Maud Maron, subject of the April order and a member of Manhattan’s District 2 community education council, has received widespread criticism from lawmakers, city leaders and parents for anti-LGBTQ, specifically anti-trans, comments made in private texts first published by ���˶���, including “there is no such thing as trans kids.” 

A few months later, in the , she called an anonymous Stuyvesant High School student journalist a “coward,” accusing them of “Jew hatred.” 

In the April 17 order, deputy chancellor Kenita Lloyd ordered that she “cease engaging in conduct involving derogatory or offensive comments about any New York City Public School student, and conduct that serves to harass, intimidate, or threaten, including but not limited to frequent verbal abuse and unnecessary aggressive speech that serves to intimidate and cause others to have concern for their personal safety, which is prohibited by Chancellor’s Regulation D-210.” 

Lloyd went on to write that Maron could face “suspension or removal” if she did not comply with the order. The directive offered Maron a voluntary “conciliation” meeting with a schools equity officer.

In a statement Maron told ���˶��� she “cannot possibly comply with a directive to cease doing something when that ‘something’ has never been communicated to me,” adding that DOE leadership have never provided her with any “dates, places, quotes, people or any information.” 

She also categorized the “procedure” as “Kafkaesque,” “bizarre,” “speech-chilling,” and an “embarrassment” to the city school system. 

But some critics said the department’s order is too little, too late, stopping short of Maron’s removal, which community members have demanded at education council meetings for months.

“I’m doubtful an order like that will really make a difference because [Maron] has shown she has no qualms whatsoever about targeting students with abuse and hateful rhetoric,” said fellow District 2 parent and council member Gavin Healy.

Schools Chancellor David Banks previously called Maron’s behavior “despicable,” promising to “take action” nearly four months ago. 

In the months since, Maron at a Moms for Liberty event and continued parent leadership duties,  including sponsoring a resolution to reassess the city’s gender guidelines for student sports. The resolution was swiftly condemned by lawmakers and advocates, fearful any change would limit trans students’ rights and open doors for anti-trans violence. 

Nearly 800 District 2 community members also signed a petition to have Maron removed from Stuyvesant High School’s leadership team after her February comments in the Post about the anonymous student, where she urged the writer to make their name public for their opinions about the Israel-Gaza war.

Parents called the rhetoric harassment and a danger to student safety and free speech. 

Due to the DOE’s memo’s vague language, it’s unclear which of Maron’s remarks were the subject of complaint and investigation that warranted the cease order. 

“I have never named any student or directly addressed any student in a manner other than polite, friendly and professional,” Maron said. She is now among several parents , alleging censorship and stifling of free speech.

In about a third of Florida school districts, and concentrated in rural panhandle enclaves like Daniels’s Liberty County, corporal punishment as a form of student discipline remains deeply ingrained in the culture. It’s why on this morning in early December, school leaders instructed the 18-year-old to bend over a desk.

What came next — a paddling that left deep purple bruises and welts for a minor school offense that Daniels said stemmed from a misunderstanding about Christmas decorations on a campus door — was far beyond routine student discipline, the Liberty County High School senior told ���˶���.

It was, she alleges, sexual assault. 

“They were so eager to go in there and spank me,” said Daniels, who said she was struck by Assistant Principal Tim Davis, a former Major League Baseball player who pitched for the , while Principal Eric Willis observed and laughed. “They took their time, they watched me.”

Liberty County School District officials didn’t respond to multiple interview requests. Reached by ���˶��� on his cell phone, Davis declined to comment on the incident or allegations that his use of force was sexual assault.  

The incident, which has sparked controversy in Florida’s least populous county roughly 50 miles west of Tallahassee, comes as state lawmakers debate the fate of rules that have long permitted teachers to spank students as a disciplinary measure. A significant body of research suggests that corporal punishment has the opposite effect of improving student behaviors and a data analysis by ���˶��� shows in parts of Florida, it’s most often used to address minor infractions like “excessive talking,” “insubordination” and “horse play.” 

where laws explicitly allow educators to use corporal punishment on students, and the practice is not expressly prohibited by laws in an additional seven states, according to by the U.S. Department of Education. In a letter last year, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona urged state lawmakers and school leaders “to move swiftly toward condemning and eliminating” a practice that “can lead to serious physical pain and injury,” is associated with heightened mental health issues, stunted brain development and hindered academic performance. Nationally, federal data show that corporal punishment is disproportionately used on students of color and those with disabilities. 

Prompted by the advocacy of two Florida college students, there is now , where roughly a third of districts use corporal punishment to discipline kids, that would require educators to get permission from parents each year before spanking their children. The measure would also ban the use of physical force on students with disabilities. The bill garnered unanimous support in a state House subcommittee last month. Yet a companion bill in the Senate has remained stalled and lawmakers worry the effort will falter this legislative session — as similar efforts have for years. 

Rep. Katherine Waldron, a Democrat who co-sponsored the bipartisan bill, said the subcommittee hearing was the furthest any effort to reform state corporal punishment rules has gotten to date. She credited the momentum to student advocacy, and specifically to the University of Florida students who launched a statewide campaign to change the law. 

“It’s great that we have this level of student involvement in the whole process and they’re really helping to push the bill and they’re learning a lot,” Waldron said. “Any time we have that kind of momentum for a good bill like this, I think representatives should pay attention and try to help.” 

In Liberty County, Daniels said that school officials accused her of lying to a substitute teacher and using her position in the school honor society to get her friend out of class to help with the holiday decorating. When school administrators approached her about the incident a week later, they gave her two options: in-school suspension or corporal punishment — a choice she said left her feeling coerced. The entire incident stemmed from an honest misunderstanding, she said, and accepting in-school suspension would have required her to miss an exam for a dual-enrollment college class and to be late for work at Chick-fil-A. 

She chose to get spanked. 

“As soon as it happened, I really just felt sexually assaulted. I felt disgusted with myself that I even kind of gave them permission,” said Daniels, who transitioned to online-only instruction after the incident and fears she may someday run into Davis or Willis at their small-town grocery store. Daniels has spoken out against corporal punishment in Florida schools and her paddling . Her mother calling on lawmakers to ban the “systemic issue prevalent across 19 school districts in Florida.” 

“I felt like they really just got off by it,” Daniels said, adding that a parent could face child protective services investigations for leaving similar bruises on their kid. “I don’t even think I could look them in the eyes now, not even now. And you know about my senior year, after the situation I really truly started realizing, I’m not going to have a senior year anymore.” 

‘You can get a paddling’

In recent years there have been numerous cases in Florida that resemble the one involving Daniels. Yet even in districts where parents can opt their children out of being hit as a form of discipline — and even in incidents where parents accuse educators of going too far — law enforcement officials have pointed to a state law permitting the practice. Kristina Vann, Daniels’s mother, said she had not given Liberty County educators consent to hit her daughter.

That didn’t stop Assistant Principal Davis from drawing the paddle. 

Daniels reported the incident to the Liberty County Sheriff’s Office and, in an interview with ���˶���, Undersheriff Robert “Dusty” Arnold acknowledged the agency looked into the case but said they don’t plan to pursue criminal charges. He called the case “a non-issue” involving a permitted form of discipline that Daniels had consented to. The entire incident, he said, was “being blown out of proportion.” 

“It’s the state law,” Arnold said in an interview. “And if you choose to take a paddling, you can get a paddling. My understanding is she was given options and she chose that.”

Sam Boyd, a supervising attorney at the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center, which has in Florida and nationally, said he’s aware of “a fact pattern” of corporal punishment incidents “that may be much more of a serious sexual assault than punishment.” 

The case involving Daniels, who is an adult in the eyes of the law, presents its own set of complicated legal questions, he said. 

“To the extent that schools are stepping in for parents, if that’s the theory behind corporal punishment, it’s hard to see how that makes any sense in the context of people who are legally adults,” he said. “As a policy matter, it doesn’t make any sense to be using corporal punishment against adults, although of course it doesn’t in our view, make any sense to be using it against minors either.” 

Florida’s law permitting corporal punishment in schools has been used in previous incidents to shield educators from criminal charges. In 2018, for example, against a Lake County bus monitor who was accused of using in ways that constituted child abuse, including grabbing children by their faces, twisting their heads and pushing them against a wall in the bus. Prosecutors concluded that the state law superseded a school district policy banning corporal punishment. 

Three years later, in 2021, an elementary school principal in Hendry County was caught on video spanking a 6-year-old girl with a wooden paddle despite a district policy prohibiting such actions. Although the state corporal punishment law requires educators to comply with local district rules, prosecutors declined to pursue charges and claimed the girl’s mother — an undocumented immigrant who filmed the encounter and shared the footage with a local television station — had consented to the beating and at no point spoke up to “raise any objection.” 

The Hendry County incident prompted an investigation by ���˶���, which revealed numerous incidents where students had been subjected to corporal punishment in school districts across the country where that practice had been outlawed. 

For University of Florida student Graham Bernstein, that investigation served as a wake-up call. The Hendry County incident coincided with another failed legislative effort to ban corporal punishment and he felt that more needed to be done to stop the practice, he told ���˶���. He joined up with a classmate, Konstantin Nakov, and wrote the bill now pending in Tallahassee that the duo hopes will persuade state officials to view Florida’s history of corporal punishment in a different light. 

The business of hitting kids

First, Bernstein and Nakov set out to get a better understanding of corporal punishment in Florida which, according to state data, was used to punish 509 students last school year.

Through emails and public records requests with districts statewide, the students found that the practice was being used to discipline the same students repeatedly — about half of whom were in special education — and often for minor classroom infractions. In Columbia County, records shared with ���˶��� revealed, spanking was primarily reserved for elementary school students. Of the 824 incidents of corporal punishment in the north central Florida county between August 2018 and May 2022, 84% were attributed to minor infractions including the use of inappropriate language, disrupting the classroom environment and inappropriate use of electronic devices. Fewer than 13% of incidents were initiated after a student hit a classmate.

The practice was also used more than a dozen times at Pathways Academy, an alternative education program in Columbia County that it specifically serves students “with behavior, academic and attendance barriers” and those with disabilities who need additional support “to overcome their own barriers.” 

Columbia County school district officials didn’t respond to requests for comment about their corporal punishment practices. 

While previous efforts to ban corporal punishment in Florida schools have focused on the research suggesting it’s an ineffective disciplinary tool and has negative consequences for students, Bernstein and Nakov used another tact to get support from Republicans, who represent the rural, predominantly conservative counties where the practice is primarily used. 

They took a page from GOP Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s playbook and presented the issue as one of parental rights.

“I don’t know what it is about conservative Republicans, but some of them just think that it’s a good disciplinary intervention to strike children,” Bernstein said. “A big emphasis has been recently on the whole idea of parental rights and making it so the government doesn’t have the ability to do something without a parent agreeing to it. And so we thought we can apply that here. … Especially with some of these more conservative legislators, who are really zealous supporters of this idea of parental rights, let’s test their rhetoric against them and see if it sticks.” 

Still, getting buy-in from lawmakers wasn’t easy, said Nakov, who graduated from the University of Florida last year and now attends medical school in Bradenton, Florida. He and Bernstein have spent the last several years sending emails to legislative offices and taking road trips to the statehouse to speak with potential sponsors. 

Rep. Mike Beltran, a Republican from Apollo Beach who co-sponsored the bill, said the legislation fits in line with other efforts in Florida to bolster parental rights. 

“I don’t think the parents should spank the kids either, but certainly the school should not be doing it and certainly the school should not be doing it without the parents’ approval or knowledge,” Beltran said. “There’s no due process — there’s no due process at all — and you’re going to spank them?”

If Florida bans corporal punishment and educators fail to comply, Beltran said that students and parents should “sue their pants off.” 

‘I took it very easy on her’

Back in Liberty County, Brooklynn Daniels’s mother used a school communication platform to confront Davis on the way he spanked her daughter. In a text chat on the app ParentSquare that she shared with ���˶���, Vann offered the assistant principal photographic proof that her daughter’s “butt is red all over,” from the paddling. Davis declined the photo and defended his actions. 

“I can assure you I took it very easy on her,” Davis wrote. “I’m teased by staff in the front office about how soft I swing a paddle and I took it especially easy on Brooklyn, as I do with any female.” 

Vann was floored at his characterization, especially given Davis’s career in professional baseball in the 1990s, which also included stints with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and . 

“That man went from swinging bats for a living to beating children,” she said. “So how do I know where he went to school to learn how to — instead of hitting a baseball out into the outfield — to gently swing a paddle to hit my kid?” 

Vann sees insular, hometown favoritism at the root of how school leaders handled her daughter and defended Davis, a Liberty County High School alumnus. The family moved to the rural county from urban Tallahassee — and longtime residents, Vann said, resented Brooklynn.

“She’s made homecoming twice, she’s a cheerleader, she’s well known in the community. She’s made her mark here and she’s not from Liberty County,” she said. “We have what they call the good ol’ boys system here. If you’re not born and raised here, they’re not going to protect you and they don’t like you. They don’t like outsiders.” 

To Undersheriff Arnold, a fourth-generation Liberty County resident, the culture of school corporal punishment contributes to a polite community where people refer to others by “sir” and “ma’am.” He recalled the times when he was paddled inside the local schools, where he and other students were sternly punished “if you got out of line.” 

“It’s a lot of what our country is missing now: Too many people get away with too many things and there’s no punishment for anything, there’s no accountability for anything anymore,” Arnold said. “When you’re held accountable, it keeps you in check.” 

Arnold said he isn’t aware of any other instances in the county where a student reported school corporal punishment to law enforcement. He described the incident involving Daniels as one where a high school beauty pageant contestant has sought to rake in views and likes on social media. He offered a steadfast endorsement of local education leaders, adding that he’s “a little bit passionate when it comes to our school district.” 

“I know what kind of school we have, I have children at that school, and I trust those individuals with my kids’ lives,” he said. “They are good people — they are really good people. They don’t want to do anything else in this county but help these children get an education.”

Yet for Daniels, she can’t get away from the thick wooden paddle and the bruises it left on her body.

“It was black and blue and purple and yellow and you could see where all the bruises had already started forming” in just minutes, she said, after she left the principal’s office and rushed into a school bathroom.

“It’s insane how hard they hit me.”

, the pivotal Supreme Court decision that made school segregation unconstitutional, turns 70 years old on May 17, 2024.

At the time of the 1954 ruling, 17 U.S. states had laws permitting or requiring racially segregated schools. The Brown decision declared that segregation in public schools was “inherently unequal.” This was, in part, because the court argued that access to equitable, nonsegregated education played a critical role in creating informed citizens – for the political establishment amid the Cold War. With Brown, the justices overturned decades of that kept Black Americans in .

As a professor of education and demography at Penn State University, I research . I’m aware that, after several decades of , the upcoming Brown vs. Board of Education anniversary comes at an especially uncertain moment for public education and efforts to make America’s schools reflect the nation’s multiracial society.

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Recent setbacks

In June 2023, the Supreme Court efforts. The decision followed the COVID-19 pandemic, which in the U.S.

Meanwhile, politicians and school boards have banned or removed books by from school libraries and restricted teaching about . I believe these legal setbacks amid the current political climate make finally realizing the full promise of Brown more urgent.

Resistance to Brown ruling

The Brown vs. Board of Education decision did not immediately change the nation’s public schools, especially in the completely segregated South, where there was . Resistance was so fierce in the first decade after Brown that compliance with desegregation orders at times required to escort to enroll in formerly all-white schools.

It would be a decade after Brown before the federal courts, a newly enacted and expanded federal education funding spurred .

While only 2% of Southern Black K-12 students attended majority white schools in 1964 – 10 years after Brown – the number had by 1970. The South surpassed all other regions in desegregation progress for Black students.

Segregation persists

Public school students today are the most racially diverse in U.S. history. At the time of Brown, about and most other students were Black.

Today, according to a , 46% of public school students are white, 28% are Hispanic, 15% are Black, 6% Asian, 4% multiracial and 1% American Indian. Based on my analysis of 2021 federal education data, public schools in 22 states and Washington, D.C., served majorities of students of color.

And yet, public schools are deeply segregated. In 2021, approximately 60% of Black and Hispanic public school students attended schools where were students of color. Black and Hispanic students who attend racially segregated schools also are overwhelmingly enrolled in .

A , a nonprofit that produced reports on school funding inequities, found that schools in predominantly nonwhite districts received $23 billion less in funding each year than schools in majority white districts. This equates to roughly $2,200 less per student per year. Unequal funding results in , to name just one example.

Benefits of diversity

While Brown was an attempt to address the inequality that students experienced in segregated Black schools, the harms of segregation affect students of all races.

Racially integrated schools are associated with , or simply building that teach children how to work effectively with others.

White students are the to students of other races and ethnicities, and therefore they often miss out on the benefits of diversity. Nearly half of white public school students attend a school in which white students are 75% or more of the student body.

Factors that exacerbate segregation

Although residential segregation is , many U.S. communities remain both . Segregated schools, therefore, often reflect segregated neighborhoods.

