Data from , a coalition of nonprofit organizations partnering with schools and districts to scale student success systems, suggest that the “national rebound” in graduation rates is masked by large states like New York and California that waived graduation requirements. But after taking a closer look, the researchers uncovered that 26 states had lower graduation rates in 2022 than in 2019. Furthermore, less than half of the nation’s districts (43%) saw rebounds in their high school graduation rates in 2022.

“The data we’ve collected sheds much-needed light on the pandemic’s deep and varied effects on students across the country,” said Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, which helps lead the GRAD Partnership coalition.

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The researchers also identified several contributors that dragged down graduation rates. For instance, a district that spent more time in remote and hybrid learning during the 2020-21 school year recorded lower graduation rates that same year. However, when states waived high school exit exam requirements, district graduation rates in those states improved.

Students who were in sixth or seventh grade when the pandemic hit appear to have been impacted the most. The full toll of the pandemic on educational attainment may not be fully reflected in currently available secondary school data, according to the report.

Overall, the report reflects a complex picture of the pandemic’s immediate and potential long-term effects on educational attainment. We encourage you to read the report yourself to learn more about which areas your district may need more support to meet this year’s academic goals.

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If, like most educators, you are seeing continued evidence that not all students have fully recovered from the disruptions of COVID and online learning. The first report, from the Center on Reinventing Public Education, finds that students are catching up thanks to tutoring, high-quality curricula, and extended learning time.

The organization, also known as CRPE, cites research showing students have regained about a third of their pandemic-era learning losses in math and a quarter in reading but also contends that high-dosage tutoring and other proven strategies are not reaching enough students. This hobbled academic recovery has the biggest impact on younger and low-income students.

CRPE also warns that schools are facing the “gale-force headwinds” of declining teacher morale, students’ growing mental health needs and post-ESSER financial peril. The report urges educators to deploy programs such as to help ninth graders build strong school relationships. K12 leaders are further encouraged to provide teachers and other staff with dedicated time to connect with parents and families. More flexible schedules and staffing would create ample time for core instruction and”pullout” programs such a tutoring and special education services.

Finally, the report emphasizes “real accountability.” It calls on state leaders to give parents better information about their child’s academic performance beyond traditional report cards and ensure schools can provide teachers with complete student data to identify needed interventions.

Civic empowerment

Another report on the American student experience could encourage K12 leaders to provide high school students with more opportunities to create change in their communities.

A YouthTurth survey of more than 115,000 higher schools found:

• Strong civic dispositions but skills lacking: “Most high school students want to help others and work across differences to improve society. However, fewer than half report learning the necessary civic skills in school, and fewer than a third have been empowered to create positive change in their communities.”
• Inequitable civic preparedness: “Civic readiness is uneven among high school students. Those with parents holding advanced degrees stand out as most civically prepared, while Hispanic/Latinx students are significantly less civically empowered than other racial groups.”
• Only half agree voting matters: “Overall, 53% of high school students believe that voting is important. School size and location do not significantly affect students’ belief in the importance of voting. However, significant differences in this belief exist based on student demographics.”
• Civic engagement thrives in extracurriculars: “Students describe academic work as disconnected from public life and a barrier to civic engagement, but they find participation in clubs, activities, and sports teams civically empowering.”

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While the type of intensive or ���high-dosage��� tutoring made possible by this expanded workforce has been shown to have powerful positive effects on academic performance, the success of a new tutoring initiative hinges on its implementation. Indeed, some early proponents of tutoring as a post-pandemic silver bullet have recently , in part because of implementation challenges at a large scale.

Implementing any kind of major intervention in schools at a rapid pace is notoriously hard���a fact we know firsthand as former educators and education researchers at MDRC.

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Based on our experience helping schools adopt new practices, we recommend that school leaders commit to the following four strategies to maximize their chances of helping new or expanded tutoring programs take root.

