This isn’t unique to my state, but it’s my first time encountering it.
Pennsylvania’s state government runs on a July-to-June fiscal year, which means that it was supposed to have passed a budget for this fiscal year by July 1.
It hasn’t passed one yet, and passage doesn’t look imminent.
This is becoming a problem.
It’s already a problem for our county, which has announced cuts. And it’s increasingly a problem for the college.
Based on previous years, we’ve expected the state allocation to cover a little over 40 percent of the operating budget. (The county’s figure is much lower.) So far this year, it has covered zero percent, for a difference of—let’s see, carry the three—millions.
We have reserves, and they’ve come in handy. But they’re meant to even out cash flow over the course of a year, to cover emergencies and to help with large expenses. They were never intended to supplant the state’s role in the budget. Our CFO recently had to calculate the number of months we could go without the state allocation, which is a number you never want to matter.
For those keeping score at home, reserves at a community college are very different from endowments at universities. Endowments are generated mostly from a combination of donations and investment returns, and they’re meant to “throw off” a certain amount per year to pay for other things. Those other things can be the operating budget, or scholarships, or facilities, as specified. (Endowment funds are a mix of restricted and unrestricted. Restricted funds can only be used for designated purposes; unrestricted funds are more flexible.)
Reserves, by contrast, are generated from operational savings and are meant to provide a bit of buffer. They’re almost always invested very conservatively because they’re meant to be liquid. Endowments can take greater risks because they’re intended to have much longer time horizons. If endowments are like retirement accounts, reserves are closer to savings accounts.
They’re crucial for cash flow because peak revenue times and peak spending times don’t always align. For a college on a traditional calendar, August shows high revenues and low spending, and October shows high spending and low revenues. That’s because students pay tuition in August to take classes in October.
Reserves can create perverse incentives for legislators. A legislator looking to pay for some other line item closer to his heart may see a public college with relatively healthy reserves as a painless target for cutting. But once reserves are spent, they’re spent, and one of the dangers of public-sector math is that even a single year’s cut can become a new baseline. At that point, climbing out of the hole can become a Sisyphean nightmare.
In practice, that means that public colleges have to perform a delicate balance with reserves. Save too much, and you become a tempting target. Save too little, and you may find yourself in a tight spot if something happens.
Right now, something is happening—or not happening, to be exact—with a major impact. The frustrating part is that the something in question is unnecessary. This isn’t the aftermath of a natural disaster; it’s collateral damage from a political standoff. The fact that it leaves us much more vulnerable to, say, a natural disaster doesn’t seem to bother legislators.
So, my request to the elected leaders of Pennsylvania, and to other states in similar spots: Pass a budget! Reserves weren’t meant for this.
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Dive Brief:
While nearly every state has some form of college and career readiness criteria for high school students, there are still areas for growth in how data on students’ postsecondary readiness is collected, according to a July report from All4Ed and the Urban Institute.
Though criteria vary depending on each state’s priorities and goals, 42 states currently use at least one college and career readiness indicator in their school accountability systems.
Accountability systems include both indicators and measures. The report defines indicators as offering information on a critical aspect of school performance, while measures are the data points used within an indicator to determine whether particular student inputs or outcomes were achieved.
Dive Insight:
“Forty-two states are using a college and career readiness indicator, that’s great progress,” said Anne Hyslop, All4Ed’s director of policy development and the report’s author. “All of these measures have been developed in the last decade or so.”
The report found that 39 of the 42 states with indicators include both college and career readiness measures, and 20 of these states also measure military or civic readiness.
Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses and exams are the most common measures of college readiness, used by 35 states. They are followed by dual or concurrent enrollment coursework (34 states) and college admission test scores, such as the SAT and ACT (26 states).
For career readiness assessment, earning industry-recognized credentials or completing a career and technical education pathway are the most common measures. Some states also use work-based learning or internships.
Hyslop noted that not all states have a clear distinction between indicators for college, career and military readiness. Some states combine several measures into a single indicator, while others group different sets of measures into multiple indicators.
“This is where getting better transparency and data would be really helpful,” Hyslop said. “A lot of states may report readiness across all of the measures, but they don’t report how many students are ready for college, how many are ready for career, etc. They don’t report it separately.”
The report highlighted North Dakota as a good example of this distinction. The state’s indicator, Choice Ready, has a list of essential skills required of all students that align with the state’s graduation requirements. Once students have demonstrated these essential skills, they need to show readiness in two of three areas: postsecondary ready, workforce ready or military ready.