However, how students are assigned to schools and districts can play a key role in how segregated those schools are.

This is because school attendance boundaries often determine which local public school a student may attend. How those boundaries are drawn or redrawn can exacerbate or alleviate school segregation. More than that are predominantly of one race are located within 10 miles of a school that is predominantly of another race.

Studies show that within school districts could make a substantial number of schools less segregated.

The same is true when it comes to school district boundaries. A high level of income and racial segregation also exists . And district secession – when schools leave an existing school district to – is . Redrawing district boundaries or preventing the formation of new boundaries could affect segregation.

Another key factor is the rise of public school choice, which allows parents to send children to charter schools or other schools beyond their zoned school. One study found that areas with more students enrolled in charter schools were associated with .

Potential solutions

Several hundred , which require districts to eradicate segregation that existed prior to the Brown decision, still exist. These are largely concentrated in some Southern states.

For the rest of the country, efforts are attempts to finally achieve the goals of the Brown decision. These include Berkeley, California’s and legal cases brought against states that challenge existing segregation under .

Finally, since reducing residential segregation could also reduce school segregation, some efforts have combined and policies. Connecticut, for example, has piloted for eligible participants in its interdistrict school desegregation program.

Like 70 years ago when Brown was decided, addressing public school segregation remains important for a healthy democracy – one that today is more multiracial than ever before.

At the concurrent , teachers, parents and community members called for Maron and Egorov’s removal, citing the Chancellor’s promise, loss of “trust,” and high risk of suicide among LGBTQ youth. Maron was not present.

An elected member of a prominent New York City education council said “there is no such thing as trans kids,” while another claimed the social justice movement is “destroying the country,” in a private parent group chat.  

In the same set of exchanges dating back to June 2022, Andrew Gutmann, a former New York City parent and current Florida congressional candidate, accused LGBTQ people and social justice advocates of being “anti-children,” and trans and nonbinary kids as “indoctrinated” in a “really dangerous cult.” 

Responding to one Brooklyn parent’s concern about the number of LGBTQ children in her child’s school, Manhattan District 2 Community Education Council member Maud Maron responded “the social contagion is undeniable” and called hormone blocking drugs “an abomination.” 

On the same day in another exchange about LGBTQ kids, Maron said, “There is no such thing as trans kids [because] there is no such thing as transition i.e. changing your sex.” 

The “social contagion” phrase, equating an aspect of a child’s identity to disease, was used by a northern California school board member earlier this year who . 

In a statement, a NYC Department of Education spokesperson called the remarks “despicable and not in line with our values.”    

In WhatsApp logs obtained by ���˶���, an additional parent leader made crude remarks levied at a state senator, while another shared a worksheet that defined hate speech as “usually constitutionally protected” and an “expression of opinion.” 

Maron also hormone therapy causes permanent, harmful effects for teens taking the drugs. “Some of these kids never develop adult genitalia and will never have full sexual function. It’s an abomination,” she wrote on November 11, 2022. 

When asked for comment on the remarks, Maron asserted her position by stating, “Radical trans ideology as taught in our public schools is regressive, homophobic and often deeply misogynistic.” She added telling gender expansive kids they need to be “fixed” by transitioning “leads to grave, irreversible harm for so many young people.” 

The  has supported access to , as have all leading medical associations in the country, according to the , who also cited research that  improves long-term physical and mental health, and reduces suicidal ideation.

Local leaders and advocates have called for Maron and fellow CEC member Danyela Souza Egorov to resign or be removed by NYC Schools Chancellor David Banks. Elected members, serving two-year terms, advise education officials on 32 CECs throughout the city. 

“If they’re not going to be removed, they have to engage in training … There has to be a level of accountability when grownups are the ones that are harming children,” said Panel for Education Policy member Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, a CUNY school of medicine neurology professor appointed by Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine. “My heart breaks.”

In addition to calling the comments “despicable,” a DOE spokesperson said the department “does not condone the opinions expressed” in the log and added “all children deserve protection, including LGBTQ+ children.”

“Our educators work every day to make New York City public schools safe and supportive environments for LGBTQ+ youth,” the DOE spokesperson said.

Chancellor’s regulation prohibits discrimination or harassment based on gender and other protected classes, stating “the DOE does not tolerate disrespect towards children.” The regulation also states that, after an investigation, the chancellor may remove or suspend members if conduct poses a “danger to the safety or welfare of students” or “is contrary to the best interest” of the district. 

The department receives complaints against CEC members who are thought to be in violation of the chancellor’s regulations by email. 

Manhattan City Councilmember Erik Bottcher, who represents families and children in School District 2, also denounced the remarks and encouraged disciplinary action. 

“It is deeply troubling that CEC members are engaging in demeaning, transphobic smears that are reminiscent of playground bullies rather than responsible adults tasked with advocating for the well-being of our kids,” Bottcher said. “Our students deserve better.” 

The chat also revealed some members believe hate speech, racism, white supremacy and other “social justice” jargon are fraught terms used to “discriminate against” white and Asian people. “The anti-racists are so racist,” said Maron.

That parents with these views have gained power locally is unsurprising to scholars who study conservative parent rights movements like Moms for Liberty. The groups and rhetoric are most frequently found in politically purple or liberal areas where parents feel their voices are sidelined for more liberal agendas. 

Pushing back on diversity trainings they find divisive, for example, one parent asked: “So you can pay to become a racist?” in reference to a , voluntary workshop hosted by the teacher’s union entitled, “Holding the Weight of Whiteness.”

Maron replied: “For the bargain price of $25.” 

In an exchange critiquing the United Federation of Teachers training on power dynamics in the classroom, Egorov said “this is poisonous and it is destroying the country.” She did not respond to requests for comment. 

Experts who study civil rights and freedom of speech in the U.S. have witnessed rhetoric throughout the country, but say there’s a key distinction at play here. 

“I think the most dangerous thing about these messages is who they’re coming from,” said Maya Henson Carey, a researcher with the Southern Poverty Law Center, “because these people have power to make change.”  

On November 20, 2022, Egorov sent the WhatsApp group an explainer to help push back on social justice terms. The one pager defined diversity as “an attack on merit and a form of soft bigotry,” adding that accountability is “bullying” and “mob rule.” A parent immediately responded, “this is good.”

The Responding to Social Justice Rhetoric sheet was created in 2021 by a group of academics with the Oregon Association of Scholars, a chapter of the National Association of Scholars, known as a conservative group that has lobbied against diversity policies.

The worksheet serves as a “translation guide,” for anyone “hoodwinked by language” said Peter Boghossian, one of its authors. 

The guide also defined inclusion as “restricted speech and justification for purges,” and a way to make “people feel welcomed by banning anything they find offensive.”

But inclusion for LGBTQ students is top of mind for many educators and families nationwide as the youth mental health crisis worsens. Queer kids, often ostracized from their homes or communities, are and foster care. They are also four times as likely than their peers to contemplate suicide, according to .

New York recently passed a safe haven law legally protecting trans students and their doctors introduced by state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal. 

In the WhatsApp chat, both the law and Hoylman-Sigal were subject to explicit vitriol by prominent parent leaders. 

Chien Kwok, former District 2 CEC member and president of local nonprofit Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education, wrote, “I would imagine Hoylman would have cut off his penis to transition if he was allowed to run away from his home state of West Virginia to NY. Do you think Hoylman or his husband would have regretted Hoylman being a eunuch?”

Kwok responded to requests for comment by reiterating his question for the state senator and adding “the radical transgender ideologies that [Hoylman-Sigal] supports and turned into law have harmed countless children and teens in the US and around the world.” 

A few hours after Kwok’s original comment, Gutmann, a former NYC private school parent who denounced his , chimed in: what LGBTQ people and social justice “ideologues” have in common is “not wanting children, which has made them anti-children (hence anti-family).” 

Gutmann later told ���˶��� that while the private messages were written “quickly” and “in a casual tone,” he stands by “everything I have written in this and any other private chat group in which I have participated.” 

Hoylman-Sigal said the “cruel and frankly outrageous” chat history makes clear that, locally, the CEC members are not able “to safeguard learning for students. The disrespect and intolerance that is evident in these chats shows just the opposite. To them, LGBTQ kids, specifically transgender children, are second class.” 

The logs are a “call to action,” he added, for CEC leaders, Banks, and parents to vote them out of office. 

Though the outcomes of recent school board elections nationwide show many parents disagree with conservative parent leaders’ emphasis on limiting classroom discussion of sex and gender, parent leaders like Gutmann, Kwok, Maron and Egorov have been hoping to expand their reach. 

“We need to organize ourselves to recruit CEC candidates so we can expand our influence and keep it where we have [a] majority,” Egorov wrote to the group on January 1, 2022. 

They came close.  

Forty percent of Community Education Council members endorsed by PLACE, the conservative parent advocacy group co-founded by Maron and Kwok, .

Lawmakers and experts at local LGBTQ nonprofit are advocating for a new , sponsored by Hoylman-Sigal, requiring that all New York school districts establish policies to protect nonbinary and transgender students.

COLUMBIA — With restoration of what remains of Columbia’s first Black public high school fully funded, the director of the University of South Carolina’s civil rights center is turning his attention to expansion.

The estimated $24 million project involves new construction on the historic property. The stories and contributions of South Carolinians in the national Civil Rights Movement can be put on display in a second, modern building, said Bobby Donaldson, director of the University of South Carolina Center for Civil Rights History and Research.

Renovations at the former high school auditorium started a decade ago. It’s the only building left standing on the campus beloved by generations of Black Columbians.

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The last phase of improvements is set to begin in late 2024 or early 2025. It’s funded by a $5 million awarded in June. That will bring the total spent on its preservation to $8.7 million.

But a high school building built in 1956 has its limitations.

“The new space is where we can envision how we reach audiences decades beyond our time,” Donaldson told the SC Daily Gazette.

Today, visitors will find walls full of informational placards about the history of the school, its students and the educators who once walked its halls. But there is no space to permanently house exhibits and of audio recordings, film clips, photographs, postcards, diaries and manuscripts. There have been temporary displays there.

Funding for the expansion

The new, will house a research library, archives, conference space, offices and modern exhibit space. Collections include the official papers of South Carolina senior Congressman Jim Clyburn, a Democrat first elected in 1992. The space will include more immersive, interactive and high-tech displays to “bring history to life,” Donaldson said.

So far, he’s raised $9 million for the expansion from a combination of federal grants, private donations, the university and most recently, $1 million in the state budget sponsored by state House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford, D-Columbia.

Donaldson hopes to use the state funding to encourage more private sources to chip in on the project.

“I want to give people a reason to come to Columbia,” Rutherford said. “I think if Columbia is going to be on the map, we have to take advantage of our assets. “The (Congaree) River is one of those and our history is another.”

The center’s new building will pay homage to the once 4-acre high school campus that was at the center of Columbia’s Black community from 1916 through its closure in 1974.

‘More than a school’

Long the largest Black public high school in the state and the only place Black children could receive a high school education in Columbia as southern states clung to segregation, Booker T. was a source of pride that shaped generations of educators, trades workers and community and Civil Rights leaders, Donaldson said.

Donaldson still remembers what  told him when renovations began in 2013 thanks to a donation from another Booker T. graduate. Green was the school’s 1959 valedictorian and dedicated to preserving its history.

“I want you to know this building is more than a school to us,” Donald recalls her saying. “It’s a shrine to the struggles and triumphs of African Americans in Columbia.”

Alumni, faculty and community leaders protested the school’s closure and sale to the University of South Carolina in 1974, to no avail. USC gradually swallowed up the property, bulldozing the classrooms and gymnasium to build dormitories for college students. It was only a decade earlier that the university admitted its first Black students since Reconstruction.

The school’s lone building standing is itself a testament to the struggle for equality.

It was built with collections from South Carolina’s inaugural 3% sales tax, which then-Gov. James Byrnes pushed as a way to . Hundreds of Black- and white-only schools were built in a failed effort to prove public schools could be “separate but equal.”

The effort to expand the center comes on the tail of another milestone in the endeavor to acknowledge and amplify the stories of Black South Carolinians.

How it differs from other museums

The city of Charleston this summer celebrated the of the $125 million International African American Museum, located on what was once the largest U.S. point of entry for enslaved Africans. The museum, two decades in the making, on African culture dating to 300 B.C., the transatlantic slave trade, the Holy City’s role, and the little-known achievements of Black South Carolinians.

Donaldson said USC’s civil rights center works with museums, including IAAM and the Penn Center on Saint Helena island, home to the Gullah Geechee culture. But his work is less about tourism and more focused on archiving, researching and providing resources to educators who teach U.S. history, he said.

“What we aim to do with our work is to remind audiences that South Carolina played a valuable role in the long struggle for civil rights,” Donaldson said.

That history includes the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1963 decision, , in which the high court ruled the state violated the First Amendment rights of Black high school and college students when police arrested them for protesting on the Statehouse grounds against segregation.

Then there was , who protested segregation on Columbia’s city buses more than a year and a half before Rosa Parks’ refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

When Clyburn retires, researchers will be able to peruse his congressional papers as well as files from his 18 years as the South Carolina Human Affairs commissioner.

Rutherford said one trip to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., shows just how much of the Civil Rights Movement started in South Carolina.

Expanding the Center for Civil Rights History and Research, he said, provides the opportunity to educate the public right here in the Palmetto State.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. SC Daily Gazette maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seanna Adcox for questions: info@scdailygazette.com. Follow SC Daily Gazette on and .

And schools in which at least 75% of students are Black and Latino offer fewer math, science and computer science courses than those with a low-minority population.

Those are among the racial disparities noted Wednesday in the Civil Rights Data Collection — the first released since 2017-18. Considering the data was collected when the vast majority of districts offered only virtual or hybrid learning, officials cautioned against making direct comparisons to previous years. But they also noted that among the many topics covered in the survey, including suspension rates, sexual harassment and school staffing data, course-taking trends might be less affected by the pandemic. 

“Sadly, the inequities that have long persisted in our education system are on full display,” said Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, noting the department’s efforts to expand access to STEM learning through with NASA, nonprofits and the private sector. “We spent years fighting COVID; now we must fight complacency.”

COVID disrupted all aspects of the U.S. education system, and that includes federal efforts to measure how schools are protecting students’ civil rights. Officials canceled the and moved it to the following year, without knowing how COVID would continue to upend normal school operations. Many U.S. schools did not return to in-person learning full time until . Prior to that, steep declines in areas such as out-of-school suspension or the use of corporal punishment are likely because many students were learning at home — not because schools stopped disciplining students. 

That doesn’t mean the data isn’t useful for examining gaps based on race and disability. Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine Lhamon called the release “crucial civil rights data specific to students’ pandemic experience.” Others agreed that the data will help the nation better understand how the pandemic exacerbated inequities for vulnerable students. 

“It won’t be an apples-to-apples comparison,” said David Hinojosa, director of the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “At the same time, the whole intent behind the collection of this data is for schools, communities and civil rights enforcement agencies to identify and correct any civil rights disparities.”

‘Discipline looked very different’

As the primary source of information on school discipline, the survey shows that despite school closures, students missed more than 2 million days of school due to out-of-school suspensions during the 2020-21 school year.

Black boys were suspended at higher rates than boys of other races — a longstanding disparity. Black boys represented 8% of the total K-12 population but 18% of those that received one or more out-of-school suspensions. Black girls represented 7% of student enrollment, but accounted for 9% of students with one or more out-of-school suspensions. White girls made up 22% of the student population, but represented 13% of out-of-school suspensions. 

This data was especially impacted by remote learning, noted Nancy Duchesneau, a senior P-12 research associate at EdTrust, an advocacy organization that focuses on educational equity. 

“Exclusionary discipline looked very different during virtual learning,” she said. “Students were locked out of accounts, or removed from virtual learning environments, without official suspensions or expulsions. These instances of unofficial exclusionary discipline will not be reflected in the data.”

Despite 2020-21 being an unusual school year, districts still referred 61,900 students to law enforcement, which officials described as alarming, and 19,400 students received corporal punishment. Earlier this year, the department urging schools to replace physical punishment with other methods.

The department also collected 2021-22 data and , districts can begin to submit responses for the current 2023-24 school year, putting the program back on its regular biennial schedule.

The 2020-21 findings confirm what some researchers captured during the pandemic — the decline in preschool enrollment, for example. In 2017-18, 1.4 million children attended a school district preschool program, but that dropped to 1.2 million, according to the latest data. 

“People did not equitably have access to the internet,” Hinojosa said, “and they weren’t going to have their 4-year-old in front of the screen where they couldn’t learn.” 

The survey, for the first time, included questions about students’ access to the internet and devices. Ninety-three percent of schools offer high-speed internet, and there’s little variation between high-minority and low-minority schools. But there were state-level differences.

Students in Alaska have the least access, where 59% of schools reported a high-speed connection, followed by Florida with 66%. Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia all reported 99% or more. 

