LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Lisa Dansby Williams loves connecting students in need with mental health resources.

"It's just been hard for many of the students and their families to navigate some of the resulting issues of the pandemic, whether that be domestic violence within the family, homelessness, maybe mom, dad lost a job," she said.

As the need rises, services are stretched thin.

"We do have a limited pool of mental health professionals to employ. Some of the main issues are that they are moving to different platforms to provide services. Some have been burnt out themselves by the pandemic and some of the increase of need for services and so that's been a major issue as well," Dansby said.

The national recommendation for school counselors is 1 for every 250 students. According to the National Association of School Counselors, only 17.8% of school districts met that requirement. Only 4.2% of urban school districts met it, according to pre-pandemic numbers.

"We are definitely seeing an increase in the number of students, families, and staff, and even administrators that are referring students and families to us," said Alma Lopez, who is a school counselor at a California middle school.

"It's been a challenge, you know, we're putting in some full days and then some and so definitely the need to have more mental health professionals in the school building is an essential need right now," she said.

What's been helping, Lopez said, is the waning stigma around mental health and the increased awareness from lawmakers. However, she believes more needs to be done, including help for counselors.

"More people need to actually understand the role of the school counselor and of mental health professionals right in the school building," she said.

For mental health workers, no matter what assistance comes, they're going to show up for the students, and be their much-needed rock, even if everything is so uncertain

"Right now there's a greater need to help family, so if I can make it happen, that's what I try to do," Williams said.

ODESSA, Texas — When the pandemic started, Michelle Villegas was in 6th grade. Now she's finishing up middle school, but not without some unpleasant memories from remote middle school.

"The tests would just, it would just load and load and load. Like I hated seeing that circle was just, it was in my nightmares, the circle!" she said.

The nightmarish loading circle is something that so many families across the nation can relate to as the pandemic exposed a weak link in rural America’s access to the internet. Michelle's mom says her heart broke watching her daughter struggle just to simply join a class.

"It was stressful, it was overwhelming, it was frustrating," she said.

The Villegas live on the outskirts of Odessa, Texas – a boom or bust oil town that’s one of many spots on the map without access to reliable internet.

According to the FCC, 6% of the country’s population lacks internet access. Narrowing in on rural communities, one in four lacks access – that’s 14.5 million people.

"I couldn't get on and I would call my mom crying because I was like, mom, I'm going to fail this. Like, my grades are so low because I can't do this," Michelle recounted.

Scott Muri is the superintendent in Ector County, where Odessa is located. When the pandemic hit and they had to move to remote learning over the course of a weekend, they found that 39% of their student body lived in areas with inadequate internet or no internet at all.

"Many of our kids do not live in an area of our community, that even if they had the money, they could access the internet, it's simply didn't exist," said Muri.

With that large of a percentage of students that couldn’t log on for remote school, they had to think of solutions. So they decided to shoot their shot and contacted SpaceX to be a part of their Starlink internet access pilot project and the multi-billion dollar company said yes.

"This big dad started to cry because he understood as a parent, what that a simple little dish was going to mean for his children because he had watched his kids struggle mightily to connect with their teachers," he said.

What Ector County has is a unique public-private partnership. However, federal dollars will trickle into tackling this same issue nationwide. $45 billion dollars from the infrastructure bill is going toward equitable broadband access.

"I think we need to appreciate broadband as a utility. You know, it is not a special thing that only certain people have. It is not something that you earn through wealth. It is something that is a right and a privilege and an opportunity for every American," he said.

Next year, Michelle is entering high school and both her and her mom are relieved to have reliable service because it will help put her on an equal playing field for the rest of her education.

"Everything is technology now. And if you don't have a good internet source, you're not going to be caught up with everything that's happening now. Like you're going to be left in the past," said Michelle.

Many traditional books are being replaced by e-books in school.

Nearly 60% of teachers say they utilize e-books because they are less expensive and more accessible than many paper books.

However, there is a major drawback to the use of e-books.

A study suggests teenagers who read traditional books had higher test scores than those who read books on a device.

"Reading from paper is more efficient, meaning that you can understand more in the same amount of time than reading from screens," said Virginia Clinton-Lisell, Ph.D., of the University of North Dakota.

Experts say parents should opt for paper books when they can, but they stress that any type of reading is better than none at all.

"Reading is good. If your kid likes to read from an e-reader, that's awesome. Encourage it as much as possible," Clinton-Lisell said.

NEW YORK (AP)  — When President Joe Biden announced a plan to forgive student loan debt, many borrowers who kept making payments during the pandemic wondered if they'd made the right choice.

Borrowers who paid down their debt during a pandemic freeze that started in March 2020 can, in fact, get a refund — and then apply for forgiveness – but the process for doing that hasn’t always been clear.

If you think you’re eligible, here’s what you need to know:

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WHO IS ELIGIBLE FOR A REFUND?

Borrowers who hold eligible federal student loans and have made voluntary payments since March 13, 2020, can get a refund, according to the Department of Education.

For some people, that refund will be automatic. You can get a refund without applying if your payments brought your loan balance below the maximum debt relief amount: $10,000 for all borrowers and $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients. Borrowers can check their balance in their studentaid.gov account.

For example, if a borrower paid $100 a month for 10 months of the pandemic and their balance is now $8,000, that $1,000 will automatically be refunded. Then they can apply to get the rest of their debt forgiven.

But if a borrower paid throughout the pandemic and still owes $14,000, they won’t get an automatic refund. They can, however, apply to have $10,000 of that debt erased.

Another group of people that has to apply for a refund is those who completely paid off their loan balance during the pandemic. If that’s you, you’re eligible for loan forgiveness, but you’ll have to request a refund prior to applying for debt relief. Borrowers should confirm their eligibility for the loan forgiveness program prior to requesting a refund.

For example, if a borrower had $5,000 in debt at the start of the pandemic and paid it all back during the freeze but is eligible for up to $10,000 in forgiveness, they would apply for a $5,000 refund, then apply to have their debt forgiven.

“Borrowers who paid off their loans during the pause will need to request a refund first, then request cancellation,” said a spokesperson from the Department of Education.

The refund is not available for private student loans.

Eligible federal student loans:

—Direct Loans (defaulted and non-defaulted)

—Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) Program loans held by ED (defaulted and non-defaulted)

—Federal Perkins Loans held by ED (defaulted and non-defaulted)

—Defaulted FFEL Program loans not held by ED

—Defaulted HEAL loans

If you are not sure which loan you have, visit your dashboard at studentaid.gov and find the “my loan servicers” section. If you can’t access your dashboard, you can call the Federal Student Aid office at 1-800-433-3243 to ask for loan servicer information.

HOW CAN I APPLY FOR A REFUND?

Borrowers who want a specific amount refunded can apply by calling their loan service provider. Right now, refunds are only being done via phone and not through any website or email.

When the Biden Administration announced the forgiveness, loan servicers found themselves inundated with calls. But many borrowers now say they’re not waiting long when calling.

“I was on hold for about five minutes,” said Megan McParland, of New Jersey, who graduated in 2018 and made several payments during the payment freeze.

McParland requested a refund the first week of September. At first, she felt the servicer tried to dissuade her from making the request. But after confirming that she wanted to proceed, she was told that she would see her refund in about a month.

Sierra Tibbs, a 47-year-old resident of Casselberry, Florida, had a similar experience. The entire phone call with her loan servicer took around 20 minutes.

