Thanks to her new Fulbright scholarship, UW-Stout associate professor Candice Maier will teach her feminism-informed approach to family therapy at an Istanbul university next Spring.
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More than 20 Milwaukee Public Schools were damaged in recent flooding, a financial blow to a school district already dealing with the fallout of a lead paint crisis and aging buildings.
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Milwaukee Public Schools have received more than $16 million in state aid that was being held back because of missing financial reports.
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Sen. Tammy Baldwin toured La Follette High School in Madison on Tuesday. (Photo by Baylor Spears/ Wisconsin Examiner)
Opposition to the Trump administration’s efforts to close the U.S. Department of Education is gaining momentum, Sen. Tammy Baldwin said Tuesday during a visit to La Follette High School in Madison.
Baldwin visited the school, part of the state’s second largest school district, as new educators met for an orientation ahead of the start of the school year on September 3.
“[New educators are] coming or returning to teaching at a time where we have seen this administration doing devastating things to education and education funding,” Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat, told reporters after a tour of the school. “It has proposed the abolition of the Education Department. He wants to dismantle it. He’s called for the end to it, but he also knows that there are some constraints because the Education Department was set up by Congress and it’s funded by Congress.”
President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March ordering Education Sec. Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.” McMahon has said she is “dead serious” about putting herself out of a job.
In June, schools across the country were thrown into uncertainty when the Trump administration withheld over $6 billion in federal funds meant to support English language learners, migrants, low-income children, adult learners, after-school programs and more. The frozen funds included $70 million for Wisconsin. The administration decided to reverse course and release the funds in late July after Republican and Democratic Senators both called on the administration to do so.
Madison Metropolitan School District Superintendent Joe Gothard said that, as of Tuesday, the district had expected $3.4 million and is “still waiting for direct language to ensure that we are going to be reimbursed for the cost that we plan to incur this school year.”
Without that money, “students would not receive the services they deserve, and that could be by way of reading interventions, it could be some of the outreach we’re able to do with communities, with families,” Gothard said. “$3.4 million out of $6 billion may not seem like a lot, but those are targeted funds at students who need it most.”
“I’m grateful that we’ve had support for the unfreezing of these funds,” Gothard said, adding that uncertainty of funding “undermines public education and who it’s for.” The lack of certainty is leading the district to rely more heavily on the local community and government for the support the district needs.
“I’ve got a range of students,” Thompson said, adding that the City Center allows for students to “come in and get what they need.”
Baldwin also got to see the school’s music room, library, gymnasium and technical education spaces, including an autoshop.
“One of my most popular classes is our cooking classes, right, and kids get to learn basic life skills, and then, they actually do cooking for the school,” Thompson said.
“And nutrition and all that stuff,” Baldwin added.
“Yeah, you know, everything kids don’t want to hear,” Thompson joked.
The Trump administration’s efforts to close the Education Department comes even as some Republican lawmakers are balking at the idea. Politico reported that Republican lawmakers looking to fulfill Trump’s agenda are considering breaking the process down into smaller bills given the opposition to shutting down the department, especially from those in school districts that have benefited from funding and those that rely on the agency for guidance.
When it comes to challenging the ongoing federal uncertainty, Baldwin pointed to a recent bill that came out of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health, and Human Services, and Education and was recently approved by the full committee.
“We have seen him propose to put some of the career and technical education programs in the Labor Department rather than keeping them in the Education Department,” Baldwin said. “He’s talked about putting the IDEA program” — which serves students with disabilities under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act — “into the Department of Health and Human Services, where it would not be suited, and he is defunding programs left and right, so we’re fighting back.”
According to Baldwin’s office, the bill would provide $79 billion in discretionary funding for the Department of Education and would put measures into place to limit the ability to downsize the department’s role. The bill includes a requirement to make formula grants available on time and maintain the staff necessary to ensure the department carries out its statutory responsibilities and carries out programs and activities funded in the bill in a timely manner.
Baldwin said the bill is “wildly bipartisan,” noting it passed the committee on a 26-3 vote at the end of July.
“We have more work to do. It has to go through the whole process and end up on the president’s desk before its law,” Baldwin said. “I feel like we have momentum in standing up against this president’s plans with education, so when we return to session the day after Labor Day, we’re going to continue to press to restore all funding, and fight back against this idea of abolishing the Department of Education.”
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Retention and graduation rates are up since Northeast Wisconsin Technical College condensed most courses from 16 weeks to eight.
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Former AmeriCorps service member Daniel Zare, 27, visits Project Change at Sligo Middle School on Monday, Aug. 11, 2025 in Silver Spring, Maryland, where he mentored students before federal government cuts in April. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)
SILVER SPRING, Md. — Daniel Zare worked one-on-one as an AmeriCorps member with students going through rough times in school, lightening teachers’ workload in the classroom.
At AmeriCorps Project CHANGE, based in Silver Spring’s Sligo Middle School, Zare was one of several in his group who tracked adolescents’ emotional and social wellbeing over months using a system dubbed “My Score.” They then helped support the kids who were struggling the most.
In April, though, the program screeched to a halt. That’s when the Trump administration abruptly canceled nearly $400 million in active AmeriCorps grants across the United States that fund volunteers who embed in communities, in exchange for a small stipend and education award.
“All the work that we had culminating toward the end of the year, the relationships that we built with teachers and students and officials, it just completely went kaput because we were told we weren’t allowed to go to work at all,” Zare, 27, told States Newsroom.
Like so many longstanding federal programs and institutions severely reduced or dismantled as part of President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency project, AmeriCorps — and its nonprofit partners — are now assessing the damage and seeking a way forward.
AmeriCorps programs that survived last spring’s DOGE cuts are slowly beginning a new year of service amid major uncertainty over whether they will be able to continue their work in classrooms, food banks, senior centers and other community hubs.
AmeriCorps, a federal agency signed into law in 1993 by former President Bill Clinton, places roughly 200,000 members across the United States at 35,000 service locations, according to current agency data.
Members serve in schools, local governments and with a wide range of nonprofits that focus on health, disaster relief, environmental stewardship, workforce development and veterans.
The staffers, who pledge to “get things done for America,” are paid a modest living allowance that hovers around the poverty line. Some, but not all, can get health insurance while in the program.
Members who complete their service term, which usually lasts from 10 to 12 months, receive an education award that can be used to pursue a degree, earn a trade certificate or pay student loans.
AmeriCorps federal dollars reach programs via a couple routes. In many cases, grants flow from AmeriCorps to governor-led state and territorial commissions that divvy them up according to local priorities. In other cases, federal dollars flow straight to a program via a competitive grant process.
Kaira Esgate, CEO of America’s Service Commissions, said when the Trump administration ordered the cuts in April, some states lost large portions of their AmeriCorps portfolio, while other states fared better.
“There were no real clear trend lines around what or who got terminated and why,” said Esgate, whose member organization represents all 49 state commissions (South Dakota doesn’t have one) and the commissions for the District of Columbia, Guam and Puerto Rico.
Abby Andre, executive director of The Impact Project, an initiative of Public Service Ventures Ltd., a private corporation that launches and scales solutions to strengthen public service and communities., has been collecting data and plotting on an interactive map where AmeriCorps programs have been canceled. Andre, a former Department of Justice litigator, has also worked with her team to build other maps showing where federal workforce cuts have been felt across the country.
“AmeriCorps is a really great example of the federal dollars being kind of invisible in communities. Communities often don’t know that a local food bank or a senior center are supported by AmeriCorps volunteers and AmeriCorps money,” said Andre, who taught administrative law at the Vermont Law School after working under President Barack Obama and in Trump’s first administration.
Andre said communities with a lack of social services, including in rural areas, will likely feel the biggest losses without an AmeriCorps presence because the agency “facilitates pennies-on-the-dollar type services through volunteer work.”
“It’s not as though if these community services folded, those communities would have the money to fund equal or better services through the private market,” she said.
The Maryland Governor’s Office on Service and Volunteerism gave the green light to Project CHANGE to keep its program, which serves Montgomery County in suburban Washington, D.C., running through the upcoming school year.
Paul Costello, director of Project CHANGE, is now scrambling to launch a new AmeriCorps cohort after receiving the news on July 22 that the initiative had been funded. He estimates members won’t be able to begin until almost a month into the school year.
“Sadly, AmeriCorps, as a brand name, is badly damaged, I think. I mean, I’ve got a meeting on Wednesday with a major partner who told us two weeks ago ‘We thought you were dead,’” Costello told States Newsroom in an Aug. 11 interview.