While most of the questions focused on in-school availability, the survey also showed that 87% of schools allowed students to take home devices. 

Along with a series of national snapshots, the department also launched a with access to state and local data. That will allow for comparisons between states and districts that had different rates of in-person learning and home internet access, said Jennifer Bell-Ellwanger, president and CEO of the nonprofit Data Quality Campaign.

“We need this data even if it’s not as clear or clean as we might want,” she said. But she added, “It’s almost like a new baseline.”

Other top takeaways from the results are:

• Black students made up 15% of the total high school enrollment, but represented 6% of students enrolled in an AP math course. Latino students represented 27% of high school students, but 19% of those in AP math. 

• Boys were more likely than girls to take Algebra I, physics and computer science. But girls had higher enrollment rates than boys in Algebra II, advanced math classes, biology and chemistry. 

• White and Asian high schoolers were overrepresented in college dual enrollment courses, while Black and Hispanic students, English learners and students with disabilities were underrepresented. 

• American Indian or Alaska Native students were 3.4 times more likely than white students to attend a school with a police officer or security guard, but without a school counselor, social worker, nurse or psychologist. 

• There were 20,800 students disciplined for sex-based bullying or harassment in the 2020-21 schools year. White boys made up 24% of the total K-12 student enrollment but accounted for almost half of those disciplined for harassment or bullying on the basis of sex.

, the coalition expressed concerns that AI-enabled student monitoring tools could foster discrimination against marginalized groups, including LGBTQ+ youth and students with disabilities. The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights should issue guidance on the appropriate uses of emerging classroom technologies, the lawmakers wrote, and crack down on practices that run afoul of existing federal anti-discrimination laws. 

“While the expansion of educational technology helped facilitate remote learning that was critical to students, parents and teachers during the pandemic,” the lawmakers wrote, “these technologies have also amplified student harms.” 

Lawmakers asked the Education Department’s civil rights office whether it has received complaints alleging discrimination facilitated by education technology software and whether it has taken any enforcement action related to potential civil rights violations. 

The letter comes in response to a recent national survey of educators, parents and students, the findings of which suggest that schools’ use of digital tools to monitor children online have based on their race, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity. The survey, conducted by the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, found that while activity monitoring has become ubiquitous in schools and is intended to keep students safe, it’s used regularly as a discipline tool and routinely brings youth into contact with the police.

Findings from the CDT survey, lawmakers wrote, “raise serious concerns about the application of civil rights laws to schools’ use of these technologies.” Letter signatories include Democratic Reps. Lori Trahan of Massachusetts, Sara Jacobs of California, Hank Johnson of Georgia, Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey and Adam Schiff of California. Trahan, who serves on the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Innovation, Data and Commerce Subcommittee, has previously called for tighter student data privacy protections in the ed tech sector. 

The monitoring tools, such as those offered by for-profit companies GoGuardian and Gaggle, rely on artificial intelligence to sift through students’ online activities and flag school administrators — and sometimes the police — when they discover materials related to sex, drugs, violence or self-harm. 

Two-thirds of teachers reported that a student at their school was disciplined as a result of activity monitoring and a third said they know a student who was contacted by the police because of an alert generated by the software. 

Children with disabilities were more likely than their peers to report being watched, and special education teachers reported heightened rates of discipline as a result of activity monitoring. The findings, researchers argue, that entitle children with disabilities equal access to an education. Even beyond the technologies, students with disabilities are subjected to disproportionate levels of school discipline, including restraint and seclusion, when compared to their general education peers. 

Half of all students said their schools responded fairly to alerts generated by monitoring software, a sentiment shared by just 36% of LGBTQ+ youth. In fact, LGBTQ+ youth were more likely than their straight and cisgender peers to report that they or someone they know was disciplined as a result of monitoring. And nearly a third of LGBTQ+ youth reported that they or someone they know was outed because of the technology. 

More than a third of teachers said their school monitors students’ online behaviors outside of school hours — and sometimes on their personal devices. 

In a similar student survey, released this month by the American Civil Liberties Union, a majority of respondents expressed worries that the monitoring tools — despite being designed to keep them safe — could actually cause harm and a third said they “always feel” like they’re being watched. 

���˶��� has reported extensively on schools’ use of digital surveillance tools to monitor students’ online behaviors, and the tools’ implications for youth civil rights. The company Gaggle previously flagged to administrators student communications that referenced LGBTQ+ keywords like “gay” and “lesbian.” The company says it halted the practice last year in the wake of pushback from civil rights activists. 

Given the survey findings, the lawmakers urged the Education Department to clarify “how educators can fulfill their civil rights obligations” as they develop policies related to artificial intelligence, whose rapidly evolving role in education more broadly — including students’ use of tools like ChatGPT — has become a topic of debate. 

“This research is particularly concerning due to linkages between school disciplinary policies and incarceration rates of our nation’s youth,” the coalition wrote, adding concerns that the tools can create hostile learning environments. 

With schools continuing to find themselves caught in emotional debates over students’ access to controversial books, the U.S. Department of Education has hired a new official to oversee its response to content challenges and take action if it finds that removing materials violated students’ civil rights.  

Matt Nosanchuk, a former Obama administration official and nonprofit leader whose work has focused on the Jewish and LGBTQ communities, started his job Monday as a deputy assistant secretary in the Office for Civil Rights. In the coming weeks, he’ll lead training sessions for schools and libraries on the shifting legal landscape related to restricting books available to students. The American Library Association will host the  Sept. 26.

“Across the country, communities are seeing a rise in efforts to ban books — efforts that are often designed to empty libraries and classrooms of literature about LGBTQ people, people of color, people of faith, key historical events and more,” a department official said in an email to reporters Thursday. “These efforts are a threat to student’s rights and freedoms.”

The move comes as conservative groups continue to push for the removal of books they argue are inappropriate for students and GOP leaders take action against districts with books that include sexual content or discuss historical racism. 

“The Department of Education has decided to lawlessly leverage its civil rights enforcement power to coerce school districts into keeping pornography in their libraries,” said Max Eden, a research fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. 

, an advocacy organization, found almost 1,500 instances of book bans affecting 874 unique titles last school year. In many cases, parents complained that the books were too advanced or graphic for younger readers. But civil rights officials say removing a book just because it has LGBTQ characters or discusses racial violence is a form of discrimination.

In a first-of-its-kind resolution in May, the department found that a Georgia district may have created a “hostile environment” when it withdrew several books with LGBTQ and Black characters following parent complaints. The agreement required the Forsyth County Schools to notify students of its library book review process and survey middle and high school students about harassment based on race or sex and whether they feel comfortable reporting it. 

Some parent leaders applauded the appointment. 

“Leadership and energy on this has been a long time coming,” said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union. She hopes “to see real action and resources for children, parents and families who have been caught in the crossfire of this hate-filled political campaign for far too long.”

In Florida, for example, a new states that districts must remove books that contain “sexual conduct” if the material is determined to be inappropriate. Those who disagree with a district’s decision to keep a book on the shelves can ask for a review by a special magistrate.

“That’s one more level of control from the state to overturn what they don’t like,” said Melissa Erickson, executive director of Alliance for Public Schools, a nonprofit. She’s expressed concerns about the ability of conservative-leaning school boards to dictate what’s taught in the classroom.

In 2021, some parents in the Williamson County, Tennessee, district sought to remove the children’s book “Ruby Bridges Goes to School: My True Story,” an autobiography about Bridges’s experience as the first Black student to desegregate an all-white school in New Orleans. They objected to the word “injustice” and a reference to “a large crowd of angry white people.”

In Oklahoma, the state that said officials can downgrade a district’s accreditation if it has books with “sexualized content” that an average person might find unfit for students. The rule followed state Superintendent Ryan Walters’s claims that some included books such as “Gender Queer” and “Flamer” that feature graphic illustrations of sex. In several cases, the books had already been removed.

Some advocates say they’ve been unfairly criticized for supporting the rights of parents to restrict their children from access to explicit material.

“When people ask questions they’re crucified,” Nicki Neily, president and founder of Parents Defending Education, testified Tuesday in a . “Pretending that objections to minors accessing explicit sexual content is a threat to liberty and literature is a straw man and a distraction from real concerns about the quality of children’s education and whether students are safe in school.”

Margaret Crespo, superintendent in residence for ILO Group, an organization that supports women leaders in education, said Nosanchuk’s hiring is likely to rankle those who think the federal government should stay out of local school board matters.

She resigned in August as superintendent of the Laramie County School District 1, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where board members pushed for a policy in which books with sexually explicit content would be off limits unless to children without parents’ prior permission. The school board is .  

But Crespo acknowledged the department’s assistance could be helpful to districts.

“Many don’t have policy or state statute to guide the conversation,” she said, “and are struggling to meet the needs of all students.”

Republicans have called on the administration to and are the administration for its interpretation that Title IX covers sexual orientation and gender identity. But Democrats say transgender students need the overhaul to combat discrimination and harassment in school. Excluding trans students from using bathrooms and playing on sports teams consistent with their gender identity denies their civil rights, they say. 

The U.S. Department of Education is still reviewing “a historic number of comments” from the public on the proposed regulations, according to a department spokesperson, and is now likely to miss its for release.

The department’s Office for Civil Rights received almost 240,000 comments on the primary rule, and more than 156,000 on the athletics rule. The department plans to release both portions at the same time, but the draft rule still faces review from the Office of Management and Budget, a required step that typically lasts 120 days.

While department officials declined to say if they’d miss the deadline, one expert is skeptical.

W. Scott Lewis, a partner with TNG, a consulting firm that works on Title IX issues, said it’s possible the rule won’t come out until spring. That timing, he said, “would be better for school districts and colleges” because it would allow them to make changes in the spring for the 2024-25 school year. 

The initial draft was released in July 2022, followed by the in April.

“We might miss it; we might not,” a department spokesperson told ���˶��� Friday. “The Department is working overtime to ensure that each [comment] is thoroughly read and carefully considered.”

Higher Ed Dive the delay Thursday. Opponents of the rewrite seized upon the news as a sign their pushback has been effective.

The administration is “responding to growing criticisms from many sectors of society,” Stop Abusive and Violent Environments, an advocacy organization, said in a .

But advocates for the revision say they are tired of waiting.

Anya Marino, director of LGBTQI Equality at the National Women’s Law Center, said trans and nonbinary students are facing “staggering rates” of abuse and harassment. A showed that almost 70% of LGBTQ students feel unsafe at school because of their sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. Four in 10 LGBTQ students said they avoided bathrooms, locker rooms and gym class because of concerns for their safety.

“These very real harms have been exacerbated by the recent wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation and policies introduced at the state and local level, nationwide,” she said. “The Department’s rule is needed now.”

Biden took office with plans to roll back former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s similarly divisive rewrite of Title IX and, for the first time, extend protections to LGBTQ students. The DeVos rule, which also went through a formal notice and comment period, narrows the definition of sexual misconduct and sets limits on investigating incidents that occurred off campus. The rule also acknowledges the due process rights of students who said they have been unfairly accused of sexual misconduct. 

The Biden proposal would require schools to investigate “hostile environments” even if they occur outside of school. 

But the plan to broaden the rule to prohibit discrimination and harassment based on gender identity and sexual orientation has sparked the most outrage from conservatives, who argue the administration would undo Title IX’s accomplishments for women over the past 50 years.

Recognizing the sharp divide over trans students’ participation in girls’ sports, officials handled that part of the rule separately and ultimately issued a draft that in general would allow elementary-age students to play sports consistent with their gender identity, but gives districts the discretion to exclude older trans students from competing with cisgender girls in certain sports. 

now bar trans students from participating in sports consistent with their gender identity.

The proposal left the argument far from settled. Most advocates for LGBTQ issues say there are no circumstances in which trans students should be excluded.

In a counter move, the GOP-dominated House in April that would make the inclusion of trans students on teams consistent with their gender identity a Title IX violation. The Senate, still in the hands of Democrats, isn’t expected to take action on the bill.

This would be the second time release of the final rule has been pushed back. The department originally . Despite the procedural delays, the administration is still acting under Biden’s 2021 that prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation. 

“We continue to enforce Title IX consistent with existing law that protects students on the basis of sex, including LGBTQI+ students,” the spokesperson said.

That interpretation led to a  from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, stating that the order covers school meal programs and that any program receiving Food and Nutrition Service funds “must investigate allegations of discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation” and update signs to say nondiscrimination policies include LGBTQ students.

Twenty-two states over the issue, and Republicans in Congress, including Sen. Rob Marshall of Kansas, accused the administration of holding “children’s lunch hostage in pursuit of your woke agenda.” 

The department spokesperson did not offer a new timetable for releasing the final rule, saying, “We are utilizing every resource at our disposal to complete this rulemaking process as soon as is practicable.”

During the 2021-22 school year, the School District of Rhinelander, in the central part of the state, altered the student’s schedule so they “could take in-person classes with teachers who were allies,” and attend the rest of their courses online. 

Teachers and students wouldn’t use the student’s preferred pronouns despite multiple complaints, and the student faced both physical and verbal harassment. “Kids whispered and giggled the name” of the student, according to the complaint.

“[The Office for Civil Rights] is concerned that the district response to the persistent harassment limited the student’s participation in school activities,” according to OCR’s statement on the agreement. In addition, the district’s actions don’t reflect “steps to ensure the student’s equal access to education with their peers.”

By the end of October, the district must train all staff on compliance with Title IX, educate students on sex-based harassment, including gender identity, and conduct a school climate survey to better understand the extent of the problem.

The case stands out for a few reasons. Compensatory education is typically a remedy for a student who was denied special education services. Last year, a California district a family up to $5,000 for counseling or therapy services because it failed to promptly address harassment of a transgender student, but experts said they were unaware of other agreements like the one in Rhinelander. 

In addition, students typically subjected to what is known as , such as being placed in virtual or home-based instruction, often have disabilities that contribute to discipline problems. That wasn’t the issue with the Rhinelander student, but advocates said the situation likely isn’t isolated.

“Too often these incidents are unreported and unaddressed,” said Aaron Ridings, chief of staff and deputy executive director for public policy and research at GLSEN, an LGBTQ student advocacy group. “That results in long-term harm in terms of educational outcomes and overall health.” 

While Wisconsin isn’t among them, have considered and passed anti-LGBTQ and transgender legislation this year. Over 400 bills were introduced, and a recent analysis by ���˶��� shows that LGBTQ students face harassment in both red and blue states. 

shows that transgender and nonbinary students are roughly twice as likely as other students to say they’ve missed or changed school because they felt unsafe or uncomfortable. 

But in the Rhinelander case, an assistant principal officially changed the student’s schedule and was “looking to move Student A away from particular students,” according to the complaint. The family, however, expressed that those victimizing the trans student should be removed from the classes.

The student is no longer enrolled in the district and moved out of the state, but Eric Burke, superintendent of the 2,300-student system, said officials planned to discuss compensatory services with the family. If the student returns, the district must offer counseling and identify a staff member that the student can go to if they experience further harassment, according to the resolution.

In a separate statement, the district said it agreed to resolve the complaint “instead of fighting over the merit of the allegations” and that providing “more training was a commitment we have already embraced.”

The investigation found that the district also frequently reported incidents involving the student as “peer mistreatment” instead of sexual harassment, as in the case when a “male student ‘bumped’ Student A in the hallway and used a derogatory term … toward them.” 

As part of the agreement, the district must create an online record-keeping system to document conduct that could amount to sex-based harassment. 

GOP recommends cuts

Title IX complaints made up roughly half of the nearly 19,000 complaints OCR received in fiscal year 2022, according to the agency’s . While thousands were from the same person and most involved athletics, the Biden administration’s rewrite of Title IX to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity has likely made LGBTQ students more confident officials will investigate their case, .

“For the first time in history, it is possible to more comprehensively combat pervasive denigration of young people based on their gender identity under federal law,” Ridings said.

The administration, which saw a drastic reduction in OCR staff under President Donald Trump, has been trying to rebuild the office and asked Congress for a 27% increase in funding — $178 million — for fiscal year 2024.

House Republicans, however, have recommended a 25% cut in a that aims to advance “conservative priorities.” The bill would also halt implementation of President Joe Biden’s inauguration day on civil rights protections for LGBTQ individuals across the federal government. 

Democrats have warned that the bill, which is still before the House appropriations committee, would lead to in federal education programs, namely an 80% cut to Title I grants for high-poverty schools. But the debate over funding is still likely to stretch well into the fall. 

“It’s hard to see what the end game of this strategy would be,” Charles Barone, vice president of K-12 policy with Democrats for Education Reform, a think tank, said about the bill. He noted that most Republicans represent districts that would be affected by the proposed cuts. But he added, “They’re going to be fighting over this into Christmas.”

Some parents’ public comments against diversity and inclusion initiatives likely led to “increased fears and possibly harassment” of students, and the district’s efforts to reduce any harm were insufficient, according to from the department’s Office for Civil Rights.

