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      Trump unlawfully cancelled $2.2bn in Harvard research grants, judge rules

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      A federal judge on Wednesday ruled Donald Trump’s administration unlawfully terminated about $2.2bn in grants awarded to Harvard University and can no longer cut off research funding to the Ivy League school.The decision by US district judge Allison Burroughs in Boston marked a major legal victory for Harvard as it seeks to cut a deal that could bring an end to the White House’s multi-front conflict with the country’s oldest and richest university.The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based school became a central focus of the administration’s broad campaign to leverage federal funding to force change at US universities, which Trump says are gripped by antisemitic and “radical left” ideologies.Three other Ivy League schools stuck deals with the administration, including Columbia University, which in July agreed to pay $220m to restore federal research money that had been nixed because of allegations the university allowed antisemitism to fester on campus.As with Columbia, the Trump administration took actions against Harvard related to the pro-Palestinian protest movement that roiled its campus and other universities after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s war in Gaza.Trump during a 26 August cabinet meeting demanded Harvard pay “nothing less than $500 million” as part of a settlement. “They’ve been very bad,” he told education secretary, Linda McMahon. “Don’t negotiate.“Among the earliest actions the administration took against Harvard was the cancellation of hundreds of grants awarded to researchers on the grounds that the school failed to do enough to address harassment of Jewish students on its campus.The Trump administration has since sought to bar international students from attending the school; threatened Harvard’s accreditation status; and opened the door to cutting off more funds by finding it violated federal civil rights law.Harvard has said it has taken steps to ensure its campus is welcoming to Jewish and Israeli students, who it acknowledges experienced “vicious and reprehensible” treatment following the onset of Israel’s war in Gaza.But Harvard president Alan Garber has said the administration’s demands went far beyond addressing antisemitism and unlawfully sought to regulate the “intellectual conditions” on its campus by controlling who it hires and who it teaches.Those demands, which came in an 11 April letter from an administration task force, included calls for the private university to restructure its governance, alter its hiring and admissions practices to ensure an ideological balance of viewpoints and end certain academic programs.After Harvard rejected those demands, it said the administration began retaliating against it in violation of the free speech protections of the US constitution’s first amendment by abruptly cutting funding the school says is vital to supporting scientific and medical research.Burroughs, an appointee of Democratic president Barack Obama, in a separate case has already barred the administration from halting its ability to host international students, who comprise about a quarter of Harvard’s student body. More

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      California bill requires families to be alerted of immigration agents on school campuses

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      California lawmakers have passed a bill requiring schools to alert families and teachers when immigration enforcement authorities are on campuses as the Trump administration continues its aggressive mass deportation campaign.Under the bill, K-12 schools, state universities and community colleges must notify students, faculty and staff, “similar to early warning systems in place for other campus emergencies”, according to a statement from state senator Sasha Renée Pérez, who authored the legislation.It now heads to Gavin Newsom, who has until 12 October to sign it into law. The legislation would take effect immediately if signed and remain in effect until 2031.“With students returning to school, this legislation is more important than ever,” Pérez, the chair of the senate education committee, said in a statement.“In the face of mass deportations, raids and immigration enforcement authorities showing up at schools, the Safe Act can help inform and empower school communities to make the best decisions about their safety and their family’s safety,” she said.The bill comes as the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has thrown communities into turmoil, and immigration agents have arrested people outside schools and in shopping centers. State lawmakers passed a slate of proposals in response to the crackdown on Tuesday, and advanced bills banning immigration authorities from entering nonpublic areas of school or hospital grounds without a warrant.“Students cannot learn unless they feel safe,” Democratic assemblymember Al Muratsuchi said. “For decades we had a bipartisan agreement to keep educational institutions, schools, campuses, free from immigration enforcement activities.”The legislation was backed by Tony Thurmond, the state superintendent of public instruction, who oversees California’s public school system.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Our immigrant families are living in fear and our time to act is limited. The school year has begun, and now is the time to make decisive efforts to protect our communities and maintain schools as a safe place for learning,” Thurmond said.Other Democratic-led states introduced legislation this year aimed at protecting immigrants in their homes, at work and during police encounters amid Trump’s mass deportation plans.As the school year began at Los Angeles unified last month, officials urged immigration authorities not to conduct enforcement activity near campuses during the school day. The school district, which is the country’s second-largest, includes approximately 30,000 immigrant students, an estimated quarter of whom are without legal status, according to the teachers’ union.In August, federal immigration agents detained a 15-year-old boy at gunpoint outside a Los Angeles high school, a case that has drawn widespread outrage in the city. More