For Hyslop, improving data collection is the “lowest-hanging fruit.”
“There is so much data that is being collected on student readiness, but the way that it is reported is not necessarily leading to the maximum value from that data, because it’s not always fully disaggregated by student subgroups,” said Hyslop. “It’s just a matter of packaging it in more useful formats.”
The outlier states that do not currently have a college and career readiness indicator are Alaska, Kansas, Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, Oregon and Wisconsin, according to the report. Illinois is currently in the final stages of developing its indicator.
Thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act becoming law this summer, workforce Pell is now a reality and federal aid dollars are expected to flow to low-income students in short-term programs as soon as next July.
But now comes the hard work of figuring out which programs are eligible—and some states aren’t ready, according to a new report from the State Noncredit Data Project, which helps community college systems track data related to noncredit programs. Not all states collect the data needed to make that determination, and some offer programs that wouldn’t make the cut, the report concluded.
Under the legislation, short-term programs need to meet certain requirements to qualify for Pell money. For example, state governors need to verify they align with high-skill, high-wage or in-demand jobs. Programs also must be able to build toward a credit-bearing certificate or degree program and be “stackable and portable across more than one employer” unless preparing students for jobs with just one recognized credential. They have to exist for at least a year and meet outcomes goals, including completion and job-placement rates of at least 70 percent. And programs can’t charge tuition higher than graduates’ median “value-added earnings,” or the degree to which their income exceeds 150 percent of the federal poverty line three years out of the program.
But some states collect more data than others on community colleges’ noncredit education, which encompasses many of the programs likely to qualify for workforce Pell, according to the report. It based its findings on course and program-level data from eight states: Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.
“What we’re going to see is varying degrees of difficulty” for different states, said co-author Mark D’Amico, a higher education professor at University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “States that have more robust data on noncredit community college education are going to be at a little bit of an advantage.”
The report found that most states track basic metrics such as the length of a program. But two out of the eight states had no state-level data on noncredit credential outcomes. Half of the states didn’t collect any data on labor market outcomes like earnings and employment rates. And multiple states didn’t keep track of whether students completed credentials or went on to pursue credit-bearing programs. The report emphasized that while individual institutions might have more detailed data on their programs, gaps in statewide data could create challenges as states work with institutions to prove their programs’ eligibility for workforce Pell.
“Most states have some of the fundamental data,” D’Amico said, “but I think when it comes to the credentials’ labor market outcomes, completion, stackability, those are going to be a little bit more difficult to identify.”
The report predicted that some states, like Iowa, Louisiana and Virginia, may have an easier time proving which programs meet the criteria because they already have state funding for noncredit programs that requires colleges to report relevant data. For example, Iowa includes noncredit education in its state funding formula for workforce training programs, and Louisiana has a state scholarship for such programs.
Co-author Michelle Van Noy, director of the Education and Employment Research Center at Rutgers University, said states’ data infrastructure for noncredit programs is still a “work in progress,” but she’s seen “quite a progression” in recent years. She’s optimistic they’ll continue to improve.
“It is my hope that Workforce Pell implementation can be done in a way that will support the broader development of data and quality systems for noncredit education and nondegree credentials within states,” Van Noy wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed.
But data isn’t the only issue. The report also found that typical noncredit programs weren’t necessarily long enough to meet the standards for workforce Pell. Except for lengthier workforce programs at the Tennessee Colleges of Applied Technology, the median number of hours for occupational training programs ranged from 15 hours in New Jersey to 100 hours in Virginia, falling short of the 150-hour, eight-week threshold. Institutions could group their courses into longer programs in the coming months. But it’s not yet clear if making such a change would affect the requirement that programs exist for at least a year.
“Anyone that may be thinking that all of a sudden, all noncredit programs are going to be eligible, the data show that’s not the case,” D’Amico said. “We’ll see what happens over time.”
The report offered a set of recommendations for how states can ready themselves for workforce Pell. For example, it urged state officials to take stock of which metrics they still need to collect to fall in line with the policy’s guardrails and encouraged state and college officials to work together to start identifying programs that could be eligible. The report also suggested colleges consider reconfiguring programs so noncredit offerings serve as on-ramps to credit-bearing programs and meet other structural requirements.
Further details about how workforce Pell will work are going to be hashed out in a negotiated rule-making process this fall, but D’Amico said states shouldn’t wait for that.