Plan for absenteeism

While many factors can interfere with students’ access to a new program at school, absenteeism is one of the biggest concerns. In the , our evaluation of high-dosage tutoring in eight sites around the country conducted with the University of Chicago Education Lab, tutors have cited student absenteeism from school as a leading reason for students missing their tutoring sessions.

Given the national challenge of chronic absenteeism, schools must account for this issue when implementing a new intervention, either by incorporating strategies to reduce absenteeism into the program or by planning for mitigation strategies when attendance challenges inevitably emerge.

Be strategic about scheduling

Adapting school schedules to accommodate a new tutoring program is often an obstacle to change. Ideally, tutoring should not cut into core instructional time, lunch, physical education or special activities that students often enjoy such as recess or enrichment.

Alternative solutions include designating tutoring sessions as a class in assigned students��� schedules���a strategy used by high schools in a study where math tutoring had positive impacts���or scheduling tutoring during a period set aside for intervention. School leaders should also consider appointing coordinators to provide ongoing scheduling support throughout the year, a strategy used by Reading Partners, a tutoring program for which an MDRC study found positive effects.

Build commitment among all staff members

As we showed in our work, it���s important that all staff members���not just those who supervise or administer a new tutoring initiative���understand and support the program’s goals. When school leaders and teachers don���t fully understand a program���s requirements and potential, it���s easy for other school priorities to take precedence and for tutoring sessions to be cancelled.

To get everyone on board with a new or expanded tutoring program, school leaders should widely communicate how the program will benefit students and different staff members. It may also be helpful to involve all staff members from the start in meetings to prepare for launching the program. Once the program is running, leaders can share program data with everyone to celebrate successes and to identify areas for improvement.

Align the new with the old

School leaders can support the transition to a new or expanded tutoring program by aligning it with systems already in place. Aligning new initiatives with an organization���s existing structural elements and with staff members’ goals has long been a tenet of strong implementation of evidence-based interventions.

What alignment looks like will vary widely depending on the school. Still, leaders can start by examining procedures used by existing tutoring or academic interventions at the school: How are students identified to participate in those programs? How is students��� progress monitored? It���s possible that the new tutoring program into preexisting processes and structures.

Just as seedlings require the proper environmental conditions to grow, new school programs require the right conditions to thrive. While the abovementioned strategies are not always easy to execute and require time and money, committing to these strategies will give new high-dosage tutoring initiatives the best shot at realizing their potential.

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Two-thirds of superintendents surveyed reported facing moderate to high levels of culturally divisive conflict over LGBTQ+ issues, race and racism and book-banning campaigns, according to a team of university researchers’ just-released “” report. Dealing with that division costs school districts a staggering $3.2 billion during the 2023-24 school year, the study concluded.

���Culturally divisive conflicts in the nation���s schools are generating fear, stress and anxiety that is disrupting school districts and taking a personal toll on the educators and staff members who work in them,��� said UCLA Education Professor John Rogers, the lead researcher for the survey of 467 superintendents in 46 states.

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���Sadly, as superintendents have told us, the cost of these conflicts not only has a financial impact but is also eroding teaching and learning and undermining the trust between schools and the communities so essential to our democracy and civic life,” Rogers added.

One superintendent told the researchers that his mid-size district spent $100,000 to hire armed, plainclothes off-duty officers to provide security at school board meetings because some members of the public “are unpredictable and sometimes violent.��� The district also spent more than $500,000 on legal fees related to a campaign against its LGBTQ+ community.

The district additionally lost partnerships with service providers who were attacked at school board meetings over LGBTQ+ issues and spent more than $80,000 to replace teachers, counselors and administrators who said they resigned due to the divisive environment.

The researchers developed a ���conflict score��� to rank districts based on the level and frequency of conflicts experienced by superintendents and their schools. Some 38% of districts fell into the “Moderate” conflict category while more than a quarter (27.5%) experienced “High” levels of conflict, “with conflict occurring regularly across several issue areas, often accompanied by violent rhetoric or threats.”