The resolution required the Atlanta-area Forsyth County Schools to notify students of its library book review process, but concluded it did not violate federal discrimination and harassment laws when Superintendent Jeff Bearden directed staff to remove eight books last year for material it deemed sexually explicit.

Some anti-censorship advocates welcomed the department’s involvement.

“This is the most volatile time in history of book censorship,” said Pat Scales, a retired school librarian and former chair of the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee. “I hope that the [Office for Civil Rights] will look into more cases.”

That’s what Democrats in the House requested earlier this year when the department to investigate whether restrictions on books and curriculum violate the law. The Georgia action — which a department spokesperson confirmed was the first time its civil rights division issued findings on book removals — could inform how other districts handle future challenges. But the spokesperson added that “neither the investigation nor the resolution agreement directs, supervises or controls curriculum.”

Democrats recently criticized the GOP-led , which they say will lead to more book bans. Republicans intend the measure to increase transparency into curriculum and reading materials.

The department’s resolution comes as Republicans continue to push restrictions on students’ access to library materials. The Louisiana Senate last week passed a bill that would allow parents to block their children from checking out books they considered inappropriate. And under that takes effect Aug. 1, librarians and educators in Arkansas could face criminal charges if they distribute texts labeled “obscene.”

Last week in Florida, nonprofit PEN America, publisher Random House, five authors whose books have been removed and two parents for withdrawing controversial books even when experts in the district advised against it. 

The district is “depriving students of access to a wide range of viewpoints, and depriving the authors … of the opportunity to engage with readers and disseminate their ideas to their intended audiences,” according to the complaint. 

Beyond its investigation into the 54,000-student Forsyth district, the department began looking into the Granbury Independent School District in Texas last December. The American Civil Liberties Union calling the district’s removal of books with LGBTQ themes sex discrimination under Title IX. That investigation is ongoing.

In Forsyth, parents complained about books that included John Green’s a story of a boy at an Alabama boarding school that has a sex scene, and a memoir about growing up gay and Black by journalist George Johnson, one of the plaintiffs in the Florida lawsuit. The books, which were not required reading for any class, are young adult titles considered suitable for teens 14 and up.

The district removed eight books. In early August last year, the district’s media committee decided to return seven of them after reviewers considered a series of questions such as whether the books had a “high degree of potential user appeal and interest” and “promoted diversity.” was the only one not returned to the shelves.

But leaders did not take “steps to address with students the impact of the book removals,” according to the department’s investigation. As part of the resolution, the district must survey middle and high school students next fall to ask about harassment based on race or sex and whether they feel comfortable reporting it. 

Forsyth spokeswoman Jennifer Caracciolo said the district would implement the resolution and was “committed to providing a safe, connected, and thriving community” for students and families.

One Forsyth County student said a book ban focusing on LGBTQ and non-white characters “contradicts the idea of democracy.”

“Despite the claims that these bans are not based [on] discrimination, they have a ripple effect,” said Isabella Rappaccioli, who will be a sophomore at Forsyth’s Alliance Academy for Innovation this fall. She’s also a member of the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition, which campaigned against restricting classroom discussions of divisive concepts. s.

“Challenges like these … vicariously send a message to our young people that they are different from their peers,” she said. “No child deserves to feel that way.”

But Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the libertarian Cato Institute, called the resolution “federal overreach.”

“The agency’s analysis seems to have come down to this: Some students reported feeling that the school climate was hostile to their group, therefore it was,” he said. “But issues like this are much more complicated, including whether others felt keeping the books in libraries was hostile to them.” 

The department’s investigation is not the first time the district became embroiled in controversy over a decision to remove books some parents find inappropriate. Under  in January with parents who complained about several books, the district must allow the reading of explicit excerpts at school board meetings.

Mama Bears, a conservative parents group that advocates for book restrictions, last year when the board refused to allow parents to recite passages with profanity or sexually explicit language during public comments. U.S. District Court Judge Richard Story sided with the parents. In a settlement, the district paid $107,500 in legal fees and agreed not to prohibit parents from quoting from any book in the district’s school libraries or classrooms. 

“It’s their First Amendment right to be able to give their opinions like anybody else,” said David Keating, president of the Institute for Free Speech, which defended the parents. 

The nonprofit didn’t take a position on whether the books removed were unsuitable for students, and he said he would defend liberal parents if they were silenced for arguing in favor of such books. But he added that if districts are removing books because of political pressure, “that raises First Amendment red flags all over the place.”

Legal precedent on the issue dates back to 1982. The U.S Supreme Court ruled in that the Island Trees Union Free School District in New York violated the Constitution when it removed books that some parents deemed to be “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and just plain filthy.”

‘True education’

In Granbury, Superintendent Jeremy Glenn’s comments — such as there being “no place” for books with transgender characters in school libraries and that “there are two genders” — sparked the district’s review of books. Ultimately two of the three titles removed contained LGBTQ topics, including “This Book is Gay,” a nonfiction for youth coming out as gay, lesbian or transgender.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas arguing that removing books with LGBTQ themes amounts to sex discrimination under Title IX.

Scales, the retired librarian, said schools discriminate against students when they remove such books.

“Books help readers develop empathy,” she said. “Let’s give them the books and hope that this younger generation will see things differently than the folks who are trying to shut down true education.”

Department civil rights officials eschewed either blanket inclusion of trans students in teams consistent with their gender identity or banning such policies altogether.

In a sign of the controversy the issue has generated, the department received over by Monday’s deadline. But if those remarks are any indication, a hoped-for compromise could remain elusive.

“No young person should ever be excluded just because of who they are — especially students who just want to play sports,” wrote Tim Turbiak, a board member for the Ballston Spa Central School District, north of Albany, New York. 

North Carolina state Superintendent Catherine Truitt, meanwhile, said the proposal undermines Title IX’s intent.

“Under no circumstance can we assume that Congress, when crafting this important law 40 years ago, fathomed a biological male playing competitive sports in an all-female league or competition at any level,” she wrote.

Such views are among the many the department must reconcile before issuing a final rule. The existing draft largely puts interpretation of the policy in the hands of individual districts. But several experts said it lacks clarity on several key issues and leaves school systems in a legal no man’s land if they’re in one of with a categorical ban on trans students in sports. 

In a state with a ban, “What does [the Education Department] expect the recipient to do?” the Association of Title IX Administrators, a national membership group, asked in an 11-page comment. 

Nineteen states have already in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit opposing the Biden administration’s interpretation of Title IX. A involving a transgender West Virginia middle schooler who runs track is before the 4th Circuit.

In general, the draft rule would allow elementary-age students to play sports consistent with their gender identity and likely continue in middle school. In high school, however, districts could make a case for excluding trans athletes if they can show how that decision achieves an “important educational objective.”

District leaders will need clearer guidance than the department has provided so far to write those policies, according to the Title IX association’s .

In general, the organization wants a plainly written rule allowing students to participate in athletics consistent with their gender identity. At this point, the draft addresses a “phantom fear” that trans female athletes would dominate competitive sports, wrote board Chair Brett Sokolow and President Daniel Swinton.

If the department fails to heed that advice, the association urged officials to provide examples of restrictions that would and would not comply and offer clarity on specific scenarios that are likely to arise if the draft becomes official policy. 

For example, if a trans student makes a team, but is “benched” and never gets to play, would that qualify as discrimination on the basis of gender identity? They want the department to clarify exactly what rights Title IX protects. 

“Is it the right to be on a team, the right to compete, the right to have the opportunity to win or play, etc.?” they asked.

‘Case-by-case basis’

With the issue likely to end up before the U.S. Supreme Court, Max Eden, a research fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who opposes the change, said the political debate currently favors those who oppose any restrictions on trans students in sports.

Democrats, he said, “will publicly argue that Republicans are going to the Supreme Court to defend sex segregation in mostly non-existent elementary school sports.”

He argues that the administration’s attempt to bridge the divide over the issue has failed.

“It appears to concede everything, because high schools can adopt policies that predicate competitive sports participation on biological sex,” he said. “But actually, it concedes nothing, because [the Office for Civil Rights] reserves the right to insist that those policies change on a practically arbitrary and case-by-case basis.” 

When Sandra Hodgin, founder and CEO of the Title IX Consulting Group, first read the draft, her initial thought was, “Oh boy, the conservative side is going to have a heart attack.” She said she’s heard some district leaders in more conservative parts of California, where she’s based, discuss rejecting federal funds rather than comply.

Progressive districts, she said, seem more willing to balance inclusion with respecting the concerns of conservative parents. 

“They don’t want to make it seem like they are just jumping on the Biden bandwagon,” she said.

Co-ed teams

While debate over the issue focuses mostly on trans girls, an incident last fall in Florida demonstrates some of the confusion over the issue. The Duval County Public Schools to play on the boy’s soccer team, citing the state’s ban on trans girls playing on a girls team. But the district later reversed its decision and apologized. 

Six states — Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, New Mexico and Texas — require students to compete on teams consistent with the sex listed on their birth certificate, according to the advocacy group . Several more require documentation that a student’s gender has changed before they can play on a team where they feel most comfortable.

Rules for middle school students, who often enter puberty during those years, should be more explicit, the Title IX association said, since only about a third of state athletic associations have policies governing middle and junior high school sports.

“Given the changes the body undergoes during puberty, educational objectives like injury avoidance or fairness may increase in significance after puberty,” they wrote.

Finally, the association wants the department to explain vague terms such as “minimize harms to students” and clarify whether districts would have to organize or pay for alternative opportunities for trans students to play. 

Districts stuck in limbo between the federal government and state law should consider adding a co-ed team, Hodgin recommended. 

“I’ve been saying this for well over a year. It costs money, time and attention. Who is going to coach it? And who are they playing against?” she asked. “But if we’re really looking at equity and ensuring there’s no discrimination, that would be my suggestion.”

Advocates for LGBTQ students agreed that the draft rule should be more straightforward. While the introduction notes that across-the-board bans in sports would violate the law, Olivia Hunt, policy director at the National Center for Transgender Equality, wants that statement reflected throughout the text.

Any case where a trans student is excluded has “to address a well-founded concern and not be based on over-broad generalizations. The regulation should spell that out,” she said. “This is an issue where there is a lot of confusion among policymakers at the state and district level.”

While large districts may have legal teams prepared to advise board members and administrators as unexpected challenges arise, the final rule, she said, “needs to be something that can apply in large and small districts.”

On the morning of Aug. 21, 1939, five young Black men entered Alexandria’s only public library and sat down at tables to read books they had selected from the shelves. The head librarian, following the library’s “whites only” policy, called the city manager. He had the five men arrested. They were charged with disorderly conduct, even though they did nothing other than read quietly. The charges were not dismissed until 2019, long after the men had passed away.

The event was, in fact, an organized sit-in, the first of its kind in a public library. It is now the subject of a new book, Public in Name Only, written by former librarian Brenda Mitchell-Powell and published last fall by the University of Massachusetts Press. For decades, the story of these five men — one as young as 18 — was barely known. Most residents of Virginia, let alone the United States, have never heard of it. Today — as educational spaces like libraries are under attack, and as questions about race and education access become central to the debate over what kind of country the United States should be — the story of the Alexandria library sit-in needs to be heard.

Obviously, there are key differences between current injustices and the Jim Crow policies that denied students access to libraries and schools based on their skin color — policies the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional more than 50 years ago. Today, debates rage about what books can be stocked on library shelves or introduced to students in public school classrooms. This situation feels more subtle, not to mention complicated by issues such as at what age it is appropriate for a child to have access to certain materials.

But the story of these five young men in Alexandria in 1939 is a reminder of the unfairness and infringement of rights that come when one group of people dictates what other people are allowed to see, read, absorb and learn.

With the benefit of Mitchell-Powell’s scholarship, as well as decades of work by the Alexandria Black History Museum, the Alexandria Library and other researchers, new details about the sit-in are now coming to light. The story starts with a 26-year-old Black lawyer named Samuel Tucker, who grew up in Alexandria in the 1920s and early 1930s. At that time, if Black students in the city wanted to attend high school, they had to cross the state line to attend school in Washington, D.C. Tucker, educated at Howard University, passed the Virginia bar exam without even attending law school and was determined, along with his younger brother, Otto, to get a library card and check out books at the newly opened public library down the street from their house.

The Tuckers organized a peaceful sit-in to show how the whites-only policies of the day were restricting their rights — an early example of the way young people today are challenging systems that limit how and what they are allowed to learn. On that hot day in August, they executed their plan, resulting in Otto and four other young men being escorted out by two police officers and exposing the ugliness of the library’s policy. More than half a dozen newspapers covered the event.

The eventual outcome of this sit-in was, as Mitchell-Powell writes, “a partial victory and a defeat.” Delaying tactics by judges in the city, along with the distractions of the start of World War II just a few weeks later, ruined any chance of a clear ruling on the constitutional rights of these young men to use the public library. City officials, apparently wishing that the issue would just go away, rushed the construction of what was labeled the “colored library.” That library Mitchell-Powell calls “a civil rights loss.” It was a one-room building with one-fifth the number of books, very few of which related to the interests and lives of those in the city’s African American community, and which were in generally rough condition. It was not until 1962, 23 years later, that Alexandria’s library system was opened to all.

Similar instances of closed doors and exclusion were happening across the South, and less blatant versions dotted the North, according to Not Free, Not for All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow, a book recently published by University of Arizona professor Cheryl Knott. This denial of educational opportunity affected generations of residents, and as part of a constellation of other discriminatory acts, reduced Black residents’ chances for building knowledge and skills for themselves, as well as their children and grandchildren.

Today, some conservative groups are pushing libraries and schools to remove books related to race, gender and sexual orientation. Some libraries fear cuts in funding if they don’t capitulate. In this, we see the outlines of a contemporary version of denying certain people — those who look and think differently, those on the margins or those who cannot afford to buy books — access to knowledge and ideas. Naturally, institutions like libraries also need to respect parents’ rights and ensure that young children do not stumble onto inappropriate material designed for teens and adults; libraries and schools, and the professionals within them, know they have a responsibility to set restrictions and guardrails. But when one group following a particular viewpoint is setting the terms for an entire community, dictating who is allowed to read what and which reading materials should be available, we hear echoes from the days of more blatant racial and gender discrimination in the education system.

Today, the battle over who gets to make decisions about access to books and media persists. Just as Samuel Tucker and his friends protested for educational freedom in 1939, today’s youth are raising their voices for the right to read. Power struggles over how and whether teachers should address topics deemed divisive close off opportunities for learning when, instead, libraries and schools should be opening them up. Without learning lessons from the past, American society risks reverting to the days when whole populations of students and families were shut out. The story of the Alexandria library sit-in could not come at a better time.

Hundreds of Floridians, civil rights activists and religious leaders from across the state marched Wednesday from Tallahassee’s Bethel Missionary Baptist Church to the Florida Capitol building complex in protest of efforts to “whitewash” Black history by rejecting an Advanced Placement course in high school on African American studies.

The large crowd also included students and older folks and many Black activists and advocates — including civil rights leader Al Sharpton — who rallied against the DeSantis administration over what students can learn in school regarding Black history and other topics.

At the historic church, Ben Frazier, with the advocacy group Northside Coalition of Jacksonville, said that the DeSantis administration is attacking the rights to tell the truth about slavery, racism and white supremacy.

“Folks, the policies and the practices of this racist DeSantis regime, are in fact a vile and poisonous form of indoctrination. Simple and sweet: it’s political propaganda. I call it ‘hogwash,’” Frazier told the crowd gathered inside the church. The pews were nearly filled.

“By his efforts to whitewash American history, this governor is trying to turn back the sands of time,” Frazier added. He led the crowd in a chant: “Allow teachers to teach the truth.”

The crowd later left the church to start the march to the Florida Capitol building. There were signs and chants along the road, which led up to the Florida Senate side of the complex outside.

Metaphorically addressing Gov. DeSantis, Bishop Rudolph W. McKissack Jr., a senior pastor of the Bethel Church in Jacksonville, said that:

“We are not saying you don’t want Black history, but what we’re saying is we won’t let you have it your way. We will not let you tell our story from your perspective.

“We will not let you redact our history so that your children are comfortable. The reality is your children, and other generations can be comfortable now, because our ancestors were uncomfortable,” McKissack continued.

The rally gathered largely in response to an ongoing battle between the DeSantis administration and the century-old nonprofit College Board, which created a new AP African American studies course for high schoolers who can earn college credit.

The Florida Department of Education rejected the then-pilot course, according to a letter sent to the College Board in mid-January, causing a nationwide outcry and concerns that the move diminishes the importance of Black history and Black culture.

But the scope of the march and rally Wednesday spanned far beyond the AP African American studies course. The comments from faith leaders and Florida lawmakers touched on policies impacting the LGBTQ+ community, women, and immigrants.

The Rev. Al Sharpton spoke to the potential of Gov. Ron DeSantis running for president. Sharpton called DeSantis “baby Trump.”

