Top 5 stories from K-12 Dive

In the past few years, school districts have navigated extraordinary challenges, from COVID-19 shutdowns and students' academic lags to politically charged parental involvement and a constantly shifting policy landscape.

Inevitably, some of these issues that start at the schoolhouse make their way to the courthouse.

"As states pass legislation providing more defined rights for parents, and parents approach school officials with requests or legal complaints regarding curriculum, teacher speech in the classroom, and school-wide programs, schools face increased likelihood of receiving complaints," said Andrew Manna, a partner at law firm Church Church Hittle and Antrim and chair-elect of the National School Attorneys Association, in an email.

Manna said lawsuits in those and other education areas have increased over the past two decades — and continue to climb. Amid it all, districts continue to field lawsuits on common yet hot-button issues like special education and Title IX.

"So you have those sort of garden variety things that school districts tend to face," said Verjeana McCotter-Jacobs, executive director and CEO of the National School Boards Association. "And a lot of it is driven by climate," specifically by "what's happening in the political world or just education in general." 

As districts nationwide gear up for another school year, here are the top legal liabilities they may face in 2024-25. 

First Amendment

Issues regarding freedom of religion and speech of students, staff and even school board members will likely remain front and center. 

Anti-LGBTQ+ curriculum and policies in conservative states have already led to a number of high-profile First Amendment lawsuits. LGBTQ+ supporters are alleging violations of freedom of speech, while opponents of students and employees using preferred pronouns, or allowing bathroom access based on gender alignment, claim violations of religious belief accommodations. 

"I think we can anticipate that those things will continue," said Dennis Parker, adjunct professor at Columbia University's Teachers College and an expert in education policy and social analysis. 

Activism in response to the Israel-Hamas war has also split students and staff, with district leaders including the superintendent of New York City Public Schools stepping in to discipline students and staff after politically charged encounters. 

In some places, school boards have sought to pass resolutions calling for a cease-fire in the war in hopes of making the school districts more welcoming for Palestinian, Israeli, Jewish and Muslim students. However, that's led to pushback from supporters of Israel and Jewish community members, who say resolutions made them feel targeted or isolated. 

"And there were some that were like, "Why are we even in that discussion? Why are we even talking about that?" said McCotter-Jacobs of the board resolutions.

Changing school climates because of the war have already brought increased U.S. Education Department investigations of bullying and harassment based on shared ancestry and ethnicity — and may also lead to First Amendment disputes.

Title IX

In the past few presidential administrations, policies and practices related to anti-sex discrimination protections in schools have turned volalite. 

The few months since the Biden administration released its final rule protecting LGBTQI+ students in April have been particularly charged. Legal challenges from conservative states have blocked implementation of the rule in at least 26 states and more than 400 specific schools. In those states and schools, the Education Department will be enforcing the 2020 rule instead, the agency said on the morning of the rule's Aug. 1 implementation date.

However, until that morning, schools had not heard from the agency as to which rule would be in effect, leaving educators in those areas confused and frustrated about how to proceed on training and other preparation for the new school year.

"As litigation continues and courts issue injunctions halting implementation of the Title IX Final Rule issued by the Department of Education on sex-based discrimination, many school districts are in the position of not knowing which set of regulations, and which parts of those regulations, will be in force in the new school year," said Manna prior to the Aug. 1 final rule implementation date. "This situation sets up schools for complaints by individuals who believe the school is following the wrong rules." 

Privacy

Schools also risk liability with technology constantly evolving, social media at the tips of students' fingers, and the introduction of artificial intelligence into the classroom. 

Pornographic deepfakes spreading on social media, for example, became an issue in one district in New Jersey earlier this year. In other places, lawsuits alleging school district negligence have cropped up over bullying — including cyberbullying — after tragic student suicides. 

"What does it mean if a student threatens harm in a social media post, but they were only joking?" McCotter-Jacobs asked. 