Here’s how they broke down the ���conflict score���:

• A district serving 10,000 students with Moderate levels of conflict spends nearly $500,000 annually.
• Districts experiencing High levels of culturally divisive conflict spend an average of $812,000.
• If a district with a High level of conflict decreased to Low, it would save roughly $562,000.

���There is a real opportunity cost to this conflict,” said co-author Robert Shand of American University. “These are funds that school districts may not have and may be diverted from support for student learning. For example, one superintendent told us that increased costs forced the district to divert funds from planned professional development aimed at improving instruction.���

Cultural conflicts are also playing a role in superintendent turnover. Nearly half of the superintendents who reported seeking another position did so because of “school board conflict, stress, and politics,” the survey noted. One-third of superintendents said they had lost teachers and other staff members because of culturally divisive conflicts.

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If, like most educators, you are seeing continued evidence that not all students have fully recovered from the disruptions of COVID and online learning. The first report, from the Center on Reinventing Public Education, finds that students are catching up thanks to tutoring, high-quality curricula, and extended learning time.

The organization, also known as CRPE, cites research showing students have regained about a third of their pandemic-era learning losses in math and a quarter in reading but also contends that high-dosage tutoring and other proven strategies are not reaching enough students. This hobbled academic recovery has the biggest impact on younger and low-income students.

CRPE also warns that schools are facing the “gale-force headwinds” of declining teacher morale, students’ growing mental health needs and post-ESSER financial peril. The report urges educators to deploy programs such as to help ninth graders build strong school relationships. K12 leaders are further encouraged to provide teachers and other staff with dedicated time to connect with parents and families. More flexible schedules and staffing would create ample time for core instruction and”pullout” programs such a tutoring and special education services.

Finally, the report emphasizes “real accountability.” It calls on state leaders to give parents better information about their child’s academic performance beyond traditional report cards and ensure schools can provide teachers with complete student data to identify needed interventions.

Civic empowerment

Another report on the American student experience could encourage K12 leaders to provide high school students with more opportunities to create change in their communities.

A YouthTruth survey of more than 115,000 higher schools found:

• Strong civic dispositions but skills lacking: “Most high school students want to help others and work across differences to improve society. However, fewer than half report learning the necessary civic skills in school, and fewer than a third have been empowered to create positive change in their communities.”
• Inequitable civic preparedness: “Civic readiness is uneven among high school students. Those with parents holding advanced degrees stand out as most civically prepared, while Hispanic/Latinx students are significantly less civically empowered than other racial groups.”
• Only half agree voting matters: “Overall, 53% of high school students believe that voting is important. School size and location do not significantly affect students’ belief in the importance of voting. However, significant differences in this belief exist based on student demographics.”
• Civic engagement thrives in extracurriculars: “Students describe academic work as disconnected from public life and a barrier to civic engagement, but they find participation in clubs, activities, and sports teams civically empowering.”

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A growing body of research underscores the game-changing impact of tutoring, when designed and delivered according to evidence-based practices known as high-dosage tutoring. At schools that provided tutoring sessions multiple times a week with the same tutor over the course of several months, students saw their academic achievements skyrocket, recovering on average as much as four months in literacy and nearly 10 months in math.

But along the way, it���s become clear that not all tutoring is equal. ���High-dosage tutoring��� became more of a marketing buzzword than a reliable indicator of program quality. The effectiveness of tutoring varies widely. Schools and districts face diverse challenges���from recruiting challenges to scheduling logistics���and what proves effective in one setting may not work in another.

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As the deadline to spend the last of federal pandemic relief aid dollars looms, we must examine the pitfalls to ensure the longevity and success of tutoring programs across the country.

Implementing a high-dosage tutoring program within a school district requires careful planning and investment. While building a district-driven program may be appealing, there are several areas to consider that may make partnering with a vendor to launch and run the program more feasible, affordable and effective.