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      The battle over US history reveals our education system’s key flaw | Katherine Kelaidis

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      No part of the Trump 2.0 agenda has been more revealing to the ideological intentions of the administration than the sustained efforts that insist upon a “pro-American” version of history. It is an effort that has taken many forms, including a recent letter sent by the White House to the Smithsonian announcing that there will be a review of the national museums’ semiquincentennial plans to “insure alignment with the president’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions”. It is only the latest move in a broader campaign to commandeer the nation’s historical memory, a campaign mirrored in statehouses and school boards across the country, where history curricula have become a central front in the culture wars.Unfortunately, the battle over the past – how we should understand it and, more importantly, how we should teach it – is a conflict for which most Americans today are woefully unprepared. That is because for more than two generations, the US educational system has systematically devalued the liberal arts in favor of vocationally oriented Stem education. By doing so, we have failed to accomplish the primary goal of education in a democracy: creating citizens capable of the difficult work of self-government. Of course vocational training and Stem education are vital to individual livelihoods and national prosperity. But when they become the sole focus of education, at the expense of the liberal arts, they leave citizens unprepared for the demands of democratic life.The liberal arts derive their name from the Latin ars liberalis, which literally means “the trade skills of a free person”. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, and more importantly their Enlightenment admirers, citizenship was a trade, a vocation that required particular skills, just like any craft. Among the skills a citizen needed were critical thinking, a command of rhetoric and historical literacy. Importantly, historical literacy does not just mean memorizing dates and facts, but the ability to evaluate arguments, weigh interpretations against evidence, and connect past to present.The decline of the humanities has also contributed to the collapse of empathy in American society. Literature and history, in particular, cultivate the ability to see the world through another’s eyes. Of course, empathy can be learned in other ways, but the humanities are uniquely powerful in diverse societies, where civic life depends on the capacity to empathize with those who are profoundly different from ourselves.This is why the Trump administration and its allies have zeroed in on history education. They know what the enemies of free and compassionate societies have always known: people who understand what lies in the pages of history are far harder to oppress and far harder to coax into cruelty.In the place of teaching history, they wish to place propaganda aimed at assuring that the critical thinking, compassion and perspective cultivated by real historical education are denied to America’s students. It is a kind of education American students have been denied for too long, which is why the American public is so vulnerable to this administration’s escalation.Public education in the United States was not initially created to give students “job skills”, as so many on both sides of the political aisle today would have you believe. Teaching the skills necessary for a particular occupation, undeniably essential to economic health, was long viewed as the responsibility of private business and industry, which directly benefited from a trained workforce. Publicly funded schools existed to assure that students would have the skills needed to participate as responsible citizens of the republic. For this reason, the liberal arts, including history, were at the heart of the curriculum.This began to change in the late 1950s, as cold war paranoia fueled a shift in educational priorities towards science, mathematics, technology and engineering aimed at preventing the US from falling behind the Soviet Union in these areas. These subjects, eventually branded Stem, would gain additional traction over the course of the next 60 years as changing economic winds seemed to suggest that career prospects in the rapidly expanding “technology” sector were the best assurance of a stable, if not prosperous, future. The fact that future employment prospects were even a consideration was evidence of another, less often articulated, change that was occurring.Our understanding of education was being shifted to a view in which every part of the curriculum must have an immediate economic utility. It was, whether anyone realized it at the time or not, a dangerous and unconsidered change to the fundamental goals of education that assumed the assurance of economic prosperity required more public attention – and public funding – than the safeguarding of political liberty.It was a gamble that has cost us dearly. The reason that so many of us have become increasingly susceptible to foreign propaganda, “fake news” and just plain bad arguments can be easily explained by the fact that much American curriculum simply fails to teach students how to think critically and deprives them of the important historical and geographic information that would allow them to spot when they are being deceived.One of the great ironies of our era is that the economic benefits of Stem-focused education have proven to be an illusion. It is now clear that within a generation, many non-research based Stem jobs (and plenty of the research-based ones) are likely to simply vanish in the face of AI. And a public without a liberal arts education may simply lack the imagination to work their way out of this radical reordering of the economy. We will have traded our freedom for prosperity and ended up with neither.But it is not too late. Maga’s assault on history can be the line in the sand – the moment we recognize what we have nearly lost. The surest way to defeat the dark forces now gathering in our politics is to make education once again serve its true purpose: preparing citizens for freedom. The liberal arts have always been at the heart of that mission. If we want to remain a free people, we must restore them to their rightful place at the center of American education.