How to handle such bullying can be written into student codes of conduct, McCotter-Jacobs said. "So policies will be put in place to avoid lawsuits that may come out of not providing a safe and respectful school environment." 

Privacy issues might also arise with vendors who can access sensitive student and staff information, or from unsafe district practices leading to data leaks.

"How many school districts have we heard that have been hacked into, and the information has been made public or things like that?" asked McCotter-Jacobs. "So cybersecurity has become a really big issue for school districts." 

DEI

Diversity, equity and inclusion issues are another area where districts walk a fine line. In recent years, "divisive concept" laws, U.S. Supreme Court decisions on race-conscious college admissions practices, and increased activism for and against diversity efforts have complicated district approaches to creating inclusive environments. 

Since 2023, over 150 bills regulating DEI in education have been introduced across 34 states, according to a Movement Advancement Project report released in July. At least 15 states have enacted such bans or restrictions.

As a result of heightened awareness and activism on DEI, districts could face liability around efforts to diversify the teacher pipeline, for instance. Hiring programs meant to increase the number of minority teachers could become subject to greater scrutiny, said Parker.

"That's not to say that there aren't practices you can do that would be effective, but that they will have to be really carefully considered when you're putting them in place," he added.

Curriculum, textbook and course decisions should also be made carefully with DEI restrictions and benefits both in mind, said Parker.

Special education

In line with trends in previous years and especially after the pandemic, special education lawsuits continue to roll in. With districts regularly understaffed in special education, it is especially difficult to provide adequate services not only in compliance with the law but also that satisfy parents. 

"Special education is an area that every district across the country can, in some form or fashion, find themselves looking at legal compliance," said McCotter-Jacobs.

During COVID school building shutdowns, the Education Department required school districts to continue providing students a "free appropriate public education" as promised under IDEA, but many were concerned that districts lacked the ability to provide adequate services. Lawyers also gave districts varying advice on the issue, McCotter-Jacobs said. 

As a result, districts will likely grapple with COVID special education-related lawsuits for another few years, she said.

While there is a federal two-year statute of limitations on when parents can use a more formal dispute resolution option by requesting a due process hearing, states can extend that time frame. And while it's already been a few years since COVID shutdowns, students' pandemic recovery challenges could still keep school attorney's hands full.

A historic influx of federal funding to help K-12 schools recover from setbacks created by the worst global pandemic in modern times has largely been spent without waste or fraud so far — and it has been essential for students' academic recuperation, several education finance and policy experts said.

Fears of a dramatic and widespread fiscal cliff for school districts after the mostly flexible federal COVID-19 emergency funding dissipates also seems to be overstated, the expert said.

"I don't think it is as bad as people were concerned about, because the narrative for a while — you would have thought that every single district was going to be facing a cliff, and the reality is, not all of them are," said Elleka Yost, director of advocacy and research for the Association of School Business Officials International. 

Jasmine Bolton, policy director at the Partnership for the Future of Learning, a nonprofit that has a network of over 800 stakeholders across the education field, said the federal pandemic funding has helped districts support students with disabilities, make progress in closing racial equity gaps, invest in whole-child supports and more. "I think it's important that we stress how huge, how impactful this amount of money really is and continues to be," she said.

Although there's been many positive activities supported by the COVID funding, Yost, Bolton and others also note the challenges districts now face four years after the pandemic first emerged, and as schools wean themselves from the federal emergency funds. 

Some school communities face hiring freezes, school consolidations and needed facility improvements, as well as ongoing demand to support students' mental health and academic needs.

"We need continued investment, and probably continued investment that speaks to what students are continuing to experience as a result of the pandemic," Bolton said.

Saying goodbye to ESSER

The last and largest of the federal COVID-related appropriations — the American Rescue Plan fund through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief allocation — has an obligation deadline of Sept. 30 for when districts must commit to spending down the money. The ESSER-ARP spending deadline for school districts is Jan. 28, 2025.

ESSER allocations under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act and the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act had earlier obligation and spending deadlines. However, some districts that received spending extensions have longer spending time frames. 