“I would use the guardrails now, use the data that they have now, to begin to do that pre-identification” so they have “a little bit of time to begin to fill some of those gaps in existing data,” D’Amico said.
He also hopes states’ preparation for workforce Pell pushes forward “a larger conversation” they’re already having about the quality of short-term noncredit programs over all.
The overarching goal is “ensuring that noncredit programs are designed well, have credentials associated with them linked to further education and are really designed in a way that’s going to be beneficial to students and ultimately help the local and state economies that these programs are going to serve,” D’Amico said.
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Dive Brief:
Twenty four states and the District of Columbia are seeking to throw out a lawsuit challenging this summer’s delay of K-12 federal grant funding. A joint motion to dismiss was filed Monday by the coalition of states, led by California, and the Trump administration, with both parties agreeing that the balance of the remaining funds be released no later than Oct. 3.
The expected July 1 release of more than $6 billion in fundingwas delayed for several weeks due to a “programmatic review” by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. OMB said an initial review found that “many of these grant programs have been grossly misused to subsidize a radical leftwing agenda.”
The funding delays impacted after-school programs, English learner services, academic supports, migrant student assistance, adult education and professional development. The inaction caused significant financial disruptions just as schools were finalizing staffing and programming for the upcoming school year, according to educators, families, lawmakers and education-related organizations.
Dive Insight:
The states’ lawsuit, State of California, et al. v. Linda McMahon, et al., was filed July 14 and said the “abrupt freeze is wreaking similar havoc on key teacher training programs as well as programs that make school more accessible to children with special learning needs, such as English language learners.”
President Donald Trump, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon and OMB Director Russell Vought are named as defendants in the lawsuit, as are OMB and the U.S. Department of Education.
In a statement Monday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the assurance by the federal government that it will release the remaining funds resolved the states’ lawsuit.
“The Trump Administration upended school programs across the country when it recklessly withheld vital education funding just weeks before the school year was set to begin,” Bonta said. “Our kids deserve so much better than what this anti-education Administration has to offer, and we will continue to fight to protect them from this President’s relentless attacks.”
The Trump administration has said it wants to close the Education Department and give states more decision-making authority over federal K-12 spending.
The states’ lawsuit said that the funding freeze had violated federal funding statutes and regulations. In addition to the states’ lawsuit, a coalition of 14 school districts, parents, teachers unions and nonprofit organizations also sued the Education Department and OMB for withholding the K-12 federal funds. Both parties in that lawsuit — Anchorage School District, et al. v. U.S. Department of Education, et al. — also filed a joint motion to dismiss that lawsuit on Monday.
That motion said the second tranche of federal funding due to states should be available on or about Oct. 1.
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A dozen states and their school districts are more vulnerable to federal funding rollbacks than others in K-12 because of their higher proportions of high-need districts and students living in poverty, according to an analysis from nonprofit group Education Resource Strategies.
Another risk factor for the 12 states is their higher dependency on federal funding: 16% of Alaska’s total education revenue, for example, came from the federal government in 2021-22. Nationally, 13.7% of public school funding came from the federal government that school year, according to USA Facts.
According to ERS, there are 12 states that meet all three risk factors: Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia.
In addition to the three risk factors reviewed by ERS, states and public schools are facing myriad other funding pressures, including federal fiscal delays and cutbacks, the end of COVID-19 emergency aid and competition from school choice options.
Although most funding for public schools comes from local and state coffers, reductions in federal revenue could lead to school-level impacts, including staff reductions or program cancellations, ERS said.
3 risk factors
In its analysis, ERS considered three risk factors that would make states more vulnerable to federal funding cuts. The first is ahigher reliance on federal funds as a percentage of total education revenue.
While federal funding has an impact on all states, those where federal funds exceed 10% of total K-12 revenue could be more vulnerable, ERS analysts said.
The analysis considered all federal funding directed to public K-12 districts, including Medicaid reimbursements and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits. The analysis did not consider federal pandemic emergency funding.
The second risk factor is the percentage of districts in a state serving students living in poverty.
Districts serving a high proportion of students living in poverty rely the most on federal funding, as federal grants support low income students and districts.
The ERS analysis said states that have more than 30% of districts defined as “high-need” means that many districts would be impacted by reductions or disruptions in federal funding. A high-need district is one in which more than 20% of students live in poverty.
In Louisiana, for example, 81% of the state’s 69 public school districts qualify as high-need, which could be a challenge for Louisiana should Congress reduce federal funding for FY 2026, ERS said.
