BURLINGTON, Vermont — A federal judge Friday ordered the immediate release of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish Tufts University Ph.D. student whose video-recorded detention by masked federal agents drew national scrutiny amid a crackdown by the Trump administration.
U.S. District Judge William Sessions III ruled that Ozturk had been unlawfully detained in March for little more than authoring an op-edcritical of Israel in her school newspaper.
“That literally is the case. There is no evidence here … absent consideration of the op-ed,” the Clinton-appointed judge said, describing it as an apparent violation of her free speech rights. He also said Ozturk had made significant claims of due process violations. “Her continued detention cannot stand.”
Sessions said the Trump administration’s targeting of Ozturk could chill the speech of “millions and millions” of noncitizens.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio had revoked Ozturk’s visa, saying her continued presence in the United States was contrary to American foreign policy interests, part of a wave of similar visa terminations targeting students who had criticized Israel or joined pro-Palestinian protests.
On March 27, Trump issued an executive order authorizing the cleansing of the Smithsonian Museums and other federal sites of anything that detracts from American greatness and patriotism.
Trump makes clear that he doesn’t want anything displayed that implies that racism exists. He specifically targets the 21 museums of Smithsonian Institute. He wants all exhibits to remind the public of America’s greatness. Any exhibits that don’t, he says, should be removed.
The executive order says, in part:
It is the policy of my Administration to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing. Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn — not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.
The executive order assigns to Vice-President JD Vance the job of cleansing the Smithsonian museums and all federal parks and cultural institutions of all derogatory content about our history. In doing this, Vance will be assisted by one Lindsey Halligan, Esq.
Who is Lindsey Halligan, the woman who will determine which parts of the nation’s story should be told? If you open the link, you will see that she is a beautiful woman with long blond hair. But that’s not all.
The first question is: What is improper ideology, exactly?
The second: Who is Lindsey Halligan, Esq.?
We have her on the phone, actually. She’s calling from the White House.
“I would say that improper ideology would be weaponizing history,” Halligan says. “We don’t need to overemphasize the negative to teach people that certain aspects of our nation’s history may have been bad.” That overemphasis “just makes us grow further and further apart.”
As for the second question: Halligan, 35, is a Trump attorney who seems to have tasked herself as a sort of commissioner — or expurgator, according to critics — of a premier cultural institution.
After moving to D.C. just before the inauguration to continue working for Trump as a special assistant and senior associate staff secretary, Halligan visited local cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian museums of Natural History, American History and American Art. She didn’t like everything she saw. Some exhibits, in her view, did not reflect the America she knows and loves.
“And so I talked to the president about it,” Halligan says, “and suggested an executive order, and he gave me his blessing, and here we are.”
Here we are: A former Fox News host is leading the Pentagon. A vaccine skeptic is running the Department of Health and Human Services. A former professional wrestling executive is head of the Department of Education.
And Lindsey Halligan, Esq., could turn a major cultural institution upside down.
How did she arrive at this point? Halligan grew up in Broomfield, Colorado, and went to a private Catholic high school, Holy Family, where she excelled at softball and basketball. Her parents worked in the audiology industry. Halligan’s sister, Gavin, a family-law attorney in Colorado, ran for a state House seat as a Republican in 2016 in a blue district and lost.
Halligan attended Regis University, a Jesuit university in Denver, where she studied politics and broadcast journalism. She was always interested in history, she says — particularly the Civil War and the westward expansion of the country.
She competed in the Miss Colorado USA pageant, making the semifinals in 2009 and earning third runner-up in 2010, according to photos and records of the events. This was back when Trump co-owned the organization that puts on the Miss Universe pageant, for which Miss Colorado USA is a preliminary event.
“Bye, Jose, I’ll see you Monday. Have a good weekend. Go Dodgers.”
That’s my standard weekly sign-off to Jose Hernandez, the third grader I tutor at Jackson Elementary in Altadena, a Title I school near where I live.
To say he’s a huge Dodgers fan doesn’t quite capture it, and, like most of the world, he loves Shohei Ohtani. In fact, he made it to the recent Jackie Robinson Day at Dodger stadium and was pretty excited to show up to school the next day with his new Dodgers cap with Ohtani’s name emblazoned across it.
He’s not always the chattiest, but I’ve learned if I happen to say the right thing, all kinds of information comes pouring out. So I learned he’d been to the game because we happened to be reading a book about Robinson in one of our sessions. It was part of the 10 minutes of read-aloud I do at the beginning of our 45 minutes together.
“Ohhhhh,” I said, “that’s why your usual Dodger cap suddenly upgraded to this special Ohtani one.”
“Yeah,” he explained, “it was Jackie Robinson Day, and he was playing. And that was cool.”
I’ve been doing two reading sessions with Jose a week — Monday mornings and Wednesday afternoons — since October, before I started this job as CEO of EdSource. The synchronicity wasn’t deliberate, but it has turned out to be a really helpful window into what’s happening on the ground in California’s public schools. And what it takes to help a kid who’s at least a grade level behind make a dent in the gap.
It took me a while to get the hang of tutoring. My kids are now 16 and 20, and teaching them to read is but a distant memory. I’m not sure where I’d even start, but luckily I haven’t had to figure it out myself. I’ve been volunteering through Reading Partners. They use an evidence-based curriculum, based on the science of how children learn to read.
It’s very structured — I write an agenda on a small white board, we start with 10 minutes of me reading while he follows along, then it’s his turn. We work our way lesson by lesson, Jose reading and filling out the worksheets that reinforce his comprehension.
