Educators tap two tech firms to create NYC Childcare Navigator, a free platform that cuts through the chaos.
A one-stop shop
Frustrated by the maze of agencies, websites, and applications families face to find childcare and possible financial support, New York City teachers said, “Enough!”
The United Federation of Teachers, the union that represents more than 200,000 educators and professionals in New York City, teamed up with two tech firms to build a better approach: NYC Childcare Navigator.
Navigator is a platform that connects New York City families to upwards of 12,000 childcare options across the five boroughs. It offers instant eligibility checks for money-saving programs, step-by-step application support, and the most comprehensive directory of childcare providers in the city — all in one free, easy-to-use website.
The union created the tool as a benefit for its own members, but it was so successful that the union opened it up to all New York City residents in October.
“We couldn’t gatekeep something that we knew so many New York City families needed,” said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers.
Centralizing tailored childcare
The union partnered with Mirza, a city-based tech firm that builds platforms to connect low-wage workers with local, state, and federal benefits, including for childcare.
“We wanted to get meaningful benefits to parents, but there wasn’t a single place that would allow a parent to see all the options available. That felt like a big missing piece. But it also pointed toward a solution,” said Siran Cao, CEO and Co-Founder of Mirza, who said she was inspired by how her own mother navigated a new country and the impact that a few well-timed bits of financial support had on her own family.
The union then introduced Upfront, a software company that consolidates multiple sources of childcare providers into a single, centralized database. The result: parents using the NYC Childcare Navigator can see every licensed program in NYC (center, home, and school-based), searchable by zip code, child’s age, availability, languages spoken, special needs, and many other filters. For the first time, childcare providers can claim a dedicated page to share current information about their specific childcare services.
“It’s everything in a single location instead of having to make dozens of calls and scour multiple, incomplete websites,” said Levin-Robinson, who said she was motivated by how challenging it was to find care for her own children.
By now, it’s obvious that the Trump administration’s efforts to expand Immigration and Customs Enforcement activities go far beyond enforcing federal immigration policy. The near-daily stories of inhumane detainment conditions, open violence against citizens and noncitizens alike, wanton civil rights violations, and purposeful shielding of these abuses from any form of public accountability lay bare that President Trump is now using ICE as a key component for advancing his administration’s hateful agenda.
This context is essential to evaluate why the administration has sung such a different tune with the advertised $60,000 student loan forgiveness offers to new ICE recruits, compared to the normal song and dance about how higher education is evil incarnate. Trump and his political allies didn’t suddenly discover the societal benefits of affordable education, as evidenced by his simultaneous efforts to strip loan forgiveness pathways from those who are deemed obstructors to Trump’s political goals. What’s clear is that federal student loan forgiveness is now a poverty draft, coercing increased ICE and military enlistment from among those experiencing economic desperation.
Weaponizing educational debt to fuel armed forces conscription from lower-income individuals is essentially socioeconomic hostage taking. It deprives people of their agency in choosing whether conscription is truly the career and life pathway they desire by forcing the decision as a survival tactic, especially when nearly half the country is approaching an economic recession deliberately caused by Trump’s policies.
A History of Weaponizing College Affordability
The easiest way for an authoritarian regime to maintain a highly militarized state is to make enlistment the only means of socioeconomic survival for the masses. This is exactly why the Trump administration is promoting student loan forgiveness for ICE recruits while curtailing eligibility for Public Service Loan Forgiveness. By passing the reconciliation bill that nearly tripled ICE’s budget while restricting Pell Grant eligibility for some students and cutting back basic needs programs like food stamps and Medicaid, congressional leaders have identified themselves as active participants in this strategy.
Though Trump’s tactics are an unprecedentedly naked attempt to weaponize student loan relief in the service of authoritarianism, this is a foundational concept in federal higher education policy that he’s taking the opportunity to exploit. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, the first federal educational assistance program for veterans, and most follow-up educational assistance programs were more focused on rewarding military service in already-declared conflicts than using benefits as a recruitment draw.
That shift came with the larger 1960s push to align higher education with the Cold War. California’s Master Plan of 1960 provided an opening for later attacks on college affordability, because it codified into public policy the idea that some types of institutions were worth attending more than others, mainly by segregating various types of educational experiences offered by different institutions. Later in the decade, then–California governor Ronald Reagan slashed public university budgets, in this way punishing students for antiwar protests. Reagan’s camouflaging of draconian education funding cuts as a necessary tool to combat the “filthy speech movement” became the groundwork for today’s deep inequality across all levels of the educational system.
Over the next several decades, federal and state policymakers abandoned their responsibilities to fund public higher education, which has strengthened the ties between college (un)affordability and militarization. In 2022, 20 Republican House members—14 of whom are still in office—wrote a joint letter to then-president Biden expressing concern that his efforts to provide widespread student loan forgiveness would harm the ability of the military to use higher educational benefits as a recruitment tool.