The third risk factor is the percentage of students attending a high-need district. The analysis measured this as a risk factor if more than 20% of a state’s students attend a high-need district. For those states, many families would be impacted by any federal budget reductions, even if a family is not low income.
ERS points out, however, that even if a state has a lower number of high-need districts, those few districts could be serving a large number of students. For example, only 12% of New York’s districts are considered high-need, but because New York City — a high-need district — serves more than 1 million students, 52% of the state’s students are served by a high-need district.
An ‘unprecedented level of uncertainty’
“It’s important for stakeholders to understand the challenges that schools and districts might face if federal funding cuts do happen, and to recognize that the impact will be different” depending on the risk factors, said Betty Chang, managing partner at ERS.
“Districts are facing a pretty unprecedented level of uncertainty when it comes to their financial forecast,” Chang added.
Congress is currently considering the budget for fiscal year 2026. President Donald Trump has proposed funding the U.S. Department of Education at $66.7 billion, and the Senate Appropriations Committee recommended $79 billion, or about $300 million more than current budget. The federal fiscal year begins Oct. 1.
Last month, the release of $6.2 billion in federal grant funding for several programs, such as English learning and after-school, was delayed as the White House’s Office of Management and Budget conducted a review to ensure compliance with Trump’s directives. The funding limbo caused some districts to reduce staff and cancel programs, according to educators and lawmakers.
A Moody’s Ratings report released last month, meanwhile, said districts that have strong budget managementand the capacity to increase revenue, as well as access to state funding, will be on stronger financial footing to adjust to federal policy changes.
Selina Likely, a child care director in Columbus, Ohio, understands the desperation that parents feel when they can’t find a good placement for their children with disabilities. When Likely’s daughter was a child, the little girl was abruptly kicked out of her daycare center for biting, leaving her mother with little recourse.
“I was so angry and mad at the time,” said Likely, whose daughter is now an adult. “How are you going to kick out a 1-year-old?”
Thanks to a new state initiative, Likely and other child care providers like her can now receive additional training on how to support children with disabilities, who are far more likely than other children to be expelled from child care programs. Some states have similar programs, with the ultimate goal of creating more child care slots where young children with disabilities and delays can thrive.
How Hechinger inspired a bill
Earlier this year, my colleague Sarah Carr published a piece revealing that in Illinois and other states many families of premature babies are leaving the hospital with no information or guidance on critical therapies they are entitled to. In June, the Illinois Legislature passed a bill that would require hospitals to distribute detailed information on early intervention — those required therapies for babies and toddlers with disabilities and developmental delays — to most families with severely premature infants. The new law was proposed by state Rep. Janet Yang Rohr after Sarah’s story was published.
The bill, which awaits action by the governor, would also require the state’s early childhood systems to prioritize, in a public awareness campaign, the early identification of infants who automatically qualify for the therapies because of their low birth weight.
This story about children with disabilities was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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 story about children with disabilities was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
COLUMBUS, Ohio — When Selina Likely became director of the Edwards Creative Learning Center six years ago, she knew there was one longstanding practice that she wanted to change. For as long as she had taught at the thriving child care center, it had turned away many children with disabilities such as autism and Down syndrome. The practice was even encoded in the center’s handbook as policy.
Likely, the parent of a child with a disability, wanted to stop telling families no, but she knew that to do that she and her staff would need more support. “I said, ‘Let’s start getting training and see what we can do.’”
Not too long after, her effort received a big boost from a state-funded initiative in Ohio to strengthen child care teachers’ knowledge and confidence in working with young kids with disabilities and developmental delays. That program, Ohio PROMISE, offers free online training for child care workers in everything from the benefits of kids of all abilities learning and playing together to the kinds of classroom materials most helpful to have on hand. It also offers as-needed mentorship and support from trained coaches across the state.
Related: Young children have unique needs, and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.
Child care providers across the country — including large, established centers and tiny home-based programs — struggle to meet the needs of children with disabilities, according to a 2024 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. More than a quarter of parents of children with disabilities said they had a lot of difficulty finding appropriate care for their kids. And even those who do find a spot regularly encounter challenges, like having their children excluded from extracurricular activities such as field trips and even academic instruction.
“It’s really hard to find child care for this population, we heard that loud and clear,” said Elizabeth Curda, a director on the GAO’s Education, Workforce and Income Security team and a coauthor of the report. Even the most well-resourced centers report that they struggle to meet the needs of children with disabilities, according to Curda.
