WASHINGTON — Twenty-six GOP-led states are suing the Biden administration over changes to Title IX aiming to from discrimination in schools.

Less than a month after the U.S. Department of Education released its final rule seeking to “based on sex stereotypes, sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics,” a wave of Republican attorneys general scrambled to challenge the measure.

The revised rule, which will go into effect on Aug. 1, requires schools “to take prompt and effective action when notified of conduct that reasonably may constitute sex discrimination in their education programs or activities.”

The lawsuits hail from Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.

All of the attorneys general in the 26 states suing over the final rule are part of the Republicans Attorneys General Association.

Various advocacy groups and school boards have also tacked onto the states’ legal actions. The lawsuits carry similar language and arguments in vehemently opposing the final rule. They say the new regulations raise First Amendment concerns and accuse the rule of violating the .

LGBTQ+ advocates say the revised rule offers students a needed protection and complies with existing law.

“Our kids’ experience in schools should be about learning, about making friends and growing as a young person. LGBTQ+ students deserve those same opportunities,” Sarah Warbelow, vice president of legal at the LGBTQ+ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign, said in an emailed statement. “In bringing these lawsuits, these state attorneys general are attempting to rob LGBTQ+ students of their rights, illustrating a complete disregard for the humanity of LGBTQ+ students.”

GOP states band together against new regulations

In the most recent effort, sued the on Tuesday, accusing the Department of Education of seeking to “politicize our country’s educational system to conform to the radical ideological views of the Biden administration and its allies.”

The lawsuit claims that under the updated regulations, teachers, coaches and administrators would have to “acknowledge, affirm, and validate students’ ‘gender identities’ regardless of the speakers’ own religious beliefs on the matter in violation of the First Amendment.”

In another lawsuit, a group of Southern states —  — sued the administration in in Alabama over the new regulations.

Republican Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall President Joe Biden “has brazenly attempted to use federal funding to force radical gender ideology onto states that reject it at the ballot box” since he took office.

“Now our schoolchildren are the target. The threat is that if Alabama’s public schools and universities do not conform, then the federal government will take away our funding,” Marshall said in a press release.

The lawsuit also drew praise from Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who said “Biden is abusing his constitutional authority to push an ideological agenda that harms women and girls and conflicts with the truth.” He added that the will “not comply” and instead “fight back against ”țŸ±»ć±đČÔ’s harmful agenda.”

Individual states sue the administration

Meanwhile, some states have opted to file individual lawsuits against the administration.

In Texas, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the Biden administration late last month in in Amarillo. Paxton filed an amended complaint earlier this week, with two new added.

In an , Paxton said the Lone Star State “will not allow Joe Biden to rewrite Title IX at whim, destroying legal protections for women in furtherance of his radical obsession with gender ideology.”

Gentner Drummond against the Biden administration earlier this month in federal court in Oklahoma. The also filed a separate suit against the Biden administration.

A hodgepodge of states

In late April, Republican attorneys general in filed a lawsuit against the in federal court in Kentucky.

The states argued that the U.S. Education Department “has used rulemaking power to convert a law designed to equalize opportunities for both sexes into a far broader regime of its own making.”

also sued the Biden administration in late April, echoing the language seen in the other related lawsuits. Seventeen local in Louisiana also joined the states.

Earlier this month, also brought a collective to the final rule.

A spokesperson for the Education Department said the department does not comment on pending litigation but noted that “as a condition of receiving federal funds, all federally-funded schools are obligated to comply with these final regulations.” They added that the department looks forward “to working with school communities all across the country to ensure the Title IX guarantee of nondiscrimination in school is every student’s experience.”

The department has yet to finalize a separate rule that establishes new criteria for transgender athletes. So far, 24 states have passed laws that ban transgender students from partaking in sports that align with their gender identity, according to the

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Family members and NAACP President Derrick Johnson spoke of the violent threats endured for years following the decision, which outlawed separating children into schools by their race. 

President Joe Biden met with the delegation of two original plaintiffs, about 20 descendants and NAACP leadership “critical in fighting for these and other hard-won freedoms for Black Americans,” according to a White House official. 

Several family members reiterated the struggle to make good on ”ț°ùŽÇ·ÉČÔ’s promise of quality education for all is far from over. 

“We have a lot of work to do,” said Cheryl Brown Henderson, youngest daughter of namesake plaintiff Oliver Brown, just after leaving the Oval Office. “… We’re still fighting the battle over whose children we invest in.”

In the private meeting, family members said they urged the President to continue that fight and support HBCUs. President Biden thanked them for taking on the risks required to push back on Jim Crow and segregation, including risking “your life, your livelihood, your home,” said Brown Henderson.

At least one litigating family’s home was burned to the ground in South Carolina. Many others lost jobs, compounding the challenges Black families faced in trying to build economic wealth less than a century after the fall of slavery. 

One descendant urged the President to consider a national holiday commemorating the landmark court decision so that its significance and history would not be lost.

“We have yet to fulfill the promise of Brown,” said NAACP President Derrick Johnson, adding that teaching “adequate” history is being threatened in multiple states. Last month, the organization for its “anti-indoctrination” law and alleged discrimination against Advanced Placement African American Studies courses.

“So the fight continues,” Johnson said. “It is a political fight. It is a legal fight. It is a moral fight, to ensure that we have a future that’s reflective of the demographics of this country today and not the demographics of 1950.” 

Earlier this week, scholars at Stanford University and University of Southern California unveiled troubling research that school segregation steadily increased in the last three decades. Experts say there’s an urgent need to reform how students are sorted into schools – four states require, and nearly all allow, districts to enforce attendance zones, which often mirror racist housing or sundown town boundaries from nearly a century ago. 

Family members called out the press’s failure to accurately document challenges to ”ț°ùŽÇ·ÉČÔ’s implementation and racial educational inequities being played out in schools today. They also voiced criticism for the administration’s military and war spending in comparison to education priorities. This week and late last month signed a for aid to Ukraine, Taiwan and other countries. 

“The truth about education in America? Are the kids from the Indian reservations 
 in West Virginia, or my mother’s hometown in South Carolina [getting quality education]? I say no. Tell me I’m wrong,” said Nathaniel Briggs, son of the namesake plaintiff in . “We’ll spend millions of dollars to buy an airplane and a bomb, but not on education.” 

Thursday’s event was the first of several NAACP and White House engagements commemorating the anniversary. Tomorrow, seven decades to the day since the court issued the Brown decision, the President will share remarks at the African American Smithsonian. 

Under the proposed changes, announced Thursday, the law would protect victims against discrimination based not just on sex but on sexual orientation and gender identity, in effect adding transgender students as a protected class. Current regulations are silent on these students’ rights.

But the proposal sidesteps the question of transgender athletes’ rights to compete in girls’ sports, an explosive issue administration officials said will get its own set of regulations at a later date.

“This is personal to me as an educator and as a father,” U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said during the announcement. “I want the same opportunities afforded to my daughter and my son — and my transgender cousin — so they can achieve their potential and reach their dreams.”

The changes come 50 years to the day after President Richard Nixon signed the federal civil rights law that bans sex discrimination in education.

Cardona on Thursday noted that LGBTQ youth “face bullying and harassment, experience higher rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide, and too often grow up feeling that they don’t belong.”

The proposed regulations, he said, “send a loud message to these students and all our students: You belong in our schools. You have worthy dreams and incredible talents. You deserve the opportunity to shine authentically and unapologetically. The Biden-Harris administration has your back.”

Education and civil rights groups welcomed the proposed rules, with Ronn Nozoe, CEO of the saying they “greatly strengthen principals’ abilities to ensure schools provide what students need.” 

Amit Paley, CEO of, a suicide prevention and mental health organization for LGBTQ youth, applauded the administration’s bid to extend Title IX protections to sexual orientation and gender identity, saying, “School should be a place where students learn and are comfortable being themselves, not a source of bullying and discrimination.”

But the proposed rules irked some conservative groups. In a, Nicole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education, called the move a “federal overreach” and dubbed the proposed regulations “The Biden administration’s ‘Must Say They’ rewrite of Title IX,” refering to the preferred pronoun of some who are transgender. 

“American families should be deeply concerned by the proposed rewrite of Title IX,” Neily said. “From rolling back due process protections, to stomping on the First Amendment, to adding ‘sexual orientation and gender identity’ into a statute that can only be so changed by Congressional action, the Biden Administration has shown that they place the demands of a small group of political activists above the concerns of millions of families across the country.”

Taken together, the proposed regulations would create a sharp contrast to Trump administration rules adopted in 2020 under then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Under DeVos, for instance, schools were prohibited from opening Title IX cases if an alleged assault took place away from school grounds. Under the new rules, schools would be required to address “hostile environments” in programs and activities, even if the conduct that contributed to the hostile environment “occurred off-campus or outside the United States,” a senior official told reporters.

“Our view now is that the existing regulations do not best fulfill Congress’ mandate in Title IX,” the official said. “There is more we can do to ensure that students do not experience sex discrimination in school.”

Cardona’s proposed changes both expand the definition of sexual harassment and potentially limit opportunities for students accused of sexual assault or harassment to confront their accusers. Administration officials said the new regulations would require schools to take “prompt and effective” action on campus sex discrimination.

But they also said the regulations in effect loosen requirements on schools’ sex assault investigations: The proposed rules, for instance, would “permit but not require” schools to hold live hearings in which accused students can directly confront survivors.

A senior department official, who briefed reporters Thursday on background, said the administration has concluded that a live hearing, which resembles a courtroom procedure, “is one, but not the only way, to address investigation and to determine what has occurred.” The official noted that the vast majority of schools were not conducting live hearings before the Trump administration began requiring them in 2020. “And it was clear to us that a live hearing was not essential to determination of outcomes and a fair process,” the official said.

In a statement, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), said the move “returns to the deeply flawed campus disciplinary process of the Obama Administration, which led to hundreds of inconsistent judgements and more than 300 legal challenges. The existing rule struck a balance that follows the law and is fair to both parties.”

Notably absent from Thursday’s announcement was any mention of Title IX’s application to athletics, which has caused a furor due to a handful of transgender athletes’ bids to compete in girls’ sporting events.

The administration said it will engage in a separate rulemaking process to address the law’s application to athletics and gender, but offered no immediate timeline for the process. A senior department official said the topic “deserves its own separate rule-making process.”

Administration officials have previously said Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination and harassment in programs receiving federal funds, will echo the in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, which extended protections against sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace to LGBTQ employees.

While the department’s interpretation of the Bostock ruling doesn’t mention sports, the Biden administration last year filed in a West Virginia case in which a transgender girl who wants to compete with girls on her middle school cross country team is challenging the state’s 2021 law banning students born as male from participating in girls’ sports. 

A group of 15 Republican-led states, led by Montana Attorney General, has threatened to challenge the regulations in court,. Since last year, a dozen states have passed legislation prohibiting trans females from competing in girls’ and women’s sports. 

Last week, the , the world governing body for swimming, voted to prohibit transgender athletes from competing in high-level women’s competitions unless they began medical treatments to suppress testosterone production early in their lives.  