Sometimes we work on breaking unfamiliar words into identifiable parts, which quite frankly often makes me think about how illogical English is.
“Well, so this time -ch sounds like sh, but yeah, you’re right, in that other word it was ch”.
Other times we advance through comprehension skills, like how to pull out the author’s main point or how to identify main characters. Some come more easily than others to Jose, but he hangs in there, and I’m often surprised at how much he understands from a story he seems to be struggling through.
Six months in, I felt like we were both getting in a groove and couldn’t believe the school year was coming to an end. Then came the email, a surprise this past Sunday at 8:30 pm.
No warning.
I suppose we should have seen it coming — in mid-April, the Trump administration targeted some 400 million dollars worth of federal AmeriCorps grants for elimination, but it wasn’t clear how that might affect Reading Partners, one of their programs. When we talked about it at tutoring that week, my amazing coordinator, Kaiya, seemed to think we were OK for the present. Now, a dozen states have filed lawsuits to block the overall AmeriCorps cuts, but confusion reigns.
The writing, as they say, is on the wall.
Reading Partners targets kids up to fourth grade who are reading anywhere from six months to 2.5 years behind their grade level. The research shows what a difference one-on-one help with reading can make in closing the gap. So what of Jose and the 54 other kids getting help with their reading at Jackson Elementary? Or of the nearly 800 kids across Los Angeles?
These kids from Jackson have already had more than their share of challenges this year. Jackson was one of the schools closed for several weeks after the Eaton fire in Altadena — the structure was fine, but had to be cleaned top to bottom to get rid of smoke damage. Jose’s family was displaced for even longer, so he was arriving at school late for several weeks, presumably while his parents navigated a new morning commute from the hotel in which they were staying. But the fire also meant most of the kids at Jackson also lost the midyear assessment that Reading Partners does to track whether the tutoring has been making a difference. End-of-year assessments were supposed to start this week, so with the hit to AmeriCorps, that all gets a lot more complicated.
As of this writing, it looks like some of the Reading Partners coordinators will be coming back, but not as AmeriCorps, and we will get a few more tutoring sessions after all. Whiplash. I can’t help but wonder how much the kids know about all of this.
I hope Jose improved in the months we worked together. I don’t think I was the greatest tutor, but I tried my best. I’d like to think it made a difference.
The books we were reading got harder. He kept advancing in the lessons. He got better and better at sounding out unfamiliar words with less prompting from me.
But I know reading was a struggle for him, and I can’t say I imparted a love of reading in him. He seemed to enjoy our time together, and once, when I picked him up at the after-school program at the school, a couple of his buddies asked how they could get tutors. I’ll take that as a sign of something.
Meantime, he and I were a few chapters into “James and the Giant Peach” at our last session. We may never get to the happy ending at the book’s conclusion, but now, with the reprieve, perhaps we can get far enough to at least see the hideous aunts perish.
•••
Deborah Clark is CEO of EdSource.
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West Contra Costa Unified School District administration building.
Credit: Louis Freedberg / EdSource
TOP TAKEAWAYS
West Contra Costa Unified anticipates it will receive only about $600,000 of $4.2 million it was awarded last year.
The cut is part of a big push by the Trump administration to roll back or eliminate funding to support student mental health in schools across the nation.
The district was one of only three school districts in California to be awarded grants from the Mental Health Professional Services program.
The West Contra Costa Unified School District is the latest school district in California to feel the direct impact of the Trump Administration’s elimination of a range of grant programs approved by the U.S. Department of Education during the Biden administration.
At its meeting on Wednesday night, Interim Superintendent Kim Moses told board members, who were caught unawares by the news, that she had received a letter the previous day from the department of education indicating that the five-year, $4.2 million grant awarded last fall will be cut to one year.
The letter stated that the grant was no longer “aligned with the current goals of the administration,” she said.
As a result of the cut, the district anticipates it will only receive about $600,000 of the funds it was expecting, all of which must be spent between August and December of this year.
Board president Leslie Reckler summarized her reaction in two words: “Total bummer.”
The district was one of three in California to receive a five-year grant last fall. They were among 46 grants awarded last year under the Mental Health Services Professional Grant program begun by the Biden Administration.
The grant was supposed to enable the San Francisco Bay Area district to address the mental health needs of its students by placing graduate student counseling interns in its schools, in collaboration with San Jose State University and St. Mary’s College in Oakland.
The goal of the program, as described in the Federal Register, is “to support and demonstrate innovative partnerships to train school-based mental health services providers.”
Interim Superintendent of West Contra Costa Unified, Kim MosesCaption: Courtesy West Contra Costa Unified
Moses said she was taken aback by the news of the drastic reduction. “Of all the things that I am worrying about being reduced or taken away, I didn’t have this grant in mind,” she said in an interview after the meeting. “The grant is to build our workforce (of mental health workers). How could building our workforce and supporting students with their mental health needs be against what the administration stands for?”
School board member Demetrio Gonzalez-Hoy described the funding cut as “atrocious.” “This is just another way they (the Trump administration) are going to start hurting our kids, our staff, our school district, because of what we stand for, because of what we look like.”
The drastic grant cutback comes as a blow to the district, which has made significant progress over the past year in cutting major budget deficits and averting the prospect of a state takeover. Especially since the pandemic, educators have realized that addressing the mental health needs of students is essential to their ultimate academic success. A particular challenge has been to boost the number of school mental health professionals, especially those reflecting the backgrounds of students.