There’s a lot of desire at the grassroots level to change that. Ohio PROMISE and a few other recent initiatives provide models for how to expand the capacity — and the will — of child care centers to serve the more than 2 million U.S. children age 5 or below who have a disability or developmental delay.
Cards on the walls at Edwards Creative Learning Center display the signs for different letters so students — whether nonverbal or not — can all learn sign language. Credit: Sarah Carr/The Hechinger Report
In Vermont, for instance, officials hope to soon unveil a free, on-demand training program aimed at helping child care teachers have more inclusive classrooms. And officials in Ohio’s Summit County, home to Akron, report growing interest from other counties in creating programs based on Summit’s more than decade-old model that provides in-person training for child care operators in inclusion of children with disabilities.
“We’re helping to create child care centers that feel they can handle whatever comes their way, especially when it comes to significant behavior concerns,” said Yolanda Mahoney, the early childhood center support supervisor for Summit County’s disabilities board.
The federal government until recently encouraged the creation of such models. In 2023, the federal Department of Education and Department of Health and Human Services issued a joint statement urging states to take steps to support inclusion in early childhood settings, including strengthening training and accountability.
Under the current president, federal momentum on the issue has largely stalled. While the administration of President Donald Trump hasn’t directly attacked inclusion in the context of special education, the president has criticized the term more broadly — especially when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion. That can create uncertainty and a chilling effect on advocates of inclusion efforts of all kinds.
Funding for some inclusion efforts is also in jeopardy. States rely on Medicaid, which faces nearly $1 trillion in cuts over the next decade, to pay for early intervention programs for children birth to age 3 with developmental delays and disabilities. Trump has also proposed eliminating Preschool Development Grants, which states such as Vermont and Illinois have used to expand support of young children with disabilities.
That means over the next few years, progress on inclusion in child care settings could hinge largely on state and local investment. It helps that there’s a “real desire” among providers to enroll more children with disabilities, said Kristen Jones, an assistant director on the GAO’s education, workforce and income security team, who also worked on the report. “But there’s also a concern that currently they can’t do that in a safe way” because of a lack of training and resources.
In Ohio, the idea for Ohio PROMISE came after an appeal in 2022 from Republican Gov. Mike DeWine. He reported that families were coming to him saying they couldn’t find child care for their kids with disabilities.
“He said, ‘Come to me with ideas to solve that problem,’” recalled Wendy Grove, a senior adviser in the Ohio Department of Children and Youth who spearheaded development of the program.
Grove and her colleagues had already been working on a related effort. In 2020, Ohio won a federal grant that included help exploring how well — or not — children with disabilities were being included in child care and early education settings. DeWine liked the idea Grove’s team presented of morphing that work into a state-led effort to strengthen training and support for child care teachers. They also proposed more direct support to families, including the extension of child care vouchers to families with incomes above the poverty level, with a higher reimbursement rate for children with disabilities.
The training, which debuted about two years ago, is provided in three levels. Jada Cutchall, a preschool teacher at Imaginative Beginnings, an early learning center just outside of Toledo, recently completed the third tier, which for her included customized coaching. Cutchall’s coach helped her create communication tools for a largely nonverbal student, she said, including a board with pictures children can point to if, for example, they want to go to the bathroom or try a different playground activity.
As a result, Cutchall said, she has watched kids with disabilities, including those with speech impairments and autism, engage much more directly with their classmates. “They have the courage to ask their peers to play with them — or at least not distance themselves as much as they usually would,” she said. All of the children in the classroom have benefited, she added, noting that kids without disabilities have taken an interest in learning sign language, strengthening their own communication skills and fostering empathy.
Child care programs where one teacher and one administrator have completed some of the training earn a special designation from the state, which may eventually be tied to the opportunity to get extra funding to serve children with disabilities. In Ohio PROMISE’s first year, 1,001 child care centers — about 10 percent of the total number in Ohio — earned that designation, according to Grove.
For the last six years, Selina Likely has overseen the Edwards Creative Learning Center, where she’s steadily tried to enroll more children with disabilities and developmental delays. Credit: Sarah Carr/The Hechinger Report
The effort costs a little over $1 million in state dollars each year, with most of that paying for several regional support personnel who work directly with centers as mentors and advisers. Over the last two years, Ohio has seen a 38 percent increase in the number of children in publicly funded centers who qualify for the higher voucher reimbursement rate for children with disabilities, which can be double the size of the standard voucher.