The group, known internationally as FĂ©dĂ©ration internationale de natation, or FINA, said it would also a new, “open” category for athletes who identify as women but do not meet the requirement to compete against people who were female at birth.

By contrast, World Cup and Olympic soccer star Megan Rapinoe last week that she is “100 percent supportive of trans inclusion” in sports, noting that what most people know about the topic comes from “relentless” conservative talking points that don’t reflect reality. 

“Show me the evidence that trans women are taking everyone’s scholarships, are dominating in every sport, are winning every title,” she said. “I’m sorry, it’s just not happening. So we need to start from inclusion, period. And as things arise, I have confidence that we can figure it out. But we can’t start at the opposite. That is cruel. And frankly, it’s just disgusting.”

The public has 60 days to send comments on the new proposal, which could take several months to finalize. 

In a press conference Thursday, White House COVID Response Coordinator Ashish Jha outlined the possible timeline for when young children, the last group in the U.S. still ineligible for immunizations, could begin rolling up their sleeves.

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Here are the key dates:

—June 1, Pfizer-BioNTech formally asked the Food and Drug Administration to grant emergency use authorization to their doses for kids under 5. Moderna submitted its application in late April for kids 6 months to 6 years old.

—June 3, states became able to order vaccine doses for kids under 5. A total of 10 million are currently available, the White House said.

—June 14 & 15, the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee is scheduled to meet to review the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech doses. Should the committee vote in favor of authorization, the White House expects the FDA to greenlight the vaccines in the days immediately after the meeting.

—June 18-20, if the FDA has authorized shots, doses will begin to arrive at doctors’ offices. The White House can begin sending vaccine shipments immediately following FDA authorization.

—June 21, after the long holiday weekend, if the previous steps proceed without setbacks, kids under 5 may begin receiving vaccine doses. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must also recommend the shots, but the agency typically follows the guidance of the FDA.

The White House has asked states to first provide vaccines to sites that can handle large volumes of supply, such as children’s hospitals. But as soon as Atlanta-based pediatrician Jennifer Shu receives the green light from local officials, she will order doses for her office.

“Parents have been asking me about vaccine availability for kids under 5 for several months. I plan to order them as soon as I get the notice from our health department,” she wrote in a message to Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

The White House also stressed that providers should offer vaccinations outside traditional working hours.

“We want to make this as easy as possible for working parents and their families,” said Jha.

The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a question from Âé¶čŸ«Æ· asking how many doses have been ordered so far and by which states.

With COVID case counts once again high amid a second Omicron surge, the updated vaccine timeline for young kids appeared as a light at the end of the tunnel to many pandemic-weary parents.

“I teared up in the car today thinking about being able to get my kid vaccinated,” Marisol LeBrón, professor at UC Santa Cruz, wrote on Twitter.

Parents of young children awaiting vaccines for little ones have been on a months-long roller coaster that has repeatedly raised their hopes only to later send them crashing down. In late February, Pfizer-BioNTech first submitted a request asking the FDA to grant emergency authorization for a two-dose regimen of their vaccine for children 6 months to 4 years old, only to then withdraw the application just five days later.

Then in April, when Moderna was on the verge of submitting its EUA application for the age group, Politico reported that the FDA might postpone the review process until Pfizer’s shots were also ready, a reveal that angered many parents and spurred a congressional letter asking the agency to explain the reported delay. The FDA’s current timeline appears to confirm those speculations of a simultaneous review.

The Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech doses have several differences. Moderna’s shots are a two-dose regimen spaced four weeks apart, while the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine requires three doses each spaced three weeks apart. The Pfizer-BioNTech shots were 80% effective in clinical trials, while Moderna’s were 51% protective in toddlers 6 months to 2 years old and 37% protective in youngsters 3 to 5 years old.

Researchers believe both vaccines offer a strong defense against severe illness and hospitalization in the age group.

In a clip from the Thursday press conference that has circulated widely on Twitter, White House Press Sec. Karine Jean-Pierre cut off Jha before he could respond to a reporter’s question asking whether “all schools will and must be open this coming fall.”

Any speculations that the Biden administration would advise school closures next year, however, starkly contrast with the administration’s prior actions and messaging. Biden has continually underscored his commitment to keeping schools open and oversaw a push to 99% of schools offering in-person learning in his first months in office. Although early in the pandemic an in-person learning divide existed between red and blue states, virtually all school systems reopened their classrooms for the 2021-22 school year, regardless of their partisan leaning.

But with toddler vaccines possibly rolling out in just a few weeks, many older children have not yet been immunized. Just 29% of children 5 to 11 years old and 59% of youth 12 to 17 years old had received two vaccine doses as of June 1, according to data from the American Academy of Pediatrics. The rates that have remained nearly stagnant for months.

The winter’s massive Omicron surge demonstrated the importance of youth vaccination, said Shu, the Atlanta pediatrician. Children under 5 were hospitalized with the virus at five times the rate they were during the Delta surge, a study from the CDC recently found. And in February, the agency’s data revealed that 3 in 4 kids under 18 had been infected by the virus.

“The kids who are ending up in the hospital are more likely not to be vaccinated,” the doctor told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· in May.

“It doesn’t feel safe going to school,” said Joshua Oh, a rising ninth grader from Gambrills, Maryland.

“Even if you 
 don’t go to the school where the shooting happened, it’s still something that’s in the back of your head,” said Mahbuba Sumiya, who grew up in Detroit and is now a sophomore at Harvard University.

On Monday evening, Âé¶čŸ«Æ· convened members of its Student Council to speak about the ripple effects of the tragic event on their own school communities and to share their thoughts on the issue of gun safety more broadly. Several young people relayed anecdotes illustrating that fear and worry spurred by the shooting reverberate far beyond Texas.

Ameera Eshtewi attends an Islamic private high school in Portland, Oregon. In May alone, there have been multiple Islamophobic attacks on mosques in her community, she said. Those events plus the Texas shooting made it hard for her not to imagine the worst at her school.

“Thinking that someone could go into an elementary school and murder so many kids and then they could hear about our school, and on top of that we’re Muslim 
 they could easily come in and do the same,” she said. “I felt terrified.”

At Devin Walton’s high school in South Torrance, California, the ninth grader began to anxiously take account of safety measures in a way he never had before. He noticed the location of school security officers, surveillance cameras, the locks on the door. He began to imagine how, if an intruder were to enter his classroom, he could use the fire extinguisher hanging on the wall as a possible weapon to defend himself.

“After hearing about this school shooting, I’ve started to consider to myself, like, ‘Am I safe enough at my school?’” he said.

For Maxwell Surprenant, a high school senior in Needham, Massachusetts, an otherwise innocuous task became clouded by worry. The day after the shooting, he was helping carry supplies outside for a pre-graduation ceremony. Having read the news that the Uvalde shooter entered through a side door propped open by a teacher, he couldn’t avoid a creeping thought.

“I was looking at some of the doors and wondering, all it takes is for one of these to be left open one day,” he told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· in a phone call separate from the group meeting. 

“This shouldn’t be something that we should be concerned about,” added Sumiya, who noted that gun possession was common among her peers in high school to protect themselves from street violence, striking fear in her heart and rendering learning nearly impossible. 

“We’re going to school to get the education that we need. Why is our safety and our life on the verge of, like, you never know what can happen?”

With March For Our Lives youth organizers planning a in Washington, D.C. to demand universal background checks, students agreed that school safety and the prevention of shootings is one of the major issues on the minds of young people today.

“It’s such an important issue to us, to this generation, particularly because this generation, Gen Z, has really experienced it,” said Diego Camacho, a high school senior in Los Angeles, California.

School shootings have over the past decade. Excluding 2020 when schools were largely remote, there has not been a full calendar year since 2018 — the year of the mass shooting at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that galvanized the March For Our Lives movement — with fewer than 27 classroom attacks. The highest annual tally before that, spanning from 1999 to 2017, was 16 school shootings. Through only five months this year, there have already been 24.

There’s a cognitive dissonance to hearing about events that are as terrifying and heart wrenching as school shootings with such regularity and needing to continue going about their lives, expressed students. It’s weird, said Oh, that when a school shooting happens, it almost feels like a “normal event.”

“I felt a little numb,” added Eshtewi. “I was angry that I felt numb because this shouldn’t be something normal.”

The Uvalde shooting was the deadliest attack on a school since the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, which killed 20 children and six educators. 

In the days after the shooting, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced plans to and ban military-style firearms, including a mandatory buy back program set to begin at the end of the year. Meanwhile, after visiting with survivors and families of victims in Uvalde, Texas, U.S. President Joe Biden said policy changes such as background check requirements or assault weapon bans , which remains gridlocked on the issue.

But while Washington stands still, students are mulling what they think should be the path forward. The Uvalde shooting, said Suprenant, spurred meaningful conversations within his friend group, which spans the full political spectrum.

The high school seniors thought about the stark difference between the requirements for gun ownership and for driving a car—both activities that can pose a deadly threat to oneself and others. To earn a driver’s license, young people must first take a permit test, complete a driver’s education course and log a specified number of training hours, the teenagers observed, but no comparable preparations are required to purchase a gun in this country.

The accused shooter, who didn’t have , crashed his grandparents’ car before opening fire at Robb Elementary, authorities said. A week earlier, he was able to legally purchase two AR-15-style rifles, according to authorities.

“It’s just common sense to all of us that the process should be longer in terms of obtaining a weapon,” said Surprenant. 

The accused shooter crashed his grandparents’ car before opening fire at Robb Elementary, authorities said. His grandfather that his grandson, who legally purchased two AR-15-style rifles last month, didn’t have a driver’s license.

Sumiya agreed that gun control measures are overdue, but also pointed to deeper issues like poverty and housing insecurity, which she thinks played into the high crime rates where she grew up.

“What [are] the underlying concerns making someone go out of their way and then buy a gun?” she wondered. Teachers should be raising those questions and “talking about issues like that in the classroom setting.”

Surprenant offered advice to educators looking to facilitate dialogue on gun safety: Give students access to resources through which to inform themselves, but then “encourage kids coming up with their own solutions.”

With little to show for the efforts of adult policymakers to advance gun safety measures, Eshtewi understands that young leaders may have to pick up the torch. That frustrates her, but she sees no other choice.

“With any issue I remind myself, if not us, then who?” said the high school junior.

This story was brought to you via Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s Student Council initiative, an effort to boost youth voices in our reporting. America’s Promise Alliance helped in the recruiting of our diverse 11-member council and the idea was conceived as part of Asher Lehrer-Small’s Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship.

The Food and Drug Administration April 29 that it will reserve the dates June 8, 21 and 22 for its vaccine advisory committee to review the emergency use authorization requests of Moderna’s and Pfizer-BioNTech’s coronavirus shots for toddlers. While the dates remain subject to change, they provide an indication of when doses may be available to those under 5, as the FDA typically follows the recommendation of the committee in the weeks following its meeting.

Members of Congress sent a to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Monday asking whether the agency intended to delay reviewing Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine for children 5 years old and younger and for “the scientific basis and any other rationale” for such an action.

The move comes after White House officials told last week that young kids, the last age group not yet eligible for coronavirus vaccines, will likely have to wait until the summer for immunizations — a longer timeline than previously expected.