Tibbs applied for a refund after seeing a video online informing her that she could get back money she paid during the pandemic.

If you are unsure who services your loan or if the servicer changed during the pandemic, visit your student aid account dashboard and scroll to “my loan servicers” or call 1-800-433-3243.

Before calling your loan provider to request your refund, you need to know your account number and the amount you want to be refunded.

—Loan servicers’ phone numbers:

FedLoan Servicing: 1-800-699-2908

Great Lakes Educational Loan Services, Inc.: 1-800-236-4300

Edfinancial: 1-855-337-6884

MOHELA: 1-888-866-4352

Aidvantage: 1-800-722-1300

Nelnet: 1-888-486-4722

OSLA Servicing: 1-866-264-9762

ECSI: 1-866-313-3797

Default Resolution Group: 1-800-621-3115 (1-877-825-9923 for the deaf or hard of hearing)

HOW WILL THE REFUND WORK — AND WHEN WILL MY LOANS BE FORGIVEN?

When you request a refund, the amount that you have paid during the payment freeze will be added back to your student loan balance, said Katherine Welbeck, Civil Rights Counsel for the Student Borrower Protection Center.

That amount is still eligible for cancellation and can be eliminated after you apply for forgiveness.

You're eligible for debt relief if you had an annual federal income below $125,000 individually or $250,000 if you're married or head of household in 2020 or 2021. The application is expected to open in early October, and you can apply until Dec. 31, 2023.

It is unclear when borrowers will see debt relief. So far, the plan only mentions borrowers will be notified by their loan servicer when their debt is forgiven. There is also a possibility that forgiveness could be delayed if the Biden administration faces legal challenges.

Laura Baum, a 30-year-old resident of Chicago, paid $5,000 during the payment freeze toward her $15,000 remaining debt. She is eligible to have $20,000 canceled since she was a Pell grant recipient when she was an undergraduate. At the beginning of September, Baum called her loan servicer and asked for a refund.

But because of the uncertainty, she plans to save that money until the Department of Education confirms her debt has been canceled.

“I’m going to hold on to that refund until I absolutely see $0 in my student loans,” Baum said.

WHEN IS THE DEADLINE TO APPLY?

The deadline to apply for a refund is December 31, 2023. However, Welbeck recommends applying for a refund before applying for debt forgiveness.

“If you apply first, you can process the refund to get your money back, and then that balance in your account is canceled,” Welbeck said.

The application process for loan forgiveness is expected to take four to six weeks.

The Department of Education offers a subscription page where you can sign up to be notified when the application is open.

HOW MUCH CAN I GET REFUNDED?

According to the Department of Education, you can get a refund for the entire amount you paid during the payment freeze. However, you can choose a lower amount.

You might pick this option if, during the pandemic, you paid enough to get your debt below the maximum amount of forgiveness. You could get a partial refund, then apply to have your remaining debt wiped out.

Say you had $15,000 worth of debt remaining at the beginning of the payment freeze and have since paid $8,000 but qualify for $10,000 in debt relief. You might decide to ask for a refund of just $3,000. Then, your debt balance will be exactly $10,000, and you can apply for maximum loan forgiveness.

WHEN WILL I GET MY REFUND?

Borrowers should expect to receive their refund six to 12 weeks after requesting it, according to the Department of Education. But you might want to double-check with your loan servicer.

McParland’s loan servicer told her that she should see her refunded amount in 30 to 45 business days, but Baum was told that it would take 60 to 70 business days to see her money back in her bank account.

IS THE REFUND TAXABLE INCOME?

It is not yet clear if the refunded money will be considered taxable income. Welbeck recommends borrowers check with financial advisers from their own state.

Some states, such as Indiana, have already said they will tax debt relief for people who have their student loans canceled. Policies vary from state to state.

DOES THE REFUND AFFECT MY CREDIT SCORE?

Since the Department of Education has not yet announced how the cancellation or refunds will be reported to the credit bureaus, it is still uncertain if these amounts will affect borrowers’ credit scores, said Welbeck.

SHOULD I START PAYING AGAIN WHEN THE PAYMENT FREEZE ENDS?

The pandemic payment freeze is set to end on Dec. 31. If you have not seen debt relief by then, you are still expected to start making payments. Welbeck recommends that borrowers enroll in income-driven repayment plans before the end of the payment freeze.

Income-driven repayment plans allow you to set an affordable payment amount based on income and family size.

You can find more information about the four types of income-driven repayment plans here.

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You can find all of AP's financial wellness coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/financial-wellness.

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The Associated Press receives support from Charles Schwab Foundation for educational and explanatory reporting to improve financial literacy. The independent foundation is separate from Charles Schwab and Co. Inc. The AP is solely responsible for its journalism.

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A deal has been reached in the state budget, preventing Ohio from having a government shutdown.

The main focus of both the House’s and the Senate’s budgets was education. The Senate plan was much more conservative, while the House plan was bipartisan. After a week and a half of negotiations, agreement was reached on the $191 billion budget. The nearly 2 billion budget will be split for the next two years.

Ultimately, the chambers took pieces of both budgets to reach a compromise that satisfied Republicans in the Senate and House. Although Democrats got a few small wins, many of them still voted no on the budget.

“Our priorities — education, and the fact that we were able to get back the $550 million that the Senate took out of our public schools — I think is a big win for Republicans, Democrats for the people of Ohio, all across the state,” said State Rep. Jay Edwards (R-Nelsonville).

Edwards, the House Finance Chair, was able to reinstate the total funding needed for the Fair School Funding plan, but with that, he had to give Senate Finance Chair Matt Dolan (R-Chagrin Falls) what the Senate wanted when it came to private school vouchers.

“Gives parents the choice to decide where and how their child's going to be educated,” Dolan said of the private voucher program.

Democrats are unhappy with the majority of the budget, but they did get one of their main requests — getting the higher education overhaul bill removed. This bill would have banned public universities in Ohio from having “bias” in the classroom and limiting how and what “controversial topics” were taught.

However, the budget did keep in a bill that would create learning centers on OSU and University of Toledo campuses, meant to specifically target “intellectual diversity, or safe spaces for conservatives” on campus.

“I loved seeing Senate Bill 83 taken out,” said Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio (D-Lakewood). “Unfortunately, not only did they leave [Senate Bill] 117 and these indoctrination centers at universities in, but then they added they have to now have three more, and they added one in Cleveland State.”

While the chambers have reached an agreement, they aren’t done with the budget just yet. It goes to Gov. Mike Dewine, who gets to veto any provision within it.

Follow WEWS statehouse reporter Morgan Trau on Twitter and Facebook.

There is a national child care crisis, and programs are looking for ways to help alleviate some of the issues families are facing when trying to secure child care.

Some parents are needing to wait between nine and 12 months to secure a spot on a waiting list. To help solve this problem, programs are turning towards education for refugees and immigrants to add them into the workforce.

“As refugees and immigrants come into our economy, we want them to enter into jobs right way,” said Deborah Young, the co-founder of Pamoja Early Childhood Education. “There are 27,000 teachers that are missing, so this is a great match. We have a huge talent force, and we have a need for them.”

The Pamoja Early Childhood Education workforce program is made up of refugees and immigrants from all over the world to serve as a pipeline for new early childhood educators.

Fatima Jafari, who is from Afghanistan, is in the program.