Here are five reasons why many district tutoring efforts fall short:

1. Struggle to Find Enough���or the Right���Tutors

Finding great subject matter experts to work consistently in the model that high-dosage tutoring requires (2 to 3 sessions per week consistently for at least 10 weeks) is not easy. Many students need individualized instruction support, so the volume of ready tutors needs to be large and flexible.

In conversations with hundreds of district leaders who have tried to build tutoring programs from scratch, I���ve heard common frustrations that there are simply not enough tutors. Most have been bound by geography, faced shortages in high-demand fields or lacked tutors that spoke a student���s native language. When building brick-and-mortar programs, these can all be huge���even insurmountable���challenges.

Some have tried to solve this problem by utilizing their own teachers and other school staff to serve as tutors, failing to recognize that many teachers already feel overworked and do not have the time or a desire to tutor.

Savvy districts are building a hybrid tutoring workforce���leaning on a combination of online, yet face-to-face video-based tutors and cultivating partnerships with local colleges to tap college students and the local business community. For many schools, this hybrid strategy provides a bigger and more diverse tutor pool from which to pull, in addition to being a great opportunity to leverage subject-matter experts with whom students may not otherwise come into contact.

This strategy is also crucial to expanding tutoring programs and adopting the mind shift that tutoring shouldn���t only be for the 8% to 10% of students who are struggling the most academically and need intensive tutoring���but for all students throughout the entire school year.

2. Tutoring Becomes a Scheduling and Logistical Challenge

Consistency matters. The research is clear: Students benefit the most from consistent tutoring embedded into the school day.

Many schools struggle to manage complex tutoring schedules that account for students’ and tutors’ schedules. And logistical hurdles abound for in-person sessions, including directions, transportation, weather and parking���to name just a few. These challenges make maintaining consistency of attendance for students and tutors difficult to sustain and severely complicates the already complex task of providing accurate reporting and evidence of impact for large programs.

The challenge is even greater in small group tutoring models (typically four to five students). In these models, regular monitoring needs to be done if the group of students matched to a tutor needs to be rematched if one or more students are learning at a faster or slower pace.

To support this, schools need strong technology infrastructure that can leverage matching algorithms to not only sync student and tutor schedules and anticipate last-minute staffing gaps but to intelligently connect each student to the right instructor, based on their unique needs. In addition, active data needs to be collected on student learning mastery throughout the engagement to feed the matching algorithms to make recommendations on change.

3. Mismatch Between Classroom Curriculum and Tutoring

I often hear educators��� frustration that students show up to class saying a tutor taught them how to do something���solve an algebra equation or diagram an essay���in a different way than they are teaching it in class. Not only can it be frustrating for the educator, but confusing for the student as they work through the school curriculum.

Districts seeking to partner with an organization to provide tutoring support should seek out programs that don���t operate using their own curriculum and pedagogical point of views, and instead work with the district���s and collaborate with teachers. In order for the tutoring to be effective, as well as to build trust and get maximum buy-in from teachers, tutoring programs need to meet students where they are, using the standards, curriculum and classroom materials they���re already using.

Programs that are content agnostic have managed to side-step this particular challenge more easily. Even better: A program that allows teachers to collaborate directly with tutors and mark exactly where in their class lesson a student needs additional support. Whether virtual or in-person, educators should also receive notes from a student���s tutoring session so that they have insight into how students are progressing during tutoring sessions, or where they are continuing to struggle.

4. Students Are Disengaged Because They Feel Singled Out

Students are sometimes unfairly stigmatized for needing tutoring and it can negatively impact self-esteem, especially if the same chronically low-performing or special needs students are being pulled out of classrooms every day.

But imagine a learning environment in which tutoring and academic enrichment outside of instructional time is part of a school���s culture. Schools where all students receive tutoring support of some ��� even students who are at and above grade-level, who might participate in a Minecraft coding camp or SAT preparation. Schools and districts that embrace a tutoring-for-all mentality are flipping the script on tutoring, transforming it into a widely accepted and normalized way of learning among students.