“Black, Latino, women, LGBTQ — we beat Big Trump. We’ll beat Baby Trump,” he said.

“After Disney one day, after Blacks the next day — he’s like a baby,” Sharpton said. “Give him a pacifier and let some grown folks run the state of Florida.”

After his dig at DeSantis, Sharpton brought it back to teaching Black history to young Floridians.

“You ought to tell the whole story… Our children need to know the whole story. Not to know how bad you were, but how strong they are. We come from a people who fought from the back of a bus to the front of the White House. Tell the whole story,” Sharpton said.

He warned: “If we can’t protect education in Florida, it will jump to Alabama, it will jump to Texas — this is a national crime.”

Sen. Shevrin Jones, a Democrat who represents part of Miami-Dade County, said Wednesday, also spoke to teaching history centered around minority communities.

“Black history is American history. Queer history is American History. Black immigrant history is American history,” Jones said.

He added: “What we are dealing with here in this moment — the structure of a system that continues to perpetuate racism across this country, not just in the state of Florida,” Jones said at the Capitol. “The fight is never just about AP history. The fight is against this strong uprising of racism from people who are seeing the shifting of America.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on and .

“No one would touch what I touched because they thought someone that looked like me must have been, like, riddled with disease,” Adii said. One peer told her to change her skin color like pop superstar Michael Jackson did.

After that experience, she went through the rest of elementary and middle school “actively trying to rid myself of any association” with what she perceived as “Black stereotypes.” She studied hard and chose not to wear the Batik clothing she bought when visiting her father’s relatives in Indonesia. Being different weighed on her.

But when, as a high school junior, she first attended a club meeting for students of color to connect with each other, she felt an instant sense of relief. It was the only time in her life she had been in a room with no white people, she realized, other than with family. The group was created to allow Black, Hispanic, Asian and Indigenous students to share about their experiences navigating the over 90% white, 800-person school.

“It felt so validating to just be in a room where you don’t have to give this huge backstory or explain yourself,” Adii said. “It made me feel like all of these little experiences, it’s not just happening to me. All these people can relate.”

Gatherings like the one described by the high school senior — often called “affinity groups” — have long been a strategy that schools, universities and workplaces employ to support community members who are from minority identities. But recently, those programs have become the target of pushback from conservative parent organizations, part of a wider GOP effort to oppose equity measures in K-12 education.

In early January, Parents Defending Education, a national nonprofit formed in 2021 to counter what it sees as indoctrination in schools, filed three federal civil rights complaints alleging that school-based affinity groups for people of color unfairly discriminate against white students and educators. The approach serves to “segregate” youth by race, violating the Civil Rights Act and the equal protections clause of the 14th Amendment, the organization’s letters say.

“Public schools that maintain policies or programs that discriminate against students on the basis of race are unconstitutional, period,” spokesperson Erika Sanzi wrote to ���˶��� in an email. 

Those complaints come on the heels of the organization has filed since 2021 against districts in , , , , and over similar opportunities for students and educators of color. In the 2021-22 school year, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights received more complaints than ever before, . Some 2,900 of those alleged racial discrimination, but federal officials do not track how many claimed discrimination against white students.

Two of Parents Defending Education’s most recent complaints concern student groups in majority-white school districts — Ashland, Oregon and Shelburne, Vermont — and the third flags a staff group in Portland, Maine, where just over half of all students are youth of color compared to just 14% of all educators.

“Within such a homogenous workforce, affinity groups are one way to help people who may experience marginalization feel welcome and supported,” said Barrett Wilkinson, director of diversity, equity and inclusion for Portland Public Schools. The group for teachers of color has run since 2017 when it was founded by educators, he said, and “the district absolutely supports it and is proud of these kinds of efforts.”

Legal landscape

While affinity groups can be formed around any number of identities — religion, sexual orientation or political outlook, for example — school-based gatherings for students of a specific race or races may fall into murky legal water, scholars say.

According to Derek Black, education law professor at the University of South Carolina, there are two central considerations for determining the constitutionality of race-based affinity groups. First, does the program actually exclude certain students or educators based on race? And second, if so, does the race-conscious policy serve to remedy existing inequities?

Some affinity groups, while catered to students of certain races, do not actually exclude those of other identities. In Shelburne, Vermont, district spokesperson Bonnie Birdsall said all existing affinity groups, including the one for people of color and a sexuality and gender alliance, welcome “any student who would like to be involved.”

Others, however, are open only to students of certain races. Those programs are subject to “strict scrutiny,” said Black. A 2015 from the Obama administration’s Office for Civil Rights found an Illinois high school’s assembly for only Black students in the wake of was unconstitutional.

That precedent, when applied to the question around affinity groups, is “persuasive, but not exactly on point,” said Maryam Ahranjani, professor at the University of New Mexico’s School of Law. Affinity groups have a different structure and purpose than assemblies, she points out, and the Obama-era decision is “not binding law.”

When school-based programs are racially differentiated, their legality may depend on whether they serve to fix prior injustice, said Black, which can create “a legitimate, compelling interest” for their existence in the eyes of the law.

“The state can clearly engage in race-conscious actions … to remedy discrimination,” the law professor said.

Though the toll can be hard to quantify, researchers have that students of color in predominantly white schools typically face challenges such as a lack of curricular materials that reflect their racial identity and more strict disciplinary punishments than their white peers.

Thus, it matters whether racially differentiated affinity groups actually help address those problems, Black said. Over a dozen academic studies examine the gatherings, and most find wide-reaching benefits, including participants reporting , and .

The legal landscape could shift, however, should the U.S. Supreme Court, as is widely expected, this spring in higher education admissions — another race-based policy meant to address longstanding disparities. Such a ruling would “chip away” at the legal basis for race-conscious policies in schools, Ahranjani said.

The U.S. Department of Education said it could not comment on when the agency expects to issue a response to the Parents Defending Education complaints or what actions it may take.

When asked whether her organization would consider filing a lawsuit should it disagree with the agency’s response, Sanzi replied that “a number of options exist to remedy racial discrimination in public schools.”

‘Doesn’t hurt me one iota’

Jesse Tauriac is chief diversity officer and an associate professor of psychology at Lasell University. There, he leads several affinity groups on campus — including gatherings for first-generation students, student athletes, students of color and for conservative students at the predominantly liberal school.

The groups spur “more candid and frank” conversations, he said, and afterward, students “feel better equipped to engage and speak with people who have different perspectives.”

A student who participated in the group for conservatives on campus wrote an email to Tauriac after the experience: “As a conservative student who didn’t always believe that diversity and inclusion meant including my voice, you have proved me wrong.”

Whether affinity groups gather students of one political stripe or a shared racial identity, some familiar with the model say it confuses them why those who don’t share in those attributes or experiences would want to join.

Wilkinson, the director of equity for Portland schools, who is white, said it “wouldn’t occur” to him to want to participate in the district’s group for staff of color. “Why would I insert myself in that way?” he said.

Gail Burnett, an English as a second language teacher in Portland, penned an in the Portland Press Herald.

“As a white person, I don’t qualify for the [Black, Indigenous, people of color] Community Circle. I’m not offended by this any more than I would be offended if I found out that I couldn’t join a men’s support group or a group for staff members who are left-handed, or survivors of child abuse, or flute players. This is about them, not me. It doesn’t hurt me one iota,” she wrote.

However, Sanzi explained that her organization filed the complaints because “racial discrimination hurts everyone whether they are being included or excluded based on their skin color.”

Blake Jordan is a senior at Southern Oregon University and an active participant at his school’s Black Student Union. The college is in the same small city as the Ashland School District named in the legal complaint. His organization “focuses on Black experiences,” but is open to students of any race who want to learn about Black history, art and culture.

“I don’t think it’s the correct approach to make strong divisions along identities,” Jordan said. He acknowledged, however, that there’s a difference between higher education, where students generally have the maturity to center Black students’ voices in the club, and K-12, where white youth “might change the dynamic” by failing to fully listen to the experiences of their peers of color.

Adii, in Vermont, has tried to think about what it would mean for her high school’s affinity group to welcome white students. During the school day, she’s the only person of color in most of her classrooms. In those settings, she feels “a lot less apt to speak up around ideas of race, because I don’t really want to get met with pity from white people … and I also don’t want to feel invalidated,” she said.

The gathering for students of color, 40 minutes twice per week during a free period, is the only time she’s surrounded by people who directly relate to her experiences. Having white peers in the room could “undermine” the club’s purpose, she said.

“The conversations would just have to completely change and we’d have to kind of cater what we were doing based off white people — and that’s what I’ve been doing my whole life.”

A spokesperson for the company, which describes itself , cited a societal shift toward greater acceptance of LGBTQ youth — rather than criticism of its product — as the impetus for the change as part of a “continuous evaluation and updating process.”

The company, which uses artificial intelligence and human content moderators to sift through billions of student communications each year, has long defended its use of LGBTQ-specific keywords to identify students who might hurt themselves or others. In arguing the targeted monitoring is necessary to save lives, executives have pointed to the prevalence of bullying against LGBTQ youth and data indicating they’re than their straight and cisgender classmates. 

But in practice, Gaggle’s critics argued, the keywords put LGBTQ students at a heightened risk of scrutiny by school officials and, on some occasions, the police. Nearly a third of LGBTQ students said they or someone they know experienced nonconsensual disclosure of their sexual orientation or gender identity — often called outing — as a result of digital activity monitoring, according to released in August by the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology. The survey encompassed the impacts of multiple monitoring companies who contract with school districts, such as GoGuardian, Gaggle, Securly and Bark. 

Gaggle’s decision to remove several LGBTQ-specific keywords, including “queer” and “bisexual,” from its dictionary of words that trigger alerts was first reported in . It follows extensive reporting by ���˶��� into the company’s business practices and sometimes negative effects on students who are caught in its surveillance dragnet. 

Though Gaggle’s software is generally limited to monitoring school-issued accounts, including those by Google and Microsoft, the it can scan through photos on students’ personal cell phones if they plug them into district laptops.

The keyword shift comes at a particularly perilous moment, as Republican lawmakers in multiple states . Legislation has looked to curtail classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity, ban books and classroom curricula featuring LGBTQ themes and prohibit transgender students from receiving gender-affirming health care, participating in school athletics and using restroom facilities that match their gender identities. Such a hostile political climate and pandemic-era disruptions, a recent youth survey by The Trevor Project revealed, has contributed to an uptick in LGBTQ youth who have seriously considered suicide. 

The U.S. Education Department received 453 discrimination complaints involving students’ sexual orientation or gender identity last year, according to data provided to ���˶��� by its civil rights office. That’s a significant increase from previous years, including in 2021 when federal officials received 249 such complaints. The Trump administration took and complaints dwindled. In 2018, the Education Department received just 57 complaints related to sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination.

The increase in discrimination allegations involving sexual orientation or gender identity are part of , according to data obtained by The New York Times. The total number of complaints for 2021-22 grew to 19,000, a historic high and more than double the previous year. 

In September, ���˶��� revealed that Gaggle had donated $25,000 to The Trevor Project, the nonprofit that released the recent youth survey and whose advocacy is focused on suicide prevention among LGBTQ youth. The arrangement was framed on Gaggle’s website as a collaboration to “improve mental health outcomes for LGBTQ young people.” 

The revelation was met with swift backlash on social media, with multiple Trevor Project supporters threatening to halt future donations. Within hours, the group announced it had returned the donation, acknowledging concerns about Gaggle “having a role in negatively impacting LGBTQ students.” 

The Trevor Project didn’t respond to requests for comment on Gaggle’s decision to pull certain LGBTQ-specific keywords from its systems. 

In a statement to ���˶���, Gaggle spokesperson Paget Hetherington said the company regularly modifies the keywords its software uses to trigger a human review of students’ digital communications. Certain LGBTQ-specific words, she said, are no longer relevant to the 24-year-old company’s efforts to protect students from abuse and were purged late last year.

“At points in time in the not-too-distant past, those words were weaponized by bullies to harass and target members of the LGBTQ+ community, so as part of an effective methodology to combat that discriminatory harassment and violence, those words were once effective tools to help identify dangerous situations,” Hetherington said. “Thankfully, over the past two decades, our society evolved and began a period of widespread acceptance, especially among the K-12 student population that Gaggle serves. With that evolution and acceptance, it has become increasingly rare to see those words used in the negative, harassing context they once were; hence, our decision to take these off our word/phrases list.”

Hetherington said Gaggle will continue to monitor students’ use of the words “faggot,” “lesbo,” and others that are “commonly used as slurs.” A previous review by ���˶��� found that Gaggle regularly flagged students for harmless speech, like profanity in fictional articles submitted to a school’s literary magazine, and students’ private journals. 

Anti-LGBTQ activists have , and privacy advocates warn that in the era of “Don’t Say Gay” laws and abortion bans, information gleaned from Gaggle and similar services could be weaponized against students.

Gaggle executives have minimized privacy concerns and claim the tool saved more than 1,400 lives last school year. That statistic hasn’t been independently verified and there’s a dearth of research to suggest digital monitoring is an effective school-safety tool. A recent survey found a majority of parents and teachers believe the benefits of student monitoring outweigh privacy concerns. The Vice News documentary included the perspective of a high school student who was flagged by Gaggle for writing a paper titled “Essay on the Reasons Why I Want to Kill Myself but Can’t/Didn’t.” Adults wouldn’t have known she was struggling without Gaggle, she said. 

“I do think that it’s helpful in some ways,” the student said, “but I also kind of think that it’s — I wouldn’t say an invasion of privacy — but if obviously something gets flagged and a person who it wasn’t intended for reads through that, I think that’s kind of uncomfortable.” 

Student surveillance critic Evan Greer, director of the nonprofit digital rights group said the tweaks to Gaggle’s keyword dictionary are unlikely to have a significant effect on LGBTQ teens and blasted the company’s stated justification for the move as being “out of touch” with the state of anti-LGBTQ harassment in schools. Meanwhile, Greer said that LGBTQ youth frequently refer to each other using “reclaimed slurs,” reappropriating words that are generally considered derogatory and remain in Gaggle’s dictionary. 

“This is just like lipstick on a pig — no offense to pigs — but I don’t see how this actually in any meaningful way mitigates the potential for this software to nonconsensually out LGBTQ students to administrators,” Greer said. “I don’t see how it prevents the software from being used to invade the privacy of students in a wide range of other circumstances.”

Gaggle and its competitors — including , and — have faced similar scrutiny in Washington. In April, Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey argued in a report that the tools could be misused to discipline students and warned they could be used disproportionately against students of color and LGBTQ youth. 

In , Gaggle founder and CEO Jeff Patterson said the company cannot test the potential for bias in its system because the software flags student communications anonymously and the company has “no context or background on students,” including their race or sexual orientation. They also said their monitoring services are not meant to be used as a disciplinary tool. 

In the survey released last summer by the Center for Democracy and Technology, however, 78% of teachers reported that digital monitoring tools were used to discipline students. Black and Hispanic students reported being far more likely than white students to get into trouble because of online monitoring. 

In October, the White House cautioned school districts against the “continuous surveillance” of students if monitoring tools are likely to trample students’ rights. It also directed the Education Department to issue guidance to districts on the safe use of artificial intelligence. The guidance is expected to be released early this year.

As an increasing number of districts implement Gaggle for bullying prevention efforts, surveillance critic Greer said the company has failed to consider how adults can cause harm.

“There is now a very visible far-right movement attacking LGBTQ kids, and particularly trans kids and teenagers,” Greer said. “If anything, queer kids are more in the crosshairs today than they were a year ago or two years ago — and that’s why this surveillance is so dangerous.”

If you are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. For LGBTQ mental health support, contact The Trevor Project’s toll-free support line at 866-488-7386.

The Wisconsin Indian Education Association of  the state’s commitment to Native American education under Act 31 on Thursday, Aug. 18,  at the Menominee Casino Resort in Keshena, with Native peoples from all over Wisconsin attending.

Act 31 is a remarkable piece of legislation. The law requires that primary and secondary public schools instruct students in the history, culture and treaty rights of Wisconsin’s Native Americans. The legislation was an outgrowth of the protests and conflicts between white fishermen and Native American spearfishers in the late 1980s. White protesters Indians with racist shouts and signs at public boat landings in the late 1980s. But the animosity went much deeper than just fishing.

Legislators were convinced by both Indians and others that just enacting laws to protect treaty rights for Native Americans was not enough. Education was the key. So, in 1989, Act 31 was enacted and signed into law by then-Gov. Tommy Thompson.

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Act 31 struggles

The story of the law is well documented by J P Leary in his 2018 book, .  Leary is an associate professor at UW-Green Bay and was the American Indian studies consultant at Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) from 1990 to 2011.

The law had teeth, according to Leary. DPI would send out officials to inspect at least 10% of all school districts to examine curriculum and compliance with Act 31. The intent was to make contact with all school districts over the space of a few years.