Although Moderna completed the trial for its toddler vaccine in late March and submitted a on Thursday, Anthony Fauci said that the FDA is considering reviewing the pharmaceutical company’s application at the same time as Pfizer-BioNTech’s, which has not yet been submitted.

“[The] two products 
 are similar but not identical, particularly with regard to the dose. And what the FDA wants to do is to get it so that we don’t confuse people to say, ‘this is the dose. This is the dose regimen for children within that age group of 6 months to 5 years,'” President ”țŸ±»ć±đČÔ’s chief medical advisor on Thursday.

“Such a decision could delay the potential authorization and administration of the Moderna vaccine by several weeks,” points out Rep. James Clyburn, chair of the House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, in its letter to the FDA. The committee asked for a staff briefing on the subject by May 9.

In early February, Pfizer-BioNTech submitted data on a two-dose vaccine series for children under 5 to the FDA, but in a highly unusual move withdrew their application just 10 days later. The two shots, which are 10 times less potent than the companies’ adult doses, were safe for all age groups, but did not provide enough protection against the Omicron variant for 3- and 4-year-olds. Pfizer-BioNTech now plans to request that the FDA authorize a three-dose regimen for children under 5, the companies have said.

The Moderna series currently submitted for review includes two shots that are each one-quarter the dose adults received. Trial data showed shots to be 44% and 38% effective in preventing illness among children 6 months to 2 years old and 2 years to under 6 years old, respectively.

But despite the relatively low efficacy, many parents of young children are anxious for a base level of protection for their kids, especially as mask mandates and social distancing requirements continue to fall across the country. 

For some, the idea that the FDA would delay the Moderna shots on parents’ behalf — ostensibly to avoid confusion — struck the wrong chord.

“If I sign a waiver saying ‘I don’t find this confusing at all,” can I go ahead and get the vaccine for my four-year-old?” parent and New York Times writer Whet Moser .

Meanwhile, a Tuesday report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that more than half of Americans have been infected by the coronavirus, including . Rates of prior infection nearly doubled over the course of the Omicron surge, the agency found.

Jennifer Shu, an Atlanta-based pediatrician, agrees that if doses are ready for emergency use authorization, Washington should not delay the rollout. After all, vaccines from separate companies were approved at different times for other age groups, she pointed out.

“If it’s ready to go, if the science has proven that the vaccine is safe and effective, then why not let the parents educate themselves on it?” she told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·, adding that health professionals like herself can help families make an informed choice.

Parents of kids under 5 may feel they’re being “thrown under the bus” as pandemic precautions dwindle and the BA.2 Omicron subvariant threatens, said Shu.

But despite thousands of families eager to vaccinate their toddlers, still more are likely to pass on the opportunity when it becomes available. 

Immunization rates remain relatively low for older kids and teens with 28% of 5- to 11-year-olds and 58% of 12- to 17-years-old fully vaccinated as of April 20, according to the . New immunizations have slowed nearly to a halt, with vaccine coverage having increased only 1 percentage point in each age group since mid-March.

Even as vaccination rates are flatlining, Pfizer-BioNTech is planning to seek authorization for a third booster shot for kids 5- to 11-years old after trials found that it offers added protection against the Omicron variant.

Declaring that children’s “lives and education have been turned upside-down,” President Joe Biden used his first State of the Union address Tuesday night to highlight the pandemic’s blow to student mental health and fixed some of the blame on social media.

Earlier in the day, the White House released highlights of Biden’s plan to use federal relief funds to double the ranks of school social workers and counselors. The administration also said the president will propose $70 million in early-childhood mental health funding as part of his 2023 fiscal year budget and has already included $1 billion in his 2022 budget request for school-based mental health services.  

The White House linked students’ social and emotional struggles to , pointing to early data revealing that students were four to five months behind in math and reading. 

Hinting at COVID’s lingering effects, Biden urged Congress to “take on mental health, especially among our children.”

While his address largely focused on the war in Ukraine and the lagging American economy, Biden also signaled a major shift in the pandemic’s disruption to education. 

“Our schools are open,” he said. “Let’s keep it that way. Our kids need to be in school.” 

He highlighted federal relief funds designed to help students make up for lost learning, urging “every parent to make sure your school does just that. And we can all play a part — sign up to be a tutor or a mentor.”

The attention to mental health comes amid mounting evidence of the pandemic’s negative impact on student well-being. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week showing increases in emergency room visits among teen girls have increased since 2020 for behaviors ranging from eating disorders to anxiety.

In December, Walter Gilliam, a professor of child psychiatry and psychology at Yale School of Medicine, briefed the administration on preliminary data showing that at least half of early educators report some children are acting out more and showing symptoms of depression and anxiety.

While states have previously used federal child care funds for early-childhood mental health, he said he’s never seen anything “of this size and nature.”

“It’s certainly the right time for it,” he said. “To have money that is carved out very specifically for early-childhood mental health is completely new.”

During the state-of-the-union, Biden also pointed to the ill effects of “addictive” social media and called for tighter restrictions.

‘We must hold social media platforms accountable for the national experiment they’re conducting on our children for profit,” he said. “It’s time to strengthen privacy protections, ban targeted advertising to children, demand tech companies stop collecting personal data on our children.”

A from U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued last year argued that some platforms were pitting students against each other, contributing to cyberbullying and undermining school safety.

The president also referenced state-level legislation targeting transgender students. He called on Congress to pass the , intended to eliminate LQBTQ discrimination.

“​​I will always have your back as your president, so you can be yourself and reach your God-given potential,” he said.

In the Republican response, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said Biden has taken the country’s economy backward and called students’ experiences over the past two years “unconscionable.”

“Our kids have been left behind and so many will never catch up. That’s why Iowa was the first state in the nation to require that schools open their doors,” she said, adding that Americans are “tired of politicians who tell parents they should sit down, be silent and let government control their kids’ education.”

Her remarks on parental empowerment and government overreach in schools echoed themes many Republicans hope will lead them to victory in upcoming midterm elections.

Last year, Reynolds was among the first governors to sign restricting discussions of race in the classroom, and fought in the courts. She cited the U.S. Department of Justice’s inquiry into parents protesting at school board meetings.

“The Department of Justice treats parents like domestic terrorists, but looters and shoplifters roam free,” she said.

Prior to the president’s address, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, a former elementary school principal in Meriden, Connecticut, addressed student mental health in a talk with school leaders gathered in Washington to advocate for increased federal funding.

“You spend the majority of your day addressing symptoms of unmet needs in students,” Cardona told members of the National Association of Elementary School Principals. “You can probably count on one hand the number of professionals in your building who are trained and educated.to serve the needs of those students. A principal becomes a manager of a crisis.”

Jacqueline Shirey, at-risk coordinator for the Beaumont Independent School District in Texas, east of Houston, told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· that even “seasoned” educators are feeling overwhelmed by students’ behavior. Schools are seeing spikes in disputes and students skipping class, as well as vaping and drug use.

“It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen,” she said. “Students’ needs are so elaborate. They’re very hard to reach right now.”

Parents and grandparents are also having a hard time reaching children. “Children are being defiant. Children are indulging in things that they normally have not been. Some are suffering from depression,” said Mamie Cosey, a great grandmother in East Saint Louis, Illinois. She’s raising her granddaughter’s three teenagers, including a ninth grader suspended last fall for a drug infraction.

‘A watershed moment’

Josh Golin, the executive director of Fairplay, a nonprofit focusing on the impact of commercialism on children, called the president’s remarks on social media “a watershed moment for families, children, and all those working to create a healthier media environment for young people.”

Katherine Solis, a ninth grade English language arts teacher at Sahuarita High School near Tucson, Arizona, has seen the problems first-hand. She allows students to use phones in her classroom for schoolwork, but too often those activities are interrupted by messages or TikTok and Snapchat notifications that negatively affect their moods, she said.

“The social media is insane,” she said. “They can be engaged with a vocabulary lesson, but I can’t stop the social media presence that comes into my room.”

Nicole Moore, principal of Indian Mills School in Shamong, New Jersey, hopes the administration also focuses on staff well-being, adding that she’s seen “Zoom in a room” — providing live instruction to students remotely while still teaching students in the classroom — bring one of her strongest teachers to tears.

“The adults are the forgotten group,” said Moore, who was among the 180 elementary principals gathered in Washington this week.

Jill Bohnenkamp, who leads the Center for School Mental Health at the University of Maryland, told the attendees at the NAESP leadership conference there are also free staff training programs and educators can use to build “mental health literacy.” She said even creating a “shout-out wall” with positive messages for students and staff members can help “re-energize” a school. 

“If we’re thinking about 
 low cost, high-impact strategies, this is where it’s at,” she said. Following her presentation, she said the issue and that data shows a connection between school-based mental health efforts and better academic outcomes. She called the president’s attention to the issue “an investment in our next generation.” 

In his first State of the Union, the President will outline a unity agenda consisting of policy where there has historically been support from both Republicans and Democrats, and call on Congress to send bills to his desk to deliver progress for the American people. As part of this unity agenda, he will announce a strategy to address our national mental health crisis.

Our country faces an unprecedented mental health crisis among people of all ages. Two out of five adults symptoms of anxiety or depression. And, Black and Brown communities are undertreated – even as their burden of mental illness has continued to rise. Even before the pandemic, rates of depression and anxiety were inching . But the grief, trauma, and physical isolation of the last two years have driven Americans to a .

Our youth have been particularly impacted as losses from COVID and disruptions in routines and relationships have led to increased social isolation, anxiety, and learning loss. More than half of parents concern over their children’s mental well-being. An has found that students are about five months behind in math and four months behind in reading, compared with students prior to the pandemic. In 2019, one in three high school students and half of female students persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, an overall increase of 40 percent from 2009. Emergency department for attempted suicide have risen 51 percent among adolescent girls.

This youth mental health crisis has been accentuated by large social media platforms, which for years have been conducting a national experiment on our children and using their data to keep them clicking—with enormous consequences. While technology platforms have improved our lives in some ways, there is that social media is harmful to many kids’ and teens’ mental health, well-being, and development. As the Surgeon-General has , “when not deployed responsibly and safely, these tools can pit us against each other, reinforce negative behaviors like bullying and exclusion, and undermine the safe and supportive environments young people need and deserve.” In the State of the Union, the President will call on Congress to strengthen privacy protections, ban targeted advertising to children, and demand technology companies stop collecting personal data on our children.

President Biden is laying out a vision to transform how mental health is understood, perceived, accessed, treated, and integrated – in and out of health care settings. The American Rescue Plan laid the groundwork, providing critical investments to expand access to mental health services. Now, far more is needed to ensure that everyone who needs help can access care when and where they seek it.

The President is announcing a national mental health strategy to strengthen system capacity, connect more Americans to care, and create a continuum of support – transforming our health and social services infrastructure to address mental health holistically and equitably.