Last fall, 48 percent of 16- to 21-year-olds surveyed by the Department of Defense identified “to pay for future education” as a main reason they would consider joining the armed forces. This was the second-most common reason expressed in the survey, behind only “pay/money.”
Student Loan Forgiveness Is Not Siloed Public Policy
Public policy is rarely siloed into neat categories, and we are now experiencing the widespread consequences of allowing an inequitable and unaffordable higher education system to exist for so long in the United States. Trump isn’t the only federal policymaker endorsing this strategy, but he is the primary beneficiary. The more people willing to join ICE’s march toward martial law or forced to join ICE due to socioeconomic necessity, the easier it is for Trump to fully embrace authoritarianism and stay in power past January 2029.
This is the framing that should be used in every policy conversation about student loan forgiveness moving forward, not just for the offers given to new ICE recruits. These actions are not distinct or separate from the administration’s federalizing of the National Guard, ICE’s vast increase in weapons spending or Trump’s public consideration of invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy more troops to U.S. cities; they’re a vital complement. Ransoming access to an affordable higher education, along with its associated socioeconomic benefits, based on how willing someone is to inflict terror on immigrant communities or any other population that the administration deems undesirable, is a deliberate tactic to build an authoritarian military state.
Ideally, the current scenario facing higher education will end the usual hemming and hawing from policymakers about universal student loan forgiveness or tuition-free higher education being too expensive. Are the cost savings from not offering widespread forgiveness truly worth militarizing the country against the estimated 51.9 million immigrants living in the U.S., including more than 1.9 million immigrant and undocumented higher education students? Is appeasing Trump’s desire to play dictator dress-up so vital that policymakers feel compelled to willingly eradicate recent progress in national college affordability, discourage or outright bar international students from coming to learn in the United States, and shrink the economies of every state and congressional district due to the loss of international students?
State Legislatures Are the Last Line of Defense
The Trump administration is desperate to expand domestic militarization through ICE, as evidenced by advertisements on popular media streaming services and during nationally televised football games, public commitments to keep paying ICE agents as roughly 1.4 million federal workers go without pay during the government shutdown and the elimination or loosening of recruitment and training requirements for new ICE agents in relation to their age, physical fitness and ability to speak Spanish. As the Trump administration through ICE utilizes every available tool to further its authoritarian agenda, policymakers and institutions must use every available tool to combat said authoritarianism.
State legislatures wield vast amounts of legal authority over education policy in comparison to the federal government. However, that authority is useless if states capitulate or are otherwise unwilling to use that authority to protect their education systems and their larger communities.
Efforts like Connecticut’s new statewide student debt forgiveness program, California’s prohibition on campus police departments providing personal student information for immigration enforcement purposes and Colorado’s adoption of a new state law requiring public campuses to limit federal agents’ access to campus buildings are all welcome ways that state policymakers can fight back against ICE.
These efforts must be expanded to more states as ICE continues to ramp up its domestic terrorism and congressional leadership remains content to abandon its constitutional responsibilities to hold the executive branch in check. For institutions, advocates and concerned community members, resources available through the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration and its Higher Ed Immigration Portal, and from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, provide essential guidance on how to act in protecting immigrants and their families.
Student loan forgiveness, and the larger concept of an affordable and equitable higher education, could now be a matter of life and death for millions of people. The traditional willingness of policymakers to resist supporting higher education during times of economic surplus, while eagerly cutting educational funding at the first sign of economic distress, has now imperiled American democracy. Every image of ICE committing authoritarian violence is a stark call for policymakers to ask themselves what they value more: the fiscal savings of making no meaningful effort to address the more than $1.6 trillion owed in student debt, or American democracy itself.
Christian Collins is a policy analyst with the education, labor and worker justice team at the Center for Law and Social Policy, a nonprofit organization focused on reducing poverty and advancing racial equity.
Landscape, a College Board tool for providing colleges with information about the educational environment of an applicant’s high school and neighborhood based on publicly available information, has been discontinued, the organization announced this week.
“As federal and state policy continues to evolve around how institutions use demographic and geographic information in admissions, we are making a change to ensure our work continues to effectively serve students and institutions,” College Board wrote in the short announcement.
Geographic recruitment has come under fire from the Trump administration. Attorney General Pamela Bondi, in a memo declaring various diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives unconstitutional, said that recruiting from specific areas or neighborhoods could be unlawful when it’s being done as a proxy for race. Experts have said that doing so is not a standard practice for universities.
Jon Boeckenstedt, a longtime enrollment manager, criticized the decision to discontinue Landscape in a post on LinkedIn.