But within three years, writes Leary, “The initial staffing allocation for two full-time education consultants, one education specialist, and one program assistant had dropped to one education consultant and a shared program assistant.” Gone were the inspection teams; gone were reviews of school curriculum.

Today the American Indian studies program at DPI is down to just one person:  . Leary gives high marks to O’Connor for the quality of material he makes available to schools and the workshops he conducts all over Wisconsin. But the number of school districts that are using the DPI materials or trying to meet the mandates is in question.

The National Indian Education Association (NIEA) is headquartered in Washington, DC, but its president is Jason Dropik, principal of Indian Community School in Franklin, just south of Milwaukee.

He is pessimistic that even half the school districts in Wisconsin are implementing Act 31. Just looking at the lack of books and materials on Native Americans in most Wisconsin schools is revealing, says Dropik.

Leary attributes most of the loss in Native American studies to the push for basic skills with No Child Left Behind under the Bush administration. But even before that, Leary points out that Wisconsin’s social studies test questions were more geared to reading comprehension than content base. No one was checking to see whether students were learning anything about Wisconsin tribes.

Growing up Indian in Milwaukee

Dropik reflects on his own experience growing up in Milwaukee. His roots go back to the Bad River tribe near Lake Superior but his family came to the city two generations ago looking for work and a better life.

He remembers his mother stressing to her son, “You have to try to blend in,” not to make too much of his Indian heritage. It was something his mother had to do when she attended school in Milwaukee. Dropik became more sensitive to these issues when he became a teacher and taught in Milwaukee Public Schools, mostly at Fritsche Middle School.

Dropik says that, even when teachers try to instruct students on Native American curriculum, they make a lot of mistakes. Sometimes they put the only Indian student on the spot asking that student to become the “expert” on all Native American  issues, far beyond their knowledge and understanding.

Dropik says it is a myth that there are few Indian students in urban school settings. While Milwaukee lists less than a half percent of students as Native American, other studies show these students are “severely underreported.”

Leary says that the underreporting is often related to a lack of self-reporting. School may come from more blended families with one parent identifying as Indian and another parent Latino. They might get counted as Hispanic rather than Indian. Dropik believes that there may be several more times Native American students than the official count. About 45% of Wisconsin Native Americans live in metropolitan areas.

Minorities under attack

Black students have been forced to cut dreadlocks or remove hair beads in order to participate in athletic events. Native American students have faced similar discrimination targeting boys with braided hair. In 2021, the WIEA passed a resolution in support of protecting expressions of cultural identity such as the wearing of braids or eagle feathers on graduation caps.

Leary gives credit to Tony Evers, then state school superintendent, for instructing school districts to allow such cultural expressions. But Native American students are still bullied by other students especially in schools where little is being taught about Native American identity.

Many school districts are telling teachers not to dwell on the history of slavery, not to teach critical race theory. Similar mandates are being given regarding forced removal from tribal lands and even acts of genocide against Native American villages.

Again in 2021, the NIEA resolved to reject “any legislation or actions that limit the teaching of full and accurate history of the United States, especially as it relates to American Indians, Alaskan Natives and Native Hawaiians.” The resolutions states that the NIEA “will take immediate action with state, federal, and Native leaders to ensure educators are able to teach a full and accurate history of the United States, particularly as it relates to American Indians, Alaskan Natives, and Native Hawaiians, without threat or punishment.”

In theory, no Wisconsin school board can unilaterally tell a teacher to stop teaching Native American studies because of existing state laws, but that might not stop some districts from trying.

Dropik is finishing up his superintendent license and has been having a dialogue with other prospective superintendents around the state. “School board meetings have become so political and trying to eliminate multiple perspectives even though it is protected in state statutes,” says Dropik.

Carrot or stick

Jim Pete, president of the Wisconsin Indian Education Association, isn’t sure that the Aug. 18 event should be called “Celebrating Act 31” instead of just an acknowledgment of the law’s 30-year anniversary. So much has been on hold for the last couple of years due to COVID, he says, “We are starting to get back into it.” He acknowledges that there has been  some backsliding over the years on enforcement.

Dropik understands the sentiment, but sees signs of hope as well. He points to students who leave his Community School after eighth grade and attend traditional public schools. Often, they face poor understanding of Native American issues. Their schools may not recognize a view of history that doesn’t celebrate Christopher  Columbus as a hero for “discovering’ America. Those former students sometimes come back to Indian Community School and ask for help.

Dropik says often the NIEA has reached out to local public schools, and more often than not, those schools are receptive to the group’s suggestions. “More willing than they were 20 years ago.”

Leary says he didn’t want his book on Act 31 to be all doom and gloom. “I wanted to show it as a victory story. So many folks who were even on the front lines in enacting that policy have become so disillusioned with the implementation. And I wanted to go back to the story of their efforts — the most specific curriculum requirement the state of Wisconsin ever adopted.”

Even though he believes that less than half of Wisconsin school districts are meeting the mandates of the law, he also believes that many more would be willing to do what needs to be done if they were just given the resources to do the job. “In schools we are struggling to deliver instructions of any sorts” during the pandemic. “My approach has always been around capacity-building.”

In 2020, the Wisconsin Association of School Boards (WASB) a resolution calling for the removal of all Indian mascots from schools. The resolution went down by a wide margin.

School districts with Indian mascots were vocal in stating that other school boards should not be telling them what to do. “Local control” was their battle cry. Leary has heard it all before. “Local control” is only one step away from Southern states invoking “states’ rights” in order to maintain racial segregation.

A year later, WASB members supporting Native American rights took a .

They pushed for and adopted a calling for additional funding to increase student competency under the mandates of Act 31 (3.205). These are the kinds of actions more likely to get results along the lines Leary is suggesting.

In April, the Madison School District held a with the Ho-Chunk Nation acknowledging that its schools sit on land originally inhabited by the Ho-Chunk people. “Government-sanctioned institutions have been responsible for much of the trauma to First Nations families, and that is why MMSD is proud to lead this effort towards healing the wounds of the past, beginning today,” said former state schools superintendent Carolyn Stanford Taylor, who now works for MMSD.

At the beginning of each full meeting of the Milwaukee school board, the following statement is read: “We acknowledge that Milwaukee lies on traditional Menominee, Potawatomi, and Ho-Chunk homeland along the southwest shores of Lake Michigan, part of North America’s largest system of freshwater lakes. On this site, the Milwaukee, Menominee, and Kinnickinnic rivers meet, and the people of Wisconsin’s Menominee, Ojibwe, Ho-Chunk, Oneida, and Mohican sovereign nations remain present to this day.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Ruth Conniff for questions: info@wisconsinexaminer.com. Follow Wisconsin Examiner on and .

Thomas and their peers watched videos during high school gym class that stressed the importance of abstinence — and the horrors that can come from sex before marriage. But for Thomas, who is bisexual and nonbinary, the lessons didn’t explain who they were as a person. 

“It was very confusing trying to navigate understanding who I am and my identity,” said Thomas, now a student at Arizona State University. It was on the internet that Thomas learned about a whole community of young people with similar experiences. Blog posts on Tumblr helped them make sense of their place in the world and what it meant to be bisexual. “I was able to find the words to understand who I am — words that I wouldn’t be able to piece together in a sentence if the internet wasn’t there.” 

But now, as states adopt anti-LGBTQ laws and abortion bans, the digital footprint that Thomas and other students leave may come back to harm them, privacy and civil rights advocates warn, and it could be their school-issued devices that end up exposing them to that legal peril.

For years, schools across the U.S. have used digital surveillance tools that collect a trove of information about youth sexuality — intimate details that are gleaned from students’ conversations with friends, diary entries and search histories. Meanwhile, student information collected by student surveillance companies are regularly shared with police, according to a recent survey conducted by the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology. These two realities are concerning to Elizabeth Laird, the center’s director of equity in civic technology. Following the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade in June, she said information about youth sexuality could be weaponized. 

 “Right now — without doing anything — schools may be getting alerts about students” who are searching the internet for resources related to reproductive health,” Laird said. “If you are in a state that has a law that criminalizes abortion, right now this tool could be used to enforce those laws.”

Teens across the country are already to fill the void for themselves and their peers in the current climate. Thomas, the ASU student and an outspoken reproductive justice activist, said that while students are generally aware that school devices and accounts are monitored, the repeal of Roe has led some to take extra privacy precautions. 

“I have switched to using Signal to talk to friends and colleagues in this space,” they said, referring to the . “The fear, even though it’s been common knowledge for basically my generation’s entire life that everything you do is being surveilled, it definitely has been amplified tenfold.”

Police have long used social media and other online platforms to investigate people for breaking abortion rules, including where police obtained a teen’s private Facebook messages through a search warrant before charging the then-17-year-old and her mother with violating the state’s ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. 

LGBTQ students face similar risks as lawmakers in Florida and elsewhere impose rules that prohibit classroom discussions about sexuality and gender. This year alone, lawmakers have proposed 300 anti-LGBTQ bills and about a dozen have . They so-called “Don’t Say Gay” laws in Florida and Alabama that ban classroom discussions about gender and sexuality and require school officials to tell the parents of children who share that they may be gay or transgender. 

In a survey, a fifth of LGBTQ students told the Center for Democracy and Technology that they or another student they knew had their sexual orientation or gender identity disclosed without their consent due to online student monitoring. They were more likely than straight and cisgender students to report getting into trouble for their web browsing activity and to be contacted by the police about having committed a crime. 

LGBTQ youth are nearly twice as likely as their straight and cisgender classmates to search for health information online, according to . But as anti-LGBTQ laws proliferate, student surveillance tools should reconsider collecting data about youth sexuality, Christopher Wood, the group’s co-founder and executive director, told ���˶���. 

“Right now, we are not in a landscape or an environment where that is safe for a company to be doing,” Wood said. “If there is a remote possibility that the information that they are trying to provide to help a student could potentially lead them into more harm, then they need to be looking at that very carefully and considering whether that is the appropriate direction for a company to be taking.”

‘Extraordinarily concerned’

For decades, has required school technology to block access to images that are obscene, child pornography or deemed “harmful to minors,” and schools have used web-filtering software to prevent students from accessing sexually explicit content. But in some cases, the filtering to block pro-LGBTQ websites that aren’t explicit, including those that offer crisis counseling.  

Many student monitoring tools, which saw significant growth during the pandemic, go far beyond web filtering and employ artificial intelligence to track students across the web to identify issues like depression and violent impulses. The tools can sift through students’ social media posts, follow their digital movements in real time and scan files on school-issued laptops — from classroom assignments to journal entries — in search of warning signs. 

They’ve also come under heightened scrutiny. In a report this year, Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey warned that schools’ widespread adoption of the tools could trample students’ civil rights. By flagging words related to sexual orientation, the report notes, LGBTQ youth could be subjected to disproportionate disciplinary rates and be unintentionally outed to their parents. 

In in July, Warren and Markey cautioned that the tools could pose new risks following the repeal of Roe and asked four leading student surveillance companies — GoGuardian, Gaggle, Securly and Bark — whether they flag students for using keywords related to reproductive health, such as “pregnant” and “abortion.”

“We are extraordinarily concerned that your software could result in punishment or criminalization of students seeking contraception, abortion or other reproductive health care,” Markey and Warren wrote. “With reproductive rights under attack nationwide, it would represent a betrayal of your company’s mission to support students if you fail to provide appropriate protections for students’ privacy related to reproductive health information.”

The scrutiny is part of a larger concern over digital privacy in the post-Roe world. In August, the Federal Trade Commission and accused the company of selling the location data from hundreds of millions of cell phones that could be used to track peoples’ movements. Such precise location data, the , “may be used to track consumers to sensitive locations, including places of religious worship, places that may be used to infer an LGBTQ+ identification, domestic abuse shelters, medical facilities and welfare and homeless shelters.” 

School surveillance companies have acknowledged their tools track student references to sex but sought to downplay the risks they pose to students. Bark spokesperson Adina Kalish said the company began to immediately purge all data related to reproductive health after a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion suggested Roe’s repeal was imminent – despite maintaining a 30-day retention period for most other data. 

“By immediately and permanently deleting data which contains a student’s reproductive health data or searches for reproductive health information, such data is not in our possession and therefore not produce-able under a court order, subpoena, etc.,” Bark CEO Brian Bason , which the company shared with ���˶���. 

GoGuardian spokesperson Jeff Gordon said its tools “cannot be used by educators or schools to flag reproductive health-related search terms” and its web filter cannot “flag reproductive health-related searches.” Securly didn’t respond to requests for comment. Last year its web-filtering tool categorized health resources for LGBTQ teens as pornography. 

Gaggle founder and CEO Jeff Patterson to the senators that his company does not “collect health data of any kind including reproductive health information,” specifying that the monitoring tool does not flag students who use the terms “pregnant, abortion, birth control, contraception or Planned Parenthood. ” 

Yet tracking conversations about sex is a primary part of Gaggle’s business — more than references to suicide, violence or drug use, according to nearly 1,300 incident reports generated by the company for Minneapolis Public Schools during a six-month period in 2020. The reports, obtained by ���˶���, showed that 38% were prompted by content that was pornographic or sexual in nature, including references to “sexual activity involving a student.” Students were regularly flagged for using keywords like “virginity,” “rape,” and, simply, “sex.” 

Patterson, the Gaggle CEO, has acknowledged that a student’s private diary entry about being raped wasn’t off limits. In touting the tool’s capabilities, he told ���˶��� his company uncovered the girl’s diary entry, where she discussed how the assault led to self-esteem issues and guilt. Nobody knew she was struggling until Gaggle notified school officials about what they’d learned from her diary, Patterson said. 

“They were able to intervene and get this girl help for things that she couldn’t have dealt with on her own,” Patterson said.

Any information that surveillance companies collect about students’ sexual behaviors could be used against them by police during investigations, privacy experts warned. And it’s unclear, Laird said, how long the police can retain any data gleaned from the tools. 

‘Don’t Say Gay’

Internet search engines are “particularly potent” tools to track the behaviors of pregnant people, by the nonprofit Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. In 2017, for example, a with second-degree murder of her stillborn fetus after police scoured her browser history and identified a search for an abortion pill. 

While GoGuardian and other companies offer web filtering to schools, Gaggle has sought to differentiate itself. In his letter to the senators, Patterson said the company — which sifts through files and chat messages on students’ school-issued Microsoft and Google accounts — is not a web filter and therefore “does not track students’ online searches.” Yet Patterson’s assurance to lawmakers appears misleading. The company acknowledges on its website that it partners with several web-filtering companies, including Linewize, to analyze students’ online searches. By working in tandem, flags triggered by Linewize’s web filtering “can be sent straight to the Gaggle Safety Team,” if the material “should be forwarded to the school or district.” 

In an email, Gaggle spokesperson Paget Hetherington said that in “a very small number of school systems,” the company reviews alerts from web filters before they’re sent to school officials to “alleviate the large number of false positives” and ensure that “only the most critical and imminent issues are being seen by the district.” 

Gaggle has also faced scrutiny for including LGBTQ-specific keywords in its algorithm, including “gay” and “lesbian.” Patterson said the heightened surveillance of LGBTQ youth is necessary because they face a disproportionately high suicide rate, and Hetherington shared examples where the keywords were used to spot cyberbullying incidents. 

But critics have accused the company of discrimination. Wood of the nonprofit LGBT Tech said that anti-LGBT activists have used surveillance to target their opponents for generations. Prior to the seminal 1969 riots after New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn gay bar, LGBTQ spaces and made arrests for “inferring sexual perversion” and “serving gay people.” From the colonial era and into the 19th century, anti-sodomy laws carried the death penalty and police used the rules to investigate and incarcerate people suspected of same-sex intimate behaviors. 

Now, in the era of “Don’t Say Gay” laws, digital surveillance tools could be used to out LGBTQ students and put them in danger, Wood said. Student surveillance companies can claim their decision to include LGBTQ terminology is designed to help students, but historically such data have “been used against us in very detrimental ways.” 

Companies, he said, are unable to control how officials use that information in an era “where teachers and administrators and other students are encouraged to out other students or blame them or somehow get them in trouble for their identity.” In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott calling on child protective services to investigate as child abuse any parents who provide gender-affirming health care to their transgender children. 

“They can’t control what’s going to happen in Florida or Texas and they can’t control what’s going to happen in an individual home,” where students could be subjected to abuse, Wood said. “Any person in their right mind would be horrified to learn that it was their technology that ended up harming a youth or driving a youth to the point of feeling so isolated that they felt the only way out was suicide.” 

When private thoughts become public

Susan, a 14-year-old from Cincinnati, knows firsthand how surveillance companies can target students for discussing their sexuality. In middle school, she was assigned to write a “time capsule” letter to her future self. 

Until Susan retrieved the letter after high school graduation, her teacher said that no one — not even him — would read it. So Susan, who is now a freshman and asked to remain anonymous, used the private space to question her gender identity. 

But her teacher’s assurance wasn’t quite true, she learned. Someone had been reading the letter — and would soon hold it against her. 