In total, ESSER funds equaled $189.5 billion. By contrast, the FY 2024 appropriation from Congress to the U.S. Department of Education was $79.1 billion. Any unused COVID relief funding must be sent back to the Education Department. 

Because the obligation and spending dates were known as soon as Congress approved K-12 COVID relief monies in 2020 and 2021, school districts were able to plan for a timely off-ramp of the funds. Districts were also warned against spending practices — such as hiring many additional full-time employees — that would be unsustainable once the federal funding ran out.

Lessons learned from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which helped states and localities overcome setbacks from a financial recession, also helped school systems be disciplined with COVID funding, said Noelle Ellerson Ng, associate executive director of advocacy and governance at AASA, The School Superintendents Association.

One of those lessons learned was to avoid using aid funding for recurring staffing obligations that may not be sustainable when the funding was no longer available, she said.

"There was enough of a memory to think, 'OK, here's what happened to schools after we saw ARRA go away,' and they were able to better anticipate and navigate what that ramp-down could look like," Ellerson Ng said.

Still, adjusting to non-ESSER supported budgets will likely be a challenge in many school systems, particularly for lower-income areas that received higher portions of federal emergency aid. 

A survey by the Texas Association of School Business Officials conducted in the spring found that 43% of 313 districts surveyed said they were in the process of making significant budget cuts. More than half of the districts expected to end FY 2024 in a deficit.

"I think there's a general willingness to say, 'Listen, these were services or supports that we brought in because there was federal funding, and when that federal funding goes away, something has to go away,'" said Ellerson Ng, adding that those conversations about what programs should be trimmed or cut can be difficult at the local level. 

Pace of spending

An Education Department dashboard on the pace of ESSER spending shows districts in states have spent between 70.5% (Nebraska) and 93.1% (Washington), as of June 30. The District of Columbia is the outlier with a spend rate of 63.5%.

Marguerite Roza, director of Edunomics Lab, an education finance research center at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy, said most school districts will spend down all their money, but some won't. As the ARP spending deadline approaches, she advises state education agencies to monitor their districts' pace of liquidation so the funds get used and not returned to the federal government. 

The type of spending matters too, Roza said. For instance, schools can't pay their employees with ESSER funds beyond the obligation deadline. Only spending for vendor contracts for services or materials can go past the obligation deadline due to education finance provisions set in play before ESSER, she said.

Nearly 50% of ARP funds have been directed toward labor costs, such as hiring teachers, reading specialists and for providing salary increases, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and based on state reported data. 

And although the Education Department has created a method for states and districts to request COVID relief spending extensions, the request process can be complicated. Some states, like Minnesota, have discouraged districts from seeking spending extensions.

Because of the complexity with federal and state education finance rules, some auditors have raised concerns about the late liquidation process, according to the Council of Chief State School Officers, an organization of top state education administrators. The Education Department has said it will ensure auditors are aware of its guidance and will answer questions from states and auditors. 

The Education Department's Office of Inspector General is conducting reviews of selected local and state use and planning of ESSER funds and discovered that most were meeting allowable requirements. 

Yost said grant managers, district CFOs and district finance teams "really want to do right by kids. They really want to make sure that these dollars reflect the good news, and help students with not just navigating the challenges of the pandemic but recovering and getting on a better path after the fact."

Efficient budgeting

While severe and universal fiscal cliffs are unlikely as ESSER funding goes away, Yost said, there will be fiscal slides in many areas, causing school systems to adjust to a post-ESSER reality.

Roza said school finance decisions should be made by analyzing data to see what investments are helping students academically and socially — and what aren't. For instance, if math scores are low, schools should look at preserving investments in math instruction and consider slimming costs in other areas.

"Districts are going to have to think about compensation differently going forward, because if they are trying to shrink their workforce, then you don't do the big across-the-board raises in the name of retention," Roza said. Rather, raises given for retention purposes should be targeted to those positions that are hard to staff, such as math, special education and in high-poverty schools, or where the academic needs are, she said.