      Katherine Kelaidis is a research associate at the Institute of Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge, England More

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      Trump administration to restore $6.8bn in education funds after multi-state suit

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      After a multi-state lawsuit over Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to freeze more than $6.8bn in education funding to US schools, the Trump administration has agreed to restore the funds for a range of educational services, including after school and summer learning, teacher training, and support for English-learners.The administration did not give a clear explanation as to why it had withheld the congressionally-allocated funds, though a spokesperson for the White House Office of Management and Budget had indicated that review found instances of federal education money being “grossly misused to subsidize a radical left-wing agenda”.Following a lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of California and 22 other states, as well as the governors of two states, the administration released some funding. On Monday, California attorney general Rob Bonta announced that the states secured an agreement to have the funding fully restored.“The Trump administration upended school programs across the country when it recklessly withheld vital education funding just weeks before the school year was set to begin,” Bonta said. “Fortunately, after we filed our lawsuit, the Trump Administration backed down and released the funding it had previously withheld … Our kids deserve so much better than what this anti-education administration has to offer, and we will continue to fight to protect them from this president’s relentless attacks.”In their lawsuit, states accused the administration of holding back money illegally, as the US constitution gives congress the rights to appropriate funding, and the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 bars the president from unilaterally withholding funds designated by congress.The delayed funds, which were frozen just weeks before the start of the school year this year, had left many communities and school districts uncertain if they would be able to sustain programs. The withheld funds affected after-school and other programs attended by about 1.4 million children nationwide, according to the nonprofit group Afterschool Alliance. Most of the programs benefit low-income families.The funds also covered programs to retain teachers, especially in low-income school districts.Since taking office, Donald Trump has pushed to reshape public education in the US to fit more closely with his rightwing political and social beliefs.He had repeatedly threatened to withhold federal funds from states over policies allowing transgender athletes to compete in sports. It has also separately threatened or cancelled for sex ed over mentions of transgender people from educational materials.The administration has also pushed states to disqualify immigrant students from discounted in-state tuition reserved for state residents. More

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      When immigration shows up at daycare: crackdown in DC terrifies families and workers