Costello’s program not only places service members in Montgomery County Public Schools, where Zare served, but also with partners including Community Bridges, Montgomery Housing Partnership and Family Learning Solutions.
The nonprofits respectively focus on helping adolescent girls from diverse backgrounds, children whose families live in community-developed affordable housing units and teens eyeing college and career paths.
The county’s school system is the largest in the state and serves a highly diverse population. About 44% of the system’s 160,000 students qualify for free and reduced meals, and close to 20% are learning English while continuing to speak another language at home.
Costello’s 18 cohort members embedded in those schools and nonprofits this past academic year were suddenly yanked in April when the government cut his grant. The partners, which had planned and budgeted to have the members through June, were thrown into “total chaos,” Costello said.
“So some of them are so desperate, they rely on their members. They had to dig into their pockets to keep them on as staff. And then we go back to them this year and say, ‘You want members this year?’ AmeriCorps has made no attempt to make them whole. So they’ve been screwed,” Costello said.
AmeriCorps did not respond to States Newsroom’s questions about nonprofits losing money.
The federal courts granted some relief to members and organizations who abruptly lost living allowances and contractually obligated funding.
A Maryland federal district judge ordered in June that funding and positions be restored in 24 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia that sued the agency.
Another district judge in the state also handed a win to more than a dozen nonprofits from across the country that sued to recover funding they were owed.
But for many it was too late, and AmeriCorps’ future still feels shaky.
After suddenly losing his living allowance in April, Zare had to leave Silver Spring.
“I was renting a room off of Georgia (Avenue), and I was not able to pay rent there anymore, so I actually moved back to my mom’s in Germantown for the time being,” he told States Newsroom in August, referring to another Maryland suburb.
Hillary Kane, director of the Philadelphia Higher Education Network for Neighborhood Development, said by the time the court orders were issued, many of her AmeriCorps members had already found other positions and she had completely let go of one of her full-time staffers.
While the court injunctions were “welcome news,” reinstating the programs remained “questionable,” Kane wrote in a July 21 update for Nonprofit Quarterly.
Kane’s organization is a member of the National College Attainment Network, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that was among the successful plaintiffs.
Other organizations that joined the lawsuit are based in California, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Virginia.
The Democratic-led states that won reinstatement for AmeriCorps members include Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin.
Kane got news on July 10 that PennSERVE, Pennsylvania’s state service commission, reinstated funding for her AmeriCorps program that places members in four West Philadelphia high schools to mentor students on their post-graduation plans.
The late notice meant Kane could only begin recruiting new members in mid-July.
“And so our start date has to be a bit fluid,” Kane told States Newsroom during a July 22 interview. “We have to essentially recruit people into this one-year cohort position, and say, ‘We’re hoping to start September 2, but we’re not 100% sure. Can you kind of just roll with it?’ It’s an awkward position to have to be in.”
Other AmeriCorps programs have not fared so well, as the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget continues to withhold funds that were appropriated by Congress for the ongoing fiscal year.
Trump signed legislation in March that extended the $1.26 billion for AmeriCorps for the full 2025 fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30.
Kane said the most “insidious” part of the recent AmeriCorps storyline is that programs that receive grants directly from the federal agency are being strung along by OMB.
“So there are agencies who have been theoretically awarded money, but they’re like, ‘Is it actually going to happen? Should I spend all this money and then not be able to bill the federal government to reimburse me if OMB is going to hold it hostage?’”
Programs at risk include 130 recently expired contracts for AmeriCorps Foster Grandparent and Senior Companions programs that support roughly 6,000 senior citizen volunteers across 35 states. The programs are eligible for just over $50 million for the new service year, which should be off to a start.
A bipartisan group of U.S. senators pressed the executive branch agency on Aug. 1 to release the funds.
“Further delays in grantmaking will have immediate and irreversible consequences for programs, AmeriCorps members, and communities,” the senators wrote in a letter to OMB Director Russ Vought.
Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Thom Tillis of North Carolina joined Democratic Sens. Chris Coons of Delaware, Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York in signing the letter. All are members of the Senate National Service Caucus.
The White House and AmeriCorps did not respond for comment.
The Republican-led Senate Committee on Appropriations voted on July 31 to preserve $1.25 billion in AmeriCorps funding for fiscal year 2026. Collins chairs the committee.
U.S. House appropriators, which for the last two years under Republican leadership have sought to cut AmeriCorps funding, are expected to debate its budget in September. But it’s almost certain Congress will have to pass a stopgap spending bill when the end of the fiscal year arrives to stave off a partial government shutdown, so a final decision on funding may not come for months.
Zare never did have a chance to say goodbye to all his students in April.
And even though the option was on the table, he did not sign up to serve a third year with AmeriCorps.
Before he applied and earned a spot with Project CHANGE, Zare was working odd jobs, including as a utilities contractor for Comcast. He had also earned his associate’s degree.
“I don’t think there’s any other program to take someone like me who was working a couple of different jobs and put them in an environment like this, to see firsthand as an American citizen how our classrooms operate and what position I would need to be in to actually be of benefit,” Zare told States Newsroom.
Zare is now freelancing and debating his next move, whether that’s a new job or further higher education.
“AmeriCorps is something that I’m always going to cherish because a lot of the people there still help me,” he said.
Editor’s note: D.C. Bureau Senior Reporter Ashley Murray served in AmeriCorps in 2009-2010.
The Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building in Washington, D.C., pictured on Nov. 25, 2024. (Photo by Shauneen Miranda/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — A federal judge in Maryland has struck down the U.S. Education Department’s attempts to do away with diversity, equity and inclusion practices in schools.
The Thursday ruling marks a blow to President Donald Trump’s administration as it continues to take significant strides to try to crack down on DEI efforts across the federal government.
U.S. District Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher found both an agency Dear Colleague letter threatening to yank federal funds for schools from K-12 through colleges and universities that use race-conscious practices in aspects of student life and a memo ordering state education leaders to certify compliance to be “unlawful,” vacating the two.
Gallagher’s ruling follows a lawsuit from the American Federation of Teachers union and its affiliate, AFT-Maryland, as well as the American Sociological Association and a public school district in Oregon.
She noted that both the letter and certification requirement are “unconstitutionally vague.”
Gallagher is one of three federal judges who blocked different parts of the agency’s initiatives back in April, which brought enforcement of the letter and the memo on certifying compliance to a halt.
“The administration is entitled to express its viewpoints and to promulgate policies aligned with those viewpoints,” wrote Gallagher, who was appointed by Trump. “But it must do so within the procedural bounds Congress has outlined. And it may not do so at the expense of constitutional rights.”
The department drew swift legal action after sending a Feb. 14 letter to school districts that threatened to rescind federal funds for schools that use race-conscious practices in programming, admissions, scholarships and other aspects of student life.
The letter gave a sweeping interpretation of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2023, which struck down the use of affirmative action in college admissions.
The four-page letter raised a myriad of questions for schools over what exactly fell within the requirements. The department in March issued a Frequently Asked Questions document on the letter in an attempt to provide more guidance.
Adding fuel to the fire, the department in April gave state education leaders just days to certify all K-12 schools in their states were complying with the letter in order to keep receiving federal financial assistance.
“While the Department is disappointed in the judge’s ruling, judicial action enjoining or setting aside this guidance has not stopped our ability to enforce Title VI protections for students at an unprecedented level,” a spokesperson for the department said in a statement shared with States Newsroom on Friday.
“The Department remains committed to its responsibility to uphold students’ anti-discrimination protections under the law,” the spokesperson added.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said “the court agreed that this vague and clearly unconstitutional requirement is a grave attack on students, our profession, honest history, and knowledge itself,” in a Thursday statement.
Weingarten added that “it would hamper efforts to extend access to education, and dash the promise of equal opportunity for all, a central tenet of the United States since its founding.”
This week, educators from across Wisconsin are working to update the state's school report card system for the first time since it was released in 2012.
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Halfway through his Monday morning class at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College’s Green Bay campus last month, Patrick Parise instructed his Introduction to Ethics students to hold up their fingers: one if they’re confused about the lesson, 10 if they’ve mastered it. When met with a sea of “jazz hands,” he moves on to review the next chapter.
The students will take their final exam several days later, after absorbing major ethical theories and key philosophers’ views in just eight weeks — half the length of the traditional 16-week college course.
That’s because NWTC leaders have overhauled nearly every course in recent years, accelerating them to move twice as quickly. Administrators and instructors say the intensive pace helps students perform better and prevents them from dropping out when they face hardships outside of school.
NWTC is part of a growing national trend of colleges moving to shorter courses, but it’s one of fewer to offer eight-week classes almost exclusively. Many others have recently flirted with the idea by piloting a smaller share of shortened course options.
