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Eye on Education
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ESSER Deadline Extended
The U.S. Department of Education has extended the spending deadline related to Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief III school funding (ESSER III), which provides schools with $122 billion for COVID prevention and mitigation strategies aligned with CDC guidance, and to address the academic impact of lost instructional time, reports K-12 Dive. Before the extension, all funds had to be obligated by September 30, 2024, and spent within 120 days – by January 2025. The tight timelines, compounded by labor shortages and supply chain issues, put the completion of capital improvement projects at risk. Now, districts may extend the spending timelines up to 18 months, to April 2026, to complete a project.
Funds still had to be allocated by September 30, 2024, however. According to the article by energy management and automation company Schneider Electric, states needed to formally apply to the U.S. Department of Education on behalf of their school districts to receive the extension.
Over the last two years, ESSER has been a game changer for schools. Districts have invested ESSER dollars in a variety of near- and long-term priorities, ranging from academic interventions to staff retention to air quality and HVAC improvements.
More Fundraising Needed as Christian Schools Grow
More parents want their children in private Christian schools, but many Christian schools aren’t geared up for the influx of new students, according to a new research study by nonprofit consulting firm DickersonBakker. Christian schools – including many that were until recently struggling to fill classrooms – are seeing a surge in interest and enrollment, says the report, “A National Study on Christian School Growth and Sustainability.”
The surge is part of a national trend following COVID-19 public school closures when students had to switch to online classes at home. Public schools across the U.S. have seen an exodus of nearly 2 million students since the pandemic, according to a report in The Christian Post in August. A recent survey by EdChoice, a nonprofit that helps families choose a schooling environment that best fits their children’s needs, revealed four out of 10 parents say they’d prefer a private education for their children.
“For Christian schools, this represents an opportunity for growth,” said Derric Bakker, president of DickersonBakker, “but
it also presents challenges, particularly related to financial sustainability.”
They include balancing budgets amid soaring costs and making tuition fees affordable. Three out of every four Christian school leaders say they’re struggling to hire qualified staff and a third say they don’t have enough room for more students. Even so, only three out of 10 schools have increased their fundraising activities.
Although a whopping 97 percent of Christian-school leaders say upping their fundraising efforts is vital to the future of their school, Christian schools “on the whole are not raising money effectively,” and most administrators lack training and guidance on the topic, the study concludes.
DickersonBakker estimates Christian schools, on average, invest less than 3 percent of their annual revenues into raising funds, and nearly six out of 10 of the school leaders involved in the study acknowledge their fundraising efforts need “substantial” improvement.
After Dobbs, Texas Middle Schools Adds Contraception to Sex Ed Curriculum
For the first time in more than 20 years, Texas has changed its minimum standards for sexual health education to go beyond focusing on abstinence to stop pregnancies. This fall, schools will be teaching middle school students about contraceptives and how to prevent sexually transmitted infections, such as the human papillomavirus (HPV), according to NBC News.
Also new for Texas students is the requirement of a signed permission slip from their parents. Previously, parents had to “opt out” of the sex ed portions of their kids’ health classes, but now they have to “opt in” for their children to receive those lessons. Some fear this change could lead to kids missing out – not because of parental objects, but because of lost forms and language barriers.
The changes come as the state reduces abortion access following the Supreme Court decision in June to overturn Roe v. Wade. “The question of how schools educate young people about their sexual health and development has taken on new urgency now that many state governments have enacted abortion bans,” says NBC.
While teen pregnancies have declined across the country in recent decades, Texas continues to have one of the highest
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state rates of teens giving birth: 22.4 births per 1,000 girls and women ages 15-19, reports NBC. The lowest, in Massachusetts, is 6.1. In addition, Texas (along with Alabama) has the nation’s highest rate of repeat teen pregnancies. A 2017 report showed 58 percent of Texas school districts offered “abstinence-only” sexual health education, while only 17 percent offered curriculums that expanded beyond that. A quarter of schools offered no sex ed. Today, each district may choose its own curriculum and teach more than the state requires, says the article.
Research shows that sex education programs that teach about contraception are effective at increasing contraceptive use and even delaying sexual activity among young people. Abstinence-focused education programs have not been shown to be particularly effective at curbing sexual activity among teens. Referencing the reproductive health research organization Guttmacher Institute, 39 states plus the District of Columbia mandate that sex ed classes provide information about abstinence; 29 of them require that it be “stressed.” Just 20 states and D.C. require that the classes provide information about contraception.
A Run of False Reports – “Swatting” – Keeps Schools, Law Enforcement on Edge
Dozens of schools in Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Texas, and Virginia went into lockdown in September when local police received calls about school shootings that were false, reports Education Week. The disruption has renewed attention to school safety and communication protocols, and prompted the FBI and local law enforcement officials to investigate whether the incidents are connected.
The FBI labels the practice “swatting,” a term that refers to filing a false report with the aim of stoking chaos and provoking a large law enforcement response.
It isn’t the first time a wave of unsubstantiated threats has occurred at the start of a new school year, says the article. Callers
claim to be inside the affected building, and sometimes cite specific room numbers and mention injured students. Waves of copycat threats also tend to follow mass school shootings, like the May 24 attack in Uvalde, Texas. That’s because conversations about school safety and worst-case scenarios often follow such events, and some students see threats as a way to tap into that attention.
The current surge comes alongside a wave of more typical events that spark school lockdowns: students issuing threats as pranks, reports of suspicious people near school buildings, and other false alarms, says Ed Week. “It’s unclear whether the recent swatting calls have come from students or from outsiders. Many of the calls seem to be made to clusters of schools in the same state on the same day, local news reports show.”
“The FBI takes swatting very seriously because it puts innocent people at risk,” the agency said in a statement to Education Week. “We will continue to work with our local, state, and federal law enforcement partners to gather, share, and act upon threat information as it comes to our attention.”
Repeated lockdowns that result from swatting can become routine to school staff, diminishing their sense of readiness in a real emergency, says Amy Klinger, co-founder of the consultancy Educator’s School Safety Network. In addition, “You have a lot of rapid response, anxiety and messages going out, people scrambling to find their kids,” she told Ed Week. “It’s happening much more than we think, and it’s having a much bigger impact.”
Swatting calls and other prank reports are particularly difficult because the nature of the situation is so unclear, leaving time for rumors and fear to build up on social media, administrators, notes the article. “Schools should be specific when they direct a lockdown, telling adults as much as they can about the reason behind it, the nature of the threat, and what level of precautions to take with students.”
An investigation of the Uvalde shooting revealed that the app the district used to notify staff about lockdowns didn’t specify the reason for the precaution. The community, near the Mexico border, frequently locked down its schools in response to nearby police pursuits of vehicles with undocumented immigrants. Uvalde schools responded to “about 50” such incidents between February and May of 2022, says Ed Week, citing the investigation.
“While school threats and false alarms often fail to make national news if they don’t result in actual violence, they can be a huge deal to school administrators, who must help students and families regain a sense of normalcy after hours of thinking they may be experiencing an unthinkable event.”