“For two years, I have studied early childhood education, and I am working as a teacher in the center,” Jafari said. “The program is so important for all the women in my community. They come into the United States, and they need to learn to communicate with the children and how to live in the United States in a new environment. They also need to learn to grow their kids in a new country.”

According to Child care Aware of America research, it shows that nearly 9,000 daycares closed in 37 states between 2019 and 2021. While there are also less day cares, child care center costs increased across the country at an average rate of 41%.

For this reason, Pamoja Early Childhood is utilizing refugees and immigrants by not only giving them the education to start a new life in this country but to help decrease the childcare worker shortage and promote diverse people in the industry.

“We need childcare, and we don’t have enough childcare. We don’t have enough childcare workers, mostly because we do not give professional wages or living wages even,” Young said. “Really investing in our refugees and our immigrants to get higher education, to get the credentials and knowledge and get into the workforce, they’re contributing in one way or another to our society, let’s get them to contribute in ways that creates the whole increase in well-being for everybody in our communities.”

According to the CDC, 94% of childcare workers are female and 40% of those are people of color.

“Right now, almost two years ago, I started the study of the children,” Jafari said. “One of my children is a little bit delayed, but I just want to learn a lot about the behavior and learn about growing the brain for him. Also, I want to help others who have children like me, and I can help them.”

“We want childcare workers to speak the same language and look the same as the child,” Young said. “We want child identity to really be confident in who they are who their family are and what their background and historical context are. And most of the background of teachers and leadership positions look like me.”

The developers of this program believe that bringing in women of color who speak multiple languages can help provide more options for child care to the country and overcome cultural differences while also closing the work shortage gap.

DENVER, Colo. — The local craft beer scene and farm-to-table movement have shifted a focus on where our food comes from, and the trend is far from over. We're now seeing that same concept make sweeps in the fashion industry.

Behind every piece of clothing is at least one artist and an art form, that in many cases, has been replaced by fast fashion.

"You know your grandma probably knows how to sew but your mom doesn't know how to sew or your dad doesn't know how to sew," said Skye Barker Maa, the owner of Factory Fashion.

However, at Factory Fashion in Aurora, Colorado, the art of design is being nurtured.

"People want to know where their clothing is made. They want to know where their food is grown. They want to know what it's made of and what it includes and make sure that the people who are making the clothing are taken care of," Barker Maa said. "For us, for small batch, we're trying to check as many of those boxes as well."

The concept of small-batch manufacturing is simple. Barker Maa explains it encompasses creating on a smaller scale in a more intimate setting and straying away from the concept of mass production. That's where many artists are initially pushed.

"You're probably going to call New York or L.A., a big house where they do everything and they are going to tell you, 'Yes, we'll help you if you make three to 500 of those,' so you're probably not going to have that money. You're going to be not ready to make a 300 garment investment in something if you don't know if it's real or not," Barker Maa said.

Just like we've seen with farm-to-table food and local craft beer, shopping is following this local movement.

"I think we went through this huge phase of trying to get as much as we can for as little as we can and I'm not suggesting that doesn't exist anymore, but I also think we're now willing to pay a little more to understand the full scope of how our products come to us," Barker Maa said. "The more you start paying attention to where everything comes from, the more you understand the people who are behind the products that you wear."

Many of those people, like designer and sewer Geli Hayes, have stories of dedication.

"I basically am self-taught. I started sewing about five years ago, bought my first sewing machine, actually skipped my rent just to buy my first sewing machine and some fabric back then. And that's how I knew I loved it because I'm not going to skip rent for anybody," Hayes said.

For her, it's about seeing that fabric turn into a finished garment.

"Sometimes, when I'm here, at the job, they have to like tell me to go home because I just want to keep sewing," Hayes said.

Small-batch fashion has given Hayes the creative freedom and opportunities she says she likely wouldn't have gotten at a larger operation.

"I think if I were to be actually working for a huge manufacturer or a huge factory, I wouldn't have for one got the position let alone learn stuff on the way," Hayes said.

"That's the bigger differentiator for us, is providing an opportunity for people to be local and providing an opportunity for them to be financially flexible as they move through the process," Barker Maa said.

Artists like these are in every city across this country that's why these designers say don't pass by the local shop.

NEW YORK CITY — More children across the country are dealing with anxiety and depression than ever before, but mental health experts say children’s books can play a role in helping them cope. Because of that, sales of these books have been steadily increasing over the last decade.

Children’s author Ian Ellis James takes on grown-up conversations with his own children’s book. James, who goes by Electric, is an Emmy-award-winning writer for Sesame Street. Now an author, he visits elementary school kids in New York City to share messages about safety.

“If I can write some books, if I can use some songs, and then go out and start with a 5-year-old, 6-year-old going in and do this well, like a workshop about gun violence and gun violence awareness, I think I can change behavior,” said James.

Books like James’ "A Gun is Not Fun" are in high demand. Sales of books for young readers on violence, grief and emotions have increased for nine straight years, with nearly 6 million copies sold in 2021, that’s more than double the amount sold in 2012.

James sees these books are especially needed in lower-income communities where children typically have less access to mental health care services.

“It really impacts kids of color, the community of color. I tell you, it like, it breaks my heart. That's really why I'm doing this,” said James.

Child psychologist Aryeh Sova believes these children’s books can be effective in helping kids make sense of violence and loss.

“I think it could be a great way to help kids become more of a partners in their own therapy, because a lot of these books involve activities that they could participate in and they can fill out for themselves,” said Sova.

However, Sova said bringing up violence when a child isn’t worried about it could increase their anxiety unnecessarily. So, parents and teachers need to ensure kids are prepared for what they're reading.

“There was probably an effort a while ago to keep children's literature sort of light and happy, and kids shouldn't have to experience trauma in their books. but the fact is, kids do,” said Andrea Colvin, the editorial director of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.

Colvin hopes parents and teachers see these books as an opportunity to prepare children for the world they’re living in.

“Whenever major things happen in the world, it makes its way down to children's literature because children's literature needs to or it should reflect what's actually happening to kids and what's happening in the world,” said Colvin.

James is encouraged that communities are embracing the idea as a way to help kids cope.

“If I could get you on board to monitor guns and not pull a gun on your friend or neighbor and realize that this gun is not a good thing. If I can turn you around, we got something. We got a little strategy here going,” said James.

A U.S. appeals court decided on Friday to temporarily block President Joe Biden's plan to forgive and cancel billions of dollars in student loans.

Reuters reported the appeals court made the move temporary as various parties worked to allow the scheme to progress while others work to block it.

Biden made the announcement in recent months that his administration planned to work to forgive at least $10,000 in federal loans for eligible borrowers. It was a version of a campaign promise that the president has worked to see carried out.

As the Associated Press reported, A federal judge on Thursday dismissed an effort by multiple Republican-led states to block the president's student loan forgiveness plan, relieving debt for tens of millions of student loan borrowers.

U.S. District Judge Henry Autrey in St. Louis said because the six states, including Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas and South Carolina, all failed to establish a standing, Autrey said, “the Court lacks jurisdiction to hear this case.”

Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson's office said states will appeal. A statement said the states "continue to believe that they do, in fact, have standing to raise their important legal challenges.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — The COVID-19 pandemic spared no state or region as it caused historic learning setbacks for America’s children, erasing decades of academic progress and widening racial disparities, according to results of a national test that provide the sharpest look yet at the scale of the crisis.