5. Parents Aren���t Seen as Part of the Solution

Since the onset of remote learning, an increasing number of families are advocating for greater access to tutoring and seeking clarity on its implementation for their children. They are keen to understand their role in helping their kids stay on track and address unfinished learning.

To ensure the success of tutoring programs, districts must establish mechanisms that engage parents and all stakeholders���teachers, tutors, students and families���from the very beginning.

Federal pandemic relief aid dries up at the end of September, but both Democratic-led and Republican-led states have already dedicated funding in their own budgets to continue tutoring programs. There���s even some chatter about tutoring becoming the next big bipartisan school reform.

But to ensure tutoring is impactful, to ensure its staying power and to ensure we meet the moment and take full advantage of the opportunities high-quality and high-dosage tutoring present for students, we must recognize and safeguard against the challenges that have caused tutoring programs to sputter and districts to walk away from the promise they hold.

The future of learning will include more individualized instruction incorporated into the teaching workflow provided by schools. The evidence is clear���high-dosage tutoring has emerged as a promising intervention to address educational disparities and accelerate student learning, for one great reason – proven results backed by evidence. It���s now time to integrate thoughtful models that are affordable, sustainable, and complement the work of educators in the classroom.

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Test scores from approximately 7.7 million students in grades 3 through 8 show “academic recovery remains elusive” based on pre-pandemic trends, according to of the 2023-24 school year by the assessment firm, NWEA.

Last school year’s scores were compared to test results from 2016 to 2019. The report’s key findings “highlight persistent achievement gaps,” especially for older students:

• Achievement gains during 2023-24 fell short of pre-pandemic trends in nearly all grades.
• The gap between pre-COVID and COVID test score averages widened in 2023-24 in nearly all grades, by 36% in reading and 18% in math.
• The average student will need 4.8 additional months of schooling to catch up in reading and 4.4 months in math.
• Achievement gains for all race/ethnicity groups lagged pre-pandemic trends in 2023-24. Marginalized students remain the furthest from recovery.

���Achievement disparities that predate the pandemic have been starkly exacerbated over the last four years, and marginalized students are still the furthest from recovery,��� said Dr. Karyn Lewis, director of research and policy partnerships at NWEA and one of the authors of the report. ���Pandemic fatigue is real, but accepting a new normal of lower achievement and widened inequities is not an option.���

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The hardest-hit group appears to be current middle schoolers who were in the early grades when the pandemic hit. Achievement gaps for these students show they need six to nine months of additional schooling to catch up, NWEA advises.

���As millions of students continue to fall behind academically, schools across the country are grappling with an impending ESSER financial cliff as federal COVID relief funds run out this September,��� said Lindsay Dworkin, NWEA’s senior vice president of policy and government affairs. ���Even as resources dwindle, districts must try to continue investing in evidence-based strategies that have been proven to improve student outcomes: keeping kids in school, providing high-dosage tutoring, and offering expanded instructional time over the summer or after school.���

Additional learning loss coverage from 91心頭:

• Reversing pandemic slides: How does your state compare?
• We know tutoring works. Here���s how to make it work better油
• School boards are now spending more time on these 5 topics

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To focus their efforts and learning, tutors should begin their tutoring journey by focusing on high-leverage instructional strategies. The top three high-leverage strategies they should focus on are building positive relationships, choosing appropriate tasks for students,and using strategic questioning during tutorials.

Tutors can enhance their skills through self-reflection or through feedback from tutor coaches or artificial intelligence. The following actions align with each of the top three strategies. These strategies are designed to intentionally focus on elements within the tutors��� control, focusing on inputs rather than student-action outputs.

Build positive relationships

In , Laurence Holt remarks that it���s logical in longer-term tutoring situations (weeks or months) for tutors to establish rapport with students, understand their interests and support their social-emotional needs. As with teacher-student relationships, positive relationships between tutors and students are essential to helping students build confidence and persistence in learning.