“I’m no fan of College Board of course … but I thought Landscape was a good and thoughtful product,” he wrote. “Now, it’s going away. You don’t have to be Wile E. Coyote to figure out why. Someone in DC has suggested it’s too close to ‘race based admissions’ (a thing that does not exist) and ‘it’d be a shame if something happened to your company.’ Or their lawyers rolled over voluntarily.”
Edward Blum, the founder of Students for Fair Admissions, the group that successfully challenged affirmative action at the Supreme Court, lauded the decision.
“Since the 2023 Supreme Court opinion in our Harvard and UNC cases, Students for Fair Admissions raised has concerns that Landscape was little more than a disguised proxy for race in the admissions process. We are gratified that this problematic tool will no longer be used to influence who is and who is not admitted to America’s colleges and universities,” he wrote in a statement. “This decision represents another important step toward ensuring that all students are treated as individuals, not as representatives of a racial or ethnic group.”
Phillip Levine, an economics professor at Wellesley College, has been studying college financial aid and students’ higher ed spending habits for more than a decade. When his children first started applying to college about 15 years ago, he was amazed by how difficult it was to get a clear answer on how much it was really going to cost them—and he was a trained economist.
Imagine, he thought, how the average family felt reading through interminable webpages and offer letters explaining the detailed price breakdowns, differences in tuition and fees, added expected costs, and loans versus grants. Then he tried to imagine how parents who’d never gone to college might feel.
Since then, Levine has worked on a number of college cost transparency initiatives. His most recent project is the Instant Net Price Estimator, a streamlined digital tool that he hopes will make it easier for colleges to break through the noise and deliver a clear estimate to families.
As public skepticism about the value of a postsecondary degree grows and $100,000 sticker prices make front-page news, colleges are in the market for a simple way to let families know that their degrees can be affordable. Washington University in St. Louis became the first institution to adopt the tool and served as a kind of pilot program this application cycle. Interest from colleges has grown swiftly: This fall, an additional 19 institutions will introduce Levine’s calculator on their websites, and he anticipates that number will triple next academic year.
Levine spoke with Inside Higher Ed about his new tool, how low-income students get stuck in the financial aid “funnel” and how colleges can be better communicators in a time of widespread public distrust of higher ed. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Walk me through the genesis of this idea. What were you hoping to achieve?
A: I don’t think it’s a state secret that college pricing is complicated. If you go to any college website and look at the financial aid webpage, there’s tons of stuff there trying to explain how much they charge, but they overshoot it in terms of what people are looking for. You’re taking a high school kid and their family and giving them a Ph.D.-level course in financial aid. Not surprisingly, they don’t usually get it.
I think about the admissions process like a funnel: You give me a little information, I’ll give you a basic answer that’s pretty imprecise. You give me more information, I’ll give you a better answer that’s a little more precise. You can keep going down the process until eventually, you know, ultimately you fill out the FAFSA or the CSS Profile.
To maximize access, that funnel needs to have a very wide mouth at the top; in financial aid language, what that means is you need to communicate extremely quickly to as wide an audience as possible that college is not $100,000. It doesn’t even matter exactly what it is. But if you can’t get people off of the ledge at the $100,000 number—the mainstream media puts out stories all the time that college costs a million dollars a year, so their perception is that it’s extremely expensive. All you want them to do at the beginning stages is to be like, “Hey, maybe this is something I can afford.” Then you need to lead them through the rest of the funnel.
Phillip Levine
Ultimately, the financial aid process really is complicated because we have this concept of what a family can afford to pay, and there’s no right answer to that question, but we have all these complicated formulas that are trying to find it anyway. Over time, colleges have been trying to do a better job of getting past that point, just not very successfully. What I’ve been working on for the last 10 or 15 years is to make an easier entry point, and this tool is even higher up the funnel than what I’ve been working on in the past.
It takes three seconds to get a sense of what college is going to cost you, and in particular to get you over that hurdle that it’s probably not $100,000. My goal is within a matter of literally a few seconds to give people a sense that college is very unlikely to be as expensive as they fear. And then you can start having a more substantive conversation. Otherwise, you close the door on the poor kids, way before they’re into the process.
Q: Colleges have been trying to do this kind of thing on their own for a while. What makes your tool an improvement on institutional efforts?
A: Colleges understand that this is a problem. But to be quite honest, the only people who actually understand the way the financial aid system works are the people in the financial aid office, and they don’t speak English, so to speak. It’s an unbelievably complicated process, very complex, and now they have to explain it to a regular person, and they can’t do that. It’s not their fault; they try, they’re just not successful. There’s a handful of people in the admissions office who understand it, too, but not many. And once you get past those two audiences, nobody else at the college understands it, including the public affairs people.
I got started on this because when my kids were looking at colleges, I just wanted to know whether I was eligible for any financial aid, yeah. And I realized how unbelievably hard it was to figure it out. Back then [around 2010] it was actually impossible to figure out. Things have evolved a lot since then.
