Latest news with #andOpportunity
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
LGBTQ+ advocates speak about community challenges at CT Capitol
HARTFORD, Conn. (WTNH) — LGBTQ+ advocates took to the Capitol on Wednesday to speak about the challenges the community faces. Organizers hosted a panel discussion which addressed topics like mental health, support systems and community-based healing systems. Connecticut officials underscore challenges for LGBTQ+ community during Pride Month 'We talk about behavior, we talk about what's happening with our young people, are there enough mental health supports for them in school?' said Melvette Hill, executive director Commission on Women, Children, Seniors, Equity, and Opportunity. 'We want to put them on a behavioral health track, we want to throw them in a closet literally, but when they tell us who they are, what they want, when they tell us what they need, what is our response to them?' Pride month runs for the entire month of June. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Chicago Tribune
24-04-2025
- Business
- Chicago Tribune
Indiana updated budget proposal includes $2 increase to cigarette tax
Republican leaders in the Senate and House and Gov. Mike Braun reached a decision on a final budget, which includes raising the cigarette tax by $2 a pack to help address a $2.4 billion deficit. Last week, legislators received a forecast that projected a $2 billion shortfall for the next budget cycle and an additional $400 million less available in the current budget cycle. After the forecast, budget architects Sen. Ryan Mishler, R-Mishawaka, and Rep. Jeff Thompson said 'everything is on the table' when it comes to budget cuts. Thompson, R-Lizton, said increasing 'sin taxes' — cigarette, alcohol and gaming — could be considered. In the updated budget report released Wednesday evening, it increases the cigarette tax by $2 per pack, which will bump up the overall cigarette tax to just under $3 per pack. The budget also increases the tax on closed system cartridges or pre-filled e-cigarettes, open system or refillable electronic cigarettes, moist snuff, alternative tobacco products and cigars. In regards to the cigar tax, the tax can't exceed $3 per cigar. Senate Democrats, who proposed amendments to the state budget to increase the cigarette tax by $2 a pack, said the increase would generate nearly $800 million in additional revenue. Approximately 61% of the tax revenues will go into the state general funds and approximately 39% will go toward Medicaid obligations. The updated budget included cuts to public health programs, higher education and economic development while total reserves decreased by three percentage points to 10%, according to the Indiana Capital Chronicle. Legislators don't get a pay increase, under the updated budget, and it requires a caseload study for the Indiana Department of Child Services as opposed to ending caps. The updated budget also reduced the 'Freedom and Opportunity' budget item that funds dropout prevention and other K-12 programming and the eligibility for On My Way Pre-K and subsidized child care, according to the Indiana Capital Chronicle. In Northwest Indiana, the updated budget terminates the compact of the Chicago-Gary Regional Airport Authority. 'Government is doing exactly what Hoosier families have to do. We're living within our means and tightening our belts. This budget reduces government spending while funding our most critical priorities and providing continued income tax relief for Hoosiers,' said House Speaker Todd Huston, R-Fishers, in a statement. The Indiana Senate Democrats released a statement after the updated budget was released stating that the state's $2.4 billion shortfall 'is the direct result of economic fallout tied to Washington's tariffs and trade instability that began in January.' The updated budget maintains the 2% increase in public school funding while expanding to universal vouchers in the second year of the budget, according to the statement, while public health is funded at $40 million while Braun promised $100 million for public health under the 'Make Indiana Healthy Again' plan. 'We all agree — we must balance the budget,' according to the statement. 'But we can't balance it on the backs of school kids, working families and aging parents and grandparents while the politically connected continue to benefit.' Indiana Senate Democrats offered three options for increasing revenue: Generating sustainable revenue, like regulating and taxing marijuana; controlling government spending, like reining in inflated administrative costs like six-figure cabinet salaries; and enacting no-cost reforms, like fully restoring public health funding and establishing a summer commission on tariff impacts. 'This is a defining moment for Indiana,' the caucus said. 'We can play politics with talking points – or we can face the truth and build a budget that actually works for the Hoosiers who sent us here.' The legislature is expected to vote on the budget Thursday. As of press time, the legislature had not discussed the budget.
