws in Ohio and Kentucky echo the DEI bans that the other states have enacted, but Ohio’s legislation goes further than Kentucky’s, allowing immediate “for cause post-tenure reviews,” banning strikes for a large group of faculty and much more.

    Ohio governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, signed into law Friday a version of higher education legislation that’s been debated for the last two years but had failed to pass despite Republican majorities in the capitol. Senate Bill 1, the evolution of the failed legislation, combined numerous postsecondary changes that GOP legislators have sought to enact in other states.

    Among many other things, the new law bans full-time faculty from striking. It prohibits DEI offices, DEI in job descriptions and DEI in scholarships, without defining what DEI is. It requires institutions to “demonstrate intellectual diversity” in a range of areas, including course approval, general education requirements, common reading programs and faculty annual reviews. It also requires four-year institutions to publicly post online the syllabi for undergraduate courses, including the names of the instructors and “any required or recommended readings.” Community colleges must post more general syllabi.

    SB 1 also mandates a version of institutional neutrality, requiring colleges and universities to declare they “will not endorse or oppose, as an institution, any controversial belief or policy, except on matters that directly impact the institution’s funding or mission of discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge.” The “controversial” beliefs and policies that institutions are required to stay silent on include any that are “the subject of political controversy, including issues such as climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion.” (Ohio colleges and universities do retain the right to endorse Congress when it goes to war.)

    The law further requires all institutions to establish post-tenure review policies—which could lead to firing tenured faculty. The legislation bans unions from using their collective bargaining rights to negotiate over these policies. And SB 1 allows certain administrators to launch “an immediate and for cause post-tenure review at any time for a faculty member who has a documented and sustained record of significant underperformance” outside their regular annual performance evaluations.

    “This bill eliminates tenure,” said Sara Kilpatrick, executive director of the Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors. “If certain administrators can call for post-tenure review at any time and fire a faculty member without due process, that is not real tenure, that is tenure in name only.”

    Pointing to a provision for an appeals process, Republican state senator Jerry Cirino, who filed SB 1, said, “They’re lying about that” and “once again, the AAUP is misrepresenting the facts.”

    He added that the bill is “very pro–higher education.”

    “I’m not going to fall for these false narratives that the left is trying to put out there mischaracterizing this bill,” Cirino said.

    The Ohio governor’s office didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment Monday about why DeWine signed this bill into law.

    In Kentucky, the Democratic governor didn’t go along with the legislature, vetoing an anti-DEI bill. But Republicans overrode Gov. Andy Beshear.

    Bucking Beshear

    Kentucky’s House Bill 4 bans what that legislation defines as DEI offices, employees and training in public colleges and universities, as well as the use of affirmative action in hiring and in deciding scholarships and vendor selection. It also affects curricula by barring institutions from requiring courses whose “primary purpose is to indoctrinate participants with a discriminatory concept.”

    The new law generally defines a “discriminatory concept” as one that “justifies or promotes differential treatment or benefits” for people based on “religion, race, sex, color or national origin.” It broadly characterizes DEI as promoting a discriminatory concept. And it defines “indoctrinate” as imbuing or attempting to “imbue another individual with an opinion, point of view or principle without consideration of any alternative.”

    Additionally, under the new law, the Council on Postsecondary Education, which oversees Kentucky’s public colleges and universities, can’t approve new degrees or certificates that require courses or trainings primarily intended to “indoctrinate” with discriminatory concepts. And it encourages the council to eliminate current academic programs that contain such requirements.

    Beshear vetoed House Bill 4 on March 19 and defended diversity programs, adding that the legislation attempts to “control how universities and colleges meet the needs of their students and prepare them for their future.”

    “Acting like racism and discrimination no longer exist or that hundreds of years of inequality have been somehow overcome and there is a level playing field is disingenuous,” Beshear added. “History may look at this time and this bill as part of the anti–civil rights or pro-discrimination movement. Kentucky should not be a part of that movement.”

    On Thursday, the Kentucky House voted 79 to 19 to override this veto, and the Senate voted 32 to 6.

    Beshear also vetoed another bill, House Bill 424, which required institutions to evaluate president and faculty “productivity” at least once every four years using a board-approved process. Presidents or faculty who fail performance and productivity metrics could lose their jobs, under the bill. Beshear wrote in his veto message that the legislation “threatens academic freedom.”

    “In a time of increased federal encroachment into the public education, this bill will limit employment protections of our postsecondary institution teachers” and the state’s “ability to hire the best people,” he wrote. Lawmakers overrode him with an 80-to-20 House vote and a 29-to-9 Senate vote.

    Amy Reid, Freedom to Learn senior manager at PEN America, a free speech and academic freedom advocacy group, said in an email that the new Ohio and Kentucky laws “are not only significant blows to public higher education, but also reflect a galling disregard for the voters, educators and students in these states.”

    “Ohioans were massively organized in their opposition to SB 1, with hundreds of citizens coming to the capital to testify against the bill,” Reid said. “The legislature ignored them and so did Governor DeWine.” She said there was also “strong opposition across Kentucky” to the new laws there.