“Everybody wants shortened learning. Nobody wants to be in a class for 16 weeks anymore. That’s not the pace of learning,” said Kathryn Rogalski, the college’s vice president of academic affairs and workforce development. “That faster pace, that more intensive time together, I think, is making the difference.”
The schedule at NWTC splits the traditional semester in half — for example, rather than taking four classes over the course of 16 weeks, a student would complete two speedier classes in the first eight weeks, then complete two more in the latter half of the semester.
Proponents of the approach say juggling fewer classes allows students to focus better while some worry the brisk pace makes it easier to fall behind.
The transition required a heavy lift, which came with challenges. Some students say the swift pace required a learning curve, and administrators acknowledge that starting a new slate of courses every eight weeks can be intense.
But data suggests the switch has brought positive change to the 23,000-student college. Retention rates are up, meaning fewer students are dropping out. Students are earning higher grades on average. More are graduating on time.
Parise, who has taught at NWTC since 2007, says his students engage more in shorter courses. In the 16-week model, he would have taught the ethics students once a week. Now he sees them twice weekly, which reduces the material students forget between classes and strengthens relationships, he said.
“I find classes develop a far better sense of a learning community,” Parise said. “That’s huge … in the classes that I teach, creating an environment where students feel safe and comfortable and share ideas and ask questions — I don’t know that you can teach somebody ethics without having an environment like that.”
In 2018, NWTC leaders contemplated how they could reduce the number of students who were “stopping out,” or withdrawing from their studies with the intention of returning later, at the six-week mark.
At least one in three NWTC students rely on federal financial assistance to afford college costs, and many have jobs and families — meaning nonacademic challenges can easily derail the semester.
College leaders wanted these students to be able to “take a break when they needed to, but then not have to be gone a whole semester or a whole year before they could start back,” Rogalski said.
Breaking the semester up into smaller pieces could help, they realized. National research and data from a few short courses they already offered suggested students persist better in accelerated courses. Meanwhile, the eight-week course model was beginning to gain momentum at community colleges in Texas, showing promising results.
“If (students) are in week six of eight, they can figure out those last two weeks of, ‘How do I figure out that child care? How do I find some transportation?’ And they can finish the courses that they started,” Rogalski said. “If they’re in week six of 16 weeks, it’s really hard for 10 more weeks to figure out how to make it through.”
So NWTC leaders went all in. By 2020, they shifted roughly half of classes to the model. By 2021, 93%. The college exempted select courses, such as clinical rotations in hospitals for nursing students, but otherwise asked all instructors to get on board.
That sweeping overhaul across nearly every program is vital to seeing results, but it’s a feat few colleges have accomplished, said Josh Wyner, vice president of education nonprofit The Aspen Institute.
“That’s really one of the things that we’ve appreciated about Northeast Wisconsin for years, is that they went to scale when they found something that worked,” Wyner said. “If the data show that students will benefit, they ask themselves the question … ‘Why would we continue to offer things in other formats?’”
Accelerating college courses comes with speed bumps.
A sick student absent for a week misses double the instruction. Financial aid payment schedules must be retooled. Some high schoolers taking dual enrollment classes must manage the condensed schedule. Instructors must revamp their courses.
Many colleges make the mistake of “simply trying to take 16 weeks of coursework and squeeze it into eight weeks,” Wyner said.
“It can’t be the same class when it was in 16 weeks as it is in eight weeks. It has to look different,” Rogalski said. “I don’t think any college could be successful at this if they just shrunk their curriculum and just did exactly what they were doing, but did it twice as fast.”
When Nick Bengry transferred to NWTC from Lawrence University in Appleton to save money on tuition, it came with a learning curve. The university used a lengthier semester schedule, so he worried about the transition to more rigorous courses at the technical college. In the last year he’s found “some (classes) that are a little bit rougher” than others in the eight-week format, but feels like the workload ultimately “ends up being similar.”
“Some classes like, the medical terminology class, were really fast-paced because of the way they were designed,” said Bengry, who plans to transfer to the University of Wisconsin-Madison next year and eventually become an emergency room doctor like his father.
He also finds it easier to schedule the requirements he needs for his biomedical engineering major while juggling a job at Bellin Health.
“It makes it easier to fit the courses you need into your semester,” Bengry said. “Each course being only half the length means that if I need to fit a course into this semester, there’s more spots — it could be the first half or the second half.”
When students do struggle with their coursework, college staff has half the time to get them back on track before their class ends.
For example, in Kristin Sericati’s developmental reading and writing class, which helps students with lower literacy skills, “resource navigators” visit the classroom during the first week to meet one-on-one with every student and advertise services like tutoring or financial assistance. The college also has an “early alert” system that enables staff to intervene with helpful resources immediately if a student isn’t showing up to class or scores poorly on an assignment.
“A student is not waiting two weeks to have some sort of support that they need, which is now a quarter of their learning experience in that class,” Matt Petersen, NWTC’s associate vice president for institutional research and strategic analytics, said. “We just can’t afford that. Our students can’t afford that.”
As they’ve worked out the kinks, NWTC leaders have returned some classes to 16 weeks. One microbiology class changed back when eight weeks wasn’t enough time to grow the bacteria needed for the students’ research. Now, about 86% of courses are accelerated, fewer than the share in 2022, and administrators say they’ll continue evaluating what works best.
Seven years after leaders conceived the overhaul, data shows it’s paying off.
Retention for full-time students, or the share of students who stay enrolled or finish their program from one year to the next, has shot up by 19 percentage points since 2018, when the college introduced eight-week courses. Now, 77% of full-time NWTC students continue in their studies, federal data shows. Nationwide, full-time community college students had an average retention rate of 63% in 2023, according to the National Student Clearinghouse.
Retention rates for part-time students have shown smaller growth, rising from 56% to 59%. Part-time students regularly have lower retention rates than full-time.
In addition, the share of NWTC students who graduate within three years of enrolling has risen 3% to 46% since 2018. That’s well above the national average of 35% — and a tough data point to budge, according to The Aspen Institute.
Petersen said the change also correlates with an improvement in students’ grades, with hundreds more students now receiving a “C” or above in their courses.
Plus, students who do have to temporarily withdraw are having an easier time getting back to their studies, said Sericati, the developmental writing instructor.
“Before, if a student is in five classes and they come up against a life issue in week six and drop out of all of their classes, they now are on (academic) warning. They failed all of these credits,” Sericati said. “Now, if a student comes up against a life issue, they likely can complete those two courses that they’re in and not have that issue when they rejoin us again in another eight-week session.”
As colleges like NWTC share their success with shorter classes, the model is building momentum, said Karen Stout, CEO of Achieving the Dream, a nonprofit focused on community college success. For example, Western Technical College in La Crosse began transitioning to seven-week courses in the summer of 2024.
“It is such a relief, actually, to see that this made a positive difference,” Rogalski said. “Students who probably never imagined that they could be successful in college … They haven’t aspired to complete a degree or go on to a university, and now we’re seeing that these students have this hope that they didn’t have before. And within eight weeks, they’re seeing that they have been successful.”
Miranda Dunlap reports on pathways to success in northeast Wisconsin, working in partnership with Open Campus.
This college’s strategy for preventing dropouts? Classes half as long is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
Percy Brown stands outside the church where he grew up, Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Madison. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)
For more than two decades, Percy Brown has worked as an educator, his core priority striving to address gaps in achievement between Black and white students.
There’s no single cause for those gaps, Brown says. Poor teaching methods are one factor, in his view. He points to changes in how reading is taught, for example, that have been shown to improve reading proficiency among white and Black students alike.
But, he contends, that’s only part of the answer. A legacy of discrimination through the generations demands more careful attention to making sure every student is fully welcome at the schoolhouse door and gets the opportunity to learn and thrive, he says, in the classroom and out.
Brown pursued that goal as the director of equity and student achievement in the Middleton School District, west of Madison, and more recently as a trainer and consultant on diversity and equity in education as well as a speaker on other education-related topics.
Biases about Black students’ inherent academic abilities persist, Brown contends — influencing not only white teachers but Black students as well.
“We’ve dealt with racial inferiority being placed on us and embedded in the psyche of all of America for a very, very long time,” Brown says. “And while we might have egalitarian beliefs, those stereotypes and biases are still there.”
Concern about that legacy drove Brown to write “Strength Through Generations” — a combination memoir, thumbnail sketch of Black history and call to action.
The book has more than one audience, Brown says.