Tutors should employ routines to build a respectful culture, showing consideration for students��� humanity. They should engage students promptly at the start and close tutorial, leaving students feeling successful. They can create a joyful, engaging environment by modeling kindness and using time well. Through their body language, tone, and expressions, they can convey that students��� questions and opinions are important.

What does a positive relationship look like in practice? If you observe a high-quality tutoring session, you���ll see tutors who build positive relationships with students by greeting them by name and with genuine enthusiasm. Effective tutors start sessions on time and talk to students in a welcoming tone that makes them feel valued and understood. They ask about their students��� daily lives.

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If tutors work remotely, you���ll see effective tutors leaning forward, looking at the screen and showing excitement when students ask questions. You might hear them say, ���Ooo, I love that question!��� At the end of tutorials, tutors end on an optimistic note that helps tutors gauge students��� understanding of the day���s topic. Observers will hear these tutors ask students to summarize their learning for an absent student. Or, tutors might ask students to create two questions or problems on the topic they���re learning about.

Select appropriate tasks

Tutors should understand and internalize the content to facilitate learning with accuracy. They���ll choose tasks for students that allow for connected understanding, problem-solving and reasoning, and use grade-level tasks to accelerate student learning. And each part of their tutorial will have a clear purpose.

How might a tutor put these skills to work? First, they���ll spend time before the session making sure they are well-versed in the content, so they anticipate students��� questions and are alert to common misconceptions. If, for example, they���re working on building students��� stamina to persevere through word problems, they���ll have spent time before the session selecting slightly longer word problems than students can comfortably work through but not too much longer. This is one way they can align tasks with students��� current learning goals.

Effective tutors know why students will be engaged with specific content. For example, if they���re working on building up fractional skills and grade-level content of equations, tutors will select a few equations that involve fractions to build both skills simultaneously. Skilled tutors know that rote problems are boring and make students good at computation, not thinking.

Question strategically

The tutor’s role is to ���orchestrate the session so that the student engages with the topic in a sustained way,��� according to The Science of Tutoring. Questions are one of the most powerful tools for tutoring. Tutors can elevate their practice by using focusing questions to guide student thinking. Those prompts ask students to elaborate on their learning and explain their thinking. They���ll also use a balance of procedural and conceptual questions to assess student understanding. And they���ll give students enough time to collect their ideas before responding.

Tutors can help facilitate students��� learning by not doing too much of the work for them. These tutors are eager to get students to explain their thinking with questions like ���Can you explain why you chose that method?��� or ���How do you know that?��� Questions should be planned before the session to focus student thinking on the main concepts of the lesson.

While many aspects and skills go into providing quality instruction, tutors can significantly enhance the quality of their tutoring by prioritizing the three elements above. By prioritizing positive relationships with students and creating a joyful and engaging learning environment, selecting appropriate tasks that align with grade-level materials, and using strategic questioning techniques to assess student understanding and guide student thinking, tutors can improve the effectiveness of their tutorial sessions.

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COVID-19 caused unprecedented drops in learning in areas like reading and math, and if leaders don’t act now to teach kids what they missed, it could cost children hundreds of billions in future earnings, declares this year’s edition of the from the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

The researchers point to significant disruptions in attendance, math proficiency and reading scores. For instance, only 26% of eighth-graders were at or above proficient in reading, 2% lower than pre-pandemic levels.

However, it wasn’t just absenteeism and remote learning that caused gaps.油Some 40% of students also experienced at least one adverse childhood experience, such as economic hardship or their parents having divorced, separated or served time in jail.

“Kids of all ages and grades must have what they need to learn each day, such as enough food and sleep and a safe way to get to school, as well as the additional resources they might need to perform at their highest potential and thrive, like tutoring and mental health services,” Lisa Hamilton, president and CEO of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, said in a statement.