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      Early on Tuesday morning, as parents went to drop off their young children at a bilingual childcare center in north-west Washington DC, they received a message from the administrator saying that unmarked cars were parked directly outside.Shortly after 8am, federal agents in tactical vests arrested two people unaffiliated with the center, the administrator said.“While these activities are not connected to our program, we are closely monitoring the situation and taking extra precautions to ensure everyone feels safe entering and leaving the building,” read the message to parents, reviewed by the Guardian.Foram Mehta, whose son attends the daycare, said she had feared immigration raids there for months, but her fears escalated when Donald Trump sent national guard troops and federal agents to Washington two weeks ago. She said she was concerned about her own safety as a brown person, even though she’s an immigrant in the country lawfully, and also worries for her undocumented neighbors.She, and other Washington residents, including undocumented parents and caregivers, said they were avoiding parts of the city where federal agents have been reported, and she said her parents who are visiting were “strictly forbidden to go anywhere alone – even down the street to the grocery store”.In a city already upended by the second Trump administration’s mass firings of government workers, Trump’s decision to take over the city’s police force, send thousands of federal agents to Washington, and ramp up immigration enforcement has left many residents on edge and grappling with how to go about their lives in a city that no longer feels safe. The return to school for most public schools on Monday has cast that in sharp relief.The White House said on Friday that 719 people had been arrested since the start of the federal crackdown, with many hundreds of them immigrants in the country without legal documents. On the ground, that has looked like federal agents patrolling the streets for undocumented immigrants, setting up checkpoints at busy intersections, stopping delivery drivers and pedestrians, and detaining immigrants at their places of work.The crackdown has especially been affecting parents and caregivers as the new school year begins. Parents told the Guardian they were scared to send their children to school. Nannies are calling out or asking to be escorted to and from work. Daycares are having to implement new safety precautions.Once off limits for immigration enforcement and arrests, schools and daycares feel as if they are no longer safe for employees and for children, many Washingtonians said.Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment. Last week, Ice’s acting director, Todd Lyons, told NBC that Washington parents should not expect to see Ice officers at schools on the first day Monday, but that they may come to school campuses in the future.“It’s gotten to the point where people are scared to be out and about,” said Amie Santos, a Washington resident who lives near the daycare. “Nothing about this is making DC safer.”For many Washingtonians, the potential targeting of people and institutions that care for small children has been especially alarming. Multiple people told the Guardian they were struggling with childcare, as so many who work as nannies or in childcare centers are immigrants.Claire, a mom who asked not to use her real name due to fears about her undocumented nanny, said her caretaker called out of work last week with short notice, saying she was concerned about reports of increased