Grove hopes that ultimately the effort plays a role in narrowing a critical and stubborn gap in the state: about 27 percent of children without disabilities show readiness on state standards for kindergarten; only 14 percent of children with disabilities do. Since so few disabilities exhibited at that age are related to intellectual or cognitive functioning, “we shouldn’t see that gap,” said Grove. “There’s no real reason.”
One goal of the new efforts is to reduce the number of young children with disabilities who are expelled from or pushed out of care. Those children are frequently asked to leave for behaviors related to their disability, the GAO report found.
Several years ago, a child care center in Columbus expelled Meagan Severance’s 18-month-old son for biting a staff member. The boy has several special needs, including some related to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Severance brought him to Edwards Creative Learning Center, where not too long after Selina Likely shifted into the role of director. The boy also bit a staff member there — not uncommon behavior for toddlers, especially those with sensory sensitivities and communication challenges.
Likely was determined to work with the child, not expel him. “They put in time and effort,” said Severance. “The response wasn’t, ‘He bit someone, he’s gone.’”
Likely empathized. Decades earlier, her own daughter had been expelled from a child care center in her hometown of Mansfield, Ohio, for biting.
“I was so angry and mad at the time — how are you going to kick out a 1-year-old?” she said. The center director didn’t think at all about how to help her child, Likely recalled, instead asking Likely what might be happening at home to make the child want to bite. She said she got no notice or grace period to find a new placement. “That left me in a disheartened place,” she said. “I was like, ‘I still have to go to work.”
Seventeen years old at the time, she was inspired by the injustice of the situation to quit her job in a factory and apply to be an assistant in a child care program. She’s been in the industry ever since, gradually trying to make more space for children like her daughter, who was later diagnosed with autism.
Meagan Severance, a parent and teacher at the Edwards center, has worked in recent years to make her classroom more inclusive for children with all different abilities. Credit: Sarah Carr/The Hechinger Report
As director, Likely displays the nameplate “chaos coordinator” on her desk. And she’s taken the stance that the center should at least try to work with every kid. She and some of her teachers have completed the first two tiers of the Ohio PROMISE training, as well as some related sessions available from the state. Likely estimates that about 10 percent of the children in her center have a diagnosed disability or developmental delay.
Liasun Meadows, whose son has Down syndrome, chose Edwards several years ago for her then 1-year-old over another program better known for its work with children with disabilities. She has not been disappointed.
Parents of kids with disabilities watch their children like a hawk, she said. “There are certain things you notice that you don’t expect others to notice, but they do at Edwards. They’ve been growing and learning alongside him.”
Severance, whose son is now 8, works at the center these days, leading the 3-year-old room, which includes two children who are largely nonverbal. She’s made the classroom more inclusive, adding fidget toys for children with sensory issues, rearranging the classroom to create calming areas, providing communication books to nonverbal children so they can more easily express needs and wants, and teaching everyone some sign language.
“For a while there was segregation in the classroom” between the kids with disabilities and those without, Severance said. But that’s lessened with the changes. “Inclusion has been good for the kids who are verbal — and nonverbal,” she said.
As in Ohio, state officials in Vermont turned to online training to help ensure young children with disabilities aren’t denied quality care. The state should soon debut the first parts of a new training program, focusing on outreach to child care administrators and support for neurodivergent children. The state wanted to focus on center leaders first because “directors that are comfortable with inclusion lead programs that are comfortable with inclusion,” said Dawn Rouse, the director of statewide systems in Vermont’s Child Development Division.
One tool for supporting and calming children with sensory issues is keeping a healthy supply of fidget toys and Pop-Its on hand. Credit: Sarah Carr/The Hechinger Report
Vermont also pumped millions of dollars into a separate program, known as the Special Accommodations Grant, that supports young children with disabilities. Since 2009 the state has set aside $300,000 a year that child care centers can tap to provide services for individual children with disabilities. It might help buy specialized equipment for a child with cerebral palsy, for instance, or be used to hire a full- or part-time aide.
The $300,000 has been maxed out every year, Rouse said. And after the pandemic, the need — and the number of applications — surged.
As a result, the state allocated some federal American Rescue Plan and Preschool Development Grant dollars to increase spending on the program by about sevenfold — to between $2 million and $2.5 million annually — an amount Rouse still describes as a “Band-Aid.” Without access to the grants, “we see a lot of children being asked to leave programs,” Rouse said. “That’s not good for any child, but for children with specialized developmental needs it’s particularly bad.”