Q: Like you said, there are other tools out there now. What makes this one different?
A: I’m just trying to push it to the next stage of development. I’m an economist; I can speak geek as well as anyone. But as I started doing this, I’m learning more and more about how you sell a product, which is basically what you’re doing with college cost. I’m realizing how little time you have to communicate a message.
I’m in a weird position, because I’m doing the research on the pricing issues, and I’m developing the tools. It was in one of the Brookings [Institution] papers I wrote when these ideas were just kind of coming together and we were thinking about how you do the graphics. And it just kind of came together that we can visually display this information in a simulator, what I really refer to as a simple game. So I thought, if I can do it for a Brookings paper, why can’t I do this for a school or a family? And about that time, Washington University [in St. Louis] came to me looking for assistance on some other issues, and I pitched this to them, and they bought into it. So they paid for the development, and it’s been up and running there since December. If you go to most schools’ webpages, including my own, there’s stuff there, but you gotta read forever. And you know as well as I do that nobody reads that much anymore.
That’s what I’m trying to accomplish with this: just get the ball rolling with something that speaks to where students are.
A demo version of Levine’s Instant Net Price Estimator, which can be customized to fit colleges’ specific needs and profiles.
Screenshot from myintuition.org
Q: I assume the calculator doesn’t factor in things like merit aid?
A: You want it as simple as possible. So you just slide your input and it essentially just tells you what the average cost is going to be for you based on income, and tells you the range, which may be very broad. At Washington University, they don’t give a lot of merit aid, so, like, it would not be a big deal there, but at schools that do a lot of merit aid, that range could also include merit. They can factor that into the calculator.
But mainly, you just want the light bulb to go off of, “Oh, maybe I can afford this.” And then maybe they’re willing to go spend some time reading instead of getting scared off right from the start. Their initial instinct is, there’s no way I can afford to go to Washington University. And it’s the school’s job in terms of marketing to communicate to people. The problem, in my mind, is that the door is closed so early for so many people that you need to be able to just let them get through that first door in the process. There’s still a lot of hurdles you have to get through after that, yeah, but if you don’t make it through the first one, you don’t even approach any of the others.
Q: There’s been legislation introduced at the federal level and passed in many states to mandate that colleges take certain steps toward cost transparency. Do you think there’s a good understanding of what that takes among policymakers?
A: Clearly, policymakers have figured out that transparency is an issue, and they’re right. But their intentions are often better than their proposals. The net price calculator law [a federal law mandating institutions include a price calculator on their websites by 2011], for instance, was very well intended. But it’s easy to see the big picture problem; to then come up with a solution that actually works, you have to have a little bit more inside baseball. The net price calculator law is a perfect example. It was so well intended, they completely had the right idea, and they blew it. I obviously don’t know all of the details of all the different state laws, but I’ve seen proposals, and generally I look at them and go, right idea, wrong solution.
Q: Have there been any good policy solutions?
A:The College Cost Transparency Initiative. It’s much better if the schools can fix this problem on their own, because they know what they’re doing. It’s a tiny step, and you have to already apply and get accepted before you get your letter. And then it tells you, in a more clear way than it used to. It’s lower on the funnel, really at the bottom. But it’s a good step.
[Levine later clarified that he sat on the technical advisory committee for the CCTI.]
Q: Has there been a lot of interest in your instant price calculator from other colleges? And what kinds of colleges seem to be most invested in these transparency efforts?
A: Nineteen more colleges will roll it out in the fall. It’s a small range right now, from relatively wealthy to very wealthy. I think at the very high end of higher ed, the Ivies and such, where they have a lot of money to spend on financial aid, they’re trying to increase access in a very direct way. It is good for them to enroll more lower-income students from a public relations perspective. And I think every school wants to do the right thing. But as you stray from the very top of the spectrum, there’s also an interest in simply increasing enrollment, where they don’t want to be turning away students because they think they can’t afford it when they can. They’re just looking for more students, especially because there’s fewer kids. So the ability to open the door to as many kids as possible at this moment has appeal.
Unibuddy, a higher education peer-to-peer engagement platform, has officially launched Assistant – an AI tool designed to support large-scale, authentic student-led conversations.
Following a successful beta phase, the tool is now fully live with 30 institutions worldwide and delivering impressive results: tripling student engagement, cutting staff workload significantly, and maintaining over 95% accuracy.
As universities face increasing pressure from tighter budgets and rising student expectations, Unibuddy said its Assistant tool offers a powerful solution to scale meaningful engagement efficiently, combining the speed of AI with the authenticity of real student voices.