Yahoo
13-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
What People Working in Education Are Watching For in the Linda McMahon Hearing
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. What with all the Trump administration's activity at the end of January, you might not have noticed that it also launched its promised assault on U.S. public education with a pair of executive orders. 'Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunity for Families' focuses on school choice, while 'Ending Radical Indoctrination in K–12 Schooling' covers conservatives' culture wars around race and gender. On Thursday, Linda McMahon's confirmation hearing in the Senate begins. Here's what we're looking for as we try to understand how these two orders might be implemented in a future McMahon Department of Education. The orders are jammed with red meat for conservatives: threats to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; attacks on transgender kids; efforts to mandate a national 'patriotic' history curriculum; and a generalized push to defund public schools. 'Ending Radical Indoctrination' opens by warping common educational terms through a conservative looking glass. Many of the ideas in here are familiar from the past few years of school-related culture wars. For instance, programs that focus on redressing persistent biases against kids of color are, in this document, part of 'discriminatory equity ideology.' This probably includes things like Black History Month, which faces an uncertain future in schools, given the stated goals of Trump's administration. It also likely includes civics lessons that are insufficiently 'patriotic' in their retelling of American history. And the order accuses schools who let trans kids use the bathrooms where they feel safest of promoting 'gender ideology.' 'Ending Radical Indoctrination' requires the secretary of education to produce a plan for defunding any school, district, or state advancing these 'ideologies.' Under this order, schools that are trying to become fairer or more welcoming to children of color and/or transgender kids could lose funding. Similarly, 'Expanding Educational Freedom' directs the secretary to come up with ideas for how to repurpose existing federal K–12 funding for 'educational choice initiatives.' Sounds pretty direct, and pretty bad, to the many people nationwide who are invested in the goal of fairer, better public schools. And yet, at the end of both orders, there's a provision that makes things considerably less clear. It reads, 'Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect … the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency.' In plain terms, this is the White House acknowledging—or at least pretending to acknowledge—that the department's existing funding is spoken for. Those dollars are bound by legislative limits. Congress passed laws creating the DOE and its different programs. It appropriated public funds to support those programs for specific, legislatively delineated purposes. No matter how much Donald Trump—or his secretary of education—wants to mandate the history curriculum for public schools in Evanston, Illinois, he can't just repurpose existing federal K–12 funding to do it. No matter how badly Trump and McMahon want to convert $18 billion in federal Title I funds into a school voucher scheme, they legally can't: Those funds are dedicated to supporting public schools serving large numbers of low-income families. The same, by the way, goes for impending efforts to close the department by executive fiat. They may have promised to do it, and they may want very badly to do it, but these deep yearnings don't make it legal to do so without the passage of legislation. Basically, the core tension in Trump's K–12 education proposals is similar to the core tension in his administration's broader approach to governance. The White House wants things, but it doesn't have the power or the authority to actually get them in the ways or at the pace that it'd like. On the one hand, these two executive orders tell the secretary of education to steal funding from various current programs and use it for conservative priorities that are way outside those programs' designated purposes. On the other, the orders explicitly promise not to do anything outside the law. In theory, this leaves the orders almost meaningless; they direct the secretary to find ways to misuse public K–12 funds for right-wing ends. When people talk about guardrails, about the checks and balances of the American government, these legislative limits are precisely what they mean. But in practice, it's hard to know how this will shake out. Members of the Senate's Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee will assuredly be curious, during McMahon's hearing, to get clarification on the tension in these orders. Does McMahon believe that Cabinet secretaries can ignore Congress' instructions for how federal money can be spent? Republican Sen. Susan Collins, of Maine, is a member of the HELP committee, but she's also the chair of the Appropriations Committee, which leads in determining how much money Congress will dedicate to any particular program. Collins has long been interested in education policy—including the needs of children with disabilities. She might be uniquely interested in securing promises from McMahon that the DOE won't try to divert federal special education dollars into some new school voucher scheme invented through these executive orders. Collins would be well within her rights to ask, since all evidence suggests that Trump and McMahon will push right through these guardrails. And then either we'll see Congress force the Department of Education to follow the law in how it spends money (perhaps with support from the judicial system) or we'll see that we no longer have any institutional checks limiting the executive branch's authority. Hilariously, predictably, these orders reflect another sadly familiar case of stunning conservative hypocrisy. In 2009, as part of its recession recovery package, Congress gave Arne Duncan, Obama's secretary of education, $4.35 billion to run a competition—known as Race to