Likewise, if districts are faced with fiscal decisions that include closing or consolidating schools, they should base those decisions on cost and performance data, Roza said.

"If you were going to shrink your footprint, you would normally, in most industries, look at performance first, and try to hold on to what's working, and maybe reduce what's not working," she said. "So we encourage district leaders to just certainly be eyes wide open on that." 

Roza added, "The name of the game is efficiency. We're going to just have to get better at leveraging what we have to maximize value and turn away what's not working.”

When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously on May 17, 1954, in favor of the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education, the "separate but equal" precedent — which had allowed state-mandated school assignments based on race for the six decades prior — ceased being the law of the land. 

It had become clear that "separate but equal" was not in fact equal, as schools designated for Black children lacked updated textbooks and basic facilities like cafeterias — amenities and materials that were commonly available in White schools. The justices' decision solidified that state-sanctioned racial segregation of public schools violated the 14th Amendment and was therefore unconstitutional.

A handful of lower court decisions in various parts of the country — from Kansas to Virginia to Delaware — showed this was a widespread problem, leading to the case being elevated to the Supreme Court.

But a whole year passed after that decision before the Supreme Court determined a timeline for school desegregation, only to state that it should occur "with all deliberate speed." 

Those resistant to the change would take advantage of that ambiguity. 

In the decade that followed, some communities quietly and peacefully began transitioning toward integration. In many communities, the NAACP, which had been instrumental in legal challenges to school segregation ahead of Brown v. Board of Education, helped facilitate local governments' compliance with the Supreme Court's ruling. 

But in other localities, massive resistance from pro-segregationists erupted into violent confrontations on school campuses. In one notable conflict, nine Black students, who were enrolling in Arkansas’ all-White Little Rock Central High School for the first time on Sept. 2, 1957, were blocked from entering the school. In their way stood state National Guard troops summoned by Gov. Orval Faubus. 

For weeks angry mobs prevented the nine students from regularly attending schools — until President Dwight Eisenhower superseded state leaders by federalizing the National Guard and sending U.S. Army troops to escort the students into school, according to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. 

Soon after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, voters in Georgia, South Carolina and Mississippi approved constitutional amendments authorizing their legislatures to abolish public education systems if they were forced to integrate by the federal government, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, an advocacy organization that challenges racial and economic injustices.

While some Black and White activists were fighting for school integration, a few Black communities were hesitant about the change. One such instance came in St. Louis, where funding for Black schools had been nearly on par with White schools. 

Across the nation, when desegregation efforts began White students were not often moving into the all-Black schools — initially, it was the Black students who had to leave familiar buildings and teachers who knew them well. 

Teachers from all-Black schools feared integration would eventually lead to the end of their careers if the schools they taught at wound up closing.

Their fears became reality. Between 1964 and 1972, a school district transitioning from fully segregated to fully integrated — occurring at this point mostly in the South — brought a 31.8% reduction in black teacher employment, according to a 2019 paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. 

Little Rock resident Virginia Walden Ford was a 10th grader in 1966 when she transferred from her all-Black school to Little Rock Central High. She recalled last year to K-12 Dive how she wanted to stay at her former school because she was worried about encountering racism at Little Rock Central High. Sure enough, a White geometry teacher refused to call on her and other Black students in class. It caused her to fail the class because participation made up 50% of the grade, Walden Ford said.

“I think part of the reason I fight so hard now is because my experiences in high school were traumatic to me,” said Walden Ford, who has spent the last two decades advocating for the rights of students to attend private school using taxpayer-supported vouchers.

The sluggish pace of school integration following the Brown decision fueled, in part, the Civil Rights Movement. In 1964, more than 98% of Black children in the South still attended segregated schools, according to 2017 research from the Civil Rights Project and the Center for Education and Civil Rights.