Current policies and priorities fail to focus on these essentials for preparing young students for life after high school, Hamilton added.油

Here’s what the researchers recommend to get students back on track:

• Give access to low- or no-cost meals, reliable internet, a place to study and time with friends, teachers and counselors
• Expand access to intense tutoring
• Leverage pandemic relief funding toward social-emotional, academic and physical well-being
• Gather and report chronic absence data by grade
• Policymakers should invest in community and public schools that provide wraparound support

The report also offers a snapshot of how each state ranks on education, specifically in these four indicators:

• Children ages 3 and 4 not in school
• Fourth-graders not proficient in reading
• Eighth-graders not proficient in math
• High school students not graduating on time

According to the data, these 10 states are excelling in each of these areas:

1. Massachusetts
2. New Jersey
3. Connecticut
4. New Hampshire
5. Florida
6. Utah
7. Virginia
8. Wisconsin
9. Vermont
10. Illinois

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Understanding the problem

Transgender students often face significant challenges in the school environment, including bullying, discrimination, and lack of access to appropriate facilities. According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, nearly 75% of transgender youth feel unsafe at school. This pervasive lack of safety can lead to severe consequences, including higher rates of absenteeism, lower academic performance, and mental health issues.

The 2024 Title IX regulations specifically mandate that schools address harassment based on gender identity, making it more crucial than ever to take proactive steps.

But several states have declared their intention not to comply with the new Title IX regulations related to gender identity discrimination, including Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. These states argue that the new Title IX regulations conflict with state law and contradict the original purpose of Title IX. If you live in such a state, consult your general counsel on your legal obligations.

Practical solutions

1. Policy review: Start by reviewing your district���s current policies to ensure they are inclusive of transgender students and compliant with the new Title IX regulations. This includes anti-bullying policies and Title IX harassment procedures, as well as dress code and facility access policies.

2. Training and education: Provide regular training for staff on issues related to transgender inclusion. This training should cover the basics of gender identity, the specific challenges faced by transgender students and strategies for creating an inclusive classroom environment.

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The 2024 Title IX regulations also require all employees be trained on conduct that constitutes gender identity-based harassment. Consider bringing in experts from local LGBTQ+ organizations or hiring an attorney with knowledge of these issues.

3. Support systems: Establish support systems for transgender students. This could include access to on-site counseling, peer support groups, peer mentors and designated safe spaces where students can feel secure and supported.

4. Accessible facilities: Ensure all students have access to facilities, such as bathrooms and locker rooms, that correspond to their gender identity. This is required in some states, such as those in the Fourth Circuit, as a result of recent litigation.

Also have gender-neutral, single-stall facilities for students who do not feel comfortable in a multi-stall facility for whatever reason, whether that is due to their gender identity or their religious convictions.

5. Inclusive curriculum: Where not prohibited, incorporate LGBTQ+ topics into curriculum to promote understanding and acceptance among all students. This can be integrated into subjects such as social studies, the sciences, English and health education.

LGBTQ+ history and innovations by LGBTQ+ individuals can be incorporated into curriculum instead of having a separate lesson that may make transgender students feel alienated.

6. Inclusive language: Use inclusive language and examples that reflect LGBTQ+ identities in classroom materials and discussions. Calling students ���friends��� instead of ���boys and girls��� and asking students what name and pronouns they use at the start of the year can go a long way in helping transgender students feel like they belong.

7. Engage with the community: Host informational sessions and create resources to educate the community about gender identity and the importance of inclusivity. Partner with local LGBTQ+ organizations to provide additional resources and support for students and staff, such as outside support groups and alternative proms.

8. Legal compliance: Regularly consult with legal counsel to ensure your school district���s policies and practices comply with the law. This is a rapidly changing landscape and vigilance is required.

Moving forward

Creating a supportive environment for transgender students is a continuous process that requires commitment and proactive effort. By taking these initial steps, you can ensure that your school district complies with legal requirements and fosters a culture of inclusivity and respect for all students.

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