Across the country, math scores saw their largest decreases ever. Reading scores dropped to 1992 levels. Nearly four in 10 eighth graders failed to grasp basic math concepts. Not a single state saw a notable improvement in their average test scores, with some simply treading water at best.

Those are the findings from the National Assessment of Educational Progress — known as the “nation’s report card” — which tested hundreds of thousands of fourth and eighth graders across the country this year. It was the first time the test had been given since 2019, and it’s seen as the first nationally representative study of the pandemic’s impact on learning.

“It is a serious wakeup call for us all,” Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, a branch of the Education Department, said in an interview. “In NAEP, when we experience a 1- or 2-point decline, we’re talking about it as a significant impact on a student’s achievement. In math, we experienced an 8-point decline — historic for this assessment.”

Researchers usually think of a 10-point gain or drop as equivalent to roughly a year of learning.

It’s no surprise that children are behind. The pandemic upended every facet of life and left millions learning from home for months or more. The results released Monday reveal the depth of those setbacks, and the size of the challenge facing schools as they help students catch up.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said it’s a sign that schools need to redouble their efforts, using billions of dollars that Congress gave schools to help students recover.

“Let me be very clear: these results are not acceptable,” Cardona said.

The NAEP test is typically given every two years. It was taken between January and March by a sample of students in every state, along with 26 of the nation’s largest school districts. Scores had been stalling even before the pandemic, but the new results show decreases on a scale not seen before.

In both math and reading, students scored lower than those tested in 2019. But while reading scores dipped, math scores plummeted by the largest margins in the history of the NAEP test, which began in 1969.

Math scores were worst among eighth graders, with 38% earning scores deemed “below basic” — a cutoff that measures, for example, whether students can find the third angle of a triangle if they’re given the other two. That’s worse than 2019, when 31% of eighth graders scored below that level.

No part of the country was exempt. Every region saw test scores slide, and every state saw declines in at least one subject.

Several major districts saw test scores fall by more than 10 points. Cleveland saw the largest single drop, falling 16 points in fourth-grade reading, along with a 15-point decline in fourth-grade math. Baltimore and Tennessee’s Shelby County also saw precipitous declines.

“This is more confirmation that the pandemic hit us really hard,” said Eric Gordon, chief executive for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. To help students recover, the school system has beefed up summer school and added after-school tutoring.

“I’m not concerned that they can’t or won’t recover,” Gordon said. “I’m concerned that the country won’t stay focused on getting kids caught up.”

The results show a reversal of progress on math scores, which had made big gains since the 1990s. Reading, by contrast, had changed little in recent decades, so even this year’s relatively small decreases put the averages back to where they were in 1992.

Most concerning, however, are the gaps between students.

Confirming what many had feared, racial inequities appear to have widened during the pandemic. In fourth grade, Black and Hispanic students saw bigger decreases than white students, widening gaps that have persisted for decades.

Inequities were also reflected in a growing gap between higher and lower-performing students. In math and reading, scores fell most sharply among the lowest-performing students, creating a widening chasm between struggling students and the rest of their peers.

Surveys done as part of this year’s test illustrate the divide.

When schools shifted to remote learning, higher-performing students were far more likely to have reliable access to quiet spaces, computers and help from their teachers, the survey found.

The results make clear that schools must address the “long-standing and systemic shortcomings of our education system,” said Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of Los Angeles schools and a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets the policies for the test.

“While the pandemic was a blow to schools and communities, we cannot use it as an excuse,” he said. “We have to stay committed to high standards and expectations and help every child succeed.”

Other recent studies have found that students who spent longer periods learning online suffered greater setbacks. But the NAEP results show no clear connection. Areas that returned to the classroom quickly still saw significant declines, and cities — which were more likely to stay remote longer — actually saw milder decreases than suburban districts, according to the results.

Los Angeles can claim one of the few bright spots in the results. The nation’s second-largest school district saw eighth-grade reading scores increase by 9 points, the only significant uptick in any district. For other districts, it was a feat just to hold even, as achieved by Dallas and Florida’s Hillsborough County.

Testing critics caution against putting too much stock in exams like NAEP, but there’s no doubt that the skills it aims to measure are critical. Students who take longer to master reading are more likely to drop out and end up in the criminal justice system, research has found. And eighth grade is seen as a pivotal time to develop skills for math, science and technology careers.

For Carr, the results raise new questions about what will happen to students who appear to be far behind in attaining those skills.

“We want our students to be prepared globally for STEM careers, science and technology and engineering,” she said. “This puts all of that at risk. We have to do a reset. This is a very serious issue, and it’s not going to go away on its own.”

PLEASANT VIEW, Tn. — Dana Wallace believes in the power of her profession.

"Whether there had been a pandemic or not, teachers are rock stars and we're gonna take them from where they are to where they need to be," she said.

She’s been an elementary teacher for close to two decades, but for this school year, she’s taking on a new challenge: tutoring to combat covid-era learning loss.

"It definitely affected their academics but affected them socially too, and I look at my position as the cherry on top—that I just get to love on these kids and give them one more person to be their cheerleader," said Wallace.

This kind of tutoring isn’t the afterschool tutoring we might have endured years ago; this is high-dosage or high-impact tutoring as part of her state’s strategy to help kids bounce back. For 45 minutes, in small groups during the school day, she helps 42 kids throughout the week bridge gaps in their understanding of their classroom curriculum.

Last week, the National Assessment of Education Progress, or NAEP, released numbers that showed just how much students’ skills suffered since 2019. Math scores dropped 5 and 8 points in fourth and eighth grade respectively, the lowest since the early 2000s. Reading scores dropped by 3 points.

Kevin Huffman is the former education commissioner for the state of Tennessee and the current CEO of Accelerate, a new national initiative to help school districts across America integrate high-impact tutoring in their lesson plans through grants and research.

"A lot of districts are saying, 'We want to do tutoring. We know that it works. We've read the research.' But the challenge of finding the people to deliver," said Huffman.

While there’s no hard data yet to see how intensive tutoring has helped students post-COVID learning loss, years of studies on the positive impact tutoring has on student success has led to some states—like Tennessee Colorado, Texas, Lousiana and New Mexico— using some of their portion of the billions allocated through ARPA funding to invest in tutoring efforts.

Dana Wallace’s state of Tennessee, for example, is matching funds for school districts that decide to integrate tutoring. Tutoring works— the challenge is figuring out how to make it happen on a larger scale to fit the need.

"All districts across the country have federal stimulus money, and so they've got resources right now to deliver tutoring. price is not the barrier right now," he said. "So, we have a window right now to experiment, learn, try to figure out how to do this in a way that is more cost-effective, but hopefully still delivers results."

While the national scores are alarming, those working on helping students say that parents should have confidence in the people behind the efforts to help their kids get back on track.

"Every person is working our tails off for these students, not because of that score that came out, just because that's our heart and that's what we want to do is help them do their very best," said Wallace.

The COVID-19 pandemic sent Heidi Whitney’s daughter into a tailspin.

Suddenly the San Diego middle schooler was sleeping all day and awake all night. When in-person classes resumed, she was so anxious at times that she begged to come home early, telling the nurse her stomach hurt.

Whitney tried to keep her daughter in class. But the teen’s desperate bids to get out of school escalated. Ultimately, she was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward, failed “pretty much everything” at school and was diagnosed with depression and ADHD.

As she started high school this fall, she was deemed eligible for special education services, because her disorders interfered with her ability to learn, but school officials said it was a close call. It was hard to know how much her symptoms were chronic or the result of mental health issues brought on by the pandemic, they said.