The reduction appears to be part of an aggressive drive by the administration to eliminate mental health programs serving schools. On the same day West Contra Costa heard about its grant reduction, the Associated Press reported that the U.S. Department of Education is moving to terminate $1 billion in mental health grants to schools, signed into law by President Biden after the school shooting massacre in Uvalde, Texas in 2022.
The district applied for the funds in the spring of 2024 and was awarded them in the fall. It had been working on signing a Memorandum of Understanding to begin implementing the program this fall.
The funds were designated to be spent in “high-need” school districts like West Contra Costa Unified, where nearly two-thirds of its almost 30,000 students qualify for free and reduced-price meals.
Program probably targeted because of emphasis on diversity
What almost certainly caught the Trump administration’s eye was the emphasis on diversity in the grant application guidelines, a term the current government is using as a rationale to cut federal funds to education institutions at all levels.
One of the goals of the program, according to the guidelines, is to “increase the number and diversity of high-quality, trained providers available to address the shortages of mental health services professionals in schools served by high-need districts.”
The mental health professionals serving students in those districts, according to the guidelines, “shouldreflect the communities, identities, races, ethnicities, abilities, and cultures of the students in the high-need districts, including underserved students.”
“We considered appealing, but the reality is that they just erased this whole grant, and everybody is in the same boat,” interim Supt. Moses said. “This isn’t a case of ‘we picked on you because you’re doing something wrong, we picked on you because the grant is going away.’”
Looking forward, board member Gonzalez-Hoy said, “We must just continue to reassure our students that even if we have less resources, we are here to support and protect them, and we will give them what we can with what we have.”
Other districts that received grants under the program are Trinity Alps Unified and the Wheatland Union High School District, both in Northern California. Also receiving grants are the Marin County Office of Education, Cal State East Bay and the University of Redlands, as well as two charter schools, Entrepreneur High School in San Bernardino and Academia Avance in Los Angeles.
Policing experts say that discipline is the responsibility of school administrators, not law enforcement.
Many California school districts’ contracts for policing services do not prohibit officers from involvement in routine student disciplinary matters, despite the federal government’s guidance that administrators are responsible for handling those issues, an EdSource investigation found.
EdSource obtained 118 contracts between 89 districts across the state and the cities and counties that provide them with school resources officers from local police, sheriff’s and probation departments. More than half either allow police to enforce school rules and code of conduct violations, such as using profanity or wearing inappropriate clothing, or don’t address disciplinary issues.
The U.S. Department of Justice advises that agreements for what are generally called school resource officers “clearly indicate” that officers will not be responsible for requests to resolve routine discipline problems involving students. That guidance aims to “prevent unnecessary law enforcement involvement in noncriminal student misbehavior.” (A spokesperson for the department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services did not respond to multiple requests to elaborate on the department’s recommendations.)
Jyoti Nanda, a professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, said that officers lack the training necessary to respond to behavioral issues that can result in student discipline.
“Well-trained educators can handle all of the disciplinary issues,” Nanda said. “When police enforce school rules as opposed to criminal law, they are overreaching their footprint” in ways that are “deeply damaging to children.”
Many policing contracts also put resource officers in vaguely defined roles.
They are to act as “informal counselors,” “mentors,” “role models” and exemplars of “good citizenship.” Some contracts are meant to “promote a positive image of law enforcement.” One agreement refers to them as “youth development officers.” Another says their duties include serving as “a visual deterrent to aberrant behavior.”
Some give police authority to enforce school rules and code-of-conduct violations, such as using profanity or public displays of affection, that could result in a student being disciplined.
Some contracts say that officers will teach classes, without specifying the courses or training requirements.
The Anderson Union High School District’s contract with the Shasta County Probation Department requires resource officers to “provide class instruction as identified by the district and approved by the county.” Superintendent Brian Parker did not respond to questions about that requirement.
The varying roles officers play can result in legal risks to students, according to University of North Carolina law professorBarbara Fedders, who has argued for removing school resource officers.
“Relationship forming and being nice and all of that is misleading. Because if you then need to question the kids, you’re going to be able to take advantage of that relationship and use it for law enforcement purposes,” Fedders said in an interview.
‘Situations that arise from student conduct’
Some contracts don’t differentiate between officers’ roles in investigating school rule violations and potential crimes.
The Fullerton Joint Union High School District, which straddles Los Angeles and Orange counties, has policing contracts totaling more than $800,000 with the cities of Fullerton, La Habra and Buena Park. Each requires resource officers to “investigate situations that arise from student conduct at school.” The agreements also authorize officers to search students if they believe, or have reasonable suspicion, that something illegal occurred, or are “directed to do so by a school administrator.”
Fullerton Union High School in Orange County.Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource
Legal experts were critical of those terms.
The language in the contract “sends the wrong message not only to officers but to students and parents and teachers because it’s so vague,” said retired Superior Court Judge LaDoris Cordell, who also served as San Jose’s independent police auditor from 2015 to 2020.
“It’s pretty much at the discretion of an administrator, or even the officer, to just decide if there’s something suspicious, or they think may be illegal,” Cordell said. “We’re not talking here about probable cause. Who’s the reasonable person? The officer? The administrator? Who knows?”
District Superintendent Steven McLaughlin, Assistant Superintendent Ruben Hernandez, school board President Vickie Calhoun, and Dr. Chester Jeng, who was board president when the contracts were ratified on a consent agenda vote, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The city managers of Fullerton, La Habra, and Buena Park also did not reply to messages seeking comment.
Khadijah Silver, a supervising civil rights attorney for the Washington, D.C.-based Lawyers For Good Government, also criticized Fullerton’s contract language.