65,000 unique students have used Assistant
100,000+ student questions answered automatically without requiring manual intervention
125% increase in students having conversations
60% increase in lead capture
five hours saved per day for university staff
“Today’s students demand instant, authentic and trustworthy communication,” said Diego Fanara, CEO at Unibuddy. “Unibuddy Assistant is the first and only solution that fuses the speed of AI with the credibility of peer-to-peer guidance – giving institutions a scalable way to meet expectations without sacrificing quality or trust.”
Unibuddy has partnered with more than 600 institutions globally and has supported over 3,000,000 prospective students through the platform. As part of this extensive network, it regularly conducts surveys to uncover fresh insights. Although chatbots are now common in higher education, survey findings highlight key limitations in their effectiveness:
84%of students said that university responses were too slow (Unibuddy Survey, 2025)
79%of students said it was important that universities balance AI automation (for speed) and human interaction (for depth) while supporting them as they navigate the decision-making process (Unibuddy Survey, 2025)
51%ofstudents say they wouldn’t trust a chatbot to answer questions about the student experience (Unibuddy Survey, 2024)
78% say talking to a current student is helpful — making them 3.5x more likely to trust a peer than a bot (Unibuddy Survey, 2025)
Only 14% of students felt engaged by the universities they applied to (Unibuddy Survey, 2025)
Unibuddy says these finding have shaped its offering: using AI to handle routine questions and highlight valuable information, while smoothly handing off to peer or staff conversations when a personal, human connection is needed.
Buckinghamshire New Universityused Unibuddy Assistant to transform early-stage engagement – generating 800,000 impressions, 30,000 clickthroughs, and 10,000+ student conversationsin just six months. The university saved over 2,000 staff hoursand saw 3,000 referrals to students or staff.
Today’s students demand instant, authentic and trustworthy communication Diego Fanara, Unibuddy
Meanwhile the University of South Florida Muma College of Business reported over 30 staff hours saved per month, with a 59% click-to-conversation rate and over a third of chats in Assistant resulting in referrals to student ambassador conversations.
And the University of East Anglia deployed Assistant across more than 100 web pages, as part of the full Unibuddy product suites deployment of peer-to-peer chat, with student-led content contributing to a 62% offer-to-student conversion rate compared with 34% of those who didn’t engage with Unibuddy.
Gathering and assessing the quality of information is one of the most effective ways to develop media literacy, critical thinking and effective communication skills. But without guidance, too many young people fail to question the reliability of visual images and overly rely on the first results they find on Google.
That’s why News Decoder has been working with the Swedish nonprofit, Voice4You, on a project called ProMS to create a self-guided digital tool that guides students in writing news stories.
The tool, called Mobile Stories, is now available across Europe. It takes students step-by-step through the journalistic process. Along the way, they gain critical thinking skills and a deeper understanding about the information they find, consume and share.
It empowers students to develop multimedia stories that incorporate original reporting for school, community or global audiences, with minimal input from educators. It comes with open-access learning resources developed by News Decoder.
After a decade of success in Sweden, Voice4You partnered with News Decoder to help make the tool available across Europe and the globe. Throughout the ProMS project, new English language content suitable for high schoolers was developed and piloted in 21 schools in Romania, Ireland and Finland. The Mobile Stories platform has demonstrated remarkable potential in building student confidence and media and information literacy by providing a platform and an opportunity to produce quality journalism.
From story pitch to publication
Using the new international version of Mobile Stories, students have already published 136 articles on mobilestories.com, with another 700 currently in production. Their topics range from book reviews and reporting from local cultural events to in-depth feature articles on the decline in young people’s mental health and child labor in the fast fashion industry.
“The tool looks like a blogging platform and on every step along the way of creating an article, students can access learning materials including video tutorials by professional journalists from around the world, articles and worksheets,” said News Decoder’s ProMS Project Manager Sabīne Bērziņa.
Some of these resources, such as videos and worksheets are open access, available to all.
The Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms, is investigating the unintended consequences of AI-powered surveillance at schools. Members of the Collaborative are AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.
RIGBY, Idaho — Four years ago, a sixth grader in Rigby, Idaho, shot and injured two peers and a custodian at a middle school. The tragedy prompted school officials to reimagine what threat prevention looks like in the approximately 6,500-student district.
Now, student-run Hope Squads in Rigby schools uplift peers with homemade cards and assemblies. Volunteer fathers patrol hallways as part of Dads on Duty. A team of district staff, counselors, social workers and probation officers gathers to discuss and support struggling students. Thanks to a new cellphone ban, students are off screens and talking to each other. The positive results of these combined efforts have been measurable.
“We’ve helped change … lives,”said Brianna Vasquez, a senior at Rigby Highand member of her school’s Hope Squad. “I’ve had friends who have been pulled out of the hole of depression and suicidal thoughts because of [the Hope Squad].”
School shootings like Rigby’s have driven America’s educatorstotry to prevent similar harm. Many districts in the U.S. have turned to technology — especially digital surveillance — as the antidote. Not everyone is sold on that approach, as there can be issues, including with privacy and security.Without broad agreement on which strategies do work best, some districts are trying a braided approach — using a combination of technology, on-the-ground threat assessment teams, and other mental health supports.