Pro-integration activists fought against Jim Crow laws, mostly in the South, aimed at maintaining legal segregation by denying or impeding employment, education and voting rights for Black individuals. 

On July 2, 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and other characteristics in public accommodations and federally funded programs. 

The law strengthened enforcement of voting rights, and it specifically referred to school desegregation by stating students should be assigned to public schools without regard to their race, color, religion or national origin. It also said “‘desegregation’ shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance.”

The Civil Rights Act also gave the U.S. attorney general authority to respond to complaints of school segregation by filing court orders against school systems that were resistant or slow to integrate. These mandatory desegregation orders gave the federal government oversight of certain aspects of school district governance. 

Between the 1960s and 1980s, court-ordered desegregation plans were implemented in hundreds of school districts nationwide, according to a 2022 U.S. Census Bureau Center for Economic Studies report. Although the process was meant to speed up integration, some school districts wound up spending decades under desegregation orders.

By 1969, the Supreme Court reversed its decision for schools to integrate "with all deliberate speed" and instead told school districts they were obligated to immediately terminate segregated school systems. 

One common strategy for desegregating schools involved voluntary or mandated busing of White students to Black schools and Black students to White schools. In the Supreme Court's unanimous 1971 ruling in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, the justices approved such busing to achieve racial balances in schools. Time would show that the court decision would help to speed up integration efforts in areas refusing to change, but it was largely unpopular among both Black and White families.

Researchers over the decades have found mixed results from busing on the academic, social and emotional impacts for children. Some critics called the practice in cities like Boston and Los Angeles "disastrous" — with Black children enduring long bus rides to reach mostly White schools, while a large number of White middle-class families fled urban centers to avoid their children's assignment to predominantly Black schools.

But others felt differently. Some Black adults, reflecting on their childhood experiences being bused to predominantly White schools, have said they valued the exposure to diverse classmates and to the variety of academic and after-school programs.

 

For the most part, the court-ordered busing approach worked to create more racially balanced schools. School integration peaked by the late 1980s, with most Black students attending desegregated schools and 44% attending majority White schools, according to the Learning Policy Institute. Additionally, according to the U.S. Department of Education, at the height of school desegregation efforts in the 1980s, the achievement gap for 13-year-old Black students had decreased by more than half in reading and nearly half in math.

Some of the local busing agreements, meanwhile, carried into the late 1990s and even the 21st century. North Carolina's Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, for instance, ended its busing program in 2001.

As busing fell out of favor — but some districts still had to comply with court-ordered desegregation agreements — another strategy emerged: the creation of magnet schools and school choice options. 

However, in developing these options, segregated school systems needed to ensure their plans would make progress toward racial balance, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in 1968 in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County.

Public and private school choice increased in the 1990s, with Education Department data showing the percentage of students enrolled in their assigned public school decreased from 80% to 74% between 1993 and 2003. 

At the same time, enrollment in public school choice programs grew from 11% to 15%. Enrollment in religious private schools stayed stable at 8%, and enrollment in nonreligious private schools rose from 1.6% to 2.4%.

However, some blame the expansion of school choice for the resegregation of schools in certain localities. This is a debate that continues today.

Between 1991 and 2009, more than 200 mid- and large-sized school districts were released from desegregation court orders. Increased activity to end federal oversight of desegregation plans came after a Supreme Court decision in 1991's Board of Education of Oklahoma City Public Schools v. Dowell. That 5-3 ruling found that court-ordered desegregation plans were "intended as a temporary measure to remedy past discrimination."

In a 2020 paper, The Century Foundation, which advocates for racial and economic equity in education, identified 185 districts and charter schools that consider race and/or socioeconomic status in their student assignment or admissions policies. A quarter of those schools were under some type of legal desegregation order or agreement, according to the foundation's analysis of National Center for Education Statistics data from the 2018-2019 school year.

Some research has found positive outcomes for school districts that had been under desegregation plans but reached "unitary status" — or when a district has eliminated school segregation as much as possible. For example, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 2007 found districts that had obtained unitary status since 2000 exhibited higher levels of integration than those that were fully desegregated years prior.