Strengthen System Capacity

At the center of our national mental health crisis is a severe of behavioral health providers. More than one-third of Americans live in designated, communities that have fewer mental health providers than the minimum their level of population would need. Even outside of these shortage areas, the fragmentation of the current system makes it hard for mental health providers to meet people where they are. We must dramatically expand the supply, diversity, and cultural competency of our mental health and substance use disorder workforce – from psychiatrists to psychologists, peers to paraprofessionals – and increase both opportunity and incentive for them to practice in areas of highest need. Our crisis response infrastructure must also be strengthened to ensure that those facing acute behavioral health challenges can be seamlessly connected to necessary services.  We will: 

• Invest in proven programs that bring providers into behavioral health. The President’s FY23 budget will invest $700 million in programs – like the National Health Service Corps, Behavioral Health Workforce Education and Training Program, and the Minority Fellowship Program – that provide training, access to scholarships and loan repayment to mental health and substance use disorder clinicians committed to practicing in rural and other underserved communities. These major new investments will both expand the pipeline of behavioral health providers and improve their geographic distribution to target areas with the greatest unmet need.
  
• Pilot new approaches to train a diverse group of paraprofessionals. Doctors, nurses, and other clinicians cannot do this work alone. In the fall of 2022, HHS expects to award over $225 million in training programs to increase the number of community health workers and other health support workers providing services, including behavioral health support, in underserved communities. The President’s FY23 budget will also propose major new multi-year funding to develop provider capacity and support mental health transformation.

• Build a national certification program for peer specialists. The Biden-Harris Administration will convene stakeholders, launch development, and support implementation of a national certified peer specialist certification program, which will accelerate universal adoption, recognition, and integration of the peer mental health workforce across all elements of the health care system.
  
• Promote the mental well-being of our frontline health workforce. Three-quarters of frontline health care workers report burnout, while more than half say they lack adequate supports to cope. The Administration has already $103 million in American Rescue Plan funding to address burnout and strengthen resiliency among health care workers. The President will strengthen this commitment by signing the bipartisan Dr. Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Act into law, which will invest $135 million over three years into training health care providers on suicide prevention and behavioral health while launching an awareness campaign to address stigmatization, promote help-seeking and self-care among this workforce. In addition, HHS will continue grant programs to support health systems and provider groups to prevent burnout, relieve workplace stressors, administer stress first aid, and increase access to high-quality mental health care for the frontline health care workforce.
  
• Launch the “988” crisis response line and strengthen community-based crisis response. This summer, HHS will launch the mental health crisis service hotline, which will create a national network of local crisis centers fortified by national back up centers to answer calls and texts. Through the American Rescue Plan, the Administration has provided $180 million to support local capacity to answer crisis calls, and establish more community-based mobile crisis response and crisis stabilizing facilities to minimize unnecessary emergency department visits. The President’s FY23 budget will build on this investment with an additional nearly $700 million to staff up and shore up local crisis centers while also building out the broader crisis care continuum: someone to call, someone to respond, and somewhere for every American in crisis to go.
  
• Expand the availability of evidence-based community mental health services. The American Rescue Plan invested millions of dollars to expand Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics (CCBHCs), a proven model of care that has been to improve health outcomes while lowering costs, by delivering 24/7 mental health and substance use care to millions of Americans, no matter who they are or whether they’re able to pay. The President’s FY23 budget will build on this down payment, by proposing to make this program permanent while granting states funding to expand CCBHCs for the communities that need them most. The President’s budget will also permanently extend funding for Community Mental Health Centers, which provide essential mental health services to vulnerable communities that would otherwise lack access.
  
• Invest in research on new practice models.  New scientific and technological innovation has the opportunity to expand our capacity to meet American’s mental health needs, but there is a pressing need for research to validate what works and build a robust evidence base. The President’s FY23 budget will call for investing $5 million in research into promising models for treating mental health conditions.

Connect Americans to Care

Less than half of Americans with mental health conditions treatment. The average delay from the onset of mental health symptoms to treatment is.  Too often, prevent people from accessing care far. At the same time, those with mental illness are misunderstood, mistreated, mislabeled, and misdirected to services. It is imperative that we promote better pathways to care and make it as easy as possible for all Americans with behavioral health needs – including common and pervasive conditions like anxiety and depression – to access the resources that will improve their well-being. We must fight to ensure that every American can access mental health and substance use disorder care through their insurance coverage, while integrating mental health services and supports into a variety of other settings, online and in the community. The Biden-Harris Administration will:  

• Expand and strengthen parity. The called for mental health care benefits to be covered at the same level as physical health care benefits. The President’s fiscal year 2023 (FY23) budget will propose that all health plans cover robust behavioral health services with an adequate network of providers, including three behavioral health visits each year without cost-sharing.
  
• Integrate mental health and substance use treatment into primary care settings. Equipping primary care providers with the tools to identify, treat, and manage behavioral health conditions is a approach for delivering quality mental health and substance use care, particularly for individuals with depression. To facilitate adoption of these models, the President’s FY23 budget will double funding for primary and behavioral health integration programs. In addition, using existing authority, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will test payment models that support the delivery of whole-person care through behavioral health integration and authorize Medicaid reimbursement of inter-professional consultations so that primary care providers can consult with a specialist and provide needed care for patients.

• Improve veterans’ access to same-day mental health care. Veterans are at risk for mental health and substance use challenges than the general population. Increasing their access to quality mental health care is the first step to closing this disparity. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) will reduce barriers to mental health access by fully implementing their Primary Care Mental Health Integration and Behavioral Health Interdisciplinary Program, which connect veterans to same-day mental health care and improve the integration of these services into primary care settings.
  
• Expand access to tele- and virtual mental health care options.  The use of telehealth to address mental health and substance use needs dramatically during the height of the pandemic and has remained above pre-pandemic levels even where COVID has waned. These tele-mental health services have proven both, while reducing barriers to care. To maintain continuity of access, the Administration will work with Congress to ensure coverage of tele-behavioral health across health plans, and support appropriate delivery of telemedicine across state lines. At the same time, the HHS will create a learning collaborative with state insurance departments to identify and address state-based barriers, like telehealth limitations, to behavioral health access. And the United States Office of Personnel Management will facilitate widespread, confidential, and easy access to telehealth services, in part by strongly encouraging Federal Employees Health Benefits Program carriers to sufficiently reimburse providers for telehealth services, and to eliminate or reduce co-payments for consumers seeking tele-mental service.
  
• Expand access to mental health support in schools and colleges and universities. The President has committed to doubling the number of school-based mental health professionals. The Department of Education (ED) will continue to support states, school districts, colleges and universities, in using relief funds – including the more than $160 billion invested by the American Rescue Plan in the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) and Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF) – to address the mental health needs of students, including by training, recruiting, and retaining more school- and college and university-based mental health professionals. With the help of ESSER funds, schools have already seen a 65% increase in social workers, and a 17% increase in counselors. To help schools sustain these roles, the Department of Health and Human Services will make it easier for school-based mental health professionals to seek reimbursement from Medicaid, and the President’s FY23 budget will propose $1 billion to help schools hire additional counselors and school psychologists and other health professionals.
  
• Embed and co-locate mental health and substance use providers into community-based settings. Expanding pathways to care also means creating new, low-barrier access points, in settings where Americans already live, work, and play. To that end, the President’s FY23 budget will include $50 million to pilot models that embed and co-locate mental health services into non-traditional settings like libraries, community centers, schools, and homeless shelters.
  
• Increase behavioral health navigation resources. Finding the right care or an available provider can be a frustrating experience. We need to make it easier for Americans both to find help, and to receive it. To meet this need, the Administration will build new easy-to-access, user-friendly online treatment locator tools – starting with a redesigned and refurbished mentalhealth.gov – so Americans can find care when they need it, where they need it, with the click of a button. The Department of Defense will also create a one-stop online resources for service members and their families to access mental health information and locate mental health providers.

Support Americans by Creating Healthy Environments

We cannot transform mental health solely through the health care system. We must also address the determinants of behavioral health, invest in community services, and foster a culture and environment that broadly promotes mental wellness and recovery. This crisis is not a medical one, but a societal one. In December 2021, the Surgeon-General released an that outlined a wide range of causes for the national youth mental health crisis and underscored growing concern about the harms of digital technologies, particularly social media, to the mental health and well-being of young people, as well as calling for practical action from technology companies to address these concerns.

We need a whole-of-society effort to address these concerns: to expand prevention programs and actions that improve mental health at every age and across settings; and to enhance programs that support recovery, especially for populations at increased risk during vulnerable transition periods. The Biden-Harris Administration will: 

• Strengthen children’s privacy and ban targeted advertising for children online. The online platforms have of users worldwide, many of whom use the platforms for. These companies know everything from at any moment, to how many seconds they spend reading a particular post, to intimate personal data like what medical symptoms they have been researching. Children are also subject to the platforms’ intensive and excessive data collection vacuum, which they use to deliver sensational and harmful content and troves of paid advertising to our kids., online advertising firms hold 72 million data points on the average child by the time they reach the age of 13. The President is calling on Congress to ban excessive data collection on and targeted advertising online for children and young people.
  
• Institute stronger online protections for young people, including prioritizing safety by design standards and practices for online platforms, products, and services. Social media platforms are designed to be addictive, too often deliver age-inappropriate content, promote unhealthy social comparisons, and enable harassment, child sexual exploitation, stalking, and cyber-bullying. Children, adolescents and teens are uniquely vulnerable to harmful and dangerous content online. Other democratic countries have been acting to prevent and reduce the online harms to their children. The President believes not only that we should have far stronger protections for children’s data and privacy, but that the platforms and other interactive digital service providers should be required to prioritize and ensure the health, safety and well-being of children and young people above profit and revenue in the design of their products and services.

• Stop discriminatory algorithmic decision-making that limits opportunities for young Americans. When a girl searches for jobs online, platforms will too often push her away from fields like engineering that historically have excluded women. Searches for “Black girls,” “Asian girls,” or “Latina girls” too often return harmful content, including pornography rather than role models, toys, or activities. Platforms shape how our kids understand what is possible and access opportunities. When young people are treated unfairly, it can have mental health impacts including anxiety and depression. We must ensure that platforms and other algorithmically-enhanced systems do not discriminatorily target our kids.
  
• Invest in research on social media’s mental harms. Ample research has now emerged that social media is with negative mental health outcomes, particularly among, and that children under 18 are disproportionately to the dangerous and harmful content that they might encounter online. More research, however, is needed to understand why and how these harms occur – and how they can be prevented and treated. To meet this need, the President’s FY23 budget will dedicate at least $5 million toward advancing research on social media’s harms, as well as the clinical and societal interventions we might deploy to address them. Over the next year, the Department of Health and Human Services will also launch a national Center of Excellence on Social Media and Mental Wellness, which will develop and disseminate information, guidance, and training on the full impact of adolescent social media use, especially the risks these services pose to their mental health.
    
• Expand early childhood and school-based intervention services and supports. Half of all mental disorders begin the age of 14. And when systems act to promote well-being at early developmental stages, youth reap the mental and emotional benefits for to come. The American Rescue Plan dedicated millions of dollars to youth mental health. The President’s FY23 budget builds on this investment and proposes to make historic investments in youth mental health services, including more than $70 million in infant and early childhood mental health programs. For example, Project LAUNCH works to ensure that the systems that serve young children have the resources and knowledge to foster their social, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral development. The FY23 budget will also continue funding for the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program of the Department of Health and Human Services, which supports new families by teaching positive parenting skills, conducting developmental and mental health screenings, promoting school readiness, and linking to community resources and supports. Additionally, the President’s FY23 budget will propose to dramatically expand funding for community schools by increasing funding for the Full-Service Community School program by over $400 million dollars relative to current levels – a more than ten-fold increase. Community schools provide a range of wraparound supports to students and their families, including mental health services and other integrated student supports.
  