“It’s basically saying, anytime a kid acts up, you’re free to go violate their civil rights and interrogate them off of the school’s premises and all of that,” Silver said. “It’s unconstitutionally overbroad language that fails to define or delineate any bounds of appropriate police behavior whatsoever.”
‘What any reasonable adult would do’
Some legal experts say that by allowing officers to enforce school rules, districts create situations that are confusing and intimidating to students. Nanda said that officers’ involvement in discipline is often “ambiguous.” Students, she added, may not understand why an officer stops them in the hallway: Is it for an alleged crime or a violation of school rules?
“Are they just walking the child over to the principal’s office, or are they interviewing the child and taking police notes? How does that play out?” she said. The presence of resource officers can result in harsher discipline for students, “particularly for Black students, male students and students with disabilities,” according to a 2023 study by researchers at State University of New York, Albany, “even though officers are typically not trained to, and often do not intend to, become involved in minor disciplinary matters in the school.”
Although the Alabama-based National Association of School Resource Officers recommends that districts prohibit officers from “becoming involved in formal school discipline situations,” its executive director, Mo Canady, said in an interview that he thinks officers should get involved in situations that could result in discipline.
When officers see a young person misbehaving and get involved, they’re doing “what any reasonable adult would do,” Canady said. “Adults should never walk by and ignore a situation like that. I don’t care if we’re at a shopping mall, whatever it is.”
Asked whether there is a difference between an adult and an armed police officer intervening when a juvenile misbehaves, Canady said: “That’s why one of the issues that we harp on constantly is the importance of good relationships that (officers) build with students.”
California’s Department of Education does not provide guidance on the use of school resource officers, Elizabeth Sanders, an agency spokesperson, said.
The California School Boards Association provides districts with what it calls a “sample policy” on policing contracts, which recommends that the duties of resource officers should “not include the handling of student code of conduct violations or routine disciplinary matters that should be addressed by school administrators or conduct that would be better addressed by mental health professionals.”
Troy Flint, spokesperson for the association, said district leaders are free to “interpret the sample policy in a way that captures their community’s desired approach to law enforcement on campus. We recognize there’s a diversity of opinion throughout the state about the role security personnel should play on campus or whether they should be there at all.”
‘Why are we policing our students?’
The Oxnard Union High School District has contracts with two law enforcement agencies that clearly prohibit resource officers’ involvement in disciplinary matters.
The district’s $2.33 million contract with the city of Oxnard states that police are to distinguish “between disciplinary misconduct to be handled by school officials from criminal offenses.” The contract also says that officers “are responsible for criminal public order offenses” and “should not get involved in school discipline issues.” A separate contract with the city of Camarillo contains similar language. Both contracts require officers to establish “clear probable cause” before searching a student.
Oxnard Union High District Superintendent Tom McCoy chats with school resource officers Alexus Santos,left, and Sgt. Hannah Estrada on the campus of Pacifica High School in Oxnard.Credit: J. Marie / EdSource
But the district’s contract with Ventura County for one resource officer does not address discipline. Superintendent Tom McCoy said in an interview that it is “well understood and discussed in meetings” that resource officers provided by the county do not enforce discipline. It’s never been an issue. They are very aware of our policies.”
The district has a policy that is not in its policing contracts and that allows students to request “a person of the same gender or gender identity or a staff member familiar to them to be present” if they are questioned by law enforcement.
McCoy added that the district requires students who “are questioned or interviewed by police on campus also must be referred for counseling and wellness services on the same day to address any specific needs identified through the interview process.”
Karen Sher, the school board member whom McCoy credited with helping create the district’s policy, said her experience teaching at a school with resource officers led her to ask herself, “‘Why are we policing our children?’”
Oxnard Union High School District board member Karen Sher.Credit: J. Marie / EdSource
Sher said she believes that officers have a role to play in school safety, but she also worries about how their presence might affect disadvantaged students. About 16% of district students lack stable housing, she said.
“How on earth does anyone believe those students have not had an interaction, both positive or negative, with police?” Sher asked. “We expect them to come to school, see police cars in front of their school, and expect them to feel good about that? That’s a very entitled perspective.”
Eric Wiatt, a Ventura County sheriff’s deputy who has worked at Adolfo Camarillo High School for the past three years, said adjusting to being a resource officer took time.
“The first year was a learning experience of communicating with (students) and developing a rapport. It wasn’t natural in me. You know, all the different social media platforms that are used and the different slang they use,” Wiatt said in an interview.
He says he spends a lot of time investigating bullying and threats made on social media.
School resource officer Eric Wiatt from the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department patrols the campus of Adolfo Camarillo High School in Camarillo.Credit: J. Marie / EdSource
“We actually dig into them. We take every threat very seriously. We do a full investigation,” Wiatt said.
When he’s not investigating threats, Wiatt walks the campus wearing a bulletproof vest over his uniform and a pistol holstered to his hip. He often eats lunch with students.
Riley Young, a 16-year-old junior whom school officials selected to be interviewed by EdSource, described Wiatt as calm and helpful.
“I’d been getting in trouble,” she said. “He helped me realize that being good in school and in life was important.”
‘Providing clarity’
District leaders provided a range of reasons why their policing contracts don’t address whether resource officers can be involved in disciplinary matters.
The Madera Unified School District’s contract with the city of Madera for resource officers doesn’t address disciplinary issues. Superintendent Todd Lile said the idea that officers would enforce discipline “has never been present and, as a result, has never been explicitly called out in contractual language.” Police are “not thought of or expected to keep control of a campus,” he said.