Over time, Likely hopes, her Ohio center can play a small role in reducing that instability, although the center hasn’t yet been able to work with all such children it wants to. Likely recalls one toddler with a severe disability who climbed up anything he could. There wasn’t enough money to pay for what the child really needed: a full-time aide. “It’s hard when you know you’ve tried but still have to say no,” she said. “That breaks my heart more than anything.”
On one June morning, the center’s teachers acknowledged and celebrated several milestones in its work on inclusion, big and small. One child in the 3-year-old classroom with fine and gross motor challenges was drinking independently from a bottle. The preschool classroom held its first graduation ceremony, translated partly into sign language. All of the kids, no matter their challenges, were set to go on field trips to Dairy Queen and the zoo.
Likely dreams of someday running a center where about half of the children have a disability or delay. It may be years off, she said, but as with the milestones she sees scores of children at the center reach every day, “There’s a way — if there’s a will.”
Sarah Carr is a fellow at New America, focused on reporting on early childhood issues.
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.
When then-16-year old Mariam Kaba won $1 million through the Transform Rhode Island scholarship three years ago, she saw it as her opportunity to create the change she wanted to see in her nearly 45,000-person community of Woonsocket.
“I don’t see much positive representation from our community all the time,” Kaba said. “I was thinking ‘my scholarship won’t get picked.’ But it did … and I was able to bring something so big to my community, a community that already doesn’t have the most funding in the world.”
Kaba’s investments resulted in a number of youth-centered spaces and opportunities popping up across the city, including 120 calm corners in elementary classrooms to support students’ sensory functions, new physical education equipment for all Woonsocket elementary schools, job fairs, hundreds of donated books, and field trips to local colleges & universities, among others.
Kaba, who is now a rising sophomore at Northeastern University, describes the experience of winning the scholarship as surreal.
“It didn’t occur to me that I was the last person standing and I won $1 million,” Kaba said. “But when I won, the first thing I thought was, ‘OK, let’s get to work. I’m given this opportunity to help improve my community. What steps can I take? And when does the groundwork start happening?’”
When a teen leads, adults follow
Bringing Kaba’s vision to life meant working alongside adults with experience in project management and community engagement while keeping up with her student life at Woonsocket High School.
“In high school, I managed both classwork and extracurriculars like student council, being a peer mentor and participating in Future Business Leaders of America,” Kaba said. “Balancing those things with my work with the scholarship came easy to me.”
Kaba partnered with community organizations across the state like nonprofit Leadership Rhode Island. This collaboration helped lay out a roadmap for Kaba’s proposal, manage the scholarship funds and coordinate meetings with community leaders.
The winning student also sits on the board of the Papitto Opportunity Connection Foundation for a year. This provides an opportunity for them to build their network and connect with leaders in Rhode Island.
High schoolers can make a difference through spaces and support like this, Kaba said, and also advises teens interested in engaging with their community to “not be afraid to start off small.”
This “small” gesture, Kaba added, can be as simple as gathering a group of friends to organize a community cleanup or starting a school club or Instagram to advocate for something they’re passionate about.
“Starting off small is going to give you those steps to leading these big impactful projects,” Kaba said.
The feedback Kaba received on her community investments, primarily from peers, community members and teachers in Woonsocket, was overwhelmingly positive.
“People told me, ‘I was able to go to this job fair and I got connected to this job,’ or, ‘I’m going to the Harbour Youth Center to get items from the food pantry you created and it’s been helping my family a lot,’” Kaba said. “Community organizations reached out to me to let me know they would love to find a way to work together and do their part to take action too.”
Agencies in at least 28 states and the District of Columbia have issued guidance on the use of artificial intelligence in K-12 schools.
More than half of the states have created school policies to define artificial intelligence, develop best practices for using AI systems and more, according to a report from AI for Education, an advocacy group that provides AI literacy training for educators.
Despite efforts by the Trump administration to loosen federal and state AI rules in hopes of boosting innovation, teachers and students need a lot of state-level guidance for navigating the fast-moving technology, said Amanda Bickerstaff, the CEO and co-founder of AI for Education.
“What most people think about when it comes to AI adoption in the schools is academic integrity,” she said. “One of the biggest concerns that we’ve seen — and one of the reasons why there’s been a push towards AI guidance, both at the district and state level — is to provide some safety guidelines around responsible use and to create opportunities for people to know what is appropriate.”