One audience is fellow educators — “to reach teachers, to help them be more culturally responsive in the classroom,” Brown says.
“I also wrote it for high school students that are African-American, so that they can learn more about their history, with the hope that that inspires them,” he says. “To know thyself is so key to what you’ll be able to do in life.”
The book comes at a time when organized programs to address racial diversity, promote equity to overcome centuries of discrimination and subjugation, and promote inclusion of the broad range of people into national life and institutions are under fierce attack.
Starting on his first day in office President Donald Trump has issued a series of executive orders aimed at ending diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs in federal government and education while also condemning inclusive policies in the private sector.
Brown has critiqued some of the ways DEI has been carried out. When he read an audit of Universities of Wisconsin DEI programs conducted by the Legislative Audit Bureau on behalf of the Legislature, he was struck that there seemed to be no consistent definition throughout the system for DEI.
But he also considers the anti-DEI wave a backlash to the protests in 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd. “That woke up the world,” Brown says. “There was a coming together, and it wasn’t even politicized like that.”
Right-wing influencers began attacking critical race theory — a complex, academic concept — and subsequently DEI, he observes, deploying “the anti-woke rhetoric to really scare people.”
Six years earlier, however, in Middleton, “I was able to collaborate and get support from people on the right side of the aisle to try to make things better for historically disenfranchised students,” Brown says. “It wasn’t a boogie man.”
The book’s publication is especially timely, he believes.
“There’s a lot going on that I would say is just anti-‘We the people’ — unless you’re talking about ‘We the People’ in its original intent for this nation to be a nation for white people — and then nobody else,” Brown says.
Brown’s book weaves the stories of his grandfather’s involvement in the civil rights struggles in rural, segregated Mississippi and the lives of his father, aunts and uncles growing up there together with a primer on Black history.
“As a Black male educator with a background in social studies, I know that America’s schools focus heavily on teaching slavery, but this does not address the more significant curricular issue when it comes to the history of Black people,” Brown writes in the book’s introduction. “There’s no mention of ancient African civilizations, such as the Kingdoms of Mali, Songhai, Benin, Kemet, Nubia, Axum and Ethiopia.”
By teaching “a more comprehensive history of Black people,” he writes, educators can appropriately build self-esteem of Black children and also “change the perception of those who are not Black.”
Brown’s father, Percy Sr., and his father’s siblings integrated their local high school in Mississippi in 1965 after the district was forced to admit Black students. Ku Klux Klan members burned a cross at their home and fired gunshots. “The intimidation was real, as real as could be,” Percy Sr. told his son in an interview included in the book.
His father moved north from Mississippi to attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison, graduating in 1975. Percy Brown Jr. grew up in Madison, and his book reflects on the racial divisions then and now in the state’s capital city despite its progressive image.
When it came time to go to college, Brown attended Delta State University in Mississippi near where his father grew up.
A bout of spring cleaning helped trigger Brown’s idea to write the book. He turned up a paper he had written as an undergraduate in 1997 “about the need to incorporate Black history into the curriculum to help build the self-esteem of Black children,” he recalls. The paper concluded with his declaration that one day he would write a book about Black history to help meet that need.
Not long after finding the paper, he traveled to Egypt in 2023 to learn about the African roots of one of the world’s oldest civilizations — roots that Brown says have long been unappreciated.
“Going to Egypt — that was transformational for me, and in a lot of ways I think I felt more closely connected to the human family,” Brown says.
The final push for the book came from the CEO at a publishing firm that specializes in producing books by entrepreneurs.
While his book focuses on Black experience, Brown says that in his consulting work he sees parallel experiences in places where the population is all white or nearly so.
Conducting a student assembly (about being safe online) in Door County, he got a firsthand look at the way schools there are also under-resourced. “My empathy for them up there is no different than the empathy that I have for the Black kids here in the community,” Brown says.
He worries about polarization and what he calls the tribalism that divides the public.
“The things that we have in common, that’s how you start to build those authentic relationships,” Brown says. “That’s how you start to build community, right? And it’s about our collective shared stories — not shutting down one story.”
Carroll University is preparing for projected record enrollment this school year with a more than $50 million facilities plan for its Waukesha campus.
The post Carroll University launches 5-year, $52M construction plan appeared first on WPR.
Rising senior Cole Mellom finishes the top of a smoker he created in a Beloit Memorial High School academy that features manufacturing. | Photo by Wayne D’Orio for The Hechinger Report
This story about career and technical education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
BELOIT, Wis. — As Chris Hooker eyed a newly built piece of ductwork inside Beloit Memorial High School, a wry smile crept over his face. “If you worked for me,” he told a student, considering the obviously crooked vent, “I might ask if your level was broken.”
Hooker, the HVAC manager of Lloyd’s Plumbing and Heating Corp. in nearby Janesville, was standing inside a hangar-sized classroom in the school’s advanced manufacturing academy, where students construct full-size rooms, hang drywall and learn the basics of masonry. His company sends him to the school twice a week for about two months a year to help teach general heating, venting and air conditioning concepts to students.
“I cover the mountaintop stuff,” he said, noting that at a minimum students will understand HVAC when they become homeowners.
But the bigger potential payoff is that these students could wind up working alongside Hooker after they graduate. If his firm has an opening, any student recommended by teacher Mike Wagner would be a “done deal,” Hooker said. “Plus, if they come through this class, I know them.”
Manufacturing and construction dominate the business needs inside Beloit, a small city of 36,000 just minutes from the Illinois border. Sitting at the nexus of two major highways, and within 100 miles of Chicago, Milwaukee and Madison, Beloit is home to a range of businesses that include a Frito-Lay production plant, an Amazon distribution center and a Navy subcontractor. In the next two years, a $500 million casino and hotel complex is scheduled to open.
But staffing these companies into the future is a major concern. Across the country, the average age of manufacturing workers is increasing, and one in four of these workers is age 55 or older, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2021 figures, the most recent available. In many other jobs the workforce is aging, too. Wisconsin is one of several states looking to boost career and technical education, or CTE, as a possible solution to the aging and shrinking workforce.
While the unemployment rate of Rock County, which includes Beloit, is 3.6 percent, only slightly higher than the state’s 3.2 percent, there’s a worker mismatch in the city, according to Drew Pennington, its economic development director.
Every day, 14,000 city residents travel outside of Beloit to work, while the same number commute into the city to fill mostly higher-paying jobs, said Pennington.
So when Beloit decided to revamp its public high school in 2018, CTE and work-based learning were at the forefront of the transformation.
The 1,225-student school now has three academies that cover 13 different career paths. After ninth grade, students choose to concentrate in an area, which means taking several courses in a specific field. Students also have the option to do work-based learning, which can mean internships, a youth apprenticeship or working at high-end simulated job sites inside the school.
“This creates not just a pipeline to jobs but also to career choices,” said Jeff Stenroos, the district’s director of CTE and alternative education.
“There are a lot of really good-paying jobs in this area. Students don’t need to leave, or go earn a four-year degree,” Stenroos said. An auto mechanic can “earn six figures by the age of 26 and that’s more than an educator with a master’s degree,” he said.
Beloit’s effort is a shift in high school emphasis similar to the extensive CTE programs being run in other places, notably Indiana, Kentucky and Alabama. In 2024, 40 states enacted 152 CTE-related policies, the biggest push in five years, according to Advance CTE, a nonprofit group that represents state CTE officials. Nationwide, about 20 percent of high school students take a concentration of CTE courses, it says, adding that the high school graduation rate for students who concentrate in CTE is 90 percent, 15 percentage points higher than the national average.
Three years ago, Wisconsin called for 7 percent of its high school students to be in workplace learning programs by 2026. Beloit’s progress puts it far ahead of that target. In Beloit Memorial, nearly 1 in 3 students meet this designation today, Stenroos said.
The high school features a cavernous construction area where students build full-scale rooms, learn masonry and complete plumbing and electrical wiring projects. The metal shop offers 16 welding stations and a die-cutter machine that allows students to create customized pieces to fit projects. Down the street, the school runs an eight-bay car repair center, a space it took over when a Sears autobody shop left town.
These spaces are “better than a lot of technical colleges,” Stenroos said.
In addition to their high school courses, Beloit Memorial students pile up industry-recognized certifications, Stenroos said. More than 40 percent of its students graduate with at least one certification, and 1 in 4 of them has multiple certifications.
While some simple certifications, such as OSHA Workplace Safety, can be accomplished in just 10 hours, others, such as those for the American Welding Society, require up to 500 hours of student work, he added. The state has called for 9 percent of graduating high school students to have earned at least one certification by next year. To incentivize schools to offer these opportunities, the state’s Department of Workforce Development pays schools for each student who earns a certification; in 2024, Beloit received $85,000 through this program, Stenroos said.