The Lucia Mar Unified School District has two contracts for resource officers. Its agreement with the city of Arroyo Grande prohibits officers from enforcing discipline. But its contract with San Luis Obispo County does not address disciplinary matters.
Amy Jacobs, a district spokesperson, said Lucia Mar has a policy prohibiting law enforcement’s involvement in discipline, but Jacobs didn’t provide an answer when asked why that policy wasn’t written into the contract with the sheriff’s office.
The Galt Union High School District board in Sacramento County agreed to a three-year contract with the city of Galt for three resource officers in 2023. The agreement did not address police involvement in discipline. But shortly after Anna Trunnell became district superintendent in 2024, the contract was revised.
It now states that resource officers “will not be responsible for requests to resolve routine discipline problems involving students. They will not respond to incidents that do not pose any threat of safety or would not be considered crimes if they occurred outside of the school.”
Trunnell said the new language “assists in providing clarity when responding to student needs.”
The lack of clarity in many school policing contracts is “profoundly alarming,” said Nanda, the Southwestern law professor.
“It’s crucial,” she said, “for parents, educators and administrators to pay attention to the who, what and why of officers in our schools.”
Seventh-graders work together on homework in their school library.
Credit: Allison Shelley / EDUimages
Mental health has been at the center of former U.S. Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy’s personal journey to recovery from addiction as well as his public career as a policymaker, author and advocate.
In 2008, while representing Rhode Island in the U.S. House of Representatives, Kennedy wasthe lead author of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, a federal law that requires health insurance companies to provide equal coverage for mental health and addiction care and general physical health care, such as diabetes or cancer treatment.
Forner U.S. Rep, Patrick J. Kennedy, D-R.I.
Kennedy, who has long been vocal about pursuing treatment for his substance use and bipolar disorder, remains an advocate for greater access to mental health care. Earlier this year, he published his book “Profiles in Mental Health Courage” — a reference to his late uncle and former President John F. Kennedy’s classic “Profiles in Courage” — detailing how people from diverse backgrounds across the country have taken on mental illness and addiction. In October, he was a keynote speaker at the annual student wellness conference Wellness Together in Anaheim, where he spoke about his advocacy as founder of the mental health policy nonprofit The Kennedy Forum.
“As we turn the corner on stigma related to suicide and overdose, we need to finally focus a lot more on solutions early on in a person’s life,” Kennedy said in an interview with EdSource. Not only are young people less likely to seek help due to stigma, but are also less likely to be properly insured, incurring high out-of-pocket costs for treatment when they need it.
For Kennedy, the key to addressing the youth mental health and addiction crisis is increasing and sustaining funding for care on the local, state and federal levels. He emphasized that schools desperately need the bulk of that funding, given that early intervention significantly reduces a child’s chance of developing a serious mental illness in adulthood.
California has, in recent years, invested heavily in expanding mental health support for children and adolescents. The state’s next challenge, Kennedy said, is sustaining these crucial services.
In 2019, the state embarked on a $4.7 billion Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative, focused mainly on recruiting and training new mental health providers across the state’s school system. To help sustain these programs, the state Department of Health Care Services plans to make new public school-based mental health services billable to both Medi-Cal and commercial health insurance, making California’s multi-payer fee schedule one of the largest school reimbursement programs in the country.
EdSource interviewed Kennedy about expanding mental health care for students and families. His remarks have been edited for length and clarity.
How do we address the enduring impact of stigma on our health and education systems?
We need greater literacy (regarding mental health) across the board. Many don’t know these mentalillnesses as brain illnesses, and they don’t understand that they’re treatable. If we knew we could treat them successfully, which we can, especially if we go in early, how can we think about them differently? We don’t let cancer get to stage four to treat it. We screen it, screen it, screen it. It’s embedded in my medical chart. My doctor asks me 15 ways about my risk for stroke and cancer. We need to do that with mental health.
We could address so much of this if we just incorporated better mental health services within our community. So many families have their mental health symptoms exacerbated by lack of stable housing, no supportive employment and a lack of community to help. They become isolated, which is the worst thing for those struggling with their mental health.
Why does the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act matter for young people today?
It used to be the case where, if you had a mental illness, you had to pay higher co-pays, premiums and deductibles to get mental health treatment than you would to get diabetes treatment or asthma treatment. Unlike for physical illnesses, insurance companies would cap the total of dollars you could spend as a patient on mental health. The Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act established that insurance companies could not discriminate and treat the brain any differently than any other organ of the body.
Ultimately, we can’t treat everyone based upon bake sales. We have to change the metrics of what constitutes value in our mental health system. We have to get this embedded in regular insurance.
How can California ensure that new school-based coverage for mental health care is effective in the long term?
We have to figure out how to reorient the insurance process so that there’s a way of capturing the return on investment from an earlier investment. The state is the one that has the most to say about overall state coverage for mental health early on, in order to reduce future obligations on the state’s part, which means picking up the pieces of a broken population that hasn’t properly been supported by coverage through early intervention services.
We need to get organized as voters. There’s not a family out there that doesn’t have these issues affecting a member of their family, who hasn’t lost a loved one to suicide or overdose. There’s a huge need for mental health treatment because we keep waiting till people are in a crisis. Why not make this a public health issue and really embed resources in elementary and secondary schools so students can take care of themselves?
What role should the federal government play in addressing youth mental health?