“If you’re sitting in the shoes of a district leader, taking a multi-pronged approach is probably very sensible,” said Jennifer DePaoli, a senior researcher at the Learning Policy Institute, who has studied school safety.
In Rigby, educators lean toward human interaction. Artificial intelligence and digital surveillance systems are perhapsless likely to identify who is eating alone at lunch or withdrawing from friends.
“It’s all about culture,” said Chad Martin, the superintendent of Jefferson County School District in Rigby. “It starts with that — just having a friend, having a group of friends, having a connection somewhere.”
Rigby school leaders use technology to detect threats, including an app, STOPit, which allows students to anonymously report safety concerns, and surveillance software that monitors students’ keystrokes and looks out for troubling terms. Martin said those are helpful, but must be used in concert with human-led initiatives.
The district’s version of a threat assessment team, which meets monthly, has been one of the most useful tools, Martin said. In those group conversations, school staff may realize that a student who’s been missing class has a parent who was recently arrested, for example.
“Everybody has a little piece of information,” Martin said. “So the goal is to put those people in the same room and be able to paint a picture that can help us support kids.”
Chad Martin, superintendent of Jefferson County School District, said student relationships remain the most powerful tool in keeping school safe. Credit: John Roark
A leading model,used by thousands of school districts, is the Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines (CSTAG). These were developed by forensic clinical psychologist Dewey Cornell after he spent years studying homicides committed by children or teens, including school shootings. He said digital surveillance technology can offer school districts “an illusion of safety and security.”
With CSTAG, school-based teams use a five-step process when threats emerge. The team includes a school administrator, a counselor or psychologist, a social worker, a staff member focused on special education, and a school resource officer. In serious situations, the group might suspend or move a student elsewhere while conducting mental health screenings,a law enforcement investigation, and development of a safety plan. Ultimately, that plan would be put into effect.
If implemented correctly, Cornell says, this type of approach is less punitive and more rooted in intervention. Instead of relying only on technology, Cornell and his threat assessment guidelines recommend adding humans who can make decisions with schools as situations emerge. He points to a recent study in Florida, one of the states where threat assessment teams are mandatory. Threats investigated by those teams “resulted in low rates of school removal and very low rates of law enforcement actions,” according to the report authored by Cornell and fellow University of Virginia researchers.
“If you’re a school counselor and you can work with a troubled kid and help get them on the right track, you’re not just preventing a school shooting, but you’re more likely to be preventing a shooting that would occur somewhere else and maybe years in the future,” he said.
Threat assessment teams — whether using the CSTAG model or another form — haven’t been immune from scrutiny. Complaints have emerged about them operating without student or parent knowledge, or without staff members to represent children with special needs. Criticism has also included concern about discrimination against Black and Hispanic students.
DePaoli, from the Learning Policy Institute, says more research is needed to determine whether they successfully identify threats and provide students with appropriate support. She suspects it boils down to implementation.
“If you are being required to do these, you need to be doing them with so much training and so much support,” she said.
The Jordan School District in Utah uses the CSTAG model. Travis Hamblin, director of student services, credits the “human connection” with strengthening the district’s approach to handling threats and, as a result, boosting student safety and well-being.
Earlier this school year, the district received an alert through Bark, a digital monitoring tool that scans students’ school-issued Google suite accounts. It flagged a middle schooler’s account, which contained a hand drawn picture of a gun that had been uploaded.
The notification mobilized the school’s threat assessment team. By using the CSTAG decision-making process, the team determined the student did not intend any harm, Hamblin says.
Rigby High’s Hope Squad — and those like it nationwide — aim to foster connection and reduce the risk of suicide. Credit: John Roark
The school leaders didn’t unnecessarily escalate the situation, he says. After their assessment, they chalked it up to middle school immaturity and asked the student to avoid such drawings in the future.
“When you say, ‘Why did you do that?’ And they say, ‘I don’t know.’ That’s the truth, right? That’s the gospel truth,” Hamblin said.
He shares this example to illustrate how the district marries technology-related monitoring with human-led threat assessment. The district employs someone — a former school administrator and counselor — to field the Bark alerts and communicate with school staff. And administrators from every school in the district have undergone threat assessment training, along with select members of their staff.
“A digital tool for us is a tool. It’s not the solution,” Hamblin said. “We believe that people are the solution.”
In Rigby, one of those solution people is Ernie Chavez, whose height makes him stick out in a hallway streaming with middle schoolers. He’s part of Dads on Duty, a program that brings in parents to help monitor and interact with students during passing periods and lunch.
Throughout the school, students reach out to Chavez for high-fives. On one February afternoon, he was greeted with applause and cheers. “I don’t know what that was about,” he said with a smile.