police and arrests.View image in fullscreen“She said there’s a very heavy police presence and she’s hearing all of these stories from other nannies and from friends and acquaintances that there are all of these checkpoints,” Claire said. “She said she and her husband are both staying home and not coming into work, either of them.”Claire gave her the week off and is working to figure out options to make her more comfortable to return to work this week, including offering to pick her up from her home.The nanny, who has been in the country for almost three decades, has a teenage child, and “she is so concerned about deportation – that something could happen to her and her husband – that she has asked if we would take care of her child if that were to happen”, Claire said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOther parents said they were driving their children to the neighboring state of Maryland to meet their nannies who live there, or that their nannies have been staying inside rather than venturing outside, or driving throughout the city rather than walking.In a neighborhood parents group, a mom on Tuesday shared a document template for parents to fill out and give to their nannies as they escort their children around the city.“In the event that [NANNY’S NAME] is detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) or any other law enforcement authority, this letter affirms that [CHILD’S NAME] is my child and should be immediately returned to me, [HER/HIS MOTHER/FATHER/PARENT] and legal guardian,” the template reads. “Under no circumstance should [CHILD’S NAME] be taken into government custody or placed in foster care.”With the new school year beginning in the middle of Trump’s federal takeover, parents are also concerned about what might be happening at schools.Sebastien Durand, the director of facilities at a public charter school in north-west DC whose role involves student safety, said the school had engaged with families this week before the school year begins.“It was made clear to us that they are all extremely scared,” he said. “Quite a bit of them were actually asking if we can go back to a pandemic era-type of school where they didn’t have to come to school and we had to provide something remote.”He said he explained to them that legally they can’t do that, but the school decided to use its own funds to run buses from the closest Metro station to the campus for at least the next two weeks. The school is concerned about attendance, he said, especially with rates still lower than desired since the pandemic.For children that have already started the school year, the first week has been fraught. Santos’s five-year-old son started kindergarten on Monday at school in north-west DC. On the second day of school, there were unmarked police cars with agents who appeared to be in tactical gear parked in front of the school, she said. That evening, parents were told the school was enhancing security measures and all students, parents and caretakers would be required to wear colored lanyards with photo identification to enter school grounds. The school will also be running a bus for students and caretakers from the Metro to the parking lot.“As you can imagine, it’s been hard,” Santos said. “We had to talk to our son about what was going on, why there was increased security, the importance of kindness, that not everybody feels safe and welcome.“With kids going back to school, there are intimidation factors at play,” she added, “and it’s creating an aggressive environment that I don’t think is conducive to learning or to children.” More