“They put my kid in a gray area,” said Whitney, a paralegal.

Schools contending with soaring student mental health needs and other challenges have been struggling to determine just how much the pandemic is to blame. Are the challenges the sign of a disability that will impair a student’s learning long term, or something more temporary?

It all adds to the desperation of parents trying to figure out how best to help their children. If a child doesn’t qualify for special education, where should parents go for help?

“I feel like because she went through the pandemic and she didn’t experience the normal junior high, the normal middle school experience, she developed the anxiety, the deep depression and she didn’t learn. She didn’t learn how to become a social kid,” Whitney said. “Everything got turned on its head.”

Schools are required to spell out how they will meet the needs of students with disabilities in Individualized Education Programs, and the demand for screening is high. Some schools have struggled to catch up with assessments that were delayed in the early days of the pandemic. For many, the task is also complicated by shortages of psychologists.

To qualify for special education services, a child’s school performance must be suffering because of a disability in one of 13 categories, according to federal law. They include autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, learning disabilities like dyslexia, developmental delays and “emotional disturbances.”

It’s important not to send children who might have had a tough time during the pandemic into the special education system, said John Eisenberg, the executive director of the National Association of State Directors of Special Education.

“That’s not what it was designed for,” he said. “It’s really designed for kids who need specially designed instruction. It’s a lifelong learning problem, not a dumping ground for kids that might have not got the greatest instruction during the pandemic or have major other issues.”

In the 2020-2021 school year, about 15% of all public school students received special education services under federal law, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Among kids ages 6 and older, special education enrollment rose by 2.4% compared with the previous school year, according to federal data. The figures also showed a large drop in enrollment for younger, preschool-age students, many of whom were slow to return to formal schooling. The numbers varied widely from state to state. No data is available yet for last year.

While some special education directors worry the system is taking on too many students, advocates are hearing the opposite is happening, with schools moving too quickly to dismiss parent concerns.

Even now, some children are still having evaluations pushed off because of staffing shortages, said Marcie Lipsitt, a special education advocate in Michigan. In one district, evaluations came to a complete halt in May because there was no school psychologist to do them, she said.

When Heather Wright approached her son’s school last fall seeking help with the 9-year-old’s outbursts and other behavioral issues, staff suggested private testing. The stay-at-home mom from Sand Creek, Michigan, called eight places. The soonest she could get an appointment was in December of this year — a full 14 months later.

She also suspects her 16-year-old has a learning disability and is waiting for answers from the school about both children.

“I hear a lot of: ‘Well, everyone’s worse. It’s not just yours,’” she said. “Yeah, but, like, this is my child and he needs help.”

It can be challenging to tease out the differences between problems that stem directly from the pandemic and a true disability, said Brandi Tanner, an Atlanta-based psychologist who has been deluged with parents seeking evaluations for potential learning disabilities, ADHD and autism.

“I’m asking a lot more background questions about pre-COVID versus post-COVID, like, ‘Is this a change in functioning or was it something that was present before and has just lingered or gotten worse?’” she said.

Sherry Bell, a leader in the Department of Exceptional Children at Charleston County School District in South Carolina, said she is running into the issue as well.

“In my 28 years in special education, you know, having to rule out all of those factors is much more of a consideration than ever before, just because of the pandemic and the fact that kids spent all of that time at home,” said Bell.

The key is to have good systems in place to distinguish between a student with a lasting obstacle to learning and one that missed a lot of school because of the pandemic, said Kevin Rubenstein, president-elect of the Council of Administrators of Special Education.

“Good school leaders and great teachers are going to be able to do that,” he said.

The federal government, he noted, has provided vast amounts of COVID relief money for schools to offer tutoring, counseling and other support to help students recover from the pandemic.

But advocates worry about consequences down the line for students who do not receive the help they might need. Kids who slip through the cracks could end up having more disciplinary problems and diminished prospects for life after school, said Dan Stewart, the managing attorney for education and employment for the National Disability Rights Network.

Whitney, for her part, said she is relieved her daughter is getting help, including a case manager, as part of her IEP. She also will be able to leave class as needed if she feels anxious.

“I realize that a lot of kids were going through this,” she said. “We just went through COVID. Give them a break.”

A loose panel in a Cape Cod home revealed a hidden treasure behind its walls. Anna Prilliman came upon a trove of letters — hand-written seven decades ago, between a young man named Vance and his Betty Sue.  

"I read one of those letters, and it is absolutely a love story," Prilliman said. 

Their delicate cursive reminded Anna of the days people slowly put pen to paper instead of racing over computer keys. 

"There are no 'smh's' or 'omg's' or 'lols' it's full sentences. Grammatically correct sentences. Isn't that funny how that works," Prilliman said.  

For many, these letters are also a reminder of a timeless art form they worry is slipping through the hands of new generations.  

Cursive flourished after the fall of the Roman Empire, with each part of Europe creating different styles of handwriting. By the late 8th century, an English monk, inspired by Roman characters, revolutionized cursive. He designed handwriting that would maximize legibility and feature lowercase letters, word separation, and punctuation.

But when the invention of the printing press threatened to make hand-written texts obsolete, Italians revolted by creating "Italic cursive." And for centuries on, elegant writing proved to be a status symbol associated with different jobs and social ranks. By the 1700s, schools were teaching the first master scribes.  

When the U.S. gained its independence, Congress hired professional penmen to copy the nation’s founding documents.

And we were left with arguably one of the most famous signatures of all time — John Hancock’s. The American penmanship style we know today evolved from the mid-1800s.  

Abolitionist Platt Rogers Spencer created the first cursive system in the U.S., crafting a style still seen on Coca-Cola's iconic logo. 

Other methods of cursive took favor over the years until students were taught to form those loopy letters we still see today — though technology has changed the game. Today, students are instructed to put fingers on keys more often than pen to paper. 

Just 21 states require public schools to teach cursive in their curriculum.   

Cursive is also left out of common core state standards — fully adopted by 35 states since 2010.  Sue Pimental, one of the lead writers of the English standards, told EdWeek that teachers around the country felt cursive instruction took an "enormous" amount of time and welcomed the change. 

A few years after the common core was introduced, a survey found roughly four in 10 elementary school teachers were no longer teaching cursive, though about seven in 10 felt its absence would lead to long-term negative consequences. 

Steve Graham, a writing studies expert and professor at Arizona State University says there is evidence that handwriting is beneficial for cognitive development. He says good handwriting makes it easier for students to get ideas on paper and score higher on writing tests. But that doesn’t mean learning cursive is necessary.

Graham says there isn’t enough evidence to prove teaching cursive is better than print, and it’s only marginally faster to write in cursive — if at all. 

Others say we get more benefits from the writing style, like Virginia Berninger, an emeritus professor at the University of Washington’s College of Education. She’s studied the different ways cursive and print activate our brains and believes cursive helps students better recognize and write letters.

As for Betty Sue and Vance, their love story surrounds their carefully crafted letters, their lives changing from exchanging letters to exchanging vows and a lifelong marriage. The story of their cursive correspondence was told nationwide. And Anna eventually tracked down the couple’s grandson — 3,000 miles away.  

"Human connection matters. The past matters," Prilliman said. 

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The air children breathe may have an impact on their upbringing.

A study from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health shows certain low-income populations are being exposed to higher levels of dangerous fine particulate air pollution more than other groups.