• Set students up for success. When students struggle in school, it impacts their well-being. A comprehensive strategy to support student wellness must also include efforts to address the impact of the pandemic on student learning, particularly on students most impacted by the pandemic, and create supportive learning environments. ED will continue to help states and school districts use the $122 billion in ARP ESSER funds for this purpose. Specifically, the Department will help states and districts use the funds to provide more individual and small group instruction, hire instructional and other critical staff, launch high-impact tutoring programs, provide high-quality afterschool and summer learning and enrichment programs, and invest in other evidence-based strategies that will help our students recover from the pandemic. Districts nationwide are already using ARP ESSER funds to invest in these strategies. To support this work, we need more caring adults taking on roles supporting students. The President is calling on Americans nationwide to take on roles as tutors and mentors to help our students recover. Those looking to return to the workforce, who are just out of school, or changing careers, should consider the rich, rewarding job opportunities in our schools and with our young people. The investments the President will propose in his FY23 budget will support and sustain efforts that set up students for success. This includes more than doubling funding for Title I, a ten-fold increase for the Full-Service Community School program, and an historic $3.3 billion increase for Individuals with Disabilities Education Act grants that support PK-12 children with disabilities and $450 million for IDEA PART C, which supports early intervention services for infants and toddlers.
  
• Increase mental health resources for justice-involved populations. In too many communities, jails and other correctional facilities have become the provider of mental health care. Approximately of incarcerated individuals have a mental illness, yet merely receive treatment. The President believes that we have both a moral and a public health obligation to increase access to comprehensive mental health care for the justice-involved. To this end, the Department of Justice will expand funding and technical assistance to local communities and corrections systems to provide behavioral health care, case management services, family services, and other transitional programming for adults returning from incarceration into the community.

• Train social and human services professionals in basic mental health skills. It’s not enough to train health care providers to deliver mental health care; social and human services providers must also be equipped to identify, understand, and respond to signs of mental illness and addiction among those they serve. To this end, the Department of Housing and Urban Development will launch a national effort to train housing counselors, housing-based services coordinators, and Fair Housing grantee staff to recognize the signs of emotional distress and to connect residents with mental health resources. The U.S. Department of Agriculture will provide training on mental health resources and communication strategies to Farm Production and Conservation Mission Area field employees, who serve farmers and ranchers, as well as incorporate updated mental health information into its online resource center for State, local and clinic staff administering the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). ED will continue to highlight the effectiveness of Mental Health First Aid training for educators, so that they can better support their students and one another. And the Department of Health & Human Services will provide additional training support to Head Start, Early Head Start, and home visiting grantees to spot and address mental health challenges among children.

There is a “COVID test supply crisis” that will impact Michigan schools, said Linda Vail, health officer for Central Michigan’s Ingham County, on Wednesday. The state is working to supply testing kits to schools in the highest-risk communities where COVID is most rampant, she . States from Florida to Washington have .

Last week, the Biden administration announced that it was “” on its commitment to keeping schools operating safely in person by providing an additional 10 million monthly COVID test to K-12 institutions nationwide — 5 million rapid and 5 million PCR.

In December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention endorsed “test-to-stay” protocols that allow students and staff who may have been exposed to COVID to remain in school buildings, provided they test negative for the virus before walking through the front doors. 

But where testing supplies dwindle, it can cause in school operations.

Most schools across the country have managed to stay open in the three weeks since winter break. But an average of more than have been disrupted by brief closures or pivots to virtual learning as they navigated high caseloads and staff shortages, according to the K-12 data service Burbio.

Last week, over 980,000 new youth COVID cases were reported nationwide, according to the , the largest weekly total to date and nearly quadruple the highest tally previous to Omicron. 

To help weather the current surge, Âé¶čŸ«Æ· spoke with White House Senior Education Policy Advisor Mary Wall who explained how schools can make use of the newly available testing resources.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Âé¶čŸ«Æ·: Testing in schools is such a key issue right now during the Omicron surge and some officials are saying that they might run out of supply soon. What is your message to school leaders on how to access testing?

Mary Wall: Sure. We’ve really made a lot of efforts to make sure that schools have everything they need to reopen and remain open safely and testing has been central to that effort. It was the core investments that this administration made, starting with the American Rescue Plan, that really helped to make sure that schools could be ready for this moment. 

Across the country there are many, many schools who are implementing testing right now and building on the existing testing programs that they already established. We know that schools are kind of coming at this from a lot of different places and a lot of different levels of experience, so we want to make sure it’s easy for everyone to access both the tests as well as [strategies for] implementing testing in school. 

The biggest headline is the $10 billion that we invested in the (ELC) program at the CDC. That gave $10 billion to states to set up testing programs for schools and we have seen significant movement from states doing just that. 

We’re building on that with the new announcement of the 5 million rapid antigen tests, as well as the expansion of capacity through to reach another 5 million [through PCR testing] with lab capacity each month.

So that $10 billion investment, those 5 million rapid tests and 5 million PCR tests, those are big numbers. I’m curious, what are the mechanics going on here? And what might some school leaders not understand that could be keeping them from accessing tests that are available to them?

Testing can be a challenging endeavor for schools, and schools have been asked to do a lot over the course of the pandemic. We’ve seen it as our charge to make it as easy as possible for schools to tap into resources. 

With the news we announced last week, we have put out steps for schools to take right away. The first and foremost would be tapping into the state’s existing testing initiatives. Every state has something set up for K-12 COVID-19 testing and it varies by state how exactly it looks. But we have created a resource on the CDC website that is basically a that the school can go onto right now and click to learn more about what their state is doing for K-12 testing. That page will lead them to how to get involved in their state’s program. 

If they want to make use of the 5 million antigen tests that we are now offering, those are usually requested by state health departments. And they are 
 submitting requests to the CDC for those (based on local need). But testing resources fueled by the $10 billion in ELC funds, those are available right now and schools can tap into those right away. 

Operation Expanded Testing, which is the free lab-based (PCR) testing capacity that we offer as the federal government, that is also available and open for service right now. Schools can go online to the , click on the link for the regional hub, and they can begin the process right away 
 and can get started in as few as seven days after that.

We also want to remind all schools that they are able to also connect to other testing providers that operate in their state and use their ESSR [Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund] dollars. So there’s $132 billion distributed through the American Rescue Plan for states and school districts. Testing is an allowable use of funds and we’ve seen many school districts [use] that funding stream to set up customized programs in their schools — and that’s been in large districts and in small districts. 

That’s fantastic. And after the announcement last Wednesday, what kind of responses did the U.S. Department of Education receive from K-12 leaders?

We’ve been getting a lot of interesting and exciting responses on testing. It kind of falls into a couple different categories.

One is, we’ve gotten a lot of really eager and positive feedback from districts who have already been doing testing. 
 Those [school systems] have really been eager to take this to the next level. I know there have been districts who are doing weekly screening, for instance, and are excited to expand that into a test-to-stay a program. There’s others who have been doing diagnostic testing and decided, we really want to expand the screening tests we’re doing in our schools to be on a weekly basis to cover more kids and this new investment is going to help enable that.

We’ve also heard from many districts who have not done testing and said that they’re eager to tap into it. They know that the current surge has really seen significant increases for caseloads, including with kids, and they want to make sure they can use this as a key line of defense in their school buildings. And so for them, you know, [our role has] been how can we help you set up testing successfully in your building. We’ve gotten started on this right away by offering technical assistance and support to school districts. 

We’re offering more this week, we’re going to offer it every week for the next several weeks to make sure that no matter where you are in your testing journey, that if you’re a school who is interested in implementing testing that you’re able to do so. That you not only have the resources to do so in terms of tests, but that you also know how to use them effectively in your building.

Some people would say that the most recent expansion of K-12 testing is a great effort, but that it came too late to help schools respond nimbly to the Omicron surge. [Though of course, there might be subsequent surges.] I’m wondering what your response is there.

I disagree with that assessment. I think that we have made clear our commitment to keeping schools open safely. We’ve made that commitment clear through the American Rescue Plan, which provided $130 billion for K-12 schools through the Department of [Education] and $10 billion for K-12 COVID-19 testing. We’ve seen states take that money and set up testing approaches starting back in April of last year. So we are eager to build on that investment. And we saw across the country that schools who were already implementing testing strategies have been able to use it in this current surge very effectively.

And last question here. Clearly, the White House has put itself on the frontline of this testing shortage in schools. I’m curious whether the Department of Education also sees itself as responsible for helping to remedy the staffing shortages that many schools have been facing recently?

As an administration, we see the staffing issues that are occurring, and we take them very seriously. 

We passed the American Rescue Plan specifically with the purpose of making sure that we could have more staff in school buildings, both to accommodate mitigation strategies like social distancing, but also to make sure that schools have all the people on hand that they need to make sure that students can come back safely and have their needs met after this completely unprecedented time. 

First and foremost, we would want to remind school districts and states that they have that $130 billion to spend on additional staff, to retain the staff they have, to pay the staff they have more money, and really make sure that whatever personnel needs they have in response to pandemic can be met. 

We’ve also really tried to make clear that there are existing flexibilities, either in ways that you approach retirees or others who were previously teachers, ways that you can hire bus drivers, creative uses of bringing more staff into buildings to make sure that we can meet the staffing needs of the school.

With a of over 1 million daily COVID cases reported on Monday and more than this week temporarily closed or pivoted to remote instruction, educators and families are being thrust back into the existential struggle over keeping schools open.

The second half of the 2021-22 school year began with a growing list of shutdowns, including major urban districts such as Atlanta, Milwaukee and Cleveland. In Philadelphia, leaders on Monday night announced that on Tuesday, though stopped short of shutting down the entire district.

Other top school systems such as New York City and Chicago have moved forward with plans to reopen in person, but have hit snags along the way: In New York, nearly a third of students did not show up for classes on Monday, and in Chicago, a late night vote Tuesday held by the teachers union demanding to teach remotely Wednesday.

The reactions from weary parents ranged widely. “It’s chaos,” National Parents Union President Keri Rodrigues The New York Times, pointing out that when schools nix plans for in-person learning at the final hour, it leaves families scrambling for child care options. 

On the other hand, with the Omicron variant rampant post-holiday, Cleveland parent Tiffany Rossman was glad schools stayed closed to start the new year. She and her teenage daughter both tested positive for the virus in December, and she fell quite ill despite her vaccination, she told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·. The mother worried that opening classrooms after the holidays could lead to infected kids spreading the virus.

Rossman acknowledged, however, that “if I had small children and needed to go into the office then I don’t know what I would do.”