One of the school’s best automotive students, Geiry Lopez, graduated this year with five Automotive Service Excellence certifications. Standing less than 5 feet tall, Lopez said she is not bothered that she might not look like a typical mechanic. “I know I can do this,” she said, adding that she hopes to work on heavy machinery such as tractor trailers after she graduates.
She’s worked on her own car, with some fellow students, replacing the brakes, a front axle, rotors and wheel bearings at the school’s garage, she said, although she still hasn’t been able to drive it.
“My dad is taking forever to teach me how to drive,” she said.
The garage operates like an actual business, but the only customers are teachers and other Beloit staffers and students. Students estimate work costs, order parts and communicate with customers before any repairs take place. While oil changes and brake replacements are common, some students are totally rebuilding an engine in one car.
Over in the welding room, rising senior Cole Mellom was putting the finishing touches on a smoker he built in less than a month’s time. He said he loved the creativity of finding a plan, cutting the metal and building something that he could sell, all while in school. Plus, he knows that welding is a key skill needed for his dream job, race-car fabrication.
In the past, students created a custom-made protective plate that the city’s police use on a bomb squad vehicle.
The welding program has 125 students this year and had to turn away 65 more because of space limitations, Stenroos said; last year, 17 of the school’s welding academy graduates enlisted in the armed forces to specialize in welding.
These programs are designed to help meet the future needs of the state’s workforce. More than one-third of Wisconsin jobs will require education beyond high school but less than a bachelor’s degree by 2031, according to the Association for Career and Technical Education. For the last four years, the state has had more job openings than people on unemployment.
“There’s more jobs than there are people to fill them right now,” said Deb Prowse, a former career academy coach at Beloit Memorial who now works at Craftsman with Character, an area nonprofit that helps train students for careers in skilled trades.
Hooker, the Lloyd’s Plumbing HVAC manager, agreed. “Every project we work on has a delay, from a multimillion-dollar mansion to a three-bedroom spec,” he said. “There aren’t enough workers.”
The main reason Beloit Memorial has been able to zoom past state and national goals for both CTE and work-based learning is the school’s single-minded focus since 2018 on helping to ensure that its graduates will understand what businesses need and giving them a head start toward gaining those skills.
High school officials actually pared back the program from 44 pathways to 13, Stenroos said, part of an effort to tie each pathway to specific jobs. About 75 percent of pathways target area jobs, with the remaining quarter highlighting prominent professions within the state, he added.
Even though three straight budget referendum defeats have left the district with a $6.2 million funding gap, Stenroos said he’s been able to keep the CTE equipment modernized through donations and strategic allocation of the school’s federal Perkins grant and the state reimbursement for student certifications. In one instance, the school recently bought a $20,000 scanner for its automotive program; the machine can not only help diagnose a car problem, but also connect students to garages throughout the country that have successfully fixed the specified problem.
“It’s an expensive piece of equipment,” Stenroos said, “but it’s industry-certified and will give students real-life experience.”
Each of the three academies has an advisory board of teachers and industry professionals who work out how to embed practical lessons in classroom curriculum. “We ask business people, ‘What do you need, and how can we help our kids get there?’ ” said Stenroos.
“It’s really cool how receptive the school is to feedback,” said Heather Dobson, the business development manager at Corporate Contractors, Inc., a 200-person general contracting firm.
She explained that the district has incorporated small changes over the years, such as having students work in Microsoft programs instead of Google Classroom apps and teaching them how to write a professional email.
“Rarely is there an idea presented that they don’t embrace,” said Celestino Ruffini, the CEO of Visit Beloit, a nonprofit that promotes tourism of the city. The school is expanding its hospitality program because of the expected influx of jobs connected to the new casino and hotel, he said.
All the changes aren’t at the high school, however. In order to employ Beloit Memorial students, Frito-Lay had to alter its corporate policy of not allowing anyone under 18 to work in its plants, according to Angela Slagle, a supply chain manager there. The company now hires Beloit Memorial students for its career exploration youth apprenticeship program, she added.
The connection to area businesses goes beyond the school’s leaders. Each year, about 10 teachers complete an externship in which they spend one week of their summer at a local business. Teachers are paid $1,000 for the 20 hours, and they not only learn about what jobs a company may have but also find ways to incorporate real-world problems into their classroom lessons.
A few summers back, math teacher Michelle Kelly spent a week at Corporate Contractors. She was searching for different ways to use construction-based math problems with her students. In addition to using math to estimate a bid for a project or calculate the surface area of a job, she realized that complex math is needed to build a truss, the framework used to support a roof or bridge.
Because the triangular truss is supported by different lengths of wood inside its structure, Kelly said, building one requires the calculation of angles, total area, how much wood is needed and more. Since all her algebra students were in the school’s construction academy, she partnered with those teachers to go beyond blueprints and have the 10th graders build trusses, a collection of which sit in the back of her classroom.
She sees this work as one way to help counter the chronic absenteeism that has existed since Covid. Teaching with this kind of hands-on work makes students see the relevance of algebra, she said. “Would it be easier to just have them take a test? Yes.”
Beloit Memorial Principal Emily Pelz said the school’s work is paying off. In the last four years, the school’s four-year graduation rate has ticked up slightly, from 83.4 percent in 2021-22 to 85.2 percent in 2024-25, while its attendance went from 78.5 percent to 84.8 percent in the same period, Pelz said.
Rik Thomas, a rising senior who already has his own business repairing and modifying cars, said this work has definitely made him more interested in school. While he thought the academy would merely explain what a construction career might include, “It’s nice to find out how to do the work.” His father works in construction and, Thomas added, “He loves that I take this program.”
Thomas and his classmates built a wooden shed earlier this year and were able to sell it for $2,500, with the money going to pay for more materials. Likewise, the first smoker created in the welding class was bought by Stenroos; the students are looking forward to posting the second one for sale after they determine how much they should charge.
While the school’s construction and other trade-related fields have drawn the most attention, its three academies also offer career paths in healthcare, education, business, the arts, hospitality and more.
For example, rising senior Tayvon Cates said he hopes to study pre-med at a historically Black college or university on his way to becoming a cardiology radiologist. Cates, who is in the school’s health and education academy, said, “If you want to do something, the school can help you do it.”
This story about career and technical education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents is paying $265,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by a woman who says she was demoted from a diversity, equity and inclusion leadership position because she is white.
The post UW Board of Regents settles racial discrimination lawsuit for $265,000 appeared first on WPR.
A teacher and students in a classroom. (Photo by Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images)
I recently read over my son’s last report card and was overwhelmed with pride.
It showed how far he’s come — progress that, not long ago, felt out of reach. I made mental notes of the areas where we still need to do some work, but mostly I just sat with the joy of seeing comments like “participates well in class” and “a pleasure to have in class.”
A few years ago, those kinds of remarks seemed impossible.
My son is on the autism spectrum. He’s bright, curious, and kind, but he faces challenges in areas that come more naturally to his peers — things like socializing, staying focused, and following multi-step directions.
To support his growth, our family relies on services in Milwaukee made accessible through Medicaid. Without it, we couldn’t afford the therapies and supports that have made such a profound difference in his life.
One of the most transformative resources we’ve accessed through Medicaid is applied behavior analysis (ABA) therapy. Before my son began this program, he had a hard time sitting still, struggled with completing even small tasks, and rarely interacted meaningfully with others. The world often overwhelmed him, and those feelings showed up as frustration or withdrawal.
Our family was doing everything we could to support him, but we needed help. Medicaid made that possible.
The ABA therapy was intensive and, at times, exhausting — but it worked. Over time, we watched our son develop new skills, regulate his emotions, and engage with the world in a completely new way.
By the time the program ended, we had a different child. Not in that he changed who he was — but because he could finally show the world the amazing person he had always been. He could carry on a conversation, initiate play with peers, connect with adults, and begin building friendships.
Today, thanks to Medicaid, he continues to receive occupational therapy and speech therapy at school. These services help him strengthen motor skills, improve communication, and better navigate daily life. He also receives support through his Individualized Education Plan (IEP), ensuring he has the accommodations he needs to succeed. Because of this, my son is not just surviving — he is thriving.
But now, all of this is under threat.
Millions of families like mine could lose Medicaid because the Trump-GOP budget — the so-called “One Big Beautiful Act” — strips away the very support that children like my son depend on, all to finance tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy. It’s hard to describe the fear that takes hold when you realize that your child’s future has been jeopardized with the stroke of a pen.