In an automated May 2021 email, Gaggle notified her that the letter to her future self was “identified as inappropriate” and urged her to “refrain from storing or sharing inappropriate content.” In a “second warning,” sent to her inbox, she was told a school administrator was given “access to this violation.” After a third alert, she said, access to her school email account was restricted. She said the experience left her with “a sense of betrayal from my school.” She said she had no idea words like “gay” or “sex” could get flagged by Gaggle’s algorithm.

“It’s frustrating to know that this program finds the need to have these as keywords, and quite depressing,” she said. “There’s always going to be oppression against the community somewhere, it seems, and it’s quite disheartening.” 

School administrators reviewed the time capsule letter and determined it didn’t contain anything inappropriate, her mother Margaret said. While Susan lives in an LGBTQ-affirming household, Thomas, who grew up in Mississippi, warned that’s not the case for everyone.

“That’s not just the surveillance of your activities, that’s the surveillance of your thoughts,” Thomas said of Susan’s experience. “I know that wouldn’t have gone very well for me and I know for a lot of young people that would place them in a lot of danger.”

Such harms could be exacerbated, Margaret said, if authorities use student data to enforce Ohio’s strict abortion ban, which has already become the subject of national debate after a 10-year-old girl traveled to Indiana for an abortion. A 27-year-old man and accused of raping the child. 

Cincinnati Public Schools spokesman Mark Sherwood said in an email that “law enforcement is immediately contacted” if the district receives an alert from Gaggle suggesting that a student poses “an imminent threat of harm to self or others.” 

Given the state of abortion rules in Ohio, Susan said she’s concerned that student conversations and classroom assignments that discuss gender and sexuality could wind up in the hands of the police. She lost faith in school-issued technology after her assignment got flagged by Gaggle. 

“I just flat out don’t trust adults in positions of power or authority,” Susan said. “You don’t really know for sure what their true motives are or what they could be doing with the tools they have at their disposal.”

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has joined a coalition of 16 attorneys general from across the country in filing an opposing Florida’s “Parental Rights in Education Act,” otherwise known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law.

Nessel, a Democrat who is Michigan’s first openly gay top statewide official, says that the law, which prevents classroom discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity, poses a serious threat to LGBTQ+ students who she says are particularly vulnerable to discrimination.

“This bill is an affront not just to educators, but also to LGBTQ+ students, especially those who may already be experiencing the stigmatizing effect of their identity at school,” Nessel said. “This bill is not motivated by the desire to limit inappropriate content in classrooms. It is meant to have a chilling effect on how educators do their jobs and may also violate the First Amendment rights of students and teachers alike. I gladly join my colleagues on this brief and hope it discourages other states, including Michigan, from considering similar legislation.”

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The law is being challenged in federal district court by a group of students, parents, teachers and organizations seeking to prevent its enforcement by alleging that it violates, among other things, the Equal Protection Clause and the First Amendment.

The law entirely bans “classroom instruction” on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through Grade 3 while also requiring the state education agency write new classroom instructions for standards that must be followed by grades four through 12.

Opponents say that because the law does not define many of its key terms, like “classroom instruction,” it is forcing Florida teachers to censor themselves out of fear of prosecution. That fear is further compounded by the fact that the law also allows a parent to bring a civil claim against a school district to enforce its prohibitions.

There are two main points in the brief.

“Florida’s law is extreme,” it states. “Although Florida claims the Act is intended to protect children and preserve parental choice, the attorneys general have curricula in place that allow for age-appropriate discussion of LGBTQ+ issues while respecting parental views on the topic.”

“The law is causing significant harms to students, parents, teachers, and other states,” claims the brief. “Non-inclusive educational environments have severe negative health impacts on LGBTQ+ students, resulting in increased rates of mental health disorders and suicide attempts. These harms extend to youth not just in Florida, but throughout the country.”

Nessel is joining the amicus brief alongside Attorneys General from New Jersey, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New York and Oregon.

This article originally appeared in , a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. 

In , 10 of the 16 judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled that Charter Day School in Leland, North Carolina — just like any other public school — was acting on behalf of the state when it adopted a dress code requiring girls to wear skirts, and, therefore, violated their constitutional rights. 

The school’s board in Peltier v. Charter Day School Inc., maintained that because it’s a nonprofit organization, it should have flexibility over its educational approach, which includes strict expectations on student behavior and appearance.

“Were we to adopt [Charter Day School’s] position, North Carolina could outsource its educational obligation to charter school operators, and later ignore blatant, unconstitutional discrimination committed by those schools,” wrote Judge Barbara Milano Keenan, an Obama appointee. “We need look no further than the shameful history of state-sponsored racial discrimination in this country to reject an application of the Equal Protection Clause that would allow North Carolina to abdicate its duty to treat public schoolchildren equally.”

The case is the first time a federal appeals court has considered whether charter school students deserve the same constitutional rights as their peers in traditional schools. The American Civil Liberties Union sued the school on behalf of three families who argued the skirt rule was discriminatory. But the school’s argument threw the status of charters into question. Charter advocates and authorizers argued that their existence as public schools was never a matter of debate, while some school choice supporters suggested they operate more like private schools and could even be run by religious organizations.

Derek Black, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, said the ruling should come as no surprise because states created charters to be part of the public education system. 

“The court held that the Constitution applies to schools that operate under the state’s name and with the public’s money,” he said. “Yet, this obvious point has escaped several other courts. Hopefully, this case will go a long way in setting an example for others.”

In a joint statement, Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools — which filed a brief in support of the plaintiffs — and Rhonda Dillingham, executive director of the North Carolina Association for Public Charter Schools, said the ruling gives charter schools clarity over their status and obligations to protect students’ civil rights.

“The North Carolina charter statute not only compels this outcome but the statute mirrors the substantive provisions in charter statutes around the country,” they said, adding that the “decision crosses state lines — inside and beyond the 4th Circuit.” 

Judge Keenan wrote that charter schools are not merely alternative models like private schools or homeschooling, and putting them in the same category “ignores both the ‘free, universal’ nature of this education and the statutory framework chosen by North Carolina in establishing this type of public school.”

But in the minority’s dissent, Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr., a Trump appointee, said the majority “breaks new ground” and ignores Supreme Court precedent. 

Quattlebaum’s earlier opinion — which the new ruling overturns — leaned on a 1982 case, , in which the Supreme Court ruled that a private school receiving state funds for educating “maladjusted” high school students was not acting under the “color of state law” when it fired a counselor and five teachers. 

The implications of Tuesday’s opinion go far beyond whether a charter school can require girls to wear skirts, he wrote in his dissent Tuesday.

“The majority significantly broadens the scope of what it means for the actions of a private party to be attributed to the state,” he wrote.

Aaron Streett, an attorney representing the nonprofit organization that founded the school and its board members, said the decision restricts parents’ ability to choose the kind of education they want for their children.

“[Charter Day School] will continue to provide an excellent education to its students,” he said, “even as it evaluates the next steps in challenging this mistaken and harmful ruling.”

Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey are calling on the Federal Communications Commission to clarify how schools should monitor students’ online activities, that educators’ widespread use of digital surveillance tools could trample students’ civil rights.

They also want the U.S. Education Department to start collecting data on the tools that could highlight whether they have disproportionate — and potentially harmful — effects on certain student groups. 

In October, the senators asked four education technology companies that keep tabs on the online activity of millions of students across the country — often 24 hours a day, seven days a week — to provide information on how they use artificial intelligence to glean their information. 

Based on their responses, the senators said:

• The companies’ software may be misused to identify students who are violating school disciplinary rules. They cited a recent survey where 43% of teachers reported their schools employ the monitoring systems for this purpose, potentially increasing contact between police and students and worsening the school-to-prison pipeline.

• The companies have not attempted to determine whether their products disproportionately target students of color, who already face harsher and more frequent school discipline, or other vulnerable groups, like LGBTQ youth.

• Schools, parents and communities are not being appropriately informed of the use — and potential misuse — of the data. Three of the four companies indicated they do not directly alert students and guardians of their surveillance.

Warren and Markey concluded a dire “need for federal action to protect students’ civil rights, safety and privacy.”

“While the intent of these products, many of which monitor students’ online activity around the clock, may be to protect student safety, they raise significant privacy and equity concerns,” the lawmakers wrote. “Studies have highlighted unintended but harmful consequences of student activity monitoring software that fall disproportionately on vulnerable populations.”

An FCC spokesperson said they’re reviewing the and an Education Department spokesperson said they “look forward to corresponding with the senators” about its findings.

Lawmakers’ inquiry into the business practices of school security companies Gaggle, GoGuardian, Securly and Bark Technologies is the first congressional investigation into student surveillance tools, whose use grew dramatically during the pandemic when  learning shifted online.

It follows on the heels of investigative reporting by ���˶��� into Gaggle, which uses artificial intelligence and a team of human content moderators to track the online behaviors of more than 5 million students. ���˶��� used public records to expose how Gaggle’s algorithm and its hourly-wage workers sift through billions of student communications each year in search of references to violence and self harm, subjecting youth to constant digital surveillance with steep implications for their privacy. Gaggle, whose tools track students on their school-issued Google and Microsoft accounts, reported a during the pandemic.

Bark didn’t respond to requests for comment. Securly spokesman Josh Mukai said in a statement that the company is reviewing the senators’ March 30 report and looks forward “to continuing our dialogue with Senators Warren and Markey on the important topics they have raised.”

“Parents expect that schools will keep children safe while in the classroom, on a field trip or while riding on a bus,” GoGuardian spokesman Jeff Gordon said in a statement. “Schools also have a responsibility to keep students safe in digital spaces and on school-issued devices.” 

Gaggle Founder and CEO Jeff Patterson submitted a statement after this article was published. He said the company is reviewing the lawmakers’ recommendations “to assess how we can further strengthen our work to better protect students.”

“We want to ensure our technology is effectively supporting student safety without creating unintended risks or harms,” Patterson continued. “We have taken steps over the years to ensure effective privacy protections and mitigate bias in our platform, but welcome continued dialogue that will help make sure tools like Gaggle can continue to be used to support students and educators.”

Bark Technologies CEO Brian Bason wrote in a letter to  lawmakers that AI-driven technology could be used to solve the country’s “terrible history of bias in school discipline” by removing the decisions of individual teachers and administrators.

“While any system, including AI-based solutions, inherently have some bias, if implemented correctly AI-based solutions can substantially reduce the bias that students face,” Bason wrote.

As to the question of whether their surveillance exacerbates the school-to-prison pipeline,  the companies’ letters acknowledge in certain cases they contact police to conduct welfare checks on students. Securly noted in its letter that in some instances, education leaders “prefer that we contact public safety agencies directly in lieu of a district contact.”

Under the Clinton-era , passed in 2000, public schools and libraries are required to filter and monitor students’ internet use to ensure they don’t access material “harmful to minors,” such as pornography. Districts have cited the law to justify the adoption of AI-driven surveillance tools that have proliferated in recent years. Student privacy advocates argue the tools go far beyond the federal mandate and have called on the FCC to clarify the law’s scope. Meanwhile, advocates have questioned whether schools’ use of digital surveillance tools to monitor students at home violates Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

In a recent survey by the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, 81 percent of teachers said they used software to track students’ computer activity, including to block obscene material or monitor their screens in real time. A majority of parents said they worried about student data getting shared with the police and more than half of students said they decline to share their “true thoughts or ideas because I know what I do online is being monitored.”  

Elizabeth Laird, the group’s director of equity in civic technology, said it has been calling on student surveillance companies to be more transparent about their business practices but it’s “disappointing that it took a letter from Congress to get this information.” She said she hopes the FCC and Education Department adopt lawmakers’ recommendations.

“None of these companies have researched whether their products are biased against certain groups of students,” she said in an email while questioning their justification for holding off on such an inquiry. “They cite privacy as the reason for not doing so while simultaneously monitoring students’ messages, documents and sites visited 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” 

���˶���’s investigation, which used data on Gaggle’s foothold in Minneapolis Public Schools, failed to identify whether the tool’s algorithm disproportionately targeted Black students, who are more often subjected to student discipline than their white classmates. However, it highlighted instances in which keywords like “gay” and “lesbian” were flagged, potentially subjecting LGBTQ youth to heightened surveillance for discussing their sexual orientation. 

Amelia Vance, an attorney and student privacy expert, said she was intrigued that the companies pushed back on the idea that their tools are used to discipline students since the federal monitoring requirement was meant to keep kids from consuming inappropriate content online and likely face consequences for viewing violent or sexually explicit materials. She agreed the companies should research their algorithms for potential biases and would benefit from additional transparency. 

However, Vance said in an email that FCC clarification “would do little at best and may provide counterproductive guidance at worst.” Many schools, she said, are likely to use the tools regardless of the federal rules. 

“Schools aren’t required to monitor social media, and many have chosen to do so anyway,” said Vance, the co-founder and president of Public Interest Privacy Consulting. Some school safety advocates are actively lobbying lawmakers to expand student monitoring requirements, she said. 

Asking the FCC to issue guidance “could actually be counterproductive to the goal of limiting monitoring and ensuring more privacy protections for students since it is possible that the FCC could require a higher level of monitoring.”

Read the letters from Gaggle, GoGuardian, Securly and Bark Technologies: 

Scan the constitutions of most states, and you won’t find any clause guaranteeing every child the right to a quality public education. They promise a free public education, but not a great one. 

It is no wonder states across the nation have failed to deliver a quality public education for so many students, particularly children of color and those who are economically disadvantaged. Even before the pandemic, just 35 percent of American fourth graders were reading at grade level, along with only 22 percent of Latino and 15 percent of African-American eighth graders, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

These outcomes are not inevitable. They are the result, in many cases, of policies formulated by a system that was never designed and is not incentivized to put the needs of all students first. Convinced that a quality public education — not just a free one — should be a civil right for all American children, President Obama and I advocated for parent empowerment and a student-centered agenda with better educational opportunities for millions of young people across the nation.

But so much more work must be done to meet this moment for the children and parents of America. At the state level, countless policies perpetuate educational injustice. In most states, these have so far been nearly impossible to change because kids can’t vote, parents don’t have lobbyists and the right to a quality public education is not enshrined in the constitution.

A growing movement of parents, educators and community leaders across multiple states have begun to advocate for change in their state constitutions. Last year, bills were introduced in the , and legislatures to enshrine a right to a quality education in their constitutions. These movements have continued to accelerate recently in to establish a long-overdue seat at the table for public school parents to advocate for the interests of all students. 

The Page Amendment campaign in Minnesota is leading this national movement. It is driven by a broad coalition that includes youth, parents, education and community leaders, businesses, sovereign tribal nations and, notably, Neel Kashkari, president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, and Alan Page, former Minnesota Supreme Court justice and iconic former Minnesota Viking. Their initiative would amend the state’s constitution to add: “All children have a fundamental right to a quality public education that fully prepares them with the skills necessary for participation in the economy, our democracy, and society.”      

The campaign has built a broad bipartisan legislative coalition, with the goal of a historic education civil rights public referendum this November.  

Throughout two decades of working to improve American public education, as superintendent of Chicago Public Schools then as Obama’s education secretary, I have learned that it takes bold action to transform struggling schools and entrenched bureaucracies. When politicians and special interests defend the status quo, it takes parent power to compel the public school system to meet the needs of students. 

Establishing a constitutional right to a quality public education would empower parents with the right to challenge policies that harm students and double down on longstanding injustices. Such a tool would be particularly valuable for communities of color, where the education bureaucracy has failed generations of children and ignored generations of parents. 

In the wake of pandemic-related school closures that denied in-person learning to millions of children for up to 18 months, parents in Virginia, San Francisco and elsewhere have voted against Democrats who were perceived to embrace the status quo at the expense of children. Especially in this unique moment, relegating parents to the sidelines and telling them to leave the education of their children to the so-called experts has proven to be a losing political strategy.

Politicians have talked about education as a civil right for generations, but too often only as a metaphor. Empowering parents to advocate for the interests of all students would make public education more public. It would reorient education policymaking around the student learning because all children deserve the opportunity to reach their full potential regardless of race, ethnicity, disability, geography or socioeconomic status. 

This is our moment. Now is the time for Minnesota to chart a path forward for the nation by translating “kids first” from a soundbite into a civil right for all public school students. 

 Arne Duncan is managing partner at the Emerson Collective, a former secretary of education and Chicago superintendent of schools, and author of “How Schools Work.”

Speaking to ���˶��� as the uprising was unfolding, Clay Roy said the day exposed the “very deep divisions” in America, but she also held onto a sense of optimism: “I am hopeful in this moment, that there is a peaceful conclusion to what’s happening now and that folks can begin to focus on how we are going to move forward and try to repair many of the breaches and rips that have occurred.”

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That hope infuses how Clay Roy talks about about civics education and in particular action civics — an approach that guides students to find a problem in their community and work together to solve it — which Generation Citizen helps bring to life in classrooms around the U.S.