While a handful of school systems had planned before the winter break to be remote for short stints in January or to close for testing, the vast majority of announcements were made last minute as record-high COVID case rates came into view. Yonkers Public Schools started classes this week remotely after of students who took rapid tests over the holidays were COVID positive. Detroit announced that school would be closed Monday through Wednesday after rapid testing revealed a positivity rate. Districts are open for in-person learning in and , but officials there had to shut down eight and 12 school buildings, respectively, for lack of staff.

“A lot of it was last second, and it continues to be,” Dennis Roche, co-founder of the K-12 data tracker Burbio, told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

The , and school systems are exceptions to the trend, he noted, as each district had planned before the holidays to take a handful of days in the new year for students to receive rapid tests. As it currently stands, classrooms are set to open in all three districts in the coming days. Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest, does not re-open until Jan. 10, but has said it intends to test all students before it does.

Over the weekend, Roche watched Burbio’s jump from 1,591 to 2,181, and again on Tuesday to 3,556. Shutdowns were concentrated in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions, where current COVID rates are among the .

Amid the chaos, the Biden administration has maintained that schools should keep their doors open wherever possible and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention extended booster eligibility to two separate groups of children this week.

“I believe schools should remain open,” the president said during a on the current Omicron surge. And in fact, despite some conspicuous closures, the vast majority of the nation’s roughly 98,000 public schools have returned from the holiday break in person. 

Hedging slightly in a conversation on Fox News Sunday, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona added: “We recognize there may be some bumps in the road, especially this upcoming week when superintendents, who are working really hard across the country, are getting calls saying that some of their schools may have 5 to 10 percent of their staff not available.”

“For anyone who has gone remote, we want to similarly keep on engaging with them, and make sure that they can come back as quickly as they can,” a senior White House official told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· Tuesday.

Federal policymakers underscore that districts can draw on American Rescue Plan dollars as well as multiple other devoted to helping K-12 facilities stave off COVID through purchasing tests and other mitigation measures.

To help schools stay open, the CDC in December endorsed “test-to-stay” practices allowing students and staff who may have been exposed to the virus to remain in the classroom if they test negative for COVID. 

The federal agency also took the controversial step on Dec. 27 of reducing its recommended quarantine timeline for infected individuals, including teachers and students, from 10 to five days. The move divided many health experts, leaving numerous observers to wonder whether the CDC was after .

But several school officials appreciated the chance for teachers and students to return more quickly to the buildings.

“Anything that will help the schools to stay open is welcome,” Dan Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

Nationwide, pediatric COVID and are at a pandemic high. But top infectious disease experts say that the vast majority of serious infections are among unvaccinated youth. Under a quarter of children ages 5 to 11 have received a single dose of the COVID vaccine, and just over half of adolescents ages 12 to 17 have been fully immunized, according to data published by the .

​​“Most of our pediatric population is still undervaccinated,” said Kristina Deeter, a physician at Renown Children’s Hospital in Reno, Nevada. Even though the Omicron variant has generated more breakthrough infections, the pediatrician assured that the vaccines continue to be successful at their key function: preventing severe illness and death.

“We’re still so much safer having received the vaccine,” she told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

For youth who have received both shots and are ready for a booster, the Food and Drug Administration on Monday and, on Tuesday, the CDC recommended an extra shot for , five months after the initial two-dose series.

Amid the widespread concern and flurry of new pandemic policies, a bit of good news regarding the giant spike in cases also surfaced on Sunday. In South Africa, where the Omicron variant was first identified, the surge in infections driven by the hyper-transmissible strain has , giving health experts hope that the U.S may follow a similar course in the weeks to come.

Still, other mutations of the virus may arise further down the road, Deeter pointed out. The only long-term path to move beyond the pandemic, she said, is getting immunized.

“If there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, it’s going to come through vaccination.”

In a highly unusual move, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky on Friday overruled a recommendation delivered by an advisory panel of her agency — paving the way for teachers to receive booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine.

Teachers and other school workers inoculated with the Pfizer vaccine may now receive third doses at least six months after receiving their second shot. Those under 65 years old should make their decision based on the “individual benefits and risks,” the CDC said.

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“If 
 you’re a frontline worker, like a health care worker or a teacher, you can get a free booster now,” said President Joe Biden in remarks on Friday.

In addition to essential workers, senior citizens and adults with underlying health conditions are also eligible, meaning a total of some 60 million Americans will soon have access to third doses, including 20 million already eligible because six months have elapsed since their second Pfizer shot.

Walensky’s decision comes as the final play in a days-long drama between the Food and Drug Administration, which on Wednesday in their list of groups recommended for boosters, and the CDC, whose Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted on Thursday to leave those in high-exposure occupations off the list.

The CDC director then broke with her agency’s recommendation early Friday morning, endorsing third doses for those working in high-risk fields.

“As CDC Director, it is my job to recognize where our actions can have the greatest impact,” Walensky said in a . “I believe we can best serve the nation’s public health needs by providing booster doses for the elderly, those in long-term care facilities, people with underlying medical conditions, and for adults at high risk of disease from occupational and institutional exposures to COVID-19.”

But while some educators may soon line up for third doses, others are resistant to even get their first or second shot.

An Education Week survey from the summer found that of teachers nationwide do not intend to get vaccinated, while 87 percent reported that they had already been immunized. More recently, a Sept. 24 poll from the American Federation of Teachers found that and that 67 percent favor a vaccine requirement for all school staff. The exact nationwide totals of vaccinated school personnel remain unclear.

In New York City, where teachers had been expected to provide proof of vaccination by Monday, Sept. 27, many schools have dozens of teachers who have not yet complied with the mandate, including some sites with up to 100 staff without proof of immunization, said Mark Cannizzaro, president of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, in a Friday press conference.

“Principals and superintendents have been reaching out consistently to tell us that they are concerned about not having enough staff come Tuesday morning, Sept. 28,” he said.

A federal appeals court judge on Friday New York City’s vaccine mandate for Department of Education staff, delaying its enforcement. But late Monday, the federal court Chalkbeat reported, clearing the way for the city to require staff to provide proof of vaccination or be placed on unpaid leave.

Alongside New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago, the second- and third-largest districts in the country, are also requiring teachers to be immunized without providing regular testing as an alternative. The same is true for Washington, Oregon and the District of Columbia. Seven other states require educators to choose between COVID vaccination or regularly undergoing testing for the virus, according to an EdWeek .

But even where mandates are supposedly in place, , meaning that many unvaccinated teachers remain in the classroom, often teaching students who themselves are not yet eligible for shots. Students aged 12 and up are authorized for COVID vaccines, and children aged 5 to 11 may gain access by Halloween.

Further still, data from the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education show that the majority of school districts do not require teachers to be vaccinated, said Director Robin Lake.

“That is a major unresolved problem,” she wrote in an email to Âé¶čŸ«Æ·. “Why do we keep giving teachers priority access to the vaccine without requiring they all do their part to protect kids?”

President Biden urged the more than 70 million Americans eligible for shots who have still not received immunizations to reconsider their choice.

“We have the tools to beat COVID-19,” he said. “Get vaccinated.”

Whether schools can roll tests out effectively — and get cooperation from those who screen positive for the virus — remains to be seen.

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The promise of quicker, more accurate results could bring a welcome reprieve for school districts across the country that are sending large groups of students home with suspected COVID exposure. Last month, six days into the school year in Florida’s Palm Beach County, one in 50 students was . In California, state guidelines call for unvaccinated students who are “close contacts” of a person with a positive COVID test to , forcing thousands of students too young to get a vaccine to miss critical days of in-person instruction.

While the tests’ use in schools has only recently begun to rise, the technology has been in development, in many cases, for more than a year. One of the new tests, developed by , is available through a network of nationwide and counts the National Basketball Association among its users. Another test, developed at , has been championed by New Jersey , who last year called it a potential “game-changer.”

In the K-12 world, the saliva test with arguably the most traction is one developed by the University of Illinois — it is in use by about 45 percent of the state’s 3,859 K-12 schools, covering more than 877,000 students, the university . School health officials elsewhere, including and Washington, D.C., are also piloting it, with more districts likely to follow.

The field will likely get a huge boost after President Biden last week nearly $2 billion for schools, community health centers, and food banks to buy about 300 million rapid tests. Biden said he’d use the Defense Production Act to increase the manufacturing of rapid tests, including those that families can use at home.

‘A very promising platform’

Researchers developed the Illinois test in June 2020, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted for the so-called covidSHIELD test in February. One reason researchers say saliva tests is that virus found in the saliva is more likely to have passed into patients’ lungs, where it can do serious damage. Viral load in saliva, they say, is also significantly higher in patients with known COVID-19 risk factors, such as obesity or diabetes.

Because the new saliva tests are polymerase chain reaction or PCR tests, they can detect both the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, as well as fragments of the virus after a test subject is no longer infected.

Dr. Rebecca Lee Smith, a University of Illinois infectious disease epidemiologist, developed the studies that earned their test its emergency authorization. She said PCR tests are not only reliable, but very sensitive. And they’re better early-warning indicators of infection.

“Our data show that saliva is one of the best ways to find people early because the virus replicates in saliva before it moves to the nasal tissues,” she said.

But saliva tests aren’t without controversy. In one case earlier this year, the FDA warned that a saliva swab test developed by the California startup ​​Curative some later-stage infections. It said Curative’s tests should only be used on people who showed COVID symptoms within the prior two weeks.

In January, health agencies in Colorado, citing concerns over false negatives, said they the Curative tests. Other purveyors have tried to distance themselves from these results.

Dr. Tim Lahey, an infectious diseases physician and head of ethics at the University of Vermont Medical Center, said he’d research with a small sample of patients on the Yale test, as well as a for other saliva tests. Research on the Yale test, he said, found that saliva in the samples was as accurate as nasal swabs. And the meta-analysis, he said, “showed basically the same thing for various saliva testing approaches including the one developed at Yale.”

But he cautioned that he hadn’t seen detailed analyses of “how well the saliva technology performs in people with mild symptoms, or no symptoms at all.”

And the Yale sample was small — just nine patients. How well the test performs in larger groups “is still an open question.” But he said it’s “a very promising platform” and he’s looking forward to seeing more data.

Lower cost, faster turnaround

Pinpointing exactly how many K-12 schools regularly test students for COVID-19 is difficult, but a few indicators suggest that testing isn’t widespread. A recent found that the largest group of schools implementing testing last fall were using rapid tests mostly for symptomatic students and staff, “since they often lacked enough tests to conduct screening testing.” Private schools were more likely to be conducting routine screenings, they found. One survey noted that about 20 percent of private K-12 schools conducted regular screenings at school.

The Illinois test costs just $20 to $30 per dose, a fraction of the typical $100 cost for a standard nasal swab test, according to SHIELD Illinois, the nonprofit that manages testing in the state. The organization is making it available for free to districts across the state, mostly thanks to in federal COVID test funding for schools.

Beth Heller, a spokesperson for , said the organization operates seven labs statewide, which cuts test turnaround time from as much as three days to less than one, on average.

A shorter turnaround time matters, especially now: With the earlier COVID-19 variants, Smith said, about 30 percent of infections happened before subjects showed symptoms. “With Delta, it’s more like 75 percent.”

