Local superintendents have been complaining about increased health insurance bills for employees who don't hold teaching certificates, including bus drivers, cafeteria workers, custodians and classroom aides.
"Opportunity awareness is the name of the game," says James Guerra, of JG Consulting, founder of the platform, which he created to help show leaders just how vast vacancies are in this field and to make the hiring process as seamless as possible for school districts.
"The secret is out: K12s are a target-rich and resource-poor sector," says TJ Sayers, cyber threat intelligence manager at the Center for Internet Security (CIS). "Maintaining complete, secured, and offline backups is the single-most effective way to recover from most attacks, including ransomware."
That error won't just affect budgets for next year, but school divisions will also feel it this year. Out of the $201 million involved in the mistake, $58 million of that would have been for a year that's almost three-quarters done.
With a shortage of school counselors and incidents of self-harm and violence toward others surging this past year, districts are turning toward online monitoring services that can help administrators stay ahead of the curve.
Black students' standardized test scores and graduation rates have long trailed those of their white and Asian peers. For decades, educators and legislators have tried to close that achievement gap, and a school funding proposal in Gov. Gavin Newsom's new budget illustrates just how difficult it is to do .
A New Jersey appeals court heard arguments Tuesday about state funding for the Lakewood school district, which lawyers for a public school parents group argue is so low that it violates students' rights.
At the moment, school districts are essentially sitting on a gold mine to spend at their discretion, as long as it's used to provide relief in an area that was impacted as a result of the pandemic. But while most suffered some sort of toll—whether in student academics, staffing, or mental health—they've been slow to spend these funds.
The popular understanding of budgets is that, despite coming across like cold ledger sheets, they are deeply human documents, a numeric portrait of priorities — in other words, the things we care about.
"We're actually calling 2024-25 'the bloodletting,'" said Dr. Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. "Public education has not seen a right-sizing, fiscal cliff, whatever you want to call it, of this magnitude at any time in the past, including the last recession. I think it's going to be quite shocking."