Similarly, the district’s Hope Squads, in place since 2021, have become an active presence inside the school.
The student-led coalitions aim to foster connection and reduce the risk of suicide. Thousands of schools across the United States and in Canada have implemented Hope Squads, but in Rigby, the mission of violence prevention has become personal.
Ernie Chavez monitors the hallways at Rigby Middle School on Feb. 5 for the Dads on Duty program. Credit: John Roark
“We refer … students every year to counselors, and those students go from some of the worst moments in their life (to getting help),” Vasquez said. “We build the connection between adults and faculty to the student.”
Members of the Hope Squad notice peers who seem down or isolated and reach out with a greeting, or sometimes a handmade card.
“We just reach out and let them know that people in the community are there for them, just to show them that we care and they’re not alone,” said Dallas Waldron, a Rigby High senior and Hope Squad member.
The groups also plan assemblies and special events, including, for example, a week of activities themed around mental health awareness.
Emilie Raymond, a sophomore at Rigby High, said the shooting made it clear “that people need to feel included and they need to find that hope.”
Another change at Rigby schools is a cell phone ban that was put in place this school year.
Before the ban,students were “sitting in the corners, isolated, staring at a screen,” said Ryan Erikson, Principal at Rigby Middle School. Now, “they’re playing games, they’re goofing off … they’re actually conversing.”
While Jefferson County School District’s approach to stemming violence is robust, “it’s not perfect,” Martin, the superintendent, said. “It’s still life. That’s just the reality of it, we’re still going to have things come up that we haven’t prepared for or weren’t on our radar. But we address them and just try to do whatever we can to support kids.”
Carly Flandro is a reporter with Idaho Education News. Jackie Valley is a reporter with The Christian Science Monitor.
Contact Hechinger managing editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, on Signal at CarolineP.83 or via email at [email protected].
This story about school threat assessments was produced by the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
The HEPI blog was kindly authored by James Pitman, Chair of IHE and Managing Director U.K. and Ireland, Study Group
The Graduate Route has been extraordinarily powerful in driving international education value in the UK. Although all the surveys show students choose universities and courses for their reputation or fit, the opportunity to translate this into a first job in another country to strengthen English language skills as they earn is evidenced by what happens as soon as that is taken away.
The correlation between removing the Post Study Work Visa scheme on the back of statistically invalid analysis and the drop in international students choosing the UK in 2012 is irrefutable. This is strengthened by the significant international student growth linked to the re-introduction of the Graduate Route in 2021.
Why is the graduate route visa such a powerful incentive for some international students to come and study in the UK? The simplest explanation came from an agent in India, who explained:
‘An Indian student can recoup much of their investment in a UK degree over a few years of employment in the UK when it would take several decades to do the same back in India.’
International students contribute a net £100,000 to the UK economy during their degree study. A degree is required to enter the Graduate Route. Therefore, one could consider the ‘entry ticket’ for a Graduate Route visa to be a £100,000 investment in the UK – which may be worth up to £30,000 to the exchequer. From a Treasury growth perspective, international students drive employment and economic benefit in every constituency of the UK, especially in university towns and cities. I doubt the mandarins at the Treasury could think of a more cost-effective measure that seeds prosperity right across the country while building connections and loyalty that last a lifetime amongst the very group who will, in years to come, shape societies and build companies.
Oxford Economics concluded that every 10 international students supports 6 jobs, with half in Higher Education and half in the local economy. If this remains accurate, the reported loss of approximately 10,000 jobs in Higher Education last year, mainly attributed to the decline in international students, should correspond to a similar loss in local economies across the country.
And yet this is economic harm proactively driven by policy choices which raised uncertainty regarding the future of the Graduate Route. If you were thinking of making a £100,000 investment, uncertainty would not exactly be conducive to choosing to invest in the UK. As one local businessman in Sheffield put it, “If you walk past a shop window swinging a baseball bat for a couple of weeks, it doesn’t matter if you never hit it, the people inside will still get worried.” Even just the threat of future policy changes creates “a massive amount of uncertainty, and uncertainty for students is a big problem.”
Subsidising the domestic tax payer
Students on the Graduate Route, like all international students, pay the Immigration Health Surcharge (currently £776 p.a. for students and £1035 p.a. for graduates on the Graduate Route). The actual costs according to the Department of Health and Social Care in 2018 were £480 p.a. including dependants. Given the restrictions on dependants, a shift in the mix (until recent restrictions) to shorter PG courses, the prevalence of private insurance that many students have and the reality of waiting times for treatment, this is a subsidy to the NHS.