We need to have Federally Qualified Health Centers in every public school in America. They could open satellites in each of the schools that can help treat kids where they are. A lot of kids, particularly from minority communities, are not going to get mental health care after school. You could bring tele-mental health into a school nurse’s office, so it’s not just where you get an aspirin, but a real clinic in the school where you could be meeting kids’ health needs writ large. You’d also need ongoing intensive care to connect them to the community health center outside.
We already fund Federally Qualified Health Centers. It’s supported on a bipartisan basis. It covers the uninsured as well as the insured. These centers and Certified Community Behavioral Health Centers cover a lot of rural areas and health deserts, and they can provide general counseling and support services. They have a board of directors, who are all people in the community who know the resources in the community and can pull together a more wraparound, holistic approach.
So many kids come to school from homes where there’s violence, addiction or mental illness. We need to reach the whole family. In many states where Republicans don’t have good benefits for their people, the centers provide a valuable safety valve for their constituents to get health care. We just need to take that model to scale in schools. The easiest thing is to run all of these through existing bureaucracies, so you’re not trying to create a new system from whole cloth.
How can students help address mental health?
I would say to young people that there are two major ways they can really help the system. One, they can learn about how to prevent mental health challenges themselves through learning about their own brain and learning coping skills and problem-solving skills. We can focus on a lot more upstream, or proactive, mechanisms early in a student’s life, when they can start to build different coping skills and learn how to manage their emotions.
And second, if they’re interested in going into the mental health space, they can create a much better track to get into the mental health field. We just don’t have enough hands on deck to really meet the enormity of the need for those who desperately need treatment. Not only do we need to build that infrastructure and access, but also build a workforce pipeline for those trying to go into the field in greater numbers.
It’s got everything to do with young people. These are illnesses where 50% of them occur before the age of 14, and 75% occur before the age of 25. They’re illnesses of the young; they can take you hostage and take out whole parts of your life, when, ordinarily, you’d be in the most productive period in your life as a young person.
Isabel Dueñas teaches her transitional kindergarten students how to read at San Miguel Catholic School in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Credit: Archdiocese of Los Angeles
The article was updated to include a statement that LAUSD Supt. Alberto Carvalho issued on Dec.23.
Los Angeles Unified has settled a 3-year-old lawsuit with the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles over how much federal Title I funding low-income students within the archdiocese are entitled to receive. The district agreed to pay the $3 million it improperly withheld from archdiocese schools and to comply with federal regulations requiring transparency and consultation with the archdiocese it had repeatedly violated.
The agreement covered 2018-19 and 2019-20, when Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD) first changed the method of determining student eligibility for Title I and cut funding by more than 90%, from $9.5 million for the eligible 13,000 students in the archdiocese to $757,000.
The LAUSD school trustees signed off on the agreement in a closed session Dec. 11 and did not publicly disclose details after announcing the vote. A district spokespersondeclined comment before publication of the article.
But Paul Escala, superintendent of the Los Angeles Archdiocese schools, said the agreement sends a clear message. It “ensures that non-public school students who are eligible for these services will get them. While that may seem basic, when we’ve operated in an environment where that was not clear and was not being upheld, that is a win for kids,” he said.
“This recognizes that kids who attend Catholic schools in urban Los Angeles, not only are they eligible for Title I services, but in fact suffer with poverty and needs just like their public school district peers,” he said.
Since its passage in 1968, Congress extended Title I funding to poor students in private schools, including religious schools, to boost their chances for success. However, to avoid directly funding religious schools, Congress decided that districts in which private and religious schools are located should determine student eligibility and consult with the schools on which services, such as counseling, the students should receive.
Districts have a menu of methods for determining Title I eligibility. The simplest and generally most advantageous for private schools is to use census data to determine the level of poverty in a neighborhood and calculate eligibility as the proportion of low-income students that attend a private school. It’s the method most large urban districts have used, Escala said, including LAUSD and Miami-Dade County Public Schools, where Alberto Carvalho was superintendent before becoming LAUSD superintendent in 2022. That approach also meets the spirit of Title I, he said.
An incentive to deny Title I to privateschool kids
Under Superintendent Austin Beutner’s incoming administration, the district changed the eligibility process for 2018-19 without prior notice to require schools to document family incomes through surveys or the number of income-eligible students registered for the federal subsidized meals programs. Along with requiring more time, paperwork and verification by the schools, the district changed the reporting rules several times in a short period and failed to engage the archdiocese about its decisions meaningfully, the California Department of Education wrote in 2021 in response to a formal complaint by the archdiocese. In addition to slashing funding, the district cut the schools served to fewer than two dozen out of 116 schools in the archdiocese. According to the California Department of Education, the district cut its total share allocated to private schools from 2% and 2.6% of $291 million to 0.5%.
Districts have a financial incentive to minimize private schools’ Title I eligibility, since the federal government awards Title I funding to districts. After subtracting the amount going to private schools, a district gets to keep unallocated dollars for its own Title I students.
“There’s a moral and ethical question on the table,” Escala said at the time.
In its 58-page report, the California Department of Education called the funding cuts “totally unreasonable.” Its report concluded that LAUSD “engaged in a pattern of arbitrary unilateral decisions,” including giving archdiocese schools 12 days during a summer break to produce income surveys for families and then removing all the schools that were unable to meet the deadline. It characterized the district’s approach as a “hide-the-ball approach (that) breached both the spirit and the letter” of the law.
LAUSD appealed the ruling to the U.S. Department of Education, which largely affirmed the California department’s findings in a November 2023 ruling. It gave the district 60 days to consult with the district, as the Title I law required, and fix the inaccurate count of ineligible students. It gave the district 90 days to provide the services that it had denied.