Moreover, U.S. Census Bureau research from 2022 found that Black adults who were younger than 25 when a school desegregation order was implemented in their county of birth —  and therefore had more exposure to integrated schools — attained better secondary, postsecondary and job outcomes compared with Black adults who were older upon implementation of a court order.

There were no comparable changes in outcomes among White adults in counties under such an order, or among Black adults who were beyond school age when a local order was implemented, the research said.

Today, 70 years after the Brown decision, much has changed: Black and White schools no longer officially exist, violent mobs are not blocking students' entrance into schools, and governors are not calling out the National Guard to keep schools segregated. Nonetheless, the quest for racially balanced schools continues for some school systems.

In fact, national data actually shows schools generally to be more segregated now than they were in the early 1990s. 

In an April paper titled "The Unfinished Battle for Integration in a Multicultural America — from Brown to Now," the Civil Rights Project says that over the last 30 years, the portion of schools "intensely segregated" — with 0-10% enrollment of White students — jumped from 7% to 20%. 

The nation's largest cities have some of the highest levels of segregation. In those communities, on average, Black and Latino students attend schools with non-White peers at 84% and 83%, respectively. 

The resegregation of schools can be blamed largely on two factors, the Civil Rights Project said: 

• The 1991 Dowell Supreme Court decision that said court-ordered desegregation plans should only be temporary, spurring action for more local control over school enrollment practices.
• School choice policies, with charter and magnet schools now being "substantially segregated."

The Century Foundation, in a 2022 paper, found that during the 2018-19 school year, 1 in 6 public school students attended schools where over 90% of their peers had their same racial background. This translates to 19% of White students attending a nearly all-White school and 15% of Black students attending a nearly all-Black school. 

Even as the U.S. student population has grown increasingly racially diverse with rising enrollment of Latino, Asian and multiracial students, attaining racially diverse schools has remained out of grasp in many areas. 

And seven decades after Brown, questions about using students' race as a factor in K-12 school enrollment continue to move through the legal system. 

As the Civil Rights Project said: "Schools are the largest American public institution and race is the most severe social problem, so continuing conflict is unsurprising."

It’s been over six years since Colorado’s 27J Schools implemented a four-day school week, and Superintendent Chris Fiedler says he doesn’t foresee the district going back to a traditional schedule.

The switch to a shortened school week in Colorado’s 15th largest district came in fall 2018 after 27J Schools failed for six consecutive years to gain voter support for increasing local taxes to boost education funding, including teacher pay, according to Fiedler. 

Given the competitive “dog eat dog” nature of school staffing in the Denver metro area, Fiedler says, the district had to think differently about how it would recruit and retain employees. 

“The four-day week is the second-best option, and the first-best option is to pay teachers and support staff well,” says Fiedler, who has run the 23,000-student district in Brighton since 2012.  

The per-pupil revenue from these local taxes, known as the Mill Levy Override, has historically decreased in 27J Schools unlike in other neighboring districts. The district's funds per pupil from local taxes, overall, consistently fall below levels in surrounding districts.

Eventually, the district was able to pass a 16% teacher pay increase with local voter approval of a Mill Levy Override in fall 2022. That raise moved 27J Schools from offering the lowest educator starting salary of the 15 Denver metro districts to two rankings higher, Fiedler says. The district’s average teacher salary was $59,030 in 2022-23.

Despite the district’s historically low teacher salaries, Fiedler says four-day school weeks have kept the school system “relevant” and competitive. “Our turnover rate has always outperformed our base teacher salary rate.”

Fiedler added that the four-day week has also helped recruit teachers who live in 27J Schools’ boundaries but had commuted to other nearby Denver districts. More teachers moving into the area from out-of-state have also joined the district, he says. 

Though the four-day model may not be directly correlated to student achievement rates, Fiedler notes that the district’s overall graduation rates rose dramatically from 77.4% to 90.9% between 2017 and 2022.