Some 37 million children — roughly half of kids in the United States — rely on Medicaid for health care, therapies, and other essential services. For kids with disabilities, Medicaid is often the only option for accessing the support they need. Without it, families face impossible choices — foregoing therapies, draining savings, or going without care altogether.
What’s even more heartbreaking is the callousness with which some elected officials treat this issue. Watching Republican Senators dance to a disco song as they celebrated the passage of this harmful bill made me physically ill. While they partied, families across the country worried about how to care for their children, afford therapy, or keep a roof over their heads.
This isn’t political for me — it’s personal. My child is not a budget line item. He is a human being who deserves the chance to live a full and meaningful life. Every child does.
Medicaid has been a lifeline for us, and it should be protected, not gutted. No parent should have to fight this hard for basic support, and no child should have their future jeopardized by politics.
The promise of America is an opportunity for all. That promise cannot be fulfilled if we dismantle the very systems that allow families like mine to survive — let alone thrive — simply to cut taxes for the wealthy.
We need to do better. We must do better.
Just in time for the back-to-school season, Connecticut-based school bus company, DATTCO, launched a bilingual children’s book designed to help young students overcome the fear of riding the school bus for the first time.
The company, which transports over 130,000 students daily across Connecticut and Rhode Island, created “The Big Yellow Adventure” in response to a concern staff hear regularly from families. Many parents have shared that their children are nervous or afraid of taking the school bus, especially for the very first time.
“As a school transportation provider, we understand that our role goes beyond simply getting students from point A to point B,” Reya Samuel, the marketing specialist at DATTCO, told STN. “We’re a part of the daily lives of thousands of families, and we want to help make that first day and every day after feel safe and welcoming.”
To help ease that anxiety, DATTCO partnered with local behavioral health provider Optimus Healthcare to create a storybook that serves as a comforting and educational resource. The book is designed to be read aloud by parents or caregivers and encourages conversations about what children can expect during their first ride. By helping kids prepare emotionally, the book supports smoother transitions into the school year.
The free resource will be distributed to every elementary school DATTCO serves, and families will also have access to PDF copies and coloring book versions on the company’s website. The book is available in both English and Spanish.
Paul Mayer, vice president of marketing and communications at DATTCO as well author of “The Big Yellow Adventure” emphasized the motivation behind the project.
“When we started hearing the same concerns from parents year after year, we realized we had an opportunity to do more than just transport students safely, we could help them feel confident and excited about their journey to school,” he said.“ This book represents our belief that a transportation company’s responsibility extends far beyond the bus ride itself. We’re part of each child’s educational story, and we want that story to start with confidence, not anxiety.”
Emotional wellness was at the forefront of the project. Brianna Whitlock, licensed clinical social worker from Optimus Healthcare, who helped develop the book, shared her perspective on the broader impact.
“When transportation companies take this kind of proactive approach to child welfare, it demonstrates a commitment that goes far beyond their core service,” she said. “This book fills a genuine gap in preparing children for school transportation.”
From DATTCO’s leadership, the initiative is viewed as a natural extension of the company’s mission. “We know that a child’s first school bus ride is an important step not just in their education, but in their emotional growth,” said Kyle DeVivo, chief operating officer. “This book is our way of saying, We’re here to help. Partnering with Optimus Healthcare has been invaluable in making sure this resource truly serves the children and families we care so deeply about.”
Company President and CEO Don DeVivo echoed this sentiment, framing the book as part of a broader philosophy.
“At DATTCO, we’ve always believed that our responsibility extends beyond transportation, we’re part of each child’s educational journey,” he said, adding that book represents the company’s commitment to innovation and dedication to making every aspect of that journey as positive as possible for the students and families served.
As schools prepare to reopen, DATTCO is organizing events including book reading demonstrations and school bus tours to give families a chance to meet drivers and ask questions ahead of the first day.
Related: Guiding Hands: New York School Bus Driver Supports Young Rider Through Her Anxiety
Related: School Bus Driver Creates Children’s Book to Promote School Bus Safety
Related: (STN Podcast E254) Gus, the Talking Safety Bus: Supporting Educational Access & Student Safety
Related: NC Transportation Manager Channels Passion for Education, Safety into Children’s Books
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Under Wisconsin law, children can be exempt from vaccine requirements if their parents cite personal conviction, religious or medical reasons.
The post Proposed Wisconsin bill would require more notice to parents on vaccine waivers appeared first on WPR.
A group of federal agencies announced in July that at least 15 federally funded health, education and social service programs would exclude undocumented immigrants and some who are living in the country legally.
Responding to President Donald Trump’s February executive order to “identify all federally funded programs currently providing financial benefits to illegal aliens and take corrective action,” the departments of Education, Health and Human Services, Justice and Labor listed programs that provide literacy classes, career education, medical and mental health care, substance abuse treatment, free preschool and more.
In Wisconsin alone, the state Department of Justice estimates the new federal restrictions “put at risk more than $43 million each year in substance abuse and community mental health block grants that fund services in all 72 counties, 11 Tribal nations, and approximately 50 nonprofit organizations.”
Wisconsin Watch contacted more than a dozen Wisconsin organizations, government agencies and national experts to learn about the new policy’s effects. But we found more questions than answers. Most are unsure who is subject to the new rules or how to comply.
While we were reporting this story, Wisconsin joined 20 other states in a lawsuit challenging the new restrictions. That suit is still pending, but the parties have agreed to a deal that would delay most of the restrictions in those states until September.
Confusion created by the guidance could have serious consequences, experts say. Some providers might delay or cancel programs unnecessarily out of an abundance of caution, while some immigrants may avoid services for which they remain eligible, such as health care and education.
While much remains unclear, here’s what we know so far.
A 1996 law already prohibited certain immigrants from receiving 31 “federal public benefits,” including Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and cash assistance. The Trump administration’s new guidance bars the same immigrants from additional programs, according to the National Immigration Law Center.
Those ineligible include:
People in the following groups would remain eligible:
A range of institutions — including colleges, government agencies and nonprofits — manage the affected programs. Many did not previously check the immigration status of the people they serve; creating a process to do so may add costs and logistical challenges. It could prove especially daunting for organizations like soup kitchens and homeless shelters, which provide urgent services to people without easy access to documents.
Meanwhile, entities that administer these federal funds include nonprofits and federally funded community health centers, which operate under laws that conflict with the guidance.
Health and Human Services said its settlement with the suing states “will permit the agency to consider, as appropriate, whether to provide additional information” about the restrictions it announced.
Wisconsin has 16 federally qualified community health centers serving patients at 217 sites. They receive money from Congress to provide primary care to all, regardless of their ability to pay. Nationally, such clinics serve more than 32 million patients, making up 1 in 10 people in the United States and 1 in 5 people in rural America, according to the National Association of Community Health Centers.
Aside from emergency rooms, they are often the only care options for undocumented immigrants or those with limited English proficiency, said Drishti Pillai, director of immigrant health policy at KFF, a national nonprofit providing information on health issues.
Federal law requiring those clinics to accept “all residents of the area served by the center” contradicts the Trump administration guidance.
The national association said in a July 10 statement that it’s working with experts and legislators to understand the impact of the new rules and ensure centers “have the information and resources needed” to continue serving their patients.
Access Community Health Centers, a nonprofit that provides medical, dental and mental health care at five south central Wisconsin clinics, will make “adjustments” if further federal guidance comes, CEO Ken Loving said.
“We don’t have the information we need to understand how this is going to impact us and how we can adapt to help our patients,” he said.
The new restrictions target adult education services under the Adult Education and Family Literacy Act and career and technical education services under the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act. Community and technical colleges would likely face the brunt of the impact, but just how much is unclear.
The Wisconsin Technical College System has followed 1997 guidance that said public benefit restrictions did not apply to such educational services, spokesperson Katy Petterson said. She’s not sure how the updated guidance might affect the system, which will “wait to learn the impact of the lawsuit.”
If community-college-operated programs begin checking immigration status, ineligible immigrants may remain able to take federally funded classes through nonprofits that are subject to different rules.
The nation’s 1,600 Head Start agencies, which provide free early childhood education and family support services for low-income families, fall under the restrictions announced in the Department of Health and Human Services notice. But the document doesn’t say whether Head Start staff must verify the immigration status of children, parents or both.
“It’s very ambiguous about who this impacts. … If you read the language, it’s 26-plus-ish pages of legal jargon, and it’s shifting,” said Jennie Mauer, executive director of the Wisconsin Head Start Association, which supports the state’s roughly 300 Head Start service sites.