Victoria Petro-Eschler, a mother of three, lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. They are all too aware of how the air they breathe affects their daily lives.

“We never have just a quick little 48-hour head cold. We have a cough that starts, and we try to like Dimetapp it out, you know, and then it always settles into their lungs,” Petro-Eschler said. “You can't avoid it here. It is part of everything. It determines if my kids get to play inside or outside on certain days. You know, my kids go from one highway that they're in the shadow of for school and another highway that they're in the shadow of that home.”

The air quality also determines how often the children are able to attend school.

“My kids have been late for days out of the past two weeks because we have been dealing with chronic coughs and upper respiratory,” Petro-Eschler said.

They live on the west side of Salt Lake City, a community with a median income of $49,000. An airport, an interstate interchange, a quarry and multiple refineries are their neighbors.

Richard Holman was one of the founding members of the Westside Coalition, an organization that made enough noise about the problem that they gained the attention of the Environmental Protection Agency. While each individual company meets EPA standards, it’s the combination that affects nearby residents.

“And it's not difficult to prove what's happening on the west side. These people are compromised,” Holman said.

A University of Utah study of 174 Salt Lake City County public schools showed schools with predominately minority students were exposed to worse air quality. A separate study showed there were more school absences when the air quality was poor.

Harvard professor Francesca Dominici was part of a study that looked at air quality throughout the United States. The study showed that air quality is not just a problem in Salt Lake City.

“The most polluted area is the one that there is a lower socioeconomic status where they have multiple environmental stressors,” Dominici said.

Environmental stressors forced Holman to eventually move, out of fear for his health. Those same stressors ignited Petro-Eschler to run for city council.

“To fix environmental issues is going to be slow and tedious. To fix the equity issues, the racial, the ethnic, the gender disparities, tt's going to be slow and tedious,” Dominici added.

The EPA is evaluating environmental stressors for the next six months.

Petro-Eschler worries a fix won't come soon enough.

“My doctor, when I told her this last time, when I went to get the steroids, I looked at her and said, 'Am I killing my kids by living where I live?' And she looked at me and said, 'One of these you know,' she doesn't want to tell me that.”

Great efforts have been made to close the gender pay gap. But not all fields of work are created equally.

Alexandra Light, who has been doing ballet since she was two years old, says even the dance world is dominated by men at the top.

“A lot of people on the outside of the dance world still don’t realize," she said. "In the industry, it’s still very much a boys’ game."

Tracey Rockett, who teaches management practice at Texas Christian University, said she can point to any number of studies that show the wide gulf between women and management. That gulf persists even in fields dominated by women.

“In public schools, for instance, men make up the minority of teachers, but to keep them, very often, they will be offered promotion opportunities much earlier than women are,” Rockett said, “You see that in the restaurant industry, in education, in healthcare, and in dance.”

According to the Dance Data Project, among the largest 150 ballet companies in America, a quarter of works produced last year were choreographed by women.

Light is a principal dancer. She’s at the front of the room, but she knows the hurdles in reaching a position where she’s at the front for good.

“You know, there's a choreographic workshop, and you don't sign up for that because you're like, ‘Well, I need to, I need to dance,’” Light said.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, women quit the workforce in larger numbers. They reported larger rates of burnout while taking on the extra burden of child care. At companies where women often take the lead on efforts of diversity and equity, they typically don’t get additional pay or substantial recognition.

But Rockett sees hope in Light’s generation.

"That is one thing we are seeing in particular with Gen Z. They will leave, and they will leave without a backup job. They will leave without a plan. If they're dissatisfied, they're going to take off,” Rockett said.

“I think a lot of dancers sort of face it at some point that, you know, there’s a lot of problems with our career. Like, we love dance so much, but there’s a lot of work to be done,” Light said, “Even when I was a little kid, I loved choreographing. I would go with my best friend. We would go down to the dance studio together and bring my boombox. As I got into my professional career, it completely waned.”

Light took the path she was steered to take, but she has plans to go beyond that path.

“I have goals for where I want to be in the future, but I’m really proud of where I am now,” Light said.

Federal COVID-19 relief funding that schools have relied on since the start of the pandemic is set to expire next year.

In 2020 and 2021, congress passed three COVID relief packages that added up to more than $190 billion for public and private schools across the U.S.

Districts report putting the money toward hiring staff, tech upgrades for online learning, improving airflow in schools, and mental health support.

Knowing the money will run out, some districts are concerned about budget shortfalls.

Former educator Amanda Bratten wants teachers and districts to know about a free online resource that could help them save money. It's called Propello.

"Propello is a K-12 education platform," Bratten said. "It's made for teachers, by teachers. and we bring together high-quality customizable curricula designed for hands-on learning. We allow for teachers to be able to personable that education to help students succeed."

Right now, Propello offers middle school science and language arts. There are plans to grow its elementary school curriculum next, including subjects like math and social studies.

Bratten says they do offer districts pay packages with premium tools, integrations and advanced services, but the priority is offering it for free to teachers.

The hope is districts can retain teachers, and those teachers won't have to spend their own money on resources.

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — A revised curriculum for a new Advanced Placement course on African American studies downplays some components that drew criticism from conservatives including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had threatened to ban the class in his state.

In the official framework made public on Wednesday, topics such as Black Lives Matter, slavery reparations and queer theory are no longer subjects to be taught. They are included only on a list of topics that states and school systems could suggest to students for end-of-the-year projects.

The rejection of the course by DeSantis, a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2024, stirred new political debate over how schools teach about race. Florida officials last month issued a chart that said it promoted the idea that modern American society oppresses Black people, was inappropriate, and uses articles by critics of capitalism.

A spokesperson for DeSantis on Wednesday said the state education department is reviewing the revised curriculum for compliance with Florida law.

The course is currently being tested at 60 schools around the U.S., and the official framework is intended to guide the expansion of the course to hundreds of additional high schools in the next academic year. The College Board, which oversees AP courses, said developers consulted with professors from more than 200 colleges, including several historically Black institutions.

The College Board has been taking input also from teachers running the pilot classes as the draft curriculum has gone through several revisions over the last year.

Critics accused the organization of bending to political pressure.

“To wake up on the first day of Black History Month to news of white men in positions of privilege horse trading essential and inextricably linked parts of Black History, which is American history, is infuriating,” said David Johns, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition. “The lives, contributions, and stories of Black trans, queer, and non-binary/non-conforming people matter and should not be diminished or erased.”

The course has been popular among students in schools where it has been introduced. At Baton Rouge Magnet High School in Louisiana, so many students were interested that Emmitt Glynn is teaching it to two classes, instead of just the one he was originally planning.

Earlier this week, his students read selections of “The Wretched of the Earth” by Frantz Fanon, which deals with the violence inherent in colonial societies. In a lively discussion, students connected the text to what they had learned about the conflict between colonizers and Native Americans, to the war in Ukraine and to police violence in Memphis, Tennessee.

“We’ve been covering the gamut from the shores of Africa to where we are now in the 1930s, and we will continue on through history,” Glynn said. He said he was proud to see the connections his students were making between the past and now.

For Malina Ouyang, 17, taking the class helped fill gaps in what she has been taught. “Taking this class," she said, "I realized how much is not said in other classes.”

Matthew Evans, 16, said the class has educated him on a multitude of perspectives on Black history. He said the political controversy is just “a distraction.”