‘Rapid growth’ of 4-day school weeks

Districts nationwide are increasingly joining the likes of 27J Schools and hopping onto the four-day school week bandwagon. In fact, a total of about 2,100 schools across 900 districts had adopted shorter weeks as of the 2022-23 school year, says Paul Thompson, an economics professor at Oregon State University who researches the model.

Those numbers are up from 1,600 schools and 650 districts embracing four-day weeks in 2019-20, according to Thompson.

“There’s been rapid growth in this over the past five years,” Thompson says. “It hasn’t really slowed down since COVID. If anything, it kind of has exacerbated the need for four-day school weeks around this issue of teacher stress, teacher burnout, teacher shortages that have come out of the pandemic.”

Thompson cites teacher recruitment and retention as the key motivating factors for the latest wave of districts taking on shorter weeks. “The four-day school week may offer that additional flexibility in areas where maybe they just can’t offer teachers greater monetary compensation.”

While much anecdotal evidence suggests four-day school weeks are a successful staffing strategy for districts, there’s little empirical research measuring the impact, Thompson says. 

The trend isn’t going away, Thompson adds, but pushback is emerging from state legislators seeking to slow down the expansion of four-day school weeks in states including Oklahoma, New Mexico and Missouri.

Will the competitive advantage vanish?

Some concerns have surfaced about a contagion effect in certain localities, Thompson says, meaning that as one district adopts shorter school weeks, other nearby districts may follow suit.  Thompson adds that the benefit of teacher recruitment and retention may disappear as neighboring schools adopt the model. On the flip side, four-day school weeks could still be a useful staffing strategy for the teaching profession as a whole, he says. 

For Missouri, teacher retention remains a concern, says Jon Turner, a professor in the School of Special Education, Leadership and Professional Studies at Missouri State University whose research includes four-day school weeks. 

According to the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, 38% of first-year teachers in the state stayed in the profession after five years, as of the 2021-22 school year. 

Four-day school weeks attract teachers seeking greater work-life balance, but more importantly the model encourages teachers to stay, Turner says. About one-third of districts are using the model in the state, he adds.

“The competitive advantage is going away as we have more and more of them [four-day school weeks], but the part that they’re missing is it’s keeping people away from retiring or leaving the profession of teaching,” Turner says.

Of the 180 Missouri school districts that have adopted four-day weeks, only two school boards have voted to go back to a traditional schedule, according to Turner.

A similar pattern is seen nationwide, with only 10% of schools reverting to five-day school weeks, Thompson says. “There’s very few districts that switch back to the five-day school week, suggesting that there are benefits, or at least perceived benefits, to this school schedule.”

It's a common refrain in the wake of school violence: Why would anyone do something like this? But a substantial and growing body of research continues to find strong correlations between school shooters and bullying.

Most attackers who target K-12 schools were bullied — sometimes persistently, according to a 2019 report by the U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center that analyzed 41 incidents of school violence at K-12 schools between 2008 and 2017.

While that analysis only looked at behavioral histories for 35 of the 41 attackers, 80% of those 35 were bullied by classmates, and 57% faced bullying that lasted for weeks, months or years. 

There’s also a 49% higher chance that adolescents will carry guns if they were bullied on school property within the previous year compared to peers who weren't bullied, according to a 2022 study published in the journal Cureus.

Anecdotal evidence of bullying is emerging from last week’s tragic shooting at Perry High School in Iowa — in which a 6th-grader was killed and four other students and three staff members were wounded. In an interview with The Associated Press, two classmates said the 17-year-old shooter who died on the scene from a self-inflicted gunshot wound was “bullied relentlessly since elementary school.” 

It’s important to note that no specific personality profile or traits can be linked to a person who has committed a violent act like a school shooting, said Stephanie Fredrick, associate director of the Alberti Center for Bullying Abuse Prevention at the University at Buffalo. Most students who are bullied do not respond by committing mass violence, she added. 