North Carolina, which last year became one of the first states to issue AI guidance for schools, set out to study and define generative artificial intelligence for potential uses in the classroom. The policy also includes resources for students and teachers interested in learning how to interact with AI models successfully.
In addition to classroom guidance, some states emphasize ethical considerations for certain AI models. Following Georgia’s initial framework in January, the state shared additional guidance in June outlining ethical principles educators should consider before adopting the technology.
In the absence of regulations at the federal level, states are filling a critical gap, said Maddy Dwyer, a policy analyst for the Equity in Civic Technology team at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonprofit working to advance civil rights in the digital age.
While most state AI guidance for schools focuses on the potential benefits, risks and need for human oversight, Dwyer wrote in a recent blog post that many of the frameworks are missing out on critical AI topics, such as community engagement and deepfakes, or manipulated photos and videos.
“I think that states being able to fill the gap that is currently there is a critical piece to making sure that the use of AI is serving kids and their needs, and enhancing their educational experiences rather than detracting from them,” she said.
Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: [email protected].
Louisiana Governor Jeff LandryLouisiana Governor Jeff Landry announced that his state will join six other Southern university systems in creating an alternative accrediting body, marking a significant departure from established higher education standards. Through an executive order, Louisiana becomes the seventh state to participate in the Commission for Public Higher Education, which launched in June with university systems from Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.
The new commission is currently seeking expedited approval from the U.S. Department of Education to serve as an official accreditor responsible for maintaining quality standards at colleges and universities. This development represents a direct challenge to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, the traditional accrediting body that currently evaluates institutions across Louisiana and ten other Southern states including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.
The formation of this alternative accrediting body stems from growing tensions between conservative politicians and established accreditors. These conflicts have centered on traditional accreditors’ standards related to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, as well as their requirements for safeguards designed to limit external political influence in public higher education governance.
Landry’s executive order establishes a Task Force on Public Higher Education Reform charged with developing recommendations for implementing the new commission. The task force will specifically focus on creating a pilot program for dual accreditation, allowing Louisiana schools to maintain authorization from both the new commission and the Southern Association simultaneously.
The governor highlighted the ideological motivations behind the move in his announcement.
“This task force will ensure Louisiana’s public universities move away from DEI-driven mandates and toward a system rooted in merit-based achievement,” Landry said.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who helped launch the original commission, articulated similar sentiments when announcing the new accreditor in June.
“[The Commission for Public Higher Education] will upend the monopoly of the woke accreditation cartels, and it will provide institutions with an alternative that focuses on student achievement, rather than the ideological fads that have so permeated those accrediting bodies over the years,” DeSantis declared.
The practical implementation of this new accrediting system faces a significant hurdle, as U.S. Department of Education approval is mandatory before any institution accredited solely by the new commission can receive federal financial aid. This requirement could potentially affect students’ access to federal funding programs if the transition is not handled carefully.
The composition of Louisiana’s new task force reflects the governor’s significant influence over the state’s higher education leadership structure. With the exception of Commissioner of Higher Education Kim Hunter Reed, every task force member has been directly appointed by Landry or his conservative legislative allies. The task force includes Board of Regents Chairwoman Misti Cordell, University of Louisiana System Board Chairman Mark Romero, LSU System Board Chairman Scott Ballard, Southern University System Board Chairman Tony Clayton, Louisiana Community and Technical College Systems Chairman Tim Hardy, Senate Education Committee Chairman Sen. Rick Edmonds, and House Education Committee Chairwoman Rep. Laurie Schlegel.
Additionally, Landry has appointed his executive counsel Angelique Freel and Commissioner of Administration Taylor Barras to the task force, with the option for them to send designees in their place. The governor retains the authority to select three additional task force members, further consolidating his influence over the group’s composition and direction.
This level of gubernatorial control over higher education governance represents a recent shift in Louisiana’s political landscape. Last year, Landry successfully advocated for legislative changes that granted him direct appointment power over the chairs of the state’s five higher education boards, positions that were previously elected from within the boards’ memberships. An earlier version of this legislation would have extended Landry’s authority to include direct hiring of university system presidents, but this provision was ultimately removed due to concerns that such concentration of political power could jeopardize existing accreditation status.
The task force operates under a compressed timeline that reflects the urgency Landry places on this initiative. The group must convene its inaugural meeting no later than August 31 and maintain a regular schedule with meetings occurring at least once every two months. The task force faces a deadline of January 30, 2026, to submit its comprehensive recommendations for implementing the new accrediting system in Louisiana.