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      Burner phones, wiped socials: the extreme precautions for visitors to Trump’s America

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      Keith Serry was set to bring a show to New York City’s Fringe festival this year, but pulled the plug a few weeks out. After 35 years of traveling to the United States, he says he no longer feels safe making the trip.“The fact that we’re being evaluated for our opinions entering a country that, at least until very recently, purported to be an example of democracy. Yeah, these are things that make me highly uncomfortable,” said Serry, a Canadian performer and attorney.“You’re left thinking that you don’t want to leave evidence of ‘bad opinions’ on your person.”Serry is among a substantial cohort of foreign nationals reconsidering travel to the US under the Trump administration, after troubling reports of visitors facing intense scrutiny and detention on arrival.In March, a French scientist who had been critical of Donald Trump was refused entry to the US after his phone was searched. An Australian writer who was detained and denied entry in June said he was initially grilled about his articles on pro-Palestinian protests, and then watched as a border agent probed even the most personal images on his phone. He was told the search uncovered evidence of past drug use, which he had not acknowledged on his visa waiver application, leading to his rejection. German, British and other European tourists have also been detained and sent home.More than a dozen countries have updated their travel guidance to the US. In Australia and Canada, government advisories were changed to specifically mention the potential for electronic device searches.On the advice of various experts, people are locking down social media, deleting photos and private messages, removing facial recognition, or even traveling with “burner” phones to protect themselves.In Canada, multiple public institutions have urged employees to avoid travel to the US, and at least one reportedly told staff to leave their usual devices at home and bring a second device with limited personal information instead.“Everybody feels guilty, but they don’t know exactly what they’re guilty of,” said Heather Segal, founding partner of Segal Immigration Law in Toronto, describing the influx of concerns she’s been hearing.“‘Did I do something wrong? Is there something on me? Did I say something that’s going to be a problem?’”She advised travelers to assess their risk appetite by reviewing both the private data stored on their devices and any information about them that’s publicly accessible, and to consider what measures to take accordingly.US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has broad powers to search devices with minimal justification. Travelers can refuse to comply, but non-citizens risk being denied entry. CBP data shows such searches are rare; last year, just over 47,000 out of 420 million international travelers had their devices examined. This year’s figures show a significant increase, with the third quarter of 2025 reflecting an uptick in electronic device searches higher than any single quarter since 2018, when available data begins.“Anecdotally, it seems like these searches have been increasing, and I think the reason why that’s true is, undoubtedly, I think they are more targeted than before,” said Tom McBrien, counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.“It seems like they are targeting people who they just don’t generally like politically.”Travelers who are concerned about their privacy should consider minimizing the amount of data they carry, McBrien said.“The less data you have on you, the less there is to search, and the less there is to collect,” he said. Beyond using a secondary device, he suggested securely deleting data, moving it to a hard drive or storing it in a password-protected cloud account.A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson rejected claims that CBP had stepped up device searches under the new administration or singled out travelers over their political views.“These searches are conducted to detect digital contraband, terrorism-related content, and information relevant to visitor admissibility, all of which play a critical role in national security,” the spokesperson told the Guardian in a statement.“Allegations that political beliefs trigger inspections or removals are baseless and irresponsible.”The statement acknowledged, however, that there had been heightened vetting under Trump and the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Under the leadership of the Trump Administration and Secretary Noem, we have the most secure border in American history,” it said. “This has allowed CBP to focus to actually vet and interview the people attempting to come into our country.”Alistair Kitchen, the Australian writer who was denied entry to the US in June, said the DHS’s denial of political targeting directly contradicts what he was told on arrival.Border officials “bragged actively that the reason for my targeting, for my being pulled out of line for my detainment, was explicitly because of what I’d written online about the protests at Columbia University”, he told the Guardian.While he doesn’t plan to return to the US under the Trump administration, Kitchen said that if he ever did, he would either not take a phone or bring a burner.“Under no conditions would I ever hand over the passcode to that phone,” he added. “I would accept immediate deportation rather than hand over the passcode. People should think seriously before booking travel, especially if they are journalists or writers or activists.”Various foreign nationals told the Guardian they are rethinking travel plans for tourism, family visits, academic events and work.Donald Rothwell, a professor who teaches international law at the Australian National University, says he no longer plans to accept speaking invitations to the US over fears of being detained or denied entry – which, he noted, could also trigger red flags on his record for future travel.He’s even considered traveling without a device at all, but is concerned his academic commentary in the media could be used against him regardless.“I might be commenting on matters that could be quite critical of the United States,” he said. “For example, I was very critical of the legal or lack of legal justification for the US military strikes on Iran in June.”Kate, a Canadian whose name has been withheld due to privacy concerns, said she has wrestled with complicated decisions about whether to travel across the border to see American relatives, including for an upcoming wedding. During a trip earlier this year, she deleted her social media apps before going through customs.Despite DHS assurances that travelers are not flagged for political beliefs, she said “it’s hard to believe things that this government is saying”.“It would be really nice to have trust that those kinds of things were true, and that these kinds of stories that you hear, while absolutely horrific, are isolated incidents,” she said.“But I do feel like in many ways, the United States has sort of lost its goodwill.” More