The archdiocese returned to Los Angeles Superior Court in the spring of 2024 because, Escala said, the district dragged its feet and declined to hand over documents the archdiocese was entitled to.
The documents confirmed what the archdiocese had assumed, said the archdiocese’s chief academic officer, Robert Tagorda. “For years they had insisted that they were following the law. We had suspicions that if you’re cutting us this much, it can’t be lawful. We had the documents to show we had far more low-income students than they had originally counted.”
With revelations of public records, the archdiocese reached out to LAUSD to resume settlement talks. Within several weeks in November, there was a deal. The terms correspond to what the U.S. Department of Education had recommended, Tagorda said. LAUSD would recalculate how much was owed in 2018-19 and apply the corrections to 2019-20. It would disclose how the Title I obligation was calculated and confer with the archdiocese on the services to be provided. The archdiocese also will be able to pool Title I money so that it can direct it to the most intensive-needs schools — a practice that LAUSD had prohibited.
The combined $3 million owed for the two years was far below what had been received the year before the district changed the eligibility method. But staff turnover in the district and the archdiocese, and incomplete records in some schools, undermined the claims, Tagorda acknowledged. The eligibility process in years since 2019-20, unaffected by the lawsuit, changed little. In 2023-24, the archdiocese received $2 million in Title I funding.
Title I rules allow districts to annually change the process of determining eligibility. Escala said the archdiocese will continue to request that LAUSD return to the proportionality method that produced more funding; LAUSD, by law, must give the rationale each year for denying it.
Escala acknowledged that the archdiocese could have chosen to litigate the case — and likely won. But the outcome would have potentially taken years and legal expenses that archdiocese schools don’t have. “We recognized that we could not afford another day, another year, another generation of students not having the ability to fairly access legally entitled services,” he said.
Tagorda said the additional money from the settlement would be used for tutoring, after-school and summer programs, and academic counseling that schools have been requesting.
In an interview with EdSource in March 2022, soon after becoming LAUSD superintendent, Carvalho said he had familiarized himself with the archdiocese lawsuit. “I’m going to resolve this issue sooner rather than later,” he said. “What I can tell you is that we need more objective, transparent tools by which we assess and fund this guaranteed federal entitlement that’s driven by poverty,” regardless of whether for a public or private school.
It took nearly three years since then, after exhausting appeals and losing one ruling in Superior Court, for the district to resolve the case. Escala said he is optimistic it will be enforced.
“When we came back to the table, it was clear that Carvalho took a personal interest to make sure we have the conditions on his side to get a settlement done. We have seen a change in approach by district staff. He is committed to abide by Title I regulations and consultation that is fair, I take him at this word,” said Escala.
“In the course of these negotiations, trust and faith had to be rebuilt. I think that we’re in a far better place than we were six months ago.”
On Dec. 23, a day after the article was published, Carvalho issued the following statement: “I am grateful for our partnership with the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. I look forward to the ways we can work together in the future and serve the students of Los Angeles. Thanks to Superintendent Paul Escala for his steadfast leadership over the Department of Catholic Schools.”
One of Trump’s major goals during his campaign was to strip any rights from transgender people and make them invisible. He and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth agree that trans men and women should not serve in the military and should not receive gender-affirming care to support their transition to a different gender identity. Trump signed an executive order ousting them from the military.
The Pentagon will resume gender-affirming care for transgender service members, according to a memo obtained by POLITICO, an embarrassing setback to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s efforts to restrict their participation.
The memo says the Defense Department is returning to the Biden-era medical policy for transgender service members due to a court order that struck down Hegseth’s restrictions as unconstitutional. The administration is appealing the move, but a federal appeals court in California denied the department’s effort to halt the policy while its challenge is pending.
As a result, the administration is barred from removing transgender service members or restricting their medical care, a priority of President Donald Trump and Hegseth. The administration insisted its restrictions were geared toward people experiencing medical challenges related to “gender dysphoria,” but two federal judges said in March that the policy was a thinly veiled ban on transgender people that violated the Constitution.
The Trump administration on Thursday asked the Supreme Court to allow the Pentagon to ban transgender servicemembers while legal battles continue to play out.
Both judges ordered the military to refrain from forcing out more than 1,000 transgender troops and to resume providing for their medical care, including surgical procedures and voice and hormone therapy. The memo is the latest move by the Pentagon to comply with those orders.
But it presents another headache for Hegseth, who has made culture war issues — such as changing recruitment standards and reinstating the ban — a key piece of his effort to make the military more lethal. Hegseth has emphasized this theme as he’s sought to defend himself amid multiple scandals, including texting sensitive details of military operations in Yemen to multiple Signal group chats and a vicious brawlbetween his top advisers.
“Service members and all other covered beneficiaries 19 years of age or older may receive appropriate care for their diagnosis of [gender dysphoria], including mental health care and counseling and newly initiated or ongoing cross-sex hormone therapy,” Dr. Stephen Ferrara, the Pentagon’s acting assistant secretary of Defense for health affairs, said in a memo dated April 21.
Trump signed a long-expected order banning transgender people from serving in the military at the outset of the administration, just as he had done in 2017. But LGBTQ+ advocacy groups quickly pounced, calling the order discriminatory.
So far, the courts have rejected the Pentagon’s arguments that including transgender troops reduces the military’s ability to fight. U.S. District Judge Benjamin Settle ruled in March that there is no evidence that transgender troops harm military readiness, and ordered the Pentagon to return to the status quo.