In Baltimore, where school health officials have been using the Illinois-developed test since March, weekly saliva testing has “made parents feel comfortable sending their children back” to school, said James Dendinger, interim director of COVID testing.

In most of the district’s middle and high schools, students now submit to weekly saliva tests. In most elementary schools, health officials test classroom groups with nasal swabs. If any group of swabs delivers a positive result, they test each student again. Only those who test positive or who had close contact with those who test positive must quarantine.

These protocols kept Baltimore’s positivity rate extremely low last spring: from March 1 to June 15, it was 0.6 percent in middle schools and high schools, and less than 0.3 percent in pre-K-8 schools.

The new tests also bring a certain comfort factor, Illinois’ Smith said. “It’s a lot easier to than to have a swab stuck up your nose, especially if you’re going to be testing regularly.”

Laura Wand, an advisor for SHIELD T3, the for-profit that administers the tests outside of Illinois, said that ease allows users to make testing part of their routine. “The key to containing the virus is to be able to test often, isolate, and track,” she said. “And the gold standard for testing often is everybody, twice a week. Now, people are not going to do a nasal swab twice a week.”

For the SHIELD test, subjects let saliva pool in their mouth and simply raise a small funnel to their lips, then “let the saliva fall out, push it out with your tongue,” Smith said. “Once people get the hang of it, most people can complete the process in one to two minutes.”

One drawback: Test subjects can’t have anything in their mouth for at least an hour before the test, “which requires planning and logistics,” especially in K-12 schools. Students can’t eat or drink, chew gum, use mouthwash, or brush their teeth for at least an hour prior to the test. For adults, that means no smoking or chewing tobacco either.

Smith said the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the system’s flagship campus, relied on the test for the entire academic year, at least for the more than 35,000 students attending class in person. “We did have some outbreaks, but they came in back under control,” she said.

The biggest one came early, between Aug. 15 and Sept. 15, 2020, as students returned to campus. In early September, the university even imposed a brief lockdown, The New York Times , after an unexpectedly high number of students with positive results continued to socialize and attend parties. One official called the phenomenon “willful noncompliance by a small group of people,” and top officials circulated a , saying the irresponsible students “have created the very real possibility of ending an in-person semester for all of us.”

The letter concluded, “We stay together. Or we go home.”

Behind the scenes, though, the university was testing so often, Smith said, that “we didn’t have to have a long-term lockdown” like .

Willful noncompliance notwithstanding, the university’s seven-day average positivity rate never rose above 1.21 percent, according to data on its .

Once the twice-weekly testing got underway, Smith said, this “just brought everything back under control. We saw outbreaks within dorms or within apartment buildings, and we would increase the frequency of testing to every other day. And within a week we would bring the case numbers in that location down to zero.”

SHIELD Illinois’ Heller said the testing regimen has allowed Champaign County, where the flagship campus is located, to keep its COVID positivity rate under 1 percent since September 2020. Elsewhere in Illinois, she said, positivity rates jumped as high as 12 percent last fall. Nationwide, positivity rates climbed to about .

The state health department in August said it would for free to any school district outside of Chicago that wanted it (The city receives a separate federal funding stream that other districts don’t.) The department also said schools could use it to take advantage of a so-called “Test-to-Stay” protocol, rather than quarantine.

Under the protocol, students and teachers who have close contact with someone who tests positive can stay in school if they agree to be tested four times: one, three, five, and seven days after exposure. If their tests remain negative, they don’t have to quarantine.

Quick results bring ‘an extra layer of comfort’

One of the first public school systems to take up the SHIELD tests was the tiny Hillside District 93, a pre-K-through-8 district in Cook County, about 20 minutes west of Chicago.

Superintendent Kevin Suchinski said the quick test “allowed us to make sure that we kept our doors open” and avoid shutting down, even as other districts took to control outbreaks.

And as in many areas, COVID cases there are rising — last week, the average daily new case count per 100,000 people, but the county’s infection rate remains among the lowest statewide.

The ease of testing students’ saliva, he said, meant “we were testing early-childhood kids all the way up to 8th grade,” ages 3 to 13. The quick results, even with asymptomatic students, “gave us an extra layer of comfort to say, ‘Is it spreading within our community? Is it spreading within our school?’ And we could then react.”

Suchinski made the tests voluntary for students and staff, but the ease of testing and the district’s 0.5 percent positivity rate encouraged more people, including students’ family members, to submit to it. In August, the district was testing 55 to 60 percent of families.

“Nothing’s 100 percent,” he said. “We cannot guarantee that we’re going to stop [COVID]. We’re not going to stop cases. What we’re going to do is prevent the spread.”

Immigrant-rights activists rallied outside a Houston courthouse on Monday demanding the Biden administration act swiftly to protect them after a federal judge halted an Obama-era program that provides deportation relief and work permits to hundreds of thousands of undocumented residents brought here as children.

“It hurts deeply that my home state, the place I’ve grown up in and have grown to love, is the one leading the charge against me and my right to live and work,” Susana Lujano, a 28-year-old Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient, said at the gathering organized by the immigrant-rights group United We Dream. Lujano, who has lived in Texas since she was 2, called the latest ruling — one in a long series that has left the fate of the so-called Dreamers in turmoil — â€œcruel and vindictive.”

On Friday, barred any new applications to the DACA program, creating uncertainty for thousands of first-time applicants who sought its protection. While Judge Andrew Hanen of the U.S. District Court in Houston let the status of the more than 600,000 current DACA recipients stand, the George W. Bush appointee found the Obama administration overstepped its authority when it created the program in 2012.

Referring to DACA as an “illegally implemented program,” Hanen wrote that “the public interest of the nation is always served by the cessation of a program that was created in violation of law.” His position echoed that of the Trump administration, which sought to end DACA under the premise that it was illegally created by the Obama administration without congressional approval. Though polls have consistently found , immigration reform has stalled in Congress for years.

President Joe Biden has the case brought by Texas and other Republican-led states. Under what the president called a “deeply disappointing” ruling, current recipients aren’t immediately affected but the Department of Homeland Security is prohibited from approving new applications. The move is particularly damning for those young people whose applicants were awaiting approval but were snagged in a backlog caused by the pandemic.

Among them is Andrea Anaya, who was born in El Salvador and raised in Maryland. Anaya said she applied for DACA for the first time in February but was still waiting on U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to process her application.

Friday’s ruling “means I continue to be exposed to the threat of deportation and don’t know if my DACA application will ever be approved,” she said in a media release. “I shouldn’t have to fight to prove that my life and my existence matter.”

Joe, I’m tired of hope and your well wishes. I want certainty of my livelihood. Do something, you’re THE President of the United States. Keep your promise.

— Andrea Anaya (@andreajanaya)

Lujano said she was “heartbroken” that those who applied for DACA protections for the first time this year “won’t be able to have the same peace of mind that I had when I was approved.”

The administration’s intent to appeal means DACA could make its way back to the U.S. Supreme Court absent congressional action. In a statement, Biden called on Congress to pass legislation that provides permanent protection to DACA recipients. Greisa Martinez Rosas, executive director of United We Dream, urged Congress to include a pathway to citizenship in its upcoming budget.

“Today’s ruling is evidence that DACA is not enough,” she said in a press release. “The program has always been temporary, leaving hundreds of thousands of lives vulnerable to the next attack.”

DACA recipients — and young immigrants applying for the program for the first time — have lived in a state of limbo since the Trump administration announced efforts to end it in 2017 and its fate has been the subject of back-and-forth court decisions. In June 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration failed to provide “a reasoned explanation” for its decision to terminate DACA and failed to consider how ending it could affect its beneficiaries.

Meanwhile in Washington, D.C., on Monday, immigrant rights advocates marched to the White House, where they demanded that Biden include a pathway to citizenship for undocumented residents in the American Jobs Plan.

Critics of the Obama-era immigration policy were quick to cheer on the Texas ruling. Robert Law, director of regulatory affairs and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that supports restrictive immigration policies, praised the ruling, but said the judge’s unwillingness to terminate the program for current recipients “neuters the impact of his decision.” The federal judge noted that hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients and their employers rely on the program and therefore “it is not equitable for a government program that has engendered such a significant reliance to terminate suddenly.”

“Establishing a ‘reliance interest’ for an illegal program for illegal aliens takes the winds out of the sails of advocates for the rule of law,” Law wrote in a press release. Allowing current recipients to keep their benefits makes the ruling “yet another mostly symbolic victory.”

As lawmakers in Washington debate the Dreamers’ fate, Lujano made clear at the Houston rally that the status quo is unsustainable.

“I don’t want to be here temporarily anymore. This is my home. I’ve grown up here, I love this state,” she said, pointing to her pink hat embroidered with the word “HOME” and a Texas illustration. “It hurts to love it so much. It hurts to love it when it seems to hate me.”

Last August, when Florida’s Hillsborough County Public Schools began upgrading air filters in their K-12 buildings, the event was so significant that to document one of the first installations, at a Tampa elementary school.

When RAND Corp. researchers last spring with a list of 13 items that would make them feel safe about in-person schooling this fall, parents’ top priority wasn’t teacher or student vaccines, social distancing or regular COVID testing.

It was ventilation.

Perhaps that’s because COVID-19 has made our most basic act — breathing — newsworthy.

But therein lies the problem: In 2021, with an airborne virus still infecting Americans at a rate of , the heating and cooling systems in many U.S. public schools are nothing short of awful. Whether billions in new federal aid will be enough to help school districts upgrade an aging system anytime soon remains an open question.

While data on the scope of the problem are scarce, what little there are suggest that schools are looking at billions of dollars in deferred maintenance. A few examples:

• In Worcester, Mass., the district last summer said it would spend to upgrade heating and cooling systems in its 44 schools, some of which date back to the 1800s. Nearly half of its schools were built before 1940;
• In Denver, the school board spending $4.9 million to upgrade school heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems in more than 150 buildings after former Superintendent Susana Cordova said parents had been asking her specifically about HVAC upgrades.

Like many issues, this one hits low-income students hardest.

In a of school facilities by the National Center for Education Statistics and Westat, researchers found that schools serving the largest percentage of low-income students also had the largest percentage of air ventilation/filtration systems rated “fair or poor” in permanent buildings.

The study found that in schools with the highest concentration of low-income students, 33 percent had such troubled systems. In schools with the lowest concentration, it was 27 percent.

In the RAND survey, nearly three in four parents put school air quality at the top of their school wishlist. Even among a subgroup of parents who were unsure whether they’d even send their kids back to school, ventilation came in as the most important safety indicator.

The dilemma is resonating beyond parents: Last fall, the non-profit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), with the New York State Labor Department on behalf of 44 employees in nine public school campuses across New York City, saying most school buildings were improperly ventilated. It also said the city’s “minimalistic” ventilation standards don’t prevent the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19. The group wants inspectors to determine whether schools are ventilated and filtrated to adequately protect teachers, students, and staff.

Kyla Bennett, the group’s New England director, said the conditions in these schools were “pretty horrifying.”

“The inspections that they had done, most of the schools did not have windows that opened (in) the classrooms. They didn’t have the correct supply ventilation or exhaust ventilation in the rooms. I mean, some of them literally had zero ventilation.”