“Any time you want to try to silence something, you will only make someone want to learn about it even more,” he said.

The College Board offers AP courses across the academic spectrum, including math, science, social studies, foreign languages and fine arts. The courses are optional. Taught at a college level, students who score high enough on the final exam usually earn course credit at their university.

In a written statement Wednesday, College Board CEO David Coleman said the course is “an unflinching encounter with the facts and evidence of African American history and culture.”

“No one is excluded from this course: the Black artists and inventors whose achievements have come to light; the Black women and men, including gay Americans, who played pivotal roles in the Civil Rights movements; and people of faith from all backgrounds who contributed to the antislavery and Civil Rights causes. Everyone is seen,” he said.

In Malcolm Reed's classroom at St. Amant High School in Louisiana, where he teaches the AP class, he tries to be mindful of how the material and discussions can affect students.

“I give them the information and I've seen light bulbs go off. I ask them, ‘How does it affect you? How do you feel about learning this?’ ” he said. “It's also new for me, and I'm just taking it in stride. We're not just learning history, but we're making history.”

It’s January, the middle of the school year, and yet tenth grader Lala Bivens is preparing for her first day at a new school.

Bivens started fall classes at One City Preparatory Academy, a new charter middle and high school in Madison, Wisconsin, but on January 13 a teacher shortage forced the school to shut down classes for more than 60 9th and 10th graders, including Bivens, who then had to switch schools.

“Teachers were just dropping like flies,” she told CNN.

Since the beginning of the school year, Bivens says she lost her math, chemistry and history teachers. The charter school’s CEO, Kaleem Caire, tells CNN the school lost “five core academic teachers” since the high school opened last fall.

On the second day of school, the Academy lost a humanities teacher. Then, four weeks later, a math teacher resigned. The school would lose three more teachers throughout the fall.

“We have quite a few students who are behind academically, the teachers found it hard, and some teachers came on not knowing how hard it was,” Caire told CNN by phone.

In addition to having to deal with low pay, high student-to-teacher ratios, poor working conditions, post-pandemic learning loss, school shootings and social or emotional issues with students, teachers across the nation are also grappling with culture wars over what they can and cannot teach in the classroom.

Florida school district begins 'cataloging' books to comply with DeSantis-backed law

Despite a national recruitment effort, Caire says he could not fill the open positions at the school. “Competition is intense. There are 16 school districts in this area.”

By the time Caire made the decision to shut down classes at the school for ninth and tenth graders, he had been filling in as a math teacher while other teachers at the school were teaching more than one class at a time.

The charter school helped Bivens and 61 other students scramble to find new schools midsemester. After a week of missed classes, Bivens’ mother was able to successfully enroll her at a local public high school.

It’s not just Wisconsin

What’s playing out in Madison is the worst-case scenario of a national teacher shortage gone unchecked.

Department of Education data shows 47 states have reported teacher shortages this school year with the problem being most acute in urban and rural areas. Meanwhile, desperate state legislatures are passing laws making it easier to become a public schoolteacher by lowering or eliminating certain qualifications.

The National Council On Teacher Quality told CNN that over the last two years, 23 states have lowered teacher qualification requirements for beginning teachers. That includes lowering or removing assessment tests designed to determine whether teachers have a firm grasp on the subject they will teach and creating emergency teaching certificates to expedite candidates into the classroom without a teaching degree.

Arizona, Florida and Oklahoma have created new pathways for people without a bachelor’s degree to teach in classrooms.

“Making it easier to become a teacher is an overly broad, short-term solution to staffing challenges that amounts to saying we just need ‘warm bodies’ in classrooms. It’s harmful to students and insulting to the teaching profession,” said Heather Peske, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington, D.C., think tank that researches and evaluates teacher quality nationwide.

Linda Darling Hammond, president of the Learning Policy Institute, an education research and policy advocacy group, says state efforts to repeal teacher qualification requirements will only exacerbate the teacher shortage.

“When states respond to shortages by reducing standards rather than increasing salaries and improving working conditions, what they’re doing is creating a vicious cycle. They get people in who are underprepared. Those people leave at two to three times the rate of those who have come in with preparation.”

Hammond says at the same time the quality of education for students suffers. “You’re undermining student achievement.”

A Band-aid on a gaping wound

Since Florida opened teaching roles to veterans without a bachelor’s degree last August, the initiative has only netted the state 11 new teachers, according to the state’s education department, raising the question of whether lowering standards is an effective solution to the shortages.

Florida’s Department of Education denies that there’s a teacher shortage and instead says, “The purpose of this new pathway was to value the unique experience military service provides while simply offering additional time for these veterans to obtain a bachelor’s degree and other requirements to receive a full professional educator certification.”

Back in Madison, Superintendent Dr. Carlton Jenkins’ school district will absorb most students transferring from One City Preparatory Academy, despite his district dealing with its own teacher shortage.

“I know our staff is amazing and they do magical type work but it’s still a challenge that will eventually bring stress on the staff here.”

“We have to try to make sure that what they learned aligns with what we are getting ready to teach. We don’t want the regression to happen,” he added.

But the learning loss he fears may have already begun.

“When I didn’t have enough teachers in my classes it was very hard because we didn’t really learn anything,” Bivens tells CNN.

Michael Jones, president of the Madison Teachers Inc. union told CNN, “We need to change the way public schools view educators as a never-ending supply of energetic martyrs and treat them more like the professionals they are and that we expect for our children.”

Kimberly Walkes, Bivens mother, says when she sent her daughter to school, she always assumed there would be enough teachers on staff to teach, so she was surprised when she learned that was not the case at her daughter’s school.

“You set your child up for greatness and they have so many great opportunities and to hear that was no longer being afforded to her, it broke my heart and brought me to tears," she said.

Black Americans have long articulated a clear vision for the kind of social change that would improve their lives.

The Pew Research Center recently explored Black Americans’ views about how to overcome racial inequality. The 2022 report found Black Americans “have a clear vision for reducing racism but little hope it will happen.”

“Most African Americans know their history,” said Spelman College professor Cynthia Neil Spence. “We know that from the stories that our grandparents have told us, our great-grandparents have told us. And those stories have always, in fact, been centered around the disenfranchisement of us based on who we are and based on how we were born.”

That same Pew report stated nearly 70% of Black adults see racial discrimination today as the primary obstacle to success.

“We still have the highest maternal mortality rates. We still have the highest rates of poverty,” Spence said.

“The systems that we currently have in place are not developed in a way that would meet the needs of most Black business owners and entrepreneurs in this country," said Alex Camardelle, vice president of policy and research at the Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative.

The Pew report stated that after George Floyd’s death in 2020, more than half of Black adults said the increased attention on racial equality would lead to meaningful change. In a survey one year later, nearly two-thirds said it hadn’t led to change.

“America is having to really just take an inventory of itself and look in the mirror and decide how are we going to be equitable and equal moving forward," said
Kyle Walcott, president of the Emerging 100 of Atlanta.

“I’m really a bit tired of hearing what the problems are. We have a George Floyd bill that yet has not been approved. We have a John Lewis Voting Rights Act that has not been approved. We have individuals who are serving at the federal government and the state governmental level, who have demonstrated behaviors that suggest that they don’t really care," Spence adds.

According to the Pew report, just 13% of Black adults say equality for Black people in the U.S. is very likely.

