Category Archives: US education

Teacher wins free speech case after wearing Trump-themed hat to school

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Eric Dodge wore Make America Great Again baseball cap twice but judge found no ‘tangible disruption’ to Washington school

A federal appeals court has ruled in favor of a former teacher in Vancouver, Washington, concluding that his wearing a hat supporting Donald Trump to school was protected speech under the first amendment.

Documents from the ninth circuit court of appeals show that Eric Dodge, a science teacher, brought the Make America Great Again baseball cap to an Evergreen Public Schools building twice before the 2019-2020 school year.

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New Orleans lawyer fined for alerting school to priest’s past sexual misconduct

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Richard Trahant was fined $400,000 for violating confidentiality rules around a bankruptcy filing by the local archdiocese

A New Orleans attorney who represents victims of clerical sexual abuse faces a $400,000 fine after alerting a local Catholic high school that a priest who worked there once admitted to fondling and kissing a teen girl he met at another church institution.

The lawyer, Richard Trahant, said he would appeal against the hefty sanction handed to him on Tuesday, which stemmed from a federal judge’s ruling that his alert violated confidentiality rules governing a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing by the local archdiocese.

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Students protest Ben Sasse’s views on LGBTQ+ rights at University of Florida

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Likely appointment of Republican Nebraska senator as president of the university sparks protests during his campus visit

Less than a week after being revealed as the likely next president of the University of Florida (UF), the Republican senator Ben Sasse was met with protests when he appeared on campus in Gainesville on Monday.

“Hey-hey, ho-ho, Ben Sasse has got to go,” protesters chanted, seeking to draw attention to the Nebraskan’s views on LGBTQ+ rights.

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Oakland police search for two suspects after school shooting that injured six

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Mayor Libby Schaaf calls for gun restrictions after shooting at Rudsdale Newcome high school for recently immigrated students

California authorities are searching for at least two people in connection with a shooting on a school campus in Oakland that left six people injured.

Wednesday’s shooting occurred at Rudsdale Newcomer high school, which serves students who are at risk of not graduating and have recently immigrated to the US after fleeing their home countries “because of violence and instability”. The school is one of four adjacent schools that serve middle and high school students on Fontaine Street just outside East Oakland.

This story was amended on 28 September 2022 to clarify that the shooting happened at a grade school, not a high school

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Virginia seeks to strip transgender school students of protections

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State education department issues guidance reinstating bathroom and locker room restrictions and curbing pronoun changes

Virginia is attempting to roll back major protections for school students who are transgender, according to the latest set of guidelines announced by the state’s education officials.

The state’s department of education announced on Friday that it had rewritten a number of policies around the treatment of transgender students, issuing guidance for school districts to follow that ease up accommodations from the previous administration.

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Suspicion falls on employee after explosion at university in Boston

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Man who said he discovered package at Northeastern University may have staged incident, law enforcement officials say

Federal officials are now examining whether the employee who reported an explosion at Northeastern University may have lied to investigators and staged the incident, law enforcement officials said on Wednesday.

Investigators identified inconsistencies in the employee’s statement and became skeptical because his injuries did not match wounds typically consistent with an explosion, said one official.

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Biden unveils plan to cancel $10,000 in student loan debt for millions

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President delivers on campaign promise and outlines debt relief measures for those on lower incomes in White House speech

Millions of Americans received welcome news on Wednesday when Joe Biden delivered on a campaign promise to provide $10,000 in student debt forgiveness.

Borrowers who earn less than $125,000 a year will be eligible for loan forgiveness, with those whose low incomes qualified them for federal Pell Grants receiving up to $20,000 in relief. About a third of US undergraduate students receive Pell Grants.

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Texas school district pulls the Bible, The Bluest Eye and other books from library

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School board in Dallas-Fort Worth area requires reviewing books facing challenges from parents

A Texas school district is scrambling to remove books from its library shelves ahead of the fall semester, after they were challenged by parents and community members. Among the books removed are a graphic novel adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and the Bible.

It’s not clear why more than 40 books were challenged.

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Principal of Uvalde elementary school suspended in wake of deadly shooting

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Mandy Gutierrez put on administrative leave, as 77-page report details multiple failures from police and other Texas officials

The principal of the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, where an intruder shot dead 19 students and two teachers in May, has been suspended from her job.

Mandy Gutierrez of Robb elementary school was put on paid administrative leave on Monday, her attorney Ricardo Cedillo said in a statement to the Associated Press.

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Virginia lawsuits indicate pattern of schools ignoring reported sexual assaults

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Two lawsuits are back in front of federal judges, drawing scrutiny to schools’ failure to support students who report assaults


A pair of lawsuits that for years has plagued Virginia’s largest school system with allegations that it ignored students’ accusations of sex assaults are back in front of federal judges.

One of the lawsuits includes allegations of horrific abuse suffered by a student at a Fairfax county middle school and was the basis for a 2014 federal investigation.

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Mississippi school district upholds teacher’s firing for reading I Need a New Butt! to kids

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Toby Price, an assistant principal who plans to pursue an appeal with the chancery courts of Mississippi, was fired in March

The firing of a Mississippi assistant principal for reading pupils a humorous children’s book, I Need A New Butt!, has been upheld by his school district.