One thing Mauer wants families to know: Children already enrolled in Head Start won’t be forced out.
“We want to follow the rules, but Head Start is not required to redetermine eligibility,” Mauer said, noting it has never been required to do so in 60 years. She’s been telling the center directors to sit tight, even as worried parents ask questions.
One entity that won’t start checking immigration status: K-12 schools. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1982 that denying education to undocumented students violated their constitutional rights.
Probably not. The 1996 law restricting public benefits says nonprofit charities are not required to “determine, verify, or otherwise require proof of eligibility of any applicant for such benefits.”
At Literacy Network, a nonprofit offering a variety of free ESL and basic education classes in Madison, staff aren’t planning changes based on the new rule.
“It could certainly impact many of our students in other areas of their lives and therefore their ability to participate in our programs, but not who we can serve,” spokesperson Margaret Franchino said.
Still, guidance from the Department of Education is vague. It states that the exemption for nonprofits is “narrowly crafted,” and “the Department does not interpret (it) to relieve states or other governmental entities … from the requirements to ensure that all relevant programs are in compliance.”
Ryan Graham is the homeless systems manager at Wisconsin Balance of State Continuum of Care, a nonprofit that supports agencies responding to homelessness across most of the state.
As his agency discusses updates with partner agencies, it is preparing for an “increased administrative burden on already stretched staff.”
“We don’t yet know whether there will be delays caused by having to check or validate someone’s citizenship status, especially in emergency situations where time is critical,” Graham said.
The notices published in July took effect immediately, though some federal agencies said they would likely not enforce them for about a month. The Trump administration later agreed to pause enforcement until Sept. 3 in the 21 states that sued.
The Department of Health and Human Services, meanwhile, has voluntarily stayed enforcement of its directive in all states until Sept. 10.
The multistate lawsuit argues the Trump administration failed to follow proper procedures in implementation and that it can’t retroactively change the rules after states accept grants to administer programs. Requirements to check the immigration status of every person served would unreasonably burden program staff and possibly force programs to close, the states argue.
States “will suffer continued, irreparable harm if forced to dramatically restructure their social safety nets and render them inaccessible to countless of the States’ most vulnerable residents,” the plaintiffs wrote.
The American Civil Liberties Union and Head Start groups nationwide had already sued before the Trump administration published new guidance. That suit argued staffing cuts, funding delays and bans on diversity efforts threatened to destabilize Head Start — a long-standing, congressionally mandated program. A hearing in that suit was held Aug. 5 on a request to temporarily block the Health and Human Services notice.
The 1996 public benefits ban exempted federal programs that offered services available to all people on the grounds that they were “necessary for the protection of life and safety.”
Trump calls that exemption too broad.
“A surge in illegal immigration, enabled by the previous Administration, is siphoning dollars and essential services from American citizens while state and local budgets grow increasingly strained,” the White House said.
Citing studies from congressional committees and groups that seek to severely curtail immigration, the White House argues that allowing broad access to federal resources incentivizes illegal immigration and costs U.S. taxpayers. The recent federal spending package also eliminated access to Medicaid, Medicare and food stamps for some authorized immigrants, including refugees and asylees.
Trump ran for office on a promise to carry out mass deportations, and the bureaucratic moves appear to be a new frontier in that immigration crackdown. Since he took office, the administration has raided stores and workplaces, built new detention centers and attempted to shut down the asylum process at the southern border. It has also urged many immigrants without permanent legal status, including DACA recipients, to self-deport.
Experts worry the confusion about the new rule could have a chilling effect, leading even eligible immigrants to stop using services.
Pillai of KFF noted that the restrictions on community health centers, alongside congressionally approved changes “that limit health coverage to a smaller group of lawfully present immigrants,” will likely make immigrant families even more reluctant to seek health care and social services.
The changes “may increase their reliance on emergency room care, which can be more costly in the long term,” she added.
Graham, the homeless systems manager, believes the Trump change will create “a direct barrier to safe and stable shelter for undocumented individuals and mixed-status families” and qualified immigrants or citizens who “may not have identification or the means to attain identification after fleeing a dangerous situation or crisis.”
It could also prompt administrators of some programs not covered by the rule to start screening participants as a precaution, or shut down programs to avoid screening challenges.
That has happened before. When Trump issued an executive order in January saying the administration would no longer “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support” gender-affirming health care for people under 19, some providers stopped offering those services even though state law protected them.
Likewise, a 2023 KFF study found that in states that institute abortion bans, the majority of health care providers say they worry about accidentally running afoul of the law.
Braden Goetz, who worked for more than 20 years in the U.S. Department of Education and now works as a senior policy adviser at the New America Foundation’s Center on Education and Labor, said it’s unusual for federal guidance to be so sparse and ambiguous.
“Maybe that’s the intention: to confuse people and chill services to people who are not citizens or not legal permanent residents, and scare people,” Goetz said.
Natalie Yahr reports on pathways to success in Wisconsin, working in partnership with Open Campus. Sreejita Patra is statehouse reporting intern for Wisconsin Watch.
Trump is trying to exclude immigrants from many federally funded programs. Here’s what it means for Wisconsin. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
A student draws with chalk on an outdoor court at a New York City public school in 2022. If states didn't receive billions in congressionally approved funding for K-12 education that the Trump administration had been withholding, officials said programs for migrants, English-language learners and kids in need of after-school care would be at risk. (Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)
It’s been a troubling summer for anyone who cares about children, families and the thousands of students who rely on summer and after-school programs across Wisconsin. In early July, without warning and without sound legal authority, the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced it would withhold billions in federal education funds — including money that had already been appropriated by Congress months earlier.
Among the frozen funds was support for 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLCs) — the only federal program dedicated exclusively to after-school and summer learning. In Wisconsin, more than 18,000 students across over 150 programs rely on this funding for safe, enriching places to go when school is out. These programs aren’t extras. They are essential for student success and family stability.
Also caught in the freeze were other critical federal programs, including Title II-A (teacher professional development), Title IV-A (student support), Title III-A (English learners), Title I-C (migrant education), adult basic education, and English literacy and civics education. These dollars support some of our most vulnerable students.
There was no clear explanation. No legal justification. And no warning to the schools and organizations already planning for the 2025–26 school year.
But the response from the after-school field was swift. National networks like the Afterschool Alliance, local providers, parents and state advocates mobilized. Tens of thousands of letters and phone calls poured into congressional offices. The Afterschool Alliance organized a briefing for the bi-partisan Senate Caucus and then within days, 10 Republican senators sent a letter demanding the OMB release the funds. That pressure worked. The administration reversed course. For now, the 21st CCLC money is moving.
Why did we have to fight so hard for funding that was already signed into law? Why was it even legal for the administration to delay disbursement based on a vague “review”? And what’s to stop it from happening again next year?
This experience exposed a dangerous truth: Wisconsin has no backup plan. We are in the minority of states without any dedicated state funding stream for after-school and summer learning programs. That leaves our kids — especially those in rural or under-resourced areas — completely dependent on federal dollars. And when federal dollars get caught up in politics, Wisconsin kids lose.
We can’t afford that gamble.
Because 21st CCLC programs are not just child care; they are proven, high-quality learning environments that deliver real results.
In fact, students who regularly attend these programs see improvements in their grades, attendance, engagement and even standardized test scores. A national study of low-income, ethnically diverse students found that regular attendance in a high-quality afterschool program like 21st CCLC led to up to a 20-percentile gain in math scores. Students also showed better behavior and were less likely to be chronically absent. In Wisconsin, where absenteeism has surged post-pandemic, this is exactly the kind of support our students need.
After-school programs work because they meet kids where they are. These programs offer hands-on STEM projects, arts and music, physical activity, service learning, leadership development and workforce readiness. They give students new experiences, expose them to future career paths, and build skills like communication, collaboration, and critical thinking. They engage the whole child and they engage families, too.
They’re also essential for working parents. A recent survey found that nine in 10 voters agree that after-school and summer programs are vital to the economic well-being of families. Employers rely on them to ensure parents can work full hours. Yet today, two-thirds of Wisconsin families who want after-school and summer programs can’t access them. There simply isn’t funding to support the need.
And demand is growing. In 2024 alone, more than half of 21st CCLC providers reported having waitlists. Nearly 90% said they are worried about long-term sustainability. And while the cost of operating these programs has gone up, federal investment hasn’t kept pace with inflation — meaning we’re doing more with less every year.
Affluent parents have long understood that learning opportunities outside of school hours are essential to their children’s full development. All of Wisconsin’s children deserve the same chance to thrive. These programs are a vital part of our state’s education and workforce infrastructure, and it’s time Wisconsin started treating them that way.