She understands why windows in some cases don’t open. “There’s noise out there. There’s pollution. …There’s danger, especially for small children, if the windows open wide enough. But the bottom line is that in order to make the schools safe for not just the students, but for the staff and the teachers, we need to improve the ventilation in the schools.”

Nathaniel Styer, a city schools spokesperson, said the district’s public schools “were some of the safest places to be during this pandemic because of our focus on ventilation and safety. We ended the year with a .03 percent positivity rate, which never went above 1 percent and was consistently far below the city average. Our schools are safe and if any repairs need to be made to ventilation systems the impacted classrooms are closed until the problem is fixed.”

Styer said the district only uses classrooms in which ventilation systems are working and operational, with the means to bring fresh air inside, circulate it, and ventilate the air outside. He also said every room was inspected multiple times by professional engineers and union inspectors.

The high costs of building repairs — as well as other priorities and the political gridlock gripping Washington, D.C. — likely mean that most families won’t get their school ventilation wishes granted by the time students return this fall.

Last December’s Covid-19 stimulus measure, as well as President ”țŸ±»ć±đČÔ’s proposed infrastructure legislation, could change conditions in schools. The stimulus includes $54.3 billion for states and school districts to shore up school facilities, including HVAC systems. But schools’ total price tag could be billions more, recent estimates suggest.

”țŸ±»ć±đČÔ’s could help as well. It proposes $50 billion in direct grants and another $50 billion leveraged through bonds to upgrade and build public schools. While its fate remains up in the air, a bipartisan group of congressional lawmakers last week of the proposal. A summary of the “Rebuilding America’s Infrastructure” plan by the Problem Solvers Caucus endorses upgrading schools’ internet systems, but school ventilation.

Needed: $1 million — or more — per building

Much of what we know about school infrastructure these days comes from a 2020 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which and found that 54 percent needed to update or replace “multiple building systems” including HVAC. An estimated one in three schools needed to update their systems, it found. And 41 percent of districts needed to update or replace HVAC systems in at least half of their schools, totaling about 36,000 nationwide.

The price tag for upgrading these systems: about $1 million per building. If half of the 36,000 buildings get upgrades and the rest get entirely new HVAC systems, it could cost schools about $72 billion, the non-profit Learning Policy Institute .

Among educators themselves, the problem is hardly hidden — actually, most of them would agree with RAND’s findings, calling ventilation an urgent problem. When the American Society of Civil Engineers earlier this year graded infrastructure systems nationwide, ventilation upgrades topped schools’ most pressing concerns. More than half of districts — 53 percent — reported that they need to update or replace multiple building systems, including HVAC. The report estimated that schools need a in repairs. Taxpayers are currently investing only $490 billion, the group said, leaving a $380 billion shortfall.

While the engineers’ group gave the nation’s overall infrastructure a , it was even tougher on our public schools, handing them a .

It noted that in the decade between fiscal years 2008 and 2017, state capital funding for schools fell 31 percent, the equivalent of a $20 billion cut. In that period, 38 states cut school capital spending as a share of the state economy.

One of the report’s authors, California civil engineer Dan Cronquist, said in an interview that HVAC upgrades and replacements topped all other school officials’ concerns, including roofing, lighting, safety, plumbing, and even asbestos, lead, and mold remediation.

Air quality, he said, is “a big issue,” but he acknowledged that educators have a lot on their plates. “School buildings are not as a high-priority in some districts as other expenses.”

When GAO researchers visited school districts in six states last year, they found that security “had become a top priority,” often taking precedence over spending on building systems such as HVAC. It also found that in about half of districts nationwide, funding for school facilities came primarily from local sources such as property taxes.

In most cases, schools can’t rely on federal funding for ongoing, needed repairs, unless they’re located on military bases, receive federal Impact Aid, or are charter schools.

Upgrades don’t necessarily mean better air quality

suggest that schools use “multiple mitigation strategies” to lower the risk of exposure, such as improving building ventilation, as well as masks and distancing. While most buildings won’t actually require new ventilation systems, CDC says, upgrades or improvements “can increase the delivery of clean air and dilute potential contaminants.” In buildings that are already up to code, it suggests using window fans, improving filtration, and using portable high-efficiency particulate air filtration systems, among other measures.

Even if they get upgrades, schools may not automatically enjoy better air quality if they don’t maintain and operate the systems properly.

In a study , before the pandemic hit, researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Davis, visited 104 California classrooms that had recently been retrofitted with new HVAC units. About half had high CO2 concentrations, researchers found, and many were “under-ventilated,” likely due to improperly selected equipment, poor maintenance, or other issues.

The researchers concluded that better oversight of HVAC installation, as well as periodic testing and CO2 monitoring, would improve ventilation.

As for conditions in New York City schools, the PEER complaint is on hold after the state Public Employee Safety and Health Bureau said it didn’t have jurisdiction over COVID-19 cases, Bennett said. “We’re looking at our options, but there’s no quick solution here.”

She added, “The bottom line is that this pandemic, this isn’t the end. This is something that’s going to be hanging over our heads — whether it’s COVID-19, that still hasn’t gone away, or whether it’s the next pandemic — we need to make sure that the ventilation in our schools is better than it is, because it’s not a safe working environment.”

The Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund (GEER I and II) gave states $4.25 billion in discretionary federal dollars to support K–12 schools, higher education, and workforce initiatives. These were welcome resources, coming just as the pandemic accelerated unemployment and exacerbated declining college enrollment, hitting those from low-income backgrounds hardest.

As of May 1, about $1.5 billion remained from GEER I and II; only eight states had used even a portion of their GEER II funds. And governors still have time to use new American Rescue Plan (ARP) dollars to invest in initiatives that prepare youth for the workforce, through summer internships and college and career navigation tools. If governors act boldly and creatively, remaining GEER and ARP funds can lay the groundwork for closing opportunity gaps through education and workforce initiatives.

Most states are not yet putting youth hit hardest by the pandemic on a path to success. Instead, they are investing in one-time college scholarships or short-term supports that will end once funds run out —  with academic resources.

Policymakers can look to their peers in the 11 states that have used GEER to fund programs focused on long-term, systemic improvements to college and career access. These forward-thinking states awarded grants to colleges for initiatives that enroll and retain underrepresented youth, increased access to college and career learning through online platforms, awarded competitive grants to drive systemic change, and promoted learning and collaboration across education entities.

College and Career Access — The Second-Largest Spending Category of the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund

So far, states have spent $472.3 million in GEER funding on college and career readiness — more than on remote learning and academic and social-emotional support.

Of the $2.75 billion spent on GEER I and II, college and career access is the second-largest spending category behind general operating grants:

While college and career access is a common investment, the majority of states have used GEER funding to meet immediate needs, like setting up remote learning or offering pass-through grants to K–12 and higher education. This spending makes sense as an emergency response, but half of the states that have dedicated GEER II funds are still distributing grants directly to districts and institutions of higher education — with limited direction or oversight.

Of the states that focused GEER appropriations on short-term, limited programs, seven used GEER funds for scholarships to help youth access college, like $103.5 million on one-time scholarship grants. used funds from GEER I to launch the Graduation Alliance this spring, which provides counseling and academic coaching to disengaged youth, but only for six months.

How 11 States Are Prioritizing Funds to Outlast the Crisis

We did identify 11 states that invested in initiatives that are designed to outlast the pandemic and have the potential to address long-standing gaps in college and career access:

1 Helping postsecondary institutions enroll and retain underrepresented youth in college

Some states are doing more than investing in scholarships by helping higher education make systemic changes:

• put $3 million toward targeted initiatives that enroll and retain underrepresented and first-generation students.
• Governor Phil Murphy is using a competitive grant program to incentivize institutions of higher education to overhaul access and retention strategies so they better support working adults, students from low-income households, and underrepresented students of color. The proposed programs must align with best practices identified by the governor.

2 Building online platforms that expand access to college and career counseling

States like used GEER funds to expand online course platforms. But the states listed below went one step further by increasing access to advanced courses that will help prepare youth for college and careers:

• added AP and advanced coursework as a resource for youth in schools who don’t have these opportunities. created a statewide dual-enrollment portal so more high school students can earn college credit.
• launched to help dislocated workers reskill rapidly. GEER paid for participating higher education institutions in South Dakota to create eight online certificate programs in high-demand fields. These microcredentials can be earned with as few as 18 credits—at little or no cost to the student—and can be used as the foundation for an associate’s or bachelor’s degree later.
• and increased access to career and technical education and work-based learning by investing in online simulations and equipment that students can use for years to come.

3 Launching competitive grants to drive systemic change:

Instead of operating grants, states allocated grants to make impactful innovations:

• invested $1.5 million from GEER I toward community- and school-based initiatives that offer personalized learning, sometimes called pods or microschools.
• Colorado Governor Jared Polis awarded $40 million to school districts, higher education institutions, and nonprofits that proposed innovative ways to serve historically marginalized youth. Out of 32 grantees, 14 focused on college and career readiness. is building an online platform to offer concurrent enrollment classes to 14 districts and 54 rural schools. in Denver is creating a pathway program that starts in 9th grade and guides students through college and into a career.

4 Promoting collaboration and learning across education entities:

Partnerships and collaboration facilitate learning and new ways of working:

• In , GEER funds were used to create the Governor’s Innovation Team, which regularly convenes leaders from GEER-related grants to share best practices. One GEER-supported network will design parent education and family support initiatives for schools and communities.
• awarded grants to two-year colleges that proposed ways to increase access to training in high-demand careers. The grant prioritized multi-campus collaboration, so of the approved programs were collaborations with at least two institutions. For example, three Montana colleges launched a pilot to share a respiratory therapy program, and four colleges are working together to launch a remote IT program.

Most Governors Have Failed to Invest in Sustainable Systems

Only eight governors have used even a portion of their GEER II funds, and ARP allows for a great deal of flexibility over state dollars. States should use at least a portion of their remaining funds to expand access to sustainable, long-term initiatives that promote high-quality, high-value college and career pathways.

As legislators, advocacy organizations, and governor’s offices consider how to dedicate their remaining federal funds, college and career access will likely top the list. States can learn from forward-thinking peers that have used their discretionary funds to put youth most impacted by the pandemic on a path toward opportunity while closing historic gaps in access so youth can continue benefiting from these investments long after the pandemic is over.

States have a historic opportunity to invest in initiatives that will lead to systemic change and address long-standing inequities. As we adjust to a post-COVID education system, this is what should be the top priority—not well-meaning but short-term programs. States must think beyond immediate recovery and reimagine systems to put students on a path towards successful college and career readiness.

Georgia Heyward is a research analyst at the Center on Reinventing Public Education. Her work focuses on career and college readiness, rural and urban improvement initiatives, state policy, and community and family engagement in reform efforts.

Matt Robinson is the associate policy director for Innovation at ExcelinEd. His policy areas include reimagining learning, course access, and digital access and equity.

Betheny Gross is associate director at the Center on Reinventing Public Education. Dr. Gross oversees CRPE’s research initiatives, leading analyses of personalized learning initiatives, public school choice, out-of-school learning, and district transformation and improvement.