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      ‘We’re all going backwards’: dismay as Trump undoes Biden student-debt plan

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      When Faith, a 33-year-old in Burlington, North Carolina, went back to get her master’s degree in higher education administration in 2020-21, she hoped it would accelerate her career growth and maybe even help her get on the housing ladder.Now, Faith has federal student loan debts of $38,113, and a repayment schedule that is much more demanding than she realized so she feels like the program stalled her progress.“I wasn’t aware of the detriment it would have on my future,” she said. “You really don’t know the full scope of what you’re getting into [when taking out student loan debt] … I got my master’s specifically to progress in my career, but what I make now versus what I owe on the degree, it’s almost like it doesn’t make sense.”She added: “I always regret that decision.”Faith’s situation has been made worse by the Trump administration’s move to resume charging loan interest for borrowers under the Saving on a Valuable Education (Save) plan as of 1 August. Under the Biden administration, about 8 million people enrolled in the Save plan – a 2023 income-driven repayment plan for student debt – many of whose loans have been in forbearance since last year.Under Donald Trump, the Department of Education has effectively killed the Save plan, recommending people switch to another repayment plan for their federal student loans. Borrowers can still choose to forgo payments, but will see interest accruing on their loans and won’t make any progress toward student loan forgiveness.“To me that just looks like you’re digging me deeper into debt, so I felt like I had no other choice but to go ahead and change from the Save plan and start making those payments,” Faith said.Faith is one of scores of people who got in touch with the Guardian to share how they will be affected by changes to the Save plan. Her new repayment plan means she must find an extra $300 a month, on top of her rent of $1,200 (before bills and living costs), a financial challenge that feels “very overwhelming” and has put everything else on hold.“Luckily I don’t have any dependents … but all the people in their 30s around me, it feels like we’re all going backwards,” Faith said. “I’m scared for what the future looks like, especially as we get older. Does that mean, unlike our grandparents whose homes were paid off and who were free of debt, that we’re just going to be in debt?”Public school teacher Jennifer, a 34-year-old based in Portland, Oregon, with $63,419 in federal student loan debt, is also leaving the Save plan, but said her monthly payments almost doubled in her new repayment scheme from about $250 to $480.“I don’t understand why it’s so high,” she said – but she has to leave the Save plan in order to make progress towards loan forgiveness for public school teachers.Jennifer wants to have children in the next couple of years, but said she was “scared for my family plans” under such difficult financial pressures. Alongside teaching in public school, she babysits and runs a weekly bar trivia night in order to earn extra cash to make a living.“The [Trump] administration claims to be pro-family, but is screwing a lot of people over – including ones with families, including ones who want to build a family,” she said.After changes to the Save plan were announced, Jennifer was forced to ask her parents for financial support to help pay off her car loan, which felt difficult as a 34-year-old woman, the age her mother already had two children.“I’m really lucky to be in the position” to ask for help, she said, but added that “there’s so many Americans who don’t have access to generational wealth in that way, and so many teachers who don’t – and we wonder why the teaching field is so white, so unrepresentative. It’s so expensive to be a teacher.”Sedona, a 30-year-old lawyer in Seattle, Washington, who has federal student loans worth $170,848, will be staying in the Save plan, despite the loan interest resuming. She is “much more afraid of defaulting on private debt”, which is currently $22,413 in loans co-signed with her mother, she said.Despite Sedona earning a good wage as an associate lawyer, she and her partner still “live paycheck to paycheck” and already keep a hawkish eye on their finances. As a household they have cancelled most of their subscriptions, very rarely go on trips like to the movies or for nights out, and Sedona picks up sporadic gig work such as copy editing to supplement their income.“In my therapy sessions, we talk a lot about how so much of my anxiety and issues are tied to financial concerns,” she said. “It’s kind of like always sitting there, as this heavy weight.”Sedona feels that the Trump administration’s decision to in effect kill the Save plan aggressively punishes those already in often severe levels of debt, while it simultaneously gives lavish tax giveaways to wealthy individuals and corporations.One day Sedona and her partner would like to adopt or foster children but they currently cannot see a future in which it would be financially responsible to do so. “It feels like, when do I get to start living my life?” she said. “We’re a generation of people who feel jilted.”In Aurora, Colorado, 46-year-old Chris is also remaining in the Save plan. He said he had about $50,000 in outstanding student loan debts – down from $65,000 – that he accrued while studying a bachelor’s degree in hospitality management. He’s keeping his federal student loans in forbearance and paying the interest for as long he can, in order to prioritize paying other debts.“It’s not that I don’t intend to pay my students debts, I understood it was a loan like any other to be repaid,” he said, but the “repayment costs need to be able to fit in a budget that allows for personal and professional growth”.It feels to Chris as if the Trump administration wants to “keep those with [student] debt in it for as long as possible”.“My hope is that midterm elections will bring about government leaders that will undo this mess, that is where my vote will go,” he said. More

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      Ohio requires buses for private school kids. Public school students have to find their own ride