Another subsidy is less well known, but any student on the Graduate Route employed at any salary level, high or low, is actually subsiding the UK tax payer. In comparison with a domestic employee at the exact same level of remuneration, international students pay the same income tax and National Insurance, but critically, they can only access less than half of the services that those taxes pay for. International students on the Graduate Route are barred from benefiting from services provided in the areas of Education, Social Protection, and Housing, and they already subsidise the NHS, as shown above. Those four areas account for c.65% of public sector expenditure on services (PESA 2023/4). Another way of putting this is that international students employed on the Graduate Route are effectively paying income tax at double the rate of a domestic equivalent worker.
The dependants dilemma — a third way
However, the Migration Advisory Committee has argued that there is a subsidy element for international students. This seems to be based on the fact that international students could, until last year, bring unlimited numbers of dependants and that any child dependants had access to free education at the UK taxpayer’s cost. This option was then removed with a devastating knock-on impact for university finances.
However, it is instructive to note that the options considered around this issue were binary — either close the dependants route (the approach taken for any students other than for those on research-intensive PG courses) or leave the system as was. What was not considered was adapting the dependants’ visa by removing access to free childhood education but leaving the route, which would have caused far less damage to international student recruitment in 2024. Instead, removing the dependant’s route caused significant damage that disadvantaged female students and students from cultures where chaperones are required. I know the options considered, because the Home Office responded to an FOI on this matter. Let us also remember that dependants have always been (as the name implies) dependant on the international student that they accompany, not the UK tax payer.
Cost-benefit analysis
In reality, in economic terms, international graduates are more akin to tourists, having no recourse to public funds (apart from the historical significant exception of child dependants) and bringing resources into the UK to sustain themselves. However, unlike tourists, they do have to pay the Immigration Health Surcharge.
To give an indicator of the cost to the UK of restricting international students coming to study in the UK over that period, I compared the government-published data on value and growth rates of international education from 2010 to 2024 to the equivalent global international student mobility value growth rates published by Holon IQ (part of the QS Quacquarelli Symonds, group). It is only an indicator, but against the UK having been permitted by government to grow at the same growth rate as the global market (which I doubt many in the sector would have bet against), cumulative loss to GDP over that period was £66 billion, implying a cumulative loss of income to the exchequer of £23 Billion. How many hospitals, schools and roads would be in better shape today if that scale of investment had been funded by international education? What a wasted opportunity, and for what purpose?
Now, the Prime Minister tells us his priorities are security and growth. On both, international students can be a key part of a progressive policy shift. And yet it is sad to say that our new government, whilst saying the right things, has not yet done anything to undo the damage of the past. If reports are to be believed, they are even being tempted to impose even more restrictions on international students in the Immigration White Paper to be published this month, preceding the new iteration of the International Education Strategy in April.
Once again, it appears that those who are tasked with reducing immigration are acting in direct opposition to the avowed growth agenda of the Treasury, the Department of Business and Trade, the Department for Education and others and, quite frankly, considering the above, against the demonstrable interests of the UK.
Rethinking terms
I have a clear understanding of the root cause of this ambivalence towards international students, and I direct any interested readers to the HEPI blog ‘When is an Immigrant not an Immigrant’. Allpolling of the general public (most recently by Public Future) shows that they recognise international students are not immigrants, and a strong majority cannot comprehend why they are categorised in the same way. If our government is serious about growth, I urge them to separate international students from immigration immediately.
Finally, again, to demonstrate the value of international students, we should consider the increasingly dangerous situation we find ourselves in and the government’s commitment to ramp up defence spending. That incremental 0.2% GDP or £6 billion spend, announced recently, could have avoided the contentious cut in the overseas budget.
Why didn’t the Treasury consider international education instead? With no investment needed beyond the political will to enhance the UK’s international education offering, we could provide high-quality education to an additional 175,000 international students (that’s merely, on average, 1,250 per university). At current rates, this would generate around £6 billion for the exchequer from each cohort while also supporting the creation of approximately 50,000 jobs in higher education and another 50,000 jobs for hard-pressed families in local communities across the UK. Furthermore, it would significantly enhance the UK’s soft power in the long term.
Many in the international education sector believe that our ability to welcome students is, in financial terms, as near as our country can get to a golden goose, although not one that will live forever. The Graduate Route is a key golden lever in its nest. International students bring huge investments in order to access the benefits of the Graduate Route, subsidise the UK taxpayer while they are on it and can only remain in the UK after that with another category of visa.
The Higher Education Inquirer has always promoted nonviolence for progressive social change. Strikes and boycotts are two of the most powerful tools when used well. These tools must be part of a strategy that may take years and even generations. Civil rights for African Americans and other people of color have been ongoing for centuries. Women have never been granted full rights by the US Constitution (the Equal Rights Amendment only passed in 38 states). And the class struggle is never ending. When we study these struggles, we must be aware of the truth that no single person can make a great difference, but groups in concert, can. How will you be part of a movement? And what burden are you willing to carry?