    But Tom Young, chairman of the Ohio House Workforce and Higher Education Committee, said he had heard support for the legislation from students and faculty who were concerned about speaking up. He said DEI had become “a tool for dividing people,” and most opposition to SB 1 that he heard regarded its anti-strike and post-tenure review provisions.

    “I don’t believe that any of these professors are concerned about the classroom,” Young said of faculty upset about the new law.

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  • Education Department to reduce staff by nearly half

    Education Department to reduce staff by nearly half

    J. David Ake/Getty Images

    The Education Department is moving to lay off nearly 50 percent of its more than 4,100 employees as of Tuesday evening, according to four sources inside the agency who were told about the plans.

    It’s not yet clear what specific departments or positions were affected, though officials planned to tell affected employees this evening, sources told Inside Higher Ed. The department previously offered employees buyouts to cut down the workforce. The goal to reduce staff by 50 percent includes prior reductions. Those affected will receive 90 days’ severance and will have 10 days to transfer their job duties to another staffer or political appointee, according to a longtime staffer with inside knowledge of the reduction-in-force details.

    The department said in its announcement that the employees will be placed on administrative leave, starting March 21, and that core programs such as distributing student loans and Pell Grants will continue.

    “Today’s reduction in force reflects the Department of Education’s commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents, and teachers,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement. “This is a significant step toward restoring the greatness of the United States education system.”

    The Washington Post reported that 1,315 employees would lose their jobs, in addition to the roughly 600 who took the buyouts. The reductions will bring the total workforce down to fewer than 2,200.

    Earlier on Tuesday, the department told staff that D.C. offices will be closed Wednesday and reopen Thursday for “security reasons,” according to an email obtained by Inside Higher Ed. One staffer said they were told by department officials that the closure was due to the reduction in force.

    The email instructed department staff to take their laptops home with them on Tuesday in order to telework Wednesday, and that they would “not be permitted in any ED facility on Wednesday, March 12th, for any reason.”

    Some department staff were notified of the impending layoffs during meetings with top department officials—including an acting deputy secretary—on Tuesday afternoon, according to sources inside the department who spoke with Inside Higher Ed on background.

    Sheria Smith, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents over 2,800 workers at the Department of Education, pledged to fight the cuts in a statement released Tuesday evening. Smith said that the Trump administration “has no respect for the thousands of workers who have dedicated their careers to serve their fellow Americans.”

    “We will not stand idly by while this regime pulls the wool over the eyes of the American people,” Smith added. “We will state the facts. Every employee at the U.S. Department of Education lives in your communities—we are your neighbors, your friends, your family. And we have spent our careers supporting services that you rely on.”

    The expected cuts are part of a governmentwide strategy to reduce the federal workforce. All federal agency officials were told last month to start preparing for a “large scale reduction in force” and to eliminate all “non-statutorily mandated functions.”

    While the government layoffs are far-reaching, President Trump has frequently targeted the Education Department for cuts, even vowing to shut down the agency. That would require congressional action, but Trump and McMahon can make deep cuts to the agency even if they don’t abolish it altogether.

    Trump is reportedly planning to sign an executive order directing McMahon to “take all necessary steps” to return authority over education to the states and facilitate closure of the Department of Education “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law,” according to draft text reviewed by Inside Higher Ed.

    Higher education groups and advocates have warned that cutting staff and programs at the department would be catastrophic for institutions and students, though critics say the agency is in need of a serious overhaul. State higher education officials, university administrators, nonprofit advocacy groups and students depend on the Education Department to oversee federal student aid, manage the student loan portfolio, investigate civil rights complaints and allocate billions of dollars in institutional aid, among other operations. The department, which has an $80 billion discretionary budget, issues about $100 billion in student loans every year and more than $30 billion in Pell Grants.

    The massive personnel cuts—the largest in the department’s history—will likely impact most agencies and offices in the department, including the Office of Federal Student Aid, sources say. Within FSA, the cuts will be most severe among teams that work directly on policy and higher education oversight, including the Ombudsman Office, which investigates complaints into student loan practices and financial aid.

    Staffers at the Education Department have been anticipating the reduction in force for the past week. Last Tuesday, department leaders called a meeting to discuss the impending layoffs but canceled at the last minute. Meanwhile, staff have been awaiting the executive order from Trump to close down the department since last Wednesday.

    “Everyone’s ready,” one exhausted staffer told Inside Higher Ed.

    Other federal agencies have started to lay off thousands of employees via a planned reduction in force, a process that should give them 60 days’ notice. At the Environmental Protection Agency, Trump expects 65 percent of the workforce to go, according to Government Executive, a trade publication tracking the layoffs. Last week, the Veterans Affairs Department said it was laying off 80,000 people.

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  • LA Wildfires Reduce Classrooms to Ashes, Uproot Students’ Lives – The 74

    LA Wildfires Reduce Classrooms to Ashes, Uproot Students’ Lives – The 74

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