A three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday became the first appellate court to hear arguments on Trump’s transgender military policy but gave little indication of how it might rule.
Defense officials acknowledged in a March memo sent to Pentagon leadership that the agency would comply with the court order, but did not detail the steps the department would take to follow it. Hegseth has openly attacked one of the judges, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, for her order, labeling her “Commander Reyes” in a pejorative post on X.
The Trump administration claims that it wants to reduce federal intervention into the nation’s public and private institutions. But it intervenes forcefully in both public and private sectors to punish anyone with different views. It has threatened to withhold federal funding for research from universities unless the targeted universities allow the federal government to supervise its curriculum, its hiring policies, and its admissions policies. And he threatened to stop the funding of any K12 school that continues DEI programs.
The Trump regime has created a nanny state.
From Day 1, Trump made clear that he would ban practices and policies intended to diversity, equity, and inclusion. He threatened to withhold federal funding of schools that ignored his order to eliminate DEI. He has taken complete control of the Kennedy Center, so as to block DEI programming, and he has appointed a woman with no credentials to remove DEI from the Smithsonian museums.
Who knows how the African American Museum will survive Trump’s DEI purge.
ABC News reported that a federal district judge has halted the DEI ban, at least in schools associated with one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, the NEA.
The Trump administration’s attempt to make federal funding to schools conditional on them eliminating any DEI policies erodes the “foundational principles” that separates the United States from totalitarian regimes, a federal judge said on Thursday.
In an 82-page order, U.S. District Judge Landya McCafferty partially blocked the Department of Education from enforcing a memo issued earlier this year that directed any institution that receives federal funding to end discrimination on the basis of race or face funding cuts.
“Ours is a nation deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned,” Judge McCafferty wrote, adding the “right to speak freely and to promote diversity of ideas and programs is…one of the chief distinctions that sets us apart from totalitarian regimes.”
“In this case, the court reviews action by the executive branch that threatens to erode these foundational principles,” she wrote.
The judge stopped short of issuing the nationwide injunction, instead limiting the relief to any entity that employs or contacts with the groups that filed the lawsuit, including the National Education Association and the Center for Black Educator Development.
People protest against a funding freeze of federal grants and loans following a push from President Donald Trump to pause federal funding near to the White House in Washington on Jan. 28, 2025.
State leaders spent much of Tuesday trying to determine the potential impact of a White House freeze on federal grants and loans that could potentially affect millions of California students and their families.
A White House memo released Monday from the Office of Management and Budget called for the freeze to begin Tuesday at 2 p.m. PST. But, just minutes before 2 p.m., U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan in Washington, D.C., blocked the order until next Monday at 2 p.m. PST to give courts more time to consider its impact, according to Politico.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said Tuesday that the freeze could cut $3 trillion in federal funding from programs that help the homeless, veterans, seniors, disaster victims and school children nationwide.
The order has thrown state programs into chaos and created uncertainty around their administration, said a media release from Bonta’s office.
“I will not stand by while the president attempts to disrupt vital programs that feed our kids, provide medical care to our families, and support housing and education in our communities,” Bonta said in a statement. “Instead of learning from the defeats of his first administration, President Trump is once again plowing ahead with a damaging — and most importantly, unlawful —agenda.”
Bonta joined 22 other state attorneys general to file a lawsuit calling for a temporary halt to implementation of the memo. The White House directive called for advancing the Trump administration’s policies and called “the use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism and green new deal social engineering policies a waste of taxpayer dollars.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office called the White House memo a violation of federal law. “We are confident funding will be restored,” officials there said in an email to EdSource.
California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said the White House action is misguided. “(It) serves nothing more than to hurt the most vulnerable students and people in our nation,” he said.
Early Tuesday, state education leaders expressed concern that student loans, special education, Head Start, and Title 1 programs could be impacted by the freeze.
But by late Tuesday afternoon, conflicting information from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget and the U.S. Department of Education made it unclear which programs would be affected, according to a letter from the California Department of Education to county and district superintendents scheduled to be sent Tuesday night.
According to the letter, the U.S. Department of Education assured state departments of education that Title 1 programs for low-income schools, special education and other formula grants will not be frozen. But, officials at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said these programs will be subject to the same scrutiny as others regarding compliance with the Trump administration’s executive orders.
“We hope to gain more clarity on affected programs before Feb. 3 and plan to communicate this information to the field as soon as possible in case the OMB directive becomes effective,” said the California Department of Education guidance signed by David Schapira, chief deputy superintendent.
Officials in the U.S. Department of Education said only discretionary grants would be affected and not formula grants, according to Troy Flint, spokesperson for the California School Boards Association.
A list of discretionary grants on the U.S. Department of Education website includes grants for educator development, charter school programs, early learning programs, school and community improvement programs, as well as grants for arts and literacy education.
California School Boards Association officials will be watching to see how the issue is resolved in the courts, Flint said. “This is a fluid and fast-moving topic, and we don’t think we have heard the end of it.”
University leaders are also waiting to see what the freeze could mean for them. University of California staff and lawyers are “working diligently to clarify the potential impacts” on the university, said President Michael Drake in a statement.
He noted that the White House has said federal student loans and Pell Grants would not be impacted.
“We are in contact with key policymakers in Congress and at federal agencies, as well as association partners and other higher education institutions. We are evaluating what actions we are able to take and will keep you informed,” Drake added in a message to the UC community.
EdSource reporters Emma Gallegos, Michael Burke, Mallika Seshadri, Betty Márquez Rosales, Amy DiPierro, Vani Sanganeria contributed to this story.
