Franklin Towne Charter High School agreed Friday to a False Claims Act settlement over its January 2023 admissions lottery, which prosecutors say was manipulated to lower Black applicants' odds. The school is 17% Black in a city where district schools are 42% Black. Neither the school nor former CEO Joseph Venditti admitted liability.
Mary Johnson
A 4-3 vote in one of Douglas County's fastest-growing towns rewrote the rules for 13 sites that developers set aside for schools. The district now has to fund a school before it gets the land, and seven of those sites are already penciled in for parks. We read the ordinance and the town's site memo.
Mary Johnson
The nation's largest school system will bar student-facing generative AI from 2-K through eighth grade for the 2026-27 year, ban companion chatbots in every grade, cap classroom screen time, and limit high school AI to five named pilots. The mayor's message to the tech industry was blunt.
Mary Johnson
A coalition of Virginia parents and former teachers is asking the state Board of Education for a statewide framework governing digital tools in schools, plus the right to opt a child out. A state senator plans to introduce a model policy in January.
Mary Johnson
About 90% of America's 480,000 school buses run on diesel, now averaging $5.62 a gallon against $3.70 a year ago. Districts are consolidating routes, staggering bell times, and tapping rainy-day funds, and one Washington official measured the hit in teachers.
Mary Johnson
Meta settled with 52 attorneys general and agreed to default limits on teen accounts: two hours a day, no access overnight, hidden likes, and muted notifications during school hours. It does not block the apps during class, and it does not cover TikTok, YouTube, or Snapchat.
Mary Johnson
House Bill 959 requires every North Carolina public and charter school to bar phone use during instructional time. An Asheville charter school that adopted the same rule two years early says parents report happier, more talkative kids, and that a few students are gaming the system with decoy phones.
Kate Carter
New federal guidance says considering race in student discipline is itself discrimination, reversing a decade-old policy that told schools to examine their discipline data for racial disparities. Two districts are under investigation, and both say they have not been told why.
Arthur Chen
Rob Burnside let a homeless student keep attending Lakota East High School after the district said he had to withdraw, then took him into his home. It ended a 31-year career. It also points at a federal law most families have never heard of.
Mary Johnson
Officers in Nebraska's largest district had been carrying gloves that deliver an electric shock on contact, and used them twice last school year. After students and parents objected, Omaha police agreed to stop. Bellevue police, who patrol nearby schools, are keeping theirs.
Mary Johnson
There is no federal ban on paddling students, so it is left to states. Fifteen still have laws allowing corporal punishment in public schools, almost all in the South, even as psychologists broadly agree it is harmful and ineffective. Here is where it happens, what the research shows, and why supporters defend it.
Mary Johnson
A Farnsley Middle School student agenda labeled Kentucky 'Venecky,' Illinois 'Vitoiis,' and included a distorted periodic table. Parents pay a $10 fee for the booklets and suspect the pages were AI-generated. The school told teachers to have students tear the bad pages out.
Mary Johnson
The DeKalb County School District agreed to pay $29.5 million to seven charter schools that sued over withheld funding, nearly triple the roughly $10 million they first claimed. A judge had ruled the district breached its contracts, and the deal now requires it to show its funding math every month.
Arthur Chen
Gov. Brian Kemp suspended all seven members of the Dublin City school board as the small Georgia district works through a roughly $20 million financial crisis that began with a missed health insurance payment and has already cost 46 jobs. A committee will recommend temporary replacements.
Mary Johnson
Aurora Public Schools opened Escuela Bilingüe Betty Benavidez this month, its first dual-language magnet, built on the idea that Spanish is an academic strength to grow rather than a gap to close. About 150 young students start in a model that aims for full biliteracy by the upper grades.
Mary Johnson
Granville County took student take-home laptops away for grades 3 through 8, blocked YouTube, and set two tech-free days a week. Its own web monitoring showed why, and a year in, the results are messier and more interesting than a simple win. Other North Carolina districts are following.
Mary Johnson
Samira Hardcastle, a former Metro Nashville Teacher of the Year, resigned after nearly a decade and went public with claims that district practices pushed her out, including being asked to change a student's failing grade. Metro Nashville Public Schools disputes key parts of her account.
Mary Johnson
A seventh-grade student is in custody after a teacher was stabbed during class at Jonesville Middle School in Lee County, Virginia, on Thursday morning. The sheriff said the teacher's injuries are serious but not life-threatening, and credited several students with stopping the attack.
Mary Johnson
The Quality Education Commission says schools need $13.8 billion just to hold steady and $16.2 billion to hit new targets. Enrollment has dropped nearly 33,000 students since 2017, and even the commission's own chair says more money alone won't fix it.
Mary Johnson
The rules LAUSD approved in spring are now live: no screens for first grade and under, with limits rolling to every grade this year. One science teacher says 75% of his work ran through a screen and he doesn't feel set up for success.
Mary Johnson