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      For about 2,000 students attending high school in Dayton, Ohio, there won’t be a bus in sight when they walk out the door for the beginning of the school year this week.Ruben Castillo, an 11th grade student at Meadowdale Career Technology Center, is one of them.Ohio law means that public school districts such as Dayton’s are responsible for transporting students who attend private and charter schools. When they fail to do so, they risk fines of millions of dollars.A shortage of drivers and buses combined with the threat of fines, means that public school districts in Dayton and around Ohio find themselves relegating their own students to the back of the transportation line.“I’m going to have to use Uber, and it’s going to cost me $25-$30 a day to get to and from school,” says Castillo. “In wintertime, when demand is higher, it’s probably going to be more.” At 180 school days over the course of a year, that’s thousands of dollars he is set to fork out from his own pocket.For the past several years, school administrators in Dayton, Cincinnati and elsewhere have been trying to get around the problem by issuing students with bus passes for public transportation.But children riding public buses have reported being subjected to a variety of dangers. Public transportation administrators have also reported difficulties trying to serve the public and thousands of students all at once.The situation came to a tragic head on the morning of 4 April when 18-year-old Alfred Hale III was shot dead at the public bus hub in downtown Dayton while en route to class at Dunbar high school. Shortly after Hale’s killing, Ohio lawmakers introduced a law making it illegal for Dayton public schools (DPS) to buy public bus vouchers for students.The burden of getting children to school now falls on students’ parents, grandparents, local churches and charities, say officials. Families who choose to continue to have their students use public buses to get to and from school will have to fork out at least $540 per high school student a year.“There seems to be an aggressive approach to the most vulnerable families and people in America,” says DPS’s superintendent, David Lawrence.“Not only is it unfair, it’s onerous that public schools have to provide transportation to non-public school students.”What’s happening in Ohio is a result of a wider effort by conservative politicians to push for more children to attend charter and private schools, many of which are run by religious organizations.Republican politicians hold a supermajority across Ohio’s legislature and have built up a $1bn fund in the form of vouchers for families who want to send their students to private and charter schools.Ohio is not alone.Republican-dominated state legislatures have been pushing for or have already enacted laws that see billions of dollars of taxpayer money directed to funding private school voucher systems in Texas, Florida, Iowa, Tennessee and elsewhere.In Pennsylvania and Minnesota, where political control is largely split between Democrats and Republicans, public schools are required to provide transportation for students attending non-public schools. In January, Donald Trump signed an executive order steering taxpayer funds from public schools to private schools.Many in Democratic-leaning cities say they are being targeted.In Cincinnati, children as young as 13 are being forced to use public transportation to get to and from school due to funding shortages that this year will see more than 100 yellow bus routes cut.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn Columbus, where more than half of all students are African American, the public school system is required to bus students of 162 private and charter schools.About 1.8 million, or 80%, of all school-going students in Ohio attend public schools and nearly two-thirds of students attending Dayton public schools are African American. In July, the state passed a budget that saw the smallest increase in spending on K-12 public education in more than a decade.“It’s simple – if we did not have to bus non-public school students on our transportation, we could transport every single one of our K-12 students on yellow buses,” says Jocelyn Rhynard, a member of the Dayton public school board. DPS transports between 4,000 and 5,000 charter and private school students every school day.“It’s a direct result of the legislation from the extremist Republicans at the Ohio statehouse mandating that we must transport non-public students as well as public students in our district.”But Republican politicians disagree.“We had an 18-year-old get shot and killed. The environment for the students is not good down there. The NAACP interviewed the children, they don’t want to ride the public transportation buses, they want to ride the yellow school buses,” says Phil Plummer, a Republican party state representative who spearheaded the budget amendment banning DPS from giving its students public bus vouchers.Plummer says he and others “found 25 school buses” that DPS could purchase. “They decided not to transport their kids,” he says.DPS administrators, who pay drivers the highest rates in the region, say about 70 buses would be required to meet the need, a number that could take up to two years to procure. Lawrence says the process of buying buses and training drivers is not simple.“It’s an 18-month cycle. [Buses] are $150,000 to $190,000 each to buy, and ones with backup cameras and air conditioning are [even] more expensive. Then drivers have to take at least 10 tests before they become fully qualified,” he says.With the law coming into effect just months before the new school year, parents, students and public school managers have been left in a difficult situation.“I’m a single dad raising two kids on my own. We all have to be at school at the same time. That’s a big dilemma,” says William Johnson, an educator at DPS whose daughter is no longer able to get to school using a bus provided by or paid for the district.“I’m lucky that my 80-year-old father is going to help out taking them to school. But I ask the state [politicians] – please come up with a solution. We’re going to lose a whole generation of kids if this continues.” More