“It’s difficult, you know, as a Black person to think about, ‘When is that change going to come?’” Walcott said. “Things don’t happen overnight, and so how long are we going to wait, you know, on the government, the structures, the leaders who are in charge? We need the people that are in charge of the changing, the regulatory frameworks and the policies to be on the front lines.”

“I’m born and raised in the South. So, I’m in a community that’s hard-wired to believe that things won’t change or that the pace is just going to outlive me," Camardelle said.

“It’s time now for us to sit around tables and to build out sustainable strategies for addressing inequalities in our society,” Spence added. “This is what works, and let’s do it. Let’s make a difference.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released its recommendations on what kids should be eating after conducting a survey focused on the consumption of fruits, vegetables and drinks sweetened with sugar.

The health agency asked three questions about children between one of five years, requesting that participating households reveal how often vegetables, fruits and drinks with sugar are consumed by children, and how much they had consumed during the previous week.

The CDC said households are "randomly sampled from the Census Bureau's Master Address File" and then they are contacted by mail to see which have at least one child or adolescent.

The CDC found that in 2021 at least 32.1% of children between one and five did not eat fruit on a daily basis and that 49.1% did not eat vegetables during the entire week before the survey was conducted. 57.1% of those questioned had a drink sweetened with sugar, according to the responses given to the CDC at that time.

David Goldman/AP

2.4% of the respondents did not answer at least one item and were excluded from the findings.

The CDC indicated that many children do not have enough fruits and vegetables on a daily basis, but they were regularly consuming sugary drinks.

According to the agency's data, out of 20 U.S. states, over half of the children from those states did not eat a vegetable daily during the entire week before the survey, according to responses.

Out of children from 40 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, over half of those kids consumed a sugary drink at least once in the week before the survey.

Numerous schools in Colorado and Idaho were put on lockdown Wednesday after someone reported threats, which police believe were part of a hoax.

Boulder Police Chief Maris Harold told reporters Wednesday that dispatchers received a call in the morning from a male who said he was going to Boulder High School when the sound of gunshots could be heard in the background.

Boulder Police cleared the school, but there were no confirmed injuries.

Threat calls were also made to schools in Colorado, including in Aspen, Alamosa, Brighton and Canon City. In all the cases, the schools were cleared of any threat.

In Idaho, the Caldwell Police Department said there were a number of "non-legitimate" threats made at several schools Wednesday morning. Officers continue to respond, but they believe the threats are part of a wide-reaching hoax.

"In the past week, similar instances involving hoax calls into schools have occurred in Oregon, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada," the Caldwell Police Department said in a statement.

A spokesperson for the Boulder Police Department said the FBI is now helping investigate the source of the calls.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. —

Most animal shelters admit it's easier to get dogs adopted than cats.

Wayside Waifs in Kansas City did something this week that not only got international attention but also found several felines a forever home.

Sometimes you really have to think outside of the box to get animals adopted or, in this case, take to social media.

Wayside Waifs posted a lighthearted video on TikTok with the simple intention of showing off some of their cats up for adoption.

The simple video got more than one million views. Thanks to that video, all but two of the cats were adopted.

"It was actually something that one of our feline care technicians thought of. What kind of animal likes people? What kind of animal would wanna snuggle with the other kittens?” Casey Waugh with Wayside Waifs said.

The goal was to get these shelter cats some attention. They had no idea just how much response they’d get.

"The dogs are sometimes easier, you know, to make TikToks about things like that, but we’ve got lots of different personalities,” Humane Educator Amy Putman said.

Those personalities are now a worldwide hit.

"We have comments from Brazil and the Philippines and the UK, all these amazing places," Waugh said.

Wayside Waifs said they still have plenty of animals to adopt. They’ll be looking to come up with more fun ways to get that done in their next video.

A charter school principal in Tallahassee, Florida, did not follow procedure before a lesson on Michelangelo's statue of David was given to sixth graders, school board Chair Barney Bishop III told CNN.

Due to this and other issues, she was asked earlier this week to either resign or be terminated from her position, Bishop said. She chose to resign.

Hope Carrasquilla, the former principal at Tallahassee Classical School, told CNN that things had been escalating over the past year.

"My board chair has not been happy with me," she told CNN, adding that she did not always follow every policy and procedure.

Agreeing with Carrasquilla's assessment, Bishop told CNN that over time it had become evident the school needed to go in a different direction and with different leadership, and he had expressed that to her on many occasions.

"She was not let go because of Michelangelo's David lesson," he said.

"Our school is two and a half years old. Every year we show that picture in the Renaissance Art class taught to our sixth graders," he added. The problem that arose in this instance was that the procedure for notifying parents of the upcoming lesson was not followed, according to Bishop.

"We aren't trying to ban the picture," he said, referring to the statue of David. "We think it's beautiful, but we are going to make sure the concept of parental rights is supreme in Florida and at our charter school," he added.

Last year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the Parental Rights in Education bill into law, which states in part, "The parent of each public school student has the right to receive effective communication from the school principal as to the manner in which instructional materials are used to implement the school's curricular objectives."

As a public charter school, Bishop told CNN, "We agree 100% with what Gov. DeSantis is doing with education in Florida. Parents decide what their children get to learn," he said.

"It does not mean that parents are telling us what we are going to teach their children. We are going to make sure that parents specifically know what we are going to show their kids, what we are going to talk to their kids about and any keywords that might be a triggering event. This gives parents the opportunity to say, 'Wait a minute. My child isn't old enough to hear that,'" he added.

Bishop and Carrasquilla agree this was the step that was missed regarding the lesson on the 500-year-old sculpture.

Bishop said about 97% of the sixth-grade parents were fine with the lesson, but the school did receive complaints from others.

"If there is a parent that has a problem and we haven't followed our process -- we have to make sure that mistake doesn't happen. That's why we adopted the process of a two-week notice and one-week notice," he said.

Carrasquilla's resignation was effective immediately and the school promoted one of the deans as the new principal.

Tallahassee Classical School enrolls about 500 students, and according to its website, it is a classical, tuition-free public charter school under Leon County Schools and governed by a non-profit board of trustees.

Officials at several school districts in Texas are traveling to Mexico to interview potential teacher candidates to meet the growing demand.

The ‘Exchange Teachers’ Visiting International Teacher Program was approved by the ESC-2 Board of Directors in December 2021.

District officials in South Texas are conducting interviews in the Mexican state of Tlaxcala.

“There are 65 candidates available right now. It does not mean we are going to use all 65, it’s just what the district is needing at this time,” said ESC-2 Associate Director of Curriculum, Instruction & Accountability, Dr. Daniel Ceballos.

District leaders say COVID-19 exacerbated the demand for educators. The need goes beyond teachers in core subjects like math and science.

“Now it’s really English teachers, special ed teachers, bilingual teachers, those are in high demand,” said Kingsville ISD Superintendent Dr. Cissy Reynolds-Perez.

“There may be potential other vacancies, because usually about May or April is when people start deciding if they are going to retire or not and so we just need to have a pool ready to make sure that we can fill those vacancies quickly and easily.”

Region 2 directors are looking forward to bringing highly qualified candidates into the classrooms through this specialized partnership.

“Making sure that all the shortages positions are taken care of, I think it’s going to be important not only to the teachers but the kids and the communities there,” said Dr. Ceballos.

“And what a better way than to have somebody also, an international teacher that comes in to also learn about the different culture as well, I think it’s an added benefit.”

This story was originally reported by Reyna Rodriguez at KRIS in Corpus Christi, Texas.