The book describes a boy who tries to find a new bottom after he sees a “crack” in his current bottom which makes him afraid it is broken.

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New York teacher under investigation for cotton-picking lesson

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Teacher put on leave after allegedly telling class of mostly Black students to pick seeds out of cotton during lessons on slavery

School officials in Rochester, New York are investigating allegations that a white teacher told his class of mostly Black students to pick seeds out of cotton and put on handcuffs during lessons on slavery in a seventh-grade social studies class.

“It made me feel bad to be a Black person,” one School of the Arts student, Jahmiere O’Neal, told reporters.

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Florida rejects 54 math textbooks over ‘prohibited topics’ including critical race theory

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Move follows a series of hardline measures by Republicans in the state to alter teaching in schools as governor welcomes news

Florida’s education department has rejected 54 mathematics textbooks from next year’s school curriculum, citing alleged references to critical race theory among a range of reasoning for some of the rejections, officials announced.

The department said in a news release Friday that some of the books had been rejected for failure to comply with the state’s content standards, Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking [Best], but that 21% of the books were disallowed “because they incorporate prohibited topics or unsolicited strategies, including CRT”.

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California university sues YouTubers who allegedly filmed disruptive pranks

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A judge also granted a restraining order to the pair accused of terrorizing students who ‘provoked extreme fear and anxiety’

A pair of YouTubers are facing a lawsuit and a restraining order after allegedly filming themselves disrupting classes at the University of Southern California campus in Los Angeles and uploading footage of the staged pranks online.

The University of Southern California sued Ernest Kanevsky and Yuguo Bai over the incidents, USC Annenberg Media reported last week. A judge granted a restraining order banning Kanevsky and Bai, who are not USC students, from campus after university attorneys said the pranks had terrorized “students to the point where they are running out of lecture halls for fear of their lives”.

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Police investigate hazing allegations of women’s rugby team at Vermont college

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Team at Norwich University accused of branding and waterboarding other team members

Vermont police have launched an investigation into hazing allegations surrounding the women’s rugby team at Norwich University in the state, including allegations of branding and waterboarding.

Police have executed search warrants and went to a residence hall at the private military academy in Northfield to collect evidence, the Barre Montpelier Times Argus reported.

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Georgia senate passes bill limiting discussion of race in schools

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‘We must teach that America is good’ says top Republican of bill banning teaching that US is ‘fundamentally racist’

The Georgia senate passed a bill on Friday that would limit discussions of race in kindergarten through 12th grade classrooms.

House Bill 1084, the “Protect Students First Act”, was approved by the Georgia senate. The measure requires local school boards and administrators to ban discrimination on the “basis of race” by limiting how race can be discussed in classrooms.

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Republican retracts false claim schools placing litter boxes for ‘furry’ students

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Nebraska’s Bruce Bostelman apologises for repeating rumor that schools accommodating children who self-identify as cats

A Nebraska state lawmaker apologized on Monday after he publicly cited a persistent but debunked rumor alleging that schools are placing litter boxes in school bathrooms to accommodate children who self-identify as cats.

State senator Bruce Bostelman, a conservative Republican, repeated the false claim during a public, televised debate on a bill intended to help school children who have behavioral problems. His comments quickly went viral, with one Twitter video garnering more than 300,000 views as of Monday afternoon, and drew an onslaught of online criticism and ridicule.

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New Orleans rescinds little-known century-old ban on jazz in schools

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School board ditches policy ‘rooted in racism’ that was widely ignored in practice

The New Orleans school board has unanimously reversed a little known but century-old ban on jazz in schools in a city which played a huge role in developing jazz and where it is still played nightly at various venues.

“I’m very glad that we can rescind this policy. I want to acknowledge it. It was rooted in racism,” the Orleans parish school board president, Olin Parker, said during the meeting on Thursday night. “And I also want to acknowledge the tremendous contributions of our students and especially of our band directors, whose legacy continues from 1922 through present day.”

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Texas attorney general says school district’s Pride week ‘breaks state law’

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Ken Paxton called district’s Pride week ‘sex education’ and claimed without parental consent it is against law

The attorney general of Texas has declared a school district’s celebration of LGBTQ+ students “sex education” and in violation of Texas law.

For the past eight years, students in the Austin Independent school district have held a district-wide Pride week as a chance to celebrate LGBTQ+ students, staff and families in the district, according to the district’s website.

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West Virginia Republicans miss own deadline to pass schools race bill

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Supermajority runs out of time to greenlight House version of bill but does pass abortion restriction

Republicans who enjoy a supermajority in the West Virginia legislature nonetheless failed to pass a controversial bill restricting how race is taught in public schools because they missed a midnight deadline in the final moments of the 2022 session.

Lawmakers spent weeks during the legislative session debating and advancing proposed bills similar to the Anti-Racism Act of 2022. It wasn’t immediately clear why Republicans waited until late on Saturday to take a final vote. The act had passed the Senate and House overwhelmingly and the vote was merely to greenlight the House version.

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