Yes, restoring the 21st CCLC funds was a victory. But it came only because thousands of people raised their voices. We shouldn’t have to beg to protect something so fundamental. And we shouldn’t leave our kids’ futures up to the whims of politics in Washington.
If we want every student in Wisconsin to have a chance to succeed, not just in school, but in life, we need to invest in these programs. Not just when there’s a crisis, not just when federal funds are threatened, but every year. With reliable, sustainable state funding.
Our kids and our communities deserve nothing less.
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Wisconsin doesn’t require daily exercise for students.
Physical education must be given weekly to students in kindergarten through sixth grade and, for older middle school students, with “sufficient frequency and instructional time to meet the objectives outlined in the district’s curriculum plan.”
High school students must follow a curriculum “designed to build lifelong fitness habits.”
In 2024, GOP lawmakers as part of a child obesity task force introduced legislation to require 180 minutes of weekly “physical activity” for K-8 students. One lawmaker said the aim was to require movement, such as playing tennis, rather than teaching tennis.
The bill passed the Assembly but not the Senate.
On July 27, former Gov. Scott Walker called for a 60-minute daily exercise minimum.
In 2022-23, 18.4% of Wisconsin children ages 6-17 were obese, the 16th highest rate in the U.S.
Childhood obesity that lasts into adulthood can result in conditions such as diabetes, liver disease and high blood pressure.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
Does Wisconsin require daily exercise for K-12 students? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
A school bus drives along a rural road outside of Kenosha, Wis. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act established a national tax credit scholarship program, but state leaders can decide whether and how to participate. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
When President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, he gave state leaders — not federal regulators — the power to decide whether and how to participate in the first-ever national tax credit scholarship program.
That decision now looms largest in blue states, where Democratic governors and lawmakers must weigh whether to reject the law outright on ideological grounds — or try to reshape it into something that reflects their own values.
“This isn’t the federal voucher program we were worried about five years ago,” said Jon Valant, a senior fellow in governance studies at the left-leaning Brookings Institution who testified before Congress on earlier versions of the bill. “It still has serious problems — but states now have tools to mold it into something they might actually support.”
The final law gives states wide discretion, he said. They can opt out entirely. They can opt in passively, leaving the program to operate as written. Or, as Valant suggests, they can try to redraw its footprint — focusing less on private school tuition and more on public school supports like tutoring, transportation and enrichment services in underserved districts.
“My hope is that blue states take a hard look and ask: Can this be used to address our own needs?”
For progressives and education advocates who are wary of school vouchers, the decision is fraught. Opting in could draw criticism for approving what many see as a vehicle for privatization of K-12 education. But opting out could mean turning down federal dollars — education money that states with budding or robust private school voucher infrastructures, such as Arizona and Florida, will gladly take.
“There’s money on the table, and it can be used for more than just private school tuition,” Valant said. “If blue states want to keep that money from reinforcing inequality, they’ll have to get creative, and act fast.”
Since 2020, private school choice programs — once limited to low-income or special needs students — have rapidly expanded.
In 2023, $6.3 billion was spent nationwide on private school choice programs — less than 1% of total public K-12 operational spending, according to EdChoice, a nonprofit that advocates for school choice measures. From 2023-24 to 2024-25, participation in universal private school choice programs surged nearly 40%, growing from roughly 584,000 to 805,000 students in just one school year.
By 2026-27, about half of all U.S. students will be eligible, according to estimates by FutureEd, an independent think tank at Georgetown University.
These trends, combined with new federal tax credit, could fundamentally reshape the education funding landscape across state governments, experts say.
“States will need to decide whether to encourage the redirection of funding to support private and religious schools — either by expanding existing voucher programs or, if they don’t have one, by introducing such a program for the first time,” said Sasha Pudelski, director of advocacy for AASA, The School Superintendents Association. The group opposes the national voucher plan.
As of this May, 21 states operated tax credit scholarship programs with varying degrees of funding and oversight. According to the EdChoice Friedman Index, the states of Florida, Arkansas, Arizona and Alabama rank highest in private school access, with 100% of students eligible for school choice programs.
Some states, like Florida and Arizona, already have extensive tax credit scholarship systems. Others, including Texas, are building new infrastructure such as statewide voucher programs and education savings accounts, known as ESAs.
States with no current programs face decisions about participation, regulation and equity, but without clear federal guardrails, education advocates told Stateline.
The federal policy builds on existing state-level tax credit scholarship programs — such as Alabama’s — but significantly expands eligibility, removes scholarship caps and broadens allowable uses to include not just tuition, but also tutoring, therapy, transportation and academic support services. Beginning in 2027, scholarships will be excluded from federal taxable income.
Valant, of Brookings, told Stateline that some of his initial concerns were addressed in the version of the bill signed into law.
“There was a very realistic scenario in the earlier version of the bill where a small number of very wealthy people could essentially make money off this,” Valant said. “That was mostly addressed.”
The enacted version eliminates stock donations and caps individual tax credits at $1,700. And with states that opt in having the power to shape their own program, Valant said that gives them the chance to establish their own guardrails, such as income eligibility caps or nondiscrimination policies for participating schools.
If blue states want to keep that money from reinforcing inequality, they’ll have to get creative, and act fast.
– Jon Valant, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution
The scholarship-granting organizations, known as SGOs, would then be subject to new state regulations about where the money can go.
“States could say SGOs can’t give money to schools that discriminate based on sexual orientation. … There’s quite a lot of room here for state regulation,” he said.
Looking ahead, Valant said he’ll be watching how states interpret their regulatory powers — and how effective scholarship-granting organizations are at fundraising under the new rules, which prohibit large stock gifts and rely instead on millions of smaller donations.
“Now it’s a strange pitch: ‘Can you front me $300 to give to the SGO? I swear the IRS will give it back,’” he said. “It’s going to take time to figure out how to sell this to families.”
Concerns over transparency and equity remain. The program allows donors, scholarship-granting organizations and families to direct funds with little public accountability, critics say. And in states without robust oversight, Valant warns that funds could be misused — or channeled to institutions that exclude students based, for example, on identity or beliefs about sexual orientation.
He also emphasized that early participation is likely to skew toward families already in private schools, particularly in wealthier ZIP codes — mirroring patterns seen in programs in Arizona, Florida and Georgia.
“One big risk is that the funds will disproportionately flow to wealthier families — just like we’ve seen in many ESA programs,” Valant said.
FutureEd studied eight states — Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, Oklahoma and West Virginia — where 569,000 students participated in school choice programs at a cost to taxpayers of $4 billion in 2023-24.
The FutureEd analysis found significant differences among the states in design, funding and oversight.
Arizona’s ESA program was the first of its kind in 2011, and also the first to shift toward universal eligibility in 2022.
Florida operated the largest and most expensive program, with broad eligibility, no caps or accreditation requirements, and a major influx of higher-income families, though it mandated some university-led performance reviews. Iowa fully funded ESAs and, like other states, saw mostly existing private school families benefit.
Arkansas had a cautious rollout due to legal delays and geographic clustering of participants, while West Virginia allowed spending across state lines with no performance reporting.
Newcomer North Carolina began with income-based prioritization but quickly expanded under political pressure or demand, while Alabama and Louisiana will launch ESA programs in 2025-26 using general state revenues.
Utah enacted a universal voucher program in 2023, providing up to $8,000 per student for private school or homeschool expenses. A state teachers union sued, arguing that participating schools were not “free and open to all children” and that the program diverted public school funds. A state court this April ruled the program was unconstitutional.
As the new federal law opens the door for tax-credit-funded tuition support, Texas is building its first universal school voucher program, aided through ESAs to begin in the 2026-27 school year. The program is funded with $1 billion over two years, with $10,000-$11,000 per student — up to $30,000 for students with disabilities and $2,000 for homeschoolers.
The Texas comptroller will oversee the program, and private schools must be open for at least two years to be eligible for funds.
Voucher programs can drain state budgets, and budget wonks predict the cost for Texas could rise to around $4.8 billion by 2030, The Texas Tribune reported.
A spokesperson for the Texas comptroller’s office said that details are still being finalized; the state has issued a request for proposals due Aug. 4 to select eligible educational assistance organizations that would help funnel scholarship dollars to schools.
Other states may be more cautious. The Missouri National Education Association filed a lawsuit this summer to block $51 million in state appropriations to private school scholarships through the MOScholars program. The suit argues that using general revenue rather than private donations violates the state constitution and undermines public education funding.
Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at rsequeira@stateline.org.
Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.
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