the Top—in which states could overhaul policies, like their academic standards or teacher-evaluation systems, to try to win additional federal funding. Conservatives soon framed this as power-mad federal overreach, accusing Duncan of overstepping his bounds and intervening in state and local K–12 education decisionmaking. Republican Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, himself a former secretary of education, leaned into the criticism, saying that Duncan was using the funding to establish a 'national school board.' Congress gave Duncan wide legal latitude to set priorities for how to spend those specific funds, and he used it. But by the time Congress replaced No Child Left Behind with 2015's Every Student Succeeds Act, conservatives built their criticism into the new bill with a host of proscriptions blocking secretaries of education from pressuring states to change academic standards. These added to Congress' long history of placing limits on the federal DOE. Unsurprisingly, in that bill, Congress did not give any education secretary more latitude to mandate the sorts of things that the Trump administration has demanded in these executive orders. The department doesn't have the legal authority to require 'patriotic education' in any school, school district, or state—especially if the secretary invents that mandate through leverage by threatening to withhold unrelated federal education funding. Legally, it can't decide that a school's Hispanic Heritage Month celebrations are too equity-minded and merit funding penalties. It will be interesting to hear if conservatives are as incensed at lawless mandates from McMahon's Department of Education as they were at Duncan's legal priority-setting. Perhaps this seems quaint to point out in our present chaos, as Trump and Elon Musk's DOGE initiative are consistently steamrolling Congress anyway—and as the administration suggests that it may defy court rulings demanding that it stop. Indeed, Musk has already canceled nearly $1 billion in research grants from the DOE's Institute of Education Sciences, with no measurable pushback from Congress. Put simply, if Musk can unilaterally gut the U.S. Agency for International Development, what is to stop him from doing the same to the Department of Education? Sadly, the answer is the same in K–12 policy as it is in every other domain: We don't yet know. Perhaps the Trump administration can just run roughshod over Congress and legal constraints on the president's power. I wish I could say it'll be fun finding out.
Yahoo
30-01-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump signs executive orders stripping federal funding from schools that teach CRT, supporting school choice
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed two executive orders on education, one to remove federal funding from K-12 schools that teach critical race theory (CRT), and another to support school choice. Trump's executive order on CRT, "Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling," reads, "Parents have witnessed schools indoctrinate their children in radical, anti-American ideologies while deliberately blocking parental oversight." It goes on to say that "Such an environment operates as an echo chamber, in which students are forced to accept these ideologies without question or critical examination. In many cases, innocent children are compelled to adopt identities as either victims or oppressors solely based on their skin color and other immutable characteristics." New Guide Helps Parents Protect Kids Against 'Woke' Ideologies In Schools The executive order states that any K-12 school that does not comply with the directive to end discrimination will lose all federal funding, citing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination over race, color, and national origin for any activity or program receiving federal funding. Trump's executive order on school choice, "Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunity for Families," cites the National Assessment of Educational Progress Report Card, highlighting that "70 percent of 8th graders were below proficient in reading, and 72 percent were below proficient in math." Read On The Fox News App "When our public education system fails such a large segment of society, it hinders our national competitiveness and devastates families and communities," the executive order reads. "For this reason, more than a dozen States have enacted universal K-12 scholarship programs, allowing families — rather than the government — to choose the best educational setting for their children." Florida Dei Leader Sees Revenue Cut In Half Due To State Policies 'We're In Trouble' Among other actions, it also directs the Secretary of Education, within 60 days of the order, to "issue guidance regarding how States can use Federal formula funds to support K-12 educational choice initiatives," as well as directs the Secretaries of Labor and Education, within 90 days of the executive order, to propose plans to use grant programs to further educational choice. "President Trump just showed the American people why he won the parent vote by 9 points," Corey DeAngelis, senior fellow at the American Culture Project and executive director of the Educational Freedom Institute, told Fox News Digital. "Parents want to be able to direct the upbringing of their children. Parents need to be in charge of their children's education, not the government." Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.6 million-member American Federation of Teachers, voiced her concern about the educational freedom executive order in a Wednesday press release, saying, "Americans of all political stripes want safe and welcoming public schools where kids are engaged and have the knowledge and skills to thrive in careers, college and life. This plan is a direct attack on all that parents and families hold dear; it's a ham-fisted, recycled and likely illegal scheme to diminish choice and deny classrooms resources to pay for tax cuts for billionaires."Original article source: Trump signs executive orders stripping federal funding from schools that teach CRT, supporting school choice