“That being said, yes, many students who have engaged in school shootings or other violent behavior — they do have a history of experiencing bullying,” Fredrick said, citing the 2019 Secret Service center's findings. “Certainly, schools should have a strong dedication to bullying prevention, and I do think that would certainly help to prevent some instances of school shootings.”

As school and district leaders consider how to embrace bullying prevention more, K-12 Dive spoke with bullying prevention and child psychology experts who shared three approaches to consider. 

Set explicit expectations

According to data updated in September by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 1 in 5 high school students reported being bullied on school property. More than 1 in 6 high school students reported being bullied online in the last year. Nearly 14% of public schools reported that bullying is a discipline problem occurring daily or at least once a week.

Peter Faustino, a school psychologist in New York who has been practicing for about 25 years, said that the complex issue of bullying has unfortunately been a challenge in schools for a long time. 

But fortunately, he said, awareness and prevention strategies have grown in the past two decades. Faustino, who is also a board member of the New York Association of School Psychologists, advises educators to be observant and responsive. 

For example, if a teacher sees unkind behavior, it's not enough to discourage those actions or words. Instead, he recommends that they talk to the students involved and describe what they've seen rather than jump to accusations.

"Just the fact that you take an extra second to intervene or ask a question, I think, sometimes can be sort of an agent of change in this whole bullying cycle," he said.

Teachers should trust their instincts that something may be amiss with students and continue to share their concerns with administrators until the issue is addressed, he said.

Another important approach schools should take is to be explicit about what is and isn't acceptable behavior. Those points can be included in a school's code of conduct or handbook — but they also need to be reviewed periodically with students, Faustino said.

"Sometimes, just really outlining what the expectations are can be incredibly powerful," he said.

Implement bystander education

Faustino also said it's important for school communities to note that bullying isn't only about two students — the person who bullies and the target of bullying — but encompasses a broader circle that includes supporters and defenders of those involved, bystanders and others.

"Everybody in school, at some level, plays a role. And everybody at some level could potentially intervene to kind of mitigate some of the challenges between bullying and victimization," he said. 

A schoolwide bullying prevention program should also include a bystander component, Fredrick said. This includes teaching students what to do if they’re involved in or witness a bullying situation. 

“There’s just so much that adults don’t know about what’s happening in the school. Students are often not telling adults what’s happening, but peers know,” Fredrick said. “That bystander component is key to preventing bullying, including bullying that might lead to these more violent instances including school shootings.”

But Fredrick also recognizes that bullying prevention can be difficult to implement as schools are often under-resourced and “putting out fires all day long.” Even so, prevention is a crucial part of addressing bullying in schools, she said, and schools should try to consistently implement a program over time instead of using a one-off occasion such as a schoolwide assembly without any follow-up. 

Other crucial components in bullying prevention programs include teaching social-emotional learning skills, empathy, problem-solving skills and internet safety, Fredrick said. There should also be anonymous reporting mechanisms for students to flag problematic behavior, she added.

Endorse inclusive practices 

Like Faustino, Jessica Dirsmith, a school psychologist for Arin Intermediate Unit 28, which serves 11 districts and two technical schools in Pennsylvania, advises schools to take time to explicitly teach about their core values and expected behaviors. 

Schools need to be proactive about endorsing inclusive practices and normalizing differences, said Dirsmith, who will be the 2024-25 president-elect of the Association of School Psychologists of Pennsylvania.

Educators should be aware that students who are perceived to be different from other children, such as having a physical difference, could make them more susceptible to bullying, she said. Additional mental well-being screeners and supports may be needed for those students. 

Dirsmith also advocates for schools to use person-first language. For example, she recommends using "individual engaging in bullying behavior" rather than "bully" and "individual victimized by bullying behavior" rather than "victim." The purpose of this is to focus on the behavior and not a lifelong personal characteristic.

"With the right supports, a lot of people, most people, can act differently or can change," Dirsmith said.