More recently, critics have action civics for encouraging students to be activists and for promoting partisan causes. But, Clay Roy said, Generation Citizen is “issue neutral” and teachers using the program let students choose issues that matter to them.

Clay Roy said the controversy is an opportunity to explain Generation Citizen’s mission and talk about its success. , for example, showed students in Generation Citizen classrooms were more likely to say they participate in their other classes.

���˶��� talked to Clay Roy earlier this year about her own journey with civic life and her dreams for Generation Citizen.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

���˶���: I noticed in that when you were a kid you campaigned door to door for local politicians in Boston and led the youth coverage of the 2000 presidential election for a PBS show. How did you first get interested in civics and politics? 

Clay Roy: I grew up in a house where politics were talked about all the time. As an only child of two educators, I often say this because it is very true: I went from my preschool years of having Sesame Street on the TV all the time to watching the Eyes on the Prize documentary on PBS on repeat. The was this powerful representation of the Civil Rights Era.

Even though I was growing up in the 1980s, that it was on so frequently in my house is a representation of the fact that my parents believed that the struggle for civil rights wasn’t over, but had changed. I grew up in a house where there was a lot of discussion about politics, equity, fairness, and the role that education can and should play in a fair society.

I remember in third grade, during the Bush-Dukakis election, I volunteered to do a classroom debate with a fellow student. I was really passionate about politics from a very, very early age.

It really developed outside of school. On weekends, I would get involved with voter registration campaigns, which you could volunteer for even if you were too young to vote, or go door to door for city council candidates. I had a chance to think through that — and by watching lots of C-SPAN and Meet the Press from an early age — really develop greater confidence in myself as a future citizen and civic actor.

Part of the reason I’m so passionate about the work that Generation Citizen does is because I think it is important that a young person’s civic identity is formed in lots of spaces. For some people that’s family, for some people that’s church or faith, and for others, it might come about from a youth organization they’re involved with. But school is such an important setting for young people to have that civic identity affirmed and grow.

It was really an incredibly caring high school teacher who encouraged me to be confident and to talk about what I cared about inside of school, even if that’s not what anyone else was talking about, even if teachers weren’t necessarily creating opportunities to talk about current affairs. That teacher knew about my interest because I was always bothering him about it, talking to him about it. He encouraged me to really develop that part of my identity, and that was really important and allowed me to go from being a pretty shy and quiet middle schooler to a really proactive vocal high schooler and college student. And so I deeply appreciate not only the foundation I was given by my parents in terms of my own civic development but, I really credit that teacher, Mr. Bryant, for helping me solidify that in the school setting.

Thinking back to you as a kid, was there anything in particular that stuck with you or really inspired you in the Eyes on the Prize documentary? 

What I really noticed was how young many of the protesters were. It was clear to me that this was different from what I read in history books, which seemed to focus on what older people were doing, what established leaders who held representative office were doing. These change makers who were putting their bodies on the line — and who ended up in many ways being founding mothers and fathers of our multiracial democracy — were really young. It was visible that they were teenagers or college students.

It was reinforced by my parents telling me about their own experience. They both were involved in civil rights efforts, and they talked about that. I was also inspired because so much of our civil rights story of the 20th century in this country has had both youth leadership and happened in and around schools.

I grew up in Boston, so the Boston busing riots were never far from our imagination. I started school after the riots had occurred, but it was all a reminder, and one that I carry with me when we talk about issues of racial equity and racial justice. Those aren’t somehow grown-up issues that should be shielded from children. Children are very much engaged and involved in those elements of our society, from as soon as they leave home, and we have a responsibility to create an environment that’s worthy of young people’s engagement, and we have to be conscious of their safety.

We also should not shield young people from conversation and opportunities to engage in changing their surrounding environment until they’re old enough to vote. There’s nothing magical about the age of 18 that says that that’s when you fully become a member of society. Just because we’ve determined that to be the voting age doesn’t mean that that’s the first age when you get to take civic action, or when the consequences of government will start to affect you. The consequences of government start to affect young people far sooner.

I think that what the takeaway for me [from Eyes on the Prize] was that young people have an opportunity and a moral responsibility to be involved in civic change.

Some critics have said action civics tends to leave out facts that they think students should know or that it overemphasizes social justice and progressive causes. What do you make of those criticisms? 

I think it’s important to be grounded in facts — we want that for our students. … Action civics is project-based learning about civics and our democracy. And the fact is classrooms are one of the only public spaces where students engage with the world independently from their caregivers. It’s especially important that students have an opportunity to learn in a supported and supportive setting, about current event issues, so that they can be supported on their path toward active citizenship.

One of the core tenets of our work at Generation Citizen is that we as an organization are completely issue neutral. We have never selected an issue that students participate in, nor do we ask teachers to play any role in that. That’s one of the many areas that we are in fact looking to support student critical thinking, student learning and deliberative debate among students, which are the skills we’re trying to teach. The students select the issues that they work on.

For those who are worried about politics in the classroom, we know that the overwhelming experience of Generation Citizen teachers over the last decade in several states has been that the curriculum brings students together and helps them find common ground, reducing polarization, reducing mistrust. We’ve seen that from Texas, to California, from Oklahoma to Massachusetts, and Rhode Island and New York, and and we believe that project-based civics really teaches students to engage in civil discourse, bridge their differences and build consensus, which are some of the skills that we sorely need as adults in this country. Being able to help the rising generation do that feels more important than ever.

Does the culture war that’s unfolding around critical race theory change how you think or talk about Generation Citizen’s work?

It doesn’t change fundamentally except that we always feel like we have a responsibility to communicate about our work in a way that is understood. And so if it means that we have to more thoroughly share our approach with a variety of different stakeholders, we don’t take that as a problem: That’s a good thing to have the opportunity to talk about our work with different folks. Our work is more important than ever. The concerns that are being lifted up do not take us off of our path as an organization seeking to support high-quality civics education across the country, and we believe that education and action are both good for democracy … We want more people to participate in their communities, not fewer. And I think what’s important is we know that because this has become polarized, and there’s different levels of information in different communities about what action civics is.

We welcome the opportunity to share our work with teachers and students, of course, but also with parents and school boards, and others. What we can take for this moment is it is always good to be having conversations about how we can best support student learning, and best support students on their path to becoming whole adults. We welcome the opportunity to talk about that.

What would you say to a teacher or a principal who wants to bring Generation Citizen into their school or classroom but is worried about hearing backlash from people who might just be uninformed about what it means or who are worried that it’s going to be too political?

I think it comes down to first making the very clear, data-driven case, first, that action civics is effective at supporting student learning. We know that high quality civics education prepares young people to be informed civic participants in our in democratic society. There are so many program evaluations that verify the effectiveness of Generation Citizen’s work and other civics education curricula, and find positive influences on their applied knowledge, their skills, as well as their civic disposition.

The other part is to answer some of the questions that other stakeholders might ask of that teacher or administrator. First, does action civics promote a partisan agenda? And the fact is no, it does not push any partisan agenda. Neither the curriculum nor teachers ever tell students what to think or what to prioritize or identify as a critical issue. Instead, teachers are guided to help students gather reliable information, including sources of information from different perspectives, and how to read those carefully considering assumptions and underlying logic to formulate their own conclusions.

Another question that sometimes comes up is, are students too young to engage? What we know is that civic literacy is not something you’re born with, but it can be developed in a developmentally appropriate way at every age from elementary school on up… No one is imposing on students an agenda, but in fact, teachers are giving them tools to use as they look at the world out in front of them, which can be their classroom, school, community or country. This is different in each school. We believe that teachers have deep wisdom and knowledge about how to support their students through this journey, and our role as Generation Citizen is to provide state standards-aligned materials, and a well-documented and tested program that can support educators to guide their classes through that process.

The last thing that has been raised, for example, on social media, is a notion that students are taught to protest or to have or to have a negative point of view about establishment or government. That is not what action civics is doing. We’re supporting students to learn how to find their own voice and participate in self government. … We take very seriously the notion that our government is a government for the people, by the people and of the people. And action civics is a set of tools that helps schools make that real for their students. And I can’t think of anything more important or more patriotic that schools could be doing in a moment like we’ve been in.

We just have lived through a really dramatic couple of years: There’s a major crisis in the pandemic. We saw an impeachment, Donald Trump disputing election results and making false claims, and an armed insurrection at the capitol. What does civics education need to look like in the post-Trump presidency America? 

Despite the intensity of this moment, civics education in many ways is as urgent now as it was 12 years ago when this organization was founded, and the urgency remains, and has only grown. What Generation Citizen believes is critical for civics education is that it is fully experiential and action-oriented. Not just because pedagogically that is a powerful approach to engage students and have them feel excited about and connected to what they’re learning. It’s even more critical in this moment, because in a moment like this when we are seeing such turmoil, a danger can be that young people — or any of us — get into an observational stance around our government. We have to remain firm in a sense of our own agency. And the active role that we play reminds me of , “Democracy is not a state. It is an act.” It feels particularly critical in how we think about civics education and I think what is so essential, even on a day like Jan. 6 when [many students were in school remotely and might have been watching on TV].

By having a positive experience where they have learned about and identified a priority issue in their community and researched it so that they feel confident in their understanding of that issue, and then having the experience of being able to go to city council meetings, talk with local officials, work with staffers of a state legislator and put together legislation — to me, that kind of lived experience can create a likelier path to success for bigger projects.

What does your identity as a Black woman and your previous work on racial justice mean for you as the leader of Generation Citizen? 

I’m conscious, frequently, of the fact that a generation from now, there will be no one racial group that is a demographic majority in the United States. I’m hopeful about that. I think people are recognizing that greater racial justice and deeper democracy are actually interwoven as critical for America’s foundational strength, and that it’s going to be difficult for us to have a strong multiracial democracy without addressing the challenges that racial injustice have created in the foundations of our country.

[At Generation Citizen,] we have set a clear goal around strengthening democracy by elevating youth voice, and that also means being attentive to the ways in which racial equity is connected to whose voices are listened to. The outcomes of a healthy, robust democracy are intertwined with the outcomes of an equitable society. That’s something that for me, as a Black woman growing up in this country, has always kind of been second nature. I can’t imagine a notion of a strong, healthy democracy that leaves some people out. So in that sense, I think we have always been on the path of perfecting our democracy. And we’re not, in fact, in a moment where we are looking to the past, to find our democratic strength, I think we’re looking to the future.

The poem that has always resonated with me so profoundly — though this was before became perhaps one of my favorite American poets — but the poem that’s always struck me so deeply, so personally, is Langston Hughes’s and the recognition that he describes in that poem — “America will be” — is my version of patriotism, which is a deep, abiding love for the country that we could become, and that we have not yet been. That language really speaks to a recognition that you cannot have a true robust, healthy democracy that leaves some people out based on any marker of their identity.

From a practical point of view, how does getting kids involved in action civics and real-life projects help make this country a more robust democracy? 

It does it in a number of different ways. When young people participate in Generation Citizen’s curriculum, some of them go very quickly from feeling like they are observing politics from afar to recognizing that they are actual changemakers in their community at that moment. They don’t need to wait for anyone’s permission to be changemakers in their community. And once you learn that, and once you’ve experienced that, and you have gotten the attention of an elected official who is listening to you, recognizing your expertise, and is starting to make change as a result of what they’ve heard, it’s hard to go back to a place where you think that your participation doesn’t matter.

Even if your entry point to that is on the safety of water of the water in your schools, as it is for some of our students in New York, or it’s about substance abuse issues in your school in Lowell, Massachusetts, whatever your entry point is, the recognition and the civic knowledge you develop, as a result of that process, will forever be part of your consciousness as other collective challenges arise. You have learned the skills to bring your voice forward and engage others to bring their voices forward, to try to make community change. And particularly to do that outside of the ballot box. Now, we believe so deeply in voter engagement, and often partner with groups that work on voter engagement, but too often, our conversations about democracy with young people are telling folks to vote. We feel very deeply that what we’re doing here is talking about everyday democracy, which complements voting and is a real driver of long-term civic engagement.

The other piece is that in our curriculum, we invite students to do a root cause analysis of the challenges facing their community. That is a lesson that sticks with young people. When we ask years later, what do you remember most of the curriculum, often former students talk about the root cause analysis, because once you have undergone that with a great teacher, with engaged classmates about one issue, you keep doing it, and you wait to return to a deeper understanding of the root causes of any of the symptoms of our collective crises. For me, that is the most exciting kind of critical thinking you can do.

And lastly, the civic knowledge and skills that are developed as a part of the curriculum invite young people to understand the levers of power in their community, in a way that does make them more invested and engaged in future elections, and potentially in running for office themselves, because they have a real, tangible understanding of how change gets made on issues that they know impact their lives.

You wrote this year in a Generation Citizen that hope is a “tool of personal and collective survival.” Can you talk more about your sense of hope and what that means for you going forward?

Many of us who spend time working with young people in or out of schools have to be hopeful almost by definition because there’s attention to the possibility in every day and the possibilities for each student and a real commitment to never giving up … Some of my hope is grounded in a core belief that individuals can make a positive and profound difference and that even as we see dark moments for our country, the positive action of individuals, particularly young people, can be meaningfully transformative. I believe that when we invest in young people — whether that’s through civics education, whether that’s through mentoring, whether that’s through the arts or the many other areas where we invest in young people — we will see the results of that can be exponential. That’s why I feel deeply passionate about working with and for young people.

The other reason I feel a sense of hope and optimism is because I believe there has been a greater unveiling of the challenges that we face as a country and a shared witnessing of the seriousness of the moment we’re in. The pandemic has made incredibly visible our interdependence. It’s become cliche to say this, but we’re not going back. We’re only going forward. I believe strongly that there is going to be a deep desire on the part of many many many Americans to find ways to move forward that strengthen our democracy. I believe we’re not going to take it for granted.

I am particularly hopeful because I think that the rising generation — which reflects a diversity not yet seen in America and a greater understanding and openness to our diversity — creates space for so much leadership to emerge. They can be transformative for our country in a positive way. I’m excited about this work because of what Generation Citizen’s work can do to support our democracy and to support a sense of self worth and agency in the hearts of young people across this country. I think both of those are needed — collective transformation and an individual sense of agency and purpose.

The department’s Office for Civil Rights on Monday sent letters to five states — , , , and — explaining that their policies prevent districts from protecting students that might be at higher risk of health complications from COVID-19 because of a disability.

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“It’s simply unacceptable that state leaders are putting politics over the health and education of the students they took an oath to serve,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement. “The Department will fight to protect every student’s right to access in-person learning safely and the rights of local educators to put in place policies that allow all students to return to the classroom full-time in-person safely this fall.”

The OCR letters, sent to the superintendents in each state, are the latest development in an ongoing, three-way standoff between the Biden administration, Republican governors and districts trying to respond to rising numbers of students testing positive for COVID-19 because of the Delta variant. Districts, especially in Florida and Texas, have moved ahead with mandates regardless of governors’ threats to withhold funding.

“Local leaders are not being given the freedom that they want and need right now as those closest to the ground,” said Mike Magee, CEO of Chiefs for Change, adding that universal masking, “buys us time to finish the job on vaccination. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so critical right now.”

The organization includes superintendents such as Chad Gestson of the Phoenix Union High School District in Arizona and Pedro Martinez of the San Antonio Independent School District who have defied state laws banning the mandates.

Oklahoma Superintendent Joy Hofmeister anticipated the OCR’s action, saying in a statement that officials were not surprised by this civil rights investigation spurred by passage of a state law prohibiting mask requirements in Oklahoma public schools.Her department, she said, will “fully cooperate.”

The U.S. Department of Education said OCR did not send letters to Texas, Florida, Arkansas and Arizona. Governors in those states have also banned local mandates, but the courts have intervened, temporarily suspending the bans on universal masking.

In Florida last week, a Leon County county for a group of Florida parents that sued over Gov. Ron DeSantis’s ban on local district mask mandates. And in Texas, has ruled that Gov. Greg Abbott overstepped his authority and that some districts should be allowed to require masks. But the state’s attorney general quickly appealed, leaving districts in further limbo.

On Tuesday, the South Carolina Supreme Court is scheduled to hear filed over the state’s ban, and Superintendent Molly Spearman has urged the legislature to reconsider it. On Aug. 18, she sent districts stating that mandates might be necessary for those teaching or coming in contact with medically fragile or immunocompromised students.

“The [department] is particularly sensitive to the law’s effect on South Carolina’s most vulnerable students and are acutely aware of the difficult decisions many families are facing concerning a return to in-person instruction,” according to a statement.

Cardona has said publicly that he’s concerned some parents might not send their children to school if masks aren’t required, and President Joe Biden on Aug. 18 authorized the secretary to use the “enforcement authority” of OCR.

The fact-finding process will focus on what is known as Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, which protects students from discrimination because of their disability and guarantees them the right to a free and appropriate public education. The agency will also look at whether the states are violating the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires public buildings, including schools, to accommodate those with disabilities.